Jericho Mosaic

Part 3

ONE

For many years until he was brutally killed in the sordid tribal warfare of Lebanon, the little journalist Ziad was Halim's closest friend in Damascus. A Syrian by profession as much as by act of God, as he was fond of joking in the coffeehouses, nervous and smiling and ever brash as he sank more deeply into failure, Ziad was never able to achieve his lifelong dream of escaping his homeland. The great capitals of Europe were always his secret goal, above all the glittering wonders of Paris. But circumstances trapped him early in life and chance receded, and like any man with too weak a grip on hope he sank back into what he already knew and made a routine of it.

Europe was his eternal over there, an unreachable land of freedom far from the stifling clutter which was his real lot in the world. Halim — who was still Yossi undercover in the beginning — would have loved him as a friend no matter where they had met and under whatever conditions. For despite all his faults Ziad was a peculiarly lovable man, although perhaps an outsider like Yossi was better able to see that.

Yet circumstances counted in any friendship and particularly for someone as isolated as Yossi had been when he first arrived in Damascus, struggling to make a place for himself in a dangerous enemy capital.

There was no way he could ever forget all the help Ziad had been to him then, nor could Ziad himself ever realize the extent of his gifts to Halim, for the simple reason that Halim could never speak of them. It was what Tajar would one day refer to, in consoling Yossi after Ziad's terrible death, as the lost factor of friendships in the world of intelligence. Or what Abu Musa in Jericho, going beyond espionage to more fundamental failings of human nature as he saw them, had once referred to in Halim's presence as the pitiful silence of the human heart.

The hard facts of the matter were that Ziad made very real contributions to the early achievements of the Runner operation, without ever knowing it. Through Ziad's ridiculous posturing in the coffeehouses, Halim first made the acquaintance of the vain young lieutenant who was the nephew of the Syrian army's chief-of-staff.

Through Ziad's desperate attempts at womanizing, Halim became a close friend of the colonel in command of Syria's paratroop brigade on the Golan Heights. And eventually through Ziad he also came to know the Syrian minister of information, a rigorous intellectual who could open almost any door in those days. But for Halim there would always be another dimension to the closeness he felt for his great friend: the small, strictly personal things Ziad had done for him when Yossi was newly arrived in Damascus and groping inside himself, truly alone and truly frightened.

Halim met Ziad on his first exploratory trip to Syria from Argentina, the visit that was supposed to decide whether he would move to Damascus to go into business. The editor of an Arab weekly in Buenos Aires had given Halim the name of a nephew who worked as a journalist in Damascus. The nephew took Halim to a coffeehouse where journalists gathered and there, among other acquaintances who greeted them, a small and noisy man sat down at their table.

This was Ziad. When he heard Halim was from Argentina he immediately began calling him gaucho. Several days later he found Halim sitting alone in the same coffeehouse and joined him without being asked. He was loud and boastful and seemed to have a small man's need for making his presence felt. He dismissed Argentina as backward . . . the place where the devil lost his poncho. Isn't that the expression you use down there for a totally useless corner of the earth?

Ziad had a superficial knowledge of many things. He lectured Halim on the politics of South America and then launched into a detailed account of the sexual practices of an Indian tribe in Brazil, his voice rising. He was vulgar and crass and so busy spewing out opinions that saliva collected at the corners of his mouth, yet no one at the other tables took any notice of him. Only once did he interrupt his noisy recital of his own prejudices and that was to ask Halim what he thought of a certain French painter. Halim had never heard of the man. So this was Ziad in his coffeehouse role — a pathetic buffoon, a shabby clown promoting himself.

Or at least that was the way he acted when confronted by a stranger like Halim, a man who had actually been somewhere in the world and done something. But when he was alone with Halim he was very different.

Then he dropped his public pose and became quiet and thoughtful and morose. In only a short time Halim came to know Ziad well on their walks along the river, and he wasn't surprised to learn that the little journalist was a sad and vulnerable man.

Ziad was a few years younger than Yossi, therefore a few years older than Halim, according to the biography put together by Tajar. His background was as poor as Yossi's, although for a time it looked as if he too might rise above it as Yossi had done. Like Yossi, he was the only surviving child in his family. Disease had carried off the others. His father and mother had run a fruit and vegetable stand in the Hamdia souk, the traditional Oriental bazaar in the old section of Damascus. They had gone out before dawn to acquire their produce from peasant dealers, then haggled at their stand all day and into the evening with customers who demanded a discount and threatened to go next door.

A few piastres gained here, a few lost there. It was numbing and brutal work that always required a smile, a deferential politeness. Ziad said he never remembered seeing his father and mother when they weren't exhausted. The drooping eyes, the permanent slump to the shoulders, the old rough hands which were always busy stripping decaying layers off green vegetables to get at a core that could be sold. It just never ended for them, he told Halim.

For their son they naturally hoped for a better life. Ziad was clever and was able to get into a French school run by Catholic fathers, though he was a Sunni Moslem. From the French school he was able to enter the University of Damascus to study law. It was a time of political turmoil and young Ziad became involved with the radical activities of the emerging Baath Party, which advocated social reform and made a special appeal to the new educated classes. The army revolted and one coup followed another. Ziad was suspended from the university, then expelled. He drifted into journalism, which he had been doing part time for the party. His father died, embittered and unreconciled to his son's failures. Overnight his mother became ancient and half-senile, fearful of crowds and afraid to leave the semidarkness of their tiny cavelike apartment above the souk, which was unbearably hot in the summer and icily cold in the winter.

For years his mother lived on alone in her dismal room, supported by Ziad, who came by several times a week to cook her hot meals in the late afternoon before he went out drinking. She was too frugal to use the new lamp he had bought her. He would find her huddled in a corner like some terrified nocturnal animal, buried away in the shadows under a heap of tattered shawls, his gifts of blankets and a fan and a heater and warm clothes carefully packed away in a cupboard, an old woman with only half a mind who muttered to herself about vegetables.

Once, much later, Ziad took Halim to see these rooms in the souk where he had grown up. They left the alleys of busy shops and made their way back through filthy stone tunnels worn down by centuries of squalid poverty, crept up a narrow stone stairway that was so steep it was more like a ladder twisting and turning between old walls in darkness, the crevices stinking of urine and rotting animal flesh. Finally they came to a low door and Ziad knocked, announced himself, fitted a key. The door opened and they stepped forward.

Halim could make out nothing in the shadows. And then all at once a ghastly light lit the cave where they stood, dead white and flat, remorseless. Ziad had turned on the switch by the door as they entered.

The light was neon because neon was cheaper, the original light put in by Ziad's father. The single neon bar hung from the center of the low ceiling and lit the dreary room without depth or contours, a horrible macabre moment. Halim was stunned. In the corner two eyes and a creature cowering under a pile of rags — his friend's mother. Only a short distance away, the seething noisy alleys of the souk where crowds pushed and shouted and every manner of thing was for sale. And here above the alleys this cave of silence, impenetrable in its waste and sorrow. Nothing seemed alive in such a light. It was the illumination of nightmares and death.

Welcome to my secret past, said Ziad. This is my mother and this is where I learned to dream of the world.

****

Because he spoke French and read French newspapers, Ziad liked to think of himself as much better informed than the average journalist in Damascus. He fancied himself a theorist of international politics and was always working his ideas into conversations by drawing grand designs in the air with his busy fingers, here a great power, there a plot. He bought his French newspapers secondhand from clerks who worked in hotels where French travelers stayed. He always had a French newspaper under his arm when making his rounds of the coffeehouses, but since the front-page news was old by then he had the newspaper folded to an inside page of commentary. Interesting piece on the Congo, he would say as he slipped into a chair, adding cryptically: I'm making some notes. Later he resold the newspapers to students at his old school.

Ziad was at his strongest when lecturing bored acquaintances in a coffeehouse. The folly of human affairs was obvious to him then and his face had the worldly grin of an ancient Greek mask of comedy. But if asked a question on the Congo, the mirthless laughter in his eyes betrayed him. His expression turned brittle and he covered his fear by getting his hand up in front of his face and sucking deeply on his cigarette. He needed time to think. What should he say? He threw back his head and blew a long stream of smoke toward the ceiling. Despite the maneuver, Halim had the indelible impression of his friend's face abruptly cast in the other extreme of classical drama, a rigid mask of tragedy. But in only an instant Ziad had recovered, and whether his answer was inadequate or ridiculous didn't matter. Once again he was rushing on in a headlong tumble of words, grinning and talking and talking, desperate to fill the silence inside himself.

When Halim first met him Ziad was prospering in a minor way as a journalist. Or at least he seemed as close to it as he would ever come in the corrupt crosscurrents of bribery and scandal that passed for journalism in Damascus, where every newspaper was the tool of a political party and some loose amalgam of commercial interests, whose enemies it viciously attacked day after day while negotiating with those same enemies, through intermediaries, for a sweeping reversal of editorial policy in exchange for money.

In case things turn out differently tomorrow, Ziad said to Halim. It's just the traditional Levantine sense of contingency. Why be caught publishing yesterday's truths about today's national heroes and saviors, when we all know they're going to turn out to be tomorrow's unscrupulous villains and national traitors? It's no secret you can't run a newspaper that way. In a way it's even fair. Everyone on the outside gets a chance to buy success, and everyone on the inside gets a chance to sell out his friends and principles. And the public, or at least those who remember yesterday, get a chance to read about it and be entertained.

They were out on one of their walks by the river, crossing the Nabek Bridge in the middle of Damascus. The bridge was packed with ancient overflowing buses and old French taxicabs and donkeys pulling carts, with men carrying huge loads on their backs and women selling flowers. People hurried through the dust and the noise and the clatter, their eyes intent on the far shore. Ziad pulled Halim over to the railing and gestured at the muddy river, then at the city.

But you, gaucho, how are you going to know the way things work? asked Ziad. You left Syria at the age of three and you made your way well enough in Argentina, but this isn't a place where laborers eat steaks twice a day. Oh they warned you in Argentina, I know. No pampas and no beef over there, they said, just politics and people. Too much of the one and too many of the other, they said, laughing, and you laughed with them.

Because at the same time they were also telling you other stories, weren't they, gaucho? The old men became sentimental and never tired of recalling their beautiful memories. Nostalgic in their faraway land, faces glowing, they described the summer nights of their childhoods when all of Damascus seemed to drift down here to picnic on the banks of the Barada, to lounge on the shores of the river and forget the heat of the day, children playing under the trees in the shadows and lights twinkling on the water and cool breezes whispering up where family and friends were gathered around for long pleasant evenings. Oh just lovely memories when they recalled their homeland. But they don't come back, gaucho, do they? Idle memories are enough for them over there, where pampas and beef mean a man can make a life with only hard work and honest labor.

Of course they admired your idealism and wished you every success, said Ziad. Why shouldn't they? So all your life you've heard these lovely stories about your homeland and wondered about it, and what did it matter that it might be more difficult over here, where there's just politics and people. Worthwhile things are difficult.

You're young and you've already achieved success in the New World, so why not the Old? Why not Syria?

But what do you know about it, gaucho? Do you have any idea what an Alawite or an Ismaili or a Shiite is saying this month beneath what he appears to be saying? Do you know the way the Kurds or the Druse or the Armenians or the Orthodox or the Assyrians are getting along with any of these others this week, and why? Or who's with the Egyptians at the moment and who's against them among the older nationalist groups or the civilian and military wings of the Baath, or the various factions of the army, and why? Because it doesn't really matter so much what they're up to, as why they're up to it. It's the why that's going to affect what happens next week. And all these rivalries and jealousies and alliances are going somewhere, just as the people and buses and carts on this bridge are going somewhere, intent and hurrying. But where?

And even a coffeehouse is never just a coffeehouse, said Ziad. It's a secret society where alert and suspicious members meet to exchange information and get a sense of shifting fortune. You're a Syrian and a Sunni by birth, gaucho, and no doubt that seemed a long-lost identity to you over there in Buenos Aires, a birthright that would provide you with a place in Damascus. But it's just not so. You'll need to be much more, to know much more, in order to go into business here. Syria is a land of ancient fragments, chaos remembered, a primeval place of fanatical discord. Our great gifts to early Christianity were those strange men like St. Simeon Stylites who erected pillars off in the desert and stood on top of them for fifty years, day and night and winter and summer. What possessed them? Is there anything men won't do? It's the Syrian disease and people are like that in this part of the world. They hold onto things. If a prejudice was good enough for the fifth century, it's good enough for us. The more heretical the belief, the more we embrace it.

Schismatic Moslem sects have always thrived here. We still have Nestorians and Chaldeans, Christian sects that are so obscure no one else in the world has heard of them for fifteen hundred years. There are even people whose common tongue is still Aramaic, the language of Jesus.

So perhaps back there in Argentina you thought you had an identity as a Sunni and a Syrian, said Ziad. And no doubt you thought you could come over here and rediscover it. But identities change when we cross oceans. Don't you know that, gaucho? Here, you're not what you were back there. Here, there's not enough to go around and never will be. It's a poor country with too many tribes and too many religions in too many variations, without oil, without pampas, with a few fruit and olive trees and too much desert . . . just people and politics, as they told you in Argentina.

Ziad laughed. He took Halim's arm and they left the railing overlooking the river, falling in with the busy crowds swarming across the bridge. Still holding Halim's arm and steering him between the carts and people, Ziad went up on tiptoe and stretched his neck to whisper in Halim's ear.

Of course I could begin to tell you about it, whispered Ziad. That's my business, my profession: how it all works. So if you still want to leave Argentina and move to Damascus, I can show you how to get started.

***

Halim was wary of Ziad in the beginning. It was Tajar who overcame his reluctance at their subsequent meeting in Geneva, when Yossi was returning to Buenos Aires to conclude his affairs there. Yossi was simply being overcautious, Tajar thought, now that the time had finally come for the Runner to move to Damascus.

I'm sure there's nothing to fear, Tajar said in Geneva. Let our little journalist friend help. Open up to him.

You're apprehensive and that's natural, but you don't have to underestimate yourself. Ziad obviously respects you, Yossi, and my own feeling is that he's fascinated by what Halim intends to do, wants to do, imagines he can do. In you he sees things he misses in himself, and there's no question he can help you in a very practical way right now. He dramatizes matters to emphasize his own importance, his value to you, but that's all right. You can always distance yourself from him later. By helping you he'll be boosting his self-esteem, which is the point of it for him, I imagine. You'll be doing him a favor by letting him help you. A man like that must suspect even now that he's never going to go very far in the world, but he feels you may.

Anyway, it's not material things that concern him with you, said Tajar. Your eventual success in Damascus as a businessman, as a man who knows people who count and moves among them, all that is too far away for him to think about, inconceivably far away. Life for him is week to week. A month from now the army may have revolted again and there may be another government. That's the way it is in his world. He doesn't know long-term. How can he?

So his interest in you is personal, said Tajar. If he were thinking about bettering himself and promoting his career, he'd be spending his extra time in Baath politics. But the fact is he doesn't. The fact is he would rather spend his extra time with you. Why? Because he's intrigued by the whole idea of the mad gaucho from Argentina. Because he knows himself and knows he'll never be mad or a gaucho, an adventurer from some distant foreign place, some exotic faraway culture, taking a chance. Because he knows he's sane and reasonable and a little timid, which is to say ordinary. The way you've described him tells me we see him in the same way. He's a little man with good perceptions and talent, trapped in a place where that's not enough.

Likable, harmless, useful. I've known men like him before, in Damascus and elsewhere.

I'm sure, replied Yossi, thoughtfully.

What is it? asked Tajar.

Oh, I was thinking of Argentina, said Yossi. When my Syrian acquaintances there used to speak of life being hard in Syria, because it's a poor country, there was often a hint of something more in their voices. A suggestion meant for me perhaps, an unspoken word, a perception they shared, looking back. Not something they wanted to say out loud because that would have meant demeaning their homeland and their memories. I felt it on this trip, especially when I was with Ziad. Ruthless was that unspoken word. You have to be that way to succeed in such a place, when you're born there and grow up there, and Ziad doesn't have it. He lacks it entirely.

Oh well, ordinary for his time and place, like most people, said Tajar. Of course I wouldn't imagine he'll go very far. But then most people don't . . . anywhere, do they?

TWO

The first years of the Runner operation in Damascus were devoted to Halim establishing his export business.

With his introductions from Syrian businessmen in Buenos Aires and his Swiss letters of credit, he had no difficulty putting together shipments of leather goods and obtaining export licenses. The shipments went off to Belgium and more orders came in.

Halim worked alone in his business, using the small hotel where he lived as his office. The hotel occupied the top floor of a large building off Martyrs' Square in the center of downtown Damascus. It was not yet a big city but it was growing rapidly, in confusion, and private flats and commercial and government offices tended to be all crowded together in the same buildings. Construction was haphazard after the Second World War and new Damascus was as much a hodgepodge as the old. Halim's building was typical with shops and coffeehouses on the ground floor, the offices of dentists and lawyers and small businesses and municipal departments on the two floors above that, then three floors of apartments where families lived, with the hotel on the top floor.The same two creaking cage-lifts serviced all the floors, so every manner of person could be found coming in and out of the building. The lifts were at the end of a cavernous entrance hall, poorly lit, and people tended to slink through this near-darkness like fugitives, no matter how confidently they entered from the bright sunlight. Far back in the gloom an elderly guard reigned from his perch on a high stool. The guard wore a vague khaki uniform and was armed with a Mauser, a huge antique rifle from the time of the Ottoman Turks. The rifle was merely ceremonial: a shiny brass plug with a red tassel was fitted into the end of the barrel. But this was the guard's undisputed domain and here he ruled with the ill-humor of a stranded Tatar horseman, gruffly directing a band of ragged urchins who fetched coffee and ran errands for the offices upstairs.

Only Syrians stayed at the hotel. The bedrooms were comfortable, even spacious, and a few were occupied by old women who lived there permanently and spoke French more often than Arabic. But most of the guests were men from the provinces with business to do in the capital, or people visiting relatives. The polite deskmen were careful with messages, and the younger bartenders were ready to provide discreet information on women and gold and hashish.

Halim often worked on one of the balconies outside the public rooms of the hotel, where he could do his correspondence and bookkeeping while looking down on courtyards with palm trees and banks of flowers, a low red-tiled roof somewhere among them. The streets near Martyrs' Square were always noisy and crowded but there were also grand old houses with overgrown gardens hidden away between the newer buildings, and the balconies of Halim's hotel offered a glimpse of these graceful memories of an older Damascus.

Ziad pretended to find Halim's living arrangements insufferably bourgeois. Secretly, though, he liked the peaceful comfort of the hotel, exotically named the Brittany, which was far removed from the hectic coffeehouse scheming he lived in so much of the time. Halim would still be at work when Ziad arrived at the end of the afternoon. Ziad would poke his head through the beaded curtain separating the barroom from the balcony and announce himself, then settle into a leather armchair and order Scotch. Ziad loved Scotch but he could never afford to buy it. Here it went on Halim's bill. The bar was a sedate room with wood paneling and potted plants and a ceiling fan. There were also free bowls of peanuts. Ziad sat in splendor with his French newspaper open on his lap, watching the sinking sun through the windows and feeling himself a man of the world.

A second bowl of peanuts arrived with Ziad's second Scotch. By then Halim was gathering up his paperwork and soon it was time for them to go out and roam the city, to visit coffeehouses and meet people and take long walks, ending up at some restaurant Ziad knew.

On other evenings Halim generally ate in the hotel dining room. It was astonishing how many friends he made there in a short time, men of different backgrounds from different parts of Syria. In many ways, Tajar had told Yossi, your first year in Damascus will decide everything. People get an idea of someone and it lasts.

Halim was aware how Ziad's company enhanced his own position with other people. Ziad's futile self-display in public, so desperate and awkward and shrill, could only emphasize Halim's more thoughtful manner. Ziad had to pretend to understand every subject and would make any claim, while Halim never talked about something he didn't know. So the contrast between the two of them was striking, and Halim seemed all the more inviting and worthy of confidence because of Ziad's boisterous antics.

In the beginning Yossi deeply felt the dangers of Damascus. Keeping watch and informing on others, after all, was the traditional free entertainment of the city. In a casual or venomous manner, people idly repeated scurrilous news as a way of passing the time while they waited for something more interesting to happen, much as they also split sunflower seeds with their teeth and spit out the shells around them as they walked or tarried . . . By the by, have you heard? . . . did you know? . . . his mother . . . her grandfather . . . that one

. . . yesterday . . . the last time. . . .

This commonplace pastime was a way to enact a private revenge on life, to defend against personal inadequacy and unkind fortune, a neverending litany on the weaknesses and misfortunes of others which hovered between simple gossip and outright slander. Imagined petty intrigues were slipped into any conversation, if for no other reason than to show that the speaker was clever and suspicious. Spite and jealousy and politics were pervasive and demanded constant attention. Rumors had to be tested and insinuations passed along, for how else could they be verified? It was part of the social fabric for everyone to inform on everyone else, and beyond these routine habits lurked the professionals, the plainclothes policemen and the innumerable agents who were employed by the various security services.

Yossi was only fifty miles from Beirut, where he could meet Tajar. He was only a hundred and thirty-five miles from Jerusalem itself. Yet he often felt farther away from Tajar than he had in Argentina. After the vast expanses of South America, he found it strange to readjust to these tiny distances separating people and enemies in the Middle East.

So Yossi was intensely aware how alone he was, cut off with no one to turn to. Every confidence he made in the hotel dining room or in the offices where he did business, every step he took on the path to becoming Halim, only made his isolation clearer to him. His life was profoundly remote and there was no relief from solitude. At first this aloneness was hard to bear and he often confided in Ziad, revealing his fears and loneliness as a stranger — not as Yossi of course but as Halim, an immigrant from faraway Argentina, absent from Syria since the age of three. As for Ziad, he was more than sympathetic. In fact he loved this intimacy and was eager to understand Halim's feelings, which were exactly what he had always yearned to experience in life and knew he never would, an aspect of his own secret dreams of adventure, of breaking away from the confines he had been born to and going to live in a foreign land.

A concern, an understanding which was always generous and genuine — this was Ziad's gift to Halim in the beginning, and certainly for Yossi the gift was far from small. Yossi was aware someone else might have done as much for him when he first arrived in Damascus, some other friend he might have made during that early, crucial period. But the fact remained it was his little friend Ziad who listened to him and shared his feelings when he was vulnerable, before he began to acquire confidence in his status as Halim.

***

Shesh-besh caused the first great change in Halim's life in Damascus. The game was newly popular in Europe when he began exporting tables, and they became an enormous success. Other companies soon entered the market, but by then Yossi had already made enough money to recompense the Mossad for all the costs of the Runner operation to date.

Tajar was astounded when he read the Runner's financial reports. He smiled and hummed to himself.

Intelligence operations never made money. They either spent it or lost it. The Runner was unique in many ways but of course no one would ever know it except Tajar and the director of the Mossad.

In Damascus, Halim's manufacturers were ecstatic with their share of the profits. The tale of Halim's shesh-besh triumph in Europe crept into the coffeehouses, and Halim's reputation as a shrewd businessman was assured. Halim rented offices on a lower floor of his hotel building and hired a clerk and a bookkeeper.

He began to look for a permanent place to live. The government fell and the influence of the Baath Party increased, particularly in the army. Through Ziad, Halim became friendly with the arrogant nephew of the new army chief-of-staff.

They're Druse and therefore the uncle can never be president, confided Ziad. That makes it a safe appointment, unthreatening to the older political parties. But the uncle is known to lean toward the Baath, and this shows how our strength is growing. Another year or two and we'll have it all. . . .

Ziad's we was the Baath. His interest in the party had suddenly revived now that it was moving closer to power.

Halim's shesh-besh success gave him a reputation as a marketing genius with the right contacts in Europe.

Businessmen approached him with proposals and he studied the projects carefully before investing his time and money. He was thorough and hardworking and honest. He favored partnerships and was exactly the kind of man anyone would want for a partner. He liked the idea of developing import schemes to balance his export trade. He also showed a flair for practical engineering projects. Once he had even thought of becoming an engineer, he admitted.

And then with a shy smile: If we could choose whatever we wanted in the world I suppose I would have been an inventor in the early nineteenth century, in Europe or America, one of those cranks who tinkered around in his workshop and found a practical solution to something real, on his own.

Halim had this conversation with a businessman he had befriended a few years previously at the hotel. The man owned a well-established machinery company which had begun to slip. Together they worked out an ambitious partnership. Halim would invest capital for new imports and be responsible for marketing and development. His partner would continue to run the firm and be in charge of its service and repair operations.

Halim redirected the company into air-conditioning, which was soon making money. He also developed a special capability in exhaust systems, first for plants and then for trucks. They repaired army trucks and went on to the more complicated systems of armored personnel carriers. The basic equipment was Russian and not the best, nor had it been designed for Syrian conditions. Sand got into everything.

With his machinists, Halim worked out modifications for the intake and exhaust systems. The new parts were tooled in the company's shops and worked well when installed. They made still more improvements when army transport officers took Halim and a master machinist into the field to check performance on the spot.

But that was only one of Halim's many projects during those years. He was always busy and worked long hours. He now had a manager running his central enterprise, his export-import office, and was generally involved in two or three other business ventures as a partner, in addition to the machinery company. His work took him back and forth through Syria, frequently to Beirut and sometimes to Europe. He also went to Jordan to visit the Palestinian refugee camps there, a humanitarian problem that had begun to concern him.

Still, he was careful to stay out of politics in Damascus, which he could do as a businessman who had come from Argentina and was unencumbered by the usual intricate networks of past favors and loyalties and allegiances. Of course there was no question he was a patriot. He had returned to Syria for that very reason.

And everyone knew his sympathies were with the progressive policies of the Baath, the party of social reform and nationalism. His friends suspected he might take a more public role when enough time had passed for him to feel firmly established. He might not, but that was the usual way with businessmen who owed their success to hard work and caution.

Although he had little time to enjoy it, Halim was obviously very fond of the house he had found for himself. It was one of those old Damascus villas he had always admired, with rustling palm trees and an overgrown garden tucked away between newer buildings, a relic from a more leisurely era. The house itself wasn't so large and much of it was given over to wholly useless verandahs with broad stone steps to nowhere, which must have once commanded a view. The villa had been on the outskirts of Damascus when it was built and now it was well within the city, but the grounds and the trees and walls still gave the house a great sense of privacy. Halim could walk to his office and did so every day, strolling briskly along tree-lined streets and greeting dozens of people on the different routes he followed to vary his walks. Because Damascus was growing so rapidly, squalor stood next to luxury and Halim passed through many kinds of neighborhoods.

Ziad wasn't surprised at the sort of house his friend had chosen. Since their days on the hotel balcony he had expected Halim would eventually live in one of these crumbling old villas, hidden away behind high walls and crowded in among ancient fruit trees. Ziad knew his friend would take no notice of the primitive electrical wiring and water pipes which ran along the walls inside the rooms. Naturally it was the tangled garden that would enchant Halim, with its disused fountains and broken, discolored statues. The statues were half as old as Damascus itself, relics of the Greek and Roman and Byzantine periods, worn both white and black by two millennia of rain and sun. How many gardens have they stood in? mused Halim. How many eras have they calmly watched come and go?

Of course, tradition, Ziad said, laughing. It takes a man from the wide open spaces of the New World to appreciate such a romantic ruin of a house. What does it matter that it has leaky roofs and bad plumbing and huge drafty rooms which are impossible to heat in the winter? The garden alone justifies all. Here Aristotle can contemplate the bust of Homer and marvel at the poet's blind stone eyes and wonder whither time marches . . . yes?

There was another government coup. Tanks rumbled through downtown Damascus and this time the Baath seized power outright. The more outrageous land speculators were arrested, allowing this sure means of instant wealth to slip into other hands, perhaps those closer to the new educated classes and the army. The general who had been the Syrian military attaché in Buenos Aires became the new president. Halim sent flowers to his former shesh-besh partner, congratulating him, and became a guest at presidential receptions.

Ziad was able to find a job for himself in the ministry of information, the most substantial position he had ever held.

Halim began entertaining in his home and Ziad turned up with his new friends, mostly Baath army officers.

Ziad also brought along women to these evenings. With the ways of regular journalism now behind him and no longer a source of income, with his success now dependent upon army officers, he had come up with a new service for those in power — pandering. Always pathetically unsuccessful himself with women, he now found he could enjoy their company on the strength of the important men he would introduce them to. Slightly hysterical and already a little drunk, he appeared at Halim's door early in the evening with a woman on each arm, and rushed off to try to gather up a few more who might or might not be waiting for him. Then he gulped Scotch and spent the rest of the evening flitting around Halim's living room, refilling glasses and telling raucous anecdotes.

Halim himself acted as a quiet host at these gatherings, in keeping with his more reserved manner. While Ziad chattered noisily from group to group, Halim was apt to be in conversation with someone off to the side.

Most of the women brought along by Ziad were secretaries from government ministries, but occasionally he captured a more glamorous prize. One evening he turned up with a popular singer, a vivacious and ambitious young woman. Halim introduced her to a colonel and took the two of them for a stroll in his garden, applying all his charm to making the encounter a success. For the colonel, who was the new commander of the paratroop brigade on the Golan Heights, that evening in the shadows of Halim's garden was the beginning of a passionate love affair with the singer, and he always felt warmly toward Halim for bringing her into his life.

There were also other kinds of friendships for Halim. The austere minister of information, educated in Paris and the leading intellectual of the Baathist regime, was a man of a different sort. Halim met him through Ziad but thereafter they got together without Ziad, the better to discuss Latin American politics and pursue the minister's scheme, first suggested by Halim, of securing financial support for the Baath from the Syrian community in Buenos Aires. Halim wrote letters to Argentina and collected some funds for the minister. But as the minister said, the amount of money wasn't as important as the principle of Syrians overseas taking part in the rejuvenation of their ancient homeland.

***

Halim was busy, always busy. The machinery company in which he was a partner had been given a contract to improve the ventilation systems of bunkers on the Golan Heights, which accommodated armored vehicles as well as artillery and tank crews, a whole complicated series of connecting underground fortresses. Each bunker was different and presented a slightly different set of ventilation problems. Halim worked on the diagrams with his master machinists, making modifications and finding practical solutions.

For his central office Halim still used the suite of rooms he had acquired originally in the large building off Martyrs' Square, the building with the hotel on the top floor. Now he had to find space in the suite to work on these ventilation schemes. The only free area was the seating arrangement at the end of his own room, where a company director normally sat with his guests over coffee. Halim moved the overstuffed chairs to his manager's office and put in draftsman's tables and lighting fixtures and banks of deep flat cupboards with dozens of drawers to hold the blueprints and diagrams. When his partner came by and found Halim and the master machinists pouring over their papers, he joked that Halim's room looked more like a crowded architect's den than a successful businessman's office.

It was crowded and there were papers everywhere, but nothing was done by chance in the Runner's life. The entrance to Halim's offices lay at the end of one of the two corridors that ran the length of the building on each floor. The elevators opened between the first and the second corridors. In the second corridor was the room with toilets and sinks for the smaller offices on the floor which were without toilets of their own. The entrance to Halim's offices was in the first corridor, but his rooms extended to the blank wall of the second corridor.

And the far end of his own room, now crowded with draftsman's cupboards and tables, backed exactly against the wall where the toilet stalls were.

In redesigning the room the Runner had done some special work of his own. If he set the screws in the back of one of his cupboards in a certain way, a man in the second corridor could enter the toilets and lock himself in the last stall, unfasten a panel in the back wall and another panel in Halim's wall, and reach through into Halim's cupboard — to remove the cardboard cylinder that had been placed there for him. The panel in the toilet stall could conceivably have been opened by chance, but if that happened it would have revealed nothing. The next panel through Halim's wall, giving access to Halim's cupboard, couldn't be discerned. Nor could that second panel be opened accidentally, since only a correct combination of screw turns on Halim's side allowed it to open.

There was risk involved. No dead drop was ideal when bulk material had to be transferred frequently. Either the Runner repeatedly carried compromising material on his person to some neutral location in Damascus, or the dead drop had to be adjacent to his office. Tajar felt the lesser risk was for the Runner never to have the compromising maps and diagrams on his person. Better for the couriers to bear that danger and make it their main concern. The arrangement also freed the Runner to be only Halim when he moved around Damascus, a subtle and important consideration to Tajar's mind. Thus setting the screws at the back of the office cupboard was Yossi's task. And later when Halim walked out of the office he could simply be himself, a man who carried nothing he need fear. Risk was inherent for the Runner, but Tajar knew the risk was lessened the more Halim could be Halim. In any case, Tajar expected the dead drop to be in use for only a limited period of time. The underground fortresses on the Golan were extensive, but not infinite.

So there were intricate risks and dangers in the Runner's progress, and precise precautions and continual readjustments. To Ziad as to anyone else who knew him in Damascus, Halim's early steps in the Syrian capital had always seemed to follow naturally and easily one upon the other: where he lived and where he worked, the hotel on the top floor and then the offices on a lower floor of the same building, the villa out of the center of town, the way his life and business came to be what they were. But behind it all were the careful decisions of a master planner.

***

Hectic, busy years for the Runner then, and soon there were to be many changes around him because the Middle East was slipping toward the Six-Day War, that utterly disastrous defeat for the Arabs. God was said to have created the world in six days and rested on the seventh, and certainly the 1967 war completely reworked the destiny of the Middle East in only six days. But it did so with a secret promise of years of brutal struggle instead of a seventh day of peace. Ziad lost his job and added espionage to his list of failures. After the war, the young nephew of the former army chief-of-staff lapsed back into the obscurity of his Druse village.

The minister of information, more fortunate than many, went into exile as the Syrian ambassador in Paris.

And the paratroop colonel took part in a failed coup attempt and then escaped to Baghdad, only to reenter Damascus clandestinely with the help of Iraqi agents, disguised as an old peasant woman, to be immediately arrested and tried and shot, all within twenty-four hours.

Yet for Halim looking back, those times before the Six-Day War were the good years, the years of building and moving forward, before chance and skill changed the maps of fate so drastically. Tajar used to tell Yossi that the identity of Halim would come over him very gradually in Damascus. Before the Six-Day War this seemed to be so to Yossi, and the two aspects of his life never met. Yossi and Halim remained separate people. They had different tasks and different lives, different emotions and different sensibilities, in keeping with the controlled schizophrenia of a deep-cover agent. Halim's life was decided by circumstances outside himself, by the background Tajar had constructed for him, and by the ways business and society worked in Damascus. Halim's life was subtly aggressive. Exploiting opportunity was the purpose of it. And Halim could do this without second thoughts because the justification for it lay elsewhere. The Runner operation justified what Halim did.

Yossi's life, on the other hand, was minutely prescribed. There were exact instructions for everything Yossi did, particularly after the fortifications on the Golan Heights became the goal of the Runner operation. Tajar's back-up team was responsible for moving the Runner's material, and Yossi didn't know these men for security reasons. Halim crossed paths with hundreds of people each day, all kinds of people in all kinds of places. His life was arranged that way on purpose. The disguised and coded messages between Tajar and the Runner might be embedded between the outer and inner cardboard layers of what looked like a common cigarette box, discarded and crushed and empty, its bottom torn open so that it would be of no use even to a child or a tramp. The crushed cigarette box was put in a certain place, and elsewhere a commonplace mark was made at a certain place on a wall or a tree, by Halim or by a member of the back-up team, explaining exactly what had been done. The cupboard transfer for bulk material remained the same at Halim's office, but coded messages back and forth were always kept separate from that.

Tajar continually revised these procedures, always striving for naturalness and simplicity. When he met Yossi in Beirut, an important part of their time together was devoted to reviewing Halim's movements and contacts, so Tajar would have the knowledge to work out safe new methods connecting the Runner and his back-up team.

Thus Yossi's work was rigid and inflexible. It was mechanical, outwardly complex but demanding nothing of his inner self. Yossi was neither aggressive nor opportunistic. He didn't exploit people or situations. That kind of activity belonged to Halim's sphere. Yossi as a person, a former paratrooper who had gone on to more specialized training, had no need to question anything. His objective was clear: the high ground of the Golan.

The Runner operation as a whole — Halim, Yossi, the communication and transport systems maintained by the back-up team — worked as a machine run by Tajar. In fact Tajar did more than run the machine. In effect, he was the machine.

All that changed with the Six-Day War. It took some time for Yossi to realize it, but the comfortable schizophrenia of his several lives irrevocably came to an end with that war, which had seemed to be his and Israel's greatest triumph. Thereafter he had no choice but to become Halim, a man who was as much a Syrian in his complex way as Ziad.

THREE

Damascus was appalled by the magnitude of the Six Day defeat. Overnight the Runner operation became completely inactive. Halim retreated into the quietest of his business enterprises and saw as few people as possible, like everyone else. The danger grew as shock gave way to recrimination and bloodletting in the government, in the Baath and the army. Yossi, hidden away inside of Halim, suddenly had a great deal of time to roam through his house and garden. He was joined by Ziad, who was out of work and in need of drink.

Ziad came to spend long summer evenings alone with him in the old villa. Together they sat for hours in heavy thronelike chairs on Halim's broad empty verandahs, above the wide stone stairs leading down to nowhere, their thoughts drifting in the shadows as they imagined the open fields and caravan processions which were no longer there in the distance.

Defeat — brutal, overwhelming, ignominious — caused Ziad to look back over his life that summer. He became obsessed with the past and often recalled the stirring visions and noble causes of his student days, all sadly come to nothing.

Yossi also looked back over his life that summer, though in a much different way. The news of Assaf's wounds from the war troubled him far more than he was able to admit to himself at first. The fact that Assaf had come so close to death destroyed the exhilaration Yossi might have felt over Israel's victory and his own contribution to it. To be suddenly inactive after years of hectic effort might have brought a letdown in any case, but added to this depression was a profound sense of remorse.

There was nothing he could do for Assaf. There was no way he could ease Assaf's pain or comfort him, no way he could even see him. This caused a terrible sense of inadequacy in Yossi, and the fact that he understood his situation so clearly did nothing to lessen his bleak mood of uselessness. He felt he had betrayed Assaf and the betrayal brought him intense pain. Even the house he was trapped in was all at once painful.

Yossi's house in Damascus was very much like Anna's house in Jerusalem, at least in its interiors. Tajar had described the Jerusalem house to him and of course the similarity wasn't surprising. The stone houses on Ethiopia Street had been built by the Nashashibi family, one of the important Arab clans of Jerusalem under the Turks and the British. When various branches of the family had gotten together and erected an enclave of connecting homes and courtyards early in the century, they had followed accepted custom and built their houses in the Damascus style: a large central room with high ceilings of painted wood arranged in geometric designs, tall recessed windows and wrought-iron doors opening onto courtyards or balconies, the smaller rooms for sleeping all giving off this central gathering place for the family, with the kitchen and pantries and storerooms tucked away out of sight at the end of a long corridor. As an arrangement of space it was the typical old-fashioned design for a large Arab family of means. The spaciousness of the central room and its painted wooden ceilings, in particular, were what signified the Damascus style during the Ottoman era.

Thus the apartment where Assaf had grown up in Jerusalem was almost a replica of Yossi's house in Damascus. The grounds were different and Yossi's house was single-storied. But when Yossi wandered through the great central room of his old villa, he sometimes had a haunting premonition that Assaf was there somewhere, lying wounded in a bed behind one of the doors, waiting for Yossi to find him. The sensation came to Yossi without warning, a sharp rush of excitement as fleeting as it was irrational. Restless and pacing, his thoughts on some practical matter, he would chance to glance up at the orderly patterns of the ceiling and all at once feel a presence near him, a special significance to one of the doors. . . . Was Assaf in there?

The feeling was so strong he might turn toward the door or even take a step in that direction. But then the truth would strike him like a blow and crush his heart in a moment of unspeakable anguish, a pain far worse than any he had ever known. He realized it was his own guilt that was torturing him in this cruel way, but he could do nothing to evade the torment. Yet it was also true that he only had this experience when he was alone and could think of himself as Yossi. It never happened in the company of someone else, not even Ziad.

Tajar's training of Yossi had been so profound that even these powerful bursts of emotion were overruled by Halim's unshakable discipline.

So Halim's safety and solitude remained intact, but there was an inevitable price to be paid for it. In a matter of months Yossi's hair turned mostly white. It was also during this period that his face came to have the lean carved look of a permanent desert traveler, and his eyes acquired that startling penetrating quality which Tajar found so mesmerizing when they met again in Beirut after a separation of several years. By then the Runner's transformation was so complete that Halim's radiant smile was the only outward sign to remind Tajar of the eager young man he had sat with on the shores of the Mediterranean near the Negev a decade and a half ago, and there revealed his dream of an extraordinary clandestine operation they would build together, and an adventurous new life for Yossi which would be uniquely devoted to the purest of ideals.

As for the Runner, he was simply trying to survive in his innermost being, and what surprised him most was how remote his old self now seemed. He found himself recalling Yossi as he might recall a childhood friend.

He knew every detail about the life of this other person, but it was all a memory from another world. Yossi's hopes, Yossi's fears . . . they were simply no longer his. Halim understood disguises, and the lean new face he saw in the mirror, with its deep-set eyes and white hair, meant little to him. It was the inner changes that astonished him as Yossi slipped away into the past.

The steps of survival were always so small, it seemed to the Runner. Yet how vast was the sad finality of these changes he was witnessing.

***

Through the long quiet evenings they shared on Halim's dark verandahs that summer, Ziad mistook his friend's distant mood for the gloom of defeat pervading Damascus. Ziad had lost his job at the ministry even before the war broke out, a casual victim of one of those periodic shuffles that accompanied minor weekend intrigues in the army. Some pro-Egyptian officers had been arrested, some people fired. Ziad was caught having coffee on the wrong side of the corridor one morning.

He was disappointed, but he knew after the war he would have lost his job anyway. Important men were being arrested and jailed, and Ziad wasn't even important. People used him. He ran errands. Now he was doing part-time work for several newspapers. The only real friend he had was Halim, who treated him as an equal.

With Halim there was never any need for him to hide and to play the buffoon. He could always reveal his fears and be himself, because of the bond between them. He wasn't used to such good fortune in life and never ceased to be amazed by it, and grateful for this place he had in Halim's heart.

But then Halim wasn't like other people. Halim had grown up in Argentina and chose to live in a crumbling villa from another era. He recalled grand tales of a mythical Damascus and dreamed of being a Syrian and an Arab, which meant he actually believed there were such things. To Ziad these were abstract concepts, unconnected to reality and meaningless in the end. Reality to Ziad was the nexus of family and tribe and chance, and money and skill and religious sect, which determined a man's place in the souk. There were many little souks and the one great souk that included them all — Damascus, which for thousands of years had been the chief place of a satrapy or province or border state often called Syria, sometimes Greek or Roman or Persian or Turkish or Mongolian, sometimes Moslem or Christian or pagan, a meeting place for caravans, a way-station for conquering armies from Europe or Asia or the vast hinterlands of the deserts. This abstraction was what Halim liked to think of as his homeland, Syria. And to Ziad, Arab had even less meaning than that. To him it was a term as vague as Latin American.

You know it means nothing, he said to Halim. What does an Amazon Indian hunting in the jungle with a blowgun have in common with a stiff Chilean of German descent tending vineyards on the slopes of the Andes? You had no trouble understanding that over there. Why pretend it's any different here?

Halim only smiled in answer to Ziad's arguments. Of course it was true Halim had visionary aspects to him, undeniable touches of the mystic. Halim even believed in the cause of the Palestinians, who were merely a tool to everyone else, a convenient source of manpower to be drawn on for private wars. So astute and practical in business affairs, Halim had this strange other side to him when it came to viewing the politics of men, an ability to disregard the everyday facts of life and find an ultimate faith in human destiny. Ziad couldn't fathom the paradox. He knew the world didn't work the way his friend envisioned it, but he was still fascinated by Halim's faith. Halim was a dreamer and Ziad couldn't help but love him for that.

But above all, it was Halim's acceptance of him that affected Ziad most deeply. Life for Ziad was a hard, perpetual performance of skill and trickery and dissembling, a desperate and neverending attempt at false bravado. He utterly lacked Halim's charm and easy way with people. It wasn't that he meant to harm himself with his awkward behavior. He wasn't perverse. He simply had a clumsy touch with others and couldn't avoid the feeling that he was sinking in life, without ever having had a chance to rise. He felt out of place in almost any situation. Inevitably his feelings betrayed him and then he was out of place.

Only with Halim was it different. Halim's presence reassured him. When they were alone together he truly felt calm inside himself, as if blessed, because Halim accepted him as he was. This seemed nothing less than a miracle to Ziad, a gift from heaven.

In fact he often thought of his friend in exactly those words.

For me, he said to himself, Halim is a gift from heaven.

***

As the months passed Halim began to devote more of his time and money to helping his Palestinian friends.

Again the Runner was busy, reporting on Palestinian activities.

In Damascus it was a time of instability and uncertainty. Halim's former friend, the minister of information, was brought back from Paris and sent to jail for life. A younger cousin of the ex-minister, who had become the head of a Baathist intelligence agency while still in his early thirties, committed suicide by jumping out an office window in the defense ministry, or was murdered. A fierce struggle developed between the civilian and military wings of the Baath, with Iraqi agents and pro-Egyptian elements active against each other. Protection money from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf oil states, beyond the regular subsidies, was available to those who knew how to extort it. In this turmoil Syria practically closed its borders to Westerners. Even influential Syrians rarely traveled beyond Beirut. King Hussein of Jordan, in danger of losing control of his country to the PLO, went to war against the PLO militias and drove them out of Jordan into Lebanon. Syrian tanks invaded Jordan but drew back when Israel warned of war and Saudi Arabia warned of a cut in money.

It was a serious failure for the Syrian army, which had been acting under the influence of the civilian cadres of the Baath. The Syrian defense minister, a career army man, seized power and made himself president, which was a victory for the military wing of the Baath. But more important, the new man was the son of peasants and from the minority Alawites, a poorer Moslem sect which was traditionally scorned and oppressed by the majority Sunnis. Further, it turned out that the new president was not merely the head of another coalition of officers. He ruled alone, something no Syrian had done in centuries. His first act was to arrest his mentor in the Baath, the former president, and have him sentenced to life imprisonment in a notorious desert dungeon.

Ziad was cynical and excited.

An Alawite as president? he said to Halim. An inconceivable thing, it's never happened before. People will see him as representing all those who have always been wronged, which is naturally most of the country. So now we have a real presidente, our very own Perón to be the father of the shirtless ones, but far cleverer in the ways of the souk and not a banana dictator. Oh no, a genuine Levantine leader who knows how to scheme and cut throats. A despised Alawite? An ex-peasant whose first act is to turn on the man who made him?

Despised minorities produce patient, angry men, and people will love him for that kind of treachery. Secretly, it's what they all dream of. And this ex-peasant even had the foresight to change his name to Lion as a young man. The king of the beasts as our dictator? It's apt. It fits. Maybe he'll even be strong enough to get back our land from the Israelis. Dominate or be dominated? Anyone who is different is inferior? This Alawite knows how it is. He has to. He is an Alawite, after all.

Ziad was also enthusiastic because once again he sensed a new future for himself. A new government meant new loyalties. A dictator meant new kinds of opportunities. And a dictator from a minority sect which was despised by most Moslems meant there was suddenly a chance for little men, failed men, to rise in society.

***

Ziad found his new life — in espionage. He was hired by one of the new men, a captain in Syrian intelligence whose agency ran a Palestinian militia which was establishing itself in southern Lebanon, after having been expelled from Jordan. The new Syrian government was continuing the old government's policy of not mounting operations against Israel from Syria itself, to avoid reprisals. With Jordan now closed to the PLO militias, the Syrian secret services were redirecting their money and arms into Lebanon.

The intelligence agency Ziad worked for was one of a dozen secret services maintained by the Syrians.

These secret services were independent of each other in their budgets and tasks and authority. All of them kept their own files, controlled their own agents, and pursued the goals set for them by the man at the top of their organization, who might be a major or a colonel, a minister or the president. Some of the intelligence agencies were much larger than others, with those run by the army and the defense ministry being the largest of all. But size didn't necessarily signify importance. An agency employing many thousands might not be as influential, at a given time, as a much more secret organization with only a few dozen key agents.

These intelligence agencies operated out of the defense ministry, the foreign ministry, the interior ministry, the army, the Baath, the president's office — all the centers of power in Syria.

The agencies were seldom separated into the usual spheres of intelligence: foreign or domestic, espionage or counterespionage. Most of them worked both sides of any question, since friends and enemies abroad were as crucial to the power center in Syria as friends and enemies at home. Nor were the military and political functions separate, since there was no strength in one without the other. The military agencies also had political targets, and the civilian agencies also worked in the army.

Some of the Syrian intelligence agencies had more specialized interests. The Baath Party in Syria had long run an intelligence agency devoted solely to Iraq, where a Baathist party was also in power. This civilian service concentrated on manipulating and subverting Baathists of consequence in Baghdad, under the guise of fraternal relations with like-minded comrades, while countering the constant subversion by Iraqi Baathists in Damascus.

Egypt, as the largest Arab country, was another special case. In the past Syria had been briefly controlled by Egypt in a political union, and there were still pro-Egyptian officers in the intelligence agencies run by the army and the defense ministry. But the intelligence agencies run by the interior ministry were fervently anti-Egyptian. Jordan, as a neighbor, was the province of the secret services run by the army and the foreign ministry. Liaison with the KGB was ostensibly handled by a secret service in the foreign ministry and another in the defense ministry, but in fact a second defense ministry agency was deeply involved.

As a matter of course most Syrian intelligence agencies tried to penetrate each other, or at least have a source in the others with access to some of the files. This was done most aggressively by the secret services run by the Baath — its civilian wing, its military wing — which planted men wherever it could in addition to its regular counterintelligence service, which it ran as a counterweight to the counterintelligence service run by the interior ministry.

Secret money from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf oil states, an important source of funds for covert operations, was another special case and was channeled through the secret services of the defense ministry. But other agencies could acquire it for selected targets, or if they had the right connections. In one way or another all the Syrian secret services operated in Lebanon and all of them used Palestinians. In the Middle East, Beirut was the meeting place for the agents of every secret service, not just those of Syria, and the Palestinians were the foot soldiers and mercenaries who ran the errands.

A gigantic Mafia-style operation was the way Tajar described Beirut. Lebanon, he said, is gangsterism on a scale the world has never even imagined before.

Lastly in Damascus, there were the small secret services run directly by the president's office, the most special case of all. In the past these highly clandestine services had never been involved in field operations.

Their job was to keep the president informed on the other agencies, even though in order to get where he was the president would already have been in control of some combination of the army and defense ministry intelligence agencies, and more recently those of the Baath as well.

These competing secret services in Damascus were always in the process of splitting apart and swallowing each other as fortune changed and a new group or new individuals gained power at the expense of others.

The agencies sprang up, disappeared, completely altered their targets and size and influence.

Sub-departments drifted away over a weekend to find a new home in another agency, or were liquidated, or suddenly became independent in another ministry on the other side of town. Even the most stable among them — the military intelligence agencies — radically shifted in importance as power accrued in some army field command or was pulled back into the central offices of the defense ministry. What was astonishing was that the total number of secret services in Syria — twelve — remained constant and had done so since the end of the Second World War, when the French left.

This devious confusion bewildered the Syrians as much as anyone, but fortunately for the Runner there was an expert who understood the Syrian intelligence services far better than most Syrians did, certainly far better than any other non-Syrian. That man of course was Tajar, for decades the Mossad's wizard on arcane Arab lore of any kind.

It's the magic number twelve that has always puzzled me, Tajar once said to Yossi. No other country in the world has half that many intelligence agencies, but the Syrians always do. Why? It's curious. Why have all these fellows tripping over each other? The Russians get along with just one or two. The Americans, who like free enterprise and competition, allow for three or four. And all other countries, even the most untrusting and paranoid, make do with no more than that. But not the Syrians. The Syrians insist on a dozen of the monsters. What a headache. How can they keep track of anything? The cost, the duplication, the inefficiency

— it's simply staggering. From time to time one of the Syrian agencies gets greedy and gobbles up three or four of the others, and you think some sense is in the air, some logic, the powerful are doing what you expect the powerful to do. But what happens? A few months go by and three or four new agencies have suddenly oozed their way into being, mysteriously squeezing in from the sidelines somewhere. It's extraordinary and I've never been able to explain it adequately. It's some kind of natural law of Syrian secret services, an archetypal infatuation with chaos, a passionate embrace of ultimate suspicion. Perhaps it's a state of mind that comes with centuries of having your destiny in the hands of foreigners. Of course the Italians and Greeks have these tendencies in a minor way, so some of it may be simply Mediterranean anarchy: the sun beats down, the skies are always fair, one can't help but imagine real things must be going on around the corner and undercover and out of sight. . . . But no matter. When it comes to sheer distrust, no one in the world compares to the Syrians. It's their unique contribution, on the order of the pyramids of Egypt. Like the pyramids, their distrust is monumental. As for the natural law and the magic number, that practice may have gotten started eight hundred years ago when Salah al-din was riding out of Damascus, leading the Moslem forces against the Crusaders and throwing the foreign devils out of the Middle East bit by bit. We all know he was a great general who managed for a time to get all the Moslems behind him, but as a Kurd he must have had his doubts.

About? Yossi had asked, and Tajar had nodded, laughing.

My point exactly, Tajar had replied. About everything and everyone, I suspect. That's why he was such a great and glorious general and such a successful leader, because he did have so many doubts. So many, in fact, that he knew one intelligence agency wouldn't do the job. Not even three or four would do the job. He had too many elements to contend with in his own forces, so he conceived the idea of a dozen secret services to keep a balance to things. And perhaps that memory became deeply embedded in the Syrian psyche eight hundred years ago and has been there ever since: for success, no less than twelve will do, like a country with its tribes. . . . Why not, Yossi? It's as reasonable an explanation as any other. Because it just makes no sense that a country should always have a dozen intelligence agencies when the powerful ones are continually gobbling up the less powerful ones. Surely from any rational point of view, it's incomprehensible. .

. .

Oddly, as if to substantiate Tajar's quaint theory, the new man Ziad called el presidente, Syria's first dictator in centuries, didn't change the system. What he did do was have all of Syria's twelve intelligence agencies report directly to him — something that had never happened before, or at least not since the time of Salah al-din, as mythically described by Tajar.

FOUR

After a lifetime in the poverty and Moslem austerity of Damascus, Beirut was a new world for Ziad. The bars and nightclubs where rich Arabs from the oil countries came to escape the puritanism at home, the luxurious shops and hotels and the blond women from northern Europe, the hashish and money and sex and alcohol which were everywhere, the cheerful avarice and blatant intrigue, the ever-changing parade of Europeans and other foreigners seeking quick profit from the sheiks and oil millionaires on holiday — it was all a lurid fantasy of material and erotic plenty, ripe with decadence.

And Ziad loved to think of himself as a spy. He found it immensely exhilarating to have a clandestine purpose and to be passing himself off as a foreign correspondent in Beirut. Now that he was a secret agent embarked on mysterious international missions, who could say what might follow? Perhaps these trips to Lebanon, he mused with Halim, were only the beginning of much greater opportunities. Perhaps they might even lead to a career in Europe, in Paris?

In fact Ziad was merely a low-level courier. Using his newspaper work as cover for his forays, he carried money and directives to the Palestinian militia in southern Lebanon controlled by his captain's agency. He left Damascus early in the morning, sharing an oversized taxi with six other passengers, strangers, Syrians and Palestinians with business to do in Beirut. The passengers were all nonchalantly puffing cigarettes and pretending not to look at each other, Ziad smoking as many cigarettes as anyone. In appearance the group was as ordinary as any band of messengers and thugs setting out for a day's work in Lebanon. The elongated Mercedes became an impenetrable cocoon of smoke as Ziad huddled in one of the jump seats, safe in the middle of the car with a noncommittal smile on his face. They raced across the valleys and down the mountains, scattering goats and peasants and donkeys, horn blaring without letup, hurtling toward the glittering skyline of Beirut rising high above the Mediterranean.

From Beirut Ziad slipped off south by buses and taxis to the refugee camps in the south, returning by the same route with sealed envelopes for his captain in Damascus. Often he slept in the camps. When he was lucky he managed a night or two in Beirut, staying at some cheap hotel which doubled as a brothel.

His captain had given him a briefcase with a false bottom, which he was very proud of. In this false bottom he carried the money and directives in sealed envelopes. He had been told never to let the briefcase out of his sight and therefore took it with him when he went out in the evening to prowl Beirut's bars and nightclubs. In order to stretch his meager pocket money, he did his serious drinking at the open-air stands for laborers which were to be found in any alley. There he would throw off tumblers of cheap arak, then chew mints to mask the smell of arak on his breath as he wandered deeper into the night, examining the photographs on display by red-leather doors and savoring the florid promises of extravagant floor shows, the special acts of obscenity direct from Sweden and Holland and Germany, listening in evil-smelling alleys to the whispered offers of smooth-faced boys and giant glistening black women from the Sudan, knowing that somewhere behind one of these grimy doorways the ritual of a French circus was taking place — a small amphitheater heavy with peculiar animal odors and the smoke of hashish, the narrow wooden benches in utter darkness above a sawdust-covered pit lit by bright lights, deafening music pounding the fetid air, two sweaty handlers in the pit, a male donkey between them with a rag tied over its face, the beast in a frenzy and bucking wildly because the mask over its eyes and nostrils gave off the pungent scent of a mare in heat, and beneath the donkey a slovenly fat woman insensate from drugs, heaving in the harness that held her.

And then finding his own place at last behind a red-leather door, his private little corner in some nightclub for the evening, a stool in a dim crowded room where he could lean on the bar when he felt dizzy and sniff his single Scotch and have a clear view of the floor show, of the blond women moaning with their snakes and cucumbers in the harsh white glare of the spotlight, then squatting on the fringes of darkness to suck up thick phallic rolls of money from outstretched, straddled hands, the wandering pink and blue searchlights of the room playing over his face and catching his eager smile in garish half-tones . . . an adventurer ready for the world, ready for anything.

To Ziad these private evenings of isolation in the alleys of Beirut were a baroque fugue of sin, a dream of wickedness far removed from the pathetic sexuality he had known his whole life: alone in his barren, wretched room at night, furtively pouring over magazines of naked women as his right hand churned and his mind danced through a phantasmagoria of human parts. Yet it wasn't that he couldn't have wanted more than pornography from sex. Sometimes he did imagine more when he saw a romantic French film in Beirut. It was just that sexual reality for him was always reduced to pornography by the harsh ways of his society, by the strict separation of men and women and the primal fears of his religion.

He did a minor trade in Swiss watches, smuggling one or two at a time into Syria in the false bottom of his briefcase, along with the sealed envelopes. One night in Beirut, drunker than he realized and made forgetful by the enchanting pink and blue lights, he left his briefcase in a bar. The moment he awoke the next morning with a shattering headache, he knew what had happened. He vomited in the sink of his sordid hotel room and rushed through town to the bar, where a cleaning man knew nothing. Miserable and sick, Ziad sat in the foyer until a man in a suit finally showed up at noon and retrieved the briefcase from a cupboard, which also revealed a shoe and a cane and a soiled address book, the lost-and-found remnants from the previous evening of glory. Ziad tipped the man outrageously and rushed back to his hotel room to examine the false bottom of the briefcase. It hadn't been opened. One of his hairs was still pasted across the secret opening inside — a trick he had learned from a spy movie. He was ecstatic and celebrated by getting drunk in an alley behind the hotel.

Ziad was absurdly enthusiastic over his new role and had to tell Halim all about it. He told Halim far more than he should have and Halim was seriously concerned for his friend's safety, both with his employer and in Lebanon itself. Ziad didn't seem to realize that along with its freedom and glitter, Beirut was a city of real danger. The bars of Beirut were not the same as the coffeehouses of Damascus, which Ziad had grown up with and understood intuitively. Life could be dangerous in Damascus, but Syria was also ruled. Only those in authority could kill people. The dangers of Beirut, with its gangsterism, were totally different.

Halim was worried by his friend's reckless behavior. He felt he had to caution Ziad. Halim knew Beirut well from the export-import business he had done there over the years, and he knew a briefcase carried into bars and alleys at night could be mistaken for something worth stealing, a delivery of drugs or foreign currency.

There were safe places to store baggage — lockers with keys in public places. Thus under the guise of warning his friend in a practical way, the Runner now found himself in the odd position of training Ziad in some of the fundamentals of his new job in Syrian espionage.

Fortunately for Halim, there was never any question of the Runner having to use what he learned from Ziad.

Ziad's kind of low-level information was readily available to the Mossad in Lebanon. The Runner operated at a much higher level, using as sources the well-placed Palestinians whom he had befriended years ago in the refugee camps of Jordan.

***

The KGB began to find Damascus a hazardous place from which to direct the PLO agents of its terrorist campaign in Europe. The Syrians ran so many Palestinian groups of their own, for so many different purposes, that the Russians were finding it impossible to maintain security among their Palestinians. The Syrian intelligence agencies routinely penetrated each other, and although the KGB's use of the PLO wasn't a target for them, information on the KGB's operations invariably slipped out. To regain security, the KGB

moved the headquarters for its European terrorist campaign to the island of Cyprus. There, the internal conflict was between Greeks and Turks and the KGB could exert greater control over its Palestinian agents flying in and out of Europe.

Unhappily, it means the Runner is going to have much less to tell us about airplane hijackings and other things, Tajar said to General Ben-Zvi, the director of the Mossad. But I suppose it was inevitable that the Russians should learn their lesson like everyone else. Having the Syrians as allies is one thing, but working out of Damascus is another. As the Egyptians used to say, quoting their brothers the Iraqis, who had it from their brothers the Jordanians, who borrowed the saying from their brothers the Palestinians, who were repeating an old proverb of their brothers the Lebanese: With brothers like the Syrians, who needs? . . .

Led by Sadat of Egypt, the October war of 1973 was launched against Israel. Syria's tank brigades fought well on the Golan Heights and briefly it looked as if they might win back the territory taken by Israel in the Six-Day War. But Israeli air power was too sophisticated for the Syrians and their army was beaten with dreadful losses. Once more Ziad came to sit through long evenings with Halim on his friend's broad empty verandahs, above the overgrown gardens where the villa's solitary broken statues could be glimpsed among the trees and hanging vines, elegiac guardians of lost memories.

Ziad was especially gloomy. It's hopeless, he said. I was sure we were at least going to break even this time.

But no matter how well we fight, we lose anyway. The Russians give us last year's weapons in abundance, but the Americans give the Israelis next year's weapons and there's no comparison. Courage has nothing to do with it. Technology decides the outcome and we can never fight them as equals. If we did we might win, and who knows, maybe even the Russians don't want that. What's the point of it all? We're simply used as murderous toys. . . .

As after the previous war, the Russians rearmed the Syrians with improved weaponry and the Americans rearmed the Israelis accordingly. In matters of electronic guidance for shells and missiles and bombs, and counterelectronic systems to overrule them, nothing could compare to tests under actual battlefield conditions.

More then ever Beirut flourished as the Middle Eastern entrepôt for pleasure and money and arms and drugs, the convenient meeting place for everyone with something or someone to buy or to rent or to sell. The oil embargoes had arrived with the October war and oil became the great black weapon of the world as the price shot up. The industrial nations of Europe scrambled to strike covert deals with the sheiks of the desert.

Enormous sums were to be made by entrepreneurs at every level. Western banks and corporations came to Beirut to help the oil princes dispose of their stupendous new wealth. And everyone in Beirut had to be serviced: the bankers and sheiks and corporations, the myriad business representatives from every country with oil or in need of oil, the arms dealers and smugglers, the drug merchants from Africa and the West, the intelligence agencies from all the countries of the Middle East, the intelligence agencies from the major countries of Eastern and Western Europe, and the biggest players of all with their spy satellites roaming the heavens — the KGB and the CIA.

Plots and schemes and trade. This for that in Beirut, with a cut for the smiling industrious people who provided the sun and the waterskiing, the seaside hotels and the dark back alleys, the appropriate setting for any transaction.

Trade in every guise had been the vocation of the Lebanese coast since the time of the Phoenicians, five thousand years ago. The temples of true believers had always been elsewhere, beside the Nile and the Tigris and the Euphrates and in Jerusalem and Damascus.

***

It was almost a surprise for Halim to realize how great a distance the Runner had traveled in the last years. A pattern had settled over his business enterprises and he no longer had to concern himself much about them, now that he wasn't trying to start up in new fields. The same earnest manager still ran his office in the building that had the Hotel Brittany on the top floor. The man had been with him more than a decade and they were old friends. Halim seldom had to interfere with his decisions.

In addition to his export-import business, Halim was generally involved in two or three partnerships which turned some profit. He wasn't wealthy but he was successful for a Syrian. He gave part of his income to charity as would any worthy Moslem in his position. The Runner's back-up team was Tajar's expense, but the Runner himself cost the Mossad nothing. In any case the back-up team was smaller than it had been before the Six-Day War, when the Runner was concentrating on tactical intelligence and moving a great deal of material, quickly. The cupboard-toilet dead drop was almost never used anymore.

Halim still rose early and walked to work for the exercise, taking different routes to vary the scenery. By now he knew hundreds of people along the way, familiar faces from over the years who greeted him and passed along the neighborhood news, sold him his cigarettes and newspaper, inveigled him to pause for a Turkish coffee. When he entered the lobby of his office building, the Tatar horseman on guard there solemnly raised his antique Mauser rifle with the red tassel at its end, in the morning ritual of salute. Halim conferred with his manager and dropped in on his bookkeepers, always a pleasantly nostalgic pastime for the boy hidden away in him who had once done bookkeeping.

At least once a week he rode the creaky cage-lift up to the top floor to have coffee in the hotel lounge and visit with his old friends who still worked there. He went out and walked to appointments in downtown Damascus, then met a business acquaintance for lunch near Martyrs' Square or by the river. He took a taxi home after lunch and observed the siesta hours, unplugging his phone and resting or reading until late afternoon, when he was known to be at home to visitors. He carried the phone out to the gathering of chairs beneath his fig tree, and there people came and went.

Halim welcomed them all, his Syrian friends, his Palestinian friends. He listened and advised and helped when he could. His friends knew where to find him and came around the house through the garden, after first calling and setting a time. Halim boiled Turkish coffee for every guest and later set up a table with drinks beneath the fig tree. It was a comfortable setting, relaxed and private. Occasionally he went on to dinner with some of his visitors but returned home early to read and listen to music. Several times a week he met one of his women friends for dinner at a restaurant beside the Barada, but even then he was home early the next morning to change clothes and walk to the office. It was a single man's regular life of work and routine, friends and commonplace pleasures.

Life was also a nexus in the usual Arab fashion. His office manager was a cousin of the machinery company owner who had been his first business partner in Damascus, the man he had met over dinner in the Hotel Brittany. The owner had now retired from his company and been replaced by his son, whom Halim served as a senior business adviser. Halim had been given a place of honor in the son's wedding and was an unofficial uncle to his firstborn, a boy. Halim had also helped his manager by guaranteeing a loan for a new apartment.

Halim's cleaning woman, who arrived in the morning and worked until he returned home in the early afternoon, was a poor relation of the manager's wife from a village in the north. And so it went, with obligation and loyalty tightly connected in the usual manner of a traditional society.

The pain Yossi used to feel over Assaf was hardly there anymore. Very slowly the torment had dimmed, the anguish receded. Halim still experienced it sometimes when he was alone in the garden, not in the house.

But even then the feeling was remote, a memory rather than a physical sensation that suddenly gripped his chest and threatened to strangle his heart, as it once had done. Only the sadness afterward was the same, the immense longing he was left with when the spasm passed, an emptiness for what was gone.

As if in compensation for his loss, a small compensation but nonetheless real, he had come to love his old house again. Here he had suffered and survived his terrible anguish and now it was truly his home, his place in the world. He loved its crumbling grandeur and tangled gardens, its noble old-fashioned rooms with their great window-doors opening onto the verandahs. He felt safe and comfortable sitting beside the fire on rainy winter nights, listening to music, and never tired of wandering along the verandahs on warm evenings and gazing up at the stars. Israel seemed very far away to him now and more than ever a dream, an imagined place. It was over there, like Ziad's dream of Europe and Paris: a distant place and beautiful, a rare and certain treasure to be loved, to be cherished, pure as only an abstraction can be.

But there was never anything abstract about Tajar in his thoughts. Tajar was also far away but Tajar was his dearest friend and more, his father and brother and keeper, the conscience of his finer self. He felt so close to Tajar that he often spoke of him in conversations with friends in Damascus, under the pretext of recalling the widower-cousin in Argentina who had given him his start in life. Naturally, this was most true with Ziad. It was curious but in some ways Ziad was more familiar with Tajar — under a different name, in a different time and place — than he was with almost anyone else in the world, save for Halim himself.

Halim had always hoped Anna would remarry, and his memories of her had an idyllic charm to them. The memories dwelled on the intensity of their lives at the little settlement in the Negev that was soon to fall. . . .

Those few huts in the vastness of the desert. The still nights and glorious sunrises. The two of them together at the dawn of the world when hope and love had sparkled in the very grains of sand sifting through their fingers.

The women he knew now were loving in their way, but it could never be the same again because he wasn't the same. Now, the unfathomable joys and sadness of life were no longer still ahead of him.

Yet he had achieved what he always wanted. He had been determined to create his own life and that was exactly what he had done, with Tajar's help. Choice after choice, decision after decision, he had pushed on to create Halim, the Runner, himself — a long and arduous journey. And he was here in this house, and the accomplishment was unique. He knew that.

But there were also strange moments of indefinable power when Halim saw something else. On evenings when there was a moon and his overgrown garden came alive with shadows and eerie moonglow, he sometimes found himself gazing down from the verandahs and glimpsing ghosts among the trees. These were the broken, discolored statues he had inherited with his old house. The clearings that had once surrounded the solitary statues, like the paths that led to them, had long since been lost to vines and bushes and hanging branches. He knew they were no more than statues, and yet they would suddenly rise up to haunt him as images of the important people in his life — Anna, Assaf, Tajar, Ziad. . . . Each statue solemnly off by itself. An enduring stately presence in its own secret grove. A mystery standing alone in the moonlight.

There were so few of them, so few people in his life. But were there more in any man's life?

He wondered about that. He also wondered about the conceits of solitude. Because lately, as if to mock these illusions, another ghost had abruptly begun to appear in his garden at night.

Yes, Bell. That crooked, shattered, fate-blasted face . . . smiling in broken discolored marble. Of all the ghosts only Bell seemed to smile, and Halim found this oddly appealing. The idea intrigued and amused him at the same time because to his mind, the hermit of Jericho was the ultimate spirit of disguise. Who but God, after all, could ever create a mask as unworldly as Bell's face?

***

Ziad continued to make his regular trips to the squalid refugee camps in southern Lebanon. The practical training given him by Halim was to bring him to the notice of his superiors, with unexpected results.

The Runner operation, through no fault of the Runner himself, entered a period of torpor which was vaguely troubling to Tajar. Before the 1973 war the Mossad was almost totally occupied with the international terrorist campaign of the PLO, so effectively financed and directed by the KGB. The director of the Mossad, General Ben-Zvi, spent all his time on it. When the KGB transferred control of the campaign from Damascus to Cyprus, Tajar and the Runner operation slipped in importance for a time. But that was to change.

Looking back later, Halim was able to see it all clearly enough. Wars marked the great changes in the life of the Runner: the Six-Day War in June 1967, the Yom Kippur War in October 1973. Up until the June war he had lived as two people, as Yossi and Halim, with part of himself still in Israel and another part in Syria. From then until the October war he had gone through the painful process of learning to be but one man in Damascus — Halim. And thereafter came the third great shift in his career, which was to involve him so intimately with Lebanon.

Of course both Halim and Tajar had always known this third stage would come. It was only to be expected that sooner or later, one of the important Syrian intelligence agencies would make Halim an offer he couldn't refuse.

FIVE

Halim had come to know Bell at Tajar's suggestion, in order to add a different dimension of time to the Runner's life, as Tajar had said then, when Jericho was still part of Jordan. Yet Tajar didn't renew his own acquaintance with Bell when the opportunity came after the Six-Day War. The reason Tajar gave himself for this was professional. It was a matter of security. Assaf had become closely connected to the house in the orange grove in Jericho, through his friendship with the fugitive Yousef.

The excuse was plausible and even real, but it wasn't in Tajar's nature to fool himself, and he also knew how easily the demands of security could be adapted to personal needs. The secrecy of espionage wasn't always a mask presented to others. It could also be a mask to oneself, a hiding place, and in fact there were deeply personal reasons why Tajar hadn't gone to see Bell.

The most important was that Bell had once lived Tajar's kind of life but had gone on to choose a different path.

Tajar was a little afraid of that. And then there was the fact that Bell had once been the grand master of espionage and Tajar the novitiate, long ago in the Monastery in Egypt. And finally, there were Anna's feelings for Bell.

So it was complicated and there were many subtle reasons why Tajar had put off his journey to Jericho. But the passage of the years changed that, especially the profound despair Tajar felt after the Yom Kippur War.

Suddenly delay and caution seemed futile. Why go on avoiding Bell? All at once it seemed a cowardly act of omission in facing himself. He decided to make his pilgrimage to Jericho and not surprisingly, the decision brought a kind of relief that lightened his heart.

***

Everything having to do with Bell tended to be unique in Tajar's eyes, and he would never forget their first meeting after a lapse of thirty years. Tajar turned up at Bell's gate early one summer morning when it was likely Bell would be alone on his front porch. The iron gate creaked noisily under his hand. He took a deep breath and called out: Anyone at home among God's oranges?

The insects buzzed in the orange grove. Tajar imagined his feet being studied beneath the trees, from the porch. No, Bell wouldn't recognize these old shoes with the aluminum crutches planted beside them. A generous, welcoming voice came back: But for the grace of God we are all strangers at a strange gate.

And so it began. Tajar shuffled forward through the orange grove and there was Bell standing in front of his dilapidated chair, looking exactly as Tajar remembered him. With a face like that, a man didn't change. Tajar stopped in front of the porch, smiling broadly.

The last time we met was by the Nile, said Tajar. I learned a great deal from you then, but it's the student who remembers the teacher, isn't it? I had legs in those days and you took me for a walk in the desert to help me and calm me, because I was frightened. I was leaving on a mission that night which seemed very dangerous, and you said . . .

***

Bell was pleased to see Tajar, who was surprised at how well Bell remembered him. When he had served under Bell during the Second World War, Tajar had been no one of any particular importance, merely another of those experts in disguise, the anonymous Monks, who were sent on long-range missions by Bell's secret organization hidden away in the desert near Cairo. Yet as soon as Bell placed him, which he did very quickly, the recollections came back at once.

Just as surprising, Bell seemed totally unconcerned that Tajar had turned up on his porch that morning.

Without quite putting it in words, Tajar hinted that intelligence had become his career. Yet Bell seemed to accept his unexpected appearance as a commonplace event. For the hermit, apparently, all things were equally routine and fantastic. Bell was as relaxed as Tajar himself would have been at home in his hammock, contemplating his rosebushes.

They talked of many things, going back to the time when they had known each other three decades ago in Egypt.

And so you went on to do important work, said Bell. You must be very proud of that. It's a splendid way to spend one's life. If I'd had a cause such as yours ahead of me, the building of a homeland, my life would have been very different. But there was nothing so grand waiting for me at the end of the Second World War, in fact nothing grand at all. Quite the contrary. What lay ahead seemed petty and mean and narrow. The days of the British Empire were over and it was obvious they would be trying to withdraw with a measure of order, which meant fighting ugly little wars of retreat. I wanted no part of it. And because I'd been born in India and had never really lived in England, I suddenly found myself a man without a country. Permanent exile seemed to be all there was, so I ended up here.

Bell smiled in his strange twisted way.

Like all men I was born at the wrong time, he said. A mostly blind Argentine wrote that. It's miraculous to. me what people see despite the darkness and anguish they live in. Mostly we hear the roar of the world but there are real tunes of glory and this land, more than most, has heard them. Perhaps that's why it has always been fought over. . . .

When he opened Bell's gate that morning Tajar still hadn't decided whether to mention Anna, which also meant speaking of Assaf. He had hoped the candor between Bell and himself would go that far, and now after only a few hours it seemed completely natural to speak of them. Bell was excited and pleased and showed it.

How fortunate you are to have known her all these years, he said. Bell spoke of his fondness for Assaf, and then of the lost Yousef and the dead Ali. After that, he fell silent.

Better to say it? asked Tajar at last.

Oh yes, replied Bell. I was thinking of Anna. Of all my acts of cowardice and stupidity, none compares to that piece of folly. Once in Jerusalem I had the whole world within reach and I let it go, let her go, turned away. It was utterly inexcusable and I've never forgiven myself for it. Fools that we are, we learn everything too late. It seems unimaginable to me now. Why did I do it? How? But there are no answers to comfort a human heart, or to justify or explain it, and the tragedy is always the same. Love was there and I lost it, I turned away. Oh yes. . . .

The time came for Tajar to leave, the long morning of remembrance and renewal at an end. Bell walked with him to the gate.

My car is just down the way, said Tajar. I'll come again.

They embraced and Tajar began hobbling away. Bell leaned on the gate watching him go. The road was deserted in the midday heat and Tajar hadn't gone very far when a thought came to Bell.

That evening we walked in the desert, Bell called out. The time when you were leaving that night. Where were you going?

Tajar stopped and turned his head. To Syria, he called back. I was on my way to Damascus and it seemed very dangerous, but you pulled me through.

He waved a crutch in salute and hobbled on down the road, raising little puffs of dust with his crutches.

***

Tajar drove slowly out of Jericho that day, working the special hand levers in his old car that made it possible for him to drive without legs. He went slowly because he was reluctant to leave the bright colors of the oasis, the splashes of purple bougainvillea and orange-red flamboyants, and to leave Bell and the house in the orange grove. He was thinking how aware Bell was of the advantages of his, Tajar's, life and what he had done with the years. Of course. Tajar had been busy in the world and his mark was deep on men's affairs. Yet it was human nature to miss what you lacked and Tajar couldn't help but think how appealing Bell's life seemed, with its solitude.

Tajar laughed at himself, at his own weakness for misgivings. If Bell had been in his place in life, Bell would have done exactly what he had done for the last thirty years. Tajar knew that for a fact. And if he had been Bell, well then naturally. . . .

All the same, it was fascinating how the dream could change.

He was thinking of his father and his father's father, those pious poor rabbis who had endured the squalor and oppression of Jerusalem under the Turks, men of profound longing for whom the Holy City on the mountain had always been an imaginary place, an unrealizable dream, much as it was for Bell, who had lost the great love of his life there. Yet for he who had been born in Jerusalem and lived there and had come to know it as the capital of his country — for Tajar — his imagination was now turning elsewhere, he found. Bell was the one who was in exile, seemingly in exile. He wasn't. And yet?

Tajar smiled at his musings that day. He shook his head and laughed as he busily pushed and pulled levers, driving his car without legs up the mountain. The road curved and he caught a last glimpse back at the plains of Jericho and the Dead Sea, and beyond them the hills of Moab where God had shown Moses the promised land which Moses could never enter.

Of course we learn everything too late, thought Tajar. Life, our Jericho crossing, our Jericho mosaic . . . there it is forever glimpsed from afar.

***

After Tajar left, Bell stood lost in a reverie with the fierce sun beating down on him. What a splendid man he is, Bell kept thinking. What a grand life he has built for himself since we knew each other so long ago.

Bell, alone in retreat all these years, had only two or three friends for whom he counted, whereas Tajar, this hobbling and smiling cripple from the mountain, had tirelessly pursued his worthy cause and truly become a world to many people. Inevitably, thought Bell, a paucity of giving is the affliction of one who cuts himself off.

But why have I done that? Why have I become a recluse?

He stood in the dense sunlight gazing at his porch, at the tattered chair and the old table with its worn dusty goods. All at once this shabby evidence of his days seemed a profoundly naked display, a pitiful collection of junk to be left behind one day as proof he had lived here. He crossed the porch and wandered through his rooms, aware there was almost nothing in them. They were so bare it was as if no one at all lived here, or at best some transient putting up for a night or two.

Bell felt exhausted, drained. He went out the back door and fled to his grape arbor to escape the waste of his life. This shabby emptiness . . . what was the use of it? Tajar had been so pleased to see him, but Tajar remembered another man who had gone by a different name in Egypt, a clever and determined man of great power, the secret leader of the Monastery whom Tajar recalled with respect . . . looking back.

But of course Bell wasn't that man anymore. Tajar was. It was Tajar who helped people to do more and be more, who gave back light from the darkness of the times, who smiled merrily and kicked up little puffs of dust on the difficult road to somewhere, while Bell lapsed ever deeper in his dream of a crumbling nowhere, a recluse in timeless Jericho, absorbed in the rhythms of the sun and the swelling hum and shade of his orange grove.

This house, this life, thought Bell. This unspeakable shabbiness . . . it's appalling.

In fact it was so appalling it made him smile. For even Bell was sometimes surprised at how far he had gone in creating his own world, where everything was in harmony with his being.

***

When Abu Musa arrived late that afternoon for the daily shesh-besh session with Moses the Ethiopian, Bell was still sitting in the grape arbor, his round single eye a full stop in the question of the universe.

What's this? thought Abu Musa. Off by himself without even a large empty glass of arak in his twisted claw?

Only the memory of a lost love in Jerusalem could keep our resident holy man from a drink at this time of day. Obviously he needs a jolt. Even a holy man can doubt himself.

Stealthily, Abu Musa went up on tiptoe. Bell was too absorbed to hear anything but he did sense a movement and all at once he saw Abu Musa's great noble head, dark-skinned and white-maned, gazing solemnly down at him from among the grapes at the end of the arbor. There was no body with the head. The foliage hid that.

There was simply Abu Musa's huge serene face among the sun-streaked grapes, a magnificent vision of mankind adrift amidst nature's fruits.

My God, murmured Bell with a start.

I am black but comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, boomed the head. Look not upon me that I am swarthy, that the sun hath tanned me.

The head wagged roguishly and disappeared. Laughing and sighing and snorting all at once, Abu Musa came waddling into the arbor and settled his bulk on a bench. The quotation was from the Song of Songs, he said, good King Solomon's discourse on love and lovemaking. Moses had taught it to him and he particularly liked that phrase, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, because it suggested the sensual mysteries and flowering courtyards of a sumptuous harem. Solomon had had innumerable wives and concubines, he added, and surely it was a wise king who replenished his wisdom regularly in the heat of summer afternoons.

Bell smiled. In his roundabout way Abu Musa was reasserting his belief that nothing revived the spirit so well as love and lovemaking. But given Bell's status as a hermit and holy man, Abu Musa quickly moved on to his second-best solution for any problem, which was a tale. Abu Musa loved to tell stories and he now launched into a convoluted account of Crusader ruins in desolate places. According to him, the reason the Crusaders had lost out in the Holy Land was because of their underwear. Most of them had come from France and Germany and had insisted on wearing the same heavy sheepskin underwear they had used for the cold damp winters at home.

In the long summers we have here? asked Abu Musa. Tufts of sheepskin squeezed in under all that tight-fitting armor? Can we even begin to imagine the intolerable itching?

Abu Musa shuddered at his own description. Quickly he reached down to give his genitals a thoughtful scratch and realignment through the loose folds of his faded blue galabieh. In other words, he concluded, it's futile to bring your prejudices with you when you go in search of the Holy Land. That's not what the land is about.

Bell laughed. What is the land about then? he asked.

Abu Musa looked even more thoughtful. Dust and oranges? he replied. A dream of man's spirit freed at last from the fervor of fanaticism? Cool water and shade and the talk of friends at the end of the day? For a wise king, hot summer afternoons of love. And for a holy man, smiling on all this because it is right and good.

And yet nowhere in the world has there been more fervor and fanaticism than here, said Bell. And why is that, when all great men of all religions have always preached otherwise?

Why? said Abu Musa. Because great men understand dust and oranges far better than the rest of us.

Because they know man is dust and oranges. Because they know all the rest of it is simply the clatter and dice of a shesh-besh game, a run of chance and skill which we all play and refer to as life . . . clatter and dice, dice and clatter. So come now. Moses and the very finest chatter await us on your front porch, and you and I know a man is always in the right place when he's in Jericho. . . .

***

That evening after the shesh-besh players left, Bell recalled the glorious vision of Abu Musa's smiling face among the sun-streaked grapes. Long ago, after the First World War, his war, Abu Musa had been briefly, joyously married. His happiness, and hers, had known no measure. His young wife had wanted to give him a son and she did, but she had died in childbirth and then a few years later the child had also died, so there was nothing. Over half a century ago. And all that time Abu Musa had honored the love in his heart with his gently lustful daydreaming, an inspiration for poetry and good humor and erotic tales, a memory to be embraced and treasured, the indomitable dream of an epic lover. Could one ever be sure, wondered Bell, who the real king was?

And again that night as so often, Bell thought of Yousef lost somewhere above Jericho in the vastness of the Judean wilderness. Oddly, it seemed to him, he also found himself thinking of a man he hadn't seen in some years, the mysterious adventurer from Damascus, Halim.

Why had Halim come to mind? Bell thought about it and decided it had to do with Tajar's unexpected visit.

The connection seemed simple enough. The last time he had seen Tajar, three decades ago beside the Nile, Tajar had been leaving on a mission to Damascus. And as it happened Bell knew only one man in Damascus, Halim, the Arab patriot Yousef revered and had always wanted so much to meet.

Bell smiled to himself in the darkness of the grape arbor where he had gone once more to sit. Tajar, Halim, Yousef . . . why was he suddenly trying to make something of these associations? The connections were only in his own mind. Moreover, it had been years since he had thought this way. It was Monastery thinking, he knew, the mirrors and reflections of the secret world of intelligence which he had left behind long ago in Egypt, only briefly resurrected today because of the appearance of Tajar. For Tajar was still a traveler in that other world of secret knowledge and probably Halim was too, although Halim lived across the river on the other side of the Great Afro-Syrian Rift that ran through Jericho. Halim and Tajar were enemies, of course, in the implacable temporal struggle of Arab against Jew.

And Yousef? Also a traveler in another world, but one that was even more obscure and inaccessible than espionage — the stark, sun-blasted landscape of lunar chasms called the Judean wilderness, where his human soul could know no bounds or comfort at all. Ineffable was Yousef. A spirit lost to the regular ways of men.

Tajar, Halim, Yousef . . . Three totally different reflections of the fabled land where all great men had always preached freedom from fanaticism. It was Monastery thinking, but the more he thought about them the more he connected them in his imagination: a Jewish masterspy in Jerusalem, a Moslem patriot in Damascus, a Christian schoolteacher hiding in the caves of the Judean wilderness. Yet the connection had no reasonable basis. It was bizarre and arbitrary. With their conflicting dreams and journeys, what could three such men possibly share? How could they have anything in common, other than fate perhaps?

Other than fate. As if that were not enough.

Abruptly, Bell laughed at himself. Poor Tajar had merely wanted to look up a piece of his past. That was the purpose of his visit to Jericho, and why was Bell now conjuring up mysteries around the poor fellow, imagining connections that didn't exist? Was it simply because he had failed to mention that he knew Halim, Tajar's enemy in Damascus?

I'm being as convoluted as Abu Musa, thought Bell. I'm thinking in some kind of Jericho time.

Bell stirred in the warm darkness and his gaze drifted up toward the stars. But are we finally all secret worlds? he wondered.

SIX

Colonel Jundi's offer was the most extraordinary among many that Halim had received over the years. Long ago Tajar had told Yossi that a measure of the operation's success would be the length of time the Runner could function in Damascus without being recruited by Syrian intelligence. That the Runner would eventually have to become a double agent was never in doubt. It was inevitable because the more successful he was as Halim, the more attractive he would be to Syrian intelligence. Their hope was to delay it as long as possible, so that Halim would be recruited by the Syrians at a higher level.

Tajar's task was to allow this strategy to continue to exist within the Mossad. Again and again he had to convince successive directors of the Mossad that it was right for the Runner to refuse opportunities which often appeared extremely inviting.

To do this, Tajar relied on his intimate knowledge of the way the Syrians disorganized intelligence — the perennial nature of their twelve secret services. Since the Syrians didn't have a paramount intelligence agency that was going to survive as an entity, argued Tajar, it wasn't worthwhile for the Runner to devote himself to one of them. If the Runner accepted a position with a Syrian agency the Mossad would benefit for a few years, but then the Runner's reputation would suffer with the next realignment of power in Damascus, where no one was more suspect than the intelligence agents of the last regime. The Runner's independence, his ability to maneuver and make friends among the new men, whoever they might be, was far more valuable to the Mossad than any short-term gain.

The argument made sense and Tajar was allowed to have his way. The closest he ever came to losing out was when the KGB established the headquarters for its European terrorist campaign in Damascus. The Mossad's need for immediate operational information, then, was so urgent that the long-term benefits of the Runner operation might well have been sacrificed to it, if the right offer had been made to the Runner at the time. But as it happened, the KGB found it impossible to run a secure campaign from Damascus and soon moved that headquarters to Cyprus.

From a personal point of view, Tajar couldn't help but be relieved. Once more it put off the time when the Runner would have to become a double agent, with all the complications that meant. For Tajar had never envisioned the Runner operation as merely a penetration of an Arab capital. To succeed in Tajar's terms the Runner had to be pure in his support of the Arab cause. He had to be a genuine idealist — what Tajar himself might have been if the history of the Middle East had taken a different course after the First World War, when Tajar had learned to run through the multiple cultures of Jerusalem as a boy. Of course Tajar never expressed his idea in this way to the directors of the Mossad. With them he used arguments based on the terms of espionage, which were also true. But the Runner himself had always understood it, and it was the special nature of this vision that had inspired Yossi from the very beginning.

It was never easy for Halim to turn down these offers from the competing secret services in Damascus. Nor was it just the Syrians who approached him. As his reputation grew among the Palestinians, his potential value was recognized by the intelligence agencies of other countries. In Beirut especially, where he went on routine business in connection with his export-import company, he often found himself having chance meetings and chance introductions which weren't what they appeared to be. The ruling Baathists of Iraq, ostensibly Syria's closest friends and in fact its most relentless enemies, were particularly eager to recruit him. The Iraqis were the most persistent but he was also approached by the Egyptian and French services, a Lebanese Christian faction, and the Iranians of the shah. And there was a tentative inquiry that Halim suspected came from the Mossad itself.

Tajar was greatly amused to hear of this last contact. He looked into it before his next meeting with Yossi near Beirut.

True enough, Tajar told Yossi. Suspicion confirmed. I ran my own little operation inside headquarters and it turns out this man who had his eye on you was actually on the Runner back-up team in the sixties. He didn't think there was a chance in the world that Halim would bite, but his boss was so impressed by Halim's reputation he thought an effort had to be made through that Lebanese who talked to you. A bizarre turnabout, but at least it shows the Runner's security is everything it should be. . . .

With his years of experience, the Runner saw these approaches coming long before an offer was made. What he couldn't always discern was whether the offer would be professional or personal. Syrian intelligence officers often engaged in smuggling and other illegal ways of making money, and Halim as a businessman who traveled was a natural target for their schemes. But Tajar had foreseen this and Halim kept strictly to his reputation as the incorruptible one, an eccentricity in Damascus and one of those odd characteristics that made Halim unusual. To his friends, it was part of the idealism that had brought him back from Argentina in the first place.

When the approach was professional, however, and a Syrian intelligence officer began by appealing to Halim's patriotism, his reaction had to be much more intricate and subtle. With great charm Halim set out to project that quality of vision, almost of naïveté, that Ziad had felt so strongly in the early days of their friendship. Halim spoke warmly of all the important causes and his enthusiasm was real, but he also seemed hopelessly impractical when it came to politics, a dreamer who couldn't grasp the everyday facts of life in the Middle East. Perhaps it was because he had grown up in Argentina and saw Syria differently, not really the way it was. In any case he drifted off into a nonexistent realm of airy concepts and futile abstractions, talking on about Arab unity and the Palestinian cause and the Syrian role in Arab brotherhood. The Syrian officer who had thought of recruiting him would soon be accepting Halim's unspoken claim that it was only bookkeeping and basic engineering that he understood in a practical way. Certainly Halim was a patriot, but he just wasn't suited for a clandestine role. He lacked a devious eye. He lacked cunning and the essential traits of espionage. In political matters he had faith instead of understanding, an innocence that was nearly childlike in its simplicity.

Finally, the Syrian officer had no choice but to arrive at the conclusion so skillfully prepared for him. Halim only looked as if he could be useful in espionage. In fact recruitment was out of the question. Halim was a mystic and such men were always unreliable as agents, although they could be fascinating in other ways. In the end the Syrian intelligence officer went away without an agent, but with an intriguing new friend.

***

Colonel Jundi's offer was different because the times were different. The intelligence situation in Damascus had changed with the advent of the dictator, the man Ziad referred to as el presidente. There were still a dozen Syrian intelligence agencies continually shifting in size and influence, but now they all reported to the president, who used this system to absorb the energies of conflict beneath him. Ambitions were played out in intelligence rather than in open politics, and the agencies served to counterbalance each other's power.

Like the president, Colonel Jundi was from the minority Alawite sect. He was a former tank commander who had distinguished himself in the 1973 war. He ran one of the very small secret services that operated directly out of the president's office. His job was to keep watch over the internal affairs of all the Syrian secret services. To do this he used a small number of agents who reported directly to him, most of them professional employees of the various Syrian intelligence agencies, their connection to Colonel Jundi unknown within their own agencies. Colonel Jundi spied on the spies and it was the secret identity of his agents that gave him his power. He moved freely in government circles but was seldom seen at public functions. Naturally he was feared, but within the upper echelons of the intelligence agencies themselves, not in the army or the ministries at large where his true role was unsuspected. Even someone as experienced in gossip as Ziad thought Colonel Jundi was merely a minor military adviser attached to the president's office, an ex-hero with a sinecure. Another Alawite crony, Ziad called him.

Halim knew better. The dictator was far too clever to have less than a superior man in such a position. Halim had great respect for Colonel Jundi. He had met him several times but didn't know him well. His knowledge of Jundi's agency came from secondary sources and was inexact, more suggestive than anything else. Tajar had gotten into the habit of referring to Colonel Jundi as the inspector general of Syrian intelligence. It was an organizational term that a man inside might use, but Halim thought it was probably accurate. The fact that Halim knew so little about Jundi's work was itself an indication of the high caliber of the colonel's operation.

The setting Colonel Jundi chose for Halim's recruitment was as spectacular as the offer itself. Halim didn't keep a car in Damascus. Instead he walked and took taxis, part of the method of operation worked out long ago by Tajar. When Halim had business in Beirut he hired a car and driver for the fifty-mile trip. One autumn morning at the border crossing into Lebanon, a Syrian official asked Halim to step inside the customs shed.

This was unusual but of course Halim went in. The official excused himself and Halim was left alone. A moment later a man in civilian dress appeared and presented identification showing he was a major in a Syrian security service. Politely, he asked Halim to accompany him. They went out a back door and Halim was ushered into an automobile with curtains over the rear windows. The major drove over bumpy roads for twenty minutes and deposited him at a small farmhouse high up on a hillside, with a magnificent view of the Bekaa Valley.

It was a simple stone house surrounded by olive trees. Standing in the doorway was Colonel Jundi, also in civilian clothes. He welcomed Halim and thanked him for coming, then led him through the house to a flagstone terrace overlooking the valley. The three of them seemed to have the little house to themselves.

Halim and the colonel sat in rough wooden chairs on the terrace, facing west, while the major went off to make coffee. A mild autumn sun warmed their backs. The major brought coffee and retired inside the house.

Halim was struck by the serenity of this perch above the peaceful valley, by the stillness and the sweeping beauty of the view. Goats' bells tinkled from some distant crevice in the hills. A thin line of smoke rose far away in the clear sky. The terrace was blissfully remote, rich with the smell of earth and sunshine. Colonel Jundi smiled, gesturing toward the valley.

Syria, he said. Our true boundary in that direction has always been the Mediterranean, since ancient times.

Today we have these artificial creations of the West, Lebanon and Jordan and Palestine, these legacies born of British and French scheming at the end of the First World War when they carved up the Ottoman Empire to suit themselves. But though empires come and go, real countries remain. You know all this and you know it's time we set things right, and I think it's time you came to work for me. Now what do you say to that?

Colonel Jundi smiled affably and Halim was astounded. He didn't know what to say. He stared at the colonel and then stared again at the view. There was a large bowl of purple-black grapes on the table, freshly washed and glistening with drops of water. The colonel plucked a grape and popped it into his mouth. He plucked another and went on munching, smiling at Halim as the sun cast its autumnal glow over the peaceful valley.

They ended up talking for several hours, finishing the grapes together. The colonel called for another bowl which they also ate, one at a time, each man popping a grape when he had a point to make. The colonel excused himself after his third cup of coffee and wandered away to relieve himself under an olive tree, still enjoying the view. Later Halim followed his example. Halim had begun with his usual reservations but Colonel Jundi waved them aside. He knew all about that. Halim's manner and reputation were exactly what the colonel needed. In effect, he wanted Halim to spend more time in Beirut and report on the activities of the various Syrian intelligence agencies in Lebanon. Some of this he said directly, much of it was only implied.

Obviously the colonel had regular agents in Lebanon who provided him with specific information on specific subjects. What he wanted from Halim was far more personal: the judgment of an outsider. Halim had the right sort of work and character, the colonel felt, for the kind of assessment he wanted in Lebanon. Halim was known to have refused a number of offers in intelligence and his reputation among the Palestinians was unique. He would not be seen as someone from Syrian intelligence, least of all as Colonel Jundi's man. And that was the most important factor from Colonel Jundi's point of view. Halim was perfect for the role because he was so unlikely.

The colonel said he would give Halim only a minimum amount of training. Halim was to be himself. Above all it was Halim's status as a nonprofessional that made him valuable to the colonel, and the colonel didn't want to jeopardize that.

They would meet at the little farmhouse as they had met that morning, never in Damascus. The colonel would tell Halim what he wanted to know and Halim would report directly to the colonel. He wouldn't deal with anyone else. It wasn't all explained in exactly this way to the Runner, but as a professional he quickly grasped what the colonel had in mind. The Runner was to be the private informant in Lebanon of the inspector general of Syrian intelligence, with all the access that implied.

It was an offer that Halim the patriot couldn't refuse, an offer that the Runner could hardly have imagined. In a way it would do for the Runner operation in the seventies what exhaust systems for bunkers had done for it in the sixties.

Once more Tajar had a great deal of planning to do to adapt the Runner's new situation to the needs of the Mossad, to assure the operation's security, and to safeguard the Runner himself. It was difficult and Tajar was careful never to underestimate Colonel Jundi's abilities, but he was also confident that he and the Runner could make it work as it should.

Sometimes, it seemed to Tajar, idealism could indeed produce strange and wondrous results.

***

Ziad also found himself with a new job in a different secret service. One weekend the captain he served moved over to another Syrian intelligence agency to work full time in the hashish trade. Since Ziad had proved himself competent as a courier, the captain took him along. Halim's careful warnings to his friend, in effect his training of Ziad for an undercover role, had favorably impressed Ziad's superiors.

Ziad was happy with his new job because it meant he no longer had to travel south of Beirut. He had learned to fear southern Lebanon, now the province of PLO militias and commonly known as Fatahland. Even as a Syrian and a courier for one of the Syrian military intelligence agencies, Ziad had felt the danger there.

Various Syrian intelligence agencies financed different PLO factions. Other Syrian secret services were conduits for Arab oil money. Many Moslem and Christian factions of Lebanon ran their own operations in the south, either business or intelligence or both, sometimes separately but more often in conjunction with a PLO

group. The Iraqi secret services were always busy. There were invisible border crossings between one group's territory and another, often in every village. Armed men jumped up at checkpoints and Ziad was stopped, interrogated, stopped again. He never knew whether he would get through with his briefcase with the false bottom. There were stories of hijackings and robberies, and all day long everyone was waving automatic weapons in the air or pointing them with bored, blank expressions.

At what? For whom? Many of the gunmen were no more than boys. They had thin black hairs on their upper lips. They hadn't begun to shave yet. Did they know what game they were playing? Did they care? Did they know who was giving them their orders that day, or why?

Ziad was used to guns, to army coups and tanks in the central squares of Damascus. But armed men to him meant uniformed soldiers marching in ranks. Discipline was brutal in the Syrian army. For that matter, discipline was brutal in all of Syria, a strict Moslem society with rigid rules of conduct, oppressive but orderly and regulated. To Ziad the anarchy of southern Lebanon was frightening. He couldn't stop shaking when he entered those villages where all the boys and young men were running around with guns. Obviously someone was paying them to do something, but he didn't know what it was. Everything about it terrified him.

So Ziad was overjoyed with his new job, his promotion as he called it. His talents had been recognized and he no longer had to stand in front of the boyish gunmen of Fatahland, humiliated and frightened as he looked down the barrels of automatic weapons. Now he lived like a civilized man, traveling to Beirut and sometimes on to the Christian areas of central Lebanon.

Hashish and a promotion — perhaps Europe and Paris would be next? As usual he confided the details of his work to Halim, who already knew the full scope of the venture he served. Hashish was Lebanon's leading export, a source of enormous illegal wealth. Lebanon supplied the huge Egyptian market and also shipped hashish to black Africa, to other Mediterranean countries and to Europe. Within Lebanon it was a vital political factor to many people. Even without Colonel Jundi's interest in the politics of hashish, Halim would have known all about the notorious new alliance that had just been set up between Syria and Lebanon.

The dictator in Damascus wasn't himself corrupt in a personal way, but he had a younger brother who was. At the core of loyalty was family, even more important than clan or religious sect. The dictator thus allowed his younger brother to maneuver and accrue power in his own right, if he were clever enough to do so. The younger brother had begun close to home. First he organized special army battalions in Damascus to protect the dictator, a palace guard. The special units were under his personal control and all the officers were Alawites, former peasants like him and the dictator, men who owed their good fortune in life entirely to him.

After that the younger brother naturally wanted to have his own secret service. To finance it and to have independent funds for other enterprises in the future, he struck up a hashish alliance with one of the leading Maronite Christian families of Lebanon. With the protection and influence of the Syrian dictator's younger brother, the Maronite clan's position would be greatly strengthened to control more of the hashish trade out of Lebanon. The younger brother's specific partner in this alliance was an ambitious and sophisticated Maronite who was about his age, also in his middle thirties: the oldest son of the Lebanese president.

Ziad's boss, the captain, was now employed in the hashish department of the younger brother's intelligence agency. And Ziad, far down the line, was still a courier who traveled to Beirut with sealed envelopes in the false bottom of his briefcase. But now he met well-groomed young Maronite men in expensive hotels, rather than gun-waving Palestinian boys in poor villages. Using Halim among others, Colonel Jundi kept track of the alliance at the top, watching it as carefully as he watched everything else in Lebanon.

As for Halim, he couldn't help but feel sad when Ziad spoke of his new life. His friend was always so eager, so excited as he paced up and down describing it all to Halim, and what made it so terrible was Ziad's absolute conviction that this was actually a promotion, that he was finally being rewarded by life.

Ziad described himself sitting in an expensive café on Beirut's seafront, waiting for a contact who would give him his instructions. It was a sunny winter day and the Mediterranean glistened beside him. Everyone was smiling and laughing, the men in their Italian silks and French tailoring. Exquisite women walked by, breathtaking in their beauty. Gleaming automobiles drew up, their doors opened by driver-bodyguards. On the table before him was a real cappuccino, a real croissant, lovely delicate china. He was holding a copy of Le Monde, bought crisp and new in a hotel lobby, and it was all an idyll of true grandeur. Here at last was the great world. Here were taste and comfort and beauty, the very magic of his dreams.

And one scene above all. One small heartbreaking moment that touched Halim so deeply he could never recall it without feeling that tears were coming to his eyes.

It was a glimpse of Ziad in the evening, sitting alone in the lounge of one of those splendid hotels by the sea, one whole side of the room an immense window showing the lights on the Mediterranean at night, the little ships in the distance, the moon. There was laughter and music. A stringed orchestra was playing and people were dancing, smiling at each other. Near Ziad a party was going on, a birthday celebration for an elegant white-haired woman who wore jewels. A handsome young man rose and asked her to dance. It was her son.

Everyone in the party cheered and applauded as the son escorted his mother out to the dance floor. They danced slowly, gracefully, and soon all eyes were upon them, for they must have been known to the people of Beirut. In the corner Ziad sat gripping his Scotch and staring in wonder and awe, sweating in his ancient winter suit, hardly able to breathe.

It was so beautiful, he said to Halim. That room with the lights on the water behind them, the soft music and the proud way he held her and the proud way she danced, the love and joy in their eyes, this elegant woman and her handsome son. . . .

It was snowing in Damascus the night Ziad described that scene to Halim. They had gone downtown to a favorite neighborhood restaurant, a small place which was all but deserted because of the weather, and after dinner they walked along the river as they always did when they went there. It was cold and no one was out by the river. The paths were new and white, without a footprint, the city unusually quiet under the snowfall.

Suddenly Ziad turned and clutched Halim's hand.

Don't you see? he said. I know you've worked hard for what you have in life, but you've also succeeded.

People respect you. People admire you. You've built a place for yourself in the world and I don't have that.

Other than you, no one will ever care that I've lived. For years and years it doesn't seem to matter too much.

You just go on and that seems all right. But then later it does matter and you begin to realize how alone you are, how you have almost no one, and it's frightening. Most of us don't want to be just alone in the end. I know you manage that way but you're different. Most of us aren't like you. Solitude terrifies me. So that's why this is a chance for me. What does it matter if it's an illusion? I know what I look like sitting in one of those cafés in Beirut. I look the way I always look anywhere — ridiculous and awkward and out of place. But even an illusion is better than nothing. Anything is better than nothing. . . .

SEVEN

Beirut is the flashy whore of the Middle East, said Tajar, with a hundred major pimps and a thousand major customers. The pimps are armed like Barbary pirates and every one of the customers lusts after a different menu of earthly and spiritual delights. In such a situation you have to expect some kind of trouble. . . . The gangsters and militias of Beirut began their civil war in a desultory way, about three decades after the French put together a famous ancient coastline and a string of mountains and called it the country of Lebanon.

According to the National Covenant, the Lebanese Christians still controlled the government in the middle 1970s, although they were no longer the majority community. Their main partners in power were still the Sunni Moslems, although the poorer Shiites were now the majority Moslem sect. The Druse were in the mountains and the Shiites were in the south, which was controlled by Palestinian militias. Even before the Palestinians arrived there had been eleven major communities. Beyond religion were clan politics and commerce and clan warfare, honor and profit and hatred and fear, and refugees from every lost cause in the Middle East. There were also the agents of dozens of foreign intelligence agencies, all of them spending money and some of them making as much as oil princes.

Beirut was a flashy playground but without much respect beyond the seas. When the Lebanese president came to New York in 1974, to present the Palestinian cause at the United Nations, his luggage was sniffed for hashish at Kennedy Airport. The Lebanese president was outraged, but it was his son back home who maintained the grand hashish alliance with the Syrian dictator's younger brother.

The Lebanese Christian militias had names like the Tigers and the Giants and the Phalange. In those days they bought their arms in the Soviet bloc, from Bulgaria. Their swaggering gunmen wore large wooden crosses around their necks and had decals of the Virgin Mary on their rifle stocks. They were mostly Maronites, an ancient Eastern church that derives its name from a Syrian hermit and holy man of the fifth century. They also bought arms from Palestinians who wanted to make money. The Palestinian militias were receiving their arms from Iraq and Saudi Arabia and Libya and Syria. The Lebanese Christians felt threatened by the Palestinians, who felt threatened by the Christians and aligned themselves with the Lebanese Moslems.

The fighting began in the poorer neighborhoods of Beirut in the spring of 1975. There was looting in the souks, which spilled over into residential areas. The battle of the hotels began that autumn. Each side occupied the upper floors of luxury hotels on the shorefront and fired artillery and rockets cross-town. Streams of brilliant red tracers lit the night sky over the city. During the day the firing stopped and the coastal highways were crowded with cars as people rushed back and forth to do business. There were truces at the end of the month so people could get to banks and cash their paychecks.

Pauses in the fighting were also a useful time for taking hostages. Armed gangs set up makeshift roadblocks and checked identity cards, which listed religion. Hostages were merely a new kind of money in Beirut. They were barter goods like animal skins in a frontier region. If valuable they could be sold outright, if commonplace they could be swapped by lot. Sorting out the money by identity card was easy. Moslem gangs took Christian prisoners, Christian gangs took Moslems.

It was the end of the appearance of central authority and the beginning of rule by militia. Hatred and fear were now as important as money. The Christians tied prisoners to automobiles and dragged them through their mountain villages while children cheered, until the bodies fell apart. In their areas the Palestinians extracted information by cutting up prisoners with blowtorches and welding irons, a part at a time.

Still, there was business to be done in the new disorder and both sides quickly got down to it. The Palestinians went to work robbing the main banks, which were in their sector of Beirut, and the Christians pillaged the port, which was in theirs.

Eleven major banks were emptied. What every gang was after was the vault where the safe-deposit boxes were kept. Palestinian groups controlled by different Syrian secret services fought gun battles with each other in the streets for the right to break into the different banks. At first they tried to dynamite their way into the vaults, but they didn't know enough about it, so underworld professionals were flown in from Europe to do the job. The Christian militias, meanwhile, pillaged the port of its goods, most of which were subsequently shipped off to be sold in Iraq — with more profits for innumerable middlemen.

These stupendous robberies cost very little life. Killing and profit weren't always connected in Beirut. But outside the city it was a time of massacres, of women and children machine-gunned in villages — Christians by Palestinians and Moslems, Palestinians and Moslems by Christians. In Beirut everyone hurried through the streets and alleys carrying cheap cardboard suitcases, trying to escape somewhere with something. In the Levantine manner, both sides claimed every defeat was a victory and every atrocity an act of heroism.

The Syrian dictator was a fierce enemy of the PLO leadership. He had been helping the Christians but still the Christians were losing. Lebanon was disintegrating and no one in the Middle East wanted Palestinians and Moslem leftists to take over the country, at least no one with money or military power that counted, not the Saudis who heavily subsidized the Palestinians, and not the Syrians or the Israelis.

It was time for a peacekeeping force. The Syrian dictator offered his good offices. An arrangement was made through the Arab League and two Syrian army divisions were sent into Lebanon in 1976, to save the Christians and put down the Palestinians.

Halim's respect for the dictator's maneuvering had greatly increased since he had gone to work for Colonel Jundi in Lebanon. As Halim said to Tajar: Only a very clever mongoose actually gets invited into the pit to keep order among the snakes.

***

In fact Halim was horrified by the savagery of Lebanon. He talked about it with Tajar when they met near Beirut. He talked about it far too often with Ziad in Damascus. He even talked about it with Colonel Jundi at their frequent meetings in the little stone farmhouse overlooking the Bekaa valley. Halim had always thought he knew about war and death and brutality. He had learned about killing as a young man, and since then there had been years and more years to live with the reasons offered up to explain it by wise men, by cynical men, by commonplace frightened men.

He knew it was mostly meaningless. Grand causes were generally the cover: patriotism, family and tribe, honor. Or very personal causes: patriotism, family and tribe, honor. But even war at its purest, war in the desert — two groups of men who agreed to be soldiers and went off to hunt each other like animals through the wastes — even then most men were suddenly dead to no purpose, forever struggling up the wrong hill when the bullet came, or crouching terrified in a hole somewhere and gazing sadly at their left boot, their right boot, lost in a vast unspeakable loneliness at the moment the shell struck.

All that he knew. But the vicious chaos of Lebanon? These cruelties a thousand times a day? This boundless hatred and fear and self-destruction?

***

In Damascus, in the great central room of Halim's crumbling old house, Ziad stood in front of the fire with his hands out, trying to warm himself and quell his shivering. It was another winter, a year after they had taken their long somber walk in the snow beside the river. Gone now were Ziad's illusions of Beirut, the city of soft music and dancing and gentle laughter, of beautiful lights playing in the night on a Mediterranean harbor of sunsets. The heavy armor of Syrian tanks had brought a ceasefire of sorts to the Lebanese civil war, but what was gone was gone and there was no hope of peace.

Only the little area in front of the fire was warm and bright. The heat glowed on their faces but the rest of the room was a dim cavern of cold and darkness. Huge shadows loomed on the distant walls, distortions of the fire and the drafty room and the agitated gestures of Ziad, whose every movement before the fire set off giant configurations in the gloom. Halim was sitting beside the fire watching his friend and watching these unfathomable designs play across the ceiling and leap up the walls. Outside the wind howled through the garden, crackling the stiff fronds of the palm trees. Every so often a crash sounded through the gale as the wind tore away a branch and hurled it at the night. The whole house rattled and creaked, its very stones uneasy. Halim thought of the solitary broken statues in the darkness beyond the verandahs, each one alone in its grove and blind to the wild fury of the storm, solemnly guarding its secret memories of Greece or Rome or Byzantium.

I'm scared, Ziad was saying again. I've never been so scared. I used to think it was bad before but that was nothing compared to now. They kill people for no reason. They do things to them first, over and over and over.

I want to stop going there but I know I can't just say that. My captain wouldn't even laugh at me. He'd just pick up something and hit me over the head, hit me two or three times and stare at me. What do I have to complain about? I have a job, don't I? I get paid, don't I? I'm Syrian and not Lebanese, aren't I? Why am I whining? What do I have to whine about? . . .

As so often, it went on until a late hour in front of Halim's fire. Ziad was deeply disturbed and drinking more heavily. His shoulders twitched and his hands moved in rapid little jerks as he smoked cigarette after cigarette. And then there was the relentless wind, the huge room dark beyond the little circle of light, the blasts of cold night air and the hulking restless shadows which never stopped roaming the walls with their fantastic shapes.

Halim tried to comfort his friend. There wasn't much to say in words but he said what he could, and he knew the act of sharing Ziad's fear was itself important. That alone was a kind of escape from despair for his friend.

Halim understood this well enough, having long had the benefit of this sort of comfort from Tajar.

So in a way these long winter evenings beside Halim's fire could have been part of any friendship. Ziad was terrified by his place in life and Halim as his friend gave him what he could: attention and love, the strength of sharing, the embrace of his heart. In a small fire's glow, he helped keep back the dark immensity of the night.

But beyond that, it surprised Halim how much time he spent worrying about his friend. His own trips to Lebanon were frequent and complicated. His tasks were grave and there was always danger. Colonel Jundi was an extremely competent professional, a man of nuance who placed heavy demands upon him. It was true Halim had always been a solitary person who liked to be alone inside himself, but he still had to work very hard to satisfy Colonel Jundi and also be the Runner. It was never easy and whenever he left his house on another journey, there were always many details to consider each step of the way. To do less, to neglect any of the details, would be fatal.

Yet at home, crossing the great central room or roaming the verandahs, he found himself thinking again and again of Ziad: picturing some everyday event in his life, recalling an expression on his face or a nervous movement of his hands. These images returned obsessively to Halim, as if he were somehow compelled to see his friend's life more clearly than his own. Why was this so, he wondered? Was his friend's life a reflection of his own, or did his mind at least see it that way? Some kind of different and opposite image, as in a mirror? Because it was easier to see things in Ziad, rather than admit to them in himself?

The irony of this to Halim was enormous and unexpected. Knowing himself was the essence of the Runner, his strength and protection, and in appearance the Runner had never been more successful. Through his work for Colonel Jundi, he was providing the Mossad with highly detailed information on Syrian activities in Lebanon. Syria was the occupying force and the Runner knew everything its intelligence agencies did in Lebanon, often before they did it. He kept watch on their manipulations for Colonel Jundi and passed on the information to Tajar. His secret material had never been more valuable to Israel. Surely it was inconceivable for the Runner to succeed so well in Damascus and Beirut, against all the professionals, and yet falter due to his friendship with an insignificant little man like Ziad?

The very idea astonished Halim. And it was profoundly troubling to him that the Runner operation should suddenly seem fragile — not through any objective concerns, but because of the tricks of his own imagination.

He loved Ziad far too much to think of his friend's life as pathetic. But he did find it infinitely sad, and in the end the brutal ways of Lebanon could only lead to disaster for his friend, a terrified messenger scampering back and forth between ruthless warlords, a little man lost among powerful and monstrous forces. With all his heart he wished there were some way he could really help Ziad, some way to lift him out of his life.

But it wasn't that way for either of them. Halim knew that, and he also knew his friend's destiny seemed all too clear. Yet still the deeper doubts haunted the far corners of his mind. Why was he confusing the fate of another with his own?

EIGHT

There were also startling disorientations from over there which served to remind Halim that espionage wasn't the ultimate subterfuge in life, that the deceptions perpetrated by love could be far more devious and profound.

The specific news brought by Tajar was that Yossi was a secret grandfather. Even Anna didn't know of the birth of the child. Assaf hadn't told her and probably never would. The revelation astounded Halim. More than ever he felt remote in his role as the Runner, as if he were off on some interminable desert journey and a messenger from the distant past had suddenly come riding into camp with this improbable announcement from beyond the horizons.

In fact it was a summer evening and he was sitting with Tajar in a shuttered room south of Beirut, less than a hundred and fifty miles from Jerusalem. The squat concrete farm building, near the coast, was serving as a safehouse that night. He and Tajar met more often, but for shorter periods of time, now that Halim was skulking around Beirut for Colonel Jundi. It was hot in the small room and a fan played over them, the noisy hum of the cicadas outside occasionally rising above the steady whir of the fan.

Tajar himself had only recently learned all this from Assaf. Of course he did know Abigail, unlike Halim, who was hearing of her for the first time, so quickly had that come about. And yes, Tajar was also amazed by the intricacy of it.

Tajar's account went back a few years.

Assaf was now a history instructor at the university in Jerusalem. As a graduate student he had become very close to the professor who was his academic adviser, and to the man's wife and two young children. He spent time at their house and became part of the family. He played with the children and helped the wife when his professor was away at conferences. Imperceptibly over time, the wife and Assaf drew closer in a different way. With the opportunity so often there, they eventually became clandestine lovers.

The husband learned of the affair only after his wife became pregnant. The two of them considered their lives and the lives of their young children, and agreed to hold onto their marriage for the time being. The baby was born, a girl, and there was no question Assaf was the father. In the end the husband and wife decided against divorce. Instead they were reconciled. Only the two of them and Assaf knew the truth about the daughter, and they resolved to keep it secret for the sake of the family. Assaf agreed to have nothing to do with any of them ever again, not with the daughter and not with the family. The secret was to be inviolable and so it was for some years. Unknown to Anna or Tajar, Assaf went on alone carrying his painful burdens of unspoken loyalty and love, his terrible guilt and regret.

Then that summer Assaf had fallen deeply in love with a young American woman, Abigail, who had arrived in Jerusalem as a journalist and immediately come under the spell of the city's light and sun and history. Abigail adored Jerusalem and Assaf was an inseparable part of it for her. The intensity of their feelings was obvious and even Anna was convinced it was the great love of Assaf's life.

He's devoted to her and I can understand why, Tajar said that night near Beirut. She has intelligence and charm and believes in the Tightness of causes. She also has that marvelous American gift for optimism. Of course she's young, and since she grew up in America she's been protected from many things. I'm told this state of grace she's in is known as the sixties generation in America, but you can't fault her beliefs or her courage, or her youth. She'll get where she's going, I have no doubt about that. And even as it is her feelings aren't all that foreign to me. It seems a hundred years ago now, but when I was her age I remember feeling pretty much the way she does. . . .

Assaf's love for Abigail caused a crisis of conscience. He felt he had to tell Abigail of the child who was his and not his, yet to do so seemed an unpardonable betrayal. In despair he sought out Tajar and told Tajar everything.

He wanted absolution, said Tajar. After all he's still young himself, older than Abigail and a strong boy, but young. Children and a family of his own have come to mean a great deal to him. It's what got him into trouble and I suppose it's easy enough to understand. So this matter of the daughter who's his and not his was assuming enormous proportions to him. To someone else it might not have seemed so grave, but it did to him because of the way he is and because of Abigail. Well naturally I told him to tell Abigail the whole story, which was an immense relief to him. The two of them are good for each other and they're getting on wonderfully. The problem now is that Abigail has some notion she never wants to get married, even though she loves him. She'll live with him but she doesn't want to be married. It has nothing to do with Assaf's past, but with her own. Some set of ideas she has, something to do with her own upbringing. Alas, we all have our own ghosts to exorcise. But they're young and with time, who can say. In any case, that's how I learned of all this. . . .

Tajar paused in the shuttered concrete room and looked down at his hands, grown hard and broad from pushing his crutches all these years. The fan turned slowly. Halim was also gazing at those hands and he realized Tajar must know exactly what he was thinking. Tajar always knew. He never hid his feelings from Tajar. They had talked about Beirut and he had spoken of Ziad, as he always did, and now in turn he had heard about Assaf.

Tajar sighed. He looked up, a questioning expression.

Yes, said Halim, our decisions from long ago do live on in the lives of others, don't they? And they assume directions we could never have foreseen or imagined, a will of their own. Assaf and his secret child? Assaf and the family he wanted so much to be part of and became part of in a wholly impossible way? This confusion of the heart and these dreadful complications between him and his Abigail now that he has found the woman he loves, who loves him? When we're young we ask ourselves where it will end, but of course it never does. It has no end. Deep in the past and lost in the future, it just goes on and on . . . this forever mysterious espionage of the human heart. But why do you feel he'll never tell Anna? They've always been so close, sharing everything. And they're so much alike.

That's all true, said Tajar, and I think the reason is simply because he wants to spare her the pain of an illusion. Her family all gone long ago in Egypt, having never remarried, Assaf her only child — for Anna, nothing in the world could mean so much now as having a grandchild. And Assaf knows that, so he spares her this lost hope.

Halim nodded. All at once Assaf had become a much more complicated person to him. He realized he couldn't understand what Assaf had done because it wasn't something he would have done.

The affair with the professor's wife was a terrible mistake, he said. Didn't Assaf sense the betrayal in that when it was happening?

I would say he was very confused in his emotions back then and got them wrong, replied Tajar. I would also imagine a psychiatrist could work out a weighty structure of technical terms to explain it, but what of that?

The fact is Assaf was being himself at the time. In the course of it he made a serious mistake, and the outcome was wretched. Certainly Assaf feels wretched about it.

Halim felt chastened. For years he himself had been a secret father, given to guilt and remorse. What was so strange about Assaf, in completely different circumstances, stumbling into the same dark corner?

You forgive the failures of others with such ease, he said.

Tajar seemed surprised by the remark. He thought about it a moment, then smiled sadly.

If that's so, it's only because my own failures have been so catastrophic, he replied. When I was Assaf's age I had to bear the memory of whole groups of people who had been lost because of my blunders. Now that was failure and those mistakes were truly terrible. To my mind, forgiving oneself is the hardest thing any of us has to face, since no life can measure up.

To what? asked Halim.

What we would have it be, replied Tajar. What we promised ourselves, when young, it would be. We all know that promise is genuine and eternal and foolproof, but nonetheless it turns out we are not.

***

At another of their meetings near Beirut, Tajar spoke of his renewed friendship with Bell. In particular he described his first dinner at Bell's house. For Halim this evoked nostalgic memories, since he recalled with great fondness the times he had spent at the house in the orange grove in Jericho, more than a decade ago now.

***

Darkness had already fallen when Tajar turned up in Jericho that summer evening, only his second visit to Bell's cottage. He intended to stop for just a few minutes and perhaps have some coffee. He was on his way down the Jordan Valley from the north, driving back to Jerusalem. But Bell urged him to stay for dinner and, since it would be late by then, to sleep over on a cot in the living room.

I leave the house at first light for my walk, said Bell, my circle tour of the valley out toward the river and back.

So you can be up and on your way early, and in Jerusalem before most people are having breakfast.

It was more convenient for Tajar to drive down to Jericho in the evening and thus that became the pattern of his visits. He left Jerusalem before the sun set and dropped down through the Judean wilderness in the cool of twilight, arriving in Jericho soon after dark. Bell served dinner and afterward they sat out behind the cottage under the grape arbor, talking until a late hour. Bell welcomed the company. And as Assaf and Yousef and Halim before him had fallen under the spell of the hermit's quiet ways, so Tajar came to anticipate the pleasure of these hours spent with Bell in his oasis near the Dead Sea.

Anna wasn't surprised that Tajar had become so friendly with Bell. She only wondered why he hadn't looked up Bell sooner. Were you being shy? she asked him merrily.

Tajar smiled. I'm always shy with holy men, he said. It's just not seemly to go banging into the life of someone who's considered a holy man. Besides, this hermit-in-residence happens to reside in Jericho and Jericho runs on a different time. Jerusalem is old but Jericho is three times older, and who can imagine such a thing? In Jericho you might greet a neighbor in the morning, then a dozen years later you might greet him in the afternoon and ask him how he is that day. Down there time isn't going anywhere, in other words, and neither are you. Bell says Abu Musa thinks he's three hundred years old and maybe he is. The corn gets harvested in May. Bell also says Moses the Ethiopian thinks he's living in the age of King David and maybe that's true too. What makes sense in such a place? Jerusalem is timeless, but what then of a place that's three times older than timeless? Surely it must be another realm altogether. Yes?

Anna laughed. It amused her the way Tajar talked about Jericho and she enjoyed hearing his descriptions of Bell and the house in the orange grove. But no matter how softly Tajar approached the subject she wasn't ready to think of meeting Bell again herself. Perhaps someday, she replied vaguely, reluctant as always to revive the past.

But that first evening at Bell's cottage when he was invited to stay for dinner: Tajar could never have imagined anything like it. After Tajar accepted, Bell wandered off to the tiny room at the back of the bungalow which served as his kitchen. Tajar had seen the emptiness of that room with its two rusty gas rings, and he preferred not to think what might come out of it that evening. Instead he perched himself regally in Bell's tattered chair on the front porch and gazed out at the shadowy orange grove, imagining it to be his portion of paradise in the hereafter, a sleekly dark old god smiling in the night.

From time to time he heard Bell clattering around in the far-off kitchen. What on earth was the hermit conjuring up back there for his unexpected guest? Last month's impregnable bread and the month-before-last's rock-solid goat's cheese? A bowl of last year's hardtack crumbs topped by a moldy dried date with a side dish of ramrod-hot green peppers, the thin slippery kind shaped like a horn of the devil, to obliterate all taste and detonate nature's needs? Perhaps an ancient green onion the hermit had found hiding in a corner of the kitchen and was now busily stripping of its long gray roots? God alone knew but no matter.

Tajar had survived on desert rations before and whatever the hermit put before him, he was sure he could manage it. The first rule in such a situation was to have a mug of scalding tea at hand. Once cleansed and softened, even a fistful of last year's locusts would go down. Alone in the desert, the prophet Elijah was said to have smiled a blissful smile when Providence and crows had provided him with such fare. Smile and swallow: then as now the rule of the desert. Hermits were notoriously austere creatures, known for their single-eyed vision of other worlds.

And in any case dessert would be delicious. God also made mangoes, an undeniable fact. In Jericho, oasis of fruit trees, dessert was a gift from heaven.

The distant banging eased off in the kitchen. Bell drifted out to the porch and apologized for the delay. Would Tajar care to step inside? Tajar nodded resolutely and gathered up his crutches, determined to face hardship with grace.

Candlelight greeted him at the door. He found himself staring at a magnificent spread of curries and steaming rice, fortified here and there by glistening bowls of homemade chutneys, mango for sweetness and three shades of fiery lemon to burn through the jasmine-scented evening. The array of rich dishes covered the unpainted wooden table in the barren living room, which was also the dining room and later to be Tajar's bedroom. Two sun-bleached wooden benches sat facing each other across the candlelit table, the bare floors swept clean by gentle breezes scurrying through the house. Packing crates hung in the corners with stacks of worn books. High up on the walls immobile geckos, friendly little lizards, awaited any stray insect that might wander in through the doors and windows, which were all thrown wide to the restless fragrance of the night.

My God, what's this? Tajar asked in amazement.

The finest curries in Jericho, said Bell, quietly pleased with his handiwork. Also the only curries in Jericho. In the past they flourished here but the secret was apparently lost. Dig in.

Tajar did so and ate with gusto, helping himself to everything again and especially to the chutneys. How could he have known he was so hungry? Bell ate right along with him, scooping up mounds of food.

Delicious, said Tajar between mouthfuls. But is it possible Jericho was known for curries in other eras?

It must have been, replied Bell, heaping more rice on his plate. Two thousand years ago, say. Picture an adventurous Indian trader following the ancient spice route along the coasts of Arabia and up the Red Sea. He lands at Aqaba and joins one of the camel caravans making its way north to Damascus, through deserts and more deserts and finally through the desolation along the shores of the Dead Sea. Then one evening the caravan comes swaying into Jericho and all at once the trader raises his eyes and looks around and thinks: Isn't this it? This has to be it. Why go any farther in life?

Tajar laughed. Oh I see, he said. Of course that does make sense. I'm sure a trader or two did turn up here from India and found it to his liking and decided to stay on. Do you like to recall such a thing?

I do and I do so all the time, replied Bell. But just imagine how distant, how remote Jericho was then for a man from India. Much farther away than the moon is for men today. It was more like another galaxy, another corner of the unknown and unimaginable universe. Yet here he sat, this traveler in time, perhaps right here where we're sitting now. The oasis has always been small because there's only a limited amount of water.

And the shade is the same and the desert roundabout is unchanged, as are the sun and the moon and the stars at night. So then, what thoughts filled the long evenings for him?

I suppose you know this imaginary traveler quite well, said Tajar.

Bell smiled. It's one of the advantages of living in a small place, he said, which is also the oldest village on earth. When you think of it, an extraordinary variety of people have sat right here where we're sitting in the course of Jericho's ten thousand years. Quite astonishing, really. . . .

***

Halim laughed at Tajar's wonderful description of his first curry dinner in the house in the orange grove. Halim had once enjoyed those grand curry banquets at Bell's, and he also remembered Bell's make-believe Indian trader. Born himself in India and long a man without a country, Bell was very fond of his imaginary story of an Indian traveler who had decided two thousand years ago that Jericho was his place in the world.

So Halim was cheered and his mood lightened by Tajar's account of Bell. But there had also been another part to the encounter which Tajar chose not to mention in the safehouse near Beirut: Bell's ominous prophecy concerning Halim. That had come after the curry feast when Bell and Tajar were sitting out back, sipping coffee in Bell's grape arbor.

Bell brought up Halim. Bell didn't have to mention that he had known Halim once, but he had thought about it and decided he wanted to mention it. Why withhold the truth? That would have been Monastery thinking.

Tajar, for his part, was intensely curious. Several times in the long history of the Runner operation he had spoken to men who knew Halim strictly as Halim, Europeans as well as Arabs. But never to someone like Bell, whose opinion he so greatly admired. Bell went on to describe his friendship with Halim over a decade ago, when the two of them had taken long walks out of Jericho at dawn and at sunset.

A man with an intense inner life, said Bell. I realize that as a Syrian, he's your enemy. Doubly so perhaps, since you both move in secret worlds. And I also realize you may know much more about him than I do, if he is a professional as I suspect. But as I recall we can never know enough in the secret worlds, can we?

There's always more to be gleaned, a new view or a different insight, some odd fact that may reveal a new dimension. . . . Well then, I have to say first of all that you'd like him. He'd appeal to you immensely. He's thoughtful with a wide heart. He has vision and never fools himself. He's not naive or cynical, and yet . . . he may lose himself in the end.

The suddenness of the words startled Tajar. Why? How? he asked.

I don't believe he knows defeat as well as you do, said Bell. Whatever it is he does, I fear one day he'll feel it hasn't been enough — in his own eyes. He'll feel he has failed himself, taken a wrong turn perhaps. The thought will haunt him and eventually it may push him over the edge. I say fear because he's a good man and I'd be sorry to see it come to that. But you realize I'm not talking now about intelligence agencies or Arabs and Israelis. I'm referring to another kind of secret world.

I understand, said Tajar. The world of Jericho time, as your friend Abu Musa likes to call it. But obviously you care for this man Halim and your feelings about him seem very specific. Why do you feel about him the way you do?

Bell pondered the question. I can't really point to any one thing, he said at last. A man like Halim is always a mystery to anyone who hasn't known him day to day for years. Some people are like that, as you discover especially in the intelligence business when you try to put together a coherent dossier on a man. Sometimes the deeper you dig, the more you realize all your informants are recalling a different man. It's strange but Halim makes me think of Stern, that agent in Egypt whom we've talked about.

Abruptly Bell laughed in the shadows of the grape arbor, startling Tajar anew. What is it? asked Tajar.

A Jericho breeze in the brain, said Bell. I was about to follow Abu Musa's example and say . . . Let me tell you a tale. Well why not? I will. One of the places where Halim and I used to go on our walks toward sundown was the Omayyad palace on the outskirts of town. Earlier than sundown really, for the light. Those splendid ruins, you know them of course. It was the mosaic that was our destination. Surely you know that too. . . .

Tajar nodded. He knew it well. The small palace had been built in the eighth century as a winter residence for the Omayyad caliphs of Damascus. But an earthquake had destroyed it only a few years after it was completed, and then the caliphate had moved with the wealth of Islam to Baghdad, so the site had remained quietly in ruins ever since, a dusty jewel lost in the sands of Jericho. Of the magnificent artistic creations which must have adorned the palace in sumptuous detail, only one survived, but this excavated remnant was complete and of pristine beauty, its subtle colors perfectly preserved by the sands of centuries. This treasure was a raised mosaic floor at the end of an oblong room, the polychrome mosaic rounded at the top as if to represent a portal into the earth, a gate to the world as seen from the sky. Perhaps it had served on special occasions as an alcove at the end of the room, a dais where a dignitary could sit when receiving guests.

The mosaic depicted a pomegranate tree as the Tree of Life. The thickly seeded fruit, an ancient symbol of fertility, hung heavy on the branches. On one side beneath the tree two slender gazelles grazed with raised heads, feeding on leaves, while on the other side of the tree trunk a third slender gazelle was caught in the same pose by a huge lunging lion, which had just landed on the gazelle's back and drawn first blood. A motif of pomegranate blossoms circled the entire mosaic. The greens and browns of the tree, shading in and out, and the flowing lines of the softly brown animals were of awesome delicacy, realistic and stylized at once.

It was the most beautiful mosaic Tajar had ever seen. The serenity of the spreading tree, all-encompassing in its majestic reach, contrasted sharply with the scenes in conflict beneath it, the two gently feeding gazelles on one side, the powerful outstretched lion claiming its kill on the other. The one was idyllic and pastoral, oblivious to any danger in the timeless rhythms of nature, while the other cut through life with opposite extremes of brute force and infinite longing: the ferocious fixed gaze of the lion ripping with its jaws, its bloody talon marks slashing across the tender flanks of the victim so suddenly struck from behind, the sad startled eyes of the little gazelle as it looked up at the leaves in what had become, at that very instant, its last moment of life. The emotions in the mosaic seemed to crowd together and yet remain separate — a commanding Tree of Life sheltering unbounded cruelty and beauty.

The mosaic fascinated Halim, said Bell. We would sit there and look at it and before long his imagination would be roaming in every direction at once, back and forth through history to all those ancient and not so ancient peoples who have unrolled their banners and come marching this way in search of Jericho, our not quite forgotten Garden of Eden, the Egyptians and Assyrians and Babylonians and Persians, the Greeks and Romans and Byzantines and Arabs, the Crusaders and Mamelukes and Turks, the Israelites before and the Jews more recently, and the many other less remembered tribes whose movements remain obscure, whose empires were never born. Yes, the mosaic fascinated Halim and evoked many moods in him, many emotions and memories. I've always found peace when I sit beside it, but not so Halim. To him it was deeply disturbing, finally. Yet he always wanted to return to it and so we did, many times.

Bell fell silent but Tajar said nothing, waiting. Perhaps there was more?

I asked him once what troubled him about the mosaic, Bell said at last. He told me but his answer was a little too succinct. Quite possibly he didn't fully understand it himself, then.

What did he say? asked Tajar.

He mentioned the lion's gaze. Not the ferocity of it but its fixed quality. That was what seemed to bother him.

NINE

With the Syrian army on hand in Beirut to suppress the Palestinian and Moslem militias, the Maronite Christians were free to take on each other and act out a play within the play of self-destruction, a civil war within the civil war. At stake as always was money and power, called territory by the Maronites in gangland style, what Tajar referred to as Lebanon's Mafia imperative.

The elderly leaders of the Maronite factions were all in their seventies and eighties. For decades these aging clan chieftains had tirelessly plotted against each other as one or another of their number had managed to ease himself into the presidency, by way of unscrupulous deals with his deadly enemies. The play had always gone on because the presidency was good for only six years of plunder. Wisely, the French had made reelection to the presidency unconstitutional, in order that the keys to the treasury might keep moving from gang to gang. The difference in the late 1970s was that the Syrian army had put down the Maronites'

enemies, and the Maronite factions were very heavily armed. Both the Syrians and the Israelis had been providing them with weapons since the civil war.

Among the most powerful Maronite chieftains was one who had always been squeezed out of the presidency at the last moment, a stiff and impeccable man known to everyone as Sheik Jean-Claude, very dapper in his dark blue French suits.

Although the mask of the old man's face was now as dry and set as an Egyptian mummy's, the sheik had begun life as a pharmacist and had been known in the 1930s as Jean-Claude the condom, because his pharmacy in the brothel district was conveniently open at odd hours, the better to do business. That was long ago but a certain raffish aura still clung to the ancient visage of Sheik Jean-Claude, who had seen it all so many times that his expression never changed, and whose hard-earned transformation from a condom to a sheik in the course of a busy half-century was very much in the admired Lebanese manner of achievement.

Sheik Jean-Claude embodied the Francophil element in Maronite thinking, which liked to believe that Lebanon wasn't really in the Middle East at all, but rather just off the south coast of France, a spicier Riviera. The opposing view was held most strongly by the Maronites of the north, who did think they were situated in the Middle East, in fact right next door to Syria. The northern Maronites were accustomed to getting along with the Syrians and even doing business with them. Thus the former Lebanese president whose son ran the Lebanese side of the Middle Eastern hashish alliance, along with the Syrian dictator's younger brother, was a chieftain of the north.

Sheik Jean-Claude had never quite managed to maneuver himself into the presidency, but he still had hopes for his sons. The eldest son and heir apparent, Zozo, was killed in a boating accident at the beginning of the civil war. While waterskiing off Beirut, he was swamped and ridden over by an unidentified speedboat. Sheik Jean-Claude's aspirations then passed to his second son, Fuad, and his third son, Nazo, who dropped his childhood nickname and reverted to his real name, Naji, which Sheik Jean-Claude considered more respectable for a possible presidential candidate.

Both Fuad and Naji had become local leaders during the civil war. Fuad was more interested in political organization, like his father, but Naji loved the casual flair of paramilitary uniforms and devoted his time to Sheik Jean-Claude's militia. Both brothers were also active in various commercial ventures, in order to pay for their political and military enterprises. Fuad dealt in smuggled whiskey and automobiles and ran some profitable joint businesses with the chief of PLO intelligence. He was friendly with many Lebanese Moslems and had close connections with Syrian intelligence, who supplied him with arms. Naji dealt mostly in hashish and smuggled gold. He despised Moslems, got his arms from the Israelis, and had close connections with the Mossad.

Naji, always smartly dressed in well-tailored camouflage fatigues, became the official commander of his father's militia. He was only twenty-eight at the time and his preferred food was Mars bars. Naturally Fuad still had his own troops which he controlled, separate from Naji's. There were also many other private armies financed by the Arab powers, who all found Lebanon a convenient place to do their killing, without disturbing the precarious political situations they invariably faced at home.

One June morning Naji launched a fateful attack against the summer palace of the clan chief of the northern Maronites. The ex-president himself was in Beirut and Naji's target was the man's son and heir, the most prominent Lebanese of Naji's generation and Naji's most serious Maronite rival, both in politics and in the hashish trade.

For Naji, whose experience was mostly in street killings, the attack on the summer palace was a well-planned military assault. His rival, the ex-president's son, went down shooting in the kitchen, killed along with his wife and their three-year-old daughter and the family dog.

***

And so it went as the gangsters in Lebanon shot and bombed their way into the eighties. Halim met with the lieutenants of these clan chieftains, as well as with Palestinians and Lebanese Moslems. He also dealt with many Syrian intelligence officers who ran operations in Lebanon, and with the countless agents they employed — all for Colonel Jundi. He knew Lebanon could have managed a vicious civil war on its own, but how much more vicious it was with the country stuffed with arms and serving as a killing ground for everyone else's causes, with Syria on one side and Israel on the other and the PLO in between them.

In time Naji became more and more closely aligned with the Israelis. First the Mossad dealt with him, then Israeli generals, then the new Israeli prime minister himself. The Syrians had entered Lebanon on the side of the Christians, but in only a few years the Christians had turned around and were fighting the Syrians, more or less led by Naji.

It was easy enough for Halim to see what was happening. The Israelis had a grand new scheme which would make Lebanon right for them: the Maronites in control, the PLO crushed and Syria out of the country, a peace treaty, an open border. And Naji was the tool who would bring these wonders to pass, with the help of the Israeli army. To Halim it made no sense at all. It ignored everything he knew about Lebanon.

It was also obvious to Halim that his reports to the Mossad had become irrelevant. The extraordinary access he had in Lebanon, the information he acquired for Colonel Jundi and passed on to Tajar, had seemed spectacular only a few years ago. But it was entirely meaningless now that the Israeli government had already decided on its course in Lebanon. And not only the Runner but Tajar himself had become irrelevant to the Mossad. Tajar was a man of subtlety in Middle Eastern ways, and to him the grand new scheme for Lebanon was preposterous. As Naji organized new shoot-outs around Lebanon and was praised by those in power in Israel, Tajar more than ever seemed a man of the past. As usual he spoke his mind, and like the messenger who brought unwanted news he was ignored and isolated in the Mossad as a result.

Halim knew all this. They talked about it one night at a meeting in another safehouse on the coast.

It is what is, said Tajar. I've served a long time and eras change. We used to wonder about it but it does seem, finally, that Israel is to become part of the Middle East after all. People in this part of the world have always had a thin grasp of reality. It's a place of wish and fantasy. You either believe absolutely, which generally means religion, or you make-believe with equal fervor. Either way there's not much room left in the middle for men like me. It's dangerous to always call defeats victories, as we do in this part of the world, but what is it that leads us to embrace these fatal illusions? Is it the desert with its harsh extremes that promotes fanaticism? Everything is so much itself in the desert. Is that why man gets viewed with such disastrous simplicity? In all my life I've never seen anything so horrifying as Lebanon. Even religion is merely a metaphor for what goes on here. The Maronites fear the Moslems, but they're just as quick to kill Maronites from the next village, and the Moslems are the same way. And where are the Palestinians to go? Or are they simply to go, as the Turks said to the Armenians when I was a child. How much easier it is when evil has a name, when there is an enemy. But Lebanon isn't like that, unfortunately for all of us, and worst of all for the people who live here. Being Israeli or Syrian may be difficult, but it's nothing compared to being Lebanese. . .

.

Halim was aware that in fact he was now working primarily for Colonel Jundi. His reporting was no longer of any particular use to the Mossad and to Israel, but it was extremely valuable to Colonel Jundi and therefore to Syria. He said as much to Tajar.

Yes, I suppose that's true, replied Tajar. And it does seem like some kind of unbelievable reversal of cause, of loyalty. But it isn't really, not to my thinking. Look at it another way. I can't use the word succeed in Lebanon, because no matter what anyone does here now it can't be called succeeding. But if Colonel Jundi and the Syrians were somehow able to keep things together in Lebanon, that and only that might keep the Israeli army out, which would be a blessing for us and an enormous triumph for the Runner operation. The Syrians can't win here. No one can. There are no winners in such a place. To come in means to lose. It will be a disaster for the Syrians here, but it will be a far greater disaster for us, to us, to come in. If we do we'll be just another Middle Eastern country playing the Middle Eastern game: illusion, power, suppress where you can, dominate those you can dominate. And coming in on the side of a man like Naji, this heroic defender of his minority faith, is fantasy pushed to madness. So I see your work for Colonel Jundi as immensely important in an unexpected way. Strangely, it's as important as anything the Runner has ever done. You're serving Israel, Yossi. But you're doing it in a murky and difficult world where truth can be its opposite. . . .

When Halim left Tajar that night he found himself thinking of the persistence of the Arab-Israeli wars, with their steady recurrence every seven to ten years, or about the time it took for a new generation of men to exert their influence on affairs. Yes, but it isn't just that men forget, thought Halim. It isn't as easy as that.

The tragedy is that our greatest human treasure — memory — so often glitters locked away out of reach, the one gift we can never quite give to another, even to those we love most.

He was staying that night with a Syrian officer, an acquaintance who had taken over a villa in the mountains above Beirut. He had to go to another meeting in the city before he went up to the house, so it was very late when he got there. He was exhausted, as he always was in Beirut. The watching and the listening, memorizing every nuance of what he saw and heard — there was never any rest when he left his garden in Damascus and took the road of descent down into the hellish chaos of Lebanon.

It was almost three o'clock and he had to be up again in three hours. Still, he didn't feel like trying to sleep.

The somber conversation with Tajar had disturbed him in many ways. The house was quiet and he poured himself a brandy to take out to the terrace. Some specific memory was rumbling around in the back of his mind, trying to push itself up into consciousness. He was too tired to think of it but he settled into a chair on the terrace, hoping the memory would surface and release him to go off to bed.

In the distance below was the harbor, peaceful and beautiful with the lights on the sea. All harbors were beautiful at this silent hour in the darkness. And beyond it the great black expanse of the Mediterranean reached out to an infinity of stars.

Suddenly he saw it. The image was there in front of him with perfect clarity. It was thirty years ago at the little settlement in the Negev and he and Anna were sitting side by side in the central hut, counting out bullets. It was night and a single kerosene lamp burned overhead. Other men and women were there. They were all there except for those on guard duty, about two dozen of them. Only Yossi and one other Palmach soldier had had any military training. The rest were just men and women, like Anna. The Egyptian army was expected in two or three days and they were all sitting together and counting out the rounds for the few old rifles they had. They were also deciding who would take over each rifle — in the second case, in the third case — if the man or woman assigned to the rifle could no longer fire it. After that Yossi would fill some bottles with the last of their precious petrol, so that he and the other Palmach soldier would at least have something to throw at the armored cars or tanks, if the Egyptians came with them.

How solemn they were as they went about these tasks to defend the little settlement which they all knew would fall. How pure the dream had seemed to them then, how simple and right and good. And they had succeeded, that was the wonder of it. They had held out and defended their settlement for one whole day, a miracle. And to Halim . . . Yossi, looking back, that single day in the desert seemed the greatest triumph of his life. Never again had he known such exhilaration, such a sense of pure victory as when darkness came to protect them that night.

Only thirty years ago and now there was this. There was this tormented city at his feet, half-destroyed and torn by war and more war. There were Naji and his gangsters and all the other gangsters. And there was the Runner, as clever an agent as the Mossad ever had, working as hard as he could for Colonel Jundi, the utterly ruthless inspector general of Syrian intelligence.

He drank off his brandy. He had always believed in himself and his cause, but lately he had begun to wonder how long the Runner could go on running. That only really mattered to him and to Tajar. If it did happen that he saw the end coming, should he speak of it? He was inclined to think not. After all Tajar had done for him, a smile and a wave seemed the better way. The rest, all the rest, Tajar would certainly understand.

TEN

Ziad was painfully morose that last winter, the winter of 1982, the fortieth year since Anna had fled from Egypt. He still worked in Syrian intelligence as a courier for his old hashish department, its senior employee both in age and in years of service, a true survivor who had managed to hold on to his battered briefcase with the false bottom as his department had moved from agency to agency and been regularly raided and absorbed and realigned and reintegrated, in keeping with the law of changing fortune for Syrian secret services. Ziad had also served under many different men. His original captain had been purged years ago.

Other captains had disappeared into prison and a few had been transferred to the Golan Heights. The last captain before the present one had simply not turned up for work one day, the victim of some unrevealed intrigue.

Ziad's hashish department always served the dictator's younger brother, no matter which intelligence agency it happened to be in at the moment. The turnover in captains was continual because they were at a level where the temptation to do a private deal was great. If they took a chance and succeeded, they made a small fortune overnight. Ziad always referred to the officer he was serving as my captain. They lasted for longer or shorter periods and were cruel and ambitious men. Colonel Jundi had their secret services penetrated at a higher level and the danger of their work was extreme. But the potential profits were so enormous there were always new men eager to take their places.

Ziad himself might easily have advanced beyond his lowly status if he had been willing to take chances. But Halim was forever warning him against it, and Ziad was too timid for that in any case. Ziad loathed his trips into the Lebanese mountains. He feared the Maronites he visited and hated the way they treated him. Before he left Damascus he was so depressed he could hardly speak, and by the time he returned he was so hysterical he had to drink himself into a stupor in order to quiet down, as if each trip were an unexpected reprieve from death.

With Halim that last winter he was morbid and manic at once. His humor knew no bounds. He laughed wildly with tears in his eyes and joked as the tears ran down his face. He grinned and gestured extravagantly, making fun of himself. But still the tears kept coming and eventually, as the night wore on, his pathetic face crumpled into undisguised despair.

In the afternoon when he and Halim were strolling along the river in Damascus, he would suddenly look over his shoulder to see that no one was near them in the thin winter sunlight. Then he would clutch Halim's arm and lean close and giggle.

Have you noticed that el presidente has promoted himself? he whispered. He's now having the newspapers compare him to the illustrious Salah al-din, the greatest Moslem warrior who ever lived. And with careful reminders that it was this military genius who defeated the Crusaders and finally threw the foreign devils out of the Middle East. At first I thought: oh dear, is he really going to become as powerful as all that? But then I thought: oh no, there's nothing to worry about, it's just another mild case of terminal megalomania. National leaders in this part of the world always get that. It's when they begin comparing themselves to God that you have to worry. That's when the trouble starts and you get upheaval on a colossal scale. . . .

Or on a sunny winter weekend as the two of them sat side by side in overcoats on Halim's verandah, a bottle of brandy between their thronelike chairs, Ziad would suddenly interrupt their silent drinking with another terrified giggle.

In Lebanon they say that Syrian torture is considered the cruellest in the Middle East, he whispered. But how do people arrive at such conclusions? Is there a way to measure these things? What of our brothers the Iraqis who also have a progressive Baath party in power? Their president is known as the butcher of Baghdad, and doesn't that mean progress is everywhere? . . . Why do I fear Naji and the Maronites so much? Are they worse than anyone else? It's irrational, I know, but fear's like that. It starts with something specific and becomes general, which is called anxiety. Which is my state of mind, precisely. When are the Israelis going to come in and take Lebanon off our hands? Isn't it time for the Americans to fly by and bomb it into the Stone Age? Aren't the Russians even a little interested? Could the French be talked into taking it back?

Doesn't anyone want it? . . .

Halim didn't see Ziad often that last winter. They were away from Damascus at different times, or Halim was too busy when he was in Damascus. But Halim did see Ziad in Lebanon once during those last months of his friend's life, the only time that ever happened.

It was in the mountains north of Beirut. Halim had gone to a village stronghold to meet a Maronite sub-chieftain who was an enemy of Naji. The man had dealings with the Syrians and Halim was there for Colonel Jundi, under the cover of some suitable business, to find out more about a certain Syrian intelligence officer. As he was led into the villa he saw a row of men sitting on a bench in an anteroom, waiting their turn, each man with a briefcase between his feet. One of them was Ziad. Ziad looked up and quickly looked down again, staring hard at the floor. His face was wet with sweat. In his heavy old winter suit he looked like a poor petitioner from the village, some tenant farmer who had put on his best clothes and come to beg the landlord for an extra tenth of his crop.

Halim kept on walking. He was ushered into the sub-chieftain's library and had his meeting. He was asked to stay for lunch, but lunch in Lebanon could take three or four hours and he gave an excuse. The house was richly furnished with expensive carpets and furniture. There were gardens and a swimming pool. It was the kind of mountain retreat that became known as a summer palace in Lebanon, if the owner managed to shoot his way to the top in Beirut.

Later, Ziad gave an account of that day to Halim.

He had been sweating heavily in the anteroom because he was wearing long underwear. It was cold in the mountains in the winter and he had to wear long underwear to keep warm on the trip up to the potentate's village. But when he finally reached the potentate's waiting room, naturally it was hot. Potentates were rich and their houses were well-heated. Sometimes he had to wait for hours and his long underwear began to smell. At least it began to smell to him. As for his old suit, that already smelled of a thousand lonely nights in Damascus and Beirut and the back streets of poor Lebanese mountain villages, all those places where he had spent the last ten years of his life as a messenger . . . watching life. Because that was what he did, wasn't it? He was always looking at life from the outside and was never a part of it. He was always peeking in at it and yearning to be in there somewhere, clumsy in the way he came across to people, awkward and out of place and inept. There was no denying that, was there? A whole decade of his life spent carrying messages to Lebanon in fear and loathing, always hiding inside himself and wishing for something better, damning them all because he was trapped, terrified when anyone looked at him or spoke to him and asked him who he was . . . Who am I? I'm Ziad, the anonymous failed spy from Damascus. Before that I was an anonymous failed whore of a journalist, and before that I was a boy sitting in a tiny cavelike room above the souk in Damascus, dreaming of the world, dreaming of being someone when I grew up. But it didn't work out that way and I never did become someone, and you might as well shoot me now. That's who I am. . . . So finally, after waiting and sweating and waiting some more in the sub-chieftain's anteroom, a man came in and looked at Ziad. He was a young man about half Ziad's age, a junior thug. He laughed arrogantly and came striding up to Ziad and slapped a Lebanese pound-note on Ziad's wet forehead. The pound-note stuck there, glued to Ziad's skin, and Ziad knew he was being called into the presence. He was next. The chief thug would see him now. Ziad got to his feet, feeling weak and sick and ruined. He shuffled forward, thinking: this is me, this is my life. He kept swallowing, trying not to throw up out of fear. His feet made squishing sounds in his shoes. Cold sweat was running down his arms, his legs. The pound-note was still stuck to his forehead and what was he supposed to do with it? Was it safe to peel it off and hand it back to the junior thug, or would that be an insult? Perhaps he was supposed to go inside this way and appear in front of the chief thug with the money glued to his forehead. A kind of sign: I'm a whore and I sell myself to get by in the world. He knew that once he was inside he had to cringe and look frightened in front of the chief thug, but that was easy. That was the way he felt. But what about the rest of it? Different thugs liked different kinds of obeisance. How should he behave with this one? Should he do a little dance of excitement, like a boy who had to make water? Should he grin and joke that he smelled like a soggy ram left out alone in the rain too long? Or should he compliment the chief thug on his French cologne and his excellent taste in carpets looted from Beirut homes? No, that was all haphazard. Better to fall back on basic local behavior when meeting a Middle Eastern dignitary. Look humble and fearful and gaze at the chief thug as at a great light, while muttering over and over, God be praised, God be praised. . . .

Thus Ziad's day at that well-guarded villa in the mountains where Halim had been casually asked to stay for lunch, which would have meant fine French wines in the glassed-in terrace overlooking the gardens and the swimming pool. Ziad ended his description by warning Halim about that particular Maronite sub-chieftain. Ziad had heard rumors that the man was not to be trusted. That he might be making some kind of deal with Naji to sell out his Syrian friends and go over to the side of Naji and the Israelis.

Halim listened sadly, in silence, to this warning. Of course he knew all about the man. That was his job. And in fact the man was making a deal with Naji, and it would have been better for Ziad to stay away from that sub-chieftain's village and never go there again. It might be dangerous for any Syrian to be within the man's reach when the deal was set and he betrayed his Syrian contacts and made some gesture to prove his new allegiance to Naji and the Israelis.

Halim knew all about that. Colonel Jundi knew all that. This kind of intrigue was a morning's work for them.

They were professionals. But Halim couldn't say anything to Ziad, and even if he could, what difference would it make? Ziad didn't decide where he would go in Lebanon, or when. He didn't have any control over it. My captain decided that. And who could say? Perhaps it was even better that poor Ziad knew nothing about the trouble ahead other than some vague rumor. What he didn't know he couldn't fear. And yet even now here he was still loyally trying to help Halim, trying to warn his friend.

The thought of that cut deeply inside Halim, and once more he felt useless. He was failing Ziad, perhaps fatally so. But there was nothing he could do about it.

***

There was nothing special about their last evening together. Of course they didn't know it was their last evening, so there was no reason for it to be different from any other. They were to meet downtown and have dinner. It was to be an early evening because Halim was just back from a visit to Beirut and still exhausted from his trip. Halim had work to do at the office, and it was decided that Ziad would wait for him at the hotel bar on the top floor of the office building.

As it happened Ziad hadn't been up to the hotel for a long time. The barroom was still the same with its wood paneling and potted plants and ceiling fan, not turning now, and the bowls of peanuts that came with the drinks. To Ziad, though, it seemed much shabbier than he remembered it from the times when he had sat here and waited for his friend — the gaucho then, the enthusiastic young idealist from Argentina — to finish his paperwork on the balcony and come in and plan an evening on the town. But yes, that had been a long time ago, over twenty years. As he had done then, Ziad sat near the window watching the light of the sinking sun slant into the room. When Halim finally did show up Ziad had a crisp new copy of Le Monde open on his lap, a glass in his hand, an untouched bowl of peanuts at his elbow. Ziad was smiling and relaxed, happy for once, his fond memories of the room having evoked a magical nostalgia in him. He raised the bowl of peanuts in greeting.

You see here a man on top of the world, said Ziad. Twenty years ago I sat in this place and didn't know my good fortune. I wonder if you'll ever be able to appreciate how I felt then, drinking real Scotch and plundering bowl after bowl of free peanuts? It was sheer joy, and more. You showed me the world. Just watching you and seeing your confidence in things was a marvel for me to behold. Oh yes, good days, my friend. The very finest life has to offer. . . .

They went on to one of Ziad's little restaurants, which was Halim's too now. Then they walked along the river, stopped for one more coffee, parted. Halim took a taxi home and it was as simple as that. A quiet evening between two friends. A commonplace evening toward the end of winter, 1982.

***

Colonel Jundi told him of the killing.

Halim was returning from Beirut one winter morning when he found the colonel's man waiting for him at the border crossing. It was unexpected. He and the colonel didn't have a meeting scheduled. He got into the curtained automobile and they set out across the hills.

A dismal rain had been falling since first light, a hard steady downpour that threatened to go on all day. Deep pools had formed in the ruts of the mountain road and there were washouts on the curves. The major was a new man who had only recently joined the colonel. He drove slowly, picking his way with care. In the distance an occasional goatherd huddled beside some outcropping of rock, which gave little shelter. Halim caught sight of them through the curtains. The land was bleak and the lonely men looked cold and miserable. At last the car came bumping into the yard of the little stone farmhouse. Halim pulled his coat around him and made a dash for the door.

Colonel Jundi was waiting for him in the main room, standing with his back to a crackling open fire. He must have just come in from a walk across the hills, because his trousers were steaming and his boots were caked with mud which hadn't yet dried. The room smelled of wet wool and wood smoke and that special sweet fragrance that came from wild mountain bushes, which were used to supplement fires in the hills where wood was scarce. Halim greeted the colonel and went up to warm himself at the fire. He noticed that a bottle of brandy stood on the table, which was unusual. The colonel poured two glasses and handed one to Halim.

Colonel Jundi seldom drank and never during the day. Halim knew the brandy was meant just for him and the colonel was joining him out of courtesy, because it wasn't proper to make a man drink alone. Gravely, the colonel faced him.

I have bad news, said the colonel. Your friend Ziad is dead.

Naturally, the colonel knew all about Ziad. To him the friendship had always seemed strange because the two men had been so unequal. Halim was an unusual man in every respect and Ziad hadn't been at all. Halim was gifted and would have been a success anywhere, while Ziad had been mediocre and would have failed anywhere. Still, friends could be oddly balanced and the colonel knew these two men went back to the time when Halim had first arrived in Damascus from Argentina.

The colonel's account was terse.

The Maronite sub-chieftain had finally made his about-face switch to Naji. In doing so, as a gesture of his new loyalties, he had rounded up the Syrians in his area. Ziad had the misfortune to be spending the night in the village. He was pulled out of bed and taken away without being allowed to dress. There were five Syrians in all, minor figures like Ziad. The next morning they were found hanging naked from a makeshift gallows in the central square of the village. There had been torture and mutilations. Huge, deep crosses were cut in their chests. It wasn't known whether the carving had been done before or after death.

But now it doesn't matter, said Colonel Jundi. Your friend's suffering is over and he rests, his pain gone. Ours is still with us, but our concern must be for the living. . . .

There were other words from the colonel but Halim didn't really hear them. He left the little farmhouse and was driven back to the border crossing, where he went on to Damascus. It was raining as hard as ever when he arrived home. It was cold and he kept his overcoat on although he had no intention of going anywhere or doing anything. He was too restless to sit in front of a fire and warm himself, so he poured brandy and wandered around the house with the glass in his hand, listening to his footsteps echo.

At the end of the central room, the almond tree outside the window-door was in full bloom, its white and pink flowers bravely set against the gray skeletons of the garden. It was by far the first tree to bloom, recklessly throwing out its flowers in the very deepest gloom of winter, long before the other trees had sprouted even a tentative bud. In the rain and cold its beauty was always astonishing, an unexpected cry of abandon and hope, its delicate colors calling forth the memory of a season that seemed far away. And impossibly out of place in the bare gray desolation of winter. Even now the beautiful little flowers of the almond tree were past their peak and falling, broken by the hard rain.

All afternoon the rain pounded down on the house. Darkness came early but Halim didn't turn on a lamp.

Toward evening a wild electrical storm broke over the city. First hail pelted the verandahs and then fierce thunder and brilliant flashes of lightning crashed across the sky, lighting the great central room and the garden in a pure white intensity which abruptly went black. Only the flowers of the almond tree survived in the darkness. Another flash of unworldly light lit the garden and Halim caught a glimpse of a solitary broken statue beyond the gray trunks of the trees, the stone streaked and weathered with half its head gone, one eye staring.

He was glad the storm had come. The explosions of lightning and thunder soothed him by screaming his own emotions at the night. It was wild and chaotic, a war of the gods in heaven, and its awesome crashes exactly reflected his own black, shattered mood.

ELEVEN

Halim traveled to Lebanon much less that spring, then stopped altogether. Part of the reason was operational: Colonel Jundi's priorities were changing and Halim's reporting was less vital to him at the moment. The colonel expected an Israeli invasion of Lebanon by the summer, which meant the Syrian secret services would have to deal with a regular army in the field, not just the murky intrigues of Lebanese tribal warfare. The term of the Lebanese president ended in September. Colonel Jundi expected the Israeli army to be in place well before then to assure Naji's election.

Not that that particular piece of chicanery matters, the colonel said to Halim. If Naji's elected, he'll be killed.

It's too much to expect us to put up with someone like him next door.

Halim also traveled less to Lebanon because of Colonel Jundi's concern for his well-being. The Runner's double life for Colonel Jundi over the years in Lebanon — and beyond that his triple life for Tajar — had cost heavily. Halim had been working without letup since the beginning of the Lebanese civil war in 1975.

Increasingly he had come to rely on alcohol to sustain him, which worried the colonel. To him, Halim had always seemed a man of impregnable balance and moderation. But he had himself seen the impact of Ziad's death on Halim, and Halim's profound emotional response had made a deep impression on him. It was only then, during that dismal rainy morning at the stone farmhouse on the border, that he had fully come to realize how exhausted Halim was. Nor was that all. Something else had suddenly struck him. For a moment he had wondered if he knew Halim as well as he thought he did.

It was the depth of Halim's emotion that caused the colonel to wonder. Halim was successful and had innumerable friends. The Palestinians in particular revered him for his integrity. Was it also possible, then, that he had felt so isolated in Damascus all these years that the death of his oldest friend could have such a powerful effect on him?

Of course it was possible, thought the colonel. There were reasons why even a man like Halim might feel isolated. Living a secret life — the fact that no one really knew him — was only one of them. Halim's sense of isolation didn't have to mean an espionage connection. Halim had grown up in Argentina and that could be the cause of his estrangement. Or it could be some peculiarity of character. A man who was revered and felt he didn't deserve it might feel estranged, especially an idealist like Halim who believed so strongly, who wanted things so much. Colonel Jundi hadn't achieved his high position in intelligence through any lack of understanding of human nature. He knew the Halim-Ziad friendship could have been exactly what it always appeared to be: an odd congruence of two unlike people, brought about long ago by chance.

So it wasn't that Colonel Jundi suddenly had doubts about Halim's loyalty or patriotism. There was nothing as specific as suspicion, and at the moment he had a hundred serious matters in front of him. Israel would soon be invading Lebanon. The PLO would be smashed in the south. The Syrian army might be attacked. Naji would be gunning for the top in Beirut, backed by Israeli tanks. What of the Shiites and the Druse and the anti-Naji Maronites, all the dozens of factions and armed militias? The civil war in Lebanon had already gone on for seven years and it might go on indefinitely, if everyone kept feeding in arms and agents.

Colonel Jundi was hectically busy. Furthermore, he was very fond of Halim in a personal way. He liked Halim's frankness and modesty and determination. Halim had worked hard for the colonel in Lebanon and worn himself out. He looked haggard. He was living too much on alcohol. He detested Lebanon and the death of his friend had overwhelmed him temporarily, a final event which made the weight intolerable.

Thus Colonel Jundi felt more than sympathy. His concern for Halim was deep and genuine. He praised Halim and urged him to spend more time in Damascus. He also urged him to take a rest from his businesses, which would be interrupted by the invasion in any case. The Israelis would have their futile adventure with Naji.

They would lose in Lebanon and pull out. After that there would be time for Halim and the colonel to sit down and see what was next for the two of them, together.

Halim agreed and thanked the colonel. The invasion was imminent but he also felt the Runner had gone as far as he could in Lebanon. He had been working for Colonel Jundi for almost a decade, and to his mind, he had failed finally. Israel's coming war in Lebanon was the failure. The Runner had traveled far but as with Ziad, it hadn't worked out in the end.

With his great experience, Halim was also aware of the doubt he had placed in Colonel Jundi's mind. He knew he could easily have overcome that doubt in the years ahead, if there had been years ahead. But that didn't concern him now because he was no longer thinking of a future for the Runner in Damascus. Instead, at last, Halim now saw the Runner's long journey coming to an end. Soon, very soon, it would be time for a final smile and a final wave to Tajar.

Years ago in front of the fire in the great central room of his house, during the second winter of the Lebanese civil war, he had listened sadly, helplessly, to the outpourings of Ziad's heart and watched the shadows of Ziad's terror loom on the far walls of the room like some primitive dance of death in a cave on the edge of the underworld. He had felt very close to Ziad then, so close he had wondered whether he might be in danger of confusing Ziad's destiny with his own.

Yes, well, his friend had given him many things over the years, far more than he ever knew. And wasn't it strange how all of this had ineluctably come to pass for the Runner? Even with the most careful planning and all the will in the world, there never seemed a way to know which little moment from the past would mysteriously blossom into a man's inevitable, entire future.

When did it begin, I wonder?

But when did what begin? Which part of the intricate scheme of things? The sordid nightmare of life which was Lebanon? His complex feelings for Ziad? A man's estrangement from his country and culture?

And that was just it. For years he hadn't had time to ask himself that kind of question, which a recluse like Bell pondered day in and day out. Yet once there had been long leisurely hours when he and Bell had explored it together in the ruins of the Omayyad palace in Jericho, sitting beside the magnificent mosaic of the pomegranate tree with its three gazelles and its lion.

Before the Six-Day War. Yes, Halim remembered those times very well.

***

Yossi saw Tajar only once that spring. There had been little reason for them to meet after they had both come to accept the fact that the Runner, now, was working primarily for Colonel Jundi. Tajar had far more cause than Colonel Jundi to be concerned about the effect of Ziad's death on Yossi. He knew how close they had been and how Yossi had identified himself with Ziad in strange and unpredictable ways.

But Yossi had no intention of making the meeting dramatic. On the contrary, he wanted it to be as ordinary as possible. Of course his self-discipline in the face of hardship had always been phenomenal.

They met in a safehouse on the coast near Beirut. Yossi was in a reflective mood, relaxed and calm. Tajar was reassured. He felt Yossi was managing very well under the circumstances.

After talking about Ziad they went onto other subjects, which pleased Tajar. With the death of his friend, it seemed natural that Yossi should be looking back over his life and recalling other times. Tajar thought it a good sign. It also encouraged him that Yossi asked about Anna, as if he were reaching into the past to find a place for his strongest memories. Tajar was relieved and chatted away.

There had been great changes in Anna's life, Tajar said. All at once she had become very prominent as a painter. Now she exhibited abroad, and every dealer in Jerusalem had to have her works on hand in order to be taken seriously. Success had come in a short time, brought on by the changes in the Jerusalem landscape.

For years Anna had been painting the hills around the city as she had first seen them: a scattering of almond and olive trees, the stray ruins of a stone house clinging to a slope, a crumbling gate without walls opening onto empty fields, the sparse geometry of an Arab village, a donkey path winding away through the centuries.

Now these scenes of a simpler Jerusalem were treasured as tiers of concrete apartment buildings crept out from the city and covered the hills, penetrating even the once lonely wastes of the Judean wilderness, for so long a primeval moonscape of wind and sun and nomads.

It all happened so quickly in the heady optimism after the Six-Day War, said Tajar. First the hills were transformed to look like modern Western suburbs, then highways were strewn around to connect them. But gradually people realized what was being lost and longed to recall the real Jerusalem, the old Jerusalem, and there were Anna's paintings as she had been doing them for years, so simple and powerful in their economy, a beautiful dream of a city unchanged for millennia, worn old with hope. Well in no time at all the house on Ethiopia Street has become something of a shrine, especially for rich Americans dropping over in the summer. They arrive at Anna's door dressed for a Florida outing but ready to assume a reverent manner —

the Holy Land, after all — and parade along Anna's walls to buy views of the real Jerusalem of their imagination, to take back to their modern suburbs at home. Anna finds it embarrassing to be making money out of nostalgia. She's always shy around her paintings and not accustomed to the attention being shown her. Once or twice I've been sitting in a corner when a group of tourists arrives and the stares I get are most curious. Some crippled old smiling Arab? A faithful retainer kept on the dole even though he's not much use anymore? But artists are known to be eccentric so the visitors are respectful, just in case I'm some questionable friend of the great lady. A fine sunny day, the men say heartily, and I nod with pleasure. Of course. Even mute old Arabs enjoy a fine sunny day. I've thought of stopping a couple of them on their way out, blocking them into a corner with my crutches like some mad ancient mariner of the desert, then fixing them with wild eyes and whispering: Listen, I was the first chief of the Mossad, let me tell you my tale. . . .

Tajar laughed merrily, impish to the end.

But poor Anna, he added with feeling. Success is truly a burden to her. She welcomes the recognition but she'll always be uncomfortable with strangers. They think she's withdrawn and aloof when she's just being shy. . . .

Tajar also had good things to say about Assaf and his Abigail. After a difficult time they seemed closer than ever, even though Assaf still longed to have a child with her and Abigail was still opposed to marriage.

She and Anna have become great friends and surely that's good, said Tajar. She also likes to talk to me for some reason. We have long intimate discussions on Anna's balcony when Anna's working. I guess I'm something of a key to Assaf's past for her. She asks about you and Anna's brother David, and I'm supposed to unlock all the secrets about how Assaf became what he is. I tell her there are no secrets about that and Assaf is still her best source, but she thinks I'm just being inscrutable and finds some other way to question me. I like her more and more. Of course she has fears to overcome, unlike the rest of us at that age, or this age. . . .

Bell also came into the conversation along with the shesh-besh partners who haunted his front porch, Abu Musa and Moses the Ethiopian, and Assaf's unfortunate schoolteacher friend from after the Six-Day War, Yousef, who was still a fugitive somewhere in the caves of the Judean wilderness. They spoke of many things from the past but not of the future. Yossi gently hinted it wasn't a time for that. He would have the rest granted him by Colonel Jundi, then they would see.

Tajar felt this was just as well. Certainly he had no desire to discuss what the next months would bring in Lebanon. The Runner's reports had all gone to the director of the Mossad, but what did it matter? The course was set and Israel's grand plan for Lebanon was under way. There was to be an end to the Palestinian nationalist cause and Naji was to be Lebanon's new national savior.

So Tajar and the Runner talked of where they had been, not where they were going. Yossi preferred it that way and Tajar, for his part, was encouraged by the Runner's quiet strength. Characteristically, Yossi left him that night near the coast with a smile and a wave which warmed Tajar's heart.

At least he has survived the dreadful years in Lebanon with his spirit whole, thought Tajar. At least there's that.

TWELVE

Halim spent most of his time that spring sitting under the fig tree at the end of his garden, watching the tangled vines and bushes and trees come to life. Of all the trees, the fig grew its leaves in the most peculiar way. One tiny leaf appeared at the very tip of each of the larger branches, perhaps a few dozen in all. After several days a small green bud thrust out at the base of each single leaf, a messenger for the future fruit.

Then rapidly in the next days the vivid greenery burst out from the ends of the branches and marched in triumph back toward its source, the grayish-black tree trunk of winter.

***

He had an extremely erotic affair with a young Italian woman which lasted a few weekends. She was younger than Assaf, still in her twenties. She worked for an airline and would arrive at his door in her uniform, demanding no more than a bath and some hashish to smoke, then they would make love all weekend. They also made love under the fig tree when its leaves became full. Once she had lounged there laughing and naked in the golden light of late afternoon, redolent with love's smells, and raised a languid hand to the tree's hard little fruits.

Do you know what fig is slang for in Italian? she asked. No? A wise man's breakfast. . . .

Even while it lasted he thought of her as the Italian woman, which was how Ziad would have referred to this magnificent creature. It was a Ziad kind of fantasy, a daydream of a ravishing young woman from Europe who flew into his life as if by magic, who was convulsed by sex and wanted nothing but sexual excess for the short time she was with him. An affair without prologue or consequence, without explanation, an abandoned celebration of lust that would have reaffirmed all of Ziad's glorious fantasies on the erotic possibilities of life, on the irresistible nature of lovemaking, on the final triumph of joyous bold sex over loneliness, an erotic feast that was always just here while it lasted and always just for now.

After a few weekends she left to fly a different route elsewhere. A slip of paper arrived in an envelope with a drawing of a fig tree and a sun and a moon above it. In the upper corner an airplane sped away, trailing tears.

She hadn't written any words and there was no signature.

As brief as it was, he knew he could have loved this wonderful young woman. A woman who was capable of giving so much, whatever the circumstances, was a rarity to be treasured. If he had met her a year ago or six months ago, who knew what might have come of it? But he had met her exactly when he did. Why? Because she sensed her abandon was safe with him? Without a future to study it, to understand it and reduce it? Was perfection only there when you disregarded it and considered nothing, calculated nothing, weighed nothing?

Clever people and grocers, she had said, weigh everything.

An idyll in the grand manner, then, a perfect sexual encounter. The Italian woman come and gone, and a last banquet of sensuality . . . Ziad's exquisite daydream briefly made real under Halim's fig tree.

What a superb taste of life. He smiled at the splendor of it.

***

Out of habit he continued to rise early, even though he seldom left his house and garden. One morning at first light he wandered out into the garden and found a dead man.

The man was sitting under the fig tree where the garden furniture was. He wore a greasy cloth cap pulled down tight on his head and a ragged winter overcoat buttoned up to his neck. His trousers were rolled up to his knees, leaving his thin legs bare. He wore no socks and his tattered shoes were huge, without laces. The tongues of the shoes curled up and the soles curled down, making the shoes look like a clown's prop from a circus. The man's eyes were closed and his face was frowning as if he were deep in thought, but the unnatural pose of his body left no doubt he was dead. Halim telephoned the police.

The odd thing was he knew the man, or knew him by sight just as thousands of people did. For years he had seen this tall thin derelict haunting the sidewalks of downtown Damascus, often near the central post office.

He was a stooped man with nervous eyes who was always peering intently down the street. He dressed the same in summer and winter and seemed oblivious to anything around him except a smile, which caught his attention at once if he thought it was directed at him. Then he grew agitated and muttered angrily. But when he was ignored he became calm again.

The derelict's heavy overcoat looked grotesque in the stifling heat of summer, the exposed gray flesh of his legs painfully cold in the hard wind and rain of winter. People learned to walk past him without disturbing him.

He hovered close to buildings and gave the impression that he was about to make a decision to break away and head off down the sidewalk. Sometimes he even took a few forceful steps forward, gazing intently into the distance. But ten minutes or two hours later he was still in the same place, doing exactly the same thing.

Like other people Halim assumed someone looked after him because he was more or less clean, except in winter when his bare legs were caked with mud.

The police were apologetic when they arrived to remove the body. They said the derelict normally kept to the busier downtown streets during the day because he liked to be among people who were hurrying in every direction. Then when it grew dark he went straight home to his slum, bothering no one. He was a harmless man who had been deranged for years, cared for by his sister.

Later that morning Halim received a telephone call from the district police superintendent, a friend, who said it was very unusual for the derelict to have strayed into a good residential area. As for him climbing over Halim's wall to sit down and die in the garden, well, there was no explaining that. Some manner of breeze in the mind of God, as the old saying put it. The superintendent also apologized for the awkward incident.

***

Halim often thought of Bell that spring. More and more he had come to admire Bell's achievements as a man, his humility and wisdom and acceptance of himself despite his horrible disfigurement. The fact that Bell hadn't intended to become what he did in no way lessened the accomplishment.

If Halim had been given a choice now to be positioned anywhere he wanted in life, he would have chosen himself as he was, making a new start in Bell's house with the young Italian woman. Yes, why not perfection? Why not everything? He would have feasted on the fruits of life and sat on Bell's front porch, in Bell's orange grove with its dust and sunlight and hum of insects in the morning, with that magnificent woman singing somewhere nearby.

Certainly he would have chosen Jericho, not Jerusalem and not Damascus.

When he was a child growing up in a village near the Euphrates, both Jerusalem and Damascus had been mythical cities to him. Now at the other end of life, knowing one of them was enough. A man heard many myths but lived only one in the end.

Jericho, still and always, was a different sort of place. Jericho had never had great temples or been the throne of empires. Armies ignored it and aspiring tribes passed it by. Conquerors searched elsewhere. Of all the dreams of man it was the oldest. It was the kind of place, valuable for its balsams, that Mark Antony would present as a love-token to Cleopatra, who would then turn around and rent it for a good price to Herod, who enjoyed it for its sun. Herod had wanted to escape the winter rain and cold of Jerusalem. Mark Antony was thinking of empires and Cleopatra of rent and meanwhile Jericho slumbered on, an oasis in the Great Rift of the world's affairs where one millennium was not so very different from another.

After all, a town that was ten thousand years old didn't have to concern itself with passing fancies. Jerusalem and Damascus with their mighty deeds and ruins, their mighty passions and vigorous causes, went back not half so far in time.

***

Thinking of Bell and Jericho also led him to think of Bell's surrogate son, Yousef, the young Arab schoolteacher who had befriended Assaf for one autumn and winter and spring after the Six-Day War. Since then Yousef had been a fugitive hiding in the Judean wilderness, an exile in his own land, an idealist who had sought this wholly personal and futile way to live the cause of his people in freedom. For all that time, nearly fifteen years, Yousef had done nothing but survive in the wilderness, hiding in caves and wadis and never lifting a hand toward anyone, almost never seen. By now he would surely have to be a little mad, touched by the awesome extremes of solitude in those desolate wastes.

In the security reports submitted to Tajar by the Shin Bet, Yousef was referred to as the green man, the code name given him long ago by Tajar. The green man was a traditional Arab name for the prophet Elijah. At the time Tajar assigned the code name it had been a quiet tribute to an unusual friendship, and a suggestion of the spiritual nature of Yousef's gift to Assaf after Assaf suffered his near-fatal wounds of the soul in the Six-Day War. To the Shin Bet the green man was a crazed Palestinian hermit of no operational interest whatsoever, whom they occasionally heard about third- or fourth-hand, via their informers. When they did hear news they passed along the report to the Mossad, as requested, wondering how even a low-level desk man in the Mossad could be concerned with such a totally useless figure. If they had suspected the recipient of their infrequent reports on the green man was a man as important as Tajar, they would have been astounded. But within the Mossad Tajar kept his interest in Yousef hidden, and only Tajar and Yossi had ever been aware of the private significance of the code name.

During their last meeting near Beirut, Tajar had mentioned how this code name from another era had strangely acquired a reality of its own. For it seemed that in the Arab villages near the Judeah wilderness, the fugitive Yousef had in fact come to represent a kind of Elijah to some of the more superstitious villagers, an elusive spirit in the wastes for whom children left tiny caches of food in secret places when they were out tending their flocks of goats.

***

Halim smiled. He poured himself more brandy under the fig tree. Tajar's long-ago code name for Yousef had reminded him of Tajar's habit of suddenly dipping into history without warning, without preface. Tajar had always been famous for that. Sometimes when he first mentioned something you couldn't quite be sure whether he was referring to yesterday or to a thousand years ago.

The green man, Elijah, wandering the Judean wilderness in this day and age?

It sounded odd to Halim but it had always been Tajar's own particular way of recognizing things, of giving them a shape and a size that made sense to him. Of course memory was also like that, as Tajar liked to point out.

It's as free and erratic as a butterfly . . . Tajar's phrase.

Once in Geneva two decades ago, in the middle of a discussion on dead drops in Damascus, Tajar had abruptly begun talking about the pyramids of Egypt. Yossi had listened to him in astonishment. What was the connection? What had sent Tajar careening off to Egypt? Had he suddenly thought of the pyramids as history's ultimate dead drop? Solid stone proof of man's insatiable desire to have a secure secret place, at last, to hide in? Tajar, meanwhile, had gone on to marvel over a statue of Cheops he had seen in the museum in Cairo, the only known representation of the pharaoh who had built the Great Pyramid as his mausoleum.

According to Tajar the statue of Cheops was tiny, no bigger than a man's finger.

Just imagine it, Tajar had said. In the desert the Great Pyramid, six million tons of fitted stone perfectly piled into place, immense and incomprehensible. And in a museum five thousand years later, this minuscule presentation of its creator. Alas for poor Cheops. He wanted to be remembered as the weightiest king in the history of the world, but as it turned out some minor craftsman undid him with an hour's work. We see him.

And there he is, as big as a finger but no bigger. . . .

Halim smiled under his fig tree. He remembered laughing in Geneva and asking Tajar what on earth had caused him to think of Cheops in the middle of a discussion on dead drops. Tajar had said something, but he couldn't recall his fanciful explanation now.

***

Memory . . . Tajar's butterflies.

There in his garden that spring Halim was trying very hard to see the Runner's life as right in the end. He knew the Runner's days in Damascus were over. He had accomplished much but the Runner's role was for running, and Halim knew he had already pushed his endurance more than enough. It was a younger man's vocation which demanded a young man's eye and skill. Spies didn't grow old in their work. They went inside like Tajar or found an oasis on the edge of the desert like Bell, or died with their mask on like Ziad. But where could he go?

He felt like Bell at the end of the Second World War — a man without a country. Bell was English but he had never really lived in England. He had grown up in India but then his past had been denied to him and he couldn't go back there because of race and war and circumstance.

Israel wasn't Halim's home. Even when he had lived in Israel he had felt out of place, and how much truer that would be now after nearly twenty-five years as an Arab in Damascus. He had served Israel with honesty but Israel as an idea, a concept, perhaps as Bell had served England while living in India and Egypt. For Bell, that hadn't meant there was an England to go back to.

Where then? Some Arab community in South America? In North America? Sitting with the other old men in an Arab coffeehouse on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, playing shesh-besh and reminiscing about the old country? Recalling Tajar's humor and sneaking off one afternoon a week to ride a subway to a Jewish neighborhood of Brooklyn where he could back some frightened schoolboys into a corner and whisper to them with wild eyes, like some mad ancient mariner off the docks: Listen, I was the greatest secret agent the Mossad ever had, let me tell you my tale? . . .

He laughed at himself. It was marvellously ridiculous, and also sad and hopeless. But what then? A new identity and a new life in Hong Kong? A new identity and a new life in New Mexico? On the edge of the Gobi desert? On a hillside in the Hindu Kush?

He was trying hard to make light of the end of his role as the Runner. He was trying to believe he might be going somewhere — not just leaving Damascus and this house and this garden. He had known profound friendships over the years and he wanted very much to honor Tajar and Ziad as they deserved to be honored, and not to feel regret or sorrow. All the choices had always been his, so regret and sorrow were wrong. A smile and a wave was the way to honor his friends, but he also knew these gestures had to be real.

To honor them he had to honor himself, which was the hardest thing for any man to do alone in the end. Tajar did it but he wasn't alone. He had Anna and Assaf and Abigail. Bell managed it but he wasn't quite alone. He had Abu Musa and Moses the Ethiopian. Ziad hadn't managed it, and he had been alone.

***

The green man.

The idea came to him between Cheops and Herod. Merely a glimpse of an idea at first, a suggestion which slowly took shape. In his garden beneath the fig tree that spring, between Cheops and Herod: the green man.

There was a majestic simplicity to it. In fact Yousef had always wanted to meet him. The obscure fugitive who lived like an animal in the wilderness had always yearned to meet the revered visionary from Damascus: Halim the incorruptible one, the conscience of the Palestinian cause.

Over the years men from the West Bank had turned up in Halim's garden with Yousef's humble request. They weren't sophisticated men. They were men from villages near the Judean wilderness who respected Yousef's reputation, such as it was. They were simple farmers and goatherds to whom the fugitive Yousef meant something. To them Yousef was a symbol of freedom, a spirit of resistance. All these years Yousef had never left the land, never forsaken it, but he was willing to do so and cross the Jordan to the east if it meant he could meet Halim.

It was strange, thought Halim. Subterfuge was strange, and illusion and reality and myth, and love. Tajar had always said the Runner had to be a genuine idealist in order to succeed in Damascus, and so he had been and so he had succeeded. Yet Yousef was also a genuine idealist, although of a completely different sort.

Much had come from the Runner's idealism. Had anything come from Yousef's?

A little perhaps. In a few poor villages of Palestine, some Arab children dreamed as a result of Yousef. He gave them a kind of hope, and a hope and a dream were always a hope and a dream. The green man? Elijah?

Something might come of it someday, who could say. . . .

The idea shaped itself slowly, over brandy, in his garden beneath the fig tree. First he decided he would meet Yousef. Then he decided the place to do that was not on the Jordanian side of the river, but in Israel. He would cross the river to the plains of Jericho: the spy who came home to the promised land.

That part of it amused him. Not even Moses had managed to make that crossing. God had said no to Moses.

Moses had already come far enough. He had journeyed long and well through the wilderness, but here was an end to his wanderings: a view of the promised land. . . .

So the Runner would stand on one of the mountains of Moab and look down on the valley and the river to the west, and when darkness came he would slip across the river to the plains of Jericho. Yousef had pledged himself never to forsake his homeland, and Halim would honor that pledge by going over to meet him on the other side, Yousef's side. It would also be a way to honor Yousef for what he had once done for Assaf. The finer meanings of all this would be unknown to Yousef, but that didn't matter. Halim was doing it for himself.

Tajar would also understand this final gesture.

Halim even knew where he and Yousef could meet. There was a small, abandoned Ethiopian monastery on the banks of the river. As a child Yousef had gone there for picnics with his brother Ali, now dead, and with Bell and Abu Musa and Moses the Ethiopian. There the Runner and the green man would sit in the darkness and rejoice at the end of their long journeys through the wilderness. And since they would both be at home on the plains of Jericho, together on the promised side of the river, neither of them would ever have to set out again. Halim made a telephone call. A Palestinian friend was to come by that evening. Once the message got through to Yousef, the reply would come back to him quickly in Damascus. He only hoped it could be arranged before summer, so he wouldn't have to hear about Lebanon.

THIRTEEN

Bell had seldom seen Yousef during the last decade. Once a year on a moonless night Yousef might turn up in the ruins of Herod's winter palace on the outskirts of Jericho, a silent ghost in the darkness. The rest of the time Yousef kept to his caves up in the wilderness, hiding far back in the deeper ravines and the more inaccessible wadis.

Yousef went barefoot and was pitifully thin under his rags. He had lost most of his teeth which gave him the gaunt sunken look of a man without flesh. His legs and arms were covered with running sores, infected bites from the minute creatures that gnawed on him in the caves where he lived. He was not so nimble now but always alert, like an animal, his gaze suggesting a simpleminded attention. To Bell, he looked a generation or two older than Assaf. Sadly, Abu Musa had been right. The Yousef they knew had been lost to them long ago.

When Bell saw him that spring — the spring before Israel went to war in Lebanon — Yousef talked much more than he usually did. He also asked questions about Jericho, about the fields under cultivation toward the river, about military patrols along the border. He even reminisced about the wonderful excursions they had all once made together down to the little Ethiopian hermitage on the river, floating in eerie silence across the plains in the grand old steam-powered touring car driven by Moses in his flowing yellow robes and racing goggles, those trips likened by Bell to a journey on a flying carpet. There by the hermitage, Ali and Yousef had played in the water for hours under the watchful eye of Abu Musa, while Bell daydreamed over a book, until Moses finally finished his duties around the place and they all sat down to an epic picnic on the banks of the Jordan. For a moment Bell's heart leapt at these fond memories. Was Yousef at last thinking of leaving the wilderness?

But no, he had promised to tell Bell before doing that and there was no hint of such a decision. It was just a sudden stirring of nostalgia, thought Bell, as he watched Yousef begin the long climb up to the desolate hills.

And so Bell left the ruins of Herod's winter palace and wearily made his way back to his orange grove, the bleaker vistas of his life hard upon him as they always were when he saw Yousef.

***

That spring was a gloomy time for Tajar. Israel was preparing to go to war and all the Mossad's resources were directed toward Lebanon. An apocalyptic sense of purpose had seized the government, which seemed mesmerized by the ease with which it was going to achieve so much at a single blow.

Tajar opposed the invasion and was so outspoken he was excluded from almost everything in the Mossad.

Even the Runner's reports were not highly regarded, perhaps because they reinforced Tajar's arguments. The Runner said flatly that the Syrians would never allow the Maronite Christians to dominate Lebanon. But the answer to that was that the Syrians could do nothing about it because Israel was far stronger than Syria, army to army. In any case, like Tajar, the Runner was sometimes known to see things from an Arab perspective and there was no place for that now.

The Mossad sent teams of agents in and out of Beirut and Tajar was kept away from planning. Ignored and isolated, he retreated more than ever to Jericho and the unworldly serenity of Bell's orange grove.

***

Early in June, late in the afternoon, a bedouin boy was scrambling up a ravine in the Moabite mountains of Jordan, overlooking the Jordan Valley. Every few moments the boy stopped to peer and to listen. During the long day when the sun stood still above the barren plains of Jericho, there was never any danger of a goat straying. But as soon as the sun stirred from its throne above the valley and edged westward, then an animal might wander and lose itself, lured by the instinct of return — to a place, even an imagined place, what men called home, all animals felt it — an instinct which had been obscurely triggered by this tiny promise that darkness was coming.

His grandfather had taught him that. The boy moved nimbly up the ravine. He had been out on these slopes with his family's black goats for over eleven hours. The walk from the tent to the east, begun at first light, had taken another two hours. The animals had been fresh and hungry then and it would take longer to lead them back, but he wasn't worried yet. There was still time to find the lost one and be home by nightfall. She had strayed before and he knew her ways.

The boy encouraged himself by dreaming of adventure. Miracles could happen in this valley. When his grandfather was a young man, a bedouin boy in the hills across the valley had sought a lost goat and discovered a cave with ancient earthenware jars protruding from the dust. The jars had contained not gold but something which turned out to be even more valuable — brittle parchment with strange writing on it. That goatherd boy had broken off a piece of the writing and taken it with him. The fragment found its way to more and more important people and eventually the boy's family was made rich through his discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. That was in his grandfather's time. Who could say what might happen in his?

The boy stopped dead. He was peering down into a smaller ravine and saw there a man who was just sitting, gazing west out over the valley. The man looked like a bedouin, a very poor bedouin, ragged and dusty as if he had been living alone in the wilderness for a long time. The boy's first impression was that the stranger was a fugitive. He knew who was to be seen in these parts and this man didn't belong. It even flashed through the boy's mind that this might be the fabled green man, a wild creature of the wastes of whom he had heard, an unworldly presence who was both spirit and holy man. The green man was said to dwell on the other side of the valley in the mountains to the west, but who could be sure where a spirit wandered? Perhaps he had flown over here during the night.

The boy stared only a moment. Whether this was the green man or not, the boy knew better than to approach strangers in these gullies. The border with Israel was just down below. A fugitive who sat in the mountains of Jordan so close to the border, looking west toward Palestine as if waiting for darkness, was enough reason not to search here for the missing goat. The second miracle of the Dead Sea Scrolls would have to wait for another day. This wasn't the time to discover ancient fragments of history more precious than gold.

Silently the boy withdrew, backing down the way he had come. . . .

In fact the stranger had seen the boy's flock earlier and knew there was nothing to fear. A bedouin child tending goats would keep well away and speak of what he had seen only to his family, that night. Such was the rule for the children of nomads near dangerous enemy borders.

The stranger would have been taken for a bedouin by anyone, but his age betrayed him as a man out of place. The white stubble of a beard stood out on his lean dark face. To the boy this had given the stranger the desperate look of a fugitive, although actually it served to soften the man's gaunt, weary features. But in any case he was out of place in these ravines, whichever desert he was from, since only goats wandered here without a secret purpose and only children minded them.

As for the stranger himself, he wasn't feeling at all out of place but that was because he was gazing across the great empty valley at the green patch on its far side, imagining he was there. The green patch was the oasis of Jericho with its luxuriant fruit trees and cascading flowers, a little up the valley at the foot of the opposing range of mountains, which marked the easterly reaches of the Judean wilderness. He had chosen this sheltered lookout because he could view the oasis from here without having the glare of the Dead Sea in his eyes. Now the sun was sinking toward the far horizon and casting shadows of the wilderness back over the lifeless deep-blue waters, but earlier the sea had been a mirror too brilliant to behold. And this perch in the hills of Moab was also directly above a certain spot — two small huts invisible from here — which lay hidden within the thin line of green foliage winding down the middle of the pale barren valley to the Dead Sea, the banks of the little stream which was itself the border. Now the vast empty plains were also coming alive with subtle shades of color as the sun sank lower and gave the magical oasis in the distance an even more intensely green hue in the day's afterglow.

He thought of it that way — a magical oasis. Green was the color of Jericho, of the Prophet's banner and paradise. And it was none other than Jericho that Satan had spread before Jesus to tempt him in the wilderness, as Abu Musa was so fond of recalling.

Give pause, Abu Musa would say, looking up from the shesh-besh game on Bell's front porch. How could it be that Satan hoped to win the soul of Jesus by offering him Jericho? Why didn't Satan offer Rome and Persia and the other great empires? But the answer must be obvious. In those days serious people must have been much more like me, intent on the real fruits of life. So there was the choice of choices two thousand years ago. Did one choose Jericho or eternal life? Which was it to be?

A familiar portent, a sparkle of devilish joy, would creep into Abu Musa's eyes . . . But might they not be the same thing? he would whisper. Isn't that also a possibility? And are you now thinking we may be in deep sand here? Well it's true we are, just as Jesus was when he was standing up on the Mount of Temptation behind us. And Jesus had to choose then and we have to choose now but I insist on choosing both, on having all of it, because to me eternity and a life lived in Jericho are one and the same, deliciously so. . . .

Whereupon a massive grin would erupt on Abu Musa's old face and his huge body would heave with silent laughter, while Bell raised his glass in salute to homegrown theology, and Moses the Ethiopian smiled benignly and went on sniffing a fragrance of jasmine that was passing his way. . . .

The sun had slipped below the horizon on the far side of the valley. These rich memories of Bell's front porch, of Bell and Abu Musa and Moses, had never been more vivid to him. He could feel these memories in a thousand different ways. Jericho's greenery had turned dark and somber in the twilight beyond the desolate plains. And so what did Jericho mean to him, finally?

Bell's life, of course. He knew that was what he had always wanted in the end, but it was too late for that now. He had gone too far, too long. He had missed somehow and would never know Bell's life. Once long ago there had been exhilaration and success, a very grand success in the Six Days of creation. And then there had been despair which he had overcome, and sadness and loss and all of it come to this — a dream of Jericho glimpsed from afar. From empty verandahs through long days and nights that spring, since the death of Ziad at the end of winter, he had looked down into the tangled gardens of memory and seen the broken statues of his life, solitary and silent and discolored by time, a mystic's solemn companions.

So perhaps it was as Ziad had often claimed and there was far more than just a touch of the mystic to him.

Perhaps that had even been necessary in order for him to have been the Runner. Mysteries and mysticism and espionage, esoteric codes and rituals and undeciphered identities, unsuspected rites — weren't such things always likely to travel together in the mythical caravans of these ancient lands? He thought of Bell and his long-ago Monastery in Egypt, where Bell had been the enigmatic grand master of the secretive Monks and Tajar had been one of the novitiates. I see your role in Damascus as that of a working mystic, Tajar had once said to the Runner.

He thought of Ziad's wistful smile and his sad dreams of a longed for, an eternal over there. . . . If it works it can go on forever, Tajar had said to the Runner in another lifetime, when he was young, and certainly it had looked like forever then.

Night fell. Darkness graced the ravine, the hillside, the mountains of Moab. Night was a welcome friend come to hide the expanse of barren desert stretching between him and the distant lights of tiny Jericho, that beautiful dream in the moonless deep of the immense chasm at his feet. It was time now and he left his perch, his lookout, to make his way down to the valley floor. He went with great care. There was an exact route to follow and he had to move swiftly without delay, without a wrong turn. He reached the dry cracked plains and hurried on.

Once he thought he heard a muffled beat whispering to him in the dark stillness. Could it be the famous drum of Moses the Ethiopian thumping in the night, carried on some errant breeze from Jericho? But no, that was impossible. Jericho still lay miles away and Moses's little chapel was in the very heart of the oasis. Even if Moses were beating his drum in Jericho the dense fruit trees would absorb its rhythms. It was his own heart he heard as he trotted over the wastes.

The low line of foliage, with the stream and the border, lay ahead. He had but to cross it and make his way a few hundred yards upstream to reach the spot where the small huts stood, the place where Yousef had been brought for picnics as a child. He admired and pitied Yousef and had much to thank him for. His own son was whole because of Yousef, who had lived with a purity he himself had only pretended to. But of course accomplishing things was partly pretense, and purity was also a kind of madness. What he wanted tonight was to bind his existence to Yousef and unite their secret purposes. That this had to happen in death would be their own private breach of time, not suicide but a final and necessary transverse of identity. That he was making the decision for both of them was as it must be. He couldn't avoid it. So here was the last border, the final crossing, and it wasn't for innocents. It seemed unlikely they would have more than a minute or two together, if they were able to meet at all. But if he actually did reach that poor confused soul he would take his hand and tell him that his own real name was also Yosef, which was only the beginning of an astonishing secret history they shared, a tumultuous tale if they but had time to recount it. . . .

He waded into the water, walked the few yards across, climbed up the other bank.

The Jordan. He had crossed the river and here was the promised land. On these same desolate plains of Jericho, long ago, the prophet Elijah had left behind the secret despair of his fate and risen to eternity in a chariot of fire, a whirlwind into heaven.

He hadn't gone very far upstream when he heard the engine of a desert vehicle. It didn't sound far away but perhaps he had heard it before and willed himself to ignore it. At that moment a searchlight must have been switched on as the vehicle churned forward, the beam pointed down to sweep the gullies and reflecting off the sand, for all at once an eerie glow leapt up over the landscape in front of him. The glow was diffuse and illusionary, not penetrating the darkness overhead but clinging close to the earth as if the desert were surrendering a host of pale memories to the night, a last remnant of sun-wracked noons. He even stopped moving for an instant, so hypnotizing was this haunting illumination with its looming shapes and dancing shadows. But now the dance suddenly quickened as the eerie glow gathered strength, and he began to run and run harder and harder, flying over the earth.

There were shouts off to his left and he saw the first of the little huts which stood by the shore upstream. A figure, an unworldly ghostlike figure, emerged in the uncanny glow beside the hut. It was Yousef, that strange apparition from the Judean wilderness, and he was looking around the clearing with a childlike curiosity, bewildered and frightened, not knowing what to do. The warning shouts were closer and louder, the glow to the land swelled brighter. There were also sharp thuds off in the darkness, what might have been warning shots at the stars. As he ran he smiled and waved at the ghostly figure and Yousef must have understood something, for he too seemed to smile as he came around in front of the hut. Yossi ran even harder and called out the single word of recognition, his final cry — their name, the man they both were — here at the end of time on the edge of the promised land, waved and smiled and raced on, but he was still only running toward the hut when the first burst of bullets chattered out of the night.

He stumbled, saw Yousef smile, then nothing. Yousef, confused, a ghost with welcoming arms stretched wide in the pale night light, almost reached him. But then another burst of small flames chattered from the darkness and the ghost shuddered, knelt, settled lightly in a fluttering of rags a few yards away as a last bullet ticked at the dust between the two crumpled bodies, beside the little stream trickling down to the Dead Sea.

***

One evening at the beginning of June Tajar was visiting Bell when a jeep drew up outside Bell's gate. It was a moonless night and they had just finished another of Bell's superb curry dinners. The two of them were still sitting at the table, facing each other in the candlelight. Bell was talking about India. He knew Tajar's gloomy mood those days and suspected it had something to do with Lebanon, so as best he could he distracted his friend. The arrival of a jeep at the gate didn't surprise Bell, although it had never happened before. Bell had no telephone and obviously Tajar would have to leave his whereabouts known to someone.

The gate clanged and they heard a man advancing through the orange grove. Tajar only had time to reach for his crutches, not to rise, before there were steps on the porch and the man appeared in the doorway. He was a young army captain in fatigues, armed. He glanced at Bell and addressed Tajar.

A call from one of your men, sir. The green man has been killed near here at the border. Near the river, by one of our patrols.

What? Trying to cross over to Jordan?

It seems not but there was a mix-up. Another man was killed with him and that one had come across — from Jordan — which is what caused the mix-up. A Syrian, apparently.

Bell saw his friend's eyes open in horror.

A Syrian? How do they know?

He was carrying papers, replied the young officer. I can —

Tajar was heaving himself up on his crutches. His bench went over with a crash and he was hobbling toward the door. The officer disappeared ahead of him and Bell heard the gate clang, the jeep drive away. It had all happened in a minute or two.

Bell sat for a time and then began clearing away the dishes. He washed them and cleaned up in the kitchen, put the food away, started to boil coffee and then thought better of it. Usually he went to his grape arbor after dinner but tonight he returned to the front porch and sat in his chair with a glass of arak, the decanter on the table beside him. Not that he expected to see Tajar again that night but he felt his place was here, facing the orange grove and the front gate and the road. It was a silent night of stars and the gentlest of summer breezes.

The green man . . . Elijah?

That had to be Tajar's code name for Yousef, of course. The ghost of Yousef gone at last, released from his suffering in the wilderness by a mix-up near the border, near the river, shot by an Israeli army patrol. That was why Yousef had asked Bell questions about the land near the river and border patrols, because he had intended to go there.

And a Syrian killed with him by the river?

For some reason Bell was sure that could only be Halim, the man Yousef had always hoped to meet someday, the mysterious adventurer from Damascus who had once spent long twilights with Bell beside the beautiful mosaic in the ruins of the winter palace of the Omayyad caliphs.

The look of horror in Tajar's eyes?

Yes, there was no doubt in Bell's mind that Halim had secretly been Tajar's man. And chance and fate and desire — who knew in what combination? — had brought Halim across the river to meet Yousef on the plains of Jericho, where they had both been killed.

Bell raised his glass and gazed through the clear liquid at his orange grove. And to think he had once linked these three men in an illusionary chain of being . . . poor Yousef, poor Halim, poor Tajar.

Gazing through his arak, Bell thought of the ancient Egyptian belief that to repeat the name of one who is dead is to cause him to live again.

FOURTEEN

Nearly three decades had passed since Tajar had conceived the beginnings of his audacious master plan for the Runner operation and taken the first quiet steps to set it on its course. Years had gone by before the vast scope of the plan had become apparent and even then only four men, the directors of the Mossad past and present, had shared the intricacies of the operation with Tajar: Little Aharon, Tajar's competitor in the Mossad at the beginning, Generals Dror and Ben-Zvi, and now General Reuvah. The Runner operation had been the most ambitious penetration in the history of Israeli intelligence. For nearly twenty-five years the Runner had been an influential citizen of Damascus, respected as a Syrian patriot, admired as an Arab visionary. The operation was also the most closely guarded secret in the history of Israeli espionage. Only the four directors of the Mossad had ever known, with Tajar, the true identity of the Runner — that he was an Israeli, an immigrant from Iraq who had learned to pass as an Arab, a soldier who had distinguished himself in the 1948

war when the state was founded.

Tajar had spent the days after the Runner's death gathering facts from the Shin Bet, the border police, the soldiers involved in the shooting. Still shaken and somber, still crushed by the enormity of his loss, he sat in the office of the director of the Mossad one night, alone with the director.

General Reuvah was a blunt squat man of great tenacity, a former paratrooper and hero from the Yom Kippur War, when he had fought on the Golan Heights against the Syrians. Like Colonel Jundi, he had distinguished himself as a tank commander in that war. Tajar had never worked out a common ground for friendship with General Reuvah, perhaps because they differed too widely in their views, perhaps simply because Tajar was beginning to find unbridgeable the gap between himself and these younger and younger generals.

General Reuvah had never disguised his lack of sympathy for Tajar's ways, nor Tajar his disagreements with the general. But the general did understand death all too well, particularly the deaths of comrades who were also friends. And the Runner had been the Runner, Tajar's magnificent and unique creation from long ago, so there was much to unite them that evening. Indeed, all at once they both felt extremely close to each other —

and lonely. They also knew that as unlike as they were, a powerful bond would always exist between them.

Of the facts, there was little to say. Certainly there had been a mix-up and it was always better to sit down and ask questions, if that could be done. But a border at night? The sensors picking up a figure moving through the Israeli no-man's-land toward the river? Another figure moving through no-man's-land on the other side of the river and then crossing the Jordan into Israel? A patrol dispatched and warning shouts in the darkness, warning shots in the darkness, men running in the darkness? . . . No, there was nothing to say about that other than to ask one simple question: what was the Runner doing on the plains of Jericho? So they put aside the facts from that fatal night and instead talked about the Runner, or rather the general quietly asked questions and Tajar talked about the Runner.

And when you saw him in Lebanon the last time? . . .

Yes, it's easy enough now to imagine I saw things and ignored them because I preferred to, for both our sakes. The signs were there — aren't they always in retrospect? Of course we had talked about him leaving Damascus someday and where he might go and what he might do. It's true he never thought of coming back to Israel to live. He thought in terms of a visit perhaps, then going on somewhere else to live, somewhere so far away and foreign to him that he could always be a stranger and never have to fit in. As for t he green man, Yousef, the Runner had known about him for years, ever since Yousef and his son became friends after the Six-Day War. Yousef had always wanted to meet him. It was Yousef's great dream and there's no question he would have tried to cross the river to fulfill it, if he had been asked to.

But instead? . . .

Yes, instead the Runner came over to our side. The meeting was obviously going to be in that little abandoned monastery, or hermitage, beside the river. Just a few huts, really. The property still belongs to the Ethiopian church. An ancient anchorite lived there for decades. Do you know the story?

No.

The anchorite was an Ethiopian monk who had lived beside the river since Turkish times, said Tajar. After the Six-Day War the army moved him out. Abba Avraham was the anchorite's name, mostly deaf and so shrunken with age he was little bigger than a child. Close to a hundred, by all accounts. He chanted prayers through all his waking hours, rather loudly because he was deaf. I'm told you always knew when he was nearby because he sounded like a gently buzzing bee. The army took him to the Ethiopian monastery in Jericho where a couple of monks were living, but the next day he was gone. During the night he had walked back to his hut beside the river. An officer tried to explain to him that the river was now a border, a military area and out-of-bounds, but ancient Abba Avraham wasn't having any of it. All he knew was that his tiny hut beside the river was his place in the world. John had baptized Jesus there and that was where he belonged.

The Ethiopian monk in charge in Jericho, a giant old eunuch called Moses, pleaded with the anchorite and all went well for a time. It seemed ancient Abba Avraham would stay in Jericho. But then one morning he turned up missing again and sure enough a patrol found him collapsed out in the desert, buzzing very weakly, half-dead from exhaustion, on his way back to the river. Moses was in tears. I can't lock him up, he said, and if I don't he'll just keep trying to go back until it kills him. Well as it happened ancient Abba Avraham didn't recover from that last trek. He was mostly unconscious when they brought him back to Jericho and a few days later he died . . . trailing his hand in a pan of water which Moses had placed beside his cot. In his mind anyway, Abba Avraham's mind, he had gone to heaven straight from the banks of his holy river. With Moses's help, of course.

It sounds like a tale from some other age, said General Reuvah.

Yes it does, replied Tajar. And so the Runner decided to come over to our side for his meeting with Yousef, a matter of only a few yards, after all. The river isn't much of anything at that point. In fact I've never known anyone who wasn't astonished at seeing the Jordan for the first time. To be so small, just a quiet little stream a few yards across and shallow and warm, and yet to be so famous. It's always imagined quite differently, as a great river, and the crossing of it surely a momentous event. Chills the body but not the soul, hallelujah —

as the American song says, getting it exactly backward. And so the Runner wanted to cross it and he did, and he even carried papers with him to show he was a Syrian . . . if anything happened.

If anything happened. Tajar had added those words in a whisper. Now he bent his head, looking down at his hands. The general waited a moment before speaking, and when he did it was as if he were speaking to himself.

I assume he knew about our sensors, said the general. He would have to have known about borders.

Tajar still gazed at his own hands. Of course the Runner had known about borders. That was his profession.

And he had known sensors sounded alarms that brought soldiers. He had also known Jericho was only fifteen miles from Jerusalem and that the border near Jericho was therefore very tightly guarded. . . . And at night?

With troops dispatched immediately? It could only mean sure bursts from automatic weapons if an infiltrator didn't stop at once, as ordered. No one could expect to cross the river there by chance, to trespass without the full, expected response.

Oh yes he knew about borders, replied Tajar. And he knew about that one.

Again the general paused before speaking.

Perhaps what we call in the army the silently wounded, he said. I've seen good men go on for years and then suddenly for no reason, what appears to be no reason. . . . But it's foolish for me to speculate about the Runner. I never even met the man and you knew him . . . well, forever. No one else ever really knew him at all.

Not for thirty years anyway.

Tajar nodded. He gripped his hands together and gathered his strength, pushing on. He mentioned Anna and Assaf and talked for a while about both of them.

It's up to you, said General Reuvah. If you want to talk to them you can, but of course they can never share the secret with anyone. Do what you think is best, just let me know what you decide. No one else is going to know and nothing will ever be said from here about the existence of the Runner, or the fact that there ever was a Runner operation. Officially and unofficially: nothing. There'll be some talk within the agency about a mysterious operation having ended, and a few of our most knowledgeable people may discreetly try to find out which important Arab diplomat has been dismissed lately, or has retired or dropped out for some other reason. But even within our security services no one knows the identity of the Syrian who was killed with the green man, nor will they try to find out, since we took over the case immediately and the green man was no one of importance to them. So on our side, nothing. An end. The security services in Damascus will want to find out what happened to Halim and they will. They'll find out he went to meet Yousef across the river, and they'll see it as another of his quixotic gestures on behalf of the Palestinians. He covered himself in Damascus, dropped hints as we know and said things, particularly about his despair with Lebanon. So now, for them, this will only add to the legend that Halim was the true conscience of the Arab cause. In a way he always prepared them for something like this. His refusal to get involved in factions, staying above that and then deciding all at once to cross the river to meet someone as inconsequential as Yousef — it will all fit for the Syrians, Halim being Halim right to the end. What an extraordinary agent he was, just perfect in his disguise. Even when he decided . . . to do this, he prepared it and covered it and made it seem natural and plausible, inevitable even. Yes, that's what would strike me if I were a Syrian intelligence officer reviewing the life and death of Halim. The inevitability of it.

Tajar looked up from his hands. The general was saying all this because he deeply felt the need to talk about the Runner, to praise and honor and remember him. And since he couldn't speak of Yossi as a man and a friend, he did the next best thing and praised and honored him as a professional. Tajar realized this. To him these thoughts could have sounded crude and belittling, but he recognized General Reuvah's good intentions.

He was also grateful the general had so carefully avoided dwelling on the one simple question concerning the Runner's entry onto the plains of Jericho. For there was no answer to it except that this had been the view given to Moses three millennia ago, his glimpse of the promised land which God had said he could never enter.

They talked for a long time. Eventually Tajar gathered up his crutches and pulled himself to his feet. He would be leaving the Mossad now, his work done. Yossi's grand rabbi of intelligence was retiring. To others in his work Tajar had always appeared to be the fortunate one, the gifted and the blessed. He was a legend without rival, the patriarch of Israeli intelligence, the incomparable survivor whose mysterious trail spanned nearly half a century of success and adventure, stretching all the way back to Baghdad in 1936. There were tears in the general's eyes as he stepped forward to embrace this small crippled figure, so weighed down with grief.

The Runner was the most valuable agent Israel ever had, said the general.

Oh yes, whispered Tajar. . . . He was that too.

***

It was a quiet June evening when Tajar sat down with Anna and Assaf in the spacious high-ceiling room of the old stone house on Ethiopia Street, and there recounted the story of Yossi's secret journey through the years, beginning in Argentina a quarter of a century ago. Tajar spoke by candlelight, slowly and lovingly going into detail as best he could, careful to dwell on small moments which might help them recognize Yossi from their memories, bringing to life in the shadows these echoes of Yossi's dedication and struggle, his lonely triumphs and far more lonely defeats, from the grand successes before the Six-Day War to the growing darkness of the later years, a steady advance in the footprints of time which had finally ended in a fatal crossing of the Jordan to meet Yousef on the plains of Jericho.

Neither Anna nor Assaf interrupted him during all this long tale. When he was finished Anna rose and went to stand in the doorway to the balcony, her back to the room, looking out at the night. Assaf seemed to have a thousand questions at first, but soon he too sought refuge in silence, the enormity of these revelations far beyond the grasp of a moment.

After a time Tajar went off to the kitchen to make coffee. Assaf followed him down the corridor to bring it in.

On the way back from the kitchen, carrying the three little cups on a tray, Assaf stopped in the middle of the great room to stare with a quizzical expression at the candlelit photograph of Yossi on Anna's desk, over by the balcony window, trying to comprehend a small part of what he had heard. Tajar, hobbling along behind him, paused to follow his gaze. It was the photograph of Yossi in his paratrooper uniform at the age of twenty-nine, handsome and smiling somewhere in the desert, taken a month before the 1956 war broke out and Yossi was supposedly killed in the Mitla Pass in the Sinai. At that moment Anna turned in the balcony doorway and smiled at them both, a strangely enigmatic smile in the candlelight. Her hands came up as if to welcome the two men, or to hold them.

Assaf with his offering on a tray and the solemn figure of Tajar leaning on his crutches, Anna smiling and reaching out, the photograph off to the side between them: for a long moment the three of them stood motionless in these attitudes, facing each other and memory, silently fixed for all time in the large airy room they all loved, a grave and ancient tableau as if from some dimly remembered rite.

It was Anna who broke the silence.

You see it doesn't surprise me in a way, she said. Tonight we've heard nothing but fantastical things, a kind of display of magic. And yet in a way none of it surprises me because everyday . . . so seldom do we know the worlds where we walk.

Tajar and Assaf weren't aware of it but these were Yossi's words which Anna was resurrecting, spoken long ago when he and Anna had sat on a little desert hill watching the sunrise in the Negev, sifting through their fingers the riverborne, seaborne, wind-driven sand which had come all the way from the upper Nile to lie at their feet, the two of them rejoicing in that quiet place at the dawn of the world.

FIFTEEN

That summer Israel went to war in Lebanon and Bell died with his eye open, sitting on his front porch gazing at the dust and oranges of his life. Abu Musa found him.

Late one afternoon the old Arab turned up at the regular time, wheezing and sputtering as he gave Bell's gate a kick and sent it clanging open on its hinges — his usual warning to Bell that the drowsy siesta hours were giving way to the demands of serious shesh-besh and society, to inscrutable Ethiopian chants and clouds of hashish smoke and interminable monologues on a princess and God and a holy river, on lust and castles in the sky and all manner of growing things.

Yes, the social hour in Jericho. Scandal and gossip and disreputable intellectual mayhem in the lowest and oldest village on earth. Surely no self-respecting holy man could survive without it?

Cradled in Abu Musa's arm were masses of bright red mangoes, oozing and sticky with juices, fresh from one of his trees. Bell liked to claim that the ambrosia of the ancient Greeks, the food of the gods of Olympus, had in fact been nothing more unworldly than ripe juicy mangoes. Was it true? But if the ancient Greeks had really been so dedicated in their quest for knowledge, thought Abu Musa, why hadn't they settled down right here to eat ambrosia while working out their laws of man and nature, their philosophies and sciences and their epics of tragedy and comedy? If they were so wise, why had they left Jericho and pushed on east dreaming of Persian and Indian and Bactrian empires? Pure folly and so much for the Greeks. Because in matters of knowledge, obviously, a man could go no deeper than the lowest and the oldest, which in fact was right here.

Around his ample stomach, Abu Musa's pale blue galabieh was darkly stained from the juices of the mangoes cradled in his arm. At the end of his arm, in his hand, blossomed an orange-red fistful of fiery flamboyants, also from one of his trees. Abu Musa was never quite sure which one of the three kings of the Orient he was meant to represent in Bell's abstruse scheme of things — who could fathom a holy man's thoughts? But he never doubted he was a king and was always careful to arrive for the social hour bearing gifts for the other two kings, who would be grateful and thank him for them. Then Bell would slice mangoes and Moses would delicately arrange flamboyants behind his ears, framing his huge chocolate face in an orange-red halo, and while they were busy with these matters he himself would be free to launch another fascinating account of his day in Jericho.

Today he was feeling especially fine because he had been visited by a mysterious and complex dream during his siesta, a beautiful dream incorporating large parts of his life and filled with symbols and grand events and sensuous delights, a dream of fruit trees and lions and gazelles and many colors, of vast deserts and a distant oasis and all of it never ending . . . even now it puffed him up to think of it. Abu Musa's heart glowed.

How many refills of his nargileh would it take just to begin such a tale?

Bell's gate clanged open and Abu Musa's eyes narrowed with cunning. Perhaps he should tantalize his two friends? Merely hint at the splendors of his dream and spread the telling of it out over a week? But might not there be other dreams between now and then? Was it wise to wait and fall behind? Or would either of his friends even tolerate delay once he had fired their imaginations? He could see Moses gently nodding on the other side of the shesh-besh board, pretending to chant prayers under his breath while he was secretly gulping down every word. And he could see Bell smiling beside them in his tattered chair, pretending to daydream with a glass of arak while secretly listening for every exciting new turn of events. They would insist, of course. They would demand to hear, immediately, the entire intriguing drama of his dream from beginning to end.

Abu Musa was sweating heavily. Even in the late afternoon the summer heat was ferocious out there in the sun by the gate. Wheezing and plotting and smiling to himself with his armload of mangoes and flamboyants, he wallowed into the hermit's compound and went crashing through the orange grove with his head down, to emerge in the clearing in front of the porch. Here, over the years, he had been known to break into wild dances when his joy and his sorrow were too great for words. How well he knew this clearing.

He raised his head. Bell was looking at him and smiling, lean and austere in white and sitting where he always sat on his porch, the claw of his bad hand gripping a half-empty glass of arak and resting on the table, which was cluttered with the usual bowls of fruit and piles of worn books and the two decanters of what looked like water to prevent dehydration. Abu Musa beamed and was about to shout a greeting when an invisible blow struck him.

Bell's eye. There was no life in Bell's eye.

He tiptoed up to the porch and placed his armload of fruit and flowers on the table. He raised Bell's hand from his lap, his good hand, and held it, feeling for a heartbeat, then gently replaced it. He passed his fingers over Bell's face, closing the single eye. A great sob escaped him. He clutched his chest and staggered back into the clearing in front of the porch, where he fell to his knees. Still Bell sat facing the orange grove, smiling and gripping his glass, his eye now closed. Abu Musa moaned and swayed back and forth on his knees, raising his head and lowering it, his hands groping in the dust and throwing dust over his head, more and more dust to mix in the fading sunlight with his anguish and tears and soft cries.

Before long the gigantic shape of Moses the Ethiopian arrived in bright yellow robes to cast a shadow over the clearing. Moses let out a huge yelp and at once whispered praise to God and thanksgiving to God for the infinite variety of His gifts, His blessings. Then solemnly Moses began to chant the Psalms, repeating David as it was known in his language, and with Moses chanting in the darkness and Abu Musa kneeling and moaning and throwing dust over himself, so it went on and on in the gentle embrace of the summer night.

SIXTEEN

His heart just stopped, Abu Musa said to Assaf. At some moment very soon before I turned up he took a sip from his glass and put it down on the table, thought of something and smiled and . . . went. Moses is inconsolable, sentimental old monk that he is. He insisted there be a service. Is that proper, I said, with the body already gone and buried? But Moses insisted and you know how he is when he decides something —

immovable. He's so big, a fact of nature like a mountain or a desert. He just sits there and refuses to budge.

Most of the time he's content to let his mind drift along with his chants, mulling over his memories of his little princess and his dreams of a holy river nearby, even if it is inaccessible. But this time he wouldn't be deterred and there was no arguing with him. A service for Bell, he said, and on his front porch, and either you beat the drum or I'll hire a pair of ragamuffins off the street to do it. Well what could I say? I knew it was all decided because when Moses gets it into his head to break out his great African drum, we will have drumming.

The drum Abu Musa was referring to — known to everyone in Jericho as Moses's heartbeat — had been brought to the Holy Land from Ethiopia by the tiny Ethiopian princess who had also brought Moses himself to the Holy Land. It was long and thick and handsome with the shape of a hollowed-out tree trunk, from which such drums must once have been made. Stretched hides were lashed over its ends and the smooth wooden sides were intricately decorated with abstract designs painted in red and green and gold, Ethiopia's national colors. A tall man with long arms could just manage to sit with the drum across his lap, one end of the drum resting on the ground, and thump both drumheads with the open palms of his hands — two thumps with the right hand followed by one with the left hand was the usual beat . . . thump-thump boom. The great drum was primitive in appearance and Moses claimed its shape and design hadn't changed in thousands of years.

No question about that, Abu Musa had once whispered to Bell with a wicked gleam in his eye. Of course its shape hasn't changed in thousands of years, but I don't think primitive is the word to describe it. Basic would be more like it. Moses is much too spiritual to know what he has there, but that drum's not fooling me. Nor, I suspect, did his little princess have any doubts about what it represented. That thing gives a shape to little boys' dreams, little girls' too. Call it the staff or rod of life or call it the tree or drum of life, what does it matter?

In any case, call it life. Without that none of us would be here. Long and thick and handsome and booming?

Ah, how well I know it. The thought of it, the fact of it, the meaning and memory of it, plagues my days and haunts my nights. Moses doesn't realize how fortunate he is to be able to devote his energies to higher realms. He chants to it, but the rest of us? But for that thing, I could have been a saint. . . .

The great drum was used only on the most sacred Ethiopian Christian feast days, and even then few people ever saw it except for Moses and his two or three elderly fellow monks, only heard its dull throb swelling out into the night from the Ethiopian chapel next door to Bell's house. On those special nights all of Jericho would quietly pulsate in the darkness for hours, from sundown until first light, and everyone would sleep especially well because the primeval rhythms of the drum were exactly what sleep required. Clever rogues, these Ethiopians, Abu Musa used to say. Their muffled thump-thump booms in the night take us all back to better times, reminding us of the blissful eternity we once spent dozing away in our mothers' wombs, before all our troubles began.

So Moses's service for Bell was planned and announced and the day came, and a small crowd of Bell's friends and neighbors from Jericho gathered in his orange grove, where they sat scattered around under the trees in the shade. Assaf and Tajar were there, and even Abigail and Anna. Bell's front porch looked the same as it had when Bell was alive. The doors and windows of the little bungalow were all open and deep shadows stirred inside the rooms. Bell's old straw hat lay in his tattered chair on the porch, and it was in front of this chair that Moses had positioned himself in the clearing. There he stood in his bright yellow robes with his congregation spread out behind him, leaning on a tall staff with a mass of flamboyants tucked behind his ears, monotonously chanting above the beat of the drum.

Moses was chanting in Ge'ez, the ancient language of his church's liturgy, and naturally no one could understand him. Before the service Abu Musa had suggested that perhaps, just this once, Moses might chant in Arabic. Otherwise no one will have any idea what you're up to, Abu Musa had said, and Bell didn't know Ge'ez, so wouldn't Arabic make more sense? But Moses, always self-assured in matters of prayer, had replied with a broad smile and a quotation: Religions in general tend to be in foreign and archaic tongues —

who said that? Bell said it, Abu Musa reluctantly had to admit, thereby resigning himself to hours of incomprehensible Ge'ez, which was surely as foreign and archaic a language as anyone in the orange grove was ever likely to hear.

Abu Musa had started out on the drum, sitting near Moses's feet in the clearing in front of the porch, but after a while he caught the eye of a tall young man from the village who came over to relieve him. Beating the drum was hypnotic work, Abu Musa had found. Moses might be used to it, but Moses was a monk and this sort of thing was his business. For Abu Musa the regular beat of the drum was profoundly sleep-inducing. Again and again he had found himself nodding off as he thumped away, slipping back into a dreamy paradise aided by Moses's monotonously soothing chant. Clearly it wouldn't do. No one understood Moses's chants but everyone understood a drum beat. He got the young man to relieve him, lumbered to his feet and staggered back into the shade of the orange grove, sweating heavily. He rested on a tree and wiped his face with the sleeve of his galabieh. Many of the people in the orange grove already seemed fast asleep, lying stretched out facing the porch with their backs propped up against the trees. Did Moses know? wondered Abu Musa.

Would he care? Would Bell?

Next to Abu Musa stood the small man on crutches who had become so friendly with Bell during the last years. Assaf had introduced them that morning but they hadn't yet really had a chance to talk. The small man was about half Abu Musa's size. Now he gestured toward the people asleep under the orange trees and whispered up at Abu Musa.

It seems thoughtful prayer and sleep have much in common, he said.

It's true, Abu Musa whispered back. Bell used to say the same thing. Serenity, prayer, peace of mind, sleep

— they all partake of the same gentle breeze, he used to say. But I hope you don't find this scandalous. Are you Christian?

No, whispered Tajar.

Good. I mean I can't imagine what a Christian would make of this service Moses is putting on. Facing the porch like this as if it were an altar, and specifically facing Bell's old straw hat in that shabby chair as if it were a chalice. Surely it must be sacrilegious. I don't know what's gotten into Moses. Do you think any of this is allowed? Mightn't a flight of Christian saints swoop down and whisk us off to Purgatory? Mightn't the Pope? Oh dear.

It may be an Ethiopian variation, whispered Tajar. A vestige from the African past. Old beliefs live on, don't they? Even in distant lands?

I hope you're right, whispered Abu Musa. I wouldn't like to think that Moses, at his age, could be getting himself into trouble with his superiors. He's too old to be going off on his own and founding a new religion.

Once upon a time, perhaps, when he first put on his racing goggles and got behind the wheel of that enormous touring car with the Lion of Judah on its prow. If he had decided then to set out on his own across the desert, who can say? But that was centuries ago when his little princess was still alive and he was young with his life ahead of him. It's best to be young, I always say, when founding a new religion.

He's the biggest man I've ever seen, whispered Tajar.

Also the most determined, replied Abu Musa. It's very dangerous to play shesh-besh with him. Eunuchs have extraordinary powers of concentration which become dispersed in the rest of us through sexual innuendo.

I see. And what will become of your shesh-besh games now?

We intend to go on playing, whispered Abu Musa. Moses is adamant about it. Every afternoon we'll turn up here at the regular time and sit on Bell's front porch and play. Of course our conversations won't be the same because Moses always believes anything I tell him and I always believe anything he tells me. It was Bell who asked questions and straightened us out.

Abu Musa wiped his face with his sleeve. The sweat was still pouring off him.

It must be hot work beating a drum in Jericho today, whispered Tajar.

Today or any day, agreed Abu Musa. But when you live in the lowest and oldest village on earth, you have to expect some heat. You don't look so young yourself. Do you understand dreams?

A bit. What kind are we referring to?

The ones that come during sleep, whispered Abu Musa, bending down more to get his mouth closer to the ear of the little man on crutches. Once more Abu Musa mopped his face.

This heat, whispered Tajar. But dreams, you say?

Yes. You see I had one the day Bell died.

Ah.

During my siesta that afternoon. I was on my way here, hurrying over to tell Bell and Moses about the dream, when I found him. He was sitting right where you now see his hat, sitting and smiling with a glass of arak in his hand and gazing out at the orange grove, at just about the spot where we're standing now. It was uncanny. He looked exactly the way he always looked.

Ah.

A thin man, Bell, and he always sat very erect. I could never understand why he was so thin when he ate so much. Those immense curry dinners, for example. You know about them. He served them to you, he served them to me and Moses, he served them to Assaf and to others in the past.

Others?

There was his Syrian friend some years back, the man from Damascus. Bell also made curry dinners for him.

And after that, almost every week it seemed, there was the Indian trader passing through. Before you turned up in Bell's life, of course, and took the trader's place.

He once told me about an Indian trader, whispered Tajar, but I thought the trader was imaginary. I also thought he was speaking about something that might have happened two thousand years ago. Was there really an Indian trader?

Abu Musa nodded thoughtfully and wiped his face with his sleeve, still bending down to keep his head close to Tajar, who craned upward. The buzz of their whispering voices was easily hidden by the incessant beat of the drum and Moses's powerful chant, by the hum of insects in the orange grove and the gentle snores rising from the spectators asleep under the trees.

Assuredly the Indian trader did exist, whispered Abu Musa. Not for us to see him but in Bell's mind. Once a week Bell would announce that the Indian trader was due that night and excuse himself early from the social hour, to go into his kitchen to make preparations.

Ah, I see.

Thump-thump boom.

To make curries, in other words, which he would then eat alone, in the company of the Indian trader who existed in his mind. And you know how he ate when one of his curry dinners was in front of him: like a camel that had been lost in the wilderness for forty years. So I always asked myself, why did he remain thin?

And the answer?

A mystery to the end, whispered Abu Musa. One of God's mysterious gifts to a holy man. And there were other mysteries. My dream the day he died, for example. The very afternoon he died. It might even have been no more than a few moments before he died. There is a rumor that we sometimes have a vision before we die and in this vision our entire life passes before us in an instant, which is perhaps the instant it took us to live it. For one moment, in other words, we are given to see everything, all we are and were and have done and have been. Are you familiar with this rumor?

Yes.

Well that's what happened to me, whispered Abu Musa. I had that kind of utterly comprehensive dream and hurried over to tell Bell and Moses about it, to enlist their help in explaining it to me — not realizing at the time that it was a dream to sum up a life — and what did I find? I found Bell smiling as if a pleasant thought had just come to him . . . smiling and dead, so I closed his eye. Only later, after reconsidering it, did I realize the dream was his, not mine. It was his life I had seen in its entirety, not my own, which was why so much of the dream had seemed mysterious to me and slightly askew. So that's a more important mystery. Death came to him but the dream came to me. Nor is that all. The day after Bell's death I told Moses about my curious dream, and it turned out that exactly the same thing had happened to him.

Thump-thump boom.

What? You mean Moses also dreamed Bell's life? whispered Tajar.

Abu Musa smiled and mopped his face. So Moses claims, he whispered, but he might just be following my lead. In spiritual matters our monkish Moses has always been notoriously susceptible to suggestion, including his own. Just look at this service he's putting on for Bell. Wouldn't any serious Christian be scandalized by it?

I'm not so sure anyone would find it amiss, whispered Tajar. And in any case I like it. I like the drum and Moses's chants, and I like the people dozing under the trees. Everyone seems to be enjoying himself and that's a fine tribute to Bell. In fact, I feel nothing but elation.

Abu Musa's eyes flashed. An immense warm smile burst over his dripping, sweaty face.

But that's wonderful, he whispered. I like it too and elation is just the right word. And we feel this way, you and I, because we have both had the vast good fortune to have known this compassionate, genuine, hard-drinking holy man whom we are here to honor. Surely God has never fashioned finer handiwork, don't you agree? But come now, at once.

Where?

Abu Musa had seized Tajar by the shoulder and was propelling him out of the shade and into the clearing.

The dazed youth on the drum had been relieved by another dazed youth who thumped on. Moses also droned on and most of the friends and neighbors in the orange grove were now definitely asleep. Tajar looked over his shoulder and saw Anna sitting with Abigail and Assaf under a tree near the gate, watching him with startled eyes. Abu Musa dragged him right up beside Moses.

Welcome him, he's one of us, whispered Abu Musa, tugging Moses's robes.

Moses broke off his chant and turned and smiled. He reached down and put his hands under Tajar's arms and lifted him up off the ground as if he were a child, raising him up in the air to his own eye level. Tajar's crutches dangled at the ends of his arms. Moses pulled Tajar in and hugged him and noisily placed a kiss on each side of his face.

Welcome, said Moses, beaming. Then he lowered Tajar down to the ground and turned back to face the porch and the tattered chair and Bell's old straw hat, resuming his chant. Abu Musa nodded happily and sat down at Moses's feet, once more taking his place at the drum. Tajar hobbled out of the clearing and through the shade of the orange grove toward Anna and Abigail and Assaf, who were all silently clapping. Anna held his hand when he sat down beside her.

Bravo, she whispered. But what did all that mean? It looked like some special little ceremony. Have you joined something?

Tajar nodded, smiling.

It seems I've become the third partner of a shesh-besh game, he said. I watch and they play. I also comment on what they say. Now and then I turn up here and sit on the porch with them.

Is that all?

All? But the game has no end, Anna. Don't you see? I've been invited to become part of Jericho time.

***

Later Abu Musa came to join them where they sat under the trees near the gate. He was happy they were all there and especially thankful that Anna had come. After chatting for a while he gestured toward the clearing and the front porch.

Look here, he said, you might as well just drift away whenever the spirit moves you. There's no logical time to leave a ceremony like this. Tales may have a beginning and a middle and an end but life in Jericho doesn't, and especially a celebration staged by Moses. When Moses casts a spell over Jericho his chanting has a way of going on and on like his favorite holy river. No doubt there'll be a subtle transformation from one thing to another at some obscure hour today or tomorrow or the day after that — but who can say when it will come? I'm sure Moses himself doesn't know. I'll be sitting at the drum thumping away when I begin to sense that something has changed, that the world is not quite the same as it used to be. And then I'll notice, say, that the insects seem to be humming more loudly in the orange grove than they were. Has my hearing suddenly improved because I'm young again? Am I less dazed than before? But no. I'll look up and notice that Moses's lips are no longer moving, that instead he's just standing there leaning on his staff, pondering the old straw hat in Bell's chair. By God, I'll think, that's why the humming seems louder, because Moses is no longer chanting. So I'll know it's time to give the drum a particularly forceful whack and that will be the end of it, the final end of the whole affair. Like Moses, I'll be left limp and tired and elated and satisfied, gazing at the old straw hat in Bell's chair, and so it goes. Life, Bell, a day in Jericho . . . ah yes, and so it goes. Our great friend will have been given a send-off fit for a holy man, Jericho style, and Moses and I will both feel good about it because we dearly loved him. . . . And our friends and neighbors here? These people who are happily asleep under Bell's orange trees? Well in due time they'll rouse themselves as if from a dream, today or tomorrow or the day after that, and stretch their arms and legs and wander home and eat a meal as the sun is setting, and water their fruit trees and stroke the heads of their children or their children's children and say good night and go to bed, where some of them will conceive new life while others give birth and still others breathe a final sigh, and all the while I'll be beating the drum and Moses will be chanting in his incomprehensible Ge'ez and everyone in Jericho will be feeling especially good about everything. But fear not.

I'm clever and I've bribed some of the local youths to stay on and share the vigil on the drum with me, so all's well. I'll be able to nap a bit and still do my share of the thumping and our holy man will be properly honored in Jericho. . . .

Abu Musa laughed at the end of his softly spoken speech. But before you leave, he added to Assaf, do take your family for a turn around the village. Surely that's the right way to remember Bell.

Joyously smiling and waving and scratching himself and wiping his face with his sleeve — all of these things at once — Abu Musa said good-bye to them at the gate. Abigail knew Jericho from her visits with Assaf but it was all new to Anna, who had always avoided it when Bell was alive. So Assaf, who was driving, decided to follow Abu Musa's advice and take them on a tour. Just up the road from Bell's house they passed the tel where archaeologists had excavated Jericho's huge round stone watchtower, ten thousand years old and the most impressive ancient structure in the world, standing now in a deep pit far below the earth's surface, witness to time's accumulations and the drifting sands of millennia. Across from the tel bubbled Elisha's spring, the source of Jericho's water and the cause of its orchards and flowers. On the outskirts of the village they stopped at the famous ruins of the Omayyad winter palace so Anna could see its exquisite mosaic with the pomegranate tree and the three gazelles and the lion, the ferocious and gentle image of life that had always haunted Yossi. Then Assaf drove slowly through the back roads of the village, down dusty lanes beneath thick greenery, between tumble-down houses half-hidden by fruit trees and banks of flowers and crumbling walls and gates. Tajar smiled and smiled, holding Anna's hand in the back seat.

What a strange and beautiful little place it is, said Anna. So lush and effortless in its splendor but only as far as the water reaches, and then nothing. Nothing but empty desert, a different beauty, stark and pure. You can't escape the contrasts of life here, not for a moment. Seeing Jericho like this, it's not difficult to understand how we have arrived at so many of our dreams.

Assaf nodded and Tajar went on smiling, both of them pleased that she was at last sharing Jericho with them. Abigail was also smiling as she gazed out the window, preoccupied by private thoughts.

Once more they lapsed into silence. The mood deepened as they emerged from the dusty green tunnels and Assaf drove slowly west out of the oasis, climbing above Jericho toward the foothills of the Judean wilderness where the sun was sinking, already casting the first shadows of twilight. Assaf's dirt road gave way to a desert track. He turned off it and they bumped along over hard sand, coming to a stop near the edge of a wadi. The wadi was broad and shallow as it entered the desert plains, but above them it deepened into a steep ravine where it cut upward into the rising wastelands to the west. Jericho lay below them now.

Scattered ruins lined the earth near the wadi, the stones worn and bleached white by the sun, what had once been Herod's winter palace. Here great ornamental pools had shimmered in the sun two thousand years ago, when the palace had straddled the wadi and the runoff of the winter rains from the mountains had fed magnificent fountains.

They were above the plains with a view not only of Jericho but of the whole Jordan Valley. To the south in the distance the Dead Sea glistened blue and empty, and to the east across the valley the long ridge of the hills of Moab reared pink and purple and mysterious in the late afternoon sun. The silence was complete as they got out of the car to enjoy the view. Anna roamed by herself over to the edge of the wadi. Down below was a bedouin tent with its sides opened to the breezes, little children playing and dogs and chickens poking around, the few camels of the family grazing nearby on the parched land. Across the wadi a small mosque stood amidst a cluster of mud-brick houses, its thin brown minaret rising straight and true against the awesome blue sweep of the sky. Banana trees grew along the far side of the wadi. Farther up in the sandy hills a string of tiny black dots stretched over the wastes — the family's herd of black goats being led down the mountain by one of the older children.

Surely much of this scene hasn't changed in thousands and thousands of years, thought Anna. It was here long before the palace was built and it's still here, long after the ruins have returned to the desert.

She walked along the edge of the wadi, entranced by the grandeur of the view and the placid routine of the bedouin family down below. They didn't have a view down there, but the wadi provided some meager vegetation for the camels. The family was preparing for night and they would all be asleep soon after darkness came, guarded by their watchful dogs. The camels were already seeking out a place to kneel not far from the tent, their spindly front legs collapsing first and then their hind legs as they awkwardly lowered themselves onto their bellies for the night, the young one close to the mother, the male a little to the rear protecting the calf from the other side. They had arranged themselves so that they faced exactly east, awaiting tomorrow's light. Did they always sleep that way? she wondered. They were unfettered and untied because they wouldn't wander in the darkness and no man would steal a camel. From high up the mountain the string of tiny black dots wound nearer. Now she could make out the small figure of a child running along with the goats, leaping down the hillside after a long summer day in the wilderness. How welcome the open tent must look from up there. How good to be coming home at last. And dogs and chickens and camels and a whole family moving around near the tent . . . surely a joyous moment for the child running down the mountain in the shadows.

Anna too felt great joy then. She was happy with her family and happy with all of it, at peace with herself. She hadn't seen Assaf so lighthearted in years, and Abigail simply glowed in the rich afternoon sun. And Tajar was so proud to be invited to visit the shesh-besh games on Bell's front porch. . . . Yes, there were wonderful times in life, moments of breathtaking beauty.

Assaf was calling to her. She walked back to the blanket where Abigail had laid out their late picnic of olives and tomatoes and cheeses and bread, grapes and peaches and figs. They feasted looking out over the valley, over the intensely green oasis of Jericho and the desolate plains surrounding it, facing east like the camels with the Moabite hills across the way and the Dead Sea off to the south, watching the colors of the world change as the sun sank behind them and offered these final glimpses of a glorious summer twilight over the desert.

As the feast ended Abigail made her announcement. She was going to have Assaf's child. Anna tried to hold back her tears but the tears came anyway. Certainly it was joy she felt, but there was also sadness in her heart. Assaf put his arm around her to comfort her. Tajar made a gesture and Abigail and Assaf left them for a few minutes to wander over near the wadi. Tajar took Anna's hand.

I didn't want to say it in front of them, whispered Anna, but I couldn't help thinking of all the things this unborn child will have to go through someday. It just seemed to overwhelm me for a moment. The things we come to know in time . . . the endless farewells of life. You understand, don't you?

Tajar squeezed her hand. Oh yes, he said. Memory we call it, you and I . . . and yes, dear Anna, I do understand.

The hills across the valley dimmed with the last of the day's light. Anna wiped her eyes and looked up. She was smiling now and Tajar smiled with her. He waved for Abigail and Assaf to come back.

And now, dearest Anna, he said, isn't it time for us to make our way up the mountain to our mythical city . . .

our beautiful and imaginary and oh-so-real Jerusalem?