An armed Palestinian, blood streaming down his face from a scalp wound, mistook the dust-covered figure standing in the rubble and clutching a weapon for one of his comrades. He shouted urgently in Arabic for Merlin to run for help. To avoid having to reply, Merlin shook his head as though deaf or dazed. Around him, people with torn clothes, people clutching wounds and people in shock, were running and staggering in all directions through the smoke and dust. Merlin took advantage of the confusion to walk unsteadily away between the hovels of the camp, uncertain where safety lay. The light, not his recent captors, was now the chief enemy. It beat into this brain through over sensitive eyes that throbbed as though someone were showering them with fire hot needles. It was this pain that brought him finally to his knees, sobbing, on a pile of dust and bricks that had been someone’s home.
The woman was standing over him when he looked up. It was hard for Merlin to see her face against the background of the too bright sky. Veiled from head to foot, her features were hidden. He was aware only of her eyes – compelling eyes that ordered him to obey.
‘Come,’ she said. ‘You must get up. And hurry.’
She had none of the humility with which most Arab women talked to a man. Merlin thought she was speaking French but with such a heavy accent that her speech was almost unintelligible to him.
‘Je suis blessé,’ he said. I am wounded.
‘You will not die.’ She spoke coldly, like a busy surgeon who had more important cases to attend to.
Eyes half closed, Merlin staggered to his feet and followed her through the dust and shouting and confusion to a deserted building, roofless and with walls holed by shellfire.
‘Stay here,’ she ordered. ‘Hide yourself and wait until I come for you.’
*
The old man picked his way past what had been a luxury French restaurant and through the vandalised gardens of bombed out villas once lived in by wealthy American, Swiss and French expatriates. At the far end of the village was an ancient house hidden among trees, thanks to whose concealment it had escaped the worst of the bombardment when the Syrian guns had bombarded the Palestinian positions. The iron-bound door with its creaking, rusted hinges gave directly onto a courtyard around which the house was built. There, waiting by the dried up fountain, was the old man’s elder son.
*
Salem Chakrouty was dressed in civilian jacket and trousers with a Kalashnikov assault rifle slung over his back. Apart from the weapon, there was nothing military about him. His manner was gentle and his eyes were dead, as though the fire had gone out behind them. He embraced his father. Neither talked of the last time they had met, at the funeral of Salem’s wife and two children. After the earth had covered the three shrouded bodies in their shallow grave, they had walked between rows of graves whose makeshift headstones were decorated with plastic-covered colour portraits of moustached young men looking serious for the camera. The pictures had put Salem in mind of the Biblical plague which had taken the firstborn son from every household in the land of Egypt. The two men talked now of trivialities.
‘The fountain is dry,’ said Salem. ‘Its basin is filled with leaves and rubbish.’
‘One day the water will flow again,’ said his father.
‘Insh’allah.’
‘But there is something here more precious than water.’ Yussef knelt beside the basin and cleaned the mess away from the tiled surround. It was a crazy paving of broken ceramics, tastelessly set in cement. One tile, more or less intact, drew his eye. It had a glaze of intense blue, broken up with white classical Arabic writing scrolling itself into intricate, indecipherable patterns. Before the war, tourist traps in the city had been full of tiles like this, bearing roughly written prayers or quotations from the Koran which tourists bought as souvenirs. This tile, however, was genuinely ancient, and the writing was not a prayer but a poem. In one corner, the glaze had been shattered by a bullet at some time in the fighting, but most of the verse was intact.
‘This tile,’ Yussef told his son, ‘is your legacy which I bequeath to you as my father did to me and his father to him. Guard the secret well, for it is a precious thing.’
Salem watched his father, concealing the worry he felt. The old man had been ill for a long time and there were no medicines to be had. The obsession with an old tile which had brought them both to the house that day at risk of their lives sounded to him like a senile fixation.
‘Can you read what the writing says?’ Yussef asked.
To humour his father, Salem studied the scrolls and curlicues of the classical script which meant nothing to him. For privacy, in case anyone was prowling about the ruins, the two men were speaking English. All the family spoke French and English as fluently as Arabic. In the days when Lebanon’s prosperity and stability merited the title of Switzerland of the Middle East, they had been as much at ease walking down the Champs Elysées or Fifth Avenue as strolling through the smart shopping streets of Hamra. Now the boutiques of Hamra were boarded and shuttered, the streets overgrown with weeds and Paris or New York as remote as the moon.
‘This,’ said Yussef, caressing the tile, ‘is the writing of an ancestor of ours. He was a great man known as Yussef El Kebir – Joseph the Great. It has been in our family for forty generations. I shall read to you what it says.’
His eyesight was not good, but he knew most of the words from memory. His father had taught them to him as a boy, as his father had taught him:
‘Destroyed by fire is house and home.
My sons with weapon in hand shall roam.
The olive bears no fruit; the fig tree dies.
When all is lost, then shall arise
My sons …’
*
The old man’s voice faltered. ‘Have you news of Kassim?’ he asked.
‘I heard that my brother is with a Shi’ite militia unit in the Beka’a Valley,’ Salem answered. ‘They are fighting men who were their comrades until last week when everyone changed partners in this crazy game we are all playing.’
Yussef finished reciting the text of the inscription, then stood and shuffled to the grated opening in the courtyard wall where long ago he had set up a telescope to look down on the city. The mounting was still bolted into the masonry, the telescope long stolen. He recalled using it years before to show his two excited young sons the illuminated sign with letters three metres high atop the Chakrouty International Hotel near the British Embassy on the waterfront of West Beirut.
Proudly he had told them, ‘One day all that will be yours, my sons.’
Now his eyesight was not good enough to see the city unaided and the hotel would not have been visible even with a telescope, for it was a pile of rubble surrounded by other piles of rubble. He had the Syrians and the Israelis to thank: the Syrian Army for converting the lower floors and basement garage of the hotel into a command bunker and the Israeli Air Force for inserting a bomb with surgical precision through a first floor window to implode the entire structure in a cascade of concrete and quick-broiled corpses.
South of the city, the Chakrouty family’s citrus orchards, vineyards and olive groves were now all barren wasteland. The last remnant of the family wealth was the primitive lime-washed house in Tel el-Sultan.
Yussef collected his thoughts. The first part of the prophecy on the tile was surely fulfilled a thousandfold: Destroyed by fire is house and home. My sons with weapon in hand shall roam … All that had come to pass.
The olive bears no fruit; the fig tree dies … It was all true. The only thing of value left for him to bequeath to his sons was a tile. He knelt beside it again and stared at the bright blue glaze. What did the words mean? His own father had said: ‘At the right time, the meaning will be clear to your son or his son or his son’s son. That is the way with prophecies.’
Dimly and confusedly, he remembered saying farewell to Salem. The pains in his chest were worse now, but they no longer worried him. If his elder son survived, the message had been passed on and he had done h
is duty. If not, it no longer mattered.
Forgive me, he said to the other Yussef: forgive me if I have failed you.
He scattered debris and leaves over the tile and thought about the long journey back to the city. There was a trickle of rust-coloured water oozing from a broken pipe beside the basin of the fountain. He crouched beside it and filled the leather water bottle tied to his waist, using some more of the brackish liquid to moisten the last crust of bread from his waist pouch which he swallowed morsel by morsel as once he had eaten caviar.
*
It was dark when Merlin awoke. He sighed with relief at the gloom of a moonless night, lit by fires burning out of control and the intermittent flashes of explosions. Crawling out of the hide he had burrowed in the rubble, he found the woman waiting, silhouetted against the flames.
‘Hurry,’ she ordered. ‘I have brought your friends, but you must be quick’
Warily, Merlin followed her outside. It was curfew. On either side of the street, whole apartment blocks towered, black and gutted by fire and explosion like sculptured cliffs. He looked for the woman but she had gone. Still clutching the Kalashnikov, he had taken no more than twenty paces when he was surrounded by a group of armed men in nondescript uniforms. In the poor light their blackened faces were hidden in the folds of the keffiyeh, the traditional Arab headdresses they wore.
‘Drop it!’
The command rang out in Arabic, given extra authority by the muzzle of a machine pistol rammed against the back of Merlin’s neck.
He obeyed, his spirit crushed by the sheer bad luck of being so swiftly recaptured. The Kalashnikov skipped from his hand and clattered to the rubble-strewn ground. A hand was clamped over his mouth, forcing his head back. He felt a knife dig into his back just above the kidneys, ready for a swift thrust before he could cry out. He stood still, hands above his head, wondering whether the men frisking him so expertly were Palestinians or a patrol of Shi’ite militia. Either way, the result would be the same.
Then a shaded torch shone briefly on his face. There was an intake of breath and an oath that was Russian, not Arabic: ‘Yob tvoyú mat!’
The light went out and the same voice said quietly in English with an Israeli accent, ‘Shit! Just when we don’t want to see a newsman, who should crawl out of the woodwork but the famous Merlin Freeman?’
It took a couple of minutes of being dragged along the darkened streets over piles of rubble before the realisation sank into Merlin’s mind that he was in the hands of a squad of Israeli paras on a clandestine mission. They led him through the blackout to where they had hidden their dark-camouflaged jeep. There was a muttered exchange in Hebrew.
A torch was flashed on Merlin’s face again and a voice he recognised as belonging to an Israeli para captain said, ‘Fuck you, Freeman. You’re a goddam embarrassment. I ought to slit your interfering throat, that’s what I ought to do.’
Merlin’s brain could not lock on to reality. Despite the half-serious threat, his relief at being safe in Israeli hands was too much to handle. He felt a mad laughter bubbling up inside him. Someone passed him a water bottle from which he drank greedily. The action of swallowing helped to damp down the insane mirth.
‘What happened to the woman?’ he asked.
‘What woman?’
‘The one who came to fetch you.’
‘No one came to fetch us.’
Merlin let that go.
‘Question is, what are we going to do with you?’ the captain asked.
The laughter was coming again. This time there was no way Merlin could stop it. The captain grabbed a handful of Merlin’s torn and stinking shirt and slapped his face hard with the other hand. ‘Sober up, old buddy!’ he hissed. ‘We have to make a deal fast.’
‘Okay,’ he said weakly. ‘Whatever you want.’
‘Silence in return for your safety,’ said the Israeli. ‘That’s the deal. We weren’t here tonight, so you didn’t see us. Got it? We’ll dump you nice and near the Intercontinental Hotel where you shikker slobs in the Press corps hang out. But for the record, you walked home.’
Merlin fought the hysteria again. ‘Right,’ he agreed. ‘There was no woman. I didn’t see you. I walked home.’
Hustled into the jeep for the two mile-dash to the between-the-lines haven of the Intercontinental Hotel, Merlin could not stop alternately weeping and laughing uncontrollably. As the engine revved and the jeep progressed bumpily through the darkness, reversing back from junctions that suddenly lit up with streams of tracer and darting down narrow alleyways to avoid them, the tears ran freely down his cheeks and it was hard to know what was real and what he had imagined.
Chapter 4
At the western end of the Mediterranean on the morning of Easter Monday 1982, early risers were staking their claims to favourite places on the beaches of the Costa del Sol. A few miles inland, hidden in the folds of the Sierra Nevada lay a remote, fenced-off private estate known as El Valle de los Cantos.
There was no road leading to the valley, only a dusty track which had once had a sun-bleached signpost at the end, now replaced by a notice painted with a skull and crossbones above the warning: QUARRIES! DANGER OF EXPLOSIONS. The occasional tourist who ignored the sign was stopped at a checkpoint manned by a pair of athletic looking young men in their twenties, each holding a Doberman straining on its leash. They spoke in German with Austrian accents.
From the checkpoint, little could be seen of the valley itself. It was an arid bowl where only sage brush grew and half a dozen modern buildings were dotted in small plots of irrigated greenery. The buildings were odd in that all the windows on external walls were narrow shuttered slits. Video cameras enabled anyone inside to look out but there was no way of seeing in. Anyone curious enough to climb the nearby heights with a pair of binoculars would have been lucky to escape the Dobermans that ran free after dark or the helicopter that made regular over-flights during the day. The only sound in the valley that morning was the howling of the Dobermans, disturbed by the scent of a vixen lurking in the hills up wind.
In the largest house, Hermann Kreuz was still at work. Usually the sexagenarian scholar followed a strict daily timetable, but excitement had stopped him sleeping that night. He had spent the small hours working on the translation of a letter discovered in the archives of a monastery high in the Austrian Alps. How it had got there was a mystery. It was a poem written eight centuries before by Richard the Lionheart to his mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine.
Satisfied with his translation of the poem, Kreuz broke off for a snack of nuts and fruit, eaten standing up because of his belief that eating while seated was bad for the digestion. He was something of an enigma in the art world, although widely respected for his erudition. Collectors and scholars who consulted him, or asked for an attribution, addressed him as Professor or Doctor Kreuz, but the highest rank he had ever held was Sturmbannführer in the SS. The art collection that filled his house and overflowed into the other buildings was even more mysterious. Few of the rare visitors saw more than one or two of Kreuz’s treasures. They were given to understand that their host was not so much the owner of all these precious objects, more of a learned curator acting for a consortium of owners. The truth was that hardly an item in the collection had been acquired legitimately. Most of it was loot from museums, monasteries, castles and private homes, taken at the point of a gun wherever the writ of the SS had extended during the Second World War. What Adolf Eichmann had been for the Jews of Europe, his comrade Hermann Kreuz had been for its medieval art: a transportation expert par excellence.
Kreuz was disappointed, but resigned, that morning. In scholarship, so many leads came to nothing. The Lionheart’s letter, although in verse, was no more than a whining complaint to his mother, written in March of 1199, that the treasure tower in Chinon Castle was completely empty. ‘Savies qu’a Chinon non a argent ni denier …’ the king had written.
That, reflected Kreuz, must have been a large part of the reason for Richard’s
well-documented haste to grab the treasure of Châlus before Count Aymar could claim it as his own. In the spring of 1199, the English Crown was irretrievably in debt: the first instalment of the enormous ransom demanded by the German Emperor had procured King Richard’s release from captivity but it had also drained the vast resources of his realm on both sides of the Channel. Not even the king’s extraordinary rapacity could squeeze more taxes from his ill-used subjects. The treasure tower at Chinon was indeed empty.
Kreuz was, like most scholars, an orderly man. He went methodically to file the poem and its translation in the appropriate drawer of his extensive filing system and found himself looking at a parchment whose significance had eluded him until then. It recorded the disappearance, variously ascribed in the contemporary chronicles to a miracle or witchcraft, of the vizier to the emir of Granada, Yussef el-Kebir. The parchment was dated October 1199 – eight months after Richard’s ill-fated expedition to Châlus.
As Kreuz knew, the ancestor of Yussef Chakrouty and his sons had been famous during the twelfth century for his work as an alchemist, a philosopher and a doctor, an economist and architect. Europe north of the Pyrenees was still wallowing in the Dark Ages while in Moorish Spain all the arts and sciences of Greece and Rome, of India and Egypt, were flourishing thanks to minds like that of Yussef el-Kebir.
What interested Kreuz particularly was that the disappearance of the alchemist vizier coincided exactly with an undocumented gap, which had long intrigued him, in the otherwise well-chronicled life of Eleanor of Aquitaine. Feverishly he pulled out tome after tome from among the priceless ancient volumes which lined the shelves of his library. For the thousandth time he retraced the contemporary accounts of the siege of Châlus with its great mystery: what had happened to Richard the Lionheart’s gold? That it had been discovered was certain. Yet it had disappeared again shortly afterwards in the most mysterious circumstances and never seen the light of day again.
The Spirit and the Flesh Page 3