Vicious Circle (19 page)

“Do you?” Maali whispered.

Staring deeply into Maali’s eyes, Delilah nodded imperceptibly. Then she curled up on the cot and, her body jerking spastically
from
time to time, dozed. Every two hours or so the Isra’ilis hauled Delilah off, and dragged her back to the cell looking more
beat up than before. Maali guessed the Jews were killing two birds with one stone—they were trying to beat information out
of Delilah, and using Delilah to demonstrate to Maali that they weren’t fainthearted when it came to making a woman talk.
Delilah was sleeping fitfully sometime in the early afternoon when Maali heard a door opening at the far end of the passageway.
She shook Delilah awake. They could make out the sound of footsteps approaching. Delilah looked around wildly. “Can’t take
any more,” she moaned. “I need metal, it does not have to be sharp, with which to cut my wrists.” Seeing nothing she could
use, she pulled Maali roughly toward her until their foreheads were touching. “I ask you—knot a length of cloth around my
neck and strangle me.”

Maali shrank back in horror. “It is out of the realm of possibility.”

The cell door opened. Two young Isra’ili woman soldiers, both wearing khaki miniskirts and khaki sweaters, came in. One carried
a plastic basin filled with warm water. The other set a bar of soap, a towel, a pair of low-heeled shoes and a folded Arab
dress on the cot. “Count your blessings,” one of the soldiers sneered in Arabic. “Palestinian lawyers have brought your case
before an Israeli judge and he has ordered your release. You are free to go as soon as you clean up.”

“And my husband?”

“Your husband is in the hospital—he suffered a concussion when he beat his head against a wall to make it appear as if he
had been tortured.”

“You lie!”

The young soldier shrugged. “Your lawyers are waiting outside to take you to him. Call out when you are ready to leave.”

Maali helped Delilah wash away the dried blood and fit her aching limbs into the clean dress. The two women stood in front
of the cell door and embraced. “We have only known each other for a few hours, but I think of you as a sister,” Delilah said.

“I will never forget you,” Maali declared emotionally.

“Do you want to send word to your husband?”

Maali leaped at the chance. “Address a note to Tayzir the florist,” she whispered into Delilah’s ear. “Leave it with the lame
shoemaker across from the El Khanqa Mosque in the Christian Quarter. Say I have been arrested but am holding up. Say that
the Isra’ilis discovered the ring and know it belonged to the dead Jew.”

“The Isra’ilis discovered the ring and know it belonged to the dead Jew.”

“Say I have not told them who gave it to me. Yussuf will understand.”

Delilah turned away before Maali could embrace her again and called for the two women soldiers to open the cell door. She
stepped through it and started striding down the passageway ahead of them almost as if her limbs were not in pain. A moment
later she disappeared through the door at the end of the passageway.

Around six in the evening, Maali caught the squeak of the food cart being pushed by a Palestinian orderly down the corridor.
It came to a stop in front of the door of her cell and a plastic tray was slipped through the slot. Maali carried it back
to her bunk and looked at the food. There was a plastic bowl half filled with cold rice and pieces of chicken, a single slice
of white bread, a bowl of jello. She knew that she had to force herself to eat to keep up her strength. Using the plastic
spoon, she started in on the rice, then picked up the bread. Hidden under it was a rolled up cigarette paper. Maali glanced
at the door, then turning her back to it, unrolled the paper and flattened it on the plastic tray. “Beware,” it said in minuscule
Arabic writing. “The Jews are using a beat-up Arabic-looking woman to get prisoners to talk.”

Her skin crawling, her blood running cold, Maali sank to the ground. “What have I done?” she moaned, and she leaned forward
and began to slowly pound her forehead against the cement floor, each stroke incrementally harder than the one before.

I
N THE ROOM ABOVE THE SEAFOOD RESTAURANT, THE RETIRED
general named Uri poured Lagavulin whiskey neat into the six tumblers lined up on the oval table, adding a splash or two
until he was satisfied all the glasses held the same amount. He passed out five of the tumblers to the members of the inter-agency
Working Group, gripped the sixth in his paw and sank dejectedly onto the overstuffed couch against one wall. From his seat
at the oval table, Baruch started reading out loud the police report on the Palestinian woman Maali. Prison guards had discovered
her unconscious on the floor of the cell. The prison doctor had been summoned. He had noted massive injury to the forehead
and dilation of the pupils of the eyes, which indicated the brain itself had been bruised by impacting against the inside
of the skull; he had observed convulsions of the extremities of the limbs, which suggested the brain may have swelled, putting
pressure on the cerebrum. The chief interrogator had given the doctor permission to move Maali to a nearby hospital, but had
instructed him to make sure the records showed that she had been brought in to the hospital’s emergency room unconscious after
a motor scooter accident and had been in a coma ever since. A surgical procedure to drain the skull cavity and relieve pressure
on the brain had been performed, but the pressure had built up again rapidly. A brain scan had indicated irreversible cerebral
trauma. The woman Maali had died in the intensive care unit shortly after midnight.

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.”

T
HE 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 blocked 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.