Blood Rules (29 page)

Colin smiled. “Well, you’ll see.”

“Why doesn’t Mummy want to come and see the money-ment?”

“Monument. She’s seen it lots of times. Anyway, she was sleeping this morning and I didn’t want to wake her. Oh, look: there’s some villagers up ahead.”

Despite the bright sunshine of midsummer it was growing cold in the car; hard to believe that just an hour ago he’d been sweltering in a humid city. Colin wound up his window. The scenery had subtly turned into a moonscape, with boulders and rock falls outnumbering the scattered vineyards and orange groves prevalent lower down. The road narrowed; it started to get rough. After several miles of potholes, Robbie’s face was tinged with green.

“Daddy,” he said in a small voice, “I’m going to be sick.”

Colin stopped the car and they both got out. The breeze caught him full in the face, making him shiver. Robbie hovered anxiously by the roadside for a few moments, but the respite seemed to have done the trick. Colin looked around, shading his eyes against the sun. They were nearly at the top of a deep ravine. If he approached the edge of the road, far below he could see a tiny village: that must be Masser es Chouf, which, according to the guidebook, stood six thousand feet above sea level. No wonder it felt so cold.

He turned his attention skyward. Something black lay like a heavy drape over the ridge above them. Cloud, perhaps? Then he saw that the drape was rippling to and fro in a heavy sway.

“Robbie,” he said. “Look.”

The little boy craned his neck. “Is that the moneyment, Daddy?”

“It’s the cedars, yes. King Solomon used trees like that for the greatest temple the world’s ever seen, Robbie.”

They drove on. At last the road petered out into a grassy track, and Colin switched off the engine. They had to walk the last quarter of a mile; the path was steep, and by the time they reached what they had come to see they were panting, drawing down thin air cold enough to burn their sinuses.

They were alone up here, seemingly within easy reach of the paradise for which King Solomon had yearned. No matter where they looked they saw vast boles graced with sturdy branches, the trunks gnarled into fantastic shapes like bas-relief carved by demons.

“Come on, let’s measure one.” Colin was whispering. He wondered if Robbie could possibly share in his sense of awe, but when he looked down it was to see the child’s face radiant with delight. Suddenly Robbie broke free of him and began to dance about, wheeling and whooping. The silent trees seemed to harken, graciously bending their boughs the better to garner his happiness.

Colin made for the biggest cedar and took note of a particularly frenzied pattern on its trunk as his starting point. He began to stride around the tree. Fifty-two paces. He stared up into the lower branches, overawed and silent. Something so old and yet living was almost beyond human conception.

He looked down. Rocks of every size and shape littered the glade, but here, in the shadow of the most noble tree of all, a smooth meadowlike grass covered the earth. Pale mauve flowers shimmered in the wind. He knelt down and stroked the grass. It felt smooth as velvet.

Something caught his eye: an altar, carved with crosses and a moon.

“Robbie,” he called. “Come and look at this.”

Silence. The cedars, towering above him, seemed to listen. Colin stood up slowly. He looked to right and left, could see no sign of movement except for the majestic swaying of tasseled foliage and the contrapuntal shivering of the little mauve flowers. “Robbie,” he called again, louder this time, with the first hint of fear audible in his voice.

The trees gave him back his voice. Colin jerked around, covering the four points of the compass. Nothing. Robbie had vanished.

“Robbie, darling, stop playing games now.”

Terrorists,
muharabin.
Kidnaps, murders.
This was Lebanon.

“Robbie! Can you hear me?”

The silence repaired itself.

“This isn’t a joke. Answer me!”

Everywhere he looked there were only trees, nothing that moved or was human. For a mad moment Colin didn’t know which he feared more: gunmen or ghosts. Over recent days he had been able to piece together the rudiments of Lebanese politics. In a country whose population consisted entirely of minorities, the engine that powered things along, hidden beneath their feet but humming twenty-four hours a day, went under the name of
mo’amera:
the plot. Druze plotted against Maronite, Jumblatt against Gemayel, Phalangist against Palestinian, and, towering over everyone and everything, the Hanifs: for and against all others, according as they were paid. What plot was this, who had organized it,
this conspiracy against him?

He stood there quietly, head on one side, while his rational academic mind reasserted itself, methodically laying out possible explanations. Robbie had been kidnapped. He’d wandered away and fallen down a hole. Yes, an accident, that was it! No help for miles….

Something made him turn through a semicircle, facing into the great yellow sunbeam that carved a wedge through the trees almost to his feet. At first he was blinded. Then, marching through the light like an angel of God, came a deformed figure, recognizably human. Colin’s eyes narrowed. He raised a hand to shade his sight, and as he did so the figure split apart to become two people, one taller than the other, holding hands.

“Robbie?” Colin sped to sweep his son up into his arms. He admitted to himself that he’d not expected to feel this flesh warm against his ever again. Just for a moment, of course; only a moment….

“Where were you?” he cried into Robbie’s shirt. “Daddy was so worried.” For the first time it struck him how stupid that formulation must sound to a child. ”
I
was so worried,” he added breathlessly.

Robbie smiled at him, jerking his head away, perversely playful. Colin realized that his son was happy. He knew there was another person present, patiently waiting, but he put off acknowledging him … her, he corrected himself after taking a sideways peep. She was obviously a woman from these parts; she would speak no English, leaving him without the means of either chastizing her for the theft of his son or thanking her for his restoration.

But suddenly she thrust an envelope at him. It lodged awkwardly between Robbie’s thigh and Colin’s hand. He smiled uncertainly and put the boy down, having first given him a quick kiss on the cheek. To his amazement, Robbie, normally the shyest of boys, ran to rest against the woman’s skirt. She patted his head while they smiled at each other like people sharing a secret that any moment now will cause them to break into laughter.

The envelope reeked of some powerful but fresh scent that seemed to go well with the cedars. The handwriting was beautifully italicized but at the same time businesslike, as though the composer had devoted much time to perfecting her style until it became second nature. Even before he read the first words he had no doubt that the writer was a woman.

“Good God.” He looked up from the letter to find the woman’s proud stare full upon him. “So you’re Azizza.”

“You have heard of me?” she asked in strongly accented English.

“Oh, yes. And Celestine too. Robbie, this lady knows Mummy’s grandmother.”

“Celestine.” The boy pronounced it carefully, giving each syllable equal weight. “Can we go and see her? Oh, let’s!”

“Well, I’m not sure if it’s convenient—” Then he remembered the letter.
You will know also what to do next.
“Can you take us there, Azizza?”

“That’s why I came. Follow my car.”

She had parked her Citroën some way below the place where they had stopped, which explained why Colin hadn’t heard her approach. As Colin loped down the hill he asked his son, “What happened back there? You got lost.”

“No. I saw the lady and I went to say hello.”

“Robbie, you know you shouldn’t do that. What have Mummy and I always told you about strangers? Why did you go?”

“She’s not a stranger. She’s nice.”

“But—”

“I
told
you. She’s
nicer

Robbie dozed during the drive to Yarze, and Colin was grateful for that because he wanted to dredge up from memory everything Leila had told him about her remarkable grandmother. He knew that she was half Swiss and half a mishmash of Mediterranean bloods; that she had been wild in her youth and never learned what it meant to be old; that she had been widowed in tragic circumstances, had seen her husband assassinated; that she was on bad terms with Feisal, her only son, although she had loved her daughter-in-law to distraction and blamed Feisal’s neglect for her early death. Yet she’d somehow remained like a set of photos in a faded album, or a snatch of dialogue half heard when someone turned on a radio in the next room: almost, but never quite, within focus, within his grasp.

One other thing he did know: after Robbie, after himself, Leila loved Celestine more than anyone in the world. Not a day went by without her mentioning her beloved grandmother. So he found it poignant, a little sad, that their first meeting was to take place without Leila.

He was to wish for Leila’s presence more than once, in the course of that long afternoon. He could have done with some moral support. But then, he’d had such high hopes of the encounter that it was bound to be a disappointment.

He had not reckoned on this old woman being so savage. She did not seem to have the least understanding of his position as an outsider wedded to the Hanif clan. It was obvious that she detested his political analysis of Lebanon. On his side, he found her superficial and shrill. Then, right at the end, she had given him a gun, and his impressions of her finally coalesced. In a word, he thought her ridiculous.

Robbie’s patent adoration of Celestine did nothing to improve his temper. The boy cried all the way back to Beirut, until by the time the elevator doors opened onto the penthouse he looked half dead with exhaustion. Leila rushed up, all concern, and took Robbie away; Colin could hear her comforting him while he fixed himself a scotch and went to drink it on the balcony, which was where she found him ten minutes later, when things were quiet again.

He took her hand and said, “Sorry.” He didn’t know why he said that, but someone had to make the first move and the long day had knocked most of the pride out of him. “About last night, I’m sorry I was such a fool.”

“No, no!” Leila cried. She snatched the glass from him and gripped his upper arms, forcing him to look at her. “Don’t say sorry, I’m the one who’s sorry. I love you. I love you.”

“My God, but I do love you so.”

He held her in the way you do when you want to crush somebody into your rib cage and zip them up tight, so they can’t get away from you again, ever. When Leila finally lowered her hands, one of them brushed against his jacket pocket.

“What on earth?”

She held up the gun. Suddenly they were both on the verge of laughter.

“My God, she didn’t really give you a gun? Not seriously?”

“You think I bought it at the Mandarin Deli?”

She slapped his arm. By now they were close to going into paroxysms.

“It’s loaded too. My God!”

“Leila, no, seriously now, what am I supposed to do with this?”

She shook her head, still laughing. “Give it here. I’ll find a way of getting it back to her.”

“What if Robbie were to find it, and—”

“Don’t worry, darling, I’ll put it in my vanity case.”

“No,” Colin said, “I’ve got a better idea. We’ll use my pilot’s bag. It’s got combination locks.”

“You’re right. Much safer.” She giggled again, and Colin, seeing her face, felt his own laughter bubble up. “Just don’t forget it,” she managed to shriek before the final collapse. “That’s all!”

E
XHAUSTION
zapped Celestine just at the moment she most needed her wits about her. The El Al woman at Cyprus’s Larnaca airport had stripped her bag down to the lining and when a Shin Bet agent came up close, eyeballing her, aggressive and humiliating, Celestine felt pain in her chest and prayed, Oh, God, not
now.
But it was now. She was seventy-six and worn out. As the questions rolled over her—purpose of visit, length of stay, relatives in Israel?—she could do nothing but mumble answers she’d dreamed up earlier, with Azizza’s help, and trust in Allah.

The passport was good, it was the best, but the Shin Bet agent did not like it. He inspected it from every angle. He turned it upside down and would have turned it inside out as well, had the stitching not prevented him. Ten years ago, when civil war in Lebanon was imminent but Celestine and Feisal were still talking, her son had arranged French passports for all the family. She wasn’t sure if they were legitimate or not, and this was one hell of a time to be finding out.

Suddenly her heart seemed to pause before thundering off again at a high rate. Another pause. She held a hand to her breast, willing the fickle pump inside to behave.

The officer passed her through. Her mind went blank after that. It wasn’t until the plane had climbed high over the Mediterranean that she came to herself, realizing that the flight attendant was offering her a drink. Normally, she would have taken one. Today she sipped mineral water, sipped it slowly for fear of vomiting.

She was standing on the edge of eternity and she wanted to dive over it, because then she would not feel so wretched. One thing kept her going: the memory of Robbie. Nothing she endured could compare with what he must be suffering.

She passed through Tel Aviv immigration in a blur and somehow managed to rent a car plus chauffeur. She slept during the drive north up the coast, until at last they came to Haifa and Mt. Carmel, just a few miles over the border with Lebanon but thirteen hours’ traveling time away from it. Her driver, a lovely old man with a white mustache, didn’t want to leave her. He said she was too ill to be traveling alone, but she spun him the tale that had done for all the other inquisitors: about how she was going to visit a friend who’d made aliya only after her goy husband died and left her wealthy enough to please herself at last. So reluctantly he dropped her off at the villa in Hadar, the oldest residential quarter, with its spectacular view of the bay and the mountain behind, and mercifully he drove away before she had made it up to the front door, because she was expecting guards and how shaming she would have found it to be bundled away, a prisoner, in front of that dear old man who had driven her so far and so well.

The villa looked as if it had been constructed out of square boxes, two side by side to make up the ground floor and another dumped on the right-hand-side box to give half an upstairs. A TV aerial sprouted off the flat roof; alongside it she could see a shorter radio antenna, which, she knew, meant business, not pleasure. The garden was dusty and dry: faded grass, two orange trees and some cypresses, a couple of rickety folding metal chairs, the canvas of one of them torn away at the side, a rake and watering can. She walked up the path, noting the absence of a vehicle in the carport, praying he would be in; and suddenly it was amazing, but she did not feel ill at all, she felt like a girl on her first date and the pounding of her heart was evidence of rude good health, not decrepitude.

She raised a finger to the doorbell, still half expecting to feel a hand descend on her shoulder and yet not totally surprised by the absence of a guard. The owner of the villa was like that. He had retired two years ago amid fanfares and fandangos, with medals and speeches and bands, and
Time
had asked him what he proposed to do and he’d said, “Grow fruit on Mount Carmel.” Which he now did. A widower, he lived alone and his number was in the phonebook, just like everyone else’s. She admired that. She had always admired this man, in secret, keeping her emotions to herself, almost since the day he’d killed her husband, years before.

She hoped he would not be down at his fruit farm because time was short, but when she rang the bell he came at once, a hand in the pocket of his linen jacket, so he at least kept a gun; yes, that was natural. For a moment she just stood there, studying him and remembering. His white beard was short, neatly trimmed but doing nothing to conceal a prominent, jutting chin. The eyes looking into hers were big, blue, and guileless. The same as before.

He said: “Who are you?” And she replied, “Celestine Hanif.” Not a muscle of his face moved, not a flicker lit his eyes; he said: “What do you want?” She took out the Polaroid photo of Raful Sharett and showed it to him; she answered, “To convince General Avshalom Gazit that this man is aboard flight NQ oh-three-three with several of his men.”

Then, unexpectedly, hands did grasp her from behind; she was half dragged, half carried into a simply furnished living room and there dumped onto a sofa, where she lay staring at the floor while someone made a phone call, and in the kitchen another man dragged heavy equipment around before sounding off in the high singsong voice that means radio communication. A third voice was hectoring the general, and although Celestine did not speak Hebrew she could translate the words as easily as if they were spoken in unfamiliar Arab dialect: How often do we have to tell you, this third man was asking, that they’ll come for you one of these days; why won’t you let us have someone in here around the clock? This hag is just a decoy; you should let us take care of you. Why not have a little self-respect?

Gazit let the man run on for a while before shutting him up, and she feared the voice he used because it was cruel.
His
words she could not translate, but they were fell. The third man did not open his mouth for a long time after that.

“How did you get here?” Gazit asked her in English.

She told him about her French passport, though they were already examining it under a reading lamp. The second man, the radio operator, came out of the kitchen sputtering Hebrew. After a while Gazit shut him up too. Celestine raised her head enough to see him thoughtfully biting the nail of his little finger while he continued to study her through those blue eyes of his, the ones she remembered so well. A man might change; his eyes, never.

“You came to tell me a story,” he said at last, abandoning the nail as if he intended to give up a bad habit. “So tell it.” “I want to sit up.”

He nodded carelessly. She rolled her feet off the sofa and cautiously came upright. Her head spun, for a moment she thought she would be sick; then the world righted itself, all except for a burning pain in her side.

“May I have a glass of water?”

More babble in Hebrew, accompanied by pounding of fists into palms and jabbing of fingers in faces. Gazit cut through the argument “No,” he said. “She wouldn’t come all this way just to swallow a cyanide pill using my water. Not before we’ve talked, anyway.” He allowed a silence to develop, knowing how weak she was; knowing he, they, had the upper hand. “If you want water,” he said at last, “earn it.”

She began to retch. His face twisted into a grimace of distaste. “Water,” he said sourly.

As soon as she had sipped from the glass the retching fit passed. A glance at his face was enough to confirm that he thought she’d been shamming. Some of the old hatred washed through her, but she controlled it.

“Tell me your story,” he said, in a voice that was almost gentle.

She spoke for forty minutes and during that time he only moved once, to pick up the photocopied pages of Sharett’s passport. He sat in a stark, modern chair with his legs apart and his arms draped loosely over the sides so that the hands could lie in his lap. He never took his eyes off her face. He scarcely blinked. She could not glean the faintest idea of what he thought. Only right at the end did he ask her, “How did you deal with Hakkim?” and when she replied, “Azizza hit him over the head with the flask,” he laughed, along with his men, but not so as to tell her whether he believed her and thought it funny or was scoffing at the presumption of her lies.

He stood up, then, and went into another room, returning a moment later with a card in his hand. He gave it to her.

“The Ganei Hamat,” he said. “Tiberias. Wonderful hotel. Four stars, you would like it. This is a postcard from Sharett; he’s staying there. You see the postmark? You see the signature? Sharett is one of my oldest friends; that is his signature on the bottom of the card. Your Polaroid photograph is fake, his signature is real. The card was posted in Tiberias three days ago.”

Celestine’s head was going round and round. She didn’t know if Hakkim had lied to her or not. All she knew was that she’d run out of options.

“He wrote the card,” she heard herself say, “but how do you know he posted it?”

Gazit’s eyebrows rose and he spoke a few quiet words of Hebrew to the nearest man, who scowled and shrugged. Someone brought Gazit a phone. He dialed. He kept his eyes on her face throughout what followed.

“Hello? Ganei Hamat Hotel? I want to speak to one of your guests, his name is Sharett…. ”

He spoke English, so that she would be able to follow everything.

“Hello, yes … no reply from the room, I see. But he is still staying there? … Yes. Give me the manager, please, my name is Avshalom Gazit.”

There was a long wait while they fetched the manager. The pain in Celestine’s side was spreading outward, down into her stomach.

“Yes … yes, I’m
that
Gazit. You have a guest staying in your hotel, my old friend Raful Sharett; can you confirm that? … You can.” Another pause. “He is on a two-day tour of the Sea of Galilee. Thank you.”

He was putting down the phone. “Describe him,” she heard a voice say. Her own.

“Wait,” Gazit commanded down the phone. “This may touch on security. Describe Sharett to me.”

She knew from Gazit’s smile that he was enjoying this little triumph, that he was glad to be asked to request a description. The smile was an active, living thing.

“Yes? Yes … about one-seventy pounds, yes … um-hm. Okay.” He replaced the receiver and looked at Celestine for a long time through those faintly mocking eyes of his. Then he said, “Balding, fat, so high, so heavy … what did you think he would say, eh?”

Celestine stared straight ahead of her, praying to God to staunch the pain in her abdomen.

“Before,” Gazit said, “I frankly admit I thought you were insane, at the end of your days, harmless. Now I know you are part of a trap I can tell you that your age and health will not save you. Come, madam, tell us everything, tell us the truth now, or I shall hand you over to Shin Bet.”

“I have told you the truth. Every word.”

“No, every word is a lie. Let us review what we know. I killed your husband. He was financing the PLO, he was their biggest supporter. Did you know that?”

“Yes.”

This answer took him aback.

“I knew what he was doing, but he did not.”

“Explain.”

“He was an idealist. He thought the Zionists had stolen the land from the Palestinians, whom he loved. He thought that a great evil. He trusted the Palestinian leaders. He did not realize they were using his money to buy cars and apartments in Paris and guns. He thought they would use what he gave them to house their people, find alternatives, work for the foundation of a democratic state where Arab and Jew could live and work side by side.”

“No banker would ever believe such a fairy tale.”

“That’s what you thought when you killed him. That is what I thought, too. I even warned him that he might be murdered one day. He just laughed.”

“He laughed before I killed him too.”

She looked at Gazit, hating him then, and said bitterly, “He thought you must be a friend. He thought everyone was his friend.”

“And that is why he got his granddaughter to let me in?”

“Leila had been told over and over again: Never let anyone into the house. Anyone! Even if you know the person, wait, let someone else decide to open the door.”

“She disobeyed—why?”

“My God, weren’t you ever a child? Anyway … she never got over it.”

“Oh? I am sorry for her; no doubt that is why she blew up Sharett’s daughter.”

Celestine stared. “She—”

“You didn’t know? I’m surprised; I imagined it would have been a matter for pride in your family. She killed the daughter, and Sharett’s wife committed suicide. She, to use your own phrase, never got over it.”

“Nor did Sharett.”

“No.”

“That’s why he’s on the plane, isn’t it? So he can have his revenge.”

From the slight creasing of his forehead, she guessed the thought had not crossed his mind.

“Do you have a passenger list, General? Have you checked all the names? Do you recognize any aliases, have you cross-checked the list against your own forged passports?”

He did not know. He kept his face impassive, but he could not keep this certainty from her: he did not know.

“I understand about revenge,” she went on quickly. “I’ve thought about it for years. I wanted to kill you for so long. It faded, like toothache. There but not there. Hate’s negative. Love’s positive. I love Robbie, and Colin too. I’m going to save them.”

When he was silent, she knew what he was thinking:
It’s odd this woman doesn’t have a weapon.
Strange, how telepathy could work.

“If I were still driven by hate, I wouldn’t be here. I’d be in some bar, drunk, cursing you, cursing Israel, wasting my energy. Hate does that to you, when you’re old and pathetic. It’s love that brought me here.”

“Did you love your husband?”

She smiled in appreciation of his simple psychology. “Oh, yes. I used to think he was part of the old Lebanon. The good old days, you know?”

“And wasn’t he?”

She shook her head. “When I looked back, I saw the parties, the drinking, the beach. Restaurants. Talk into the night about books and politics. Good business, money. Cars. Friends without number. Lebanon, Lebanon.”