The couple had forbidden their daughter to marry Abu Moses (having discovered his identity via an errant love letter) and virulently disapproved of the girl's liaison, at one point threatening to disown her should it continue. Their objections to the young man, it should be noted, were not moral ones: On the contrary, a commando was simply poor marriage material, unable to earn a salary one could boast about at embassy cocktails and unfit to provide them a suitably opulent lifestyle in their golden years. The recent (and bumbling) Achille Lauro assault, during which young Palestinian commandos hijacked a Mediterranean cruiser and killed an elderly, wheelchair-bound American tourist, coupled with those ghastly shootouts at the Rome and Vienna airports, had made a mockery of the Titoist soft spot for resistance groups and rendered dinner chats with Western diplomats unbearably awkward.

Meanwhile, the girl -- sweet, dull-witted, ever teary from the imminent breakup -- was sheathed in a sort of heroin permafrost, and headed nowhere. I was fond of her because she lacked the nasty, usurious edge of many Yugoslav girls who frequented Arab circles. Also, I never saw her in any condition but slightly drunk.

Returning to the city after travel abroad, Abu Moses would hide away at the apartment of his best friend Walid, our mutual friend, and arguably the least political Palestinian in all of Belgrade. A hulking beauty of a man with a luxuriant Afro resembling Gen. Gadhafi's, Walid owned a miniature German washing machine and kept house like a woman, replete with the broom sweeps and shooing sounds of a grandmother.

"Donkeys, donkeys! I'm cleaning!" Walid would mockingly scold, whisking breakfast crumbs over the feet of Abu Moses and the girl, who both giggled, bleary-eyed and barely lucid, having just tumbled out of bed at 2 in the afternoon. Walid's father was a devoutly religious mukhtar from a village near Jenin, blinded during an accident at the Düsseldorf chemical plant, where he labored for 20 years without returning to his homeland: The Israelis are thugs, he told Walid, but I'd rather live under their boots than the godless communists any day.

And so where Abu Moses went and what he did while away from Belgrade was never mentioned aloud. In fact, so little was said about Abu Moses' life outside that it came to seem a fiction, then to fade away from our consciousness entirely. The Balkans were a universe unto themselves, and while in those years PLO operatives were heading out on raids from ports throughout the Mediterranean -- from Athens, Tripoli, Cyprus -- it seemed unfathomable that Abu Moses could be a part of it.

Abu Moses remained Walid's opposite in every way: his ebony hair lacquered flat; prancing eyes; tight, economical movements; the quick jokes that brought to mind some wisecracking Chicago gangster, a sort of Mickey Rooney in fatigues. He was also a head shorter and a good deal more street-savvy than the rest of the cohort.

Abu Moses never claimed to be anything but moderately clever -- a notion that may have been deceptive. He did, in any case, relieve me of considerable harassment, if not worse, from bored young commandos who could not imagine why I chose to live in the dead-beat morass that was the Balkans when, as an American, I could surely be living in either a Hollywood sitcom set, a mansion, or a sprawling Colorado ranch of the type featured each week in campy reruns of "Dynasty." Over time, several had become convinced that I was a spy, if for no particular reason save my paternal grandparents' religion -- Judaism -- a faith that had, over the millennia, morphed into a sort of ethnicity, and later the stated raison d'être of an entire nation, one that had -- in the young commandos' not unreasonable view -- usurped their ancestral lands.

"Who is she and what is she doing here?" a group of them had questioned Abu Moses morosely, after finally cornering him one afternoon at his desk at the Jordanian Embassy, safe harbor for the stateless Palestinians. Spy rumors were rife, a way to pass the time. They could also have serious consequences and required a fairly solid rebuttal.

Apparently (according to Walid, who later divulged the incident), Abu Moses had, in his relaxed but unequivocal way, replied that I was a friend, the best protection that one could hope for under such circumstances. I never knew why he did it. Nor did I understand at the time just why Abu Moses' word carried such weight among his peers, but as the rumors faded, I slowly came to understand that it was final.

From time to time that year, around Walid's supper table Abu Moses would toss off bits of sober advice: When Ronald Reagan decided to bomb Libya, he warned me away from the protest marches spilling out into the streets of Belgrade.

"They won't believe you're against it," he said simply. (There were few Americans in the city then; the most visible were at the embassy compound, known to be a sort of elite social club for CIA adjuncts and their families -- and a place I'd resolved never to go near. Times were tense, however, and, as Abu Moses indicated, such distinctions between oneself and one's compatriots could not be counted upon.)

And so Abu Moses patiently described how one identified the Libyans living among us (flashy billfolds, bright-hued Mercedes). They were the one group, he warned me, that enjoyed total criminal impunity -- Libya was, at the moment, Yugoslavia's key petroleum supplier -- and as such, the Libyans were the wild card in Belgrade. It would be important to stay clear of them.

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