Retribution (14 page)

“You say this as an Israeli?” Bradshaw asked. “That nothing can be done about these terrorists?”

“Not about the zealots themselves, no. The ones we can and need to control are those who pay the expenses, which are considerable.
You two come here and ask that we Israelis do something about the June 4–New Arab Social Front. What do you mean do something’?
You mean kill their gunmen and bomb throwers. We Israelis say yes, certainly we will do that for you. And that is all you
want. You will look no further.”

“It’s taken us long enough to get even this far,” van Gilder remarked impatiently. “You Israelis will have to talk peace with
the Palestinians and give them some land.”

“They will never negotiate peace with us while Arafat and other cowboys have more to gain in personal
power from a state of war,” Bikel said heatedly. “But those are our problems. All you need is to get them out of your flower
beds, right?”

“Something like that,” van Gilder conceded.

“Well, I think we’ll have something to show by this evening,” Bikel promised.

“Good show,” Bradshaw said.

None of the three guards at Abu Jeddah’s headquarters answered the tape-recorded calls of the imans at noon for the second
prayers of the day. All were Marxist–Leninists and hadn’t kneeled toward Mecca in years. Inside the compound Abu Jeddah floated
in the pool, having returned from inspecting the recruits at his training camp. He heaved himself out of the water and sipped
some spiked coffee. A smell of lamb pieces roasting on a spit came from the kitchen. He ate the food listlessly when it was
served to him. His mind was still not decided on what to do in Europe. He heard the guard descend from the roof, driven down
by the heat or lured by the smell of food or both. Sleep… After an hour’s rest in a cool, dark room, then he would decide…

Even the sun-loving lizards crept into the shade. Men and beasts huddled down from the sun’s heat almost as if they were weathering
a high wind. Peace descended on Lebanon. These early afternoon hours, when gunmetal was too hot to touch, were the only daylight
times that calm seemed restored to the war-ravaged land.

The two guards slept in their chairs in the shade
cast by the wall. The roof man squatted down beside them. He was more dedicated and did not doze. Grown used to letting his
eyes unfocus and his thoughts drift to a stop for hours on end, he showed no more signs of life than the lizards—only a slow
rising and falling of the ribcage as he breathed. But just as the reptiles were nearly impossible to approach unseen, so was
he. In addition, as roof man, the sky was his realm as well as the land.

He saw the planes as they came over the horizon and was already shouting before the sounds of the engines reached them, “Two
bombers! Three-plane fighter escort!”

They might have been friendly Syrian aircraft. The roof man knew they were not. He recognized almost instinctively the deadly
style Israeli pilots used. The two bombers were ejecting dummy metal targets every few seconds to deflect the land-to-air
rockets. They needn’t have bothered. The radar operators and missile men were asleep.

Abu Jeddah and his staff ran from the house to the bomb shelter. Before they reached its sandbagged entrance, next to the
pool, they felt the ground vibrate beneath their feet over and over again and heard the thump of bombs exploding on impact.

“The training camp!” the roof man yelled. “They’re not hitting us. They’ve found the camp.”

He ran to a Toyota four-wheel-drive vehicle. Abu Jeddah jumped in beside him and one of the other
guards climbed in over the side as the roof man drove the vehicle along the bumpy track toward the camp.

The smoke, dust, and shouts left no doubt in their minds what the target had been. The long, low building constructed of blocks
with a flat tar roof was crumpled. Those uninjured worked feverishly with their bare hands to lift the fallen masonry off
those trapped inside. They carried out the injured, the dead, and the near-dead.

Abu Jeddah circulated among them, touching people, offering praise and encouragement. This was a test from Allah. They must
overcome every adversity. They were brothers and sisters united in a common goal. Some had been chosen as martyrs for Islam.
This was not a time to mention international socialism.

As he went around comforting and encouraging, he was also counting. From a force of twenty-one male and three female recruits,
he had five males and one female uninjured. They happened not to be in the building for the midday rest because they were
being disciplined for minor infractions and were working in the kitchen and latrines. This was what he was left with to campaign
in Europe!

They loaded the injured onto trucks to take them to the makeshift hospital at Taanayel. Then they laid the dead out side by
side on the ground and began to dig graves.

The roof man spotted a plane flying south, very high overhead.

Abu Jeddah looked up and shook his fist in impotent fury at it. “Now they take photographs of our
misfortunes for their imperialist friends! It is not enough for them to kill and maim us, they want pictures of it too!”

He strode across and pulled the picks and shovels from the six uninjured recruits. “You will not dig graves for your brothers
and sisters. We will do that. You will make graves for the murderers responsible for this. You leave in the next few days
for Europe to wreak vengeance for our cause. Go now, bid farewell to your loved ones.”

As a result of the terrorist outrages at Père Lachaise cemetery and the Café Arizona, the president of the French Republic,
the prime minister, and the government were accused in the press of ineptitude, laxness, stupidity, and a variety of other
things. To show the voters their concern, the elected officials ordered the police to make some visible efforts to arrest
the terrorists, even if these efforts amounted to nothing and caused more disruption than anything else. The police immediately
set up checkpoints on various routes, which caused traffic backups and made the people thus delayed complain, but feel more
secure now that the government was finally doing something.

One such checkpoint was in operation on the road between the airport and Nice, which also included coastal traffic from Cannes
and Antibes and points west along the French Riviera. It was not a roadblock, and anyone looking like a French-born citizen
or northern
European or American was waved through. But the police stared at people as if they knew things about them. The word was already
out to dope dealers to detour inland through the mountains—only out-of-towners would be caught. The police manning the checkpoint
knew all these things and expected that no wonders would be performed. It was all a game.

When a pretty woman driving an ordinary family car reached the two policemen covering eastbound traffic, they told her to
pull over for a car search, just for the hell of it. The drivers in front and behind her were sour-faced men—she looked high-strung
and strident, just the sort for them to have fun with. Instead of pulling in to the side of the road, she hit the gas pedal,
knocked the two cops on their asses, and caused a multiple-car collision as drivers swerved to avoid being hit by her.

No one was hurt seriously and the incident would have been buried inside the Paris papers, if mentioned at all, had not a
Japanese tourist taken a series of photos which were bought by the national press agency and sold to papers worldwide. One
photo showed a frustrated policeman with a submachine gun being forced to hold his fire for fear of hitting innocent people.
Several of the pictures showed the face and hair of the pretty woman, slightly blurred by the windshield and thus useless
for identification.

Dartley’s arm was healing well, with no infection or swelling. The hooker had taken him to her hungry
young doctor and he had cleaned the wound. She earned another hundred by buying him a fresh set of clothes. A turquoise shirt
with pearl buttons wouldn’t have been his choice, but so long as there were no bloodstains, he didn’t complain. It struck
Dartley that neither the doctor nor she might have been so cooperative if he had tried to pay them off in French francs. But
gunshot wounds and American hundred-dollar bills were associated in the French mind with TV and movies, not with everyday
life. To them he was from another planet.

Back to his search for the two Palestinians, Dartley watched every television newscast and scanned a selection of newspapers
for anything that might provide him with a lead to their present whereabouts or future movements. Greece would not sign. Holland
was sticking by its announced intention to sign. Britain and Ireland were expected to stand by the concordance. France was
rumored to be backing down. The French government leaders were continuing to take a personal beating in the daily press.

Resting his arm, Dartley sat in the spring sunshine at café tables, flipping through the pages of papers and magazines, watching
pretty girls, passing the time. The photos of the car breaking through the checkpoint outside the Riviera city of Nice caught
his attention. He looked at the woman’s face in one paper, put that one down and looked in another. He hurriedly went through
all the papers to see which ones ran the best shots of her. He might be wrong but he thought not. He couldn’t
swear to it in court, yet he was reasonably certain that the woman driving this car was the one who had followed him in Père
Lachaise cemetery, had come to his hotel room with him, and had steered the Palestinians to him. if Claudine was in Nice,
chances were they were too.

These photos might have scared her away from Nice. Then again, they might not, since the indistinct image of her face through
the windshield glass and the grainy photo reproduction on the newsprint could hardly cause her much alarm. Still, he had recognized
her.

Dartley got his things together and a couple of hours later boarded a plane for the sixty-minute flight to Nice.

The water was still too cold for swimming, but pale Europeans were out on the pebble beach working on their tans. Some of
the women wore only the bottom half of a bikini and did not seem shy about lying on their backs and showing off their charms.
Dartley walked along Nice’s famous Promenade des Anglais, ten feet above the beach. This was between seasons—winter’s wealthy
retirees and summer’s youth culture—and the place wasn’t crowded.

The sea was clean and properly Mediterranean blue. Palms and bougainvillea grew on the center divider of the busy highway,
and exhaust fumes floated over the stony beach. Dartley checked the faces, as well as the breasts, of pretty sunbathers as
he walked along.
Some peddlers trudged along the beach stones selling chocolate, beer, and soda from straw baskets. On the Promenade itself
kids on motor scooters and light motorbikes brushed close by startled elderly men who shouted curses after them, waving their
sticks. One kid tried to buzz Dartley for the hell of it. As he brushed by on Dartley’s left, uninjured side, he found himself
against a solid unyielding shoulder that unseated him from his motorbike. The kid bit the raspberry-colored asphalt and the
bike scraped along on its side before its engine stalled. The kid picked himself up, giving Dartley the look of a hurt innocent
as he limped to the bike. Last Dartley heard of him, he was still trying unsuccessfully to start the machine.

He kept walking around the old part of the city and back on the Promenade again, constantly looking for Claudine, until the
lights flicked on along the entire length of the Promenade. He stayed for a while on a wooden bench, looking out at the dark
sea which was slapping softly on the beach stones. To the east a lighthouse flashed regularly every three seconds. Another,
to the west, gave two longer flashes, spaced three and seven seconds apart.

Dartley was used to looking for needles in haystacks. He tried the casino and lost a hundred dollars at baccarat before turning
in for the night at the Westminster Concorde on the Promenade. He wasn’t disheartened by his unsuccessful search and was determined
to repeat it the next day and the next, until some solid lead turned up.

Next morning a cool breeze blew in off the sea. The beach was deserted and only a few hardy all-weather types walked on the
Promenade. Claudine was definitely not this sort, and the Palestinians probably weren’t fresh-air freaks either. The winding
narrow streets of the old town were sheltered from the breeze and were filled with visitors. The major sight in the old town
at this time of year was the flower market. Roses, carnations, and other flowers grown in the coastal hills were marketed
here before being shipped, for the most part, by train to Paris. Tourists posed before huge colorful banks of flowers for
their friends to photograph them.

Dartley prowled, weaponless and without much hope. And it was while he felt most strongly that he was only wasting his time,
although determined to persevere, he saw Claudine on the sidewalk coming toward him. He sidestepped quickly into a doorway
and watched her pass. She hadn’t seen him and appeared to be alone. He was just about to slip out of the doorway to follow
her when he saw her turn and head back again. Had she seen something that aroused her curiosity or suspicion? She walked past
the doorway where he stood without glancing once in his direction. In fact she seemed more interested in what was going on
across the street, where flower market stalls stood next to each other and sellers shouted their bargains.