The Wreckage

12

The Courier watches a skinny black-haired girl in a G-string and high heels undulate around a pole, moving like there’s an itch in her groin that she can’t quite reach. He pulls a twenty from his wallet and tucks it into her G-string, brushing his fingertips along the fabric. She dances away, waggling her finger at him.

She has a pageboy haircut. Black. Straight. A wig. Painted eyes. Red lips. The red reminds him of his first hit, the schoolgirl, the blood that seeped from the corner of her mouth as she lay in the dust, one leg folded under her, her schoolbag still in her hand.

He can’t remember if she was on her way to school or coming home, or if she was just visiting someone at another settlement. She was killed because she was there and not somewhere else. It was a test. His initiation. That was fifteen years ago on the West Bank near the city of Nablus.

He was told that the first killing would be the hardest-a leap of faith across a blood-soaked divide-but in that moment between the recoil and the bullet hitting the target, the blink of an eye, he felt nothing. Each killing since has been an exercise in trying to feel something, some sense of horror or satisfaction or completion.

The second person he killed was an Iraqi dissident, found hanging in a townhouse in San Francisco. Next came an Iranian defector who fell beneath a train in Amsterdam and a Syrian politician who died in a hit-and-run accident in Cairo. The most recent-an Iranian nuclear scientist-was killed by a booby-trapped motorbike, triggered by remote control outside his house in Tehran. State TV blamed “Zionist and American agents.” A smokescreen. Masoud Ali Mohammadi had been leaking details of Iran’s nuclear program to the US.

How many in total? More than a dozen but less than his enemies suspect. Defectors. Dissidents. Spies. Sympathizers. Rivals. Enemies. He does not judge-he carries out the judgment of others.

The girl on the pole has finished her dance. She clomps off stage, retrieving a wad of chewing gum from the edge of a glass. As she moves through the tables, a bouncer steps in to protect her. Later she emerges from her dressing room wearing a midriff top and low-slung jeans. A tattoo ripples across her lower back-the tramp stamp. Forty years from now there’ll be tens of thousands of old ladies trying to hide the ink-pricked follies of their youth.

The Courier sends her a note. Offers to buy her a drink. She signals her interest. Five minutes. He waits.

Yesterday hadn’t gone to plan. The soldier hadn’t capitulated. The Courier had shown him the long-nosed pliers, drawn attention to them, demonstrated, but it made no difference. The soldier had simply smiled at him, a mad grin-that’s what war does to a man, puts spiders in his head.

“I have no desire to kill you,” the Courier told him, “but you took information that didn’t belong to you. Now I must collect it. Just tell me what you did with the notebook.”

The soldier grinned. Died that way.

Now it’s up to the girl. He should never have let her get away. That was careless. He had underestimated her. Most women meekly surrender or go rigid with fear. This one knew how to fight. Survive. Now he can’t get her face out of his mind-her smoky blue eyes and her nice white teeth, slightly overcrowded at the bottom. He remembers the heat of her skin and the smear of her saliva across the back of his hand.

They took her to the police station. There was someone with her, a much older man, solid, but quick on his feet. It didn’t look like he lived on the estate. He was driving an old Mercedes. Should be easy to trace.