Exile: a novel (51 page)

“I know you,” he told David. “You have come about Hana Arif.”

David waited, saying nothing. Glancing at Ernheit, Lev pointed the rifle at the low stone wall to one side of his redoubt. “Sit,” he ordered. “Over there, where I can watch you both.”

David sat beside Ernheit. At close range, Lev’s eyes seemed to betray a soul more troubled than inflamed. “What is it you want from me?” he asked David.

“To find out who killed your friend.”

Lev’s eyes flickered. He sat at the end of his platform bed, a few feet from David, gun tacked beneath his right arm with its barrel pointed at Ernheit. “And you think that I know this?”

“Not the name of the bomber, but who sent him. And why.” David stared hard into his eyes. “If they came for Hillel Markis, they may also come for you.”

Lev did not seem to blink. “
You
came for Hillel,” he said in a chill accusation. “Death followed. And now you’re here.”

“Death followed Amos Ben-Aron,” David countered. “Whoever planned his murder killed Markis. I guess they didn’t tell you that would happen.”

Beside him, David felt Ernheit tautly watching him, then Lev. Softly, Lev answered, “You would have me die in an Israeli prison.”

David felt a tense anticipation—at last, were he skillful, he might discover at least one aspect of the truth. “You don’t control these people,” David said. “You never did. Now you understand the cost, and that they
won’t hesitate to kill you. Better to die in prison having named the people who killed your friend.”

Lev’s smile was grim. “And killed Ben-Aron, you think. That is your interest here—extricating your Arab woman from this conspiracy you think I’m part of.”

“That’s
m
y interest. Yours is in avenging Hillel Markis.”

Lev’s bark of laughter made David flinch. “My interest is in Greater Israel. This admission you would have me make could well destroy its future.

“Every November in the rump state called Israel, Jews mourn the death of Yitzhak Rabin.
I
celebrate it, and honor the man who killed him. But there are still too few of us, and far too many of the others. Let Ben-Aron’s death be the work of two Palestinian students and your whore of a law professor.” Lev’s smile betrayed a trace of self-contempt. “For all I know she is as guilty, or as innocent, as I. The pawn who thought himself a king.”

David felt the truth like a tangible thing lurking in the shadows, just out of sight and reach. “Whose pawn?”

“Even if I knew, I would not tell you. Not even for Hillel.” His tone grew quiet. “I have lost a woman, and a child, and now a friend. I can only hope we are all the pawns of God.

“Our destiny is bigger than any one of us, or even all. God demands the destruction of this rotten secular Jewish state, through whatever means there is—enemy or friend. Then the Israel of the Bible can arise, a place free of Arabs and cleansed of this socalled democracy.” His eyes became bright again, lit by the reanimation of his vision. “Compared to this, Hillel is nothing, I am nothing, Arif less than nothing. You have wasted your time in coming here.”

But David believed that he had not: his dialogue with Lev, witnessed by Ernheit, might well be sufficient basis to demand more information from the Israelis or even, perhaps, to compel them to produce Lev for a deposition. From there, the outline of a conspiracy involving both Palestinians and Jews, however complex and obscure, might raise more definitive doubts about Hana’s guilt. Standing, David told Lev, “Just stay alive. For now, that’s all I want from you.”

Ernheit stood with him, as did Lev, gazing hard at David. “Tell me this,” Lev said. “What is it that makes a Jew trouble himself for the life of an Arab slut?”

“There are Jews,” David answered, “and there are Jews. Not all Jews have a psychotic God who tells us who to murder.”

The skin around Lev’s eyes tightened. With a derisive smile, he pointed
to the steps with his rifle. “Go,” he ordered, his smile vanishing. “Before God speaks to me again.”

Glancing at Ernheit, David turned, feeling pinpricks on the back of his neck. As the two men headed toward the steps, there was a swift, percussive pop, then a sickening spattering sound. David flinched, instinctively ducking, then looked sideways back at Lev.

The top of his head had vanished. Blood and brains and hair were splattered against the rock; eyes rolling backward, Lev toppled to the ground. Ernheit grabbed David’s elbow and pulled him down.

“Don’t move,” Ernheit hissed.

His face inches from Lev’s sightless eyes, David quickly turned his head. Catlike, Ernheit crawled forward to the mouth of the redoubt. David felt his shock and fear as a clammy nausea that chilled his skin and gripped his throat and the pit of his stomach. All he could see was the far wall of the canyon, pocked with caves.

David inhaled, then exhaled, face pressed against the ground. He and Ernheit lay like that for endless minutes, Lev crumpled dead beside them.

Finally Ernheit took the cell phone from his pocket and started dialing.

The Shin Bet arrived in helicopters—crime scene investigators, armed officers, and two lead agents, who took Ernheit and David to an empty trailer.

The agents were cool, expressionless, thorough. The sniper was a professional, Ernheit told them with assurance, who had shot from a great distance. His only target was Lev; David and Ernheit knew too little for inclusion in his assignment.

The agents questioned David separately. He told them what he could— that Markis and Lev were friends; that he suspected them of complicity in the murder of Ben-Aron; that he did not know the man who had met him in the Assyrian Chapel. His description of the stranger was sketchy. He did not mention Ari Masur or Anat Ben-Aron.

Toward the end, to David’s surprise, Avi Hertz—Israel’s liaison to the prosecutor—entered the trailer. Wearily, David said, “I thought you were in America.”

“Where you should be,” Hertz answered with lethal quiet. “You’ve accomplished a great deal in the last two days. A death in Bar Kochba and, I suspect, in Tel Aviv.

“You played a dangerous game with us. Now whatever these men knew has died with them. Did you think we were so quiet, and so cautious, just to
frustrate your defense? Or can you possibly imagine we had some larger aim in mind?”

“You kept me on the outside,” David retorted. “I have a client to save from execution. You might have tried to reconcile our interests.”

“Go home,” Hertz said softly. “You have done your work in Israel.”

15     
T
he next morning, after ascending from a dark pit of sleep, David went to the Western Wall.

This was an act of will—he could not escape the image of a dead man with a shattered skull, or the instinctive fear that the next dead man could be him. So it was necessary, he concluded, not to cower in his room, haunted and disoriented and alone. Near the wall, David saw a cluster of angry demonstrators—Lev’s followers, a man explained to him, protesting the inability of the government to protect Jews in the biblical homeland. Nonetheless, the wall seemed as good a place as any for meditation.

Wearing a paper yarmulke, David bowed his head. Three months ago, before Hana’s call, he had been living a life of his own design. The only deaths he had known had been natural or accidental; the only mischance, his affair with Hana; the only barriers to his success—the conflicting ambitions of others—a contingency he could plan for and surmount. Then he had thrown it all away, along with Carole and Harold, because of a mixture of principle and passion he still could not untangle. Even then he had been naive; too certain of his ability and nerve, he had misconceived the danger and complexity of the strategy he had designed. Now two men had died, one right before his eyes. It was hard not to see himself as the man who might have fatally impeded, to Hana’s detriment, the discovery of how, and by whom, Ben-Aron had been murdered.

And for what? Still he was not sure of Hana’s innocence; the ambiguities of her relationship to Saeb, intertwined with the evidence against her,
were difficult to unravel. David’s only beliefs were contradictory and, for now, beyond proof: that Al Aqsa could not, by itself, have engineered an assassination in America; that Iyad Hassan might have been connected to Hamas; that Barak Lev and Hillel Markis had facilitated the murder of their own prime minister; that the authors of an undefined conspiracy had killed them both; that someone other than the Shin Bet had followed David.

Because of
that
there was nothing more for him to do here. He had not heard from those who, for their own reasons, had tried to help him; the murders of Lev and Markis had no doubt driven them deeper underground, unwilling to deal with a man who had become an albatross. Glancing at the men praying all around him, David wondered who among them might be his shadow.

He had run out of choices now. Whatever his self-disgust at being overconfident and overmatched, he could not quit the case, or forget what he now knew: that the key to Hana’s guilt—or, he hoped, her innocence— lay in a conspiracy the dimensions of which he had yet to grasp. To retreat behind the shield of “reasonable doubt” would not be enough to save her. He would go, as planned, to the West Bank.

Turning, David followed the cobblestoned streets to the edge of the Old City. He made no efforts at evasion, not even to look behind him.

That evening as he packed, David watched CNN. On the screen, he saw the men of the Masada movement bearing Barak Lev on a litter, his ruined head exposed. His wife wept openly; his son, barely five, walked stoically at her side. They buried Lev where he had died.

As the film ended, CNN followed up with a second report: only hours after Lev’s funeral, in a village beneath Bar Kochba, someone had shot and killed a teenage Arab girl. Her fatal wound was nearly identical to Lev’s.

The next morning David checked out of the hotel. Politely, the young

woman at the desk asked, “Where do you plan to visit next?”

“Ramallah.”

She blinked, seemingly perplexed. “How far is that?” she asked.

“Ten miles.”

His answer seemed to surprise her. As though recounting a rumor, she said, “I hear it is dangerous there.”

David was struck by a dual level of irony—not only had he precipitated
two murders in Israel, but Ramallah was visible from numerous vantage points in Jerusalem. And yet, for all this young woman knew, he could have been traveling to Zimbabwe: her sole impression was that the place, and its people, were to be avoided.

“I’ll be careful,” David promised.

16     
D
avid met his investigator in front of the hotel. Nabil Ashawi was a former member of the Palestinian security forces; Ashawi’s virtues, according to Bryce Martel, included discretion, an eye for trouble, and sometimes shadowy connections that he could use to help David probe the lives of Hassan and Jefar, and even Saeb Khalid. David found him to be quiet and self-contained, a slight man with thinning hair, a soft voice, and perceptive, somewhat melancholy brown eyes. His other attribute, rare for a Palestinian, was that he had a pass to enter Jerusalem.

Settling into Ashawi’s van, David told him what the young Israeli hotel clerk had said. Ashawi gave a mirthless laugh. “Thanks to the checkpoints,” he responded, “Ramallah might as well be in Zimbabwe. You will see.”

Within twenty minutes, David felt the impact of the checkpoint at Qalandiya.

They waited in a single lane of traffic, with a thirty-foot-high security wall on one side and, on the other, a line of Palestinians trudging behind a wire screen toward a checkpoint too distant for David to see. The delay afforded Ashawi time to explain the differences between travel on the West Bank for Israelis and Palestinians. One Israeli bypass road was entirely off-limits to Arabs; the others were protected by more than six hundred road-blocks, which insulated them from Arab cities, leaving the roads used by Israelis unimpeded by obstacles and largely free of Palestinians. It was this, David realized, that had rendered the Arabs invisible even when Ernheit had driven near their villages.

David checked his watch. “How long will it take us to get to Ramallah?”

“It
should
take, at most, a half hour. Today? An hour, two hours. One
never really knows.” Elbow propped against the window, Ashawi gazed listlessly at the road. “What so many fail to understand is that the checkpoints do not separate Israel and the West Bank, but one part of the West Bank from another. Their purpose, the Israelis say, is to interdict terrorists and weapons. But these checkpoints do not discriminate—because we are all Palestinians, we are all suspects. And so all of us wait.”

“How frequent are the checkpoints?”

“Frequent, and unpredictable. There are permanent checkpoints, like this one, and temporary barriers—socalled flying checkpoints—set up to create the element of surprise for terrorists. For the rest of us, we often find it impossible to get home for dinner, or to visit a sick parent.” As Ashawi spoke, the line of traffic, at a standstill for minutes, began slowly creeping forward. “The Israelis divide us into zones. The cities are Zone A, in theory controlled by the Palestinian Authority—although at any time the IDF can come in to pursue terrorists, as they did in Jenin. Zone B, the areas immediately around the cities, is jointly administered by the IDF and the Palestinians. And Zone C, the countryside surrounding A and B, is controlled exclusively by the IDF. So our cities are separate enclaves; for Hana Arif to get from Ramallah to Birzeit University, she must pass through whatever checkpoints the Israeli army wishes to impose.” Ashawi gave a fatalistic shrug. “Some days she will make all her classes, some days not. And she will never know which days. Same thing for students such as your assassins, Jefar and Hassan.”

“What would you have the Israelis do?” David asked. “From what I’ve learned, it strikes me as a chicken-egg problem: are there suicide bombings because the occupation continues, or does the occupation continue because there are suicide bombings?”