Mario Puzo: The Fourth K

Yabril laughed at the stilted romanticism, felt a little contempt for this desire for personal glory. "Infamous," he said. "We compete with a long history of terror." Yabril was thinking of their embrace. An embrace of professional love on his part, but shot through with remembered terror as if they were parricides standing over a father they had murdered together.

There were dim electric lights along the courtyard walls, but their faces were in darkness. Romeo said, "They will know everything in time. But will they give us credit for our motives? Or will they paint us as lunatics?

What the hell, the poets of the future will understand us." Yabril said, "We can't worry about that now." It embarrassed him when Romeo became theatrical; it made him question the man's efficiency though it had been proved many times. Romeo, despite delicate good looks and fuzziness of concept, was a truly dangerous man. But there was a fundamental difference between them: Romeo was too fearless, Yabril perhaps too cunning.

Just a year before, they had walked the streets of Beirut together. In their path was a brown paper sack, seemingly empty, greased with the food it had contained. Yabril walked around it. Romeo kicked and sailed the sack into the gutter.

Different instincts. Yabril believed that everything on this earth was dangerous. Romeo had a certain innocent trust.

There were other differences. Yabril was ugly with his small marbled tan eyes, Romeo was almost beautiful. Yabril was proud of his ugliness, Romeo was ashamed of his beauty. Yabril had always understood that when an innocent man commits absolutely to political revolution, it must lead to murder. Romeo had come to that belief late, and reluctantly. His conversion had been an intellectual one.

Romeo had won sexual victories with the accident of physical beauty, and his family money had protected him from economic humiliations. Romeo was intelligent enough to know that his good fortune was not morally correct, and so the very goodness of his life disgusted him. He drowned himself in literature and his studies, which confirmed his belief. It was inevitable that he would be convinced by his radical professors that he should help make the world a better place.

He did not want to be like his father, an Italian who spent more time in barbershops than courtesans at their hairdresser's. He did not want to spend his life in the pursuit of beautiful women. Above all, he would never spend money reeking with the sweat of the poor. The poor must be made free and happy, and then he too could taste happiness. And so he reached out, for a second Communion, to the books of Karl Marx.

Yabril's conversion was more visceral. As a child in Palestine he had lived in a Garden of Eden. He had been a happy boy, extremely intelligent, devotedly obedient to his parents-especially to his father, who spent an hour each day reading to him from the Koran.

The family lived in a large villa with many servants, on extensive grounds that were magically green in that desert land. But one day, when Yabril was five years old, he was cast out of this paradise. His beloved parents vanished, the villa and gardens dissolved into a cloud of purple smoke. And suddenly he was living in a small dirty village at the bottom of a mountain, an orphan living on the charity of kin. His only treasure was his father's Koran printed on vellum, with illuminated figures of gold and calligraphy of a rich blue. And he always remembered his father's reading it aloud, exactly from the text, according to Muslim custom. Those orders of God given to the Prophet Mohammed, words that could never be discussed or argued. As a grown man, Yabril had remarked to a Jewish friend, "The Koran is not a Torah," and they had both laughed.

The truth of exile from the Garden of Eden had been revealed to him almost at once, but he did not fully understand it until a few years later. His father had been a secret supporter of Palestine liberation from the state of Israel, a leader of the underground. His father had been betrayed, gunned down in a police raid, and his mother had committed suicide when the villa and grounds were blown up by the Israelis.

It was most natural for Yabril to become a terrorist. His kin and his teachers in the local school taught him to hate all Jews but did not fully succeed. He did hate his God for banishing him from his childhood paradise.

When he was eighteen he sold his father's Koran for an enormous sum of money and enrolled at the university in Beirut. There he spent most of his fortune on women, and finally, after two years, became a member of the Palestinian underground. And over the years he became a deadly weapon in that cause.

But his people's freedom was not his final aim. In some way his work was a search for inner peace.

Now together in the courtyard of the safe house, Romeo and Yabril took a little over two hours to go over every detail of their mission. Romeo smoked cigarettes constantly. He was nervous about one thing. "Are you sure they will give me up?" he asked.

Yabril said softly, "How can they not with the hostage I will be holding?

Believe me, you will be safer in their hands than I will be in Sherhaben. They gave each other a final embrace in the darkness. After Easter Sunday they would never see each other again.

On this same Good Friday, President Francis Xavier Kennedy met with his senior staff of top advisers and his Vice President to give them news that he knew would make them unhappy.

He met with them in the Yellow Oval Room of the White House, his favorite room, larger and more comfortable than the more famous Oval Office. The Yellow Room was more a living room, and they could be comfortable while being served an English tea.

They were all waiting for him and they rose when his Secret Service bodyguards ushered him into the room. Kennedy motioned his staff to sit down while telling the bodyguards to wait outside the room. Two things irritated him about this little scene. The first was that according to protocol he had to personally order the Secret Service men out of the room, and the second was that the Vice President had to stand out of respect for the presidency. What annoyed him about this was that the Vice President was a woman, and political courtesy overruled social courtesy. This was compounded by the fact that Vice President Helen Du Pray was ten years older than he, was still quite a beautiful woman, and had extraordinary political and social intelligence. Which was, of course, why he had picked her as his running mate despite the opposition of the heavyweights in the Democratic party.

"Damn it, Helen," Francis Kennedy said. "Stop standing up when I come into a room. Now I'll have to pour tea for everybody to show my humility."

"I wanted to express my gratitude," Helen Du Pray said. "I figured you summoned the Vice President to your staff meeting because somebody has to do the dishes." They both laughed. The staff did not.

Romeo smoked a final cigarette in the darkness of the courtyard. Beyond the stone walls he could see the domes of the great churches of Rome. Then he went inside. It was time to brief his cadre.

The woman Annee served as the cadre's armorer and she unlocked a huge trunk to distribute the weapons and ammunition, One of the men spread on the living-room floor a dirty bed sheet, on which Annee put gun oil and rags. They would clean and oil their weapons as they listened to the briefing. For hours they listened and asked questions, and rehearsed their movements. Annee handed out the operational clothing and they made jokes about that. Finally they all sat down together to a meal that Romeo and the men had prepared. They toasted the success of their mission with new spring wine, and then some of them played cards for an hour before retiring to their rooms. There was no need for a guard, they had locked themselves in securely, and they had their weapons beside their beds.