Correct, I had resolved to give her up, at least that had been my decision then, but I’d not been happy about it, and it certainly wasn’t what I wanted now that I knew she was fighting for me. The HQ guys should have told me.
“Udi’s not going to get away with this,” I muttered.
“Hey, I never told you anything!” Moshik quickly warned me, but he went on to say that the Foreign Ministry had also been involved, because “that girl of yours went to our consulate in Toronto and notified them that her Israeli boyfriend had disappeared, and she thought something had happened to him, that perhaps he’d been abducted, because she had a key to his room and she’d gone in and that was what it looked like.”
My Niki!
I remembered exactly the mess I’d left in my hotel room after moving my stuff to my rented apartment, and when I returned to meet Udi, the place looked like it had been burgled.
“Have you got a way of contacting Udi?” I asked. “I’ve got to talk to him.”
Moshik took out his scrambled mobile. “I think he’s already back in Israel,” he said, handing me the phone.
“I saw your note,” Udi told me, “but this isn’t the time and it isn’t a matter for the phone.” He was right, of course, but I didn’t want to keep it all in, nor was I capable of doing so. I didn’t even care if he was in the middle of some stupid ceremony at the facility, with Jack or even with Eli, in honour of his team’s successful operation.
This was the first time that I’d put my feelings for Niki into words. Feelings that had intensified now that I’d heard she wasn’t prepared to give up on me. Strange, but apparently that’s how things work even with this thing called love. Action, response, action.
Udi realized he couldn’t send me into a target country without first having a proper conversation.
“To tell you the truth, I don’t know how to handle this,” he confessed. “The decision has to be yours. Clearly a man with a torn heart, who isn’t focusing on his mission, is very bad, something I can’t afford to allow. You didn’t want to recruit her, and that’s what would have enabled you to keep on seeing her.”
“You’re still telling me to lie to her,” I shot back. “And I’m surely not going to do that. Anyhow, that would also have exposed that I was using you know what.” I decided not to mention, even on a scrambled phone, Ron’s passport.
“Right, but as I told you back there in the north, and it’s a pity you didn’t listen to me then, the question is, using it for what. For business in places where you couldn’t do business as what you are. It’s not all that farfetched.”
“And again, that means lying to her. We’ve already had this conversation. The answer is still no. I don’t believe a relationship can be based on a lie and subterfuge.”
“You aren’t leaving yourself many choices. It is your decision. But I’d like you to make it after you get back.”
From his point of view, the matter of Niki was in abeyance and the only item on the agenda now was my mission. From my point of view, it wasn’t like that. Instead of being preoccupied with my assignments, or getting cold feet, or an upset stomach like Dudu, I took my flight to Amman and spent the time thinking about Niki and how much I loved her.
It would have been nice and convenient if I could have told myself as I had in the past, that nature had given us a biological screening mechanism that enables us to find suitable partners, zeroing in on those who are more or less suitable for us, or else we would all be hopelessly in love with Michelle Pfeifer or with Claudia Schiffer, and we aren’t.
I was compelled to emphasize to myself that nothing about the way Niki and I had bonded seemed logical. The screening mechanism had gone crazy. And the moment these feelings of mine towards her had awoken – once in Tokyo, then again in Toronto, and again today in Paris, en route to Jordan – a magic that seemed to be utterly un-biological also awoke in me: Love – precisely what had been missing with the hookers in Pigalle the evening before. And throughout my life so far, this love had awakened, with this intensity, only towards Niki.
So, biology – with all the respect that I harbour for it, and the high marks I got for it at school – is one thing, and love is something else entirely.
10.
Alone in Amman
I FELT STRANGE landing in Amman. Although I’d been there twice before, this was my first time under a false identity. My first two visits were after my discharge from the army when I’d stopped over on my way to and from Japan. Before and after Niki. Royal Jordanian’s flights to the Far East were the least expensive of all the airlines. I was sure that on the previous trips I had not felt the rumbling in my stomach, a rumbling that if it had been one or two degrees more acute would have put me in Dudu’s situation. Some Israeli tourists visit Amman, but I was there undercover, and if I were to be caught it would be very unpleasant for me, and very embarrassing for the Israeli government.
Apart from the rumbling, border control went smoothly. There was no way that a border guard was going to link me with the young Israeli with the cropped hair who’d landed there twelve years ago and returned with slightly longer hair.
Then, I’d only seen Amman from the air. This time, on my way to the Intercontinental Hotel in the city centre, I was surprised by the many palatial villas, built out of what Israelis call Jerusalem stone, surrounded by high walls and gardens in bloom. Only after I got to know the city did I realize that the road from the airport went through an enclave inhabited by wealthy members of the regime, many of them belonging to the Hashemite royal family. There were also homes owned by rich residents of certain Gulf emirates who often came to spend weekends of pleasures forbidden in their home countries. Other parts of Amman looked like East Jerusalem, Ramallah or Nablus, typically Palestinian.
I spent my first two days working at being a tourist. On the first day, my Lonely Planet guidebook led me to the Roman amphitheatre on a hill overlooking the city, and the museum at its foot, as well as the Sheikh Hussein Mosque, the market and to the well preserved Hellenist palace. Two taxi drivers addressed me in Hebrew, freezing the blood in my veins. One of them even mumbled in disbelief when I replied in English that I didn’t understand what he was saying. It was apparently not easy to deceive our cousins, especially those who’d come here from the West Bank or Jerusalem and could identify the features and manner common to many Israelis. But these drivers didn’t want to make a big deal out of it and my Israeli appearance didn’t bother them for long.
On the second day I travelled south in a rented car to Madaba, site of an ancient mosaic map of the Holy Land, Mt Nebo, and Petra, the Nabataean city carved out of red rock cliffs. It was actually Mt Nebo that moved me most, as I looked out over the northern part of the Dead Sea and the southern Jordan Valley, from the spot where Moses had stood thousands of years before, according to the Bible. There was something exciting about standing there, posing as a foreigner amongst the locals and the few tourists, and gazing at my own country. It was easy to pick out Mt Karantal, the hill overlooking Jericho, from which I had, as a soldier, done observation duty in the opposite direction, and the slopes of the mountains all the way up to Jerusalem. There in the desert I began filling my sketchbook with quick drawings, and taking photographs, of the wadis and hills, horses and camels, Bedouin girls with water pitchers on their heads, desert vegetation and flocks of black goats. I found that the cheap Pilot pens did the job in the quickest and most precise way, and it was simple to use them to fill in the black clothing of the Bedouin, while the coloured pencils filled in the background in several different shades of brown, with a little green and yellow.
On day three, I began carrying out recon for my pre-op intelligence-gathering mission. The following two days went by exactly according to plan. First, I drove along the streets where the targets lived, trying to spot their houses, something that wasn’t always easy because many of the houses didn’t have numbers, and also because I had difficulty making out the names of the streets, which were in Arabic
. The small tourist map that I kept in my pocket with the guidebook wasn’t much help in the winding streets where our “objects” had chosen to reside, but fortunately I’d put a lot of time into studying the more detailed maps and the aerial photos, and had them pretty much down pat. The material Moshik had brought to Paris was useful and I was able to navigate my car relatively confidently along the route I had mapped out. I located the addresses according to landmarks I had set for myself beforehand and I drove on past them, without stopping or slowing down. I didn’t think I was arousing suspicion, although rental cars must have been a rarity in these neighbourhoods.
After driving past some of the addresses in two of the neighbourhoods, I returned to the main street to take a break in a restaurant. The intense concentration and high state of alert that I’d summoned up to reconstruct the routes in my mind and drive along them had been exhausting.
After another swing past further addresses on my list in a third neighbourhood, I called it a day and went back to my hotel. In the evening I went to the city centre where I indulged myself with a shwarma and aubergine with tahini and yoghurt – a combination that wasn’t kosher but was absolutely delicious. I took my coffee onto the terrace, where people were smoking hookahs. It was cold outside, but my coat, the coffee and the water-pipe would take care of that, I reckoned. It was my first hookah since the army, and I coughed a little – I’d lost my knack for it – but the satisfying smoke filled me with serenity.
I sat up half the night writing reports on what I had seen. I drew a few three-dimensional sketches, photo-graphed them and sent everything to HQ in an encoded message. The next day, I changed my car, got my camera ready, and set out on a second round of more detailed observation. This time I stopped at where Fatah functionaries were assumed to be living, checked that I was at the correct site and took pictures of the numbers over the entrances. I also photographed the cars parked outside, and here and there I snapped people entering or leaving the houses. I did it all covertly, from inside the car. I managed quite a bit, and that evening I drove out to Kan Zaman, a tourist village on the outskirts of the city which houses a variety of arts and crafts workshops, souvenir shops, cafés and restaurants in restored old buildings.
When I got back to the hotel, a wedding party was taking place around the pool. I found a table, ordered another coffee and enjoyed the cool air and the pretty location. I also enjoyed that special Invisible Man feeling, with no one there aware of who I was, as if I could see everyone and no one could see me. All the men were in suits and ties and the women were in evening dresses and there was a kind of genteel, calm atmosphere, very different from the noisy Israeli weddings I was used to. I assumed it was a high-class affair, people from the Hashemite nobility, but I could quite easily picture them as partners with whom we Israelis could live in harmony.
That night on CNN I saw a report of a terror attack in Jerusalem – a burned-out bus, injured people, bodies, paramedics, police, a scared crowd of onlookers. The background looked familiar and after a while I realized it was Liberty Bell Park. Then came the announcement by the perpetrators: Only three weeks after their last suicide attack, the one on the No. 19 bus, Fatah’s Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades were admitting responsibility for this one too. Eight people were dead, including students on their way to school. It had happened in the morning and, who knew, perhaps I had been driving around by the homes of the very people who had supplied the explosives or had raised the money to purchase them.
I couldn’t fall asleep. In addition to my daily report, I relayed: “Please notify by return if any of the targets I observed today is connected to latest attacks, if there is any intention of acting against him, and if you want me to prepare a full field file.”
The reply came: “Carry on as usual. They may be more wary today.”
Pictures of the bombing were still on my mind in the morning. Before going out I saw on CNN parents of the casualties, stunned and grieving, and a few seconds of footage fro m a memorial assembly at the Experimental School, where one of the murdered children had been a student. When I was at Bezalel, I’d rented an apartment on Rabbi Akiva Street, where the school was located. Every morning, I’d walk along that street on my way to the old Bezalel buildings, where the fine arts studies were held before their move to Mount Scopus, and often it would be at the same time as the parents bringing their kids to the Experimental School. I always thought these parents were rather special, an unusual mix of yuppies, former hippies, and plain, good-natured Jerusalemites. I’d also watch them on my free mornings as I sat in the Aroma café at the other end of the street, or as I lunched at the Focaccia Bar, right opposite the school gate. Sometimes I surprised some students sharing a joint in the yard of my building, instead of being in class. This, I thought, is what good parents generate when they give their kids a little too much freedom by sending them to “democratic” schools like the Experimental.
The tearful faces of the children on CNN took me back to my own students after the Dolphinarium attack, two and a half years before. It’s strange, I thought, how the bombings at places I knew affected me in ways that other attacks didn’t. Terrorist outrages in Hadera, Pardes Hanna, Nahariya, Afula, Beersheba, left me less moved, as if they had happened in another country. Even the huge atrocities, with hosts of casualties, like the bombings at the Patt Junction in Jerusalem, the Megiddo Junction, or the Old Bus Terminal in Tel Aviv, with at least twenty people killed in each, did not arouse the same emotion in me as those at places I was familiar with, or where I had even spent time, like the Sbarro restaurant, or Moment café, or Café Hillel in Jerusalem. Not to mention the bus bombing in which I’d lost Dolly.
I couldn’t help but intensify my intelligence gathering, push the risk a little more. Fatah had taken responsibility for the bombing, and not Hamas, as in Dolly’s case, but at the higher echelons of activity – planning, weapons purchase, money matters – they could well be the self-same people. I became a little more daring and decided to do some recon on foot around those places where, from the car, I had been unable to ascertain unequivocally who lived there. Twice, when apartment blocks were involved, I photographed the mailboxes with the names of the tenants. I did the same thing at the entrance to some smaller houses as well. When I saw I was attracting the attention of children playing there, I got back into the car and drove off.
My downfall occurred elsewhere. I’d stopped in a narrow street at the northern edge of the neighbourhood where three known Hamas activists lived, although I didn’t have to check their addresses, as well as two Fatah members whose houses I’d snapped earlier. I had the feeling the camera hadn’t clicked and wanted to see if the pictures had come out, so that if necessary I could change the battery and go back and take them again. I saw that they were fine, but the battery did have to be changed. I decided to stay in the car and make some of my 3-dimensional sketches of the houses and streets that I’d just passed by, while they were fresh in my memory.
The further I drove away from the activists’ homes, the more my adrenalin level dropped, something that apparently made me less alert. I didn’t see who was paying attention to me, or why – the rented car, my foreign appearance, busy with a camera, sketching … Catching me off guard, a police patrol car drew up behind me and an armed officer climbed out.
I’m not sure my face didn’t give away my alarm. I stammered a little when he asked what I was doing, and it took a few seconds before I selected the cover story that would fit best, but it didn’t account for the camera and the sketches. The cop asked politely for my papers, and I took my passport out of the pocket of my jacket, which was lying on the seat next to me. Just before I handed it over I thought of putting my foot on the pedal and speeding away. I might have got away but they would have called in reinforcements and in the narrow streets it would have been easy to block me. Escape on foot after that, on the edge of a refugee camp, was not an option. It was also clear that the number of my car, which had probably already been checked by the co
p who’d stayed in the vehicle behind me, would lead them straight to my hotel. And actually I had done nothing serious enough, as far as they were concerned, to warrant endangering myself in a chase through the streets and then having to steal across the border back to Israel and totally invalidate my documentation for future use.
I handed over my passport and, while the officer was examining it, I surreptitiously erased all the photographs in my camera. This meant losing a full day’s work, and I was glad that I’d already transmitted the pictures I took the day before. But I didn’t have time to remove from the screen the last command. The “Empty card?” and “Yes” option.
Neither did I manage to hide the sketches. I’d meant to push them under the seat, but before I could I hear his voice: “Artist?” I nodded and quite surprisingly, I found this definition quite heart-warming.
“May I see?” He held out his hand through the car window and signalled to me to give him the drawings that were in my hand. I gave him the sketchbook as well, open at the pictures I’d made in the desert. He ignored them, and looked at the sketches of buildings.
“I think I know these places,” he said. “They are houses in the street below here, no?”
“Houses that I saw and I want to remember. Perhaps they are mixtures of more than one house.”
“No, no, they look very exact to me,” he complimented me. “And may I see your camera please?”
That was what tipped the scales. The cop asked me to get out of the car and accompany him to his vehicle. Again the option of running for it occurred to me and again I ruled it out. I believed I could explain to him – and if necessary to the chief at the station – that I was no more than a tourist, an artist, seeking out places that seemed exotic without having any idea what went on inside them, drawing them, and then taking the drawings home to Toronto where I made paintings of them that “sold not at all badly”.
Final Stop, Algiers: A Thriller Page 20