The Covenant (13 page)

_______

They made copies, and then they sat down to watch.

“Okay, press play,” Sean told Ismael.

Only the four of them were in the room, which had been cleared of secretaries, stringers, messenger boys, and of course, all “locals,” as they called Israeli Jews.

The blank screen went on for four minutes, and then suddenly, when they’d all but given up, the voice-over began, followed by one of the most chilling images they had ever seen.

“Good God!” Julia whispered, a lump in her throat. “It’s a child. She can’t be more than five or six.”

Duggan got on the phone. “Get me the prime minister’s office.”

He put his hand over the receiver and turned to Julia. “Call headquarters in Oxford and tell them to hold the evening news prime spot, we are going to be broadcasting.”

“Hello, this is Jack Duggan of BCN. A videotape has been delivered to our offices anonymously, and it contains an ultimatum showing Dr. Jonathan Margulies and what appears to be his child… Yes, we are here. We’ll be expecting you.” He hung up. “The Israeli military, probably the
Shabak
—secret service, that is—will be here any minute to pick it up.”

“I think we need to contact the mother. She shouldn’t hear about this on television,” Julia insisted.

“Look, the Israelis are going to do that. We don’t want to be involved with hysterical Jewish mothers…” Sean waved her off.

“Actually, that would be a great angle,Julia. Get her to let you film while she’s watching the tape for the first time. Do it before the Israelis take over. Get an exclusive. Let’s tell her she gets to see it if we get an exclusive.”

“And if she says no?”

“Then she can watch it with the rest of the world.”

Julia leaned back. She felt sick and confused, her stomach filled with a desperate discomfort. It was just being tired, being hungry, she thought. “Does anyone have a candy bar?” she asked faintly.

Right now, she needed something to sweeten the terrible taste in her mouth.

Chapter Eleven

(
NINE YEARS EARLIER
)
Berkeley, California September 3, 1993
8:30
A.M.

E
LIZABETH STOOD ON
tiptoes, scanning the library shelves hopefully: Boa, Bob, Bod… ah… there it was, Boethius, Ancius,
The Consolation of Philosophy.
She took it down eagerly from the shelf. It was the first reading for the semester. The bookstores had copies on back order, and she had rushed to the library hoping she hadn’t been beaten to it by her fellow freshmen. Ah! One copy still sat on the shelf, she exulted, clutching it almost fearfully.

“Oh, you found it!” The voice, a deep male baritone laced with disappointment, startled her.

“I beg your pardon? Are you speaking to me?”

“You found the Boethius. It’s the last copy, and the assignment is due next week. I was hoping…”

She looked him over. Six foot two with the build of a linebacker. “You are in Von Nagel’s class?”

He seemed amused at her skepticism. “Why not?”

“I don’t know. You just don’t seem the type. The only people I remember seeing were freshman girls in plaid shorts and very short, pale debating-club men.”

“I wasn’t aware that there was a body-type requirement. At least, it’s not listed in the catalogue,” he said with a completely straight face. “Anyhow”—his eyes lingered over her long, lithe body wearing a teeny-tiny miniskirt and a low-cut red T-shirt proclaiming:
IF YOU CAN READ THIS, YOU ARE

“Oh, I’m not the type at all. I’m sure this whole philosophy thing is going to turn out to be a huge waste of time.”

“Why would you say that?”

“Well, as my grandmother would point out: ‘Who hires philosophers?’ ”

“My grandfather would agree. A waste of time.”

“I wonder if Boethius would agree.”

“I’m sure he would. He was very practical.”

“How do you know? I thought you were desperately searching for the only copy, the one I just got.”

“Actually, I’ve read Boethius before. During summer vacations in Switzerland at some horse camp I hated. You see, Boethius has been imprisoned, and he knows they are going to kill him any day, and so he’s writing all about the meaning of life. What man should be looking for. Those summers, I could really identify with that.” He finally grinned.

“You must have been one strange kid.” She grinned back.

“You have no idea, so…?”

“So… what?”

“So here we are, both needing the same book, and only one of us having it.”

“I thought you read it already.”

“But I haven’t memorized it. And the assignment is very word-specific, very page fifteen, paragraph two…”

“True. And therefore?”

“I await a generous philosophical response to an existential dilemma.”

She laughed. “Well, I suppose we could do the assignment together. The question is when, and where?”

“Your place or mine?”

“Neither. Someplace neutral wrould be better.”

“Library?”

“Can’t talk.”

“Under the trees?”

“No back support.”

“Rome Cafe on College Avenue?”

“Much too noisy.”

He cracked his knuckles and smoothed back his dark hair impatiently. “Are you always so choosy?”

“Philosopher’s prerogative.”

“Perhaps
you
would like to suggest something?”

“Look, I was actually heading toward the Botanical Gardens. I can meet you at the entrance at three.”

“If it doesn’t rain.”

“It won’t.”

The Botanical Gardens of UC Berkeley were green and lush, with rare species of Mojave Desert plants, and birds that rioted overhead like little old ladies gossiping on park benches. That was the setting, where it all began.

His name was Whally. That was all she knew at the beginning. And it was enough. Boethius took care of the rest:

“Alas how men by blindness led
Go from the path astray,
Who looks on spreading boughs for gold
On vines for jewels gay? . . .
But in their blindness men know not where lies the good they seek.
That which is higher than the sky, on earth below they seek
What can I wish you foolish men?
Wealth and fame pursue,
And when your toil false good has won,
Then may you see the true!”

There, in the fading sunlight, two strangers explored life with a man condemned to death hundreds of years before, a man who discarded as false happiness all roads to power, fame, riches, pleasures or honors. True happiness, according to Boethius, was being self-sufficient. Needing nothing outside. And there is nothing, he concludes, greater or more self-sufficient than the supreme good. Men who seek evil, seek something which has no power; in fact, which doesn’t exist at all. Evil men have ceased to exist, pronounced the philosopher, holed up in his cell, waiting for death, surrounded by evil.

They were both students. She, barely eighteen, the first time away from home, in the first bloom of a beauty that turned heads and made ordinary people stop whatever they were doing. She flaunted it, the sleek, tall, young body of the dancer she was before her height cut short any hopes of ballet. But she kept that dancer’s graceful carriage. Her hair, a sun-kissed, California
blond, had every delicate shade from platinum to golden brown. She wore it carelessly, uncut, letting it fall down her back and across her shoulders. The clothes were careless too. Salvation Army castoffs. Secondhand Chanel jackets purchased from genteel shops that paid parsimonious society matrons for their discards. She loved pairing Chanel with torn jeans or flowing Indian cotton pants and beaded sandals. Somehow, despite her mother’s pronouncements to the contrary, she never looked ridiculous, the way fashion models on the runway never look ridiculous in the outlandish and laughable creations of talentless and pretentious designers: see-through blouses and metallic underwear, pointed skullcaps, fur bikinis. There was something in the arrogant, insouciant carriage of those fabulous beauties that made onlookers believe in their self-congratulatory saunter through flashing lightbulbs and applause.

Like the models, Elizabeth was so tall, so truly, remarkably beautiful, there was nothing she could do to dim that glow. Not that she hadn’t tried: short haircuts. Big glasses. Baggy pants. Shirts like unfitted sheets. Orthopedic shoes. Purple tights. Gray suits. She tried, but nothing worked. And so she stopped trying, embracing instead the freedom of being the center of attention. She gloried in it, and learned that it wasn’t necessary to protect oneself from come-ons and whistles and rude remarks. She was philosophical about it. It was like the rain. It existed in the world and could not be altered. It was often not to one’s liking, and even mildly injurious. But it didn’t kill you, and in the end, one could find shelter and wait for it to pass.

She liked men, boys, but found few interesting enough to spend time with. The truth was, she picked up men as she did books, exploring them, understanding them, and then, when she had gotten the essential point, she itched to put them back on the shelf to make room for a shiny new one whose binding had not yet been creased.

The longest any relationship had lasted was four weeks, and the only reason it took that long was because she was fifteen and he was twenty. It had taken her time to understand the lag of experience between them. But when, scarcely a month later (quite a bit of it spent in bed, catching up) she found herself on par, she knew he was soon to be history.

What she needed, she realized early on, was a man of endless variety and mystery; part of a whole world that would take many years to explore. That is what every woman with a low boredom threshold needs. And Elizabeth
Gold Miller had a very, very low boredom threshold. And such a man was not, by any means, easy to find. Sometimes such women never marry. Or they become the kind that marry so often it becomes a rather tacky joke. It isn’t fickleness. They have simply, and sincerely, got the story straight, and realize that there will never be any surprises, any improvements, any fundamental changes. It’s the boredom that sends them out on their next quest.

Elizabeth feared that because of her looks, she was doomed to meet men with unreasonably high self-images and no depth, the kind that dogged movie actresses and models. Men who were superficial to begin with, and existentially boring in that which they sought, and thus ultimately unsatisfying and unworthy of respect or interest.

Boethius had it right, she thought. Self-sufficiency.

She had come to Berkeley to become self-sufficient. To understand herself and the world and to explore the limits of human culture and history; the “why” of why are we alive on this earth. Is there a God? What do we need to do to find happiness? What is freedom? And then, Whally had come along.

He really was a mystery. He didn’t offer any information about himself, nor did he get involved in questioning her about her family and background. She found him enormously attractive and exotic: the dark hair, the olive skin, the powerful build. And she could see he was smitten with her.

But somehow, the physical part of their relationship was held back in a tense abeyance while they explored each other’s minds.

Each conversation ended with a suggestion that they meet again.

And so it was, that year, her freshman year at the University of California at Berkeley. How is it that people who come from two different worlds, two radically different worldviews and backgrounds, learn to love each other? Is there not some automatic mechanism that turns on to thwart the drawing together of opposites? Or do human relationships mimic nature in that the magnetic forces most opposed are in an unstoppable journey toward union?

She was a Jew, the grandchild of a woman arrested, tortured and marked for death by those who hated Jews. She was an American woman, taught that freedom to dress, feel, learn, work, think was her birthright, and the right of every human being. She took her unlimited freedom for granted, like the bathroom tiles, or the solid earth beneath her feet.

His name was Whalid Ibn Saud. His family lived in Riyadh. He was
from the Saudi Arabian royal family, who subscribed to the Wahabi sect of Islam, a sect that rejected the notion of freedom of religion, who had built a country in which being in possession of an Old or New Testament was a jailable crime. It was a country that denied entry to Jews, and outlawed the presence of Christian churches, Jewish synagogues, and Shi’a Muslims. He came from a patriarchy in which women were still veiled, forbidden to go out into the street alone without male permission, or drive or work. A place where women belonged to men and had no separate existence.

How is it, then, that they fell in love? Because that is what happened. They didn’t mean to. But they haunted each other’s dreams, and each morning when they awoke, the desire to see each other, to hear the other’s voice, was almost unbearable. And so being together became almost as routine as showering, or going to classes. They simply couldn’t help themselves.