“Now then,” said Hassan, “what is it that I can help you with today?”
“A man was killed yesterday. A ritual dagger was used. A koummya.”
“Oh yes,” said Hassan, nodding. “The director of the museum.”
“You’ve heard about this already?” asked Finn, startled.
“Americans are Americans, Arabs are Arabs-even Jewish Arabs like me. You think the world runs one way. We know it runs another. When a koummya is used to still someone’s tongue that is Moroccan business, Moroccan news, therefore we hear about it quickly.” He smiled with a twinge of sadness. “These days it is better for people with large noses and dark skin to have their story straight before the men from Homeland Security show up at your door with your ticket to the Guantanamo Hilton.”
“Tell us about the koummya,” said Valentine.
“The koummya, or sometimes called the khanjar, comes from the northern part of the country. It is usually thought of as a right of passage, a sign of a boy’s admission into manhood, you know?”
Valentine nodded. Finn waited. She thought about having another one of the little gooey pecan-cashew-toffee things and then decided against it. Just as Hassan Lasri produced a little silver box and lit another one of his oval cigarettes Finn found herself wishing she smoked. No smoking, no drinking, no pecan-cashew-toffee things and no sex-she might as well be a nun.
Lasri took a long drag on his cigarette, blew the smoke out of his wide hairy nostrils and popped another square into his mouth. He chewed and looked thoughtfully at Finn. “Of course,” he continued, his mouth still half full, “the koummya had another purpose.”
“What was that?” asked Finn.
“Other than being used for circumcisions-Arabs and Jews alike circumcise their children, you know-it is only the Christian and Asian infidels who do not-other than that, the dagger was used to cut out the tongues of traitors. Traditionally, that is; I haven’t heard of it being done recently. ‘To still the tongues of traitors’ is the official terminology.”
“Could that have applied to Crawley?” asked Finn.
“How should I know, my dear? I never met the man. I do, however, know where that particular koummya came from.”
“How?”
“A policeman showed me a picture of it this morning. A man named Delaney. He was apparently aware that I was head of the local Moroccan Friendship Alliance. At any rate, I told him what the dagger was, its background and uses.”
“And whom it belonged to?” asked Valentine.
“He didn’t ask me.”
“But you know.”
“Of course. Except for the cheap tourist-quality knives they sell in the souks in Marrakech and Fez and Casablanca and the like, a properly made koummya-especially a Moorish one of great antiquity-is as personal as a fingerprint.” He grinned broadly and popped yet another square into his mouth. Finn drank more coffee. “Not to mention the fact that the owner’s name is usually embossed in silver on the hilt or the scabbard.” He smiled. “Mr. Delaney, of course, does not read Arabic.”
Finn’s brain was beginning to cloud over from the wreaths of smoke wafting around the store from the man’s cigarettes. He swallowed, drank the last of his coffee, tonguing up a mouthful of the fine-grained grounds at the bottom of the cup and smiled again. “The grounds are very good for the colon, you know,” he said. “Moroccan men have a very low incidence of colon cancer.” He opened his silver box, took out another cigarette and lit up. Here was a classic example of what they called an oral-compulsive back in psych 101. “On the other hand,” he continued, “they have a horribly high incidence of lung cancer.” Lasri coughed harshly as though making his point.
“The dagger,” murmured Valentine.
“It came from the collection of a young men’s private school in Connecticut,” said the man.
“The name of the school?” asked Valentine.
“Greyfriars,” said Lasri, eyeing the last gooey square on the plate. “The Greyfriars Academy.”
18
He entered the room and went through his ritual with the uniform. Naked, he crossed the room to his chair and sat down. He examined the leather cover of the book as he always did when he came here and then opened it carefully, turning the pages filled with minute but perfectly clear script, pausing every now and again to whisper the words like hateful prayers: “Genus humanum quod constat stirpibus tantopere inter se diferentibus non est origine unum descendus a protoparentibus numero iisdem.”
For it was true: all men were different, their origins different, some base, some blessed, some damned from birth. Some were born as demons, others as saints. Since the words were immutable and divine they could not be argued with and so, by their very nature, following those words would be the act of a divine. It was all so simple when the order of it all could be seen.
He turned the page and the farm stood before him as it had been, the photographs fading now, the faces gray, but full of life in memory. He knew each one like a brother. Patterson in his glasses like that Beatle who was shot wore, Dorm, the guy they called Dormouse, Winetka, Bosnic, Teitelbaum and Reid. Pixie Mortimer, Hayes, Terhune, Dickie Biearsto. He could see them all, cold in the late winter chill, slipping up through the forest, ten guys from the forty-four playing baby-sitter to a bunch of art freaks from back home. But in the end they all smartened up, didn’t they? They were spies first and art types second and they’d all been in the fucking war long enough to know that war was for what you could get out of it once you got by the survival part. War was a game of bullies and bastards, not heroes.
There it was, right in front of him, the Altenburg farm and beyond it the little tumbledown Benedictine abbey called the Althof, long abandoned for want of monks or nuns in a part of the world that had forgotten that God had ever existed. Rain was coming down, cold and thin, the way his blood felt and he dropped his neck a little farther down into the collar of his jacket, not that it did much good. He was soaked through, his nose was running and he couldn’t keep a cigarette lit for more than a few seconds before it fizzled out on him.
They’d come down out of the mountains at last, moving through the trees down whatever goat paths they could find. There had been no way to stick together, and eventually the squad had come apart like a crumbling piece of old stone. There were ten noncoms, all with Garands and.45s; Pixie, the skinny fruit from Jersey City carrying a thirty-cal. across his back like he was Christ, and Dick Hayes, the wild-hair bald guy carrying the mortar and talking about what he’d really like to do-and I mean really like to do would be to slllide it into that Greer Garson babe-and he’d felt that way ever since he saw her in Mrs. Miniver. When Pixie told him she’d married the guy who played her son in the movie he almost shit and told Pixie that before the war was over he’d find an excuse to cut his fuckin’ good-for-nothing nuts off. Ten right guys and the three spooks from the ALIU, the Art Looting Investigation Unit, which everybody knew was part of the OSS and all they really wanted to do was catch Nazis with their hands in the cookie jar. McPhail, Taggart and Cornwall. McPhail thought he was some kind of big shit with his Boston accent and that funny Skull and Bones signet ring he wore; Taggart talked to himself, and Cornwall didn’t talk to anyone, he just had that notebook of his out all the time, writing. Altogether a weird crew.
Dick Hayes, the bald guy with the mortar took the first hit. It was one of those Russian SVT-40s the Germans liked so much; it had that flat, slap-in-the-face sound that hardly left an echo, even in that kind of countryside. Hayes was just ahead of him and to the right and the sergeant saw his whole right arm blown off at the shoulder leaving nothing but some blood and bone and some white twisted things he figured were tendons. Then that sound like someone dropping the lid on a child’s desk in grade school and then Hayes just dropped and the way he was lying you could look into his rib cage and see his lung and his heart swimming around in a lot of blood and purple stuff. One shot and he was gone and that was it for him and any chance with Greer Garson.