“Everything all right up there?” her brother asked.
Laila nodded. “Except Whalid is drinking again. He bought himself a bottle this morning.”
“Let him drink. He can’t do us any harm anymore.” Kamal stared at the passersby on the sidewalk, the garishly lit shops, the odoriferous fast-food stores. His eyes caught those of an emaciated teenage whore lurking in the shadows at the top of the stoop of a brownstone. She glared at him. Kamal snorted.
A few minutes before he had had her for twentyfive dollars, brutally, quickly, mechanically. It was the kind of imprudence he should never have indulged in. But, he had told himself, it might be his last time, and he had slammed himself at the girl with savage anger until she had cried out in pain.
Why did you cry, child? he thought, looking at her now. After all, you’ll be able to do it a few more times before you fry. He turned his eyes away, back to the passing crowd.
I loathe this street, Kamal reflected. I loathe these people. I loathe this city. It’s not the Jews I hate, he suddenly realized. It’s these people.
All of them. Satiated. Smug. Indifferent. Lording it over the earth. He spat. Why do we all hate them so much, he wondered? The Baader-Meinhoff people he had known in Germany, his Italian friends, the Iranians, those strange dour Japanese he’d once trained with in Syria. What is in these people that makes us hate them so much? Were the Romans hated like them once?
“What are you going to do tonight?” he asked his sister.
“Nothing,” she replied. “I took a room at the Hilton. I won’t leave until I’m ready to come for you.”
“Good.” Kamal stopped. To his right was 74 West Eighth, a hardware store.
“What time have you got?”
Laila checked her watch. “Seven-thirty-six.”
“I’ll meet you right here at one tomorrow. If you’re not here I’ll be back at one-ten, then one-twenty. If you don’t show up by then, I’ll go back. If they catch you, you’ve got to keep quiet until then.” Kamal had stopped and glared intently at his sister. “For God’s sake, if something should happen to the car and you show up late at the garage, be sure I know it’s you.
Because once I get back there I’ll be ready to set it off at the first noise I hear.”
He squeezed her hand. “Ma salaam,” he said. “All will be well, inch’
Allah.”
Then he strode off alone, off to his last lonely vigil with his rats and his bomb in the midst of the people and the city he proposed to destroy.
“Come here, baby.”
Enrico Diaz sprawled on his gold silk mattress like some Oriental nabob, his head and shoulders leaning against the black walls of his flat, his knees drawn up, legs spread apart, the soft satiny folds of his djellabah falling down to his bare ankles. He was flying, winging to a distant place on the coke he had snorted ten minutes ago, the blood surging in his brain as his mind fled through clear, crystal prisms of delight.
Two of his girls lolled in a corner of the pad, sharing the joint whose slightly rancid odor mingled with the Ceylonese incense burning in the bronze censers hanging from the walls. His third girl, Anita, squatted like a suplicant on the gold-covered mattress before Rico. She was a twentyfive-yearold Swede from northern Minnesota, a lanky raw-boned girl whose blond hair tumbled in unkempt strands to the small of her back. It was to her that Rico’s command was addressed.
“Yeah, honey.”
Anita snuggled forward toward the pimp. Her fleshy lips were fixed in the sullen pout everyone told her made her look like Marilyn Monroe. She was wearing skintight emerald disco pants Rico had bought her-albeit with her own earnings-and one of the strapless black lace bras she wore to work because she could snap it off with one deft gesture and flick it challengingly at her waiting clients.
“You know what your man did for you today?”
Anita shook her head.
“He buy you five years.” Enrico drew out the number, lacing it with the Southern intonation he so despised.
“Hey, honey, you …?”
“Yeah. I seen a man, we got those charges dropped.”
Anita was about to gush out her gratitude when Enrico sat bolt upright. His hands shot out and grabbed two fistfuls of girl’s hair. Brutally, he jerked her forward. She shrieked.
“Dumb cunt! I told you never to stiff no John, didn’t I?”
“Rico, you’re hurting,” Anita whispered.
The pimp’s response was to yank harder. “I don’t want no cops sniffing around my women.”
Rico dropped one of his hands, reached under the mattress and drew out a switchblade knife. Anita gagged with terror as he snapped the steel blade open. Before the petrified girl could move, he whipped it across her lips, keeping the blade a precise eighth of an inch above their pulpy surface. “I oughtta streak your lips.”
A razor’s slash down the lips was the pimp’s traditional vengeance on a girl who has strayed. No surgeon, no matter how skilled his fingers, could fully repair the cut.
“But I ain’t.” Rico snapped the blade shut and tossed the knife over his shoulder. With tantalizing, lascivious slowness his free hand took the hem of his djellabah and inched it up his dark, muscular calves to his knees, then back down his thighs, revealing the dark cavern of his crotch and the slowly stiffening form of his member. While his left hand continued to hold the terrified Anita’s head firmly in place, the right reached leisurely toward his snuffbox for a pinch of coke. With sensual, deliberate gestures he patted the white powder around the tip of his organ, then once again grabbed Anita’s head.
“Now,” he announced, “you going to have a little talk with my friend down there. You going to tell him you sorry you gave old Rico so much trouble.”
He pulled the girl forward, thrusting her head into his groin. Obediently, she bent to her task, long red fingernails dancing their way around his testicles as her slithering tongue licked at the coke.
He released her head and leaned back against the wall. “Yeahhh,” he groaned in pleasure.
That was when the doorbell rang.
At the sight of the two men in old GI khakis and black berets standing on his doorstep, Rico went limp. The taller of the two jerked his head at the staircase. “Vdmonos,” he said. “Hay trabajo-let’s go, we’ve got work to do.”
In Jerusalem, the carillon of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher tolled 2 A.M. Tuesday, December 15. Each resonant note was hurled across the old city by the winter wind sweeping the hills of Judea. Eyes half closed in strain and sadness. Menachem Begin studied the warring members of his government assembled around him in his Cabinet Room. Just as he had foreseen it would, the President’s threatening phone call had produced the bitterest, most acrimonious debate the room had ever known; worse than those that had preceded the 1967 war, more vindictive than the recriminations that had followed the 1973 conflict, more impassioned than those that had led to the raid on Entebbe.
While the heated words swirled around him, Begin silently reckoned up the balance of the fourteen men who shared with him the responsibility of governing their nation. As he had expected, the most vigorous reaction to the President’s threat had come from Benny Ranan. The former paratrooper was on his feet now, waving his arms, urging a full and immediate mobilization of the Israeli Defense Forces to oppose any American intervention on their soil.