Yaakov shoved Arwish headlong into the back of the car. Gabriel scrambled in after him and drove the informant toward the floor. Yaakov ran around the front of the car to the driver’s side door, pausing long enough to spray a volley of rounds a few yards from the feet of the Palestinian villager, who scurried back into the shelter of his house.
Yaakov jumped behind the wheel, then reversed down the narrow street. Reaching the market square, he turned around and sped through the village. The gunfire and the roaring of the car engine had alerted the villagers to trouble. Faces appeared in windows and doorways, but no one dared challenge them.
Gabriel kept watch out the rear window until the village vanished into the darkness. A moment later Yaakov was once again racing along the rutted wadi, this time in the opposite direction. The collaborator was still pressed to the floor, wedged into the narrow space between the backseat and the front.
“Let me up, you jackass!”
Gabriel pressed his forearm against the side of the Arab’s neck and subjected his body to a rough and thorough search for weapons or explosives. Finding nothing, he pulled the Arab onto the seat and tore away the black hood. A single eye glared malevolently back at him-the eye of Yasir Arafat’s translator, Colonel Kemel.
THE CITY OF HADERA, an early Zionist farm settlement turned drab Israeli industrial town, lies on the Coastal Plain halfway between Haifa and Tel Aviv. In a working-class section of the city, adjacent to a sprawling tire factory, stands a row of wheat-colored apartment buildings. One of the buildings, the one nearest the factory, stinks always of burning rubber. On the top floor of this building is a Shabak safe flat. For most officers it is a meeting place of last resort. Yaakov actually preferred it. The acrid smell, he believed, lent an air of urgency to the proceedings, for few men who came here wished to linger long. But then Yaakov was driven by other ghosts. His great-grandparents, Russian Jews from Kovno, had been among the founders of Hadera. They had turned a worthless malarial swamp into productive farmland. For Yaakov, Hadera was truth. Hadera was Israel.
The flat was devoid of comfort. The sitting room was furnished with folding metal chairs, and the linoleum floor was buckled and bare. On the kitchen counter stood a cheap plastic electric kettle; in the rust-stained basin a quartet of dirty cups. Mahmoud Arwish, alias Colonel Kemel, had turned down Yaakov’s rather disingenuous offer of tea. He had also requested that Yaakov leave the lights off. The neatly pressed uniform he’d been wearing that morning at the Mukata had been replaced by a pair of gabardine trousers and a white cotton shirt, which glowed softly in the moonlight streaming through the window. Between the two remaining fingers of his right hand rested one of Yaakov’s American cigarettes. With the other hand he was massaging the side of his neck. His single eye was fixed on Gabriel, who had forsaken his folding chair and was seated on the floor with his back propped against the wall and his legs crossed before him. Yaakov was a formless shadow against the window.
“I see you’ve learned a thing or two from your Shabak friend,” Arwish said, rubbing his jaw. “They have a reputation of being good with their fists.”
“You said you wanted to see me,” said Gabriel. “I don’t like when people ask to see me.”
“What did you think I was planning to do? Kill you?”
“It’s not without precedent,” Gabriel replied calmly.
Shabak agents, he knew, were at their most vulnerable while meeting with assets from the other side. In recent years, several had been killed during meetings. One had been hacked to death with an ax in a Jerusalem safe flat.
“If we’d wanted to kill you, we’d have done it this morning in Ramallah. Our people would have celebrated your death. Your hands are stained with the blood of Palestinian heroes.”
“Celebration of death is what you’re good at these days,” Gabriel replied. “Sometimes it seems to be the only thing. Offer your people something instead of suicide. Lead them instead of following the most extreme elements of your society. Build something.”
“We tried to build something,” Arwish replied, “and you tore it down with your tanks and bulldozers.”
Gabriel glimpsed Yaakov’s shadow stirring in the window. The Shabak man wanted the topic moved onto less contentious ground. Mahmoud Arwish, judging from the menacing manner in which he lit a second cigarette, was not ready to concede. Gabriel looked away from the Arab’s single glaring eye and absently trailed his forefinger through the dust on the linoleum floor. Let him rant, Shamron would have counseled. Let him cast you as the oppressor and villain. It helps to assuage the guilt of betrayal.
“Yes, we celebrate death,” Arwish said, closing the lid of Yaakov’s old-fashioned lighter with a snap. “And some of us collaborate with our enemy. But that’s the way it always is in war, isn’t it? Unfortunately, we Palestinians are easily bought. Shabak calls it the three K’s:
Gabriel, silent, continued doodling in the dust. He realized he was tracing the outline of a Caravaggio- Abraham, knife in hand, preparing to slay his own son in service to the Lord.
Arwish went on. “Do you know why I collaborate, Jibril? I collaborate because my wife became ill. The doctor at the clinic in Ramallah diagnosed her with cancer and said she would die unless she received treatment in Jerusalem. I requested permission from the Israeli authorities to enter the city, which brought me into contact with Shabak and my dear friend.” He inclined his head toward Yaakov, who was now seated on the window ledge with his arms folded. “In front of me he calls himself Solomon. I know his real name is Yaakov, but I always refer to him as Solomon. It is one of the many games we play.”
Arwish contemplated the end of his cigarette. “Needless to say, my wife received permission to travel to Jerusalem for treatment, but it came at a steep price, the price of collaboration. Solomon jails my sons from time to time, just to keep the information flowing. He’s even jailed a relative who lives on the Israeli side of the Green Line. But when Solomon truly wants to turn the screws on me, he threatens to tell my wife of my treachery. Solomon knows she would never forgive me.”
Gabriel looked up from his Caravaggio. “Are you finished?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“Then why don’t you tell me about Khaled?”
“Hosea,” Gabriel replied indifferently.
“Correct,” said Arwish. “Are you a religious man?”
“No,” answered Gabriel truthfully.
“Neither am I,” confessed Arwish, “but perhaps you should heed the advice of Hosea. What is Israel ’s solution to her problems with the Palestinians? To build a fence. To act, in the words of Hosea, like shifters of field boundaries. The Jews complain bitterly about the centuries they spent in the ghetto, and yet what are you doing with that Separation Fence? You are building the first Palestinian ghetto. Worse still, you’re building a ghetto for yourselves.”
Arwish started to raise his cigarette to his lips, but Yaakov stepped away from the window and slapped the cigarette from the Palestinian’s ruined hand. Arwish treated himself to the victim’s superior smile, then he twisted his head around and asked Yaakov for a cup of tea. Yaakov returned to the window and remained motionless.
“No tea today,” Arwish said. “Only money. To get my money, I must sign Solomon’s ledger and affix to it my own thumbprint. That way, if I betray Solomon, he can punish me. There is but one fate for collaboration in our part of this land. Death. And not a gentleman’s death. A biblical death. I’ll be stoned or hacked to pieces by Arafat’s fanatical killers. That’s how Yaakov ensures I tell him nothing but the truth, and on a timely basis.”
Yaakov leaned forward and whispered into Arwish’s ear, like a lawyer instructing a witness under hostile questioning.
“Solomon grows irritated with my speeches. Solomon would like me to get down to business.” Arwish studied Gabriel for a moment. “But not you, Jibril. You are the patient one.”
Gabriel looked up. “Where’s Khaled?”
“I don’t know. I only know that Arafat misled you this morning. You’re right. Khaled does exist, and he’s taken up the sword of his father and grandfather.”
“Did he do Rome?”
A moment of hesitation, a glance toward the dark figure of Yaakov, then a slow nod.
