into the gutter.
Different instincts. Yabril believed that everything on this earth was dangerous. Romeo had a certain innocent trust.
There were other differences. Yabril was ugly with his small marbled tan eyes, Romeo was almost beautiful. Yabril was proud of his ugliness, Romeo was ashamed of his beauty. Yabril had always understood that when an innocent man commits absolutely to political revolution, it must lead to murder. Romeo had come to that belief late, and reluctantly. His conversion had been an intellectual one.
Romeo had won sexual victories with the accident of physical beauty, and his family money had protected him from economic humiliations. Romeo was intelligent enough to know that his good fortune was not morally correct, and so the very goodness of his life disgusted him. He drowned himself in literature and his studies, which confirmed his belief. It was inevitable that he would be convinced by his radical professors that he should help make the world a better place.
He did not want to be like his father, an Italian who spent more time in barbershops than courtesans at their hairdresser's. He did not want to spend his life in the pursuit of beautiful women. Above all, he would never spend money reeking with the sweat of the poor. The poor must be made free and happy, and then he too could taste happiness. And so he reached out, for a second Communion, to the books of Karl Marx.
Yabril's conversion was more visceral. As a child in Palestine he had lived in a Garden of Eden. He had been a happy boy, extremely intelligent, devotedly obedient to his parents-especially to his father, who spent an hour each day reading to him from the Koran.
The family lived in a large villa with many servants, on extensive grounds that were magically green in that desert land. But one day, when Yabril was five years old, he was cast out of this paradise. His beloved parents vanished, the villa and gardens dissolved into a cloud of purple smoke. And suddenly he was living in a small dirty village at the bottom of a mountain, an orphan living on the charity of kin. His only treasure was his father's Koran printed on vellum, with illuminated figures of gold and calligraphy of a rich blue. And he always remembered his father's reading it aloud, exactly from the text, according to Muslim custom. Those orders of God given to the Prophet Mohammed, words that could never be discussed or argued. As a grown man, Yabril had remarked to a Jewish friend, 'The Koran is not a Torah,' and they had both laughed.
The truth of exile from the Garden of Eden had been revealed to him almost at once, but he did not fully understand it until a few years later. His father had been a secret supporter of Palestine liberation from the state of Israel, a leader of the underground. His father had been betrayed, gunned down in a police raid, and his mother had committed suicide when the villa and grounds were blown up by the Israelis.
It was most natural for Yabril to become a terrorist. His kin and his teachers in the local school taught him to hate all Jews but did not fully succeed. He did hate his God for banishing him from his childhood paradise.
When he was eighteen he sold his father's Koran for an enormous sum of money and enrolled at the university in Beirut. There he spent most of his fortune on women, and finally, after two years, became a member of the Palestinian underground. And over the years he became a deadly weapon in that cause.
But his people's freedom was not his final aim. In some way his work was a search for inner peace.
Now together in the courtyard of the safe house, Romeo and Yabril took a little over two hours to go over every detail of their mission. Romeo smoked cigarettes constantly. He was nervous about one thing. 'Are you sure they will give me up?' he asked.
Yabril said softly, 'How can they not with the hostage I will be holding?
Believe me, you will be safer in their hands than I will be in Sherhaben. They gave each other a final embrace in the darkness. After Easter Sunday they would never see each other again.
On this same Good Friday, President Francis Xavier Kennedy met with his senior staff of top advisers and his Vice President to give them news that he knew would make them unhappy.
He met with them in the Yellow Oval Room of the White House, his favorite room, larger and more comfortable than the more famous Oval Office. The Yellow Room was more a living room, and they could be comfortable while being served an English tea.
They were all waiting for him and they rose when his Secret Service bodyguards ushered him into the room. Kennedy motioned his staff to sit down while telling the bodyguards to wait outside the room. Two things irritated him about this little scene. The first was that according to protocol he had to personally order the Secret Service men out of the room, and the second was that the Vice President had to stand out of respect for the presidency. What annoyed him about this was that the Vice President was a woman, and political courtesy overruled social courtesy. This was compounded by the fact that Vice President Helen Du Pray was ten years older than he, was still quite a beautiful woman, and had extraordinary political and social intelligence. Which was, of course, why he had picked her as his running mate despite the opposition of the heavyweights in the Democratic party.
'Damn it, Helen,' Francis Kennedy said. 'Stop standing up when I come into a room. Now I'll have to pour tea for everybody to show my humility.'
'I wanted to express my gratitude,' Helen Du Pray said. 'I figured you summoned the Vice President to your staff meeting because somebody has to do the dishes.' They both laughed. The staff did not.
Romeo smoked a final cigarette in the darkness of the courtyard. Beyond the stone walls he could see the domes of the great churches of Rome. Then he went inside. It was time to brief his cadre.
The woman Annee served as the cadre's armorer and she unlocked a huge trunk to distribute the weapons and ammunition, One of the men spread on the living-room floor a dirty bed sheet, on which Annee put gun oil and rags. They would clean and oil their weapons as they listened to the briefing. For hours they listened and asked questions, and rehearsed their movements. Annee handed out the operational clothing and they made jokes about that. Finally they all sat down together to a meal that Romeo and the men had prepared. They toasted the success of their mission with new spring wine, and then some of them played cards for an hour before retiring to their rooms. There was no need for a guard, they had locked themselves in securely, and they had their weapons beside their beds.
Still, they all had trouble failing asleep.
It was after midnight when Annee knocked on Romeo's door. Romeo was reading. He let her in and she quickly threw his copy of The Brothers Karamazov on the floor. She said almost contemptuously, 'You're reading that shit again?' Romeo shrugged and smiled and said, 'He amuses me, his characters strike me as Italians trying hard to be serious.'
They undressed quickly and lay down on the soiled sheets, both on their backs. Their bodies were tense not with the excitement of sex but with a mysterious terror. Romeo stared straight up at the ceiling and the woman
Annee closed her eyes. She was on his left and used her right hand to slowly and gently masturbate him. Their shoulders barely touched, the rest of their bodies was apart. When she felt Romeo become erect, she continued the strokes with her right hand and at the same time masturbated herself with her left hand. It was a continuous slow rhythm during which Romeo once reached out tentatively to touch her small breast, but she made a grimace like a child, her eyes tightly shut. Now her pulling became tighter and stronger, the stroking frantic and unrhythmical, and Romeo came to orgasm.
As the semen flowed over Annee’s hand she too came to orgasm, her eyes flew open and her slight body seemed to hurl itself into the air, lifting and turning to Romeo as if to kiss him, but she ducked her head and buried her face in his chest for a moment until her body shuddered to a stop. Then very matter-of-factly she sat up and wiped her hand on the soiled sheet of the bed. She then took Romeo's cigarettes and lighter from the marble night table and started to smoke.
Romeo went into the bathroom and wet a towel. He came back and washed her hands and then wiped himself. Then he gave her the towel and she rubbed it between her legs.
They had done this on another mission, and Romeo understood that this was the only kind of affection she could permit. She was so fierce in her independence, for whatever reason, that she could not bear that a man she did not love should penetrate her. And as for fellatio and cunnilingus, which he had suggested, they were also another form of surrender. What she had done was the only way she could satisfy her need without betraying her ideals of independence.
Romeo watched her face. It was not so stem now, the eyes not so fierce.
She was so young, he thought, how did she become so deadly in so short a time? 'Do you want to sleep
