The Lie: A Novel (10 page)

“You were at his bar mitzvah.”

“Dahlia, listen to me. You must stop acting like a mother.”

“A mother is what I am.”

“You must stop acting only like a mother. There are indications the key is in your hands.”

“My hands?”

“Mohammed Al-Masri. One can’t be sure. But there are signs.”

Dahlia straightens her back. She takes Dudik’s handkerchief and wipes her eyes. The heavy mascara she favors has long since washed away. “There is no connection other than that he was picked up the same day.”

“Dahlia,” the old man says, “that Ari has fallen into their hands is happenstance. This could have happened to any of our boys. But it did happen to your son. That Al-Masri has fallen into
your
hands alters the equation.”

Dahlia’s eyes are dry. “Zalman, are you saying that Al-Masri is somehow related to the kidnapping of two young soldiers? How can that be?”

Zalman Arad rises to indicate the interview is over. “You are asking the wrong person. Ask Mohammed Al-Masri.”

Later that day, in her office, Kobi lights Dahlia’s cigarette. He is the kind of man who carries matches though he does not smoke. “Do you wish to be relieved?”

“Why? Because I’m a woman?”

“Because you’re a mother, because you’re in pain, because you might better use your strength elsewhere.”

“There is no elsewhere. Elsewhere is . . . elsewhere.”

“The younger son. You should be with him. And your husband.”

“Dudik and I are divorcing.”

“He is Ari’s father.”

Dahlia sighs. “The father is as useless as the mother.”

“We’ll get through this, Dahlia.”

“Zalman Arad believes there may be a connection between Al-Masri and the two boys.”

“He may be right.”

She stares at him.

“Or wrong. A man like Zalman Arad, he has spent his whole life seeing conspiracy. To a man like that nothing is accidental. To Zalman Arad a pair of mismatched socks is a plot.”

“Do you have another idea?”

“Dahlia, I am a trained intelligence officer. Intelligence officers do not have ideas, not least because it is too often difficult
to separate one’s ideas from one’s feelings. The best we can do is deduce from available hard evidence. In this case . . .”

“Yes?”

“In this case we have what is known as proximal data. Two soldiers fell into the hands of the enemy in the same time frame as Al-Masri fell into ours. Coincidence? Normally I would say probably nothing more than that. However, Al-Masri did not merely fall into our hands, he practically leaped.”

“Why would he do that?”

“Mind reading is not part of my job description, but as it happens I have in my possession a psychological portrait of our guest.”

“I’d like to read it.”

“Not more than I would like you to. But this particular document is not for general dissemination.”

“Kobi, I am a senior officer.”

“And the mother of one of the kidnapped soldiers.”

“This somehow precludes my seeing all the evidence?”

“Dahlia, such a document is not evidence. It is psychological conjecture created in less than twenty-fours by a team of professionals whose track record is both admirable and imperfect. How shall I put it?”

“Honestly, I hope.”

“Honestly, then. The organization that employs us wishes to know the truth, not to be reassured in its errors. Once you see this speculative report, you are bound to use it to guide your investigation. Your value to me is not your concurrence. It is your independence.”

“There’s nothing you can tell me?”

Kobi offers a wry smile. “Think of it this way: Some men of action would prefer to be professors. All professors dream of being men of action.”

Despite herself, she laughs. It feels so good. “Does this tell me about Mohammed Al-Masri or about Kobi Shem-Tov?”

“Ah,” he says. “About Kobi Shem-Tov, I can tell you this: He would rather be sitting on the Riviera or in Rio or Miami Beach, sipping cocktails with little umbrellas in them, a carefree Jew among other carefree Jews, without a nation to protect, without borders to secure, without a care in the world beyond what to choose for dinner. But you know, Dahlia, in the end either we Jews take responsibility for our own fate, or someone else will. And that, the last time, did not turn out very well, did it?”

In the basement of the same building where Fawaz Awad and Tawfeek Nur-al-Din sit and smoke, green-uniformed militia drape a cinder-block wall with a green-on-yellow banner marked
HEZBOLLAH
, out of which one stylized Arabic letter rises like an upstretched arm to hold a rifle. Lighting is adjusted. Armed men discuss shooting angles that do not, at this moment, involve guns. A cameraman in a red-and-white-checked kaffiyeh looks through a viewfinder and directs the straight-backed chair to be moved a bit to the right. “Ah,” he says. “Perfection. Just like Hollywood.” He smiles. “But with real blood.”

In the interrogation room Dahlia chain-smokes, staring off into space, and is startled when the door opens and the constables wheel in Al-Masri, his head covered by a black sack.

A moment earlier she checked her face in her compact mirror, then snapped it shut. This is the way Al-Masri looked when first she had seen him in this room, his features so tired they seemed to be a blur, an out-of-focus photo, eyes baggy, skin without luster, mouth so tight it appeared to forbid speech.
There are all kinds of prisons
, she thinks,
but all prisoners are the same
.

“Please remove that thing, officers.” When they lift the black sack, Al-Masri clenching his eyes against the light, she dismisses the guards.

“I’m genuinely sorry, Mohammed, about the sack. It seems to be policy.”

“Edward.”

“Edward.”

“Can you do something about my accommodations, then?”

“Bad view?”

“None at all. Don’t you think it funny that the world calls the Arabs barbarians?”

“Edward, unless you help me, you can expect to see that view for a long time. Am I making myself clear?”

“Exceedingly.”

“Then tell me the truth.”

“You know, Dahlia, even in high school, when I wanted to fuck you, I wanted to kill you.”

“Your adolescent fantasies are not relevant here.”

“You were oh, so . . . good. Such a nice Jewish girl. A volunteer is needed? There is Dahlia. A weak student requires tutoring? There is Dahlia. Every teacher’s favorite. And my only competitor.”

“Like you, I was ambitious. Ambition took you far, Edward.”

“It took me to a prison cell as long and wide as I am tall. They play music day and night. Are you aware?”

“Not Mozart?”

“Heavy metal. Try sleeping through that. Do you know about the lights?”

“I imagine they are bright.”

“Bright, on, off, to a rhythm that makes no sense. Day, night—who knows? What day is it?”

“Wednesday.”

“Should I believe you?”

“Why should I lie?”

“Because you’re not working for me, are you? You’re working for them.”

“You’re delirious. Edward, I’m here to help you.”

“I don’t trust you. I didn’t trust you then. I saw through you. You didn’t care about the dumb student who couldn’t handle algebra. When you volunteered to clean up the lunchroom after a party, you had your own agenda. And when you resisted my advances—”

“Edward, for heaven’s sake. High school? You are charged with a serious crime. Do you really wish to spend the little time we have to discuss my rejecting you when we were—what—sixteen?”

“In my room with no view, with the lights going on and off, the heavy metal, my mind went back to those days. I thought,
Who is this Dahlia that represents me?
I recalled what you told me then, that you were not interested in boys. But you lied. You were not involved with any boy at school, I knew that, but I knew, I know in my heart, that you lied.”

She lights another cigarette.

“It was because I am an Arab, a filthy Arab from Baka al-Gharbiya.”

“It was because you were a boy, and not a particularly attractive one. I was already a woman. I was interested in men.”

“It was because I am an Arab.”

“Edward, you are an Arab idiot. I’m no longer sure I want to help you. If it were not for your mother . . .”

“Fuck that! And fuck you, too!”

“Very nice.
Edward
.”

“I wish a new attorney. An Arab.”

“And Israel wishes only to live in peace. We don’t always get what we wish, do we?”

“I don’t trust you.”

She grinds out her cigarette. “Well, at least your instincts are sound. I need to know everything about your visit to Israel. Who sent you? Why? And the purpose of the money. I need the truth.”

He spits in her face.

She slaps him so hard his wheelchair topples. She wipes her face, calls the guards.

As they right the wheelchair and turn it toward the door, he swivels his head in rage. “A whore then, a whore now!” The rest is muffled. The black sack is thick, double-lined, a barrier to sound as well as sight.

Outside the Bedouin tent goats and sheep bleat in a rough enclosure of acacia branches, more or less the only tree capable of surviving in the Negev. To these branches are tied bits and pieces of timber scavenged from the nearby Jewish villages, as well as entire eucalyptus saplings uprooted from roadside plantings. Only steps from where Dahlia’s Ethiopian driver dozes at the wheel of her police vehicle, a small gray Arabian mare is tethered to the rusting carcass of a pickup truck with neither engine nor wheels. In the distance are more black tents, beyond which is nothing but cracked brown earth with here and there a camel searching for the odd green shoot.

Dahlia had turned to Kobi to find Salim’s family. Bedouin move about, sometimes over hundreds of miles. But in an Israel in which every citizen has a cell phone the Bedouin are no exception. Though there is no public directory of mobile numbers, Kobi’s people came up with the right one immediately, and then provided a turn-by-turn map, the last several turns signified by little more than a left by the large rock and a right by the acacia tree split by lightning. The last several miles were little more than goat paths.

Within the tent, a battery-powered radio blares the songs of Umm Kulthum, the great Egyptian contralto of the previous century whose keening songs remain a daily staple on Radio Cairo,
which can be picked up here in the Negev Desert as readily as any station broadcasting from Tel Aviv.

Dahlia, Dudik, and Uri sit cross-legged on rugs in a circle with a wizened Bedouin and his male relatives. Their women, faces tattooed with tribal markings, clear away a huge platter of lamb from the center, serve coffee, then take their places outside the circle. This is a cultural adjustment to the equality of Jewish women in Israel—in other Middle Eastern countries Bedouin females serve and are gone.

As well, in other Middle Eastern countries, a Jewish family would not initiate a visit to a Bedouin family in a gesture of solidarity. With the exception of a dozen here and a handful there, there are no longer any Jewish families in the Arab world. With the declaration of the Jewish State in 1948, they had been driven out.

“My family is deeply honored that you have come to share with us our burden,” Sheikh Adnan intones. His Hebrew carries with it the reflective poetry of Arabic, a muted singsong rather than a declarative statement. “Inshallah, the next time, let it be upon a happier occasion.”

“Inshallah,” Dudik says with a certain awareness that he must take on the role of speaker for his family.
For the first time
, he thinks,
my wife knows her place
. Immediately, he is overcome by shame.
This is not the occasion for stupid macho jokes. Our marriage broke up not because Dahlia did not know her place, but because I did not know mine. Perhaps if we were still together, this thing with Ari would never have happened. No
, he thinks,
that’s cheap guilt talking. If I’m going to feel guilty, it had better be of the expensive sort
.

“And this is the younger son? Soon in the Army?”

“Soon,
ya’hawadja
.” It is an Arabic honorific:
gentleman
.

“Please, I am merely a small sheikh. In the Army, they called me Adnan. Master Sgt. Addy. Please tell me what you know.”

As is common, they have been eating for an hour without
discussing the reason they are here. As T. E. Lawrence wrote, “By three sides is the Arab way across a square.”

“We know as little as you do, Sheikh Adnan.”

“Two officers came,” Adnan says. It is quite as if he is retelling a legend. “We thought the worst. But a prisoner, this leaves hope. The officers called it a window of hope. Alas, as you can see, we have none. In our tents, the window is not known. Therefore we have windowless hope.”

Dahlia decides to speak. Most of her clients are Arabs, though the culture of settled Arabs is distinct from that of the Bedouin—each group despises the other. “You have a multitude of sons, Sheikh Adnan?”

“Eleven. Also daughters. But not with this.” He nods discreetly toward one of the women, the youngest. “With this, only the one.” He shrugs. “You have seen the other tents?”

“Other wives?”

“Praise Allah, with no offense, we are unlike the Jews. However, all the sons of my wives serve. Trackers, each one of them.” He taps his temple. “Myself, thirty-two years I served. In recognition of this service I was presented with a house in a new village near Beersheba.” He points, his finger rising in small circles. “What can a Bedu do with a house? The wives fought. The children fought. Even the goats fought. Our neighbors were too close. For us, this is unnatural. We are suited to tents. Some Bedu, they wish to be like village Arabs. Or Jews.” Now he glances at the young wife, at once recognition and rebuke. “When we sign to serve in the Army, we men understand there are risks. It is harder for a female. It is the pain of the mother.”

Soundlessly the woman rises and whispers in his ear.

“What does she say?” Dahlia asks.