The Last Secret Of The Temple (30 page)

'My uncle. He had some business with a man in Cairo. Fruit exports – oranges, lemons, that sort of thing. One day this man calls, says he needs a favour. Wants this flat burnt out. Says he'll pay good money. Five hundred dollars. But it has to be done quickly. No questions. So my uncle calls me.'

'You know who this man was?'

Majdi shook his head. 'I never speak to him. My uncle arranges everything.' He brought up his hands and began rubbing his eyes. 'Gad, Getz, something like that. Not an Egyptian name.'

Ben-Roi scribbled it down in his notebook.

'And your uncle? Where's he?'

'Dead. Four years ago.'

Outside, there was a metallic clatter as if someone had just kicked a paint can. Ben-Roi was too immersed in the interview to notice it.

'So, this Gad, Getz, he phones from Cairo, offers five hundred dollars to torch this old woman's flat—'

'We didn't know whose flat it was. He just gave the address.'

'And he didn't say why? No explanation?'

The young man shook his head.

'You didn't think that was strange?'

'Of course we thought it was strange. What were we supposed to do? Turn it down? We needed the money.'

Ben-Roi stared at him, then went back to the cot-bed and sat down again.

'OK, so he tells you to burn the flat. Then what?'

The young man shrugged. 'Like I told them at the time, we went up to the Jewish Quarter. There's an alley behind the building; Hani stayed down there to keep watch, we climbed up to the flat, broke in through the back window, covered everything in petrol, set it alight. Someone spotted us climbing down, they chased us, we got caught. That was it. Just like I told them at the time.'

'What was in there?'

'What do you mean?'

'In the flat. What was in the flat?'

'How the fuck am I supposed to remember that? It was fifteen years ago!'

'You must remember something.'

'I don't know! Furniture, a table, a TV . . . normal stuff. What everyone has.'

He pulled out another Marlboro, jamming it between his lips and lighting it. There was another clatter outside, and what sounded like muffled whispering.

'There was a lot of paper.'

'Paper?'

'That's why the place went up so quickly. There was paper everywhere.'

'Newspaper?'

'No, no. Files and stuff. Photocopies. Everywhere, stacks of them. Like some sort of . . .'

He paused, trying to find the right word. Ben-Roi recalled what the Weinberg woman had said, about Schlegel coming home with armfuls of papers from Yad Vashem.

'Archive?' he suggested.

'Yes, like some sort of archive. You could hardly move for papers. And on one of the walls, in the living room, there was this huge photograph, blown up, this big . . .' He gestured with his hands. 'A man. In some sort of uniform. Black and white. You know, like it was taken a long time ago. It was the only picture in the place.'

There were more voices outside, the thud of feet. Quite a crowd seemed to be passing through the alley.

'And you didn't recognize the man in the photo?' asked Ben-Roi, oblivious to the sounds.

'Never seen him before. Like I said, it was old. Black and white. Not family, I don't think.'

The detective flicked his eyes up questioningly. 'How do you know that?'

'I don't. I just . . . it didn't feel like family. Blown up like that, taped to the wall. It was more like' – he took another pull on his cigarette – 'like the pictures you get in police stations. You know, of wanted people. That's what it was like. A police wanted picture. It was weird.'

He clamped the cigarette in his mouth and, wheeling himself back across to the television, picked up the ashtray, sat it on his knee and continued into the kitchen area. There was a groan of pipes, and then the splash of a running tap. He reappeared a moment later, a glass of water wedged between his thighs.

'That's everything I know,' he said. 'There's nothing else.'

He returned to the old woman's side and cranked the chair around. Ben-Roi fired off a few more questions, but it was clear the young man was telling the truth, and after a couple of minutes, accepting he'd got all he was going to get, he closed his notebook and got to his feet.

'OK,' he muttered. 'That's it.'

There didn't seem much point in saying goodbye – it hadn't exactly been a social visit – so, slipping the notebook back into his pocket, he simply gave a curt nod and started towards the door. As he did so the old woman gabbled something at his back.

'Ehna mish kilab.'

He turned.

'What was that?'

Majdi looked up, dragging on his cigarette.

'What did she say?' repeated Ben-Roi.

The young man exhaled a curlicue of smoke.

'She says that we are not dogs.'

The old woman was staring up at the detective, her expression neither fearful nor defiant, just weary, infinitely sad. He half-opened his mouth to make some sort of response, tell her about Galia, the way they'd butchered her, blown away her legs, the same people whose faces were now plastered on posters all over the camp like fucking heroes. But he couldn't think of anything to say, any words to express adequately the enormity of his loneliness and hatred, so he simply shook his head, turned away, walked over to the door and threw it open.

'Al-Maoot li yehudi! Al-Maoot li yehudi!'

An explosion of noise blasted into his face. The alleyway, previously empty, was now crowded with young men, teeth bared, fists clenched, eyes alight with the jubilant, ecstatic blood-lust of hunters who know they have cornered their prey. There was a momentary pause, just a fraction of a second, like a wave teetering at its highest point before crashing down onto a beach, and then the mob surged towards him, screaming.

'Iktelo! Iktelo! Uktul il-yehudi!'

Ben-Roi didn't even have time to react. One instant he was standing in the doorway, the next a dozen pairs of hands had seized his coat, his shirt, his hair, and he was being dragged out into the alley. Someone pulled the pistol out of his shoulder holster and fired it off into the air right beside his ear, deafening him; near the back of the crowd he caught a glimpse of the young Palestinian boy his driver had earlier asked for directions, laughing, clapping his hands above his head. A noose was thrown around his neck and tightened; something slammed into his stomach – a baseball bat, a beam of wood – doubling him up, winding him.

'I'm dead,' he thought to himself, choking with horror and yet at the same time curiously detached, as though he was watching a video of the assault rather than actually being a part of it. 'Sweet Lord God, I'm dead.'

He tried to get his arms around his head, to protect himself from the barrage of punches that were raining down, but they were yanked away again and brought up behind his back. Spit showered at him from all directions, hot, viscous, sliming down his cheeks and chin like slug trails. He felt himself being propelled down the alley as if caught up in some roaring mudslide.

And then, as suddenly as it had started, the assault abruptly ceased. One moment he was being punched and dragged, the next, inexplicably, the crowd had split and withdrawn against the walls of the alley, leaving him bent double, a high, shrill sound echoing in his ears. At first he thought it was a result of the punching; then, as his senses started to clear, he realized it was a woman's voice yelling. He remained as he was, coughing, terrified that to move even a fraction of an inch would somehow trigger a renewed frenzy of violence. Then, slowly, he straightened, the rope still dangling from his neck like some sort of joke tie.

Majdi was sitting in the doorway of his house, face white, hands clenched around the wheels of his chair. His mother, stooped, frail, was standing just outside, waving her hands, jabbering at the crowd, admonishing them. Although she was by far the smallest person in the alley, the men seemed cowed by her presence, unable to meet her fiery gaze. She continued yelling for almost a minute, gesticulating, voice hoarse, then came forward a step towards Ben-Roi.

'Keefak?'

He looked wildly around, blood pounding in his temples, his whole body trembling, not knowing what she was saying.

'Are you hurt?' called Majdi.

Amazingly, given the ferocity of the attack, he wasn't. A few bruises, a cut lip, a nasty rope burn around his neck – superficial injuries, nothing serious. He tried to speak, but the words seemed to jam in the funnel of his throat, and in the end all he could do was give a sort of broken half nod, like a wooden doll with a snapped neck. The old woman stooped to retrieve his pistol, which had been dropped in the confusion, and, hobbling slowly forward, handed it to him, lifting her frail arm and drawing the sleeve of her dress roughly across his chin, which was spattered with blood.

'Ehna mish kilab'
she said quietly.
'Mish kilab.'

He held her eyes for a moment, then turned and stumbled away down the alley, pulling the noose off his neck and slotting the pistol back into its holster, the whispering of the crowd following like an angry gust of wind.

At the bottom, the taxi driver was standing by his car, trembling.

'I tell you it dangerous come here,' he spat. 'I said you—'

'I don't fucking care what you said!' hissed Ben-Roi, heaving open the passenger door, throwing himself into the car and yanking the hip-flask from his pocket. 'Just get me out of this fucking shithole. Get me out of here now.'

Layla's travel-agent friend Salim had booked her on to BA's midday flight to London Heathrow. There was an earlier El-Al service to the same destination, but it was more expensive, and anyway, she made a point of never using Israel's national carrier so she had opted for the later, cheaper flight instead. Kamel, her driver, dropped her off at Ben-Gurion at 8.30 a.m., letting her out in the airport's main car park, in front of its giant Salvador Dalí menorah sculpture. He was in an even surlier mood than usual, and having ensured that Layla and her bag were out of the car he leant over, slammed the passenger door and sped off without even saying goodbye.

'Well fuck you too,' she muttered as he disappeared round a corner.

She checked her passport and tickets, and, as she seemed to do every time she came to the airport, stood for a moment gazing up at the surrealist menorah, its arms all lopsided, its dull brass surface swirling and chunky so that it looked as if the whole thing was slowly melting. As the emblem of Har-Zion's Warriors of David, paraded every time they seized another pocket of Arab land, it was a symbol that carried distinctly malevolent connotations for her. At the same time, almost despite herself, she found something curiously hypnotic about it – its curving symmetry, the way its arms reached outwards and up, as though stretching to embrace the sky. Only last year she had researched an article on its iconic importance to the Jewish people, how in ancient times, before it was carried away by the Romans in AD 70, the Menorah had been the most revered of all the sacred objects in the Temple. Looking at the Dalí sculpture now, with its dedication to 'Thou people of Israel, chosen people', she felt both distaste and an indefinable sense of connection. Like her attitude towards Har-Zion himself, she had often thought. She gazed up at it for a while longer, then, grasping her bag, turned and set off towards the departures terminal.

Getting out of Israel was always a complicated business. She'd lost count of the number of times she'd only just made her flight – and in a couple of instances actually missed it – because Israeli security staff insisted on going through her baggage with the very finest of fine-tooth combs, subjecting her to an interminable series of questions about where she was going, why she was going there, who she would be meeting, when she would be returning – her entire itinerary, basically, with a raft of additional enquiries thrown in for good measure about her family, friends, colleagues and private and professional life. 'You've got enough here to write my fucking biography,' she had once snapped at her interrogator, an outburst that, far from speeding things up, had only served to intensify the questioning.

It was the same for every Palestinian who used the airport – the suspicion, the bullying, the obstructive-ness. She suspected she copped it worse than most, however, because of her reputation as a journalist. 'They've got your details on file,' Nuha had once told her, only half-joking, 'and when you check in a flashing sign comes up on screen saying "Urgent: fuck this person over big time." '

She did what she could to make things easier, always arriving half an hour before the earliest check-in time and keeping her luggage down to a bare minimum – no address book, no anti-Israeli literature and definitely no electrical items (the one unavoidable exception being her mobile phone). It never seemed to make any difference, and it certainly didn't today. She was the first person to arrive for her flight and the last person to board, her phone, as always, having been laboriously examined by an in-house explosives expert who had accidentally-on-purpose succeeded in wiping out all her stored numbers. ('What the fuck's the point?' she had wanted to scream. 'The only people who plant bombs in mobile phones are the fucking Israelis!')

As she finally settled back in her seat – she had requested a window or an aisle but had, inevitably, got one in the middle – and leafed through the book she had bought the previous day on the history of the Cathars, she drew scant comfort from the fact that she'd made it through. If leaving Israel was difficult, it was a piece of cake compared to the hassle of getting back into the bloody place.

Khalifa stubbed out his umpteenth cigarette of the day, drained his glass of tea and slumped back in his chair, exhausted. He'd been in the office since five that morning, and it was now almost two o'clock. Nine hours of banging his head against a brick wall.

First thing, he'd faxed pictures of Jansen over to Interpol and the Dutch police in the vain hope their files might throw up some sort of match – they hadn't – and had then hoofed around Luxor for a couple of hours doorstepping some of the town's more renowned antiquities dealers, trying, and failing, to establish some link between Jansen and the trade in stolen artefacts. Whatever else he was doing with all the objects in his basement, the dead man clearly hadn't been trying to sell them. After that he'd returned to his office and spent the rest of the morning sitting at his desk going back over everything he'd discovered these last two weeks, scribbling down what seemed to him all the key elements of the case onto blank filing cards – Thoth, al-Mulatham, Nazis, Farouk al-Hakim, everything – and then, like an epigrapher piecing together the fragments of some shattered inscription, trying to arrange the cards into some sort of recognizable pattern. Try as he might, though, he just couldn't make sense of it, couldn't work out where it was all leading him.

He lit another cigarette and, with a despondent groan, left his office and went downstairs, walking out of the station onto El-Matouf Street to get some fresh air. There was a small drinks stall on the corner with Sharia Karnak Temple. Wandering over to it, he bought himself a glass of
karkaday
and squatted down against the station wall, sipping at the cool ruby liquid. A baker's boy cycled past balancing a giant tray of
aish baladi
on his head.

The truth was he was fast running out of options. Farouk al-Hakim was dead so he couldn't talk to him, and although there remained a few minor leads to chase up, as he saw it the investigation had now come to hinge on two key factors: speaking to Jansen's friends up in Cairo, and getting some useful feedback from that dreadful Israeli detective. The Gratzes were still refusing to get in touch. They were definitely at home, both of their neighbours having independently reported hearing their voices inside their apartment. For reasons best known to themselves, however, the two of them were playing hard to get, and short of going all the way up to Cairo and hammering on their door personally, Khalifa didn't see much immediate hope of pinning them down.

Which left Ben-Roi. Rude, incompetent, lazy Ben-Roi. Khalifa had already called his office four times that morning, on each occasion getting an answerphone, and on each occasion leaving an increasingly curt message asking what, if anything, the Israeli had managed to dig up about Hannah Schlegel. He still hadn't replied, however, fuelling Khalifa's suspicions that he was simply giving him the runaround, not taking him seriously.

He let out a frustrated sigh and drained off his
karkaday,
closing his eyes and allowing the afternoon sun to play across his face. It was warm and relaxing, not yet possessed of the furious scorching heat that would come with summer.

'Bloody damn you, Ben-Roi,' he muttered, dragging on his cigarette. 'Bloody sodding damn you.'

'All going well, then!'

His eyes flicked open again. His deputy, Mohammed Sariya, was standing over him.

'You know, I think that's the first time I've ever heard you swear,' said Sariya, impressed.

'It's the first time I've ever had to deal with the sodding Israelis,' grunted Khalifa, flicking his cigarette into the gutter and coming to his feet. He handed his glass back to the street vendor and, slipping his arm through Sariya's, the two of them wandered back into the police station together.

'I hear you're working with Ibrahim Fathi now,' said Khalifa.

Fathi was another of the station's detectives, popularly known as
el-homaar
– the donkey – on account of his plodding, unimaginative approach to police work. Not surprisingly he was one of Chief Hassani's favourites.

'Anything interesting?'

'A pair of banana merchants who've been fiddling their weights up in el-Bayadiya,' replied Sariya, 'and an intriguing case of serial chicken theft over in Bayarram. Things were never this exciting when I was working with you.'

Khalifa smiled. He wouldn't have admitted as much, but a part of him had been worried Sariya might actually enjoy working with
el-homaar,
doing things by the book for a change. The fact that he clearly didn't was somehow a relief, made him feel a little less isolated. He had missed his deputy these last few days.

They passed between the twin guard emplacements set on either side of the station entrance and started up the main stairway.

'But seriously, how
is
it going?' asked Sariya as they climbed. 'Not so good, I take it.'

Khalifa shrugged, but said nothing.

'Anything I can do? Calls I can make, you know.'

Khalifa smiled and patted his deputy on the arm. 'Thanks, Mohammed, but it's probably best if I just get on with it on my own. I'm not overworked. Just confused. As usual.'

They reached the top of the stairs.
El-homaar's
office, where Sariya was working, was down a corridor to the right; Khalifa's was to the left.

'Make sure you let me know what happens with those banana merchants,' he said, releasing Sariya's arm, winking at him and turning away. He went a couple of paces, then turned back again.

'Hey, Mohammed! There is one thing.'

Sariya joined him and together they went down the hall to Khalifa's office. The phone was ringing as they came through the door.

'You want to get that?' asked Sariya.

Khalifa waved a hand dismissively. 'It'll just be Hassani phoning to check up on me. Let him wait.'

He crossed to his desk and, ignoring the phone, started rooting through the piles of paper heaped all over its surface, eventually pulling out the photographic slide he had taken from Jansen's house.

'It's probably nothing, but I was wondering if you could find out where this tomb is. To be honest, it's more personal interest than business, so don't bother wasting too much time on it – just whenever you get a moment.'

Sariya took the slide from him and held it up to the light. The ringing continued, shrill, insistent, filling the room.

'And probably best not mention anything to Fathi,' added Khalifa, throwing an annoyed look at the phone. 'I don't think he'd be too happy about you moonlighting.'