“So what?”
“I just want to know if you remember anything about the truck, is all.”
“Hertz truck. One of them vans there. What about it?”
“You sure it was a Hertz truck?”
“Yeah, sure. It had them blue stripes on it”
Angelo took a Hertz sales brochure from his pocket. Pictured on it was the spectrum of Hertz trucks rented in the New York area. “Do you suppose you could show me which model it was?”
“Right here.” The youth’s forefinger stabbed at the photo of the Econoline van. Angelo glanced at Rand, then back at the youth.
“Thanks, kid,” he said. “Give you a good-conduct medal one of these days.”
He turned and, with Rand behind him, ran out of the pier, dodged across the West Street traffic and raced for his car.
As Angelo Rocchia scrambled into his Chevrolet, just twelve blocks away in front of a hardware store at 74 West Eighth Street another man slipped into the front seat of a car pausing at the curb. Kamal Dajani noted that his sister had on her blond wig. It changed her so completely that she looked, sitting there beside him, like a total stranger.
No policeman, even one equipped with a picture of her, could identify her now, he thought with satisfaction.
She headed into MacDougal Street and then, through Waverly Place, over to Sixth Avenue, letting the car glide in and out of the traffic with a deft and gentle touch. At Fourteenth she moved into the outside lane, waiting to turn left, stopping as she did at the red light.
“Is everything all right?” she asked, her eyes fixed on the rearview mirror to see if they were being followed.
“Of course everything is all right.”
“There’s been no news on the radio.”
“I know,” Kamal replied, his own eyes scrutinizing the throngs rushing to beat the “Don’t Walk” sign. “I have a transistor.”
“You don’t suppose there’s any possibility the Americans won’t agree, do you?”
Kamal remained silent, staring at the crowds thronging the sidewalks, at the Christmas decorations and the white slashes of the advertising banners promising “Clearance Sale: Everything Must Go” and “All Stock Reduced.”
Nothing there, he realized, to indicate that anyone in this city even suspected the enormity of the threat under which they were living.
Nervously, Laila lit a cigarette, struggling to concentrate on her driving, painfully aware that this was not the moment to bang somebody’s fender the way Kamal had done with his truck.
“How do you feel about it, Kama]?” she asked, stopping for another light.
“Feel about what?”
“About this, for God’s sake! The bomb. About what’s going to happen if the Americans don’t agree. Don’t you feel anything? Triumph or vengeance or remorse or something?”
“No, Laila, I don’t feel a damn thing. I learned not to feel a long time ago.”
He lapsed into his dour silence again, staring straight ahead toward the grayish stain of the Hudson. Then, almost as though his body had been struck by a muscle spasm, he sat up and turned to his sister.
“No,” he said. “That was wrong. I do feel something.
Hate. I used to think I was doing this for Palestine or the cause or Father or whatever. But I realized last night the real reason I’m doing it is because I hate these people and the world they made for us to live in with their television and their movies and their banks and their cars and their goddamn tourists in their white shirts and their straw hats and their cameras, climbing all over our monuments, running the world the way they wanted it run for the last thirty years-my thirty years!”
“My Godl” His sister shuddered. “Why do you hate them so much?”
“Hatred doesn’t need reasons, Laila,” Kamal replied. “That’s the trouble with people like you and Whalid. You always need reasons.” Angrily, he grabbed at the map of New York on the seat. They were in the outgoing tide of traffic now, moving up the West Side of the city. “Don’t go the way you did the last time,” he ordered.
“My?”
“Because I don’t want to go through any toll gates in the city. If they’re looking for us, that’s where they’ll be.”
Of all the pleas and threats, boasts and arguments Menachem Begin had heard since the President’s first telephone call, none had moved him quite as much as that articulated by the Mayor of New York. Begin had met the Mayor twice-once on a visit to New York for a fund-raising banquet, later when the Mayor had brought a group of New York Zionists to visit Israel.
He was listening to the Mayor at his desk, staring at the exquisitely peaceful vista of the Judean hills, dark welts gilded with the ghostly patina of a full moon, under those December stars which once were to have promised mankind a better world in which to live. How do I respond to this man, he asked himself, how do I answer the unanswerable?
“Look, Mr. Begin,” Stern was saying, “I’m pleading with you on behalf of every single man, woman and child in this city, Italian, Irish, black, Puerto Rican, whatever. But why do you think he put this bomb here and not in Los Angeles, or Chicago, or Washington? Because he knows there are three million Jews here, more than there are in Israel, that’s why.”
“Ah,” Begin interrupted. “That is the essence of this terrible tragedy, Mr. Mayor. A tyrant has succeeded in pitting brother against brother, friend against friend, as Roman emperors once forced their captives to slaughter each other in the arenas for their entertainment.”
“The essence of this tragedy, Mr. Begin;” the Mayor’s distant voice was tremulous with anger and concern, “is not that at all. It’s your government’s refusal to take a handful of Jewish people off land which belonged to us two thousand years ago and hasn’t belonged to us since. And your mistake in putting them there in the first place.”
“My dear friend,” Begin pleaded with the Mayor, “please believe me when I tell you I share every one of your concerns, your fears, your angers. They have been ours since this terrible ordeal began. But what you and the President are talking about is not those settlements. It is the very life of this nation. You are asking us to commit national suicide by handing this land over to a people who are sworn to destroy us. Our people, Mr. Stern, that part of us which is here, were in the camps. We were on the road to Jerusalem in 1948. We were in Sinai in 1956. We were on the Golan in ‘67. We were on the canal in ‘73. Our sacrifices, our blood on those battlefields, gave a dignity to our existence-and yours as well. They also gave us the right to survive, Mr. Stern, and that is a right we cannot and will not surrender.”
“Look, Mr. Begin, all that is fine, but no one is asking you to commit suicide. All we are asking you to do is get the hell off land that doesn’t belong to you anyway. Let the poor Palestinians have their place in the sun, too. That’s going to satisfy Qaddafi and it’s going to save my people.
We’ll deal with Qaddafi afterwards, but I’ve got to save my people. That is the number-one priority, people. If I’ve learned nothing else in the hell of these hours, it’s that. The people come first. The rest of it doesn’t matter.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Mayor.” Begin had set his glasses on his desk and was rubbing the bridge of his nose in fatigue and strain. “But the rest does matter. The principles do count. If we destroy the principles by which we live through cowardice or expediency or fear or whatever reason, we will destroy the basis of our existence. For all its faults, we were bequeathed a civilized order by our fathers. Are we going to bequeath our children chaos and the jungle?”