Free Damascus Gate by Robert Stone Page B

him.
    "Nuala has a lot of chutzpah," Ernest said in his antipodean cockney. "She'd better be careful."
    "Is she right about this? Is the guy IDF, do you think? Are they doing what she says they're doing?"
    "Ah," Ernest said, "here it is." He had found the threatening note on his desk. He picked it up and stuck it to his bulletin board with a thumbtack, beside the Amnesty International bulletins and the Peace Now handbills. "Is Nuala right? Well, Nuala's strange. I don't always know what side Nuala's on, and I don't know if she does. But she's a valuable man, as it were. And I think she's right on this one."
    "She wants me to do a story on him."
    "Jolly good," Ernest said. "Do it."
    "I hate it down there," Lucas said.
    "Everyone does, mate. The Palestinians. The soldiers. Everyone but the settlers, who claim to love it. And Nuala, of course."
    "Actually, the beaches look nice."
    "Great beaches," Ernest said. "The settlers have a hotel called the Florida Beach Club. Scandinavian lovelies come to frolic, I hear. Gambol like lambs, with seven hundred thousand of the most wretched people on earth a mere stone's throw away. So to speak. The beach is protected by razor wire and machine guns."
    "Anybody else working the Gaza story?" Lucas asked. "I told Nuala to take it to Janusz Zimmer."
    "She and Janusz broke up, I understand," Ernest said. "But maybe he'll take it on."
    "That was a strange romance."
    "All her romances are strange," Ernest said. "Anyway, it would be good if we didn't have to rely on foreigners to do this one.
Ha'olam Hazeh
is trying to get a line on it."
Ha'olam Hazeh
was a left-wing magazine in Tel Aviv. "It's nice when one of our papers takes that sort of thing on. So it's not like we need the rest of the world to tell us about it."
    "I think so too," Lucas said.
    "Nuala and her UN friends," said Ernest, "they've all been to Gaza. They've been to Deir Yassein and to everywhere else Jews did the kicking. You wonder if they've ever been to Yad Vashem."
    "Never asked her," Lucas said. There was an American feminist calendar on the wall beside Ernest's desk, with pictures of great international heroines and red-letter dates in female history. Lucas leaned over to inspect the fetching photograph of Amelia Earhart. "I've never been there myself, actually."
    "No?" Ernest asked. "Anyway, we talk to the IDF, and very often they talk back to us. I think I have an idea of how it goes in the territories."
    "How?"
    "There are unwritten laws. The Shin Bet operate there. They mount punitive strikes and conduct interrogations. They've told us unofficially that they feel entitled to use moderate force in those interrogations. That's the term they use, 'moderate force.' Obviously, this can mean different things to different people. It can mean one thing to a kid from Haifa and another to a kid from Iraq."
    "Right."
    "They also feel entitled to kill people they believe have killed Jews. Or who've killed one of their informers. It's a respect thing, see. They have Arabic-speaking agents who have to pass a field test, pretending to be Palestinians, hanging around a market somewhere, chatting it up. If they think one camp or village is ready to explode, they'll sometimes use provocation, set it off themselves and come down hard. For a while last year they were killing six rioters a day, and it was hard to believe this was coincidence. Every day it was six."
    "I see."
    "Shin Bet itself is divided into compartments. Sometimes the left hand isn't acquainted with the right."
    "Sounds a little like Kabbala," Lucas said.
    "Doesn't it? And there are other organizations besides Shabak and Mossad. Sometimes they're in favor, sometimes out."
    "Dangerous work," Lucas said.
    "That's what I tell Nuala," Ernest said. "And her friends."
    "Well," said Lucas, "I hope they'll be careful. She came back from her last encounter with a black eye."
    "I'm sure one of our soldiers roughed her up," Ernest said. "Still, I can't help noticing how often Nuala