Blood Rules

by John Trenhaile

  It was the “half that convinced Raful. “All right,” he said. “That’s where I want to be.”

  Ehud swept his pieces from the map and folded it up. Something about the way he did it suggested to Raful that his silence should not be taken as acquiescence; there was more to say.

  “They told me you wanted observer status,” Ehud said. “They should have told you I’d earned observer status.”

  “It’s true.” Ehud stood up, shifted restlessly to and fro, now not looking at Raful, now subjecting him to a baleful stare. “Without your intelligence, we’d not have found her.”

  Without Avshalom, God bless him, Raful was thinking, no one would. (Now that the ban on this operation had been overturned, Gazit was reinstated in Sharett’s mind as “Avshalom.”)

  “Listen to me, Raful.” Ehud had come to stand very close. “I run my house here. Nobody tells me what to do, how to do it. I don’t have any … ‘observers’ on my teams.”

  Raful looked Ehud in the eye. “I understand,” he said softly. “So you’d better find me a gun, hadn’t you?”

  If he was being totally honest with himself he’d have admitted to doubts then. Not because he’d had second thoughts about Leila Hanif, but simply because he respected Ehud Chafets and didn’t want him compromised or harmed. Two days later, however, sitting in the front seat of an electric-blue Mercedes parked off the slip road south of the Avenue Jamal overpass, his doubts were all resolved. Perhaps it had to do with the 9mm Uzi he was cradling in his hands, for its warm wooden stock was a comfort to him. Ehud had offered him the choice between a 32- and a 40-round magazine, and he’d chosen the 40-round model without a second thought.

  The two “bishops” were in the Lebanese army’s apartment block, overlooking Shatila from the west. To the south of the Avenue Jamal intersection, two “knights” watched from an alleyway leading to Burj al-Barajinah refugee camp, while below them a pair of “rooks” kept vigil by the last crossroads before the airport. They had everything covered: every possibility, every last square on the board.

  Chafets and Sharett were the “kings.”

  The radio bleeped. Ehud picked up the portable transceiver. “Yes?”

  A babble of gobbledegook followed. Code. “They’re leaving,” Ehud said laconically. “Two cars. Black BMWs. Family’s in the front one.”

  “How long before they get here?”

  Ehud looked at his watch. Twelve forty-four. “Half an hour, maybe less. Lunchtime traffic.”

  Raful stared through the windshield. They were parked on the shoulder, facing toward the airport. Ahead of him stretched the highway, its two lanes separated by a narrow concrete barrier and a line of shrubs, shimmering in the noonday heat. If he moved his head slightly left he could see pine woods rooted in tracts of red sand, with occasional white villas dotting the Chouf’s mauve and green slopes. On the right, Hay al-Sellum, a hodgepodge of slums blocking their view of the nearby sea. Traffic was thin to medium, moving fast. Everything covered, no problem.

  The radio beeped again. More code. Ehud said, “Coming our way.” He wiped his nose with the back of his hand, not looking at Raful, not saying, See, I told you so. Raful smiled to himself and set his Uzi to automatic.

  The cars they drove today had been supplied as one small part of a big murky deal with the Kata’ib, the Phalangists. Each team had a backup vehicle parked within fifty meters of its present position, so that wherever the hit took place there would be a getaway car within easy reach. They had worked endlessly on the permutations: if the bishops struck lucky, the kings would move thus while the knights traveled so to liaise with the rooks there … everything, every last tiny detail, covered: left, right, center, straight up.

  False passports, covered. New license plates, covered. Change of clothing, check. Routes to the border with Israel, surveyed one hour before. Fall-back: Damascus road, red emergencies only, clear, open.

  Twelve fifty-three. The stock of the Uzi felt wet to Raful’s touch and slightly sticky. He rubbed it with his hand; then, still not satisfied, with a paper tissue. Everything covered but unable to handle his gun, clean it again.

  Twelve fifty-five. The first prickle of doubt tingled along the base of Raful’s neck. They weren’t coming.

  “Patience.”

  Ehud had read his mind, then? Or was he saying “Patience” as a way of calming his own nerves, of reassuring himself that they were in fact coming, that nothing had been overlooked?

  Something had been overlooked. Something so obvious that any minute it was going to punch its way out of the glove compartment like a jack-in-the-box and smash into Raful’s face.

  A jumbo jet trundled overhead, aligned for a landing on runway one-eight. Above the whine-roar of its engines the beep from the radio could have passed unnoticed, but Ehud heard. Static, the Hebrew code urgent and unhappy. Ehud swearing. “What?” Raful shrieked; then, more rationally, “Tell me.”

  “They’ve lost the convoy.”

  “How?”

  “What does it matter?” Ehud spat. His fists pounded on the steering wheel. Then he was on the radio again, and this time Raful did not need to have the code translated, the meaning was so obvious: Wake up, watch, you’ll have no advance warning, don’t let them slip past….

  Everything covered. Just about every fucking damn thing

  “What do we do, stay here or …?” “Wait.” Ehud was calm again now. “We listen and we watch.” One oh-five precisely.

  “They have to get to the airport.” Ehud was speaking almost under his breath. “Their plane leaves at three thirty-five; we know they have left the apartment; we know they are on their way.”

  Yes, thought Raful; and one thing you do not mention there, Ehud: We do not know where they are.

  He swallowed again. His mouth tasted of dried fish. When he looked through the windshield he saw only the row of tatty shrubs marking the center of the two-lane highway, white houses on a hillside, cars, an endless stream of traffic moving to and fro between city and airport, with nothing except sun flashes off varicolored metals to distinguish one from another.

  Suddenly, for no reason, he remembered the apple jam. He saw himself sitting at a rickety table with its view of a sunlit bay and he could taste jam superimposing itself over the dry fish that coated his tongue, everything so beautiful, everythingcovered, and he wanted to vomit.

  The radio:Beep, beep, beep. Ehud snatched it up. Another voice, measured and cool; no code this time. “Coming around the back of Burj al-Barajinah, north crossing.”

  Before the cool voice could finish, Ehud was hurtling south down the highway, chasing a Boeing 707 on its glide path into the wind. Raful wound down his window and clutched the door handle, ready for a quick exit. Seconds away now. Ehud overtook a coach on its blind side, horn screaming. Ninety miles an hour, closing, everything covered again, closing, closing....

  Raful found time to notice that his heart was pulsing away like an electric motor, that his mouth was awash with saliva no longer tasting of fish. As Ehud rattled in front of a lorry, forcing it onto the hard shoulder, the jam, that magical jam, came oozing back onto his palate untainted and he laughed aloud.

  And now, straight ahead, he could see the start of things. Two black BMWs traveling along the outer lane, bunched up, fast, a quarter of a mile ahead with several vehicles between them and their pursuers. Traffic lights visible, green traffic lights. On the left, beyond the guardrail, a shantytown of corrugated iron roofs. A gap opening; Ehud insinuating them through it with a demented blast of the horn and rubber left on the road to mark their passage; the lights rushing toward them, still green.

  Ehud tucked the Mercedes in behind the rear BMW and braked. Raful could see an arm stretched along the back seat of the car in front. Man, turning to see who was tail-gating them; second man, also in the back seat, his head also now in profile,spotted—

  Fortunately Ehud realized that in the same instant, and roared up the hard shoulder to shove the Mercedes in between
the two BMWs. As Raful fought to recover his balance he saw jagged movement from the car in front—a pale face, a boy’s face—but then he was too busy with the Uzi to think about that;every war has its tragic casualties: he leaned out the window, faced back toward the bodyguards’ BMW,fire!—three rounds, inside, out, five rounds more—Ehud swearing as he wrestled with one hand for his own Uzi, tucked away on the floor, no time to retrieve it when the “Go” came through….

  Bullets splintered their rear window. Raful ducked while Ehud somehow managed to keep them going straight at seventy miles an hour, no damage, everything covered, keep it coming … outside the window, keep low profile, squeeze,fire! … and this time he was rewarded by the sight of the rear BMW swerving madly, left-right, left-right, until at last it broke away from the lane altogether, rocketing across the roadway to climb the barrier, turn on its side, and skate alongside the road for a few meters before smashing into an illegally parked ten-ton truck and so coming to a very final halt.

  Now there remained only the one BMW, and everything was, it really was, at last,covered.

  They were nearly at the crossroads where the two Israeli “knights” awaited them. Now the lights had changed to red, but the BMW in front sounded its horn in an endless note, kept going, kept going hell for leather for the junction, headlamps ablaze, and Raful was checking his magazine, ensuring the safety was off, Raful was nearly there, his triumphal march already begun, when the beige E-type Jaguar pulled out of the side road as planned, everything as planned,everything covered—and this Jaguar rammed into the BMW, sending it careering across the road, its trunk flying open, suitcases bouncing in the dust, the car itself stopping almost against the fender of a bus coming down the opposite lane.

  Shouting. Screaming. People running this way and that like so many chickens with their heads cut off, a woman shrieking over and over, “Fire, fire, my God, fire!” Four men, strong, resourceful, converging on the wrecked BMW. Four Uzis, but no one saw them or remembered them until later; then, of course, nobody had seen anything else, but now all they saw was a quartet of would-be rescuers. The offside front door of the BMW opened and an arm unfurled, just as the first of the four men reached the car and fired a burst into the driver’s head. Just to make sure that the unfurling arm wasn’t a trick; how Raful admired these people!

  From inside the car came a noise like a cap gun going off: bodyguard in the front seat, valiant defender to the last; another ripple of automatic fire, silence.

  People, other people, innocents, ten of them, twenty maybe, had come as close as the suitcase nearest to the wreckage. They did not know what was happening, saw only a road accident. Then at last they registered the Uzis. Then they understood and melted away, like a line of crisp-coated snow retreating in the first flush of spring. This was Lebanon, this was Beirut, this was the Palestinian refugee camp of Burj al-Barajinah. This was war.

  A profound, malignant silence enveloped the sunlit scene; and Raful was back in his movie. A star. He saw himself, as if from a distance, walk toward the shattered BMW, Ehud a few paces ahead of him. They carried their Uzis upright, a little apart from their torsos, fingers through the trigger guards. Everything covered, as never before. Revenge, seconds away now. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,goel! Yea, Sara and Esther, verily, Lord,to everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.

  The movie lacked a convincing soundtrack and it was slow, proceeding frame by frame. On the outer fringes of the screen, Raful became aware of figures flowing down the road from the ten-ton truck against which the other BMW had run aground. Little green men; no, wrong, men in green clothes. All wearing the same kind of green clothes. Men carrying things, men still too far away to worry about....

  Ehud, five steps ahead, bringing his Uzi to the horizontal. The two Israeli “knights” were already on their way back to the E-type Jaguar; now they had reached it, now they were trying to start its engine. Now they had succeeded; no need for the backup car, after all. Now, Raful said to himself, we are ready to flee the moment God’s purpose has been accomplished.

  Ehud, opening the back door of the BMW. Ehud, bending down to get a clean line of fire. Ehud spinning back, the Uzi jerked from his hand, grayness and gore splattering everywhere. Raful, looking down stupidly at his slacks, wringing wet and hot, as if he’d peed in his pants, black-red pee.Whang of a bullet whistling past his head, more bullets, suddenly nothing covered at all....

  His mind connected, even as he ran. Simple, really. The rear BMW, the one containing Hanifs bodyguards, had run smack into a lorry carrying Phalangist soldiers, now so close he could recognize the insignia on their green uniforms, a triangular cedar tree with the wordsKata’ib Lubnaniya, and the Phalangists were coming to butcher the Israelis who’d started it all.

  But it wasn’t the soldiers who had killed Ehud. His head had been blown off frominside the front BMW.

  Raful threw his Uzi into the Jaguar’s back seat and somersaulted after it as the driver stamped the accelerator down to the floor. The leading Phalangists had found their range and the Jaguar’s bodywork sang to the tune of lead on chrome. By some miracle the gas tank escaped a hit. They were doing sixty before the driver shifted out of second gear. The shots died away. Raful crawled up off the floor. He had wrecked his knee and was suffering from concussion. His trousers were soaked through with Ehud Chafets’s life blood. Ehud Chafets was dead.

  Leila Hanif was not.

  21 JULY: EVENING:

  BEIRUT, LEBANON

  CHAFIQ! Good evening, dear Chafiq.” He did not rise at once, and that frightened Celestine. As she crossed Hakkim’s priceless Bukhara carpet the size of a small domestic swimming pool her mind was busy with all kinds of calculations, but they were muddied by his failure to stand up and waddle around his desk to meet her. By the time she was halfway to him he had rectified the omission—they met in the middle of the carpet with kisses that landed three inches from the nearest flesh—but by then she already knew she was in trouble.

  “Darling, dearest, madame … et comment vas-tu?”

  “Ça va, merci. Shu haida, chéri? How’s business, darling?” Arabic, French, English, all of them together and none: that was to be their mode of communication. What a country, she thought, as he lowered her tenderly into an overstuffed buttoned armchair; no wonder we can’t agree on a thing.

  He’d already taken his own place of mastery, behind the desk, and now he could afford to smile. “Business? Wonderful. Booming.”

  He pronounced it “bombing,” which rather spoiled the effect.

  “And you are married, since we last met? Congratulations.” “Ah, so many thanks.”

  And another thing, she thought. He should be surprised to see me, yet he isn’t.

  “Obviously the events haven’t troubled you, Chafiq.” She glanced around the ornate Ottoman room from which he oversaw his empire, all the time monitoring his reaction to her use of the phrase al-hawadess, “the events.” Among true children of Lebanon there was never a war, only “events.”

  “Too much fighting,” he said genially, “is bad. A little fighting …” He wagged his head from side to side while he pursed his lips; because he was small and round and had a thin mustache that would only grow in patches, the effect was merely to make him resemble a clown. Someone ought to have taken him aside and told him that his best bet was to look serious, always. When Chafiq Hakkim was serious his eyes and their surrounds were composed of lines and angles, with no soft curves to cushion their resemblance to scalpel blades. Then he might look hard, and unpleasant, and dangerous; but silly, no.

  She remembered how she had never liked him, feeling only a vehement distrust which went back far, farther even than those evenings when he would fondle sleepy little Halib on his lap, pretending to read him a story while one of his flabby hands fidgeted over the boy’s crotch. But she had to start somewhere, and Banker Hakkim was nearest. So.

  “What brings Celestine to Beirut now of all times?”
He lit a cigarette, not offering her one—it was forgivable, just; he knew she did not care for Turkish tobacco—and sat back to view her through the smoke like a voyeur seeking the illusory protection of a bead curtain, jacket buttoned across his paunch in a tight X-shaped crease.

  “I happened to be passing,” she said; and they both laughed at the ceiling for a dutiful couple of seconds. “I need to talk about my investments.” She rubbed the thumb and first two fingers of her right hand together.

  “I see. A private matter.” Hakkim’s voice had become a little slurred, reminding her that business, to him, was the one true drug.

  “And since it’s also a family matter, who should I turn to but you?”

  Her smile was intended to be disarming, but her heart beat uncomfortably fast. Although she was a wealthy woman, today she had come as a suppliant, wearing a plain black dress produced by Azizza from God knew where, plus sensible shoes that lived permanently in her suitcase. And here, in this high-ceilinged room with its two priceless chandeliers, quantities of ugly furniture, and French windows overlooking East Beirut, she felt the contest to be unequal. And he had not stood up to greet her when the servant ushered her in.

  “A family matter: perhaps your son …?”

  “Oh, let’s leave him to count his billions,” she said carelessly. “You know how he never can be bothered with buying anything smaller than a Swiss canton.”

  He pushed his chair back a fraction and crossed his fat little legs, resting his hands on his lap in such a way that smoke seemed to rise out of his crotch. The notion of Hakkim’s cock being on fire delighted Celestine, even at such a dangerous corner.

  “So it’s buying?”

  “Yes. This plane that my granddaughter borrowed for a trip to Yemen.”

  He had been raising the cigarette to his lips, but now he stopped. Celestine knew he had been thrown off balance. No, not just that. Chafiq was scared.

  “You wish to purchase … the plane?” He laughed uneasily.