Through Darkest Europe

by Harry Turtledove

  Father Martino finished reading the document, then looked up at the security man. “This does not bind me. For one thing, I do not know that the signature and seal are genuine. For another, even if they are, that would only prove the Pope has lapsed into heresy. I am not obliged to obey a heretic. I put my soul in peril if I do.”

  “You put your body in danger if you disobey his Holiness,” Captain Salgari said. “That gives us more reason to treat you the way you deserve.”

  “You have me. You will do what you will do,” the monk said with bleak courage. “I can’t stop you. All I can do is pray that God will grant me strength to bear what I must bear. In the world to come, I will see Him in heaven. Satan’s demons will torment you in hell.”

  He sounded sure of himself, sure enough to send a small chill through Khalid. This wasn’t the first fanatic’s interrogation he’d been a part of—far from it. Sometimes they broke. Sometimes, in spite of everything you did to them, they wouldn’t.

  Major Badoglio steepled his fingers. “We know from others that you were involved in planting Maria Conti in the Grand Duke’s palace.” That was the name of the serving girl who’d blown herself up, and Cosimo with her.

  “I deny it,” Father Martino said.

  Badoglio stood, walked around the table, and stopped next to the Aquinist. He slapped him in the face. You would not have seen that in an interrogation room in the Maghrib. Khalid shook his head. You should not have seen that in an interrogation room there. Investigators being human, it did happen now and again. The Italian major took it for granted. He slapped Martino of Padua again, harder. “Don’t waste our time with lies. We will make you sorry.”

  “I am sorry—sorry you follow the godless ones. It will cost your soul endless suffering,” the Aquinist said.

  “We are not godless. Only a fool would say we are,” Captain Salgari snapped.

  “You are so godless, you have no idea how godless you are.” As Father Martino spoke, a thin line of red dribbled down from the corner of his mouth. He went on, “You worship the Grand Duke. You worship the state. You worship howitzers and helicopters. You worship filthy films and foul music. You worship Mammon. You do not render unto God the things that are God’s.”

  “Mammon?” Khalid whispered to Dawud.

  “Wealth,” the Jew whispered back.

  Badoglio slapped the monk again. “We didn’t bring you in here to make speeches. We brought you in here to find out what you know—and who you know. You would be smart to sing for us. We may go easier on you if you do.”

  He didn’t say they would go easy on him. Khalid noticed that. So did Father Martino. “You’ll kill me any which way,” he said, which wasn’t quite an admission that he’d helped put Maria Conti in the palace, but came close.

  “You’re right. We will,” Major Badoglio agreed. “But if you tell us who helped you, we may do it fast.”

  “You cannot punish me as a righteous, vengeful God will punish you,” Father Martino said. “Our cause shall prevail. God wills it!”

  This time, Major Badoglio hit him hard enough to rock his head back. Blood streamed from the monk’s right nostril. He snuffled when he breathed. Badoglio didn’t wipe the blood away. If Martino choked or suffocated, the major didn’t mind—or didn’t let on that he minded. He also gave no sign that he enjoyed tormenting a prisoner. He was just a man doing a job. He might have been a mechanic putting a new battery in a Garuda.

  Khalid wondered whether that made what he did better or worse. True, he got no kick from hurting someone else. But what did you call a man who hurt other people strictly in the line of duty? A monster was the first thing that came to mind.

  It went on for a long, unpleasant stretch of time. After a while, Martino of Padua began naming names. Whether they were names of any value might be a different question. Captain Salgari wrote them down. Martino might have condemned more people to torment. No, not might have—he had. Khalid had to hope they would deserve it.

  This was how investigators played the game here. Khalid and Dawud went back to their hotel and got drunk at the bar. Dawud seemed at least as eager to do that as Khalid. The way it looked to Khalid, that made his colleague seem better, not worse.

  * * *

  Everything had consequences. If you followed the Aquinists, you fell foul of the secular authorities. If you served in the Grand Duke’s Ministry of Information, you tortured people because that was what functionaries in the Ministry of Information did. And if you got drunk over the course of an evening, you felt like a badly resurrected corpse the next morning.

  Khalid woke up with evil jinni throwing fireballs at one another inside his head. Sometime while he was sleeping, a camel had shat in his mouth. Repairmen had slapped plywood over the window the Aquinists’ bomb shattered. It was too bright in there anyhow.

  “Yisgadal v’yiskadash sh’may rabo—” Dawud began, his voice harsh as a raven’s croak and much too loud.

  “What is that horrible racket?” Khalid’s own voice sounded much too loud in his own ears, too.

  “Prayer for the dead,” Dawud answered.

  “Oh.” Khalid thought it over. Thinking also hurt. He nodded, which made his aching head want to fall off. He wished it would. “Well, you’ve got that right.”

  Dawud lurched to the sink and splashed cold water on his face. He was more urgent about it than he had been when the Aquinas Seminary was falling down behind him. Afterwards, he blew like a grampus. “Have you got any aspirins in your travel kit?” he asked.

  “I think so. Let me see.” Khalid bravely stood up himself. He didn’t think he’d hurt himself this badly since some of the parties in his madrasa days in Egypt. He pawed through the little crocodile-skin case. “Here we go! Three for you and three for me.”

  He and Dawud swallowed the pills with as much alacrity as they’d gulped grappa the night before. The barman had sworn grappa was distilled from grapes. He’d left out the part about the thunder and lightning. They rumbled around inside Khalid’s aching skull.

  “Coffee,” Dawud said. “Coffee and a little something greasy. After that, I’ll just feel … bad.”

  “Maybe you didn’t drink as much as I did, then,” Khalid said. “Well, now I remember why the Prophet—peace be unto him—forbade Muslims from drinking wine.”

  “We weren’t drinking wine. We were drinking dynamite. Something pretty much like it, anyhow,” Dawud said.

  “It’s not even haram for you,” Khalid said.

  “Drinking that much ought to be haram for everybody,” his friend replied. “A little every once in a while is nice. It makes you feel good. It makes you feel happy. But we weren’t drinking to get happy last night. We were drinking to get the taste of Martino of Padua out of our mouths.”

  “That’s about the size of it,” Khalid said unhappily. “I felt as if I’d been slapping him around myself, as if I’d break the bathroom mirror here if I looked into it. Or if I didn’t break it, I wouldn’t want to see what was looking back at me.”

  “Sometimes you have to do these things. I keep telling myself that,” Dawud said. “I keep telling myself the Aquinists are worse, too. We can work with the Grand Dukes and their people. We’ve done it for years, and we’ll go on doing it. Work with the Aquinists? Good luck!”

  “I’ve been telling myself all the same things. They’re true. We both know they are.” Khalid could hear that he sounded like a man trying to persuade himself. Well, that was the kind of man he was right now.

  “Yes, we do.” Dawud nodded, then looked as if he regretted the motion. Khalid sympathized with him there, all right. The Jew went on, “We went out and drank ourselves disgusting last night anyhow.”

  “So we did. Come on, let’s go downstairs and see if we can spackle over some of the cracks,” Khalid said.

  The Italians brewed coffee as strong as what he was used to on the other side of the Mediterranean. They sweetened it less than Maghribis liked, but pouring in more sugar took care of that. Dawud
ordered a plate of scrambled eggs and fried potatoes. That seemed like such a good idea, Khalid picked the same thing. Greasy food would help coat his stomach against the horrible things the grappa had done to it.

  “Keep the coffee coming,” Khalid told the waiter in Italian.

  “Just as you say, sir,” the man replied with a knowing smirk. “Did you and your friend hurt yourselves a little last night?”

  “No,” Dawud said before Khalid could answer. As the waiter raised an eyebrow, Dawud amplified that: “We hurt ourselves a lot.”

  “I see,” the waiter said. “Coffee will help with some of that, yes. I’ll get you some more right away.” He hurried off.

  Khalid wished he were back in Tunis, in a land that had come by modern civilization honestly instead of getting its nose rubbed in the stuff and hating the smell. Given their druthers, the Christian lords of Western Europe would have stayed the way they were before advancing science and engineering changed the whole planet. They didn’t have that choice, not if they wanted to avoid being ruled by their Muslim neighbors to the south and east. But they and their countrymen still fought modernity every way they could. Why would so many of them keep on wearing their traditional, uncomfortable clothes if they really wanted to join the rest of the planet?

  “What can you do?” Dawud said when Khalid came out with some of that. “They are the way they are, not the way we want them to be. If we get them to the point where we don’t have to strip-search them before we let them on airplanes, that’s about as much as we can reasonably hope for.”

  The waiter came back with the coffee. Khalid and Dawud poured it down. As it and the aspirins took hold, Khalid began to feel human again, in a melancholy way. And even thinking about being melancholy could make him melancholy in a new and different way. European doctors had clung to the theory of the four humors till only a little more than a century ago, hundred of years after the Muslim world found the evidence to show it was nonsense.

  “Humors?” Dawud said when he remarked on that. “Well, if you say so. Not much funny about the way I feel, though.”

  “Something ought to be done about your sense of humors, all right,” Khalid said. Both Maghribis managed wan grins.

  When they talked with each other, naturally, they spoke Arabic. They didn’t pitch their voices to carry. All the same, other people eating breakfast started glancing their way. Wearing robes wasn’t enough to make them seem foreign. A fair number of forward-thinking Italians did choose the international style. Another language? That was a different story.

  “Some of these people will be memorizing our faces and—” Khalid began.

  “—and then throwing away their heads. I wish I could throw mine away right now,” Dawud broke in. Khalid nodded. Of course, the Aquinists already knew they were here. That didn’t mean they wanted extra notice, though. Want it or not, they had some.

  VIII

  Even walking along the streets of Rome turned risky. Almost every day, a car exploded somewhere in the city. Sometimes it would be one parked (often double-parked, given how traffic worked in Rome) on a busy thoroughfare and set off by a timer. Nearly as often, a fanatic would aim a rolling bomb at a group of policemen or soldiers and touch it off himself.

  No doubt the Aquinist was sure he’d go straight to heaven while sending his foes to hell. Nobody came back from either place to let the fanatics know they were right. That didn’t stop them, or even slow them down.

  “You’d think, what with all the explosives they planted under the Aquinas Seminary, they’d be running low on them by now,” Major Badoglio grumbled.

  “Too much to hope for?” Khalid said.

  “Too much to hope for,” the Italian agreed. “This is a big town, and it’s an old town. Too many places to hide things, too many ways to bring in more no matter how much we find.”

  “If they were sensible people, the idea of blowing themselves to charred couscous would wear thin after a while,” Dawud ibn Musa said. He sighed and did an excellent job of mimicking Badoglio’s tone: “Too much to hope for.”

  “The really horrible thing is how much damage a car bomb can do,” Badoglio said.

  “We’ve seen,” Khalid told him. The Aquinists would put a couple of talents’ worth of explosives in a car’s trunk, and add more in the hard-to-inspect space between the front and back seats. When the driver joyfully flipped the switch that touched it off, all the steel and glass in the car turned to shrapnel. Gasoline and motor oil added liquid fire to the blast. Sometimes nothing at all was left of the man behind the wheel.

  A bomb like that could kill dozens of people. It could blow out windows for half a parasang in all directions, and leave a hole in the roadway ten cubits wide and three cubits deep. Khalid had visited several bombings. One of the things the papers and television didn’t talk about much was the horrible wounds sharp fragments of flying metal inflicted on people they didn’t kill. Getting splashed with blazing gasoline was another horror not widely covered.

  Khalid wondered whether that discretion made good policy. If people understood what a foul weapon a car bomb was, wouldn’t they turn on the maniacs who used them?

  “They might,” Major Badoglio allowed when he asked the question. “Or they might decide to fear them instead. And they might decide that, if we can’t stop those bastards, siding with them would make them quit.”

  “It’s much harder to stop someone who wants to die than someone who wants to stay alive,” Dawud said.

  “Isn’t it just!” Badoglio said. “If Maria Conti had cared about staying alive, Grand Duke Cosimo would still be with us, too.”

  The Jew rubbed his jowly chin in thought. “Could Pope Marcellus—would Pope Marcellus—declare that people who kill themselves to harm others go to hell, with no hope of heaven?”

  “With Christ, there is always hope. So we are taught,” Badoglio said. “But his Holiness might perhaps be persuaded to say something not far short of that.” He scrawled a note to himself.

  He seemed a normal, careful, competent investigator. Not at all the kind of man who would hurt a prisoner because the fellow didn’t feel like talking. Which proved … what, exactly? That you couldn’t tell by looking. And that not all the pieces of a man’s life came out of the same puzzle.

  A messenger hurried in and handed Badoglio a folded sheet of paper held closed by a blob of blue sealing wax. The major examined the seal and nodded to himself before breaking it. Wax was an old-fashioned way to secure a document, but still worked well.

  After reading the message, Badoglio swore under his breath, crumpled it into a ball, and threw it into a wastebasket by his desk. “What’s gone wrong now?” Khalid asked. Plainly, something had.

  “Our people have arrested two more policemen at a checkpoint on the Via Cassia—the road down to Florence,” the major answered. “They were letting the Aquinists smuggle things past them. Not even for a price, mind you, but because they believed. Well, the fanatics will get a surprise the next time they come through there.”

  “Good,” Khalid said. After a polite moment, he added, “Not the first time that’s happened, is it?”

  “I only wish it were,” Badoglio answered. “Too many traitors. Too many men who line up with the Grand Duke’s enemies. You expect some of that in the police. Everybody knows you can pay a lot of them off. But we’re getting reports of disloyal soldiers, too.”

  “That isn’t good,” Khalid said. Badoglio took the idea that policemen were for sale for granted. It happened on the other side of the Mediterranean, too. It was bound to happen everywhere. Some policemen were venal, and that was all there was to it. But they didn’t take it for granted in the Maghrib, or in most of the civilized world. They fought it. Here, it was part of the way things worked.

  How long had it been part of the way things worked here? The Romans built the Via Cassia centuries before the archangel Gabriel gave Muhammad the Qur’an. Did ancient Roman police prefects or whatever they called them let Christians slip
past in exchange for some silver, or because they’d decided to follow Christ themselves? Khalid wouldn’t have been surprised.

  How many other pieces of the past survived in an old, backward land like Italy? Even the name of the highway to Florence hadn’t changed in all those hundreds of years. How many people here could tell you who Cassius was and why he had the road named after him? How many people here thought of him as a great-uncle or something like that?

  Dawud’s mind was going in a different direction. He asked Major Badoglio, “If there’s, ah, dissension among the police and the army, how do you know the Ministry of Information is free of it?”

  “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” Badoglio answered.

  It sounded like Italian, but it wasn’t. “Sorry—I don’t follow Latin, if that’s what that is,” Khalid said. He thought Dawud did, but the other Maghribi wasn’t foolish enough to let on. The less they knew you knew, the better off you were.

  “Yes, it’s Latin. We don’t use it just for things of the Church. Juvenal was a long way from a religious writer.” The Italian grinned crookedly. “That bit means ‘Who will guard those guardsmen?’ He’s talking about brothel guards.”

  “Is he?” Khalid’s grin was crooked, too. “Well, who does keep watch on the Ministry of Information?”

  “There are people—I know that,” Badoglio said. “I don’t know all the details, and I don’t suppose I should.”

  “All right.” Khalid could see he’d have to be content—or discontented—with that. The Maghrib certainly had people keeping a discreet eye on government agencies. Why shouldn’t the Grand Duchy of Italy?

  One reason that Italy might not was that it was a less sophisticated state than the Maghrib. But that didn’t seem to be true. Plenty of Italians might hate the direction in which the world civilization was going. But they had their own long history of plots and coups and treachery. They saw they needed watchdogs. If Major Badoglio was to be believed—and Khalid found no reason to doubt him—they had them.