by Jon Land
“While you were out, I received a call from Commander Baruch.”
Danielle sat down.
Giott took his chair as well, gingerly. “He says your attitude bordered on insubordination to a superior officer earlier today.”
“I don’t work for Shin Bet. He isn’t my superior officer.”
“Baruch is a well-respected department head, all the same.”
“Not by me, he’s not.”
“Your family has a history with Baruch, doesn’t it? Your father, I believe.”
“That was many years ago, and the bastard got what he deserved.”
“You’re getting defensive, Pakad.”
“It was Baruch who was on the defensive in the desert, Rav Nitzav, because he knew he didn’t belong there. That jurisdiction should have remained with National Police.”
Giott raised an eyebrow. “The commander also provided more of the specifics of your rendezvous. The presence of your Palestinian friend, for example.”
“I needed a translator,” Danielle lied.
“We have people on staff to provide such services.”
“Not for native bedouin dialects.”
“This was an unfortunate misjudgment on your behalf, Pakad, because it provided Commander Baruch with just the kind of ammunition he can use against you.”
“Let him.”
“Don’t be naive. Commander Baruch has suddenly become very interested in the day-to-day operations of National Police. That includes the appointment of my successor and that successor’s accompanying senior support staff. I can neutralize his influence to a degree, but if we give him reason to make a stand neither of us will come out the better for it. Am I making myself clear?”
“Yes, Rav Nitzav.”
“Do you want an upgraded position?”
“Very much,” Danielle replied.
“Enough to choose your footing more carefully, Pakad?”
“Not if it means kowtowing to a bastard like Commander Baruch.”
“That’s too bad, because the costs of defeat with a man as powerful as Commander Baruch on the other side will be extreme. There will be nothing left for you to go back to. You will be left without a position anywhere in government and I’m afraid you’ll find the private sector considerably colder and less inviting for someone with your kind of experience.”
Danielle felt a tightness inside her chest. In that instant she saw herself as Giott, and others no doubt, saw her: a woman in her mid-thirties, which made her too old to be a wunderkind any longer and too young to be considered a secure part of the old guard.
“The way to get what you want,” the commissioner of the National Police continued, “and avoid what you don’t, Danielle, is to compromise. Say things you don’t entirely mean. Do things sometimes your heart is not into. But always with a greater goal in mind.”
Giott’s tired eyes blinked slowly, the sternness gone from them. Yes, he knew Danielle well, knew her better than anyone and certainly better than she knew herself.
“That goal could be as simple as self-preservation, or as complex as career advancement. Either way,” Giott said, his voice winding down the way a toy doll’s does when its batteries run low, “it pays to have your enemies believe you are doing exactly what they expect of you. Now, Pakad, I would like your assurance that there are no other surprises, nothing else you are holding back from me.”
Danielle took a deep breath.
* * * *
CHAPTER 13
J
ericho’s newest Catholic church was located on the town’s southern outskirts amid neat rows of white stone houses, exactly one mile from Ben Kamal’s apartment. He had walked that distance in the fading heat of the late afternoon, already looking forward to the evening coolness that would greet him in the walk back.
Strange how in the five years since his return from America, he had never gotten used to the heat, wishing he could treat it as he had back in Detroit: unwelcome but easily avoidable with air-conditioning always a dash away, life lived between cool cars and cool buildings always with the hum of fans whirring at the edge of his consciousness. But there was no escaping the heat in Jericho, no respite of air-conditioning except in the hotels, popular restaurants that catered to tourists, and now the Oasis Casino. The heat was a reminder to him of exactly where he stood, and how little he could change it.
A run-down, abandoned mosque had provided the home for this church, one construction phase leading to another under the careful tutelage of Father Mahmoud Faisal, or “Father Mike,” as he was known to his English-speaking faithful. Just over sixty, Father Mike was a round-faced, pleasant-looking man with a bald dome and hair like black wire sprouting from both sides of his head. His family had immigrated to America at the same time the Kamals had, just before the Six-Day War in ‘67, but he hadn’t returned to Palestine until the mid-1980s when he came back to establish his own church. Lured home by the fiery nationalism of the intifada.
Father Mike was working in the garden today—-planting or weeding, Ben couldn’t tell which. Ben grabbed a spade from a rusted wheelbarrow and joined the priest crouching in the dirt.
“If it isn’t my favorite parishioner,” Father Mike greeted.
“Not because of my attendance on Sundays, obviously.”
“Just blame the Israelis, like everyone else. They have become tougher than ever at the checkpoints. My parishioners often spend their Sundays waiting in long lines to be turned back.” Father Mike gave Ben a longer glance. “But at least you come prepared to work.”
“Call it my penance,” Ben said, waiting for Father Mike to tell him what to do with the spade.
“Penance is prescribed, not volunteered.”
“What about anticipated?”
Father Mike looked up from his work and studied Ben. “Feeling guilty about something, my son?”
“Are we calling this the confessional?”
“It’ll do, so long as you keep turning over the dirt before you as you speak. I want to get the new flower beds in today.”
“I thought you were painting.”
“That’s tomorrow. I’ll expect you to come by for more penance. Then it’s the stone wall the week after that.”
“Perhaps you’ve chosen the wrong line of work.”
Father Mike frowned at Ben’s clumsy work with the spade. “Especially since the study of ancient Latin and Aramaic, especially Aramaic, was my original avocation. Not much demand for a translator these days.” Father Mike reached down and held Ben’s hand still for a moment. “You’d better talk fast before I have to redo that entire section.”
“My nephew, the son of my older brother, was murdered.”
Father Mike fixed his face in a tight frown. “In America?”
“No, here. In the Judean Desert. He was part of an American archaeological team that was all killed. I . . . saw his body.”
“What a terrible thing.”
“I called my brother. He didn’t believe me.”
“Denial.” Father Mike nodded. “Not unusual in such tragic situations.”
“It was like talking to a stranger. He didn’t know me well enough to trust my word. He didn’t think I knew my nephew well enough to be sure.”
“Was he right?”
“Yes,” Ben conceded.
“So who are you angry with, your brother or yourself?”
“We’ve only spoken a few times since I came back to Palestine, and our relationship was strained even before I left the United States.”
Father Mike went back to turning the ground with his hands, inserting tiny bulbs lovingly into dirt that would turn to dried clay by week’s end. The sun and heat had flushed his face red and drew spiderwebs of blue veins to the surface of his cheeks.
“I get the feeling there’s something more you want to tell me.”
“I arrested a man earlier today,” Ben responded without hesitation. “He told me he had seen the devil.”
“Is that a crime?”
/> “He also wounded a woman with a sword. I think he had gone mad. Said he recognized the devil from years before.. Right now I want to believe him, I want to believe he really did see the devil.”
Father Mike laid his tools down. “You’d like the devil to be real.”
“Do you blame me?”
“It’s not my job to dispense blame. I leave that to someone else.”
Ben didn’t seem to hear him. “First my wife and children killed back in Detroit, and now my nephew here in Palestine. Maybe the devil’s been following me around. I even told the man I arrested this morning that I had seen him too. Was I lying, Father?”
Father Mike brushed his hands off on his baggy work pants. His blue eyes seemed to lighten. “You’ve seen evil. You’ve seen violence. You’ve seen hate.” Father Mike nodded. “Close enough to the devil, that’s for sure.”
“Everything changed for me that night my family was killed. Sometimes I forget how much. Today, in the desert, made me remember.” Ben let the words trail off, but suddenly the memories turned vivid on him, like still shots unfolding in rapid fashion. The serial killer known as the Sandman coming at him with a knife, soaked in the blood of his wife and children. Ben putting bullet after bullet into him, wondering now if you could really kill the devil. “I don’t know what I came back to Palestine looking for any longer,” he continued.
Father Mike nodded, as if that made sense to him. “Those who have walked in the darkness have seen a great light.”
“What’s that?”
“A proverb from the prophet Isaiah.”
Ben smoothed the dirt before him with his hand. “I don’t think I see his point.”
Father Mike pushed himself to his feet. Ben could hear his knees crack, gazing up at the older man as he spoke. “Maybe Isaiah was saying that light can best be seen from the darkness. Picked out and followed like a beacon to lead you out. I don’t think you’ve seen that light yet, Ben. But if Isaiah was any kind of prophet at all, then eventually you will.”
“I don’t suppose he was a good enough prophet to say how long it would take.”
* * * *
B
en was awoken by the sound of banging on his apartment door. His alarm clock read one a.m., and he had been sleeping fitfully, racked by dreams of his family back home. His brother had not called back, allowing Ben to still cling to the hope that the body in the desert had not been that of his nephew at all.
Ben threw on his bathrobe and wobbled to the front door. He had barely started it open when the door was forced inward, staggering him backward. A sea of uniformed figures swept into the room, all at once swallowing and holding him still. He heard words being exchanged rapidly in Hebrew, then a new voice in English. A woman.
“I think you have something that belongs to us, Inspector.”
* * * *
CHAPTER 14
Y
ou know who we are?” the same woman asked after the Israeli soldiers had transported him to a building somewhere in the West Bank, blindfolded in the back of what must have been a van.
Ben’s vision cleared slowly. He was in a large, square room surrounded by Israeli soldiers. His legs and arms were bound to a chair. Around him the bare walls were made of cinder blocks and the smells of gasoline, dried oil, and rubber from a pile of discarded tires hung in the air. He could see dark splotches of grease and motor oil on the floor beneath a trio of mechanic’s lights that hung from the ceiling, providing the room’s only light. They must have taken him to a vehicle storage dump, abandoned after control of the area had passed to the Palestinians. The windows had been boarded over and the only door Ben could see was a garage bay set on rusted metal runners.
“I asked if you know who we are!” the woman repeated and walked around from behind the chair to face Ben.
She had short brown hair, neatly styled. She would have been attractive, if not for the nasty scar that ran down the left side of her face like a zipper.
“Yes,” he managed, through a mouth that had gone bone-dry.
“You understand you are under arrest.”
Ben saw the bars on her uniform that identified her as a captain. “On what charge?”
“Suspicion.”
“Suspicion of what?”
“Take your pick, it doesn’t really matter. We are not required to say.”
The woman’s boots clacked against the wood floor as she circled Ben’s chair again. She was holding a weighted sap down by her hip for Ben to see. Ben knew the routine of such torture, often called shabeh, knew its purpose was to inflict as much pain and bruising as possible without breaking any bones or doing lasting damage. There were stories of prisoners being kept in a chair for days, or being confined for weeks in a coffinlike concrete box. Sometimes loud music was used, or deprivation of water, food, and bathroom facilities. All part of what the Israeli officials when pressed referred to as “moderate physical pressure.”
“Since you know who we are,” the woman continued, “we can assume that you understand the gravity of the situation.”
“I understand you have violated the agreement between our respective law enforcement agencies.”
“The agreement is rendered void by crimes committed against the state of Israel.”
“Is that what you’re accusing me of?”
The woman came closer and knelt down until she was eye-to-eye with Ben. She slapped the weighted sap lightly against her own leg. “You stole something belonging to the Israeli government. That makes this a political incident. That makes you a political prisoner.”
“What did I steal?”
The woman removed the mini-disc Ben had given to Commander Moshe Baruch of Shin Bet earlier that day. “I think you know that too. Tell us where we can find the real disc, and you will be released.”
“And I’m supposed to believe that. . .”
“We will have no reason to hold you, once the real disc is in our possession.”
Ben looked around the room, then back at the woman who was holding the sap at eye level now. He weighed his chances, considered his options. “It must have slipped out of my pocket. I lost it.”
“At least you didn’t try to tell us you hid it in the garden in front of the Catholic church in South Jericho,” the woman accused.
Ben felt a sudden chill, recalling how he had eased the disc, now wrapped tightly in plastic, into the dirt of Father Mike’s flower beds when the priest wasn’t looking.
“We were watching when you buried it,” his interrogator continued. “Since we couldn’t find it, we had to assume either you had changed your mind, or the priest had retrieved it.” She came close enough for Ben to smell oranges on her breath. “We are now satisfied he did not.”
“What did you do to him?” Ben demanded, lurching forward against his bonds.
The woman slapped the sap against the outside of Ben’s left leg. It smacked the muscle with a whap that made Ben cringe, grimacing through the pain.
“We did what we had to. I’m afraid he wasn’t very cooperative, which brings us back to you. The disc was not in the garden, not in the church, not on your person, and not in your apartment. That means you must have hid it somewhere else.”
“I hid it in the garden, just where you saw me.”
“You’re lying.”
“I’m telling you the truth!”
The woman struck him lower down, on the outside of the knee. The pain jumped up his leg and Ben winced audibly. “I suggest you find another truth to tell us. Did you view the disc?”
“No.”
“Did you give the disc to someone else?”
“No! I told you I hid it in the—”
The sap got Ben in the side of his ribs this time and his breath split apart inside him.
“I am getting tired of this,” the woman said. Her face had turned beet-red except for the jagged, zipperlike scar that remained pale, the color washed out of it. “I meant what I said about releasing you. We have great respect for your
work, Inspector. We do not relish this assignment, believe me. But we will keep you for as long as it takes us to recover that disc.”
“I’m telling you I—”
The woman hit him in the side of the skull before Ben could finish. His head whiplashed to the side and stuck there, the world turned on edge. The pain lingered, digging deep. Ben tasted blood and realized he had bitten into his Hp.