There were legends about him, stories, but more than stories. Theories might be a better word. Gil Baruch, forty-eight, Israeli expat. (Though one of the theories was that he owned a home on the razor’s edge of the West Bank, an edge he himself had forged single-handedly from Palestinian land, driving up one day in an old jeep and setting up his tent, enduring the stares and taunts of the Palestinians. Rumors he had chopped the wood himself, poured the foundation, a rifle strap over his chest. That the first house had been torched by an angry mob, and Gil—rather than using his prodigious sniper skills or hand-to-hand prowess—had simply watched and waited, and when the crowd dispersed he urinated his disdain into the ashes and started again.)
That he was the son of Israeli royalty, no one disputed, his father, Lev Baruch, being the trusted right hand of Moshe Dayan, renowned military leader, mastermind of the Six Day War. They say Gil’s father was there in 1941 when a Vichy sniper put a bullet through the left lens of Dayan’s binoculars, that it was Gil’s father who cleaned out the glass and shrapnel and stayed with Dayan for hours until they could be evacuated.
They said Gil was born on the first day of the Six Day War, that his birth coincided with the opening shot down to the second. Here was a child forged in war from the loins of a military hero, born of cannon recoil. Not to mention, people said, that his mother was the favorite granddaughter of Golda Meir, the only woman tough enough to forge an entire nation inside the belly of an Arab state.
But then there were others who said Gil’s mother was just a milliner’s daughter from Kiev, a pretty girl with a wandering eye who never left Jerusalem. This is the nature of legend. There’s always someone lurking in the shadows, trying to poke holes. What’s undisputed is that his oldest brother, Eli, was killed in Lebanon in 1982, and that both his younger brothers, Jay and Ben, were killed in the Gaza Strip during the Second Intifada—Jay annihilated by a land mine and Ben in an ambush. And that Gil lost his only sister in childbirth. This was part of the legend, that Gil was a man surrounded by death, that everyone close to him died sooner rather than later, and yet Gil prevailed. He was rumored to have been shot six times before turning thirty, to have survived a knife attack in Belgium, and to have shielded himself from an explosion in Florence by hiding in the belly of a cast-iron tub. Snipers had targeted him and missed. Bounties on his head, too numerous to list, went perpetually uncollected.
Gil Baruch was an iron nail in a burning building, left gleaming in the ashes after everything else had been destroyed.
And yet all that death and sorrow hadn’t gone unnoticed. There was a biblical quality to the travails of Gil Baruch. Even in Jewish terms his suffering was exceptional. Men would clap him on the back in bars and buy him drinks, and then remove themselves to a safe distance. Women laid themselves at his feet, as they would on the tracks of a train, hoping that in the collision of bodies they would be annihilated. Crazy women with fiery tempers and bountiful G-spots. Depressive women, fighters, biters, poets. Gil ignored them all. At his core he knew that what he needed in his life was less drama, not more.
And yet the legends prevailed. During his tour in private security, he had bedded some of the most beautiful women in the world, models, princesses, movie stars. There was a theory, prominent in the 1990s, that he had taken Angelina Jolie’s virginity. He had the olive skin, hawk nose, and heavy brow of a great romantic. He was a man with scars, both physical and emotional, scars he carried without complaint or remark, a taciturn man with a glint of the ironic in his eyes (as if deep down he knew he was the butt of a cosmic joke), a man who carried weapons and slept with a gun under his pillow, his finger on the trigger.
They said a man had not yet been born that Gil Baruch could not best. He was an immortal who could only be killed by an act of God.
And yet what else can one call a plane crash, except the fist of God sent to punish the bold?
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