by Paul Sussman
'Ezayek?' asked the Palestinian, laying a hand on Khalifa's shoulder. 'You OK?'
The detective nodded. 'Ana asif,' he mumbled. 'I'm sorry. I shouldn't have . . .'
Marsoudi's hand squeezed reassuringly. 'Believe me, that was tame compared to some of the things this place has heard these last fourteen months. This is a difficult time. It is inevitable there will be harsh words.'
He squeezed again and sat down beside Khalifa. There was a long pause, the world around them completely still – that perfect, pristine stillness you only ever encounter in deserts and on high mountaintops – then, raising his arm, Marsoudi pointed up at the sky.
'You see there?' he asked. 'That constellation with the four bright stars? No, there. Yes, that's it. This we call the tank. That line of stars at the bottom, those are the caterpillar tracks, then the turret, and there, the gun.'
Khalifa followed the movement of the Palestinian's finger, watching as he slowly traced out the shape, which, now he looked, did indeed resemble the crude outline of a tank.
'And there' – Marsoudi swung his hand towards another constellation – 'the Kalashnikov. See, its butt, its muzzle. And over there' – he took Khalifa's elbow and turned him – 'the grenade: body, arm, pin. Everywhere else in the world people gaze up into the heavens and see beauty. Only in Palestine do we look up and see the objects of war.'
Somewhere out across the desert a jackal started to wail, the sound tailing off almost as soon as it had begun. Khalifa dragged on his cigarette and pulled his jacket around him against the cold.
'I can't do this,' he whispered. 'I'm sorry, but I just can't work with them.'
Marsoudi smiled sadly, and, dropping his head back, gazed up into the night.
'You think I didn't feel the same? My father, he died in an Israeli prison. When I was nine I watched my own brother blown up by a tank shell, right in front of me. You think after that I wanted to talk with them, come out here and negotiate? Take it from me, I have more reason to hate them than you ever could.'
He continued to stare upwards, his face deathly pale in the light of the moon.
'But I did come out here,' he said quietly. 'And I did talk to them. And you know what? These last fourteen months, Yehuda and I, we have become friends. We, who've spent our whole lives fighting each other. Good friends.'
Khalifa finished his cigarette and flicked it away into the shadows, its butt continuing to glint for a moment like the tail of a glow-worm before gradually fading into darkness.
'It's Ben-Roi,' he mumbled. 'If it was someone else . . . but Ben-Roi . . . he's dangerous. I can see it in his eyes. Everything about him. I just can't work with him.'
Marsoudi drove his hands into the pockets of his trousers.
'You have a wife, inspector?'
Khalifa nodded an affirmative.
'Apparently Ben-Roi was going to get married.'
'So?'
'A month before the wedding his fiancée was killed. In a suicide bombing. Al-Mulatham.'
'Allah-u-akhbar.' Khalifa hung his head. 'I didn't know.'
Marsoudi shrugged and, pulling his hands out of his pockets again, raised his first and middle finger and tapped them against his lips, asking Khalifa for a cigarette. The Egyptian pulled one out of the pack and lit it for him, the Palestinian's thin, handsome face momentarily illuminated by the flare of the lighter before sinking back into the shadows again.
'In six days' time there will be a rally in central Jerusalem,' he said quietly. 'Yehuda and I have chosen that rally as the place to make public what we have been doing here this last year. We will outline our proposals, and we will announce the formation of a new political party, a joint Israeli-Palestinian party of co-operation and peace, one that will work to have our proposals implemented. As Yehuda said, it's going to take years, generations, to turn things round, but I think we can do it, I genuinely think we can. Not if the Menorah falls into the wrong hands, though. If that happens everything we've worked towards, everything we've hoped for, everything we've dreamt of. . .'
He took another long drag, and stared at the ground.
'Help us, inspector. From one Muslim to another, one man to another, one human to another – please, help us.'
What could Khalifa say? Nothing. He let out a deep sigh, scraped at the ground with his foot, nodded his assent. Marsoudi reached out a hand and touched his shoulder again, then looped an arm through his and led him back towards the building.
* * *
The meeting continued for another hour, Khalifa and Ben-Roi doing most of the talking now, coldly formal, avoiding each other's eyes, going over all the information they had about Hoth and the Menorah, trying to narrow down the search and develop possible lines of attack, the other men occasionally interjecting the odd comment but otherwise listening in silence as the two detectives hammered things out between themselves. It was past midnight when they eventually fell silent.
'One final thing we should discuss,' said Milan, grinding out his cigar butt. 'The al-Madani woman. What's to be done about her?'
Gulami drained off the contents of the cup he was holding in his hand.
'She can't be kept in custody till this is resolved?' he asked.
Marsoudi shook his head. 'She is well known to my people. And well loved by them. To keep her under arrest would attract much attention. Something we don't need in the current situation.'
'So?' Gulami said as he crunched the cup into a ball and launched it across the room.
No-one answered, all of them staring off into space, sunk in their own thoughts, the room now thick with velvety wedges of shadow as the kerosene lamps slowly burnt themselves down. A full minute went by.
'She can work with me.'
It was Ben-Roi. Everyone looked up.
'She knows as much as we do,' he said, 'about Hoth and the finding of the Menorah, probably more. And she understands what would happen if al-Mulatham got his hands on it. We should use her.'
It seemed a reasonable suggestion, and Gulami, Marsoudi and Milan all nodded. Only Khalifa seemed uncertain, his brow furrowed, his eyes scanning Ben-Roi's face – the way his tongue kept flicking out to moisten his lips, a mannerism he had often seen during police interviews when the interviewee was nervous, trying to conceal something. There's more here, he thought to himself. Something you're not telling us. Not a lie, just . . . some other agenda. Or was it simply that he disliked the man so much he could take nothing he said at face value? Before he could decide, Gulami came to his feet and declared the meeting closed.
Outside, as they trooped back towards the helicopters, Khalifa found himself walking just behind Ben-Roi, who towered over him, higher by a head and almost twice as broad. After all that had happened that night he felt no great inclination to address him, to have any contact with him at all save what was absolutely necessary to get the job in hand completed. His sense of decency got the better of him, however, and, coming up alongside the Israeli, he told him that despite what had been said earlier he was sorry for what had happened to his fiancée, that he had a wife and children himself, could not imagine what it must be like to lose a loved one in that way. Ben-Roi looked down at him, then, with a muttered 'Fuck you', strode away again.
'It is a strange coincidence, no?' Gulami's voice drifted back to them from up ahead. 'An Egyptian, an Israeli and a Palestinian began this whole process. And now it is upon an Egyptian, an Israeli and a Palestinian that its survival depends. I like to think that maybe this is a good sign.'
'Please God it is,' said Milan.
'Please God,' echoed Marsoudi.
KALANDIA REFUGEE CAMP, BETWEEN JERUSALEM AND RAMALLAH
The envelope was waiting for Yunis Abu Jish when he woke at dawn, slipped beneath the door of his house, although who had delivered it, how and when, he had no idea. Inside was a simple typewritten note informing him that his martyrdom was to take place in six days' time. At exactly five p.m. on the afternoon of that day he was to be outside the payphone on the corner of Abu Taleb and Ibn
Khaldoun streets in East Jerusalem, where he would receive his final orders.
He read the note three times, then, as instructed, took it outside into the narrow dirt alley that ran along the back of the house and burnt it. As its paper curled, blackened and crumbled into ash he felt a sudden rush rising from his stomach. Collapsing onto all fours, he began to vomit uncontrollably.
PART THREE THREE DAYS LATER
LUXOR
'What is it? What have you found?'
Khalifa leant forward over the veranda rail, his voice urgent, excited.
'A bicycle frame, ya inspector.'
'Dammit! You're sure?'
'I think my men know a bicycle when they see one.'
'Bloody dammit!'
The detective spat out his half-smoked cigarette and stomped it beneath his foot, muttering in frustration at this latest false alarm. In front of him, leaning on their tourias amid the remains of Dieter Hoth's garden, its neatly tended rose beds and immaculately clipped lawn now scarred with an unsightly assault course of pits and trenches and heaps of sand and mud, stood four dozen workers in earth-stained djellabas. Three days and nights they'd been digging, Gurnawis fellaheen, peasant labourers from the villages on the west bank of the River Nile, the best excavators in Egypt. If there was anything buried in the garden, they would be the ones to unearth it. Yet they'd found nothing, just a couple of concrete utility pipes, the rotted remains of an old wooden shaduf and, now, part of a bicycle. Wherever Dieter Hoth had hidden the Menorah, it certainly wasn't here. As, deep down, Khalifa had always known would be the case.
He gazed out at the mess in front of him, weary, despondent; then, lighting another cigarette and signalling to the gang's rais that his men should call it a day and pack up their tools, he turned and wandered back inside the villa. Here too the scene was one of utter devastation: half the floorboards were up, drifts of books and papers lay scattered everywhere, ragged holes gaped in the white plaster walls and ceilings – the detritus of three days' increasingly frantic searching. Three days' vain searching, because here too he'd drawn a complete blank: no Menorah, no clue to the Menorah's whereabouts, not even a mention of the damned thing.
Standing in the hallway now, cigarette dangling limply from between his lips, mayhem all around, Khalifa acknowledged that he'd reached the end of the line. Jansen's office at the Hotel Menna-Ra – a play on the word menorah, he now realized – his former house in Alexandria, even his blue Mercedes: all had been thoroughly gone over and all had yielded precisely mafeesh haga – nothing. The only other possibility, that Hoth's friend Inga Gratz had kept something back when he'd interviewed her the other night, was for the moment unverifiable, the old woman having fallen into a coma a few hours after he'd left her bedside, a state from which, according to her doctors, she was unlikely to emerge for some while, if at all. There was no-one else to talk to, nowhere else to look, no stone still to be turned. Whatever Hoth had done with the Lamp, the answers weren't, it seemed, going to be found in Egypt.
He remained in the villa for another twenty minutes, trudging aimlessly from room to room, uncertain whether he ought to feel relieved that he'd done all he could and could now abandon the hunt with his honour intact, or disappointed that he hadn't got more of a result. Then, locking up the house, he set off back to the station to call Ben-Roi, to tell him his search had failed. The Israeli wasn't going to be happy. From the conversations they'd been having over the last few days – curt, stiff, monosyllabic – it was clear that his end of the investigation had been going no better than Khalifa's. Time and options were both running out, and still the Lamp remained resolutely hidden.
JERUSALEM
As the two of them walked up through the grounds of the Kfar Shaul Mental Health Centre, past its pretty terraces of flowering plants and collage of neatly spaced stone buildings, Layla was tempted to make some reference to the place's history, to ask Ben-Roi if he was aware that the older buildings had once formed part of the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin, scene, in 1948, of an infamous massacre by Jewish paramilitaries: two dozen men, women and children shot dead in cold blood. One look at her companion – his eyes bloodshot from lack of sleep, his mouth set into a seemingly permanent rictus of stress and displeasure – was enough to tell her the information wouldn't be appreciated, and she said nothing, just carried on up the hill in silence.
A joint Israeli-Palestinian investigation – that's what he'd proposed when he'd marched into her cell out of the blue three mornings ago. The two of them working together as a team to try and track down the Menorah, plus some other guy called Khalifa following up leads in Egypt, all officially sanctioned, all top secret, all for the greater good. Was she up for it? Would she help?
Of course, she'd been surprised. Suspicious too, even though it was she who had mooted the joint-investigation idea in the first place (never for one minute believing he'd take her up on it). That manic glitter in his eyes, the not entirely successful attempt to sound calm and reasonable; everything about him had screamed out that there was more to his proposal than he was letting on, some concealed agenda. There was too much at stake for her to refuse to cooperate, however, and she had agreed immediately and without question to do whatever was required.
Equally unexpected had been his insistence that for the duration of the search she should move into his apartment in West Jerusalem. Again, every warning system in her body had rung out, told her the arrangement had less to do with them having somewhere they could work together without arousing suspicion, as he claimed, than his wanting to keep tabs on her, follow her every movement. Again, she had kept her concerns to herself, said that, yes, in the circumstances that would be a very good idea, accepting that if she wanted to remain in the hunt for the Menorah she was going to have to play by his rules. And anyway, with the stakes this high she was just as anxious to keep an eye on him.
So he'd signed her release forms, driven her over to her apartment to pick up her laptop and a change of clothes – she saw immediately that the place had been thoroughly gone over in her absence – and then back to his flat in Romema, whose living room had been turned into a makeshift office. And that's where they'd been ever since – three solid days, tense, uncomfortable, claustrophobic. Each morning they would start work first thing, calling, emailing, surfing the net, chasing up every lead they could possibly think of, continuing thus all day and deep into the night, living off coffee, sandwiches and, in Ben-Roi's case, endless swigs of vodka. In the early hours she would collapse onto the sofa for a few hours' uneasy sleep and he would disappear into his bedroom, although he didn't seem to do much sleeping there because on several occasions she'd jolted awake in the dead of night to hear him pacing up and down, whispering into his mobile phone, and once to find him standing in the corridor staring in at her, his face deathly pale, his lips trembling. A couple of times, near the beginning, she'd tried to break the ice, get some sort of dialogue going, asking him about his background, the photograph of the young woman on his bookshelf, anything; but he'd simply snarled and told her she was there to help find the Menorah, not write his fucking biography. So she'd just got on with it, phoning, emailing, researching, trying to stay focused. And all the while that insidious, choking atmosphere of mutual antipathy and suspicion.
Hoth's visit to Dachau – from the beginning that had formed the main thrust of their investigations. There seemed little doubt that the crate he'd brought with him had contained the Menorah. But where had he taken it afterwards? Why had he commandeered the six prisoners? These were the questions they needed to answer. And these were the questions they had singularly failed to crack. Dachau experts, Third Reich experts, Ahnenerbe experts, experts in tracking down looted Nazi treasure, even experts in World War Two German transport infrastructure – they'd contacted them all, questioned and delved, but to no avail. Most hadn't even heard of Hoth; those that had could offer no clue whatsoever as to why he'd visited the camp or where he'd gone subsequently. She'd contacted Magnus Topping
again – yes, she'd love to have dinner with him when she was next in England – Jean-Michel Dupont again, half a dozen friends and associates of Dupont, all in vain. No-one knew anything, no-one could help them.
In three long, hard days of researching only two new pieces of information had come to light: the type of trucks Hoth had had with him – Opel Blitzes, three-ton, standard German Army transport – and, from the archive at Yad Vashem, the names of the six Dachau inmates Hoth had commandeered: Janek Liebermann, Avram Brichter, Yitzhak Edelstein, Yitzhak Weiss, Eric Blum, Marc Wesser, the first four Jews, the last two, respectively, a communist and a homosexual. None of them had been returned to the camp; every attempt to try and track them down, to discover if any of them had survived the war, had failed. In short, they had come to a dead end.
Which is why, after three days, they had finally left Ben-Roi's apartment and made their way to Kfar Shaul. Because the only other possibility was that during her long quest to locate Hoth, Hannah Schlegel had somehow tracked down the Menorah as well. And that she in turn had communicated that information to her brother Isaac.