Vicious Circle (13 page)

Q. You are positive there is no trace of her in the Jewish hospitals?

A. Nothing. I can say for sure that she was not in an accident.

Q. And your jails? The Jewish jails—

A. I had a search made when you phoned me yesterday.
There is no Maali al-Chir Abu Saleh in Israeli hands.

Q. What about the Italian scooter?

A. There is nothing on the scooter either. Look, it’s no secret your daughter is married to the Abu Saleh who is high on our
most wanted list. So if he couldn’t come to her, maybe she went to him.

Q. She would have left a note—

A. Girls. I have two myself. When it comes to chasing after boys, they sometimes forget they have parents. I’ll call you if
we hear anything …

Baruch flipped to the next page and started reading the transcript of the interrogation of the wife of Yussuf Abu Saleh. He
had conducted enough interrogations in his career to read between the lines. The prisoner Maali would have been brought into
a room with padded walls and no heating, and seated on a stool whose front legs were slightly shorter than its rear legs to
be sure she was uncomfortable. All four legs of the stool would be bolted to the floorboards. Strong spotlights would be trained
on her; saturated in light, angling her head to escape it, shielding her eyes with a forearm, she would look like a deer caught
in the headlights of a car: frightened, confused, ready to bolt at the sound of a twig snapping if there had been some place
to bolt to. From the darkness beyond the lights, the toneless voice of the interrogator would pitch questions at her.

Q: When was the last time you saw your husband?

A: I answered that yesterday. I answered it this morning.

Q: Answer it again.

A: I have not set eyes on Yussuf since the night of my wedding, six months ago.

Q: Then why were you waving to him at the Damascus Gate?

A: I wasn’t [unintelligible].

Q: If you weren’t waving to Yussuf, whom were you waving to?

A: I don’t remember waving to anyone.

Q: You were seen waving to someone. You uncovered your face and waved. Which means you were waving to your father or one of
your brothers or your husband, Yussuf.

A: Maybe it was my younger brother, Sami. Yes. I [unintelligible]. It must have been [unintelligible].

Q: Speak louder. It was seven thirty in the morning. Sami was sound asleep in the home of your father in Abu Tor.

Baruch skimmed the transcript to the end, then reread the last page.

A: I haven’t been permitted to sleep since you arrested me. I must sleep.

Q: You haven’t been arrested. You have been detained for questioning. You will be permitted to sleep when you have told us
what we want to know. Whom were you waving to at the Damascus Gate?

A: I want to see my mother.

Q: Whom were you waving to?

A: [unintelligible].

Q: Whom were you waving to?

A: The light stings my eyes.

Q: Where did you get this ring?

A: What ring? Oh,
that
ring. I bought it from a Bedouin who sells jewelry in the souk.

Q: What is the name of the Bedouin? What street is his shop on?

A: I don’t remember.

Q: How long ago did you buy it?

A: A month, maybe [unintelligible].

Q: Take her back to the cell.

A: I vomited on my dress. I [unintelligible] the smell. You must give me another dress—

This was the first time Baruch had seen a ring mentioned in the Maali interrogation. He wondered why the interrogator had
bothered raising the subject. Had something caught his eye? Baruch flipped through the dossier to the official interrogation
center description of the detainee’s possessions, with Maali’s almost illegible signature on the bottom of the page.

One leather wallet containing forty-five shekels and twenty agora in notes and coins, along with an Israeli identity card
and a motor scooter registration card.

One key, believed to be the front door key of her father’s villa in Abu Tor.

One 14-carat gold chain and locket containing a lock of hair and a black-and-white photograph of a man we’ve identified as
Yussuf Abu Saleh.

One pair of silver clover-leaf earrings.

One 14-carat gold engagement ring with a slightly scratched garnet stone.

One 18-carat gold wedding band.

One gold-colored ring with an unidentified crest on an unidentified stone and a man’s name, “Erasmus Hall,” and the date 1998
engraved on the inside.

“Who is Erasmus Hall?” Baruch asked aloud. He swiveled in his chair and gazed through the window at Jewish Jerusalem, stretching
to the horizon and turning mauve in the musky twilight. Baruch, a
namesake of the scribe who recorded the doomsday declarations of the prophet Jeremiah six hundred years before Jesus, had
been a cop here for all of his professional life. Jerusalem, for him, was a city of sediments, a dozen Jerusalems piled one
on top of the ruins of the other. If you strip-mined it, brushing away layer after layer, you just might one day reach something
that looked suspiciously like bedrock: King David’s Jerusalem. He wondered if there had been cops in David’s capital. There
surely had been crime and where there was crime, there were cops.

“Erasmus Hall,” he repeated—and he began working through the sediments of this particular crime. Swiveling back to the desk,
he lit off the computer and punched in his personal code, then typed in the word “Apfulbaum” and drummed his fingers on the
desk as he waited for the menu to appear on the screen. He keyed the computer down to “Ancillary Dossiers” and ran a search
for the name “Hall, Erasmus.” The computer drew a blank. Mystified, he started to read through the biographies of the secretary,
Efrayim, and the three bodyguards who had been killed in the kidnapping and the one who had died later on the operating table.
One of the bodyguards was named Ronni Goldman. Scrolling through the dead boy’s background, he came across a reference to
the date 1998.

Moments later Baruch was dialing the Goldmans’ home number in Brooklyn, New York, U.S.A. He got the dead boy’s father on the
line. “My name is Baruch,” he said. “I’m calling from Jerusalem. I’m trying to catch the people who murdered your son. I’m
sorry to open wounds but there’s something I need to know.”

“What time is it in Israel?” the father asked.

“Almost six.”

“What’s the weather like?”

“It’s cold and crystal clear. The sun is disappearing behind a hill. Jerusalem is bathed in a golden light.”

Goldman’s voice crackled over the international line. “When Ronni wrote home, he always talked about Jerusalem the golden.”

“According to our records, your son graduated from a Brooklyn high school in nineteen ninety-eight.”

“That’s right. It was in June of ninety-eight. We wanted him to
go to college and study medicine. He wanted to go to Israel and study Torah.”

“What was the name of the high school?”

“Erasmus, on the corner of Flatbush and Church.”

“Is Erasmus the full name of the school?”

The father hesitated. “I think the full name is Erasmus Hall High School. Something like that.”

“Did Ronni own a high school graduation ring?”

Baruch could hear the dead boy’s father blowing his nose. After a moment Goldman came back on the line. “Thirty-five dollars
he spent on the ring,” he said, his voice faltering. “What’s so important, you ask now about a ring?”

“What I really want to know,” Baruch said softly, “is what finger he wore it on.” He caught his breath so he wouldn’t miss
the answer.

Goldman suddenly understood why Baruch was phoning from Jerusalem to raise the painful subject of his son’s mutilation. “They
sold him a ring a size smaller—.” The dead boy’s father held his hand over the phone and collected himself and started again.
“A size smaller than he asked for. Rather than return it, he wore it on the finger the newspapers say the terrorists cut off.
The pinky finger.”

T
HE DIRECTOR OF THE MILITARY AFFAIRS COMMITTEE
, Z
ALMAN
Cohen, a baby-faced prodigy whom the press had dubbed the Prime Minister’s Alter Ego, ambled into the conference room. In
his very early thirties, he was dressed in rumpled black trousers and a white open-necked shirt with the sleeves rolled up
above his fat elbows. Baruch and the
katsa
, seated at the end of a long rectangular table, climbed to their feet. An arid smile worked its way onto Cohen’s beefy face
as he offered a pudgy palm in a politician’s handshake—a fleeting feather-weight touching of fingers—and walked over to a
sideboard to pour some mineral water into a glass. He plucked two enormous pills from a vial, threw them into the back of
his mouth, tilted his head back and gulped them down with a muscular throbbing of his Adam’s apple. “If you’re not taking
vitamins, you ought to,” he grunted, flopping into a chair at the far end of the conference table, a soccer field away from
his visitors. “You probably know that Zachary Sawyer has been burning up the phone lines to the Prime Minister—four Jews have
been murdered, two others have been kidnapped, but as usual the White House expects us to be the ones to show restraint, maturity,
moderation and discretion.”

“The Americans are worried sick this will spiral out of control and scuttle the Mt. Washington peace treaty,” the
katsa
remarked.

“No reason for that to happen if we all keep our eyes on the prize,” Cohen said.

“And what is the prize?” Baruch inquired, blinking innocently.

“The prize is peace in our time,” Cohen declared. He snickered as he came up with the line Chamberlain had used to explain
Britain’s 1938 abandonment of the Sudetenland to appease Hitler. It was widely known that Cohen considered any concessions
to the Palestinians to be appeasement; that he would have preferred a military solution to the Palestinian question over a
political one; that he, like his Prime Minister, would go to Washington and sign the treaty to get the Americans off their
back and buy time. In six or eight months, when the White House was distracted by another crisis, the government would test
the temperature of the water. If the public outcry from the “Peace Now” crowd could be somehow muted, they would allow themselves
to be “provoked” into occupying strategic arteries and areas of the West Bank. “It goes without saying,” Cohen continued,
“that the Palestinians must get the lion’s share of the blame if we fail to achieve peace in our time.”

“Neither Baruch nor I are consulted on policy matters,” the
katsa
commented. “We are nuts and bolts people who deal with the situation on the ground.”

“That’s why you’ve been brought here,” Cohen said. “So I can spell out the government’s position with respect to the situation
on the ground. Just so we’re playing from the same music, the bottom line is what it’s always been. We will never bow to terrorism.
We will never release terrorists or pay money to free hostages. There will be no deal now or ever with the
mechabel
.”

Baruch eyed Cohen across the table; he had the impression that all those vitamins were transforming his skin into the sallow
parchment of a Dead Sea scroll. “You’re not responding to the written question we submitted to the Prime Minister.”

“The formal answer to your formal question is, yes, you can nibble at the edge of any deal you care to invent in order to
buy time. I am authorized to release appropriately vague pronouncements in the Prime Minister’s name. When the press asks
if we are willing to negotiate, we will say we’re not ruling anything out. We will say that all options are being explored,
with the emphasis on the word
all
.”

“The Working Group appreciates the Prime Minister’s willing-ness
to play along with our efforts to buy time,” Elihu informed the director. The
katsa
’s eyes narrowed, his voice turned cautious. “Given the circumstances, we didn’t want to climb out on a limb and have it cut
off behind us.”

The PM’s Alter Ego rolled his head from side to side as if he was trying to work out a stiff neck; for Cohen, cutting off
limbs was indoor sport. “The Prime Minister and his cabinet appreciate your tactfulness in putting the question,” he said
in a patronizing tone, and Baruch was reminded, once again, of why he loathed Zalman Cohen. He was one of those wily political
creatures who thought that peace was a continuation of war by other means; that the manipulation of the peace in preparation
for the next war was too important to be left to people who hadn’t mastered Machiavelli.

Cohen absently wound the stem of the oversized watch on his soft wrist. “If you find out where Apfulbaum is being held, organize
a raid—I’m told you do that sort of thing nicely. If you get him out alive, we’ll take the credit. If not …” The director
flaunted his mirthless smile, which had been caricatured in a thousand newspaper cartoons. “We all understand that raids of
this nature imply risks. Rest assured that no one will second guess you if the Rabbi is murdered before you can liberate him.”

Baruch avoided looking at Elihu. “Why are you afraid of Apfulbaum?” he inquired, his eyes fixed on Cohen. “In terms of numbers,
in terms of political influence, Islamic fundamentalists are a cloud of locusts. Ours are an occasional horsefly.”

Cohen’s smile evaporated, leaving behind the faint trace of a tired smirk. “You swat horseflies,” he said quietly. “If we
had a choice, we’d naturally prefer the autopsy to show the shot that killed this particular horsefly came from Abu Bakr’s
.22-caliber handgun.”

“Are you telling us you prefer Apfulbaum dead?” Elihu asked blandly.

A trumpet-call bleated through Cohen’s soft lips; Baruch realized the Prime Minister’s flunky was sounding retreat. “I most
certainly am not telling you we prefer him dead, for God’s sake. I am telling you we prefer him alive. But we will
understand
if he becomes an unavoidable casualty. We will rend our clothing and mourn publicly,
we will send the minister of public cesspools to attend the funeral of this Jewish shit.”