House of Spies (Gabriel Allon #17)(37)

Highway 6, Israel’s main north-south motorway, was blocked at the Iron Interchange. Gabriel’s motorcade turned onto Highway 65 and followed it eastward to Megiddo, the hillock where, according to the Book of Revelation, Christ and Satan would wage a climactic duel that would bring about the end of days. The ancient mound appeared peaceful, though it was shrouded in a sepia-toned veil of smoke from the distant fires on the ridge. They headed northward into the Valley of Jezreel, keeping to the side roads to avoid the diverted traffic, until finally a security gate, metal and spiked, blocked their path. Beyond it was Nahalal, a cooperative agricultural settlement, or moshav, founded by Jews from Eastern Europe in 1921, when Palestine was still in the hands of the British Empire. It was not the first Nahalal but the second. The first Jewish settlement on this plot of land had been established not long after the conquest of Canaan. As recorded in the nineteenth chapter of Joshua, it belonged to the tribe of Zebulun, one of the twelve tribes of ancient Israel.

Gabriel leaned out his window and jabbed the code into the keypad, and the security gate rolled open. Oleander and eucalyptus lined the gently curved lane that stretched before them. Modern Nahalal was circular in layout. Bungalows fronted the road, and behind the houses, like the folds of a hand fan, lay pastures and cultivated cropland. The children filing out of the cooperative’s only school paid scant attention to Gabriel’s large black SUV. Several of Nahalal’s residents served in the security services or the IDF. Moshe Dayan, perhaps Israel’s most famous general, was buried in Nahalal’s cemetery.

At the southern end of the moshav, the SUV turned into the drive of a contemporary-looking house. A security guard in a khaki vest appeared instantly on the shaded veranda and, seeing Gabriel emerge slowly from the vehicle, raised a hand in greeting. In the other he gripped the stock of an automatic weapon.

“You just missed her.”

“Where is she?”

The bodyguard inclined his head toward the farmland.

“How long ago did she leave?”

“Twenty minutes. Maybe a half hour.”

“Please tell me she’s not alone.”

“She tried, but I sent a couple of the boys with her. They took one of the ATVs. None of us can keep up with her.”

Smiling, Gabriel entered the bungalow. Its furnishings were spare and functional, more office than home. Once, the walls had been hung with outsize black-and-white photographs of Palestinian suffering—the long dusty walk into exile, the wretched camps, the weathered faces of the old ones dreaming of paradise lost. Now there were paintings. Some were Gabriel’s, youthful works, derivative. The rest were his mother’s. They were Cubist and Abstract Expressionist, full of fire and pain, produced by an artist at the height of her power. One depicted a woman in semi-profile, gaunt, lifeless, draped in rags. He recalled the week she had painted it; it was the week of Eichmann’s execution. The effort had left her exhausted and bedridden. Many years later, Gabriel would discover the testimony his mother had recorded and then locked away in the archives of Yad Vashem. Only then would he understand that the Cubist depiction of an emaciated woman in rags was a self-portrait.

He went into the garden. Smoke rose above the Carmel Ridge like the plume of an erupting volcano, but the skies above the valley were clear and perfumed with the smell of earth and bovine excrement. Gabriel glanced over his shoulder and saw he was alone; his security detail seemed to have forgotten about him. He followed a dusty track past the animal enclosure, watched by blank-eyed dairy cows. The farm’s pie slice of cropland stretched before him. The portion nearest the bungalow was under cultivation of some sort—Gabriel affected a resentful ignorance of all matters farming—but the distant section of the parcel lay tilled and fallow and awaiting the seed. Beyond the outer boundary was Ramat David, the kibbutz where Gabriel had been born and raised. It was established a few years after Nahalal, in 1926, and derived its name not from the ancient Jewish king but from David Lloyd George, the British prime minister whose government had looked favorably upon the idea of establishing a Jewish national home in the land of Palestine.

The residents of Ramat David were not from the East; they were largely German Jews. Gabriel’s mother arrived there in the autumn of 1948. Her name was Irene Frankel then, and she soon met a man from Munich, a writer, an intellectual, who had taken the Hebrew name Allon. She had hoped to have six children, one child for each million lost to the Holocaust, but one was all her womb would bear, a boy she named Gabriel, the messenger of God, the defender of Israel, the interpreter of Daniel’s visions. Their home, like most in Ramat David, was a place of sadness—of candles burning for parents and siblings who had not survived, of terrified screams in the night—and so Gabriel passed his days wandering the ancient valley of the tribe of Zebulun. As a child he had thought of it as his valley. And now it was his to watch over and protect.

The sun had slipped behind the burning ridge; daylight was in retreat. Just then, Gabriel heard what sounded like a distant cry for help. It was only the first notes of the call to prayer drifting down from the Arab village perched on the slopes of the hills to the east. As a child, Gabriel had known a boy from the village named Yusuf. Yusuf had referred to him as Jibril, the Arabic version of his name, and had told him stories of what it was like in the valley before the return of the Jews. Their friendship was a closely guarded secret. Gabriel never went to Yusuf’s village, Yusuf never came to his. The divide had been unbridgeable. It was still.