The Fifth Horseman (13 page)

She set the cups on the table beside Kamal’s chair, the noonday sun highlighting as she did the rich rolls of auburn hair cascading down to her shoulders. She shivered inadvertently as the enormity of what her brother contemplated overwhelmed her.

“How in God’s name will we ever get him to help us?” she asked.

Outside, the harsh bleat of an ambulance rushing toward the clinic across the street pierced the noonday quiet.

Laila Dajani’s face lit up at the sight of the familiar figure advancing toward her through the crowded waiting room of the Marseilles airport.

Her brother Whalid still walked with his splay-footed gait. John Wayne, she had always thought, ambling away from his horse in an old Western.

As he drew closer, something else struck Laila about her elder brother.

My God, she thought, he’s put on weight!

“Frangoise feeds you well,” she laughed.

Selfconsciously her brother drew in his stomach. “You’re right,” he said.

Smiling broadly, Whalid led Laila out of the airport to his Renault 16

parked in the airport’s reserved parking area, opposite the arrival lounge.

He owed that privilege to a yellow-and-green sticker in one corner of his windshield. It was a security pass to the Nuclear Research Center at Cadarache, the heart of France’s atomic-energy program and, above all, the developmental work on the Super-Phenix, the breeder reactor which France counted on to replace the world’s first generation of nuclear reactors.

Whalid Dajani was an expert on the bizarre behavior patterns of one of the most precious and dangerous elements on earth, plutonium. His doctorate thesis for the University of California’s Department of Nuclear Engineering, “A Revised Projection of Neutron Release Across the Plutonium Isotope Spectrum,” had been published in the March 1970 Bulletin of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and stamped him as one of the most brilliant young physicists of his generation. A paper he had delivered on the same subject at a Paris forum in November 1973 had prompted the French to offer him a key position in the Phenix program.

Whalid steered the car out of the parking lot, away from the flashing traffic of the autoroute toward the narrow country road leading to the Provengal inn in which he’d told his wife, Frani~oise, to meet them for lunch.

After the spontaneous emotion of their greeting, a strained silence fell between brother and sister.

Smoking nervously, Laila watched the rolling fields of vineyards, vines pruned down to gaunt skeletons, fleeing past her window. As they entered a small village, Whalid glanced at his sister. Her eyes were fixed on the square ahead, its dirt surface baked hard by the sun and the tramping of generations of boules players like the halfdozen men gathered there now, casting their lead balls on it in the pale winter sunshine.

“You said in your telegram you had something urgent to talk to me about.”

A moving car is not a place for a serious conversation, Laila thought. You talk in a car when you want to say something without having to look at the person you’re saying it to. End an affair. Give an order. Announce un-pleasant news. But for what she had to say to her brother, she had to be able to watch him, to fix her eyes on his.

“What a lovely squarel” she said. “So calm. Let’s stop for a drink.”

Whalid parked the car, and brother and sister walked to one of the three cafes whose terraces gave onto the square. Whalid ordered a pastis.

Laila hesitated. “No alcohol,” she said.

“Try a nice mint tea, ma petite,” the proprietress proposed. She turned and gave Whalid a friendly leer. “Very aphrodisiac.”

As she bustled away, Whalid turned to his sister. “What was it you wanted to talk about?” he prodded gently. “Is it about Kamal?”

Laila’s fingers plucked nervously over the clutter in her handbag until they came on her Gitanes cigarettes. She lit one and inhaled several times.

“No, Whalid, it’s about you.”

“Me?”

“You. The Brothers need your help.”

Whalid felt a twinge of nervous tension cramp his stomach. “Laila, all that’s behind me now. I have a life here, a life I’ve worked hard to build.

I’ve got a wife I love. And I’m doing something that I love and that I know is important. I’m not going to jeopardize that. Not for the Brothers. Not for anyone.”

Whalid could not help thinking of the lithe blond French girl who would be waiting for them at lunch. He had met Frangoise in the Cadarache senior employees’ restaurant. Passing her a mustard pot, they liked to joke. She had given him so much: a sense of place at last, a meaning to his existence that gave dimension to the work in which he so passionately believed. Their seventeenth-century dwelling in the little medieval city of Meyrargues was for Whalid a citadel, a citadel his beautiful wife was helping to build against the encroaching tides of his past.

Beside him, Laila sipped her tea. “Whalid, you can never escape your past.

Palestine is your home. Jerusalem. Not here.”

Whalid did not answer. Brother and sister sat side by side a moment, united in silence by the bond of the suffering they had once shared. Neither had ever known the horror of life in a Palestinian refugee camp, but the pain of their exile from their native land had been nonetheless real for that.

They represented a face of the Palestinian problem that a world used to the stereotyped miseries of the camps rarely saw: a Palestine that had once produced the Arab world’s elite, a proud flow of scholars, doctors, businessmen, scientists. Forty-five successive generations of Dajanis had dwelt upon the hillsides of Jerusalem, deeding the city an unending flow of Arab leaders and thinkers, until 1947. Twice since then, in 1948 and again in 1967, Israeli gunfire had driven them from their homes. Israeli bulldozers had reduced their graceful ancestral dwelling to rubble in 1968

to make way for a new apartment complex. Three months later, their father had died of a broken heart in his Beirut exile.

Whalid took his sister’s hand in his and softly caressed it. “My heart screams out against what happened to us, just as loudly as yours or anyone else’s,” he said. “But it’s not the only thing it screams out for. I suppose now Palestine is the only cause in your life. It’s not in mine.”

Laila fell silent, reflecting on what her brother had just said. “Whalid,”

she asked after a long sip of her tea, “do you remember the last time we were all together?”

Whalid nodded. It was the evening after his father’s funeral.

“You said something that night I’ve always remembered. Kamal was leaving for Damascus to join the Brothers to get vengeance for our people. He wanted you to go with him and you said no. The Israelis were so strong, you said, because they understood what education meant.

You’d been accepted to do your doctorate in California. Berkeley was going to be your Damascus, you told us. Getting the best scientific education in the world was going to be your way of helping your people and the cause.”

“I remember. And so?”

Laila glanced at the square, at the boules players, at the dark-robed women gossiping in front of the Prisunic, cord shopping bags bulging in their hands. “Where is the cause, where are your people, in all this?”

“Right here,” Whalid replied, tapping his chest. “Where it always was, in my heart.”

“Please, Whalid,” his sister entreated, “don’t get angry. I wanted to say you were right that night. Each of us has to help the cause in his own way.

With what he has. Maybe carrying messages to Beirut in my bra isn’tmuch of a contribution. But it’s what I can do. Kamal fights. That’s his way. But you’re special, Whalid. There are thousands, hundreds of thousands, of us who can carry a Kalishnikov. But there’s only one Palestinian in the world who can do for his people what you can.”

Whalid sipped his pastis and turned a cold, appraising regard to Laila.

“And just what is this special thing the Brothers expect me to do for our people?”

“Help them to steal plutonium. But not for themselves, Whalid, for Qaddafi.”

Whalid exhaled slowly, softly. He lowered his pastis to the table.

Instinctively, he looked around to see if there was anyone in earshot who could overhear them. He ran his fingers across his forehead, feeling as he did the little beads of sweat that had formed there.

“I suppose the Brothers think I can just put a few kilos of plutonium in the back seat of my car some Sunday afternoon and drive out of Cadarache with it?”

“Whalid,” Laila replied, “the Brothers are many things, but they are not crazy. The whole thing has already been thought over and studied in great detail. All the Brothers want from you is information. Where the plutonium is stored. How it’s guarded. How many people protect it. Some idea of how they can get in and out of Cadarache without getting caught.”

She opened her purse and picked through its contents until she came upon a thick white envelope. “What the Brothers need to know is all set out here.

And I’m authorized to promise you one thing. No one will ever know where it came from. No one will ever be able to trace it back to you.”

“And suppose I refuse?”

“You won’t.”

His sister’s smug reply, the presumptuousness of those who had sent her to him, infuriated her brother.

“I won’t?” he said in a hoarse whisper. “Well, I do! Right now! And I’m going to tell you why.”

He grabbed for her pack of cigarettes. His gesture prevented him from seeing the expression sweeping across his sister’s face. It remained there just an instant, a strange, distant glance full of compassion and horror, fear and respect.

“I believe in what I do, Laila. I believe in it as passionately as I ever believed in Palestine.” He paused, inhaling slowly. Despite the passion of his words, his tone was grave and measured. “Florence Nightingale once said, ‘The first thing a hospital should not do is spread germs.’ Well, the first thing a nuclear physicist should not do is spread this terrifying knowledge he has so man kills himself with it instead of using it to build a better world.”

This time it was his sister’s turn to erupt. “A better world!” she said scornfully. “Why does Qaddafi want the bomb? Because the Israelis have it.

You know damn well they do. Do you think they got it to build a better world with? Like hell! To use on us if they have to.”

Her brother remained impassive. “Yes, I know they have it.”

“And you can sit here beside me, admit the Israelis have it, and still tell me you won’t help your own people, your own people who’ve been trampled on like no other people in the world, to get it?”

“I can. And I am, because I feel a commitment to something higher than Palestine. Or the cause. Or whatever you want to call it.”

“Higher than to your own flesh and blood? Your own dead father?”

Brother and sister were silent for a moment, each spent by the intensity of their argument. The midday sun was warm now and the stucco houses across the square seemed to radiate a terra-rosa glow in the bright light. The knot of hangers-on around the boules game had thickened, and the sound of their muttered comments lapped at the edge of the square, wavelets of a gentle sea sliding along a beach.

“The answer is no, Laila. I’m not going to do it.”

A sense of emptiness, of despair filled Laila. For a second she felt physically ill.

A pair of boys, perhaps twelve years old, set their skateboards onto the hard-packed square. In an instant, they were swinging through it with the gentle grace of birds cruising a summer sky. Laila glanced at her brother’s forearm. On the inside of his wrist, just above the steel band of his Rolex Submariner watch, was a tattoo, a blue serpent entwined around a heart pierced by a dagger. Laila leaned over to her brother and slowly, almost sensually, scratched the surface of the tattoo with her crimson fingernail.

“And this?” she asked.

He looked at her, furious. That tattoo was a souvenir of the most painful moment of his life, the death of his father after their exile from Jerusalem in 1968. The day of his funeral, he and Kamal had gone to a Saudi Arabian tattoo artist in the souks of Beirut. The Saudi had fixed that design on the flesh of each brother’s forearm: a pierced heart for their lost father, a serpent for the hatred they bore those responsible for his death, a dagger for the vengeance they had sworn to obtain. Then they had sworn together a vow from the fourth chapter of the Koran to use their lives to avenge their father’s death under pain of losing them if they faltered in their pursuit.

Laila saw his muscles twitching. At least, she thought, I’ve given a face to the people, to the cause, I’m pleading for.

“You got out, Whalid,” she said. Her voice was tender; there was no hint of reproach in its tone. “You’ve been able to forget here with your new life, your wife. But how about the ones who didn’t? Are they to be a people without a home forever? Without an address? Is our own father’s body never to go home again?”

Whalid looked at the tattoo under his watchband, glowering at it as though somehow his glare might erase its stigmata from his flesh.

“What am I supposed to be?” His voice was an angry, sibilant hiss. “A prisoner of this skin because I was born with it? Do I have to go against my reason, against the things I believe in, just because I was born in a place called Palestine thirty-eight years ago?”

Laila waited along and thoughtful moment before answering. “Yes, Whalid,” she said. “You do. I do. We all do.”

After lunch with Whalid’s wife, Frangoise, brother and sister drove back to the airport in silence. Laila went immediately to the checkin counter to register for her return flight to Paris. When she had finished, she walked across the airport lounge toward the newsstand where Whalid scanned the headlines of the evening papers. His dark eyes seemed distant and melancholy, shutters turning his vision back into some interior world of his own. He’s understood, Laila thought. He’s miserable, but he knows he has no choice. She laid a hand on his elbow. “I’ll tell them it’s all right. You’ll do it.”