Free Vicious Circle by Robert Littell

alley. Behind one of the sandbags, a pudgy sergeant wearing a net-covered helmet and high-collared flak jacket swiveled
     his machine gun and sighted on the truck’s tires, ready to shoot them out if the driver didn’t instantly obey.
    The spectacle at Erez never failed to dazzle Sweeney: one hour and ten minutes down the road from the creature comforts of
     Jerusalem—the roof-top terrace of his apartment in Yemin Moshe with its spectacular view of the Old City walls, the ice cubes
     rattling in the driest martinis this side of the river Jordan, his hand resting lightly on the sexiest female thigh in the
     holy land—and he was knocking on the gate of D. Alighieri’s inferno.
    Not that there was any problem getting in. Getting out of Gaza, for a Palestinian, was an ordeal; you had to have a spanking
     clean charge sheet and no known relatives in any fundamentalist organization and a special magnetic identity card that the
     Israelis swapped fornew ones whenever they wanted to give the Palestinians a hard time. Entering Gaza, on the other hand, was a piece of cake.
     Barely glancing at Sweeney’s American passport and his government-issued press card, a baby-faced border guard who looked
     as if he had never shaved in his life waved him through the indoor border post. Sweeney appeared to be a consenting adult,
     the cranky gesture seemed to say. If he was dumb enough to walk into this hell on earth, the Israelis weren’t going to stop
     him.
    A hundred yards up the Erez alley, past endless coils of tangled concertina wire and more strong points protected by steel
     spikes set in the road, Sweeney reached the local Palestinians, come to pick up their clients in ancient automobiles that
     billowed clouds of dense brown smoke when the drivers kicked over the motors. For a hundred dollars a day, cash on the barrel
     head, you got ferried to your rendezvous in Gaza or one of the swarming refugee camps; for another hundred the driver would
     organize a demonstration for or against anyone or anything you named; for an additional sawbuck, he would translate the slogans
     scrawled on every naked wall in the Strip. Two Christian Arabs Sweeney recognized as reporters from a Gaza news agency were
     loading television cameras into the back of a battered Buick station wagon. A prime-time newscaster Sweeney remembered from
     his Beirut days—the newscaster used to pick his brain for the price of a three-course meal in the St. George Hotel—was passing
     out American cigarettes to the scrawny Palestinian kids hawking tiny cups of thick sweetened coffee. “My man Sweeney, how
     you doing?” Prime Time called.
    “I’m hanging in there,” Sweeney answered. “What do you have lined up?”
    “I’ve got a noon interview with the head honcho. I promised him six minutes, no commercial breaks, as long as he wears a checkered
     kerchief—shit, what do you call those damn things?”
    Sweeney, who had not managed to arrange an interview with anyone higher than dog catcher in his eight months as Jerusalem
     bureau chief, said, “
Kiffiyehs
.”
    “Yeah. That’s it.
Kiffiyehs
. I knew that. I just couldn’t remember how to pronounce it. Hey, Sweeney, there are three problems with growing old. The
     first is you start to lose your memory. Awh, shit! Ican’t remember the second and third.” Prime Time cackled at his own joke until he was short of breath.
    Sweeney’s driver, universally known as Roger because the Palestinian had picked up the habit from American war movies of acknowledging
     orders with the word “Roger,” had parked his beat-up Lada at the end of the line. It occurred to Sweeney that only God knew
     how a car constructed in Russia wound up in the Gaza Strip. On the other hand, all cars finished in a junk yard, so there
     was probably a logic to it after all. Roger, wearing his habitual Indian shirt buttoned up to the neck, a brown suit and sandals,
     squeezed his over-weight body in behind the wheel. “Where we