Leon Uris (65 page)

‘But, darling, we went to so much trouble,’ Ursula soothed.

He was rolled over onto his back. A man stood over him with a devil’s-head mask from the costume room. He removed it slowly. The Effendi’s eyes bulged. His fat body glistened with wet fear perspiration.

‘Sultan! Sultan!’ he screamed.

‘Ah, but he cannot hear you, my darling,’ Ursula said. ‘He is quite dead and awaits in your speedboat for you to join him.’ She turned the music up several notches. Ibrahim straddled him and his dagger came from its sheath with a zing.

‘Talk! Let’s talk,’ Kabir begged.

‘Yes, please do speak,’ Ibrahim said.

‘Money. All the gold you can swim in. Millions! Millions!’

Ibrahim sat on the edge of the couch and placed the point of the dagger against the jugular vein and pressed it slightly. ‘How many millions do you have in mind?’ Ibrahim asked.

‘Millions, millions. Five, ten ... more

‘But if I take your money it would lead the police to me.’

‘No, no, no. I get you money. Cash. I call and have it brought here right now.’

‘Do you hear that, Ursula? He wants to give me money.’

‘He is a liar. He has code words with his banker.’

‘I do not lie! I do not make tricks! I am honest!’

Ibrahim backhanded him hard over the face, then grabbed him by the short ringlets of hair on the back of his neck and jerked his face up and looked into his terrorized eyes. Kabir wept and babbled incoherently. A smattering of a smile crossed the Haj’s lips. He was sorely tempted to prolong the Effendi’s agony. What to do? Beat him with hoses and whips? Ibrahim felt himself tremble with a sudden rush of perverse sensations. The music thundered and the lights spat out wild flashes. Oh Allah I am enjoying this, Ibrahim thought.

He signaled for her to turn down the sound. ‘Good. Now we will be able to hear his very last heartbeats.’ An awesome silence fell. No noise but the exaggerated breathing of the three and Kabir’s interspersed whimpers.

‘When I lived among the Bedouin I watched my uncle, the great Walid Azziz, take revenge on a boy who had fucked one of his favorite daughters. If this is done properly, he will drown by choking on his own blood without any mess and we should actually hear the air leave his body.’

‘Partner ... you are full partner in everything ... take it all ... I want nothing ... nothing ... millions ...’

The point of the dagger slid down Kabir’s Adam’s apple to a place at the base of his neck where the collarbones joined and the windpipe bulged ever so slightly. Ibrahim jabbed the point into Kabir’s throat, moving in a downward motion.

‘I confess to everything ... mercy ...’

‘But each time you open your mouth the blade goes in a little deeper, like this.’

A circle of blood oozed out. Ibrahim held the knife in this position for several moments, luxuriating in Kabir’s agony. Ursula came into view and spat on him. The blade probed a fraction deeper. ...

‘You are enjoying this too much, Ibrahim.’

‘Yes, I am.’

‘I don’t want to be a beast like him. Finish him.’

‘Soon ... soon ...’

A light hissing sound was heard as air leaped toward his punctured throat, then mixed with the growing pool of blood and the hiss turned to a gurgle. Ibrahim pressed the blade in just so and held it motionless again. Now the blood came out in spurts.

‘You are starting to make a mess,’ she said. ‘Finish it.’

‘Just a little longer. See, the life is beginning to leave him.’ Kabir tried to speak but blood gorged out of his mouth.

‘You are making a mess!’ Ursula screamed.

‘YAHHHHH! YAHHHHH! YAHHHHH!’ the Haj yelled as he pulled out the knife, then plunged it into the Effendi’s heart up to the hilt. ‘YAHHHHH! YAHHHH! YAHHHHHHH!’

He withdrew the dagger and stood panting in joy. Ursula leaned against him and closed her eyes.

‘We make love now, Ursula!’

‘Are you crazy!’

‘Yes, I am crazy! Take off your clothes and we make love!’

He kicked Kabir’s body off the couch and it skidded down the steps. He flung her on the couch and leaped on her. It was like a thousand insanities of pain and happiness in a thousand paradises and hells. It was, she was, entirely magnificent.

Ibrahim wrapped Kabir in sheets of plastic as Ursula cleaned up the traces. They dragged the corpse out to the dock and dumped it unceremoniously into the speedboat alongside the poisoned Persian. As he tied an anchor around the legs of Kabir, she placed Sultan’s dishes in a sack to be dumped with their quarry. In a moment they sped out to the middle of the lake.

Both Ursula and Haj Ibrahim remained in Zurich as though nothing had happened. The Effendi Kabir had been known to disappear for days and even weeks without explanation. For two weeks he wasn’t even missed and everyone thought surely he had rushed off to Saudi Arabia. When it became apparent that he had vanished, it was impossible to establish foul play. There was no body, no witnesses, no apparent crime. Some routine inquiries were made, but the final police report said that the Effendi and his bodyguard had simply disappeared without feasible explanation. So far as the Swiss were concerned, that was the end of that.

When the first snows of winter fell, the arbitration conference broke up in disarray. On a bitter cold December day, Frau Emma Dorfmann and Franz took Haj Ibrahim to the airport for the long flight back.

Ursula remained in Zurich for several more weeks, then quietly slipped out of the country to rejoin the fortune she had skimmed off Kabir over the years.

W
HILE THE CONFERENCE WENT
on in Zurich, Colonel Farid Zyyad had obtained confessions from almost all of the Avenging Leopards who had been arrested in Manger Square. The cooperative ones were permitted to exchange their prison sentences for ‘volunteer’ service in a special unit of fedayeen, or freedom fighters, and were put into training for future guerrilla raids against Israel.

The few who did not cooperate after weeks of interrogation and torture were given long prison terms. Aside from knocking their teeth out and other crude beatings, Farid Zyyad had perfected favorite forms of inflicting pain. Both were creations of the desert and the desert’s heat.

The victim was tied on a table and covered with a wet cloth. He was then pressed by a hot iron from foot to chest. By controlling the temperature of the iron, they could ensure that the resulting burns and infections increased only slightly with each pressing.

Zyyad’s second favorite form of torture was saved for the most persistent of the rebels. They were simply wrapped each in a heavy blanket, tied up, and laid out in the midday sun. When one passed out from heat prostration, he would be revived long enough to gain sufficient strength to be wrapped up once more.

Jamil had gotten it all. His teeth were gone, he was a mass of bruises. He had been pressed a dozen times until his body became bloated with pus. He had been wrapped in the blanket on another dozen occasions.

About the same time Haj Ibrahim changed planes in Athens, Jamil was dragged between two guards before Zyyad. The boy was in blistering agony but conscious enough to still feel every bit of pain.

‘Well, you dirty rotten little animal, I don’t have to play with you anymore. Do you know what I am going to do with you, Jamil? I am going to give you to your father as a present.’

Jamil was taken to a secret enclosed and dreaded little yard in a far corner of the prison where one of the guards tended several dozen cats. Jamil was placed into a large burlap bag, six cats were thrown in with him, and the bag sewn shut.

When Farid Zyyad beat on the bat with a stick, the cats went berserk. He beat and beat until Jamil’s screams were no longer heard.

The cats had eventually clawed through to the bone. Face, eyes, sexual parts had been ripped away. All that was left was a blood-soaked mass of flesh so torn it was unrecognizable. The coffin was sealed, and the next day a story was released that Jamil had been serving on a secret mission against the Jews. He stepped on a land mine, the story continued, so his body was too disfigured to allow for an open coffin. The coffin was presented to Haj Ibrahim as he landed in Amman in a formal military ceremony reserved for heroes.

For the moment Aqbat Jabar forgot that Haj Ibrahim had been branded as a traitor, a spy of the Jews, and a man who had apparently sold out for several dunams of orange groves.

Jamil’s funeral became a crush of screaming and weeping refugees, fifty thousand of them, who jammed the highway to Jericho’s mosque, passing his coffin overhead. Hagar wept with suitable hysteria and collapsed a half-dozen times among the mourners. From that day on she would be called Umm Jamil, the mother of Jamil, a title of respect earned by his death.

Hundreds of placards bearing Jamil’s photographs were waved aloft along with other placards holding slogans of the fledgling ‘revolution.’ As Jamil was laid to rest in a place of honor in the mosque courtyard, the former Leopards, now redeemed freedom fighters, shot volleys over his grave and the priest swore vengeance on the Zionists who had killed the boy.

The first martyrdom of the Palestinians had come to pass.

END OF PART FOUR

W
HILE MY FATHER WAS
in Zurich, I passed my time among the al Sirhan Bedouin. The eastern desert of Jordan that bordered on Iraq and Saudi Arabia was so remote that there was no sign of civilization for a hundred miles in any direction. Because of Professor Doctor Nuri Mudhil’s stature, I had been taken in by Sheik al Baqi, the head of a large clan, and was treated as though I were one of his sons.

Sheik al Baqi and his sons taught me horsemanship, falconry, tracking, and, mainly, how to read the desert. Each day began with the sound of coffee being crushed, setting off another cycle of survival, the struggle that dominated our lives.

Until I came to the al Sirhan, I had always been a dreamer. No matter what the fates had imposed—Jaffa, Qumran, Aqbat Jabar—I felt that things would get better, that someday I would end up in a lovely villa back in Tabah or even go beyond to a great university in Cairo or Damascus. The desert and the Bedouin taught me that certain things are final in life.

In the brutal heat and poverty, it became easier to cope by finding some shade, seeing mirages, and allowing fantasy to enter and take over my mind. Through the Bedouin I came to know why the Arab adopted a passive acceptance of the unmercifulness of life. Everything was predestined by fate, and there was little one could do but accept the bitterness of earth and look forward to the relief of the trip to paradise.

The al Sirhan made no pretense of an equal society. One was born, lived, and died locked into a rigid caste system, staying in place from birth to death without protest. Within this ironclad conformity few marriages were arranged between families of different stations.

Sheik al Baqi’s face and body bore a road map of scars to testify to his manhood and leadership. He kept a half-dozen slave boys. Although slavery was outlawed, the al Sirhans were so remote they were beyond the reach and rules of ordinary society. Three of his slaves tended his sheep and another was his personal servant. The other two had been castrated, made into eunuchs to guard his wives and his harem of concubines. Two had been purchased from families within the clan and the others were captured in raids.

I arrived at a time when Sheik al Baqi was making peace with a rival tribe after eight bloody years of tribal warfare. It had started when a frustrated lover had kidnapped a girl from the al Sirhan and fled to a tribe over the border in Saudi Arabia. Peace had come only after the woman was sacrificed by murder to avenge al Sirhan honor. There was a great feast of brotherhood between former foes.

Everyone out here seemed preoccupied with sex, but one could do little about it. The women were more totally enslaved than in Tabah. They worked harder and did everything of a menial nature. Although very old women were allowed to sit by the fire with the men and were treated with respect, the others had no means of joy. They were quick to become hysterical, for weeping was generally their only means of relief from frustration. I noticed that Bedouin women were extremely affectionate with one another, and I was certain that this was a secret way they found pleasure.

The law out here did not always come from the Koran, but from the harsh order of life.

Men can kill but they must do so face to face.

Men can steal but not from their own.

Rape is no crime against a woman from an enemy tribe.

Lying and cheating are quite permissible so long as they are done to someone from another tribe.

There were strict laws requiring vengeance. Punishments often meant amputation of a limb. Life was dire. The law of survival begets cruelty.

The desert is a wicked master, but it is the sole possession of the Bedouin and when you enter the desert you are at his mercy. Mercy is not for those who break his rules.

I learned my lessons well, stayed out of trouble, and won a measure of respect because I was the only one in the clan who was literate.

The true pleasure in life came around the fire at night, drinking coffee, retelling the story of a raid or an epic of personal heroism. The dervish family in the clan would join us and, in their capacity as witch doctors, dance away evil spirits. They whirled themselves into a trance, then walked through the hot embers of the fire barefooted and became weak. They had proved their magical powers once again.

Everything happened with deliberate slowness. The continual reconstruction of the past gave us a place to disappear and helped us cope with the reality of daily existence.

The awesome sunrises often found me alone with Sheik al Baqi as the last around the fire.

‘Wealth and property are something Allah passed out unjustly,’ he told me. ‘We have many deaths, but it is no tragedy in the desert. Mainly, Ishmael, we are free. The peasant is a slave to his land. The city man is a slave to money and machinery. They are evil societies. The Bedouin does not need them.’