He threw his hands high overhead. In reasonably good Hebrew he sang out, “I am your prisoner!” And he drew his lips back, exposing his bad teeth in a terrible grin.
Both men trained their guns on him. He had faced guns innumerable times in the past and did not find them intimidating. But one of the men held his Uzi as if he was about to fire it. Moonlight glinted on the gun barrel. Anselmo, still grinning, waited for a burst of fire and an explosion in his chest.
It never came.
The two men sat in folding chairs and watched their prisoner through a one-way mirror. His cell was as small and bare as the room from which they watched him. He sat on a narrow iron bedstead and stroked his chin with the tips of his fingers. Now and then his gaze passed over the mirror.
“You’d swear he can see us,” Gershon Meir said.
“He knows we’re here.”
“I suppose he must. The devil’s cool, isn’t he? Do you think he’ll talk?”
Nahum Grodin shook his head.
“He could tell us a great deal.”
“He’ll never tell us a thing. Why should he? The man’s comfortable. He was comfortable dressed as an Arab and now he’s as comfortable dressed as a prisoner.”
Anselmo had been disarmed, of course, and relieved of his loose-fitting Arab clothing. Now he wore the standard clothing issued to prisoners — trousers and a short-sleeved shirt of gray denim, cloth slippers. The trousers were of course beltless and the slippers had no laces.
Grodin said, “He could be made to talk. No, nahr, I don’t mean torture. You watch too many films. Pentothal, if they’d let me use it. Although I suspect his resistance is high. He has such enormous confidence.”
“The way he smiled when he surrendered to us.”
“Yes.”
“For a moment I thought—”
“Yes?”
“That you were going to shoot him, Nahum.”
“I very nearly did.”
“You suspected a trap? I suppose—”
“No.” Grodin interlaced his fingers, cracked his knuckles. Several of the joints throbbed slightly. “No,” he said, “I knew it was no trick. The man is a pragmatist. He knew he was trapped. He surrendered to save his skin.”
“And you thought to shoot him anyway?”
“I should have done it, Gershon. I should have shot him. Something made me hesitate. And you know the saying. He who hesitates and so forth, and I hesitated and was lost. I was not lost but the opportunity was. I should have shot him at once. Without hesitating, without thinking, without anything but an ounce of pressure on the trigger and a few punctuation marks for the night.”
Gershon studied the man they were discussing. He had removed one of the slippers and was picking at his feet. Gershon wanted to look away but watched, fascinated. “You want him dead,” he said.
“Of course.”
“We’re a progressive nation. We don’t put them to death anymore. Life imprisonment’s supposed to be punishment enough. You don’t agree?”
“No.”
“You like the eye-for-eye stuff, huh?”
“ ‘And you shall return eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burning for burning.’ It’s not a terrible idea, you know. I would not be so quick to dismiss it out of hand.”
“Revenge.”
“Or retribution, more accurately. You can’t have revenge, my friend. Not in this sort of case. The man’s crimes are too enormous for his own personal death to balance them out. But that is not why I wish I’d killed him.”
“Then I don’t understand.”
Nahum Grodin aimed a forefinger at the glass. “Look,” he said. “What do you see?”
“A piggish lout picking his feet.”
“You see a prisoner.”
“Of course. I don’t understand what you’re getting at, Nahum.”
“You think you see a prisoner. But he is not our prisoner, Gershon.”
“Oh?”
“We are his prisoners.”
“I do not follow that at all.”
“No?” The older man massaged the knuckle of his right index finger. It was that finger, he thought, which had hesitated upon the trigger of the Uzi. And now it throbbed and ached. Arthritis? Or the punishment it deserved for its hesitation?
“Nahum—”
“We are at his mercy,” Grodin said crisply. “He’s our captive. His comrades will try to bring about his release. As long as he is our prisoner he is a sword pointed at our throats.”
“That’s far-fetched.”
“Do you really think so?” Nahum Grodin sighed. “I wish we were not so civilized as to have abolished capital punishment. And at this particular moment I wish we were a police state and this vermin could be officially described as having been shot while attempting to escape. We could take him outside right now, you and I, and he could attempt to escape.”
Gershon shuddered. “We could not do that.”
“No,” Grodin agreed. “No, we could not do that. But I could have gunned him down when I had the chance. Did you ever see a mad dog? When I was a boy in Lublin, Gershon, I saw one running wild. They don’t really foam at the mouth, you know. But I seem to remember that dog having a foamy mouth. And a policeman shot him down. I remember that he held his pistol in both hands, held it out in front of him with both arms fully extended. Do you suppose I actually saw the beast shot down or that the memory is in part composed of what I was told? I could swear I actually saw the act. I can see it now in my mind, the policeman with his legs braced and his two arms held out in front of him. And the dog charging. I wonder if that incident might have had anything to do with this profession I seem to have chosen.”
“Do you think it did?”
“I’ll leave that to the psychiatrists to decide.” Grodin smiled, then let the smile fade. “I should have shot this one down like a dog in the street,” he said. “When I had the chance.”
“How is he dangerous in a cell?”
“And how long will he remain in that cell?” Grodin sighed. “He is a leader. He has a leader’s magnetism. The world is full of lunatics to whom this man is special. They’ll demand his release. They’ll hijack a plane, kidnap a politician, hold schoolchildren for ransom.”
“We have never paid ransom.”
“No.”
“They’ve made such demands before. We’ve never released a terrorist in response to extortion.”
“Not yet we haven’t.”
Both men fell silent. On the other side of the one-way mirror, the man called Anselmo had ceased picking his toes. Now he stripped to his underwear and seated himself on the bare tiled floor of his cell. His fingers interlaced behind his head, he began doing sit-ups. Muscles worked in his flat abdomen and his thin corded thighs as he raised and lowered the upper portion of his body. He exercised rhythmically, pausing after each series of five sit-ups, then springing to his feet after he had completed six such series. Having done so, he paused deliberately to flash his teeth at the one-way mirror.
“Look at that,” Gershon Meir said. “Like an animal.”
Nahum Grodin’s right forefinger resumed aching.
Grodin was right, of course. Revolutionaries throughout the world had very strong reasons for wishing to see Anselmo released from his cell. In various corners of the globe, desperate men plotted desperate acts to achieve this end.
The first attempts were not successful. Less than a week after Anselmo was taken, four men and two women stormed a building in Geneva where high-level international disarmament talks were being conducted. Two of the men were shot, one fatally. One of the women had her arm broken in a struggle with a guard. The rest were captured. In the course of interrogation, Swiss authorities determined that the exercise had had as its object the release of Anselmo. The two women and one of the men were West German anarchists. The other three men, including the one who was shot dead, were Basque separatists.