Olives

by Alexander McNabb

  ‘Hi. Are you okay?’ I asked.

  Her voice sounded uneven. ‘Umm, I’ve been better. You saw the news about Jericho?’

  ‘Yes.’ I’m wondering whether you helped to do it, actually, Aish. ‘Yes, I did.’

  She took a deep breath before the words tumbled out of her. ‘I’ve taken today off. My cousin was killed in the bomb. He died in hospital this morning. I’ve known him all my life. I went to school with him. They tried to save him but he was terribly wounded. They said he screamed all through the night. Nancy’s gone there.’

  My voice came to me as if it were someone else’s as my hand tightened on the handset. ‘Nancy? He was Ibrahim’s son?’

  Aisha stammered. ‘No, no. Nancy’s nephew. He worked for Ibrahim. His name was Rashid. Look, Paul, I’m not too good right now. Could we maybe talk later?’

  ‘Yes, sure. I’m sorry, Aish. Please tell them I’m sorry.’ I didn’t have the words to deal with the situation and hated that a platitude came so readily to my rescue. ‘I’ll call you later on.’

  ‘Okay.’ She drew a deep breath. ‘Thanks.’

  Leaning against the warm window frame and looking out over the rooftops, I felt like a shit for letting my imagination run away with me, for thinking she could help to do something like that. Growing up, I had always wanted to be there, to be one of the men standing by the carnage and flames, reporting back to the world. I had made heroes of the ‘greats,’ the Simpsons and Adies, the Woodwards and Bernsteins. Now events were closer to home, I began to realise how deep the wounds cut – not just there and then, not just at the event itself, but into the people around who have to live without those they have lost.

  I tried to do some work, but eventually I left the Ministry building early, saying I had an interview. I didn’t drive straight home, but parked up near the market, the old town area of East Amman, walking down through the streets and losing myself in the choking traffic and the flows of people in the grimy streets. I leaned against a rough stone wall and watched the groups of men selling tired-looking birds in plastic cages. For the first time since I’d moved in to my own home, I felt like an utter stranger in this ancient oriental city, remembering the sick feeling of alienation that gripped me as I first looked out of my hotel window across Amman, the morning after Aisha and Ibrahim had got me out of jail.

  Aisha’s news about her cousin made Jericho real in a way news reports somehow never were, forcing me to confront a new relevance, a new immediacy where I would normally have been cushioned by the distance between the viewer and the events being broadcast around the world. Now I was, literally, in the picture, an actor in the tragedy, one of the constant stream that flickers past us, our screens refreshing fifty times a second and touching, yet never actually embracing, each new unfolding event.

  A balding man selling canaries called out to me, ‘Salaam y’sidi.’

  Startled, I could only grin stupidly and mumble back at him. His smile died and he turned back to the children in front of him. As I shambled away, the man pulled the cage open for one of the children handing over a coin.

  I walked into the kitchen. Lynch called on my mobile.

  ‘You got any plans for the weekend, Paul?’

  For some reason the sound of his Northern Irish voice made the hairs stand up on my neck. ‘No.’

  ‘Good. Let’s meet up for a chat. Tomorrow morning, say eleven at the Citadel? You know the Citadel, right?’

  ‘Why should I meet you?’

  ‘That bomb in Jericho. Very nasty. They traced the explosives back across to Jordan, you know. Smuggled over the border, so an’ they were. The Israelis are making quite the fuss about it, in a diplomatic sort of way you understand. You might find you need a friend or two in the weeks ahead. You know, what with court cases, bombings and all that. You seem to enjoy a, how should I put it, a colourful life.’

  I brought my racing mind under enough control to speak without stammering. ‘What’s Jericho got to do with me?’ But I was speaking to a dial tone.

  Jericho, the biblical city across the River Jordan. I’d stood on the banks of the river with beautiful Aisha, the daddy’s girl who had lost her baba to the Israelis and whose brother had blown himself up on a bus full of children.

  The girl unworried by her bag disappearing from a locked car in a remote place near Jericho, separated from Israel by a few feet of brackish water.

  EIGHT

  I took a shower, made myself a large orange juice and soda then sat in the living room watching the news. Jericho was yesterday’s bomb and there was only a small piece on Jordan TV confirming one of the wounded Israelis had died in hospital.

  I opened my laptop, shifting the empty whisky bottle and glass out of the way. I didn’t have a great deal of time before my impending encounter with Lynch and the nausea rolled over me in slow waves, making it hard to focus. I searched for the Dajanis, Daoud, Ibrahim and the names of the people I knew of at the Ministry. I sketched out likely connections on some sheets of paper, searched for those and connected some more. I looked up whois records for the owners of websites, scanned the scant news reports on the Dajani scandal and the extensive news coverage of the Jericho bomb. I searched blogs, forums and business databases. Close to three o’clock, I’d sketched a patchy map of the relationships I’d encountered, trying to tie them together into what I knew of the family into some sort of tree.

  Aisha’s brother, Daoud, was a powerful man but his Uncle Ibrahim was more powerful by far. I understood why Aisha had brought him along to spring me out of chokey. Ibrahim Dajani had clout. I could only find hints of the whole: Arabs are strangers to the word transparency. Whatever I could dig up on the Dajani family’s business interests on the Web would only be the tip of the iceberg. Still, I found a string of companies across the Arab World, a network of relationships stretching back decades.

  A complicated web of ownerships and investments span out from a central holding company, Jerusalem Holdings. Aisha’s father, Emad, had founded the whole empire and his name came up in connection with Arafat’s people, from Kuwait through to mentions of him in Lebanon during the seventies. His death brought a stop to the thread, killed in an Israeli rocket attack on a house in Gaza five years back. The target of the attack, according to the Israeli press, had been a big Hamas man called Mohammed Eftekhari. Nobody in the little house in Gaza had survived the rockets, which had killed twelve people in all, three of them children.

  I sat back, trying not to think of the nagging question.

  Who is Aisha?

  Lynch picked me up when I walked into the Citadel, Amman’s central hill topped with the ruins of ancient civilisations and one of its big tourist attractions. The guide hassling me to take a tour melted away when Lynch appeared. The Irishman strolled casually beside me as if he’d been there all along.

  We walked up the hill until it flattened out onto the top of the Citadel, stopping by the Roman columns that overlook East Amman in its blue, hilly haze. The Roman amphitheatre was below us, the colourful shops and tenements of the Eastern city spread out crazily around it, stretching up into the hills beyond.

  We stood together in the warm breeze. Lynch lit a cigarette. ‘You been here before?’

  ‘No. Never got around to it.’

  He puffed out smoke. ‘They’ve done a good job here. They excavated it in layers, preserving the best of each age. Roman, Byzantine, Muslim. It’s all here. Thousands of years of history on a single hilltop.’

  ‘Can we get down to brass tacks?’

  Lynch turned to me, his eyebrow raised. ‘Sure, Paul. I’m just after some information in return for helping you out with this court case you’ve landed for yourself. Simple as that.’

  ‘Bollocks, Gerry. You’re beyond information. You’re playing War Against Terror with all the other little spies and I really don’t want to get involved with any of you, if that’s all the same to you, thank you.’

  I wanted him to react, to try to defend himself, but Lynch wasn�
�t going to give me the pleasure. His accent seemed stronger, an image of the murals on the Falls Road popping incongruously into my mind as he faced me. ‘That’s Gerald, if you don’t mind, Paul. I’ve been twenty years getting away from Gerry Lynch.’

  I scanned his angry countenance, surprised by his violence. ‘Um, okay. But it doesn’t change the fact. I don’t want to play your games.’

  Lynch talked to the Citadel. ‘You know, I had a hunch that you’d meet up with Daoud Dajani. You’ve been spending a lot of time with his sister. He’d want to meet you. Have you met him?’

  ‘Yes. Why do you ask?’

  ‘He likes to be in control, does Daoud. He’s not a very nice young man, you know.’

  ‘No, I don’t. I’ve only met him once.’

  ‘Did he ask you to do anything for him? Carry anything, talk to anyone?’

  ‘No. Why would he?’

  ‘Oh, no reason, just wondering.’

  Carry anything? Like a bag to the border area near Jericho? No, officer. I packed it myself.

  Lynch’s face was screwed up against the sunlight, his shabby jeans and brown corduroy jacket seemed designed to let him blend in with the crowds in the city’s streets. He strode off again and I followed him.

  ‘Look, I know Daoud Dajani’s got form, that he was in trouble last year because of his brother,’ I said, my hands in my pockets. ‘I know his father was involved with Arafat and even Fatah, and he was helping to fund Arafat in Kuwait, okay? But so are a lot of business people in the Middle East, particularly Palestinian ones. You going somewhere with this or are you just fishing around?’

  Lynch stopped walking and looked at me, blinking. A palpable hit. Oh, thank God for the Internet. ‘How did you know about all that?’

  ‘Aisha told me.’ Which wasn’t true, but I certainly planned on giving her the chance. ‘So what’s your interest, MrLynch from the commercial section?’

  ‘Like I said, just interest.’

  ‘Gerry, don’t fuck around. Can you help me or not? And if you can, what do you want from me?’

  Lynch smiled at me. ‘I told you before, it’s Gerald. I won’t tell you again. You could use a rethink about your attitude towards authority. You’re due in court to answer a serious charge against you of assaulting a police officer and pissing me off will just make things a great deal worse. I’m not going to argue with you about what I do or don’t do. Take it or leave it. Just don’t dress me up as something fancier than I am. I know you hacks, you’ve got overactive imaginations. But I thought we could share information, you and I. You’ve got access to the Jordanian government, you’re working within the infrastructure. We’d like to share some of the inside track. Particularly on the water privatisations. There’s hundreds of millions of pounds at stake, some key British companies are involved and it’s a strategic play for us. You’ve met Clive Saunders, you know Anglo-Jordanian are going for the water. It’s in our interest to help them out in any way we can.’ Lynch turned and looked at me, his eyes glittering in the sunlight. ‘Legally, of course. Always legally. So there are my cards, Paul. There they are, right there on the table.’

  I sulked. ‘I’m flattered by your interest in me.’

  Lynch paused by a huge stone-lined hole in the ground, a hundred feet across. Steps curled around the inside wall of it down to a layer of green water in the bottom. A pillar of cylindrically cut stones rose in the middle.

  ‘This is a Roman cistern,’ he said. ‘One of their reservoirs. Clever chaps, really.’

  I looked down into the hole, my eyes following the steps down, a little thrill of vertigo ran through me, reminding me of the day I had looked out over Amman from the hotel window. It seemed like months ago.

  Lynch kicked a stone over the edge. ‘You want to be careful of Dajani, you know. We don’t know for sure he was behind Jericho, but we do know he was involved, and both his father and brother were involved with people we would rather not see wandering around the streets of Tel Aviv, let alone London or New York. We’ve got a hunch he might be funding more of the same. The family likes to fund things. Daddy used to fund things, like you said. But Daoud’s bigger. He’s got enough money and enough legitimate business interests to stay moving around between places that we’d rather he wasn’t mixed up with, to be honest. And now they’ve lost another one of the family, a cousin of Daoud and Aisha’s. He died at Jericho, but not in the blast.’

  Aisha’s hesitant voice on the telephone came back to me. The boy who had screamed through the night from his injuries before finally welcoming the cool, dark relief of death. Aisha taking huge gulps of air as she talked through her grief.

  Lynch stared at me, his face expressionless. ‘The Israelis shot the kid. That’s been kept out of the news. They don’t seem to be able to remember quite why or how they shot him, so we can’t quite link him to the bomb. It just happened in the confusion. We’re keeping an eye out, though. I’m not a great believer in coincidence. You could help us to keep an eye out, too. I’m not asking you to do anything more than have the occasional chat over a drink, to keep your eyes open. It’ll be kept confidential. Like you journalists, we’re always looking for a second source, for corroboration. And I’m not asking you to carry a micro-camera or a Walther PPK around with you, it’s just low level fill-in stuff. Really. Local colour, call it.’

  ‘So you want me to spy on Daoud Dajani for you. This isn’t about the Ministry at all.’

  ‘Daoud Dajani’s a worry. He’s seen as something of a visionary here, you know. Moneyed Arab visionaries are trouble. Look at Osama Bin Ladin. God rest the poor bastard.’ Lynch bent down and picked up a stone before flinging it into the cistern where it clicked and skittered off the downward leading stone staircase into the empty depths. ‘We’ve had research requests from the Israelis about Daoud. They’ve got something on him, but they’re not sharing. It’d be nice to know quite what he’s up to, Paul. That’s all. Is he just commercial or is he playing a bigger, nastier game? We’d love to find out but we can’t get close enough. Now if you could let me know you’d be up for helping us out, just by keeping on your toes, so to say, it would be very much in my interest to keep you out of the slammer, wouldn’t it?’

  Lynch raised his finger as he faced me, the violence in him making me step back. He may well have been too fond of the sauce, but I didn’t want to get into a tussle with Gerald Lynch. ‘The water and Daoud. You’re close to two things sitting in my little file of unfinished business, Paul. It’s in my interest to help you. If you’ll help me.’

  My mouth was open to reply, but Lynch was on the move again, his hands in his jacket pockets as he struck out ill-naturedly through the ruins. He stopped by an excavated area, a low wall around a foot high, the size of my living room at the house. There were bits and pieces of mosaic tiling poking through the hard, dry earth.

  ‘So. You going to play, Paul?’

  ‘If you can help me with the court case, I don’t see I have much choice.’

  Lynch smiled. ‘Right. Sensible. Good man.’

  He nodded towards the mosaic, his hands in his pockets.

  ‘This is Byzantine, by the way. Dates back to the dawn of Christianity. There’s an older one at Madaba and another at Nebo. The Madaba church contains the oldest surviving mosaic map of the Holy Land. It points to the place where Lot escaped to and holed up with his daughters, a cave above the Dead Sea. The girls conceived their father’s incestuous children there.’

  The depth of his knowledge surprised me. I hadn’t expected sensitivity from the man, let alone lectures on theological history. Lynch kicked a stone into the entrance of the excavated outline of the church and it smacked off the low back wall and clattered along the mosaic floor.

  He pulled a sour face. ‘Bunch of dirty fuckers, if you ask me.’

  NINE

  Aisha invited me to dinner with friends from her salsa group. I had already refused at least three invitations to go along to their dance classes, much to her amusement. We agr
eed to meet up at my place before joining the rest at a trendy bar in the posh Abdoun area. The weather was cooling fast, so I lit the old stove in the kitchen.

  She arrived wearing a fur-lined coat over a light brown knitted wool dress, which clung to her down to just above her knees. She draped the coat over a kitchen chair. Turning, she caught me looking at her and smiled. I felt myself colouring.

  ‘Sorry if it’s too warm,’ I stammered. ‘Lars showed me how to use the stove. I thought it was just decorative but it’s turned out to be a secret Jordanian blast furnace.’

  Aisha laughed, holding her hands out in front of the roaring glass-fronted stove.

  ‘Red okay with you?’

  Her bangles jingled as she nodded. ‘Perfect. Thanks.’

  I poured a glass of wine for us both before sitting, picking a chair opposite her at the table. I needed a barrier.

  I took a deep breath and plunged in. ‘Aisha, I wanted to talk to you.’

  Her smile died, her eyes flickering between mine, trying to read my face. ‘Sure. What’s up? Is it about the court case?’

  I hesitated, unsure how I was going to approach this, but knowing I had to face it for my own peace of mind. The meeting with Lynch had shaken me and I’d spent the rest of the day worrying about Aisha and her family’s connections. She had become a central part of my life in Jordan and I had been a little shocked when it hit me Aisha was creeping into my thoughts more than Anne.

  Some heavy clicking on Amazon over the past few weeks had resulted in a growing collection of books of Middle East history, helping me to learn enough to appreciate I would never truly learn enough. Aisha’s history, her very self, formed part of the larger picture, shaped by it and somehow completing it. I could no longer escape the fact that I had to find some way of reconciling her story with the things I was hearing about her family.

  I sipped some wine and watched her. Long, dark hair with highlights she’d had put in at the weekend, brown eyes fixed on mine, her brow creased and the last remnants of a smile dying on her full lips.