The Covenant

by Ragen, Naomi

  Esther felt a sudden vulnerable space open inside her body, a place that she had kept closed so tight, made so hard over the years. A soft, fleshy spot began to throb, naked and exposed.

  This couldn’t happen. This was a new world. A world all her work had made safe and comfortable for those she loved. She wouldn’t permit it to happen.

  “Give me that phone . . . Leah? My God, my God!” Esther put her hand over the phone and hissed to Morrie: “Get me Dr. Shavaunpaul at Sloan-Kettering in Manhattan on your cell phone. Use his private pager number and tell him it’s me and it’s an emergency—

  “Leah. This is not like you . . . “ I thought you had no tears left, Leah, my Leah.

  Morrie motioned to her urgently. “The doctor’s on the phone.”

  She reached out for it. “Leah, go lay down. My doctor’s coming over. Go lay down. Go! What use will you be to Elise otherwise? Take your medicine and lay down. Of course you’ll go to Israel, to be with her. Of course, we all will. But now go lay down, so you’ll have the strength. Good-bye. I’m hanging up, Leah. Good-bye. Yes. Go, go.”

  She grabbed the cell phone out of Morrie’s hand: “Doctor? Esther Gold, of Estay Cosmetics. Yes, of course . . . I’ve been giving that cardiac intensive care unit you wrote me about a lot of thought . . . But I’m actually calling for another reason. I have a friend in New York, not far from you, with a heart condition . . .”

  Her grandson listened, amazed and appalled as his grandmother wheedled and bullied the world-famous heart specialist into making a house call.

  “Morrie. Send a car to pick up the doctor and take him to Leah’s. And isn’t there some kind of private agency that negotiates the release of kidnap victims? Find out, Morrie. And get them on the phone . . . maybe send the plane to pick them up . . .”

  “Now, Gran . . .”

  “And we need to tell Maria . . . and Ariana . . .” She suddenly remembered the interview.

  “Oh, the Shoah Foundation people . . .”

  “I’ve already spoken to them. They understood. They’ll reschedule.”

  ”Did you give her a box of samples?”

  “I gave them both a box of samples.”

  She sighed. “You’re a big help to me, Morrie.”

  “Thank you. Now I want you to sit back and listen to me,” he said with authority.

  “I don’t have time . . .” She stood up.

  He pushed her gently back into her chair. “Gran, be realistic. First of all, there’s no evidence they’ve actually been kidnapped . . .”

  “Don’t go there, Morrie. Just don’t.”

  “All right, calm down. Okay. Let’s say they are alive and well and ransom demands suddenly do surface. These Islamic terrorists aren’t going to ask for money, like the South American kidnappers. They’ve got money, and plenty of it. They’ll make political demands, or try to get their terrorist friends out of jail . . . In either case, you won’t be able to satisfy them. In the end, the army will have to deal with it. Don’t you trust the Israeli army?”

  “Yes. But I don’t trust Israeli politicians.”

  “Why not?” he said, surprised.

  “Because they’re like all politicians. Jon and liana’s lives won’t be their only consideration in sending in the army to rescue them. They’ll have to decide what the UN will say, or what CNN will broadcast, and what headlines will be in the L.A. Times . . . I want my own army, which takes orders from me. And I can afford it.”

  He allowed himself a small smile, then became completely serious. He knelt down beside her, holding her trembling hands and looking into her flashing eyes. “Gran. With all the goodwill and all the money in the world, you aren’t going to be able to do anything. You’re helpless.”

  She flung off his hands, bolting upright, all five feet of her shaking with fury. He stepped back, alarmed.

  “What do you know about helpless? You want helpless? What about being fifteen years old and weighing forty pounds and waiting outside at a train station in subzero weather all tarted up in a summer dress stolen from some murdered woman? And all around you are beastly armed guards, and their vicious barking dogs, and you know that when the train comes in, you are going to get a one-way ticket to the most horrible death imaginable to any woman? You talk to me, to me, about helpless situations?”

  ”Gran . . . I just . . . meant . . .” He stuttered.

  “Listen to me, Morrie: those days are over, the days of helpless. You see this house? The furniture? You think I worked so hard for this? Got rich for this? This could burn down tomorrow, it wouldn’t mean a thing to me. No. Everything I ever did in my life was to make sure those days were over. Do you understand me, Morrie?!” Her body trembled. “Do you have any idea who Leah Rabinowitz is? What she did for me?” She took a deep breath, fingering her pearls. Her eyes narrowed. “We are going to find Jonathan Margulies. We are going to find liana. And we are going to do everything humanly possible to bring them back to Elise and Leah. Is that clear?”

  He nodded, taking the phone from her white shaking hands. He dialed.

  Chapter Nine

  Ben Qurion Airport, hod

  Tuesday, May 7, 2002

  6:30 A.M.

  JULIA GREENBERG STRUGGLED to pull her suitcase off the conveyer belt.

  “Need some help?” Sean Morrison offered, his one neat valise already draped competently over his shoulder.

  “Thanks, but I can manage,” she murmured without gratitude, giving the case a yank and sending it to the floor. Men were always looking for some signs of weakness when a blonde showed up as a foreign correspondent in a war zone. Let them look, she thought, tossing her carefully straightened light-blond mane over her shoulder. What they’d see were her tracks in the dust as they struggled to keep up with her.

  Her last war assignment had been in Sarajevo. What those poor Muslims had suffered. She looked around at the crowd of natives, her eyes sympathetically drawn to the women in traditional head scarves, the men in kaffiyehs. She had an automatic respect for Third World religions and customs, which she felt had a certain ethnic purity and simplicity simply by virtue of their foreignness. Most liberal westerners did. Minorities were naturally to be defended and championed, the poorer the better, the less powerful the more sympathetic.

  This “Jews-as-underdog” thing was really old. More important, it was boring. Here you had one of the most powerful armies in the Middle East, people who had the A-bomb, and they were still trying to cash in on the worn David and Goliath myth with markers they felt they had left over from the Holocaust. It was such a cliche. Besides, she had personally heard enough whining about the Holocaust to last her. Hitler killed twenty million Russians. Did you ever hear a Russian whine about it, build museums, make a fuss, give out guilt trips?

  Lifting her eyelash between her fingers, she removed a piece of caked mascara. What I must look like, she thought, wishing the last suitcase would show up already so she could get to a bathroom mirror. Ah, there it was, her enormous pullman chugging down the conveyer belt, its worn tan leather covered with stickers from all over the world. She braced her shapely, weight-resistance-trained arms, grabbed the thick black handles and tugged.

  It was not impressed.

  Tightening her grip, she gnawed on her lips with determination as she ran alongside the case, yanking with all her might. “Sorry, excuse me,” she repeated, bumping into people, stepping on toes, knocking shoulder to shoulder, her tone more put upon than apologetic. What, after all, did she have to be sorry about? Trying to do her job?

  This was the way Julia Greenberg had been doing things all her life. Her way, or no way. She continued halfway around the carousel, until finally, a shwarma and pita-fed Israeli with beefy arms and a handlebar mustache simply pushed her aside, taking the suitcase off the belt with one hand and heaving it down beside her.

  She could almost feel Sean’s cynical, amused eyes burning through her back.

  “Thanks,” she murmured through stretched lips.
/>   The Israeli smiled expansively. “Bevakasha, motek.”

  She looked him over, taking in the uncouth tufts of black chest hair peeking through an unbuttoned shirt collar, open-toed sandals and scruffy toenails. She cringed. Motek meant sweetie. That much she knew. He was exactly what she’d been led to expect. Despite her name, this was Julia Greenberg’s first visit to Israel. The ancestral wave of feeling that had briefly washed over her parents, sending them to the Holy Land as part of some Reform Temple group tour, had not even moistened her. Her mother had returned with dreadful stories about pushy, dishonest cabdrivers, and cheating souvenir dealers in desert roadstops, her only kind words for the ancient Bedouin camel driver who’d given her a ride. Her father, of course, had been just the opposite, waxing with typical enthusiasm over Israel’s wonderful agricultural miracles, water desalinization plants, and the marvelous antiquities—hardly stuff teenage girls find sexy.

  Her understanding of the country was based on a general knowledge of history of the region, colored by a long conversation over drinks with a BCN on-air correspondent who had done a stint in Jerusalem. Israelis, he’d told her, were unbelievably arrogant and unfriendly. The men were all chauvinists and the women classless loudmouths, especially the fawning Peace Now types, who thought they and Europe were now going to be one big, happy family after they’d embraced Oslo and thrown the Palestinians a few crumbs. The idiots.

  The last correspondent, the one she was replacing, was a florid Liverpudlian who loved to use expressions like “Hebrews,” and “Jewess,” had insisted all Jews really wanted were the Arabs shot or transferred. He’d ignored the turmoil of unrest between different Israeli factions over the Oslo Accords, broadcasting piece after piece showing Arab women struggling down dusty roads lugging small children and baskets of whatever, with Israeli soldiers in tanks in the background; shots of Muslims at prayer, contrasted to Israeli settlers turning over tomato stands in Hebron. More than once, he’d had himself filmed taking off his shoes and bowing respectfully toward Mecca.

  The network executives, eager to sell Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Abu Dhabi their new BCN-Arabic language subsidiary, had loved it. But eventually, a flood of angry letters and e-mails accusing them of pro-Arab bias, and worse, anti-Semitism, combined with an alarming drop in advertising revenues from American companies who, post-September 11, didn’t appreciate the gung-ho tone of the pro-Islamic rhetoric, had convinced them to pull him.

  Julia understood that they weren’t so much sending her as much as they were sending a Greenberg. But she was savvy enough to take her opportunities when and where she found them. If Greenberg gave her a leg up, why in heaven’s name should that be a problem, after all the times it had done just the opposite? Whatever anyone thought, she was here on her own terms, to tell the truth as she saw, understood, and experienced it, without prejudice. One of her favorite reporters was Suzanne Goldenberg of the Guardian, who had done an outstanding job of changing people’s view of British Jewish journalists reporting on the Middle East. Her pieces on the poor, brave mothers of suicide bombers and on West Bank Jihad museums paying homage to martyrs had won her an award, which she richly deserved. She had proven wrong all the naysayers who thought she couldn’t overcome her racial and cultural bias. She had more than overcome it; she had defeated it completely.

  She too felt herself liberated from any bias in favor of the Jewish State, which had been pushed down her throat since childhood at endless, boring holiday dinners full of tiresome relatives and at Hebrew School classes whose primary accomplishment had been to permanently douse any desire or interest on her part to explore her heritage and religion.

  What she had tried to do her entire life was distance herself from family bugaboos, the smarmy heartstring tug of imagined ties to groups she had no interest in and felt no connection to. She’d always chosen her friends from those most outside her own family circle. It was her way of reaching out to the world, of fighting prejudice and racial stereotyping, which had dogged her steps ever since she could remember. Her friends were from India and the Caribbean Islands; from Azerbaijan and Pakistan. She was familiar with the rites for Vishnu and for Russian Orthodox Christmas mass. Words like “Yom Kippur” and “Chanukah,” however, made her gag, although she couldn’t tell why. Something to do with being forced to undergo the strange initiation trials to enter a club in which she had no interest in becoming a member.

  Who was she? She was a journalist. An objective journalist. Neither the network’s unsubtle hints to continue the “good work” of her predecessor nor her family’s synagogue membership was going to influence her in the least.

  She loaded the pullman onto a cart and wheeled it toward the loo, checking her face in the mirror and doing the necessary repairs. Then she headed for the exit, ignoring the customs inspectors, until one tapped her lightly on the shoulder and politely requested she pull over and open her bag.

  They took out the video camera, the tape recorder. “I’m a journalist,” she said calmly. “It’s for my personal use.”

  “Journalist?” the customs man said thoughtfully. “Can I see your passport? Your press identification?” She watched him examine the documents. “Julia Greenberg? Is that you?”

  ”Yes,” she answered.

  “Write good things about us,” he smiled, waving her through.

  Sean, who had also been pulled over, and who was still in the middle of having every nook and cranny of his luggage minutely explored by the customs men, gave her a knowing look filled with accusation, as well as envy. She blushed, wheeling her cart out through the sliding doors.

  The presumption of brotherhood killed her. She looked forward anxiously to clearing her name. Her eyes panned the crowd of milling foreign strangers. To her relief, she saw someone holding up a cardboard sign with her name on it.

  She went quickly in that direction. “Hi. I’m Julia.”

  “How are you?” the man said with extreme courtesy. “I’m your driver, Ismael. Mr. Duggan, the bureau chief, is outside waiting in the car. Is Sean with you?”

  “Yes. He’s still going through customs.”

  He nodded, taking her cart. He had a gentle face, she thought, with a fine black mustache and a swarthy complexion. Sort of an Omar Sharif type.

  “You are thirsty, perhaps?”

  She was, actually. “A bit.”

  “Coke?”

  “Diet, please.” She nodded gratefully. He went off to get it. By the time he returned, Sean had shown up.

  “They went through every sock, sniffed my aftershave, opened up my tin of biscuits.” He shook his head. He smiled at her with irony. “I suppose being a Greenberg sometimes has its advantages.”

  She saw Ismael shoot her a curious, sideways glance and blink as he handed her the cold drink. It’s just a name, an accident of birth, she wanted to explain, almost apologize. I am your friend, a friend to your people, please believe me. Perhaps one of your best. But for now, she realized, there was nothing she could do. When her reports were aired, they would speak for themselves. Everyone would see who Julia Greenberg was and where her loyalties lay. People would have to admit they’d misjudged her and thought unfairly of her, based simply on ethnic stereotyping.

  She followed Ismael and her luggage out to the parking lot.

  “Julia.” A tall, jowly, rather boozy-looking middle-aged man emerged from a tan Honda Accord parked illegally near the curb. He advanced toward her, hand extended.

  “Mr. Duggan. Jack.” She smiled, grasping her boss’s hand firmly and looking into his eyes with conviction, just as she’d learned in her “Dress for Success” seminars.

  He took her hand into both of his and patted it. “Jesus, it’s hot in this godforsaken shithole. Let’s get into the air-conditioning, shall we? How are you doing, Sean?” he said over her shoulder. “All restocked on the dutyfree booze?”

  “You know I am.” The two men laughed, a secret, male-bonding laugh, Julia thought, paranoid.

  “How have thing
s been, Jack?”

  “Oh, a settler’s brat got herself shot,” the bureau chief answered. “And then the IDF went in and demolished someone’s house. You know. The usual.”

  “How old was she, and how did she get herself shot?” Julia asked.

  “Well, she was two months old and her parents are Jews who insist on living in Hebron . . .”

  “Two months old? You mean they shot a baby in a carriage?!” she said in horror. She saw Ismael’s eyes focus on her curiously, as if waiting to come to some decision. She blinked, uncomfortable.

  “Well, if her carriage hadn’t been there—” Jack began. His cellular phone rang. “Hello? Okay. Where? Okay. No, I think I’ll cover this one myself.”

  “What’s up?” Sean pressed.

  The bureau chief shrugged, putting his hand over the mouthpiece. “A settler’s car. Father’s a doctor, his five-year-old daughter . . .”

  “Who could have done it?” Julia cocked her head, already forgetting her shock about the “got herself shot” when it concerned a two-month-old; already willing to accommodate the phrase. She was nothing if not adaptable.

  Being a Jew and a woman in genteelly anti-Semitic male chauvinist British journalism, it was a necessity. Her ideas, beliefs, convictions were . . . flexible. She had no choice, at this stage in her career, but to keep her nose to the wind to see which way it was blowing, whatever the smell . . . With every conversation, she’d sock away more information that would be useful to her advancement. It was not a question of ideology. She believed in telling the truth. It was simply office politics, she told herself, being sensible, paying your dues. Once she became famous and indispensable, she would use her stature to champion the underdog, pierce the balloons of self-righteous crap that went for news these days. But right now, she had no choice but to play along. Because there was only one thing Julia Greenberg could not accommodate at this stage in her budding career: failure.

  The two men exchanged expressionless glances.