Exile: a novel (16 page)

They found a place behind the barricades at the corner of Market and Fourth. With a practiced eye, David studied the policemen on motorcycles waiting along Market as it ran toward Tenth, the barricades blocking Fourth Street. “I’d guess they’re going down Tenth Street.”

Carole took his hand. David scanned the onlookers lining Market Street: a cluster of young Jewish men in yarmulkes; a few Arab students whose signs called for an end to occupation; a bearded derelict with a shopping cart and the dissociated look of a man wandering in a daze; mothers and children waiting to experience history; a trim young man in
sunglasses whose expression of tensile alertness marked him as a Secret Service agent. On the roof of a sporting goods store, David spotted a man with a sniper rifle, and then his attention was caught by two motorcycle policemen speeding toward them from the direction of Tenth Street.

As if on cue, a team of uniformed police opened the barricades blocking Fourth Street. Abruptly, the two cyclists swerved onto Fourth, their Harley-Davidsons careening sideways. They stopped a few feet down the block, brakes screeching, one stationed on each side of the street. Beyond them, David saw more policemen and barricades lining the one-way street toward Highway 101.

“Those two motor cycle cops,” David said. “Something’s happening . . .”

Carole shot him an apprehensive look. “Trouble?”

“Just caution, I think.”

From near the Commonwealth Club came the whine of police sirens, the sound of the motorcade starting up; just beyond Fourth Street, more police pushed steel barricades across Market, sealing it off. To David, this symmetry of sound and movement expressed a certain majesty.

The motorcade came toward them now—a phalanx of six more police officers on motorcycles, followed by the limousines in close formation, perhaps six feet apart.

“Which car is Ben-Aron’s?” Carole asked.

Almost sinuously, the motorcycles turned in unison down Fourth Street, passing in front of David and Carole.

Ibrahim watched the policemen glide past him, marking the final moments of his life. Across the street, Iyad hunched over his motorcycle, preparing to give the signal. “I’ll go first,” he had instructed. “Count to three, then follow. Even if they shoot me you’ll blow him straight to hell.”

Through clenched teeth, Ibrahim murmured his sister’s name, a kind of prayer. He could find no words to speak to God.

The first limousine turned the corner. Peering vainly at its opaque windows, Carole murmured, “I don’t think we’ll be able to see him.”

The second limousine slowly passed, then the third. These, too, had tinted windows; inside, David knew, rode aides and Secret Service agents and members of Ben-Aron’s security detail. The two sharpshooters on the trunk of the fourth limousine scanned each side of Market Street.

“Here he comes, I think.”

As the next limousine turned down Fourth Street, the sharpshooters
braced themselves. From each side, the two motorcycle policemen who had waited there joined the motorcade. David trained his gaze on the limousine gliding around the corner.

Its windows were untinted. Leaning across the barricade, David peered into the rear seat and saw the prime minister raise his hand, half wave and half benediction, the brief moment passing with his limousine.

As David and Carole watched, the two policemen slowed their motorcycles until Ben-Aron’s limousine slipped between them.

To his right, Ibrahim saw the driver glancing out at him with surprise. But from the car ahead, the sharpshooters still watched the crowd for signs of danger. Heart racing, Ibrahim awaited Iyad’s signal.

Iyad edged his motorcycle closer to the limousine, slowing so that he was beside its rear window.
“Please,”
Ibrahim implored him,
“let it be done.”

Still Iyad gave him no sign. From the passenger seat, the aquiline face of Amos Ben-Aron seemed to stare into Iyad’s eyes.

A jolt ran through Ibrahim like an electric current. In a reflex of resolve and panic, he pressed the toggle switch that would end this man’s life, and his...

Nothing happened. Ibrahim’s fear turned to disbelief.

At that moment, Iyad veered toward the limousine.

David’s disbelief lasted a split second—the instant it took for a bullet ripping through the assassin’s head to spew blood and brains into the air. Then a thunderous explosion shook the sidewalk beneath their feet and shattered the windows behind them.

Ben-Aron’s limousine erupted into flames, hurling glass and metal and body parts outward in slow motion. Carole’s scream filled David’s ears; reeling from the concussive blast, he pulled her close to him. His eyes recorded images his mind could not comprehend, a kaleidoscope of horror: a severed arm; the misshapen carcass of the limousine melting into a grotesque tomb; one of the assassins sprawled in the gutter like an over-sized rag doll. David knew only that Amos Ben-Aron was dead, his dream as shattered as his body.

Trembling, Carol could make no sound. David pressed her face to his chest so that she could not see the images filling his soul with horror.

Dully, Ibrahim felt the blood soaking his tattered uniform. Helmet gone, his head lay on the concrete, which had scraped his face raw.

Was he alive? He must be. But he comprehended nothing of what had happened.

All around him he heard keening, the ululations of grief and revulsion.
I will meet the Prophet, surely I will meet the Prophet.
Darkness overcame him, a wretched sob of anguish dying in his throat.

They had spent the intervening hours as involuntary prisoners, answering the questions of two FBI agents while the police and other agents sealed off the scene, picking through debris and the charred pieces of what had once been human beings. It seemed that there were three victims beyond Amos Ben-Aron—two men in the prime minister’s limousine and their murderer, whose body had simply disappeared. The second assassin had survived, at least for the moment; paramedics had laid him on a stretcher, head lolling to one side, and rushed him to a hospital with sirens blaring. Numbly, David had tried to comfort Carole; save for her halting answers for the FBI, she had said little. Now David sat with her on the couch where, the night before, Harold Shorr had deprecated a dead man’s hope of peace.

Nothing made sense—not the unearthly quiet of a tenth-floor pent-house, the evening sunlight of a pristine day, the memory of Amos Ben-Aron speaking in the next room. David felt suspended between reality and the hazy remnant of a nightmare.

Carole looked five years older. “I was thinking of Anne Frank,” she said tiredly, “what she wrote in her diary: ‘In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.’ Despite what happened to my father during the Holocaust—to all of them—I try to. But not now.”

When the telephone rang, it was David who answered. “Are both of you all right?” Harold asked.

“As much as we can be.”

“I know.” Harold’s monotone bespoke unutterable weariness. “It seems never to end—our history, this murder of Jews. Who were they, David?”

“I don’t know. The man they carried away looked Arab.”

“Arab,” Harold repeated softly. “This much we know—suicide bombing has come to America. To kill a Jew who believed he could make peace with Arabs.”

Though David was seared by what he had witnessed, the bitter resignation he heard came from Harold’s wounded soul, cauterized but never healed. “Please come over,” David told him. “It’s good for us to be together.”

Silently, the three of them watched television.

David imagined the world reverberating, the shock waves of the explosion he had witnessed spreading outward in concentric circles. From Washington, the president expressed the nation’s shame and anger and resolve, pledging “America’s commitment to find and punish the authors of this evil, however long it takes.” The president of the Palestinian Authority, Marwan Faras, looking shrunken and defensive, decried “the heinous murder of this man of peace.” The president of Israel joined throngs of Jews praying at the Western Wall; a spontaneous gathering in Tel Aviv swelled to a hundred thousand people. Across America, mourners gathered outside Israeli consulates; on CNN, commentators and statesmen invoked the murder of John F. Kennedy and the horror of America’s first suicide bombing—its unspeakable slaughter, its foreignness, its resonance with the terror of 9/11. The mystery surrounding the assassins only deepened David’s sense of a cosmic disturbance, history forever changed.

“You think they knew the route?” Harold asked.

“It seemed so. More than that, I think they knew the route had changed.”

“What does that mean?”

“That someone told them—maybe by inadvertence, maybe not.” David sipped his scotch, feeling the anesthetic warmth of alcohol. “Somehow they got uniforms, motorcycles, and explosives, infiltrated the cops, and ferreted out where Ben-Aron was going. Whoever planned this was more than lucky—they were sophisticated and determined.”

Carole’s cell phone rang. Reluctantly, she reached into her purse. “Burt?” she said, leaving David to wonder why his chief political consultant was callingat such a time. “Yes,” Carole went on, “it’s terrible. And yes, he’s here.”

She handed David the phone. Burt Newman spoke quickly, as if the act of speech was taxed by the minute. “Sorry to bother you at Carole’s. But Channel 2 wants you for the
Ten o’Clock News
.”

“What on earth for?”

“The BenAron assassination. The producer wants somebody with
political insight and legal experience, preferably as a prosecutor, to walk people through what’s happening here. You’re perfect—”

“Burt,” David said emphatically, “I met the man. I
saw
what happened today.”

“ ‘Saw’? You mean literally saw, as in you were there?”

“Yes.”

“That’s even better. You’re four people in one: acquaintance, eyewitness, politician, exprosecutor.” Pausing, Newman continued in a more somber tone. “I’m sorry, David. But that’s an hour of airtime somebody’s going to fill—a hundred thousand dollars’ worth, for free. And no one can accuse you of grandstanding—”

“Maybe grave robbing.”

Carole turned to watch him. “You’re preparing to run for Congress,” Newman rejoined. “The murder of Amos Ben-Aron is as big a news event as this city is ever going to see, and you—David Wolfe—can speak to all of its dimensions with the seriousness it deserves. Besides, at least a quarter million people will be watching. Do you want them listening to some blatherer or you? More to the point, do you want to go to Congress? If the president of the United States can suck it up on television, so can you.”

This was surreal, David thought, a heartless joke. And it touched a certain discomfort with one aspect of his own ambitions: the need for exposure, the no-man’s-land between real and synthetic, sincere and self-serving. When he no longer knew the difference, he would become a nowhere man. “I’ll call you back,” he told his handler.

Getting off, David explained what Newman wanted. “How can I possibly do this?” he asked.

Harold lay his head back on the couch, eyes closed, dropping out of the discussion. “Because everything Burt said is right,” Carole answered. “If something happened to Dad—no matter how sad it was—wouldn’t you say something about him if a news station asked you to?”

“Why don’t I just say it now, while Harold can still hear me?”

Carole shook her head. “David,” she said tiredly, “what you do is up to you. But you’re not like some narcissist on reality TV. You care about Amos Ben-Aron and what he stood for.”

David put down his drink. “Give me the cell phone,” he said at length. “But I won’t do the eyewitness stuff. I can’t.”

It was a night for alienation.

The set of the
Ten o’Clock News
was at once glitzy and antiseptic, reminding David of a motel for business travelers, one he could not wait to
leave. And though he liked the anchorwoman, Amy Chan, their dialogue felt like an out-of-body experience, that strange moment at a cocktail party when David, utterly detached, discovered himself listening to his own responses as though they came from someone else.

“In our lifetime, Amy, there are only a few leaders we call great— Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, maybe Lech Walesa in Poland. The tragedy is that in a year or so, we might have been adding Amos Ben-Aron. Now we’re left to hope that his death doesn’t mean the end of hope, the beginning of more bloodshed.”

The anchorwoman nodded gravely. “That brings us to the legal and investigative aspects. The FBI has a man in custody. What happens next?”

“Let’s start with the crime.” He was on surer ground here, David found, his prosecutor’s reflexes kicking in. “This is a triple murder—moreover, the murder of a foreign official and the murder of the Secret Service agent are both federal crimes. That means the investigation and prosecution will fall under the jurisdiction of the Justice Department and, locally, the United States attorney. Marnie Sharpe is a capable, experienced prosecutor—my bet is that she will help direct the investigation and try any prosecution herself. She’s already under tremendous pressure—everyone is, from the president on down. The outcome of the investigation may change the history of at least two peoples, Israelis and Palestinians—”

“The president,” Chan noted, “is committing massive resources.”

David felt the camera staring at him from the shadows beyond the set. “An Israeli prime minister under our protection was murdered on U.S. soil. That means that the FBI, the Secret Service, and the CIA will be working with Israel’s external security organization, the Mossad, and the Shin Bet, Israel’s equivalent of the FBI. They’ll also be working with the subunit of the Shin Bet that provided personal protection for the prime minister.

“The FBI will take the lead—they’ll set up a command center in San Francisco, no doubt run by a counterterrorism expert, and interrogate every cop and Secret Service agent involved in protecting Ben-Aron—”