Dazzle - The Complete Unabridged Trilogy

by Judith Gould

  She stared at him, annoyed that his features were starting to shift again, becoming an indistinguishable cloud. She wished someone would stop the wind from blowing the cloud apart.

  'G-girl?' she whispered.

  'Yes, a girl!'

  'N-not dead?'

  'No, darling, no. She's very much alive! As soon as you're stronger I'll bring her in so you can hold her! Dr. Saperstein had to . . . Never mind.'

  Operate, he'd almost said, cut her out of you because your womb was punctured by a bullet, and your colon too.

  'She's gorgeous, darling,' he went on, 'a real angel. Dark-haired, though.'

  'Dark?'

  He nodded, grinning with joy, the tears still streaming down from his eyes. 'She's raven-haired—just a few wisps, of course.'

  Her eyelids could no longer stay open. They were heavy . . . oh, so heavy, and the fog was turning back into darkness, and what he had told her slipped away, out of reach. She tried to remember what it was he'd said, but it all evaporated.

  But her sleep was now contented, a Mona Lisa smile on her lips.

  Dani felt a tap on his shoulder. He looked up. It was Dr. Saperstein. 'Your five minutes are up.'

  Carefully Dani put Tamara's arm back down and tucked it under the sheet. 'She's going to be all right,' he said softly. 'Isn't she?' He searched the doctor's face for confirmation.

  Dr. Saperstein nodded. 'Yes, she's going to be all right.' He clapped a hand on Dani's back. 'Now, let's go into the other room. It's time you gave your daughter some attention.' Suddenly a frightening thought jumped through Dani's head. 'I'm not dreaming, Doctor, am I?'

  Dr. Saperstein laughed. 'I hope not, because if you are, then we're both dreaming.'

  'Do you know what, doctor?'

  The doctor shook his head.

  'You're beautiful!' Dani clapped his hands on both of Dr. Saperstein's cheeks, pulled his face close, and planted a noisy kiss on his lips. 'I love you!' Then he danced out of the room in a little shuffle-off-to-Buffalo.

  Some days, nothing could go wrong.

  Interlude:1956

  The year 1946 brought about the beginning of a new era in the Middle East. Both the Arabs and the Jews revolted against the yoke of the British Mandate, and violence and terrorism burst out from both sides. Because they were unable to control the bloodshed, the British finally asked the United Nations to help solve the problem.

  In 1948, as the British left Palestine, David Ben-Gurion proudly declared the birth of the independent State of Israel. The announcement caused the worst outbreak of violence ever seen in the Middle East. The day after the birth of Israel, Arab forces, which had opposed the UN's decision all along, swarmed into Israel and soon captured the Old City of Jerusalem, threatening to drive the Jews to the sea.

  The short but bloody battle that followed the invasion was a miracle of modern history and was to be repeated time and again. Against overwhelming odds, the Jews drove the Arab army first from Jerusalem, then Tel Aviv, Haifa, Jaffa, and Galilee. And, finally, the Negev as well.

  By 1949 the State of Israel had opened its arms to offer a homeland to Jews from all over the world.

  —Contrucci and Sullins, The Mideast Today: Strategies to Cope with the Seeds of Yesteryear

  Chapter 1

  It was past two o'clock in the afternoon when the petite MEA stewardess with the dark swept-up hair and the tiny mole above her upper lip came up the aisle. A faint cloud of Chanel Number Five followed behind her.

  She stopped at the fourteenth row and leaned across the two empty seats. 'We'll be landing in about half an hour,' she said in soft Middle-Eastern-accented English. She flashed a white enamel smile at the black-haired young man with the honey skin and the hungry mouth who sat beside the window. 'We lost nearly forty-five minutes bypassing the storm front. Could I get you a drink or a cup of coffee?'

  He nodded. 'I'll have a whisky. Neat.'

  She smiled, genuinely this time, and went to get it. Approvingly, he watched her move. She walked elegantly, on low heels, her lacquered fingernails touching the seat backs as she smiled professionally to the left and the right.

  When she returned, she handed him the plastic glass and a little square paper napkin. 'Here you are.' She smiled again.

  'Thank you.' He took it from her and held it, not bothering to fold down the tray table.

  She lingered, half-sitting on the armrest of the aisle seat. 'Where in England are you from?' she asked.

  He shook his head. 'I'm not English.' He smiled slightly, showing wolfish incisors. 'I'm Palestinian.'

  'Oh.' She looked surprised. 'I would have taken you for British from your accent.'

  'Many people do.'

  She eyed the drink she had just brought him. 'I could get you some juice, if you prefer.'

  He laughed shortly and took a sip of the whisky. 'I've spent the last four years at Harvard University, and the six years before that in English schools. Until we land I might as well take advantage of the liquor.' He looked down at the glass. 'It doesn't look like I'll be seeing much of this for a long time to come.'

  She nodded. That meant he almost certainly wasn't from Beirut, where there were plenty of nightclubs and glittering hotels and liquor and a thousand other temptations for the asking. 'Are you planning to spend some time in Beirut?' she asked softly, her dark liquid eyes probing his.

  'I'm afraid not.' He smiled apologetically.

  The professional smile went back on her face, but she couldn't hide the disappointment from her voice. 'I see. Well, if you need anything, just press the call button.'

  He nodded, tilting his seat back as far as it would go, and nursed his drink. She had made her overture, as he'd guessed she would, and he had rejected it politely. Inwardly he shrugged. Even at his age he had had more than his share of women already. They were there for the picking. Always throwing themselves at him. What was it that Revlon model in New York had told him? 'You're too damn good-looking for your own good, Najib al-Ameer. All you do is take and take, but you never want to give!' He smiled, remembering her anger when he wouldn't take her a second time.

  Forgetting women for the moment he shut his eyes.

  Nearly ten years had passed since he had left al-Najaf, and he had returned to the Middle East only once in all that time. That had been four years earlier, right after he had graduated from Eton. Now it seemed a lifetime and a world ago.

  July 12, 1952. The day the real horror had begun.

  He would never forget it as long as he lived.

  It had taken him nearly three weeks of travel to reach that fateful rendezvous with the twelfth of July in the middle of the Negev. Happily unaware of what awaited him, he felt jubilant, and with good reason. He had done his people proud. Soon he would be home in the village of his birth, a graduate of an exclusive English school with a crisp new diploma in his possession to prove it. He could imagine how it would be passed around from person to person, solemnly fingered with awe and respect, for never before had a villager attended so many years of school, let alone such an important one. There would be much celebrating, for this was a momentous occasion. A holiday would be proclaimed; there would be a week of feasting on succulent lamb and music and dancing. For six long years he had been gone ... six years during which he, the village's most gifted son, had been provided with an education fit for a prince. It was as much their victory as his. And he had done them proud, graduating at the top of the class. The only thing that made him uneasy was that he hadn't received a letter from the village for the past six months.

  The journey through the familiar Negev brought back memories, and he felt exhilarated but enervated: it was July, one of the hottest months of the Middle Eastern year, and the years he had spent in the English countryside had almost made him forget the brooding oppressiveness of the gritty desert heat which lay in stifling blanket layers. Now, at the height of summer noon, it hit him full force, and he sweltered unbearably despite the flowing desert robes he had changed into.

/>   He was unprepared to meet tragedy. The peaceful ivy-clad halls of learning had protected him from the harsh realities that were the mainstay of Middle Eastern life, had sheltered him from the ever-present lurking dangers, had made him forget the potential violence which, he was to discover, had shattered the peaceful tranquillity of his birthplace while he had been away enjoying peaceful study in blissful ignorance.

  For the remainder of his life, the memory of that day would remain crystal clear.

  The desert had been unearthly still, even for the sun-baked Negev. No living creature moved or breathed. Under the great vast bowl of the cloudless sky and the blazing white sun, the silence was eerie and unearthly. It chilled him to the bone, that mute otherworldly soundlessness that somehow held a portent of bleached bones and destruction. It was the kind of ultimate, deathlike quiet that heralds a ghost town which even the scavenging bugs and ubiquitous flies have long since deserted.

  When he stumbled out of the car he had hired in Haifa, he could only stare in disbelief. He dared not believe his eyes, certain that they were deceiving him. Maybe what he was seeing in the shimmering heat waves was really a mirage.

  But he knew deep down inside that it was no mirage, and it sickened him. He had expected a noisy reception, and had pictured the village just as it had been before he left it: abuzz with activity, the proud walnut-hued men wearing their flowing bishts, the prematurely aged women their dark, dusty abbeyas and headcloths as they patiently hoed the fields or prepared the traditional meals; the children shrieking at play under the tall, graceful date palms heavy with clusters of ripening fruit; the fields all around lush from irrigation; the lake which gave succour to all, gleaming silvery with the precious water provided by Allah the Munificent—such a beautiful, bountiful oasis, demanding lives of gruelling work but good, happy lives nevertheless.

  But something bad had swept through—a scythe of annihilating terror. It was as if a plague had visited al-Najaf.

  The grove where date palms had once risen proudly was now a wasteland of parched dead trunks completely denuded of fruit and fronds, and the desert had reclaimed the fields. Where once the small neat houses had dotted the oasis were piles of rubble, blackened, bullet-riddled, jagged fingers of ruin. The charred carcass of an overturned automobile was a rusty sculpture of despair under the merciless sun. The little lake which had nurtured life was completely dry, its concave hollow filled with rippled waves of golden sand. The perpetually creaking water wheel he had known since his earliest days was silent, its precious wood either buried in the sand or burned in whatever holocaust had visited.

  He blinked back salty tears. This couldn't be his beloved village! he thought wildly. Except for the time the Jews had attacked, just before he'd left for England, his village had been peaceful, had thrived. He must have come to the wrong place!

  But the imposing neolithic rock formations in the distance were all too familiar. They were the very ones he had grown up with, embedded in his memory forever as the shapes of giant animals and people. Now the benign fantasy figures had undergone a metamorphosis, had become leering, malevolent, mocking hulks. This was his village, all right, and he had no choice but to face that it was gone. Only an extinct ghost town remained to mark its place, only rubble gave evidence of what was once a thriving, happy hub of life in the Negev. His eyes wet with tears, he dropped to his knees, threw back his head, and keened a cry of rage, an eerie, ululating wail of mourning and despair for that which was no more.

  It was then that he caught sight of Abdullah. He stood atop a pile of rubble in phantomlike silence in flowing robes of intense blackness. His waist was circled with a cartridge belt, and a second, longer bandolier crisscrossed from shoulder to waist like a badge of authority. The ghutra he wore for protection from the sun was of the same depthless black.

  Najib stumbled to his feet and stared at him, speechless.

  Abdullah's voice was soft but mesmerizing. 'Welcome, half-nephew, grandson of my half-brother.'

  Najib remained silent, as Abdullah came down from the pile of rubble and walked toward him.

  Abdullah's powerful body was lean, all steel and springs, and his physical strength seemed to emanate from him like a malevolent aura. Yet his hands were slim and elongated, almost feminine in their delicacy. But it was his gaunt face which arrested. His forehead was high and noble, his cheekbones broad slashes, and his scimitar mouth wide and sensuous and cruel. His nose was magnificent; he had inherited the same stately hawk's beak as Naemuddin, testimony to the mother they had shared. But Najib remembered Naemuddin's eyes as wise and kind, and Abdullah's, under majestic black brows, were messianic, pitch black, and liquid as simmering oil. His skin was smooth and tawny, light for that of an Arab, and was as yet unweathered and unlined: he had yet to turn thirty-five. Like all predatory beasts, he appeared to be both relaxed and alert and gifted with an inborn sixth sense which made him sensitive to the presence of danger, no matter how distant it might be.

  When they were face-to-face, Abdullah extended his hand and Najib took it and pressed it to his lips.

  'So,' Abdullah said softly, 'you have not forgotten the traditional gesture of respect. That is good. I had feared that perhaps you had become too Westernized to remember it.' Then he embraced Najib within the batlike folds of his robes and kissed both his cheeks, as was customary. 'You have been gone a long time,' he said, drawing back and touching Najib's elbow. 'Come. We have much to discuss.'

  Najib stayed rooted to the spot, unable to move. 'What happened here?' He gestured round at the surreal ruins. 'What in the name of infernal hell has caused all this?'

  A strange vampirical light came into Abdullah's face, his cheek hollows seemed to grow deeper, the skin of his face stretching so tautly that Najib had the crazy sensation he was staring at a skull. 'The plague is come.'

  Najib stared at him. 'What plague, my half-uncle?'

  'The plague of Jews!' The words ripped odiously from between the knife blades of Abdullah's lips. 'The Jewish swine who stole our water and our lands, and who now multiply like locusts!'

  Najib was blinded by a searing rage. 'And our people?' he asked tightly. 'Where are they?'

  'Gone,' Abdullah replied, 'as though scattered by the four winds. The weak who survived are in refugee camps in Lebanon and Syria. The strong fight at my side.'

  A vice clutched Najib's heart and seemed to tear it from his chest. 'And my parents? My grandparents?'

  'They are safe and well.'

  'Praise be to Allah,' Najib said fervently. His brows knit together. 'Are they in camps also?'

  'No. Your father is brave and fights by my side, and your mother and grandparents live in a small house outside Beirut.'

  Najib looked angrily at Abdullah. 'Why did not somebody write and tell me of this?'

  Abdullah's eyes were hard and cruel. 'Better that you should see for yourself what the Jews have done to us,' he said harshly. 'This way you shall never be tempted to become weak and forget.'

  'I will never forget!' Najib's eyes glittered feverishly. 'I will not rest until their blood drips from my knife or their flesh is torn to shreds by the bullet of my gun!' He saw Abdullah's mocking smile, and his anger and purpose grew to dizzying proportions. His lean, handsome face took on a rapacious intensity. 'You have always been a leader, Abdullah. For as long as I can remember, you fought against the British and the Jews.'

  Adbullah did not speak.

  The anger burst inside of Najib and the words came out in a rush: 'I wish to join the men you lead! I wish to train in your camp and fight in your army—'

  Abdullah's arms blurred with the speed of light and he grabbed hold of Najib, his eyes shining with a kind of maniacal inner fire. 'What have you heard?' he demanded, shaking him. 'Tell me! What is this about a camp of mine?'

  Najib was suddenly stricken with fear. 'I . . . I heard nothing! But I remember—'

  'Memories are best forgotten.' Abdullah let go of him and turned around, his black robes swaying a
bout him, and he stared at the distant mountains.

  'Please, let me join you!' Najib begged. 'You will have reason to be proud of me!'

  When Abdullah turned around, his mouth was twisted in a smile. 'Are you certain you have the stomach for it, my young falcon?'

  'I have.'

  'And what of peace?' Abdullah said with a cynical laugh. 'Have not the blood and the thinking of your weak grandfather tainted your veins?'

  'My blood is not weak!' Najib's face was set and he no longer felt any fear. 'Will you accept me within your group, or must I seek vengeance on my own? Is everything I have heard about you the creation of storytellers?'

  Without warning Abdullah's hand slashed through the air and his open palm cracked against Najib's cheek with such force that Najib staggered backward. His hand flew up to his face, where a handprint shone whitely. He looked at Abdullah with surprise.

  'That is a warning,' Abdullah said softly. 'Speak that way to me again and you will regret it for as long as you live.'

  'You have not yet answered me,' Najib said stubbornly. 'Will you accept me into your group?'

  Abdullah stared at him and then nodded.

  'When?' Najib pressed eagerly.

  'When you receive word. Until then, you do nothing. Is that understood?'

  And with that, Abdullah's black robes billowed and he strode off in the direction from which he had come.

  He had turned so quickly that Najib had not seen the look of triumph glowing in his normally bleak eyes.

  A week passed before Abdullah arranged for Najib to be taken to his hidden camp. It was in a small valley in the mountains of Syria, and everywhere Najib looked there was evidence that this was some kind of military training facility. The men were all heavily armed; he could see a distant watch tower and hear the gunfire from a firing range. Small tents had been pitched, and smoke rising from a campfire smelled of roasting lamb.