Vicious Circle (36 page)

“Rabbi.”

Smacking his lips gleefully, Apfulbaum closed one eye and scrutinized the blurred figure of Sweeney with the other. “Well,
if it isn’t the
goy
journalist with the chip on his shoulder! I was, believe it or not, planning to make a formal statement about my incarceration.
Do you have a pencil? Are you all ears?” Apfulbaum giggled into his glass of tea. “Be careful to spell my name correctly—it’s
I. Ap
ful
baum, with an f after the p—and quote me accurately, that way my solid arguments will resist your efforts to liquefy them.”

Sweeney threw a quick glance over his shoulder. The Doctor was still glued to the earphone. On the floor, Azziz knocked off
one of Aown’s pieces. His brother chopped the air with an open palm in exasperation. “Rabbi,” Sweeney whispered, gripping
Apfulbaum’s arm, “there’s something extremely import—”

“I don’t deny I said Torah Judaism and Koranic Islamism are
Allah
-oriented, but I want to explicate, I want to put it in context. Up to now I’ve been too busy studying Torah to go to a dentist,
which is why I had difficulty sinking my teeth into the Koran.”

Sweeney tightened his grip on the Rabbi’s arm. “The Israelis know where you are—”

“I am absolutely convinced the creation in 1948 of the Garden of Eden, underneath which rivers are thought to flow, was a
religious event. Are you copying this down word for word, Sweeney? Get a single comma wrong and your name will be forever
engraved on my feces list. Gehenna will freeze over before I give you another interview. Here’s the deal: I would shoot my
enemies instead of my friends if I had a weapon smart enough to distinguish between the two.”

“For god’s sake, Rabbi,
listen
to me,” Sweeney pleaded. “Any moment now the Israeli Army is going to come bursting in—”

Apfulbaum set his glass down on the table and ran a finger around its rim, producing a soft moan. “For me, Genesis 17:8—that’s
where Allah gives Ibrahim and his seed
all
of the land of Canaan—is the heart of the heart of the Koran …” The Rabbi’s closed eye opened wide. He swayed drunkenly toward
Sweeney. “
What did you just say?
” he sputtered.

“Rabbi, I want you to stand up and walk with me, very casually, back to the back room. If the Doctor asks where we’re going,
I’ll say you have to urinate.”

The Rabbi shuddered like a wet dog coming out of the rain. “For too long we Arabs were a people without a Renewer …” His voice
trailed off. He screwed up his face and asked slyly, “So how do you know they‘re going to come bursting in?”

Sweeney checked over his shoulder again. “The sound-truck advertising the state lottery,” he whispered. “It’s a signal. It
means the raid is underway.” He tugged at the Rabbi’s elbow. “They could be taping explosives to the door right now. We have
to get to the back—”

“Taping explosives,” Apfulbaum repeated. He tilted his head and chewed on the inside of a cheek. “To the door.” He thought
he detected a flaw in the story. “How could they have found me?”

“They found
me
!”

Apfulbaum’s mouth sagged open, baring a set of rotting teeth. A mournful yowl emerged from the back of his throat. “
Ish-ma-el
!”

Startled, the el-Tel brothers looked up from their game. The Doctor turned away from the radio. The Rabbi’s arm swept out,
knocking over his glass and the pewter pot, splashing tea on the table. “The
goy
journalist,” he cried, his voice a raspy shriek, “is a Jewish spy. The lottery truck was a signal.” Spittle flew from his
mouth as the words spilled out. He punched at Sweeney but the journalist brushed off the feeble blows. Tears began to stream
down the Rabbi’s face. “Ohhhhhh, I told you this would be the last supper but you wouldn’t listen, would you? The Isra-ilis
aren’t delivering any Arabs to any border. They’re on the other side of our
door
.”

Sweeney swallowed hard. “He’s ranting—”

The Doctor gestured with a forefinger. Aown pitched his ancient Webley to Petra as he and Azziz dove for the AK-47s. The Doctor
barked at them in Arabic, “He says the journalist is a Jewish spy. Azziz, Petra, be quick, get them into the back room. If
you hear shooting, execute them both immediately.”

The Rabbi and Sweeney were hustled at gun point into the inner sanctum. The Doctor pressed his ear against the door and closed
his eyes and listened. He motioned to Aown. “Slip out and take a look around. If the Jews are really outside, get off at least
one burst to warn us. If nobody is there, sit outside with your back to the door. I’ll let you in when we’re sure the first
group of prisoners has been released.”

Stuffing two extra clips and two grenades into his pants pockets, Aown put the AK-47 on automatic, cocked it and snapped in
the folding stock so he could use the weapon it as if it were a hand gun. “If I should be killed—”

The Doctor touched Aown lightly on the forehead. “Those who fall in battle are rewarded with eternal life.”

Aown slid back one of the bars. “Life is beautiful but the death of a martyr is more beautiful,” he whispered in a quivering
voice.

The Doctor hauled the pearl handled Beretta from his breast pocket and worked back the slide on the top of the barrel, chambering
the first round. Behind him, Petra was carrying the carton filled with spare clips and grenades and gas masks into the inner
sanctum. He put his ear to the door again, then nodded at Aown, who dragged back the other bar, opened the door a crack and
ducked out of the hideaway. The Doctor slammed the door and drove home the bars. Hurrying into the back room, he pulled the
door closed behind him and drove home the bars on that door, too. Azziz had lashed Sweeney’s feet to the legs of the heavy
chair the Rabbi’s secretary had been bound in, and was fastening his wrists behind the chair with a length of wire. His head
bobbing in agitation, Apfulbaum collapsed into his chair and held out his wrists. “I must have my manacles,” he groaned like
a child deprived of a plaything. Petra looked at the Doctor. When he nodded, she snatched the manacles off the floor and snapped
them onto his bony wrists. The Rabbi croaked in relief. Azziz dragged over the other chair. The Doctor sat down on it facing
the door and laid the Beretta across his knees. Azziz, worried sick about his brother, cocked his AK-47 and settled back against
the Gaza Central Import-Export Bank calendar. Petra spun the cylinder on the Webley, checking to make sure it was loaded,
then cocked the pistol and, gripping it with both hands, sank onto the floor with her spine against the wall.

“Gar-dens of Eee-den,” the Rabbi sang under his breath in the ethereal voice of a choir boy, “un-der-neath which ri-vers flow.”

H
IS
FINGER CARESSING THE COLD TRIGGER OF THE
AK-47, A
OWN
drropped to one knee at the top of the narrow staircase. He had been through every nook and cranny of the building, in the
pitch darkness, many times, and knew it as he knew the alleyways of Abu Dis, the Palestinian suburb of East Jerusalem in which
he’d been raised. He bent forward and listened to the hollow emptiness of the bathhouse below. In his mind’s eye, he tried
to imagine what paradise would be like. Would the beautiful gardens, where the tears of his mother were transformed into roses
and jasmine, have different flowers at different seasons? Would the flowing rivers dry up like wadis in the summer? Would
there be different seasons? Would the sky cloud over? Would there be thunderstorms or never ending sunshine? If never ending
sunshine, would the heavenly mansion of perpetual bliss have a roof? Would his skin turn black like an African’s? He himself
loved the way dogs curled their tails between their hind legs and cringed under beds at each bolt of lightning, and the damp
breath of the cool air on his cheek after a summer thunderstorm. The eternal life that awaited him, so promised the
mujaddid
, Abu Bakr, would clearly not disappoint him. The more so if he were to die a martyr. But if there were no bone-dry summers,
and no thunderstorms …

Aown’s eyes had grown accustomed to the darkness. Hugging the wall he started down the narrow flight of stairs. Several of
them creaked under his feet. He stopped half way down to listen again. Somewhere in the labyrinth of cubicles a rat scuffed
over the cracked tiles of the floors. A shutter slapped lightly against an inside wall.
Could it be that the American journalist had somehow led the Jews to the bathhouse? The fact that the Doctor, whom Aown considered
infallible, had sent him to scout meant that it was a genuine possibility. He must be careful not to jump at shadows, lest
he alarm the people in the neighborhood and give away the location of the safe-house. But he would fire off all thirty rounds
in the clip at the first human body that stirred. Stealing down the steps, crouched low, swinging his AK-47 in a wide arc
at each doorway, Aown began working his way through the maze of tiled baths. He lingered at the top of one of the two wide
staircases leading to the ground floor and listened. He could almost make out the evening breeze whispering through the warren
of corridors and changing rooms under his feet.

Peering into the dark emptiness, Aown started down the stairs. One by one he explored the changing rooms, with their doors
hanging half off their hinges, their ceramic hooks long since pried from the walls by souvenir hunters scavenging through
the abandoned building. Turning down one corridor, he could make out the high double door of the enormous reception room looming
ahead. Sinking onto one knee with his back to the wall on the corridor-side of the double door, he peered into the darkness
and listened again, then wheeled around the corner and lunged across the threshold into the room, landing on a small mountain
of soft coarse fabric that had not been there the last time he had passed. Climbing to his feet, he kicked at the fabric with
his shoe and groped for a shred of logic to explain its presence. Who would have stored cloth in the bathhouse, where anyone
could sneak in and steal it? As his thoughts raced, a ghost-like luminous streak floated out of the darkness in front of him.
In the blink of an eye the shadow transformed itself into a goggled human figure and a long soot-blackened grooved commando
blade slipped between Aown’s scapula and rib, severing the pulmonary artery of his heart. There was no pain, only a sudden
and total loss of muscle strength as hands reached out of the blackness to lower him noiselessly to the ground. Aown actually
felt his spirit floating free of his body as many feet raced past him. As the blackness turned into blinding brilliance, the
answer came to him. Of course! Why hadn’t he seen it before? Not a phrase, not a word in the
holy Qur’an was there by chance. The angel Jibril had not whispered into the Messenger’s ear the words
Garden
of Eden, but
Gardens
. Which surely meant there was one Garden with never ending sunshine, and another for those, like Aown, who loved the crack
of summer lightning and the damp breath of the cool air on their cheeks after a thunderstorm.

I
N THE INNER SANCTUM, THE MINUTES CREPT BY WITH THE SPEED
of measuring worms. When he wasn’t staring at the reinforced door as if he could see through it, Azziz would glance at his
watch. He imagined his brother stealing through the tangle of corridors and rooms on the first two floors of the building.
If there were Jews hiding down there in the darkness, Aown would smell them; he would skid a grenade into one of the changing
rooms and leap through a back window and escape through the maze of dark alleyways.

And still no sound came from the bowels of the bathhouse. “He is gone eight minutes,” Azziz finally announced.

Petra lowered her pistol. “If there are Isra’ilis in the building,” she said in a low voice, “Aown would have come across
them by now.”

“I tell you he was ranting,” Sweeney insisted from the heavy chair.

“Takes two to tango,” the Rabbi fretted, kneading the silver worry beads. “I have it on good authority that you can’t have
a vicious circle unless both parties hold up their end.”

“Isaac, precisely what exactly did the journalist tell you?” the Doctor demanded.

His bulging eyes fixed on the single bulb dangling from the ceiling, the Rabbi sucked on one of the worry beads. After a moment
he replied, “We met on the no-man’s land of English. He said the sound-truck was a signal. He said the raid was underway.
I asked him how the Isra’ilis had found me. He said they had found him. Un-der-neath which ri-vers flow, lah di dah.”

Sweeney fidgeted in the chair. “Can’t you see he’s deranged?”

“How is it possible for Sweeney to have led the Isra’ilis to us?” the Doctor asked in Arabic. He addressed Petra. “You are
sure you were not followed when you brought him here?”

“We took the usual precautions,” she said. “That is out of the realm of possibility.”

“I destroyed his camera and his cellular phone and his wrist watch,” Azziz said. “I destroyed even the spare rolls of film.”

“The only thing we did not destroy was the device in his ear,” Petra said.

The Doctor remembered Sweeney’s description of his hearing disability.
I suffered a concussion and damage to the middle ear of my left ear—there was some kind of injury to a membrane
.

Was it the tympanic membrane?

That rings a bell
.

The Doctor moved to the door and rubbed his bruised forehead against the steel plating. The coolness calmed the migraine lurking
behind his eyes. “Break open the hearing aid,” he ordered with a sigh, “and tell me what you see.”

Petra leaped to her feet and snatched the small plastic button out of Sweeney’s ear. She set it on the floor and smashed it
with the butt of her Webley and sifted through the pieces. “There is micro-circuitry with what looks like minute transistors.
There is a tiny speaker, a round wafer-thin battery.”

Sweeney’s wrists strained at the wires behind his back.