The Covenant (12 page)

“Wait here in the car for me,” she called back to Jack and Sean. “I’ll be back.”

The group piled into two black cars, late-model Mercedes with cream leather upholstery. She looked at the cars in surprise. She had expected the kind of trucks the Che Guevarra guerillas had used in South America, smelling of straw and pig droppings. This was certainly a revolution deluxe. Someone, she thought, has money.

A small stirring of fear and excitement curdled her stomach juices. She felt the adrenaline pumping through her veins as the cars raced forward over bumpy, unpaved country roads through small villages. Outside, it was almost deserted, she thought, watching the long stretches of dusty road with no sign of human habitation. The landscape was all scrub and rocky earth with a scattering of trees. And it looked as if there was plenty of it to go around.

What about this unremarkable place stirred such remarkable passions? she wondered, as she had traveling over the ice-slick dirt trail through the Dabarsko Polje mountains toward the borders that separated Bosnian-Serbs from Croats. There too, the anemic soil produced nothing but poverty and
heartbreak. Yet men were willing to commit any atrocity not to share it, to claim it for themselves.

What a moronic species human beings were, she thought, depressed.

Inside the car, no one spoke. Once again, she felt pressed on all sides by insistent male muscles. She tried, unsuccessfully, to contract. But the more she tried to shrink, the more their flesh expanded to fill the void. Inside her pocket, she fingered a small pocketknife and a can of pepper spray. In her imagination, she could already see herself bloody and undressed in compromising positions.

Whatever was going to happen was going to happen. She shrugged, feeling her excitement mount. As her parents had always warned her, this was not a job for a nice Jewish girl. Which is why she loved it so much.

The cars stopped, and the men jumped out, screaming. Someone pulled at her sleeve, but Ismael slapped away his hand and shouted at him. After that, she was allowed to make her own way out of the car. She had no clue in the world where she was. Amman or Damascus or a suburb of Jerusalem, all were equally plausible. The house in front of her was a mansion built in the Arab style with glowing pink stone and multicolored marble floor tiles surrounded by an intricate pattern of hand-painted tiles. Formal gardens with charming fountains sprayed cooling water into the air, and the smell of jasmine and honeysuckle mingled in the vine-covered portico leading to the front doors.

Terrorism was obviously quite an upscale career choice in this part of the world, she thought, looking around with a mixture of grudging respect and utter contempt. She was led inside and asked to wait. The living room was tiled with black, white-veined marble; low, built-in couches covered with red Persian carpeting and large, hand-embroidered pillows lined the walls. Enormous bronze trays held pistachio nuts, dates, figs and almonds. A woman covered from neck to ankle in the traditional dark outer coat, her hair completely swallowed by a tightly wound head scarf, brought out a tray with a bronze tea kettle, porcelain cups and gluey semolina flour cakes, thick with honey. The woman poured with silent graciousness, indicating a
chair and table. Julia nodded her thanks, sitting down and taking a polite bite and sip. Her role completed, the woman withdrew as silently as she had appeared, but not before favoring Julia with a lovely smile.

Charming, Julia thought, charmed, as she smiled back. Yet somehow, unbidden, the name Tony Soprano popped into her head. She tried to get rid of it. After all, it wasn’t right to make up her mind yet. She still didn’t know anything about these people, except that they lived well, had uneven taste, and a good sense of hospitality. Well, and the fact that they had some connection to armed men and the kidnapping (or worse) of doctors and their small daughters. And one could probably take a wild guess that they didn’t feel much affection for the Chosen People.

She hadn’t changed her name. She wasn’t ashamed of who she was. But she also didn’t feel like she had to take responsibility for the actions and thoughts of every other Goldberg, Greenberg, Levy and Cohen in the world either. I am who I am, and they are who they are. As for being a “people,” part of a clan… it meant nothing to her. She was born in Britain; that was her people, her clan. That her grandparents had emigrated from Eastern Europe was neither here nor there. Theirs was an accident of birth, as was hers. She rejected its claim on her, refusing to kow-tow to the middle-class idea that one’s distant ancestry deserved any special loyalty.

She was a human being, part of mankind. That connection had her loyalty, her fealty. Her country of birth and education too deserved some sentimental connection that she fostered without too much difficulty. She was proud of being British; the achievement of that fair, small, green isle in culture and history and literature was worth being proud of, feeling connectedness to.

But anything in the mystical reaches of some quasicultural/religious backwater ruled by paternalistic old farts who oppressed women and interpreted musty old texts to make life easier—and more profitable—for themselves was quite outside her line of vision. The whole “Israel” thing just didn’t interest her. And it had absolutely no hold over her. Quite the contrary. The idea of Jews having their own state was quite repellant. The only thing Jews had in common was their silly, male chauvinistic religion (no sillier or more male chauvinistic than Christianity or Islam, mind you). There was no reason to mark off borders fanatically to preserve it. Just as there were Christians and Muslims all over the world, citizens of every country,
so too the Jews should be everywhere. Anti-Semitism was outdated and discredited. It was the Israeli occupation that had people hating Jews all over again. It was something new. And the Israelis had only themselves to blame.

She heard voices drift down the stairs with new urgency. Suddenly, Ismael was standing in front of her. His face was pale. “Come,” he beckoned.

She walked up after him, not exchanging a single word. In the hall, she brushed past men holding AK-47 assault rifles. One of them opened a door and jerked his head toward her. She dutifully went inside.

On the walls hung pictures of a frail old man sitting in a wheelchair dressed completely in white. His scraggly beard dripped down his face and onto his robe like spittle. His eyes, like two black stones, lightless and without humor, looked down on her intently. Yes, she thought. A physically challenged, anorexic Santa. A poster child for the Jihad Muscular Dystrophy Foundation. A basketball player for special Olympics against ageism. Good old Sheik Yassin himself.

They led her into a room almost bare except for two chairs and a table. On one of the chairs sat a heavy man with a turban and a thick black beard. He almost looked like a yeshiva student. He said something to one of the men standing next to him, who in turn barked something belligerently to Ismael.

“What?” she turned to Ismael, who shook his head curtly and seemed alarmed.

“Hair. Your hair,” he hissed.

She pushed the flyaway blond wisps back underneath the head covering and tied it back as tightly as she could.

The fearless leader barked something else in a high-pitched voice that made him sound like a character straight out of
The Simpsons
—comical, almost ludicrous—a stark contrast to the decidedly uncomical gun-wielding goons spread out all over the place ready to obey his every word.

They were beginning to annoy her.

“Tell them I don’t have all day,” she suddenly said in a loud, clear voice.

Ismael turned a bright red and mopped his brow. He began to explain, when Mr. Turban held up his hand for silence and beckoned her to take a seat across from him. She took her time. Then she took out her notebook and pen, crossed her long legs, instantly grateful to be wearing slacks and
not a skirt. (If a strand of her blond hair offended their sensibilities, then what would an ocean of white thighs do?)

“Now, Ismael, please ask my host who, exactly, is he?”

In response, Ismael leaned over her, his lips almost touching her ear. “You are not in Piccadilly, Princess Diana. And you are going to get us both killed. The man you are looking at is Sheik Mansour, the right-hand man of Sheik Yassin, head of Hamas in Palestine.”

She felt her hand tremble as she wrote down the words.

Hamas. One of the deadliest and most merciless groups of terrorists in the world. She felt herself shiver as though she had been playing with a snake that she only now realized was not of the harmless garden variety, but the kind whose poison could kill a man in ten seconds.

The sheik suddenly went berserk—screaming at the top of his lungs and waving his hands.

She jumped up. “What’s he saying? What’s he saying?” she demanded.

“He says that you are about to receive a videotape of the latest glorious exploit of the holy Izzedine al-Qassam Brigade against the murderous occupiers of holy Muslim land in Palestine. We want you to broadcast this to the Zionists. We ask that your network donate ten thousand dollars to our Muslim Benevolent Fund or this is the last time you will be allowed to enter our homes.”

She watched the sheik slam his fist into his hand.

“Get up, the interview is over,” Ismael hissed at her.

“But…” She waved her empty pad helplessly. “My questions?”

Two men rose and approached her threateningly. She put her pen away, took one last look at the evil turban-wearer and headed down the steps, Ismael holding her elbow and ushering her out.

“But he hasn’t given me a tape…?!”

“Just keep moving,” Ismael hissed.

She did what she was told, not that she had much choice: a dozen armed men were dogging her heels and there was no direction to go but out.

They hustled her into their cars and sped down the roads. Aware that at some point someone was going to ask her to describe where she’d been and how she’d gotten there, she looked outside the tinted windows, searching for some landmark. But there was nothing to hold on to. The ramshackle buildings. The donkeys. The small boys with sticks. The old men in dirty
pants. The women with enormous baskets on their heads walking through the fields. It was like looking out a porthole at sea.

She felt her stomach begin to churn, the nausea sweeping over her in great waves with every bump in the road.

“Tell them to stop, Ismael.”

“I can’t do that! It’s dangerous…”

“Tell them to stop or in one minute they are going to have digested British Airways food all over their cream leather upholstery!”

She heard him speak. A moment of silence followed, interrupted by sudden snorts of laughter. The car halted abruptly. Crawling over her companions, the cold metal of their guns touching her arms and pressing into her legs, she stuck her head out the door and drained her digestive tract of any lingering traces of nourishment.

She wiped her stinging mouth across her sleeve, then sat back down.

All the way, the men laughed and joked with each other, throwing her amused glances. Thankfully, Ismael didn’t translate.

The cars finally rolled to a halt. She followed Ismael out into the open road, looking around for signs of Sean and Jack. And then all of a sudden, she saw one of the terrorists (freedom fighters, she reminded herself; activists; Militants) walking slowly and deliberately toward her.

He was an ugly giant, built like those old-fashioned British phone booths: square, with a gut that hung over his pants like ice cream bulging out of an overstuffed cone. The black metal of his gun gleamed like a deadly sea predator in the foggy cool of the shaded road.

She stepped back. If he was going to demand a last-minute rape, this was the perfect place for it, she thought, looking at Ismael’s slender frame tensely watching from a distance.

My savior, she thought dryly.

Whatever was going to happen was going to happen. Her hand went to her pocket. She fingered her weapons.

Wordlessly, he pushed a bag into her hand, then turned and walked away.

The other men followed. She could hear the revving of the engines in the preternaturally silent place, where even a leaf scraping along the ground entered into the conversation.

Ismael was suddenly at her side. “There they are.”

She gazed up the road, and sure enough, they were: the beer-guzzling,
white-man’s burden, woman-baiting old British boys’ club in the flesh, waiting with rather morose expressions on their faces, to welcome her home.

“What, no brass band?” she murmured. “Aren’t you happy to see me?”

“Damn insane, that’s what you are!” Jack fumed. “Could have gotten yourself killed with that big mouth of yours, and not knowing anything. And the brass would have been all over me. Blamed me…”

“What have you got there,Julia, old girl?” Sean said, eyeing the bag enviously.

“A video, I think.”

Sean turned to Ismael. “Who picked you up?”

“Izzedine al-Qassam.”

“My God! You are lucky to be alive. Those guys have lovely ways of getting to know people. Like sticking explosives into human orifices, or pouring glue down throats… Most talented and inventive, in their own way.” He shrugged, lighting up. He took a long drag. “Tell me, dear, how nuts do you have to be to confront a fanatic who is just itching for the opportunity to live it up with his virgins in paradise?”

For the first time in a long time, Julia Greenberg found herself speechless. To her greater surprise, she found that she actually did have something left in her digestive system. She bent over and felt part of her stomach lining come with it.

“A video,” Jack said, taking the cassette out of its cartridge and turning it over. “And who did you say it was from?”

“Sheik Mansour himself,” Ismael told them.

“You met the sheik, in person?” Sean said, his eyes wide with astonishment and not a little envy.

“Quite a scoop, Julia, and right off the plane. London will be delighted. And I’ll bet this is an exclusive. Congratulations, girl. And welcome.” The bureau chief smiled. Julia crawled into the seat beside the driver and closed her eyes, all her courage and bravado suddenly disappearing like helium from a balloon that has flown too high and finally met the pointy, unforgiving spires of skyscrapers not meant to be touched.