the story?”
Toad was relieved to hear Ari’s voice from the other end. “You’re back?”
“Came in last night. I’ll put you in the picture when you come in. What’s the story?”
“He was drilling the shopkeeper to find out how much he knew, how much he might have told us.”
“And?”
“He talked. He told Ayoub that we had his picture. Said Bukmun was in a stew over a ‘man in Rome’ who betrayed him, a man he saw on television.”
“So Ayoub and the shopkeeper don’t know each other?”
“Apparently not—only from the photo. At least that’s what we’re meant to believe.”
Ari chuckled. “Not everything people do is a ruse.”
“It’s possible that Ayoub didn’t know we were listening…or didn’t care,” Toad replied dryly. “It’s also possible Ayoub did not kill Bukmun and is really trying to find out who did. But start multiplying possibilities and the product is less and less certainty.”
Back in the headquarters building, Ari smiled at this; he knew that Toad thrived on low levels of certainty. He was the only man Ari knew who could keep a thousand possibilities in his mind at once without paralyzing himself. Most of his colleagues were too quick with theories—Toad, on the other hand, very slow coming up with a certainty. With Toad, it was partly that he had been trained in the severest tradition of the yeshiva, and partly that he believed in nothing.
“So if Ayoub did kill Bukmun, he was just trying to find out how much the shopkeeper knew. But what’s the connection with a ‘man in Rome’?”
Toad thought for a moment. “Pictures of Ayoub’s meeting in Rome have been on TV for days. Bukmun may have caught sight of Ayoub and realized he was the man who bought the Hawkeyes. The man who betrayed him.”
“Betrayed him?”
“I haven’t worked that out. It’s new. Shop Man was a little more open with Ayoub than he was with us.”
“Could Ayoub have entered the shop Tuesday night through the tunnels and got out fast enough to show up at the front door?”
“Yesterday we found a tunnel grate in the next street that showed evidence of recent entry. A person could crawl through that tunnel from the shop, get out into the street, and walk around the corner to the front door of the shop in about five minutes.”
“Where’s Ayoub now?”
Toad checked with the agent following Ayoub. “He just walked through the Damascus Gate. Looks like he’s making for home.”
Salah-eddin Street, Jerusalem, 1000h
“After today,” Hafiz al-Ayoub thought, as he lay on his couch and rubbed the ring with his thumb. Its worn gold felt like part of his body. “There will be no more heat, no more blood. Only a green and quiet peace.”
For a second day, the old sheikh had eaten no breakfast. He felt he would never eat again. He wished only to lie quietly and enjoy for as long as possible the diminishing breeze that came through the window of his room. From the table by his couch, he picked up his book of Shirazi’s poems. Hafiz did not believe in the legend that this book could be used for divination, but he enjoyed the game; he would ask himself a question and then open the book to find the answer. These days his question was always the same.
He opened the book at random and read:
Dim, drunk, I crawled the years along
Until, wiser, I locked away my passion;
Then I rose a Phoenix from my dust;
I closed my story with the bird of Suleiman.
Satisfied as always, he closed the book again and contemplated the verses he had read. Outside his window the morning birds had gone quiet from the heat; they would not be heard again until sunset. Tonight, the sword would pass into his son’s hand and then he could rest.
For forty years he had guarded the sword with its streak of fire, although he had seldom taken it from the hiding place and the tapestry sheath. He had carried it in his heart along with Jamila—perhaps that was why he had lost her—and he had carried it through the long legal wars in courts from The Hague to Jerusalem. For a long time he had carried it in trust for Nasir and perhaps for his son after him, although he now had no hope of seeing Nasir’s children. People who thought the sanctuaries were safe for all time were as deluded as those who expected that the Israelis at any moment would take it in their heads to do the worst they were capable of. He had walked the careful path of Suleiman, refusing to acquiesce to the inner rage, staying watchful in the courts—at times even revealing a glimpse of the blade—until the day when the Rightful One would claim his own.
His duty was ended now. After tonight, he could sleep.
Nasir came into the room. “I got Amal to school.”
Hafiz stirred, pulling himself up on his couch. “You should have a word with the teacher in the madrassah,” he said wearily. “Amal is likely to hit him one day.”
Nasir gave a loud chuckle. He wanted to keep things light while he scanned the news on TV. With the sound on mute, the screen would not bother Hafiz, who was becoming noticeably less wakeful the last few mornings.
“Why are you watching television in the middle of the day?” his father asked from the couch.
“I want to see the news.”
Hafiz settled back motionless again. Using his GeM to control the flatscreen, Nasir scrolled quickly through frozen images from a dozen news broadcasts of the last few days. Like train windows, the images flashed past of the dead Pope sprawled on a staircase, of suitably solemn world leaders, of authorities both PA and Israeli deploring what had happened; and then of lesser figures and lesser stories.
There it was. He had paid little attention to it. The others at the station had made fun of him. Tuesday, 1000 hours—the item’s first appearance. He scrolled through several more appearances during the day and stopped to study one of them.
When Hafiz awoke again, Nasir was gone. It was not right to say he had been sleeping—only dozing. He had been thinking of Nasir’s mother, of Jamila; he had locked her away in his heart so long before. His uncle had questioned the wisdom of the marriage, of the passion Hafiz felt for Jamila, in light of the work Hafiz was to do. But his uncle needn’t have worried, because Hafiz did his work strictly and seriously. When a child was not forthcoming, he had adopted one, reared him, and trained him. He had now added forty years to the eight centuries of peace on the holy mount: no new Crusade had been allowed to form, even in the worst of times, even amid worldwide jihad.
He had managed the repercussions of the attack on al-Aqsa, which had nearly brought him to the grave. In truth, Hafiz smiled to himself, it had brought him to the grave. Drunken with rage, the others were demanding the worst. The practice of diplomatic delicacy had exhausted him to the point where the carrion birds in his blood freed themselves and now preyed steadily on him.
It was martyrdom of a sort, he smiled to himself.
One day his uncle Haytham had made the ultimate sacrifice, which he had expected to do. Consumed by two wars, worn out by the insistent pull of martyrdom, he died in the first Intifada. After the one-eyed Zionist general in 1967, Munich in 1972, the disastrous Egyptian attack in 1973—but the Intifada was a new thing. Haytham was exhausted by the frenzy, the stones in the air, the decapitations, and the red craters in the mud. One day he had collapsed in the street and died under the wheels of an IDF van—an accident, they said.
That was the beginning of the forty years. From that day, he had carried the weight of the gold ring on his hand.
The world continued, a cancer in remission one day and fulminating the next. A Jewish dentist murdered worshipers in the mosque at Hebron. Palestinian children