As the once familiar slight figure of his brother came through the courtyard door, Salem Chakrouty gave the traditional greeting: ‘Kassim, my brother, welcome to our house.’
The two men embraced: Salem tall, well built and outgoing despite a gaunt sadness that hung around him like a cloak, and Kassim, the shorter, thin-faced younger brother, who before the war had been a studious introvert. He was dressed now in nondescript battle fatigues, a windproof para’s smock thrown over the top against the cold. Above his left shoulder showed the butt of a Soviet assault rifle slung upside down on his back. A Czech-made Makarov 9 mm automatic pistol was in a holster on his belt, with the flap cut away for a quick draw. The smile of greeting did not stay long on his face. As they ended their embrace with the ritual kiss on both cheeks, Salem asked himself: Is this hard, angry man my beloved younger brother or is it a stranger who bears his name?
Kassim turned to the two companions who had followed him into the courtyard, each holding a Kalashnikov AK 47 at the ready.
‘It is well,’ he said to them. ‘Go now. Be back in one hour.’
They departed with a roar of exhaust from their jeep.
There was an awkwardness between the two brothers, alone for the first time in years. Salem asked about mutual friends, receiving answers in monosyllables. He led his brother to the grille and pointed at the lights of Beirut twinkling below. There were gaps – dark areas where no buildings stood any longer – but the city was nearly back to normal after a decade and a half of civil war, with services like running water and electricity available for several hours each day.
‘Look at the city,’ he said, pointing. ‘It lives again, despite everything. You see? The war is over at last.’
‘For you, perhaps,’ said Kassim coldly. ‘For me, the fighting continues until we have driven all the godless foreigners from our land.’
‘There is no point in continuing the struggle,’ Salem disagreed.
‘How can you say that?’ Kassim’s voice was harsh, accusing: ‘You of all people, who have lost your mother, your father, your wife, your children, your home, your business …’
‘They are gone.’ Salem wanted to convince, not argue. ‘Killing more people will not bring back those already dead.’
‘But you can avenge the dead, like a man should,’ Kassim sneered. ‘That would surely be more fitting than crawling on your belly to everyone you know, begging for loans.’
‘Ah,’ Salem sighed. ‘So you have heard I am trying to restart some kind of business?’
‘Business?’ Kassim sneered. ‘How can you worry about making money when the south of our country is a tributary of Israel, the north is controlled by Syria, and the city down there is a whorehouse where two-legged pigs snuffle in the filth and grovel for scraps.’
‘Stop!’ Salem shouted. ‘This is our father’s house. I forbid such talk here, from you of all people, whose friends have become the biggest drug dealers in the entire world, a man who chooses to live in the Beka’a Valley where nothing grows but hashish plants and fields of opium poppies.’
‘So?’ Kassim taunted him. ‘Do you think that you city people without pride or religion or moral values are superior to us? You know that it is not for ourselves we grow the drugs. It is to finance the Islamic revolution and at the same time to destroy the decadent nations who crave cheap illusion.’
The years of savage internecine fighting had affected men differently, Salem thought. There were those like him who had survived each torment, praying for the war to end. They now rejoiced in each day without gunfire and murder. They were the people whose lights burned in the city below where they were trying to rebuild their shattered lives. But there were also many like Kassim, who had killed his first man, a Christian Falangist sniper, before his fifteenth birthday. Those men had survived the war physically but were now able to live only by a savage creed of primitive violence. Perhaps, Salem reflected, they were the real casualties, those who had changed so much during the fighting that they could not end the war within themselves.
For a moment the two brothers stood face to face in the darkness, neither giving way. Then Salem stooped and lit a portable gas lamp he had brought with him. It hissed and spread a warm yellow glow around the courtyard. Kassim looked at the once-familiar scene. His brother had made an attempt to clean the courtyard. The filth of years had been swept into one corner and a new padlock gleamed on the hasp of the bullet-damaged door.
Salem took food from a vacuum container: tabouleh and some cold meats. There was a bottle of wine for himself which had been made sixteen years earlier from the last grapes to be harvested in the Chakrouty vineyards before the war began in 1975. For his brother, there was a bottle of water.
‘Let us eat,’ he said.
They sat on the broken coping of the basin around the fountain and shared a meal together for the first time in years. The silence was broken by odd remarks that strangers might have exchanged. When they had finished, Salem’s foot scraped away the leaves he had left covering the blue and white tile.
‘I need your help,’ he said.
‘I am your brother,’ said Kassim coldly. ‘What you need, I must give you. That is written. So tell me what you want. But hurry, for I have not long.’
Salem looked up. By the light of the gas lamp, his brother’s eyes glittered in the thin, bearded face.
‘I shall be brief,’ he said. ‘Our father – may peace be on his soul – left us a legacy to share.’ He placed the lamp on the ground beside the tile and prayed that the message fired into its glazed surface might have enough meaning to save his brother’s life. ‘This is an heirloom, handed for forty generations from father to eldest son, as our father handed it to me. When our family travelled from country to country over the centuries, the tile came with us. It was our grandfather who placed it here when he bought this house to keep his favourite mistress in.’
‘He was a fornicator,’ said Kassim shortly.
Salem thought of the anonymous mound beneath which his father lay. Forgive this lie, he prayed, clearing his throat. ‘Our father charged me to share with you the knowledge of this tile which is our legacy.’
What the old man had said, was: ‘On no account tell Kassim, or all is lost.’
But my duty to the living is greater than to the dead, Salem excused himself mentally. Aloud, he continued, ‘This tile was made by our ancestor, Yussef el-Kebir, who was a great thinker, able to foresee the future.’
‘That is an abomination!’ snapped Kassim.
‘I did not say he was a magician.’ Salem kept his voice calm. ‘Only that he could see the future. And if indeed he could do so, it must have been God’s will, my brother. In any event, our ancestor made provision for his descendants in a time of need, which is an honourable thing, is it not?’
‘Do you believe all this?’
‘There is a great treasure, so our father said, to which Yussef el-Kebir left the clues in the writing on this tile.’
Kassim laughed. ‘What does it say?’
‘I cannot read it,’ Salem confessed. ‘To me, it looks like a prayer. Certainly the script is very ancient. I thought that you who were religious in your youth would be able to decipher it better than I.’
Kassim knelt and gazed at the tile. His finger traced the curving lines of calligraphy in blue on the white background. ‘It is no prayer,’ he said. ‘The name of God is not mentioned once. It is the work of a blasphemer.’
‘But can you read it?’
‘Yes,’ Kassim admitted grudgingly.
Hearing the noise of the jeep’s exhaust returning, Salem pleaded urgently, ‘Read it to me.’
When Kassim had finished, he sat back on his heels. ‘A fairy story,’ he said dismissively. ‘A pack of nonsense.’
‘No.’ Salem caught his brother’s sleeve to prevent him leaving. ‘Father said it was all true.’ He tapped the tile between them. ‘He said that this writing, if we can understand its message, will lead us to a great fortune
which is ours by right and which we may now claim to rebuild our shattered fortunes.’
Kassim stood as the jeep returned, stopping outside the ruined house with a squeal of brakes. ‘Our father was an old man, senile and babbling,’ he said. ‘Now I must go.’
‘Shall we meet again?’ asked Salem. It seemed his plan had failed.
‘Insh’allah,’ grunted Kassim. If God wills it. He seemed not to care either way.
*
Next day Salem parked his battered and bullet-scarred black Mercedes outside the old house in Tel el-Sultan. From the back seat he took a bundle of clothing and climbed over the rubble towards the house. He was half-expecting that his brother would not come to the rendezvous. The mysterious message which had reached him at dawn seemed a complete about-face, which was not in character for Kassim, whose stubbornness had been a family joke since he was a toddler.
Salem felt a great surge of hope when he saw his brother standing outside the old house, waiting for him. He was still dressed in the clothing of a Shi’ite militiaman but for the first time in years he carried no weapons. Kassim shifted uneasily as Salem approached. He felt naked without a Kalashnikov slung over his shoulder and another weapon in his belt.
As they embraced, the older man caught a flash of what looked like anger in his brother’s eyes. He dismissed it from his mind. The only thing that mattered to him was that Kassim had come. He pulled back and studied his brother’s face.
Kassim lowered his eyes. ‘These are the clothes you found for me?’
‘I hope they fit.’ Salem felt apologetic for the shabby clothes he had brought for a man who had once worn Savile Row suits. ‘But you are so thin that none of mine would do.’
Kassim stripped and threw his militia clothing in a pile behind the fountain. Salem noted the scars on chest and belly where bullets had tom his brother’s flesh and the shiny burn patch as big as two outstretched hands that covered one shoulder. What about the wounds inside? he wondered. How deep do they go?
When Kassim was dressed, he said, ‘Read to me what it says on the tile, as I used to read to you when you were a child.’
Kassim’s shoulders relaxed.
It was going to work out, thought Salem. The tile was his legacy. If he used it to bring his brother back to life, that was his business.
‘Destroyed by fire is house and home …’ Kassim read slowly.
‘Go on,’ prompted Salem.
Kassim speeded up: ‘My sons with weapon in hand shall roam, The olive bears no fruit; the fig tree dies, When all is lost …’
‘You see?’ Salem let his excitement show in his voice. ‘This tile, made centuries ago, foretells exactly what has happened to us.’
‘Perhaps,’ muttered Kassim. After a pause he continued reading the old script: ‘When all is lost, then shall arise, My sons … to wrest from the brood of Ali Anor, What was my due so long before.’ He sat back on his heels.
‘Read on,’ urged Salem.
‘There’s a part here which is damaged,’ said Kassim. ‘I can’t make it out. Something about a vale of muses, I think.’
Salem smiled sadly. ‘Today there is no such place in Lebanon.’
Kassim stared at the tile, trying to fill in the missing curves. The calligraphy was so stylised that it was not hard to follow the lines of his ancestor’s brush strokes. He moved his right hand, holding an imaginary brush and mouthing the words. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘something is missing completely, my brother. But here I can make out something about a secret fortress of the Cross.’
‘… which in the twelfth century would mean a Crusader castle, like Krak des Chevaliers or Beaufort Castle,’ Salem guessed. ‘So perhaps the treasure is hidden in a castle?’
‘There is one more line.’ Kassim squinted at the cracked surface of the tile. ‘It looks as though this fortress of the Cross is in the land of the setting sun.’
‘Which was the old Moorish name for the kingdom of Granada in southern Spain. Is there nothing else?’
‘No more that is legible.’
‘Then who is or was Ali Anor?’ Salem wondered aloud. ‘Ali, yes. But Anor? What kind of name is that? It’s not Arabic.’
Kassim stood up and brushed the dust off his knees. He looked through the grille at the city below. From this distance, the war damage was not apparent. For a moment he recalled the atmosphere of childhood summer holidays spent in this cool old house looking down at the stifling city and the blue Mediterranean beyond.
‘Will you come with me to Spain?’ asked Salem softly behind him. ‘Will you come with me to find this legacy of ours so we may rebuild our family fortunes?’
Chapter 3
Jay listened to her own voice on the answering machine and used the remote in her hand to activate the replay of recorded messages. Voices of friends were asking how she was. It was hard for a freelance musician like her, to whom the telephone was a professional umbilical cord, not to note down their numbers and call back immediately. She felt a delicious thrill that she had had the courage to cut herself off from the world for a whole week. Nobody apart from her parents knew where she was.
Outside the medieval cottage where her father planned to retire, the Dordogne sky was far from being the cloudless blue that tourists sought in summer. It was raining, with heavy black clouds racing in from the Atlantic coast only fifty miles away. She found an old anorak of her father’s, put it on and busied herself getting some warmth into the ancient stone walls and tiled floors with the help of a few mobile bottled-gas heaters. There was an unopened bottle of still mineral water among the mouse droppings in the pantry. She heated some of its contents to make herself a cup of instant coffee, wondering if her impulse to come to St Denis in the middle of winter had been a mistake.
Time I got a grip on myself, she thought. Shopping is always fun in France. There’s just time to buy some food in the village before the shops close.
She backed her brand-new red Renault Alpine carefully out of the barn and into the muddy driveway, avoiding the worst of the ruts. There was a break in the clouds as she was crossing the bridge over the Dordogne. The sun burst through and illuminated the little village of St Denis huddled beneath a ruined tower which had been a Templar outpost when medieval pilgrims forded the river there on their way to Santiago de Compostela, long before the bridge was built. The twisted streets of timbered houses leaning towards each other, the tiled roofs and ridges meeting at crazy angles, were all suddenly ablaze with sunlight reflected off wet tiles and stone. The river sparkled below the wide quay where the barrels of wine had been stacked for loading onto barges for shipment down river to the sea. The light bouncing off the wet cobbles of the quay itself made an oblique slash of dazzling brightness.
Jay stopped her car to enjoy the view; in a minute the clouds would close up and it would be lost. There was a couple walking along the tow-path a quarter of a mile away. Even at that distance Jay recognised the woman. She got out of the car and called, ‘Leila!’
The woman looked up in Jay’s direction, blinded by the sunlight. Leaving the engine running, Jay scrambled down the wet grass of the embankment and ran to meet her only close friend outside the world of music. The other woman ran too so that they collided halfway and swung each other round, laughing with pleasure.
With her mass of dark curly hair, olive complexion, deep brown eyes and curvaceous figure, Leila Dor was often taken for an Egyptian but was a pied noir – a French citizen who had been born in Algiers, fled her troubled homeland in 1962 and then tried living in many countries before settling in the Dordogne. She was dressed as usual in vibrantly colourful clothes: a hand-painted anorak and paint-spattered jeans above red-and-yellow shoes.
She hugged Jay excitedly and called to her companion who was walking towards them along the river bank, ‘What a wonderful surprise! Merl, come and meet my best girlfriend in the whole world.’
She hugged Jay again, scolding her. ‘You should have told me you were coming, I’d have opened your house u
p and got some fires going.’
Leila’s stream of words poured out in all directions. ‘On second thoughts,’ she contradicted herself, ‘I’m glad you didn’t ring. A surprise is better.’
Her throaty accent which mixed Bab el-Oued, Brooklyn and Birmingham was only partly due to two packets of Gauloises a day. She coughed and blamed it on the weather. ‘Everyone in St Denis has la grippe, you’ll see. When did you get here?’
‘An hour ago,’ answered Jay. ‘I was just going into the village to buy some provisions and then give you a call to see if you were free for dinner tonight.’
‘Well, I would be,’ Leila drawled. ‘But you’re the second surprise visitor I’ve had today. Jay, this is Merlin Freeman, an American buddy of mine from way back – Greenwich Village, all that swinging scene, you know? And Merlin, meet an English friend: Jay French. Jay is a musician, a very good one too. She plays the flute.’
The man, who had been staring at Jay, turned on an easy smile and stretched out a hand to shake hers.
‘I know you,’ she blurted, taking in the tanned face, sexy brown eyes and dark, curly hair. From his looks, he could have been a relative of Leila’s.
Merlin’s shirt was open at the neck despite the cool wind, and his anorak was not zipped up. He stood just under six feet tall and had the easy stance of a man in good physical condition. There was something vaguely military about his bearing.
He grinned, showing perfect teeth, and shook his head: ‘I don’t think we’ve met. Music’s not my scene at all. I’m the type of ignoramus that thinks serial music is what you hear on a cornflake commercial.’
Jay stepped back. The sunlight bouncing off the river lit the scene like a floodlight. Her eyes searched Merlin’s face. ‘But I do know you,’ she insisted. ‘I know we’ve met.’
The Spirit and the Flesh Page 5
