Highlander - Donna Lettow [52]
Just inside the doors, a series of airport metal detectors were in place to protect the negotiations. Assad removed his gun from his jacket and placed it on the scanner’s conveyor belt, passed through the detection gateway with no alarm, then retrieved his weapon.
Maral placed her purse on the moving belt and walked through the gateway. She was startled when the alarm began to sound.
“Madame?” The attendant motioned her to step back and come through the machine again. Once again the sound of the alarm filled the hallway. “I’m sorry, Madame,” the security officer said, motioning her off to the side, “but I must search you.”
Maral submitted stoically. It was all too common an occurrence. Searches, metal detectors, road blocks, suspicion. Her privacy violated for little reason. She considered it one of the facts of her life as a Palestinian in an occupied land. MacLeod saw Maral’s face blank as the security officer’s hands passed over her body.
Chapter Eleven
Warsaw: April 18, 1943
Miriam’s face tightened into an emotionless mask as the police officer’s hands pawed over her body. He was Polish, supposedly one of her own countrymen, the overstuffed pig, but he carried out the orders of his Nazi overlords with great enthusiasm. “Remove your blouse,” he ordered, and when she seemed to hesitate, he struck her hard across the face with the butt of his pistol. Her head jerked back and a ragged gash opened beneath her right eye. “Remove your blouse, moja lalka,” he mocked her—my little doll.
Biting back tears of humiliation and rage, she complied, slowly unfastening the buttons on her white cotton blouse. At nineteen, any faith Miriam Kavner had once had in her fellow countrymen, or humanity itself, had long ago been crushed beneath the great Wall that was her people’s prison. Her father and mother had run an upscale restaurant before the war, which quickly became a soup kitchen for the starving after the Wall had cut the Jews of Warsaw off from their “purer” Aryan neighbors. Then the Expulsions began, and Levi Kavner sold everything they owned to buy himself a place on a German work crew, for the promise of protection that would give his family. But protection was just another Nazi lie—her father sent to a forced labor camp in Germany, her mother and little brother Zvi marched to the railroad cars, taken away to Treblinka. Now only Miriam remained, an unlikely warrior, a courier for the Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa, the Jewish Fighting Organization, the ZOB.
In the parlance of the ZOB, Miriam Kavner looked “gut”—with her bleached blond hair and light complexion, she could easily pass for a Polish Christian and walk openly in the Aryan sections of the city, carrying messages, smuggling money and food sent from Jews in America or Eretz Israel, negotiating for the few weapons they’d managed to acquire. She found she was good at what she did, never drawing suspicion as she provided vital information and supplies to her comrades in the Jewish resistance. She thought her family would have been proud of her.
But today, returning from the Aryan side in the midst of a group of munitions factory workers herded back to the Ghetto after their day’s forced labor, perhaps Miriam looked too “gut.” Carrying what could be the most important intelligence of the war, she had somehow attracted the attention of the collaborators who guarded the Gesia Street gate.
Miriam could feel the warmth of her blood as it trickled down her cheek, and she could feel the heat of the eyes of the other Polish police guarding the gate as she pulled the tail of her blouse from the waistband of her skirt, undid the final button, slipped the blouse