by Dan Sehlberg
Without saying anything, she went back into the apartment. He followed her and closed the door. It smelled like cigarettes and incense. Arabic lounge music was playing on the stereo. Dan threw his jacket on the floor beside his boots, given that there were no hooks and no closet in the hall. When he entered the living room, she was waiting for him with a bottle of whisky dangling nonchalantly from one hand. She still hadn’t said anything.
‘Wow, aren’t you talkative.’
He took the bottle and drank two sips. Then he set it against her lips and tipped it. She took a big gulp. Whisky ran down her neck. He pulled her to him and kissed her shoulders. He stroked her breasts. She pressed against him and got her hands under his shirt. Barely audibly, she whispered, ‘Take me if you want me.’
He buried his face in her thick hair.
‘I think you can feel that I want you.’
Her hand grabbed his crotch firmly.
‘Mm. So what are you waiting for?’
He pushed her away.
‘I’m not going to take you to Arab music. Change it, and you’ll see.’
She laughed, took back the bottle, and walked over to the stereo.
‘All the blood seems to have collected in one place, cowboy. I think you should go lie down.’
He watched as she theatrically leaned toward the stereo. He wanted her so much it hurt. He started to unbutton his pants as he walked into the bedroom. His shirt, jeans, and socks landed in a pile on the floor. Like the rest of the apartment, the room was hardly furnished. There were no paintings or photographs, no books, and no flowers — just a bed in the middle of the room. She probably wasn’t here very often. The music changed to George Michael.
‘Perfect!’
He threw himself onto the bed.
The explosion was so powerful that it blew out the wall in the bedroom and tore a three-metre-wide hole in the floor. The house started to burn, and thick, black smoke rose over the roof and blocked out the dark sky. All the car alarms in the neighbourhood went off like a herd of crazy dogs. After a few minutes, several police sirens joined the out-of-tune choir.
It was about an hour after midnight. Even though a simple breakfast was the only thing Eric had eaten all day, he wasn’t hungry. He was far too nervous; he had far too much to think about. He hadn’t received any new messages from Salah ad-Din. The library was quiet, except for sporadic noise from the street. Far off, he heard a thunderclap and distant car-alarms; closer by, a passing moped with no muffler, and an ambulance siren. He hadn’t spoken with Jens in several days; he hadn’t even answered the text about Mats Hagström’s death. For some reason, he was avoiding making contact with Sweden. He didn’t know what the main reason was: his fear that Hanna might be worse, or his shame over deceiving Jens. His weakness disgusted him. In the yellow glow of the ceiling light he could see his own face on the computer screen. Something clattered suddenly on the street as he took his phone from his black bag. A warning message on the screen said that the battery was nearly dead. He didn’t have a charger with him. That was that. He couldn’t call — he couldn’t risk the phone dying. It was his only link to the outside world, to the Mossad, to Rachel. He started a new text to Jens. After hesitating for a moment, he added Doctor Thomas Wethje to the list of recipients:
STILL IN TEL AVIV. PHONE ALMOST DEAD. I’M ON THE TRAIL OF THE ANTI-VIRUS. TAKE CARE OF HANNA. I LOVE HER MORE THAN ANYTHING. THANKS FOR EVERYTHING YOU’RE DOING.
//ERIC
It was a shit message that would probably just make everything worse, but what could he have written to make it better? He wasn’t on his way home. He was in a strange library in Tel Aviv. He was a tiny piece of bait in the Mossad’s hunt for terrorists. Where in the world were they? What would he do if they actually wanted to meet him? What would they do with him? These were people at war. People who had planned and carried out fatal attacks against civilians. People who were fighting a battle in which individual lives had no worth. The chance that he would come out of a meeting with them alive was non-existent. That he would also obtain the anti-virus was an impossibility. Suddenly, a new message popped up on the screen:
SEND YOUR MOBILE PHONE NUMBER AND BE PREPARED FOR TRANSPORT AT 0700.
:SALAH AD-DIN
Jesus Christ. Not only had they taken the bait, but they had fallen hook, line, and sinker for it. Or maybe not. Maybe it was a trap. They wanted to stop the leak. Should he contact Rachel? No, that’s not what her orders said. He would go along with the transport, and hope that it led him to Samir Mustaf. Only then would he contact the Mossad. After a moment’s hesitation, he sent the phone number. They knew that he wouldn’t miss the meeting. He knew it, too — whether it was a trap or not. Eric looked at the clock. There were almost five hours to go. He ought to try to sleep. He looked around among the books. If you’re tired, you can sleep anywhere. That’s what she’d said before she left, and it was surely true. Who was he to question her? He went to the door and turned off the light. The room went dark, with only the light from the computer screen remaining, and he fumbled his way back to the desk. He moved the chair and lay on the floor near the computer. He rooted through his bag in the dark, found his iPod, and started the music without bothering to change the track. It was Schubert. His bag made a fine pillow. He turned the ringer volume on his phone up as high as it would go, and placed the phone near his head. He tried to relax, and immediately thought about Hanna. Was she as alone as he was, lying there in the hospital? Maybe Jens was with her. He changed position on the hard parquetry. And Rachel, what was she doing right now?
A car honked out on the street. Eric was still lying down, with his head now on the floor. He must have slid off the bag while he was sleeping. His body ached as he slowly stretched out his legs and grimaced. His neck was stiff, and his lower back was throbbing. Sleeping on the floor came with a price. He picked up his phone to make sure no one had called. There was 10 per cent battery power left, but at least he could tell the time: it was ten past six. He got up and gathered his things, placed the yellow book carefully into his bag, and then turned off the computer and went out through the narrow door.
He remembered that there was a bathroom out in the hallway. The sun was shining brightly through the window in the larger room, and the disorder no longer felt messy. He had started to feel at home with the smells, the sounds, and the books here. This was a peaceful and pleasant place — a place where time was guided by memories, and each book had its own history, its own life. He went out the glass door and into the small bathroom. There, he washed for a long time with ice-cold water, and then stood eye to eye with himself. In less than half an hour, everything would change. If he died in a ditch outside Tel Aviv, would anyone let Sweden know? Would Hanna understand that he’d done it all for her? That he was trying to put things right? He was afraid. In fact, he was terrified. The panic crept through his body, cold and damp. He was having trouble breathing, and there was a sour taste in his mouth. His mind was racing as he tried to think of a way to get out of the meeting. I have to get home to Sweden, to Hanna. I’ll never get to meet Samir Mustaf anyway. Even if I did get hold of the anti-virus, it would never work to save her. Never. Never. He whispered the word to himself, again and again, as he stared into the red, begging eyes in the mirror. Yesterday it had all felt so far away, but now it was far too close — and far too dangerous. The library was the safest place on earth, with its scent of paper and dust. Time stood still here. No, that was an illusion. Time wasn’t standing still. Just while he had been in the bathroom, ten precious minutes had gone by.
He straightened up, ran a hand through his hair, and returned to the library. The large room, filled with books, felt empty without its proprietor. He hoped that she would show up before he had to leave. He sat in her desk chair and tried to relax, but he was far too nervous for that. On the desk was a black-and-white photography book that seemed to be about t
he river Volga. He paged through it distractedly, without really looking at the pictures. Suddenly, his phone rang. Never had a ringing phone frightened him so much. He picked it up as though it were a scorpion dripping with poison. The screen said the call was coming from an unknown number. He answered. The voice on the other end sounded young, and its owner spoke halting English with a thick accent that he couldn’t place.
‘I’m outside. A blue-and-white taxi.’
The call ended. It was five minutes to seven. The voice had stolen five minutes of the time he had left. He squeezed his eyes shut, trying to gather his thoughts and emotions. There was nothing more to ponder, nothing more to do. Now all he could do was finish what he’d started — no matter where it led him.
Eric stood up and went out through the rattling glass door and down the stairs. He came to the grey door with its dirty windows that faced the street. Everything that those two square frames contained seemed threatening and frightening: farthest off, the buildings across the street, with their drawn blinds and dirty façades; in the middle, the cars, buses, and motorcycles of all shapes and colours; closest to him, all the bodies that flickered by in a steady stream. He grasped the handle of the door and pulled it open, and the warmth, smells, and sound washed over him. As he stood on the street, which seemed to vibrate with heat and traffic and the strong sunlight, despite the early hour, he squinted and looked for the blue-and-white taxi. He caught sight of it a few cars away, parked in a loading zone with its hazard lights on — a shabby Skoda Octavia, with the number 103 in red tape on the rear window and a grey baggage rack on the roof. The motor was running, and from it came the characteristic knocking noise of a diesel engine. He opened the car door, tossed his bag in the back seat, and got in beside it. The car stank of cigarette smoke and sweet-smelling aftershave. On the floor was an issue of The Jerusalem Post. The man behind the wheel looked at him in the rear-view mirror, but didn’t turn around. He was fat, his head was shaved, and he had centimetre-thick rolls of skin on the back of his neck. He was wearing a white shirt and black pants that were too tight on his broad thighs, which seemed to run out over the edge of the seat. His pale, sausage-like fingers grasped the gear stick and put it into first.
They made their way into the line of traffic, provoking angry honks. The man yelled something in Hebrew through the half-open window, revved the engine, and finally managed to squeeze between a large delivery truck and a yellow Ford with a faded bumper sticker depicting a German shepherd. Eric studied each movement that the fat man made. He looked at the altogether-too-feminine plastic watch that cut into the fat on his left wrist and sometimes disappeared beneath swollen skin; at the wedding ring on one of the sausages that drummed against the wheel; at his broad back; and at the sweat that moistened his head, like a shiny, transparent kippa. Was this the man who would kill him? How would it happen? Where would it take place?
He looked out the window: they were passing a crowded playground. Parents — exclusively women — were standing nearby or sitting on benches, and talking to each other or on phones. Children, happy and colourful, were climbing on jungle gyms, swinging on swings, digging in sandboxes, and running around and around the playground. A redheaded woman in black athletic clothes and jogging shoes, holding a water bottle in one hand, was crouching down and hugging a small boy who seemed to have hurt himself. The boy’s hair was the same shade of red as his mother’s. Eric wished that he, too, could rest in her arms. He wanted to have a good cry, feel the warmth of her breasts, and, above all, be absolved of responsibility. He wanted to stop being an adult.
‘Radio?’
At first, he didn’t realise that this was a question and that it was aimed at him. The voice was dull and rough. He straightened up and met the driver’s eyes in the mirror.
‘Excuse me?’
‘Radio?’
‘Uh … sure.’
The question bewildered him. Such unexpected banality. The radio — a concept so integrated into the normal world that it didn’t fit in here. But at least he had asked. That indicated something important about their relationship to each other. He wasn’t a prisoner, and couldn’t be treated any way they wished. Or maybe he was a prisoner, but the driver still wanted his permission to turn on the radio. This small detail caused him to relax a little bit. And if the question had been unexpected, that went double for the music that jangled out of the long-since-busted speakers. It was a message from another planet, or at least a different time: Michael Jackson’s ‘Man in the Mirror’. The sausages drummed against the steering wheel and the gear stick. The traffic became more and more sparse, and the car’s speed increased. The playground disappeared and was replaced by grocery stores, bus stations, hotels, and schools. Downtown became suburbs. Michael Jackson’s high voice begged for solidarity.
The taxi accelerated up an entrance ramp to a wide highway — Highway 4. Apartment buildings rushed by, so ugly that they made Sweden’s Million Program buildings seem luxurious by comparison. The tall, dilapidated once-white concrete buildings with their small windows in long, even rows might as well have been prisons. Maybe that’s just what they were. Here, as in every other slum that clung to the outskirts of a city, they were as inevitable as unwanted outgrowth from the urban flora. The highway, with its five wide lanes in each direction, wound slowly inland as the surroundings changed again. Here the houses were lower and farther apart. They drove past a large power plant, fields, palms, and goats, as the city turned into country. Michael Jackson was gone, too. The new song was one Eric didn’t recognise: Jewish hard rock. The newspaper at his feet rustled, and he bent forward to pick it up. The entire front page, which was about the Mona virus and the prospects of finding an anti-virus, featured a large picture of Hassan Musawi, Hezbollah’s top leader. Hezbollah had claimed responsibility for both the virus and the bombing in Tel Aviv.
It felt surreal to read this. Eric paged through the article, which ran across six pages. Hezbollah had demanded the release of a number of prisoners, as well as an armistice and a list of all imprisoned Palestinians. The demand that The Jerusalem Post found to be the most sensational was the recognition of the so-called green line, the border from 1967. Had there been any response from Israel’s government? No. They had chosen not to comment. Eric himself was in the middle of this whole mess — in the middle of an enormous international conflict. He looked at the clock: it was twenty to eight. He leaned forward.
‘Excuse me. Where are we going?’
The fat man turned his head and glanced at him briefly. He looked irritated, and answered in muddled, poor English.
‘I drive taxi sixteen years. I find. You not worry.’
Eric tried again.
‘You’re driving very well, but I don’t know where I’m going. Where are we headedl?’
As he spoke, the driver kept nodding as if to show that he understood, that he was listening. Then he laughed suddenly — a short and rasping sound that was the result of having inhaled thousands of cigarettes.
‘You to Erez. Not worry. We there in time.’
Erez? He had never heard of the place. In time? So there was a specific time to make. Someone, whoever had ordered the taxi, maybe Samir Mustaf, had instructed the driver — who probably wasn’t a murderer, but a completely ordinary taxi driver — to pick him up and drive him to Erez. Surely that was somewhere in Israel. Otherwise, a local Tel Aviv taxi probably wouldn’t drive him there, right? What awaited him there? Surely Samir Mustaf couldn’t be in Israel, could he? It wasn’t impossible, but it was unlikely.
‘What time are we supposed to be there?’
The man nodded. Then he fumbled around on the passenger seat without taking his eyes from the road. He rooted among empty chip bags, coffee cups, and old issues of The Jerusalem Post and Haaretz. Finally, he found a small notebook, glanced at it, and returned his eyes to the road.
‘Erez eight o’clock.’
Eight. That was in less than twenty minutes’ time. His fear returned. It had never truly disappeared, but during the conversation it had softened, dulled. Eric leaned back in the seat. Outside, the fields were empty, aside from occasional brick houses and farms that seemed deserted. Deserted and old. Dire Straits were playing a crackly ‘The Sultans of Swing’. The man looked at him in the rear-view mirror.
‘You meet someone or go over?’
Eric looked at him, bewildered.
‘What?’
‘You never know if they block off or not. If you can go or not.’
When he didn’t answer, the driver quickly added, ‘I sure it will be fine.’ What will be fine? Go over? He felt like an idiot; he didn’t understand a thing.
‘What is Erez?’ A red semi suddenly changed lanes, and the driver had to brake; he roared in Hebrew and honked furiously. They passed a sign for Ashdod. The man looked at him in the mirror again.
‘Erez crossing. Gateway to Gaza.’
The world swung around him. His stomach burned. Gaza. Oh, God. He didn’t know anything about Gaza, except what he’d seen on TV. That was enough. He looked around the back seat, as if he were searching for a way out. What the fuck am I going to do? Call Rachel! He ignored the fact that he wasn’t expected to call until he had made contact. They had to protect him. The Mossad had to take responsibility — they had put him into this trap. He tore open his bag and found his phone, fumbling with the buttons for a long time before he realised the unthinkable. He pressed the power button again and again. Finally, he sank down, powerless. His mobile phone was dead. It was no more useful than a rock or a stick. He wouldn’t be able to call for help. No one would save him.