The Caliphate André Gallo (list of ebook readers TXT) 📖

could drop you off in Tel Aviv and maybe we can meet for lunch on Dizengoff.”

     Kella agreed. She liked Ezra, her stepfather’s driver. He had already shown her a photograph of his two daughters, ages eight and eleven, both dark haired with huge smiles. Ezra was an Iraqi Jew, born in Baghdad, who had made aliya—emigrated to Israel—with his parents when he was a young child.

     “Ezra, you would do me a favor if you spoke to me in Arabic,” Kella told him. “I don’t want to forget it. Where does your name come from? Why do I think I heard it before?”

     Ezra, in his forties with dark hair and always very correct, said in Arabic, “Yes Miss. I am a Babylonian Jew. I was named after ‘Ezra the Scribe’ from the Torah. My father wanted me to be a rabbi.”

     Kella sat down to change her shoes. The TV was on and giving the news in English. The broadcast had already started and a reporter was announcing, “apparently for several years. It was transported by truck from Niger under an agreement reached by A.Q. Khan, the Pakistani scientist who has been under house arrest for several years. The camp belongs to an organization that calls itself IMRA, the International Muslim Relief Agency, a social-welfare group with branches in several African countries bordering the Sahara. Still according to the Times of India, Malian authorities have refused to take its calls while the IAEA has responded that it is looking into the story. Our TV station has done some independent research and determined that IMRA was founded by Tariq al Khalil, a Muslim academic who usually lives in Brussels. We have not yet been able to reach him for comment.”

     Kella jumped up with one shoe on and the other in her hand. She gave a barely suppressed, “Yes!” pumping her fist at the same time. Her initiative had borne fruit. Her friend had been able to place the information that Coulibaly had passed on to her and Steve in the very-respected Times of India. She was very pleased.

     Alexandra walked in and stared curiously at Kella.

     “What is going on? Something good on TV? The media only tell us about conquests, war, famine and death.”

     “Nothing, really. Just before I left Paris, a friend told me she was trying to place an article and I just heard it on the news.”

     Kella was ready to go when Ezra arrived.

     “On second thought, I’ll see you at 12:30 not on Dizengoff—too crowded and touristy—but at the Haviage Restaurant. It’s Yemenite; you’ll like it, on Yermiyahu Street. I don’t know the exact address. Taxi drivers will know.”

     “Salaam Alaikum,” Ezra smiled when she got in the back of the black Lincoln Town car.

    “Alaikum salaam,” she responded.

***

The ambassador’s residence was located in in a residential neighborhood on the northern side of Herzliya, ten miles from Tel Aviv proper. Surrounded by a security wall, it backed onto a public beach and was less than a hundred yards from the sea. It was conveniently close to the Dan Accadia Hotel, also on the beach, where the ambassador played tennis on weekends, often with the Israeli prime minister. They occasionally included the CIA Chief of Station and Ben Gal, the Mossad director.

     The car turned right and made its way toward national Road Number 2, which linked Israeli urban centers from Jaffa, just south of Tel Aviv, to Rosh Haniqra on the Lebanese border.

    Kella had visited Jaffa the day before. The visit had evoked a painting in the Louvre by the French painter Gros, titled “Napoleon Visiting Plague Victims During His Egyptian Expedition.”

     As she stood looking out to sea, Kella thought Napoleon’s lightning victory over Egyptian forces had opened a new chapter in world history. It brought home to the Arabs—or it should have—the power of European nations to invade their lands at will. She thought the Muslim religion was still dealing with the trauma of their impotence following a period of imperial dominance. For centuries, Muslims found external causes, the Mongol invasion, and Western colonialism, to explain and rationalize their situation. In a weird way, she thought, the attempt to kill Steve in Morocco, and the attack that had killed people she knew in Timbuktu, were a result of Napoleon’s victory over the Egyptians.

     “You will be surprised to learn, I think,” said Ezra, bringing Kella out of her musings, “that Tel Aviv has what you call a red-light district, and we’re about to drive through it. It’s called Tel Barbach.” He chuckled.

     Kella looked around but they were still on the coast road.

     “The girls hang around here by the side of the road and take their customers to the right, into the dunes,” he was still grinning at Kella’s surprised look in the rear-view mirror. “That looks like one down there,” he said pointing straight ahead about a hundred yards down the road. “I rarely see any of them in the daytime.”

     Kella did not think the woman in front of them was acting like a prostitute. She limped and seemed to be crying. As they got closer, they could see her clothes were ripped and her hair was in wild disarray, as if she had been in a fight. It was clear she was motioning for help rather than for a paying client.

     “I will call for help,” Ezra said as he reached for his walkie-talkie radio. “Marine Guard Post One, this is Mobile One.”

     Kella leaned forward from the back seat and said, “Stop, Ezra, stop, she’s hurt! We can’t just drive by and leave her here. Put the radio down and stop!”

     They were now very close to the woman, who was standing her ground in the middle of the road, with one hand up imploring the black