The impact of Martina Klump’s palm against Ruth’s cheek cracked like a lion tamer’s bullwhip, echoing off the bulkheads of the small bedchamber and followed by a stunning ring in her left ear and a dull explosion in her brain. The power of the blow was further enhanced by its undeflected symmetry, for it had arrived completely unexpected, beginning with a hand resting casually on Martina’s hip and ending as her arm suddenly arced through the air like a baseball bat.
In the instant following the slap, Ruth realized that there had been a warning. It was the way Martina opened the door and strode into the compartment, the sheen in her eyes and her labored breath. Her body seemed to contain a great pressure, and as Ruth rose slowly from the bed, Martina appeared to be gazing past her at something that colored her face and lifted her upper lip.
And suddenly Ruth was careening through space, her skull bouncing into the hard corner where the walls intersected. Her hair flew up into a spray of wild tangles, and she slid down onto the pillow, her legs splayed like those of a child playing jacks. Her cheek burned as if scalded by an iron, and she tasted a coppery froth of blood where her flesh had been slammed against her teeth. Yet her tears were not emotional, only smacked from their ducts, and she chose not to wipe them as she raised her trembling hand, cleared the hair from her face, and tucked it behind an ear.
“Dein verdammter Vater! Your accursed father!” Martina yelled as she paced at the foot of the narrow bed, pivoting in jerky twists of her body, her hands clutching at the air as if she were choking a ghost. She was wearing a black flight coverall stained with patches of oil and grit, and a pair of leather tanker’s boots with ankle straps and cross-buckles clunked on the floor of the camper. The aluminum door to the sleeping compartment had remained open, and Martina must have sensed Youssef’s concerned stare from up forward of the kitchenette, for she suddenly spun and kicked it closed. Normally the walls of the recreational vehicle would have reverberated with such a blow, but as it was buried belowground, only a heavy thud resulted, followed by the whisper of trickling sand.
Ruth flinched with this second venting of Martina’s rage. Up until this moment, the woman had appeared to be unflappable, her cool demeanor under pressure almost admirable. In their brief encounters, she was civil if unsympathetic, her expression at times approaching a smile—a sign, Ruth assumed, of the woman’s superior position in whatever gambit she was playing. The effect of Martina’s confidence had been to drain Ruth’s hope, dragging her through alternating hours of panic and despair.
But this was different. Something Ruth’s father had done or said, or failed to do, had opened a fissure in the woman’s armor, causing a regressive tantrum. For the first time since her abduction, Ruth felt empowered by Martina’s unexpected violence.
She watched carefully as Martina suddenly stopped moving, facing a tall mirror on the door of the camper’s closet. She reached up with both hands and briskly rubbed her short blond hair, ruffling it into a spiky plume. Then all at once she was tearing open the closet door, yanking out the black mourning dress of Ruth’s recent travels. She looked at it, then flipped the hanger away and tried to tear the dress in half, but the cloth would not give. “Scheisse!” she screamed, and then she had a black, short-bladed knife in her hand, and she slashed the fabric into strips. She hurled the ragged heap into a corner, cursing like a sister who had decided that this Cinderella would not be going to the ball.
Ruth adjusted her position, moving her back against the rear wall of the trailer, setting her bare feet on the rough navy blanket. They had thrown her a pair of gray sweatpants and one of those dark-blue commando sweaters with elbow and shoulder patches, for there was no heat in the RV and the nights were very cold. They had taken her shoes.
She licked at the corner of her mouth, tasting the warm blood, then gently explored the gash inside her cheek with the tip of her tongue. She pressed her hands into the blanket, gathering a fold in her fingers. Martina was still holding the knife. Until this moment, Ruth had not thought herself capable of overpowering the woman. But if that blade came any closer, she would launch herself at Klump, crash her to the floor, and pummel her until they dragged her off the bloody body. The idea of it set her heart pounding at the cotton of her bra, and a cold rivulet of sweat snaked from her right armpit.
Yet Martina seemed to have forgotten that there was another presence in the compartment. She did not look at Ruth, who had become no more to her now than a flower vase smashed in a fit of frustration. She turned her back to the low bed and slowly sat on its corner, gripping the knife and pounding the hilt on her knee. Her back shuddered as she mumbled in German.
“Mutti, I am so sorry.”
Ruth held her breath as she tried to overhear the whispered demons escaping Martina’s mouth, tried to imagine why she should now invoke her mother.
“The devil take him and burn him in hell if he harms you.” Her voice was like a child’s whine, a thin plea choked with liquid. “I will save you, Mutti, I swear it. I will save you and still destroy their filthy bargain, and the only thing left for them to trade will be blood and bones.”
The left side of Ruth’s face throbbed, and a lump was rising under her hair where her head had struck the wall, but she pushed through the pain and tried to focus her concentration. The endless hours inside the cold metal cavern had exhausted her, dulled her, yet she realized that here was an opportunity. A small window had opened through which she might glimpse the truth of her circumstances, and she had to grasp the clues quickly.
What was the “filthy bargain” of which Martina muttered? What kind of “trade” would Martina’s enemies hold dear, while she swore to turn the objects of barter into pulverized meat?
For most of Ruth’s short imprisonment, she had been allowed to see nothing outside her chamber. Only once had she been taken out into the freezing desert night for an “exercise” walk around the compound, yet passing through Martina’s sunken warren was enough to confirm that some sort of major operation was afoot, and her abduction only a side issue.
There were three long trailers buried in the sand, of the type used to pamper film stars on location shoots. As a former army intelligence officer, Ruth had visited hundreds of concealed observation posts, bunkers, and communications facilities, for the Israelis also had a penchant for digging. One such OP on the Egyptian border was so undetectable that she had walked unaware across its roof, while her escort from the engineering corps grinned proudly. The air exchange vents were concealed in tufts of prickly scrub, the head of a periscope inside a fiberglass cactus. It was easy for her to imagine how Martina’s lair had been constructed.
A large semicircular trough had been dug into the sand, into which the RVs had been driven onto wooden planks. Duct tape and plastic sheeting had been used to seal the wheel wells, engine compartments, and roof-mounted air conditioners. You could not run the engines with their intakes obstructed, so electrical cables had been laid to the vehicles’ external hookups, leading from a gas generator that hummed day and night. The pop-up emergency ceiling exits had been removed and vertical aluminum vent pipes inserted, capped with conical “hats” wrapped in earth-tone burlap. The trailers had been backed in catty corner, so that the open driver’s door of each vehicle nearly met the tailgate exit of the next, the connections effected with sections of two-meter-wide flexible PVC water carriers, also sealed with plastic and tape.
When the sand was hoed back over the trailers, their roofs rested two meters below the desert surface.
The entrance ramp that led to the first vehicle was covered with a camouflage net and branches of scrub. This was the “action” trailer. The fold-down dining table just behind the driving station was being used as a plotting surface, but most of the other amenities, including the kitchen appliances, had been removed to make room for communications gear, equipment, and ammunition lockers. The walls were pegged with steel bolts supporting AK-47s, Hungarian AKMs, MP-5 machine pistols, and two RPGs. Martina’s men sat on twist-up piano stools, monitoring radio traffic through headphones, cleaning grit from their weapons, or reading Al Watan Al Arabi. The cabin lights sometimes flickered as the gas generator choked on a bit of dust, the yellow glow reflecting off the high windshield and side windows, revealing the umber sand packed up against the glass. The pressed earth was lined with black crevasses and small rocks, a pattern suggesting a giant reptile hugging the camper to its belly.
The second vehicle was the living quarters for Martina’s men. The ripe smell of chilled bacteria leaked from the humming refrigerator, and the scent of burned zahtar rose from the stovetop. The men had minimal access to water, and the dried sweat common to all soldiers’ bunkers topped off the aromas. Every available horizontal space was covered with a well-used sleeping bag, including two fold-down ship bunks bolted to the wall where the kitchen table had stood.
The last trailer was clearly Martina’s private quarters. She had not warmed the space with personal touches. There were no photographs, printed quilts, or tea cozies. However, the small dining table held a collection of maps, aircraft technical manuals, a copy of the German weapons magazine Visier, a pistol-cleaning kit, and a box of Tampax. She had given up her bedroom in the rear for use as Ruth’s cell, after first stripping it of every item that might be used innovatively by a prisoner. A heavy dead bolt had been added to the bedroom door.
Nowhere in the complex had an emergency escape tunnel been constructed. Martina expected her men to fight and die with her where they stood.
During Ruth’s brief passages through this submerged trailer park, she did not glimpse assault diagrams, catch the men preparing dastardly disguises, or overhear the proper names of Israeli or European cities popping through their Arabic. Rather, it was the atmosphere that convinced her of a countdown, the silences of men anticipating action, settling private accounts. It was the same pre-mission intensity she had witnessed often, always as an observer, guilty in her safety. That emotion was certainly not present now, but she could still smell an operation on the brink of its launching.
Whatever Martina was planning, she clearly thought that holding Ruth would assure noninterference. This in turn meant that somehow Ruth’s father, and therefore AMAN, could foil her operation. The conclusion had to be that Martina’s target was an Israeli one, perhaps the “trade” of her incoherent mumblings. Yet here Ruth’s reasoning ground to a halt. There were not enough pieces. As always, her father’s lust for secrecy had left her in the dark.
“Oh, Papa.” Martina was whispering now, rocking slightly as if trying to control an abdominal pain. “Please forgive me, Papa. I should never have let her leave home. I exposed her, I know it—it was so stupid.” She called herself Trottel, a retarded idiot. She roughly smeared the end of her nose with the back of her fist. “But I will get her back, I swear to you.”
Ruth stayed still as an ice statuette, which was how she had come to feel, given the winter desert days, hardly discernible from the nights. The gloom of her metal cavern did not change with the course of the sun. Her watch had been taken, and her only point of time reference was the top of the air vent. A section of chain-link fence covered the ceiling hatch, but through it she could see the undercap of the conical hat, and as the sun moved, the light inside the tube faded to a shadowless black. She shivered constantly and her nose ran, and now the bruising of her face triggered a further flood. Without warning, she sneezed.
Martina leapt up from the bed as if reacting to a gunshot. She spun on Ruth, regarding her as though the young woman had just crawled in through a window.
“You think he is going to save you, don’t you?” she said, her voice still heavy with her moments of remorse. “You think he is going to come in here and whisk you away.” She snorted once through her nose. “Or maybe that stupid policeman, yes?”
Ruth just watched her, focusing on her eyes even as the blade flashed with Martina’s gesticulations. Early on she had found the opportunity to ask about Michael’s fate, when Youssef allowed her to use the small toilet between her chamber and the kitchenette. He refused to respond, and she failed to read the truth in his eyes, yet now Martina’s slip revealed the wonderful reality. Michael had survived. He was out there somewhere, maybe together with her father. Forces were gathering on her behalf, oh, yes.
“Perhaps he will,” Martina speculated, her body easing into a more casual posture as she regained some composure. “Your father is a very resourceful man.” She looked up at the ceiling as she tapped the knife blade on a fingernail. “Isn’t he?”
It was time for Ruth to answer. She had to speak, or lose the power she had gained by refusing to cry out with Martina’s blow. “Yes, he is,” she warned.
Martina nodded as she inspected the dirty crevices of the trailer, frowning like an interior decorator in a shelter for the homeless. “Ah, that’s nice to hear,” she said. “A daughter’s pride.”
Ruth knew enough about the woman’s early loss of her own father to be wary of every step in this emotional minefield. However, she had no idea that once, when Martina was barely out of her teens, she had looked to Benjamin Baum as a substitute for that lost paternal care.
“A father’s love is also very powerful,” she suggested carefully.
Martina dropped her pale eyes to Ruth’s face. “Really?” she asked as if, having lost that gift, she could not imagine it.
“I think parental love is the most powerful of all,” Ruth said, realizing with a twinge that she might not live to adore a child of her own.
“And you think your father loves you?”
“Yes.” It was a selfish love, but was there really any other kind?
Martina’s expression did not change, though she lowered her gaze to Ruth’s mouth. The two women were separated only by the length of the bed.
“Your lip is swelling,” she said.
Ruth raised her hand to touch the bruise, then stopped halfway and returned her palm to the blanket.
“You could use some ice,” Martina suggested.
“That would be good. Thank you.”
“We have no ice here,” Martina said flatly. She waved a hand through the air. “I do not allow it. The freezers function, but I forbid such luxuries. Men are like children. Give them a treat and they immediately go slack and lazy, expecting toys and presents and affection.”
Ruth said nothing. She had a fleeting image of Martina as a mother, a shiver of pity for any child of hers.
“He loves no one,” Martina said. She looked down at her hands and, discovering oily grit beneath her fingernails, began to clean them with the point of the blade. “Your father. He is not capable of it.”
Ruth stepped blithely into the trap, a scoff of arrogance. “Oh? You know him so well?”
“I know him much better than you do, my dear!” Martina yelled without warning as she thrust the blade forward, causing Ruth to bang her head back against the wall. “Much better!”
“You must be very perceptive, then,” Ruth responded quickly, trying to assuage Klump before she erupted again. Her calf muscles bulged as she prepared to parry a lunge.
“Perceptive?” Martina sneered. “Perceptive? You think I am some kind of deluded clairvoyant? I know him from experience, years of it. He is not a man. Or yes, he is, with everything that implies. A lizard, hiding beneath a rock. A liar, a betrayer, a deceiver by trade!” She stopped yelling and slowly straightened up. Then she shook her head and laughed once as she turned and gently closed the closet door. “You don’t know, do you?” she whispered in genuine empathy.
“It is true that my father is some of those things,” Ruth offered, although Martina’s vehemence confused her, warning of some strange connection that she could not imagine. “He is an intelligence officer. Spies are not princes.”
Martina’s fingers were set to the glass of the mirror where she had pushed it home. She stood there looking at her own face, and then she began to laugh, throwing her head back and giving full vent to it.
“No!” she exclaimed, as her shoulders shook. “They aren’t, are they?” Her mirth subsided, and she touched one eye with a finger, inspecting a wrinkle in the looking glass. “Nor princesses,” she said. “I suppose it was better for you to be ignorant. I was that way too as a child.” She examined the other eye. “Then I discovered the truth much later, and I tried to make up for it, to compensate for his crimes. You can never do that, you know.”
Ruth realized that attempting to defuse Klump’s bottled rage only fanned the embers, so she held her silence. Yet more than that, she sensed a desire on the woman’s part to regain control, to sway power, if not physically, then with unsettling revelations. But what could this woman know about her father that she herself had not imagined at one time or another? That he had killed? That he had sent others to be lost, or captured, or tortured for their secrets? These were all notions she had suppressed, even while admitting their existence. She watched as Martina opened the zipper of a chest pocket, removed a box of cigarettes, and lit one up with a lighter. She assured herself that there was nothing the woman could really say to surprise her, until Martina blew a ring of smoke into the mirror and stunned her breathless.
“Your father,” she said. “I was fucking him while you were still in kindergarten.”
The words entered Ruth’s brain, bursting into a blaze that she immediately tried to extinguish by twisting their meaning. It is a rare child who can accept her parents’ sexuality, and even when her own adolescence reveals the nature of desire, somehow mother and father are forbidden carnality. Of course, her father was just a man, but he was not a sexual one aside from Eema’s bed, and even there she assumed their lovemaking to be clumsy and brief, an occasional renewal of their vows. So Martina had to mean something else, she reasoned, as her body held itself impossibly still. The woman meant that she had been outwitting him, defeating him, eluding him since the beginning of her career.
“Yes.” Martina turned from the mirror and nodded to her prisoner. “He was trying to turn me.” She looked around for a place to perch, then remembered that she had ordered the stool and every other loose item removed. She backed up to the entrance door and slid down to the floor, draping her wrists across her raised knees, the knife dangling from her right hand, the cigarette from her left. “It was in Paris. I was very young. Younger than you are now.” She took a drag and blew a stream of smoke at the ceiling. She was in no hurry. Her audience was not going anywhere. “I was very confused, inexperienced. I did not yet have any convictions. And you know how men are. They sense these things, like sharks when there is blood in the water.”
She is making it up, Ruth decided, even as a knot began to twist her stomach. It’s very good, sounds very real, but it is only a cruel game. You’re expected to protest, to deny it. Don’t jump in.
“I thought he was a wonderful lover.” Martina laughed at her own childish foolishness. “Until later, of course.” She smirked. “But it worked for him then, I admit it. That is why old men want the young girls. There is power in it, and of course a child such as I was has little with which to compare.” She looked at Ruth, savoring the young woman’s mesmerized stillness. “When I had doubts, he fucked them right out of me.”
Although Ruth’s chest was folding in on itself now, her sternum like an iron bar obstructing her heart, she refused to give Martina the gift of a reaction. With the strength remaining in her pained cheek muscles, she smiled, even as her lips trembled.
Martina waved smoke away from her face. “Oh,” she said as she lifted her chin. “You don’t believe me?” She shrugged. “Of course not.” She raised the knife and looked at the black blade. “Should I describe his cock for you? I still remember it well, and I assume you have seen it.” She lowered the weapon. “Or maybe not. Come to think of it, I never saw my father’s, though of course I was very small when he killed himself.” She placed the cigarette in her mouth and raised a finger as if an idea had struck her. “How about other things? Old wounds and such you would have seen.” She touched the finger to her right breast. “He had a small bullet scar here. I have heard he has another one in the belly, though he is fat now and it is probably difficult to find.” She put her hands to the floor and steadied herself, raising her ankles into the air and crossing them as she looked at Ruth through the open diamond of her legs. “I used to put them around his neck when he fucked me. He liked that.” She closed her eyes, smiling as she began to thump her head rhythmically against the door. “I can still see that hairy chest pounding at me like a train. Sometimes I thought he was going to kill me.” She stopped moving and opened her eyes. “He used to sweat so when he fucked.”
Ruth’s chin quivered and her eyes were squeezed shut, but she would not cover her assaulted ears. She had gathered the blanket in her balled fists, and she summoned images to drown the pain: the purple perfume of bougainvillea in Jerusalem, the pastels of her summer dresses. Her brothers chased a soccer ball through Independence Park, and she kept up with them, even though she fell and scraped her shins, and they were proud of her. She smelled the smoke of a scout campfire mingling with the pines of the Jerusalem Forest, and she and Gabi were alone on a soft blanket, the stars peeking through the branches, and though it was the first time and they were only sixteen, it was not ugly, it was not coarse. It was so sweet, so beautiful, the softness and warmth and the wonderful cry of melding souls.
She heard the awful woman coming to her feet, the heavy boots clunking as she began to pace. And still Ruth fought to keep the images, to fight off the attack as a tai chi master might, absorbing and dissolving it with the better sides of life.
“Of course, the penis has no real power,” Martina announced as she ground some form of desert insect with her boot. “It is a retarded thing that answers to the basest stimuli. Don’t you agree?”
Ruth heard the gentle hush of the Mediterranean waves in summer, the comforting pok-pok of beach paddleballs. She felt the cold of a lemon Popsicle on her lips.
“It is uncontrollable,” Martina continued with sarcastic pity. “Anything can send it flying—coarse underwear, a child’s body, even the hanging of its own master.” She stopped moving and lifted her arms, as if preaching to a congregation of militant feminists. “All of the true strength is in that which grips the penis, because a vagina is a part of a woman’s brain. Men know this, my dear, and they fuck with fear and anger, because they realize that in those moments they are puny servants, clutched by fingers that wield the power of the universe.” Her blade and the burning ember of her cigarette nearly touched the ceiling. “They are in creation’s cauldron. They are lost.”
She remained in this pose for a moment, then placed her hands to her waist. She cocked her head and looked at Ruth, surprised to find her soliloquy unappreciated, the young woman’s eyes open and full of fire.
“Du verdammte Fotze,” Ruth snarled.
Martina took a step backward, opening her mouth in feigned shock. “Cunt?” She clucked her tongue in disapproval. “Shame on you. Apparently you missed the point of my sisterly lecture.”
“You stupid bitch.” Ruth touched her wounded mouth now, as if to show that her only pain was physical. “You expect me to believe that drivel?” So what if her father did have such a scar on his chest? That fact was probably recorded in the dossiers of ten intelligence services.
“Believe what you wish.” Martina shrugged.
“Go to hell.” Ruth shifted, moving her back to the side wall and turning her face away. “You know nothing. Ten minutes of research, and I could make up a fantasy about your father.”
Martina sighed. “I suppose.” She flipped the knife in the air and caught it by the handle. “Yes, of course. You are correct.” The blade spun again. “Research.” Now she tried for two spins. “Research told me about that dog you had when you were little. A dachshund, I think. Schatzi was his name? He was killed by a milk wagon.” She looked for a new trick, trying to balance the blade on the tip of her index finger. “And research told me about your mother, Maya, and about Yosh and Amos. I also found out quite a bit about your house in Abu Tor—in the files, of course. Two floors, very Turkish and medieval. It once belonged to a pasha, I remember. Very pretty.” She caught the toppling knife and suddenly smacked her forehead with the other hand. “Oh, no,” she exclaimed. “That was not in the files! Your father drove me by it. Twice. Very unprofessional of him, a terrible breach of security. But then, he was still in the recruitment phase with me. Flowers and fucking and trust-building and all that. You know.”
“I’ll kill you!” Ruth screamed as she leapt to her feet on the bed, her fists clenching and her eyes wild.
In one quick stride Martina had her right boot on the mattress and the knife point pressing into Ruth’s chest, just a millimeter short of breaking skin and piercing flesh.
“Sit down,” she ordered. Yet Ruth’s grief and rage kept her frozen at the point, unsure if she wanted to break Martina’s wrist or pull the weapon into her already wounded heart.
“Sit!” Martina yelled, and the force of her voice trembled the light fixture. A frantic pounding at the door added to the din, as Youssef had become alarmed for his mistress. “Hör auf!” she yelled, and the knocking stopped. She looked up into Ruth’s eyes. “Unfortunately, I have to keep you alive for now. But there is nothing in the rules about carving my name on that pretty face.” She angled the blade, pressing forward and down until Ruth was forced to lower herself or bleed. Ruth’s bottom met the bed, and their heads returned to more proper positions of warden and charge.
“Take off your pants,” Martina commanded.
Ruth could not meet the woman’s eyes. She stared at the midriff of her flight suit, slowly shaking her head. Her tears overflowed and rolled off her cheeks.
“No,” she whispered. “No.”
“Take them off.”
“No.”
“I am not going to rape you, you silly shit!” Martina shouted. “You are simply far too arrogant for me. Now take them off.”
Ruth’s fingers trembled as she untied the drawstring of the sweatpants, then slipped them down to her knees. Martina dragged them over her feet, tossing the bundle onto the tattered dress in the corner, as Ruth covered her face with her hands.
Martina straightened up, keeping the blade extended in warning.
“Now, tell me which of us is the stupid bitch,” she said quietly. “Me, a simple woman who did not even finish her schooling. You, the great student of psychology. And still, a plain fact of nature turns you into an unthinking, quivering worm.”
Ruth dropped her hands and placed them on the bed. But the tears still dripped off the end of her nose, and her chest shuddered.
“Those are the simple facts, my dear.” Something like pity colored Martina’s voice. “That is the truth of your father’s legacy. I should have learned it long ago, but I trusted him, allowed him to betray me, to send me into a den of thieves and murderers, to live like them, to become one of them.” She shook her head. “And then I trusted him again, just once more, and he proved his character and tried to finish me.”
Ruth sobbed once. She turned her hands upward, her fingers contracting in small twitches.
“You should have learned it too, my dear.” Martina sighed. “A girl like you, raised in a society like yours. They bring you up to be so strong, so independent, while blinding and paralyzing you with foolish, idealistic poetry.”
Martina held the knife in position, while she looked around to find her cigarette. It was burning on the floor, and she crushed it with her boot. Then, with her free hand, she took the box from her pocket, extracted a fresh cigarette with her lips, and lit it. She plucked it from her mouth and held it out.
“Go ahead,” she offered. “You smoke. I saw you in the restaurant, with your detective.”
After a moment, Ruth accepted the smoke with fluttering fingers. She inhaled and coughed.
“He is not for you,” Martina said. “Handsome, yes. Perhaps gallant. Maybe you would even have married such a man, but it would not have worked. That kind of passion is fleeting, my dear. Believe me, I know. We should stick to our own kind.”
Ruth’s breathing had slowed to a shallow rhythm. She no longer sensed the physical pain in her face, for the injuries of her mental violation were far more serious. The woman’s words ran through her now like a slowly drawn coping saw. She took the cigarette from her mouth and tried to focus on the ember.
“And please don’t try anything with that,” Martina warned. “I’ve been burned before.” Even so, she backed up a step, for her tactical instincts were always tuned. After all, she was a smart Catholic girl trained by Jewish warriors. She placed her left hand on her hip.
“So,” she said. “You are enlightened now. But you must still be wondering what this is all about.”
Ruth’s head was so heavy, as if it had been pumped full of liquid mercury. She looked down at her bare legs. The sweater was not long enough to cover her, and she saw the white triangle of her underwear and pressed her forearms over it, holding one hand steady with the other as the smoke from the cigarette rose into her face.
Yes, she had been wondering, through every sleepless minute since being tossed in here like a rabid pet. What else was she to do? They offered her nothing to pass the time. No radio, for a local broadcast would tell her where she was. Lebanon? Syria? Libya? And nothing to read, for perhaps they thought her resourceful enough to effect a lethal paper cut. Like most fresh prisoners, she had spent the first few hours pacing, resisting, trying to reason it out. And then the temperature had forced her into bed, although sleep was not even a remote hope. Without a clue to the woman’s plans, there was no way to guess how long she would be here. A week? A year? Five? Her fear of execution had settled into a bearable ache, for she knew the histories of many war prisoners and hostages. If you were kept alive for a day, then the chances were good that you would be spared, used as leverage. I’m young, she told herself. I can survive this. I will recover when I am free again. They won’t give up until they find me.
In the emotional agony of the last few minutes, she had nearly crossed the breaking point, wanted to die. But that was gone now. She wanted to live to smell the flowers of home, feel the sun on her cheeks, be touched by a cherished kiss. If for no other reason, she had to survive and discover the truth.
“Yes,” she whispered. “I was wondering.”
“Well,” said Martina, pleased to have a receptive audience again. “It is not very complicated, and there really is no reason why you should not know.”
Ruth was not heartened by Martina’s willingness to confide. When terrorists took off their masks, it did not bode well for their hostages.
“Your people are very anxious to conclude a prisoner exchange with Hizbollah.” Martina had taken to flipping the knife again. “I, of course, do not work for either side. I am my own woman.” She failed to mention a third party, for her own inability to identify her employer weighed heavily on her today. “My mission is to destroy that exchange. Which I will do, believe me.”
Ruth nodded as she kept her focus on her cigarette. A prisoner exchange. She struck the curiosity from her mind. She needed to be responsible only for her own life now.
“I took you merely as an insurance policy,” said Martina.
Something drove Ruth to speak now. Maybe it was her army training, the tradition of challenging the status quo, the Israeli habit of questioning all statements that failed to satisfy. When terrorists took a hostage, the prisoner’s compatriots were temporarily immobilized. You could secretly kill a hostage and still buy yourself weeks of time.
“Why am I alive?” she asked.
Martina stopped toying with the knife. “I told you,” she said, as her eyes darkened. “A bargaining chip.” Yet she also realized the balances and rhythms of these kinds of gambits. Her timetable was very short, the final action nearly in play. She could have killed the girl upon arrival at Skorpion, while her unknown status still maintained its effect. Yet she had spared her, and did not know why. The girl sensed the weakness, and that brought the bile into Martina’s throat. Now the relayed message from Fouad had paralyzed her ability to act. She began to pace again, barely taking a full step to the right before she turned to the left.
“I would have let you go,” she snarled. “But your fucking father thinks he is so smart! The bastard has no respect. He will stop at nothing. My mother is an old woman. She is frail. She is ill. She knows nothing.”
Ruth slowly raised her head. Now she understood. Now the pieces dropped quickly into place as her hope began to simmer. Your mother’s life for mine! she wanted to scream, even as she held her peace. Oh, Abba. You will stop at nothing for me! She watched the woman losing control again and carefully turned up the fire.
“As I said,” Ruth whispered. “A father’s love . . .”
“Don’t flatter yourself!” Martina shouted as she spun on her, the blade leaping out close to her nose. “With him it is merely a tactic!”
This time Ruth did not flinch. The fear jackhammered in her heart, but she knew that for every scratch inflicted on her face, her father would find this woman and rend a triple vengeance upon her. He loved you? she challenged silently. Used you, yes, and threw you away when you proved to be the trash that you are. She was unarmed, half naked, yet all the arrows were in her quiver.
“If you harm me,” she warned, “he will kill her.”
Martina screamed, cocking her left hand back. Yet Ruth did not duck, only closed her eyes to take the blow. They were forced open when, instead, the woman’s fingers gripped her jaw, crushing her cheeks against her teeth. The still-fresh wound shot lightning into her skull as Klump’s face came in very close.
“I shall deal with him,” she promised, in a hiss like a steam valve. “But don’t expect to get out of it alive.”
She held Ruth for a long moment, then slowly drew her hand away. She barely made a sound as she turned, picked up the dress and the sweats, stepped quickly through the door, then slammed it so hard that the mirrored closet bucked open, swinging on its hinges.
Ruth lifted her hands and looked at them. They were quivering like autumn leaves in a swift wind. She took a last puff from the cigarette, then ground it into the wall.
Her eyes slowly scanned her cell, just once more. She would start at one corner and pull and scrape at every scrap of steel molding, any part that might give, snap, open a hole, offer a weapon, something to dig with, or to kill with.
She finally knew one thing for certain. She had a stay of execution. She had to search in earnest now for a breach, a weakness in her prison, a means of escape. A way out.
Freedom, onto a continent she could not even identify.