The Lie: A Novel (3 page)

“We do have criminal courts. Your people picked me up outside one of them.”

“Sometimes pragmatism must trump principle.”

“Pragmatism must trump the rule of law? Is that what you’re saying?”

Arad sighs. “Let us conjecture. Say we find a certain young Arab citizen is part of a group planning to attack a train, a bus, a school. We don’t know where, but we know when. The courts by nature are . . . procedural. Motions, counter-motions, counter-
counter-motions. Let us say we have only twenty-four hours. Would you not agree we must consider extraordinary means?”

She lights a cigarette. “Do I understand you correctly?”

“I think you do.”

“The State is now considering torture of its own citizens?”

“Extraordinary means. If it will save lives.”

“Torture, Zalman?”

“How many Jewish children would you expend for a principle, Dahlia?”

“I don’t deal in the hypothetical. As you taught me, it makes bad law.”

“This is not about good or bad law. This is about survival.”

“Where have I heard that before? Russia? Syria? China?”

He waves his hand. It parts the smoke. “In such places, these practices are utilized to preserve those in power. Here we would take such steps to preserve
lives
. Innocent lives. Many innocent lives.”

“It never works. And I can’t imagine why you are telling me this.”

“Listen, then. As I speak, elite units are being transferred to the Police from the Army and the security services. We are bringing in key officers, specialists, the best. The state will not be threatened from within.”

She laughs. “The Israel Police is unable even to patrol the roads.”

“That is exactly why we are augmenting its abilities.”

She rises. “With all due respect, Zalman . . .”

“I have not finished.”

She sits. “So the Police will decide whom, when, and how . . . to torture? How does this concern me?”

“As a defender of civil rights, are you not concerned?”

“How does this
relate
to me?”

“Someone must make such decisions.”

“Zalman, I can only pray for the man who must carry this burden.”

“You may pray. But it will not be a man. Dear Dahlia, it will be you.”

She stubs out her cigarette. “Zalman, you are mad.”

“Because?”

“Because I have dedicated my entire life to the cause of human rights. You expect me to take part in a practice that is its anathema?”

“Who better, Dahlia? Soldiers, policemen, academics, politicians, bureaucrats? None of these has your résumé, your instincts, your will to do the right thing until the last possible moment. Whom would you trust with such decisions? Someone else—or yourself?”

She looks at her cigarette stubbed out in the glass saucer. She stops herself from lighting another. “I need time.”

“My dear Dahlia,” the old man says. “You have none.”

Edward Al-Masri pulls the tan plaid blue-piped suitcase off the moving belt and follows the man who would not sit next to him through the passage marked
NOTHING TO DECLARE
. A tired-looking customs officer in thick glasses waves the Jewish passenger through. Al-Masri is stopped.

“Is it your duty to harass only Arab citizens, or merely your pleasure?” Al-Masri says.

The customs officer points to the next table, where a colleague spills out the contents of the luggage of a black-bearded Hasidic Jew. Most of it is toys, the same toys. “I have a lot of children,” the Hasid is saying.

The first customs officer asks, “Is this your luggage, Mr. . . . ?” He checks the passport in his hand. “Al-Masri.”

“Professor Al-Masri.”

“Mazel tov. Is this your luggage?”

“Are you accusing me of stealing someone else’s bag?”

“Is it yours or someone else’s?”

“Go to hell.”

“Sweetie, my shift ends in ten minutes. Let’s not make this more difficult than it has to be. Yours?”

“Very well, then. Mine.”

“Purpose of visit?”

“This I was already asked at immigration.”

“Humor me, Mr. Al-Masri.”

“
Professor
Al-Masri.”

“Pleased to make your acquaintance. Professor, doctor, mister, whatever. Believe me, this does not have to take long. A few questions, and you are on your way. Purpose of visit?”

“To see family.”

“Where?” The customs officer opens the suitcase.

“Baka al-Gharbiya.”

“Ah, Baka. I grew up next door. In Afula. Does Abu Adel still roast coffee there? I smell it in my dreams.” The officer feels something in the suitcase lining.

“I haven’t been back in five years. I now make my home in Canada, where Arabs are not punished for being Arabs.”

The customs officer slits open the lining with a razor. “I didn’t know that, professor. Tell me, are these Canadian? They look like euros to me.” He begins to stack the banknotes on the counter. Seemingly out of nowhere, a couple of police constables appear and stand on either side of Al-Masri.

Rather than being startled, Al-Masri looks amused. “You people had police already in place? Do you have X-ray eyes?”

“Better,” the customs inspector says, admiring the carefully stacked banknotes. “Our college girls in Montreal can feel a lump in a suitcase lining the size of a shirt button.”

“Yet they let me board the plane? It could have been a bomb.”

“All hand baggage is chemically scanned.”

“Still, a passenger with contraband?”

The customs inspector removes his thick glasses to stare directly into Al-Masri’s eyes. “Israel has no power of arrest in Canada, professor.” He replaces his glasses and turns to the two constables. “These smuggled funds will remain with the Customs Service until we are otherwise advised.” He turns to the constables. “Gentlemen, Mr. Al-Masri—excuse me, Professor Al-Masri—is all yours.”

She knows Dudik is already at Moshiko’s. Dahlia had wished to get there first, but the early evening traffic in Tel Aviv has been compromised further by a burning bus on Allenby Street, which the security people have closed off two blocks ahead of her and a block behind. Her taxi driver, a real taxi driver this time and remarkably relaxed for the breed—one A. Einstein, according to his name plate—returns from a closer look to report the bus was not bombed.

“Who would guess that it is not terrorist?” he says in a Russian accent. “Some gangster blows up the car of another gangster, and the car is next to the bus, which catches fire.”

“Makes for a change,” Dahlia says from the backseat.

Normally, she reads briefs while traveling. Now all she can think of is the strange prospect of seeing Dudik at Moshiko’s, having willed herself to do so. Another woman might have lapsed into bitter nostalgia, remembering the two of them as they had been, young attorneys, Dudik in the pressed uniform of an officer in the Judge Advocate General’s Office, she fresh from law school and finishing her apprenticeship, about to go out on her own. It was at Moshiko’s he proposed. In the garden. No doubt he would be there now, peering down at his expensive watch, one of his many expensive watches. In the garden, for sure. It was where they had always sat, once in a light rain, laughing.

But Dahlia is not another woman. She remains focused on the need to avoid confrontation over the divorce, the one thing, aside from the boys, that ties them together, the only thing, really, the divorce, that has survived—

“There is a God,” Einstein interrupts, starting his engine. The cars ahead begin to move.

If it had been a terrorist bombing, they would be there for an hour while the special squads of Orthodox Jews in their beards and fringes who volunteer for this gruesome work carefully comb the area for bits of brain, an ear, the odd finger, lest these pieces go unburied.

They pass the burned-out bus and the remains of a silver Volvo that seems to have melted into it, then turn right onto Ben Yehuda. The street has not changed much from the days of their youth. Apartments above shops, mostly small. Even the supermarkets here are small. Everywhere else, they are new and huge, American-style, with a dozen checkout counters. As they pass the Super-Sol off Gordon, she can see the same two checkout counters she had known when she and Dudik were just starting out and living a block away. The cab pulls in right behind Dudik’s red sedan, the biggest one BMW makes.

It is the same Moshiko’s, three tables on the sidewalk looking a bit forlorn on this cool evening, inside a ceiling fan turning slowly for no good reason other than it always did. She can already smell the rich, dark scent of grilling meat.

But it is not the same Moshiko who comes out from behind the refrigerated case full of kabobs, lamb and chicken, and
merguez
, the peppery sausage Dudik used to order with clockwork regularity until his stomach could no longer handle it. This Moshiko who embraces her could be Moshiko’s own father, the same sharp-featured walnut-colored Yemenite face, the same knitted skullcap, the same scent. Eau de Moshiko, she used to
call it. Equal parts slow-burning charcoal, some bizarre lemony cologne, stale sweat.

“Such a long time,” Moshiko tells her when finally he lets her loose.

“Too long. I’ve been so busy with work.”

“Funny,” he says. “Dudik said precisely the same. He’s in the back.”

It is early. They are the only customers. She threads her way between the tables and out past the tiny kitchen, where an Arab cuts onions, and into the garden, such as it is: the unadorned back of a stuccoed apartment building forming a rear wall, a cactus too big for its pot, the same willow tree, in the far corner mint spreading over the big cement floor tiles that, twenty years earlier, had not been terribly straight. Now they are jumbled, nearly upended. She thinks,
Like everything else in my life
.

At fifty, Dudik Barr is graying but thick and confident in the way of self-made men. A former major in the IDF, he had spent a total of eight years in uniform when he retired as a military judge to take up private practice representing Israeli high-tech companies wishing to go public on Wall Street. Early on, he decided to forgo hourly fees and instead be paid in stock. As a result, he is now a director of seven companies, three in Tel Aviv and four in California.

When she enters the garden, Dudik stands.

That is one thing about my husband
, she thinks.
He has always been an unerringly polite son of a bitch
. “A bus was burning on Allenby—”

“It was on the news. I heard it in the car.” He sits when she does. “I took the liberty.”

Before her is a shot glass of arak, the anise-flavored alcohol of the Mediterranean that, under so many names—raki, ouzo, pastis, sambuca, ojen, kasra—is common to its disparate cultures. Dudik used to laugh at her for preferring a man’s drink.
“A hairy man’s drink,” he liked to say. These days he could not say it. Arak is now a popular drink among twenty-somethings in Tel Aviv. Dudik’s own taste runs to single malt, the more expensive the better. There is a bottle of it on the table.

She pours the shot into a glass full of ice and tops it with an inch of water.

“Cheers,” Dudik says. He never uses the Hebrew toast.

“
L’chaim
.”

“I ordered appetizers. I hope you’re hungry.”

“I can eat,” she says. “That’s why I’m so fat.”

“You’re not fat.”

“In the twenty years of our marriage, I gained a pound a year.”

“I gained two. So it’s good we’re divorcing. We’ll be thinner.”

“I told you on the phone, I’m not here to talk about the divorce.”

He refills his glass from the bottle.
INCHGOWER
, the label reads,
14 YEARS OLD
.

She guesses he brought it. Moshiko wouldn’t know a single malt if it made a pass at him in a bar. She smiles at her own unspoken joke. “You always were such a snob.”

“I’ve an appointment at eight, Dahlia.” He sips from his Scotch. “Just to get this out of the way, you were right: I should have told you first. Not the boys.”

She smiles. “Just to get this out of the way, that’s not why I’m here.”

“You’re ill?”

“Do I look ill?”

For a moment his face darkens, its broad planes taking on a deep shadow all its own. “The boys?”

“Our young men? No, they’re fine. I spoke with Ari earlier.”

“It’s quiet in the north,” he says. It is as much an aspiration as a statement of fact. In the Middle East, statements of fact can be quickly undone.

“Thank God for quiet in the north.”

“Am I to keep guessing?”

“I need your advice.”

“My advice?” He lights a cigarette. “You don’t want me in your life, but you want my advice.”

“Exactly.”

“I’m listening.”

She had rehearsed some of this in her mind, starting with: “Dudik, I don’t like you, but you’re the smartest man I know.” She does not bother with the introduction. She knows that in a similar case he would come to her. This is not a matter of the heart. It is a matter of the head. She goes through it for him, summarizing as though it were a legal brief.

“Head torturer of the State of Israel?” he says.

“Special Adviser for Extraordinary Measures to the Chief Commissioner of Police.”

His lips purse for a moment, then straighten as his mind shifts into gear. “So what do you want to know?”

“Don’t be obtuse.”

“Obtuse? It’s your decision.”

“That much I know.”

He sips from the Scotch. “Zalman Arad is using you to cover his ass. It’s not personal, it’s political. Zalman wants you because of who and what you are. If Dahlia Barr approves of—what are we calling it?—extraordinary measures, no one can say they are not critically necessary. What made you a pain now makes you an asset.”

Moshiko brings a tray of appetizers. “Just like old times,” he says. “You want to order?”

“This ought to hold us,” she says.

When Moshiko goes away, Dudik completes his thought. “
Human Rights Attorney Moves to Police
. It’s a compelling headline.”

“They intend to crack down on Israeli Arabs.”

“I shouldn’t think it’s as general as that,” he says with casual authority. “Something is happening, something specific. Something big.”