Hour of the Assassins (24 page)

“All right, you make your point. Sit down,
chaver
. Please,” Amnon said placatingly. “I was just feeling you out. We Jews have to argue about everything, didn't you know that?” Amnon said with a wink. Caine couldn't help himself. He let out a snort of laughter and sat down.

He pulled on his jacket. The night had grown cold. “What have you got?” he asked.

“Do you know Feinberg?”

“Only by reputation. Didn't he supply the key lead for the Eichmann snatch?”

“Also Wiese, the Butcher of Bialystok, Ehle, the Mauer brothers, Franz Stangl, the commander of Treblinka, and dozens more. Feinberg operates the Jewish Relief Center in Vienna. No, he
is
the Jewish Relief Center.”

“What about him?”

“He came to us about three months ago and told us he might have a lead on Mengele. But he said it would require a large bribe. I believe fifty thousand Deutschmarks was mentioned.”

“What happened?”

“Fifty thousand marks is a lot a money,
chaver
. We don't have billions to play with like the CIA,” Amnon said with a touch of bitterness. “Anyway, we kicked around the idea and decided not to pursue it. Our resources in money and manpower were already stretched to the breaking point.”

“Why didn't you come to us?”

Amnon looked at him scornfully.

“Didn't you say yourself that the Company isn't given to subscribing to Jewish philanthropies. Besides, if the Americans or anybody else had ever really gone after Mengele, he would have been brought around the corner a long time ago. Mengele has survived because of official indifference, that's all. Just indifference.”

“Well, we're not indifferent now. And I've got the money. So do me a favor and let Feinberg know I'm coming. And
chaver
,” Caine said sharply, “this conversation never happened.”

The two men got up and shook hands. Then, almost as if it had been rehearsed, they both looked out at the pale, jumbled lights of Jerusalem, the stars hanging in the night sky, like a heavenly mirror of the city.

“It's a pleasure doing business with you,
Adon,”—
Amnon hesitated briefly, searching his memory for the name Caine was using—“Foster.”

They drove in silence down from the Judean hills toward Tel Aviv, situated on the coastal plain that had been the Via Maris, the pathway of armies since long before recorded history, because it was the only route across the mountains and deserts that separated the ancient empires of Africa and Asia. The car radio was tuned to Israeli pop music broadcast from Kol Yisrael. The music struck Caine as pleasant but a little repetitious. All the songs seemed to sound alike. It was a little like having bad sex, he thought. The sensation isn't unpleasant, but you're not sorry when it's over. Every so often Yoshua glanced away from his driving and over at Caine, as though he wanted to say something but was waiting for Caine to begin.

The headlights picked out the ancient wrecks of World War II vintage armored cars and burnt-out truck chassis that littered the sides of the road. During the 1948 War of Independence the Israelis had tried desperately to run the blockade of this road to reach besieged Jerusalem. After the war they had painted the wrecks with blood-red antirust paint, garlanded them with flowered wreaths, and left them beside the road as memorials. There were times, Caine thought, when it was impossible to escape the notion that the world was nothing but a vast graveyard.

“Do you have any children?” Yoshua asked, and Caine knew that he was thinking about a recent terrorist incident in Metulla where two children had been killed. For a moment the image of Lim, laughing and pregnant in a field of flowering poppies, flashed into his mind. Then he remembered the first time he had seen Lim's daughter, sitting motionless on the porch of the hut and staring out into the rain. He tried to push the image away and forced himself to think of C.J., as she looked in the flickering glow from the fireplace, her long blond hair cascading over them like a shower of golden silk.

“No,” he said.

“That's the worst, that's where they really get you. When they get the children,” Yoshua said grimly, and Caine suddenly realized that Yoshua was too emotional for this business. Maybe the Israelis knew it too and that was why they had called him back from Paris.

“That's not the worst,” Caine said and regretted it as soon as he said it, because he couldn't stop it now. It was like releasing the cork in a bottle of champagne and the images began to spill over, the old tightness closing on his chest like a vise. “Then what is?”

“The worst are the things we do ourselves,” Caine said, wondering how it was that Yoshua didn't know that. Wasn't it Yoshua himself who had said, “In the end we are all murderers”? And then it didn't matter because he was remembering Teu La. He remembered how Dao had looked at him, with that strange mixture of curiosity and indifference, as though Caine had been a spoiled child throwing a temper tantrum, when he had argued furiously against the raid. Even as he had shouted and threatened, he could sense Dao deciding whether it was worth having him killed. Maybe that thought had held him back. Maybe that was why he hadn't tried to kill Dao right then and there.

There was no military reason for it, he remembered shouting. There was no reason at all, because the pull-out had already begun and their only function was to distract Charley to cover the withdrawal. Except that reasons no longer mattered in a world where everything was falling to pieces, while the diplomats at the Paris peace talks had already spent more than a year debating the shape of the table for the parley.

Dao had stood there, swaying and dangerous, his eyes bloodshot from the corn liquor. All of them drunk and miserable in the fetid heat of the bush, the mosquitoes rising around them in clouds thick as mist. They had been savagely mauled for two solid days in the Plain of Jars by the heavy mortars of a full Pathet Lao division, supported by VC artillery. By the third day they were using bodies to make breastworks to crouch under, the bodies bloated black and green with the heat and the unforgettable stench of death that permeated every breath. They burrowed under the damp earth and piles of bodies like insects, the constant explosions blowing the limbs of the living and the dead into an endless rain of bleeding flesh.

When they finally escaped into the bush, it was more of a stampede than a retreat, and when they collected at the fallback site, a muddy clearing thick with snakes and land crabs, they had fallen on the corn liquor with the desperation of desert travelers on oasis water. There were barely two hundred of them left, most of them strangers to him, with the hollow eyes and rabid glare of a pack of starving dogs. Perhaps that was why it had happened. Or perhaps it was because of the wounded they had had to leave behind, like Vang, with his belly ripped open, holding his own intestines in his hands, like strings of sausages. Or Pao, stumbling blindly among the shell holes, talking to himself about getting home for the rice harvest, with one eye ripped completely away and the other eyeball hanging down his cheek from its empty red socket. Or Lynhiavu, who caught a bullet with Caine's name on it, except that he had turned away for a second and when he turned back, Lynhiavu was lying there with a faint Buddha-like smile on his face and his brains dripping out of a hole in his head the size of a baby's fist. Or perhaps … well, perhaps it didn't matter why.

“It's murder, Dao,” Caine had shouted.

Dao blinked at him like a sleepy owl, then shrugged and took another swig from the jug, stumbling and falling into the mud.

“So it's murder, so what,” Dao had muttered thickly. “What do you think war is, you stinking, fucking Yankee? War is murder, not one of your Anglo-Saxon fucking games with rules. There are only murderers and victims,” he howled. “Murderers and victims!” grabbing an M-16 and emptying the magazine in Caine's direction, except that he was so drunk that all he did was prune a few trees, their leaves fluttering to the ground like wounded birds.

They were nearing Latrun, the silhouette of the old Arab fort on the hill a dark shadow against the starry night. In '48 Latrun had been held by the Arab Legion to cut off the Jerusalem road. In the end the Haganah had been reduced to attacking the escarpment with green, untrained troops, but all they had managed to do was to soak the wheatfields with blood. Human blood was the one commodity that never seemed in short supply, Caine mused. In the end the Haganah had been forced to build the legendary “Burma road,” across the mountains, to outflank the Latrun salient.

“What do you Americans know about the worst, anyway?” Yoshua was saying. “War and terrorism are something you watch over dinner on the seven o'clock news, just before the football highlights.”

“I suppose you're right,” Caine said indifferently, wishing to God he would shut up. Turning his eyes back to the road, Yoshua flicked his lights and passed an army Jeep on a blind curve. Caine closed his eyes for a moment, with the thought that all Israeli drivers are born fatalists.

Well, what would a fatalist make of Teu La? he wondered. They had attacked the hamlet at dawn, sending a patrol down to the ravine on the opposite side of the village, to cut off any chance of escape. The terrified peasants of Teu La had hidden Pathet Lao arms and. guerrillas, and as Lao tribesmen, they had always had a basic sense of superiority to the Hmong, whom they regarded as little better than savages. It had gone beyond war, Caine realized as the Meos moved into the village. It had degenerated into a tribal conflict, a chance to settle old scores.

The sun came up hot and bright into an unblemished blue sky, the dawn evanescent and brief as a single heartbeat. Birds were chirping among the palm fronds and the lazy hum of insects rose from the dried mud fields. Although they were drunk and exhausted, the Hmong moved purposefully into position, just as he had trained them. When Dao gave the signal, they charged headlong, screaming the old war cries, two to a hut. The procedure was always the same. First the grenade tossed into the hut and they hit the ground, flattening themselves against the explosion. Before the smoke cleared, they would leap inside to spray the hut with a carbine, just in case the grenade hadn't got the attention of those inside. Then matches or a lighter were applied to the thatched sides and roof and then they sprinted to the next hut.

In a little while all of the huts were burning, sending an acrid column of smoke up to stain the empty sky. The air was full of screams and war cries and the sounds of firing as Caine jogged toward the ravine, sweat stinging his eyes. There were only a few old men trapped in the ravine, pulling their rags about their bodies as though the cloth could protect them from bullets. All the rest were women and children, wailng incomprehensibly as if they were being punished for doing something wrong. The women pressed the children close to their bodies with trembling arms, their eyes wide and desperate.

Half-a-dozen tribesmen had cornered a pretty Lao girl, her chest heaving and wet with sweat. They were laughing as they ripped her clothes off and pinned her face down over the body of an old woman. Her thin buttocks quivered as they began to take turns mounting her, arguing about whether to start first with her vagina or her anus.

When Caine reached the edge of the ravine, the shooting had already started. Dao was still drinking from the jug and every so often he would stagger to his feet and fire his M-16 into the ravine, the M-16 that Caine had given him. One of the Meo grabbed an infant from its mother, made a funny face to make the baby laugh, then threw the baby into the air and shot it before it hit the ground. A few of them had tied an old man to a tree near the ravine and were shooting their crossbows at him, being careful to avoid a fatal shot. The old man twisted and groaned as one by one, the arrows snicked into his body, until there were so many arrows sticking out of him, he looked like a medieval fresco of the martyrdom of St. Stephen.

They were still firing into the ravine, which was a tangled mass of blood and bodies, limbs still thrashing, like a scene that could only be painted by Goya. A wounded moon-faced woman with a small boy in her arms was trying to scramble out of the ravine, her hand desperately clutching at a tuft of grass. Dao leaned over, as though to help her, placed the muzzle of the M-16 against the child's head, and fired. The head exploded into a thousand fragments and the woman fell back with a scream that went on till Dao fired again.

Caine raised his M-16 and brought Dao into his sights. Dao turned to look at him, his eyes dark and opaque, but he didn't raise his gun. Instead he just shrugged and shouted.

“They're Communists, Tan Caine. That's all. Just Communists. Then we kill them. Then they're nothing. Nothing at all.”

Caine tried to squeeze the trigger, but he couldn't because it didn't matter anymore, because nothing did. And because he knew that in some way he had brought them to this. They're ours, he thought bitterly. We're the ones who paid them and taught them how to fight a
civilized
war. That's how it happens. Once the killing starts, there's no place to draw the line. He threw his M-16 into the ravine and turned away. As he walked, a refrain from a song Country Joe had sung at Woodstock kept running through his mind until he thought he would literally go mad with it. Round and round it went with the numbers, like a children's nursery rhyme:

And it's one-two-three

What are we fighting for?

Don't ask me, I don't give a damn
,

The next stop is Vietnam
.

He saw one of the tribesmen dismount the motionless body of the raped girl, and apparently dissatisfied, he pulled an old .45 automatic out of his belt and blew half her head off.

“How did your talk with Amnon go?” Yoshua wanted to know.

“Okay,” Caine said wearily. Give it a rest, will you? Just give it a rest, he told himself. He lit a cigarette and rolled the window down a few inches to let the smoke escape out to the rush of cold night air. The images fled back into the night of the soul, like the smoke drawn away by the suction created by the car's speed. Yoshua slowed down as they entered Rehovot, site of the Weizmann Institute, where much of the work on the Israeli nuclear project went on. The streets were filled with noisy young people in shorts, milling in front of movie houses and sipping ubiquitous bottles of
gazoz
soda pop.