The Last Secret Of The Temple (43 page)

'This isn't my—'

Again Gulami's hand squeezed Khalifa's arm, signalling him to be quiet, to listen. Milan pulled on his cigar, eyes never leaving Khalifa's face.

'It is a curious quirk of the region in which we live, inspector, that symbols have always counted for a lot more than human lives. The death of an individual might be tragic, but in time the sadness fades. The desecration of something sacred, on the other hand, that is never forgotten, nor forgiven. Imagine the reaction of your people if, say, the Holy Ka'ba was to be razed by Israeli jets. It is the same for us with the Menorah. If an object as iconic as that were to fall into the wrong hands, the hands of someone such as al-Mulatham, to be despoiled by him, destroyed – take it from me, the collective wound such a sacrilege would inflict would be deeper than that of a thousand suicide bombings. Ten thousand. Human loss can be redeemed. The loss of something holy, however – the pain would never abate. Not in one generation, two, three. Never. And nor would the fury.'

He tapped the ash off the end of his cigar and, raising a hand, rubbed at his eyes, his face suddenly looking haggard, his shoulders slumping as if something was pressing down on them from above.

'Our two peoples are teetering on the edge of the abyss, inspector. Sa'eb and I, we believe we can pull them back, even now, even after so much blood has been spilled. But if the true Menorah were to be found by al-Mulatham, or, conversely, by any of the fundamentalist lunatics on our side – of whom there are plenty, I can assure you, all of them just waiting for a banner such as this behind which to rally the forces of fanaticism' – in the corner of the room Ben-Roi shifted uncomfortably, fingers playing with the pendant around his neck – 'if that were to happen, believe me, we would plunge headlong into the void, and no peace process on earth could ever pull us back out again.'

Khalifa's cigarette had burnt itself out in his hand, leaving a tenuous claw of ash dangling from the butt. There was something coming, he could feel it. Something he didn't want to hear.

'Al-Mulatham doesn't know about the Menorah,' he mumbled weakly. 'Hoth died before he could tell him.'

Marsoudi shook his head. 'We can't be certain of that. We know Hoth was doing everything he could to contact al-Mulatham. Maybe he failed; but then again, maybe he didn't. Maybe al-Mulatham is searching for the Menorah even as we speak. Maybe others are searching for it. We just can't take that risk.'

Khalifa's throat was dry, his stomach tight. He was being manoeuvred, he could feel it; cornered, like the time when he was a kid and a gang of older boys used to chase him through the Giza backstreets, always running him down in the end, boxing him in.

'Why are you telling me this?' he repeated.

There was a snort from the far side of the room.

'Why the fuck do you think they're telling you?'

It was the first time Ben-Roi had spoken.

'It was you who started this thing. Now help finish it.'

Khalifa looked around, his forehead throbbing, as though there was something alive inside it, thrashing against the inside of his temples.

'What does he mean, "help finish it"? Why have you brought me here?'

He sounded desperate. Gulami removed his glasses, examined them, put them back on again. Like Milan, his face too suddenly looked weary and pinched.

'The Menorah has to be found, inspector,' he said quietly. 'It has to be found quickly. And it has to be found without any other parties being made aware of its continued existence.'

There was a pause as his words sank in, then Khalifa got to his feet.

'No.'

He practically shouted it, startled by his vehemence yet unable to stop himself, even in front of someone as powerful as Gulami. He didn't want to be part of this. Didn't want to know about Israel, Judaism, menorahs – any of it. Had never wanted to know, not from the very beginning, whatever Zenab might have said about seeking out what you don't understand, growing and becoming a better person. All he wanted, all he had ever wanted, was to lead a small, normal, regular life, to be with his family, to get on with his job, to move on up the ladder. But this – it was too big. It was all just too big for him.

'No,' he repeated, shaking his head.

'What the fuck do you mean, no?'

Ben-Roi had come forward a step, eyes blazing. Khalifa ignored him, addressing himself to Gulami.

'I'm a policeman. This is . . . it's nothing to do with me!'

'It's everything to-fucking-do with you,' hissed Ben-Roi. 'Haven't you been listening?'

Still Khalifa ignored him. 'This isn't my responsibility. I don't want to be a part of it. I don't want to be involved.'

'Who gives a fuck what you want?' snapped Ben-Roi, face reddening. 'There are more important things here.'

'Please, Arieh.' Milan tried to lay a hand on Ben-Roi's shoulder, but it was shrugged away.

'Who the fuck does he think he is!'

'Arieh!'

' "I don't want to be involved." Who does he think he is, the cheeky Muslim cunt!'

Khalifa wheeled, fists clenching. Two, maybe three times in his entire life he had completely lost his temper, uncontrollably lost it, and this was one of them.

'How dare you!' he hissed, no longer caring where he was, who he was with. 'How dare you, you arrogant Jew bastard!'

'Khalifa!'

Both Gulami and Marsoudi were now on their feet as well.

'Ben-Zohna!'
bellowed Ben-Roi, surging forward, arms swinging. 'Son of a bitch! I'll fucking kill him!'

Somehow Milan managed to grab his jacket, pulling him back. Marsoudi stepped in front of Khalifa, who was also advancing, seizing his shoulders, holding him.

'Lech tiezdayen, zayin!'
spat Ben-Roi, jabbing a finger at the Egyptian. 'Fuck you, prick!'

'Enta ghebee, koos!'
retorted Khalifa, also jabbing a finger. 'Fuck you, vagina!'

There were more insults and expletives, both men straining towards each other, before eventually Gulami shouted,
'Halas!
Enough!' and they both fell silent, breathing heavily. Gulami, Marsoudi and Milan looked at one another tight-lipped, then the foreign minister ordered Khalifa to leave the room, to calm himself down. Throwing a withering glare at Ben-Roi, the detective crossed to the door, yanked it open and stepped out into the night, slamming it shut behind him. He took a couple of deep breaths of air – clean, cool, refreshing – then stomped off towards a row of jagged black rocks looming thirty metres away where he sat down and lit a cigarette.

Several minutes passed, the world silent aside from the faint whisper of the breeze, the sky overhead spattered with an impossible number of stars, like sprays of blue-white paint. Then there was a creak as the door opened again, and the crunch of feet on gravel. Someone came up behind him. Marsoudi.

'Ezayek?'
asked the Palestinian, laying a hand on Khalifa's shoulder. 'You OK?'

The detective nodded.
'Ana asif,'
he mumbled. 'I'm sorry. I shouldn't have . . .'

Marsoudi's hand squeezed reassuringly. 'Believe me, that was tame compared to some of the things this place has heard these last fourteen months. This is a difficult time. It is inevitable there will be harsh words.'

He squeezed again and sat down beside Khalifa. There was a long pause, the world around them completely still – that perfect, pristine stillness you only ever encounter in deserts and on high mountaintops – then, raising his arm, Marsoudi pointed up at the sky.

'You see there?' he asked. 'That constellation with the four bright stars? No, there. Yes, that's it. This we call the tank. That line of stars at the bottom, those are the caterpillar tracks, then the turret, and there, the gun.'

Khalifa followed the movement of the Palestinian's finger, watching as he slowly traced out the shape, which, now he looked, did indeed resemble the crude outline of a tank.

'And there' – Marsoudi swung his hand towards another constellation – 'the Kalashnikov. See, its butt, its muzzle. And over there' – he took Khalifa's elbow and turned him – 'the grenade: body, arm, pin. Everywhere else in the world people gaze up into the heavens and see beauty. Only in Palestine do we look up and see the objects of war.'

Somewhere out across the desert a jackal started to wail, the sound tailing off almost as soon as it had begun. Khalifa dragged on his cigarette and pulled his jacket around him against the cold.

'I can't do this,' he whispered. 'I'm sorry, but I just can't work with them.'

Marsoudi smiled sadly, and, dropping his head back, gazed up into the night.

'You think I didn't feel the same? My father, he died in an Israeli prison. When I was nine I watched my own brother blown up by a tank shell, right in front of me. You think after that I wanted to talk with them, come out here and negotiate? Take it from me, I have more reason to hate them than you ever could.'

He continued to stare upwards, his face deathly pale in the light of the moon.

'But I did come out here,' he said quietly. 'And I did talk to them. And you know what? These last fourteen months, Yehuda and I, we have become friends. We, who've spent our whole lives fighting each other. Good friends.'

Khalifa finished his cigarette and flicked it away into the shadows, its butt continuing to glint for a moment like the tail of a glow-worm before gradually fading into darkness.

'It's Ben-Roi,' he mumbled. 'If it was someone else . . . but Ben-Roi . . . he's dangerous. I can see it in his eyes. Everything about him. I just can't work with him.'

Marsoudi drove his hands into the pockets of his trousers.

'You have a wife, inspector?'

Khalifa nodded an affirmative.

'Apparently Ben-Roi was going to get married.'

'So?'

'A month before the wedding his fiancée was killed. In a suicide bombing. Al-Mulatham.'

'Allah-u-akhbar.'
Khalifa hung his head. 'I didn't know.'

Marsoudi shrugged and, pulling his hands out of his pockets again, raised his first and middle finger and tapped them against his lips, asking Khalifa for a cigarette. The Egyptian pulled one out of the pack and lit it for him, the Palestinian's thin, handsome face momentarily illuminated by the flare of the lighter before sinking back into the shadows again.

'In six days' time there will be a rally in central Jerusalem,' he said quietly. 'Yehuda and I have chosen that rally as the place to make public what we have been doing here this last year. We will outline our proposals, and we will announce the formation of a new political party, a joint Israeli-Palestinian party of co-operation and peace, one that will work to have our proposals implemented. As Yehuda said, it's going to take years, generations, to turn things round, but I think we can do it, I genuinely think we can. Not if the Menorah falls into the wrong hands, though. If that happens everything we've worked towards, everything we've hoped for, everything we've dreamt of. . .'

He took another long drag, and stared at the ground.

'Help us, inspector. From one Muslim to another, one man to another, one human to another – please, help us.'

What could Khalifa say? Nothing. He let out a deep sigh, scraped at the ground with his foot, nodded his assent. Marsoudi reached out a hand and touched his shoulder again, then looped an arm through his and led him back towards the building.

* * *

The meeting continued for another hour, Khalifa and Ben-Roi doing most of the talking now, coldly formal, avoiding each other's eyes, going over all the information they had about Hoth and the Menorah, trying to narrow down the search and develop possible lines of attack, the other men occasionally interjecting the odd comment but otherwise listening in silence as the two detectives hammered things out between themselves. It was past midnight when they eventually fell silent.

'One final thing we should discuss,' said Milan, grinding out his cigar butt. 'The al-Madani woman. What's to be done about her?'

Gulami drained off the contents of the cup he was holding in his hand.

'She can't be kept in custody till this is resolved?' he asked.

Marsoudi shook his head. 'She is well known to my people. And well loved by them. To keep her under arrest would attract much attention. Something we don't need in the current situation.'

'So?' Gulami said as he crunched the cup into a ball and launched it across the room.

No-one answered, all of them staring off into space, sunk in their own thoughts, the room now thick with velvety wedges of shadow as the kerosene lamps slowly burnt themselves down. A full minute went by.

'She can work with me.'

It was Ben-Roi. Everyone looked up.

'She knows as much as we do,' he said, 'about Hoth and the finding of the Menorah, probably more. And she understands what would happen if al-Mulatham got his hands on it. We should use her.'

It seemed a reasonable suggestion, and Gulami, Marsoudi and Milan all nodded. Only Khalifa seemed uncertain, his brow furrowed, his eyes scanning Ben-Roi's face – the way his tongue kept flicking out to moisten his lips, a mannerism he had often seen during police interviews when the interviewee was nervous, trying to conceal something. There's more here, he thought to himself. Something you're not telling us. Not a lie, just . . . some other agenda. Or was it simply that he disliked the man so much he could take nothing he said at face value? Before he could decide, Gulami came to his feet and declared the meeting closed.

Outside, as they trooped back towards the helicopters, Khalifa found himself walking just behind Ben-Roi, who towered over him, higher by a head and almost twice as broad. After all that had happened that night he felt no great inclination to address him, to have any contact with him at all save what was absolutely necessary to get the job in hand completed. His sense of decency got the better of him, however, and, coming up alongside the Israeli, he told him that despite what had been said earlier he was sorry for what had happened to his fiancée, that he had a wife and children himself, could not imagine what it must be like to lose a loved one in that way. Ben-Roi looked down at him, then, with a muttered 'Fuck you', strode away again.