The Heat of Ramadan, page 37
Boaz and Eytan walked across the course, trudging quietly through the sand of the big dunes and down onto the beach. The sun was low above the Mediterranean, a light breeze carrying gull voices. Gunfire popped from the ranges.
“You want a uniform?” the instructor asked.
“Don’t have time.”
They walked again in silence. At last they faced each other at the lips of the sea.
“So, Eytan.” Boaz looked at his student, sorry for him that this was suddenly so important. It was clearly no longer an ego-building exercise. Something was up. Something very bad, from the way Eytan clenched and unclenched his fists. “What do you have time for?”
“Pistol work.”
Boaz reached back and drew his Browning. He withdrew the clip, cleared the breach, and pointed it at Eytan’s chest.
“Take it from me, and it’s yours,” said Boaz.
They worked for an hour, until Eytan’s knee was near to exploding and his hands were scraped and bloody. He returned to his Fiat, his clothes soaked with sweat, and the Browning holstered to his waistband.
Armed. But not dangerous enough.
* * *
The Café Alaska was situated on Ben-Zion Street in central Tel Aviv, at the south side of a big square that held the Habimah National Theater. The irony of the shady avenue’s name had never registered before, because Eytan had not been in the café for many years. He had been recruited by AMAN in the Alaska, while he was still a paratrooper. Young Eytan in uniform—replete with silver wings, operational pin, a perfect maroon beret cocked over one eye, nervously fingering the barrel of his Galil while he read the same paragraph in a copy of Life magazine over and over again as he waited. His bosses-to-be—large men in open-necked shirts, bristling chest hair, briefcases, and eyes that never stopped watching his.
They met there several times while he was being vetted. He—always the edgy candidate, wanting so badly to say the right things, to be accepted. They—always cool, solid, professional, used to examining anxious candidates, trying to put him at ease while throwing him off his guard. Then, as it went on, there were other meetings, in other places, with other men—psychologists, medical doctors, desk men who gave him long written tests, one who spoke to him in flawless German, one in American English. In a dark, empty import/export office in an industrial zone of Givatayim, he first met Danny Romano, who even then sucked on an empty pipe as he recorded Eytan’s biography for two straight days.
It went on for months, with Eytan taking test after test, interview after interview, never knowing if he’d passed until he was called in again. Always circling the periphery of the Service, never meeting another candidate, until he was finally cleared and the gate was opened, admitting him only to his basic training and many more months of tests.
So he was back at the Alaska. He sipped his café afooch, thinking of himself as a wounded animal searching for its birth cave, a comfortable place to die.
The café seemed much smaller now, though it had twenty tables arranged in cool darkness near a long mirrored bar, and there were ten more tables on the sidewalk beneath shiny white umbrellas. In his memory, as with all such things, it had grown into a vast, bustling cabaret. Yet now there were hardly any customers, and that was how it had always been. It returned easily into a clear cocoon of reality.
Ettie Denziger came in off the street. Her hair was cut short, a sort of blonde pageboy. She was very tan, wearing a white Izod shirt and jeans, sandals, carrying a small brown shoulder bag.
He had always wondered if AMAN used a whole string of cafés for its recruiting drives, or if they had a favorite spot, a regular “office” of milk shake and espresso machines, agent-waiters, and armed cooks. Did the Alaska make its monthly rent on the expense accounts of case officers? Or did every candidate have a different restaurant stamped on the cover of his or her vetting file?
Ettie pulled up a chair and sat down. She looked around and smiled, lifting her palms up and answering his speculations with a question.
“Capestrano?” she said.
“Cappuccino,” he answered, toasting her with his cup.
She laughed briefly, then rummaged through her pocketbook for a cigarette and lit up. She blew out the smoke and looked at his head.
“Terrible haircut,” she said.
“Thank you.”
“It matches your complexion.”
“Another compliment.”
She reached out to touch his hand, then hesitated and put her fingers on the table. She looked at the white tape around two of his knuckles.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“I’m still visiting Wingate.”
“You should try tennis, my dear.”
“That gives blisters, too, I hear.”
Ettie got up and came around the table. She pulled another chair over and sat next to him, elbows touching. It was an old habit from Europe, faces to the door, but that wasn’t why she did it. They watched the people passing on the sidewalk, soldiers, summer students, old brown men, young mothers with prams. It was growing dark.
“This nostalgic return is very sentimental, Eytan,” she said, like a wife suddenly discovering a bouquet of flowers.
“I didn’t know you’d ever been here until you said so.”
“Oh!” She pinched the skin of his wrist, hard. “You tricked me! Good for you.”
“I thought I owned the place. Me alone.”
“That’s what we all thought. But then I worked in Recruiting for a while. Remember? It was after Morocco. The Alaska was it for a long time, then the Rondo. Now it’s probably the Central Bus Station, given the budget.”
Eytan smiled, but he was thinking about Morocco. Her skin in the moonlight. Her cheek against his. Her breath.
“Let’s walk,” he said. He put some money on the table, and they went out into the cooling evening, the breeze from the distant sea.
They began to walk west, down toward the Mediterranean and the big avenues where the crowds would be lining up for movie tickets and taking over the cafés on Dizengoff. The holidays were coming soon, the schools would reopen, the ocean would cool. The atmosphere was compressed, hurried, the voices raised and the cars and buses faster it seemed, as if lives were being stuffed into envelopes of insufficient time.
Eytan walked with his hands in his pockets. He felt the Browning heavy on his hip beneath his untucked shirt. Ettie took his elbow.
“I’m leaving soon,” she said.
A mission, Eytan knew. Hopefully, it would take her very far away for a long time. Safely into a lesser danger.
“Good,” he said.
She put her hands behind her back. “Always the diplomat.” She was an expert dissembler, but it failed with him.
“Flute is here.”
Ettie stopped walking. This time, Eytan took her elbow, and they continued after a few awkward steps.
“What do you mean, ‘here’?” she whispered.
“Ba’aretz.” The expression meant in the land—a common tribal endearment of the common citizen. Yet now it also meant in our house. As he said it, he felt the hairs on the nape of his neck.
Ettie said nothing for a few moments. They reached Dizengoff Square, the fountains in the raised round overpass sputtering up into plumes of pink and yellow lights.
“You lead,” Ettie said, like a fatigued dance partner at a marathon. And Eytan took his cue. From then on, as they moved slowly northward, she would follow in step as he doubled back without warning, grabbed a cab for a few blocks, boarded a bus and got off before it left the curb. It was automatic—improvisational yet predetermined. Graceful but erratic, like the meanderings of a senile, indecisive couple.
He told her everything, some of it in German, Hebrew, English. When he got to the part about Mike Dagan and Cyprus, she took his hand and squeezed it, and she did not let go. The telling made his heart beat faster, bringing the truth up, looking at its danger in the passing lights of city night. Their coupled palms were slick with sweat.
At last they were back on Dizengoff, having doubled back over from Ben Yehuda, walking north where the cafés thinned and the shops were closing as the tourists looked for drink and entertainment in the south, having spent their jewelry and Judaica budgets. Ettie’s voice was thick though steady as she reasoned aloud.
“It is him,” she said, having juggled all the pieces of Eytan’s story. “But I’m not so sure he’s inside.”
“He’s inside,” Eytan said.
“It’s not hard evidence, Eytan. Penetrations happen every month. No one has a description to go with the passport.”
“It’s him.”
“Why?” Her voice rose a bit. Anger, or maybe panic. “Why does it have to be him?”
Eytan stopped walking. He turned to her beneath the light of a streetlamp. He was still holding her hand.
“We’re all gone, Ettie. Everyone outside is dead. Harry, Rainer, Mike.” He slipped into their cover names. “Francie has been ‘locked up,’ wherever she is. Now it’s just you, me, and Hans-Dieter. We’re all here. Where else would he want to be?”
“But why, Eytan? The man is a professional. Why would he want it?”
He looked down at her, the eyes so wide and blue. He suddenly hated it all—his country, his superiors, the Service. She should have been married, carefree, studying art at Bezalel. She should have been happy somewhere.
“I don’t know, Ettie.”
They began to walk again, this time with Eytan’s arm around her, his hand gripping her shoulder. He could feel the tightened muscle, the shiver in her spine.
They moved toward Arlosorov, then Sokalov, their eyes darting now, beneath the trees of the quiet streets, examining the shadows of the doorways. Eytan’s free hand hung loosely near his hip. Ettie clutched her pocketbook, the zipper open.
They mounted the stairs in silence. Eytan did not want to think. She turned her key in the lock. He was always thinking, always. Thinking, planning, anticipating. They were inside. Ettie bolted the door and walked through the rooms like a stranger in her own home. He couldn’t do it anymore, think for so many, double-thinking, triple-thinking. He wanted to stop, to rest, to just let it happen.
Her hands were shaking as she poured straight vodka into simple cut glasses. Eytan watched her, seeing the open suitcase on the floor, the folded clothes, careful selections. There was a pile of books in French—dictionaries, Vol de Nuit, maps of Paris. Ettie saw him looking as she handed him the glass. She drank quickly, watching him until he also took the burning liquid.
“Would you have wanted me as a brunette?” she asked, a false playfulness.
He saw her then, as she would look soon, her blond pageboy black, her eyebrows arched and plucked like a Parisian model’s. They could dye her whole body, but to Eytan her being was blond, golden, sunlit, thin like the mountain blood of Europe that ran in her veins. How would they cover that? He hated them all.
She put her glass down somewhere, without bending. He felt his chest swell, his throat, his mind paralyzed, pushing Simona down and away while he tried with all his might to remember her face.
Ettie reached down for the tails of her shirt. She lifted it over her head, the blond hair flying and then clinging to her raised face. He tried not to look at her, almost thankful that she came to him, to press her soft breasts against him so he could not see. Her mouth was soft and wet, then harder as it pressed against his and he took her in.
Her hands gripped his head, her fingers in his hair, clutching. His own hands struggled against the thick air, drawn to the skin he had to touch. And then she was unbuttoning his shirt, almost frenetic; she groaned as their tongues met.
She was leading now, dancing a clumsy waltz toward the double white doors yawning into her darkened bedroom.
“Ettie,” he tried to say. “Ettie.”
“We’re going to die, Eytan,” she cried between the flesh of his lips. “What difference does it make? What difference?”
Yes. What difference.
The telephone rang. Like a boxing bell after the first round. They stood still, mouths together, eyes half-open. She was a professional. Her master called. She responded like a Pavlovian experiment.
She put an arm across her breasts, her back heaving as she stepped to the phone. She answered, then held the instrument in the air without turning to him.
He took it, trying to control his breathing like a sniper before a kill.
“Ken?”
“I’ve been trying you there for an hour.” It was Benni. There was no admonition, simply information to underline the importance. “You’d better get back here. Now.”
Eytan hung up. He turned. Ettie was standing there, holding her shirt to her chest. She knew the spell had been broken, but she still hoped.
Eytan had never seen her cry, her restraint a horrible curse cast by unknowing parents. Yet now her tears welled; they ran over, across her tanned cheeks.
He wanted to come to her, to hold her again, to be lost. But it was past. He was thinking again. He had lied a thousand times, killed and killed again. Perhaps the only good thing left to him was to be true to Simona. The one good thing.
“I want you to go under,” he said, his voice hoarse. He buttoned his shirt.
“I can’t.” She took a step forward. “I’m leaving soon.”
“Go on in,” he said desperately. “Until this is over.”
She came closer, shaking her head, the wisps of her hair sticking to her cheeks. He reached out then, taking her head in his hands, kissing her once more.
“I’m alone, Eytan.” Her voice broke. “I’m so alone.”
“I love you, Ettie,” he whispered. “I always did.”
He turned and walked out quickly, closing the door, the white wood echoing in empty rooms.
Ettie stood there, holding her dampened shirt. Shivering. Breathless.
15: The Dead Sea
That Afternoon
AMAR KAMIL WAS CLIMBING A MOUNTAIN.
He did not need ropes, carabiners, or pitons, for he had chosen the face well. It was only sixty or seventy degrees at the worst spots, with plenty of solid hand- and footholds, and unless you were going straight up a vertical slab you would not need the accoutrements of a team or a free climber. He had cheated much more treacherous slopes, in Switzerland, in the Urals, where the ice and snow were like nature’s time bombs, threatening to explode from under your boots without a clue as to the delay of the mechanism.
Here, in the Judean desert, your most formidable opponent was the sun. It was bright like the heart of an atom, yet as it sucked the liquid from your body you hardly seemed to sweat, for even as the water gushed from your pores it was instantly evaporated. That apparently cool breeze was a devil’s lie.
The sun could turn good muscle to jelly without warning. It could sear the areolae of your lungs. Beneath the shade of a hat brim, it could cause a condensed rivulet to wash an eye with salt, making you see true rock where there was only sand, forcing your hand to reach for false security.
What you needed here was knowledge, experience, the fatalism of the Bedouin. You needed good legs, a little water, and the will to keep putting one foot carefully above the other.
Amar smiled as he climbed. He had everything he needed.
He wore the gym bag like a knapsack, his arms slipped through the nylon straps, the heavy webbing cutting down into the flesh over his collarbones. Although he had wrapped the RPG sections and the rockets inside a large beach towel, the metal warheads and iron tubes were as heavy as a field mortar, and they banged against his spine with every step.
At a roadside kiosk near Jerusalem—the kind where every summer boy scout rounded out his inventory—he had bought a pair of khaki shorts, a cheap web belt and plastic canteen, and a green T-shirt with a large Society for the Protection of Nature symbol on its chest. His white sneakers were brown now with dust, his legs and arms were already going pink with virgin burn, and his hands were scraped and bloody with the climb. He savored each new pain. He would not be getting much sleep, and the physical discomforts would help him remain alert.
He reached the summit of the mountain. It was a long, narrow razorback, and he did not stand up to take in the view like some amateur hiker. He stayed low and walked quickly to the other side, slipped down onto his rump and lay back, shaking the gym bag loose for a few moments of relief. He tipped the sun hat back and turned to look north.
On the far side of the gorge he could see the small parking area at Mitzpeh Shalem. Though it had seemed like quite a climb in his Siat from the Dead Sea to the popular overlook, now he was even higher, and his car resembled a white cold capsule on a giant, spiky anthill.
He had changed his mind about the car. It was not, after all, a good idea to abandon it in Bethlehem’s Manger Square. With nightfall, all but Israeli military vehicles would have to clear out, and then his rental would stick out like a goat dropping on a fruit plate. The Jews would suspect it, perhaps even calling in their sappers to check it for explosives. At the very least, they would trace it.
So, he had left Abu Kaddoumi’s shop and looked for a café. It was a careful selection, and he finally settled on a small, rundown counter with a few tables and, most important, a portrait of Nasser on the wall. The owners were not happy with the Egyptian–Israeli peace accords.
Amar was the only customer, and he spoke to the proprietor in Arabic. When he was reasonably sure about the man, he suddenly offered him one hundred U.S. dollars to go and fetch the Siat. Then he waited across the street.
Within twenty minutes, the man returned alone with the car.
With the RPG in the trunk, Amar drove back through Jerusalem, then down toward Jericho, turning south for the Dead Sea. It was not that he mistrusted the integrity of the PFLP-SC cell members—he doubted that they would have fiddled with the weapon parts. He was simply cognizant of the fact that his people were not always proficient in their assessment of military hardware. If the Middle East wars had proved anything, it was that painful fact.
Besides, he had learned from hard experience that you never accepted the word of another that your weapon was in good working order. He had to test-fire the RPG. If one of the rockets worked, then the chances were good that at least one more would function. He only needed one.
