Maybe Daoud could do better. He was due over from the Old City any minute. No mistaking the joy in his voice at being reeled in-jubilation at being regarded as someone with special talents. And relief at being pulled off the Roselli surveillance. The timing couldn't have been better-last night's watch had now provided the monk with an ironclad alibi.
Daniel tried to imagine Roselli as a yeshiva student, wondered how long the monk would stay faithful to his latest mistress. The spartan lodgings and seventeen-hour days Buchwald demanded from his students might not prove too different from the rigors of monkhood. But Daniel suspected that Roselli was one of those philosophic grasshoppers, leaping from creed to creed. A searcher destined never to find what he was looking for, because you had to fill your own void. No rabbi or priest or mullah could do it for you.
Not that the searchers would ever stop searching. Or flocking to Jerusalem. The city was a psychic magnet, drawing in the Rosellis of the world and those who promised them salvation. At that first meeting at The Star, Shmeltzer had bemoaned the influx of fanatics and nut cases as if it were a new phenomenon, but the attraction was as old as Jerusalem itself. Pilgrims and self-flagellators, crucifiers and false messiahs, visionaries, dervishes, charlatans, and the willfully blind. Determined to squeeze blood out of every rock, hallucinate sacred flames licking from every arid clump of mesquite.
Searchers, some of them undoubtedly mad, others teetering on the brink of madness. Yet, despite them, the city endured wave after wave of destruction and rebirth. Or maybe because of them.
Mad but benign, seeking internal order.
Unlike the slashing, plundering, mocking monster he was after.
Beast of the highway.
Disorder, internal collapse-hell on earth-was what this one craved.
Daniel resolved to burn him.
He sat behind a one-way mirror and watched Daoud conduct the interview. Hardly a sophisticated concealment, but if Abdin Barakat noticed it, he gave no sign.
The Arab detective had all the right moves-authority, compassion, patience, appeals to a husband's desire to find his wife's murderer and avenge her death. But to no avail in the beginning: Barakat blocked him out as completely as he had Daniel.
If grief was proportional to devotion, no man had ever possessed greater love for a woman than Abdin Barakat for Shahin. His grief was silent but all the stronger for it, as eloquent an opera of woe as Daniel had ever heard.
He looks dead himself, Daniel thought. Sunken-cheeked, stiff, lifeless features, lusterless eyes half-hidden in the darkness of cavernous sockets. The coarse complexion bleached pale as gauze bandage. A young man mummified by suffering.
Eight years older than Shahin, but that still made him young. Tall, sparely built, with short, poorly cut hair, the cracked fingernails and grease-stained clothes of a working man.
An ironworker in one of the stalls in the Old City. Repairer of pots and pans, family business-the father was the boss. And the landlord. For four married years, home had been two rooms tacked on illegally to the top story of the Barakat family dwelling in the Muslim Quarter. A cooking space and a tiny bedroom for Abdin and Shahin-their names rhymed; it implied a certain harmony-because without children, what need was there for more?
The childlessness was at the root of the divorce, Daniel was sure. Four barren years would have stretched the tolerance of Abdin's family. The Muslims had no use for a woman who didn't bear, made it exquisitely easy for a man to dispose of her: Talaq, verbal denouncement unencumbered by justification, set the divorce process in motion. Three denouncements, and the break was final.
On the other side of the mirror, Barakat began weeping, despite himself; the breakdown was beginning. Daoud handed him a tissue, He clutched it, wept harder, tried to force back the tears but failed. Burying his face in his hands, he moved it back and forth, as if shaking his head no. Daoud pulled out another tissue and tried again.
Patience paid off. Eventually, after two hours of listening and tissue-offering and gently prodding, Daoud got Barakat talking-softly but rapidly, in near-hysterical spurts.
A fragile victory, and the Arab detective knew it. He put his body language into the interrogation, bringing his face so close to Barakat's that they could have kissed, placing his hands on the husband's shoulders and exerting subtle pressure, his knees touching Barakat's knees. Shutting out the room, the universe, so that only questioner and answerer existed in empty white space.
"When's the last time you saw her, Mr. Barakat?"
Barakat stared at the floor.
"Try to remember. It's important, Mr. Barakat."
"M-Monday."
"This past Monday?"
"Yes."
"You're certain of that?"
"Yes."
"Not Sunday or Tuesday?"
"No, Monday was the day-" Barakat burst into tears, buried his face in his hands again.
Daoud looked past the heaving shoulders, through the mirror at Daniel, raised his eyebrows, and tapped the table silently. Glancing at the tape recorder on the table, he waited until Barakat's sobs diminished to sniffles before continuing.
"Monday was the day what, Mr. Barakat?"
"It was complete."
"What was complete?"
No answer.
"The third talaq?" prompted Daoud.
Barakat's reply was barely audible: "Yes."
"The divorce was final on Monday?"
Jerky nods, tears, more tissues.
"Was Shahin scheduled to leave your house on Monday?"
"Yes."
"Where was she planning to go?"
Barakat uncovered his face. "I don't know."
"Where does her family live?"
"There is no family, only a mother in Nablus."
"What about the father?"
"Dead."
"When did he die?"
"Many years ago. Before the " Tears flowed down the sunken cheeks, wetting the lacerations and causing them to glisten.
"Before you were married?"
"Yes."
"What about brothers or sisters?"
"No brothers or sisters."
"An only child? Not a single male in the family?" Daoud's tone was laden with disbelief.
"Yes, a great shame." Barakat sat up straighter. "The mother was a poor bearer, useless organs, always with the female sicknesses. My father said "
Barakat stopped mid-sentence, turned away from the detective's eyes. One hand picked absently at the scratches on his face.
"What did your father say?"
"That "Barakat shook his head, looked like a dog that had been kicked too often.
"Tell me, Abdin."
A long moment passed.