Then on 14 May, a Tuesday and exactly a week after her birthday, he was arrested. Ismail Ballut, a young man in his mid-twenties, had gone to the police station of the Muhayirin quarter just before midnight on Monday 13 May. He was well-dressed and identified himself as an employee of the Banque de Syrie et du Liban in Damascus. He had a large suitcase with him, and said he couldn’t sleep at nights. One of the police officers asked why not? Another laughed, and added, “Love or a quarrel with your wife, is it?”
“No, it’s the money,” he replied, opening the case, which proved to contain fifty-two million Syrian lira. The policemen stared blankly at the money. They were sure the man before them must be a complete idiot. “Nagib Surur is the devil incarnate. He’s tricked the machine that stamps old, worn-out, badly damaged banknotes to make them worthless before they’re burned in special furnaces. Then the bank produces new notes with the same numbers as the old ones and puts them in circulation,” the man painstakingly explained as they took his statement. In answer to a question he further explained that there were now doubles of those notes that Nagib had not destroyed, and they weren’t forgeries because both series of banknotes were genuine. They just had the same numbers. The man couldn’t say exactly how that devil Nagib had managed to fool the machine. His part in the business, he said, had been only to keep his mouth shut, and sign papers saying that the procedure in the room where the old notes were destroyed had been correct. “The inspector who checks the ashes wasn’t allowed into the room, so he never knew anything about it. Nagib gave him newsprint ashes instead, weighed out precisely to the last milligram. How he fixed it all only he knows. He fooled me too.”
“Easy enough, with such a simpleton!” whispered a freckled police officer to his colleague as the duty NCO went on interrogating the man, taking down his statement in person. He wrote slowly, and kept asking him to repeat what he had last said.
He, Ismail Ballut, said the man, was supposed to keep the money safe for a few weeks, and then Nagib was going to let him have one-third of it, and use the other two-thirds to bring Syrian boxing up to world-class level. The policemen looked at each other incredulously.
“And as for you, you bastard, I suppose you were just planning to make a bunch of orphaned kids happy with your share of the money!” bellowed the NCO, who had no idea that he was a mind-reader. For Ismail Ballut had indeed wanted to start and run an orphanage. He merely added, quietly, that he had been given a very religious upbringing, for his father was the well-known Sheikh Hassan Ballut. But the devil, disguised in the body of that Christian Nagib, had tempted him, and now he, Ismail, repented of his crime.
The policemen didn’t know who Hassan Ballut was, nor did they fully understand the trick allegedly used by the perpetrator to circumvent all the French bank’s security systems, so they put the man in the cells, recorded the amount of money in the files, and called their boss Lieutenant Fakhri. For a start Fakhri had the bank clerk tortured, allegedly to find out whether there was more money hidden anywhere else. Torture was a routine police measure at the time.
By the early morning of 14 May, however, it had produced no further information. Three hours later the police arrested Nagib. Unlike the loquacious Ballut, Claire’s father was saying nothing, but all Lieutenant Fakhri’s incoming phone calls showed that it was incumbent on him to go carefully with the Christian.
Since the entire sum of money was still intact, the verdict of the court, when it came later, was mild. Ballut was given a suspended sentence of six months; Nagib was jailed for five years. He was free again after three of them. Claire welcomed her father as if he had come home from a long journey. But much was to happen before that time.
Just after her father’s arrest Claire felt miserable. The others often bullied her at school now, and she had to put up with all kinds of sharp remarks. Sometimes she wept in the washrooms because some of the girls attacked her like a swarm of hysterical wasps. The nuns of the Besançon School acted blind, deaf, and dumb. Only her friend Madeleine stood staunchly by her. Claire never forgot that to her dying day.
She told Madeleine about the bad dreams that tormented her by night. For one thing, she knew that her father had been kept in solitary confinement for months to make him talk. Neither she nor anyone else was allowed to visit him, and one day someone started the rumour that Nagib Surur had died under torture and lay buried in the desert. For another, Musa’s fight against Rimon Rasmalo, the man with the steel fists, was to be at the beginning of June.
“It’s crazy,” said Madeleine one morning, “here are the two of us, best friends, and our menfolk are planning to knock each other’s heads in.” At first Claire didn’t understand. Of course she had told her friend all about Musa, and how they would probably be going to Paris. And of course she knew that Madeleine was also engaged, but her friend didn’t talk about her fiancé much, and when she mentioned his job she had just said he was a stonemason. If Nagib or Musa had ever mentioned the name of Musa’s opponent to her, reassuring her by saying that he was strong but technically a poor boxer, she had registered it only in passing, and hadn’t realized that Musa was to fight her friend Madeleine’s fiancé. Only now did the scales fall from her eyes. She was horrified.
Madeleine laughed. “I feel like someone in a trashy novel,” she joked. “All it needs is for the two of us to go for each other tooth and nail and climb into the ring ourselves, screeching. But luckily we’re not in a novel. I never go to fights. As far as I can see, they’re just a silly way to stage a brawl. Why would anyone want to watch that?”
“I wish I were as strong as you,” replied Claire. “I always have to go, not because I’m brave but because I’m a coward. I feel as if I might be some help, if the fight’s going badly for him, and if he wins he’ll be happier because then he can celebrate his victory in front of me.”
The fight had been fixed for Sunday 16 June. The boxing club was in the Muslim quarter, but both the defending champion and his challenger were Christians, and they had insisted on Sunday as the day of the match. Claire made up her face and put on her yellow dress, a particular favourite of Musa’s. But she didn’t feel happy on the way to the club, even when the whole committee welcomed her ceremoniously, expressing their sympathy with her father, an innocent man in jail.
Claire’s stomach lurched when her fiancé came into the big hall with the boxing ring in the middle of it. And before he and his large retinue disappeared into the changing rooms, Musa reassured her with his smile. “I’ll be a butterfly, you just wait and see,” he said. But it didn’t turn out that way.
Her fiancé made a majestic entrance by comparison with his opponent’s pitiful effort. Musa strode to the ring like a film star, with music and a whole team escorting him. He climbed elegantly up the steps and jumped through the opening in the ropes that his companions had made for him. Up in the ring, he ran a round of honour. The whole hall roared. He blew Claire a kiss and smiled.
When the spectators had calmed down again Rimon Rasmalo appeared. He was short and sturdy. Claire had to stand up to see him. He came in accompanied only by his trainer, who was carrying a worn old bucket. Rimon earned laughter and insulting catcalls. He walked leaning slightly forward, and his arms looked much too long. “Hey, is that ape here just to give Musa a laugh or what?” called a sweating, fat man three seats away for her, and another man replied, “No, he’s Musa’s hors d’oeuvre, but where’s the main dish?”