The Terrorist Who Fell in Love

By John Livingston

A young Palestinian man, George, who has lost the whole of his family in warfare over the years volunteers out of guilt, loss and desperation for a suicide mission to blow up the official residence of the Israeli prime minister using a explosive-laden van. The Mafia in Naples outfits the van so it can get through Israeli customs in the port of Haifa. The young terrorist needs to find, seduce and dupe an American Jewish woman to put the van in her name and take it to Israel. He find his woman in Venice, but she's a Baptist from deep Georgia who is with her friend, Regina, on a long European vacation. Janice has lost her family in a terrible car crash that kills her alcoholic husband and three little children. After a year of mourning, she and Regina, recently divorced, go on their European tour in celebration of beginning a new life, reborn Georgian Baptists, as it were. Janice falls for George and his story about being in the car import business, but being Palestinian he needs someone to bring the van to Israel. Janice agrees but Regina thinks the whole thing is fishy and suspects George. During the weeks George, Janice and Regina are in Italy and getting the van ready for shipment from Naples to Haifa, the Mossad gets wind of the assassination attempt and tracks George down in Rome but a mix-up with the Mafia ends in the wrong man getting killed, Rodolfo, who was having an affair with Regina that was becoming serious. By the time the van is being loaded onto the ship in Naples, a middle aged Mossad agent, Jerzi, who is on the verge of retirement and has pretty much lost his family to war, alienation and Alzheimer's,, finds George, Janice and Regina in Jerusalem. His mission is to find the car bomb and bring George in alive, if possible. Passing himself off as a business man, he befriends George and the girls. Regina, badly bruised by the loss of Rodolfo, is attracted to the older man, a father figure offering security. As Jerzi gets to know George, he is reminded of his soldier son killed in the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, and can't help but feel a fatherly affection for the young man who has lost his family in warfare, as Jerzi knows. Jerzi also falls for the young, russet-haired beauty Regina and finds himself in a bind between duty and love.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Nov 5, 2021
• ISBN: 9781663228031

John Livingston

John Livingston earned his BS at MIT and his PhD at Princeton University. He is currently a professor of Islamic History and Civilization and Modern Middle East History at William Paterson University. Dr. Livingston currently resides in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Love on the Wings of War is his fourth book.

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

ROME

George’s eyes darted from rearview mirror to side-view mirror and back again. Then to his watch. He was nervous. His hands were shaking. Sweaty. The arrival of the target was long overdue. Or else the ambassador had taken an alternate route. He hoped so. He wasn’t sure he was up to it. He looked again at his watch. It was too late to question if he was up to killing someone. He grimaced at the thought. He felt cramped. He’d been sitting in the car for over two hours.

He took a deep breath to calm himself and tapped his fingers on the armed RPG launcher resting across his lap. He was afraid. Not of death. Of failing. He had reconciled himself to death. Dying was easy. You didn’t have to apologize or excuse yourself for dying, not once you were dead. Failing was something else. You had to live with that hanging around your neck for the rest of your life. Living was hard enough. Killing was feeling even harder now that the moment was getting close. He’d have to live with that too. Why hadn’t they just given him a suicide mission so he could’ve been done with it once and for all? Or was this one in disguise? He wished it were. Easier to kill himself than others. A suicide mission would have been a means to his own end. He was tired. There was no more left in him. He wanted out.

He looked at his watch again. The thought of killing and the fear of failing weren’t the only things wearing him down. Just as bad were all those times the operation had gotten underway and then had to be halted for some reason or another. It had gone on for weeks. The anticipation, the waiting, the anxiety. This was the third attempt. The ambassador’s car hadn’t appeared for the first two. Israeli intelligence had probably caught wind that something was up. By now, Mossad would have uncovered the mission, would be about to snuff it out. George expected Israeli agents to pounce any second and shoot him dead. He doubted his heart could take a fourth try.

No, Mossad wouldn’t shoot him. He had sketched out in his mind how it would go. They’d want to take him alive, interrogate him, torture him, learn what they could, and then turn him to work for them and let him live his life in misery and regret as a well-paid traitor. George was resolved not to be taken alive. He took a deep breath and held it to steady himself.

Patience, he murmured while breathing out. Patience is the key to ease.

His first mission, his first act of violence. He trembled. His stomach turned with nerves. He wasn’t fit for this. He had joined the movement and had volunteered for the mission, but he had never let his mind penetrate the reality of what offering his life for a cause really meant, inflicting violence, killing. He had wanted to kill, in a vague, angry, confused way, back when the Israelis invaded two years ago. But now he wasn’t sure of himself. He was a virgin when it came to killing, to any form of violence, even schoolyard fistfights. But he had volunteered, and here he was. Not that he’d say he didn’t want to be here, sitting in this car with a loaded RPG across his lap, waiting, waiting. The dead needed to be avenged, and the living needed to be justified for having not been killed with the rest. He had volunteered to prove himself, to be at peace with himself, to die and be at rest in the grave with those he had known and loved.

He looked from the rearview mirror to the launcher across his lap. Was it vengeance? He wasn’t sure anymore. It wasn’t hate he felt. He didn’t feel hate in his heart, or what was left of it. He didn’t know any Israelis. How could he hate them? But somehow, he did. Over two years, the anger, the rage had dissipated, leaving loss, hurt, a hole in his heart for having survived. Killing the ambassador wouldn’t fill it. But the ambassador’s bodyguards might, if one of them could shoot straight.

It wasn’t intended to be a suicide mission. He was expected to survive. It had been designed that way. An escape route had been planned. He hoped he wouldn’t need it, that he’d go up in smoke with the ambassador. He looked forward to it. He didn’t want to go back to Beirut and that wretched civil war. The Palestinian war was more than enough. War within war. Who needed to live in a world where one war was being fought within another? His entire life had been war and resistance. He had lived twenty-six years, and now no one was left. Wars had wiped out his family. It was his turn.

He rubbed his hands together. They were cold, his stomach queasy. Why was he so nervous? Wasn’t this what he wanted? Was he at bottom a coward? Could he not be as strong as his enemy? Was his enemy that strong? Invading Lebanon, bombing Beirut, leveling buildings with smart bombs, incinerating people with phosphorus bombs, cutting them to pieces with cluster bombs? What was strength, having been given the modern machines of mass killing? If that was strength, then what was cowardice? Sitting in a car on a Rome street, waiting with a loaded launcher and being afraid? The suspicion and fear of being a coward had tormented him since the day he was given the mission.

He glanced at his watch. Seeking calm, he told himself he could be as brave in facing Israelis with a Soviet RPG as they could be in raining bombs down on Beirut from American jets. He could be just as brave, he told himself, and thought of the phosphorus-impregnated body of his little sister being burned alive, cooked from the inside, her innards charred in fuming phosphorus. He could be just as brave.

He looked at his watch again. It was getting late in the afternoon. He hoped with all his heart that the target had taken one of the alternate routes to save him the sweat of proving himself. A man in a van with a rocket launcher was stationed on a corner at each of the three alternate routes. Months of observation had gone into planning. The routes were known. New ones were periodically added based on what the Italian informer inside the embassy told them. There was no certainty regarding which route the ambassador would take, but the informer had insisted this was the route for that afternoon. As mission chief, George had elected to man it. He had chosen his fate freely and would meet it bravely. He wasn’t a coward. He’d prove it even if he had to die doing it. He smiled grimly, checked the mirrors, and looked at his watch. Had the operation been called off?

It had rained in the early afternoon, a long dismal drizzle that added a blanket of gray dampness to the already leaden day. The wet streets were slippery. A getaway after launching the grenade would be more difficult on wet streets. Maybe the weather had delayed the ambassador. Maybe the operation would be postponed for another day. Maybe he’d feel braver on a sunny day. The view outside the car window was bleak.

His eyes shifted again to the side mirror. He had a clear view of the street for two blocks behind him. The limo, if it came, would appear in his mirror as it came up the street. Traffic was beginning to thicken. The waiting had made him nauseous. His hands were unsteady. Was the ambassador’s limo stuck in traffic? Had it taken a different route? Informers would say anything to collect the money. They couldn’t be trusted. Italians were notorious. He hoped the ambassador would be alone. He feared he wouldn’t have the guts to launch the grenade if he saw a girl or a woman sitting next to the man. But he would have to. Failure was not an option. Not unless he was killed trying, which would at least spare him the worry of having failed or having killed a woman. He wouldn’t know it. There was no heaven where an angel might tell him. No hell where it would be burned into his ear.

Months ago, back in Beirut, when he had been given the assignment, it had seemed a simple operation of waiting for the ambassador to leave the embassy. In Rome, the simplicity had vanished. Security was tight, elaborate. Four ambassadorial limos, multiple routes, no way to get near the embassy for a hit. A black van with tinted windows was perpetually parked across the street from the building. He didn’t need to guess what was in it. Two Italian policemen stood guard outside the high prisonlike iron gate of the embassy. Behind the electronically controlled gate stood two Israeli security guards with Uzi submachine guns.

Last month, while he’d been taking a casual walk for a visual checkout of the place, the Uzis had come up, and for a hair-raising moment, George had feared he was about to be shot or dragged into the embassy for interrogation and torture. The Uzis had been aimed at someone else, a teenage Asian girl wearing a sweatshirt with Arabic lettering across it: Arabian American Oil Company. The girl had jumped, cried out in alarm, and hurried on past the two security men, who were laughing. Israelis had a good sense of humor, terrorizing people. Why not? They occupied millions of people to practice on.

If the Uzi-armed guards and the parked black van didn’t provide enough security, then on the opposite side of the street from the embassy was a fit-looking middle-aged man in sporty clothes forever walking his large, well-groomed dog at a leisurely pace up and down the sidewalk. He’d stop for his dog to sniff around a tree whenever a pedestrian approached, and man and dog would remain in place until the pedestrian had moved on. The canine, a German shepherd that looked more wolf than dog, had probably been trained to rip a man’s throat out in one bound.

Tighter than a virgin, his Rome contact had said about the embassy’s security. A fortress no man can get into.

The sharp blast of a horn startled him. His gaze shot to the rearview mirror as he gripped the launcher. If his Italian contact was right, the ambassador’s car would be turning the corner two streets behind him and coming his way down Via Mercati. George flicked the safety lock of the launcher on and off with his thumb. He felt loose in the bowels. He wasn’t sure of himself. He had been chosen to head the mission because he knew Rome and spoke Italian and because he was thought to be cool-headed and smart. He had been a medical student. Big deal. Half the commanders of the movement were physicians or had been until the defeat in the Six-Day War had turned them into revolutionaries.

The commander in chief of his revolutionary group had been a heart surgeon. George had studied under him in the American University of Beirut medical school. Two years of med school had given him self-discipline and control, but leaving it hadn’t broken his heart. Except for the biological research end of it, medical study had nothing to do with being smart, unless smartness was measured by memorization; focus; determination; dogged patience; stamina to face sickness, blood, and pain; obedience to authority; and a callow willingness to follow after senior physicians like fawning, obsequious, unctuous sycophant courtiers praising in silent bows and nods at their masters’ flawless wisdom.

He hadn’t liked med school, but he would have finished if it hadn’t been for the Israeli invasion two summers ago that had taken his younger brother and, even more painful, his little sister, who’d just entered her teen years. With his siblings gone, ending what had once been a big family, he was left as sole survivor. Father, mother, uncles, grandparents—all gone over the decades, from the Great Revolt of 1936 in British-ruled Palestine to the 1982 invasion of Lebanon. Almost half a century of grief, loss, and bloodshed. And it would go on for another half century or century.

George’s fingers tapped nervously over the metallic barrel of the launcher. He was out of his depth. He admitted it. He’d gone from medicine to assassin. It was something he had to do. He wanted to check out in a blaze. Not of glory, vengeance, or hate. Not even martyrdom. It was too personal for that. Martyrdom had died out in Greek Orthodoxy fifteen centuries ago with Constantine the Great. He had never understood martyrdom. It was too Byzantine. The weeping saints of his church riddled with arrows like porcupines and torn to shreds by the lions of emperors left him cold. Modern martyrdom was for Shi’a Muslims, not Orthodox Christians, not him. He didn’t even know if he believed in god. He didn’t think much about being an atheist or not, and when he did, the thought came with a wonder if he’d possibly been born an atheist, that he had a gene in his DNA that determined it, an atheist gene. But no, he wasn’t truly one. Not completely. He believed. He just wasn’t sure what it was he believed when it came to god and life after death and things like that.

Two blocks to his rear, a gray sedan turned onto the street. Closely behind it came the black limo. His target! Heart racing, George watched the approach of the two vehicles in the side-view mirror and lowered the window. The ambassador could be in either of the two cars. Or he could be in his office, at home sick in bed, or with his mistress in a hotel. He could be anywhere. The Italian informer could be a double agent. Anything was possible. George was learning that in his new profession, positive knowledge was as elusive as studying an incurable disease or a newly evolved virus. Little could be counted on, nothing was certain except death and that a virus would spread, and that religion claimed to have all the answers.

The lead car grew larger in the side-view mirror. George’s mouth went dry. He was trembling. He forced himself to think of Beirut two summers past—the jet bombers, the phosphorus and cluster bombs, the collapsing buildings, the carnage, the charred bodies of his siblings. He gripped the launcher, braced himself against the passenger-side door, and got down low with the conical yellow nose of the grenade’s green shell resting on the frame at the bottom of the open driver’s side window.

A blur of gray passed before the launcher’s barrel sight. When he saw the black of the limo come into sight, he squeezed off the grenade. It left the launcher with a gaseous swoosh of solid rocket fuel. George ducked down as low as he could to avoid the hot blowback.

The explosion was deafening. Bits of shrapnel flew back into the side of the car, which became engulfed in a thick cloud of black smoke rising from the burning limo. George had expected he might be killed by the close-range explosion, and if that didn’t do it, then Israel’s vaunted security officers leaping with guns drawn and shooting from the gray sedan would. But the dead man wasn’t going to make it easy for them. He tossed the launcher into the backseat, started the car, and—straining to see through the dense, dark cloud—slowly pulled away from the curb. Through the billowing smoke, he barely made out the gray sedan that had pulled to the other side of the street. All the better. If he couldn’t see them, maybe they couldn’t see him.

Accelerating to reach the corner and turn right, he saw in the mirror two men stumble out of the sedan, waving their arms in front of them as they groped through the black smoke to reach the doors on either side of the fuming limo. They looked like comic figures in a French pantomime. About to make his turn, George saw them frantically trying to open a rear door. A third man had appeared. He looked to have an Uzi. George hunched his shoulders, lowered his head, and swung the wheel sharply right, waiting for the stream of bullets that would end his torment.

CHAPTER 2

WEST BEIRUT

Nervously aware of the bursting shells landing a block away, Victor Hanna reexamined the six dossiers spread out in their manila folders before him on his desk. Of the twenty young men who had volunteered for the mission, these were the best six. One of them would lead the Jerusalem mission. Victor knew the man he wanted, but to be fair, he went through their records one last time, starting with the one he favored. He opened it just as a mortar exploded outside the bomb-blasted building of his shattered office. With every nearby explosion, a powdery cascade of loose plaster from the battered walls and ceiling fell like snow onto his head, turning his hair to a premature greenish-gray and adding another layer of flaky dust over his desk and the dossiers covering it.

Having blown the dust and flakes from the surface of his Turkish coffee and the open manila folder, he sighed, sipped his coffee, and once more reexamined the dossier. Victor had been studying the dossiers for days, trying to make a decision. Choosing which young man was to die for the cause was not easy. Victor’s wife accused him of losing his revolutionary spirit. She was half-right. It came with age. More to the point, suicide operations were beyond the movement’s code of legitimacy. Greek Orthodoxy frowned on suicide, even when it was for a cause. Victor thought it unfair. Why leave the field to the Shi’ites? But having been brought up with religion in his bones, Victor detested suicide missions, in spite of his tilt away from religion since the Six-Day War seventeen years ago, and in spite of their effectiveness and cost-friendliness.

But this was the movement’s most important mission. The fragile existence of June Blood and Vengeance depended on success. Victor contemplated the bitter irony of it all: a movement whose life depended on the sacrifice of one of its finest young men, effectively killing the best part of itself. He didn’t like it. Suicide missions were not meant for June Blood and Vengeance. Suicide was for young Shi’ite Muslims thirsting for martyrdom, not for Christians. A prisoner of his Greek Orthodox upbringing and his mother’s shadow, he had a problem sending a young man to his death, even though the central myth of his religion was based on a young man’s knowingly going to his death, nailed up by Roman guards to two heavy planks joined at right angles. The cross. Victor was awed by its symbolic power. It had been inspiring followers for two thousand years. And it would go on for another two thousand if life on Earth lasted that long. It amazed him how that simple symbol could still arouse a surge of emotion within him. It was as much a mystery to him as the miracles of the saints and the dead rising from the grave.

Victor pondered the paradox. How was it that the Shi’a sect could make martyrdom a five-star movement among their young men in seeking to emulate Imam Hussein ibn Ali, while the Christians shunned doing the same for their young men in emulation of Jesus (Isa) ibn Yusuf? Didn’t Christianity promise paradise at the end of earthly life with the same absoluteness as Islam? Was it the sensual pleasures of paradise promised to Muslims in the Quran that made martyrdom so attractive to them? He would have liked to discuss that with his wife, Marcia, who had studied Islam and received her doctorate at the University in Berkeley, or with some of his Muslim colleagues, whose lack of knowledge of their religion often surprised him. To be fair, Christians, whether Greek or Roman, were equally lacking in theirs. In any case, however eloquently it was argued, suicide by martyrdom was contradictory to everything Victor believed in as a more or less devout Greek Orthodox Christian and even more so as a medical doctor, which he had been for two decades before the horror of June 1982. It was the destruction, bloodshed, and horror of the invasion that had transformed him into a revolutionary leader, a calling he’d suspected—and his wife had confirmed—was totally contradictory to his moral and psychological constitution. How could it not be? He was a physician. How to send a healthy, bright young man to his death? Even an unhealthy dimwitted one. His wife had answered for him: "Call it ‘killed in battle,’ and be done with it! He volunteered for the fucking mission. Let him go to it! We all end up dead at one time or another. Or didn’t they teach you that in medical school?"

Victor didn’t like his wife’s attitude. She had always been ruthless in matters of the revolution. Typical Californian. Marcia had no problem with the mission. What was wrong with dying young, she’d snap. The young got to look good in a coffin. Even better looking if it meant going up in a high-powered bomb and leaving nothing left for the coffin. That was Marcia. A tough and devout Marxist atheist from UC Berkeley. Victor could tolerate her Marxism, but atheism? Total atheism? No, that he couldn’t understand. He was a surgeon who understood the mind-boggling complexities of the human organism, so how to believe in a universe that wasn’t created by a superior mind? Impossible. There had to be a guiding hand in the universe, a mastermind who’d brought life into existence. He couldn’t understand martyrdom either. He understood Marcia even less and her country least of all. How could a country standing for justice act abroad so unjustly? Contradictions abounded. For example, he and Marcia. What two people could have been more opposite? What marriage could have been more contradictory? He knew what an odd couple they made and how impossibly different they were, but one thing their marriage had taught him was that love made all things possible. Love was the solvent of contradiction that survived even the acids of marriage.

A howitzer 55 shell fired from the Israeli-supported Maronite Falangist sector to the east exploded a few buildings away. Victor brushed the flakes from his hair and blew the plaster dust from his coffee and George’s dossier, which he started to read again. He couldn’t concentrate. Marcia kept jumping into his mind. The American woman had come into his life like a smart bomb, blowing his mind apart. He had just started his medical practice when she had self-detonated in that hothouse of political intrigue, Faysal’s restaurant on Rue Bliss, just across from the American University of Beirut’s main gate, where he and other Palestinian professionals sat for hours discussing politics and revolution. At the time, for Victor, revolution had been a subject to discuss, not a vocation to die for.

Marcia had been at a nearby table scooping up tabouli and baba ghanouj in Arab bread while listening intently to the revolutionary debates raging on. He had been glancing at her. He knew she’d been listening, but they were rattling away in dialect Arabic and how could she understand? Then she’d gotten up and joined them, just like that, with no introduction, and dived in, launching her ideas on the amazed doctors, lawyers, professors, journalists, novelists, and poets at the table—the cream of the Palestinian exile community in Beirut, leaders of revolutionary movements and their professions. Victor had been shocked by the brazen arrogance of the blond American who spoke Arabic as well as an Abbasid poet and talked passionately on atheist Marxist revolution and what had to be done to get out of the Arab morass. Her ideas had shocked him from head to heart to groin to feet, so utterly shocked him that he had fallen in love with her before she finished her sixth sentence, which were like verses from a Marxist Quran.

Marcia had come from Berkeley on a Fulbright to research Palestinian revolutionary movements for her doctorate in political science. She was bright, fiery, and attractive, a blond-haired, blue-eyed devil who frightened the strongest men and melted the hearts of those who didn’t know enough to back off. Victor hadn’t backed off. He had, in fact, lunged blindly forward to fall into the abyss of love. Within seconds of hearing her speak pure classical Arabic, he had fallen like a ripe fig from a tree into the hands of this golden-haired girl from the West whose angelic exterior harbored a devil and who spouted Marxist theory and revolution in flawless Arabic. A female archangel come down from heaven via California to ignite the real revolution. Victor hadn’t known what hit him. The woman, the voice, the message—a triple whammy that had frozen him in love at first sight and sound.

Victor knew little about American women. He figured they were something between movie stars and prostitutes and that those who were neither one nor the other were in character half of each. He was mesmerized by Marcia. She had no doubts about anything. She was totally convinced in her ideas. She was certain about everything, and she knew that she knew. There was no breaking down her walls of intellectual defense. She needed no defense. Her intellectual barrage leveled everything and everyone standing before it. Anything left standing knew enough to stand aside and shut up. A fierce believer in social equality, justice, violent revolution, and the ways in which to go about achieving them, a perfect Marxist whose judicial shake of her head sent her silky blond hair flying and silenced those whose ideas might run counter to hers, Marcia was a force of nature, bursting with energy, mentally radioactive, physically a magnetic dynamo, every gram of her a Marxist idealist through and through. Pity the man who came up against her without his Kalashnikov of dialectics! In a society fragmented by doubt, defenselessness, and violence from inside and out, Marcia’s Marxist surety was a confounding offensive impossible to oppose in a world where everywhere you looked was defeat, doubt, and rubble.

Victor had never met an atheist before, not one who openly and loudly proclaimed it. The idea of her being one frightened him, excited him, perplexed him. How could one believe in a nonexistent nothing and be so certain about it? How to explain the evolution of something as complex as the eye or ear without believing in the wisdom of a heavenly hand at work? Bullshit! Marcia had shot back at him impatiently. Divine design my ass! Given time and the right chemicals and climatic conditions, nature will do its work. You don’t need a goddamned god to understand that, Victor!

Victor couldn’t understand how a woman who was half-movie star, half-prostitute and an atheist through and through could refuse to give herself to him, even after they had been companions in revolution for months. But you don’t even believe in God! he had complained in frustration. When Marcia had said she couldn’t understand what that had to do with anything, he had thrown up his hands and asked her to marry him, and when she’d replied that she believed in marriage even less than religion and the idiotic idea of a god, Victor had beat his fists against his head and torn his hair so passionately that it had frightened Marcia into saying, OK, if it means that much to you, and she’d started to undress.

It had taken months of nagging by Victor’s traditional Palestinian mother to coerce Marcia into accepting a church wedding. A year later, Marcia had given birth to twin boys, Karl and Fredrick. She’d chosen the names, of course, as she chose everything. She had for several years said she didn’t want children—she was a revolutionary—but when she’d slipped up on the pills and the two future revolutionaries had come out, she decided to love them, but only after having given the issue a period of deep self-analysis and scientific sociological thought. The twins would carry on the struggle after she and Victor were gone, since it appeared that, given the way the bumbling Arabs were fucking up their so-called revolution, there would still be plenty left for Karl and Fredrick to do.

Victor had wanted the twins to be baptized in the Greek Orthodox Church. Over my fucking dead body! Marcia had said. She was adamant. She had accepted marriage and then had compromised again to do it in the church, but defiling her babies, polluting them with so-called holy water filled with the germs of a thousand filthy fingers, including those of the disgusting long-bearded priests whose dirty little fingers had been up every little boy in the choir! Asphyxiating her babies with the cancerous smoke of incense that choked the church into a Nazi gas chamber, exposing little Karl and Fredrick to all that filth, infection, disease, and mumbo jumbo in Syriac or adulterated Greek! No, never would her precious little baby boys be exposed to the perversion of entering a church before it had been turned into a museum recording the follies of man!

The closest Marcia had come to killing someone with her own hands had been when she found out that Victor’s mother had secretly taken the babies and had them baptized. The atrocity had almost destroyed their marriage, and it would have had it not been for Victor’s patience. When to impress him with the severity of the infamy of baptism Marcia had taken to wearing black, Victor had dusted off the black suit he had worn at their wedding and penitently joined her in mourning. That had lasted a week. Victor’s mother had been prohibited from visiting or seeing her grandchildren for a year.

Following the June invasion and bombing of Beirut and the subsequent slaughter of old men, women, and children at the Shatila and Sabra refugee camps by the Israeli-protected Maronite killer squads in mid-September of the invasion, Marcia and Victor had founded the movement June Blood and Vengeance, a new movement for a new rewind of the revolution. The purpose was to counter the popularity of Islamist movements that had been growing since the Six-Day War in ’67 and the Iranian Islamic revolution in ’79. The Israeli invasions of Lebanon in ’78 and ’82 had further energized Islamist movements, giving birth to Shiite Hizballah. Religion was tearing away the foundations of what little there was of secular and democratic society, from one end of the Middle East to the other.

June Blood and Vengeance was ideologically designed to appeal to the educated and the enlightened—doctors, lawyers, academicians, scientists, writers, poets, essayists, students, artists, journalists, engineers, bankers, entrepreneurs, businessmen, peasants, priests, refugees, anyone who realized that religion had no place in politics and wanted to join the modern world to create a society based on social justice and progress. God wasn’t mentioned in the movement’s charter. Marcia threatened to cut out the tongue of anyone who uttered the word. To drive home the point, she sported a curved Yemeni dagger in a jewel-studded sheath at her waist. When they went out at night, Victor was dazzled by the figure she cut with the jeweled dagger at her waist, her Kalashnikov slung over a shoulder, and her worker’s cap jauntily tipped to the side atop her long blond hair. He loved her image almost as much as he loved her.

Victor had more or less convinced Marcia to downplay the atheistic principles of June Blood and Vengeance, along with her insistence on abolishing private property and marriage. Marxism in a religion-soaked society would be a hard sell, regardless how war-torn and traumatized people were. How many educated people with professional careers and families are going to join a movement aiming to do away with possessions and religion? To this she’d replied, Your trouble, Victor, is you don’t see the tracks of history stretched out before you. The inevitability of social brotherhood once the rot and corruption of private property and capitalism are swept away is staring you in the face and you can’t see it.

You’re wrong, Marcia. History is a blind glacial crush that massively wipes out innocent lives. Empires come and go without meaning and leave behind only destruction and failure. Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Macedonians, Romans, Byzantines, Umayyads, Abbasids, Mamluks, Ottomans, British, we’ve seen them all! You Americans know nothing because you haven’t experienced history. If there’s any tracks in history then they’re chaos and chance, things coming randomly together. That’s what makes for change. Nothing is inevitable but being born, suffering, and dying.

You’re hopeless. If I were a capitalist, I’d sell my love for you and spare myself having to hear your nonsense.

And I’d just buy it back again at market price!

Victor was unhappy with the way things were going. June Blood and Vengeance was to be a movement dedicated to fighting religion-based terrorism, but it was sinking into the same morass of violent terror that had corrupted all the other movements claiming to be either true religion or true revolution. The slew of them had splintered Lebanon and the Palestinian national movement into a dozen feuding factions, with Syria in occupation of the north and Israel of the south of Lebanon. For Victor, their revolution was looking more and more like a destructive front for vested interests.

That’s exactly what happens to revolutions, Marcia. They devour themselves in division and bloodbaths. Marcia was always ready with a brusque answer to counter his pessimism: Victor, what you don’t understand is that violence and destruction are the fuel of revolution. Whether you like it or not, that’s the way of the world until a classless society remakes the human psyche. And violence pays, Victor. Our membership has doubled in the last six months.

Victor had no answer to that. He never won an argument with her. Whatever he said, Marcia would have a smart answer and on it would go. No one won an argument with Marcia. She was an endless stream of materialist dialectic washing away every thesis with an antithesis. Victor’s only consolation was that Arab women were no different, and Marcia did know a lot. In any case, what could he do? He loved her and would until death.

The suicide mission had been Marcia’s idea. Giving the Zionist enemy a severe blow right at its heart, the prime minister’s residence in Jerusalem, would energize the movement and bring in contributions from the oil states. Israel’s inevitable iron-fisted counterblow would energize June Blood and Vengeance much more. Mu’ammar Gaddhafi of Libya had already contributed $5 million for Prime Minister Menachem Begin’s assassination. Victor had no argument to counter that big sum, but both spiritually and intellectually, suicide missions were anathema to his deepest convictions. Let’s leave suicide missions to the Shi’a, Marcia. They’re not for us. Even the Shi’a shouldn’t be wasting their young men like that.

Listen, Victor, Marcia would reply to his doubts, if those religious nuts really believe all that crap about dark-eyed houri virgins greeting them with legs spread at the gates of paradise, they damn well fucking deserve to kill themselves! It’s Darwinian!

Then what about if they’re Christian? Greek Orthodox or Syriac? The poor guys go to their deaths without expecting any virgins. It’s not fair.

They go with eyes open and knowing why they die—to advance the train of history along the track of social justice!

I’d rather have the virgins.

You’ve had one and one’s enough. Don’t be greedy. And that would be the end of it, abject surrender. But now he girded his loins, determined to defend his choice for the Jerusalem mission.

Have you decided on someone? she asked.

I’m still thinking on it, he replied, avoiding the sharp look she gave him.

Victor! You’ve been on this for a week. Make your choice. Don’t be afraid to choose someone to die. Where are your balls?

I’m waiting for you to give them back. He opened the relevant dossier for her to see. I’m thinking of George, maybe. Just saying his name was to Victor passing a death sentence on the young man.

George? George Safadi? You mean the fuckup who botched the Rome operation?

He didn’t botch it. He hit the ambassador’s car.

Except the ambassador wasn’t in it. If we can’t do better than George Safadi, we’re in trouble.

When have we not been in trouble? It wasn’t his fault the ambassador wasn’t where he was supposed to be.

Marcia read through the dossier. By the end of it she understood why he’d volunteered for a mission that in all likelihood would kill him. She fought back her instinct to like the young man. The large glossy colored photograph showed a fine-looking fellow in his mid-twenties, black eyebrows over soft brown eyes reflecting a subdued introspective sadness, and a well-proportioned physique—overall a picture of masculine magnetism that a woman might find not easy to resist. Two years of med school. Of course, Victor would think it a waste to send such a young man to his death. Victor was soft. Marcia allowed herself no space for squishy sentiment. If George Safadi wanted to end himself for the cause of his people’s liberation, then June Blood and Vengeance would show him the way. Bring him in for an interview, she told Victor. Let’s see what he’s made of.

When George arrived for an interview the next day, the first thing Marcia asked him was if he had any romantic involvements—a girlfriend or a woman he was thinking of marrying.

How could I be thinking of that? he replied. I’m volunteering for a mission.

I have to ask. We have strict regulations when it comes to missions. Anyone who’s married or about to be or has dependent children cannot be considered as a candidate for a mission like this. You understand? We’d be responsible for wives and dependents if someone doesn’t come back. It can get expensive.

I have no romantic attachments.

Good. We’re revolutionaries but not heartless. June Blood and Vengeance strictly applies the marital restrictions on operatives and takes family relations very seriously.

I have no family.

I know. I read your dossier. Now, George, tell me straight from your heart. Could you sacrifice the life of an innocent? An innocent young woman you had to use in order to carry out the mission?

An innocent young woman? he asked.

Yes. Could you kill her or let her die? Could you take her with you to your death if it were necessary to execute the mission? She waited for him to answer. George glanced at Victor, who looked away in silence.

I would do what I had to do to complete the mission.

You’re saying you could blow up an innocent woman with yourself?

He turned the question on her. Could you, Marcia?

Of course not. I’m a mother, and I didn’t volunteer for the mission. Not many people could do such a thing. The question is, could you? Think and answer truthfully, George. Take your time. Everything depends on your answer. Could you send an innocent woman to her death, one you maybe had feelings for?

The cool of the summer morning’s breeze had given way to the heat of the noon sun. The air was stagnant, heavy, humid. Marcia saw George’s forehead had become covered in tiny droplets of perspiration. It assured her that he was taking the question seriously, not just answering with what was expected in order to get the mission. She filled one of the glasses on the coffee tray beside him with cold water from the pitcher and handed it to him. He drank the glass empty, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and then wiped his brow. Marcia met his eyes. He looked down at the little Turkish coffee cup in front of him on the tray. The coffee grounds had dried in a Rorschach of brown streaks and swirls around the inside. Marcia closely watched him as he picked up the cup and slowly turned it in his hand, studying the grainy wisps that, from his serious visage, seemed to be communicating something to him.

My mother used to read cups, he said. She was clever in creating stories about a person’s past, present, and future. Within ten seconds of studying the cup, she would have a romantic or tragic story for everyone at the table as they passed their cup to her. It was amazing the way she turned what began as tragedies into happy endings. I sometimes thought she was reading the fate of Palestine in the cup, the way she went on with her sad stories and giving them happy endings to keep hope alive. A family meal wasn’t complete until after Turkish coffee had been served and she’d read the cups.

Marcia said, You sound too romantic for someone who wants to give his life for his country.

Romantic?

You must learn to keep your emotions separate from the historical mission. So tell me, what silly superstition is it you see in your little cup?

He set the cup down. Nezar Hindawi did it. I can, too, if it comes to that. As long as I died with her, I could do it.

Marcia shuddered at the name Nezar Hindawi. It was grotesque what he did, I know, but imagine what a thousand coldhearted fanatics like Hindawi could accomplish! My heart as a mother recoils, but revolutions are bloody and cruel. We have to be just as bloody and cruel. You could plant a bomb in your pregnant wife’s suitcase, drive her to the airport, and see her off knowing that your wife and the unborn child inside of her and three hundred other passengers would be blown up over the Atlantic?

Not my wife, not an airplane. You said a young woman. I said I could do it if I was blown up with her. That’s different from what Hindawi did. I meant him only as an example of sacrificing someone in order to complete the mission.

He’s a good example. But he failed. The dogs sniffed the explosives. This mission can’t fail, George. Not like you fucked up in Rome.

Victor excused himself rising to his feet. I can’t take any more of this talk. Hindawi was crazy and heartless. He wanted to prove he was a true revolutionary dedicated to the cause, but he was a coward, a cowardly showoff. Cowards debase the cause by their inhumanity. Now he’s rotting in an Irish prison where he belongs. Victor went to the door. I need a breath of fresh air. I’ll be back. Talk of Hindawi turns my stomach.

Mind the bombs, dear, Marcia cautioned.

I’ll take my umbrella.

After Victor had gone Marcia gave George a long and studied look. George. Look into my eyes. Look into my eyes and tell me you could send a woman you cared for to her death. Tell me that. After a moment’s hesitation he nodded slightly and said that he could. Marcia slid his dossier across the desk and stood. Listen and listen closely, she said sternly, leaning over the desk. You’ll need someone to get a campervan through Israeli customs. An Israeli or Jewish American woman would be best. She wouldn’t be suspected. She’ll think she’s doing you a favor, and that’s exactly what she’ll be doing, but she won’t know what it’s for. The campervan will be loaded with high explosives. Professional experts will load it in Naples in such a way that the Israelis won’t detect it.

George asked, Wouldn’t it be simpler to pack a van with explosives in the West Bank or Gaza and save the trouble of finding a woman to get it into Israel?

"Impossible. The Israelis have the occupied territories locked down tighter than a crusader chastity belt. The occupied territories are like a high-security open-air prison. We couldn’t for a million dollars buy the explosives we need, not in Gaza, not in the West Bank, not in Arab east Jerusalem, and forget trying to smuggle them in. With all the informers among us working for the Israelis, we can trust no one. The only way is to have our associates in Naples load the van professionally and get it in using only the most trusted of our own people, and there aren’t many of those.

So you’ll need a Jewish woman to ease it through customs. You’ll need her to drive the van to the target in Jerusalem. An Arab-looking man bringing a van into Israel and driving it in Zionist Jerusalem would raise too many red flags. We’ve thought this out in great detail, George. The van must be loaded in Naples and the right woman found to get it in. The target is well guarded, so don’t get too attached to her. You’ll probably have to sacrifice her. More than probably. Once she gets by the guards, she’ll be dead. You, too, but the van will be set to continue on automatically and timed to go off at the target.

What’s the target?

Number two Balfour Street. Official residence of the Israeli prime minister, Menachem Begin, Butcher of Beirut.

George’s brow rose. His eyes focused sharply. I need to do this mission, Marcia.

The mission needs a man who has a way with women, George. A man willing to take a woman to her death. You have neither of these qualities. I’m sorry to say so.

You don’t know me.

No? Tell me, how would you go about picking up a woman?

Victor returned with the four-year-old twins, Karl and Fredrick, who came bounding up to their mother with cries of joy. The artillery has started up, he said. Too risky for the children.

The twins were blond like their mother. Marcia swept them up into her arms and kissed them. Victor sat and took one of them on his lap. Marcia kept the other and bounced him on a knee. She was about to resume the interview when a shell landed close enough to rattle the windows and send flurries of plaster down from the water-damaged ceiling. The twin on Victor’s lap casually glanced in the direction of the explosion as his father brushed the powdery flakes of plaster from the child’s hair. The one on Marcia’s knee paid no attention at all.

The van will blow the prime minister’s residence sky high. Marcia gave an extra pump of her knee for emphasis, causing the twin to laugh in delight.

As well as the campervan and those in it, Victor added morosely.

They’ll already be dead, Marcia responded impatiently.

Maybe they could use a delayed detonation switch and have time to run for it, suggested Victor.

They could. But they’ll already have been shot dead by the soldiers guarding the checkpoint and probably wouldn’t get far. Marcia held her twin by the waist as she increased the tempo of her bouncing knee. Why do you fret so much over this, Victor? If we are to be successful, there has to be sacrifice. The road to revolution is littered with bodies. Human sacrifice is the fuel that drives the engine on the tracks of historical determinism. It’s as simple as that and has to be accepted. Isn’t that right, Karl? she asked, kissing the twin’s cheek.

I have Karl, said Victor. You have Fredrick. June Blood and Vengeance wasn’t meant for suicide. Little by little we slide to the path of Hizballah. We’re losing our way, Marcia. We’re not Shi’a!

Thank Athena for that. We must accept that to survive it is necessary to change with the times. Otherwise, we perish in the ashes of history. Isn’t that right, George?

I don’t know about the times, he replied. I only know I want to do the mission. I volunteered for it, and I’ll do what I have to do to do it right. What should I tell the woman to persuade her to take the van into Israel?

Use your imagination, George. Tell her you’re a Jordanian importer, the van is a new German model just out, and you want to have the first model for display in Jerusalem to beat the competition for sales orders, but the Israelis make importing tough on Jordanians. Make it up as you go. If she’s in love with you, she’ll believe anything. Worry about making her love you, George. Get that far and the rest will follow as night follows day, no problem. There’s nothing more stupid than a woman freshly in love.

She kissed the child and took him from her knee and set him down. It will be something like this, George. One of those Israeli sluts on summer vacation will smile at you on a hot sultry night on the piazza in Venice. You go up to her, introduce yourself, and let nature take over. She’ll teach you all you need to know to make her love you. Just do what she tells you until you have her under your thumb, and she’ll happily take your van in. Do you do cunalingus, George?

Is that something Irish?

I guess they have it there, too. What about clitoris?

Marcia, the children are here! exclaimed Victor.

You mean the Hellenistic king of Syria? answered George.

Never mind, George. We’ll go into that later. If you’re given the mission, is there anything you want to ask regarding it?

Yes. Who’s preparing the explosives?

Our Neapolitan affiliates, Marcia answered.

Mafia affiliates, you mean, Victor interjected with pronounced distaste.

OK, Mafia affiliates, Marcia said. What does it matter? They’re revolutionaries in reverse gear. The van will be loaded and shipped from Naples. You’ll have a Kuwaiti and a Jordanian passport—Kuwaiti to get into Italy and Jordanian for entering the West Bank from Jordan. In Naples, Don Antonio will transfer your Italian entry stamp from the Kuwaiti to the Jordanian passport. Be sure not to let your Israeli girlfriend see your switch of passports unless you have a good story or she’s so brainlessly in love with you that she can’t see straight. We’ll discuss the details tomorrow and decide if you’re fit for the mission.

Marcia stood. Come by in the morning and we’ll go over everything. If we choose you, the passports will be ready a few days later so that you can apply for your visa to Italy. You would be on your way in two weeks. In the meantime, read up on female anatomy and their regions of sensitivity. I believe you’re more familiar with Venice than you are with women, right?

I studied in Venice.

I know. For a year at the university. Why didn’t you finish?

It was a one-year UN fellowship for Palestinians. I could’ve extended it but I had to come back to take care of my brother and sister. My parents were killed in the ’78 invasion.

Marcia looked down at the dossier on the desk and was silent. She shuffled through a few papers and picked one up. Before that, you had a UN grant for Palestinians to do your primary and secondary study at the Italian Missionary School here. You must speak perfect Italian.

Northern dialect. Naples is something else. They speak their own secret language there.

Don’t worry. In Naples you will be well taken care of by Don Antonio. It’s good you know Venice.

It’s my favorite city. In winter it is.

Forget winter and the Piazza San Marco in two feet of stinking sewage and floodwater. Think of summer, George. Summer in Venice is the soul of romance.

I never thought so.

You didn’t discover it. You were studying too much. The city floats on a cloud of hot and humid lust in summer. The canals exude the smell of sweaty naked bodies. The singing of the gondoliers fills the air with the urge for raw untreated sex.

I never saw that Venice. You were there in summer, Marcia?

I’ve never been in the stinking place, but I know all about it. It’s filled with slutty women sitting in cafés with their miniskirts pulled up. A good-looking boy like you should have no trouble seducing some Israeli slut or one of those ugly, tubby sex-hungry Jewish princesses from New York. You’ll have plenty of money to wine and dine her. We’re investing a lot in this, George. Fashionable Italian clothes, a new Italian sports car, a luxury hotel, and all the money you need to seduce a woman, maybe even one who’s not toothless, pimpled, and stinking to high heaven.

Money, yes. Money from Libya, Victor said. The great Arab leader and father of his people Gaddhafi gave us $5 million for the operation. Our beloved dictators are generous in paying for the blood of others. God bless the curse of oil!

I have the mission? asked George.

We’ll tell you tomorrow. Marcia replied. Unless you get hit by a rocket.

Accompanying George on his way out, Victor put his arm around the young man’s shoulders. George. I want you to think hard about this mission, he said with avuncular warmth. Be sure you want to do it. Think of what you’re leaving behind. Your education, your scientific interests, medical school. Your life. Leave the cloak of martyrdom and sacrifice aside and think. Think of yourself and what you could do for the cause as a physician, a teacher. Will you do that? You have a lot to offer alive.

I’ll do that, Victor. I promise. But I don’t think of the mission as a way to martyrdom. Just the opposite. Not sacrifice. Salvation.

Victor saw in the young man’s cold lifeless eyes that his mind had been made up and no amount of thinking was going to change it. The light was gone from him. He may as well have been already dead. Victor’s arm dropped from the young man’s shoulders. Think about it, George. Once you commit yourself to this, there’ll be no turning back. It’s a one-way mission. There are others eager to take your place. No one would think less of you for—

George cut him short. Thanks, Victor, I promise to give it a lot of thought. Right now though, a mission like this is all I want. It’s a blessing. I won’t fail.

Standing by the open double window of his office, Victor watched George exit the building and turn up the war-torn street toward the Hamra quarter of West Beirut. The brightest and coolest of their young men. Yet Victor had serious doubts. He somehow didn’t seem suitable for the mission. He was too eager to die.

CHAPTER 3

WEST BEIRUT

Walking back to his apartment, George closed his ears to the booming artillery and let his mind wander. He wondered what he should do in the little time he had left, if he got the mission. Say goodbye to his friends in med school? No, there’d be no purpose in that, only embarrassing questions he couldn’t answer. He crossed to the other side of the street, trying not to see the collapsed buildings and mountains of debris that left the street a valley of destruction filled with memories of death, terror, and suffering. Little bodies burned beyond recognition by phosphorus. Fire raining down from the sky, incinerating, cremating, turning flesh to baked meat and ash. The cries of the burning children rang in his ears.

A mortar exploding on the adjacent street jolted George from his morbid reverie. Shells were sporadically exploding a few blocks up. The early afternoon bombardment of the Hamra quarter was starting. The closer he came to the green line separating the warring factions, the louder the shelling and machine-gun fire became. The buildings were so gutted, their walls so pocked and gouged by the ravages of war, they looked to be afflicted by some wild strain of eczema feeding on stone and concrete.

He stopped at a dingy hole-in-the-wall dairy shop that had survived the years of war. The old man who owned and attended it had stopped speaking since the aerial bombardment the summer before last. George asked for yogurt, milk, and cheese. Hands shaking badly, the old man bagged the items, took the bill George gave him, and returned the change.

George continued on. Coming to the bombed-out hulk of the Greek Orthodox church he used to attend years ago, he ducked inside and, stepping over the rubble of blasted pews and flooring, went all the way to the front, close to the altar. The statues of saints had been decapitated and covered in anti-Christian graffiti. He cautiously sat on the remains of a wobbly leg-splintered pew that rocked unsteadily under his weight. The giant cross with the carved Christ that had at one time been suspended behind the altar was gone. He sat staring at what was left of the altar, remembering the Sundays and religious holidays he and his family had come to worship. The endless masses, the colorful ceremonies, the lights, the bells and candles, the choking incense pouring out of swinging censers, the memorized prayers and chants, the bearded priests covered in jeweled crowns and vestments that went back to the Byzantines. His lips moved silently. No words came out. The faith he might have had that survived the invasion was too weak to give words to prayer.

He didn’t think of himself as an atheist. He had simply stopped actively believing and didn’t think beyond it from there, leaving him in a limbo between loss and disregard of belief, between apathy and atheism. Religion didn’t matter anymore. The spiritual fundaments of his faith had crumbled like the church and surrounding buildings. Surveying the devastated church, he wondered if loss of belief meant loss of faith. Was faith possible without belief? Could he still have faith? Faith in what? Beliefs were many; faith was one. Faith fathered belief on the bed of scripture, all of them—Syriac, Greek, Armenian, Coptic, Arabic, Latin. With faith, one could believe. But what was left to believe? Life after death? One of the few things he and Marcia agreed on was the absurdity of hell and paradise. It puzzled him how mature educated people could go on believing in the midst of such desolation. Scripture, gods, prophets. Strange, the worse the warring got, the more people suffered loss of their loved ones, the more some people believed it was god’s punishment for their wickedness. Where were their brains? Why would god punish everyone? And what for? Was it some Darwinian mechanism god rigged up to test who should survive? Who with right mind would want to?

Something brushed up against his leg. A rat? He rocked back on the broken pew and looked down. A kitten. George reached down and picked it up. The little thing was missing half a rear leg. Shrapnel from a shell might have gotten it, or a sniper. Snipers aimed at cats and dogs for practice when the streets were empty of human targets. He opened the cylindrical container of milk he had bought, poured some into the lid and set it on the ground. The crippled kitten lapped it up, purring. George wondered if cats purred when people weren’t around to hear them. Next time he would come with a tape recorder, set it by the milk and leave. Was purring a sign of a cat feeling itself in cat paradise?