‘Oh, Grandfather, I can’t imagine doing that.’
And she hadn’t, although there were times when she came close, only pride and what strength she could summon stopping her. Shvartzeh Arviyah!… ‘Nigger-Arab!’ was her first introduction to one-on-one hatred. Not the blind, irrational hatred of mobs running amok in the streets, brandishing placards and crudely made signs, cursing an unseen enemy far away across distant borders, but of young people like herself, in a pluralistic community of learning, sharing classrooms and cafeterias, where the worth of the individual was paramount, from entrance through constant evaluation to graduation. Each contributed to the whole, but as himself or herself, not as an institutional robot except perhaps on the playing fields, and even there individual performance was recognized, often more so in defeat, touchingly more so. ‘ Yet for so long she had not been an individual; she had lost herself. That had been eradicated, transferred to an abstract, insidious racial collective called Arab. Dirty Arab, devious Arab, murderous Arab—Arab, Arab, Arab—until she couldn’t stand it any longer! She stayed by herself in her room, turning down offers from dormitory acquaintances to visit the collegiate drinking halls; twice had been enough.
The first should have been enough. She had gone to the ladies’ room only to find it blocked by two male students; they were Jewish students, to be sure, but they were also American students.
‘Thought you Arabs didn’t drink!’ shouted the drunken young man on her left.
‘It’s a choice one makes,’ she had replied.
‘I’m told you Arviyah piss on the floor of your tents!’ cried the other, leering.
‘You were misinformed. We’re quite fastidious. May I please go inside—’
‘Not here, Arab. We don’t know what you’d leave on the toilet seat and we have a couple of yehudiyah with us. Got the message, Arab?
The breaking point, however, came at the end of her second term. She had done well in a course taught by a renowned Jewish professor, well enough to have been singled out by the sought-after teacher as the student he deemed to have achieved the most. The prize, an annual event in his class, was a personally inscribed copy of one of his works. Many of her classmates, Jews and non-Jews alike, had come around to congratulate her, but when she left the building three others in stocking masks had stopped her on a wooded path back to her dormitory.
‘What did you do?’ one asked. ‘Threaten to blow his house up?’
‘Maybe knife his kids with a sharp Arab dagger?’
‘Hell, no! She’d call in Arafat!’
‘We’re going to teach you a lesson, Shvartzeh Arviyah’t’
‘If the book means so much to you, take it!’
‘No, Arab, you take it.’
She had been raped. ‘This is for Munich!’ ‘This is for the children in the Golan kibbutz!’ ‘This is for my cousin on the beaches of Ashdod where you bastards killed him!’ There had been no sexual gratification for the attackers, only the fury of inflicting punishment on the Arab.
She had half crawled, half stumbled back towards her dormitory when a very important person came into her life. One Roberta Aldridge, the inestimable Bobbie Aldridge, the iconoclastic daughter of the New England Aldridges.
‘Scum!” she had screamed into the trees of Cambridge, Massachusetts.
‘You must never tell!’ pleaded the young Egyptian girl. ‘You don’t understand!’
‘Don’t you worry about that, honey. In Boston we have a phrase that means the same thing from Southie to Beacon Hill. “Them that gives, gets!” And those motherfuckers will get, take my word!’
‘No! They’ll come after me—they won’t understand, either! I don’t hate Jews… my dearest friend since childhood is the daughter of a rabbi, one of my father’s closest colleagues. I don’t hate Jews. They’ll say I do because to them I’m just a dirty Arab, but I don’t! My family’s not like that. We don’t hate.’
‘Hold it, kid. I didn’t say anything about Jews, you did. I said motherfuckers, which is an all-inclusive term, so to speak.’
‘It’s finished here. I’m finished. I’ll leave.’
‘The hell you will! You’re seeing my doctor, who’d better know his marbles, and then you move in with me. Christ, I haven’t had a cause in almost two years!’
Praise God and Allah, and all those other deities above. I have a friend. And somehow, within the pain and the hatred of those days, an idea was born that grew into a commitment. An eighteen-year-old girl knew what she was going to do with the rest of her life.
The telephone rang. The past was finished, over, the present was everything! She ran to the bedside phone, yanking it out of its cradle. ‘Yes?’
‘He’s here.’
‘Where?’
‘The embassy.’
‘Oh, my God! What’s happening? What’s he doing?’
‘He’s with two others—’
‘There are three, not four?’
‘We have only seen three. One is at the gate among the beggars. He’s been talking to the terrorists inside.’
‘The American! Where is he?’
‘With the third man. The two of them stay in the shadows, only the first man shows himself. He is the one who makes the decisions, not the American.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘We think he’s making arrangements for them to go inside.’
‘No!’ screamed Khalehla. ‘They can’t—he can’t, he mustn’t! Stop them, stop him!’
‘Such orders should come from the palace, madame—’
‘Such orders come from me! You’ve been told! The prisoner compound was one thing, but not the embassy, never the embassy, not for him! Go out and take them, stop them, kill them if you have to! Kill him!’
‘Hurry!’ cried the robed Arab running to his colleague in the front of the boarded-up restaurant and cracking the bolt of his machine gun into the firing position. ‘Our orders are to take them now, stop them, stop the American. Kill him, if we must.’
‘Kill him?’ asked the astonished official from the palace.
‘Those are the orders. Kill him!’
‘The orders have come too late. They’re gone.’
Ultra Maximum Secure
No Existing Intercepts
Proceed
The figure in the dark sterile room touched the letters of the keyboard with angry precision.
I’ve broken the Langley access codes and it’s madness! Not the CIA, for the liaison is withholding nothing. Instead, the insanity is with the subject. He has gone into the embassy! He can’t survive. He’ll be found out—in the toilet, at a meal with or without utensils, with a single reaction to a phrase. He’s been away too long! I’ve factored in every possibility and my appliances offer little hope. Perhaps my appliances and I were too quick to render judgment. Perhaps our national messiah is no more than a fool, but then all messiahs have been considered fools and idiots until proved otherwise. That is my hope, my prayer.
* * *
Chapter 11
The three escaped prisoners crawled in the darkness up through the ancient, moss-laden sewer line to a gridded opening on the stone floor of the embassy’s east courtyard. Struggling, their hands and feet scraped and bloodied, they emerged into the dazzling sunlight only to be met by a scene Evan Kendrick wished with all his being had remained in darkness. Sixty or more hostages had been removed from the roof to the courtyard for their meagre morning food and ablutions. A latrine consisted of wooden planks with circular holes above planter boxes, the men separated from the women by a large, transparent screen ripped from one of the embassy’s windows. The degradation was complete in that the guards, male and female, walked back and forth in front of the hostages, male and female, laughing and making loud jokes about the functional difficulties their captives were experiencing. The toilet paper, tauntingly held out beyond the reach of trembling hands before it was finally delivered, consisted of print-outs from the embassy’s computers.
Across the way, in full view of the frightened, humiliated people at the planks, the hostages had formed a line leading to three long, narrow tables with rows of metal plates holding dry bread and small wedges of questionable cheese. Spaced between were filthy pitchers filled with a greyish-white liquid, presumably diluted goat’s milk, which was poured sparingly into the prisoners’ wooden bowls by a group of armed terrorists behind the tables. Every now and then a hostage was refused a plate or a ladle of milk; pleading was futile; it resulted in a slap or a fist or a ladle in the face when the cries were too loud.
Suddenly, as Kendrick’s eyes were still adjusting to the harsh light, a young prisoner, a boy of no more than fourteen or fifteen, tears streaming down his face, his features contorted, screamed in defiance. ‘You lousy bastard! My mother’s sick! She keeps throwing up from this crap! Give her something decent, you sons of bitches—’
The boy’s words were cut short by the barrel of a rifle across his face, tearing his left cheek. Instead of subduing the youngster, the blow infuriated him. He lunged across the table, grabbing the shirt of the man with the rifle, tearing it off his chest, sending metal plates and pitchers crashing down from the table. In seconds, the terrorists were on him, pulling him away from the bearded man he was wrestling to the ground, pummelling him with rifle butts and kicking his writhing body on the courtyard stone. Several other male hostages, their anger and courage aroused by the boy’s action, rushed forward shouting with weak, hoarse voices, their arms flailing pathetically against their arrogant, far stronger enemies. What followed was a brutal suppression of the mini revolt. As the hostages fell they were beaten unconscious and kicked like carcasses being thumped and processed in a slaughter house.