“Drive up to the gate and stop.”
They turned into the access road and reached the gate, which was open. The UN guards saluted.
“Oh, no!” Sanani pointed. “They’re executing him!”
Elie saw Lemmy stand with his back to a telephone pole, blindfolded, his upper body exposed to the sun. A line of Jordanian soldiers stood in the ready. An Indian UN officer watched from the gate.
Elie punched Sanani’s leg under the dashboard. “Stop the car.”
The soldiers cocked their weapon while their officer raised his arm, ready to give the order.
L emmy knew he was doomed. The Jordanian officer tightened the blindfold and said something in Arabic that included the word Allah. Weapons were being cocked, and he heard an engine roar nearby. He was struggling to stay on his feet, erect and proud, not to show them how terrified he was. Would it hurt when the bullets pierced his chest? Or would he die before the nerves managed to transmit the pain to his brain?
His chest constricted. His breathing stopped. His muscles tensed up, expecting the sound of shots and the bullets to tear into him. He heard the Jordanian officer yell something in Arabic-an order to shoot! — and his mouth opened to scream.
But no shots sounded.
The air raid sirens on the Israeli side of the border continued to whine. He heard voices arguing and shook his head to loosen up the blindfold, which dropped to the bridge of his nose.
The Jordanian officer stood by Bull’s white Jeep. The UN general was sitting in the front passenger seat, and Lemmy realized with a sinking heart that Sanani was not coming. Would General Bull step in to save an Israeli saboteur from execution? Considering the enormous mayhem he had caused, Lemmy doubted the angry general would show any mercy.
General Bull’s door opened, and he came out.
Lemmy gasped in shock. It wasn’t Bull, but the skinny little man from Zigelnick’s tent! Agent Weiss! He was dressed in a UN uniform with lots of insignia that made him very important as long as no one realized he was a fake.
The Indian officer stared at the unfamiliar UN general. The guards at the gate stood still, unsure what to do.
Elie Weiss shook hands with the Jordanian officer. “Good morning,” he said in heavily accented English. “I’d like to question the spy for a couple of minutes. You can shoot him when I’m done.” He turned and marched through the gate into the UN compound.
After a brief hesitation, the Jordanian officer untied Lemmy and led him by the arm after Elie. The Indian officer sent the two UN soldiers off to assist in the fire fighting and joined the procession. Sanani drove the Jeep across the courtyard.
Elie entered Government House and strode across the lobby. UN soldiers, running back and forth with buckets of water, noticed his rank and stopped to salute him. He turned down a side corridor and entered an office on the left, which Lemmy realized he’d chosen because it had no windows facing the front of the building. The group followed him, and a moment later Sanani joined them, shutting the door.
The office had a single desk, file cabinets, and family photos on the walls. It probably belonged to a low- ranking UN administrator. Elie sat in the chair behind the desk, adjusted his blue cap, and grabbed a pen and a few blank papers.
Lemmy positioned himself to the side, against the wall. It gave him a clear vantage point and forced the Jordanian officer, who carried a pistol in a hip holster, to stand beside him, rather than behind him.
Elie’s black eyes focused on the Indian officer. “Identify yourself.”
“Major Raja Patel, operations commander for this United Nations facility. And who-”
“Thank you,” Elie cut him off. “What’s the situation with this young man?” He gestured at Lemmy.
The Indian officer started describing the events that led to Lemmy’s exposure. When he reached the part about his clever idea, that the former Nazi now running the West German BND would not employ a Jew, he turned to Sanani, who stood the closest to him. “We pulled like this,” he demonstrated, reaching down to pantomime on Sanani’s pants, but paused and took a second look at Sanani’s face. “Who are you? I don’t recall you!”
Sanani was caught unprepared. He smiled and looked at Elie.
The UN officer switched to Hindu, uttering a long sentence.
“Well spoken,” Sanani said, regaining his edge. “As Mahatma Gandhi said, An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind. ”
The Indian officer stepped back and drew Lemmy’s Mauser. “Who are you people?”
Elie stood up. “Calm down, Major.”
The Jordanian officer hesitated, shocked at the sudden conflict between the UN officers.
Major Patel stepped backward toward the door, aiming the Mauser at Sanani. “What is going on here? Tell me!”
Lemmy heard Elie whisper to Sanani in Hebrew, “He hasn’t cocked it. Knock him down!”
“No!” Lemmy reached forward to stop him, but Sanani had already leaped forward and tackled the Indian officer. A shot sounded, muffled by their intermingled bodies.
Lemmy rammed the Jordanian officer, and they both fell to the floor. Lemmy started rising, but what he saw stopped him. A long blade appeared in Elie Weiss’s hand, the shining steel at least as long as his forearm. He swung it across, almost too fast for Lemmy to see, the point passing under the chin of the Jordanian officer, leaving a thin red line on his throat. The blade continued over Sanani’s bowed head and swished below Major Patel’s jaw. It returned in a figure-eight for another cut across the Indian officer’s neck and passed by Lemmy’s face, its glistening point swiping just above the shirt collar of the Jordanian officer, who attempted to draw his gun.
The two men held their twice-cut throats. They dropped to the floor, writhing.
“Sanani!” Lemmy kneeled by his friend, whose shirt was soaked red. “ Sanani! ”
Elie felt his neck. “Your friend is dead.”
“ No! ”
“Put on this guy’s uniform.” Elie gestured at the Indian officer.
“But-”
“Quick, before his blood soaks it!” He fished the car keys from Sanani’s pocket.
In a daze, Lemmy undressed the dead Indian officer. Meanwhile, Elie was removing the uniform from the dead Jordanian, whose eyes stared vacantly at the ceiling. He tossed away the shirt, pants, and boots, and removed the identification tags from the Jordanian’s neck, replacing them with tags that Lemmy recognized as his own IDF tags.
With difficulty Lemmy buttoned up the UN shirt, whose collar was warm with Major Patel’s blood, pushed it into the oversized pants, and buckled up the Indian’s belt. He glanced up to see what Elie was doing and would have vomited had there been anything in his stomach.
The long blade was dancing in his small hand, making rapid cuts in the Jordanian officer’s dead face. Pieces of skin and flesh flew up from the blade as the face grew naked, the pink bones emerging in unnatural clarity. He poked the eyes, carved off the brows, and removed the ears. Then he held up each hand and peeled the skin off all the fingertips with quick slicing motions.
Lemmy managed to say, “What are you doing?”
“Amazing how similar we all look under the skin.”
He gagged, covering his mouth.
Elie took a hand grenade from his pocket and placed it on the corpse’s groin. “And this should count as a kosher circumcision, right?”
Voices filtered through the closed door, men talking excitedly, someone issuing orders.
Lemmy cleared his throat. “What now?”
“Now?” Elie reached down for the fuse on the hand grenade at the corpse’s groin. “Now we’re going to kill you.”
Chapter 44
