The Black Widow Page 11

  She cleaned her hands with disinfectant and then leaned in to the mirror for a closer look at her face. She hated her nose and thought that her mouth, while sensuous, was slightly too large for her face. Her eyes, she had decided, were her most alluring asset, wide, dark, intelligent, beguiling, with a trace of treachery and perhaps some hidden reservoir of pain. After ten years of practicing medicine, she no longer considered herself beautiful, but she knew empirically that men found her attractive. As yet, she had stumbled upon no example of the species worth marrying. Her love life had consisted of a string of monogamous but ultimately unhappy relationships—in France, where she had lived until the age of twenty-six, and in Israel, where she had moved with her parents after they concluded that Marseilles was no longer a place for Jews. Her parents lived in Netanya, in an apartment overlooking the Mediterranean. Their assimilation into Israeli society was glancing at best. They watched French television, read French newspapers, shopped in French markets, passed their afternoons in French cafés, and spoke Hebrew only when necessary. Natalie’s Hebrew, while fast and fluent, betrayed her Marseilles childhood. So, too, did her Arabic, which was flawless. In the markets of the Old City, she sometimes heard things that made her hair stand on end.

  Leaving the staff room, she noticed two other doctors rushing into the trauma center. The emergency room was just down the hall. Only two of the bays were occupied. Dr. Ayelet Malkin, the shift supervisor, sat in the corral in the center of the room, glaring at the screen of a desktop computer.

  “Just in time,” she said without looking up.

  “What’s going on?”

  “A Palestinian from East Jerusalem just stabbed two Haredim on Sultan Suleiman Street. One of them probably isn’t going to make it. The other one is in bad shape, too.”

  “Another day, another attack.”

  “It gets worse, I’m afraid. A passerby jumped on the Arab and tried to disarm him. When the police arrived, they saw two men fighting over a knife, so they shot them both.”

  “How bad?”

  “The hero got the worst of it. He’s going into trauma.”

  “And the terrorist?”

  “One shot, through and through. He’s all yours.”

  Natalie hurried into the corridor in time to see the first patient being wheeled into the trauma center. He was wearing the dark suit, knee-length socks, and white shirt of an ultra-Orthodox Haredi Jew. The jacket was shredded and the white shirt was soaked with blood. His reddish-blond payess dangled from the edge of the gurney; his face was ashen. Natalie glimpsed him only briefly, a second or two, but her instincts told her that the man did not have long to live.

  The next to arrive was a secular Israeli man, thirty-five or so, an oxygen mask over his face, a bullet in his chest, conscious, breathing, but just barely. He was followed a moment later by the second stabbing victim, a Haredi boy of fourteen or fifteen, with blood pouring from multiple wounds. Then, finally, came the cause of all the mayhem and bloodshed: the Palestinian from East Jerusalem who had awakened that morning and decided to kill two people because they were Israeli and Jewish. He was in his early twenties, Natalie reckoned, no more than twenty-five. He had a single bullet wound on the left side of his chest, between the base of the neck and the shoulder, and several cuts and abrasions to his face. Perhaps the hero had landed a blow or two while trying to disarm him. Or perhaps, thought Natalie, the police had given him a thrashing while taking him into custody. Four Israeli police officers, radios crackling, surrounded the gurney to which the Palestinian was handcuffed and strapped. There were also several men in plain clothes. Natalie suspected they were from Shabak, Israel’s internal security service.

  One of the Shabak officers approached Natalie and introduced himself as Yoav. His hair was shorn close to the scalp; wraparound sunglasses concealed his eyes. He seemed disappointed that the patient was still among the living.

  “We’ll need to stay while you work on him. He’s dangerous.”

  “I can handle him.”

  “Not this one. He wants to die.”

  The ambulance attendants wheeled the young Palestinian down the corridor to the emergency room and with the help of the police officers moved him from the blood-soaked gurney to a clean treatment bed. The wounded man struggled briefly while the police officers secured his hands and feet to the aluminum railings with plastic flex cuffs. At Natalie’s request, the officers withdrew from the bay. The Shabak man insisted on remaining behind.

  “You’re making him nervous,” Natalie objected. “I need him to be calm so I can properly clean out that wound.”

  “Why should he be calm while the other three are fighting for their lives?”

  “None of that matters in here, not now. I’ll call you if I need you.”

  The Shabak man took a seat outside the bay. Natalie drew the curtain and, alone with the terrorist, examined the wound.

  “What’s your name?” she asked him in Hebrew, a language that many Arab residents of East Jerusalem spoke well, especially if they had jobs in the west. The wounded Palestinian hesitated, then said his name was Hamid.

  “Well, Hamid, this is your lucky day. An inch or two lower, and you’d probably be dead.”

  “I want to be dead. I want to be a shahid.”

  “I’m afraid you’ve come to the wrong place for that.”

  Natalie lifted a pair of angled bandage scissors from her instrument tray. The Palestinian struggled against the restraints in fear.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Natalie. “You don’t like sharp objects?”

  The Palestinian recoiled but said nothing.

  Switching to Arabic, Natalie said soothingly, “Don’t worry, Hamid, I’m not going to hurt you.”

  He seemed surprised. “You speak Arabic very well.”

  “Why wouldn’t I?”

  “You’re one of us?”

  Natalie smiled and carefully cut the bloody shirt from his body.

  The initial report of the patient’s condition turned out to be incorrect. The wound was not through and through; the 9mm round was still lodged near the clavicle, which was fractured some eight centimeters from the breastbone. Natalie administered a local anesthetic, and when the drug had taken effect she went quickly to work. She flushed the wound with antibiotic and, using a pair of sterile tweezers, removed the bone fragments and several bits of imbedded fabric from Hamid’s shirt. Then she removed the 9mm round, misshapen from the impact with the clavicle but still in one piece. Hamid asked to keep the bullet as a memento of his attack. Frowning, Natalie dropped the round into a bag of medical waste, closed the wound with four neat sutures, and covered it with a protective bandage. The left arm needed to be immobilized to allow the clavicle to heal, which would require removing the plastic flex-cuff restraint. Natalie decided it could wait. If the restraints were removed, she reckoned, Hamid would struggle and in the process cause further injury to the bone and the surrounding tissue.

  The patient remained in the emergency room, resting, recovering, for another hour. In that time, two of his victims succumbed to their wounds down the hallway in the trauma center—the older of the Haredim, and the secular Israeli who had been mistakenly shot. When the police came for their prisoner, there was anger on their faces. Normally, Natalie would have kept a gunshot patient in the hospital overnight for observation, but she agreed to allow the police and Shabak men to take custody of Hamid immediately. When the restraints were removed, she hung his left arm in a sling and secured it tightly to his body. Then, without a soothing word in Arabic, she sent him on his way.

  There was another attack later that afternoon, a young Arab from East Jerusalem, a kitchen knife, the busy Central Bus Station on the Jaffa Road. This time, the Arab did not survive. He was shot by an armed civilian, but not before stabbing two women, both septuagenarians. One expired on the way to Hadassah; the other, in the trauma center as Natalie was applying pressure to a chest wound. Afterward, on the television in the staff lounge, she watched the l
eader of the Palestinian Authority telling his people that it was their national duty to kill as many Jews as possible. “Slit their throats,” he was saying, “stab them in their evil hearts. Every drop of blood shed for Jerusalem is holy.”

  Evening brought a respite of quiet. Natalie and Ayelet had dinner together in a restaurant in the hospital’s gleaming shopping mall. They spoke of mundane subjects, men, movies, the sex life of a nymphomaniacal nurse from the childbirth center, anything but the horror they had witnessed that day. They were interrupted by yet another crisis; four victims of a head-on collision were on their way to the emergency room. Natalie saw to the youngest, a religious girl of fourteen, originally from Cape Town, who lived in an English-speaking community in Beit Shemesh. She had suffered numerous lacerations but no broken bones or internal injuries. Her father, however, was not so fortunate. Natalie was present when the child was told of his death.

  Exhausted, she stretched out on a bed in the staff lounge for a few hours’ sleep, and in her dreams she was chased by a mob of hooded men with knives. She woke with a start and squinted at her mobile phone. It was seven fifteen. Rising, she swallowed a cup of black coffee with sugar, made a halfhearted attempt to put her hair in order, and headed back to the emergency room to see what horror the last two hours of her shift would bring. It remained quiet until 8:55, when Ayelet was notified of another stabbing.

  “How many?” asked Natalie.

  Ayelet held up two fingers.

  “Where?”

  “Netanya.”

  “Netanya? You’re sure it was Netanya?”

  Ayelet nodded grimly. Natalie quickly dialed the number for her parents’ apartment. Her father answered instantly, as though he were sitting next to the phone, waiting for her call.

  “Papa,” she said, closing her eyes with relief.

  “Yes, of course. What’s wrong, darling?”

  She could hear the sound of a French morning television program in the background. She was about to tell him to switch to Channel 1 but stopped herself. Her parents didn’t need to know that their little French sanctuary by the sea was no longer safe.

  “And Mama?” asked Natalie. “She’s well?”

  “She’s right here. Would you like to speak to her?”

  “It’s not necessary. I love you, Papa.”

  Natalie hung up the phone. It was nine o’clock exactly. Ayelet had given up her seat in the corral for the next shift supervisor, Dr. Marc Geller, a freckled, ginger-haired Scot.

  “I want to stay,” said Natalie.

  Marc Geller pointed toward the door. “I’ll see you in three days.”

  Natalie collected her belongings from the staff room and, numbed by fatigue, rode a shuttle to the satellite parking lot. An armed security guard wearing a khaki vest walked her to her car. So this is what it means to be Jewish in the twenty-first century, she thought as she slid behind the wheel. Chased from France by a rising tide of anti-Semitism, Natalie and her parents had come to the Jewish homeland, only to face a wave of brutal stabbings by young men bred and indoctrinated to hate. For the moment, Israel was not safe for the Jews. And if not Israel, where? We are, she thought, starting the engine, a people on the edge.

  Her apartment was a short distance from the hospital in Rehavia, a costly neighborhood in an increasingly costly city. She inched her way through the morning traffic along Ramban Street, turned left into Ibn Ezra Street, and eased into an empty space along the curb. Her apartment building was around the corner on Elkharizi Street, a tiny alleyway scarcely wide enough for cars. The air was cool and heavy with the scent of pine and bougainvillea. Natalie walked swiftly; even in Rehavia, an entirely Jewish neighborhood, she no longer felt safe. She passed through the gate, entered the foyer, and climbed the stairs to her flat. As she reached her door, her phone began to chime. She checked the caller ID before answering. It was her parents’ number in Netanya.

  “Is there something wrong?”

  “Not at all,” said a confident male voice in French.

  Natalie checked the caller ID again. “Who is this?”

  “Don’t worry,” said the voice. “Your parents are fine.”

  “Are you in their apartment?”

  “No.”

  “Then how are you using their phone?”

  “I’m not. It’s just a little trick we use to make sure you didn’t send us straight to voice mail.”

  “We?”

  “My name is Uzi Navot. Perhaps you’ve heard of me. I’m the chief of something called the—”

  “I know who you are.”

  “That’s good. Because we know who you are, too, Natalie.”

  “Why are you calling?” she demanded.

  “You sound like one of us,” he said with a laugh.

  “A spy?”

  “An Israeli.”

  “I am an Israeli.”

  “Not anymore.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Listen carefully, Natalie. I want you to hang up the phone and go inside your apartment. There’s a woman waiting there. Don’t be afraid, she works for me. She’s taken the liberty of packing a bag for you.”

  “Why?”

  The connection went dead. Natalie stood for a moment wondering what to do. Then she drew her keys from her handbag, opened the door, and went inside.

  17

  JEZREEL VALLEY, ISRAEL

  THE WOMAN SEATED AT THE kitchen table didn’t look much like a spy. She was small, smaller than Natalie, and wore an expression that fell somewhere between boredom and grief. She had helped herself to a cup of tea. Next to it was a mobile phone, and next to the phone was Natalie’s passport, which had been hidden in a manila envelope in the bottom drawer of her bedside table. The envelope had also contained three letters of an intensely personal nature, written by a man Natalie had known at university in France. She had always regretted not burning them, never more so than at that moment.

  “Open it,” said the woman with a glance toward Natalie’s stylish carry-on suitcase. It bore the bar-coded, stickered traces of her last trip to Paris, Air France instead of El Al, the preferred airline of French-Jewish exiles. Natalie tugged at the zipper and peered inside. It had been hastily and carelessly packed—a pair of trousers, two blouses, a cotton pullover sweater, a single pair of underwear. What kind of woman, she thought, packed one pair of panties?

  “How long am I going to be away?”

  “That depends.”

  “On what?”

  The woman only sipped her tea.

  “No makeup? No deodorant? No shampoo? Where am I going? Syria?”

  There was a silence. Then the woman said, “Pack whatever you need. But don’t take too long. He’s very anxious to meet you. We mustn’t keep him waiting.”

  “Who? Uzi Navot?”

  “No,” she answered, smiling for the first time. “The man you’re going to meet is much more important than Uzi Navot.”

  “I have to be back at work in three days.”

  “Yes, we know. Nine o’clock.” She held out her hand. “Your phone.”

  “But—”

  “Please,” the woman said, “you’re wasting valuable time.”

  Natalie surrendered the phone and went into her bedroom. It looked as if it had been ransacked. The contents of the manila envelope lay scattered across the bed, everything but the letters, which seemed to have vanished. Natalie had a sudden vision of a roomful of people reading passages aloud and then bursting into uproarious laughter. She gathered up a few more items of clothing and packed a small toiletry kit, including her birth control pills and the prescription pain reliever she took for the headaches that sometimes swept over her like a storm. Then she returned to the kitchen.

  “Where are my letters?”

  “What letters?”

  “The letters you took from my bedroom.”

  “I didn’t take anything from you.”

  “Who did?”

  “Let’s go,” was all the woman said
.

  Descending the stairs, suitcase in one hand, purse in the other, Natalie noticed that the woman walked with a slight limp. Her car was parked in Ibn Ezra Street, directly in front of Natalie’s. She drove calmly but very fast, down the Judean Hills toward Tel Aviv, then northward up the Coastal Plain along Highway 6. For a time they listened to the news on the radio, but it was all stabbings and death and predictions of a coming apocalyptic war between Jews and Muslims over the Temple Mount. The woman rebuffed all questions and attempts at conversation, leaving Natalie to stare out her window at the minarets rising above the West Bank towns just beyond the Separation Barrier. They were so close she imagined she could touch them. The proximity of the villages to such a vital road had left her dubious about the prospects of a two-state solution. French and Swiss villages existed side by side along a largely invisible border, but Switzerland did not wish to wipe France from the map. Nor did the Swiss beseech their sons to shed the blood of French infidels.

  Gradually, the Coastal Plain fell away and the highway tilted toward the bluffs of Mount Carmel and the green-and-tan patchwork of the Galilee. They were headed vaguely toward Nazareth, but a few miles before reaching the city the woman turned onto a smaller road and followed it past the sporting fields of a school until a security barrier, metal and spiked, blocked their path. Automatically, the gate slid away, and they proceeded along a gently curving street lined with trees. Natalie had been expecting a secret installation of some sort. Instead, she found herself in a quiet little town. Its layout was circular. Bungalows fronted the road, and behind the bungalows, like the folds of a hand fan, lay pastures and cultivated cropland.

  “Where are we?”

  “Nahalal,” replied the woman. “It’s a moshav. Do you know this term? Moshav?”

  “I’m an immigrant,” answered Natalie coolly, “not an idiot. A moshav is a cooperative community of individual farms, which is different from a kibbutz.”