Vicious Circle

by Robert Littell

  From somewhere in the city came the shrill sob of a police siren. Roger’s translation trailed off as Anwar’s father cleared his throat and shook his head and said something else. “He asks you to reply to his question,” Roger said. “‘What hope can we offer to our children under these circumstances?’”

  Sweeney looked up from the notebook into the eyes of the father of the boy who had been shot dead, so the Israeli press was reporting, to prevent him from falling alive into the hands of the Shin Bet. “Say to him I am only equipped with questions, not answers. Say to him again I feel only sympathy for his family’s loss.”

  Roger translated, listened to the father’s reply and said, very quietly, “He tells that everyone he talks to is equipped with questions, not answers. He thanks you from his heart for coming to this house of mourning.”

  Returning to Roger’s Lada, Sweeney was surprised to discover a beautiful young man with round blue sunglasses and a pointed beard leaning against one of the fenders. Obviously a cleric of some sort, he was wearing a white skullcap and a long white galabiya, and looked like the male equivalent of a vestal virgin. Sweeney immediately pinned the nickname on him. Vestal Virgin swatted flies from his face as he said, in elaborate English, “Good day to you, Mr. journalist Sweeney.”

  “Hello to you,” Sweeney said. He caught a glimpse of Roger eyeing the bearded man suspiciously.

  “So: there is an Islamic tradition that goes back to the time before the Prophet when the secular concept islam meant defying death while fighting for the honor of your tribe,” the man said. “From that day to this, when a martyr falls in battle, another martyr immediately comes forward to take his place.”

  “Good for Islam,” Sweeney said with a straight face.

  “Would it interest you to meet the warrior who will join our ranks in the place of the fallen martyr Anwar? It will surely provide you with what I believe journalists in America call a scoop.”

  Sweeney glanced at Roger, who shrugged his fat shoulders imperceptibly. “Sweeney is a friend of the Palestinian—” the driver started to say, but the Vestal Virgin cut him off with a burst of Arabic before turning to Sweeney. “I told him that if you weren’t known to us as a friend of the Palestinian people, I would not be inviting you to meet the martyr of the mujaddid.” He backed off a few paces and spread his palms wide. “If I intended to kidnap you, I would not invite you to follow me. I would produce a weapon and leave you no choice in the matter. Come. As the American President Roosevelt once said, you have nothing to fear but fear itself.” The cleric looked past Sweeney. “You,” he instructed Roger in English so the American journalist would understand, “will wait here for him.”

  Sweeney remembered an old Talullah Bankhead line. “If I’m not back in an hour,” he told Roger, “start without me.”

  “Start what?” the driver called plaintively, but Sweeney had already stalked off after the cleric.

  Walking at a brisk pace, never looking back to see if the American was still behind him, Vestal Virgin led Sweeney through the maze of side streets and alleyways of the Gaza souk. They strode past stalls brimming with apples and cucumbers and branches of dates and cheap plastic blonde-haired dolls. They stepped over suitcases filled with kerchiefs or small Japanese transistor radios or wind-up razors. One unshaven man with crutches under his armpits peddled bottles of aftershave out of a knapsack strapped to the back of a young woman. Sweeney noticed that knots of men seemed to magically part when one among them spotted the cleric approaching. Cutting diagonally across a field filled with rusting parts of cars and tractors, he followed his guide into Jabaliya, Gaza’s largest refugee camp. “What does it mean, the martyr of the mujaddid?” he called, but Vestal Virgin, flying past a warren of open sewers and corrugated tin-roofed houses, didn’t bother responding. They skirted goats grazing in the ruins of a demolished house. Stench from open sewers and burnt tires and rubbish piling up in drifts against walls mixed with the odors of fresh bread and anise seeds. Dogs with ribs pressing against their flesh and tails curled between their hind legs skulked in the shadows of tumbledown mosques. Through an open window Sweeney caught a glimpse of women in shawls watching an Egyptian soap opera on an enormous color television set.

  The cleric ducked down a narrow alley and entered a store with bare shelves and paint peeling from the walls. Sitting on woven mats in a back room, three bearded Palestinians looked up when the American journalist entered. Without waiting for an invitation, Sweeney settled cross legged onto a mat. One of the bearded men offered him a plate filled with wedges of orange and green grapes. At the rear of the room the door to an alleyway opened and a young man with slicked back hair—he didn’t look a day over sixteen—slipped in and took his place on a woven mat. Sweeney’s guide said, “You are free to ask him any question you wish except his name.”

  Sweeney popped an orange sliver into his mouth and studied the boy, who was dressed in a long white robe and sandals. His feet were very dirty and he was chewing gum. “How old are you?” the American asked.

  “Twenty-two,” the young man said.

  “What year were you born?” When the boy didn’t respond immediately, Sweeney looked Vestal Virgin in the eye. “Here’s the deal: This interview is only useful to me if I am convinced he is telling the truth.”

  “He is seventeen. Like all boys he exaggerates his age.”

  Sweeney turned to the boy. “Aren’t you afraid?”

  The bearded cleric translated the question. The young martyr-tobe carefully removed the chewing gum from his mouth and helped himself to a grape. He spit the seeds into the palm of his hand before replying. “He answers your question with a question,” the cleric said. “‘Why should I be afraid? Holy warriors will be rewarded in this life with victory and the spoils of war. Those who fall in battle will be rewarded with eternal life as martyrs. Life is beautiful, but the death of a martyr is more beautiful. On the day of reckoning, I will stand before the throne of God to be judged according to the record found in the Book of Deeds. The martyr will sit at the feet of the Prophet, who sits at the right hand of God.’”

  “Describe the life after death that awaits a martyr.”

  “The Qur’an teaches that the Garden of Paradise is a heavenly mansion of perpetual bliss with flowing rivers and beautiful gardens where the tears of my mother are transformed into roses and jasmine.”

  “Can you describe God?”

  “I cannot. The Qur’an does not reveal God, but God’s will for all creation.” The young man wiggled his toes in his sandals, then raised his eyes and quoted in the high-pitched voice of a choir boy, “‘No vision can grasp Him. He is above all comprehension.’”

  Sweeney had the distinct impression he was listening to a recorded announcement. On the other hand, even if the clerics had trotted out a theology student, as opposed to an aspiring terrorist, the replies made good copy. And there was something in the boy’s eyes, an ember of fanaticism … Perhaps he was capable of blowing himself up on an Israeli bus or gunning down Jews from a roadside ambush; perhaps Sweeney was talking to the next victim of a low-caliber bullet fired with surgical accuracy (as the Israeli newspapers gleefully put it) behind the ear into the brain. Sweeney decided to try another tack. “Now that a peace treaty is to be signed in Washington, the Palestinian Authority has been throwing people like you in prison. Does it bother you that you are an outlaw in your own country?”

  “The Palestinian Authority is making a terrible mistake,” the boy said. “The politicians who pretend to be our leaders have been tricked into signing the treaty, tricked into arresting those of us who dedicate our lives to the liberation of Palestine. Between us and the Jews there can be no peace until they have returned the land they stole.”

  “Militarily speaking, the Israelis are much stronger than the Palestinians. How can you hope to make them return the land?”

  “We cannot lose. The reason for this is that the Jews value life while we value death.” The young man smiled self-consciou
sly as he added: “The Qur’an teaches that as long as I follow the straight path, the way of God, to whom belongs all things that are in the heavens and all things that are on earth, victory is inevitable. If the Jews have up to now won the battles, it is not because they have more tanks and planes; it is because we Muslims have failed Islam. Thus teaches the mujaddid, Abu Bakr.”

  Sweeney turned to Vestal Virgin. “That’s the second time I’ve heard that word. What does it mean, mujaddid?”

  “The mujaddid,” the cleric replied with a quiet intensity that made the apprentice martyr catch his breath even though he didn’t understand what was being said, “is the Renewer sent by God in the first years of each century to restore Islam. There are amongst us some who think that Abu Bakr may be the long-awaited mujaddid.”

  “I would give my right arm to interview Abu Bakr,” Sweeney said. He brought a forefinger up to his hearing aid. “That would really give me what the Americans call a scoop.”

  Vestal Virgin noticed the hearing device for the first time. Reaching over, he plucked it out of Sweeney’s ear and held it to his own ear.

  With his good ear, Sweeney heard him bark, “Say something.”

  “Yassar Arafat was a closet Jew and secretly ate kosher food until the day of his death.”

  The cleric grinned as he returned the hearing aid. “What is wrong with your ear?”

  “I heard things I shouldn’t. In Beirut.”

  “Like what?”

  “A shell from a mortar exploding next to my car.”

  From somewhere over the roof tops came the recorded voice of the muezzin summoning the faithful to the second prayer of the day. “The interview is completed,” the cleric announced. He motioned to the boy, who popped the gum back into his mouth as he sprang to his feet and let himself out the door. “One of my colleagues will guide you back to your automobile.”

  “How do I get in touch with you again?” Sweeney asked from the door.

  “You don’t.” Vestal Virgin managed a devious smile. “When there is a scoop worthy of a friend of the Palestinian people, we will contact you, Mr. journalist Sweeney.”

  Twenty minutes later Sweeney found Roger tinkering with the motor of his Lada. “Did you get your interview, Mr. Max?” the driver asked cheerfully.

  “What do you know about someone called the mujaddid?”

  The cheerfulness drained from Roger’s face. “There is no such person,” he declared vehemently. “This mujaddid is a figment of Islamic imagination. If there really is a Renewer, it would be healthier for me not to answer your questions, and healthier for you not to ask them.” Clamming up, Roger gunned the engine and concentrated on steering the old car through the torn streets of Gaza toward the Erez checkpoint.

  EIGHT

  ELIHU WAS GOING OVER SITUATION REPORTS AND INITIALING decrypted messages when Baruch finally got through to him on the phone. “Let’s scramble,” he said. Both men flicked switches on their consoles. “Anything coming out of Aza?” Baruch asked.

  “Not a peep,” Elihu said. “The Palestinian police are combing the Strip. Our own people are touching antennas with the handful of local agents we have left. So far the result is a big blank. It’s almost as if Rabbi Apfulbaum and his secretary have dropped into a sink hole.”

  “I’m calling from Jerusalem,” Baruch said. “I was going over a sheaf of informer sightings when I spotted something that made my nose twitch. Do you remember the Nablus bomb factory the Palestinian cops uncovered last summer? They found enough chemical fertilizer and detonators to make dozens of bombs, along with two local mechablim, but the guy who ran the factory, a twenty-seven-year-old Islamic fundamentalist named Yussuf Abu Saleh, slipped through their fingers.”

  “Abu Saleh. The name rings a bell. Isn’t he the Hamas organizer whose two brothers were killed in a shootout some years ago in Jenin?”

  “Yussuf was wounded in the shootout and sent to prison, but he eventually escaped from the Negev detention camp,” Baruch said. “After that he disappeared from the radar screen. There was a report he’d been spotted at one of the secret al Qaida training camps in the tribal area between Afghanistan and Pakistan. When the Americans attacked Afghanistan after 11 September, Yussuf vanished into Pakistan. About a year ago we picked up rumors that Abu Saleh had surfaced in Nablus and antagonized the local Hamas folks by joining a new fundamentalist splinter group. He apparently took half the Nablus Hamas cell with him, along with a lot of their weapons. Hamas was furious enough to put a price on Abu Saleh’s head; like the Mafia, Hamas is not an organization that takes defections lightly. Soon after that we heard rumors that Abu Saleh was recruiting for a kidnapping that was being organized to derail the signing of the Mt. Washington peace treaty. When I heard about this, I nosed around and came up with an intriguing detail: it turned out that Yussuf was married. We assumed he would stay away from his wife, but you never know, do you? I mean, dogs in heat have been known to scramble over electrified fences. So we gently leaned on the bride.”

  “Why gently?” Elihu demanded; he belonged to the school that argued that all force should be applied forcefully.

  “She’s the daughter of a rich Abu Tor lawyer,” Baruch explained.

  “So what did gently get you?”

  “Gently didn’t get us the time of day. She made no bones about being proud of him. But she swore she hadn’t set eyes on Yussuf since the wedding night and didn’t know where he was. We bought both these stories.”

  “Money down the drain,” guessed Elihu.

  “There may be a break in the case,” Baruch went on. “That’s what I’m phoning about. When Abu Saleh disappeared from Nablus, our people distributed photos of his wife to informers. According to the sighting file, one of them may have spotted her at the Damascus gate early in the morning. The young woman in question pulled off the scarf covering her face and waved to someone.”

  “How come the nuts and bolts boys didn’t jump on the sighting while it was still fresh?”

  “They thought she could have been waving to anybody—a girl friend, someone she does volunteer work with. But I remembered that Abu Saleh’s wife had taken the veil. A devout Muslim wouldn’t remove her scarf and reveal her face to anyone but her father or her brothers or her husband. The father and brothers were still in bed at that hour of the morning. So I figure the person she was waving to could have been the dog in heat.”

  “Lean on her again,” Elihu advised. “This time don’t wear kid gloves. As the British say, maybe she can help us with our inquiries.”

  NINE

  MAALI, WHO DID TWELVE HOURS OF VOLUNTEER WORK A WEEK in a neighborhood Red Crescent clinic, checked with the woman behind the reception desk to see when her next stint was scheduled. Still wearing the white ankle-length apron over her long robe, she covered her head with a shawl and, pushing through the heavy door of the building in East Jerusalem, made her way to the back of the lot where her scooter was chained to a fence post. Standing on the starter, she kicked over the motor and pulled out into the traffic choking Nablus Road. She had blackmailed her father into buying her the Italian scooter four years before by threatening to run off with a Syrian, something she never had the slightest intention of doing, but then all was fair when it came to wrangling things out of her father. Since then she had met and married Yussuf and, inspired by her husband’s example, turned deeply religious. She was ashamed of many of her teenage escapades—she had played the role of the spoiled princess to the hilt—but she never regretted the scooter, which allowed her to move freely about the city she loved, studying the Qur’an in a mosque one day, doing volunteer work for the Red Crescent the next, from time to time meeting Yussuf in the homes of trusted friends.

  Halfway down Nablus road the traffic slowed to a crawl because of an accident, so Maali turned onto Amer Ibn El-Atz, which was being repaved and was closed to automobiles. Riding on the sidewalk, she could make out the fire-ball reflection of the midday sun in a high window up ahead; for a moment she though
t the building was actually on fire. Near the corner where Amer Ibn El-Atz crossed Salah El Din, a BMW motorcycle with two men on it overtook the scooter and, veering sharply, forced it into a narrow driveway. Furious, Maali was about to shout an insult she had picked up from her younger brother, something impugning the driver’s masculinity, when a bear of a man wearing a leather motorcycle helmet and goggles leaped on her. Before she could cry out he pinned her to the ground and, tugging free her shawl, pressed a sweet-smelling handkerchief over her mouth and nose.

  Maali came to in the back of a small delivery van filled with burlap sacks of pistachio nuts. In the dirty light filtering through the two small windows in the back doors, she could see the man with the leather helmet and goggles sitting across from her, his legs stretched straight out, his spine against the side of the truck, calmly breaking open nuts and popping them in his mouth. She couldn’t make out whether he was a Palestinian or a Jew. When he offered her a fist full of pistachios she turned her head away. “Your mother is a whore,” she muttered in Arabic, hoping to identify her abductor from his response, but he only laughed under his breath.

  Suddenly she remembered the ring Yussuf had taken from the dead Jew named Erasmus Hall. Wriggling into a sitting position, she hid her hands behind her back and tried to work it off, but she couldn’t force it past the joint.

  She was still struggling to remove the ring when, twenty minutes later, the delivery van bounced over what felt like railroad tracks, climbed a ramp and reversed up to a loading port. The engine was cut. The man in the motorcycle helmet held out a blindfold and motioned for Maali to put it on and knot it. “I categorically refuse,” she said, raising her chin as she twisted the ring around so that the stone was on the palm side of her hand.

  Speaking perfect Arabic, the man said so quietly that she shivered: “If you don’t do it, I will.”