Free Damascus Gate by Robert Stone Page A

term "love-hate." But she was good at languages and knew her way around the region like few others.
    Nuala laughed her nice Irish laughter. "I'm sorry, Christopher. I know you're a hell of a fella. The girls all adore you, truly."
    "Thanks, pal."
    "Here," she said, still laughing, "take some of this." She held out a plastic bag full of what appeared to be miniature cedar tips, a dark reddish green. When he failed to take it, she took a pinch from the bag and put it to his lips. "Go ahead, take it. It'll make you even more studly than you already are."
    He took the bag and examined it.
    "It's khat," she said. "The perfect morning chaw. One gobful and you'll never be without it."
    Lucas put the stuff in his pocket.
    "I'll tell you what," he said. "I'll talk to Ernest and find out what the Human Rights Coalition knows about Abu Baraka. Maybe I can do something about it. But I think it's going to go the other way. I mean, I think the Jerusalem Syndrome is more for me."
    "I suppose," she said. "You're religious."
    "I am not religious," he said angrily. "It's a good story."
    "Oh, rubbish," Nuala told him. "Of course you're religious. You're the biggest Catholic I ever saw. Anyway, the Jerusalem Syndrome is old stuff."
    They started walking again, turning their backs to the winds of Talpiot.
    "You're wrong, Nuala," Lucas said. "You may find it boring but it's not old stuff. Religion here is something that's happening now, today."
    It was true, he thought, although he had said it often before. Other cities had antiquities, but the monuments of Jerusalem did not belong to the past. They were of the moment and even the future.
    "What a curse it is," she said. "Religion."
    He wondered how it could be that if she so despised religion she could have made herself so at home in this part of the world. Because it was religion and religious identity that gave the place its passions, upon which she battened.
    "I guess so," Lucas said. "Why don't you take your atrocity story to Janusz Zimmer. He's good at that stuff."
    "I have," she said. "He claims to be interested." She shrugged.
    In this city, as in many others, the practice of journalism was made more difficult by the interlacing sexual affairs that consumed the international press. Nuala and Janusz, who was nearly twice her age, had entertained a brief, crazed liaison that seemed to have ended badly and about which neither would speak. Her present interest was in a Palestinian
résistant
in the Strip, where she worked.
    He walked her to the bus stop at the bottom of the hill and waited for the bus with her and kissed her goodbye. Then he began to walk toward town. In about an hour, footsore and depressed, he found the offices of the Israeli Human Rights Coalition in Amnon Square. His friend Ernest Gross was behind the desk. Gross was a South African from Durban whose tanned, athletic appearance and open face made him resemble a surfer. At the same time, he was one of those men prey to sudden, barely suppressed rages, and it was strange because his business was, after all, benign assistance and fairness and mediation. Or maybe not so strange.
    "Hi, Ernest," Lucas said. "Get any good death threats today?"
    The Human Rights Coalition sometimes received death threats and had accumulated a copious outpouring over the previous month. Its officers had recently taken part in a major Peace Now demonstration.
    "Not today," Ernest Gross said. "Yesterday I got one from a psychiatrist."
    "You got a death threat from a psychiatrist? You're putting me on."
    Ernest sorted through the papers on his desk, looking for it in vain.
    "Well, the damn thing's vanished. But it said, like, 'I'm a psychiatrist and I can see your pathetic self-hatred and I'm going to kill you.'"
    "Jesus," said Lucas. "Did he send you a bill?"
    "In no other country, right?" Gross said. "So what can I do for you?"
    Lucas explained what Nuala had told him about Abu Baraka and asked him what the Human Rights Coalition had on