Pillars of Solomon - [Kamal & Barnea 02]

by By Jon Land

  For security reasons, no packages are ever left at a house unattended in Israel. This leads to tremendous backlogs at all parcel services, necessitating separate windows just for pickup at most outlets. Even then the lines are often long, and around Hanukkah season, virtually unbearable.

  But the line was relatively short today and Danielle had to wait only a few minutes to hand over her slips in exchange for three parcels. One was from a catalog company she had forgotten placing an order with. Another was a return of a package of Israeli oranges to an aunt in the United States on which she had failed to put the proper form. The oranges were surely spoiled by now.

  Danielle could not identify the third and smallest parcel at first glance at all. It was a ten-by-fourteen-inch padded mailing envelope. The return address was blurred, perhaps purposefully, and Danielle flirted with the notion of asking that the package be run through the security station a second time.

  But the line had gotten longer and on a whim she simply yanked the tab on the padded envelope’s reverse side and pulled out its contents: a trio of thick, matching notebooks bound in leather, six by nine inches in size. The leather was dry and cracked, faded from its original brown to a kind of distressed tan. It felt rough to the touch, though it still smelled of hide.

  Standing near a wall in the post office, Danielle left her other two boxes on the floor and opened the notebook labeled on the cover with the roman numeral I.

  Her knees wobbled. She felt a little faint.

  The first page had yellowed with age around the edges, but the title was printed in bold, beautifully etched letters:

  My Story

  The name of the author was scrawled beneath it, the sloping letters perfectly centered and safe from the yellow:

  Hyram Levy

  Danielle leaned back against the wall, turned the page with a trembling hand, and began to read.

  * * * *

  CHAPTER 60

  I

  t was after nightfall before Mathilde Faustin and Ben saw anything at all.

  Faustin had motored their craft into an empty berth squeezed amid dozens of others their size in the port of Athens. She paid a harbormaster an exorbitant fee in cash and spoke briefly before the man walked away without giving her a second glance.

  “He says the Lucretia Maru is a regular visitor to this harbor,” she told Ben. “Never stays more than one night. That means we can expect some activity before dawn.”

  By ten o’clock, traffic in the harbor had all but died out. Ben and Mathilde Faustin had left their boat and found cover upon a dry-docked cabin cruiser with a stripped-down cabin. They sat beneath the cover of the gunwale with their backs resting against the starboard side in full view of the Lucretia Maru. Ben’s head had started to pound again and he wondered if the ghost of Zaid Jabral was serious about having left him for good.

  “Why don’t you close your eyes, get some sleep,” Faustin suggested. “I’ll wake you if something happens.”

  But he awakened on his own untold minutes later to find her sitting straight up, the ridges of her spine protruding through her sweater. The night had gone cold and he realized he was shivering.

  “Look,” was all Faustin said.

  Ben’s eyes followed hers to the head of the pier, where a trio of men were escorting a number of small, shabbily clothed figures along a dock. He snapped to attention, waited for his eyes to focus.

  The figures all looked to be young boys, some no more than nine or ten, others in their early teens. Ragamuffins and urchins all, some with bare feet.

  “Street children,” Faustin explained in that distant tone Ben had come to know by now. “No reason to use elaborate schemes, ruses, or tricks on these. Traffickers collect them like dogcatchers, luring them with lies of homes or work abroad, maybe just a meal.”

  “In other words, hope.”

  Faustin didn’t bother to nod, her eyes growing as faraway as her voice. “I first picked up the trail of Al Safah in Nepal, where thousands of impoverished girls and young women are tricked every year into accompanying traffickers into Bombay, where they are sold to brothels, the kind I knew all too well, only worse: I was in Bombay once when there was a fire in one of the brothels. It was the middle of the day and screams wailed from inside, but none of the girls tried to flee.” She looked at Ben briefly. “They couldn’t, you see: they’d been chained to the beds to keep them from escaping.

  “The Indian government has made some progress in fighting the practice, but corruption keeps the authorities always one step behind. Once in a while a girl escapes to tell a terrible tale, yet her life under government assistance is every bit as bad as enslavement. That more than anything explains why white slavery continues to thrive throughout the world: not only does no one care about the victims, but the life they are sold into is often better than the one they left.”

  “Sex slaves.”

  “For many years, that’s all it was. But in more recent times Al Safah has branched out to provide slave labor, usually from the Third World or China. Boatloads of peasants who dig in gold, silver, or diamond mines until they are buried where they die. Others work for less than pennies a day making merchandise that ends up in stores all over the world. I have seen these places. I have seen these people. Both always the same. You look into their eyes and see the hopelessness. Where they left just as bad as where they are. They give up, because every place must be the same.”

  Ben gestured toward the boys approaching the Lucretia Maru. “What about them?”

  “A few will join teams of beggars in European cities, handing over every penny they pocket to traffickers in exchange for one meal a day and a mattress, if they’re lucky. Others will sell pencils or shine shoes or steal wallets. A few will become fodder for pornography, perfect subjects since there is no one to report them missing or stand up to those who would so degrade them.

  “Except me,” Faustin finished.

  Ben nodded grimly. “And the freighter continues to steam in and out of Athens unbothered. More payoffs?”

  “Sometimes just apathy. If the authorities raid the ship, the responsibility for the charges on board becomes theirs. Most would much rather let it leave port and become another country’s problem. Next week, the week after maybe, another ship will come. Or maybe a plane, even a truck. Different transport. Always the same cargo.”

  “Some authorities must have acted. At least tried.”

  She looked away again. “Oh, they tried all right.”

  “Al Safah?”

  “It isn’t always the authorities themselves who are punished. Sometimes it’s their families. Never a witness. Always an apparently random act. Al Safah prefers to go after families because word spreads better that way. That’s how he gets his point across.”

  “You think that’s the biggest reason of all why no one, not a single government, does anything about this, don’t you?”

  “I know it is.”

  “So the spook story works.”

  “Story or not, it makes officials at every level ask themselves why bother, what is there to gain besides coming home one night to find the eyes of their children or their wife gouged from their heads. It’s easier to look the other way.”

  “What now?” Ben asked, watching the boys herded onto the deck of the Lucretia Maru like willing cattle.

  “At dawn, she will take on fuel and supplies, then be on her way.” Faustin turned toward him. “We will keep watch, in shifts. Go back to our boat. I’ll take the first one.”

  * * * *

  CHAPTER 61

  E

  xhausted, Ben didn’t argue. His head hurt so much that just walking back to the fishing boat made it feel like something was banging against his skull on the inside. He doubled over twice on the way, dry heaves both times leaving him woozy.

  It took all his effort to pull himself on board their boat and then stagger across the deck for the cabin, stumbling down the stairs. He set the alarm on his watch and lay down, hoping Zaid Jabral w
ould be waiting. But the journalist was nowhere to be found after he drifted off, and he slept dreamlessly until the alarm’s beep awoke him for his shift four hours later.

  He was still exhausted but pushed himself up off the couch. He splashed water onto his face from the sink and drank it at the same time. The throbbing had retreated a little, moving to the edge of his consciousness, where it reminded him of its presence with a hollow pinging in his skull. He was still a little nauseous and passed it off to going without food for so long.

  Before moving to relieve Faustin, he scoured the cabin’s cupboards for something to eat, settling on some stale crackers and cookies he washed down with water. They tasted like salty paper and sugary cardboard but they made him feel better, more alert anyway. Chilled, he searched a closet and a pair of footlockers before finding an old jacket he wrapped himself in thankfully before heading back to the cabin cruiser that overlooked the Lucretia Maru.

  Faustin was waiting when he got there, seeming not to have moved from her original perch. “I’ll see you at dawn,” she said, and took her leave, eyes on the freighter as she made her way down the dock.

  Ben kept his gaze on her until she passed out of sight, alone as she had spent the years of her quest. Then he leaned back against the gunwale and crossed his hands behind his head, taking a deep breath. He wondered if there had been coffee aboard the fishing boat. He should have looked, but it was too late now.

  The night currents lapped softly against the cabin cruiser and he watched the Lucretia Maru undulating in rhythmic fashion before him. The jacket warmed him, and he felt almost peaceful in the cool night air. To keep himself alert, he tried to focus on his last dreamed conversation with the ghost of Zaid Jabral, when he had been closest to finally putting everything together.

  There was Ramira Taji, a woman who had spent her life searching for a child she claimed had been stolen from her by a man no one believed was real. A man she had seen again after fifty years shortly before her death.

  There was Palestinian Authority finance minister Fayed Kabir, who had lived in the same refugee camp as she.

  Put all the pieces together, Jabral’s ghost had advised him. But where had his visit to a kibbutz in search of birth records fit in?

  What was he forgetting?

  For a brief moment, in the trancelike state Ben felt himself slipping into, it was all clear to him. He held the missing piece, the one that brought all the others together, in his hand.

  I need to speak with Fayed Kabir, the minister of finance, again. . . .

  As quickly as he had formed that thought, though, Ben forgot why. He lost his grasp on the missing piece and saw himself chasing it the way a child hunts a butterfly with a net.

  He was still chasing when the resounding bellow of a boat horn startled him. He snapped upright, the sun beating down on his face.

  Morning . . .

  Panicked, he checked his watch: eight a.m.

  He had slept through his watch!

  And the Lucretia Maru looked to be making ready to set out to sea again.

  Where was Faustin? She said she would be back by dawn!

  Damn!

  Ben rose on wobbly legs and bounced out of the dry-docked cruiser, cursing himself and not caring if anyone saw him. He was running before his feet were steady beneath him and weaved erratically along the docks as a result, lunging onto the fishing boat with barely any air left in his lungs.

  “Faustin!” he yelled. “They’re setting off! Faustin!”

  He threw open the cabin door and leaped down the steps. She was still sleeping atop the couch; she must have been as exhausted as he.

  “Faustin,” he said, and shook her.

  She shifted limply beneath him, limbs splayed, head lopping toward him.

  Ben dropped to his knees.

  He saw the neat slice across her throat before he saw the blood that had soaked through the mattress closest to the wall, still wet and shiny, looking like spilled paint. Faustin’s mouth hung open in a gasp she had never finished. Her hands had locked in a clawlike grip that had fastened on nothing.

  But her eyes, her eyes were the worst.

  They had been gouged out, leaving empty, bloodied sockets behind.

  * * * *

  * * * *

  CHAPTER 62

  T

  he Lucretia Maru had been at sea for hours when Ben finally emerged from a pump shed near the aft bulkhead where he had been hiding since just before she set out. The pump shed smelled of stale oil and diesel fuel, and the rubber on the hoses around him was cracked and warped. He had managed to carve out a space inside the shed big enough to sit down, so long as he kept his knees against his chest, or stretched only one leg at a time.

  The best thing about the hiding place was that the condition of the equipment clearly indicated no one on the freighter ever bothered to hose down the deck. But inside, deprived of all light other than a sliver that sneaked under the heavy door, after so many hours he had begun to feel dizzy and disoriented, even claustrophobic, which was a new and terrifying feeling for Ben.

  According to his watch, it was three p.m. when he cracked open the pump shed’s door and peered outside, gradually increasing the opening. Satisfied there was no one on deck within sight of him, Ben crawled out on his stomach, a stubborn section of hose catching on his foot. He kicked his shoe about to free it and eased the door closed again before moving on.

  Stiff from his hours in the confined space, he stretched his muscles as best he could and took cover behind the aft chimney to survey the scene around him. Close up the freighter was older and in even worse disrepair than he had thought. Surfaces blistered and bubbled everywhere with rust. The paint, composed of two or three different shades from poor efforts at patchwork, was faded and peeling. Tack welds covered the deck and surrounding structures like scars from jagged knife wounds. Orange streaks of corrosion pervaded. The air stank of dried oil, and the entire deck was filthy with a film of it that blackened Ben’s hand each time he touched something.

  From this angle he had a view of a portion of the pilothouse through similarly oil-stained glass. There were at least two men inside piloting the ship. Another two hands were on deck, one making repairs to the anchor and the other patching a hole in the fore chimney. The hatch had been removed from a ventilation baffle that rose over the engine room, probably in need of cleaning or repairs as well. It would certainly be warm inside, but the shape and position of the baffle would make it the ideal hiding place. Ben would be able to stand up in it with no trouble at all, hidden from all angles once he replaced the circular hatch top over him.

  Before moving toward the baffle, he tried to get a fix on the ship’s position. Judging by the sun, the freighter had headed due west from the southern tip of Greece, passing out of the Aegean Sea and into the Ionian. On the distant horizon he saw large landmasses that he thought must be Sicily and the southernmost reaches of Italy itself. On this approach the Lucretia Maru could either slide round the bottom of Sicily or motor north through the Strait of Messina. Since they had taken on ample provisions at Athens, the freighter could remain at sea for a very long time indeed. Yet from the way she was burning oil and guzzling fuel, a stop seemed imminent in the next twelve hours.

  Ben had no intention whatsoever of disembarking more than briefly, though. He was determined to follow theLucretia Maru all the way to her final destination, just as Mathilde Faustin had planned to do. He knew it could just as easily have been him who was murdered, would have been had their shifts been reversed, leaving Ben on the fishing boat instead of Faustin. His near encounter with death only increased his motivation, a rage building inside like none he had experienced since confronting the Sandman in his home years before.

  Not being an experienced enough boatman, Ben’s only alternative was to stow away and let the freighter take him wherever she was going. Faustin had felt certain that eventually that would be to Al Safah, perhaps to the mysterious island a number of witnesses vaguely recal
led.

  Ben hoped she was right.

  He had managed to sneak on board in the final minutes before the freighter set out to sea at Athens. With so small a crew on board, the hands were too busy with the final departure procedures to notice him slide over the gunwale and take refuge in the pump shed.

  From his position behind the chimney now, Ben figured he was thirty feet from the open ventilation baffle. He would be in the line of vision of one of the hands briefly, only if the man happened to turn around. Ben took a deep breath and darted across the deck. He reached the baffle and lowered himself quickly into it, then reached behind him and retrieved the cover. The rusted, sun-baked metal was scalding to the touch and he nearly dropped it, grimacing as he settled the cover back into place. It had openings for ventilation on all sides which provided him with a 360-degree view of the freighter should he require it, so long as he stood up straight.