“The Israelis knew exactly what was going on. Their headquarters were located just two hundred yards from the edge of Shatila. From the rooftop they could see directly into the camp. They could overhear the Phalangists talking on their radios. But they didn’t lift a finger to stop it. And why did they stand by and do nothing? Because it was exactly what they wanted to happen.
“I was just seven at the time. My father was dead. He was killed that summer when the Israelis shelled the camps during the Battle of Beirut. I lived in Shatila with my mother and my sister. She was just a year and a half old at the time. We hid beneath our bed, listening to the screaming and the gunfire, watching the shadows of the flares dancing on the walls. We prayed that the Phalangists would somehow miss our house. Sometimes we could hear them outside our window. They were laughing. They were slaughtering everyone in sight, but they were laughing. My mother covered our mouths whenever they came near to keep us quiet. She nearly smothered my sister.
“Finally they broke down our door. I wriggled out of my mother’s grasp and went to them. They asked where my family was, and I told them everyone was dead. They laughed and told me that I would soon be with them. One of the Phalangists had a knife. He grabbed me by the hair and dragged me outside. He stripped off my shirt and sliced away the skin on the center of my back. Then they tied me to a truck and dragged me through the streets. At some point I went unconscious, but before I blacked out I remember the Phalangists shooting at me. They were using me for target practice.
“Somehow, I survived. Maybe they thought I was dead, I don’t know. When I regained consciousness the rope they had used for the dragging was still wrapped around my right ankle. I crawled beneath a pile of rubble and waited. I stayed there for a day and a half. Finally, the massacre was over, and the Phalangists withdrew from the camps. I came out of my hiding place and found my way back to our family’s house. I found my mother’s body in our bed. She was naked, and she had been raped. Her breasts had been sliced off. I looked for my sister. I found her on the kitchen table. They had cut her into pieces and laid her out in a circle with her head in the center.”
Jacqueline tumbled out of bed, crawled into the bathroom, and was violently sick. Yusef knelt beside her and placed a hand on her back as her body wretched.
When she finished he said, “You ask me why I hate the Israelis so much. I hate them because they sent the Phalangists to massacre us. I hate them because they stood by and did nothing while Christians, their great friends in Lebanon, raped and killed my mother and chopped my sister to bits and laid her body out in a circle. Now you know why I’m a rejectionist when it comes to this so-called peace process. How can I trust these people?”
“I understand.”
“Do you
really
understand, Dominique? Is it possible?”
“I suppose not.”
“Now, I’ve been completely honest with you about everything. Is there anything you wish to tell me about yourself? Any secrets you’ve been keeping from me?”
“Nothing of any consequence.”
“You’re telling me the truth, Dominique?”
“Yes.”
The call came at four-fifteen that morning. It woke Yusef, though not Gabriel. He had been sitting up all morning, listening to Yusef’s account of Sabra and Shatila over and over again. It rang just once. Yusef, his voice heavy with sleep, said, “Hello.”
“Lancaster Gate, tomorrow, two o’clock.”
Click.
Jacqueline said, “What was that?”
“A wrong number. Go back to sleep.”
Maida Vale in the morning. A gang of schoolboys teasing a pretty girl. Jacqueline imagined they were Phalangist militiamen armed with knives and axes. A lorry roared past, belching diesel fumes. Jacqueline saw a man tied to the bumper being dragged to death. Her block of flats loomed in front of her. She looked up and imagined Israeli soldiers standing on the roof, watching the slaughter below through binoculars, firing flares so the killers could better see their victims. She entered the building, climbed the stairs, and slipped into the flat. Gabriel was sitting on the couch.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Tell you what?”
“Why didn’t you tell me he had survived Shatila? Why didn’t you tell me his family had been butchered like that?”
“What difference would it have made?”
“I just wish I had known!” She lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply. “Is it true? Are the things he told me true?”
“Which part?”
“All of it, Gabriel! Don’t play fucking games with me.”
“Yes, it’s true! His family died at Shatila. He’s suffered. So what? We’ve all suffered. It doesn’t give him the right to murder innocent people because history didn’t go his way!”
“
He
was an innocent, Gabriel! He was just a boy!”
“We’re in the middle of an operation, Jacqueline. Now is not the time for a debate on moral equivalence and the ethics of counterterrorism.”
“I apologize for permitting the question of morality to enter my thoughts. I forgot you and Shamron never get tripped up over something so trivial.”
“Don’t lump me in with Shamron.”
“Why not? Because he gives orders, and you follow them?”
“What about Tunis?” Gabriel asked. “You knew Tunis was an assassination job, but you willingly took part in it. You even volunteered to go back the night of the killing.”
“That’s because the target was Abu Jihad. He had the blood of hundreds of Israelis and Jews on his hands.”
“This one has blood on his hands too. Don’t forget that.”
“He’s just a boy, a boy whose family was butchered while the Israeli army looked on and did nothing.”
“He’s not a boy. He’s a twenty-five-year-old man who helps Tariq kill people.”
“And you’re going to use him to get to Tariq, because of what Tariq did to you? When does it end? When there’s no more blood to shed? When, Gabriel?”
He stood up and pulled on his jacket.
Jacqueline said, “I want out.”
“You can’t leave now.”
“Yes, I can. I don’t want to sleep with Yusef anymore.”
“Why?”
“
Why?
You have the nerve to ask me
why
?”
“I’m sorry, Jacqueline. That didn’t come out—”
“You think of me as a whore, don’t you, Gabriel! You think it doesn’t bother me to sleep with a man I don’t care for.”
“That’s not true.”
“Is that what I was to you in Tunis? Just a whore?”
“You know that’s not true.”
“Then tell me what I was.”
“What are you going to do? Are you going back to France? Back to your villa in Valbonne? Back to your Parisian parties and your photo shoots and your fashion shows, where the most difficult question is deciding what shade of lipstick to wear?”
She slapped him across the left side of his face. He stared back at her, eyes cold, color rising in the skin over his cheekbone. She drew back her hand to slap him again, but he casually lifted his left hand and deflected her blow.
“Can’t you hear what’s going on?” Gabriel said. “He told you the story of what happened to him at Shatila for a reason. He’s testing you. He wants you for something.”
“I don’t care.”
“I thought you were someone I could depend on. Not someone who was going to fall apart in the middle of the game.”
“Shut up, Gabriel!”
“I’ll contact Shamron—tell him we’re out of business.”
He reached out for the door. She grabbed his hand. “Killing Tariq won’t make it right. That’s just an illusion. You think it will be like fixing a painting: you find the damage, retouch it, and everything is fine again. But it’s not like that for a human being. In fact it’s not even like that for a painting. If you look carefully you can always see where it’s been retouched. The scars never go away. The restorer doesn’t heal a painting. He just hides the wounds.”
“I need to know if you’re willing to continue.”
“And I want to know if I was just your whore in Tunis.”
Gabriel reached out and touched her cheek. “You were my lover in Tunis.” His hand fell to his side. “And my family was destroyed because of it.”
“I can’t change the past.”
“I know.”
“Did you care for me?”
He hesitated a moment, then said, “Yes, very much.”
“Do you care for me now?”
He closed his eyes. “I need to know whether you can go on.”
30
HYDE PARK, LONDON
Karp said, “Your friend picked a damned lousy place for a meeting.”
They were sitting in the back of a white Ford van on the Bayswater Road a few yards from Lancaster Gate, Karp hunched over a console of audio equipment, adjusting his levels. Gabriel could scarcely hear himself think over the riotous din of cars, taxis, lorries, and double-decker buses. Overhead, the trees lining the northern edge of the park writhed in the wind. Through Karp’s microphones the air rushing through the branches sounded like white water. Beyond Lancaster Gate the fountains of the Italian Gardens splashed and danced. Through the microphones it sounded like a monsoonal downpour.
Gabriel said, “How many listeners do you have out there?”
“Three,” Karp said. “The guy on the bench who looks like a banker, the pretty girl tossing bread to the ducks, and the guy selling ice cream just inside the gate.”
“Not bad,” Gabriel said.
“Under these conditions don’t expect any miracles.”
Gabriel looked at his wristwatch: three minutes past two. He thought:
He’s not going to show. They’ve spotted Karp’s team, and they’re aborting.
He said, “Where the fuck is he?”
“Be patient, Gabe.”
A moment later Gabriel saw Yusef emerge from Westbourne Street and dart across the road in front of a charging delivery truck. Karp snapped a couple of photographs as Yusef entered the park and strolled around the fountains. During the middle of his second circuit, he was joined by a man wearing a gray woolen overcoat, face obscured by sunglasses and a felt hat. Karp switched to a longer lens, took several more photographs.
They circled the fountains once in silence, then during the second circuit began to speak softly in English. Because of the noise from the wind and the fountains, Gabriel could make out only every third or fourth word.
Karp swore softly.
They circled the fountains for a few minutes, then walked up a small rise to a playground. The girl who had been feeding the ducks walked slowly after them. After a moment the surveillance van was filled with the joyous screams of children at play.
Karp pressed his fists against his eyes and shook his head.
Karp delivered the tape to Gabriel at the listening post three hours later with the resigned air of a surgeon who had done all he could to save the patient. “I fed it through the computers, filtered out the background noise, and enhanced the good stuff. But I’m afraid we got only about ten percent, and even that sounds like shit.”
Gabriel held out his hand and accepted the cassette. He slipped it into the deck, pressed PLAY, and listened while he paced the length of the room.
“. . . needs someone . . . next assignment . . .”
A sound, like static turned up full blast, obliterated the rest of the sentence. Gabriel paused the tape and looked at Karp.
“It’s the fountain,” Karp said. “There’s nothing I can do with it.”
Gabriel restarted the tape.
“. . . check out her . . . in Paris . . . problems . . . thing’s fine.”
Gabriel stopped the tape, pressed REWIND, then PLAY.
“. . . check out her . . . in Paris . . . problems . . . thing’s fine.”
“. . . not sure . . . right person for . . . sort of . . .”
“. . . be persuasive . . . if you explain the importance . . .”
“. . . what am I . . . tell her exactly?”
“. . . vital diplomatic mission . . . cause of true peace in the Middle East . . . routine security precaution . . .”
“. . . it supposed to work . . .”
The audio level dropped sharply. Karp said, “They’re walking toward the playground right now. We’ll get coverage in a moment when the girl moves into position.”
“. . . meet him . . . de Gaulle . . . from there . . . to the final destination . . .”
“. . . where . . . ”
An injured child cries out for its mother, obliterating the response.
“. . . do with her after . . .”