Blood Rules (30 page)

Celestine’s silence was more eloquent than words.

“There never was an old Lebanon,” she said suddenly. “Myth. All of it.”

Gazit did not move a muscle. Only his eyes clouded a little, and at last he said, “You make it sound like Israel.”

She looked him full in the face, then, and could see that he shared her emotion: two old people who’d served different but equally romantic lies and were tired.

“When you do the right thing,” she said, “it’s often for the wrong reason. More usually, it’s for no reason that anyone can understand. You came in 1978, and again in 1982, and you pounded us into the ground. You slashed and you burned. You stood by while the Phalange butchered their way through the refugee camps, and some of us cheered. You claimed to do all that for the safety of Israel; you said it was necessary, but you were muddled and you were frightened, and so you lied a lot. ‘Surgical precision bombing'; how we used to smile. Whenever you blew up an apartment building you told the world it was ‘surgical precision bombing,’ that the PLO leadership had been there moments before, such a pity! But now we know that your pilots came in over the sea at nearly the speed of sound, with one hand they were flying their planes and in the other they held photographs of the apartment building they’d been told to bomb. Have you tried doing that?
Vroom-vroom,
I used to say, what fun, I could do that to Tel Aviv; where can I sign up for flying school?
Vroom-vroom.”

“We did what was necessary.” His voice was cold. “For the salvation of Israel.”

“As I now do what is necessary for the salvation of Robbie. I’m too exhausted to give you a good reason for my coming here. Just love keeps me going. Hate wouldn’t do that. You said this Sharett was your friend. You love him, I saw the worry in your face. He’s not at Tiberias. Why don’t you phone that hotel manager again and get him to describe your friend’s peculiarity?”

“What peculiarity?”

“He’s your friend, my God, not mine. How should I know?”

The room was hushed, pregnant with possibilities. She’d rambled her way thus far, done what she had to do, and now let it all be in the hands of God. Nausea reasserted itself, the pain in her middle was growing worse, she had gone as far as she could go,
and this was the end.

There was a muttered conference. The men were subdued now, speaking without benefit of violent gestures, lost in a consensus of ignorance. When Gazit finally called for the phone to be brought, there was no opposition.

It took an age for him to reestablish contact with the hotel manager. Celestine lay back on the sofa. She stared at one corner of the ceiling, where spiders’ cobwebs interlaced, and wondered who looked after Gazit.

“Hello,” she heard him say at last, but as if he were in another room instead of within a few inches of her. “Look, we have a problem, all right? This man Sharett, your guest, how many times have you met him? … Um-hm. And when he is speaking to you, does he have a … a kind of nervous habit, a mannerism? … Nothing, I see. Let me try this on you: Have you ever seen him wink and shrug his shoulder when he laughs? … Yes, it’s kind of hard to describe, I know,
I
know
that!”

She lay there and stared at the ceiling and she thought, If I were that hotel manager I’d answer, Yes, sure, what the hell, anything to get rid of this nebbish.

Then she heard Gazit speak. “Say that again?” That’s what he said, very low, maybe like a man at prayer, a supplicant.

There was a silence.

“The guy doesn’t do a Raful,” predicted another voice, close to where she was lying, and this man too was hushed.

Gazit slowly revolved until he was looking at the one who’d just spoken. “The guy,” he said, “doesn’t smile. Or laugh. Ever.” He twisted his head around to look at each of his men in turn, and said, “He doesn’t … ever … laugh.”

Another silence. Then Gazit was snapping the fingers of his free hand to summon his radio operator; a string of orders in Hebrew; the phone smashing back down onto its cradle; one man running out the front door and coming back moments later with a newspaper that all of them read, standing, while they mouthed names.

They were checking the passenger list for anything familiar, anything suspicious, and Celestine knew hope. For the next couple of hours there was merely a string of radio messages and phone calls, while she lay quietly on her back, forgotten, and watched the spiders. There were three spiders. They did not move. Sometimes, however, they would twitch.

“All right.” Gazit was standing in front of her, and his voice was urgent. “All right, this is the situation, now
listen.
The man at Tiberias, the man who posted the card, is not Sharett. We flew somebody up there with a wire photograph and the hotel manager is adamant: not Sharett. One of the passengers aboard that plane is called Randolph Stone. The photocopied pages you brought here were taken from this Stone’s passport. Our people in Tel Aviv confirm that some years ago Sharett signed out a forged passport in that name, to be used by a subordinate, who later died in circumstances where we would not expect the passport back again. Now, madam, you can sit up and prepare yourself, because the Shin Bet guys are coming and you will have to tell them your story again, from the start.”

“Give me some water,” she croaked. “Please.”

This time there was no hesitation; she could have asked for the Temple of Solomon and they’d have rung a contractor. She did sit up. She made an effort. But the stiletto of pain that drove into her side was as real as any blade, and she fainted before the water could touch her lips.

She came to on a stretcher, with Gazit staring down at her with an expression she could not fathom. Somebody lifted the stretcher and the room wobbled.

“Where are you taking me?” she asked, surprised to hear the words come out right.

“To the hospital.”

“No. Take me home.”

The stretcher hovered for a moment; then Gazit jerked his head, the room wobbled again, and they had set her down.

“I’ve told you everything. I can’t tell you any more. Send me home. Over the border. You can do that, I know.”

He hesitated. “The road is rough.”

“But you want me out, yes, I know. So send me up to Kharif.” She managed to smile. “You know the way.”

She felt him take her hand and through it communicate his own awesome doubts. She squeezed his fingers. They’d deadened the pain, but she was fading and she didn’t want it to happen here.

“You owe me,” she said quietly. And then, “Save my Robbie. A life for a life.”

“I will try,” he said stiffly. “You have convinced me. To convince others may not be so easy.”

She squeezed his hand again, and when this time he returned the pressure she knew she had won everything and closed her eyes, serene. Her last thought before she slept was of dear dead foolish Ibrahim: she wondered how he had managed to look after himself all those years in Paradise, without her.

After a sojourn in darkness she entered upon a strange state, neither waking nor sleeping but in transit. She was aware of the ambulance, or whatever was carrying her, bumping along poor roads; it was hot outside and the vehicle’s air-conditioning couldn’t cope, but she scarcely felt the heat. The Israeli medics were good. They gave good shots. Their shots were as good as Gazit’s had been, all those years ago.

She slept again, waking to darkness. The road, if anything, had worsened. She sensed she was alone and that they had crossed the border into Lebanon; it
felt
like home. That was all right, then.

She slept and did not sleep. The sound of an engine, all-pervasive until now, was absent. How long ago had the engine stopped? She didn’t know. Through her haze of unconsciousness she was aware of being carried, but she was having such a lovely dream about Robbie that she refused to leave it. Let them carry her where the hell they liked:
to
hell, if they wanted. All her friends would be there … back off, that’s too frightening to be funny….

She felt so calm about the whole thing, that was the amazing part. She had expected this to be stressful, and it turned out to be not drowning but waving after all. Back to the dream, now: Robbie and Kharif, and Leila too, only she was younger than Robbie, just a girl, how strange

It was Kharif. Her own bedroom. She lay on the bed with a blanket thrown over her, carelessly, not covering her legs, which were cold. The dream. No, not the dream. Azizza stood at the foot of the bed. Celestine stared at her, wondering what she might be doing in her dream, until it dawned that this was reality. Azizza cried. Celestine couldn’t understand that. She’d gone to Israel, done what she could to save Robbie, made her peace with Gazit, had not an enemy in the world. Why cry?

Azizza stepped aside. No, she was
pushed.
How annoying. Feisal stood where Azizza had been a moment before. His face spat malice.

“Are you happy, Mother?” His voice came to her as if wafted up from the depths of Hades. “Did you achieve our downfall?”

For a moment she stared at him in silence. She wanted to speak. She knew that time was short. But it was important to savor each dwindling moment.

“Of course,” she said at last. Yes, the words sounded in the silence; she wasn’t dreaming. She could speak. “Now let Mama get a little sleep, mm?”

She tried to roll over, blot out the sight of him, but her body would not respond.
Damn nuisance!

The pain was coming back. Celestine tensed. But on and on it came, surpassing all she had endured before; she felt as though someone were inflating her insides like a football, she could not bear this

Azizza started forward; Feisal thrust her back again; she swung her fist at him but he grabbed it and slapped her face.

“Izza!” she cried. “Izza,
don’t!”

But Azizza fought Feisal like a wildcat: sinuously, cruelly. He cried out when her nails lacerated his cheek. Celestine saw her son standing there at the foot of the bed, one palm clapped to his face and an expression of astonishment stealing over his countenance. The door crashed open, Feisal’s guards…. She heard a shot. Azizza fell forward, clutching her stomach, and as the echo rolled over Celestine, so too did the blanket of pain that God was slowly drawing up her body to cover her face; but not before she could see that she would have at least one old friend to chat with wherever she was going.

She murmured, “Thank you.” She died.

L
EILA
was in the cockpit.She sat there motionless and silent and alone. The Iranians’ helicopter was coming in to land. There would be messages for her. She did not care. She was so tired. The grand masters who sat beyond the horizon, the champions who presented themselves in the lists of these great tourneys of the mind, had given up trying to raise her on the radio. She knew what that meant. Negotiation had been crossed off the list of strategies. They would be turning their attention to the underwater charts. A submarine, of course.

She knew when sunset was, when the moon rose, what depth of waters lay behind the plane in the Gulf of Aden. By now, “they” would know too. They would find a way of circumventing the Iranian frigate. They would land the team on the beach half an hour after dark. Perhaps tonight.

She could not take any more speed. It was making her nauseous and thirsty.

She looked at her watch. The hands made no sense to her. Like a swimmer struggling against the current, she laboriously matched the angle they made with things she knew. Things she’d learned as a child….

Two hours to sunset.

Her walkie-talkie crackled into life. Over the crunch of static she recognized the helicopter pilot’s voice. He spoke a word. !
Zalzalah.
Earthquake. That was the code word for today. Yes. When she leaned forward to take up the handset it seemed to recede; she watched it helplessly, through tunnel vision that made everything float up and down.

“El Siif,”
! she replied listlessly. The sword.

“I have messages for you.”

“I’ll send someone to collect the bag.”

A few minutes later Selim came to the cockpit, carrying a canvas sack. She made a sign, scarcely perceptible, and he opened it before leaving her alone again. The bag contained emergency rations, revised radio frequencies and codes, an envelope with her name on it. She opened it.

Halib’s handwriting. She wriggled upright, feeling some of the fatigue seep away. So she’d been wrong in her guess that he was a Mossad agent. Strange. Stranger yet, infinitely worse: Halib still did not give her permission to leave with Robbie. How much more would he demand of her?

Earlier, Selim had reported increasing restlessness on the part of the passengers. They were weakened by lack of food and water and by fear, but they were also close to the bottom line of desperation. She and Halib had underestimated the effects of isolating the plane from the world. By avoiding the standard hijack environment of airport apron, where the assembled press was always clearly visible to those inside, they also intensified their victims’ impression of having been forsaken by those outside. They knew now that nobody was coming to rescue them. So let the hijackers shoot a few of them, so what? Since they were all going to die in any case they might as well fight back and die heroes.

It didn’t need everyone to feel that way. Just a few, with fierce qualities of leadership, might, just might, be enough to start a revolution. She could not defeat a revolution.

“My son,” she said suddenly to the Perspex. “God save my son.”

She must forestall this revolution before it erupted.

Leila used the crew phone to summon Selim and gave him instructions. A few moments later, Raful was brought to the first class cabin and made to sit down. At the start of their confrontation, Leila Hanif remained standing.

“I need you.” The expression in his eyes would have been funny, if she’d had the spirit to enjoy it. “I need you to die.”

Her amplification only deepened his lack of comprehension, she could see. “Discipline is faltering, back there. I have to make an example.”

He had no fear; it wasn’t simply that he felt afraid but could mask it. She knew the difference. He genuinely did not fear death. That interested her. He might not be with the Mossad, but…

“You knew about this hijack,” she said. “Didn’t you?”

He did not deign to answer.

“You could have tipped off the airline. You could have phoned a warning through to the airport. There’s a hundred ways you could have found to stop me.” Suddenly she knew she was going to fall down. She leaned against the bulkhead. “Why didn’t you?”

He stared straight in front of him. There was something noble in his gaze. She felt a tremendous urge to smash through it. She wanted him to cringe, to beg for his life with tears in his eyes, as Palestinian children had cringed on Tal al-Zataar while they died of thirst, or as old men had begged for their granddaughters not to be skewered in Shatila while the Israeli Defense Force officers sat in their watchtowers less than fifty yards away.

It would be a waste of time, she told herself, and time I do not have. No, that was a lie. In truth, she was frightened of losing the argument. Not because she felt tired, not because she had taken no nourishment for the best part of the day and a night, but simply because she feared he might have some justice on his side, and that would have destroyed her. So when he made no reply all she said was, “You’ve lost.”

“No.” He raised his eyes, very slowly, to look at her. “You are the one who has lost.”

She waited.

“I have kept my humanity to the end. You threw yours away.” Still she waited.

“London. Nineteen sixty-nine. Your wedding night.”

Leila wiped a hand across her forehead. Her wedding night?

“My wife … my wife, Esther, she killed herself, you know? Sleeping tablets. But she was afraid the doctor hadn’t been straight with her about the pills, so she put a plastic bag over her head and kept it there with an elastic band. One morning, after I’d gone to work. The doctor who did the post-mortem had the times all worked out; she must have swallowed the tablets while I was still on the stairs. I never suspected. I thought she’d gotten over the worst. But maybe the worst is always with you, when you lose a child.”

“Child.” The word acted like a detonator, forcing from her an echo that she was scarcely even aware of having uttered. “Your child died?”

“Sara was murdered.”

“Sara … Sara Stone?”

“Sara Sharett.”

She reached out a hand, groping blindly for the nearest chair. She sat down heavily and rested her head on one hand while she wiped away tears with the other. How fickle the body was! How weak!

At last she remembered this man. Raful Sharett and Leila Hanif had met two years before, briefly, scarcely catching sight of each other across a hallway filled with smoke; but in this moment she knew him as if they’d never been separated. She felt no surprise at finding him here.

“Sara Sharett,” she repeated stupidly. But inside, the rage was beginning. Rage at not having remembered him before. Rage at Halib for not having found out. And rage because at her very deepest core she believed her brother
must have known
this Mossad agent was on board, but still he had lied to her.

“Sara Sharett,” she said again.

“Yes,” Sharett confirmed. “I am Raful Sharett; you know who I mean when I talk of my daughter. You can remember all the names. All twelve of them.”

“Thirteen.”

Her single whispered word was enough to check the remorseless forward propulsion of his judgment. For a moment his face wiped itself clean; then his forehead creased. “What?”

I died.

“You said … thirteen. Why? Only twelve victims were named.”

That night I died too. Doesn’t anyone realize?

She lowered her hand and looked at him. Now they were sitting side by side, on opposite sides of the aisle. She looked at him, and she said, “You lost a child. Your only child.”

He nodded brusquely, once.

“You lost a child, so every day when you wake up, assuming you’ve slept a few hours before dawn, there’s this sickness in your stomach, and for a few seconds God has mercy; he won’t let you remember why. Then the memory comes back, and it isn’t today, it’s the very first day all over again, nothing dulled, nothing softened, nothing hidden.”

He was staring at her. He felt his head nodding in agreement and wanted to stop it, but he couldn’t.

“You get up. You don’t want to eat, or drink, or think. You want to lie in bed or sit in a chair, because you haven’t the energy of a corpse; it’s all you can do to drag on your clothes, even though you can’t think of a reason why you should. Maybe you have to go out Why? Because you’ve taken some kind of decision to hope your child will come back, a miracle!—so the logic of that requires you to do the other things, like eat and wash. And you’ll be walking along, maybe your mind isn’t on your child at all, maybe it’s one of the breaks, and you’ll see something, or hear, or smell something and it comes flooding back, doesn’t it? Only ten times worse, because you’ve had a little rest, and your brain knows you can take more because of that, so it piles on the grief that’s been building up behind the dam, and it’s not ten times worse, it’s a hundred times worse. You’ve gotten rid of your child’s clothes, of course, and the toys and all the little objects that might ambush you, but you can’t stop them making those chocolate bars that were his favorite, you can’t stop them selling them. You can’t always avoid turning on the TV just when the cartoons are about to start, ‘I’m Popeye the Sailor Man!'; oh, do you know how afraid I am of hearing that awful, awful tune? ‘I’m Popeye the Sailor Man, I’m Popeye the Sailor Man…. ’ Did you have the headaches, Raful? Because you don’t eat or sleep properly, but you work fifteen, sixteen, seventeen hours a day, seven days a week, twelve months a year, so you get headaches, don’t you?”

He nodded again. She did not see it. He did not know that she did not see it. They were both elsewhere.

“Migraine, the doctors call it, so they stuff you full of pills, but they’re poison, so they make you feel worse. And there you are, walking along, and
bang!
There’s your boy, just as you remember him, and you call his name, you can’t
ever
help it, but he doesn’t look around, and then someone moves out of the way and you see that your son, your boy,
your child
is holding some adult’s hand, some molesting pervert has got
your child …
and you start to run … and then …”

“She turns around,” Sharett whispered, “and she looks at you. And you realize all sorts of things with half your brain: that you’re in danger of getting arrested, at worst, or of making one almighty fool of yourself, at best, but the thing you realize, the thing you know with all your brain, is that this … isn’t … her …”

“… after… all.”

Silence filled the first class cabin. Silence and rage.

Leila Hanif and Colin Raleigh were married in a Kensington registry office. It was October 1969, one week before the start of the Oxford term, which gave them time for a fleeting honeymoon before Colin embarked on his BCL course. Halib had chosen the wedding day, just as he’d selected the hotel where the happy couple would spend the first night of their new life together. For both these choices, Halib had a reason.

On the morning of her wedding Leila woke up with a headache, unable to face the thought of food. While dressing she somehow managed to break the heel of a shoe. She found a repairman by South Ken tube station and stood there stupidly, her face a blank mask, while commuters eyed her finery and wondered how much last night’s trick had paid her.

The ceremony itself was one big nothing in her memory. At the time she was vaguely aware of an office, people in suits, forced chat and falser gaiety. Colin’s mother stood stiffly on the sidelines, wearing a smile that had been painted on with her lipstick but was much more easily removable. She had bought them a silver toast rack, without prior consultation. Leila couldn’t believe it when she heard, but Colin could. On her side, only Halib bothered to put in an appearance. He came with one of his tarts, Annette, a girl whose mascara was smudged, and Leila somehow felt that to be appropriate.

She wasn’t aware of Colin at all. He might have been a waxworks figure. It was a warm day and it was raining; London looked, felt, and smelled abominable. They piled into a taxi to be driven off to somebody’s seedy club for a reception of sorts; then it was time to go to the very old and forbidding hotel in Piccadilly that Halib had so thoughtfully chosen for them. The doorman wore an elaborate, drab uniform; she would be able to remember that later, even though she couldn’t recall her husband’s suit. She remembered the way the doorman saluted and called her madam.

Their room had not been decorated in a hundred years. The door weighed half a ton. Net curtains of impeccable antiquity guarded a window that overlooked a well composed of other windows and innumerable white bricks. She could not see a trace of sky however hard she craned her neck. The furnishings were Louis Quinze, but faded Louis Quinze; even Louis Seize might have considered throwing them out and starting again. She had never sat on such a hard bed. This hotel relished its wonderful reputation with visiting heads of state, or so Halib had assured her. She’d never thought much of diplomacy.

Somebody had arranged for a bottle of champagne to be waiting for them when they arrived. It stood in an ice bucket alongside two of those awful saucer-shaped glasses that connoisseurs had abandoned years ago as being guaranteed to make the wine go flat. But Colin’s eyes lit up. He lifted the bottle from the bucket, dripping water on the carpet, which would benefit from any kind of a cleaning, so no matter, and said appreciatively, “Vintage Laurent Perrier. 1964. You don’t often see that in England. This must have cost a mint.”

He opened the bottle with an exaggerated
pop
and tossed her the cork to keep. “A memento.” When he offered a glass, however, she waved it away, saying, “In a minute. I have a headache.”

“Poor lamb. Take an aspirin.”

“I’ll be all right.”