Martyrs’ Crossing (48 page)

“Who's the girl?” he asked.

“An old friend,” Ahmed said.

“Ah,” said George. “Another old friend.”

“Stop this right now, George,” Ahmed said. “You're scaring her, you're scaring me, and you're making a fool of yourself.”

“ ‘Stop this right now, George,' ” George said.

Ahmed shook his head in disgust.

George raised the gun again. It seemed very heavy now.

“Put it down,” Ahmed said.

George did not lower the gun. He coughed. The wind, it was too much. What am I doing here? This is no place for me. He brought the gun back down to his side, and coughed again. Was it going to be one of those coughs? He started to shake. Where was his coat? This was no place for an ill man. I should be in a library somewhere, in my dressing gown, slippers, a little fire glowing in the corner, wooden paneling, dusty shelves, reading glasses, a deep sofa, dog at my feet. Like Ahmed's father in the study in Amman. Marina bringing tea. Not on this desolate hill.

“Do you remember your father's study in Amman?” George asked Ahmed.

“Yes, I remember it,” Ahmed said. “George, you're sick.”

“Yes, I'm sick,” George said. He coughed again. “Of course I'm sick.”

“Look at your arm.”

He looked down. The sleeve was soaked in blood.

“I'm dying,” he said.

“Well, at any rate, you're not well.”

“Look at that,” George said, staring at his sleeve. “It's like a medical specimen, for Chrissakes.” He looked at the gun in his other hand and suddenly felt the absurdity of his position.

“Ahmed, Ahmed,” he said. “Take the fucking gun, would you?” He raised the gun and motioned with it to Ahmed. The motion started him coughing again. Ahmed took the gun. The girl came running back to them, now.

George smiled at her, and the cough began again. It was getting dark. He bent over double with the spasms. Ah, there was his coat, on the ground. He leaned down to pick it up and his heart knocked him over and he felt himself topple.

T
HE TEAM HAD GONE OUT
to Ramallah already to question Hajimi and perhaps to rearrest him. What a joke. As if he would say anything. As if he knew anything. Yizhar sat in a corner of the Thai noodle shop, nursing a Diet Coke. He'd thought he would eat, but he'd discovered as he entered the shop that the idea of feeding himself was repugnant. The smells emanating from behind the counter seemed muddy, rotten, and sickly sweet. Normal people would say that this aversion might come from the fact that he had just walked down Jaffa Road through what was left of the debris of the latest bombing—the glass shards, splintered wood, and crumbled concrete, the red metal scraps of bus, and the black blood splashed across the silver pedestrian barricades and staining the roadbed. But Yizhar was used to all that. The Thais remained miraculously intact among the wreckage, like a mirage, like something the hand of God had protected—probably because they were not Jews.

No, the revulsion was caused by something less palpable. He couldn't quite isolate it, but he knew that it had something to do with himself, a deep disgust with himself. Not for being pragmatic and self-serving and aggressive and obsessively secretive—it was very bad to know these things about yourself, but he thought that overall, these were good attributes. No, he was angry because he had been stupid. All his mistakes. Everything he could have done to prevent what had happened. His first mistake, not letting that woman speed right through with her sick baby. He saw himself clearly on that night, a literal-minded, authoritarian bureaucrat, out-of-touch, talking on the secure phone at his old decaying desk, and he hated that man because he had gotten the real Yizhar—brilliant strategist, clever operator, and patriot—into a difficult situation. He remembered feeling this turning of the stomach once before, when he realized that he was the one who had saved Gertler's career, and thereby had guaranteed his own eternal service on a secondary rung.

His stomach was churning up its ugly juices. Question Hajimi! Rearrest him! Another idiotic ploy. Another sham. As if Hajimi had anything to do with Doron's disappearance. Hajimi was a Hamas nut, and probably a terrorist, but he wasn't a fool. You don't leave your victim's car outside your house. They were going to question Hajimi on two counts: Doron's disappearance, which no one but the chiefs of staff and a few key operatives knew about yet, and the bus bombings, both of which Yizhar highly doubted Hajimi had anything to do with. It just seemed convenient to take one guy in for everything at once. The checkpoints would go crazy.

In any case, Hajimi wouldn't exactly be sitting there in his living room waiting for them to come chat. If he realized what had happened—and of course, he would realize it—Hajimi would already be in hiding somewhere in East Jerusalem, and he'd wait until the whole thing blew over. The smart guys always did. There was always a dark little mildewed room in the back of some crumbling medieval heap, and some deviant asshole waiting to take a guy like Hajimi in.

Publicly, Yizhar was busy blaming the bombings—and anything else that might happen—on a “rogue Hamas element.” (He was proud of that phrase, “rogue” and “Hamas” in the same sentence as if that were not redundant, implying, too, that the
nonrogue
faction of Hamas, the
not-as-bad
Hamas faction, was somehow a wing of the Authority. . . .) A “rogue” element doing evil deeds on its own recognizance—that concept kept the Authority clean, and meant that the Israelis could leave their eager, bright-eyed little Foreign Ministry youngsters at the table with the Authority, yap-yapping, and get the process over with.

As if that could ever be. Endings did not happen here. Things did not come to a close, even on the rare occasions when they seemed to. In the Holy Land, you could haggle for a century or two over an inch of unusable land, and really
mean
it. Yizhar stood and looked at the steaming noodle counter again, but he could not rouse his appetite. He walked blindly out into the grim sunlight of shattered Jaffa Road. Let's be honest. Here was another unsavory aspect of his unfolding character: he felt just the tiniest bit of relief that Doron had disappeared. Oh, the tiniest, but definite. As long as the boy did not reappear on a Gaza podium next to the Chairman, and denounce the State of Israel and its duplicitous agent, Daniel Yizhar, Yizhar was not unhappy to see him go.

If the things that had occurred between Yizhar and Doron—the discussions, the arguments, the near scuffles—had happened between men of good faith, no one would ever have been the wiser, because there were secret battles that like-minded friends fought that they never revealed to another soul. It turned out, however, that Doron was another case entirely. Yizhar had made the mistake of believing that he and the soldier were on common ground. He had looked at the open face and the uniform and thought: We are both a part of the same army. But he had been wrong. In fact, although Yizhar hadn't understood it at the time, he and Doron were fighting over that one inch of unusable land. It made Yizhar want to punch things, this mistake of a lifetime, this second serious mistake of an entire career. It made him furious. Even though the soldier had brought his fate on himself at every point, Yizhar felt that his own standing and his reputation for handling things were undermined by the soldier's conduct. The jerk even paid for his own gas and drove his own car straight into a trap in Ramallah.

Yizhar wanted to want to be the kind of person who said, Let the right thing be done. He was capable of understanding that he should want to be good, pure. He wanted to be able to think to himself, Better that I be destroyed than that any harm come to this uncorrupted, upstanding boy. He wished he were capable of actually entertaining such thoughts. But he wasn't. He couldn't do it, not with sincerity. That kind of correctness was beyond him, and thank the Lord for that. That was turn-the-other-cheek crap. He pushed open the glass doors of The Building. Behind the huge plate-glass window of the public conference room near the elevator bank, old men in strange hats were doing jumping jacks—some old labor-union club, Yizhar assumed, supported by government subsidies, of course. He caught the scent of the chicken soup the men would be having for their lunch. It smelled like baby oil and old garlic and turned schnapps. He pressed the up button and waited. What mattered was that it was better for Yizhar—and better for Israel, he reminded himself—if a boy like this just disappeared.

Yizhar had explained the problem in general terms to the Defense Minister, and the Defense Minister had understood. Whatever was said publicly, the security forces wouldn't be pushing too hard too soon for Doron's rescue. No commando forces rushing into Ramallah in hot pursuit. And Yizhar didn't feel particularly bad about it—he didn't feel remorse about the Hajimi baby's death, didn't feel in the least guilty, and he didn't feel bad about Doron's disappearance. He just didn't.

Still, the familiar creeping nausea followed him as he entered the elevator. It was the nausea you felt when fate might be going against you—fear catching you in the stomach. Yizhar got out on his floor. Maybe he was just holding his breath until he heard that the soldier had been killed, and then his cramps would ease. He opened his office door; he must have done it quietly, because there was Irit, with her feet on the desk and a bucket of soup in her lap, slurping away as happily as a puppy and chatting on the telephone.

Other people were happy, Yizhar thought.

She looked up, saw him, promptly removed her feet from the desk, and then proceeded to extricate herself, with as much dignity as possible in the circumstances, first from her telephone call and then from her bucket of soup. Yizhar stood in front of her desk, his arms folded over his stomach, considering her embarrassment. She was showing the tender line of flesh again. Thank you for the entertainment, Irit. The smell of her snack made his stomach turn over. How she would thrill to a televised denunciation of her boss!

He strode into his office and shut the door crisply. He glanced over his newspapers again and looked at his memos and checked his messages. So far, no one had claimed responsibility for Doron's disappearance, and no one had demanded anything yet in exchange for his release. In the language of terror, these were accepted indicators that the soldier was already dead. Still, Yizhar would appreciate a body. In a ditch, by the side of the road, in the wadi, under an overpass, wherever. Just give me that one final proof.

T
HEY'D PUT HIM IN THE
car. Big hands liked to show bravado—he was shoving and pushing, but the older guy was different. Doron knew that the older guy, who seemed oddly familiar, was the real threat. Old Guy thought he was clever, driving around with Doron pushed down on the floor of the car, driving all over Ramallah to try and confuse him about his whereabouts. The boy kept his feet on Doron's back. But when they'd finally came to a stop, Doron knew exactly where he was. Downtown Ramallah, in a cramped parking lot behind one of those dirty office buildings. It was unmistakable from the noises of the traffic and pedestrians, and the smell of diesel and
za'tar.

His captors had jumped from the car, and hauled him out, talking to each other the whole time in undertones Doron could barely hear, much less understand. He stumbled as they pulled him over a rubble-strewn lot to a back staircase. Going up the crumbling stairs in a blindfold was terrifying until he realized that if he looked straight down he could see the broken edge of each stair as he climbed. The younger one held Doron by his cuffed hands as he pushed the soldier up the stairs from behind, and it felt like the grip of friendship, as Doron went blindly up.

Old Guy was fiddling with a key when Doron and Big Hands reached the landing, and he muttered when it wouldn't turn in the lock. Doron heard the keys clink together. Then the swoop of the door opening. They shouldered him into a room, pushed him down on the floor, and chained his handcuffs to something. Then they removed his blindfold.