Storm Front

place, because he did. He loved all of it, from the green and blue mountains in the north to the sere desert in the south, and especially the
shephelah
, and above all, Jerusalem. But he loved it more like an Israeli than an American; that is, despite its faults.
    —
    T HE FLANKS OF C ARMEL were still dark when he drove into town. He’d leave the Avis car outside the dealership, he’d decided, where they’d find it when they opened at eight o’clock. He had a legitimate set of keys for the car, but it had been rented on a credit card provided by a credulous American graduate student from Penn State. The student would be mightily pissed if Elijah lost the car. In fact, he’d be mightily pissed if Elijah left the car outside the Avis agency, but Elijah had more important things to worry about than the feelings of grad students.
    Luckily, the Avis agency wasn’t far off Route 75, and not far from the harbor, either. He found it easily enough, dumped the car, left a message on the dashboard, and called a cab.
    As he waited, he fumbled a couple of pills from a bottle that he kept in the backpack, swallowed them without water.
    —
    T HE CABDRIVER didn’t speak much English, but Elijah had excellent Hebrew, so they got along. The cabdriver asked, “Only that luggage?”
    Elijah had the nylon backpack and the leather duffel with brass buckles. “That’s all,” he said. “It’s only a day trip.”
    “I don’t go on the water,” the cabdriver said over his shoulder. “If the water grows too deep in my shower, I get seasick.”
    “Never been a problem for me, though I live as far as you can get from an ocean,” Elijah said.
    “This is in the States?”
    “Yes, Minnesota,” Elijah said.
    The driver noticed that his fare was sweating, even in the cool of the early morning. He also had the expensive leather bag clenched in his lap, as though it might contain an atomic bomb. The driver didn’t ask.
    Strange things happened in Israel every day of the week, and asking could be dangerous. Though in this case, the driver thought, danger was unlikely: the man wore a black snap-brimmed hat, a white clerical collar under his black polyester suit, and he had an olive-wood cross hanging from a silver chain around his neck.
    He was a type. He would have been a type anywhere, but in Israel, he was
really
a type. Give a guy a black suit, a clerical collar, a wooden cross, and a sick, screaming baby, and he could walk through any checkpoint in Israel with his socks full of cocaine or C-4. Because he was an annoying, proselytizing, American Christian
type—
the kind who usually came with slightly noxious religious and political opinions, and who was almost always chintzy with the tips.
    Though not in this case. The driver dropped Elijah at the Fisherman’s Anchorage at HaKishon, the mouth of the Kishon River, and Elijah gave him a hundred-shekel note, which was way too much. He didn’t ask for change, simply hustled away, the pack on his back and the leather bag clutched in his arms, like a sick baby.
    —
    E LIJAH HAD BEEN to the port four days earlier, where he’d found the people he’d been looking for: a German couple, drifting around the Med on an ancient fiberglass sailboat with an engine that worked some of the time. He’d offered them five hundred dollars to transport him, without questions, across the water to the Old Port at Limassol on the Greek half of Cyprus.
    The Germans had been reduced to eating pilchards fished from the dirty port waters and cooked over an alcohol stove, so a little human smuggling wasn’t really a central ethical problem for them. The woman, a lanky blonde named Gerta, told him that she could provide carnal entertainment during the trip for an extra two hundred, but Elijah declined, citing conservative religious values.
    When Elijah arrived on the dock, the Germans were awake and waiting, perhaps nervous that their five hundred dollars had gone somewhere else.
    Gerta’s partner, also lanky and blond, but improbably called Ricardo, pushed them off the dock within thirty seconds of his arrival. He fired up the engine, which coughed loudly before resuming its silence. Ricardo whacked it a couple of times, and got it running well enough to get them out into open water, where the Germans launched the sails.
    Ricardo said, “Such a nice day for sailing. Should I put your bags below?”
    “No, no, they make a place to sit,” Elijah said, in German. His German, like his Hebrew, was