Prince of Fire Page 26

  “And the girl you were with that night?”

  “She became my wife.” Another puff on the water pipe. “I’m an exile, too—an internal exile. I still have the deed to my father’s land in Sumayriyya, but I cannotgo back to it. The Jews confiscated it and never bothered to compensate me for my loss. Imagine, a kibbutz built by Holocaust survivors on the ruins of an Arab village.”

  Gabriel looked around at the large house. “You’ve done well for yourself.”

  “I’m far better off than those who went into exile. It could have been like this for all of us if there’d never been a war. I don’t blame you for my loss. I blame the Arab leaders. If Haj Amin and the others had accepted the partition, the Western Galilee would have been part of Palestine. But they chose war, and when they lost the war, they cried that the Arabs had been victims. Arafat did the same thing at Camp David, yes? He walked away from another opportunity at partition. He started anotherwar, and when the Jews fought back, he cried that he was the victim. When will we learn?”

  The goat came back. This time al-Samara gave it a whack on the nose with the mouthpiece of his water pipe.

  “Surely you didn’t come all the way here to listen to an old man’s story.”

  “I’m looking for a family that came from your village, but I don’t know their name.”

  “We all knew each other,” al-Samara said. “If we were to walk through the ruins of Sumayriyya right now, I could show you my house—and I could show you the house of my friend, and the houses of my cousins. Tell me something about this family, and I’ll tell you their name.”

  He told the old man the things the girl had said duringthe final miles before Paris—that her grandfather had been a village elder, not a muktar but an important man, and that he’d owned forty dunams of land and a large flock of goats. He’d had at least one son. After the fall of Sumayriyya, they’d gone north, to Ein al-Hilweh in Lebanon.Al-Samara listened thoughtfully to Gabriel’s descriptionbut seemed perplexed. He called over his shoulder, into the house. A woman emerged, elderly like him, her head covered by a veil. She spoke directly to al-Samara, carefully avoiding the gaze of Gabriel and Yaakov.

  “You’re certain it was forty dunams?” he asked. “Not thirty, or twenty, but forty?”

  “That’s what I was told.”

  He made a contemplative draw on his pipe. “You’re right,” he said. “That family ended up in Lebanon, in Ein al-Hilweh. Things got bad during the Lebanese civil war. The boys became fighters. They’re all dead, from what I hear.”

  “Do you know their name?”

  “They’re called al-Tamari. If you meet any of them, please give them my regards. Tell them I’ve been to their house. Don’t tell them about my villa in al-Makr, though. It will only break their hearts.”

  34

  TEL AVIV

  “Ein al-Hilweh? Are you out of your fucking mind?”

  It was early the following morning. Lev was seated at his empty glass desk, his coffee cup suspended midway between his saucer and his lips. Gabriel had managed to slip into the Office while Lev’s secretary was in the ladies’ room. The girl would pay dearly for the lapse in security when Gabriel was gone.

  “Ein al-Hilweh is a no-go zone, period, end of discussion.It’s worse now than it was in eighty-two. A half-dozen Islamic terror organizations have set up shop there. It’s not a place for the faint of heart—or an Office agent whose picture has been splashed about the French press.”

  “Well, someone has to go.”

  “You’re not even sure the old man’s still alive.”

  Gabriel frowned, then sat, uninvited, in one of the sleek leather chairs in front of Lev’s desk.

  “But if he is alive, he can tell us where his daughter went after she left the camp.”

  “He might,” Lev agreed, “or he might know nothing at all. Khaled certainly told the girl to deceive her family for security reasons. For all we really know, the entire story about Sumayriyya might be a lie.”

  “She had no reason to lie to me,” Gabriel said. “She thought I was going to be killed.”

  Lev spent a long moment pondering his coffee. “There’s a man in Beirut who might be able to help us with this. His name is Nabil Azouri.”

  “What’s his story?”

  “He’s Lebanese and Palestinian. He does a little of everything. Works as a stringer for a few Western news outlets. Owns a nightclub. Does the odd bit of arms dealing and has been known to move the odd shipmentof hashish now and again. He also works for us, of course.”

  “Sounds like a real pillar of his community.”

  “He’s a shit,” Lev said. “Lebanese to the core. Lebanonincarnate. But he’s exactly the kind of person we need to walk into Ein al-Hilweh and talk to the girl’s father.”

  “Why does he work for us?”

  “For money, of course. Nabil likes money.”

  “How do we talk to him?”

  “We leave a message on the phone at his nightclub in Beirut and an airline ticket with the concierge of the Commodore Hotel. We rarely talk to Nabil on his turf.”

  “Where does he go?”

  “Cyprus,” Lev said. “Nabil likes Cyprus, too.”

  It would be three days before Gabriel was ready to move. Travel saw to his arrangements. Larnaca is a popular Israeli tourist destination, and so it was not necessary to travel on a forged foreign passport. Traveling under his real name was not possible, though, so Travel issued him an Israeli document under the rather unexceptional name of Michael Neumann. The day before his departure, Operationslet him spend an hour perusing Nabil Azouri’s file in a secure reading room. When he had finished, they gave him an envelope with ten thousand dollars in cash and wished him luck. The next morning, at seven, he boarded an El Al plane at Ben-Gurion airport for the one-hour flight to Cyprus. Upon arriving he rented a car at the airport and drove a short distance up the coast to a resort called the Palm Beach Hotel. A message from King Saul Boulevard awaited him. Nabil Azouri was coming that afternoon. Gabriel spent the remainder of the morning in his room, then, a short time after one o’clock, he went down to the poolside restaurant for lunch. Azouri already had a table. A bottle of expensive French champagne, drunk below the label, lay chilling in a silver bucket.

  He had dark curly hair, frosted with the first strands of gray, and a thick mustache. When he removed his sunglasses, Gabriel found himself gazing into a pair of large sleepy brown eyes. On his left wrist was the obligatorygold watch; on his right, several gold bracelets that chimed when he lifted his champagne glass to his lips. His cotton shirt was cream-colored, his poplin trousers wrinkled from the flight from Beirut. He lit an American cigarette with a gold lighter and listened to Gabriel’s proposition.

  “Ein al-Hilweh? Are you out of your fucking mind?”

  Gabriel had anticipated this reaction. Azouri treated his relationship with Israeli intelligence as though it were just another one of his business enterprises. He was the bazaar merchant, the Office was the customer. Haggling over the price was part of the process. The Lebanese leaned forward and fixed Gabriel in his sleepy stare.

  “Have you been down there lately? It’s like the Wild West, Khomeini style. It’s gone to hell since you boys pulled out. Men in black, praise be to Allah the most merciful. Outsiders don’t stand a chance. Fuck it, Mike. Have some champagne and forget about it.”

  “You’re not an outsider, Nabil. You know everyone.You can go everywhere. That’s why we pay you so lucratively.”

  “Tip money, Mike, that’s all I get from your outfit— cigarettes and champagne and a few bucks to waste on the girls.”

  “You must have expensive taste in girls, Nabil, because I’ve seen your pay stubs. You’ve made a rather large sum of money from your relationship with my firm.”

  Azouri raised his glass in Gabriel’s direction. “We’ve made good business together, Mike. I won’t deny that. I’d like to continue working for you. That’s why someoneelse needs to run down to Ein al-Hilweh
for you. It’s too rich for my blood. Too dangerous.”

  Azouri signaled the waiter and ordered another bottleof the French champagne. Refusing an offer of work wasn’t going to keep him from having a good meal on the Office tab. Gabriel tossed an envelope onto the table. Azouri eyed it thoughtfully but made no move for it.

  “How much is in there, Mike?”

  “Two thousand.”

  “What flavor?”

  “Dollars.”

  “So what’s the deal? Half now, half on delivery? I’m just a dumb Arab, but two thousand and two thousand add up to four thousand, and I’m not going into Ein al-Hilwehfor four thousand dollars.”

  “Two thousand is only the retainer.”

  “And how much for delivery of the information?”

  “Another five.”

  Azouri shook his head. “No, another ten.”

  “Six.”

  Another shake of the head. “Nine.”

  “Seven.”

  “Eight.”

  “Done,” said Gabriel. “Two thousand in advance, another eight on delivery. Not bad for an afternoon’s work. If you behave yourself we’ll even throw in gas money.”

  “Oh, you’ll pay for the gas, Mike. My expenses are always separate from my fee.” The waiter brought the second bottle of champagne. When he was gone again, Azouri said, “So what do you want to know?”

  “I want you to find someone.”

  “There are forty-five thousand refugees in that camp, Mike. Help me out a little bit.”

  “He’s an old man named al-Tamari.”

  “First name?”

  “We don’t know it.”

  Azouri sipped his wine. “It’s not a terribly common name. It shouldn’t be a problem. What else can you tell me about him?”

  “He’s a refugee from the Western Galilee.”

  “Most of them are. Which village?”

  Gabriel told him.

  “Family details?”

  “Two sons were killed in eighty-two.”

  “In the camp?”

  Gabriel nodded. “They were Fatah. Apparently his wife was killed, too.”

  “Lovely. Go on.”

  “He had a daughter. She ended up in Europe. I want to know everything you can find out about her. Where she went to school. What she studied. Where she lived. Who she slept with.”

  “What’s the girl’s name?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Age?”

  “Early thirties, I’d say. Spoke decent French.”

  “Why are you looking for her?”

  “We think she may have been involved in the attack on the Gare de Lyon.”

  “Is she still alive?”

  Gabriel shook his head. Azouri looked out at the beach for a long moment. “So you think that by tracing the background of the girl, you’re going to get to the big boss? The brains behind the operation?”

  “Something like that, Nabil.”

  “How do I play it with the old man?”

  “Play it any way you want to,” Gabriel said. “Just get me what I need.”

  “This girl,” the Lebanese said. “What did she look like?”

  Gabriel handed Azouri a magazine he’d brought down from his room. Azouri opened it and leafed through the pages until he came upon the sketch Gabriel had made aboard Fidelity.

  “She looked like that,” Gabriel said. “She looked exactly like that.”

  He heard nothing from Nabil Azouri for three days. For all Gabriel knew, the Lebanese had absconded with the down payment or had been killed trying to get into Ein al-Hilweh. Then, on the fourth morning,the telephone rang. It was Azouri, calling from Beirut. He would be at the Palm Beach Hotel in time for lunch. Gabriel hung up the phone, then he went down to the beach and took a long run at the water’s edge. His bruises were beginning to fade, and much of the soreness had left his body. When he had finished, he returned to his room to shower and change. By the time he arrived at the poolside restaurant, Azouri was working on his second glass of champagne.

  “What a fucking place, Mike. Hell on earth.”

  “I’m not paying you ten thousand dollars for a report on conditions at Ein al-Hilweh,” Gabriel said. “That’s the UN’s job. Did you find the old man? Is he still alive?”

  “I found him.”

  “And?”

  “The girl left Ein al-Hilweh in 1990. She’s never been back.”

  “Her name?”

  “Fellah,” said Azouri. “Fellah al-Tamari.”

  “Where did she go?”

  “She was a smart girl, apparently. Earned a UN grant to study in Europe. The old man told her to take it and never come back to Lebanon.”

  “Where did she study?” Gabriel asked, though he suspected he already knew the answer.

  “France,” Azouri said. “Paris first. Then she went somewhere in the south. The old man wasn’t sure. Apparentlythere were long periods with no contact.”

  “I’m sure there were.”

  “He didn’t seem to fault his daughter. He wanted a better life for her in Europe. He didn’t want her wallowingin the Palestinian tragedy, as he put it to me.”

  “She never forgot about Ein al-Hilweh,” Gabriel said absently. “What did she study?”

  “She was an archaeologist.”

  Gabriel remembered the appearance of her fingernails.He’d had the impression then that she was a potter or someone who worked with her hands outdoors. An archaeologist certainly fit that description.

  “Archaeology? You’re certain.”

  “He seemed very clear on that point.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Yeah,” Azouri said. “Two years ago she sent him a very strange letter. She told him to destroy all the letters and photographs she’d sent from Europe over the years. The old man disobeyed his daughter’s wishes. The lettersand photos were all he had left of her. A couple of weeks later, a bully boy shows up in his room and burned the things for him.”

  A friend of Khaled, Gabriel thought. Khaled was tryingto erase her past.

  “How did you play it with him?”

  “You got the information you wanted. Leave the operational details to me, Mike.”

  “Did you show him the sketch?”

  “I showed him. He wept. He hadn’t seen his daughterin fifteen years.”

  An hour later, Gabriel checked out of the hotel and drove to the airport, where he waited until the evening flight to Tel Aviv. It was after midnight by the time he returned to Narkiss Street. Chiara was asleep. She stirred as he climbed into bed, but did not wake. When he pressed his lips against her bare shoulder, she murmured incoherently and rolled away from him. He looked at his nightstand. The papers were gone.

  35

  TEL MEGIDDO, ISRAEL

  Next morning Gabriel went to Armageddon.

  He left his Skoda in the parking lot of the visitors center and hiked up the footpath to the top of the mount through the searing sunlight. He paused for a moment to gaze out across the Jezreel Valley. For Gabriel the valley was the place of his birth, but biblicalscholars and those obsessed by end-time prophesies believed it would be the setting for the apocalyptic confrontation between the forces of good and evil. Regardlessof what calamity might lay ahead, Tel Megiddo had already witnessed much bloodshed. Located at the crossroads between Syria, Egypt, and Mesopotamia, it had been the site of dozens of major battles over the millennia. Assyrians, Israelites, Canaanites, Egyptians, Philistines, Greeks, Romans, and Crusaders—all had shed blood beneath this hillock. Napolean defeated the Ottomans there in 1799, and a little more than a centurylater General Allenby of the British army defeated them again.

  The soil on the top of the hill was cut by a labyrinth of trenches and pits. Tel Megiddo had been under intermittent archaeological excavation for more than a century. So far, researchers had discovered evidence that the city atop the mount had been destroyed and rebuilt some twenty-five times. A dig was under way at the moment. From one of the trenches came
the sound of English spoken with an American accent. Gabriel walked over and looked down. Two American college students, a boy and a girl, were hunched over something in the soil. Bones, thought Gabriel, but he couldn’t be sure.

  “I’m looking for Professor Lavon.”

  “He’s working in K this morning.” It was the girl who’d spoken to him.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “The excavation trenches are laid out in a grid pattern.Each plot is lettered. That way we can chart the location of every artifact. You’re standing next to F. See the sign? Professor Lavon is working in K.”

  Gabriel made his way over to the pit marked K and looked down. At the bottom of the trench, two meters below the surface, crouched an elfin figure wearing a broad-brimmed straw hat. He was scratching at the hard subsoil with a small pick and appeared thoroughly engrossedin his work, but then he usually did.

  “Find anything interesting, Eli?”

  The picking stopped. The figure looked over his shoulder.

  “Just a few pieces of broken pottery,” he said. “How about you?”

  Gabriel reached down into the trench. Eli Lavon took hold of Gabriel’s hand and pulled himself out.

  They sat in the shade of a blue tarpaulin and drank mineralwater at a folding table. Gabriel, his eyes on the valley below, asked Lavon what he was doing at Tel Megiddo.

  “There’s a popular school of archaeological thought these days called biblical minimalism. The minimalists believe, among other things, that King Solomon was a mythical figure, something of a Jewish King Arthur. We’re trying to prove them wrong.”

  “Did he exist?”

  “Of course,” said Lavon, “and he built a city right here at Megiddo.”

  Lavon removed his floppy hat and used it to beat the gray-brown dust from his khaki trousers. As usual he seemed to be wearing all of his clothing at once—three shirts, by Gabriel’s count, with a red cotton handkerchief knotted at his throat. His sparse, unkempt gray hair moved in the faint breeze. He pushed a stray lock from his forehead and appraised Gabriel with a pair of quick brown eyes.

  “Isn’t it a little soon for you to be up here in this heat?”