“Halib lied, lied, lied. He used you, Mum, why couldn’t you see that?”
“I don’t know.”
Robbie, deprived of the resistance he’d expected and craved, remained silent.
“My brother never played straight.” Leila’s voice was hushed, appalled. “Nor did your Grandfather Feisal. It wasn’t their way.”
“So you threw us away, Dad and me.” Robbie coughed. The cough turned into a spasm. Leila reached for the water flask, her expression undecided. At last the coughing stopped, and her hand released the flask.
Robbie spoke again. “You threw us away and you became a terrorist? Great. All because Uncle Halib asked you to. Stupid.”
“There were other reasons.”
“Yeah? What?”
She had no answer for him. The boy’s foot lashed out, sending a pebble cascading against his mother’s thigh. She checked her anger. Then she said, “Blood won out, Robbie. It usually does.” She glanced at Sharett. “Right?”
“Oh, yes,” he replied, in a faraway voice. “Blood rules everything.” “Crap!”
Leila stiffened. So did Sharett. Only Robbie and Colin stayed relaxed. They knew this territory.
“I should have been firmer with you,” she said, mildly enough. “This is Christianity for you, then.”
“Christians don’t murder.”
Leila smiled.
“You wanted to know why I left in 1982,” she said after a pause. “All right, I’ll tell you. I’d taken an oath to be revenged on the man who’d murdered—if you like the murder topic, let’s discuss it—murdered my grandfather Ibrahim. An Israeli killed him; that’s important.” “Why is it important?”
“Because it made all other Israelis in the field my prey, Israelis like the ambassador to the United States. I’d … I’d taken part in operations. So I was wanted by the Mossad, and Halib would only protect you and me if I obeyed him in everything. Only then would he help me!”
“You should understand that,” Sharett said, and his voice contained such unexpected sympathy that Robbie tried to turn around and look at him. When the iron grip on his neck and waist did not relax he struggled, briefly, and was still.
“Why did you save Tim?” he suddenly flared. “You, the mighty terrorist, out for revenge, why so merciful all of a sudden?” And when she didn’t answer he sneered, “Aren’t you worried about your image?”
“I saved Tim because you asked me to.”
“No other reason?” he scoffed. “Humanity? Compassion?”
“Not … after what happened in 1982.”
“Yeah, well, we know all about that, don’t we?” He added another word under his breath: “Bitch!”
Leila heard it. Sulfur flowed through her veins. She had a sudden vision of herself leaning forward to pick up a stone and fling it at her son, saw, saw vividly, how it struck him on the lip, causing the blood to run, bringing astonishment and fear into his eyes. …
No. He was her son. Slowly, slowly, the rage burned itself off, evaporating into the hot, moisture-sodden air; but its odor remained in her nostrils for a long time, and it was a while before she trusted herself to speak.
“In 1982 I believed I’d seen you for the last time, Robbie.” Leila’s voice was pleading now. “But your uncle offered me one hope, if I worked for him. He promised the minute you left England he’d take you back. He couldn’t do anything while you were in England; you were being watched, you must see that. … He swore to help me.”
“Help you?” Robbie tried to laugh. “He betrayed you!”
“After New York I had no place to rest.” Leila murmured the words as if she had not heard her son speak. “No place to call my home.”
“Good. I hope you went hungry and thirsty, and I hope you were scared, every day. I hope you goddamn suffered! You … terrorist!” Robbie’s voice had sunk to a level scarcely audible in the cave, but he spat out the last word with a venom that made his hearers shudder.
“Why do you call me a terrorist?” she asked in wonder. “I didn’t feel any fear, delight, or grief when I killed. I felt nothing. I just wanted to have you back. Why do you call it terrorism?”
Sharett, looking from face to face, knew it was only conflict that kept them going, conflict and desire. Leila Hanif wanted her child more than she wanted life. He, Raful, lusted for revenge. Colin would sacrifice anything to save Robbie from the hateful virus spread by Hanif genes. But now energy came only in fits and starts, each surge weakening them, sapping will and the ability to fight. Conflict, desire … dead things.
The entrance to the cave had ceased to be a glaring white shape. He could see the watercourse floor in its natural colors. Soon it would be dusk.
His life was drawing to an end. Tongues of acid were consuming his stomach wall as the tide devours a child’s sand castle. First the outriders, rippling wavelets that reconnoitered the lower ramparts; then rollers, bearing down on the soft barriers, smoothing them flat, consuming them, until there was no longer a castle standing proud on the shore but only that seething, heavy force of nature called the sea.
Sharett eased his cramped legs a fraction. He would have liked something to deaden the pain. Not a tablet or an injection. No, he wanted something of theirs. One of Esther’s embroidered hankies, with her scent on it—what agony they’d been in the aftermath of her death, and how he longed for them now! Sara’s locket. Things old men clutch to make their deathbeds tolerable.
He could have sat at a café table overlooking the Mediterranean, with the taste of apple jam on his tongue, and had chosen to turn his back on all that. Why? Around that corner—there, see it?—lay the rationale and justification for Raful Sharett; give him a moment, it would come....
There were no more moments. In Tel Aviv, in Jerusalem, they’d have learned the truth by now. Too late to change anything. The sand castle was almost flat. Sunset, the beach emptying, children and parents alike, tired and tranquil, heading home. A last look, and then a turning of the back for eternity.
He must fight on. The woman would fight.
“What do you think will happen?” he said suddenly. “Leila Hanif, it’s you I’m asking.”
She looked at him but did not reply.
“Your water’s almost gone. Not enough to get back to the plane. And if you did … what then?” A spasm of pain made him tighten his grip on Robbie, and the boy cried out.
“Stay where you are!” Sharett shouted.
She had risen to a crouch but, seeing that Robbie no longer struggled, she slowly relaxed.
“Even if you made it back to the plane,” Sharett croaked, “what then, eh? You’re going to die, but before then you’re going to watch your boy die too. Of thirst. Or shall I break his neck in mercy? Eh?”
He wrenched Robbie’s head backward. This time, Leila did not react openly, she just became still. She became one with the stone around her.
“What were you doing in New York that evening?” Sharett asked. “The lost hours, between synagogue and sendah … how did you spend them, hmm?”
Her stillness did not lessen, but its quality changed; it was as if a cat were preparing to attack.
“You were with Halib,” Sharett jeered, “your beloved brother, listening to him tell you that Robbie had been taken safely away, was in hiding, was yours. Whereas all the time—”
The bullet whined off the rock face an inch from Sharett’s left ear and he winced, but his grip on Robbie did not slacken.
“Do that again,” he whispered, “and the boy’s dead.”
She continued to kneel in the same old position, with her gun aimed at what she could see of Sharett, but her eyes glittered, and to Colin, hallucinating somewhere on the borders between life and its extinction, it seemed that those glowing eyes mingled with others.…
A day of infernal heat, dust, flies, stink, but not in Yemen. In Beirut. A day of his youth, or so it appeared now, though in 1974 he was no longer young. End of holiday. Traveling fast and hard toward the airport, arrows o
f white light reflected off car paintwork, a noisy air-conditioner fan, reek of after-shave from the driver’s neck, red where the hairs had been razored down to the roots.…
He could hear Leila talking, as if in a far-off room of the same house. Playing with Robbie. Not far to go now, darling.…
Then, violent acceleration. Eyes in the mirror. Eyes everywhere. Robbie sniveling with fear, Leila gripped by panic, clinging to her child as if he might save her. Alf, Robbie’s stuffed crocodile, cartwheeling around the car as it skidded to a halt; Alfs eyes close to his own, replaced by another pair of eyes, bored at having to do this work, bored but not distressed, as the killer walked toward the BMW to finish what he’d begun.
Leila cowered in the far corner, holding Robbie to her breast. The boy’s eyes were closed. He was sucking his thumb, trembling. Sacrificial victims, calmly awaiting the knife: No, by Christ, no!
His flight bag bouncing here, there, everywhere except into his hands. A whimpering sound—ah! it came from him—smash, smash, smash, the case flying open, the gun in his hands and an almighty pain lancing up his backbone, his hands refusing to steady, the gun seemed so heavy and his arms seemed so stiff … but he was lifting it.
They’d meant to get the gun back to Celestine somehow, but events always conspired to frustrate them. That last morning, they’d agreed to leave it in a side pocket of the car when they reached the airport and not say anything. God had arranged it this way. God’s will.
The eyes, those dreadful eyes, coal black circling furnace-red, floated toward the car. Colin remembered that guns had safety catches. His thumb came into contact with something that moved, and he moved it. Snatching one last glance at the pale, tear-streaked faces of his terrified wife and child, he heard a noise, the door was open, and he turned, tensing his finger around the trigger while he prayed....
An explosion. His hands hurting like hell, his eardrums burst, silence, the noisy kind of silence that deafens you with its weight. A blank. Being pulled around, and pushed also, stood up against an army truck while brutal hands scraped the insides of his legs raw, and eyes, hostile eyes, curious and greedy, consumed him like fire, hotter than fire. …
Mayday! Mayday! Mayday! Ditching! Ditching! Ditching!
Fire on board. Flames snatching at the wing, the plane almost vertical now. Plunging down toward the sea. … Boom! went the flowers that grew out of the hull. Boom, boom! Something black rose up to smother him, he was choking, couldn’t breathe, because the horrible black smothery thing was so heavy. It had eyes, now: terrible flaming orbs of death that scorched his face, and there was blood everywhere, rich, red, and tantalizingly fragrant: a fresh-air smell, a come-on wake-up it’s a lovely morning smell that got you going, blood everywhere—on the car’s paintwork, on the upholstery. “Did I do that?” he kept asking the Phalange officer in charge. “Did I do it?” Because there was so much blood everywhere. See, see where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament! Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him? It was blood that was suffocating him, while the flowers spoke: Boom!
His father’s blood. Father, son, and holy ghost: “See, see. …”
Malcolm Raleigh threw his body across Colin’s to shield him from the flowers and their burden of fresh, pungently scented blood, but he died, still he died. Colin drank the blood, which was also the blood of Ehud Chafets, and he ought to have repaid his father, “paid him back,” that’s what he’d said to Robbie, but what he did was this: as he was thrusting his way through the tiny porthole of the DC-4 he felt his father behind him, and so he lashed out with his feet and lashed again, kick kick kick, until he could feel no more struggling behind him and he was up into the light, free.
Free.
He lay with his back against a damp rock wall in Yemen, head lolling over toward the cave entrance. He was awake, he was rational, his sight had focused into perception of great sharpness. He knew his own name and everything about his situation, just as he knew, withtotal clarity and for the first time, that his hands were clean of his father’s blood.
Because he had surfaced into this limpid pool of utter tranquillity he could also be certain that his senses were to be relied upon. Thus he knew that in the oval of decreasing light immediately behind Leila, a shadow had moved and instantly become still. Somebody outside the cave....
A rescue party.
Leila sat with the rifle in her lap. She kept it trained on Sharett, which meant that she kept it trained also on Robbie, their son. Move the barrel less than an inch, and it would be aimed at Colin.
If he shouted a warning, the rescuers would storm in.
If he kept quiet, they would creep up on her and try to overpower her.
He had a choice.
Robbie no longer felt sure what was real and what was dream. He floated in and out of consciousness like a plane flying through cloud, now light, now dim. In the dream he was lying on his bed, awake, while his father spoke on the telephone. He sounded far, far away, but Robbie could almost make out the words. They’d been in his head for days now. The night before they flew to Bahrain, Dad was talking to a man called Richard … Robert …
His mother was an animal. No, don’t say that. She was his mother. But still she had to be made to see that what she’d done was wrong. …
If only his father would shut up. Stop it, Dad. Say goodbye to Richard. Rodney. Robert. …
I have to make her see.
“He’s right,” Leila said unexpectedly. “Halib cheated everyone. Even me.”
It was almost dark in the cave. Colin strained to see his former wife through the gloom, but her expression remained closed to him. He knew she was preparing her last throw, the one that would bring Robbie to her side.
“In New York,” she said, “I trusted Halib. He wouldn’t let me be the one to take you away from school that day. But later he told me he’d collected you and you were safe, where no one would ever find you.” She paused, thinking. Then, in a voice that rang with grief, she said, “He was right.”
Colin’s ears ached with the effort to hear. Outside the cave the sky had turned dark blue. Shadows slithered everywhere.
“You were safe … and he promised to get you back!”
“And suppose I didn’t want to be gotten back?” Robbie wailed. “Did you ever think of that?”
Colin felt a resurgence of that desperate need to forge a relationship with his son, the kind he would have wanted with his own father. The longing brought with it an odd sympathy for Leila, because he knew she shared it. And yes, another thing they had in common: neither of them gave a damn what Robbie might want.
His heart gave a lurch and he felt himself teeter on the lip of an abyss.
Robbie’s head throbbed with pain and confusion. Dad, do shut up! Say goodbye to your friend, put down the phone. …
Must make Mum see. …
“You needn’t have left me,” he said. “You needn’t have killed anyone.” Say goodbye, Dad. To Robert. To … to … Raful! He woke into full consciousness. “Mummy!” His cry rent the silence. “Mummy!”
One determined tug was enough to free himself. Sharett lunged for him and missed. He rushed toward his mother. Colin knew what was in the boy’s mind: he wanted to buy back time. He wanted to find a way of convincing her she’d been wrong, of punishing her, but also of knowing her and healing all that was past.
He wanted her love.
Leila opened her arms to Robbie. She dropped the gun. It fell near Colin. She held her son tight. Colin leaned forward. He picked up the gun.
Leila was crouched sideways to him, less than two feet away. He could hear her sobs and see paleness where her shirt was. When Sharett yelled “Now!” Colin shouted, “Robbie! Down!”
In the same second that Colin pulled the trigger, Robbie screamed.
Shlomo Stern blew his whistle.
Robbie remembered something, as he buried his face in his mother’s breast. Funny, he hadn’t thought about it since childhood. He was
in bed, it was late; Leila came into the bedroom....
“Put that book away,” she said, in a voice that was meant to be fierce but sounded kind. “You can read it tomorrow.”
He smiled up at her. ‘"Night, Mummy,” he said sleepily.
“You can finish it tomorrow,” she said tenderly, as she tucked him up in bed. “But this day’s over now. …”
Noise shook the very walls of the cave: hurricane noise. When at last the firing stopped, Shlomo Stern switched on his torch. Colin crawled up to see that Leila had one arm thrown lightly around Robbie’s shoulders. A thick scarlet trail seeped between the boy’s lips, but even that could not conceal how mother and son were smiling.
More torches had flashed on now; the cave seemed full of huge men with dark, oily faces and black holes where their eyes should be. Raful and Dannie Neeman had flung themselves flat the second Stern’s whistle sounded. They’d survived. Colin looked up from the two corpses at his feet. He gazed into Sharett’s eyes, and he said, “You promised.” His voice was hushed. “You promised me, Raful.”
“Don’t. …” Sharett’s voice was a mere rasp against the silence. “Don’t. …”
“You promised me he wouldn’t be hurt. After New York, you said if I helped you; that was the only way. …”
Sharett opened his mouth to speak. No words came out.
“We had plans. … Help me to help you, that’s what you said. Be kind to Sharett, and you need never fear Leila again. Never walk down the street wondering if Robbie’s really safe at school, or—”
He swallowed. Bait, Sharett had said; I need bait. And for a long time Colin had refused to dangle his own son as bait. But in the end, fear and loathing of the woman who’d betrayed him had worn him down. He’d acquiesced when Raful managed to scatter references to their trip through the newspapers, even though Celestine had seen one of the earliest articles and rung him up with a warning. He’d agreed to pretend not to recognize Sharett when they met on the plane.
Blood Rules Page 42