Scoundrel

question in the context, but I nodded and said I was sure America would fight.

“I hope so,” Halil said, “I hope so.” He spoke softly, but I sensed how badly this man wanted to see a great Arab victory in the desert. Was that why he had asked me the question, simply to satisfy his curiosity? Or was his query somehow related to this boat, and to my recruitment, and to a Stinger missile in a Miami warehouse? Those were questions I dared not ask. The truth of this operation, if it ever emerged at all, would appear in grudging increments.

Halil was still worrying that America would not give the Iraqi army its chance of immortal glory for he suddenly took a folded sheet of newsprint from his suit pocket. “Your politicians are already trying to escape the horrors of defeat,” he said. “Look for yourself!” He pushed the scrap of newspaper across the saloon table. It was a recent front page story from The New York Times which told how House Representative Thomas O’Shaughnessy the Third had introduced a bill to Congress which, if it passed, would forbid the employment of American military forces in the Gulf for one whole year. O’Shaughnessy was quoted as wanting to give economic sanctions a chance to work before force was used. “You see!” Halil’s voice was mocking. “Even your legislators want peace. They have no courage, Shanahan.”

I shook my head. “You know what they call O’Shaughnessy in Boston? They call him Tommy the Turd. They say he’s too dumb to succeed, but too rich to fail. He’s a clown, Halil. He’s in Congress because his daddy is rich.”

Thomas O’Shaughnessy the Third was less than thirty years old, yet he was already serving his second term in Congress. Michael Herlihy was one of O’Shaughnessy’s staff, helping the Congressman cultivate the IRA sympathizers in his Boston constituency. I suspected Michael had been behind one of Tommy’s early crusades which demanded that the British government treat IRA prisoners according to the Geneva Convention. The campaign had collapsed in ridicule when it was pointed out that the Geneva Convention permitted combatant governments to execute enemy soldiers captured out of uniform, which meant Tommy’s bill would have given American sanction for the Brits to slaughter every IRA man they took prisoner, but the proposal had never been seriously meant, only a proof to his constituents that Tommy’s heart was in the right place, even if his brain was lost somewhere in outer space.

I offered the cutting back to Halil. “Congressmen like O’Shaughnessy will make a lot of feeble noises, but the American public will listen to the President and, if Saddam Hussein stays in Kuwait, you’ll get your war.”

“May God prove you right,” Halil said, “because I want to see the bodies of the American army feeding the desert jackals for years to come. In the sands of Kuwait, Shanahan, we shall see the humbling of America and the glory of Islam.”

I said nothing; just held the cutting across the table until Halil leaned forward for it. He reached with his good left hand and, as he did, I suddenly knew exactly who this man was and why Shafiq was so terrified of him, and I felt the same terror, because this man, this unremarkable man, this ignorant stubborn man, this hater of America and self-proclaimed expert on boats, was wearing a woman’s Blancpain wristwatch.

He was il Hayaween.

The Blancpain watch was an expensive timepiece enshrined in a miraculously thin case of gold and platinum. Except for its small size the watch did not appear particularly feminine; instead it looked what it was: a delicate and exquisitely elegant wristwatch. It was also a very expensive wristwatch. I knew, for I had bought it myself.

I had bought it five years before in Vienna where Shafiq had met me in the cafe of the Sacher Hotel. It had been an early spring afternoon and Shafiq was lingering over a sachertorte until it was time for him to leave for the airport. We were probably talking about Shafiq’s favorite subject, women, when he had suddenly dropped his fork and cursed in Arabic. Then he switched to panicked French. “I am supposed to buy a gift! Oh God, I forgot. Paul, help me, please!” He had gone quite pale.

There had followed a desperate few hours as we searched Vienna for a jeweller who might stock Blancpain watches. I had derided Shafiq’s urgency until he explained that it was the legendary il Hayaween who had demanded the watch, and Colonel Qaddafi himself who wanted to be the watch’s giver, and then I understood just what the price of failure might entail for Shafiq. Yet our search seemed hopeless. Blancpains were not like other watches, but were genuine old-fashioned hand-made Swiss watches, powered by clockwork and without a scrap of contaminating quartz or battery acid, and such rare timepieces needed to be specially ordered. The shops began to close and Shafiq was nearing despair until, in one of the little streets close to St. Stephen’s Cathedral, we found a single specimen of a Blancpain watch. It was a rare specimen, it was expensive and it was beautiful, but it was also a woman’s watch. “Do you think he’ll know?” Shafiq asked me nervously.

“It doesn’t look especially feminine,” I said, “just a bit on the small side.”

“Oh, dear sweet Christ!” Shafiq liked to use Christian blasphemies, which he thought were more sophisticated than Islamic imprecations. “If it’s the wrong watch, Paul, he’ll kill me!”

“And if you take him no watch at all?”

“Then Qaddafi will cut off my balls!”

“We’ll take the watch,” I had told the shopkeeper, and proffered him my credit card.

Now I had seen that same watch on Halil’s wrist, and I knew who he was: il Hayaween. Not that il Hayaween was his real name, any more than Halil was, or even Daoud Malif, which was the name usually ascribed to him by the Western press when they did not use the nickname. Il Hayaween was an Arabic insult meaning “the animal” and its first syllable was pronounced as an explosive breath, but on one would dare explode the word into Halil’s face for, in all the shadowy world of terror, he was reckoned the most famous and the most lethal and the most daring of all the deadly men who had ever graduated from the refugee camps of the Palestinian exiles. In the pantheon of death il Hayaween was the Godhead, a ruthless killer who gave hope to his dispossessed people. In the gutters of Gaza and the ghettos of Hebron he was the leveller, the man who frightened the Israelis and terrified the Americans. Children in refugee camps learned the tales of il Hayaween’s fame; how he had shot the Israeli Ambassador in a tea garden in Geneva, how he had bombed American soldiers in a Frankfurt night club, how he had ambushed an Israeli schoolbus and slaughtered its occupants, and how he had freed Palestinian prisoners from the jails of Oman. Whenever a misfortune struck an enemy of Palestine, he was reputed to be its author; thus when the jumbo jet fell from the flaming skies over Scotland the Palestinians chuckled and said that he had been at work again. Some Western journalists doubted his very existence, postulating that anyone as omnipotent as il Hayaween had to be a mythical figure constructed from the lusts of a frustrated people, but he lived all right, and I was talking to him in the saloon of a French yacht in Monastir’s marina.

Where I was not thinking straight; not yet. Terrorists live in a skewed world. Their view is dominated and overshadowed by the cause, and every single thing that moves or creeps or swarms on earth is seen in its relation to the cause, and nothing is too far away or too trivial or too innocent to escape the cause. Thus, to a man like il Hayaween, a game of baseball is not an irrelevant pastime, but evidence that the American public does not care about the monstrous crime committed against the Palestinian people; worse, it is evidence that the American people deliberately do not want to consider that crime, preferring to watch a game of bat and ball. Therefore a scheme to kill baseball spectators would be a justifiable act because it could jolt the rest of America into an understanding of the truth. Terrorists believe they have been vouchsafed a unique glimpse of truth, and everything in the world is seen through the distorting lenses of that revelation.

So perhaps, in such a skewed world, paying for weapons with a boatload of gold makes sense.

And risking the gold by sailing the boat across the Atlantic makes sense.

And allowing a Palestinian terrorist to choose the sailboat makes sense.

And involving the Palestinian’s most notorious killer in the purchase of Stinger missiles destined for Northern Ireland makes sense.

Or maybe not.

Halil pushed the folded newspaper cutting into his pocket. The cigarette had gone out, so now he lit another before staring into my eyes again. “Shanahan,” he said with a tinge of distaste. “You moved to Ireland when you were twenty-seven. Is that right?”

“Yes.”

“You lived in Dublin for one year and in Belfast for two.”