by Paul Sussman
He would have liked to explain, share a little of the burden. He had been expressly forbidden from discussing the matter, however, and had therefore simply assured his mother, and anyone else who asked, that he was fine, that he just had things on his mind, that they weren't to worry. That in time they would understand.
He finished his prayers, reciting the final rek'ah and the shahada, and stood for a moment gazing down at the youngest of his brothers, six-year-old Mohammed, fast asleep on his mattress on the floor, his breathing soft and helpless, a skinny arm splayed at his side as though he was reaching out towards something. Not for the first time these last couple of days he was speared by a sharp pang of horror at what he was being asked to do, at the fact that it would remove him forever from those he so loved and cherished. It lasted only a few seconds, giving way almost immediately to a conviction that it was because he loved and cherished these people so much that he had taken the course on which he was now embarked.
He bent forward and stroked the boy's hair, whispering to him, telling him how much he cared, how he was sorry for any pain he might cause him, then straightened and, taking his Koran from the shelf beside his bed, went outside into the cool grey dawn to continue his solitary preparation.
JERUSALEM
It was past eleven a.m. when Layla eventually got back to her flat in East Jerusalem, an oppressively hot morning – unnaturally so for the time of year – with a low, cloudy sky and heavy, soporific atmosphere that wrapped itself around the city like a sticky gauze. She threw her mobile and overnight bag onto the sofa, listened to the messages on her answerphone – the usual slew of insults, death threats and queries about late copy – then took off her clothes and went through into the bathroom for a shower.
What do I do now, she thought to herself, water cascading across her head and face? Where do I go from here?
Whatever Hoth had found at Castelombres – and despite the scepticism of the old Frenchwoman with her basket of mushrooms, Layla felt certain Hoth had found something – it seemed to have disappeared again during the mayhem at the end of the Second World War. If any records had been left as to its whereabouts they hadn't been made public; and although there were still, according to Jean-Michel Dupont, thousands of pages of Nazi files and documents that had yet to be properly examined – tens of thousands of them – it could take months, years even, to dig out the information for which she was looking. If, indeed, the information existed at all, which was by no means certain.
What else? There was the Palestinian kid, the one who had delivered the mysterious letter to her in the first place. She could, she supposed, make more enquiries as to his identity, try to track him down, pick up the trail back to the letter's originator. Or else return to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and talk to Father Sergius again, see if there was something she'd failed to pick up on during their first meeting, some tiny clue as to what it was William de Relincourt had dug up beneath the church's flagstoned floor.
Again, both options seemed futile. Father Sergius had been adamant there was no extant evidence of what de Relincourt had found, while trying to find the Palestinian kid would be like looking for a needle in a haystack. In a field of haystacks. A country full of the damn things. Whichever way she looked at it she seemed to have come to a dead end.
With a despondent sigh she wound the hot tap off and turned the cold one up to full jet, allowing the icy water to lash down across her head and torso. As she did so, something flashed momentarily across the margin of her mind, a half-thought, a memory, something that was in some way relevant to the problem in hand. It was gone almost straight away, like a shooting star that fades as soon as it appears, leaving her with the frustrating sense that she had somehow missed something important, some minute chink of light. She turned off the tap and closed her eyes, trying to follow her train of thought backwards: Palestinian kid, Father Sergius, church, flagstoned floor. The floor, that's what it was. The church's flagstoned floor. Why was that important? What was she trying to recall?
'Yalla,' she mumbled to herself. 'Come on. What am I thinking of? What is it? What?'
For a moment her mind remained a blank, then, very faint, she heard a sound. A clack. A strange echoing clack, as of something tapping on stone. Clack, clack, clack. What the hell was it? A hammer? A chisel? She couldn't pin it down. She opened her eyes, closed them again, forced herself to think of something else, then veered her mind back, as if trying to sneak up on the sound from behind, catch it unawares before it could escape. It worked. Of course! It was the sound of a walking stick, the one belonging to the old Jewish man Father Sergius had pointed out. Every day he comes in, regular as clockwork. Convinced de Relincourt found the Ten Commandments, or the Ark of the Covenant, or King David's sword – I forget which. Some ancient Jewish thing.
At the time she had simply dismissed the man as yet another of the deluded crackpots that seemed to hover around the de Relincourt story like moths round a candle flame. The likelihood was still that this was what he was. After what she had discovered about the Secret of Castelombres, however, and particularly the way it seemed somehow to be bound up with Judaism and Jewish history, a part of her couldn't help wondering whether perhaps the old man might know something that could help her. It was clutching at straws. Given that every other line of enquiry seemed to have petered out, however, straws were just about all she had left. At the very least it was worth following up, even if it did turn out to be nothing, which it almost certainly would.
Stepping from the shower, she grabbed a towel, dried herself and went through into the bedroom, pulling on pants, bra and a shirt before she was interrupted by a sudden loud hammering on the front door.
'Hang on,' she called.
Whoever was outside either didn't hear or else wasn't prepared to wait because the hammering continued, growing heavier and more insistent with each thud, the whole flat seeming to reverberate with the sound of the blows. Annoyed, and suddenly suspicious – the hammering was way too forceful for Fathi the caretaker, or anyone else she knew for that matter – she heaved on a pair of jeans and trainers, grabbed a hand towel with which to dry her still-damp hair and, going to the door, came up on tiptoe and peered through the spyhole drilled into its wooden face.
A huge, broad-shouldered man was standing outside in the gloom of the landing, Israeli, with a craggy, big-nosed face and a Jericho pistol wedged threateningly into the belt of his jeans. For some reason she had an immediate bad feeling about him, a premonition of danger.
'Yes?'
The man froze, one hand raised in the act of knocking, then leant right forward so that his eye swamped the spyhole.
'Jerusalem Police,' he growled. 'Open up.'
Ben-Roi had driven over as soon as he'd got off the phone to Khalifa, covering the distance from the police station to the Nablus Road in fewer than three minutes, in the process shooting two red lights and narrowly avoiding a collision with an elderly Haredi man who had stepped off the pavement without bothering to look for oncoming traffic.
Hoth, Gratz, Schlegel, the fugitive Nazi community – it had been an extraordinary story, fascinating. Disappointing too, in a way, that in the end the Egyptian seemed to have solved the thing alone; that his own input, while filling in a few details, had not in the end proved fundamental to the case's resolution.
Neither fascination nor disappointment were what was firing him now, however, not after what Khalifa had told him right at the end of the conversation, almost as a parting shot: about Layla al-Madani and the letter Hoth had sent her requesting her help in contacting al-Mulatham. Now he was running on adrenalin, the pure, ferocious adrenalin of the fighter who after months of build-up is finally on the point of stepping into the ring to confront a long-awaited opponent.
He'd always known he'd confront her eventually. Or at least he had for the last year, ever since reading that article she'd written. He could offer no clear reason for his obsession with her, no rational explanation as to why she should g
ive him such a bellyache. Sure, if you looked closely, really closely – and he'd been doing little else for the last twelve months – you could pick up hints, vague glitches in the fabric of her life and work, like the interviews she'd done (almost every bomber, for God's sake, almost every fucking bomber!). Nothing overt, however. Nothing conclusive. Nothing, certainly, to warrant the degree of suspicion and hatred she had aroused in him. All he knew was that with that article she'd somehow fixed herself in his mind as the one tangible, human link with the man who had butchered his beloved Galia, and as such he had never doubted for one moment that at some point their paths must eventually cross. That it had happened as a result of this case was unexpected. Or, then again, maybe it wasn't. Maybe it was the reason he had been drawn to the investigation in the first place – a subconscious awareness that it would somehow be the trigger, the thing that finally brought them together. He couldn't say, nor did he really care. All that mattered was that after a year of watching and waiting, of researching, following, fixating and bellyaching, now, finally, the moment had come to meet her face to face, to look into her eyes and see what he could see there.
'Come on,' he repeated, giving the door another heavy crash with his fist. 'Open up.'
'Badge first,' came her voice from the other side.
Muttering, Ben-Roi reached into his pocket and produced his police ID, thrusting it at the spyhole. There was a long pause, a lot longer than was necessary for her to take in the card's details, as though she was deliberately making him wait, emphasizing the fact that she wasn't intimidated by him, before eventually there was the click of a catch and the door swung open.
'Always a pleasure to welcome the Israel National Police,' Layla said, rubbing at her hair with a towel.
She was shorter than he'd expected, slighter, something almost adolescent about the small, tight swell of her breasts, her narrow hips, details you didn't get in the photographs from sitting opposite her apartment night after night looking up at her windows, watching her go in and out. There was a toughness there too, though, a hardness, especially in her emerald-green eyes; the way she stared at him without blinking, unfazed by his size, by the fact that he could have picked her up and swung her round with a single hand.
'Well?' she asked.
He was so absorbed in the minutiae of her appearance that the question didn't immediately register and she had to repeat it.
'Well?'
He shook his head. 'I've got some questions,' he replied, coming forward a step, as if to enter the flat.
She reached a hand across to the door-jamb, blocking his way.
'Not without a warrant you don't. You got a warrant?'
He didn't.
'I can go and get one,' he snarled. 'And when I come back I won't be nearly as friendly.'
She gave a derisive snort. 'I'm fucking trembling. Now, either you show me a warrant, or you ask whatever you've got to ask from right there. And you're going to have to do it quickly. I'm late for an appointment.'
Her manner was calm, assured, contemptuous, and for a brief instant he found himself thinking of his first meeting with Galia, when he had arrested her at the anti-settlement demonstration and been treated with a similar haughty disdain. He grimaced, as if shocked by the analogy, and came forward another half-step so that his body filled the entire door-frame.
'You were sent a letter recently. A letter asking for your help in contacting al-Mulatham.'
She said nothing.
'You know what I'm talking about?'
There was a fractional pause, as though she was weighing up how to answer; then, throwing her towel over her shoulder, she acknowledged that, yes, she had indeed received such a letter.
'And?'
Another pause, another weighing up of the options.
'And nothing. I read it, I tore it up, I binned it. Like I do with all my junk mail.'
Ben-Roi scanned her features, seeking out those small tell-tale clues that she was lying – a tightening of the mouth, a dilation of the pupils, a tremor of sweat. Nothing. Either she was telling the truth or she was better, way better, than anyone he'd ever encountered before.
'I don't believe you,' he said, testing her.
Layla laughed, her eyes never leaving his. 'I don't give a fuck what you believe. I got the letter, I read it, I threw it away. And before you ask, no, it's not still in my bin. Athough I'm sure if you go down to the municipal dump it should only take you a couple of weeks to find it.'
He clenched his fists, trying to resist the urge to lash out at her.
'What did it say, this letter?'
'It seems you already know,' she replied.
'What did it say exactly?'
She crossed her arms and sighed, like a teacher dealing with a backward pupil.
'Exactly I couldn't tell you, given that I didn't bother memorizing it. "I'm trying to get in touch with al-Mulatham, I think you can help me, I'll pay you whatever you want" – something along those lines. Bullshit, basically. I only skimmed it. If you want the full version you'll have to get in touch with your mates in Shin Bet. I presume it was them who sent it in the first place.'
Again, even though his eyes were boring into her, his ears straining, he failed to pick up the least hint that he was being lied to, the faintest shimmer of dissemblance in either her features or her voice. Which was unsettling, because every instinct in his body told him that he was being lied to, she was dissembling, so that either his instincts were all wrong, his radar irredeemably scrambled, or else she was possessed of a level of self-control that was almost superhuman in its impermeability. Only in her eyes, way down, was there a rumour of something other than what she was openly expressing, a sort of faint cloudiness, like silt disturbed deep underwater. Whether it reflected mendacity or some wholly different aspect of her psyche, however, he couldn't say. Maybe it was just a trick of the light.
'Did it mention a weapon, this letter?' he pushed. 'Something that could be used to damage the state of Israel?'
Not that she remembered, she replied. If it had, maybe she would have taken more notice of it.
'Does the name Dieter Hoth mean anything to you?'
Nope.
'Piet Jansen?'
Same response.
'I have heard of David Beckham, if that's any help.'
And so it went on, Ben-Roi firing questions at her, Layla batting them back with sneering, scornful disdain, until eventually he ran out of things to ask and fell silent.
'Is that it?' she asked, placing her hands on her hips and staring up at him. 'Because, much as I'm enjoying myself, I have got things to do.'
Behind her, the phone started ringing.
'Is that it?' she repeated.
He glared down at her, fists clenched, aware that whatever he had been expecting to get from the meeting, whatever revelation he had been hoping to prise from her, it hadn't happened. She'd won. This round, at least.
'For the moment,' he replied.
'Well, you know where I am. Like I said, it's always a pleasure to welcome the Israel National Police.'
She nodded at him, indicating that he should step backwards out of the doorway, and started to close the door. When it was half-shut she leant round and looked up at him through the gap, the phone still ringing behind her.
'Just for the record, I have absolutely no fucking idea who al-Mulatham is, where he is, or how to find him. I'm sure it won't stop you coming round and hassling me, but I thought I'd mention it anyway, just on the off chance it finally sinks in.'
In the study, the answerphone clicked on, her tinny, recorded voice echoing through the flat: 'I can't come to the phone right now. Leave a message and I'll get back to you.'
'And on a personal note,' she added, 'I've no idea what that aftershave you're wearing is, but it stinks. You should try another brand.'
Ben-Roi's eyes narrowed. Behind her, there was a loud beep and another voice drifted out into the hallway, deep, gravelly.
'Layla! Magnus T
opping. Just thought I'd give a quick call to see if you got back all right, tell you . . . um . . . well, what a pleasure it was to meet you. Also, something I forgot to mention while you were here, an interesting fact for that article you're doing. Apparently that German archaeologist, the one who was digging at Castelombres, Dieter Hoth – he had webbed feet. Thought you might like that, little bit of colour. Anyway, give me a call if you like. All the best.'
Another beep, then silence.
Layla stared up at Ben-Roi, Ben-Roi stared down at Layla. There was a fractional pause, then, with a growl, the Israeli flung out a hand to push his way into the flat. She was too quick for him. The door slammed shut in his face; there was a click of locks and the muffled patter of running feet.
'You lying bitch!' he cried.
He snatched his Jericho from his belt and, taking a step back, charged. The door held firm. He tried again, giving himself a longer run-up. There was a cracking sound, but still the door held.
