The Flaming Sword

by Breck England

  A years-old image flashed across her memory as she willed him down the face of the cliff to the ledge below.

  “Got it,” he shouted up. The sun was gone from the gorge now and all she could see was the back of his shirt; he was kneeling against the ledge, hanging from one hand and collecting her things with the other. Fatima tightened her hold on Maryse’s arm as he began to climb up again.

  Police Administration, Via San Vitale, Rome, 1640h

  “What do you mean by this?” The Commendatore of the Vatican Police rushed through Bevo’s office door and set his tablet on the desk.

  Bevo pretended to examine the panel and then sat back again in his chair.

  “Won’t you sit, please, Signor Commendatore?”

  “I will not sit. I have no time to sit. And why will you not answer my calls?”

  “I’ve been very busy, Signore.” Discreetly, Bevo tossed a mint in his mouth and rose to shut his bureau door.

  “Yes, you’ve been busy spreading the worst kind of disinformation.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “This news release. ‘Israeli spy kills Palestinian diplomat. Rome Police official Antonio Bevo announced today the murder in Rome of a prominent Palestinian diplomat by a functionary of Israel’s security forces…’ ”

  “The Palestine government wants to know about the dead man and the press were asking me questions, that’s all. The press often asks me about important cases.”

  “You make it sound like Davan is an assassin. You know as well as I do that Ayoub attacked Davan, not the other way around. And that Davan didn’t kill Ayoub—the Unknown did.”

  “I don’t know that. That’s Davan’s version of things. The ballistics people have an opinion, I have mine. The two men exchanged gunfire in the middle of a busy intersection. Davan had followed him to Rome, specifically targeting him. The Jews and Palestinians have been killing each other for a century—why is that so unexpected?”

  The Commendatore was enraged. “And you named him! You put his name in the news—Ari Davan. He’s useless to their government now; and what’s worse, he’s a dead man. Ten thousand militants will be looking for him.”

  “Yes, I know. Apparently, this Ayoub was quite popular in Palestinian circles.”

  “Why didn’t you release Davan’s photograph as well—to make it easier for them?” the Commendatore barked bitterly.

  Bevo shrugged. “He’ll be easy to find. Google.” He looked at the photo of himself on the wall and wondered how difficult it would be to take it down after all these years. It would go with him, along with the police flag and the testimonial plaques beneath it. He had been so young in that photo, his helmet white and pristine, his jaw like a razor.

  The Commendatore rattled on. “This is the worst possible time. The tensions are as high as I’ve ever seen. The conclave under way. War—real war this time—threatening to break out any moment in the Middle East. And we’ve been trying for forty years—ever since John Paul II—to keep cranks from the Middle East away from the Popes. Every would-be assassin with a Koran and a pistol has wanted to make his own special pilgrimage to Rome.

  “So you announce that an ‘innocent’ Palestinian diplomat is gunned down by a Zionist agent right in front of the holiest Catholic shrine—just when the Islamic shrines in Jerusalem are threatened. Just what are you playing at?”

  Bevo looked at the man with mock innocence and shrugged again. The Commendatore was a fussy sort; he would be glad to be rid of him.

  It was only a matter of days now. The opprobrium he had feared would now be forgotten; his position would be substantially better; all he had to do was cooperate. He could leave behind the hard policing, which he was getting too old for, and take on something far more prestigious and far less demanding. He had earned a few drinks. After all that had happened, he had never expected to be invited upstairs.

  “I don’t understand you. What do you have against Davan? That he was right about Eagle and you were wrong?” the Commendatore said.

  “On the contrary, Davan was wrong all the time. Eagle was no threat. If anything, Eagle was trying to prevent a crime.”

  Baffled, the Commendatore said, “I’m going to issue a retraction immediately,” and started for the door.

  “You might think again,” Bevo smiled. “I don’t believe a retraction would be welcome in certain quarters.”

  The Commendatore looked back nervously at him and left.

  “Good,” Bevo said to himself. “Go.”

  He glanced at the clock. It was a bit early, but he picked up his private GeMphone from the desk, tapped it, and spoke politely into it.

  “Is this the Via Condotti?”

  St. Anthony of Kozhaya Monastery, Besharri, Lebanon, 1840h

  The priest’s cell was very clean and warmly lit by a single shaded lamp in the corner. The priest, Father Elias, was so old that his face looked like a thin white flower petal; although nearly blind from age, his mind was clear.

  “Did I know Sir John? Did I not?” he whispered happily. He seemed pleased to see Fatima, whom he had embraced gently. Maryse and Ari were only shadows to him, but his greetings were no less warm. Tinged by French and Arabic, the old man’s English was good—he had been to America, he told them repeatedly. Long ago, to go to school. He knew about baseball, but he also knew about cricket because of Sir John.

  “And where do you come from, young man?” Father Elias asked Ari, who hung back silently against the door, declining to sit. After a long hesitation, Maryse spoke for him: “He’s my colleague. We’re with an international police team…we’re trying to track down a stolen art object.”

  “Stolen art!” the old man exclaimed. “How exciting. I had thought perhaps you were journalists.”

  “Investigating the Chandos family?”

  “Of course. They swarmed through like locusts days ago. But poor Rafqa was in hospital; and, as the Americans say, their span of attention, you know…” He trailed off, his smile evaporating.

  “We are not journalists,” Maryse insisted, and she fished her identification from her battered bag and held it up to the lamp.

  The old man leaned forward politely to examine it, but then demurred. “All I can see these days is a ring of light. Degeneration of the macula. It starts in the center of the eye, a small black spot, and then the spot expands until the center of all things is darkness—but a ring of light remains. A golden ring.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Oh, no. It is like the vision of Dante. God Himself in the Paradiso, a ring of golden light—and that is what I see.”

  Maryse smiled up at Fatima and glanced back at Ari, who was brooding against the doorway, clutching his pack hard under his arm, still covered with coppery dust from the cliffside. It had been such a relief to see him scrambling safely over the edge, her bag slung around his chest.

  “They are not journalists, Father Elias,” Fatima said.

  “Good. I would not want to add to her sufferings—Rafqa’s. She was my parishioner for many years, and my friend. So, how can I help you?”

  “We need to know about the father of Peter Chandos.”

  “And why do you need to know about him?” The priest was still on his guard.

  “It’s very hard to explain.”

  “They are trying to help Peter,” Fatima interjected. Father Elias rose in his chair and tilted his head, listening to the quiet breathing of his visitors. Then he relaxed, satisfied.

  “I can tell you nothing about the father of Peter Chandos. It was a turbulent time—there was war in Lebanon. People came and went. Sir John left the village quite often and his young daughter with him. He was quite elderly by then and he needed her. Then, one day, they returned for good with the child Peter.”

  “Did Rafqa have other children?” Maryse asked.

  The old man shook his head
. “No. Only Peter. Little Boutro, he was called. Shy, quiet little boy… Sir John doted on him.”

  “When did Sir John come to Besharri?”

  “When I was very young, the French were here. And then the British, with Indian soldiers to drive out the French—that was during the war. He had been seconded from the British Mandate in Palestine. He was a general then, General John Chandos. He led his soldiers to Mount Lebanon; they stopped a while and then went home. But Sir John never went home. He stayed here.”

  “He married?”

  “Oh, yes. He brought his wife with him. She was much younger than he—just a young woman. But she loved being Lady Chandos, serving tea in the afternoons and carrying a parasol. More English than the English.”

  “She was not English?” Maryse asked.

  “She was Jewish,” Ari called out.

  Again, the old man glanced up at nothing and sniffed the air. He smiled.

  “Your young man can talk, after all.”

  Maryse looked questioningly at Ari, who leaned on the doorjamb and looked back at her with an odd expression, anxious, unreadable. In the dusky light his eyes looked black and his legs and arms like tarred ropes; he was exhausted. She herself felt overwhelmingly tired.

  The priest went on. “Lady Chandos was Jewish, the daughter of a chemist who escaped to Palestine from Germany before the war, but she converted to Christianity when she married Sir John. You understand, he was very handsome—dark hair, unusual blue eyes for a man.”

  “Some years passed, and Lady Chandos gave birth to Rafqa. She was their only child. But then things got very bad. In the old days there were thousands of Jews in Lebanon—they were happy and prosperous here and we got on well together. But soon after Rafqa was born, things got very bad for Jews in Lebanon. One day when Lady Chandos was shopping in Beirut she vanished. Abducted…killed. They found her in south Beirut.

  “Sir John was despondent after that. They say he put a bullet through his own head—I think little Peter was only two or three years old—and Rafqa was left alone with him.”

  The old man seemed to stare into the past with his shimmering, weak eyes. “And now Peter is gone. And the Holy Father. I pray for all their souls.”

  Fatima knelt and held the old man’s hand.

  Maryse motioned to Ari that they should leave.

  “You’re not going,” the priest protested, but Maryse reached for his hand and shook it. “You’re Irish, aren’t you?”

  “Born and bred,” she laughed gently. “The accent. It’s not to be avoided.”

  “Well, goodbye to you,” he said as he struggled to stand. “To you and your Israeli friend.”

  Maryse snapped around and looked at Ari. His eyes burned, but he said nothing.

  “You know,” the old man chuckled, “to be blind is not to be deaf. For years I have made a speciality of listening for accents while taking the sunshine in the square. Many people come to Besharri.”

  Maryse touched Fatima on the shoulder in farewell. On the road where they had left the car it was nearly night. A muted sun lit the cirque of Mount Lebanon just as it set; within minutes the road ahead fell into the shadow of the mountain defile. Maryse shoved her bag into the back seat of the car and strapped herself in while Ari worked through his own knapsack. She heard him stowing it behind her.

  As she watched, the last of the sunlight made a pattern like marquetry along the black escarpment overhead, and then spread deep red across the stone. For a few seconds the whole world was on fire. Then the spires of Besharri’s twenty churches swelled into shadows, and a few windows in the town shed golden-gray light; on a veranda across the way she imagined a graceful lady pouring tea, an escapee from hatred dancing unknowingly back into the arms of hatred. Then she saw another young woman with eyes like blue jewels carrying her baby laughing into the room where her father lay asleep—this time forever. And the image of her son lying asleep as well, his sculptured head wrapped in red silk against the whirling marble floor of the holiest place in all the world.

  Fatima appeared in the priest’s doorway and waved. The radical coldness of men’s hearts that had blighted Fatima’s life would touch her again—and her child, too—unless Maryse could change things. Her own life had turned into a formality, a close examination of stone and paint and dead books, bitter and willful in the wake of her father’s death. Only now she realized she had been living in the tomb with him.

  At last Fatima closed the door, and Ari came around his side of the car and slid into the driver’s seat, the Tavor in his hand.

  His voice was almost inaudible. “You will remain completely silent. You will not move.”

  Startled, she turned. Ari was holding the gun to her head.

  Salah-ed-Din Street, Jerusalem, 1950h

  Amal gazed at the viewscreen and wondered how he could feel so empty and so angry at once. Pictures of his brother flared again and again on the screen, framed in the black and green of the national flag. Shot to death in the street, they said, shot by the Zionists.

  Shot by one of them in particular. Ari Davan.

  Ari Davan. This name he would not forget, ever. An evil name. A God-cursed name. The sound of that name burst against his ears with such pain he could not hear what was being said on the television. How they could pronounce this news with such dead faces, he could not understand. A news reporter with a mustache, telling the story with his face dead and indifferent. This news should erupt like a bomb in the sky.

  At last he understood what his teacher had said. On that day of requital even the rocks and the trees will cry out, “O follower of God, there is a Jew behind me. Come and kill him!”

  Nasir, dead, shot like a dog in the street, left in the street by this Jew, this Ari Davan. His brother, dead like a dog in the street of a God-cursed western city. He would not wait for the day of requital. That day was here. That day was tomorrow. He would find this Ari Davan and cut his throat.

  A door opened below and he heard people coming in the house. His father would be returning. They had called his father to the ministry to identify Nasir’s body; Dr. Adawi had come for him, with many friends. And now his father came up the stairs with Rabia supporting him. She did not wail like their friends in the street; she was all in white with a sheer black headscarf, her face stricken but determined.

  Hafiz sat on his bed and Amal went to him. The old man took his head in his hands and kissed him, then closed his eyes, muttering at the brightness of the lights. Rabia switched off all but one and doused the viewscreen. Through the window came an oddly vivid white light—they had set up security lamps all round the Dome of the Rock, and even at this distance the shouts of soldiers could be heard as they patrolled the perimeter of the Mount. A curfew would go into effect in minutes.

  “Rabia, you must go now. The devils will shoot you on the street.”

  “It’s all right, Amal. I’m going to stay here with your father. And there are others downstairs. You will not be alone.” She was looking strangely at him.

  He remembered what his father had taught him about visitors and felt suddenly ashamed. He clattered down the stairs and came back up in moments with a tray of fresh oranges and juice. She smiled.

  “It’s odd how much you resemble him,” she said. “You look like your brother, even though you are not related.”

  “He is my brother.”

  “Yes, I know, Amal.” She reached out and swept him into her arms. The boy tried to stifle his cries but could not.

  His sobs intermingled with his father’s clotted breathing from the bed. At last Rabia lifted his head and looked into his eyes. “You have a heavy responsibility now.”

  “Yes.” He heard that Jew’s name in his mind and it was like a hammer on his ears. “Ari Davan. I will kill him. He will not live another day.”

  She was suddenly firm. “No. That is not your responsibility, Amal
. I mean that you have a responsibility to your fathers.”

  “My fathers? What fathers?”

  “Hasn’t he told you? About the black eagle?”

  Rubbing his eyes, he shook his head.

  “Not about Saladin?”

  “Yes, he told me. We are of the house of Saladin. But so are many other people.”

  Rabia examined his face for a moment, then embraced him again.

  “There is more—so much more—to tell.”

  Chapter 4

  Sunday, October 10, 2027

  Qadisha Valley, Lebanon, 0030h

  Maryse awoke. Pain flashed through the nerves in her arm. Panicking, she kicked at a layer of loose clothes shrouding her and immediately realized she shouldn’t have done it. She remembered where she was—in the freezing dark, tied tightly, nearly grafted to two trees on a hillside, gagged by a hard knot in her own headscarf. Panic closed in again, an electric claustrophobia that arrested her breathing. She hovered for an instant as fear coiled through her body, and then she screamed. It was a wild, stifled noise that would never be heard by anyone but herself.

  She yanked and pulled at the strips of cord that held her spitted between the trees, her wrists scratching at one tree and her frozen, dead feet strapped to the other. She struggled uselessly—her fingers had nothing to hold to, and the trees were as inflexible as iron pillars. But she kicked and kicked, mindlessly willing the circulation back into her legs, fighting the intense cold that draped her body.

  At last, exhausted, she lay back to gather strength. Though fear had sharpened her eyes, she could see nothing above her but the icy stars. He had needed sleep, he said; he couldn’t make the drive without sleep. He hadn’t slept more than a few hours for days, and he couldn’t think anymore. He had tied her between these trees and covered her with her own clothes from her bag to keep out the cold. It gets cold in the mountains at night, he had said.