Lawrence Block - Enough Rope

“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.

A matter of days after this incident, guerrillas in Uruguay stopped a limousine carrying the Israeli ambassador to a reception in the heart of Montevideo. Security police were following the ambassador’s limousine at the time, and the gun battle which ensued claimed the lives of all seven guerrillas, three security policemen, the ambassador, his chauffeur, and four presumably innocent bystanders. While the purpose of the attempted kidnapping was impossible to determine, persistent rumors linked the action to Anselmo.

Within the week, Eritrean revolutionaries succeeded in skyjacking an El Al 747 en route from New York to Tel Aviv. The jet with 144 passengers and crew members was diverted to the capital of an African nation where it overshot the runway, crashed, and was consumed in flames. A handful of passengers survived. The remaining passengers, along with all crew members and the eight or ten Eritreans, were all killed.

Palestinians seized another plane, this one an Air France jetliner. The plane was landed successfully in Libya and demands presented which called for the release of Anselmo and a dozen or so other terrorists then held by the Israelis. The demands were rejected out of hand. After several deadlines had come and gone, the terrorists began executing hostages, ultimately blowing up the plane with the remaining hostages aboard. According to some reports, the terrorists were taken into custody by Libyan authorities; according to other reports they were given token reprimands and released.

After the affair in Libya, both sides felt they had managed to establish something. The Israelis felt they had proved conclusively that they would not be blackmailed. The loosely knit group who aimed to free Anselmo felt just as strongly that they had demonstrated their resolve to free him — no matter what risks they were forced to run, no matter how many lives, their own or others, they had to sacrifice.

“If there were two Henry Clays,” said the bearer of that name after a bitterly disappointing loss of the presidency, “then one of them would make the other president of the United States of America.”