Vicious Circle Read online

  Nursing his Scotch, Elihu stared out the window at the sea lapping against the Jaffa shore. For several minutes nobody said a word. Then the squall broke.

  “Somebody screwed up,” Baruch said angrily, tossing the police report onto the table. “The woman shouldn’t have been left alone in the cell after our agent succeeded in duping her.”

  “How could we know she’d figure out she was duped?” Altmann snapped.

  “It’s our business to know,” Baruch retorted.

  “Why are we getting worked up over the suicide of a Palestinian girl?” Uri called from the couch. “She was wearing a ring her husband cut off the finger of a murdered Jewish kid.”

  “Uri’s right,” said Dror. “Let’s put this into perspective. I don’t see any Palestinians beating their breasts over the four Jews killed in the attack on the Rabbi’s convoy.”

  “I don’t see them beating their breasts over the kidnapping of the Rabbi and his secretary,” Altmann agreed.

  “The problem,” announced Wozzeck, “isn’t the girl Maali. She’s spilt milk. The problem is the lame shoemaker across from the El Khanqa Mosque. The problem is Yussuf Abu Saleh.”

  Elihu turned away from the window. “Let’s begin with the shoemaker,” he said. “He’s obviously a mishlasim—a mail drop and not an operational agent. He won’t have the vaguest idea who sent a letter, or who received it, so there’s no purpose in interrogating him. Mossad cells operating in Europe have been using this technique for years—you have mail delivered to a post box, the proprietor of the box runs a flag of some sort up a pole, the addressee watches for the flag and picks up his letter.”

  Altmann helped himself to another two fingers of Lagavulin. “If we have a letter addressed to Tayzir delivered to the shoemaker, he’ll run a flag up the pole and Yussuf will come out of the woodwork. We could try to follow Yussuf, but that would be tricky in the narrow streets of the Old City. Even if we succeeded, chances are he’ll only lead us back to the bedroom where he hangs his hat.”

  “Yussuf should be picked up and made to talk,” Dror said. “The question is, do we do it or do we leave him to the tender mercies of Sa’adat Arif?”

  “Yussuf’s our problem,” Baruch said flatly. “We deal with it. We don’t farm the problem out to the Palestinian Authority’s people in Jericho.”

  “Whoever deals with it will have to move fast,” Altmann warned. “The clock is ticking. The deadline for the Rabbi’s secretary expires the day after tomorrow. If the katsa can’t come up with something between now and then, Yussuf—assuming he knows where the Rabbi is being held, assuming someone can make him talk—will be our last best hope.”

  Dror said, “There won’t be time to worm information out of Yussuf, the way we did with Maali. Whoever pinches him will have to beat it out of him.”

  Altmann shook his head. “We’ll have Amnesty International breathing down our necks. We’ll have the bleeding heart lawyers filing habeas corpus affidavits.”

  “The bleeding hearts won’t get the time of day out of Sa’adat Arif,” the general grunted from the couch. “The bleeding hearts never heard of Jericho.”

  “There’s another advantage to using Sa’adat’s people,” Dror said. “It’ll be easier to make it look as if Yussuf was the victim of Arab factional rivalry, which is important if we don’t want to frighten off Abu Bakr’s boys.”

  “That’s a point,” Altmann said. “There’s less chance of Abu Bakr ducking for cover, and taking the Rabbi and Efrayim with him—or killing them outright—if he can be made to think that Hamas’s jilted jihadists cornered Yussuf.”

  “I don’t like it,” Baruch said. “I don’t like owing favors to Sa’adat Arif. I don’t like letting someone else do our dirty work. It looks like Yussuf killed Jews. I think Jews should deal with him.”

  “Let’s put it to a vote,” the katsa suggested from the window. “Who’s in favor of sub-contracting this out to Sa’adat Arif?”

  Dror and Altmann each raised a finger.

  “Who’s in favor of handling this ourselves?”

  Baruch raised a hand. Wozzeck hesitated, then raised his glass of Scotch.

  Everyone looked at the general on the couch. “Part of me is with Baruch—we got into a lot of hot water in Beirut letting Arabs do our dirty work for us. On the other hand—” Uri shrugged. “I just don’t know.”

  Baruch looked across the room at the katsa. “That more or less leaves it up to you, Elihu.”

  “It does, doesn’t it.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  THE SKINNY BEDOUIN BOY WHO DELIVERED TRAYS FILLED WITH almond biscuits and tiny cups of Turkish coffee for the café on Christian Quarter Road brought the sealed envelope to Abdullah, the lame shoemaker across from the El Khanqa Mosque, minutes after the second prayer of the day. Abdullah was an old Christian Arab and wise in the ways of the souk. He glanced around to be sure no one was watching, then fitted on his reading glasses and examined the envelope. He deciphered written Arabic only with difficulty, but managed to make out the words “Tayzir” and “florist” printed in ink on the coarse paper.

  “Who gave this to you?” Abdullah asked the boy.

  “A woman.”

  “What woman?”

  “Her head was covered with a chador. I could see that her hair under the chador was long and black. She spoke our language. She gave me a shekel, she promised you would give me another when I delivered the envelope.”

  “You lie like a rug,” Abdullah said with a guttural laugh. “She gave you half a shekel and said I would give you half a shekel.”

  The boy tossed his thin shoulders sullenly.

  Abdullah reached into the deep pocket of his apron, retrieved a coin and dropped it into the boy’s palm. The boy pocketed the money and darted off down the street past the four Palestinian laborers prying up flagstones to lay telephone cables.

  Abdullah made his way to the back of his shop and tugged the rope of the dumbwaiter on which his wife lowered fruit juice and his medicine, and his midday meal. Two flights up a small bell attached to the rope sounded. “Is that you who rings, Abdullah?” his wife called down the shaft.

  “You may hang out my green shirt to dry,” Abdullah shouted up.

  The shoemaker’s wife climbed to the roof and fastened with clothespins the bright green shirt to the line stretched between the television antenna and the old chimney that had been sealed off since the Turkish occupation. If she wondered why she was hanging a shirt that was not wet to dry in the sun, she never posed the question. For forty-two years, she had been following her husband’s instructions without asking questions; she was not going to start now.

  An hour went by, then a second. Customers came and went. Several Armenian priests wandered past the shop talking among themselves in a language that struck Abdullah as exceedingly strange. A group of Italian tourists followed a short Christian Arab, wearing a fez and holding high a large red umbrella, toward Christian Quarter Road and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. When several of the woman lagged behind to window shop in front of a jewelry store across from Abdullah’s, the guide came scurrying back to get them. Snapping at their heels like a sheep dog, he herded them away from the window, raised aloft his emblem of authority and started off again in the direction of the church. Curiously, the four Palestinians laying telephone cables did not break for the mid-day meal, a fact that registered in Abdullah’s consciousness at roughly the same moment the young Palestinian Abdullah knew only as Tayzir came sauntering down from Christian Quarter Road to pick up the message that had been left at the shoemaker’s shop.

  Pushing himself off the work bench, the old shoemaker reached for his wooden crutch and limped to the doorway. “No! No!” he called, pointing with his crutch toward the Palestinian laborers just as two of them leaped from the trench they were digging to fling Yussuf violently against a wall. In an instant they had slipped handcuffs on his wrists and taped shut his mouth. The other Palestinians drew pistols from their overalls and block
ed off each end of the narrow street. A group of Japanese tourists gaped in astonishment as one of the laborers whipped out a small radio and barked into it. Seconds later an Arab taxi careened around the corner and screeched to a stop next to where the two Palestinians were pinning Yussuf to the side of a building. The taxi’s rear doors were flung open, Yussuf was bundled onto the floor in the back of the car and covered with a Bedouin rug. The two Palestinians with drawn pistols backed toward the taxi. One of them pulled a piece of chalk from his pocket and scrawled something on a wall, then leaped into the taxi as it sped off through the narrow streets of the Old City in the direction of Herod’s Gate and the Arab quarter of Jerusalem.

  TWENTY-TWO

  IN THE SAFE HOUSE PERCHED ABOVE THE MAZE OF STREETS IN THE Christian Quarter, the Doctor was pacing behind Efrayim who, relieved to be free of his hood, was trying to make his interrogation drag on as long as possible. “I don’t know anything about encoding or decoding,” he replied, “so how could I have encoded or decoded the Rabbi’s messages?”

  “Don’t believe a word he says,” Apfulbaum quipped, his voice muffled by his hood. “Already he writes the king’s English in a kind of code—only people who spell as badly as he does can decipher it.”

  “What were your duties as Rabbi Apfulbaum’s secretary?” the Doctor asked.

  “I typed his letters on a computer that thanks to God had a spell checker. I screened his phone calls and made sure the answering machine was on for Shabbat. I reminded him of appointments. I deposited honorariums in his bank account when he gave speeches or sold Op-Ed pieces, and balanced his checkbook and warned him when he was overdrawn, which was almost always. I arranged logistics when he went on trips—I called ahead to tell them what he wouldn’t eat, which was anything fried, and tasted everything first to make sure it wasn’t too salty.”

  The Rabbi piped up, “He tasted everything first, but it was to make sure some lunatic Israeli peacenik didn’t poison my food.”

  “You never told me that before, Rabbi.”

  “I didn’t want you to stop tasting.”

  The Doctor said, “If you typed his letters, you will know whom he wrote to.”

  “Our Rabbi wrote to anyone, which is to say, he wrote to everyone—he wrote to every Letters to the Editor editor in America, he wrote to our Prime Minister practically once a week, he wrote to the White House and Ten Downing Street and the Elysée Palace and the Bundestag and the Kremlin—”

  The Doctor tried to cut him off. “I think I get the idea.”

  But Efrayim couldn’t be stopped. “He wrote to the heads of state in Saudi Arabia and Syria and Iraq and Iran and Egypt and Jordan and Monaco—”

  “Why Monaco?” the Doctor demanded, intrigued.

  The Rabbi snickered under his hood. “I sent Prince Charming a list of Palestinian terrorist groups that were laundering money in his banks and advised him to clean up his act or I’d get the American Jews to boycott his Lilliputian principality. Or words to that effect.”

  “Did he ever write a letter to anyone named Ya’ir?” the Doctor asked Efrayim.

  The Rabbi’s secretary thought about this. “There was someone named Ya’ir at the Ministry of—”

  “I am talking about the Ya’ir who is the leader of the Jewish settlers’ terrorist organization,” the Doctor said impatiently.

  “Mister, I don’t know anything about that Ya’ir and I know less about Jewish settlers’ terrorist organizations. Listen, I’m not even sure I’m going to stay in Israel after what’s happened to me. I mean, it’s one thing to be kidnapped if you can be positive you’re going to be released. It’s another thing to be kidnapped by people who don’t know from happy endings.”

  “Palestinian prisoners in Israeli detention camps are also entitled to happy endings,” snapped the Doctor.

  “If it was up to me,” Efrayim said, hoping to ingratiate himself with his captor, “I’d let them all go free. I swear to God I would.”

  “It is unfortunate for us that it is not up to you.”

  “Besides which,” said the Rabbi, “only God can decide who will and who won’t have a happy ending.”

  “It’s not me who is going to say differently, Rabbi,” Efrayim declared.

  The Doctor looked down at the Rabbi’s head bobbing under his hood. “Nor would I say differently,” he remarked softly.

  In the other room, Yussuf’s failure to return from the mail drop alarmed Petra. She kept her ears glued to the Isra’ili wavelengths. She could hear paratroop units stationed around the Old City reporting in. Suddenly an officer spoke of an abduction near the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. Soldiers were being sent to investigate. Petra went to the door between the two rooms and summoned the Doctor with an urgent wave of her hand. “Yussuf has not returned from the shoemaker’s shop,” she told him. “The Isra’ilis are reporting a kidnapping.” On Petra’s radio, there were bursts of static, then a cryptic report with the details of the abduction. Four Palestinian laborers had pounced on a young Palestinian and taken him away in an Arab taxi. One of the gunmen had scratched the words, in Arabic, “Hamas has a long memory and a long arm” in chalk on a wall.

  Aown and Azziz panicked. They were all for killing the prisoners out of hand and fleeing, but the Doctor overruled them. If, in fact, Yussuf had been picked up by Hamas gunmen, it would appear to be a settling of old scores; Yussuf was known to have incensed the Hamas organization when he crossed over to join the Doctor’s Abu Bakr group and took members of his Nablus cell, along with their cache of bombs and weapons, with him. Yussuf could have been betrayed by Abdullah; if he sold letters, he might also sell people. Or Hamas could have spotted Yussuf picking up mail at the shoemaker’s shop, and decided to snatch him the next time he came into the streets. They would have no way of knowing Yussuf was involved in the kidnapping of the Rabbi and his secretary. And it would be out of character for Yussuf to offer this information.

  Straining to make out the Isra’ili voices crackling over the wavelengths, Petra agreed with the Doctor’s analysis. “There is no mention of us, no indication that the Isra’ilis suspect we are hiding in the Old City. We would be foolish to lose our nerve now.”

  “If Hamas picked up Yussuf,” Azziz said, “they must know about the shoemaker.”

  “The shoemaker is a dead end street,” the Doctor pointed out. “As far as he is concerned, someone named Tayzir was hiding in the Old City and arranged the drop, at twenty shekels a letter, in order to receive mail.”

  The Doctor nevertheless took the precaution of distributing the AK-47s and hand grenades. Leaving Petra and the el-Tel brothers in the front room, he retreated into the back room with the hostages, closing and locking the second armored door behind him.

  “Is the Israeli Army coming to free us?” Efrayim asked excitedly.

  “It does not look that way,” the Doctor said.

  “El hamdouli-lah,” the Rabbi muttered in Arabic. “Thanks to God.” In his heart of hearts, he dreaded a rescue operation as much as he hoped for it; even if the Israelis managed to fight their way into the safe house, the Doctor would surely shoot his hostages before the soldiers could blow the door to the back room off its hinges.

  “In times of crisis, you invoke the Arabic name of God,” the Doctor noted. “There is hope for you yet.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  A OWN UNTIED THE LEGS OF THE RABBI AND LED HIM TO THE lidless toilet and watched him urinate into it, then brought him back to his seat and lashed his legs. Then he led Efrayim to the toilet. When the secretary was back in his seat Aown removed their hoods and gave them each a cup of tea and several biscuits, and settled onto the cot to watch them eat.

  Efrayim whispered to the Rabbi, “I read somewhere that if kidnappers get to know you personally, they can’t bring themselves to hurt you.” The secretary turned to Aown. “So do you have a name?” When the young Palestinian didn’t respond, he said, “My name’s Efrayim. Efrayim Blumenfeld. Actually, I’m glad to meet you. I’m not j
ust saying that. I really am. I never talked to a live Palestinian before. Don’t get me wrong—I haven’t talked to dead ones either.” Efrayim indicated the Rabbi with his chin. “His name is Rabbi Apfulbaum. Rabbi isn’t his Christian name. His Christian name is Isaac. So how old are you? Me, I’m going to be twenty-seven next month.” Confronted with Aown’s obstinate silence, Efrayim cast about desperately for something to say to break the ice. “I’m not actually Israeli,” he hurried on. “I’m American. I suppose from your point of view that’s just as bad. I was thinking of emigrating to Israel but I haven’t made up my mind yet. I have a mother and a father and a teenage sister living on Long Island. They’re not so excited about me moving to Israel. They think it’s too dangerous. You’ve probably heard of Long Island? It’s the largest island on the continental United States. I suppose they call it Long Island because of how it sticks out like a sore thumb into the Atlantic Ocean. You’ve probably heard of the Atlantic Ocean?”

  The Rabbi said, “Enough already, Efrayim. Chances are he’s not going to Long Island anytime soon. If he does go there it’ll be to plant a bomb in a Walbaums.”