The Black Widow

And so she passed that evening, her last in Israel, with no company other than the melancholy woman who had wrenched her from the refuge of her old life. To occupy herself, she packed and repacked her suitcase three times. Then, after a carryout dinner of lamb and rice, she switched on the television and watched an episode of an Egyptian soap opera that she had grown fond of in Nahalal. Afterward, she sat on the balcony watching the pedestrians and the cyclists and the skateboarders flowing along the promenade in the cool windy night. It was a remarkable sight, the dream of the early Zionists fully realized, yet Natalie regarded the contented Jews beneath her with Leila’s resentful eye. They were occupiers, children and grandchildren of colonialists who had stolen the land of a weaker people. They had to be defeated, driven out, just as they had driven Leila’s ancestors from Sumayriyya on a May evening in 1948.

Her anger followed her to bed. If she slept that night, she did not remember it, and in the morning she was bleary-eyed and on edge. She dressed in Leila’s clothing and covered her hair with Leila’s favorite emerald-colored hijab. Downstairs, a taxi was waiting. Not a real taxi, but an Office taxi driven by one of the security agents who used to follow her on her runs in Nahalal. He took her directly to Ben Gurion Airport, where she was thoroughly searched and questioned at length before being allowed to proceed to her gate. Leila did not take offense at her treatment. As a veiled Muslim woman she was used to the special attention of security screeners.

Inside the terminal she made her way to the gate, oblivious to the hostile stares of the Israeli traveling public, and when her flight was called she filed dutifully onto the plane. Her seatmate was the gray-eyed man with bloodless skin, and across the aisle were her pockmarked interrogator and his wispy-haired accomplice. Not one of them dared to look at the veiled woman traveling alone. She was suddenly exhausted. She told the flight attendant, demurely, that she did not wish to be disturbed. Then, as Israel sank away beneath her, she closed her eyes and dreamed of Sumayriyya.

23 AUBERVILLIERS, FRANCE

TEN DAYS LATER THE Clinique Jacques Chirac opened to muted fanfare in the northern Paris banlieue of Aubervilliers. The minister of health attended the ceremony, as did a popular Ivory Coast — born footballer, who cut a tricolor ribbon to the rain-dampened applause of several community activists assembled for the occasion. French television ran a brief story about the opening on that evening’s main newscast. Le Monde, in a short editorial, called it a promising start.

The goal of the clinic was to improve the lives of those who resided in a troubled suburb where crime and unemployment were high and government services scarce. Officially, the Ministry of Health oversaw the clinic’s day-to-day operations, but in point of fact it was a classified joint undertaking by the ministry and Paul Rousseau’s Alpha Group. The clinic’s administrator, a man named Roland Girard, was an Alpha Group operative, as was the shapely receptionist. The six nurses and two of the three physicians, however, knew nothing of the clinic’s split personality. All were employed by France’s state-run hospital system, and all had been chosen for the project after a rigorous screening process. None had ever made the acquaintance of Dr. Leila Hadawi. Nor had they attended medical school with her or worked at her previous places of employment.

The clinic was located on the Avenue Victor Hugo, between an all-night laundry and a tabac frequented by members of a local Moroccan drug gang. Plane trees shaded the pavement outside the clinic’s modest entrance, and above it rose three additional floors of a handsome old building with a tan exterior and shuttered windows. But behind the avenue soared the giant gray slabs of the cités, the public housing estates that warehoused the poor and the foreign born, mainly from Africa and the former French colonies of the Maghreb. This was the part of France where the poets and the travel writers rarely ventured, the France of crime, immigrant resentment, and, increasingly, radical Islam. Half the banlieue’s residents had been born outside France, three-quarters of the young. Alienated, marginalized, they were ISIS recruits in waiting.

On the first day of the clinic’s operation, it was the subject of mild, if skeptical, curiosity. But by the next morning it was receiving a steady stream of patients. For many, it was their first visit to a doctor in a long time. And for a few, especially the recent arrivals from the interior of Morocco and Algeria, it was their first visit to a physician ever. Not surprisingly, they felt most comfortable with the médecine généraliste who wore modest clothing and a hijab and could speak to them in their native language.