Prince of Fire

five minutes. I’ll have instructions for you then.”
    Gabriel hung up the phone. He went to a newsstand, bought a German magazine, then walked a short distance through the terminal to another kiosk of telephones. Same number, same patter, same girl in Tel Aviv.
    “Ezekiel wants you to go to Rome.”
    “ Rome? Why Rome?”
    “You know I can’t answer that.”
    It was no matter. Gabriel knew the answer.
    “Where should I go?”
    “The apartment near the Piazza di Spagna. Do you know it?”
    Gabriel did. It was a lovely safe flat at the top of the Spanish Steps, not far from the Church of the Trinità dei Monti.
    “There’s a flight from Frankfurt to Rome in two hours. We’re booking a seat for you.”
    “Do you want my frequent-flyer number?”
    “What?”
    “Never mind.”
    “Have a safe trip,” said the girl, and the line went dead.

15

M ARSEILLES
    F OR THE SECOND TIME IN TEN DAYS P AUL M ARTINEAU made the drive from Aix-en-Provence to Marseilles. Once again he entered the coffeehouse on the small street off the rue des Convalescents and climbed the narrow stairs to the flat on the first floor, and once again he was greeted on the landing by the gowned figure who spoke to him quietly in Arabic. They sat, propped on silk pillows, on the floor of the tiny living room. The man slowly loaded hashish into a hubble-bubble and touched a lighted match to the bowl. In Marseilles he was known as Hakim el-Bakri, a recent immigrant from Algiers. Martineau knew him by another name, Abu Saddiq. Martineau did not refer to him by that name, just as Abu Saddiq did not call Martineau by the name he’d been given by his real father.
    Abu Saddiq drew heavily on the mouthpiece of the pipe, then inclined it in Martineau’s direction. Martineau took a long pull at the hashish and allowed the smoke to drift out his nostrils. Then he finished the last of his coffee. A veiled woman took away his empty cup and offered him another. When Martineau shook his head, the woman slipped silently from the room.
    He closed his eyes as a wave of pleasure washed over his body. The Arab way, he thought—a bit of smoke, a cup of sweet coffee, the subservience of a woman who knew her place in life. Though he had been raised a proper Frenchman, it was Arab blood that flowed in his veins and Arabic that felt most comfortable on his tongue. The poet’s language, the language of conquest and suffering. There were times when the separation from his people was almost too painful to bear. In Provence he was surrounded by people like himself, yet he could not touch them. It was as if he had been condemned to wander among them, as a damned spirit drifts among the living. Only here, in Abu Saddiq’s tiny flat, could he behave as the man he truly was. Abu Saddiq understood this, which was why he seemed in no hurry to get around to business. He loaded more hashish into the water pipe and struck another match.
    Martineau took another draw from the pipe, this one deeper than the last, and held the smoke until it seemed his lungs might burst. Now his mind was floating. He saw Palestine, not with his own eyes but as it had been described to him by those who had actually seen it. Martineau, like his father, had never set foot there. Lemon trees and olives groves—that’s what he imagined. Sweet springs and goats pulling on the tan hills of the Galilee. A bit like Provence, he thought, before the arrival of the Greeks.
    The image disintegrated, and he found himself wandering across a landscape of Celtic and Roman ruins. He came to a village, a village on the Coastal Plain of Palestine. Beit Sayeed, they had called it. Now there was nothing but a footprint in the dusty soil. Martineau, in his hallucination, fell to his knees and with his spade clawed at the earth. It surrendered nothing, no tools or pottery, no coins or human remains. It was as if the people had simply vanished.
    He forced open his eyes. The vision dissipated. His mission would soon be over. The murders of his father and grandfather would be avenged, his birthright fulfilled. Martineau was confident he would not spend his final days as a Frenchman in Provence but as an Arab in Palestine. His people, lost and scattered, would be returned to the land, and Beit Sayeed would rise once more from its grave. The days of the Jews were numbered. They would leave like all those who had come to Palestine before them—the Greeks and Romans, the Persians and the Assyrians, the Turks and the