He broke off, heaving for breath, his face a bruised shade of purple, bubbles of spittle popping at the corners of his mouth. He took another series of pulls on the oxygen mask, his eyes dilating with each in-breath and contracting again as he exhaled, then lowered the mask and accepted the handkerchief that was handed into frame from his left, presumably by the manservant who was still standing there.
‘I have been happy to indulge you, Mr Ben-Roi,’ he growled, dabbing at his mouth, ‘but since we now appear to have moved from the realm of policing into that of slander and insinuation, I am not prepared to continue with this interview. I wish you the best of luck in tracking down your killer, but feel bound to say that on the basis of what I’ve been hearing these last twenty minutes, you’re not going to be doing that any time soon. And trust me, I’ll be making my views known to your superiors. Good day, sir.’
His hand came up, ready to cut the video link. Ben-Roi called out:
‘One last question, Mr Barren.’
The old man hesitated. So did Ben-Roi, undecided as to what the question should be. Maybe he should ask about Rosetta again. Or push Barren harder on the sex-trafficking angle. Or maybe challenge him about the list of Egyptian companies sitting folded in his pocket. Instead, without really knowing why, he threw out a curveball.
‘Do you think the Nemesis Agenda had anything to do with your wife’s death?’
Two days ago a similar left-fielder from Dov Zisky had caught Genady Kremenko unawares. No such luck with Barren. The old man glared at the screen, his face contorting with fury, his chest heaving. Then, with a muttered ‘Get him out of here,’ he reached forward and the screen went blank.
E
DFU
, E
GYPT
As Ben-Roi was being ushered out of his meeting with Nathaniel Barren, Khalifa was being called into his with Iman el-Badri, the woman who eighty years previously had been so brutally violated by Samuel Pinsker.
He’d arrived at her village over two hours before and had hoped to be well on his way back to Luxor by now, if not already home. As he’d pulled up outside her house, however – a low, mud-brick dwelling with a pigeon tower tacked on to the side and a donkey braying somewhere round the back – he’d discovered a dozen black-robed women sitting in a line along the front of the building. Sariya had told him that Pinsker’s victim was now some sort of holy figure, and it turned out the women were queuing for her blessing.
In other circumstances he would have flashed his badge and gone straight in. Instinct told him that in this case such a peremptory approach was not appropriate. Calling Zenab to let her know he’d be even later home than expected, he’d taken up his place at the end of the queue and waited his turn, studiously avoiding the supplicants’ eyes so as not to compromise their modesty. In these out-of-the-way areas such things were important.
And now, finally, two hours and ten Cleopatras later, a woman’s voice was summoning him inside, the last person in the line. Standing, he brushed down his trousers and smoothed his hair, mindful of his appearance even though the person he was visiting was blind. Then he stepped through the bead curtain into the building.
The interior was about as far removed as it was possible to get from the suite in which Ben-Roi had just conducted
his
interview. No electricity, no carpets, no decoration, no fancy furnishings. Instead, Khalifa found himself in a room with a beaten-earth floor, bare mud-brick walls and a smoke-darkened wooden ceiling. A door on the far side led through to the living quarters at the back of the house; a single kerosene lamp gave off just enough light to render the room visible without troubling the shadows bunched in its corners. Furniture-wise the place was bare save for a pair of simple wooden couches pushed up against the side walls. On the right-hand one, an ancient, doll-like woman was sitting cross-legged with her back against the mud-brick. Everything except her heavily wrinkled face was swathed in a
djellaba suda
so that it wasn’t immediately obvious where her body ended and the shadows began.
‘It is said my blessings give comfort to those who are with child,’ she said, her voice croaky yet at the same time curiously gentle. Soothing. Like palm fronds crackling in the breeze. ‘Sadly, sir, I fear there is no blessing I can offer that will help you with
your
pregnancy.’
She smiled at her joke and motioned Khalifa on to the couch opposite. How she’d known he was a man he couldn’t say – probably she’d caught something in the sound of his breathing, or the weight of his footfall. Crossing to the left-hand couch, he sat.
‘You are not from these parts,’ she said, canting her head in his direction.
‘Luxor.’ He paused, then added: ‘I’m a policeman.’
She gave a slow nod, as if she had already somehow divined this. Other blind people he’d met had had a dullness to their eyes, a clouding of the irises that gave their condition away. Hers were a brilliant emerald green, almost unnaturally bright, as if her blindness manifested itself not so much in a lack of colour as a surfeit of it.
‘Can I get you something to drink?’ she asked. ‘The night is hot, and you have come a long way.’
Khalifa was thirsty, but declined the offer, not wanting to put her to any trouble. She smiled again, as if understanding the reason for his refusal. Easing herself off the seat, she shuffled into the living quarters at the back of the house, her movements slow but assured – if he hadn’t already known it, he would never have guessed she was blind. She returned a couple of minutes later with a glass of tea.
‘I have a girl who helps with the household chores,’ she explained, handing him the glass and returning to her couch, never once having to fumble for direction, ‘but simple things I can manage for myself. Please, drink.’
Khalifa did as she asked, not mentioning the fact that he always took his tea with sugar. It had already been sweetened. Two spoons, he guessed. Just as he liked it.
‘
Lazeez
,’ he mumbled.
‘
Afwan
,’ she replied.
A silence, then:
‘I am sorry for your loss.’
He thanked her for her commiseration and took another sip, only to realize with a start that he hadn’t mentioned Ali.
‘How did you . . . ?’
‘Some things you can see even without eyes,’ she said quietly. ‘Your grief is all around you. It hangs off you like a cloak.’
He didn’t know what to say. ‘It was my son,’ was all he managed to get out.
‘I am so very sorry.’
She stared at him, or at least seemed to, her eyes twinkling in the uncertain glow of the kerosene lamp, shadows pressing in all around. Then, clasping her withered hands in her lap, she settled back against the wall.
‘Something is troubling you,’ she said. ‘Something that makes you uneasy in my presence. Please, tell me why you are here.’
Khalifa shifted in his seat, unsettled. He’d heard that blind people had heightened senses, could pick up things that were missed by those with perfect vision, but this was something else. It was like she could see right into him, knew exactly what he was thinking and feeling. He hunched forward, swirling the tea around his glass, reluctant, suddenly, to ask the questions he’d come to ask.
‘Come,’ she pressed, ‘it cannot be that bad. Say what you need to say. You will feel better for it. Maybe we both will.’
She opened out her hands, indicating that he should talk. There was a silence, the shadows in the room seeming to deepen and thicken, as if in expectation. Then, drawing a breath:
‘Like I said, I’m with the Luxor Police,’ he began. ‘I’m working on a case . . . helping with a case . . . a woman was murdered, in Jerusalem. I won’t go into details. There seems to be a connection with a man I think you . . . knew. A
hawaga
, an
ingileezi
named . . . Samuel Pinsker.’
Her head lifted, then dropped.
‘Ah,’ she murmured.
It was her only reaction.
‘I know what happened,’ he continued, keeping his tone as gentle as he could, trying to convey not only that he understood what she must be feeling, but also that she had no cause for shame. ‘Please, forgive me for reminding you of it.’
‘You do not remind me,’ she murmured. ‘Remind implies it is something I have put from my mind. Not a day goes by when I do not think of that night. Not a minute of a day. It lives with me always. Eighty years and it might have been yesterday.’
She brought up a hand and touched her fingertips to her temples. Khalifa stared at the floor. Only a few minutes ago the visit had seemed a good idea. Now that he was actually here in her presence . . .
‘Forgive me,’ he repeated. ‘I didn’t want to . . .’
‘You have no need to apologize. They did what they did. I have learnt to live with it.’
He must have been tired because, as with the Ali comment, it took him a moment to properly register her words. He looked up, frowning.
‘They?’
‘The ones who committed the crime.’
His frown deepened. ‘I don’t understand,
Ya Omm
. I thought . . .’
‘What?’
‘That it was Samuel Pinsker who –’ he didn’t like to use the word ‘rape’, to humiliate her – ‘was responsible.’
She lowered her hand. Her eyes seemed to burn in the shadowy half-light.
‘There were three of them.’
Khalifa’s throat tightened.
‘Three criminals who were never brought to justice. Three monsters who died peacefully in their beds while their victim . . .’
She dipped her head, her face disappearing into shadow so that it was impossible to catch her expression. Khalifa sat there, cursing himself for his selfishness, for raking it all up again, making an old woman relive an event that appeared to have been even more traumatic than he had imagined, if such a thing was possible. A few seconds passed, then he stood.
‘I shouldn’t have come. It was a long time ago, it’s none of my business. Please,
Ya Omm
, forgive me. I’ll leave now.’
He turned for the door. Her voice pulled him back, unexpectedly firm: ‘You will stay.’
Her head came up, her face angling towards him. It was so deeply striated there seemed to be more wrinkles than skin.
‘Eighty years I have born this secret. It is time the truth was told. God help me, I would have done it sooner if I’d thought anyone would listen. But to be a woman in Egypt, especially a
fellaha
– you do not speak of such things. You do not speak at all if you know what is good for you. Even if I had, it would have made no difference. They were clever, my brothers.’
Khalifa’s throat tightened further. His stomach too.
‘
Allah-u-akhbar
, you’re saying your own brothers were involved in the rape!’
This time he came right out with the word, too shocked to worry about semantic niceties. To his surprise the old woman smiled, although never in his life had he seen a smile with less humour in it.
‘There was never any rape,’ she whispered, her voice not much louder than the hiss of the kerosene lamp. ‘No one laid a finger on me. Least of all Samuel Pinsker.’
She pronounced it
Sam-oo-el Peens-ka
, the name freighted with none of the bitterness you might have expected had it belonged to someone who had attacked her. Quite the opposite. Her tone suggested a tenderness bordering on reverence. Khalifa came forward a step.
‘But there was a witness. A young boy. He saw . . .’
‘What? What did he see?’
‘Pinsker attacking you.’ Khalifa could hear Chief Sadeq describing the assault. ‘You were crying, struggling . . .’
She sighed, her head shaking slowly.
‘To see is not always to understand, Inspector. Especially when it is done through the eyes of a child. When a child sees tears it does not occur to him they can be tears of joy. When he sees a man clutching a woman he assumes it must be an assault. What the boy saw was not what he thought he saw.’
There was no rancour in her voice, no hint of blame. Just sadness. Infinite sadness. Khalifa stood a moment. Then, crossing the room, he dropped to his haunches in front of her. She was so small and shrunken, the couch so low, that even squatting he was still a head taller than her.
‘What happened that night,
Ya Omm
?’
The question brought another smile. Genuine this time.
‘What happened? A wonderful thing. The man I loved asked me to marry him. And I said yes. It was the happiest night of my life. For a while, at least.’
She sighed and tilted her head, her gaze, such as it was, angling over Khalifa’s shoulder towards the shadows in the top corner of the room. Khalifa’s thoughts were spinning, trying to make sense of it all, to readjust. Everything he’d heard about Pinsker, everything he’d assumed these last few days, it all seemed to crumble away from him, like a photograph turning to ash beneath his fingertips. Shuffling closer, he dropped to his knees and took her hands in his.
‘Tell me,’ he said. ‘Please,
Ya Omm
. I want to understand.’
Outside the donkey had started braying again, a pained adenoidal honk that somehow seemed to be part of a separate reality. Inside the room the silence was so intense you could almost taste it. Seconds went by – or maybe minutes; from the moment he’d stepped into her presence, Khalifa seemed to have lost all sense of time. Then, slowly, she slipped her hands from his and brought them up to his face. Her fingertips ran back and forth – mouth, nose, cheeks, eyelids, forehead – tracing his features as though they were lines of Braille.
‘You are a good man,’ she whispered. ‘A kind man. I heard it in your voice, now I read it in your face. I read pain too, and anger, much anger, but goodness prevails over all. Just as it did with
Sam-oo-el
. He was a
very
good man. The best I have ever known. So maybe it is fitting you should be the one to hear the truth.’
She held his face a moment longer. Then, lowering her hands, she sat back, closed her eyes and told him the story.
Pinsker had saved her from her brothers. That’s how it had started.