“If you do your work well you can stay with me for ever.”
“Then I won’t let a fly touch you,” said Ali.
At six in the morning from then on, Ali was outside the building where Elias and Claire lived. It had a big wooden door and a handsome knocker, a woman’s hand made of bronze. For now, Elias had rented three rooms on the second floor. The building was very close to the St. Louis Hospital. Ali accompanied his employer to the confectioner’s shop in the morning and saw him safely home again in the evening.
He was reliable and didn’t let his master out of his sight. He never grumbled, and he did his job at the shop door with as much charm as if he’d taken at least three courses in etiquette in the finishing school run by the Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. The customers thanked him for his help and kind attentions, and Elias began seriously wondering whether he might not employ a permanent doorman. Not Ali, but an attractive little boy, dressed like a hotel bellboy, to stand at the door for him. He wouldn’t even have to pay a boy wages, for he had noticed the richer customers pressing a couple of piastres into Ali’s hand now and then. Usually the tips in his pocket amounted to more than his day’s wages by evening.
One evening, on the way home, it occurred to Elias to buy his helpful bodyguard a meal. He could sit with Ali as he ate, read the paper, and drink a coffee in peace before going home himself. The idea came to him suddenly, just as they were passing the entrance of the big Glass Palace restaurant, halfway between the confectioner’s shop and his apartment. Elias stopped suddenly and took Ali’s arm.
“Come on in here,” he said. At that moment a shot rang out. It smashed the glass window and hit a waiter inside the restaurant in the shoulder. Passers by and guests screamed in terror. Elias sprang nimbly through the open doorway into the restaurant and pulled Ali in after him, for the shot had been fired from the building opposite.
A second shot hit a woman walking by in the leg. She collapsed. Chaos ensued. A young police officer raced out of the restaurant with his pistol at the ready. He located the marksman.
“He’s in the Hotel Baladi,” he called. Three men followed him, while passers by tended the injured woman and the waiter. There was a large police station quite close, so the hotel was quickly surrounded.
The would-be assassin was led out of the building, handcuffed and bleeding from the head. Several people recognized him. Word went from mouth to mouth. “Musa Salibi, that’s Musa Salibi.”
“You saved my life,” Ali told his master.
“The hand of God protected us both. And now let’s have something to eat,” added Elias, propelling his pale employee into the restaurant. “You can sleep late tomorrow and take the whole day off. I’ll give Hassan notice and you can go back to the old job,” he told him.
“Why?” asked the naïve Ali.
“Because they’ve caught the man who was after me,” replied Elias. When Claire heard what had happened she immediately felt a stabbing pain in her belly. Elias made her some herb tea, but the pains became unbearable during the night. Elias ran out in his pyjamas, woke a cab driver and came back with him to the door of the building, where his pregnant wife was standing with a woman neighbour now supporting her. The hospital was only a few doors away, but Elias didn’t want Claire to strain herself.
The doctors did their best, but they soon discovered that at best they would save the mother, for the baby was already dead, and they induced a stillbirth.
Elias sat on the steps of the hospital for a long time in his pyjamas, weeping, until the cabby politely asked if he was to wait any longer. Elias sent him away, asking him to come to the confectioner’s shop next day, when he would be paid his fare. The cabby knew the confectioner. He pressed his hand. “My wife’s lost six children too, only God knows why,” he said, much moved, and trotted off to his cab.
Three days later a CID officer came to the confectioner’s shop and asked Elias to accompany him to the police station. A young French officer received him there and civilly questioned him. The officer was enchanted by the confectioner’s command of his own language, and kept saying that Elias spoke better French than many a Frenchman born.
Asked about the incident, and whether he would give evidence as a witness, Elias told the officer what he had heard from the flower seller, and said that after that he had always gone out with his employee to escort him.
“That bears out exactly what the criminal said,” the officer told him. “He was planning to abduct you, monsieur, torture you, and then kill you, but he saw that he wouldn’t easily be able to outwit and overcome your companion. So he decided to shoot you, and he wounded two other people instead.”
“And he has brought an innocent child to its death,” added Elias bitterly.
“Can you tell me why he did it?” asked the officer, who could make nothing of Elias’s remark about the dead child.
“I think it was jealousy because his former fiancée left him, good for nothing as he was. She’s my wife now,” replied Elias, with a certain pride.
“Yes, monsieur, but there’s something else too. He said a man with a heavy accent gave him the job to do, provided his German rifle, and paid him five gold lira. He was to have had another twenty gold lira after your murder. Can you think who that man might be? And above all, why anyone would want to murder a decent, able confectioner like yourself? But the assassin may be lying, and there could be something else behind it. We haven’t been able to find out by our usual methods of questioning. Would you like to ask him yourself?”
“Yes,” said Elias. His throat felt dry.
When the policeman brought in Musa Salibi, Elias was horrified. The “methods” of the French police had made a formerly tall, proud man into a broken, subservient creature. The marks of torture were obvious.
“Sir, I don’t know who the man was,” stammered the prisoner, “but I’ve said it a hundred times: I only met him twice, and after that I never saw him again. He was tall and he wore sunglasses. Once they slipped a little, and I saw that he had blue eyes like the French, maybe he was a Frenchman … that’s all I know. He, he … but I said it all in my statement. The devil possessed me, and now I’m left paying for it.”
“How did the man speak?” asked Elias.
“He spoke … well, it was just the way he spoke, but not like a Damascene. He spoke with an accent like … like the mountain folk. Like the people of Mala.”
Musa Salibi fell silent. He was shaking all over.
“Could it be someone from your village?” the officer asked Elias.
“Do you know anyone who wanted to kill you for some reason?”
“No,” he said, looking at the miserable specimen of humanity before him, a man who had once been such a heart-throb. He rose to his feet. “Do you need me any longer?” he asked the officer.
“No, monsieur, thank you very much,” the man replied, and he accompanied Elias to the door while the two police officers took Musa back to his cell.
“The confectioner was lying,” said the young Frenchman later to the man who had been taking down the statement. “Did you see him twitch briefly when the gunman said the man who commissioned him to do the job spoke with the accent of his native village?”
The other policeman nodded. “What shall I add?
“Nothing. Sounds like a blood feud, some kind of clan vengeance, and that’s none of our business. We have our criminal, and he’ll get the maximum sentence.”
A week later Elias sent a Jesuit priest who was a friend of his to Mala, entrusting to him the delicate task of finding his father and letting him know, straight out, that Elias had survived the murder attempt, and moreover had proof that his brother Salman had given the criminal Musa Salibi the gun and charged him with his father’s mission. He, Elias, wanted an apology and his father’s word that he would never plot against his son’s life again; otherwise he would go to the CID and give them his evidence against Salman. Under the law of the French occupying forces, the penalty for incitement to murder was death and expropriation of all the guilty man’s property. If anything were to happen to Elias, the message said, someone he trusted would take the envelope containing his evidence to the CID.