Tongues of Fire

by Peter Abrahams

  “Oh?”

  “A boy shot at some Palestinians.”

  Katz took his hand from Rehv’s knee. “What kind of boy?”

  A dead boy, Rhev thought. “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “What nationality, that’s what I mean,” Katz said with annoyance. “Do I have to spell it out?”

  “Israeli, I suppose.”

  “Goddamn it.” One pink hand made a fist. The other wrapped around it and squeezed hard. “Was anyone hurt?”

  “The boy died.”

  “Stop calling him a boy. Boys don’t shoot guns at people. Anyone else?”

  “Manolo.”

  “Who’s Manolo?”

  “He was the busboy.”

  “Dead?”

  “Yes.”

  Katz nodded as if he had known it all the time. “An innocent victim.” It was one of those redundancies Rehv heard Americans use quite often, like eternal damnation.

  Katz stopped nodding. His face began to go the color of his hands. Rehv was surprised that he could look so angry. “Something has to be done about this terrorism. It’s turning this town into a hellhole. You people—” Katz stopped himself, and resumed in a quieter voice: “Some of your people, Isaac, I’m not saying you, but some of the other refugees, are being very unrealistic. There is no Israel. There is Palestine. Israel is ancient history, like Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Apache nation.”

  “But there are still Apaches, aren’t there?”

  Katz grunted. “Look at them.” He paused to let that sink in. One of his hands twitched slightly, as though about to set off for Rehv’s knee, but it stayed where it was. “It’s what I’ve been trying to tell you, Isaac. There’s no going back, so the longer you stay marginal, the harder it will be to get into the game.”

  But Rehv didn’t feel like getting into the game. Maybe it was because of the waves in his head, maybe because of the hurt in his back.

  Katz saw something on his face that he must have decided was discouragement. “But don’t get me wrong,” he said. “It’s not as tough as all that. My grandfather came from Russia without a dime, and in five years he owned his own house and was renting out the top floor.” He smiled brightly, hoping to kindle some enthusiasm. Quite suddenly, in mid-smile, he had a thought that made him start visibly. The teeth still showed, but the smile was gone.

  “You weren’t involved in it, were you?”

  “Of course not,” Rehv said.

  “Good. I’m glad to hear that, I can tell you.” He picked up his glass, drained it, and smiled again at Rehv. He did look very glad. He licked his lips and pulled his chair a little closer to Rehv’s. His tone softened, became confidential. “You see, Isaac, I’m Jewish. That’s the truth and I’m proud of it. But first and foremost I’m an American. And America is a Christian country. Step off this island, Isaac, and you’ll find that it’s a very Christian country, and getting more Christian every day. Do you see my point, Isaac? I’m just saying that terrorism is wrong, under any circumstances.”

  Katz stood up and looked at his watch. Rehv saw that he had fumbled the usual leave-taking sequence: The polite way is to first show surprise at the time and then get ready to go. He felt a laugh begin to build uncomfortably, painfully inside him.

  “My God!” Katz said. “Look at this. And with an opening tomorrow.” He walked quickly to the door. “You’ll come, I hope?”

  Rehv nodded and murmured something. Katz went out and down the stairs. Rehv held his breath as long as he could, and then let the laugh out like an embolism. He heard himself laugh and laugh. It was a raucous laugh with no humor in it at all. He and Sheila Finkle laughing together would be bedlam.

  When the laugh finally died away, he swallowed two sleeping pills with the rest of the armagnac. Then he set the camp cot beside General Gordon, shut off the lights, and lay down. For a long time he looked at Gordon, yellow brown in the dingy light of the streetlamps, as if he had been toasted. He wanted to roll over and say to Naomi: “If we get hungry we can always have him for breakfast.”

  Later the drug wrapped its arms around him and he stopped thinking.

  Too soon something punched a hole in the sleep that held him. It kept punching, insistent and mechanical, until he opened his eyes. It was still dark. The phone was ringing in the storage room.

  He pushed himself off the cot in the darkness and carefully crossed the room, finding a path between the hungry warriors. He lifted the receiver.

  “Hello.”

  “Mr. Rehv,” said a voice. It was the man who preferred to be known as Harry.

  “I don’t want to talk to you.”

  “Please listen to me, Mr. Rehv.” He spoke very calmly, very quietly. “I’m very sorry about what happened tonight. I accept full responsibility. At least we have the girl. She is going to be fine.”

  “I don’t give a shit about the girl.”

  “I do. She is my granddaughter,” Harry said. “She tells me you were extremely able, Mr. Rehv. I very much want to talk to you at greater length. Perhaps—”

  Rehv cut him off. “I’m hanging up now. Don’t ever call me again.”

  “Wait, Mr. Rehv, please. A man like you can’t spend a lifetime sitting on the fence.”

  Rehv paused, not because Harry’s words changed his mind in any way, but because they recalled Quentin Katz talking about staying marginal. In this brief silence Rehv thought he heard a faint metallic sound.

  “Mr. Rehv?”

  “Quiet,” he hissed into the phone. He listened very hard, and after a few seconds again heard a muffled scraping. It seemed to come from the hall outside the front door of the gallery. “Don’t go away,” he whispered through the wires to Harry.

  He laid the receiver softly on the counter and opened one of the drawers. Inside, his hand found the knife Quentin Katz used to cut the cakes he sometimes gave visitors with their coffee. He walked slowly into the gallery, his bare feet noiseless on the pine floor.

  The front door was opening. A large dark figure moved out of the blackness in the hall and into the room. Rehv stood behind the sculpture of Genghis Khan. The pencil beam of a small flashlight shot through the darkness. It ran in a short arc, then fastened on the falling Gordon. The dark figure dropped quickly into a crouch. In the slight diffusion of the beam’s light Rehv could make out an extended arm, a hand holding an object.

  Nothing happened. The beam swept around the room, prodding the other sculptures. Rehv knelt behind Genghis Khan and made himself small. The beam passed over the camp cot, stopped, returned. The dark figure rose and began moving very slowly toward the cot, arm still extended.

  The figure bent forward. Light shone on the empty cot. Quickly the figure turned; the beam glanced off the object in its hand—a gun with a long silencer attached to the barrel. Carefully, methodically, the beam began probing the shadows in the room. Eisenhower. Rommel. Genghis Khan. It rested on Genghis Khan.

  The figure came closer. Slowly the beam examined Genghis Khan from head to toe. Then it touched Rehv’s knee. He dove across the floor. There was a noise like dry spitting. Something crashed. Rehv rolled at the dark figure, hitting it at knee level. It did not fall; it did not even budge. The beam shone on him. The long barrel pointed down, gleaming.

  Rehv drove up from the floor and sank the knife into the middle of the dark mass. He heard a grunt, which softened to a sound like leaking air. The figure slumped away, pulling the knife from his hand. The flashlight was pointing its narrow finger at the ceiling. Rehv picked it up and shone it on the figure at his feet: a dark suit, a dark face, an earlobe missing. A sticky wetness flowed around his bare feet.

  Rehv stood there for some time. Suddenly he turned and ran to the window. In the street below he saw only parked cars, and wet black pavement, like a river of oil.

  He walked back across the room. The sticky wetness had spread. He went into the storage room and picked up the phone.

  “Harry?”

  “Yes.”

  “Co
me here.”

  Night was slowly going gray when Harry arrived. The black mass on the floor was turning into a dead and bloody man. Rommel’s sausage head lay nearby. Harry glanced quickly around the room.

  “They’ve changed exhibits,” he murmured, almost to himself. For a moment Rehv wondered whether he had made some sophisticated joke about modern art; but Harry had given no sign that he had even noticed the man on the floor. Harry smiled at him. “You speak Arabic, don’t you, Mr. Rehv?” he asked encouragingly, like an interviewer trying to coax a lively answer from his guest.

  “Yes.”

  “Good.” He was so brisk Rehv thought he might rub his hands together; brisk the way a man is when things are going his way. Perhaps in his mind this body canceled the two at La Basquaise.

  “We’d better do something, Harry.” He was suddenly very tired. He felt the drug pulling down his eyelids.

  “Don’t worry,” Harry said. “I’ll handle everything. There’s just one little detail I’d like you to take care of. It’s really quite simple.”

  “That’s what you said this morning.” He looked out the window. “Yesterday morning.”

  “Don’t be so suspicious.” Harry sounded almost jovial. “Where is your telephone?” Rehv showed him. Harry lifted the receiver, took a clean handkerchief from his pocket, and stretched it over the mouthpiece.

  “I am going to dial a number and hand you the phone. In a very low voice, as if you are afraid of being overheard, say in Arabic: ‘It is done. There was difficulty. I will be gone for two days.’ Then hang up immediately. Do you understand?”

  Rehv was tired, and tired of Harry, too: “No. I don’t want to play these games.”

  Harry’s briskness sank into his depths, out of sight. “It’s too late,” he said quietly. He dialed the telephone and gave the receiver to Rehv. It was answered in the middle of the first ring. “Yes?” said a man in Arabic.

  He spoke the words he had been told to speak, thinking at the same time that he had heard the voice before. He hung up.

  “Who is he?” he asked Harry.

  “Abu Fahoum. Did you think your visitor came without orders from him?” Rehv remembered the long black car disappearing in the rain. They must have dropped the bodyguard near the restaurant, to follow him on foot.

  “Now do you understand, Mr. Rehv? Abu Fahoum will wait two days before he sends someone else, or comes himself, or talks to the police. He won’t know that anything is wrong. We have given ourselves two days of grace.”

  Rehv shook his head. “I’m very tired.”

  Harry looked at him thoughtfully. Night had now withdrawn, revealing the shapeless brand on his face. And his bright, cold blue eyes.

  “I am saying, Mr. Rehv, that we have two days to kill Abu Fahoum. But don’t worry: I’m going to help you.” He bent and picked up Rommel’s head.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Krebs sat in his office, watching the rain try to break through the glass of his little window. He didn’t like the weather in New York. He didn’t like anything about New York. He didn’t like Armbrister, his boss, or Bunting, Armbrister’s boss. He didn’t like Alice, his wife.

  Krebs liked the weather better in Kuala Lumpur, Rio, Lisbon, or Kinshasa. He liked the girl who brought him coffee. He liked her hard little ass and her hard little smile. He daydreamed of being rough with her, but he never did anything about that: It would have meant risking his job.

  His job meant a lot to him. He wanted to keep it, to become better at it, to rise. He ran five miles a day and did one hundred push-ups the moment he got out of bed. He knew two quick ways of killing a man with his bare hands and had employed one of them successfully. In Rio. He had just spent a long lonely year in Kinshasa, finally turning a Chinese engineer who had worked on the nuclear project at Lop Nor and was supposed to know something important. Krebs never found out what it was. He always worked hard, did what he was told, and tried to keep his mouth shut unless he was sure what he had to say was what they wanted to hear. He didn’t drink, didn’t smoke, took no drugs, wasn’t queer.

  Because of all that Krebs didn’t understand why they had brought him to New York to ride herd on a ragged little mob of Israelis who sometimes threw Molotov cocktails into the offices of airlines they didn’t like. They had no money, no support, foreign or domestic, no safe base. It was a step backwards, and it worried him. He had thought they might send him to Islamabad, or even Warsaw. What had he done wrong? He had been over the past year fifty times, and he couldn’t think of a single mistake. He sometimes thought of asking Armbrister—“Look, Armbrister, just tell me what it is, I’ll make up for it”—but would never give Armbrister that pleasure. He would make up for it without knowing what it was. He would work harder, do more push-ups, learn another quick way of killing a man with his bare hands. He turned to the square green face of the computer screen on his desk.

  He was trying to match suspected terrorists with their previous lives in Israel. It was very difficult. Immigration had been very sloppy—they had just let them roll in wave after unsorted wave. Names were wrong, ages were wrong, they weren’t arranged by family or profession or even military rank, which should have been easy, since by the end almost the whole population was in uniform.

  Hunched over his desk, Krebs tapped questions on the plastic keys. After a short pause the screen flickered and gave its usual answer in square white letters: “Negative.” Krebs tapped more questions. Sometimes the screen fed him a scrap or two of information. He made short notes on a writing pad. Outside, the rain softened into snow. Krebs didn’t notice.

  The telephone rang. “Mr. Armbrister would like to see you in his office,” a woman said. It was Armbrister’s secretary. She had trouble with her r’s. The way she pronounced Armbrister always reminded him of Elmer Fudd. Krebs thought Elmer Fudd was very funny; he still sometimes watched the cartoons on Saturday morning for half an hour or so, while he cooled down from his run, and Alice fixed his breakfast. Or didn’t.

  “Right now?” Krebs asked, but she had hung up.

  Krebs shut off the computer terminal. He made a symmetrical arrangement of his pens, pencils, and writing pads. From the bottom drawer of his desk he took out a small round mirror. He studied his reflection closely: to be sure that his short sandy hair was neatly parted, that his eyebrows, much thicker and darker, were straight, that the aviator-style glasses really did make his square face seem longer and thinner, that there were no bits of food between his teeth or blackheads on his nose. He was about to put the mirror away when he noticed one tiny hair poking out his right nostril. He gripped it between thumb and index finger and yanked, immediately feeling a sharp pain surprisingly deep in his nose. He examined the hair: It was easily an inch and a quarter in length, perhaps an inch and a half. There was no time to measure. He blew it into his paper shredder.

  Krebs locked his door and walked quickly to the end of the corridor. He ignored the elevator and took the stairs, climbing them two at a time—better for his legs and usually faster as well. He always used the stairs, except when he was with other people.

  In the outer office Armbrister’s secretary sat bent over a typewriter. Her limp black hair hung forward like blinders. “Go right in,” she said without looking up. Krebs paused for a moment to catch his breath, and entered Armbrister’s office.

  Armbrister was on the phone. He was listening carefully and writing notes on a piece of paper. With exaggerated fishlike movements of his face Armbrister mouthed something at him, probably “Hello. Sit down.” Krebs sat. Armbrister resembled a fish in any case, with his thick red lips and slightly bulging eyes, always bloodshot because the central heating dried his contact lenses. He made a very poor physical impression, Krebs thought. It was one of the reasons he disliked Armbrister—he preferred his superiors to look more distinguished.

  “Of course I won’t forget,” Armbrister was saying. He picked up the sheet of paper and read from it. “Four salmon steaks, butter, eggs, parsley, and a bottle
of Aligoté.” He listened, nodded, kissed the mouthpiece, and hung up.

  He turned to Krebs. “It’s a new code,” he said with a laugh. He laughed a little more in case Krebs wanted to join him. Krebs tried to smile.

  Armbrister stopped laughing and began pushing papers around his desk. “I’ve got something here that should be right up your alley.” He opened a drawer and rummaged inside. “If I can ever find it.” He loathed Armbrister. They had been in the same class at MIT.

  “Here we go.” Armbrister held up a yellow file. “There was a bit of contact last night.”

  “Serious?”

  “Probably not. But there might be some interesting angles. It seems they were after a man named Fahoum.” Armbrister turned his red fish eyes on Krebs. He was waiting for Krebs to say something.

  “I’ve never heard of him.”

  Armbrister smiled. “Abu Fahoum,” he said. “He was a commando leader. British educated. Also a cultured and witty man. Right now he’s attached to the Palestinian legation at the UN.”

  “But he’s in the business?”

  The fish eyes opened wide in puzzlement. “The business?”

  “Our business,” Krebs said.

  “Oh, very much so.” If Armbrister had heard the impatience in his tone he chose to ignore it. He handed Krebs the file. “Give him a call. I’m sure he’ll have a few ideas.”

  “How much can I tell him?”

  “As much as you like. We’re allies, after all. Just make sure he gets the impression that this job is very high priority.”

  Krebs stood up.

  “One more thing,” Armbrister said. “It might make things smoother if you mention my name.”

  Krebs spent the rest of the day working on the yellow file. It was a thin file: no identification of the body, no autopsy results, no suggestion of who the young woman was, or where she had gone. There was a police report that included a diagram of the restaurant showing two Xs, almost touching, and a statement of the blood types of the young woman and the busboy. They were both O positive.