The Covenant (30 page)

The religious woman with the wig from Brooklyn in the photographs on her grandmother’s dresser, the one with the pretty little girl in her arms. She called back immediately. “Grandmother, how horrible! Are they all right?”

“I don’t know. No one does. Look, Elizabeth, there’s no time for me to make chitchat, to lead into this subtly. The kidnappers are Hamas. We need to convince the Hamas leadership to extend their ultimatum, to order a stay of execution. Otherwise, in twelve hours, both of them will be murdered.”

”Is that why you called?! Six years, you send back all my letters, but now, when you need help with terrorists, of course who else would be the expert…?” Elizabeth fumed, her voice full of controlled fury.

“You have no reason to be angry! We are trying to save a life. Two lives. And don’t kid yourself. The Saudis are up to their necks in connections with Hamas, Bin Laden and every other Islamic terrorist group. And you know it.”

“I think I should hang up now…”

“Don’t you dare, Elizabeth! If you’ve got a drop of Jewish blood left in you. Don’t you dare…! I never said your husband supported terrorists. The truth is, I don’t know. And neither do you.”

The box, she thought. All those things… “What are you asking exactly?”

“Listen. We just found out that the Hamas person who is giving the orders lives in Europe. My friend Ariana found out from her contacts that he lives in Paris. But we don’t know where, and there is no time…”

“What do you want me to do?”

“There is an organization in Saudi Arabia called the Benevolent Charity Fund. It’s a front for Hamas fund-raising. The person in charge is Faisal Ibn Saud.”

“Do you know how many people in Saudi Arabia have that name?”

“Yes. Which is why I got a private investigator to check it out. Elizabeth, he’s Whally’s brother.”

Elizabeth felt her heart drop. “Are you positive?”

“Elizabeth, I wouldn’t have called at all if I wasn’t sure,” Esther said slowly. “All we need is for him to give us the address and phone number in Paris of a Musa el Khalil.”

“Just the address and phone? That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

Elizabeth hesitated. “You know, this is a delicate matter for me.”

“Believe me, Elizabeth, I didn’t want to call you. I’d never forgive myself if I put you or your family into any danger. But you’re our only hope. And Leah… I never liked to talk about the camps, but I’ll tell you one thing, and then you decide. I’d been in Auschwitz only a few months. I weighed nothing, and we were out in the freezing cold carrying bricks.
And then one day, I stepped on glass and my shoes fell apart. I covered my feet in rags. But they were bruised, infected. I couldn’t walk. I couldn’t work. And in the camps, if you can’t work they gas you and burn your body to ashes.”

She could hear her granddaughter’s breathing grow labored.

“There was a woman whose sister had died. She had her sister’s boots. They were too small for her, but good for me. I tried to buy them. I offered her half my bread for a month and any extra work rations of sausage for a month… It was an enormous price for a starving person. But the woman refused. She wanted shoes, boots. I was dead, finished without those shoes. Leah went to talk to her ‘My sister’s boots for your boots,’ the women said. ‘That’s the deal…’ It was the only thing Leah had left from home, her warm, good leather boots. But she took them off and gave them to her. She put on the woman’s wooden clogs… and brought me the sister’s boots. She saved my life. And risked her own…”

“I never knew…” Elizabeth said in a strangled voice.

“Elizabeth, do you remember when I would take you to the synagogue all dressed up like a bride or a queen to hear the story of Purim?”

She was taken aback. “I suppose.”

“Let me refresh your memory. The king of Persia gets drunk, orders his wife to strip to amuse his guests. When she refuses, he has her killed. When he sobers up, his ‘advisors’ tell him to hold a beauty contest to find a new wife. At the same time, his chief advisor…”

The sound of the noisemakers drowning out the reading of the hated name. The happy sound of children shouting.
“Haman,” Elizabeth suddenly cut in.

“Very good! Haman gets the king to agree to pick a day on which to murder all the Jews and steal their property. In the meantime a Jewish girl, Esther, is chosen as the new queen. Her uncle sends her a secret message, demanding that she talk the king out of murdering the Jews. Do you remember what happened then?”

“No, I don’t.”

“She said: ‘You’re asking me to do a dangerous thing. Anyone who goes to the king uninvited risks being put to death.’ Do you remember what her uncle answered?”

From some faraway place in her childhood, the words suddenly came back to her with shocking clarity: “ ‘If you will not help your people at this time,
help will come from another source, and you and yours will perish…’” She was silent.

“There was another part.”

“What?”

“He told her: ‘Perhaps for just this reason you have become queen.’ ”

“Granny, I’ll do what I can.”

“Believe me, I know what I’m asking of you. But I have to tell you something else: we made a sacred pact, Leah and I, and my friends from Poland and France. We called it a Covenant. If it was you or your child who was in danger, they wouldn’t hesitate to risk their lives for you. Please, think it over, my child. You have a chance to do the greatest
mitzvah
in the world. To save lives.”

A
mitzvah.
Tears sprang to her eyes. Such a long time since she’d heard that word. “It’s good to hear your voice.”

Esther hesitated, wiping a tear from her left eye, drying the phone with her palm. “And it’s so good to hear yours… my Lizzy…”

“I will talk to Whally.”

“I’ll never forget this. As soon as you have the answer, call me immediately. You have my number? My cell phone?”

“I’ve had it for a long time, Granny. Granny? Are you well?”

“Yes, well, I’ve had better days. This is hard on all of us. But it seems as if our enemies aren’t finished with us yet. We have more battles to fight before we can rest.”

“And Granny?”

“Yes?”

“For what it’s worth, I think these Muslim extremists are scum. Whally’s not like that. I swear”

“I believe you.”

“Good-bye, Granny.”

“Good-bye, my Lizzy.”

Elizabeth closed the phone with a tremor of fear. If anyone had overheard that conversation… She shuddered.

The years had not been kind to Whalid Ibn Saud. His once black hair was peppered with more than its share of gray, and the lean runner’s body had
gone heavy and slack with too many hours spent behind a desk and dining table. What remained the same was the intellectual curiosity that still shone out of his dark, intelligent eyes.

Choosing a foreign wife who expected a monogamous marriage and insisted on keeping her own lifestyle left him the constant butt of family criticism. There was also no question that it had affected his ability to rise up the ladder of influence in Saudi life, the plum jobs in foreign relations, commerce and trade going to his more traditional cousins. While few knew that his wife was a Jew before her conversion, those who did never let up on the pressure to divorce her, take away the children and remarry. At the very least, he was admonished to take an additional wife or two who would provide the traditional Saudi home life for him in the months his American wife chose to spend abroad.

Quietly, stubbornly, he had continued to fend them off.

He did not want another wife. He did not want a divorce. Everything that he had promised Elizabeth when he asked her to marry him, he had tried his best to keep. Some things, of course, had proved impossible.

There was no way that he could spend six months out of the country every year. There was no way for him to be part of her family. When they married, he had honestly believed that the winds of change were blowing over his homeland. It was just a matter of time, he thought, before women would be allowed to pursue an education, work, drive and do away with the medieval black
abaya.
He hadn’t expected it to happen overnight, but he had expected that his royal cousins, hundreds of them, who, like him, had been given western educations in the best Ivy League schools America and Britain had to offer, would usher in a new era in the monarchy.

To his shock, the exact opposite was happening: the entire Middle East, led by murderous illiterates like Saddam Hussein, had taken a huge step backward into the Middle Ages. All the Arab states were interested in now was a religious holy war! At this day and age! And the masses, pumped up by the sickening rhetoric of the ignorant clerics who saw themselves as the true leadership, were being harangued into becoming ever more backward and radical.

They were being taught that they should blow up discos, in order to have their private orgy in Heaven with seventy-two virgins; that they should offer
their children as sacrificial lambs to some crazed Islamic hysteria of world domination. The financial, social and sexual frustration of the young who had no education, no prospects, no way of satisfying their minimal human needs to marry and support a family, was being directed into a murderous rage against the west in order to deflect it from their own corrupt leadership, which had put them into this situation and offered them no hope.

As part of their arsenal, the Arabs had discovered that age-old cure for disenchanted oppressed populations: anti-Semitism. Taking a page from Germany’s dark history, forgetting they themselves were Semites, they were dreaming up ludicrous ways of convincing the people that the Jews were pigs and monkeys, that the Jews were the devil. So-called moderate Egypt had even turned
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
, that classic anti-Semitic fantasy that had the Jews running the world, into a TV miniseries…?!

Morons.

Of course, the Israelis had made it all too easy for them. Instead of kicking out the troublemakers and sending Arafat to Hell, they had bent over backward to pretend they were going to solve the Palestinian problem, raising expectations that could not possibly be met, and resolving the inevitable backlash with brutality. No Arab could watch their Palestinian brothers fighting Zionists and getting beaten without fury.

Who knew how it would all end?

He sometimes looked at his wife, his children, with secret fear. How long in this crazed atmosphere would she and her western ways continue to be tolerated? When would the whispers behind closed doors turn into a brutal public spectacle, a tidal wave that would crash against their solid, private world, turning it into a shipwreck of debris? With each passing year, he found himself becoming more and more circumspect, more cautious, more secretive, more frightened, more uncertain.

“Whally, can I talk to you?”

He was sitting behind the desk in his study, surrounded by hundreds of books in leather-bound volumes. He was going over the budget for the equipment purchases he would need to modernize the production line in his factory. It was a small operation, a sideline really, that made generators. It had done very well, becoming a popular item in many Middle Eastern countries, and in Third World areas like Pakistan and India. Orders were
up. It gave him satisfaction to think that some Third World child in a cave might be able to have light to read by because of his work.

His cousins, he knew, sneered at him. They were all wheelers and dealers, involved in brokering multibillion-dollar trade deals between the Saudi family and huge defense or construction contractors. They lived off the bribes and kickbacks.

He wanted no part of it. As a member of the Saudi family, he had received an automatic income from the time he was born. In 1984, each prince got $20,000 a month. And a prince with a large family could get up to $260,000 a month. Those who actually had a job could make as much as $100 million a year. No question, times were getting harder, and money was running out in the kingdom, but there were still over fifty princes who were billionaires.

It was, he often thought, obscene. A whole country owned by a single family who had swarmed out of a single desert tribe, taken over the land, raped its resources for themselves and relegated the rest of its inhabitants to mere serfs.

No wonder there was a Ministry of Information that had the power to license newspapers and magazines, and thus had a say on every word the Saudi people were allowed to read and hear; who had the power to destroy books, jail authors and even give the death penalty to those possessing so-called subversive literature.

He looked up at Elizabeth and smiled, reaching for her hand. A small flash went through him, the same one he had felt that first morning in the library at Berkeley, when he had seen that long, curly, California-blond hair, that perfect body, reaching up for a book. He’d thought his heart would stop. It always did, a little, even now.

“What is it?”

She hesitated. “Whally, can we take a walk in the garden? This is very private.”

He nodded. In addition to the phones, they were both aware that the house could be bugged too. Although they had brought in experts to go through it, they could never be certain one of the housemaids or porters hadn’t been bribed to cooperate with CAVES.

The garden was a wonder, she thought, with its fountains of cool, spraying mist, its fragrant rows of orange, apple and lemon trees, now all covered
with delicious blossoms. They walked along the shady path beneath the row of date palms whose fronds spread out above them like angel wings. The sound of the water, the scent of the flowers, the blooming rainbow colors enveloped her like a dream. “Paradise,” she breathed softly into his ear, slipping her arm through his.

He nodded, almost sadly. “An oasis, in the midst of a desert.” His tone was bitter with irony.

“Whally, I just got a phone call from my grandmother, Esther”

His brow shot up. “The cosmetics queen? The one who’s refused all these years to read your letters, or take your calls?”

She nodded.

“Well.”

“Well.” She took a deep breath. “She’s asked a favor of me… of you, actually. It concerns a matter of life or death.”