The New Girl (Gabriel Allon #19)(58)

She followed Unter den Linden to Friedrichstrasse and turned left. Near the old Checkpoint Charlie was the café-bar where she used to meet Omar after work. An attractive woman, blond, early forties, was sitting at their usual table, the one in the back corner with an unobstructed view of the front door. She was reading a volume of poetry by Mahmoud Darwish, the bard of the Palestinian national movement. As Hanifa approached, the woman lifted her eyes from the page, smiled, and looked down again.

Hanifa stopped suddenly. “Are you enjoying it?”

The woman was slow in responding. “I’m sorry,” she said in English. “I don’t speak German.”

The accent was unmistakably American. Hanifa considered feigning incomprehension and finding a table as far away from the attractive blond woman as possible—or perhaps, she thought, in another café altogether. The only people Hanifa despised more than Americans were Israelis, though at times, depending on the whims of American policy in the Middle East, it was a close contest.

“The book,” she said, this time in English. “I asked whether you were enjoying it.”

“Can one truly enjoy such painful verse?”

The remark surprised Hanifa, pleasantly. “I met him not long before he died.”

“Darwish? Really?”

“I produced one of the last interviews he ever gave.”

“You’re a journalist?”

Hanifa nodded. “ZDF. And you?”

“At the moment I’m on an extended holiday.”

“Lucky you.”

“Hardly.”

“You’re an American?”

“I’m afraid so.” The woman contemplated the black-and-white keffiyeh around Hanifa’s neck. “I hope that’s not a problem.”

“Why would it be?”

“We’re not terribly popular right now.” The woman placed the book upon the table so Hanifa could see the open page. “Are you familiar with this one?”

“Of course. It’s very famous.” Hanifa recited the poem’s opening words from memory. “‘Here on the slopes of hills, facing the dusk and the cannon of time . . .’” She smiled. “It sounds much better in the original Arabic.”

“You’re from Palestine?”

“My parents were from the Upper Galilee. They were expelled to Syria in 1948 and eventually came here.” Hanifa lowered her voice and asked archly, “I hope that’s not a problem.”

The woman smiled.

Hanifa glanced at the empty chair. “Are you waiting for someone?”

“As a general proposition, yes. But not at the moment.”

“May I join you?”

“Please.”

Hanifa sat down and introduced herself.

“What a beautiful name,” said the woman. Then she extended her hand. “I’m Sarah Bancroft.”



For the next ninety minutes, alone in the safe flat on Kronenstrasse, Gabriel suffered through a discourse on the subject of Israel and the Jews, delivered by one Hanifa Khoury, journalist, exile, widow of the martyr Omar Nawwaf. She left no wound unopened: the Holocaust, the flight and expulsion of the Palestinian people, the horror of Sabra and Shatila, the Oslo peace process, which she declared a dangerous folly. On that much, at least, she and Gabriel were in complete agreement.

The source of the audio was the phone that Sarah had laid on the table immediately after sitting down at the café. Its camera was aimed toward the ceiling. Gabriel occasionally glimpsed Hanifa’s hands as she described her plan to bring peace to Palestine. She declared the idea of two states, one for Jews, the other for Arabs, a dead letter. The only just solution, she said, was a single binational state, with a full and irrevocable “right of return” for all five million registered Palestinian refugees.

“But wouldn’t that mean an end to the Jewish state?” asked Sarah.

“Yes, of course. But that’s the point.”

Hanifa then treated Gabriel to a reading of poetry by Mahmoud Darwish, the voice of Palestinian suffering and Israeli oppression, before finally asking her newfound American acquaintance why she had decided to take an extended holiday in Berlin, of all places. Sarah recited the story that Gabriel had composed that afternoon. It concerned the disastrous dissolution of a childless marriage. Humiliated and brokenhearted, Sarah had decided to spend a few months in a city where no one knew her. A friend had offered his Berlin pied-à-terre. It was around the corner from the café, she explained, on Kronenstrasse.

“And what about you?” asked Sarah. “Are you married?”

“Only to my work.”

“Your name is familiar.”

“It’s quite common, actually.”

“Your face is familiar, too. It’s almost as if we’ve met before.”

“I get that a lot.”

By then, it was half past nine. Hanifa announced she was famished. She suggested they order something to eat, but Sarah insisted they have dinner at her apartment instead. The cupboard was bare, but they could grab a couple of bottles at Planet Wein and some crunchy shrimp rolls from Sapa Sushi.

“I prefer Izumi,” said Hanifa.

“Izumi it is.”

Sarah paid for the two bottles of chilled Austrian Grüner Veltliner; Hanifa, for the sushi. A few minutes later, Gabriel glimpsed them walking side by side along Kronenstrasse. He closed his laptop computer, doused the lights, and sat down on the couch. “Don’t scream,” he said softly. “Whatever you do, Hanifa, please don’t scream.”