Final Stop, Algiers: A Thriller

by Mishka Ben-David

  The list of casualties hanging on the door of the emergency ward was smaller than the number of the groups of relatives waiting for news. Most had not found the names of their missing ones on any list but knew that many of the badly wounded and killed had not yet been identified. Some went to Ichilov Hospital, in north Tel Aviv, others had given up and had gone to the morgue at Abu Kabir, to see if their relatives were lying there. But Dolly’s name was on the list of wounded although, as I discovered later, by the time I got there she was already dead.

  When I was called in to identify her, the doctor warned me it would be hard. “I’ve seen dead people,” I said, and I had really seen mangled and charred bodies. But they had not been the remains of my lover, and I collapsed when I saw the awful sight. The doctor and two nurses dragged me to a cubicle and after I recovered my senses, I left. Not in words, not even in a clearly defined feeling, I vowed that I would take revenge.

  Later on, I put my hand in my pocket and found the card given to me by the man with the big head. On it, in a small frame, there was the emblem of the State of Israel, a menorah, and an olive branch, and under it only a name, Udi Barkai, and a phone number.

  2.

  A small house in the Kiryah

  DURING THE TRADITIONAL shiva, the seven days of mourning that I spent with Dolly’s family, I gave no thought to Udi and his business card. The Jewish mourning customs of this warm family of immigrants from Morocco enfolded me too, and I got used to the protracted wailing of Dolly’s grandmother and even to the chorus of female wailers who turned up for the first few days, until Dolly’s father silenced them, I don’t know why – perhaps for my benefit. The flavours that Dolly had sneaked, smidgen by smidgen, into the meals she cooked for the two of us made full-blown appearances here, in both taste and aroma. Her parents and brothers and sisters accepted me as if I had married her, and only infrequently a distant relative muttered something like, “It’s a pity she never got to stand under the wedding canopy,” only to be hushed up, with all eyes turned on me. In the grief that I felt with my entire being, there was indeed sorrow over the way I had dragged things out and denied her those moments of joy that she deserved – yes, wearing a white gown under the huppah, as banal as it sounds, as well as having denied our parents their moment of joy.

  I sat with them from morning to evening, and when they spread out the mattresses to prepare to go to sleep all crowded together in their small apartment I left and went to the hospital to visit two of my students who had lost legs in the blast, and a friend from Bezalel who’d been badly burned all over his body. I thought of the way statistics always emphasize the number of fatalities, but the families they leave behind scarred with grief are far more numerous, as are the wounded, some of whom are disfigured and disabled for life. Men serving under me had been wounded in Lebanon. For the first year or two they were war-wounded heroes. But they soon became piteous young men and after a while “cripples” who get in the way and aren’t nice to look at. And when they are old and poor, no one will know if they were hurt storming the enemy under fire, or were victims of a terrorist attack, or just had bad luck in some accident. The dead were dead, and that was tragic, but their families and the people wounded by the bomb on the bus would bear the consequences of the terrorist attack for their whole lives, long after the incident disappeared into the overall statistics of Intifada attacks, long after the Intifada itself was swallowed up in the tangled history of the Israeli-Arab conflict.

  An old friend of my parents had been in a car next to the bus, and was blinded by the blast. I went with them to visit him, and afterwards my father said, with the harsh realism of a man who has seen everything, that the man would have been better off dead. As I was driving my parents back to Haifa, my mother sighed and said she’d never have dreamed that you wouldn’t even be able to have an exhibition of paintings in peace in this country. She then murmured, “In the end it will turn out that Li’or was right.” Before I could ask who Li’or was, my father threw a quick look at her, and at me, and rebuked her, saying that they’d had fifty-odd pretty good years here. “True, it wasn’t easy for my parents,” he said. “They were youngsters and had to begin a new life in a new country after everything they had been through, and I’ve gone through a few wars, but altogether it’s been worth it here. Certainly in comparison with the alternative, we’ve seen where that led to.”

  I thought that his fate, and the fate of his parents had been harder than that of my mother’s family, but they didn’t have an easy time of it either. Her grandfather and grandmother had been murdered in the massacre of Jewish residents of Hebron by their Arab neighbours in 1929, her parents were spared and taken to Jerusalem, but had endured the siege of the Jewish part of that city in 1948. During her own troubled childhood in the divided city, in the Musrara neighbourhood on the border, she couldn’t put the light on in her bedroom because of the danger from Arab snipers.

  I didn’t go back to the exhibition during the shiva, and at the time I didn’t really care what was happening at the Fitz. The TV culture crew put together a longish report, in which my pictures were almost hidden from view, and I was shown beginning to speak just before the explosion, and the disconcerted guests appeared on camera. Because of its news value, some of the report was screened in the weekly roundup during the Friday evening newscast. One critic, who had left before the attack, filed a favourable review which ran in her paper’s weekend edition. Some of my friends who came to the shiva to console me also said the show was excellent, and the Bezalel people told me I must carry on, as if they realized what was going on inside my head.

  During my nights alone in our apartment after my hospital visits, an awareness was taking shape that a chapter of my life had drawn to a close. The exhibition had ended a period during which I had been preoccupied with myself, my dreams, my efforts to refine my talent. I saw no sin in this; my desire to make the most of my artistic ability was only natural, just as that ability was itself natural. Both were part of me, of what I was. But now it was the turn of other parts of me to be fulfilled. I recalled my own words about the roots from which one must set out on one’s path, and I knew that from now on my path would be different. I contacted the gallery and asked the owner to pack up the pictures and send them to my apartment. I never looked at the paintings again.

  One of the condolence callers during the shiva at Dolly’s parents’ home was the commander of my reserve brigade. He was a man whose performance during the fighting in Jenin in Operation Defensive Shield I admired, and whom I had got to know when we were still in Lebanon. The admiration was apparently mutual, as he had appointed me commander of the engineering company in his brigade. I told him that if I was needed, I was ready to do a long stint of reserve duty, and what I wanted to have in my hand now was a rifle, and not a paintbrush. He offered to make me deputy commander of the brigade’s reconnaissance battalion, which was made up of my company, the recon company and an anti-tank company. These specialized units, he said, did most of the brigade’s work. “And in another year, Gadi, the battalion commander will be leaving, and you can have the job.”

  I toyed with the idea for some time, but wasn’t sure I would be capable of commanding a battalion. I doubted I would be physically able to do it, and I was also not at all sure that the military would hold my interest for very long. Most of our activity in recent years had been policing duties in the Palestinian areas, a necessary duty but one that I didn’t relish.

  The figure of the mysterious burly stranger at the opening began cropping up in my thoughts. Intuitive messages about his possible affiliation flashed across my mind, but I rejected them. He couldn’t have known before he appeared at the exhibition what was going to happen, that I would want to change direction. I remembered which pair of trousers I’d left his card in. I hadn’t worn them since then. The card had waited there patiently. I called him.

  The attractive house was in Tel Aviv’s Kiryah – the precinct where many government offices are located
. Probably built by the Templers, a German Protestant sect who’d settled in the Holy Land in the early 1900s. The house was surrounded by a high wire fence, and its walls were covered with ivy. A guard at the entrance glanced at my ID card and let me in. A friendly receptionist directed me to the second floor. I climbed the rather shaky stairs and at the top the door to Udi Barkai’s office was wide open. He stood up and hugged me, as if we were old pals. At that moment, I felt the ice in my veins beginning to thaw, ice that I had not really identified until then, and a small glimmer of warmth gradually spreading from my chest outwards. Udi was a large man, taller and broader than me, rather heavy, with thick arms and shoulders that looked very strong, and his handshake confirmed this impression. As I had observed earlier, his head was big, even beyond the proportions of his physique, and he needed – and had – a particularly powerful neck to carry it. His face was a web of wrinkles, more than his apparent age warranted, like a man who had been through a thing or two in his lifetime, but he had a pleasant smile and a twinkle in his eye.

  “Coffee?”

  I thought of the young woman downstairs who would get the order and then have to bring the coffee up, and I wanted to decline, but Udi caught my downward glance and said, “The kitchenette’s right here, make yourself a cup the way you like it.” It was as if he also knew that there was just about no one who could make coffee to suit my taste. Every size of cup needs a different amount of coffee, and sometimes I add a little or subtract a little, as if I know the precise number of grains, and pour the milk until the exact colour is obtained, taking the fat content into account. “And your coffee, that isn’t showing-off?” Dolly’s question suddenly popped into my mind, the one she asked when I insisted on making coffee myself, and a tear came into my eye. The steam coming off the cup gave me a good excuse for wiping it away, but the movement didn’t escape Udi’s observant eyes. He acted as if he’d seen nothing, poured himself a cup, and we went back to his spacious office.

  It didn’t look like a room where work was done. There was only a large, completely clear desk, an armchair on one side of it and an ordinary chair on the other, a low-slung sofa along one wall and a steel cabinet. The wide-open window, without bars, also didn’t fit in with a secret government office. So perhaps it wasn’t a secret government office?

  “So where do you think you’ve come to?” Udi asked with a smile when he saw me looking around the room.

  I was going to reply, but then I thought, why is he asking the questions and not me? After all, I’m not at some job interview, it was he who had asked me to come, and who was apparently interested in me.

  “Let’s go back a little,” I said, also with a smile. “Why did you come to me?”

  “We always go to the people we are interested in.” By now I had a fairly clear idea of who the “we” was, so instead I asked, “Yes, but why me? And of all occasions, at the opening of an exhibition, when it looked as if I was finding my feet in my chosen occupation.”

  “It was important to watch you functioning in a crowd. I’m sorry that it ended the way it did.”

  “You know that were it not for the bomb I wouldn’t have come here.”

  “There are very few people who we turn to, whatever stage they are at in their careers, who say no to us.”

  “You still haven’t answered my question,” I said.

  “I’ll answer right away. There’s just one thing I have to know first.”

  “Nothing that’s said here today will be leaked by me,” I retorted rapidly, and Udi laughed.

  “I know that. You’re also going to sign a secrecy pledge right now,” he said, taking a printed form out of a drawer and giving it to me, with the pen from his shirt pocket. I signed after a quick glance. I had no intention of revealing secrets. “But that is not what I wanted to ask. I want to know if you feel you’ve reached a crossroads and you are ready to take a new road.”

  “My brigade commander made a condolence call during the shiva. I told him I’d rather hold a rifle than a paintbrush,” I said. “He suggested I go back into the army. But I’ve seen enough of that vicious cycle of terrorist attack, military operation, another attack.”

  This was true. Only half a year earlier, when my brigade had been called up to take part in Operation Defensive Shield, a bomb was detonated in the Matzah restaurant in Haifa, within earshot of my parents’ home, and I was more anxious about them than they were about me.

  “The army does a million important things,” I continued, “but wars don’t happen so often, and I don’t like doing what the army does in the territories. I now have a personal score to settle with terrorism. That means, either the Shin Bet or the Mossad. I’d prefer the Mossad. A new road? Yes. For how long? I can’t commit myself.”

  “At your gallery opening, you raised your glass and proposed a toast to the heart, the head and the hand. And your heart and your head are now telling your hand to hold a pistol,” Udi summed up for me. His choice of the word “pistol” as distinct from “rifle” was certainly no accident.

  This exchange reminded me of a biology paper I wrote in high school, about animals as machines for fighting and survival. All the animals which exist today are first and foremost survival experts, using techniques of fighting, retreating, camouflage, deception and attack. It made no sense to me that when a war was on my doorstep I should forget my own essence as a fighting and surviving machine and give myself over to one talent of mine – painting. But the truth was that I had come here because I had lost my woman. I said this, and Udi immediately replied.

  “You’ve got to understand one important thing about Dolly,” he said. “We are not trying to avenge her death. And if you join us, that will apply to you too. We are engaged in a struggle for the existence of the State of Israel. We have many enemies: the Iranians and their nuclear weapons project, the Syrian army, Hezbollah, Hamas. Palestinian terrorism is only one of the threats we face, and from our point of view, not the most important one. The people who killed Dolly are probably in the Palestinian territories, and the Shin Bet, the army and the police will look for them, as part of their efforts to prevent more terrorist attacks. We will not deal with that.” Now it was definite: Udi was Mossad, and I was a candidate to join its ranks.

  “But the Mossad does kill terrorists abroad. I don’t understand what you are getting at,” I objected.

  Udi gazed deep into my eyes, his expression serious and searching. “I am not saying that when we run into a chance to settle an account we turn away from it. But we do not search for an individual because he has killed someone, we look for him only if he is still a threat. And that also applies to whoever killed Dolly. It is a global struggle, not a personal one. And I have to know that you can function within this framework.”

  I looked away when I thought that it was not at all sure that I would resist the temptation if at any stage of my job I discovered who’d been behind the bomb on the bus on Allenby, and I could get my hands on him. Udi realized very well what was going on in my head.

  “Are you here to get revenge for Dolly’s spilt blood, or to fight the enemies of the State of Israel?” was how he narrowed the issue down for me.

  “To fight for Israel’s survival,” I said eventually. “But I’d be happy if that would include settling my personal account.”

  “And it is clear to you that this would be for the organization to decide, not you, both whether to settle that score at all and who the job should be assigned to?”

  “Yes. I can live with that,” I said after some thought, knowing full well that if such a moment arose, I would try with all my might, and do everything I could, to be there and to take an active part. But I knew that my joining the Mossad, if that was going to happen, extended far beyond the matter of my own private vengeance.

  “Good, so now I’ll save us something like eight to ten months of screening,” said Udi with a sigh, but he was still eyeing me curiously, and perhaps a little sceptically, “and I’ll tell you exactly why we’ve
come to you.”

  He opened his attaché case and brought out what looked like a waterproof bag. From it, he extracted a passport. It had a dark blue cover, somewhat faded and shabby. I could make out the word Canada printed across it, and an elaborate emblem consisting of crowns, lions, flags and leaves. Opening the passport, Udi turned it towards me, showing me the photograph, with his fingers covering the name. I sat up and gaped. It was me, smiling for the camera. Long hair, which I’d never had, a little younger, wearing a shirt I didn’t recognize, but me.

  “Take it easy,” said Udi. “It’s not you.”

  “Are you sure?” I leaned closer to the passport, but Udi closed it, put it back in the bag, and returned it to his briefcase.

  “It’s a Canadian guy, around your age, who, let’s say for our purposes, died of a drug overdose in a hut in Sinai a few weeks ago. The Bedouin down there sold his passport to some crook, and now we have it.”

  “But how did you know about his resemblance to me?”

  “We have people whose job that is.”

  “By chance?”

  “You still have to learn that chance can be your best friend, and your worst enemy. In this trade, you must never rely on chance. The truth is that we also ran a search through some face-recognition data bases, and found a few other look-alikes for the deceased. We contacted them too.”

  “And …?”

  “They weren’t right for the job. You are, in principle.”

  “In principle?”

  “In principle. As far as the qualifications are concerned. Age, knowledge, military training. Someone who knows explosives, that’s something rare. We liked the idea that you have a good eye and a quick hand. That also has clear advantages. But to know specifically that you are suitable will take a lot of time and a lot of training.”