The Spoils of War. Gordon Kent

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СКАЧАТЬ used for too many years. The calendar date was 1987. He flipped it open to the back—penciled addresses and phone numbers in Arabic and in roman script, in cities throughout the Mediterranean.

      David thrust out a hand. “I’ll take that.”

      Dukas hadn’t seen him come down the hill, but it looked as if he had taken the longer and drier route on the tarmac.

      Dukas didn’t reply. He placed the calendar in a plastic bag, put a sticker on it, and wrote a number. He tossed the bag on the pile.

      David stepped around him and bent over the pile. Dukas stood up suddenly, his hip grazing the younger man and sending him sprawling.

      “Sorry,” Dukas said, offering his hand. “I’m clumsy.”

      David crab-walked away and rose to his feet. His jaw worked as if he was chewing, and his face was red, but he kept his distance.

      Shlomo came back from the car.

      “He attacked me,” David said.

      Dukas shook his head. “A misunderstanding.”

      “He attacked me,” David said, his anger causing his voice to rise. “He is interfering.”

      Dukas talked over David. “Get this guy out of here.”

      David began to use his hands. He wasn’t speaking English now, but Hebrew, and he was speaking only to Shlomo.

      Shlomo didn’t move. David went on talking. Shlomo ignored him and looked at the briefcase and then at Dukas, his head bent slightly to one side as if he were asking a question. Dukas locked the locks on the briefcase and put the keys in the pocket of his raincoat. The Canadian sergeant was standing by the Zil, watching the three terrified Kosovans and smoking. From time to time he glanced at the two Israelis.

      David wiped his hands on his coat, turned away from Shlomo in obvious disgust and faced Dukas. “Give me that briefcase.”

      “Don’t tempt me to start this as a homicide investigation.” David raised his hand and pointed at Dukas. “You don’t even understand what you are interfering with. Give me the briefcase.”

      Dukas walked past the younger man and started up the hill, then turned. Instead of anger, he found only fatigue and boredom, as if he had played this scene too many times. “This is evidence in a war-crimes-tribunal investigation. You never mentioned a briefcase in our memorandum of understanding. You told me that this guy was some kind of terrorist heavy hitter. I don’t know why you wanted him dead, but he’s dead. Now—”

      “We wanted him dead? The Albanians shot him!” David shouted, turning to Shlomo for support. Shlomo said nothing. His attention had switched from Dukas to David. He eyed him with distaste, the way tourists look at panhandlers.

      Dukas shook his head, looked away, glanced back at a flicker of movement. The younger man had taken a long sliding step forward and his hand hit Dukas’s elbow hard, numbing it. Dukas dropped the briefcase but managed to pivot, block the follow-on blow, and stand over the case. Dukas had plenty of time to see that the Canadians were too far away to do anything. He risked a glance at Shlomo, who hadn’t moved.

      David crouched, a relaxed martial arts position. He looked confident. “Give us the fucking briefcase.”

      Dukas shook his head. He didn’t think the briefcase was worth a crap to him or any of the cases he was making, but this was too stupid a point to concede. He picked it up and held it to him like a schoolgirl holding her books and hoped that the heavy case would deflect a blow.

      Shlomo stepped up behind his partner and elbowed him in the head so that he sat abruptly on the wet road. Again.

      The Canadian ordered all three Kosovans to the ground and started bellowing into his radio for backup.

      “It would be better if you gave us the briefcase,” Shlomo said. He sounded as tired as Dukas felt.

      “Put in a request through channels.”

      David moaned.

      “That guy’s dangerous,” Dukas said.

      “More dangerous than you know, my friend.” Shlomo wiped the rain from his eyes. “I think you’d better get out of here.”

Part One

       1

       Tel Aviv, Israel, January, 2002

      Abe Peretz told the old joke about the Polish immigrant woman and the boy on the bus. It was practically archaic, he said, from the early days of Israel, but still funny: A mother and her little boy are riding on a bus in Jerusalem. The boy speaks Hebrew but the mother keeps speaking Yiddish. A man sitting across the aisle leans over and says, “Lady, the little boy speaks wonderful Hebrew; why do you keep talking to him in this wretched Yiddish?” “Because,” she says, “I don’t want him to forget he’s a Jew.”

      Outside, the night was coming down like a lavender curtain, darker to the east behind them but brightening into orange on the undersides of the clouds out over the Mediterranean. The apartment was high above Ben Yehuda but the sounds of the street came up; and the smell of evening, a swirl of salt sea and car exhaust and cooking food, rose with them.

      “They say that if you breathe really deep, you can smell the desert,” Abe Peretz said.

      “Only if you’re a Jew,” his wife said with a smile. “You, you’d have trouble.”

      The Peretzes lived in Tel Aviv but had been there only a few months; the Craiks were old friends passing through. The two men had served on a ship together fifteen years before, when one had been new to the Navy and the other had been in too long; now Peretz was the FBI’s deputy legal attaché at the US embassy, and Alan Craik, long ago that young newbie, was the Fifth Fleet intel officer in Bahrain.

      Peretz grinned at the two guests. “Bea thinks I’m not Jewish enough. Funny, because I don’t look Jewish.” He winked at his wife; she overdid rolling her eyes and laughed and said to Rose Craik, who was visibly pregnant, “This one had better be a girl. Two boys are enough.”

      “Well, I’m concentrating really hard.”

      “Two girls are enough, too,” Peretz said. His own two had just come in, still out of sight but noisy at the apartment’s front door. “The quietest voice they know is the scream. If you think Italians are noisy, wait until you’ve lived in a—”

      The two girls erupted through the glass doors to the terrace, both in T-shirts with slogans across their breasts that were meaningless to the adults, one in Hebrew, one in English. There was a lot of kissing and flouncing and shouting; the greetings to Rose were enthusiastic but forced, because Rose Craik had been a great favorite when they had been children but now they were grown up—in their own eyes, at least; and after a lot of shouting, in which Bea took a major part, they whirled out again and the terrace seemed astonishingly quiet.

      “As I was saying before I was interrupted,” СКАЧАТЬ