Legends

The imam returned to the chair behind the desk. “Consider yourself under house arrest,” he informed Dante. “Clearly you are an expert in explosives. But I fear you may be working for someone other than Hezbollah. We will reexamine your curriculum vitae with a fine-toothed comb. We will send someone to Castletownbere on the Beara Peninsula, we will start with Mary McCullagh and the restaurant called The Bank and follow the trail from there. We will check to see if the New York clinic has a record of your circumcision. If you have lied about a single detail …” He didn’t bother to finish the sentence.

As Dante rose to his feet a deep groan escaped from the prisoner. Everyone in the room turned to look at her. Her mouth agape, Djamillah hyperventilated and angled her head and, gasping for breath, fixed her one open eye on Dante. With some effort she managed to spit out, “You are … one lousy lover, Irish.” And then she smiled a crooked smile and gagged on the mordant laughter seeping from the back of her throat.

Back in his low room, with armed guards posted at the door, Dante sprawled on his cot and stared at the white washed ceiling, wondering if the stains of the crushed flies might convey bulletins from the front. And he re-created her voice in his skull; he could make out the words, forced with great effort through her bruised lips. You are one lousy lover, Irish.

At sunset Abdullah turned up at the door of his room. His manner had changed; it was written in his eyes that he no longer thought of Dante as a comrade in arms. “You are instructed to come with me,” he announced, and without waiting he turned and quit the room. Two gunmen with their kaffiyahs masking their faces and only their eyes visible fell in behind Dante as he followed Abdullah through the village to the Hezbollah camp’s perimeter fence. The gate in the fence had been dragged back and Abdullah signaled for Dante to follow him through it to the rim of the quarry. The nineteen apprentice bombers, along with the permanent staff and the Hezbollah gunmen who had brought the prisoner from Beirut were lined up along the rim. Across the quarry, her back to the setting sun, Djamillah was being bound to a stake by two of the gunmen. One of them hung a small khaki army satchel around her neck, then reached inside it to manipulate the wires and complete the electrical circuit. Djamillah’s knees buckled under her and she collapsed into the ropes holding her to the stake. As the gunmen left her side, the satchel dangling from its straps against her chest, Dr. al-Karim materialized alongside Dante. He was holding a small remote transmitter, which he offered to the Irishman. “Would you like the honor?”

Dante looked down at the transmitter. “She is not my enemy,” he said.

High above the Bekaa rift two Israeli jets, flying soundlessly, their contrails catching the last smudges of sunlight, appeared from the north. When they were directly over the Hezbollah camp they banked ninety degrees to the west. As they headed toward the sea the sound of their engines engulfed the camp.

The imam gazed across the quarry at the woman tied to the stake. Then, in an abrupt gesture, he raised the transmitter and rotated the switch until there was a hollow click and depressed it. For an instant that stretched into an eternity nothing happened. Dr. al-Karim, his brows knitted, was raising the transmitter to activate it again when, across the quarry, a dull blast stirred up a fume of mustard-colored smoke. When it dissipated, the woman had vanished and only the stump of the stake remained. Around the rim of the quarry the fedayeen began to wander off into the darkness that settled quickly over the Bekaa at this time of year. The imam produced the string of jade worry beads and began working them through his pudgy fingers. The gesture struck Dante as therapeutic. He noticed that Dr. al-Karim’s fingers and lips were trembling. Could it be that this was the first time he’d killed someone with his own hand?

“When one of our own turns her back on faith,” the imam murmured—he appeared to be talking to himself—“it is a mortal sin, punishable by execution.”