Prince of Fire (35 page)

At eight Gabriel would leave Jerusalem and make the drive down the Bab al-Wad to King Saul Boulevard. The proceedings were held in the top-floor conference room so Lev would not have far to walk when he wished to pop in and observe them. Gabriel, of course, was the star witness. His conduct, from the moment he’d returned to Office discipline until his escape from the Gare de Lyon was reviewed in excruciating detail. Despite Shamron’s dire predictions, there was to be no bloodletting. The results of such investigations were usually preordained, and Gabriel could see from the outset that he was not going to be made the scapegoat. This was a collective mistake, the committee members seemed to be saying by the tone of their questions, a forgivable sin committed by an intelligence apparatus desperate to avoid another catastrophic loss of life. Still, at times the questions became pointed. Did Gabriel have no suspicions about the motivations of Mahmoud Arwish? Or the loyalty of David Quinnell? Would things not have gone differently if he’d listened to his teammates in Marseilles and turned back instead of going with the girl? At least then Khaled’s plan to destroy the credibility of the Office would not have succeeded. “You’re right,” Gabriel said, “and my wife would be dead, along with many more innocent people.”

One by one, the others were brought before the committee as well, first Yossi and Rimona, then Yaakov and lastly Dina, whose discoveries had fueled the investigation into Khaled in
the first place. It pained Gabriel to see them in the dock. His career was over, but for the others the Khaled affair, as it had become known, would leave a black mark on their records that would never be expunged.

In the late afternoon, when the committee had adjourned, he would drive to Mount Herzl to spend time with Leah. Sometimes they would sit in her room; and sometimes, if there was still light, he would place her in a wheelchair and push her slowly round the grounds. She never failed to acknowledge his presence and usually managed to speak a few words to him. Her hallucinatory journeys to Vienna became less apparent, though he was never certain precisely what she was thinking.

“Where is Dani buried?” she asked once, as they sat beneath the canopy of a pine tree.

“The Mount of Olives.”

“Will you take me there sometime?”

“If your doctor says it’s all right.”

Once, Chiara accompanied him to the hospital. As they entered, she sat down in the lobby and told Gabriel to take his time.

“Would you like to meet her?” Chiara had never seen Leah.

“No,” she said, “I think it’s better if I wait here. Not for my sake, for hers.”

“She won’t know.”

“She’ll know, Gabriel. A woman always knows when a man’s in love with someone else.”

They never quarreled about Leah again. Their battle, from that point onward, was a black operation, a covert affair waged by long silences and remarks edged with double meaning. Chiara never entered their bed without first checking to see
whether the papers had been signed. Her lovemaking was as confrontational as her silences.
My body is intact,
she seemed to be saying to him.
I’m real, Leah is only a memory.

The apartment grew claustrophobic, so they took to eating out. Some evenings they walked over to Ben-Yehuda Street—or to Mona, a trendy restaurant that was actually located in the cellar of the old campus of the Bezalel Academy of Art. One evening they drove down Highway One to Abu Ghosh, one of the only Arab villages along the road to survive the expulsions of Plan Dalet. They ate hummus and grilled lamb in an outdoor restaurant in the village square, and for a few moments it was possible to imagine how different things might have been had Khaled’s grandfather not turned the road into a killing zone. Chiara marked the occasion by buying Gabriel an expensive bracelet from a village silversmith. The next evening, on King George Street, she bought him a silver watch to match. Keepsakes, she called them. Tokens by which to remember me.

When they returned home that night, there was a message on the answering machine. Gabriel pressed the playback button and heard the voice of Dina Sarid, telling him that she’d found someone who had been there the night Sumayriyya fell.

T
HE FOLLOWING AFTERNOON
, when the committee had adjourned, Gabriel drove to Sheinkin Street and collected Dina and Yaakov from an outdoor café. They drove north along the coast highway through dusty pink light, past Herzliyya and Netanya. A few miles beyond Caesarea, the slopes of Mount Carmel rose before them. They rounded the Bay of Haifa and headed for Akko. Gabriel, as he continued north toward Nahariyya, thought of Operation Ben-Ami—the night a column
of Haganah came up this very road with orders to demolish the Arab villages of the Western Galilee. Just then he glimpsed a strange conical structure, stark and gleaming white, rising above the green blanket of an orange grove. The unusual building, Gabriel knew, was the children’s memorial at Yad Layeled, a museum of Holocaust remembrance at Kibbutz Lohamei Ha’Getaot. The settlement had been founded after the war by survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. Adjacent to the edge of the kibbutz, and barely visible in the tall wild grass, were the ruins of Sumayriyya.

He turned onto a local road and followed it inland. Dusk was fast approaching as they entered al-Makr. Gabriel stopped on the main street and, with the engine still running, entered a coffeehouse and asked the proprietor for directions to the house of Hamzah al-Samara. A moment of silence followed while the Arab appraised Gabriel coolly from the opposite side of the counter. Clearly he assumed the Jewish visitor to be a Shabak officer, an impression Gabriel made no effort to correct. The Arab led Gabriel back into the street and, with a series of points and gestures, showed him the way.

The house was the largest in the village. It seemed several generations of al-Samaras lived there, because there were a number of small children playing in the small dusty courtyard. Seated in the center was an old man. He wore a gray galabia and white kaffiyeh and was puffing on a water pipe. Gabriel and Yaakov stood at the open side of the courtyard and waited for permission to enter. Dina remained in the car; the old man, Gabriel knew, would never speak forthrightly in the presence of a bareheaded Jewess.

Al-Samara looked up and, with a desultory wave of his hand, beckoned them. He spoke a few words to the oldest of the
children and a moment later two more chairs appeared. Then a woman came, a daughter perhaps, and brought three glasses of tea. All this before Gabriel had even explained to him the purpose of his visit. They sat in silence for a moment, sipping their tea and listening to the buzz of cicadas in the surrounding fields. A goat trotted into the courtyard and gently butted Gabriel’s ankle. A child, robed and barefoot, shooed the animal away. Time, it seemed, had stopped. Were it not for the electric lights coming on in the house, and the satellite dish atop the roof, Gabriel would have found it easy to imagine that Palestine was still ruled from Constantinople.

“Have I done something wrong?” the old man asked in Arabic. It was the first assumption of many Arabs when two tough-looking men from the government arrived uninvited at their door.

“No,” Gabriel said, “we just wanted to talk to you.”

“About what?”

The old man, hearing Gabriel’s answer, drew thoughtfully on his water pipe. He had hypnotic gray eyes and a neat mustache. His sandaled feet looked as though they had never seen a pumice stone.

“Where are you from?” he asked.

“The Valley of Jezreel,” Gabriel replied.

Al-Samara nodded slowly. “And before that?”

“My parents came from Germany.”

The gray eyes moved from Gabriel to Yaakov.

“And you?”

“Hadera.”

“And before?”

“Russia.”

“Germans and Russians,” al-Samara said, shaking his head. “Were it not for Germans and Russians, I’d still be living in Sumayriyya, instead of here in al-Makr.”

“You were there the night the village fell?”

“Not exactly. I was walking in a field near the village.” He paused and added conspiratorially: “With a girl.”

“And when the raid started?”

“We hid in the fields and watched our families walking to the north toward Lebanon. We saw the Jewish sappers dynamiting our homes. We stayed in the field all the next day. When the darkness came again, we walked here to al-Makr. The rest of my family, my mother and father, my brothers and sisters, all ended up in Lebanon.”

“And the girl you were with that night?”

“She became my wife.” Another puff on the water pipe. “I’m an exile, too—an
internal
exile. I still have the deed to my father’s land in Sumayriyya, but I cannot go back to it. The Jews confiscated it and never bothered to compensate me for my loss. Imagine, a kibbutz built by Holocaust survivors on the ruins of an Arab village.”

Gabriel looked around at the large house. “You’ve done well for yourself.”

“I’m far better off than those who went into exile. It could have been like this for all of us if there’d never been a war. I don’t blame you for my loss. I blame the Arab leaders. If Haj Amin and the others had accepted the partition, the Western Galilee would have been part of Palestine. But they chose war, and when they lost the war, they cried that the Arabs had been victims. Arafat did the same thing at Camp David, yes? He walked away from another opportunity at partition. He started
another war, and when the Jews fought back, he cried that he was the victim. When will we learn?”

The goat came back. This time al-Samara gave it a whack on the nose with the mouthpiece of his water pipe.

“Surely you didn’t come all the way here to listen to an old man’s story.”

“I’m looking for a family that came from your village, but I don’t know their name.”

“We all knew each other,” al-Samara said. “If we were to walk through the ruins of Sumayriyya right now, I could show you my house—and I could show you the house of my friend, and the houses of my cousins. Tell me something about this family, and I’ll tell you their name.”

He told the old man the things the girl had said during the final miles before Paris—that her grandfather had been a village elder, not a
muktar
but an important man, and that he’d owned forty dunams of land and a large flock of goats. He’d had at least one son. After the fall of Sumayriyya, they’d gone north, to Ein al-Hilweh in Lebanon. Al-Samara listened thoughtfully to Gabriel’s description but seemed perplexed. He called over his shoulder, into the house. A woman emerged, elderly like him, her head covered by a veil. She spoke directly to al-Samara, carefully avoiding the gaze of Gabriel and Yaakov.

“You’re certain it was
forty
dunams?” he asked. “Not thirty, or twenty, but
forty
?”

“That’s what I was told.”

He made a contemplative draw on his pipe. “You’re right,” he said. “That family ended up in Lebanon, in Ein al-Hilweh. Things got bad during the Lebanese civil war. The boys became fighters. They’re all dead, from what I hear.”

“Do you know their name?”

“They’re called al-Tamari. If you meet any of them, please give them my regards. Tell them I’ve been to their house. Don’t tell them about my villa in al-Makr, though. It will only break their hearts.”

“E
IN AL
-H
ILWEH
? A
RE YOU OUT OF YOUR FUCKING
mind?”

It was early the following morning. Lev was seated at his empty glass desk, his coffee cup suspended midway between his saucer and his lips. Gabriel had managed to slip into the Office while Lev’s secretary was in the ladies’ room. The girl would pay dearly for the lapse in security when Gabriel was gone.

“Ein al-Hilweh is a no-go zone, period, end of discussion. It’s worse now than it was in eighty-two. A half-dozen Islamic terror organizations have set up shop there. It’s not a place for the faint of heart—or an Office agent whose picture has been splashed about the French press.”

“Well, someone has to go.”

“You’re not even sure the old man’s still alive.”

Gabriel frowned, then sat, uninvited, in one of the sleek leather chairs in front of Lev’s desk.

“But if he
is
alive, he can tell us where his daughter went after she left the camp.”

“He might,” Lev agreed, “or he might know nothing at all. Khaled certainly told the girl to deceive her family for security reasons. For all we really know, the entire story about Sumayriyya might be a lie.”

“She had no reason to lie to me,” Gabriel said. “She thought I was going to be killed.”

Lev spent a long moment pondering his coffee. “There’s a man in Beirut who might be able to help us with this. His name is Nabil Azouri.”

“What’s his story?”

“He’s Lebanese and Palestinian. He does a little of everything. Works as a stringer for a few Western news outlets. Owns a nightclub. Does the odd bit of arms dealing and has been known to move the odd shipment of hashish now and again. He also works for us, of course.”

“Sounds like a real pillar of his community.”

“He’s a shit,” Lev said. “Lebanese to the core. Lebanon incarnate. But he’s exactly the kind of person we need to walk into Ein al-Hilweh and talk to the girl’s father.”