Exile: a novel by Richard North Patterson Page A

dissociated, his gaze intent on his own inner vision. “This will not be allowed,” he intoned. “As God struck Hitler dead, so, too, will He strike down Ben-Aron.”
    Carole came in to watch with him. “As I recall,” David remarked to her,“Hitler put a bullet in his own brain. But I suppose God works in mysterious ways.”
    “This man’s bughouse,” she said flatly. “He doesn’t speak for Israelis— he’s the minority of a crazy minority of dead-enders.”
    Still watching, David put his arm around her shoulder. “Near Bar Kochba,” the newscaster was saying, “several dozen settlers threw rocks at soldiers seeking to remove two mobile homes inhabited by squatters. A right-wing member of parliament protested the prime minister’s plan to dismantle allegedly illegal settlements—like Bar Kochba—by reading the names of settlers ‘marked for expulsion by the traitor Ben-Aron.’ Outside, demonstrators with sleeping bags prepared to fast until, they say, Ben-Aron reverses course.
    “Ben-Aron’s challenge is to demonstrate, despite the rise of Hamas and the turmoil roiling Israel, that he can somehow deliver what most Israelis want: security, then a lasting peace with a people that many distrust, and even fear.”
    David kissed Carole on the forehead. “Congratulations,” he said. “This should be a truly exciting dinner.”
    “But the controversy,” the newsman’s voice-over continued, “has followed the Israeli prime minister to America. Today, in San Francisco, a spokesman for Palestinian opposition groups characterized Ben-Aron’s peace plan as a ‘sham.’ ”
    Though David should have expected it, his first glimpse of Saeb Khalid startled him.
    Saeb stood in front of the Commonwealth Club, where Ben-Aron would speak at noon tomorrow. Crow’s-feet creased the corners of his eyes, and the fine angles of his face were concealed by a well-trimmed beard, which made him appear harsher than the tormented man with whom David had shared the subtle poison of their lunch. Unlike Barak Lev, he spoke with the confidence of an intellectual who—whatever his Muslim beliefs—was firmly grounded in his version of fact.
    “First they took our land,” Saeb was saying. “Now Ben-Aron offers us a ‘homeland’ on the West Bank that is one-fifth of what we had. He offers nothing to the refugees in Lebanon whose families were slaughtered at the direction of Israel—certainly not a return to the land from which the Zionists expelled us...”
    “They can’t return,” Carole said flatly.
    Unsettled, David watched, disturbed by the complex of emotions— jealousy, compassion, sheer male competitiveness—that Saeb could stillarouse in him. “Where was Ben-Aron the peacemaker,” Saeb inquired acidly, “when they slaughtered us at Sabra and Shatila? And now he proposes to remove a pitiful few settlers among the many who will remain to burn our crops, destroy our greenhouses, and use our water for their swimming pools.” Saeb’s voice hardened. “The settlers will remain, and so will their injustice. And Ben-Aron’s ‘peace plan’ will keep Israel’s fingers around our throats, strangling the life out of our people...”
    “Who is this guy?” Carole interjected. “He’s scary.”
    “He’s damaged.”
    Carole turned to him in inquiry. “I knew him a little,” David added, “at Harvard.”
    “You were friends?”
    A lie is more persuasive, Hana had told him, if it contains a little truth. “Saeb and I could never be friends. Then, or now.”
    “Because you’re Jewish?”
    “And because I’m me.” Abruptly, David switched off the remote, banishing Saeb Khalid from Carole’s living room as he had once wished to banish him from Hana’s life.

    A week after the lunch with Saeb, David came home to his apartment in Cambridge, tossed his spiral notebook on the couch, then stopped abruptly.
    Beside the notebook was Hana’s bright cloth purse.
    He had not seen her since the lunch, nor had she