Vicious Circle (25 page)

Petra said, “I have brought you tea.”

The Doctor gripped the cup with both hands and let the tea warm his fingers for a moment. Then he did something that struck
Petra as extremely bizarre—he called the prisoner by his given name.

“Isaac.”

Whispering, the Doctor said something to him in English. The prisoner raised his eyes; the Doctor had said that, without his
eyeglasses, the Jew could only make out shapes and shadows. The prisoner shook his head no. The Doctor spoke to him again
more firmly and pressed the cup of tea into his manacled hands. The prisoner shrugged and muttered something in English. In
the middle of a sentence he pronounced the Doctor’s given name.

“… Ishmael …”

The Rabbi brought the cup to his lips and blew loudly across the surface of the tea, and then began to sip noisily at it.
The Doctor stood up and came around behind the Rabbi and started to massage his bony neck with the tips of his fingers. Looking
over the head of the Rabbi, he nodded toward the door. As she backed out of the room, Petra could hear the two of them resuming
their whispered conversation.

“Ah, Ishmael …”

“… Isaac …”

This must be a new technique of interrogation, she told herself, one designed to gain the trust of the prisoner and lull him
into thinking of his interrogator as a friend, someone in whom he could confide. Once the Jew’s guard was down, the Doctor
would extract from him the information he wanted. Surely this was the meaning of the strange bond that appeared to be growing
between the two men.

How else could a reasonable person explain the Doctor’s permitting the Jew to call him by his given name?

A
LARGE OVERHEAD FAN STIRRED THE PUTRID AIR IN THE
interrogation chamber as the prisoner shrieked in agony. Sinking back, he mumbled through his swollen lips a verse from the
Qur’an. “‘
Whoso rebels against God … His Messenger … for him … the Fire of Gehenna
.’”

From the small Sony portable radio on the shelf came the sound of frying fat. Precisely on the hour, the Voice of Palestine,
a popular call-in talk show, burst through the static. “Goooood Morning, Palestine,” a young woman brayed breathlessly into
the microphone. “To everybody, everywhere, inside and outside the homeland, a morning of love and well-being. Palestine, have
a happy morning. Okay, I’ll take the first call.”

The strains of a well known Palestinian folk song filled the room, then faded as a listener from Hebron phoned in to the Jericho
station to complain about the shortage of specialists in the local Palestinian hospitals. “My wife was diagnosed with cancer
of the breast,” he said. “My doctor was obliged to get in touch with one of the Jewish specialists in Jerusalem to find out
about the latest chemotherapy techniques.”

“What’s your question?”

“My question is, why aren’t our medical schools and hospitals sending more young doctors abroad for specialist training?”

“We are sending young doctors abroad for training,” the woman running the Voice of Palestine responded. “The problem is luring
them back to the homeland once they get accustomed to those Western salaries.”

“Turn up the volume,” ordered Sa’adat Arif, the Palestine Authority’s deputy chief of intelligence, “and give him another
jolt.”

In the heart of the Palestinian Army base of Aksa, on the southern edge of Jericho, Yussuf Abu Saleh, stark naked, with electrodes
clipped to his testicles, sagged limply from his wrists fastened behind his back to a hook embedded high in the wall. His
left shoulder had come out of its socket, causing excruciating pain every time Sa’adat tugged playfully at one of his ankles.

Sa’adat nodded at a young Palestinian policeman, who tripped the switch, closing the electric circuit. Gagging in pain, Yussuf’s
body stiffened and twitched. A chalky saliva seeped from the corners of his mouth. When the current was cut he sank back and
then howled as the weight of his body wrenched his dislocated shoulder. On the radio, a listener was putting a question about
police brutality. “I’m not saying it exists,” a taxi driver from Nablus said over the phone. “But we’ve all heard rumors of
what happens to some who openly criticize the Palestinian Authority.”

“There is no place for police brutality in the new Palestinian state we are constructing,” the woman declared into her microphone.
“If you know of any instances of actual police brutality, it is your sacred duty to come forward and expose it. Those responsible
will be severely punished, this I promise you.”

Sa’adat strolled across the room and looked up at Yussuf. “You are a courageous young man, I will give that to you,” he said.
“Few have managed to hold out as long as you have. You are also an intelligent man. You must know that you will break eventually.
Without exception, everyone does. Why don’t you save yourself more suffering. Tell us the identity of the blind
mujaddid
. Tell us where he is hiding the Rabbi Apfulbaum. Is he in Ghazeh? Hebron? Nablus? Only nod and your suffering will be over.”

“Case of mistaken identity,” Yussuf moaned, half delirious. “You have the wrong man. I am Bosnian—Koskovic, Asaf.”

Sa’adat signaled to the doctor standing by in a corner. He came over and climbed up on a chair and monitored Yussuf’s heartbeat
through a stethoscope. “To be on the safe side,” he said, “I would advise an hour’s repose.”

Sa’adat nodded to the policemen, who removed the electrodes, then climbed onto chairs and lowered Yussuf, his head rolling
from side to side, to the cement floor. “I don’t want to lose him,” Sa’adat warned the doctor, who was kneeling next to Yussuf
and waving a cracked vial of smelling salts under his nose. Yussuf’s eyes flicked open and he fixed them on the Authority’s
deputy chief of intelligence with a gleam of dark hatred.

Sa’adat leaned over the prisoner. “You have an hour to reflect on the hopelessness of your situation,” he whispered. “Are
you able to hear me, Yussuf Ben Saleh? Be reasonable—Abu Bakr is not worth suffering for. Granted, a certain amount of terrorism
is useful—the threat of fundamentalists waiting to pick up the pieces strengthens the Authority’s image as a moderate alternative.
But terrorism is a matter of timing and dosage. Your
mujaddid
risks to ruin everything for us if he succeeds in rallying the Palestinian masses to holy war against the Jews. If we are
careful not to scare the Jews off with terrorist bombs and kidnappings and threats of holy war, we will get our Palestinian
state along the Sixty-seven frontiers in a week’s time. When a year or two have passed, it goes without saying we will remind
the Jews that we have not gotten what was in the original United Nations partition plan of 1948; that Acre and large parts
of the Hula Valley and the Negev rightly belong to our new Palestinian state. Then, alternating doses of terrorism with doses
of plausible reasonableness, we will push the Jews back to the original Forty-eight partition borders. In fifty years Isra’il
will be reduced to a coastal strip that is without economic viability. The Jewish state will wither away. The Jews who are
still there will emigrate to America. Remember the old joke about the sign at Lod Airport:
Will the last Jew to leave the country please turn out the lights
. Reflect on what I say. Cast your lot with the Palestinian Authority. Only tell us where the Rabbi is being held captive.
Ghazeh? Hebron? Nablus? It would cause me great distress to have to hang you back up on the wall.”

On the radio, a Palestinian school teacher from Tulkarm was saying, “With the
intifada
, the younger generation set an example for us. Now, with an independent Palestinian state almost in our grasp, it is important
for us to set an example for the
intifada
generation.”

“I agree,” said the talk show hostess. “With God’s help, we will create the first really democratic Arab nation in the region
and live side by side with the Jews.”

Returning to his office, Sa’adat discovered Baruch slouched in an easy chair reading the matrimonial advertisements in a Palestinian
newspaper. “Ah, I am cheerful you could come down from Jerusalem,” Sa’adat said, sliding in behind his desk. “Fruit juice
for my friend Baruch,” he called to an aide. “Don’t tell me you are thinking of taking a second wife,” he remarked to his
visitor with a wink.

“I am very happy with the one I have, thank you,” Baruch replied.

Sa’adat snickered. “There are some who think the four wives permitted to a Muslim by the Qur’an are not enough. There are
others who think one is a wife too many.”

“How are things going with Yussuf Abu Saleh?” Baruch asked.

“He is what your interrogation specialists would call a tough biscuit. He will eventually tell us what we want to know, for
sure. It is only a question of time.”

“Time is what we don’t have on our hands,” Baruch mumbled. He could visualize Sa’adat’s method of questioning Yussuf and it
turned his stomach. He had seen Shin Bet reports on what went on behind the closed doors of Aksa; there had even been some
discussion of leaking the details to the foreign press, but the idea had been abandoned when it was decided that Sa’adat and
Company could strengthen the Authority’s hand against the Islamic fundamentalists. Baruch gazed out a window so Sa’adat wouldn’t
notice the look on his face and focused on the fact that this same Yussuf had participated in the kidnapping of the Rabbi
and his secretary, and the murder of four Jewish boys; had cut the finger off one of them to get a souvenir for his wife.
“Is there anything in Yussuf’s file that might give us a lead while we’re waiting for him to talk?”

Sa’adat sipped some grapefruit and lime juice as he opened Yussuf’s dossier. “Abu Saleh was born and raised in the Kalandia
refugee camp north of Jerusalem. When he was fourteen he worked as a plasterer building houses for Jews in the West Bank by
day, by night he raided the settlements to demolish the houses he had helped
build. He was first arrested at the age of fifteen for distributing anti-Israeli leaflets. It is the usual story, my friend—during
the first
intifada
he threw stones at your tanks and wound up joining a Hamas cell in Nablus.” Sa’adat looked up at Baruch, the usual smile
fixed on his round face. “You Jews created the monster—”

Baruch, who had been up most of the night, bridled. “Don’t tell me, let me guess—we should have lost the Sixty-seven war and
let you push us into the sea and avoided all these problems.”

Sa’adat shrugged. “At one point in the Nineties Abu Saleh’s two brothers were killed and he was wounded in a shootout with
Isra’ili soldiers. Abu Saleh was sentenced to preventive detention in the Negev camp Ketziot, but he soon managed to escape
in a garbage truck. He went to Ghazeh and then snuck into Egypt, and from there made his way to Afghanistan, where he joined
a contingent of al Qaida
mujahidin
and wound up fighting against the Americans. When the Taliban lost the war, Abu Saleh escaped to Pakistan and later surfaced
in Nablus holding a Bosnian passport identifying him as Asaf Koskovic from Mostar. He had this passport in his pocket when
we picked him up in Jerusalem. We think it was during this Nablus period that he fell under the spell of the blind vigilante
and came to believe that he was the long-awaited Islamic Renewer. The rest of the story I think you are familiar with. Hamas
turned out not to be fundamentalist enough for Abu Saleh, so he defected, along with half his Nablus Hamas comrades, to form
a cell loyal to the blind vigilante. It was about then that we raided his bomb factory in Nablus. I can tell you—where is
the harm?—that we were tipped off by the local Hamas people, who were furious with Abu Saleh.”

“You nailed two of his pals but Yussuf slipped through your fingers,” Baruch said.

“Ah, Baruch, you do keep your ear to the soil.”

“In this corner of the Levant people who don’t keep their ear to the soil, as you put it, wind up being buried under it.”

Sa’adat sank back in his chair and eyed his guest. “We are strange bedfellows, you and me, Baruch.”

“How so?”

“Neither of us would collaborate with the other if we had a
choice.” Sa’adat glanced at a very large wrist watch. “On the other hand we harbor no illusions, which makes for a successful
collaboration.”

“It’s true I harbor no illusions about you,” Baruch agreed. “I would have less qualms about a Palestinian state if people
like you weren’t going to run it.”

“You Jews always prefer to think you sold your souls to the devil than consider the alternative—that you
are
the devil.”

Baruch tossed his head in disgust; Sa’adat couldn’t have known it but the person he was disgusted with was himself. “Our struggle
to keep our heads above water in this sea of Arabs has changed us—some would say corrupted us. We are not the same people
we would have been if we had accepted the British suggestion to make the Jewish state in Uganda.”

Sa’adat decided to change the subject. “Abu Bakr’s deadline for the Rabbi’s secretary approaches.”

“We can count as well as you.” Pushing himself out of the chair, Baruch leaned over Sa’adat’s desk and scratched a phone number
on a pad. “That’s a direct line. I’m sleeping in the office these days. Call me if Abu Saleh talks.”

Sa’adat closed his eyes. “I will call you
when
Abu Saleh talks,” he said softly.

At the door Sa’adat took Baruch’s elbow and said, “By the way, I have a gift for you. It is in Arabic. Do you read Arabic?”

“Only matrimonial advertisements.”

Sa’adat handed Baruch a slip of paper. “We found it folded into Abu Saleh’s wallet. It is a curious document. It even bears
a number—seven. My people are unable to figure out what he was doing with it, unless of course it is a coded message.” As
Baruch scanned the paper Sa’adat started back toward his desk, then turned on his heel. “Incidentally, there has been a twenty-fourth
execution of a collaborator—a Mr. Hajji, who used to change money and guard valises for tourists at the Damascus Gate. He
was killed with a .22-caliber bullet fired at point blank range into the base of his skull behind the ear. The family claimed
Mr. Hajji died of heart failure and tried to bury him quietly to avoid disgrace. We got wind of it and had an autopsy performed.”
A shrewd smirk spread across
Sa’adat’s fat face. “You are not the only one to keep your ear to the soil, my friend.”