The Last Secret Of The Temple (10 page)

Even at a distance of fifteen years, Khalifa remembered the Schlegel case as though it had happened only yesterday.

Her body had been found by a local man, Mohammed Ibrahim Gemal, in the Precinct of Khonsu, a dark, shadowy, rarely visited building in the south-western corner of the Karnak Temple complex. Sixty years old, Israeli, Jewish, single, she had, according to the autopsy report, suffered a series of violent blows to the head and face inflicted by a blunt instrument of indeterminate type. As well as shattering her jawbone and fracturing her skull in three separate places, the murder weapon had left a curious pattern of marks on her skin –
ankh
signs interspersed with miniature rosettes, presumably from some sort of decorative design on the weapon's surface.

Despite her massive injuries, Gemal had been adamant Schlegel was still alive when he had found her. Blood-covered and incoherent, she had, he insisted, whispered two words, Thoth and
tzfardeah,
repeating both several times before slipping into a coma from which she had not emerged. There were no other witnesses to corroborate his statement, and no witnesses at all to the murder itself, save for an old temple guard who claimed to have heard muffled screams from the interior of the temple and had glimpsed someone hurrying away from the scene of the crime, limping heavily and with 'something on his head, like a funny little bird'. Since the man was old and half-blind, and had a reputation for drinking on the job, no-one had taken his evidence especially seriously.

The then head of Luxor Police, Chief Inspector Ehab Ali Mahfouz, had assumed control of the case personally, assisted by his deputy, Inspector Abdul ibn-Hassani. Khalifa, who had only just been posted to Luxor from his native Giza, was also appointed to the investigating team. He was twenty-four at the time, on his first murder case.

From the outset the investigation had focused on two possible motives for the killing. The obvious one, favoured by Mahfouz, was robbery, since the woman's wallet and watch were both missing. The second, less likely option, although one that couldn't be ruled out, was that it had been a fundamentalist attack. Only a month previously nine Israelis had been shot dead on a tour bus on the highway between Cairo and Ismailiya.

Khalifa, the least experienced and most junior member of the team, had from the first had doubts about both these scenarios. If robbery had been the motive, why had the attacker not taken the gold Star of David hanging on a chain around the woman's neck? And if it had been fundamentalists, why had they not claimed credit for their actions, as they invariably did after an attack of this sort?

There were further puzzling aspects to the case. Schlegel had arrived in Egypt the previous day from Tel Aviv, travelling alone, and had flown straight down to Luxor where she had booked into the Mina Palace, a budget hotel on the Corniche el-Nil. According to the hotel concierge, she had remained in her room from the moment she had checked in until 3.30 p.m. on the afternoon of her death, when, at her request, he had arranged a taxi to take her down to Karnak. She only had a small overnight bag with her and her return ticket to Israel had been for that same night. Whatever her reason for being in Luxor she clearly wasn't there for a holiday.

She had, apparently, made at least one call from her bedroom phone, on the evening of her arrival – the hotel housekeeper had overheard her when she had brought up towels and soap. And a large kitchen knife had been found in the handbag beside her body, newly sharpened, as if she had been expecting to do violence to someone, or else to defend herself in the face of violence from someone else.

The more Khalifa had thought about the case, the more convinced he had become that it had nothing to do with theft or extremism. The key, he felt sure, was the phone call. Who had Schlegel been speaking to? What had been said? He had requested a printout from the hotel's telephone meter, but as luck would have it the meter had chosen that evening to go on the blink, and before he had had time to chase up Egypt Telecom for a call breakdown for the entire building the investigation had taken an unexpected turn: Schlegel's watch had been found in the house of Mohammed Gemal.

Gemal was well known to the Luxor Police. An inveterate petty criminal, he had a string of convictions as long as your arm, from assault and battery – or which he had done three years in al-Wadi al-Gadid – to car theft and supply of cannabis (six months in Abu Zaabal). At the time of the murder he was working as an unlicensed tourist guide, and claimed to have been clean for several years, a claim Chief Mahfouz had roundly dismissed. 'Once a criminal, always a criminal,' he had said. 'A leopard doesn't change its spots, and a shit like Gemal doesn't turn angel overnight.'

Khalifa had sat in on Gemal's interrogation. It had been an unpleasant affair, brutal, both Mahfouz and Hassani giving the suspect a real working over. At first he had denied all knowledge of the watch. After twenty minutes of slapping and punching he had broken down and admitted that, yes, he had taken it, on the spur of the moment. He had debts, you see, his family were about to be evicted from their home, his daughter was sick. He vehemently denied that he had murdered Schlegel or taken her wallet, however, and continued to do so throughout two days of increasingly violent treatment. By the time the interrogation ended he was urinating blood and his eyes were so swollen he could barely see out of them. Still he continued to protest his innocence.

Khalifa had sat through all of this, disgusted to the core of his being yet too afraid to speak out, fearful that to do so might in some way jeopardize his fledgling police career. What made it worse was that from the first he had been certain Gemal was telling the truth. There was something in the desperate fury with which he screamed he hadn't killed the woman, in his refusal to buckle even under the hammer blows of Hassani's fists, that had convinced Khalifa he had, as he said, found Schlegel after she had been attacked. The man might have been a thief, but he certainly wasn't a murderer.

Mahfouz, however, had been unmoved. And Khalifa had said nothing. Not during the interrogation, nor when Gemal had been sent for trial, nor when he was sentenced to twenty-five years' hard labour in the Tura quarries, nor even when, four months after his conviction, he had taken his own life by hanging himself from the bars of his cell with a length of washing line.

In the intervening years he had tried to justify this silence to himself, arguing that Gemal was a nasty piece of work, an inveterate lawbreaker, and that his conviction, whether fair or not, was probably no less than he deserved. The truth was, however, that his cowardice had allowed an innocent man to be convicted of a crime he hadn't committed, and a woman to die without her murderer being brought to justice. And now that cowardice had come back to haunt him. As deep down he had always known it would.

To his supporters – and there was a growing band of them – Baruch Har-Zion was the new David, the Lord's chosen warrior battling against overwhelming odds to deliver his people to their Promised Land. Tough, fearless, battle-scarred, devout, he was the epitome of the
schtarker
– the Jewish tough-guy hero who looks out for himself, his people and his God, and suffers no qualms whatsoever about the means he uses to do it.

Born Boris Zegowsky in a small village in the southern Ukraine, he had come to Israel in 1970, at the age of sixteen, after he and his younger brother had smuggled themselves out of the Soviet Union, crossed half of Europe on foot and presented themselves at the Israeli Embassy in Vienna claiming their right as Jews to make
aliyah.
The journey had, for Har-Zion, been as much a pilgrimage as an escape, a voyage to a mythical land that offered not merely sanctuary from the corrosive anti-semitism of his native country, but also a physical manifestation of God's covenant with his chosen people.

He had devoted the rest of his life to defending and expanding that land, first as a soldier with the IDF, where he had served with distinction in the elite Sayeret Matkal regiment; subsequently, after incurring horrific burns when his Humvee ran over a landmine in southern Lebanon, with Military Intelligence, heading a unit devoted to the recruitment and running of Palestinian informers. An absolute and unwavering devotion to the Israeli cause was what defined and consumed him, a devotion that manifested itself both in acts of extreme heroism – he had twice been awarded the Medal of Valour, Israel's equivalent of the Victoria Cross – and also of extreme brutality. In 1982 he had received an official reprimand for covering a young Lebanese girl in petrol and ordering his men to set her alight unless she divulged the whereabouts of a Hizbollah weapons cache (she did). During his time with Military Intelligence he had been sent for court-martial following allegations that he had authorized the threat of gang rape as a means of coercing Palestinian women into turning collaborator (all charges had been dropped after the main prosecution witness had died in a mysterious car accident).

And that was just the tip of the iceberg. Tales of violence, brutality and intimidation followed him everywhere – something that, far from causing him concern, appeared to be a greater source of pride than all his awards for gallantry. 'It is nice to be admired,' he was once quoted as saying, 'but far better to be feared.'

A fierce opponent of the Oslo peace accords – of any peace accord that involved surrendering an inch of the biblical land of Israel – he left Military Intelligence in the mid-1990s and went into politics, allying himself first with the militant settlers organization Gush Emunim before breaking away to found the even more militant Chayalei David. The latter's campaign of seizure and resettlement of Arab land was initially dismissed as the work of a lunatic fringe. With the appearance of al-Mulatham and the Palestinian Brotherhood, however, his hard-line message – that there could be no safety from the suicide bombers until the whole land of Eretz Israel had been settled by Jews and every Palestinian driven across the border into Jordan – gained increasing popularity. His rallies attracted ever larger crowds, his fundraising dinners ever more prominent guests. In the 2000 election he had won a seat in the Knesset, and in some quarters he was now being seriously talked of as a future Israeli leader. 'If Baruch Har-Zion ever became Prime Minister it would be the end of this country,' moderate Israeli politician Yehuda Milan once commented. 'If Baruch Har-Zion ever became Prime Minister it would be the end of
yutzim
like Yehuda Milan,' had been Har-Zion's response.

This resume scrolled through Layla's mind as she stood staring at the man in front of her, with his gloved hands, greying hair and square-jawed face, pale and bearded, like a moss-covered cube of granite. Around her the press pack was once again screaming questions, Dictaphones waving.

'Mr Har-Zion, do you accept that you are breaking the law by occupying this house?'

'Do you believe any sort of accommodation is possible between Israelis and Palestinians?'

'Can you comment on claims that your actions are tacitly supported by Prime Minister Sharon?'

'Is it true you wish to demolish the Dome of the Rock and rebuild the ancient Temple in its place?'

Har-Zion fielded the questions one by one, arms held stiffly at his sides, iterating and reiterating in his low, gruff voice that this was neither an occupation nor a settlement but rather a liberation, the recovery of land that belonged to the Jewish people by divine right, continuing thus for twenty minutes before signalling that he had no more to say and turning to go back inside. As he did so, Layla stepped forward and shouted after him.

'Over the last three years members of Chayalei David have poisoned Palestinian wells, destroyed Palestinian irrigation equipment, cut down Palestinian orchards. Three separate members of your organization have been jailed for the murder of Palestinian civilians, including one case in which an eleven-year-old boy was beaten to death with a pick-axe handle. You yourself have spoken with approval of the actions of Baruch Goldstein and Yigal Amir. Are you really not just an Israeli al-Mulatham, Mr Har-Zion?'

Har-Zion froze, then turned slowly back towards the press-pack, searching for Layla's face, finding her eyes, holding them. His stare was hard, angry, although there was something flickering behind it, amusement almost, as if the two of them were playing some private game to which only they were privy.

'Explain to me, Miss al-Madani' – he spat her name, as if it tasted bitter in his mouth – 'why is it that when an Arab kills twenty civilians he is called a victim, but when a Jew defends himself and his family he is condemned as a murderer?'

Layla held his stare, refusing to be intimidated.

'So you support the unprovoked murder of Palestinian civilians?'

'I support the right of my people to live in peace and security on the land that was given to them by God.'

'Even if that involves systematic acts of terrorism?'

Har-Zion's face crumpled into a scowl. The rest of the pack were staring at them, silent suddenly, absorbed in the private duel.

'There is only one group of terrorists in this region,' he said, 'and it is not the Jews. Although you would not guess that from your reporting.'

'You don't call the murder of a child terrorism?'

'I call it a tragedy of war, Miss al-Madani. But it was not us who started the war.'

He paused a moment, eyes boring into her.

'Although it will certainly be us who finish it.'

He held her gaze, then turned on his heel and stepped back into the house.

'Bitch,' hissed one of his followers as he came in. 'She needs a bullet through her head.'

Har-Zion smiled. 'Maybe. But not just yet. Even she has her uses.'

Khalifa loved the ruins of Karnak Temple, especially at the end of the day, when the crowds had thinned and the setting sun suffused the entire complex with a hazy golden radiance.
Iput-Isut
the ancients used to call it, 'the most esteemed of places', and he could understand why, for there was indeed something magical about it, a ruined city suspended midway between earth and the heavens. Being there invariably took him out of himself, soothed and calmed him, as if he had been transported to some different dimension of time and space, leaving all his troubles behind.

Not today, though. Today, the monumental statues and hieroglyph-covered walls left him cold. Indeed he barely noticed them, so lost was he in his own thoughts, striding through the first and second pylons and into the column-forest of the great Hypostyle Hall with barely a glance at his surroundings.

It was almost five p.m. He had, on Chief Hassani's orders, wasted most of the afternoon at the Winter Palace dealing with an elderly English tourist who had reported her jewellery stolen. He and Sariya had spent three hours interviewing the entire housekeeping staff before the woman had finally remembered she hadn't brought the jewellery with her in the first place. 'My daughter told me to leave it at home,' she'd explained, 'in case it got stolen. You know, in Arab countries . . .'

Having sorted that out he had returned to the station where he had sat alone at his desk, chainsmoking, doodling on his pad, thinking about Piet Jansen and Hannah Schlegel and the meeting with Chief Hassani, going over and over the whole thing in his head. After an hour he had got up and gone down into the records room in the basement to pull out the notes on the Schlegel case, knowing he should just leave it, but unable to stop himself. Here, however, another mystery had greeted him, for the notes were nowhere to be found. Miss Zafouli, the elderly spinster who, for as long as Khalifa could remember – as long as anyone could remember – had been the guardian of the station's past cases, had searched high and low for them, but without success. The file had disappeared.

'I can't explain it,' she had muttered. 'I just can't explain it.'

He had left the basement more uneasy than ever and, without really thinking about it, hopped a service taxi down to Karnak, not so much to clear his mind as because it was the place where Hannah Schlegel had been murdered and therefore, somehow, the focal point of all his doubts and worries.

He passed now through the great Hypostyle Hall, its papyrus-shaped columns towering above him like sequoia trunks, and exited through a doorway in the southern wall. It was near closing time, and the tourist police were starting to herd visitors back towards the main entrance. One approached Khalifa, wagging his finger, but the detective flashed his ID and was allowed to continue.

Why had Hassani been so adamant he shouldn't go back into the Schlegel case? That was the question he couldn't get out of his mind. Why had the chief seemed so nervous? There was something wrong here. Badly wrong. And trying to find out what was going to bring him trouble. A lot of trouble. But still he couldn't drop it.

'Dammit,' he muttered, grinding one Cleopatra out beneath the sole of his shoe and immediately lighting another one. 'Bloody dammit.'

He angled towards the south-east corner of the temple enclosure, following a path between rows of hieroglyph-covered sandstone blocks, like the pieces of an enormous jigsaw puzzle, before eventually coming to a long, rectangular building set slightly apart from the rest of the complex. The Precinct of Khonsu. He slowed momentarily, taking in the monumental walls of weathered sandstone, then, his heart pounding suddenly, slipped through a side door into the interior.

It was cool and shady inside, very silent, very still, with a solitary shaft of sunlight spearing across the paved floor from a doorway opposite, like a stream of molten gold. To his left a pillared forecourt opened out; to his right was another open court, and beyond it a low doorway leading into the temple's main shrine. He himself was standing in a narrow hypostyle hall spanning the centre of the building, with eight papyrus-shaped columns marching away in front of him, four on either side. It was beneath the third column on the left that Hannah Schlegel's body had been found.

He allowed his eyes to adjust to the gloom, then moved forward. Although he had visited Karnak numerous times in the intervening years, he had always studiously avoided this particular part of it, and as he crossed the hall now he half expected to find spatters of sticky red blood still marking the paving slabs, a body-shaped chalk outline. There was nothing to suggest that violence had once been done here, however; no bloodstains, no chalk, no memory whatsoever, unless it was in the stones themselves, which seemed to possess a sort of elemental awareness, a knowing impassivity. 'We have witnessed many things,' they seemed to say, 'both good and bad. But of them we will not speak.'

He reached the relevant column and squatted, recalling the moment he had first seen the dead woman's corpse. For some reason the overall state of the body had affected him less than the extraneous details: the victim's green underpants, visible where her skirt had rucked up above her waist; a line of ants marching across her shoeless right foot; a jagged scar meandering across her abdomen like a pencil-line scrawled by a drunk; above all, the strange tattoo on her left forearm, a triangle followed by five numbers, in faded blue-black ink, like veins seeping their way through cheese. A Jewish thing, Chief Mahfouz had explained. Some religious sign or something. Like the marks you get on meat to show where it's come from. The analogy had shocked Khalifa, as though the victim was just some anonymous carcass lying on a butcher's slab. Like the marks you get on meat. Horrible.

He scuffed his hand across the floor, his palm making a dry hissing sound on the dusty sandstone, then stood again, raising his eyes to the wall behind the column, on which was inscribed an ancient relief depicting the pharaoh Ramesses XI being purified by the gods Horus and Thoth, the latter depicted with a human body surmounted by the head of an ibis.

Thoth and
tzfardeah,
that's what Schlegel had said just before she died.
Tzfardeah,
he felt certain, was a reference to Jansen's deformed feet. But what about Thoth? Had she simply, in her dying delirium, been stating what she could see above her? Thoth the Ibis, the last image upon which her eyes had focused. Or had there been some deeper meaning, some more revealing resonance?

He took a drag on his cigarette and rubbed his temples, digging into his mind, pulling out everything he could remember about the god. Wisdom, writing, counting and medicine – these were Thoth's particular preserves. Magic also, for it was he, according to Egyptian mythology, who had provided the spells that enabled the goddess Isis to bring her murdered husband/brother Osiris back to life. What else? He was the gods' scribe and messenger, the creator of hieroglyphs, the author of Egypt's sacred laws, the recorder of the eternal verdict on a deceased person's heart. He was closely associated with the moon – he was often depicted with a lunar disc over his head – and had his chief cult centre at Hermopolis in Middle Egypt, where he was known, among other things, as 'The Heart of Ra', 'The Measurer of Time' and 'Master of the Words of God'. His silver barque transported the souls of the dead across the night sky. He was married to Seshat, the 'Lady of Books', the gods' librarian.

There were plenty of possible connections in all of this, plenty of ways for Khalifa to bend Schlegel's mention of Thoth into a coded accusation against Piet Jansen. Jansen was intelligent and well read, after all; he spoke many languages, he had a large library of books. If the ancient Egyptians had had any interest in archaeology, Thoth would almost certainly have been its patron deity.

Yet despite these similarities, Khalifa still had the sense that he was missing something; that he had still not got to the heart of what Schlegel had been trying to convey. She had meant something specific, and he wasn't getting it. He just wasn't getting it.

He finished his Cleopatra and stamped the butt out beneath his shoe. Maybe Hassani's right, he thought to himself. Maybe I
am
just imagining things, trying to hammer a square peg into a round hole. And even if I'm not, what can I do about it? Carry on an investigation behind the chief's back, risk my entire career? And for what? When all was said and done, after all, Schlegel was only an old—

A sound of footsteps echoed at the far end of the temple. At first he thought it must be a guard. As the steps came closer, he realized they were too soft for a man. Five seconds passed, ten, then a woman in a
djellaba suda
entered the hall from its southern end, a bunch of wild flowers clutched in her hand, a black shawl draped over her head so that her face was all but hidden. The sun was gone now, and in the thickening twilight she didn't notice Khalifa, who had backed away into the shadows behind a pillar. She came up to the spot where Hannah Schlegel had died and, throwing off the shawl, squatted and laid the flowers on the floor. Khalifa stepped forward.

'Hello, Nur.'

She spun round, startled.

'Please, don't be afraid,' he said, holding up a hand to indicate that he meant her no harm. 'I didn't mean to scare you.'

She came to her feet, backing away, gazing at him suspiciously. A grimace of recognition slowly puckered her mouth.

'Khalifa,' she whispered. There was a brief pause, then: 'The man who killed my husband. One of the men.'

She had changed since he had last seen her, in the courtroom on the day of Mohammed Gemal's conviction. Then she had been young and pretty. Now she was a different person, worn, tired-looking, her face weathered like ancient wood.

'Why were you watching me?' she asked.

'I wasn't watching you. I was just . . .'

He broke off, unable to explain exactly why he had come to the temple. She stared at him, then, lowering her eyes, returned to the flowers, squatting and arranging them around the base of the column. A white egret appeared outside in the forecourt, pecking at the dust.

'I come here every now and then,' she said after a while, talking more to herself than to Khalifa, tweaking at the flower stems with her wrinkled fingers. 'Mohammed doesn't have a proper grave. They just dumped him in a pit outside the prison. It's too far for me to go all the way up to Cairo. So I come here. I don't know why. I suppose it's . . . well, the place where he died, in a way.'

Her tone was matter-of-fact, not overtly accusing, which somehow made it even worse for Khalifa. He shifted uncomfortably, fiddling with a coin in his pocket.

'I leave them for the old woman as well,' she continued. 'It wasn't her fault, was it? She didn't accuse Mohammed.'

She got the flowers laid out to her satisfaction and stood again, ready to leave. Khalifa took another step towards her.

'The children?' he asked, anxious, suddenly, that the conversation shouldn't end.

She shrugged. 'Mansour's got a job as a mechanic. Abdul's just finishing school. Fatma's married, with a kid on the way. She lives up in Armant now. Her husband works in the cane factory.'

'And you. Have you—'

'Remarried?' She looked up at him through dull eyes. 'Mohammed's my husband. He might not have been a good man, but he's still my husband.'

The white egret had pecked its way up to the doorway and now came stalking into the hall, its head jerking this way and that, its knitting-needle legs rising and falling with the controlled, rhythmic delicacy of a ballet dancer. It came to within a metre of the woman, then moved off again.

'He didn't do it, you know,' she said quietly. 'He took the watch, which was bad. Very bad. But he didn't kill the old woman. And he didn't take the wallet. Not the wallet.'

Khalifa was staring at the floor.

'I know,' he mumbled. 'I'm . . . sorry.'

She followed the egret with her eyes, tracking it as it weaved its way through the pillars.

'You were the only good one,' she whispered. 'The only one I thought might help him. But then you . . .'

She sighed and turned to leave, moving a couple of steps before turning back again.

'The money's helped. It can't bring him back, but it's helped. So thank you for that.'

Khalifa looked up, confused.

'I don't . . . what money?'

'The money you've been sending. I know it's you. You were the only good one.'

'I haven't . . . what money? I don't know what you're talking about.'

She was gazing over his shoulder into the webs of shadow thickening at the back of the hall, her eyes dry and empty – the eyes of someone from whom all hope has been drained.

'Every year. Just before Eid el-Adha. It comes in the post. No note, no name, nothing. Just three thousand Egyptian pounds, in hundred notes. Always in hundred notes. It started a week after Mohammed killed himself, and has carried on ever since. Every year. It's how I got the kids through school, how I managed to survive. I know it's you. You are a good man, despite it all.'

She looked across at him, then turned and hurried out of the temple.