Lawrence Block - Enough Rope

Bits and pieces. Threads, frail threads, coming together to form a net...

And throughout it all the man called Anselmo remained as active as ever. A Pan Am flight bound for Belgrade blew up in the air over Austria. A telephone call claiming credit for the deed on behalf of the Popular Front for Croatian Autonomy was logged at the airline’s New York offices scant minutes before an explosion shredded the jetliner.

A week earlier, rumors had begun drifting around that Anselmo was working with the Croats.

In Jerusalem, less than a quarter of a mile from the Wailing Wall, four gunmen burst into a Sephardic synagogue during morning services. They shot and killed twenty-eight members of the congregation before they themselves were rooted out and shot down by police officers. The dead gunmen proved to be members of a leftist movement aimed at securing the independence of Puerto Rico from the United States. But why should Puerto Rican extremists be mounting a terrorist operation against Israel?

The common denominator was Anselmo.

An embassy in Washington. A police barracks in Strabane, in Northern Ireland. A labor union in Buenos Aires.

Anselmo.

Assassinations. The Spanish ambassador to Sweden shot down in the streets of Stockholm. The sister-in-law of the premier of Iraq. The Research and Development head of a multinational oil company. A British journalist. An Indonesian general. An African head of state.

Anselmo.

Hijacking and kidnapping. Ransom demands. Outrages.

Anselmo. Always Anselmo.

Of course it was not always his hand on the trigger. When the Puerto Rican gunmen shot up the Jerusalem synagogue, Anselmo was playing solitaire in a dimly lit basement room in Pretoria. When a firebomb roasted the Iraqi premier’s sister-in-law, Anselmo was flashing a savage yellow smile in Bolivia. It was not Anselmo’s hand that forced a dagger between the ribs of General Suprandoro in Jakarta; the hand belonged to a nubile young lady from Thailand, but it was Anselmo who had given her her instructions, Anselmo who had decreed that Suprandoro must die and who had staged and scripted his death.

Bits and pieces. A couple of words scrawled on the back of an envelope. A scrap of conversation overheard. Bits, pieces, scraps. Threads, if you will.

Threads braided together can make strong rope. Strands of interwoven rope comprise a net.

When the net dropped around Anselmo, Nahum Grodin held its ends in his knobby hands.

It was earlysummer. For three days a dry wind had been blowing relentlessly. The town of Al-dhareesh, a small Arab settlement on the West Bank of the Jordan, yielded to the wind as to a conquering army. The women tended their cooking fires. Men sat at small tables in their courtyards sipping cups of sweet black coffee. The yellow dogs that ran through the narrow streets seemed to stay more in the shadows than was their custom, scurrying from doorway to doorway, keeping their distance from passing humans.

“Even the dogs feel it,” Nahum Grodin said. His Hebrew bore Russian and Polish overtones. “Look at them. The way they slink around.”

“The wind,” Gershon Meir said.

“Anselmo.”

“The wind,” Meir insisted. A sabra, he had the unromantic outlook of the native-born. He was Grodin’s immediate subordinate in the counter-terror division of Shin Bet, and the older man knew there was no difference in the keenness both felt at the prospect of springing a trap upon Anselmo. But Grodin felt it all in the air while Meir felt nothing but the dry wind off the desert.

“The same wind blows over the whole country,” Grodin said. “And yet it’s different here. The way those damned yellow dogs stay in the shadows.”

“You make too much of the Arabs’ mongrel dogs.”

“And their children?”

“What children?”

“Aha!” Grodin extended a forefinger. “The dogs keep to the shadows. The children stay in their huts and avoid the streets altogether. Don’t tell me, my friend, that the wind is enough to keep children from their play.”

“So the townspeople know he’s here. They shelter him. That’s nothing new.”

“A few know he’s here. The ones planning the raid across the Jordan, perhaps a handful of others. The rest are like the dogs and the children. They sense something in the air.”

Gershon Meir looked at his superior officer. He considered the set of his jaw, the reined excitement that glinted in his pale blue eyes. “Something in the air,” he said.

“Yes. You feel something yourself, Gershon. Admit it.”

“I feel too damned much caffeine in my blood. That last cup of coffee was a mistake.”

“You feel more than caffeine.”

Meir shrugged but said nothing.

“He’s here, Gershon.”

“Yes, I think he is. But we have been so close to him so many times—”

“This time we have him.”

“When he’s behind bars, that’s when I’ll say we have him.”

“Or when he’s dead.”

Again the younger man looked at Grodin, a sharp look this time. Grodin’s right hand, knuckles swollen with arthritis, rested on the butt of his holstered machine pistol.

“Or when he’s dead,” Gershon Meir agreed.

Whether it wasmerely the wind or something special in the air, the man called Anselmo felt it, too. He set down his little cup of coffee — it was sweeter than he liked it — and worried his chin with the tips of his fingers. With no apparent concern he studied the five men in the room with him. They were local Arabs ranging in age from sixteen to twenty-eight. Anselmo had met one of them before in Beirut and knew two of the others by reputation. The remaining two were unequivocally guaranteed by their comrades. Anselmo did not specifically trust them — he had never in his life placed full trust in another human being — but neither did he specifically distrust them. They were village Arabs, politically unsophisticated and mentally uncomplicated, desperate young men who would perform any act and undertake any risk. Anselmo had known and used just that sort of man throughout the world. He could not have functioned without such men.

Something in the air...

He went to a window, inched the burlap curtain aside with the edge of his palm. He saw nothing remarkable, yet a special perception more reliable than eyesight told him the town was swarming with Israelis. He did not have to see them to be certain of their presence.

He turned, considered his five companions. They were to cross the river that night. By dawn they would have established their position. A school bus loaded with between fifty and sixty retarded childen would slow down before making a left turn at the corner where Anselmo and his men would be posted. It would be child’s play — he bared his teeth in a smile at the phrase — child’s play to shoot the tires out of the bus. In a matter of minutes all of the Jewish children and their driver would be dead at the side of the road. In a few more minutes Anselmo and the Arabs would have scattered and made good their escape.

A perfect act of terror, mindless, meaningless, unquestionably dramatic. The Jews would retaliate, of course, and of course their retaliation would find the wrong target, and the situation would deteriorate. And in the overall scheme of things—

But was there an overall scheme of things? At times, most often late at night just before his mind slipped over the edge into sleep, then Anselmo could see the outline of some sort of master plan, some way in which all the component parts of terror which he juggled moved together to make a new world. The image of the plan hovered at such times right at the perimeter of his inner vision, trembling at the edge of thought. He could almost see it, as one can almost see God in a haze of opium.