No sooner had the counterman handed him his reload than something around the corner exploded with a thunderous roar. “Jesus Christ!” the Italian shouted, and made the sign of the cross. Dawud gulped the second cup without sweetening it. Then he followed Khalid out of the place.
Staggering, bleeding people were coming the other way. “He yelled ‘God wills it!’” a middle-aged woman said. “He yelled ‘God wills it!’ and he blew himself up!”
“Who did?” Khalid asked.
“That stronzo on the scooter,” she answered. “Let me by. I’ve got to clean up.” She had a cut on her forehead that would probably need stitches, but she didn’t realize it yet. Khalid didn’t know what a stronzo was, either, but he could make a good guess.
When he and Dawud rounded the corner, nothing much was left of the scooter or of the man who’d ridden it. Two smashed cars lay on their sides. Two or three others were on fire. People lay on the sidewalks. Some were still: unconscious or dead. Others writhed and wailed. The air was thick with smoke and the smell of blood.
“Fuck those Aquinists!” a man behind Khalid said. “Nobody here did anything to them.”
Khalid hurried forward to give what first aid he could. As he tore a tunic into strips to make bandages, he thought about overreaching.
X
A few Italians were part of the archaeological team excavating east of Naples. Most members came either from the Maghrib or from a madrasa in Arkansistan. The leader of the Maghribi contingent was an eager young fellow named Lisarh ibn Yahsub. “I wish we had more locals with us,” he told Khalid and Dawud. “I especially wish we did because of the language issues. We slog through Latin, but for them it comes naturally. Their language is descended from it, and they even use it in their religious services.”
“Yes, I know about that,” Khalid agreed. “But why don’t you? It’s their country and their history, after all. Some of them know a good deal about it.” He told how Major Badoglio had quoted Caligula.
“Did he? Isn’t that interesting?” Lisarh said. “Well, he must be a secular man, and there aren’t enough of them here. For too many Italians, anything that happened when the pagans ruled isn’t worth remembering.”
“Kind of like the idea of the Jahiliyah,” Dawud put in.
“Well, yes, but we don’t think of the days before the Prophet—peace be unto him—as the Time of Ignorance any more. Not all those days, I should say.” The archaeologist eyed the investigator. “The Jahiliyah isn’t exactly your people’s idea, is it?”
“You mean because I’m a Jew? I’m part of the wider world, too, or I am whenever the wider world feels like letting me be one, anyhow,” Dawud answered.
“That’s a commendable attitude. I wish more of the Italians had it,” Lisarh ibn Yahsub said. “Some of the Italians who were here have packed up and gone home because of the political situation.”
“The political situation. Yes. That’s one way to put it,” Khalid said. The archaeological dig had a barbed-wire perimeter strengthened with sandbagged machine-gun nests that would have done credit to a Ministry of Information building. The men serving the machine guns and walking the perimeter were among the Grand Duke’s most trusted troops. If they weren’t, they might have turned on the archaeologists themselves.
“It’s so frustrating!” Lisarh burst out. “We’ve known for almost two thousand years that there were two Roman towns buried under the lava here. One Roman writer, Pliny the Elder, came to the eruption site and died near here trying to get people away by boat. His nephew, Pliny the Younger, wrote about what he saw from farther away.”
“Why didn’t he go with his uncle?” Khalid asked.
“Nobody knows for sure. The best guess is, he didn’t have the nerve,” Lisarh answered. “And so he lived for another forty or fifty years, and had a fine career of his own. Not brave, maybe, but very sensible. His account has been available for centuries, but the Italians never did any digging of their own. The people from the madrasa at Tuskalusa deserve the credit. They started the project twenty-odd years ago, and we’ve found incredible things since.”
“Arkansistan has even more oil than the Maghrib does,” Dawud said. “More than it knows what to do with, almost.”
“Not like the Faisalis who rule the holy cities and the Rub‘al-Khali,” Khalid said. “They don’t have to share their money among so many people.”
“They don’t have to—and they don’t,” Lisarh said. “They get rich off the pilgrims who make the hajj every year, too. And it all piles up and piles up and piles up.” The Faisalis had never been famous for generosity. One of these days, odds were they’d regret that. In an ever more open and democratic world, they were almost as tyrannical as some of the nastier European lords.
Dawud smiled, then coughed and pretended he hadn’t. A reputation for stinginess clung to the Jews. The Faisalis might be the most pious of Muslims, but no one in the history of the world had ever squeezed a coin any tighter than they did.
“Nobody’s give you any trouble here?” Khalid asked.
“No. Of course, having the soldiers around doesn’t hurt,” Lisarh ibn Yahsub replied. “But the farmers are friendly enough. They sell us olive oil and eggs and a lamb every once in a while. They aren’t interested in what we’re doing, though. It’s sad, really.”
“I’d say you’re lucky,” Dawud remarked. “If they thought you were digging up gold or something, you’d never get them out of your hair.”
“Well, you’re bound to be right about that. We’ve found some gold and silver coins—not a lot, but some,” the archaeologist said. “Some jewelry, too. Step into my tent if you want to. You can see what I mean.”
They did. The tent looked to have come from the Maghribi army, and had seen hard use. It still kept sun and wind off the people inside it. Coins, rings, necklaces, earrings … All were carefully labeled to show where they’d been discovered. Lisarh showed that they’d all been photographed in place, too, before they were collected.
“The trench that we’ve dug this season goes right into the heart of what was the Roman town of Pompeii,” he said. “We’ve discovered body casts, where volcanic mud shows how someone fell and died all those years ago. Sometimes you can even make out a person’s expression.”
“What would happen if the volcano erupted again?” Khalid asked uneasily.
“Naples would be very unhappy,” Lisarh said, which would do for an understatement till a bigger one rolled down the highway. But the scientist hadn’t finished: “So would air travelers all over the Mediterranean. An eruption throws grit and crud thousands of cubits into the air.” He grinned. “Don’t you love those technical terms? That’s what it is, though. And airplane engines don’t like sucking in all that grit and crud. Till it comes back to earth, either you go around where it is or you don’t fly.”
“That’s an even more cheerful thought than some of the political ones we’ve been dealing with lately,” Khalid said.
“It is, isn’t it?” Lisarh nodded to himself. “It’s so stupid, too. If they had themselves a leader who wanted to bring back the glory of the Roman Empire and they got all excited about him, I could just about understand that. When Vesuvius blew, Rome was the greatest country in the world.”
“That isn’t what the Aquinists have in mind, though,” Dawud said.
Lisarh ibn Yahsub grimaced. “Believe me, I understand that. They want to bring back the Jahiliyah—not just for Italy, but everywhere. Everything we’ve learned, all the things we’ve made and the diseases we’ve stopped … They care more about God than about any of that. If they want to live that way, it’s their business. But if they say everybody has to live that way—”
“Deus vult!” Khalid broke in.
“Deus vult!” Lisarh agreed sourly. “And they do say everybody has to live that way. And that turns it into my business, because I think I have the right to live the way I want to, not the way they want me to.”
“Shows what you know, you dog
of an infidel, you,” Dawud said.
“You should talk,” Lisarh retorted, and Dawud chuckled.
“One of the reasons we wanted to check up on you was to make sure the Aquinists hadn’t learned you were out in the countryside learning things.” Khalid made that sound as filthy as he could.
“Oh, we’re learning things, all right,” Lisarh said. “Let me show you a few more photographs. Some of the buildings under there are so perfectly preserved, even the paintings on the walls are as fresh as if they were done yesterday. The pictures in this folder are from a lupanar we found.”
“What’s a lupanar?” Khalid asked. Lisarh showed him and Dawud the photographs. Once he saw them, he had no doubt what a lupanar was. “Well, it doesn’t look like we’ve learned a whole lot of new ways to do it over the past however many years.”
“Funny—that’s just what I said when we discovered the place. If the Aquinists knew it was there, they’d want to blow it up so it doesn’t give ideas to people who already have them,” Lisarh said.
“Are you worried about publishing what you’ve found, then?” Khalid asked.
“Not even a little bit,” Lisarh answered. “One of the things I’ve found out is that the people who go around screaming ‘God wills it!’ aren’t the kind who go to a madrasa library to check out an academic journal.”
“Good. They should leave the juicy stuff for people who can appreciate it,” Dawud said. The archaeologist laughed. He liked that so much, he pulled out a bottle of grappa and some more dirty pictures for the investigators.
* * *
Naples was even older than vanished Pompeii. It was the first place the Greeks had settled in Italy. At about the same time, the Phoenicians were founding Carthage, not far from modern Tunis. In different languages, both cities wore the same name: New Town.
When Dawud remarked on that, Khalid said, “I wonder how many Carthages there are in the Sunset Lands, Carthages and Damascuses and Jerusalems and Alexandrias and Cairos.…”
“Probably an Istanbul or three, too,” Dawud said. “Who knows? Maybe even a couple of Romes. If they didn’t keep the native names for the places there, they named them after places here.”
“Or else they called them things like Little Rock or Riverside that showed what was in the neighborhood,” Khalid said.
“That, too.” Dawud nodded. Then he sighed. “I’ll tell you—I wouldn’t be sorry if we weren’t right by Naples. I’d be even less sorry if we weren’t inside this miserable place.”
“Now that you mention it, so would I,” Khalid said. “It’s not even so much that I wonder whether every other man on the street is an Aquinist with a bomb strapped to his belly who wants to blow me to shreds. I do, but that’s not it.”
“No, that’s not it.” Dawud nodded again, more emphatically this time. “I’ll tell you what it is. The last honest man who ever lived here starved to death five hundred years ago, and all the crooks who stayed behind have been laughing at him ever since.”
“That’s it!” Khalid looked at him with nothing but admiration. “That’s just it! I hadn’t put my finger on it so well.”
“You can buy anything here, anything at all,” Dawud said. “You only need cash and connections. And if you have the cash, tomorrow you can buy the trusting fool who sold you what you wanted today.”
“If you’ve got the cash, it’s a wonderful place. If you don’t…” Khalid frowned. “If you don’t, you have to sell yourself.”
“In a way, though, that works to our advantage,” Dawud said. Khalid made a questioning noise. Dawud explained: “The Aquinists don’t care about money. They care about God. They seem just as stupid to the people who run things here as they do to us, even if it’s for different reasons.”
“Huh,” Khalid said thoughtfully. “I’m glad to have you along, you know? I’m not sure I could be so cynical all by myself.”
“Nice to know I’m good for something.” Dawud sounded pleased with himself.
Instead of visiting the Ministry of Information building the next morning, Khalid and Dawud called at the central police station. The prefect of police was called Pietro Vaccaro. He understood the Italian the Maghribis used, but his own Neapolitan dialect was opaque to them both.
It turned out not to matter, because he spoke fair classical Arabic. “You want to see whom, my master?” he asked Khalid. Patiently, Khalid repeated himself. The prefect’s eyes were red-veined and weary and shrewd. “What makes you think I know this Dino Crocetti fellow, or where to find him?”
While Khalid cast about for a polite way to answer that, Dawud stepped into the breach: “This is Naples. You’re the police boss. He’s the mob boss. Chances are you have dinner with him once a week, so you can keep each other up to date.”
Prefect Vaccaro swung toward him. “Yes, this is Naples,” he agreed. “People who talk to me like that are liable to have unfortunate accidents. How would you like to get fished out of the harbor six weeks from now? The crabs eat the eyes first, I hear.”
“Yes, I’ve heard the same thing,” Dawud said placidly. “Do you want to take the chance of putting the Grand Duke and the Maghrib after you at the same time? Isn’t it easier just to tell us how to get hold of Crocetti?”
Vaccaro still glowered. “They say Jews talk too damn much,” he rumbled. “I see they’re right.”
“My wife certainly thinks so,” Dawud answered.
“You’re staying at the Santa Lucia.” The prefect did not make it a question.
“That’s right,” Khalid said along with Dawud.
“Get the devil out of my office. Go to the hotel. Don’t come back here,” Vaccaro said. “Someone will pay you a call. So just remember—if you meet the crabs in the harbor, I won’t be the guy who introduces you.”
“Well, it’s a story.” Dawud still sounded altogether at ease. He and Khalid left Vaccaro’s office. Khalid imagined he could feel the daggers the prefect of police was looking at his back.
“You really know how to make officials fall in love with you, don’t you?” Khalid said after they got out of the station. He hadn’t been altogether sure they would get out, but they did.
“I try.” Dawud’s eyes glinted. “I’m sure they think I’m very trying.”
The Santa Lucia wasn’t far from the center of town. The furniture was old-fashioned, but each room had a television, a telephone, and a bathroom with hot and cold running water. Khalid and Dawud drank bottled mineral water, though. The stuff that came out of the taps in Naples could give a foreigner who wasn’t used to it a nasty flux of the bowels.
They waited. They waited. They waited some more. When they were about to go downstairs for supper, someone knocked on the door. Khalid opened it. The man in the hallway was short, but stocky and tough looking. “Come on with me,” he said.
Go with him they did. He bundled them into a green Pontiak, then slid behind the wheel himself. Traffic in Naples seemed more snarled than Rome’s. Khalid could imagine nothing worse to say about it.
The driver eventually pulled up in an alley and pointed to a door. “Get out,” he said. “Go in there.”
It could have been an ambush. If it was, they couldn’t do anything about it now. They went in. It smelled like old garbage outside. As soon as the door closed behind them, the odors turned heavenly. They’d walked into the back of an eatery, and plainly a good one.
A man in a white tunic with brass buttons addressed them in good Arabic: “You must be the Maghribis. This way, my masters, if you’d be so kind.”
He led them into a small private room curtained off from the area where most people ate. The man waiting there was about sixty, and strikingly handsome. Good living had given him a double chin and pouches under his eyes, but he still seemed able to take care of himself. He wore a robe of elegant cut and a keffiyeh with restrained red stripes.
“Peace be unto you, my masters,” he said in classical Arabic even better than the waiter’s. “I am Dino Crocetti. Someone tells me you�
��ve been trying to get hold of me.”
“I wonder who that might be,” Khalid said dryly.
“It doesn’t matter,” Crocetti said, which might or might not have been true. He rose to clasp the investigators’ hands, then waved them into chairs. The waiter reappeared with wine. It was as good as any Khalid had had in Italy. A plate of little fried squid whetted the appetite. Khalid thought they were delicious. So, plainly, did Dawud. Crocetti smiled, watching him eat. “Those are haram for you, aren’t they?”
“We’d say treyf. It amounts to the same thing, only the rules are a bit different,” the Jew answered. “But I like ’em, so I eat ’em. It’s between me and my God. Nobody else needs to worry about it.”
“I suspect the Aquinists would have a thing or two to say if they heard that from you,” Dino Crocetti remarked.
That gave Khalid the opening he’d hoped for. “Well, Signor, that’s what we wanted to talk about with you.”
“Me?” Crocetti must have had practice at looking innocent or he couldn’t have done it so well. “I have no idea why you would say such a thing. I am only a simple businessman, doing what I can to stay afloat.”
“Right.” If Khalid sounded disbelieving, he was. Dawud snorted. Even Dino Crocetti smiled, displaying teeth that had seen some expensive dentistry. Khalid went on, “If the Aquinists start running Naples—”
“If the Aquinists start running Italy,” Dawud added.
“That, too.” Khalid nodded. “If the Aquinists take over, what happens to your businesses, Signor Crocetti? They aren’t what you’d call keen on brothels or gambling houses.”
Before Crocetti could answer, the waiter stuck his head into the private room. The mob boss switched to rapid-fire Neapolitan dialect. Then he came back to Arabic: “I thought we would have ’o pigniatiello ’e vavella—it’s a soup made with fish and shellfish and octopus—and then sartù di riso, a rice cake with mushrooms and meat. Does that suit you, my masters?”
Through Darkest Europe Page 17