by Paul Sussman
It was in among a series of pictures of Middle and New Kingdom tomb doorways at Deir el-Bahri, on the eastern edge of the Theban necropolis. Although it was in black and white, unlike the richly coloured hues of its neighbours, and slightly out of focus to boot, his initial assumption was that its subject matter must be the same. Only when he held it up to the light did he start to have doubts, not simply because he didn't actually recognize the doorway – in his fifteen years in Luxor he had explored just about every tomb there was to explore in the vicinity – but because the dark, forbidding wall of perfectly flat rock at whose base the doorway opened was unlike any geological formation he had ever seen in the Luxor region.
He turned it over, intrigued, hoping it might have an explanatory label like every other picture in the collection. It didn't, which was frustrating, because for no reason he could explain he sensed the image was somehow significant. He gazed at it for a moment longer – 'What are you trying to tell me?' he murmured. 'Whose tomb are you?' – then slipped it into his inside pocket alongside the flyer and resumed his examination of the house.
He came to the basement last, as he had done on his first visit, descending the dark, creaking stairs, flicking the light switch at the bottom and gazing at the tables and shelves covered in plundered antiquities. He had, by this point, been in the house for over three hours and now spent a further ninety minutes sifting through the basement's contents, marvelling again at the sheer size and diversity of the collection, finding plenty to interest him but nothing whatsoever that shed any light on the man who had put the whole thing together.
He finished up beside the cuboid iron safe in the far corner of the room, with its numbered dial and chunky brass handle. Squatting down in front of it he idly turned the dial back and forth, the internal mechanism clicking softly as it rotated. There was no way he could force the door, and although he had, in his long association with the criminal classes, learnt how to pick a simple lock, this was way beyond his elementary breaking-and-entering skills. He either needed the combination, which had most likely gone to the grave with the safe's owner, or else . . .
He remained where he was for a moment, then, snorting as if to say 'What the hell?', went back up to the living room, lifted the phone and dialled. The line rang six times, and then a gruff voice answered.
'Aziz? It's Inspector Khalifa. No, no, it's nothing to do with that. I just need a favour.'
'If this is some sort of trick . . .'
'It's—'
'Because I'm straight now. You understand? Completely above board. All that stuff . . . it's in the past. I was a different person then.'
Aziz Ibrahim Abd-el Shakir, popularly known as 'The Ghost' because of his ability to pass through even the most heavily secured of doors, opened his tool-bag, removed a small foam pad, laid it on the floor in front of the safe and knelt down on it, edging his knees back and forth until he was comfortable. A small, plump man with a bulbous, turnip-like nose and permanently sweat-stained armpits, he took several deep, slow breaths as if about to start meditating, then reached out a hand and ran it gently over the top and sides of the safe, as if stroking a nervous animal, calming it, winning its confidence.
'This is just between us,' Khalifa assured him. 'No-one will ever know.'
'They'd better not,' Aziz muttered, leaning forward and pressing his ear against the safe door, tweaking the dial back and forth, listening.
'You have my—'
'Ssshhh!'
He continued to manipulate the dial for almost a minute, face puckered in concentration, the sweat-blooms beneath his armpits seeming to grow and spread, then came upright again.
'Can you open it?' asked Khalifa.
Aziz ignored him, fiddling in his bag.
'Chubb casing, Mauser dial system,' he muttered, pulling out a stethoscope, pencil-torch and mini-hammer of the sort geologists use to break rocks. 'Frangible tumblers, three, maybe four; double levers. Oh, you're a sweet little lady!'
'Can you—'
'Of course I can open it!' snapped Aziz. 'I can open anything. Except my wife's legs.'
He smiled sourly at his joke and began tapping around the dial with his hammer, eyes closed in concentration.
Aziz Abd-el Shakir was generally regarded, by everyone including himself, as the finest safe-breaker in Upper Egypt. The man who had twice broken into the main vault at the National Bank of Egypt offices in Luxor, and cracked the supposedly uncrackable American Express safe in Aswan, he was a legend among both his fellow criminals and those whose job it was to bring him to justice. Khalifa had first encountered him back in 1992 after he had cleaned out the strongbox at the Luxor Sheraton, and their paths had crossed several times since, most recently two years ago when the detective had nailed him for a local jeweller's-shop robbery. On that particular occasion Khalifa had written to the trial judge recommending a lenient sentence on compassionate grounds, Aziz's youngest son having just been diagnosed with leukaemia. Aziz had heard about the letter and, with that curious code of morality that allows a man to make his living from stealing yet at the same time always to honour his debts, had contacted Khalifa and told him should he ever need a favour, he only had to ask. Which is why he was there now.
He laid aside the hammer and donned his stethoscope, holding its disc flat against the safe door with one hand while gently tweaking the dial back and forth with the other, his torch held in his mouth, his eyes closed as he listened intently to the movements of the tumblers inside. Khalifa knew full well that he was lying when he said he'd gone straight, that he was as active a criminal as he'd ever been. At this particular moment, however, he needed his expertise and wasn't about to argue the point.
'There's a good girl.' Aziz was whispering to himself, a faint smile etched across his face. 'Don't be difficult now. Oh, you're a sweet little lady. A real sweet lady.'
In the end it took him fewer than twenty minutes to work out the combination, a source of evident satisfaction for, as the last tumbler clicked into place, he broke into a broad, brown-toothed smile and, bending forward, planted a kiss on the top of the safe, his lips leaving a damp mark on the green-grey metal. 'The Ghost strikes again!' he said with a chuckle, opening the door a couple of inches and gathering up his equipment.
They went upstairs and Khalifa saw him out.
'Keep your nose clean,' he said as Aziz started down the front steps.
The safe-breaker grunted and set off along the gravel path to the front gate. When he reached it he turned.
'You're OK, Khalifa,' he called back. He paused, then added, 'For a pig, that is.'
He winked and disappeared through the screen of palm and mimosa trees.
Khalifa watched him go, then returned to the basement where he squatted in front of the safe and pulled open the door. There were only three things inside: an official-looking brown manila envelope which on closer inspection turned out to contain the dead man's will; a pistol of a type Khalifa had never seen before, with a thin barrel protruding from a chunky, L-shaped body; and, right at the back of the safe, a rectangular object wrapped in a length of black cloth. The latter proved unexpectedly heavy, and after undoing the cloth Khalifa found himself gazing at a large gold bar. On its glistening upper surface was stamped an eagle with wings spread, clutching in its talons the interlocking arms of a Nazi swastika. Khalifa let out a low whistle. 'What the hell were you up to, Mr Jansen? Just what the bloody hell were you up to?'
KALANDIA REFUGEE CAMP
The summons to martyrdom, when it came, was not at all what Yunis Abu Jish had imagined it would be.
For months now he'd been praying that he would be approached and asked to give himself for his God and his people, picturing in his mind an intensive selection procedure through the course of which his courage and faith would be repeatedly tested and triumphantly proved. As it was, he received a single, brief phone call informing him that he had been chosen by al-Mulatham as a potential shaheed, and instructing him to consider carefully whethe
r he felt himself ready for this honour. If he did not, he was to do nothing; he would not be contacted again. If he did, he was to don his Dome of the Rock T-shirt – how on earth did they know he had a T-shirt with a picture of the Qubbat al-Sakhra on the front? – and go at noon the following day to the Kalandia checkpoint on the Jerusalem–Ramallah road where he was to remain for exactly thirty minutes beneath the hoarding with the advertisement for Master Satellite Dishes. Thereafter he was to start preparing himself with prayer and study of the Holy Koran, informing no-one of his situation, not even close family. More detailed instructions would follow.
And that was it. No explanation of how or why or by whom he had been chosen; no indication of what his eventual mission might be. The cold precision of the call, the businesslike manner of the man at the other end, had frightened him, and after the line had gone dead he sat for a long while trembling, his face pale, the receiver still pressed against his ear. Can I do this, he wondered to himself. Am I strong enough? Am I worthy? To imagine, after all, is one thing, to do quite another. Fear and doubt almost overwhelmed him.
Gradually, however, his misgivings eased, giving way first to acceptance, then determination, and finally a swelling sense of euphoria and pride. He had been chosen! He, Yunis Abu Jish Sabah, hero of his people, instrument of God's vengeance. He imagined the honour his family would feel, the joy of every Palestinian. The glory.
With a yelp of delight he slammed down the phone and charged outside to where his mother was sitting peeling potatoes, kneeling in front of her and wrapping his arms around her waist.
'It's all going to be OK,' he said, laughing. 'Everything is going to be OK. God is with us. Allah-u-akhbar?
JERUSALEM
It was almost midday before Ben-Roi finally surfaced from his drunken slumber and staggered out of bed, coughing and cursing. He took a cold shower, downed a Goldstar to drive off his hangover, then dressed, dabbed on some aftershave and took a bus over to the Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives, stopping en route to buy a single white lily.
He visited her at least once a day. More sometimes, if the loneliness became particularly acute. As a kid he remembered thinking it was something only old people did, going to cemeteries. A way of passing the time when you had nothing better to do with your life, when all the joy and hope was behind you. Yet here he was now, not even thirty-four, and the visit was the focal point of his day. Of his entire existence.
He alighted from the bus on the Jericho Road and entered the cemetery through a gate at its bottom left-hand corner, weaving his way upwards through the rows of flat, rectangular tombstones that covered the terraced hillside like a vast fragmented stairway. Away to his left the seven golden cupolas of the Church of St Mary Magdalen gleamed in the afternoon sun; ahead and above, the ugly arched façade of the Intercontinental Hotel loomed on the hill's summit, like a row of hoops graffiti'd onto the clean blue sky. Behind, across the Kidron Valley, sat the Dome of the Rock, the buildings of the Old City stacked up behind it like a jumble of children's play bricks.
Her grave was about halfway up, at the cemetery's southern edge, a simple flat stone bearing her name and dates – born 21 December 1976; died 12 March 2004 – and at the bottom a quotation from the Song of Solomon: 'I am a rose of Sharon, a lily of the valleys.'
He stood staring down at it, catching his breath after the steep climb, then squatted and laid the flower on top of the quotation, with beside it a small rock he had picked up on his way through the cemetery, as per Jewish custom. He bent and kissed the grave, running his hand over its warm yellow surface, allowing his lips to linger for a moment on the deep chiselled grooves of her name. Then, with a sigh, he straightened again.
Strangely, he'd never been able to cry for her. However intense the pain, however overwhelming, the tears just wouldn't come. He wept at lesser things – crap TV programmes, cheap song lyrics, schmaltzy novels – but for her there was nothing, just emptiness, the tears damming up inside him so that sometimes he struggled even to draw breath, like a drowning man only just able to keep his mouth above the waterline.
He clasped his hands together, part of him feeling he ought to recite a kaddish, or at least say a prayer of some sort. He dismissed the idea. What the fuck was the point of praying to a God who allowed things like that to happen? Who sat up in His heaven and gazed down dispassionately on so much horror and misery? No, he thought to himself, there's no comfort in belief; it's a hollow thing, empty, tuneless, like a cracked bell. He thrust his hands into his pockets and turned away from the grave, gazing across at the Old City, humming an old Jewish folk song his grandfather had taught him about a poor boy who falls in love with a rich rabbi's daughter.
He'd arrested her. That's how they'd met. Corny beyond belief, like something out of a cheap romance novel, but that's the way it had happened. She'd been part of a group protesting against Israeli settlement building on the outskirts of the city; he'd been in the police cordon thrown up to hold the protesters back. There was a mêlée, she kicked him in the shin, he slapped a pair of handcuffs on her and threw her in the back of a police van. It all happened so quickly he didn't have time to notice how beautiful she was. Only later, in the holding cell back at the station, while taking down her details as she held forth on the iniquities of Israel's occupation of the West Bank, did he find his gaze lingering on her unruly tangle of brown hair, her slim, sunbrowned arms, her sparkling grey eyes, angry and passionate yet gentle too, full of wit and laughter, so that somehow he knew she was a good person, a kind person, and that her raised voice and belligerent manner were just a front.
He could have charged her – should have charged her – but in the end he let her off with a caution. The fact that she showed no gratitude for this favour – on the contrary, seemed rather put out by it, as if his leniency somehow diminished the impact of her protest – for some reason attracted him to her even more than her physical appearance.
He had never been especially confident around women, uneasy within his bear-like frame and craggy, big-nosed face, and it took him three days to pluck up the courage to call her. When he finally did she mistook him for a friend playing a joke; then, realizing he was who he said he was, told him to fuck off and slammed down the phone. He called again the next day, and the day after that, and again the day after that, his interest (and humiliation) increasing in direct proportion to the number of rejections he received, until eventually, exasperated, she agreed to have a drink in a local bar 'just to get you off my bloody back'.
Even then it is doubtful anything would have happened between them had it not been for the spaghetti. Up to that point in the meeting they had struggled to make any sort of connection, their conversation stilted and uncomfortable, punctuated with embarrassed silences and occasional raised voices as she harangued him about their government's treatment of the Palestinians while he retorted that the Palestinians deserved everything they fucking got. They were actually in the process of leaving the bar, acknowledging that they had nothing in common, that the evening was going nowhere, when a waiter walked straight into him, depositing a plate of sauce-covered pasta down the front of his white shirt. She burst out laughing; he snapped at her, but then started chuckling too, appreciating the ludicrousness of the situation; and in that moment of shared amusement something finally sparked between them, like a match striking in the darkness, driving back the shadows. The waiter lent him a T-shirt, which lightened their mood further for it was way too tight for him and bore the embarrassingly inappropriate logo GAY AND PROUD. Accepting an offer of compensatory drinks, they returned to their table and started the conversation anew, this time steering away from politics and talking about themselves instead, their backgrounds and interests and families, exploring.
She worked as an editor for a small co-operative publishing house specializing in poetry and children's books, devoting three evenings a week to volunteer work with B'Tselem, the Israeli human rights organization. The daughter of one of the country's most deco
rated war heroes, now a Labour Knesset member, she had grown up on a kibbutz on the northern edge of Galilee, the youngest of three sisters. Her two elder siblings were both married with children.
'Perfect Jewish mothers,' she said. 'I'm the black sheep.'
'Me too,' admitted Ben-Roi. 'All the men in my family are farmers. Dad was horrified when I said I wanted to be a policeman. Although not as horrified as he'd be if he could see me now.'
He glanced down at his T-shirt. She laughed.
'So what made you want to become a tool of the fascist regime?' she asked.
'Al Pacino, believe it or not.'
'Al Pacino?'
'Well, a film he made.'
She held up a hand. 'Let me guess.' There was a pause, then, 'Serpico.'
His eyes widened. 'How did you know that?'
