Traitor's Gate

by Charlie Newton

  This had been the house of Fahmi Abboushi, mayor of Janîn, and still employed the same East Indian maids. An ornate double door finished the anteroom; two dwarf date palms guarded either side. Her chest tightened. The corporal used accented Arabic, instructing her to wait. He turned and knocked on the double doors. Saba scanned without moving her head. The left door opened. In English the corporal discussed her as if she were not present. Saba wanted to rub the sweat from her eye but did not.

  The corporal told someone inside the door, “She’s the wog from Haifa, the shopkeeper’s daughter. By the look of her hand and eyes, I’d say she’s done a bit a farmin’.”

  “She’s been checked, has she?”

  “Not by me.”

  “Then be to it, corporal.”

  The door shut and the corporal heel-turned. He used three disconnected Arabic words to explain he had to search her. She extended her hands and arms, the small pistol high in the crotch of her legs. From behind, he patted her hair under the keffiyeh, then her neck and the length of her shoulders, his hands following down her arms to her hands. Saba began to tremble, felt him staring at her hands, his fingers lightly testing the skin and muscle.

  His breath was wet, the smell of meat . . . He pushed the heavy fabric of her robe against her ribs and brushed the weight of her breasts, then felt the curve of her waist and the outside of her hip. Saba’s trembling became a series of shivers, his breath close to her neck again. His hands went to her thighs, her knees, her calves, and finally her boots. He lifted her robe from the floor and she jerked away, eyes averted, head down, the panic real. Sweat beading across her forehead into her eyes.

  The old corporal apologized and reached again. She jerked again and stumbled into the stair, tears forming in her eyes, hands forward to stop further contact. There were knives in her boots. She fumbled English. “Must go. No more hands.” She fought the panic, eyes wide, the terror not an act. “No more.”

  The corporal straightened, confused. “You won’t be seeing the commissioner, missy, unless you’re searched.”

  Saba waved both hands and edged toward the outer door, ashamed at his effect on her, the memories she couldn’t bury heightened by women’s clothes and English hands.

  The corporal blocked her exit. “Calm it there, miss. S’okay. You’re okay, then. I’ll tell ’em.”

  Saba stopped; the trembling did not. She tasted kohl makeup. The corporal backed to the double doors, smiling her calm, and knocked with the knuckles of his hand. The door opened and he told the space she was unarmed. The space widened and a tall, rigid sergeant bent only his neck to inspect her, then waved her forward.

  For Palestine. She added dignity to her posture and walked the twenty paces. The sergeant allowed her to pass the doorway. A mammoth desk and painting dominated the room from the far wall. The desk was elevated and leather-topped, eight feet across and ornamented in gold leaf. To its left, on a ten-foot standard, rose a British battle flag at rest. Next to the flag, a single door was embedded in the wall just as the East Indian maids had told her. Behind the desk, a fat man sat as if he were on a throne, his reddish face too small for the body, the sagging cheeks those of a hound. His feminine hands had papers in one, a doily or napkin in the other. The belly vest had bits of his lunch. He did not honor her with an invitation or coffee.

  An Arab interpreter, an Egyptian by his color and bearing, stood to the commissioner’s right, both men framed by the life-size portrait of England’s king. The Egyptian asked her business, barking, “Matha tureedi?”

  Saba turned her entire body away as if cowed by his tone. The tall, rigid sergeant blocked the now closed double door. His sidearm was holstered, the flap undone and tucked behind, his eyes glued to her hands. The Egyptian asked her again. Saba turned to the voice, trying to hide her eye, and began to stutter.

  “Speak slower, woman.”

  Saba fell to her knees, bending at the waist to touch her forehead to the floor, then stuttered in Arabic, apologizing for her family, begging they not be deported. The camps were cold; they would die.

  “What have you to offer? Many costs must be paid.”

  Saba unbent, her hands clutched at her waist.

  “What?” The Egyptian added measured volume. “Speak or we have no time for you. There are many who wish to stay and few spaces.”

  “Bu . . . but it is our country, my family’s shop—”

  “Silence!” The Egyptian’s shout raised the commissioner’s rheumy eyes from his desk.

  He licked his lips and glanced over her head to the sergeant at the door. Saba rose from her knees, sensed the room shrinking, her eye paste dissolving, an attack coming. She backed away and bumped into the sergeant. His hands gripped her shoulders and pulled her back into his chest, his pelvis against her buttocks. Saba spun on the sergeant, buried the .32 in his chest, and fired twice. He banged into the polished white door and bounced back toward her. She ducked his hands, pivoted, and charged the commissioner’s desk. On her left, the Egyptian fired a pistol. She ducked a bullet that had already missed her and fired the .32 empty. The Egyptian twisted into a tall row of plants. The commissioner stumbled up out of his chair. Saba lunged across the desk and rammed her empty revolver in his face.

  “With me. Now.”

  One double door slammed open. Saba wheeled and threw the knife. The old corporal recoiled and fired wide. She rushed him. He sidestepped the dead sergeant but stumbled to a knee. Saba kicked at his gun hand, drew a second knife from her boot, and slashed. His pistol discharged past her face then bounced to the floor. She slashed again and the corporal fell to his back, his arm cut to the bone. Saba grabbed his revolver, aimed it at his face. He screamed, “Nooo,” and blocked at the barrel with a blood-gushing arm. Movement behind her. Saba spun and fired at the Egyptian aiming at her. He splattered the wall red. She spun to the corporal struggling to hold his bloody arm together and push away. She didn’t fire. A gun cocked, click-click. Saba jumped left and fired three rounds through the commissioner’s fortress desk. The commissioner fired back. His first bullet missed, the second tore her robe at the shoulder, the third hit the metal flag standard, knocked it into her forehead, and blew her backward. From the floor, she emptied the corporal’s revolver into the desk, then wrestled out of the flag and pole, stood—surprised she was able—and ran through the single door embedded in the wall. It led into the residence and past two maids cowering behind furniture. Saba jumped a low table, bounced off a chair, and scrambled for the door she had been told would lead to the alley.

  The alley was quiet. Blood streamed from the rip in her forehead. Saba ran toward her young man with the cart. “Run! Follow me!” Rifle fire erupted behind them.

  “It was her, I tell ya. Plain as day and right in front of me.” The corporal was in a hospital bed and put his hand ten inches in front of his face.

  Captain Orde Wingate listened to the bandaged corporal, then glanced to a fellow special-branch officer, then back to the corporal. Wingate had come all the way from Bushehr. “A ghost shot three men and sliced off the better part of your arm?”

  “She did.”

  “Black wings under the eye, you say? A woman, not a man? And you didn’t search her?”

  “Felt her, I did. Polite, but a full search—”

  “How could that be, corporal? This dead woman—the Raven, you say, as if the dead can rise—assassinated the Crown’s district commissioner, killed a battle-tested sergeant and an Egyptian security officer using only a revolver and two knives. One of which remains stuck in the door you guarded.”

  “She’s alive all right, and I searched her, Captain. I did. She had no weapons.” The corporal shook his head and squeezed his bandaged arm.

  “You were the man who searched this woman and you were the man she allowed to live. Do you find that strange, corporal? I do.” Captain Orde Wingate pointed out the window. “The wogs rally at their Robin Hood’s return.” Wingate summoned two armed guards to the hospital bed. “For you
r efforts, Corporal, you will be court-martialed tomorrow and shot as a traitor. It is treason to give aide and take money from the enemy.”

  CHAPTER 14

  October, 1938

  Eddie had been regaled, lectured, and preached to about “the Holy Land” since he was three feet tall. Palestine was a bit different in person. He hadn’t shared that in his letters home to his mother and father over his six months here; best for them if they thought he was on some glorious adventure holiday that included a paycheck. In Haifa, Eddie’s “home” since March, it was no longer a good idea to close your eyes at night. So Eddie did his dreaming about her, the Arab princess-schoolteacher, during the day. Without her to think about, all he had was Haifa. And Haifa, like every square inch of British Mandate Palestine, was a mess, an unavoidable hate triangle of Jews, Brits, and Arabs that was now open warfare in two-thirds of the country. The Brits had just gone semi-insane over an assassination in Janîn—the district commissioner himself—thirty miles southeast. Royal Marines and Palestinian police had systematically detonated ten thousand pounds of explosives throughout the city over the last two weeks. Most of Janîn’s population was now homeless. And so far no one knew, or no one was saying, who’d done the assassination.

  British convoys were openly tying the wives and children of known combatants to their bumpers as human shields or force-marching the captives up ahead as human mine detectors. According to the truck drivers, the desert between the refinery and Janîn was littered with captured combatants who had been tried, sentenced, and shot on the roadside as examples. The message: “Don’t come to Haifa.” Vlad the Impaler had nothing on the Brits.

  “Eddie!”

  Eddie snapped to his name. His British boss waved at him to come down from the refinery’s pipes. Eddie tapped the arc welder’s shoulder next to him. “Take a break; the lord high and mighty wishes to have a spot of tea. We’ll do the crane when I get back.”

  Eddie’s boss did not offer tea. He was less happy than usual and presented Eddie with a telegram from Chicago. “You are being transferred to Tenerife in the Canary Islands.”

  Eddie grinned. He would attend church every day for the rest of his life.

  The foreman scowled. “Our contract with Culpepper is a binding agreement and not yet complete. Breaking this contract will have serious repercussions for this refinery, our companies, and you as an employable engineer.”

  “Ah . . .” Eddie tried to cover the grin. He shrugged his best disingenuous apology and opened his palms. “Not up to me, sir, first I’ve heard of it.”

  “If this cannot be changed”—the foreman shook the telegram—“you are to present yourself at this office for departure: 0-700 hours on Thursday.”

  Eddie quit fighting the grin. Three days and he’d be on a plane, a ship, a camel—good-bye Promised Land, hello Canary Islands. He ran back through the refinery pipes, did a jig in the dust at the cab of the refinery’s forty-foot crane, jumped onto the crane’s work platform, and pointed up. The crane operator hoisted Eddie into position. A thunderous blast rocked the platform. The dust layer levitated off the spaghetti of pipes and tank. Eddie gripped the platform’s rail against a fall he wouldn’t survive. Beyond the refinery fence, smoke boiled into the sky above the ancient part of Haifa. A shocked stillness radiated through the refinery, Eddie and everyone else bracing for . . . Had to be the Arab market again. The last explosion was a double car bomb that killed twenty-seven.

  A shout, then another. Distant voices began to yell in Arabic. Eddie blocked glare with his work fedora and scanned for D.J. Bennett. Eddie didn’t see D.J. and waved the fedora at the crane operator to lower the platform. Palestine was no place for a sane person with options. The crane eased Eddie to thirty feet. Turning to the sea didn’t improve the view. The Haifa harbor and this refinery were an armed camp and had been since the Arab Revolt had begun two years ago. But since the assassination in Janîn, the harbor and the refinery were on full battle alert all day, every day. The very few Arabs with whom Eddie worked whispered that any Arab suspected of participation in the Arab Revolt or loyalty to a group called the Pan-Arab Army of God were being forced into British detention camps, and behind the detention camp fences those Arabs were tortured for information, starved, and more often than not, shot for “attempting” escape. Eddie had pressed for details and his Arab associates quit talking to him entirely.

  Eddie 360ed for D.J. Usually mayhem of any sort brought D.J. running from somewhere. And from day one of their six-month tour here, there’d been plenty of mayhem. Britain’s battle cruiser, the HMS Repulse, had arrived in July to protect the refinery’s Mediterranean exposure with her fifteen-inch guns. Five hundred Royal Marines patrolled the razor wire that fenced the harbor’s land side. The Brits would not discuss the refinery with anyone but officially stated that the harbor was central to their control in the region, their “mandate” confirmed on them by the League of Nations.

  Numerous Arab factions charged that what the harbor was central to English domination of the Arab desert and illegal Zionist immigration. Charges and countercharges were the extent of “conversation” between Arabs and anyone affiliated with the British. Anything beyond that was “treason” to your side or an insult to the other. One fact was for sure: The harbor represented work, and in a farming country dying of drought, work meant food, and like the desperation of the Dust Bowl, food mattered more than tomorrow’s politics. For 176 days Eddie had watched the Palestinians who stevedored at the harbor strip-searched every shift, same for those building the refinery . . . had to be tough putting up with that in your own country no matter how hungry you were.

  Eddie had tried to imply as much when shopping in the market and out of D.J.’s earshot, hoping to make an acquaintance who might help locate the mysterious hazel-eyed teacher of the Arabian Nights. Calah al-Habra had promised to come and hadn’t. Daydreaming about her felt beyond good, why, Eddie wasn’t entirely sure, nor did he wish to cross-examine. Better just to find out in person.

  As the weeks passed, Eddie’d been seriously tempted to mention the wings beneath her eye, wings similar to some Eddie’d seen scratched into a wall after a partisan fighter had been killed, but heeding her warning and the cold stares of every Arab in the market, he had not. Eddie guessed her tattoo meant she was part of, or born to, a religious sect or a Nationalist faction of some kind. After seeing the wings on the walls, Eddie’d asked British soldiers and was told it was “wog mythology.” The single Arab Eddie felt he could approach and not die told him, “Your questions are an insult to our sorrow.” From there the Arab Revolt had grown even bloodier. Any Arab who willingly engaged an employee of the British outside the refinery in anything other than a shouting match risked being stoned to death by his peers. And since Janîn two weeks ago, any interaction with the locals had become just as physically dangerous for Eddie. No question, Eddie had seen all the hate he needed.

  The refinery whistle blew shrilly, ending another shift in paradise. Three more to go. Can’t wait to tell D.J.—the Canary Islands, exotic, pirate port o’ call off the coast of Africa—Morocco to be exact—D.J. will swoon. We’ll be swashbuckling Errol Flynns. No doubt plenty of backroom dealings involved but that will all come out in the wash. Out of here is the main thing! Eddie jumped off the crane ten feet from the foreman’s construction trailer. The foreman’s end-of-shift report would have to wait till D.J. heard the news. Eddie checked D.J.’s trailer, then the canteen. Nope. Kinda odd . . . maybe the café Mataam Cairo; it was D.J.’s spot for a pint.

  Eddie negotiated through shift-end workers being searched prior to exit. At the fortified main construction gate, Eddie tipped his fedora to the Royal Marines. Their response was grim eyes and bayonets. After showing his identification to a sergeant he saw every day, Eddie was allowed out into the road. The dusty ribbon of concrete separated the refinery from the old part of Haifa—a maze of narrow cobblestone streets and plastered buildings stacked uphill toward Mount Carmel and the olive trees
. Eddie’s name sounded behind him.

  D.J. Bennett. Finger in the air beckoning Eddie forward. D.J. was wearing work clothes that hadn’t seen any. Not that unusual given that Eddie had never actually seen D.J. work. They met mid-road, dodging a pipe truck about to lose its load. D.J. eased Eddie left toward the seaside cafés three blocks away, the café umbrellas adding color dots to the tan-on-tan plaster cityscape. “Pick ’em up ’fore we get our asses run over.”

  Eddie squinted in the sun ricocheting off the bay. D.J.’s pocked face was creased awfully somber. Eddie stopped. “Bad news?” The letters from Eddie’s mom were stoic, but they didn’t lie. What wasn’t in them was impossible to miss. Eddie tried to get ready but wasn’t.

  D.J. looked past one shoulder, then at Eddie. “Nah. Same old shit.” D.J. frowned. “Could be there’s some new shit, too.”

  Eddie beamed. “Did you hear?”

  “Hear what?”

  “Tenerife.” Eddie slapped D.J.’s shoulder. “We’re outta here in three days. Good-bye Dust Bowl, hello Errol Flynn.”

  D.J. hardened. “Says who?”

  Eddie nodded toward the refinery. “Telegram from Chicago. Foreman’s none too happy. Hell, I thought you’d be thrilled.”

  “Show me.”

  Eddie shrugged. “Foreman kept it.”

  “Who signed the telegram?”

  “Harold Culpepper, I think. Why’s that matter?”