boom.
It goes off.
It swallows the car in a fireball, the man in it vaporized. Glass explodes. Metal parts fly all over, incandescent shrapnel.
Watch how it hits those children playing in the park. Mothers walking, holding their little ones’ hands. A young mom pushing a stroller, the baby inside. Children playing on the playground. A pair of old men, their chess match has been going on for months. They won’t be able to finish it.
When tallied, casualties will be seven dead, twelve injured beyond repair.
Smell the burning flesh, mixed with the car’s gasoline.
Click a rosary bead.
Listen to them screaming. They’re screaming in pain, in fear. Hysterical screaming.
Click a rosary bead.
Hear them cry.
Allāhu Akbar.
The Prophet visited As-Sab bin Jaththama at a place called Waddan. As-Sab bin Jaththama asked if they should attack pagan warriors at night, hurting their women and children.
The Prophet replied, “They are of Them.”
So are these women. So are these children. They are of Them.
This is where They are vulnerable. This is how We can win. They can’t protect Their women. They can’t protect Their children.
They are weak.
Those women, those children, those old people—they are of Them.
How right Mahmud was.
Click a rosary bead.
He doesn’t stay to see the fire trucks, the first responders, the bomb squad.
By the time the police cordon off the area, he’s long gone.
The papers in his pocket say he’s Ezra Cohen, an Iraqi Jew living in Israel these past ten years.
His DNA says he’s Fuad Baghdadi, a Palestinian Muslim who’d been living in Hebron under the Zionist Oppressor’s boot until a few months ago.
Better not take any chances. Click a rosary bead.
This bomb was his first baby.
Semtex under the car’s gas tank. Remote detonator and fuse, cell phone–activated.
An easy bomb to make, easier still to detonate. Hard to place.
The mule used to park his car in his house’s covered garage. Both house and garage had beefed-up security. His workplace was impossible.
Mahmud’s instructions were strict.
“We must plant the bomb on the mule’s car. The bomb must go off in a public place.”
“Why use a mule? Why not plant the bomb in the park and let it blow?”
The cane hit him hard on the back.
“Do not question me. Do as you are told. If you plant the bomb in the park, the sweepers will find it and all our efforts will be for nothing.”
Another cane blow.
“The mule is an important man. It sends a message. If we can hit such a man, we can hit anyone. It puts fear in their hearts.”
Fear is something Fuad understands. It feels good to see them afraid of him. Click a rosary bead.
He had to follow the man in the car. Different days, at different hours, under different disguises.
The man in the car was a cautious man.
There were seven routes from his office to his house. He took a different one each day, in a random order, sometimes repeating the same route on back-to-back days.
Sometimes an armored van followed him. Other times it didn’t.
The car was bulletproof, but nothing is Semtex-proof. Mahmud taught him that.
Fuad doesn’t know who he was. He’s learned what need-to-know means. Mahmud knows. Fuad doesn’t need to know. Mahmud trusts Fuad. Fuad would rather die than let Mahmud down.
So Fuad followed the man in the car.
And the man in the car made a mistake.
A block away from his home there’s a café. It serves excellent coffee, pastries. Its halva is famous, and the man in the car loved it. Once a week he’d stop to buy some. Never the same day, but it was once a week, a few minutes before closing time.
That’s how mistakes are made.
The man in the car thought he’d done everything that could be done not to have a predictable routine, but halva was halva and a man’s got to have what a man’s got to have.
Fuad waited close by.
He timed how long the man took buying his halva.
He went in the café, observed the blind angles from the register.
He rehearsed with other cars of a similar make: Approach. Roll under. Place the explosive. Roll away. Leave. It could be done.
It was done.
Then the wait began.
One of the seven routes went next to the park.
The man in the car didn’t use it the day after Fuad placed the explosive. Nor the day after.
But he did the third day, and Fuad was waiting. Cell phone in one hand, rosary beads in the other.
Click a rosary bead.
Make the call.
boom.
Allāhu Akbar.
They are of Them.
Fuad Baghdadi is the snake in the grass. Ezra Cohen is the snake’s skin. The snake’s skin protects it. Camouflages it. Keeps it safe. So he must make it real.
“You must live a fiction within a fiction, a legend within a legend,” Mahmud said.
Ezra Cohen lives in a second-story studio apartment in Tel Aviv’s Hasan Arfa neighborhood. The type one must climb an outside staircase to reach. No neighbors on the ground floor, except for the occasional squatter. The place is old, rundown, in a part of town where the poor, the addicts, the downtrodden make a habit of not noticing one another.
He wanders around the city. He observes Israeli life in a way he never could before, growing up on the other side of the fence.
Middle-class shoppers bargain hunting. Commuters going from and to their work, their loved ones. Seedy restaurants, opulent bars, the smell of marijuana halfway down the block.
Children play in parks, walk to school hand in hand with their parents as he and his sister, Amal, did in another life.
Youngsters slouch, immersed in private worlds shining out from smartphones, noise canceled by ever-present earbuds. They walk. They skateboard. They ride their bicycles or buses.
The hopeless laggards of prosperity. Most of them Ethiopian immigrants from the late nineties, some East European, a few Latin Americans. He sees them lounging, watching expensive cars sweep by. He can taste their resentment. It’s a similar flavor to his.
He misses praying at the mosque. The chants, the communion. The calming safety of being one with his own people.
But Ezra Cohen is a Jew, a non-practicing Jew, but a Jew. Ezra Cohen can’t go to a mosque, even if there’s one three blocks away from his studio apartment. He can’t own a praying mat, so he owns a yoga mat. He also joins a yoga studio, one which accepts cash payments and doesn’t ask for social media accounts or email addresses. He prays during yoga practice, or tries to.
Idleness. Waiting idleness.
He finds hashish to whittle away the hours of nothing.
He buys groceries on credit from the same stalls in the shuk. Sometimes the groceries have messages.
A line or two, no more, scribbled in neat green ink.
He buys two newspapers: the leftist Haaretz, the rightist Jerusalem Word. They both carry the same news.
Seven dead, twelve injured in a car bomb. The injured include a pair of old men and five children. The dead include a mother, her newborn son, and an alleged mobster. Each newspaper highlights sob stories on the victims, depending on slant and angle.
They both speculate if this was an attack on the mobster with side casualties or a terrorist act aimed at the civilian population. They both worry how this might affect the American president’s coming trip. No group has claimed responsibility yet.
They found Semtex traces. Semtex is a popular plastic explosive both with terrorist cells and organized crime. Black market sales of Eastern European military surplus.
There’s no mention of the authorities looking for a six-foot-six Iraqi Jew or an Arab built like a tank. Not that he expected there to be.
Reading about the death he brought to others, he feels elated.
It was his fist hitting back at the Oppressor. It was now his boot, smashing the Oppressor’s face.
Fuad Baghdadi is a lion. The explosion was his roar, his claws, his teeth, gnashing at the lambs.
Yes. Fuad is powerful. He is mighty. He stands alone.
He’s lonely.