Vicious Circle (23 page)

“Escalate, that’s the ticket,” the man from 10 Downing, an old Foreign Office Janus known to be viscerally pro-Arab, heartily
agreed
.

“And when the Israelis refuse to buckle, what do we do then? Mine Haifa harbor? Bomb Tel Aviv? Listen, gentlemen, this is
not an idea I will raise in the Oval Office. Before you raise the stakes, it’s essential to have a sense of how far someone
can be pushed. If you cross this line, you invite defiance.”

They argued on for the better part of three quarters of an hour. I stood my ground. I knew it would be impossible to push
the Israelis past where their finely honed national instinct for survival told them they could safely go. To try would be
to lose whatever credibility you had when
you threatened to raise the stakes. My counterparts in London and Paris were still functioning with an imperfect grasp of
Middle East reality. One way or another, what was happening on the ground would educate them
.

You bet your socks, I’m still detached. But to tell the god-awful truth, I’m also scared. I understand why the Europeans are
panicking. If we lose control of events, where oh where do we go from here?

S
WEENEY WAS MIGHTILY PLEASED WITH HIMSELF
. H
ALF A DOZEN
colleagues from the international press corps had phoned over the past few days to congratulate him on the Shin Bet article;
two of them had even interviewed him for the articles they were writing about his article. After all, it wasn’t every day
that someone gave the world a glimpse of what went on behind the closed doors of the super-secret and super insolent Shin
Bet. Dropping his cellular telephone into the pocket of his sheepskin jacket, wrapping an old college scarf around his neck,
Sweeney pulled on a pair of ski sunglasses and climbed up to the roof-top terrace over his apartment. He had filed three hundred
and fifty words on what appeared to be a Hamas-organized kidnapping of a member of a rival fundamentalist group in the Old
City right under the noses of the Israelis and was going to unwind with the first dry martini of the day. The air was crystal
clear and wintry. Light from the setting sun glinted off the gold leaf of the Dome of the Rock mosque on the Temple Mount—the
dome that sheltered the great boulder on which Abraham, according to Jewish tradition, came a hair’s breadth away from sacrificing
his son, Isaac; from which Muhammad, according to Muslim tradition, ascended to heaven on his steed el-Burek for his rendezvous
with Allah. To the southeast, beyond the Church of the Dormition, Sweeney could make out the pale shroud of mist hovering
over the Dead Sea, the lowest geographical point on the surface of the planet, and, behind it, the dark ashen hills of Moab.
It was not surprising, he thought, that
homo sapiens
had been battling over
Jerusalem for three thousand years. Some scholars attributed the city’s greatness to the lay of the land; the earliest settlement
had been astride a caravan crossing and eventually grown into an important trading center. Others attributed the city’s strategic
importance to the discovery of an underground spring, which guaranteed its garrison an endless reserve of drinking water.
But gazing out now past the walls of the Old City, Sweeney knew where the greatness came from. The power of Jerusalem, the
magic it worked on people, was first and foremost aesthetic; every time you saw it, it took your breath away.

The cellular phone in Sweeney’s pocket bleated. He assumed it would be another reporter calling to compliment him on his Shin
Bet article; to ask, facetiously, which plane he would be taking once the Israelis relieved him of his press pass.

“Yeah,” Sweeney said into the phone.

“Mr. journalist Sweeney?” a melodious voice asked.

“Speaking.”

“Do you recognize my voice?”

“You bet I recognize your voice,” Sweeney said; he could picture the Vestal Virgin, with his round blue-tinted sunglasses
and pointed beard and white
galabiya
, feeding Israeli coins into the slot of a Gaza public phone.

“The last time we met you raised the possibility of an exclusive interview. Are you still interested?”

“Interested is an understatement.”

“The individual in question has read your article—the one describing how some of your Israeli friends who only use first names
offered you part-time employment. He was impressed by your independence, not to mention your integrity. To make a short story
shorter, he has agreed to meet with you.”

Sweeney was all business. “How do I find him?”

“Do not make any calls from your house phone or your mobile after you hang up. Depart from Jerusalem by car in precisely seven
minutes, which is the time is will take you to lock your house and walk up to the parking lot. Travel alone. Take the Beit
Shemesh-Kiryat Gat road down to the Ghazeh. Leave your car in the parking
lot and walk across the Erez crossing. A car will be waiting for you on our side.”

“How will I recognize the driver?”

The Vestal Virgin laughed quietly into his end of the line. “The driver will recognize you.”

The phone went dead in Sweeney’s ear. “Bingo,” he said aloud. A faint smile of satisfaction disfigured his lips as he slipped
the phone back into his pocket.

A
BSALOM HAD ONE OF HIS PATENTED
“I-
TOLD-YOU-SO
” SMIRKS pasted on his hide-tanned face when he ran into Baruch at the water cooler. “Azazel’s boys and girls are working
through the last file cabinets in the last aisle of the last basement,” he informed him. “There is so much dust down there,
two of them began sneezing and had to be let off on sick leave. You realize this is no piece of cake. Roughly half of the
male Arabs betrayed by collaborators wound up serving time. Half of the ones who served time were short and heavy. Half of
the short heavy males who were betrayed and served time were rabid Islamists.”

“Which leaves the suspect’s bad eyes,” Baruch noted.

“Bad eyes narrowed it down to one hundred and eighty-three, not counting the forty-eight who are known to be out of the Middle
East, not counting the thirty-six who are known to be deceased, not counting two who are known to be in a Jordanian insane
asylum, not counting whatever Azazel comes up with in the last batch of file cabinets.” Absalom seemed very pleased with himself.
“The list is being typed up now.”

C
UTTING THROUGH THE HILLS BEHIND
E
IN
K
AREM TO AVOID THE
inevitable rush hour gridlock at the entrance to Jerusalem, Sweeney rejoined the main Jerusalem–Tel Aviv highway near Motza
and headed west at a fast crawl. Fiddling with the dial of the radio, he came across an English-language talk show. “I don’t
agree at all,” a man speaking English with a thick German accent was saying, “From the Jewish point of view, it’s more accurate
to speak of a Judeo-Islamic tradition than a Judeo-Christian tradition.”

“Why’s that, professor?” a woman inquired.

“One could make the case that Christianity, with its baffling doctrine of the Trinity, has betrayed Old Testament monotheism.
Islam, with its uncompromising belief in one God, has preserved its monotheistic purity. There is a passage in the Koran,
if I can find it—ah, here it is.” The professor cleared his throat. “‘They are unbelievers who say, ‘
God is the Third of Three. No god is there but One God
.’”

“There’s also that anti-Christian Koranic inscription on the Dome of the Rock Mosque,” someone else pointed out. “‘
Praise be to God, who begets no son
.’”

“For Jews, there is also the problem of the visual iconography of Christianity,” still another person observed. “Which is
why Maimonides, in his ‘Epistle on Martyrdom,’ asserts that Jews can convert to Islam if it’s a question of saving their lives,
but they cannot convert to Christianity under any circumstance, since by doing so they become idolaters, which for Jews is
a fate worse than death.”

“If the Jews and Arabs are kissing cousins,” Sweeney asked the radio, “why have they been at each other’s throats for a hundred
years?” For answer, he got a station break and a commercial advertising an Israeli toothpaste that left your teeth whiter
than white and your breath fresher than fresh. He provided his own response to the question. “It doesn’t take a genius to
figure it out,” he mumbled. “They’ve been fighting over land.”

At the Beit Shemesh turnoff, Sweeney passed a group of soldiers trying to thumb rides back to their bases in the Negev. He
would have stopped to see if anyone was going to Gaza, but he remembered the Vestal Virgin’s admonition: Travel alone.

Traffic was light and Sweeney made good time. Just south of Tel Azeka, his headlights illuminated an orange road-work warning
up ahead. A hundred meters further along, plastic markers were strung across his side of the highway, closing it to traffic.
A bearded man wearing a
yarmulke
and orange coveralls flagged him onto the Agur road detour. As he turned off, Sweeney could see the bearded man talking into
a small walkie-talkie. Half a kilometer down the Agur road, within sight of a traffic circle, two men standing alongside a
van with the logo “Fine Bedouin Robes and Carpets” printed in English on its side waved frantically as he approached. Sweeney
recognized one of them; there was no mistaking his round blue sunglasses or the beard that seemed to have been sharpened to
a fine point. It was the Vestal Virgin himself, dressed this time in blue jeans and a tee-shirt with “Hard Rock Café” printed
across the chest. Sweeney slammed on the brakes and rolled down the window on the passenger’s side of the car. “And here I
thought you were a pious Muslim,” he called teasingly.

The Vestal Virgin stuck his head in the window. “Do not judge what is in a man’s heart by the clothing covering his breast,”
he said with great seriousness. “If you still want to interview Abu Bakr, you must continue the journey in a different vehicle.”

“I can’t abandon my car in the middle of nowhere.”

“I will drive it to Ghazeh and leave it in the parking lot on the Israeli side. My friend here will take you to Abu Bakr.”

Sweeney grabbed the satchel with his camera and tape recorder
and got out of the car. A pock-marked Bedouin smoking a thick cigarette opened the back doors of the van and lifted the lid
of a large straw hamper.

“You expect me to get into that?” Sweeney asked.

“Trust me,” said the Vestal Virgin with a disarming smile. “Be quick.”

Sweeney looked from the Vestal Virgin to the Bedouin, then with a shrug climbed into the hamper. The Bedouin covered him with
some carpets and closed the lid. Sweeney heard him hefting another hamper on top of the one he was in, and rearranging other
hampers in front of it. The back doors slammed shut. The driver must have inserted a cassette into the van’s tape deck, because
Sweeney heard the muffled sound of a popular Egyptian song. With a jerk, the van pulled onto the road. It reached the traffic
circle and turned around it six or seven times to befuddle Sweeney’s sense of direction. Then the van started down the road
at a brisk clip. Forty minutes later—the hands on Sweeney’s wristwatch glowed in the dark—the vehicle slowed down and Sweeney,
snug in his hamper of Bedouin rugs, thought he could make out young men speaking Hebrew. Were they passing through an Israeli
checkpoint into the West Bank? Half an hour later they slowed down for what could have been another checkpoint. Soon after
that the van must have been caught in a traffic jam; Sweeney heard horns blaring, and someone complaining, though he couldn’t
make out if the complaint was in Hebrew or Arabic. Eventually the van turned onto cobblestones and bumped its way through
a labyrinth of streets before pulling to a stop. The driver’s door slammed shut. Seconds later the door of a building closed
and there was absolute silence.

Stifling in his hamper, Sweeney pushed the rugs away from his face and waited. He must have dozed, because the next time he
glanced at his watch, twenty-five minutes had gone by. Moments later footsteps approached the van and the back doors were
flung open. The hampers were shoved aside, the lid of his straw trunk was lifted and Sweeney was confronted with the unsmiling
smallpox-scarred face of a young Arab woman. She gestured for him to climb out of the hamper and follow her. Vaulting nimbly
from the back of
the van, she tugged the scarf over her short hair and set off at a brisk pace through a maze of narrow alleyways. Sweeney,
who didn’t have the vaguest idea what city he was in, jogged along behind her. At one point she hiked the hem of her Bedouin
robe—Sweeney noticed that she was wearing blue jeans and running shoes—and darted up a rickety staircase, then ducked through
a low door with some Arabic words painted in red on it. A young Palestinian was waiting inside what appeared to be an abandoned
building. As the young Bedouin woman turned her back, he gestured for Sweeney to strip off his garments. “You’re kidding,”
Sweeney said. Then: “You’re not kidding.” He began to peel off his clothing, tossing them to the Palestinian, and finally
stood stark naked on the cold floor while the young man searched every item meticulously, clearly looking for some sort of
radio transmitting device. He confiscated Sweeney’s shoes and gave him a pair of sandals in their place. While Sweeney was
climbing back into his clothing, the young Palestinian opened the journalist’s satchel and removed the camera and the cellular
telephone and the four spare rolls of film. He opened the camera and the battery compartment of the telephone, removed the
film and the battery, then smashed the camera and telephone, along with Sweeney’s quartz wrist watch, against a wall and carefully
inspected the broken fragments. As an afterthought, he crushed the rolls of film and the battery with a brick and examined
them, too.

“Jesus,” Sweeney moaned. “What people put up with to get an exclusive interview.” The Palestinian, who obviously didn’t speak
a word of English, motioned for Sweeney to turn around and fitted a blindfold over his eyes. The Bedouin woman and the Palestinian
exchanged some words, after which she took Sweeney’s hand and led him out a window onto a slate roof. From somewhere below
came the indistinct sound of voices speaking Arabic, and the delectable odor of lamb being grilled on a barbecue. With one
hand on the woman’s shoulder and the other on a waist-high brick wall, Sweeney felt himself being led across several roofs
and pushed through a door into another building that, judging from the hollow ring the door made when it closed behind them,
must have also been abandoned. The woman led him to the far end of the building, up a narrow staircase
and along a corridor. She knocked three times on a metal door, then twice and then once. Bolts were thrown, the door was flung
open and then closed and locked behind them.