The Lie: A Novel (13 page)

Whatever the press knows, or does not know, Dahlia’s status as mother of one of the missing soldiers is no secret in the headquarters building of the Israel Police. Only several days earlier she was a resented stranger parachuted into the ranks of a closed and somewhat xenophobic constabulary. Now she has become an object of sympathy, one of their own. The young policewoman who had that first day shown her to an office in the second sub-basement now rises from her reception desk in the lobby as if meeting Dahlia for the first time. “Chief superintendent.”

Dahlia pretends not to see the look on the girl’s face. “Is Zeltzer in the building?”

“I just want to say—”

“Thank you”—she looks down at the girl’s name tag—“Sarit. It’s not necessary.”

“We all feel—”

“Please call Zeltzer and tell him I’m coming up.”

Walking away Dahlia thinks,
What a bitch I must seem. I don’t want to be like this. I really don’t. But I won’t have their pity, as though it’s a done deed. As though once the bastards have Ari, they have him and I’ll never get him back, never see him under the wedding canopy, never hold those particular grandchildren. What is that
, she thinks in the elevator,
prophylactic bitterness, bitterness before the
fact?
The elevator stops. Third floor. A uniformed captain steps in, a face she has never seen.

He pauses. “Going up?”

“All the way.”

He gets off on the fifth, then abruptly turns, gives her a thumbs-up.

She finds herself grimacing, then returns the gesture.

In the time it takes to reach the next floor she thinks,
The old Dahlia, the one who is dead, would have chosen a different finger
. Something has turned within her. She knows it.
I will not be my mother
, she thinks.
Not even if the worst happens. But the worst won’t happen. I won’t let it. Who the hell do they think they’re dealing with? This is my son, my firstborn, my Ari. Fuck with my family? Fuck you
.

She finds Zeltzer is in his office with two officers, one in civilian clothes. He puts up his hand as she comes to the door. There is supposed to be a secretary at the desk in the outer office, but Dahlia has never seen her. Or him. Nobody. The desk is neat, in-basket and out-basket equally empty. A stack of papers. A blue sweater on the back of the desk chair, one of those hand-knitted cardigans with a button front. It could be a man’s, it could be a woman’s.
Probably quit and left the sweater
, she thinks.
Who could stand Zeltzer?

Her commander waves her in as the two officers leave. They give her the same look.

She offers a weak smile, just the slightest flexing of her lips, an instant and it is gone. “Chief commissioner, we need to talk.”

“Clearly. You’d better sit.”

She does so. “I had a word with Jumblatt last night.”

“I was compelled to leave early. I would have preferred to be here myself to—”

“I would have preferred you stay out of my area of authority.”

He selects a cigar from a lacquered wooden box on his desk.

Absurdly, she thinks,
Dudik smokes better ones. There is no money in the civil service
.

He rolls the cigar around in his hand. “You should be happy I haven’t suspended you, Advocate Barr. This is not an optimal situation.”

“Chief Supt. Barr.”

“Correct.” He puts the cigar down, a prop, perhaps a crutch. He purses his lips. “Let us be Chaim and Dahlia for a moment. Is that all right?”

“Do you really expect to me to stand aside and let your incompetents fuck this up as they do everything else?” She nearly spits it out: “Chaim.”

“Your son is a soldier, Dahlia.”

“He’s not yet twenty years old.”

“The Bedouin, too. Soldiers. For better or worse, it’s an Army matter.”

“Let me tell you about this Army matter. Ari breast-fed until he was two. He wouldn’t separate, glued to it, to me. When he was three, they found a tumor in his leg. After it was cut out I carried him around for a month. All through school he got into trouble for talking back to his teachers. Every week I used to have to go there and smooth it over. Chief commissioner, I don’t—”

“Chaim. Please.”

“Chaim, I don’t give a damn if this is an Army affair. This is a mother’s affair. I don’t care about anything but my son. Neither you nor the Army will make all the decisions here.”

“You understand that there exists a larger question. A political dimension. In the event there is a prisoner exchange, there must not be a mark on Al-Masri. He will lie anyway. That we can’t help. But he must not be touched.”

“You people, you can’t possibly understand.”

Again he goes for the cigar. He rolls it between his fingers,
taps it on the desk. “I lost mine at eighteen,” Zeltzer says. He is half looking away. “He wasn’t in the Army six months.”

In the ensuing silence both of them hear a phone ringing insistently from down the hall. Five rings, six. Then it stops. After a moment it begins to ring again.

“We’re shorthanded,” Zeltzer says. “They give us desks and phones, but no one to answer them. For a year I have been trying to change the phone system so that an unanswered call will roll over to a manned desk. It’s primitive. There is never any money for the Police.”

“I’m so sorry, chief commissioner. I . . .”

“Please. Chaim. My wife . . . you don’t want to know. She never got over it. I live with two ghosts. The boy’s, and hers. They say for some the hair turns white overnight. Just like that, like paint. With her it didn’t happen. Nothing happened. She just . . . died.”

“I shouldn’t have—”

He waves her off. “It doesn’t change anything. It’s just the way it is.”

“It won’t end, will it?” It is as if someone inside her is speaking.

“Not in our lifetime,” he says. “Not in our children’s, those that survive. My parents brought me from Russia when I was ten. They wanted me to live without hearing
filthy Jew
in the street. They wanted me to grow up free, to be a free Jew in a free Jewish land. But nothing is free, is it? Especially freedom.”

“Chaim, I need to handle this.”

As though coming to a decision, Zeltzer returns the cigar to its lacquered wooden box. “I’m not the most pleasant commander, am I? My men fear me. They don’t love me. You feel the same. Most people do.”

“I thought you’re a piece of shit.”

He laughs, just enough. It comes out as a snort. “I have been
called worse. The monsters killed my son. I became like them. Every night I awaken bathed in sweat. It doesn’t stop. It will never stop.”

“One day it must.”

“You’ll see, Dahlia. Even if your boy is saved. You won’t be. You’ll be like me.”

“Chaim . . .”

Zeltzer clears his throat, his voice dropping an octave. “Chief Supt. Barr, pursuant to instructions from the political echelon, I officially inform you that I have forbidden the use of extraordinary measures relating to the interrogation of prisoner Mohammed Al-Masri.” His voice shrinks to a whisper. “What in fact you do with him is your own business. Dismissed.”

Three armed men enter the room in which Ari and Salim sleep. Light floods in from the open door. Ari opens one eye, then closes it. They have been in darkness for many hours. Who knows how long? Salim sleeps on, his head in Ari’s lap.

“No more for this one,” Ari says in stilted Arabic. His eyes adjust. “He will die.”

One of the men says, “It is you we require.”

Ari does not move.

“Come, rise.”

Ari arranges their filthy blanket into a ball, slipping it under Salim’s head as he gets to his feet. He is unsteady. Two films run simultaneously through his mind. In one a bad thing is about to happen; in the other he is about to be released. He thinks,
Not the good film. They would be releasing us together
. Then he thinks,
But it could be me. It could be one at a time
. As he puts his hands behind his back for the handcuffs he sees the long drive to the border in the company of Red Cross personnel, men with short-cropped blond hair wearing spectacles and starched, pressed clothes, asking if he wants a cigarette or a candy bar. Swiss chocolate that—

They have arrived at the makeshift television studio.

In the hushed room with the garage door–sized electronic map, the eyes of a dozen officers are fixed on the video playing on a large screen. It is all too familiar: the martial music, the yellow and green flag of Hezbollah, the title beneath it—
FREE MOHAMMED EDWARD AL-MASRI
in English and Arabic—and then the inevitable action whose only sound track is the thwack of broomsticks striking the boy’s stomach and then his back, his stomach and then his back, a kind of rhythm section for the boy’s cries as they ebb and flow like an oboe solo overlaid against a bass line of thwacks. The rhythm is steady, unaltered, but the boy’s cries follow some atonal musical text: He cries out differently from a hit in the stomach or the kidneys, each distinctive wailing note cut short only by the next stroke. Like some dissonant symphony, it seems to go on without form until finally it just stops, at which point the boy is left hanging by his wrists like a beef carcass, silent and raw.

But still alive.

His captors make sure of that. Only alive is he worth anything, and only suffering is he worth a good deal more.

While two of Kobi’s specialists begin a frame-by-frame analysis of the footage, which soon enough will be playing in television newsrooms around the world after it is determined how much torture is too much for the general public and how
much is necessary to remain competitive in the business of news, Kobi moves to a desk at the far end of the room. Here he is unlikely to be overheard. He dials a number.

“The chief of staff is in a meeting,” an adjutant says on the other end.

“Tell him it’s a matter of urgency.”

In a few moments, Aviv Toledano’s rich baritone comes on the line. His hobby is singing. There is in fact a professional singer with close to the same name, one Avi Toledano. The general’s critics like to say that the country would be better protected with the singer in charge of the IDF. “Kobi, I was expecting this call.”

“Then I don’t have to—”

“Just clear it with Chaim Zeltzer.”

“You’ll pave the way?”

“It’s all dream work at this point. Hypothetical.”

“If it happens—”

“A deal is a deal, Kobi. I promised, the prime minister gave it his stamp of approval. In a military crisis, you are reactivated at your request. Period.”

“I’m in your debt.”

“Be that as it may, you’re in Zeltzer’s employ. Clear it with him.”

“Toli . . .”

“The trouble with this country, everyone wants to be a hero.”

Kobi does not feel like a hero. It is he who will have to tell Dahlia that the next video stars her son. In a half hour or so he will go to her office. This is not something he wants her to see on CNN.

This time she has Al-Masri brought to her office.
There is no sense in extending the charade
, she thinks.
If the man does not already know, then it is time he does
. Besides which, unlike the interview room, her office can be locked from within. The two constables leave.

“You’re no longer pretending,” Al-Masri says.

“I never did. It was all you.” Dahlia pulls a chair opposite. Even she is surprised at her own composure. She thinks:
This must be what it is for an actor. After hours, perhaps days, of
stage fright, insecurity, anxiety, he sets foot onstage, and then, poof, it is all gone. There is only the role
. She lights a cigarette. “Do you want one?”

“I don’t smoke.”

“Are you sure?”

“I don’t smoke. I never did.”

Dahlia blows a stream of blue smoke in his face. “Actually, I don’t remember you smoking. We all smoked in high school. You didn’t.”

“Please get that out of my face.”

She continues blowing smoke. “Tell me about your family, Edward.”

He tries to turn away but his torso is locked in place. He can move only his head. “I have nothing to tell you.”

“Tell me you wish to return to them.”

“You’re wasting your time.”

“I’ll be the judge of that.” She pretends to smile. Even the most beautiful woman becomes ugly when that happens, mouth twisting in a grimace, eyes dead. She exhales smoke again. “And jury.” She gets up, goes to the door, and locks it.

Outside, hearing the tumblers fall into place, the two constables exchange a look.

“Let me just explain this to you in a way you can understand. Zero subtlety. Of course as you know there is no word in Hebrew for
subtlety
. It’s not a Jewish concept.” She blows a stream of smoke in his eyes. “In a moment I will prove that you do smoke.”

“I demand to see a lawyer. And the Canadian ambassador.”

“There is a quaint American expression that I learned from a dear friend:
And people in hell want ice water
. Edward, you are in hell. You just don’t know it. And you will smoke.”

He turns his head away.

She pulls a scarf from her purse, knots it, gags him. It is a curiously intimate act, like helping a child into his coat, or not driving through a crosswalk when a pedestrian is approaching the corner but is not yet there. “Edward . . . I don’t mind calling you Edward. You may call me chief superintendent. Many believe otherwise, but in life we do get to choose what we will be. Though some of us make better choices than others.”

He tries to say something. It comes out muffled, noise.

“Now, Edward, it may seem counterproductive that I must silence you to make you talk. But I’d rather not alarm the constables. They’re just simple cops. Me, I’m . . . not so simple.” Slowly, almost erotically, she unbuttons his shirt. “Did you say you didn’t smoke? Let us see.” She holds the lit end of her cigarette to his chest.

His scream is merely a soft noise. He shakes his head back and forth.

“Well, well. Edward, it turns out you do smoke after all. Where there is fire, there is smoke, no?” She pauses. “What, cat got your tongue? I love those American expressions. Do you have them in Canada? No? Yes? Would you like to say something, Professor Al-Masri?” She tousles his hair. “Shall we perform our little exercise again? Yes? No? Perhaps just once more?”