The Danger Within

by E. L. Pini

  I was silent for a while, not knowing what to say. Eventually I opted for my default question at times like these. “You hungry?”

  She nodded, her eyes glittering. I tried to remember what I had in the kitchen—most of it was probably intended for my paleo diet. This might constitute a problem. I somehow found it difficult to imagine her biting into a bloody steak.

  Her phone suddenly rang. “It’s the hospital,” she said and picked up. It was a short call.

  “Okay, excellent, thank you” was all she said before she hung up.

  “Froyke’s blood pressure and blood count look fine. He’s recuperating,” she said. “You know, back in med school, we practiced that thump on a CPR mannequin. None of us managed to save the poor doll. One or two of us broke her ribs, and the rest didn’t hit hard enough. Your accuracy, it saved his life.”

  “You—you saved his life, I just… you’re wonderful!” I told her. “And I’m going to kiss you,” I declared, like one declares a tossed grenade. I leaned in and kissed her until we were both out of oxygen.

  I thought I saw the hem of Ya’ara’s floral dress fluttering out of the corner of my eye. But that was impossible, I realized. Her hologram was back in the Bavarian sky, where parents tended to die before their children. Eran didn’t show up, either. I hoped they’d love Verbin just as much as I did. She would certainly love them.

  38.

  Muhammad bin-Yaakov, the son of a renowned Tripoli architect, had finally finished his architecture degree and received his diploma from the Rossetti Facoltà di Architettura at the University of Ferrara, Italy. He bid his friends farewell and flew to Pakistan, where he received a basic combat course at the Al-Qaeda training camp. He joined the secret elite squad, the Al-Quds Shahids, mostly owing to his fluency in English and Italian, coupled with his remarkable religious fervor—which only seemed to grow, fanned by his arrival at the camp and proximity to the sheikh.

  In a small hospital at the Pakistan camp, Muhammad became Dr. Taissiri’s final patient. His generous size allowed the good doctor to stuff him with an exceptionally large amount of gel. The entire unit, along with Dr. Taissiri and the rest of the shahids, was then transferred to the Shabwah camp, into the command of Imad Akbariyeh—the visionary behind the stuffed shahids.

  After Imad’s tragic demise, communications among the members of the units slowly wilted into nothing, and they found themselves scattered around the world, adrift like satellites without planets, waiting for the order to come. Muhammad returned to Ferrara and renewed his relationships with his university friends, and particularly with Emmanuella, his ex-girlfriend. Occasionally, living with the spirited, carefree Emmanuella, Muhammad would feel the prickly weeds of heresy growing within him—he attempted to nip them in the bud, but there was also the pain, the bleeding, pus-filled wounds that had become of his surgical stitches, the nausea he’d suffered from since his surgery. Water and sunlight for Muhammad’s little garden of heresy, eating at the remnants of the motivation left over from his time in Pakistan. He began to wonder about a surgical procedure to remove the explosives from his gut, allowing him to build a new, less painful life for himself. He managed to convince himself that removing the explosives had no bearing on his true faith. After all—he had never heard of any sheikh, not even the holiest and most devout, who walked around with explosive charges in his belly.

  Emmanuella convinced him to join her on a tour of his architectural roots—observe Spanish Muslim architecture in all its glory at the Great Mosque of Córdoba, and finish up at the Alhambra music festival. Her unending optimism allowed her to brush off any concerns about Muhammad’s sudden bouts of nausea and vomiting, and he let her, jokingly proposing that she must’ve knocked him up.

  They boarded a direct flight to Córdoba. Muhammad knew for a fact that the substance in his stomach was effectively invisible to security screening, and true to form, they passed smoothly through the Ferrara and Córdoba airports without incident. Any suspicion or hostility melted away in the warm glow of Emmanuella’s smile.

  The massive pillars and colorful arched dome of the Great Mosque lifted Muhammad’s spirits. This glorious architecture, he told Emmanuella, stemmed from a deep familiarity with the movements of the sun and wind, the climate and colors of the Mediterranean. Emmanuella was captivated by the openness and spaciousness of Muslim architecture, so different from the defensiveness of Christian architecture.

  By the time they headed to the Alhambra music festival, his sickness seemed to vanish completely. His mood improved considerably. For the first time, Muhammad allowed himself to embrace Emmanuella, even kiss her, in public—where everyone could see.

  When they got to the Carlos V Palace, they were greeted by a long, arduous queue. The police officers responsible for the security procedure were slow but gave no one the benefit of the doubt. Six people had been killed in the last ETA17 bombing, dozens injured. Each bag was opened and thoroughly emptied and searched. A pair of sniffing dogs pulled at their chains, eager to approach the crowd, their police handler struggling to restrain them. Muhammad shuddered, cold sweat dripping down his neck. The thought of being contaminated by the impure animals was unbearable. When he collected his belongings back into his bag, one of the animals rubbed against his leg. Muhammad cursed in Arabic and kicked it. The handler, enraged, slapped Muhammad in response.

  The slap was not a powerful one, but the humiliation of it slammed into him like a ton of bricks.

  Muhammad was furious, prepared to respond, but two of the policeman’s colleagues approached, armed and threatening.

  Emmanuella saw how offended Muhammad was and attempted to downplay the whole incident, laughing as if it were a joke. She hugged Muhammad, telling him this cop was an idiot, and they could go file a complaint against him later, if he liked.

  Muhammad eyes flashed around. The ambient noise became an insufferable buzzing. The empty soft drink cans and food wrappers scattered around by the infidels swarming the palace charged him with an uncontrollable fury. He felt as if his head would explode. The words of the sheikh rose from the depths of his soul: “There is no resistance, no resurrection, save by striking the infidels.” Muhammad suddenly felt sick and ran toward the restrooms. He didn’t make it and ended up vomiting on the tiled floor of the entrance hall. A group of nearby teenagers recoiled, exclaiming in disgust, fanning the fires of his humiliation.

  Muhammad leaned against the wall. “There is no resistance, no resurrection, save by striking the infidels,” he muttered. “No resistance—s-save by—”

  Emmanuella finally caught up with him, breathless. “Where did you run off to?” she asked, and when he couldn’t answer, she dabbed at his face with a wet wipe and kissed him.

  Muhammad pulled his cell phone from his pocket. His hand shook as he dialed the activation code.

  “Who are you calling?” she asked, baffled.

  “My Allah.” Muhammad embraced her and dialed again.

  The sizable charge in his stomach went off—thirty-four dead, including Muhammad and Emmanuella.

  The local press associated the bombing with the previous actions of the Basque ETA. Emmanuella’s father, who identified her corpse, said that she had been traveling in the company of a friend, one Muhammad bin-Yaakov. The search that followed, led by the local security service, led them straight to the University of Ferrara. Bruno Garibaldi, head of the Islamic terrorism department in the AISI, was summoned. In the room Muhammad had rented, they found three passports, cash, a book by the sheikh with a personal inscription, and documentation for a great number of flights—Tripoli, Libya, Pakistan, Yemen, Rome, Córdoba. The most meaningful find was a huge enlarged photo of the Al-Aqsa Mosque, at the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. In the foreground were ten masked men, and the words “the Al-Quds18 Shahids” in black, swirling Arabic letters. A red arrow marked one of the masked men, who seemed large enough to be Muhammad. Bruno examined the mate
rial, endless profanities spilling from his mouth at Allah and all of his Muhammads.

  39.

  Two days later was the thirty-day anniversary of the Rome bombing, and Bruno flew in for the ceremony as the Italian representative. Usually I avoided these kinds of things. When the sad ordeal at the cemetery was over, we drove back to Agur, where I promptly removed my nice Guccis.

  “Kahanov isn’t coming?”

  “If Ami hasn’t answered yet, he’s probably still looking for his missing informer.”

  I uncorked the bottle of Munch, made by Ze’evik in his boutique vineyard in Bar Giyora, not far from here. The cork smelled promising. I passed it to Bruno, who nodded his approval.

  “Excellent nose. Why Munch?”

  “Why Garibaldi?”

  “Testa di cazzo,” he replied. “I didn’t choose Garibaldi—he chose Munch. What’s Munch?”

  “Munch, like the crazy painter. My buddy harvests a ton of grapes and makes six different wines—each named for an artist. There’s also Fellini, Antoine, Camus, Lennon. The white is James Joyce, I think.”

  We swirled the wine and shoved our noses into the glasses.

  “L’chaim,” Bruno said with his rolling Italian l.

  “Saluti,” I said and inquired if he thought the wine would pair well with a carbonara.

  “Only if the carbonara is as good as the wine,” the smart-ass replied, and I went to handle the food.

  Garibaldi on his father’s side, Ventura on his mother’s, and despite the years of friendship and professional cooperation, I still didn’t know if the names were real or self-chosen, and if Ventura hinted at Jewish roots. Two years ago, after the bombing at the Great Synagogue of Rome, we’d just taken out what the local press nicknamed “The Little Jihad” in a joint operation. We celebrated at Roberto’s, at the Ambasciata d’Umbria—Bruno’s home away from home. We drank like the fancy restaurant was a trucker dive bar. Roberto was happy to oblige. Bruno, who had hated Arabs ever since his tour in Libya, insisted that every single one of them “is a primitive and an idiot. And they all smell.”

  “You’re exaggerating,” I said. “It isn’t all of them.”

  Bruno agreed and we raised another glass of Centerbe, the drain-cleaner liqueur—seventy-six percent alcohol by volume.

  “Not all of them, just around ninety-six… no, make it ninety-eight percent,” he said and asked Roberto for yesterday’s Corriere.

  Roberto wiped his hands on his apron and vanished into his office by the kitchen, returning with yesterday’s edition, featuring an interview with Oriana Fallaci.

  “Motherfuckers are turning this place into Euro-Arabia,” he said, paraphrasing Fallaci. “Do you know what she said? Let me read it for you: what you fail to understand, is that these fuckers, these bin Ladens, they think they’re allowed to kill your children because you drink wine, go to the theater and enjoy classical music. Fanculo, goddamn primitive motherfuckers. You, Ehrlich, you’re a dissident. If I were you, I’d round them all up and smack. Voilà! No more Islamic problem. You guys fuck up your one job—you have one job! Kill them when they’re young. Historically, it is your responsibility—but you’re sloppy, and so they make it to Europe and fuck it up for us, too.” Occasional points of this tirade were highlighted by Bruno banging the bottle against the table.

  “Have you ever considered a career in Israeli politics?” I suggested, adding that nothing would get him elected faster than that exact kind of rant. Probably as the minister for Arab Affairs.

  The angry whistle of the boiling teapot snapped me away from Rome, back into my kitchen. I poured the boiling water into the pasta pot and patiently waited for Bruno to reveal whatever news he most likely had for me. He seemed in no hurry to do so. I decided not to squeeze so that the intel didn’t come out with a deformed head.

  “You like those shoes?” I pointed at the nine-hundred-dollar Guccis on his feet.

  “Of course. What am I, a peasant?” he answered, nodding at my Blundstones, which lay under the table. “Why do you ask?”

  “I bought the same ones… nine hundred dollars. Damn things are unwearable.”

  Bruno laughed. “Nine hundred dollars? You could’ve bought the whole store for that. Probably a fucking Arab. You got ripped off.”

  I received my scolding silently, deciding not to mention that the shoe salesman was an Israeli expatriate who had insisted on sharing his IDF war stories.

  “Yalla,” Bruno said, seeming to enjoy his skillful pronunciation of the Arabic word. “Business before pasta.”

  He started from the top, telling me again about the results of the investigation following the Alhambra bombing, leading them all the way back to Ferrara. He took out his phone and showed me some photos of Muhammad bin-Yaakov’s passports, which seemed to have carried him all over Europe.

  This, while troubling, was no longer surprising. Old news. But that was when Bruno pulled the rabbit out of his hat, sliding his finger dramatically across the screen to reveal a group photo of masked shahids standing in front of the Al-Aqsa Mosque at the Temple Mount.

  “Oh.” My excitement was evident by the fact that I whistled inwardly, like a child first learning how. Bruno informed me that the photograph was undergoing identification processes, but so far only in Rome. They feared a leak and shared the material with no one—“except for you, cazzo. I guess you’ll find more than anyone and tell less than anyone.”

  We tried to guess whether the name of the group—“the Al-Quds Shahids”—and the Temple Mount in the background were there merely to reinforce the religious link and their sense of vision, or if they referred to concrete targets. There was no way to know. Figuring that out would be up to the researchers and threat assessors. Down in infantry, we focused on eliminating the assholes.

  The kitchen timer magnetized to the exhaust hood finally beeped.

  “Bruno, move the pasta to a bowl.”

  He stopped the beeping timer and transferred the steaming pasta into a large bowl.

  “Carbonara with strozzapreti. You know what that means? Priest-stranglers, we call them.”

  “May they strangle the rabbis as well. Amen,” I prayed, remembering the rabbi who had insisted on converting Ya’ara and Eran to Judaism, and beat four eggs, pouring them into the pasta bowl. I added parmesan shavings, black pepper and some cream and mixed it all with the fried chunks of bacon. I added some cubes of smoked goose to deepen the flavor. The carbonara, cooked à la Luciano Pavarotti, was a brutal deviation from my paleo diet—but it had its advantages. An impressive capacity to soak up alcohol was one of them. “Another Munch, or something new?”

  “The Munch was excellent,” said Bruno. He took the second bottle lying in wait and uncorked it. He happily sniffed at the cork, then at the bottle.

  “Na zdarovje!”

  “Na zdarovje!” I sipped and held my glass up to the kitchen light. The white halo was thin and delicate, and the wine was perfectly ripe.

  “Bruno, do you think everything would be different if the Muslims just drank some wine occasionally?”

  “Oh, they drink, don’t you worry. Those fuckers drink. In the dark, where Muhammad can’t see them…”

  He raised a finger. “Neshama sheli,” he said with his rolling Hebrew. “My soul, mia anima—you know I love you guys. Truly. But I need an honest answer. All of Europe is shitting its pants over these bombings, and here, at the center of the conflict—nothing?! You should know, word around the community is that you sneaky fucks have found some screening tech and you’re not sharing it with anyone, so the enemy won’t find out you have it.”

  “No new technology,” I quickly assured him. “For now. Our people are working on it, along with everyone else from the Engineering Corps to Technion19 professors. Once we’ll have the tech, you’ll know, because we’ll be selling it to you. These technologies are the backbone of this country’
s economy.”

  Bruno kept his eyes on mine. “How, then?”

  “Elementary, my dear Bruno. Our security people are trained to smell an Arab from a mile away. Anyone suspicious—anyone ‘nearly’ suspicious”—I added the relevant air quotes—“we put in a locked, armored room, pass through an X-ray, and subject to an intimate bodily search. Procedures that would never be approved in your ‘Euro-Arabia.’”

  “And that’s it?”

  “Yeah, it’s a simple solution. It’s only your hypocrisy that’s stopping you from implementing it.”

  His face crumpled, and for a moment he seemed on the verge of tears—like an indignant child, shocked and insulted. I couldn’t help but start laughing.

  “Hypocrites? Us?!” He slapped his chest. “There is no hypocrisy. Financial interests, sure. Cheap energy, and a market of—oh, two billion Arabs? More than all of Europe combined, paying full prices for our tycoons’ merchandise… but hypocrisy? How dare you.”

  Bruno was getting worked up. A small blue vein pulsed visibly at his forehead. “Have you ever seen a tycoon or a politician at the scene of one of these bombings? Never. Because it never happens. Only the poor get fucked. The people out on the streets. Puta de madre.”

  It was a sort of epiphany. Unfortunately, the very rich and the politically inclined never seemed to be the victims of the bombings. “Unless you see this as the war that it is and start acting like it, you’re going to lose,” I said.

  “The Americans estimate twenty, twenty-five Arabs still sneaking around, we have no idea where, any one of which could pass any security check and explode whenever, wherever they want. These fucking bastards… got us hoping they’d go ahead and blow up already, spare us this… fear…”