'Yes, I'm...' I didn't know what to say at all.

'You don't want to do it, now? Do you realise how dangerous...I convinced people that you can, and want to, carry out this operation. I organised the-' At that moment there was a knock on the door and I covered the parcel with my sheet. It was Wasime.

'Fahmi? Is everything all right?'

'Yes, yes, yeah, it's fine, I'll come in a second,' I said. 'Just looking at my parcel!'

I got back on the phone in a whisper: 'h.e.l.lo?'

There was a silence, which Halil's cousin finally broke.

'So what are you saying?'

'I don't know. Listen. I never said I wanted to carry out this operation. I mean, I do want to. I have an opportunity. But...I don't want to die, or to get caught.'

'So put your trust in Allah and he will guide you. Think of a way. Allah loves you. You will succeed.' She hung up, and I sat on the bed for a while before making my way back to the kitchen.

Atta was almost asleep. Wasime's face was a little flushed with embarra.s.sment, I think, at disturbing me. 'It was OK, just a parcel from my brother.' She smiled and caressed her big belly. She was pretty, just like her name said she was, and I thought she was one of those women made prettier by pregnancy. 'Tell me, Wasime. Do you maybe know a guy from the village called Tamer Sarsur?'

'Sure, why?'

'Really?'

'Of course. He's the brother of one of my best friends. Works in a hospital in Tel Aviv. When their mother was very sick he hardly ever came to see her. Even at the end. He comes back to see his friends from time to time. Aminthat's his brotherused to visit their mother pretty much every weekend. Lovely guy. You know them?'

'Me? No. Someone from work in Rosh Haayin asked me something about him. I knew there were quite a few Sarsurs in the village, so...' I petered out and sipped my tea. It was cold.

'I can ask his sister for you,' Wasime said. 'I see her almost every day. We can get in touch through Amin. They live together. What does your friend want, exactly?' Atta was pulling at her hand and she took him to his room before I had to answer.

I'd almost lost hope of finding someone who knew Tamer Sarsur, but still, this wasn't any help. If I talked to Wasime's friend or Amin, I'd have to explain why, and I couldn't see that working. And then Wasime came back into the kitchen.

'You know what you should do?' she said. 'You know the Ramoon restaurant? On the main road? Go there. Tamer's friends are there most nights. The manager's a friend of his. Avi. It's the only place he goes when he comes here. Go talk to them.'

'He's not responding. I want to do some neurological tests, talk to the intensivists, and then we'll make a decision. No visits for the moment.'

'But do you think...'

'I think I'm going to do a few tests, Svetlana.'

'Yes, Dr Hartom.'

'...Phew, what a b.i.t.c.h, did you hear her? Fahmi? Don't go, Fahmi. You hear me? Don't leave me now.'

I went to the Ramoonthe Pomegranatethe next day. I ate slowly, enjoying the meal. I missed the food in Ramallah, but this was close: fresh salads, better steak than that bar in Tel Aviv had, and good coffee, which I eked out with tiny sips. I heard one of the waiters call the name Avi. It was late, I was the last customer and he was sitting with three other guys, talking and laughing, and getting louder as the evening went on. I finished a second coffee, still uncertain how I could bring Tamer Sarsur up. The waiter, in white shirt and black trousers, came over with that suspicious look the locals reserved for West Bankers. I could smell arrack on his breath. 'Everything OK, sir?' 'Yes, thanks very much. I'd like the bill now.' I gave him a big note and when he returned with the change, left an almost ridiculously large tip. I saw his eyes take it in and seized the moment.

'Tell me, do you know Tamer Sarsur?'

The waiter's head came up quickly.

'Tamer? Of course! What have you got to do with him? Hey,' he called over to his friends, 'this guy knows Tamer Sarsur! Thank you, sir,' he added, counting the notes.

'Who knows Tamer Sarsur?' thundered one of the voices, and the waiter gestured at me. It was Avi.

'Where do you know him from?'

'From Tel Aviv. I don't really...'

'Did he send you here?' asked someone else.

'Not really. It's just I met him a while ago in Tel Aviv...He told me about this restaurant so I thought I'd give it a try, that's all.' They didn't answer. They were all looking at me now. I didn't know where to take the conversation, exactly. 'You all know him?'

Avi laughed. 'Of course we know him. Since we were this high. You see him at the hospital in his nurse's outfit?'

'Yeah,' I said. 'And very nice he looks in it too.' Everyone laughed.

'And you saw Amin's fruit-and-veg place?'

'Sure. Everyone gets them mixed up. At the hospital they ask for vegetables, and at the grocery they ask for a ma.s.sage.' They laughed at this too and I was momentarily grateful to Croc for giving me the line. Avi sent the waiter over with the bottle of arrack and a gla.s.s. I could hear one of them say something like 'I wonder if the old dear can tell the difference?' Someone else said, 'Or maybe they're both doing her, and she doesn't know!' This caused a long outburst of laughter. I smiled, not quite getting it. It was the kind of laughter that feeds on itself, that goes on too longthe laughter of men in groups. Eventually Avi, with tears in his eyes, asked me whether I had seen the old lady.

'The old lady? No, I didn't see her. What old lady?'

'The old Jew Tamer is f.u.c.king. Didn't he tell you?'

The waiter said, 'He never stopped talking about her, till we told him to go to the old people's home and try it on there.'

A guy with shoulder-length hair and a moustache said: 'We told him, "Always check afterwards to see she's still alive."'

Once they'd finally calmed down, Avi explained. Tamer had said he was f.u.c.king a Jewish woman in Tel Aviv. He was very proud of it. Avi impersonated Tamer's boasting and the others pretended to be themselves being impressed. But then it turned out she was fifty-four to his twenty-five, and the restaurant had never let him live it down. He'd never mentioned her again. I laughed along with them. It was the laughter of arrack, of the brotherhood of men, of the end of the day, and it was also, for me, the laughter of relief and release, of knowing my future. Because there was one little detail in what they'd said that I realised was the thing the Croc and his bald friend were looking for; the thing that gave me a reason to meet them again in Bar BaraBush.

41

'Nailed it!' said Bar.

Whether he'd suddenly figured something out, or heard something I hadn't caught, was difficult to tell. Two days earlier Fahmi had called to say that he'd got something for us. He wanted to meet in Bar BaraBush, where you could watch beautiful women ordering up o.r.g.a.s.ms. I told him Thursday was the best night and picked him up at the entrance to his village. But they were having a South American night and the noise was unbelievable. The place was packed and the acoustics were terrible. A killer combination. You had to stick your ear into someone's mouth in order to hear anything, and Bar was closer to Fahmi, who talked so very gently, with such a soft accent. He'd found out that Tamer was f.u.c.king some woman here in Tel Aviv. 'Fifty-four years old!' he'd said, and laughed, and Bar and I raised our eyebrows. And then he must have said something I hadn't caught, because Bar spread his hands wide and said, 'Nailed it!'

I'd been in such a fug, so preoccupied with Guetta, so out of it, that I hadn't noticed what was going on in Time's Arrow. That Thursday morning I finished the Belgian project and pa.s.sed everything on to Guy. We went over it together and I asked him what was up next.

'Next? I don't know,' Guy said. 'There aren't that many projects on at the moment.'

'Really?'

'Is this news to you?'

It was news to me. At lunch I ordered Thai (TukTuk) and ate with Talia Tenne, who had dyed her hair as red as her finger-and toenails.

'Well! To what do I owe this honour?' she said.

'Today you're going to explain to me what is going on in this company.'

'Happy to,' she said, but there wasn't that much to tell. They just weren't selling the system any more. The Indians were killing the market. The downsizing and the move to Rosh Haayin had stabilised things for a few months, but the investors were feeling the pressure again.

'Jimmy's really stressed recently,' said Talia. 'He screamed at Yoni Bronco yesterday because Yoni might have lost us the Scandinavian thing. And the Belgians aren't happy any more. They might even ditch the system. It's going round that they got an offer from another Israeli company. Check your emails, Crocthere's a company meeting this afternoon.' In the striplights of the dining nook I could see the first wrinkles in Talia Tenne's palely freckled white skin. 'It's not like the good old days, Croc. Haven't you noticed?'

But I hadn't. I hadn't been aware of the shouting or the failures or Jimmy's moods. I didn't even have the faintest clue who the h.e.l.l Yoni Bronco was. All I'd actually noticed was that the Thai food wasn't bad at all.

At the company meeting I saw a Jimmy stripped of his old enthusiasm, his customary sharpness. He talked about the usual things, but he didn't seem to believe in what he was saying. The great Rafrafthe brains behind the air force's Time Management Unit, Time's Arrow's King of Time, Mr Every Second Countslooked like a man who'd been stopped dead in his tracks.

'Do you know the Hofstadter law?' he asked us, but there was no answer, because n.o.body did. 'The Hofstadter law says: everything takes longer than you expect it to take, even if you take into account the Hofstadter law!' He looked around the room. No one's expression changed. 'And what does that mean? It means things take longer than we planned. It means we need patience. And that includes somebody like me, who memorises the Hofstadter law every morning while doing my press-ups and simultaneously watching the morning news on Channel Twoeven I lose my patience!' Jimmy's voice climbed alarmingly in volume and a.s.sertiveness, as if someone had accidentally turned his amp up to the max.

'Look,' he resumed in a calmer voice. 'No one has any time any more. Sixty per cent of Europeans said in a recent poll that they didn't have enough time. And the Venture Capital Fund investing in usVenture Capital Fund, ridiculously long name, by the way, must take at least a second and a half to say it, way too muchthey don't have enough time either. They're losing patience. They gave us money for twelve months and after twelve months they want to see results. They want to see what I promised themthe twenty-first-century Fed-Ex.'

Jimmy sipped from a gla.s.s of water. Talia Tenne's eyes asked See what I meant? See what I meant? and my eyes replied and my eyes replied Yes, I do Yes, I do.

'Why are we forever running from one place to another? Because we exist in a state of terror: the terror of time, the terror of time ending, the terror of death. Because we're afraid of time, we look for solace in the patterns we create in it, in the circle of an hour, in days, in the illusory beginnings and endings of events without any. We try to escape itin sleep, in dreams, in drink, in meditation, in mystical beliefsor we work like crazy to try and create the illusion that we are in fact in control of it.'

I can't remember everything he said. Only fragments of ideas and occasional sentences. He talked about Chronos, the Greek G.o.d of time. About Native American tribes that don't have words for 'late' or 'wait' or even 'time' about time's arrow, a river flowing in one direction only, from past to future, a series of events that cannot be reconstructed; about Stephen Hawking and the ten dimensions. We sat there in a state of shock. We were asking ourselves: what does he want, this man? What is he going through?

After the meeting we crowded into the kitchenette to drink coffee.

'To think we used to swallow all his bulls.h.i.t about time,' Bar said. 'We actually used to get motivated motivated by some of that c.r.a.p!' by some of that c.r.a.p!'

I didn't say anything. But I wanted to say: don't you see that it's not Jimmy who's changed, it's us? It's us us. We've We've changed. changed.

At the end of the day I called Fahmi and picked him up on the way to Tel Aviv. He had one of those little leather pouches on a belt that backpackers like to strap round their waists, which he dangled over his thigh. We didn't talk much on the way: he seemed a little stressed. It was nothing, he said. He just wanted to get to the bar.

The place was heaving, but I managed to find us some seats at the corner of the bar. Fahmi was happy with the spot. Bar arrived and started telling us about the Maccabi game and explaining the finer points of basketball to Fahmi and then Dafdaf called and wouldn't get off the phone. She'd had a major row with her husband and wanted to know what I would doas if I had a clue! Me, who hadn't managed to get married; who hadn't even managed to not get married. It felt as if she was trying to tell me something but I wasn't sure what it was exactly, and they turned up the volume of the salsa music so I had to hang up. It was nearing midnight by the time we finally broached the subject of Tamer Sarsur, and Bar spread his hands and shouted out. I leaned over and yelled in his ear.

'What do you mean, "Nailed it"?'

'What?'

'You said, "Nailed it"!'

'Didn't you hear what he said?'

I shook my head. 'Let's get out of here! I can't stand this! Can't hear!'

'What?' shouted Bar.

I pointed outside. 'Out of here!'

Fahmi looked taken aback. 'Out? Why?'

I put my mouth to his ear. 'I can't hear anything! Let's get out of here!'

'No! Stay longer! I want to look at the girls!'

'Come back later! Talk outside! Then come back!'

I struggled through the crush towards the exit. At the doorway I turned around and saw Fahmi reluctantly trailing after Bar, his pouch slung over his shoulder, as if he were a child dragging its heels. I walked out: it was like getting out of a vacuum cleaner. It felt like the first air I'd breathed in two hours.

'G.o.ddam, that was noisy!'

We decided to walk down to the beach in front of the Hilton, where we found three sunloungers. We lay on them and listened to the sound of the waves whispering. There was no one else around on the beach; from time to time a pleasant shiver ran through me to remind me that summer was finally loosening its grip. I eased my lounger back, as if I were moon-bathing, and lit a cigarette.

'All right,' I said, 'can someone tell me what is going on?'

'It's very simple,' said Bar. 'Tamer f.u.c.ked the professor's wife.'

'What? How do you know?'

'It's what Tamer's friends told Fahmi. That he was f.u.c.king "some doctor's wife" in Tel Aviv.'

'But he's a hundred years old. You saw how old he is. She's...what?'

'Fifty-four, according to them,' said Fahmi.

'So Tamer was s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g Warshawski's wife. What's the link to Guetta? How exactly does this mean "nailed it"?'

'You'll have to ask Warshawski,' Bar said.

'Me? Why me?'

'Who else? This is all to do with you, Croc. Not me.'