The Last Secret Of The Temple

by Paul Sussman

  Layla nodded and continued down into the city, passing the Austrian Hospice, the Via Dolorosa, the alley containing the fig tree her father had pointed out all those years ago – it seemed hardly to have grown in all that time. As she went she heard shouting up ahead and the police and military presence steadily became heavier. She started to pass straggling groups of shebab, Palestinian youths, some wearing black and white Fatah headbands, others carrying the red, green, black and white Palestinian flag, the groups coalescing into a crowd and the crowd into a crush, the narrow street echoing to the sound of their chanting, a forest of clenched fists punching the air. Israeli troops were massed in every side street, preventing the protest fanning outwards across the city, the soldiers' expressionless faces contrasting with those of the protesters, which were twisted in fury and defiance. Smudges of ash and charred cardboard stained the cobbles where makeshift fires had been lit; Israeli surveillance cameras dangled from their wall-brackets like the carcasses of dead animals, their lenses smashed.

  Layla pushed her way through the throng, the crush growing tighter with every step, and it was starting to look like she might not get through at all until she was recognized by a young man she'd interviewed a couple of months earlier for an article she had been doing on the Fatah Youth Movement. He greeted her and, appointing himself her chaperone, forced a way through the mass of bodies until they reached the crash barriers the Israelis had erected across the street. There was a small group of Israeli Peace Now protesters gathered here among the Palestinians, and one, an elderly woman in a knitted hat, called out to her.

  'I hope you're going to write about these bastards, Layla! They're going to start a war!'

  'That's exactly what they want to do,' shouted a man beside her. 'They're going to kill us all! Settlers out! We want peace! Peace now!'

  He leant forward and waved his fist at the row of heavily armed border police lined up on the far side of the barrier. Beyond them a scrum of journalists and TV crews, many wearing helmets and bulletproof jackets, was gathered outside the occupied house. Further down the street a second roadblock had been erected, this one holding back a crowd of Haredi Jews and Israeli right-wingers, there to show solidarity with the settlers. One was holding a placard reading KAHANE WAS RIGHT!, another a banner proclaiming ARAB MURDERERS OFF JEWISH LAND.

  Layla showed her press card to one of the soldiers at the barrier and, after some consultation with his superior, she was allowed through, pushing her way into the pack of journalists where she ended up beside a paunchy, bearded man wearing wire-rimmed spectacles and a plastic protective helmet.

  'The great Layla al-Madani finally graces us with her presence,' he snorted, his voice all but drowned out by the shouting of the crowd. 'I was wondering when you'd turn up.'

  Onz Schenker was a political correspondent for the Jerusalem Post. The first time they'd met she'd thrown a glass of water at him for making a disparaging remark about Palestinian women, and that had just about set the tone of their relationship ever since. They maintained a frosty cordiality, but there was little love lost on either side.

  'Dig the hat, Schenker,' she grunted.

  'You'll wish you had one when your Arab mates start throwing rocks and bottles,' he retorted.

  As if to emphasize his point a bottle came arcing over from among the Palestinian protesters, smashing onto the paving slabs a few metres to his right.

  'Told you,' he shouted. 'But then I guess they'd never throw anything at you, would they, Assad-fucking-iqa. It's the proper journalists they want to hurt!'

  Layla half opened her mouth to bat the insult back, but couldn't be bothered and instead just gave him the finger and moved away, working her way forward right to the front of the press pack. Jerold Kessel from CNN was struggling to deliver a piece to camera amid the mayhem; to her left the Israeli border police had lifted the crash barriers and were forcing the Palestinian protesters back, driving them further up the street. The shouting grew even louder. A tear-gas canister was fired. More bottles were thrown.

  For a moment Layla stood motionless, taking in the scene, then swung her camera from her shoulder and started snapping, getting shots of the spray-painted menorahs to either side of the front door – the traditional Warriors of David calling card – the Israeli flag draped down the front of the building, the troops stationed on the roofs to either side, presumably to prevent locals storming the house from above. She had just turned to her right to photograph the pro-settlement protesters when she suddenly felt the pack around her tighten and surge forwards.

  The door of the occupied house had opened. There was a pause, then the squat, cuboid figure of Baruch Har-Zion stepped out onto the street, accompanied by his crew-cut bodyguard, Avi Steiner. The pro-settlement protesters cheered and broke into a rendition of the 'Hatikva', the Israeli national anthem. The Palestinians and peace protesters, who had by now been driven almost a hundred metres up the street and couldn't see properly what was happening, rattled the crash barriers and raised their own song, 'My Homeland, My Homeland'. Steiner pushed angrily at the semi-circle of journalists, trying to keep them back. Cameras flashed like strobe lights.

  For a brief instant Har-Zion's eye caught Layla's, then slid away again. Questions flew at him like gunfire, but he ignored them, turning his head this way and that, a faint smile creasing the edges of his mouth, before slowly raising his right hand, indicating that he wished for silence. The questions died away and the pack pressed forward a few more inches, a bristling hedge of tape-recorders held out towards him. Layla swung her camera back over her shoulder and pulled out her notebook.

  'There is an old Hebrew saying,' Har-Zion intoned, speaking in heavily accented English, his voice gruff and low, like tumbling rocks. 'Hamechadesh betuvo bechol yom tamid ma'aseh bereishit. God makes the world new every single day. Yesterday this land was in the hands of our enemies. Today it has been returned to its rightful owners, the Jewish people. This is a great day. A historic day. A day that will never be forgotten. And believe me, ladies and gentlemen, there are many more such days to come.'

  LUXOR

  Even at a distance of fifteen years, Khalifa remembered the Schlegel case as though it had happened only yesterday.

  Her body had been found by a local man, Mohammed Ibrahim Gemal, in the Precinct of Khonsu, a dark, shadowy, rarely visited building in the south-western corner of the Karnak Temple complex. Sixty years old, Israeli, Jewish, single, she had, according to the autopsy report, suffered a series of violent blows to the head and face inflicted by a blunt instrument of indeterminate type. As well as shattering her jawbone and fracturing her skull in three separate places, the murder weapon had left a curious pattern of marks on her skin – ankh signs interspersed with miniature rosettes, presumably from some sort of decorative design on the weapon's surface.

  Despite her massive injuries, Gemal had been adamant Schlegel was still alive when he had found her. Blood-covered and incoherent, she had, he insisted, whispered two words, Thoth and tzfardeah, repeating both several times before slipping into a coma from which she had not emerged. There were no other witnesses to corroborate his statement, and no witnesses at all to the murder itself, save for an old temple guard who claimed to have heard muffled screams from the interior of the temple and had glimpsed someone hurrying away from the scene of the crime, limping heavily and with 'something on his head, like a funny little bird'. Since the man was old and half-blind, and had a reputation for drinking on the job, no-one had taken his evidence especially seriously.

  The then head of Luxor Police, Chief Inspector Ehab Ali Mahfouz, had assumed control of the case personally, assisted by his deputy, Inspector Abdul ibn-Hassani. Khalifa, who had only just been posted to Luxor from his native Giza, was also appointed to the investigating team. He was twenty-four at the time, on his first murder case.

  From the outset the investigation had focused on two possible motives for the killing. The obvious one, favoured by Mahfouz, was robbery, since the woman'
s wallet and watch were both missing. The second, less likely option, although one that couldn't be ruled out, was that it had been a fundamentalist attack. Only a month previously nine Israelis had been shot dead on a tour bus on the highway between Cairo and Ismailiya.

  Khalifa, the least experienced and most junior member of the team, had from the first had doubts about both these scenarios. If robbery had been the motive, why had the attacker not taken the gold Star of David hanging on a chain around the woman's neck? And if it had been fundamentalists, why had they not claimed credit for their actions, as they invariably did after an attack of this sort?

  There were further puzzling aspects to the case. Schlegel had arrived in Egypt the previous day from Tel Aviv, travelling alone, and had flown straight down to Luxor where she had booked into the Mina Palace, a budget hotel on the Corniche el-Nil. According to the hotel concierge, she had remained in her room from the moment she had checked in until 3.30 p.m. on the afternoon of her death, when, at her request, he had arranged a taxi to take her down to Karnak. She only had a small overnight bag with her and her return ticket to Israel had been for that same night. Whatever her reason for being in Luxor she clearly wasn't there for a holiday.

  She had, apparently, made at least one call from her bedroom phone, on the evening of her arrival – the hotel housekeeper had overheard her when she had brought up towels and soap. And a large kitchen knife had been found in the handbag beside her body, newly sharpened, as if she had been expecting to do violence to someone, or else to defend herself in the face of violence from someone else.

  The more Khalifa had thought about the case, the more convinced he had become that it had nothing to do with theft or extremism. The key, he felt sure, was the phone call. Who had Schlegel been speaking to? What had been said? He had requested a printout from the hotel's telephone meter, but as luck would have it the meter had chosen that evening to go on the blink, and before he had had time to chase up Egypt Telecom for a call breakdown for the entire building the investigation had taken an unexpected turn: Schlegel's watch had been found in the house of Mohammed Gemal.

  Gemal was well known to the Luxor Police. An inveterate petty criminal, he had a string of convictions as long as your arm, from assault and battery – or which he had done three years in al-Wadi al-Gadid – to car theft and supply of cannabis (six months in Abu Zaabal). At the time of the murder he was working as an unlicensed tourist guide, and claimed to have been clean for several years, a claim Chief Mahfouz had roundly dismissed. 'Once a criminal, always a criminal,' he had said. 'A leopard doesn't change its spots, and a shit like Gemal doesn't turn angel overnight.'

  Khalifa had sat in on Gemal's interrogation. It had been an unpleasant affair, brutal, both Mahfouz and Hassani giving the suspect a real working over. At first he had denied all knowledge of the watch. After twenty minutes of slapping and punching he had broken down and admitted that, yes, he had taken it, on the spur of the moment. He had debts, you see, his family were about to be evicted from their home, his daughter was sick. He vehemently denied that he had murdered Schlegel or taken her wallet, however, and continued to do so throughout two days of increasingly violent treatment. By the time the interrogation ended he was urinating blood and his eyes were so swollen he could barely see out of them. Still he continued to protest his innocence.

  Khalifa had sat through all of this, disgusted to the core of his being yet too afraid to speak out, fearful that to do so might in some way jeopardize his fledgling police career. What made it worse was that from the first he had been certain Gemal was telling the truth. There was something in the desperate fury with which he screamed he hadn't killed the woman, in his refusal to buckle even under the hammer blows of Hassani's fists, that had convinced Khalifa he had, as he said, found Schlegel after she had been attacked. The man might have been a thief, but he certainly wasn't a murderer.

  Mahfouz, however, had been unmoved. And Khalifa had said nothing. Not during the interrogation, nor when Gemal had been sent for trial, nor when he was sentenced to twenty-five years' hard labour in the Tura quarries, nor even when, four months after his conviction, he had taken his own life by hanging himself from the bars of his cell with a length of washing line.

  In the intervening years he had tried to justify this silence to himself, arguing that Gemal was a nasty piece of work, an inveterate lawbreaker, and that his conviction, whether fair or not, was probably no less than he deserved. The truth was, however, that his cowardice had allowed an innocent man to be convicted of a crime he hadn't committed, and a woman to die without her murderer being brought to justice. And now that cowardice had come back to haunt him. As deep down he had always known it would.

  JERUSALEM

  To his supporters – and there was a growing band of them – Baruch Har-Zion was the new David, the Lord's chosen warrior battling against overwhelming odds to deliver his people to their Promised Land. Tough, fearless, battle-scarred, devout, he was the epitome of the schtarker – the Jewish tough-guy hero who looks out for himself, his people and his God, and suffers no qualms whatsoever about the means he uses to do it.

  Born Boris Zegowsky in a small village in the southern Ukraine, he had come to Israel in 1970, at the age of sixteen, after he and his younger brother had smuggled themselves out of the Soviet Union, crossed half of Europe on foot and presented themselves at the Israeli Embassy in Vienna claiming their right as Jews to make aliyah. The journey had, for Har-Zion, been as much a pilgrimage as an escape, a voyage to a mythical land that offered not merely sanctuary from the corrosive anti-semitism of his native country, but also a physical manifestation of God's covenant with his chosen people.

  He had devoted the rest of his life to defending and expanding that land, first as a soldier with the IDF, where he had served with distinction in the elite Sayeret Matkal regiment; subsequently, after incurring horrific burns when his Humvee ran over a landmine in southern Lebanon, with Military Intelligence, heading a unit devoted to the recruitment and running of Palestinian informers. An absolute and unwavering devotion to the Israeli cause was what defined and consumed him, a devotion that manifested itself both in acts of extreme heroism – he had twice been awarded the Medal of Valour, Israel's equivalent of the Victoria Cross – and also of extreme brutality. In 1982 he had received an official reprimand for covering a young Lebanese girl in petrol and ordering his men to set her alight unless she divulged the whereabouts of a Hizbollah weapons cache (she did). During his time with Military Intelligence he had been sent for court-martial following allegations that he had authorized the threat of gang rape as a means of coercing Palestinian women into turning collaborator (all charges had been dropped after the main prosecution witness had died in a mysterious car accident).

  And that was just the tip of the iceberg. Tales of violence, brutality and intimidation followed him everywhere – something that, far from causing him concern, appeared to be a greater source of pride than all his awards for gallantry. 'It is nice to be admired,' he was once quoted as saying, 'but far better to be feared.'

  A fierce opponent of the Oslo peace accords – of any peace accord that involved surrendering an inch of the biblical land of Israel – he left Military Intelligence in the mid-1990s and went into politics, allying himself first with the militant settlers organization Gush Emunim before breaking away to found the even more militant Chayalei David. The latter's campaign of seizure and resettlement of Arab land was initially dismissed as the work of a lunatic fringe. With the appearance of al-Mulatham and the Palestinian Brotherhood, however, his hard-line message – that there could be no safety from the suicide bombers until the whole land of Eretz Israel had been settled by Jews and every Palestinian driven across the border into Jordan – gained increasing popularity. His rallies attracted ever larger crowds, his fundraising dinners ever more prominent guests. In the 2000 election he had won a seat in the Knesset, and in some quarters he was now being seriously talked of as a future Israeli leader. 'If Baruch
Har-Zion ever became Prime Minister it would be the end of this country,' moderate Israeli politician Yehuda Milan once commented. 'If Baruch Har-Zion ever became Prime Minister it would be the end of yutzim like Yehuda Milan,' had been Har-Zion's response.

  This resume scrolled through Layla's mind as she stood staring at the man in front of her, with his gloved hands, greying hair and square-jawed face, pale and bearded, like a moss-covered cube of granite. Around her the press pack was once again screaming questions, Dictaphones waving.

  'Mr Har-Zion, do you accept that you are breaking the law by occupying this house?'

  'Do you believe any sort of accommodation is possible between Israelis and Palestinians?'

  'Can you comment on claims that your actions are tacitly supported by Prime Minister Sharon?'

  'Is it true you wish to demolish the Dome of the Rock and rebuild the ancient Temple in its place?'

  Har-Zion fielded the questions one by one, arms held stiffly at his sides, iterating and reiterating in his low, gruff voice that this was neither an occupation nor a settlement but rather a liberation, the recovery of land that belonged to the Jewish people by divine right, continuing thus for twenty minutes before signalling that he had no more to say and turning to go back inside. As he did so, Layla stepped forward and shouted after him.