Prince of Fire

“You were there the night the village fell?”

“Not exactly. I was walking in a field near the village.” He paused and added conspiratorially: “With a girl.”

“And when the raid started?”

“We hid in the fields and watched our families walking to the north toward Lebanon. We saw the Jewish sappers dynamiting our homes. We stayed in the field all the next day. When the darkness came again, we walked here to al-Makr. The rest of my family, my mother and father, my brothers and sisters, all ended up in Lebanon.”

“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 cannot go 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 another war, 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 during the 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 description but 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 shipment of 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. Lebanon incarnate. 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, Operations let 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 obligatory gold 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