‘There’s beer in the fridge,’ she said as they went through into the kitchen. ‘Or wine if you prefer.’
‘Beer’s great.’
He opened the fridge, pulled out a bottle.
‘You want one?’
She shot him a look, pointed at the bump.
‘Of course. Sorry.’
He popped the lid and took a swig. Sarah bustled around the stove. There was music playing in the living room. Joni Mitchell.
Blue
. The first CD he’d ever bought her. She really was making an effort. He tried to focus.
‘Bubu OK?’ he asked.
‘All good. You want to . . .’
She turned her tummy towards him. He came over and pressed a hand against it.
‘The more I think about that name you came up with, the more I like it,’ she said.
‘Me too.’
‘How about Iris if it’s a girl?’
He cringed. Iris had been the name of the hooker he’d talked to down in Neve Sha’anan.
‘Maybe not,’ she said, reading his expression. ‘I’ll keep thinking.’
She pressed her hand against his. Their eyes met and she smiled.
‘It’s good to have you here, Arieh.’
‘It’s good to be here. Really good.’
They stood a moment, Ben-Roi’s hand involuntarily closing around the mobile in his jeans pocket. Then she came up on tiptoe and kissed him. Just a quick peck, but on the lips. Tweaking his earlobe, she turned back to the stove and stirred a pot.
‘Why don’t you go out on the balcony? I’m almost done here. You can light the candles while you’re out there.’
She threw him a box of matches. He caught them, told her again how good it was to be here – hoping the repetition would make up for the fact that he hadn’t even bothered to put on clean clothes – and took himself outside. There was a neatly laid table with flowers and candles, napkins, a bowl of olives, a basket of pitta breads. By the look of it he wasn’t the only one who was thinking about the two of them starting over.
He snaffled a couple of olives, lit the candles, swigged his beer. Then, easing the door closed with his foot, he pulled out his mobile and belled Khalifa again.
‘I’m getting worried here. Seriously worried. Call me as soon as you get this. OK?’
He rang off. Sarah came out.
‘You’re looking guilty,’ she said.
‘Only ’cos I’m having inappropriate thoughts about you,’ he lied, sliding the mobile into his back pocket.
She laughed and threw her arms round his neck.
‘I think it’s going to be a good evening.’
‘Me too. A really good evening.’
He returned the embrace, pulling her close, telling her how beautiful she looked.
And all the while he was thinking about the Labyrinth and willing his mobile to ring.
T
HE
L
ABYRINTH
Khalifa spent thirty minutes heaving and kicking at the barrels blocking the tunnel entrance. He didn’t move them an inch. The force of the collision had driven them into one another, as good as fusing them. Even if by some miracle he
had
managed to get one loose, it wouldn’t have made much difference. The ongoing whump and thud of colliding metal – still audible, although barely – told him that the mine’s main gallery must now be blocked to a distance of at least a hundred metres from where he was, if not more. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of barrels walling him in. He would have had more chance of clawing his way out through the bare rock. He was going to have to find a different way.
If there was one.
‘Help!’ he screamed, throat burning from the acrid stench of garlic, which seemed to be coming from the dust inside the barrels. ‘Help! Please, help! Help!’
Futile. But then desperate people do futile things. And the idea of fumbling his way blindly through the Labyrinth was just so unbearable . . .
He turned, facing down the tunnel. The darkness was so dense, so impenetrable, it was somehow beyond colour. An absolute void against which even the deepest shade of black would have looked pale. He flailed out a hand. Once, twice, three times. Then, slowly, he started shuffling forward, the distant, metronomic thud of colliding barrels seeming to echo the pounding of his heart.
So deep are its shafts, so numerous its galleries, so bewildering its complexity, that to step through its doorway is to be lost entirely and Daedalus himself would be confounded.
He went a step at a time, dabbing at the floor with his foot, fearful there might be another hole like the one he’d seen way back up the gallery. The tunnel was narrow, somewhere between a metre and a metre and a half wide and just over a couple of metres high. He swept his left hand in front of him, gripped the Helwan with his right. Pointless, given that he couldn’t see a damn thing, but the feel of the gun at least gave him a crumb of comfort. And in his current predicament he needed all the crumbs he could get.
The passage ran dead straight. The floor was flat, the walls felt neatly chiselled, like the tombs in the Valley of the Kings. There were no side-tunnels, or at least none that he could find. Part of him was relieved. Side-tunnels meant decisions, complexity, the possibility of getting lost, tangled in the Labyrinth’s fiendish web.
Part of him was concerned, however. And the concern grew with every faltering step he took. To have any hope of getting out, of navigating his way through the maze, it was crucial that he stayed as close as he could to the line of the main gallery. And the tunnel seemed to be taking him further and further from that line, deeper and deeper into the unknown.
There wasn’t much he could do about it, and so he just pushed on, inching his way forward, the only sounds the terrified pull of his breath and, from somewhere in the far distance, the continuing pulse of impacting barrels. Once, his hand brushed some sort of shallow, fist-sized cavity in the otherwise flat wall. A little further on his foot crunched on something, which when he bent down to investigate, he discovered were the fragments of a shattered jar or pot. Other than that he encountered no other features, no other objects. Nothing but the floor, the walls and the suffocating, all-consuming darkness.
And then, suddenly, the tunnel ended.
‘Oh God, no.’
Sliding the Helwan into the back of his trousers, he felt with both hands. In front of him was solid rock. He patted left, right, up to the ceiling, down to the floor. There were no gaps, not even a crack. It was a dead end.
He patted again, and again, exploring every inch of the wall. Then, turning, he slumped back against it and slid to the ground. As he did so the muted thump of barrels finally ceased. A deathly, sepulchral silence descended. He brought up his knees and wrapped his arms round them.
He was buried alive.
J
ERUSALEM
Starters was Sarah’s homemade
baba ghanoush
, another of Ben-Roi’s favourites. They turned off the living-room lights, sat out on the balcony with just the candles. There were stars in the sky; the scent of magnolia blossom drifted up from the garden beneath. Joni Mitchell had given way to Etti Ankri.
It would have been perfect if he hadn’t been so damned worried.
‘Looks like the play scheme’s shutting down,’ she said, picking a pitta from the basket and tearing it in half.
He’d sneaked the cell phone into his hand under the table, was snatching glances at the display. He looked up at this.
‘Oh no!’
She swirled the pitta through the dip.
‘It’s been on the cards for a while. And we heard today our major donor’s dropping out.’
‘You can’t find another one?’
‘Not in the current climate. Reconciliation’s dropped way down the agenda.’
‘I’m so sorry.’
She shrugged, nibbled on the corner of the pitta.
‘In a weird sense, part of me’s relieved. It’s been like watching someone you love slowly die. Kinder to put it out of its misery. We’ve got maybe a month’s grace, then we’ll—’
‘Hava Nagila’ blasted from Ben-Roi’s lap. He whipped out his phone, his focus zeroing in on the screen. It was only his friend Shmuel. Across the table Sarah was looking at him. Not angry. Not even annoyed. Just . . . disappointed.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, letting the call go to voicemail.
She reached out a hand, twined her fingers with his.
‘Just for tonight I thought you might turn it off, Arieh. You did it before. You’re strong enough. I know you are. Come on, fight the urge. Resist! Resist!’
She was trying to make a joke of it. Which made him feel even worse. He squeezed her hand.
‘Listen, Sarah, I don’t want to make a big thing of this, and I don’t want it to get in the way of tonight, but I think my friend Khalifa might be in trouble. I’m going to put the phone here . . .’
He made a show of laying it in the middle of the table.
‘And if anyone rings but him,
anyone
, I swear to God I won’t answer it. And the moment he does ring, the phone’s off and you can do whatever you want with the damn thing. Flush it down the toilet, for all I care.’
Something in her eyes said she’d heard it all before, didn’t believe him. She blinked it away and pushed a smile across her face.
‘Sounds like a fair deal to me.’
He gave her hand another squeeze. Then, half standing, he leant over the table and kissed her head.
‘Thanks for being you,’ he said.
‘Thanks for being
you
. Even if “you” is the most infuriating man I’ve ever met.’
He chuckled at that and sat back down. As he did so, his gaze jinked towards the phone’s display, just to check.
‘Eat up,’ she said. ‘Or the
cholent
’ll need reheating.’
T
HE
L
ABYRINTH
Khalifa had no idea how long he sat there at the end of the tunnel, his head pressed into his knees, his arms clasped round his legs, despair enveloping him as absolutely as the blackness of the mine. It might have been a couple of minutes, it might have been a couple of hours. It might even have been a couple of days. Down here, time seemed to have no meaning.
Eventually, though, he unwrapped his arms and pulled himself back on to his feet. He stood a moment, a distant snatch of conversation echoing on the margins of his memory, something he had once said to someone in a situation almost as bleak as this (
Trust in God, Miss Mullray. Trust in anything. But never despair
).
Then, turning, he again patted his hands across the rock at the tunnel end. Up, down, side to side. It was as solid as it had been however long ago it was that he’d first banged into it. No cracks, no gaps, no way through. A dead end. In every sense of the word.
He slammed a fist against the stone. If this had been a film, he thought, some sort of concealed doorway would have sprung open at this point. Then he started to feel his way down the side of the tunnel, sweeping his hands methodically from floor to ceiling on the million-to-one chance he’d missed a side-passage on the way down. He knew he hadn’t. Even in pitch blackness the walls were too close together for him not to have sensed an opening if there’d been one. Anything, however, was better than just sitting there counting off the minutes and the hours and the days until death eventually stepped in to put him out of his misery. Like Samuel Pinsker must have counted them off. He didn’t want to die like Samuel Pinsker. He didn’t want to die, period.
He fell into a sort of rhythm. Shuffle a few centimetres, down on his knees, palms against the wall, caress his way up, stand on tiptoes, touch the ceiling, shuffle a few centimetres, down on his knees, palms against the wall, caress his way up . . .
He didn’t need to be so thorough, to explore every single millimetre of rock, but there was something vaguely soothing in the action. And, also, by taking it slowly, he was putting off the moment when he had to acknowledge once and for all that he was doomed. While there was wall left to explore, there was still hope. Only the tiniest flicker of it, but hope nonetheless. When he’d covered every inch of the tunnel and still not found a way out – that’s when he’d give in to despair.
Shuffle a few centimetres, down on his knees, palms against the wall, caress his way up . . .
He reached the scatter of broken pottery he’d encountered before – thick, chunky shards, presumably from some sort of large storage jar – and then, a few metres past it, creeping his hands up from the floor, a shallow cavity in the stone. He’d come across a similar cavity on his way down the tunnel, although he seemed to remember that one being at shoulder height, and this was only at the level of his knee. Or maybe it was the same cavity and it was just his memory playing tricks on him. In the Stygian blackness it was impossible to be certain of any of his senses. He paused, exploring the hole with his fingertips. It was only a couple of centimetres deep, more an indentation than a hole, and had a rounded, scooped sort of feel to it. He distinctly recalled the other cavity being deeper and more uneven, which confirmed to him they were two different features. He moved his hands further up the wall. They touched another indentation – this one at hip-height – and another (chest-height), and a fourth, about level with his shoulder. This
was
the one he’d touched before, he was sure of it – same depth, same lumpy feel to its lower lip. Four depressions in the otherwise flat, neatly chiselled wall, one above the other. Interesting.
He crept his hands higher, hit the ceiling, felt across it, found . . .
A hole.
Suddenly his pulse was hammering. Standing on tiptoe, he traced the hole’s outline with his fingertips. It was square, roughly half a metre by half a metre. Neatly cut. Right in the middle of the ceiling. Like the bottom end of a chimney flue. He must have walked right under it when he came down the tunnel before.
He jumped and thrust a hand up into it. He couldn’t touch rock. He fumbled his way back down the passage and returned with a handful of pottery shards. He launched them upwards, one by one. The flue seemed to go up quite a distance. Another dead end? Or an escape route. Either way it was academic because after an initial surge of excitement he realized there was no way he was ever going to be able to get himself up into it.