The Last Secret Of The Temple (25 page)

She stared at it for a moment, checking and re-checking, then, with a sharp yelp, as much of relief as pleasure, slammed her fist on the desk.

'Gotcha!' she cried.

'The Palestinians are our brothers in Allah. Remember this always. Their suffering is not distant or abstract. It is our suffering. When their houses are bulldozed it is our houses that are bulldozed. When their women are violated it is our women who are violated. When their children are slaughtered it is our own dear children that die.'

The voice of Shaykh Omar Abd-el Karim, shrill and impassioned, echoed around the village mosque, a simple, one-room affair with whitewashed walls and a domed ceiling into which a circle of coloured glass bricks had been set, filtering and softening the harsh morning sun so that the room below was filled with a dim, sub-aquatic light, all blues and greens and misty greys. Several dozen men, young mostly,
fellaheen,
dressed in djellabas and
immam,
knelt on the mat-covered floor gazing up at the speaker in his pulpit, their hands clasped in their laps, their eyes bright with anger and indignation. Khalifa hovered in the doorway at the back of the room, neither inside nor out, fingers fiddling with a biro in his jacket pocket.

'It is our duty as Muslims to oppose the
yehudi-een
to the utmost of our strength,' the Shaykh continued, his voice teetering on the edge of a falsetto, his bony finger jabbing at the air. 'For they are an ignorant race; a greedy, lying, murdering race, the enemies of Islam. Was it not the Jews who rejected the Holy Prophet Mohammed when he came to Yathrib? Does the Holy Koran not curse them for their wickedness and infidelity? Do the Protocols of Zion not lay bare their desire to dominate the world, to turn us all into slaves?'

He was an elderly man, stooped and heavily bearded, dressed in a dark
quftan
and simple knitted skullcap, with cheap plastic spectacles pressed tight into the bridge of his nose. He had long been banned from preaching in Luxor itself – less for his anti-semitism, Khalifa suspected, than for his outspoken attacks on government corruption – and so confined his activities to the outlying hamlets, travelling from village to village peddling his own particular brand of fundamentalist Islam.

'There can be no accord with the Zionists,' he was crying, banging an arthritic fist on the edge of the lectern. 'Do you talk to the spitting cobra? Do you make friends with the charging bull? Rather they must be cursed, driven out, wiped from the face of the earth like the pestilence that they are. This is our duty as Muslims. As it says in the Holy Koran, "We have prepared for the unbelievers an ignominious punishment"; "We have appointed hell to be the prison of the unbelievers." '

There were murmurs of assent from the listeners in front of him. One, a boy with a downy moss of hair smudged across his chin and upper lip – fourteen or fifteen, no older – punched a fist into the air and cried,
'Al-Maoot li yehudi-een!
Death to the Jews!', his call taken up by the rest of the congregation until the entire room trembled with the chant: 'Death! Death! Death!' Khalifa stood gazing at them, mouth tight, then, shaking his head, he turned away into the mosque's covered porch and slipped his feet back into his shoes, which he had left there with those of the rest of the congregation, arranged in neat rows like cars in a dusty traffic queue. He lingered a moment longer, listening as behind him the Shaykh called for a Jihad, a Holy War against the Israelis and all those who supported them, then stepped outside into the fierce morning sun.

He was disgusted by what he had just heard. How could he not be? To use the teaching of the Holy Prophet to incite violence and hatred, to quote the Koran as a justification for bigotry and prejudice and intolerance – these were things he rejected with every cell and sinew in his body.

And yet . . . and yet . . .

Was there not a part of him that agreed with it? A part of him that, when he heard news of another Palestinian killed by the Israelis, another family made homeless, another orchard bulldozed, also wanted to punch the air, cry for revenge and destruction, chant 'Death, death, death!' with his Muslim brothers?

He sighed and lit a cigarette, squatting down in a thin sliver of shade beside the mosque entrance. Never before had he experienced such confusion, about where he belonged, what he believed in, what he
ought
to believe in. Even in his most desperate moments – the crushing poverty of his youth, the deaths of his parents and elder brother, the enforced abandonment of his studies at Cairo University – there had always been some core of inner certainty, a kernel of solidity and assurance. But now, every turn of this investigation, every path down which it led him – Jews, Israelis, fundamentalists – seemed to open up ever wider cracks in his sense of self.
Go towards what you fear.
That's what Zenab had told him.
Seek out what you don't understand. Because that is how you grow and become a better person.
But he didn't feel like he was growing. On the contrary, his overriding impression was that everything inside him was crumbling, fragmenting like a shattered mirror into a series of jagged and contradictory constituent parts that, even when the case was finally closed, he doubted he'd ever be able to put back together again into a recognizable whole.

He pulled on his cigarette and looked up and down the dusty street in front of the mosque. The village was only twenty kilometres north of Luxor, but might as well have been a different world, a ramshackle settlement of shabby mud-brick dwellings and brushwood animal pens, the building behind him the only structure with any sense of solidity or permanence. With his town clothes and lower Egyptian features – pale skin, straight hair – he stuck out like a sore thumb against the darker-skinned, traditionally dressed Saidee inhabitants, a fact that only added to his sense of alienation and unease.

'Dammit,' he muttered despondently. 'Bloody God dammit.'

Another twenty minutes passed before the sermon finally drew to a close. The congregation recited the
shahada,
chanted
'Al-salamu alekum wa rahmat Allah?
and began filtering out onto the front porch, pushing and jostling as they struggled to retrieve their shoes. Khalifa stood and, removing his own shoes again, dropped them just inside the porch and started easing his way through the crowd into the interior of the mosque, ignoring the suspicious glances lancing into him from all around.

The Shaykh had now come down from his pulpit and was standing at the far end of the room, leaning on a walking stick, talking animatedly with a small group of followers. Khalifa knew full well the hazards of confronting him like this: a few years ago his supporters had badly beaten a pair of undercover policemen who'd tried to infiltrate one of his meetings up near Qift. The alternative was to pitch up with a truck full of uniforms and physically take the old man into custody, a provocative act that, given the Shaykh's popularity and the fiercely independent nature of these sort of out-of-the-way villages, could well have sparked a full-on riot. Khalifa preferred to take the less inflammatory option, even if it did carry an element of personal risk.

He lingered in the doorway for a moment, then started forward across the room, feet falling soundlessly onto the matted floor. He was almost beside the group before anyone noticed his presence. The men fell silent and turned towards him.

'Shaykh Omar?'

The old man looked up, squinting through his glasses.

'My name is Inspector Yusuf Khalifa. Of the Luxor Police.'

The group of followers shifted slightly, imperceptibly, tightening around their leader, suspicion radiating from them like heat from a burning coal. The Shaykh stared at him, his body tilted at a slight angle, like a weathered tree.

'You are here to arrest me?' he asked, sounding more amused than concerned.

'I'm here to talk to you,' said Khalifa. 'About a man named Piet Jansen.'

There was a sharp hiss from one of the group, a large, bullish figure with close-set eyes and freckles spattered across his upper cheeks.

'Ya kalb!'
he spat. 'You dog! This is a holy man! How dare you insult him like this!'

The man came forward half a step, shoulders spread, squaring up. While Khalifa knew better than to rise to the challenge he was also aware that to back off would be an admission of weakness from which he'd struggle to reassert himself. He stood his ground, therefore, while simultaneously raising his hands, palms outwards, to show that he didn't want any trouble. There was a brief, tense silence; then, slowly, he reached into his pocket, produced the envelope with the flyer inside it and, as if offering a bone to a snarling dog, held it out towards the Shaykh.

'You sent Mr Jansen this,' he said.

There was another uneasy pause, then, with a faint nod, the Shaykh motioned the freckled man to take the envelope and pass it to him. He turned it over in his hand, squinting at the address on the front.

'This is not my writing,' he said, looking up.

He was playing cat-and-mouse, daring Khalifa to chase him.

'I'm not interested in who addressed the envelope,' said the detective. 'I'm interested in why it was sent.'

Another of the group, a small, plump man with a white
schal
draped over his head, took the envelope from the Shaykh and thrust it back at Khalifa.

'Are you not listening? It is not his writing! How can he know why it was sent?'

'Because a flyer for one of his meetings wouldn't be sent to a
kufr
like Jansen without his approval,' said Khalifa, taking the envelope and returning it to his pocket. 'As he well knows.'

His tone was sharper than he'd intended, more confrontational, and the followers didn't like it. Again they murmured disapprovingly, the murmur this time, like a flame catching on dry brushwood, swelling into a shout, the men closing in on Khalifa, yelling at him, jostling, their anger seeming to feed off and encourage itself. The Shaykh rapped his stick firmly against the side of the lectern, the crack of wood on wood echoing around the room like a gunshot.

'
Halas!
' he snapped. 'Enough!'

As suddenly as it had started, the commotion died away, the men shuffling backwards and to the side, leaving Khalifa and the Shaykh facing each other. There was a long silence, broken only by the sound of a donkey trumpeting outside, then the Shaykh waved at his followers.

'Leave us.'

The freckled man started to protest, but the Shaykh repeated his command and, grumbling, the men padded out of the mosque, muttering among themselves. Once they were gone, the old man removed his Koran from the pulpit and hobbled over to the far wall where he lowered himself onto a cushion on the floor.

'You are either very stupid or very brave to come like this,' he said, laying the book and walking stick on the mat beside him and tugging his spindly limbs into a cross-legged position. 'A bit of both, perhaps. Although more stupid than brave, I think. And arrogant. Like all policemen.'

He picked up the Koran again and started leafing through the pages. Khalifa came over and squatted down in front of him, flicking at a fly that had swung in over his head and was now weaving figure-of-eights in the air above. The donkey was still trumpeting outside.

'You disapproved of my sermon?' asked the old man, still turning the Koran's pages.

Khalifa shrugged noncommittally.

'Please, answer the question.'

'Yes,' said the detective, his voice sounding less firm than he would have liked. 'I thought it was . . .
ghir Islami.
Un-Islamic.'

The Shaykh smiled. 'You like the Jews?'

'I didn't come here to—'

The Shaykh held up a hand, cutting him off. Khalifa had the uncomfortable feeling that, although his eyes were fixed on the book in his lap, the old man was at the same time somehow staring straight at him, seeing not so much his physical form as everything within, his thoughts, his feelings. He shifted his position slightly.

'You are a Muslim?'

Khalifa muttered an impatient yes.

'And yet you like the Jews.'

'I did not think the two things were incompatible.'

'So you
do
like the Jews?'

'I don't . . . that's not . . .'

The detective flailed at the fly, confused, annoyed at himself for having been pulled into the conversation despite his determination not to be. The Shaykh continued turning pages, the yellowed paper making a dry, whispering sound beneath his fingertips. He eventually reached the
sura
for which he seemed to have been looking. He placed a finger on the swirling text and, turning the book, held it out to Khalifa.

'Read for me, please.'

'This is not what I—'

'It is only one
aya.
Please, read.'

Reluctantly, Khalifa took the book, aware that if he wanted any information from the old man he had no choice but to play by his rules. The passage was about midway down the page, from the fifth
sura –
Al-Ma'ida, 'The Table'. The detective looked down at it, biting his lip.

'Oh true believers,' he read, speaking fast and tonelessly, as if trying to get through the passage as swiftly as possible, to distance himself from what it was saying, 'take not the Jews and Christians for your friends; they are friends the one to the other; but whoso among you taketh them for his friends, he is surely one of them.'

The Shaykh nodded approvingly. 'You hear this? These are the words of the Holy Prophet Mohammed. They are clear and unambiguous. To be friends with the Jews, with those of any other faith, to sympathize with them, to feel anything for them whatsoever other than hatred and disgust and loathing – this is to go against the will of Almighty Allah, blessed be his name.'

He reached out a trembling hand and took the book back. The detective wanted to argue, to tell him that this was not the Islam he knew and loved, to quote other passages that spoke well of the
ahl el-kitab,
praised them. But somehow his mind had gone blank and he could not find the words he needed. Or perhaps didn't want to find them. The Shaykh noted the troubled look on his face and smiled, not entirely kindly.