Halib’s handwriting. She wriggled upright, feeling some of the fatigue seep away. So she’d been wrong in her guess that he was a Mossad agent. Strange. Stranger yet, infinitely worse: Halib still did not give her permission to leave with Robbie. How much more would he demand of her?
Earlier, Selim had reported increasing restlessness on the part of the passengers. They were weakened by lack of food and water and by fear, but they were also close to the bottom line of desperation. She and Halib had underestimated the effects of isolating the plane from the world. By avoiding the standard hijack environment of airport apron, where the assembled press was always clearly visible to those inside, they also intensified their victims’ impression of having been forsaken by those outside. They knew now that nobody was coming to rescue them. So let the hijackers shoot a few of them, so what? Since they were all going to die in any case they might as well fight back and die heroes.
It didn’t need everyone to feel that way. Just a few, with fierce qualities of leadership, might, just might, be enough to start a revolution. She could not defeat a revolution.
“My son,” she said suddenly to the Perspex. “God save my son.”
She must forestall this revolution before it erupted.
Leila used the crew phone to summon Selim and gave him instructions. A few moments later, Raful was brought to the first class cabin and made to sit down. At the start of their confrontation, Leila Hanif remained standing.
“I need you.” The expression in his eyes would have been funny, if she’d had the spirit to enjoy it. “I need you to die.”
Her amplification only deepened his lack of comprehension, she could see. “Discipline is faltering, back there. I have to make an example.”
He had no fear; it wasn’t simply that he felt afraid but could mask it. She knew the difference. He genuinely did not fear death. That interested her. He might not be with the Mossad, but…
“You knew about this hijack,” she said. “Didn’t you?”
He did not deign to answer.
“You could have tipped off the airline. You could have phoned a warning through to the airport. There’s a hundred ways you could have found to stop me.” Suddenly she knew she was going to fall down. She leaned against the bulkhead. “Why didn’t you?”
He stared straight in front of him. There was something noble in his gaze. She felt a tremendous urge to smash through it. She wanted him to cringe, to beg for his life with tears in his eyes, as Palestinian children had cringed on Tal al-Zataar while they died of thirst, or as old men had begged for their granddaughters not to be skewered in Shatila while the Israeli Defense Force officers sat in their watchtowers less than fifty yards away.
It would be a waste of time, she told herself, and time I do not have. No, that was a lie. In truth, she was frightened of losing the argument. Not because she felt tired, not because she had taken no nourishment for the best part of the day and a night, but simply because she feared he might have some justice on his side, and that would have destroyed her. So when he made no reply all she said was, “You’ve lost.”
“No.” He raised his eyes, very slowly, to look at her. “You are the one who has lost.”
She waited.
“I have kept my humanity to the end. You threw yours away.” Still she waited.
“London. Nineteen sixty-nine. Your wedding night.”
Leila wiped a hand across her forehead. Her wedding night?
“My wife … my wife, Esther, she killed herself, you know? Sleeping tablets. But she was afraid the doctor hadn’t been straight with her about the pills, so she put a plastic bag over her head and kept it there with an elastic band. One morning, after I’d gone to work. The doctor who did the post-mortem had the times all worked out; she must have swallowed the tablets while I was still on the stairs. I never suspected. I thought she’d gotten over the worst. But maybe the worst is always with you, when you lose a child.”
“Child.” The word acted like a detonator, forcing from her an echo that she was scarcely even aware of having uttered. “Your child died?”
“Sara was murdered.”
“Sara … Sara Stone?”
“Sara Sharett.”
She reached out a hand, groping blindly for the nearest chair. She sat down heavily and rested her head on one hand while she wiped away tears with the other. How fickle the body was! How weak!
At last she remembered this man. Raful Sharett and Leila Hanif had met two years before, briefly, scarcely catching sight of each other across a hallway filled with smoke; but in this moment she knew him as if they’d never been separated. She felt no surprise at finding him here.
“Sara Sharett,” she repeated stupidly. But inside, the rage was beginning. Rage at not having remembered him before. Rage at Halib for not having found out. And rage because at her very deepest core she believed her brother must have known this Mossad agent was on board, but still he had lied to her.
“Sara Sharett,” she said again.
“Yes,” Sharett confirmed. “I am Raful Sharett; you know who I mean when I talk of my daughter. You can remember all the names. All twelve of them.”
“Thirteen.”
Her single whispered word was enough to check the remorseless forward propulsion of his judgment. For a moment his face wiped itself clean; then his forehead creased. “What?”
I died.
“You said … thirteen. Why? Only twelve victims were named.”
That night I died too. Doesn’t anyone realize?
She lowered her hand and looked at him. Now they were sitting side by side, on opposite sides of the aisle. She looked at him, and she said, “You lost a child. Your only child.”
He nodded brusquely, once.
“You lost a child, so every day when you wake up, assuming you’ve slept a few hours before dawn, there’s this sickness in your stomach, and for a few seconds God has mercy; he won’t let you remember why. Then the memory comes back, and it isn’t today, it’s the very first day all over again, nothing dulled, nothing softened, nothing hidden.”
He was staring at her. He felt his head nodding in agreement and wanted to stop it, but he couldn’t.
“You get up. You don’t want to eat, or drink, or think. You want to lie in bed or sit in a chair, because you haven’t the energy of a corpse; it’s all you can do to drag on your clothes, even though you can’t think of a reason why you should. Maybe you have to go out Why? Because you’ve taken some kind of decision to hope your child will come back, a miracle!—so the logic of that requires you to do the other things, like eat and wash. And you’ll be walking along, maybe your mind isn’t on your child at all, maybe it’s one of the breaks, and you’ll see something, or hear, or smell something and it comes flooding back, doesn’t it? Only ten times worse, because you’ve had a little rest, and your brain knows you can take more because of that, so it piles on the grief that’s been building up behind the dam, and it’s not ten times worse, it’s a hundred times worse. You’ve gotten rid of your child’s clothes, of course, and the toys and all the little objects that might ambush you, but you can’t stop them making those chocolate bars that were his favorite, you can’t stop them selling them. You can’t always avoid turning on the TV just when the cartoons are about to start, ‘I’m Popeye the Sailor Man!'; oh, do you know how afraid I am of hearing that awful, awful tune? ‘I’m Popeye the Sailor Man, I’m Popeye the Sailor Man…. ’ Did you have the headaches, Raful? Because you don’t eat or sleep properly, but you work fifteen, sixteen, seventeen hours a day, seven days a week, twelve months a year, so you get headaches, don’t you?”
He nodded again. She did not see it. He did not know that she did not see it. They were both elsewhere.
“Migraine, the doctors call it, so they stuff you full of pills, but they’re poison, so they make you feel worse. And there you are, walking along, and bang! There’s your boy, just as you remember him, and you call his name, you can’t ever help it, but he doesn’t look
around, and then someone moves out of the way and you see that your son, your boy, your child is holding some adult’s hand, some molesting pervert has got your child … and you start to run … and then …”
“She turns around,” Sharett whispered, “and she looks at you. And you realize all sorts of things with half your brain: that you’re in danger of getting arrested, at worst, or of making one almighty fool of yourself, at best, but the thing you realize, the thing you know with all your brain, is that this … isn’t … her …”
“… after… all.”
Silence filled the first class cabin. Silence and rage.
1969: LONDON
Leila Hanif and Colin Raleigh were married in a Kensington registry office. It was October 1969, one week before the start of the Oxford term, which gave them time for a fleeting honeymoon before Colin embarked on his BCL course. Halib had chosen the wedding day, just as he’d selected the hotel where the happy couple would spend the first night of their new life together. For both these choices, Halib had a reason.
On the morning of her wedding Leila woke up with a headache, unable to face the thought of food. While dressing she somehow managed to break the heel of a shoe. She found a repairman by South Ken tube station and stood there stupidly, her face a blank mask, while commuters eyed her finery and wondered how much last night’s trick had paid her.
The ceremony itself was one big nothing in her memory. At the time she was vaguely aware of an office, people in suits, forced chat and falser gaiety. Colin’s mother stood stiffly on the sidelines, wearing a smile that had been painted on with her lipstick but was much more easily removable. She had bought them a silver toast rack, without prior consultation. Leila couldn’t believe it when she heard, but Colin could. On her side, only Halib bothered to put in an appearance. He came with one of his tarts, Annette, a girl whose mascara was smudged, and Leila somehow felt that to be appropriate.
She wasn’t aware of Colin at all. He might have been a waxworks figure. It was a warm day and it was raining; London looked, felt, and smelled abominable. They piled into a taxi to be driven off to somebody’s seedy club for a reception of sorts; then it was time to go to the very old and forbidding hotel in Piccadilly that Halib had so thoughtfully chosen for them. The doorman wore an elaborate, drab uniform; she would be able to remember that later, even though she couldn’t recall her husband’s suit. She remembered the way the doorman saluted and called her madam.
Their room had not been decorated in a hundred years. The door weighed half a ton. Net curtains of impeccable antiquity guarded a window that overlooked a well composed of other windows and innumerable white bricks. She could not see a trace of sky however hard she craned her neck. The furnishings were Louis Quinze, but faded Louis Quinze; even Louis Seize might have considered throwing them out and starting again. She had never sat on such a hard bed. This hotel relished its wonderful reputation with visiting heads of state, or so Halib had assured her. She’d never thought much of diplomacy.
Somebody had arranged for a bottle of champagne to be waiting for them when they arrived. It stood in an ice bucket alongside two of those awful saucer-shaped glasses that connoisseurs had abandoned years ago as being guaranteed to make the wine go flat. But Colin’s eyes lit up. He lifted the bottle from the bucket, dripping water on the carpet, which would benefit from any kind of a cleaning, so no matter, and said appreciatively, “Vintage Laurent Perrier. 1964. You don’t often see that in England. This must have cost a mint.”
He opened the bottle with an exaggerated pop and tossed her the cork to keep. “A memento.” When he offered a glass, however, she waved it away, saying, “In a minute. I have a headache.”
“Poor lamb. Take an aspirin.”
“I’ll be all right.”
“I’ll bet your brother arranged this bubbly. Halib, my hero, here’s to you!” Colin drained his glass—"Mm, wonderful!”—and poured another, before coming to sit beside her on the spindly, uncomfortable sofa, sliding one arm along the back. Leila, anticipating his move, edged forward and rested her arms on her knees. In vain. Colin began to tickle her spine. He was “tiddly,” to borrow that awful word he used to describe not being drunk and not being quite sober either. Tiddly was one degree below pissed and two degrees below legless. Tiddly, he’d assured her, often, was the thing to be. On the whole she agreed, because in that condition she found him easier to manage.
“You’ve got a present for me,” she said, edging still farther forward. “Do you remember?”
“Present?” His face clouded. “I’ve already given you the ring, we bought a tea service together—”
“When we were in Ios, you promised to tell me something on our wedding night.”
Colin seemed to sober up with astonishing alacrity. He put his glass down on the table next to his side of the sofa. “My dream?” he said shortly.
“Yes.”
“Can’t you think of anything you’d rather talk about?” His smile was mischievous. “Dreams are rather boring.”
Still she did not look at him. “Tell me why your mother blamed you for your father’s death.”
“I’m sure she didn’t, not really. You know how kids love to—”
“No. No, I’m sorry. You made me a promise and now I’m claiming it.”
“Why does it matter?”
“Because it’s a mystery between us. I don’t like that.”
The flush that had come into his cheeks was, she sensed, nothing to do with Laurent Perrier, 1964 vintage.
“You won’t tell me.” She made that a statement, not a question.
Colin stood up, staggering a little. In contrast with a moment ago he seemed a lot more drunk now. No longer tiddly. Pissed.
“All right” Aw’righ'. “I want another drink.”
She bit back the words, You’ve had enough already and said, “Just tell me, Colin. I don’t ask much.”
“The plane went down.” His speech was slurred, though she could understand him. “It began to sink quickly. There was a window. My father got me out through it. But … he was too big. Got … stuck.”
He drained his saucer of champagne, knocking it back as if it were gall.
“I was looking at him when … just happened that way. Saw him go down. Sucked down. Just his head, looking through the window, this look on his face, and the wave washing over it. Oh, God.”
The glass fell to the carpet. He dropped to his knees. Very slowly, he bent forward until he was resting on all fours. For a moment he hung there, like a dog. Then he collapsed.
Leila had not touched her own glass. She stood up, straightening her skirt over and over again, a mechanical doll that some bored little girl has forgotten to switch off. After a while she gathered herself enough to pour the remains of the champagne down the toilet and flush it, before putting the empty bottle back in the ice bucket. She placed a pillow under Colin’s head and covered him with a blanket. Then she let herself out.
The corridor was empty. The entire hotel felt empty, though doubtless there were other guests marooned in isolated corners of this mausoleum. She crept along to the next room. Its door stood ajar. As she pushed it open, an unseen hand drew it away from her and, once she was inside, closed it again.
Halib, whose hand it was, said, “Good.” He sounded impressed but surprised.
On a table directly in front of her was a briefcase, the one she had seen in his suite at Oxford’s Randolph Hotel earlier that same summer. Draped over a nearby chair was a woman’s dark gray suit, with a white blouse and thick stockings; a pair of black patent leather shoes were aligned neatly underneath.
“He swallowed the drink?” Halib inquired. “He’s sleeping?”
“Yes,” she confirmed. “My husband is sleeping.”
She felt like a figure from some darkly terrifying Jacobean drama. ’ Tis Pity She’s a Whore, perhaps.
“Nobody saw you come here, to this room?”
“Nobody.”
“Excellent.” He
hesitated. “What’s it like, being married?”
Leila, expecting Halib to pile on the pressure, had been working out paths of resistance. His question astonished her. As always.
“The same,” she replied listlessly.
“Oh.”
She thought she knew every nuance of his every mood, but tonight he was different.
“I’m getting married myself,” he said.
Her legs gave way and she sank down into the nearest chair, never taking her eyes off his face. She had come to this room expecting to find her brother at his most possessed, in full control of his frightful powers, and now this. He was blushing. He was shy.
She ought to say something. “Who’s Father fixed you up with?” she asked eventually.
“Father doesn’t know yet. Annette.”
She could not focus on Annette. Then it dawned. “The one you were with today?”
He nodded. Leila stared and stared. He was bashful, he was happy, he was going to marry one of his unbeliever tarts, a foreign infidel, and Feisal didn’t even know. Allah, what a joke! In other circumstances, how funny it would have been: her brother, Halib, breaking the family mold.
“Did I give you the idea?” she asked.
He giggled. Giggled!
“In a way, I suppose,” he said. “I want sons. Don’t you think she’s wonderful, poppet? Well, you hardly know her yet, but you will.”
“Don’t call me poppet. What’s Father going to say?”
“He’ll adore her. Naturally.”
Looking at his face, she was drawn to one inevitable conclusion. Halib had fallen in love. “Shall we begin, angel?”
His words, spoken in precisely the same light tone, caught her by surprise. What could he mean? He was in love, he was going to get married; surely he couldn’t go on with this night’s work? “Begin?”
“The uniform first, I think.” He looked at his watch. “Sorry to rush you, but not a lot of time.”
She collected all her resources and said, “Don’t make me do this, Halib.”
Blood Rules Page 31