The Pirate (23 page)

If she were a little heavier, Leila thought, she would look no different than my mother. Or any of the women in my family.

Hamid opened the door and she got into the truck beside the driver. He ran around to the back and climbed in with the women. “Okay,” he called to the driver.

The last of the furniture was being removed as they drove onto the road and fell into line behind the other trucks. A moment later the last truck came up behind them and blew its horn as a signal. Up front the first truck began to move and soon they were all rolling down the road toward the coast.

They had their last glimpse of the camp as they turned the curve around the mountain on the southern end. It was as empty and deserted as yesterday. Again the women were silent. There were no more jokes. They were all preoccupied with their own thoughts.

They had been on the road for less than an hour when they heard the sounds of explosions coming from behind them in the area of the camp. A moment later they heard the whine of the aircraft and just as suddenly the planes were upon them. Up ahead a truck burst into flame.

Hamid stood up in the back of the truck. “Israeli fighters!” he shouted to the driver. “Get off the road!”

But in the roar and the noise the driver didn’t hear him. Instead he put on a burst of speed and crashed into the truck ahead. At the same time another jet made a pass low over the convoy.

More bullets whistled through the air. Another truck was struck and blew up. The women were screaming and trying to get off the back of the truck.

“Over the sides!” Hamid yelled. “Take cover in the ditches!”

Leila moved automatically. She hit the ground, rolled over and scrambled toward the side of the road, diving head-first into a drainage ditch.

Another jet roared down on them. This time she could see the flaming trails left by its rockets. More trucks seemed to explode in clouds of smoke.

“Why aren’t we shooting back at them?” she heard someone shouting.

“With what?” someone else shouted back. “All the guns have been stowed on the trucks!”

Another woman jumped into the ditch beside her. Leila heard her sobbing. She didn’t raise her head to look. Another plane was making a pass.

This time a missile hit the truck she had been on. It exploded in a thousand fragments and anguished screams filled the air. The debris that fell around her contained scraps of metal and parts of human bodies.

She burrowed further into the ditch, trying to bury herself in the fetid earth. Somehow she had to escape death at the hands of the flying monsters.

Again the planes roared by, the shrieking whistles of their jets trailing behind them as the missiles tore once more into the convoy. Then they were gone as suddenly as they had come, climbing high into the sky and turning to the west, the sunlight glancing off the blue painted stars on their sides.

For a moment there was silence, then the sound of pain began to rise in the air. Moans and screams and cries for help. Slowly Leila raised her head from the ditch.

On the road a few people began to move. She turned to look at the woman who had jumped into the ditch beside her. It was Soad.

“Soad,” she whispered. “Are you all right?”

Slowly the Egyptian turned toward her. “I think I’m hurt,” she said, in an oddly soft voice.

“Let me help you,” Leila said, moving toward her.

“Thanks,” Soad whispered. She tried to raise her head then slipped gently back to the ground. A rush of blood bubbled up through her mouth and nose, staining the ground beneath her and then her eyes went wide and staring.

Leila looked at her. It was the first time she had ever seen anyone die, but she did not have to be told that Soad was dead. Leila felt a cold chill. She forced herself to look away and got to her feet.

She stumbled out of the ditch. The ground was covered with debris. In front of her was a severed hand. The diamond ring on one of the fingers sparkled in the light of the sun. She kicked it away and walked toward the truck.

There was nothing left but twisted wood and iron and around it were strewn broken and mangled bodies. She stared at it dully, then walked around to the front. The CO’s body lay half over the driver, half out of the open door. Her skirt was twisted obscenely over her pudgy thighs.

Out of the corner of her eye, Leila saw a movement. A soldier had found the hand and was pulling the diamond ring from its finger. When he had the ring, he threw the hand away, carefully examined the diamond, then put it in his pocket. He looked up as he became aware of her stare.

She didn’t speak.

He smiled sheepishly. “The dead need nothing,” he said. Then he walked behind the truck.

The nausea rose in her throat and she bent double with pain as she retched and spewed her vomit onto the road. She felt herself growing faint and was beginning to fall when a strong arm came around her shoulders.

“Easy,” Hamid said. “Easy.”

She was empty now but weak and trembling. She turned toward him and buried her face against his shoulder. “Why?” she cried. “Why did they have to do this to us? We never did anything to them.”

“It’s war,” Hamid said.

She looked up into his face. There was blood across his cheek. “They knew the raid was coming, that’s why they were moving us out.”

Hamid didn’t answer.

“It was stupid then,” she said angrily. “Keeping all those trucks together on the road. Giving them a target like that.”

Hamid looked at her without expression.

“Is this what we trained for? To be slaughtered like sheep?”

“It won’t be like that when we listen to the radio tonight,” he said. “My guess is that we heroically shot down at least six Israeli jets.”

“What are you talking about?” She asked, bewildered. “Are you crazy? We never fired a shot.”

He spoke in a quiet voice. “That’s right. But there are one hundred million Arabs who were not here to see that.”

“The Jews. They are animals. We were defenseless and still they came.”

“Yesterday we won a great victory, according to the radio,” he said. “In Tel Aviv a school bus was blown up, killing thirty children. I guess this was their way of showing they didn’t like it.”

“The Brotherhood is right,” she said. “The only way to stop them is to exterminate them.”

He looked at her silently for a moment, then he reached into his pocket and took out a cigarette and lit it. He exhaled the smoke through his nose. “Come, little one, let’s leave this. There is nothing here for us to do and we have a long walk ahead of us.”

“We could stay and help bury them.”

He pointed behind them. She turned and saw men searching through the debris. “Right now, they are busy looking for whatever they can find. Later they will fight among themselves to keep what they find. After that there will be only you to fight about. You are the only woman left.”

She stared at him speechlessly.

“I don’t think your desire to give solace and comfort to our comrades extends to twenty or thirty men at the same time.”

“How do you know they won’t come after us?”

He bent swiftly and picked something up from the ground at his feet. For the first time she saw that he had an automatic rifle, then she saw the gun stuck into his belt.

“You expected this?”

He shrugged. “I told you I was a professional. I had these under my bench and grabbed them before I jumped from the truck. Besides, I had a feeling. Didn’t I also tell you that thirteen was an unlucky number?”

CHAPTER 9

Baydr watched Jordana across the room. He felt satisfied. He had made the right decision. Jordana was just the balance he had needed. Now she was bidding good night to the Hutchinsons. She had made an impression on the wives and there was no doubt that it had made a difference in his relationships with the bank’s officers. Now they were a team.

Of course his new profit-sharing proposal had been a great help. Fifteen percent of the profits to be distributed among the employees on a stock dividend basis had not hurt at all. There was one thing all people had in common—greed.

Joe Hutchinson came over to him. “I’m glad we were able to get together,” he said in his hearty California voice. “It’s sure good to know that the man you’re working with has the same ideas that you have.”

“I feel good too, my friend,” Baydr said.

“The girls hit it off pretty good too,” Hutchinson said, looking back at his wife. “Your little lady invited Dolly to visit her in the south of France next summer.”

“Good,” Baydr smiled. “You come too. We can have some fun.”

The Californian winked his eye and grinned. “I heard about them French babes,” he said. “Is it true they all go around topless on the beaches?”

“On some of them.”

“I’ll be there, you can bet on that. I never got as far as Europe during the war. I caught some flak in North Africa and the only girls I ever saw were gook whores. And no self-respecting man would touch them. Either they were full of clap or else they had a nigger up an alley to run a knife into you.”

Apparently, Hutchinson didn’t realize he was talking about Arab countries. In his mind there could be no association between the natives of North Africa and the man who stood before him. “The war was a bad time,” Baydr said.

“Was your family in it?”

“Not really. Our country is small and I guess no one thought it important enough to fight over.” He didn’t mention that Prince Feiyad had entered into an agreement stipulating that if Germany won they would have been placed in charge of all the oil development in the Middle East.

“What do you think?” Hutchinson asked. “Will there be another war in the Middle East?”

Baydr looked him in the eye. “Your guess is as good as mine.”

“Well, if anything does happen,” Hutchinson said, “I hope you give ’em hell. It’s about time somebody put those Jews in their place.”

“We don’t have many Jewish customers, do we?” Baydr asked.

“No, sir,” the banker said enthusiastically. “We just don’t encourage them, that’s why.”

“Do you think that’s why we blew the Rancho del Sol development?” Baydr asked. “Because some of the developers were Jewish?”

“That has to be the reason,” Hutchinson said quickly. “They wanted to do business with the Jewish banks in Los Angeles.”

“I was curious. Somebody told me that we were underbid. LA gave them the money at prime and we wanted a point and a half over.”

“The Jews did that deliberately to undercut us,” Hutchinson said.

“Next time you cut right back. I want our bank to be competitive. It’s the only way to attract the big deals.”

“Even if they’re Jews?”

Baydr’s voice went flat. “Don’t get confused. What we’re talking about is dollars. United States dollars. That deal could have made us two million in three years at prime. If we undercut it by a half point, it would still be a million and a half. That’s the kind of money I don’t like to pass up.”

“But the Jews would have underbid us anyway.”

“Maybe,” Baydr said. “But we just might remember that from now on we’ll be an equal-opportunity lender.”

“Okay,” Hutchinson said. “You’re the boss.”

“By the way,” Baydr said. “Is that last figure you quoted me on Leisure City still firm?”

“Twelve million dollars, yes. The Japs have forced it up.”

“Put a hold on it at that figure.”

“But wait a minute. We haven’t that kind of money available,” Hutchinson protested.

“I said put a hold on it, not buy it. I think we may have a partner by the end of the week.”

“The hold will cost us ten percent, a million, two hundred thousand. If the partner doesn’t show up we lose it. And there go our profits for the year. The examiners won’t like that.”

“I’ll take the chance. If worse come to worst, I’ll put up the money myself.” If everything worked out right, neither he nor the bank would have to put up a penny. The Japanese would put up six million, and the other six would come from his Middle Eastern group which the bank in New York could finance and he would have it three ways. The bank would collect interest on the money and an equity, he would collect an equity for his share in the Japanese consortium, and he also had an equity in the Middle Eastern group. Money, it seemed, had a strange power to feed on itself and grow.

Finally the Hutchinsons were gone. Jordana came back into the room. She sank into a chair exhausted. “Jesus,” she said. “I don’t believe it.”

He smiled. “What don’t you believe?”

“That there are still people in the world like that. I thought they were all gone by now. I remember them from when I was a child.”

“You’ll find people don’t really change.”

“I think they do. You’ve changed. I’ve changed.”

He met her eyes. “That’s not necessarily for the good, is it?”

“It depends on how you feel. I don’t think I could ever go back to that kind of life. No more than you can go back home and stay there.”

He was silent. In a way she was right. There was no way he could ever go back and live as his father lived. There was too much going on in the world.

“I could use a smoke,” she said, looking up at him. “Does Jabir have any of that private hash of his?”

“I’m sure he has,” Baydr said, clapping his hands.

Jabir appeared from the adjacent room. “Yes, master?”

Baydr spoke rapidly in Arabic. A moment later Jabir was back with a silver cigarette case. He opened it and held it out to Jordana. The cigarettes were beautifully rolled, complete with cork tips. Carefully she took one. He then turned and extended it toward Baydr, who also took one. Jabir placed the cigarette case on the coffee table in front of Jordana and struck a match. He held the flame at the right distance so that only the top touched the cigarette and none of the heat came through. He lit Baydr’s cigarette in exactly the same manner.

“Thank you,” Jordana said.

Jabir salaamed, in the gesture of obeisance. “I am honored, mistress.” He left the room quietly.

Jordana sucked the smoke deep into her lungs. She felt its tranquil effects. “This is beautiful,” she said. “No one seems to get it the way Jabir does.”

“It is grown by his own family on their own farm, not far from where my father was born. The Arabs call it the stuff of which dreams are made.”