A Walk in the Darkness - [Kamal & Barnea 03]

by Jon Land

  “I’m sorry, I don’t remember. . . .”

  “You didn’t come to the closing. Everything was presigned.”

  “Oh.”

  “But I know what happened. I’m very sorry.”

  “It was a long time ago.”

  The woman opened the door all the way. “You wanted to look around.”

  Ben hedged. “It’s all right. I . . .”

  “No, please. Come in. I hope you don’t mind what we’ve done to the place. . . .”

  “Not at all,” Ben said, and the words felt like thick marshmallows sliding up his throat to be forced from his mouth.

  The truth was he did mind, minded because it didn’t look at all like his house anymore. Everything was different, even the steps he had raced up all those years ago, already sensing he was too late.

  They lay before him now, a straight hike into his past atop blue carpeting instead of the beige he remembered. But the house smelled the way he remembered it. The light dimmed to the same hue it had been that night.

  Not looking back, Ben started up the stairs.

  * * * *

  D

  anielle woke up to her own scream. It wasn’t unusual, happened often in fact, always to find herself alone. What was unusual today was that something felt wrong about being alone. She awoke disoriented and stiff and quickly realized she was in a car, rapidly recovering her bearings now.

  Where was Ben? That was what felt wrong. He should have been here, in the driver’s seat. And the car should have still been moving.

  Danielle tried to collect her thoughts but the dream chased her down again. This particular one was a replay of the day the cramps and pain had come not long before she noticed the bleeding. She’d gone to the doctor fearing the worst and got it after being admitted to the hospital. But the worst thing about the dream was that her baby was always alive in it. The doctors were wrong. Her baby was right here in bed with her. Just look for yourself.

  The dream today, though, was different because the baby was nowhere to be found in it. There was only the cramps, pain, and blood come back to ruin her again. Instead of Ben, the shape of Moshe Baruch, commander of Shin Bet, had been looming over her hospital bed, grinning. She thought he might be holding her baby, holding it hostage, but the dream ended with a scream before she could see clearly.

  Ben hadn’t been there in the dream and he wasn’t here now. Slowly Danielle began to realize where he must have driven and reached for the door latch.

  * * * *

  H

  is legs heavy and mouth dry, Ben retraced his path from six years ago. Afraid to hold his eyes closed too long, lest the visions return with the events of that night being replayed. It did seem darker all of a sudden, and then the rich blue of the carpeting suddenly looked like the beige his wife had chosen for the hallways and stairway. He looked down at his right hand, expecting his gun to be there. He saw it for an instant, quivering like a mirage in the desert, before he closed his hand and felt nothing in his grasp. Still he squeezed until his fingers ached, as if he were trying to roust himself from a dream.

  It didn’t work. He kept walking. Almost to the top of the stairs when the sharp stench of blood hit him. Ben smelled it, saw it, remembered shooting the man who spilled it a dozen times before he fell. He wavered and grabbed the banister for support.

  “Are you all right? Can I get you something?”

  He looked down the stairs and saw his wife standing there in her white nightgown, the same one she’d been wearing when the Sandman had stabbed her and draped it over his own clothes. Then it wasn’t his wife anymore; it was the woman who owned the house now, whose name he didn’t know.

  Ben shook his head, continued on. He needed to do this, live it, all on his own. The real walk in the darkness wasn’t into the unknown or the mystical, it was into the past, into the very depths of his own soul. He had relived this moment so often, trying to change it in his mind, make it end differently. Yet the stairs were smaller than he remembered them, and not as steep. And at the top there was no stench of blood or white-shrouded figure with knife in hand ready to pounce. His imagination did not produce them. The past failed to give them up.

  Ben stood there for what seemed like a very long time, beneath the lazy spin of a ceiling fan that hadn’t been there six years ago. The shadow of its blades danced against the wall, but that was as close to seeing a ghost as he got. The rooms on the right his children had slept in were neatly made up, empty. The master bedroom where he had found his wife after stepping over the Sandman’s body was drenched by the afternoon sun.

  Ben wondered what he’d expected to see, what he wanted to see. It was just a house, after all, occupied by strangers who had washed it clean of his memories.

  A cold wash of anxiety surged through him. He felt like an intruder in someone else’s world, not just their house. His past belonged here no more than he did.

  “Ben.”

  The voice from the bottom of the stairs made him shudder. He turned slowly, expecting to see his wife again, dead these many years.

  Ben looked down to see Danielle standing there instead.

  “Ben?”

  He didn’t remember going to her. There was only her arms sweeping him away from this place to somewhere different when they embraced. And for that moment, just that moment, they felt inseparable, their lives irrevocably and wondrously intertwined.

  Even after the moment faded, replaced by the cold harshness of reality, Ben still clung to Danielle, wishing it could be like this forever and knowing it couldn’t.

  * * * *

  CHAPTER 77

  B

  en headed back down Warren Avenue into Dearborn, trying to plot a course that would take them past St. Bernadette’s Church, to his brother’s house. He remembered now that the church had closed in ‘97; his mother had told him in a letter. Warren Avenue was considerably more commercial than he remembered, lined with shop after shop featuring signs in both English and Arabic. He marveled at the number and diversity of the stores that had been added, especially compared to streets back in the West Bank, where the poor economy had forced many shops to close altogether or open for only short hours.

  He passed Fordwood Park and Woodmere Cemetery, where his father was buried and his nephew soon would be. The neighborhoods looked remarkably unchanged. Arabic men and women strolled about or worked in their yards. Children knocked a soccer ball about. Others crisscrossed the streets on their bicycles, paying far too little attention to the traffic signals. It could have been Palestine, except for the neatly shingled homes with side yards of grass instead of dust. There was no mistrust in the eyes of those he drove past, no longing or hurt. The neighborhood’s children threw baseballs instead of rocks and lived without fear of soldiers coming to disperse them with rubber bullets. It was the world he had left in the hope he could make a difference in another one.

  Had he? It seemed not. Even so, that hadn’t left him longing for this world again. Instead, if anything, it was Palestine he missed, as dusty and fear-filled as it might be. The ever-changing dynamic that seemed to cheat progress at every turn while refusing to deny hope.

  “My brother lives just up this block,” Ben explained to Danielle.

  “Did you tell him I was coming?”

  He smiled at her. “I told him I was bringing a friend.”

  * * * *

  T

  hey headed up the walk together, skirting the collection of children’s toys strewn across the lawn. One bike with training wheels and two without them. A skateboard. Strange how that stood out in Ben’s mind, that and the training wheels. Children rode bikes in the West Bank too, but he did not remember ever seeing training wheels.

  In that instant Ben understood more clearly than ever why his father had moved his family here, and how difficult it must have been to go back when the aftermath of the Six-Day War left his world in tatters. His departure and subsequent death had left a hole in Ben this return was finally helping him t
o understand. Filling it was as much as anything the reason why he had returned to the world of his birth in the first place. Doing what his father had done to better understand the legacy left him.

  A six-year-old boy whose father kissed him good-bye at the airport in 1961 and never came back again.

  Ben’s own boy was almost the same age the night the Sandman had struck, neither man able to see their son grow up. He had that much in common with his father but had found little else over the years.

  Ben climbed the steps onto a small porch and knocked on the door. Inside his family would still be observing the formal grieving period over the death of his nephew, everyone gathered in the midafeh, the room where guests would be received.

  Ben knocked again and this time his brother Sayeed opened the door, his face ashen, his tie poorly knotted. Sayeed reached out; to embrace him, Ben thought, until his brother seized him by the lapels and dragged Ben in far enough to slam him up against the wall.

  “Where is my son? Where is he?”

  Ben made no move to resist. “I’m so sorry.” A tight group of family members clustered behind his brother in silence. Ben scanned their faces, shocked at how little he remembered any of them. The five years he had been away might as well have been a lifetime; in many ways, it had been.

  Sayeed’s grip slackened, but he didn’t let go. “I still haven’t spoken to anyone in Israel. No word on when they will send me Dawud’s body. No one answers my questions, no one returns my calls.” His eyes fell on Danielle. “Is that why you have brought this one here, Bayan? Does she know something?”

  “She is my colleague, Sayeed. We pursue the same enemy.”

  “We know who she is,” a woman’s voice chimed in, and the crowd parted to reveal Ben’s mother. “We recognize her from all the pictures.” Hanna Kamal stopped beside Sayeed and laid a hand over his arms, gently prodding them off Ben. “It is not your brother’s fault,” she said, trying to sound soothing. “He did not bring this misery upon us.”

  Sayeed finally let go, and Ben hugged his mother for the first time since he had left to return to Palestine. She seemed even shorter than he remembered and her hair looked grayer, thinning in patches.

  His mother eased Ben away and turned her eyes on Danielle. “Beitna beitek. Our house is your house.”

  Danielle smiled tightly back. She continued studying the faces of those around her, Palestinians all. There were few times, if any, she had been in the company of so many Palestinians at once, at least as the lone Israeli. Raise her child with Ben, and she doubted that even these would accept her.

  She could see much of Ben in both his mother and brother. Sayeed was taller, darker, but not quite as broad with the same thick wavy hair. His mother shared Ben’s eyes and the ever-present glint of questioning in her expression. A subtle strength and power behind a veil of somber self-assurance.

  Ben’s mother grasped his hands in hers and started to lead him forward, toward the living room. “You will tell us everything and we will figure out what to do together.”

  Ben let her drag him a few steps, then held his ground as gently as he could. “I need to speak with Sayeed alone first.”

  * * * *

  CHAPTER 78

  S

  ayeed led Ben outside and into a detached garage. Ben stood with his back to a wall of neatly placed screwdrivers, ratchets, and wrenches. His brother faced him from the covered fender of a classic MG sports car he was in the midst of restoring. The garage smelled of fresh tire rubber and car wax.

  “Have you swept this place lately?” Ben asked Sayeed.

  “I’m sorry its cleanliness does not meet your standards.”

  “I meant swept it with electronic equipment for bugs, listening devices.”

  “Tell me, Bayan, why would someone want to bug me? To listen to my sobs over my son’s death, which I cannot even fully mourn?”

  “No, because when fugitive Palestinians who have taken refuge in America want to return to their homeland, you are one of the men they contact.”

  Sayeed stiffened. “Did you come home to share my grief, or am I just part of another case you are working on?”

  Ben held his brother’s eyes as best he could. “Listen to me, Sayeed. Danielle and I have come here because we’re being hunted by the same forces behind Dawud’s death. No way we can use traditional means to exit this country. We need new papers, identities, passports good enough to hold up to any scrutiny.”

  Sayeed’s eyes had turned blank. “How did you find out about . . . my work?”

  “I have a friend in Palestine—Colonel al-Asi. He gave me the report he had on you last week, asked me to do something so he wouldn’t have to.”

  Sayeed stood up. “So I have you to thank for my freedom. Is that it?”

  “You have Colonel al-Asi’s friendship with me, to be more accurate, that and the fact that the men you have helped so far merely wanted to come home.”

  “I screen those I help carefully. They should have a right to return to their families, don’t you think, my brother? A right to go home without being hunted by Israelis like your girlfriend.”

  The remark failed to get even the slightest rise out of Ben. “Most of the hunting is done by Palestinian authorities now.”

  “Acting in concert with the damn Jews.”

  “Sometimes, sometimes not. But, please, this is not the time for us to argue.”

  “No, it is a time you have returned because you need me to help you.”

  “I need your help to get to the people responsible for Dawud’s death.”

  “Then let me join you, help you get the bastards. I have friends, you know. I am owed favors by men no one in Palestine would dare cross,” Sayeed declared fervently.

  “Those I am after are much bigger than they. You must believe me.”

  “Why should I?”

  “Because I’m your brother.”

  “Then tell me the truth about what’s going on, what my son died for.”

  Ben had rehearsed these next words in his mind often, but they still didn’t emerge as planned. “Dawud was part of a team only pretending to be archaeologists.”

  “But he was an archaeologist. I told you that.”

  “Because they needed one or two for cover. The rest were geologists.”

  “Geologists?”

  “The Israelis have found oil in Palestine.”

  “Where?” Sayeed asked, his spine straightening.

  “In the Judean Desert, near the caves.”

  Sayeed shook his head very slowly. “Then my son died for nothing. Or, at least, very little.”

  “Didn’t you just hear what I just said about the oil?”

  “Yes, I heard you.” Sayeed’s expression hardened in the garage’s dim light. “And what you are saying makes no sense.”

  Ben shook his head incredulously. “This oil field contains as much reserves as the North Sea and more than the Grand Banks.”

  “Buried under hundreds, perhaps thousands, of feet of shale and rock. Yes?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Assume it is, my brother; otherwise, it would have been discovered long ago. Now, the deeper you drill, and the more obstacles you encounter along the way, the more expensive it becomes to bring the oil up. Measured by the linear foot, and assuming we are talking about a thousand feet—a conservative estimate, believe me—you are looking at up to thirty dollars per barrel of oil in cost.”

  “You’re the expert, Sayeed.”

  “Then consider that the price of oil on the market these days is only twelve dollars per barrel.” Sayeed seemed on the verge of laughing, but with no trace of amusement in his voice. “So your Israeli friends would be going to all this trouble, and all this subterfuge, to lose eighteen dollars on every barrel they bring up.”

  Ben tried to find an argument to refute Sayeed’s logic, but clearly there was none.

  “It wasn’t oil that brought you back to America anyway, was it?” Sayeed asked. “Wasn’t
just oil that got my son killed.”

  “No. It was something much more.”

  Sayeed turned his palms upward, gesturing for Ben to go on. “What?”

  Ben fingered the envelope of photographs that hadn’t left his pocket since he recovered it in Providence. “I’ve said enough.”

  “I have a right to know, don’t you think?”

  Ben knew he should have stopped there, but he couldn’t help himself. “The Americans, perhaps Dawud himself, stumbled upon a discovery in the midst of their cover: a scroll written by Josephus attesting to the fact that Jesus Christ didn’t die on the cross, that the resurrection never happened.”