“The two terrorists were transferred to the Shabak,” Illan tells him.
“To Shin Bet… the internal security service?”
“Yes, exactly. They’ll decide if it’s a terrorist act or a criminal act.”
“OK,” Elias says. “But in my opinion, it’s terrorism.”
“Anyway, they were caught in the act by my telephone and confirmed by the patrol,” the officer concludes, handing him the deposition to sign. “Don’t fall asleep in the four-wheel drive,” he adds, shaking his hand. Elias takes his leave.
He snacks on a tasteless falafel in the Netivot canyon, hoping the Shabak will say it’s a terrorist attack, in which case he won’t have to explain himself. But that business isn’t leaving him in peace for all that. His luck, if you can call it luck, is that they wanted to cut his throat. If they’d only tried to rip off the car, the investigation would have gone to the police, and they would have gotten to the truth in the end.
He follows the officer’s advice and takes a hotel room in town, but the next day his mind is no clearer. He had confused nightmares, and he still can’t find a solution to the injustice that’s being perpetrated to his advantage. If he gives himself up, he’s the one who’d be behind bars for embezzlement, not to mention fired for gross misconduct. In either case, he comes out the loser.
Marcel calls him at 7:00 a.m., furious: “I just got the news in a dispatch from Reuters. This is too much, Elias! You’re too much!”
“OK, OK, I’m not dead.”
“But the competition got the scoop, Elias! What does that make me look like?”
“It’s not a scoop! There are knife attacks every day. Every day!”
“Not on a Franco-Israeli reporter! And not in the Negev!”
“Listen, Marcel, I was reluctant to call you because I’d like to be able to keep working here, and it’s better not to blow up this business.”
“What the hell are you saying? We have a great scoop, and you want to give it to the Yanks as a present?”
“Think, Marcel, instead of flying off the handle like an idiot! If you make me into a victim or a hero, there’ll be more attacks on H24 correspondents, precisely because I’m a Franco-Israeli reporter. For the terrorists, you become an ideal target if you’re making the headlines.”
“In any case, you come back here. Come back immediately, Elias!” Marcel screams. “Come back to Tel Aviv right away. I don’t want to have your death on my conscience!”
Which puts a full stop to his adventure as a permanent correspondent on the Gaza border. But not on his pain after the breakup, still less to his crisis of conscience about the two Bedouins. And then he didn’t realize the news would spread so fast. On the way, he calls his friends in Tel Aviv.
“But they did want to cut your throat!” Manu argues, after thinking about it. “Finally, they’re just getting what they deserve.” “Yeah, but shit, I swindled them! Swindled them out of twenty-five thousand bucks.”
“You reimburse them, and that’s it!”
“But I spent that bread, man! You don’t get it, or what?”
“Do whatever, but I’d rather see them both in jail than you all alone six feet under,” Manu adds.
When he gets back to the channel, Elias is surrounded like a hero. All the girls in the newsroom elbow their way in to kiss him, give him passionate hugs, and take historic selfies. Everything is ready for him to participate in The Big Night, Danielle Godmiche’s show, but Elias turns down the invitation on the renewed grounds that it would expose all of them to new terrorist attacks. Everyone has different opinions about that. The pros and cons argue for a few minutes, and while he does manage to convince some of his coworkers, he has to fight every inch of the way to escape the pressure from the top. His own interest is to squelch the affair. Keep a low profile. Very, very low, in fact.
“You won’t be able work in the Territories if you put what happened to me all over the media.”
“But I have calls from all our Israeli colleagues to interview you,” Marcel retorts.
“So refuse!”
“But we can’t do that, Elias. This is hot news!”
The director of the channel and then the megadirector and then the gigadirector call him on his cell to order him to “puff it up,” but Elias responds to each of them in the same way: “That’s taking a considerable risk. You do think about your employees a little?” When they insist, he threatens to resign and, consequently, hush up the affair. Just a short item at the end of the news, and that’s it.
Olga follows the argument from afar, and although she doesn’t get into it, she does imagine the tragedy it would have been for her if he’d been assassinated just after their breakup. Surely a lasting feeling of guilt. It’s only once they’re all back at their computers that she goes up to Elias. “You can’t imagine what I felt when I read that Reuters story. I think I would’ve died!”
“Pfff… it’s just the risks of the profession,” he answers, with a forced lone-cowboy smile as he turns away.
She grabs him by the arm and, looking him in the eyes, says, “Do take care of yourself, I don’t want them to hurt you, Eli.”
He walks away without looking back, praying she’s beginning to kick herself for dropping him. But hardly is he outside, and he begins to cry again. It tears him apart when he sees her. A stabbing. A real one. At least on the artificial dune facing Gaza, it was out of sight, out of mind.
He’ll be back in the newsroom from next Sunday on, and that will mean having Olga in his field of vision eight hours a day. Now, he spends at least six crying.
CHAPTER 13
Quivering with impatience, Diabolo is driving to Ben Gurion Airport to pick up Dina Aziza. She’s finally coming back after six months in South Dakota, working on her thesis. What she and Diabolo have between them, it’s very Freudian. He has her father’s body, overweight like him, the same ogre’s laugh, and fifteen years on her. Hence the difficulty they already had in coupling before she went to live in the States for her research. But then, at that time Dina had an apartment in Tel Aviv. Now she’s asked him to put her up—with her dog—for a while, before she leaves again for research in Poland. Cohabitation can only bring them closer together. The devil take me if it doesn’t end up in the same bed, he thought.
Diabolo throws a party on the terrace that same evening in honor of Dina’s return. A few dozen guests are jockeying for position around the buffet, even Romy. It’s the first time she’s seen Manu since that terrible evening. In the crush, they manage to avoid each other, but finally they find themselves face to face in front of the door to the bathroom. His heart starts pounding like a drum. He’s incurably in love with her. But how can you love someone so much if they don’t love you?
Up to now, Manu has experienced only mutual love affairs. Counting Juliette’s refusal, that makes twice he’s fallen flat on his face since being in Tel Aviv. Makes you wonder, doesn’t it? This was never an issue when he was in porn. Married to his wife in civilian life and lover of all his partners on the job, his love life had been clear as day. No ambiguity. Divorcing and leaving the porn world modified his condition as a male. He no longer knows how you go about seducing a woman. But did he ever really know?