Daniel Silva - The Kill Artist

“You read a great deal,” Jacqueline said.

“It’s an addiction of mine.”

“Where are you from, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“ Palestine.”

He came into the room from the kitchen and handed her a glass of red wine. Then he held out his hand. “Come with me.”

Gabriel stood in his window. Karp’s laser microphone picked up snatches of their conversation, but it was like listening to a vinyl record album that skipped. When they moved to the bedroom to make love, Gabriel said, “Shut it off.”

“But, Gabe, it’s just getting to the good part.”

“I said, shut it off.”

Karp lowered the microphone and switched off the power. “I’m hungry. I’m going for a walk.”

“Go.”

“You all right, Gabe?”

“I’m fine.”

“You sure about that?”

“Go.”

One hour later Yusef climbed out of bed, walked to the window, and opened the curtains. The yellow street lamp had turned his olive skin the color of old newsprint. Jacqueline lay on her stomach. She placed her chin atop her hands and looked at him, eyes following the line from his square shoulders to his lean, muscular waist. She wondered if Gabriel was looking at him too.

Yusef was watching the street-looking into parked cars, scanning the building opposite. He turned his body slightly, and she could see a wide, flat scar on his back, running between his right shoulder blade and the center of his ridged spine. She had felt it when they were making love. It was hard and coarse, like sandpaper. Like the skin of a shark.

He had been a gentle lover, meticulous in his attempts to give her pleasure. When he was inside her, she had closed her eyes and imagined it was Gabriel, and when she felt the scar between his shoulder blades she imagined it was Gabriel’s scar, a relic from one of his secret missions, and she wished that she could pass her hand over it and make it go away.

“What are you looking at?” she asked.

Yusef turned around and folded his arms across his chest.

“Have you ever slept with an Arab before, Dominique?”

She thought: And you’re changing the subject. She said, “You’re my first. I may have to do it again sometime.”

“Not while you’re sleeping with me.”

“Are we sleeping together now?”

“That’s up to you.”

“All right, we are now officially sleeping together.” She rolled onto her back, looked at the light from the street falling across her body, imagined it was Gabriel’s gaze. “Do you think we should get to know each other a little better, now that we’re officially sleeping together?”

He smiled and said, “What do you want to know?”

“I want to know what happened to your back.”

He turned and looked out the window.

She studied the digital alarm clock on the bedside table.

“There are some things about my past that you might find unpleasant,” he said.

“Bad things you’ve done?”

“No, Dominique. Bad things that were done to me.”

“How did you get that scar on your back?”

He turned and looked at her. “I grew up in a refugee camp in Lebanon -the Shatila camp in south Beirut. Perhaps you’ve heard of Shatila, Dominique.”

“Of course I’ve heard of Shatila.”

“The PLO had offices in the Shatila camp, so when the Israelis invaded Lebanon in ‘eighty-two, they shelled the camp day and night. A missile fired by an Israeli fighter jet hit the building where our family lived. The building collapsed on top of me, and a chunk of concrete tore away the skin of my back.”

“Why were you in Lebanon?”

“Because that’s where my family ended up after they were driven from their ancestral homes in Palestine by the Jews.”

Jacqueline looked at the ceiling.

Yusef said, “Why do you look away from me when I tell you that?”

“I met some Israelis once in a nightclub in Paris. They were debating this issue with a group of French students. They said that the Jews didn’t have to expel the Arabs from Palestine because the Arabs left on their own.”

Yusef laughed and shook his head. “I’m afraid you have fallen for the great Zionist myth, Dominique. The myth that the Palestinians would voluntarily trade the land where they had lived for centuries for exile and refugee camps. The myth that the Arab governments told the Palestinians to leave.”

“It’s not true?”

“Does it sound as though it could be true?”

“Not really.”

“Then trust your instincts, Dominique. If it doesn’t sound plausible, it probably isn’t. Do you want to know the truth about what the Jews did to my people? Do you want to know why my family ended up in a refugee camp in Beirut?”

“I want to know about you.”

“I’m a Palestinian. It’s impossible to separate me from the history of my people.”

“Tell me,” she said.

“By the way, which nightclub in Paris?”

“What?”

“The nightclub where you met the Israelis. Which one was it?”

“I can’t remember. It was so long ago.”

“Try to remember, please. It’s important.”

“We call it al-Nakba. The Catastrophe.”

He had pulled on a pair of loose-fitting cotton pajama bottoms and a London University sweatshirt, as if suddenly self-conscious about his nakedness. He gave Jacqueline a blue dress shirt. It was unspoken, but the implication was clear: one mustn’t discuss something as sacred as al-Nakba in a state of postcoital undress. Jacqueline sat in the middle of the bed, her long legs crossed before her, while Yusef paced.

“When the United Nations presented the plan to partition Palestine into two states, the Jews realized they had a serious problem. The Zionists had come to Palestine to build a Jewish state, but nearly half of the people in the new partition state were to be Arabs. The Jews accepted the partition plan, knowing full well that it would be unacceptable to the Arabs. And why should the Arabs accept it? The Jews owned seven percent of Palestine, but they were being handed fifty percent of the country, including the most fertile land along the coastal plain and the Upper Galilee. Are you listening, Dominique?”

“I’m listening.”

“The Jews devised a plan to remove the Arabs from the land designated for the Jewish state. They even had a name for it: Plan Dalet. And they put it into effect the moment the Arabs attacked. Their plan was to expel the Arabs, to drive them out, as Ben-Gurion put it. To cleanse Jewish Palestine of Arabs. Yes, cleanse. I don’t use that word lightly, Dominique. It’s not my word. It’s the very word the Zionists used to describe their plan to expel my people from Palestine.”

“It sounds as though they behaved like the Serbs.”

“They did. Have you ever heard of a place called Deir Yassin?”

“No,” she said.

“Your view of the conflict in the Middle East has been shaped by the Zionists, so it’s hardly surprising to me that you have never heard of Deir Yassin.”

“Tell me about Deir Yassin.”

“It was an Arab village outside Jerusalem on the road to the coast and Tel Aviv. It isn’t there anymore. There’s a Jewish town where Deir Yassin used to be. It’s called Kfar Sha’ul.”

Yusef closed his eyes for a moment, as if the next part was too painful even to speak about. When he resumed he spoke with the flat calm of a survivor recounting the last mundane events of a loved one’s life.

“The village elders had reached an accommodation with the Zionists, so the four hundred Arabs who lived in Deir Yassin felt they were safe. They had been promised by the Zionists that the village would not be attacked. But at four o’clock one April morning, the members of the Irgun and the Stern Gang came to Deir Yassin. By noon, two thirds of the villagers had been slaughtered. The Jews rounded up the men and the boys, stood them against a wall, and started shooting. They went house to house and murdered the women and the children. They dynamited the homes. They shot a woman who was nine months pregnant, then they cut open her womb and ripped out the child. A woman rushed forward to try to save the baby’s life. A Jew shot the woman and killed her.”