‘What?’
‘It doesn’t really matter, I suppose,’ Abdul replied.
Then, in a blur of action so fast that Mahmoud had absolutely no time to react, Abdul seized the man’s right arm, wrenched it over so that his wrist was resting on the table beside the bed, and slammed his knife straight through the back of Mahmoud’s hand, pinning it to the wood.
The Egyptian’s howl of pain filled the room as blood welled from the penetrating wound, pooled on the table and began to drip onto the wooden floor below. Abdul pressed the bed-sheet over the trader’s mouth, muffling the sound. Kassim jerked in the bed, perhaps trying to sit up, or to reach for the wound with his left hand, but before he could do anything at all, Abdul had produced a second knife and held it firmly against his throat.
‘Quiet,’ the intruder ordered. ‘That just shows how important it is for you to tell me the truth. Make me believe that you’re holding nothing back, and I might just walk away from here. If you lie, you’ll die. It’s as simple as that.’
He moved the second blade slightly away from Mahmoud’s throat until the point rested on the tender area below the man’s left shoulder blade. He changed his grip on the knife very slightly, then slowly began pushing it into Mahmoud’s flesh, the honed and polished double-edged blade easily penetrating about an inch into the man’s body.
Again, Mahmoud howled in muffled agony, his scream barely audible behind the makeshift gag Abdul was applying. His body twitched under the assault and sweat sprang to his brow as the pain increased.
Abdul knew the signs, knew that the man under his knife would do almost anything to make him stop. Now he could find the truth.
‘The first question is easy,’ he said, moving the sheet away from Kassim’s mouth, ‘because the answer is either yes or no. Do you still have that parchment?’
Mahmoud shook his head desperately from side to side.
‘I told you. I sold it to another dealer.’
‘So that would be “no”, then?’
‘No, I mean, yes. I don’t have it. I don’t have it any longer.’
Abdul nodded.
‘So who did you sell it to?’
For additional emphasis, he turned the knife slightly in the wound on Mahmoud’s shoulder, eliciting another anguished cry of pain, quickly muffled.
‘Another dealer,’ he almost shouted. ‘His name is Anum Husani. He deals in old manuscripts and other relics, and he has a shop in Cairo.’
Abdul nodded again, then gave the knife another twist, the point scraping along Mahmoud’s collar bone.
‘The address would be helpful,’ he said, his sentence almost drowned out by the other man’s muffled scream.
His voice quivering and laced with agony, Mahmoud stammered out the address of Husani’s shop, an address which Abdul immediately filed away in his memory.
After a further prod from the knife blade, Mahmoud followed that with a physical description of Husani. But when Abdul asked for the man’s home address, his victim was unable to help, and even twisting the blade in a fresh wound didn’t produce the information he wanted.
‘You’re absolutely certain?’ he asked, altering his grip on the handle of the knife very slightly, and feeling Mahmoud’s body tensing in pointless anticipation of the pain to come.
‘Yes, yes. He has it. I sold it to him, but I don’t know where he lives. Please, no more.’
‘I do have some good news for you,’ Abdul said after a moment, withdrawing the knife from the man’s shoulder and wiping the blood from the blade on the sheet. ‘I believe you. I think you’re telling me the truth.’
He looked down at the man on the bed.
‘But I also have some bad news for you,’ he added, and with another rapid movement he sliced the knife into the left-hand side of Mahmoud’s throat and pulled it all the way across, the blade instantly severing the oesophagus and the carotid artery. Blood spurted from the end of the artery, splashing onto the wall behind the head of the bed.
The man’s body flailed on the bed as his left hand clutched desperately at his throat, but it only took seconds for the light in his eyes to fade away as his brain died.
‘And that was the bad news,’ Abdul muttered, standing clear of the side of the bed and looking down at the corpse.
He wiped the blood off his knife on the sheet, then pulled the other blade out of Mahmoud’s right hand, wiping that as well, but he didn’t replace the knives in their respective sheaths. First, he needed to wash them properly. He stood up and checked that none of the blood he had spilled had got onto his clothing, but he could see no sign of it. The latex gloves were heavily stained, but he would dispose of them after he left the property. To avoid any of the blood being transferred from his gloves to his clothing, he first went into the attached bathroom and washed his gloved hands in the sink, drying the latex on a towel when he’d finished. Then he carefully washed both knives until not a trace of blood was left on them, dried them and put them away in their sheaths. He would bleach everything thoroughly later.
Five minutes later, he was outside the house, having re-locked the rear door, and was making his way through the silent streets of the Cairo suburb.
21
That evening, Angela followed her usual routine once she got back to her apartment. She poured herself a large glass of wine, switched on the TV to inspect the day’s news, and flopped down on the sofa, kicking off her shoes as she did so. Once she’d seen the headlines, she used the remote control to turn off the set, and then opened up her laptop.
She worked her way quickly through her work inbox, marking the vast majority of the emails not simply for deletion, but also to be bounced back to the sender — her way of trying to spam the spammers. As she glanced down the list of senders of the unread emails, one message stood out. She hadn’t heard from that particular person for some months, and the area he worked in was of great interest to her.
She clicked it open, and read the fairly short message. The first couple of brief paragraphs were simply a polite catch-up, which her eyes skimmed over as she looked for the meat in the sandwich. Although she didn’t know Ali Mohammed particularly well, she knew that he was not inclined to waste words, nor to contact her simply to ask what she was up to. He would have a very specific reason for sending her a message, and she was keen to find out what it was.
His question was in the final paragraph. A colleague had given him a sheet of parchment to work on. The relic appeared to be old, he explained somewhat unnecessarily, and the writing on it was largely invisible. He would be working on it to try to decipher exactly what the text said, and if it was interesting he would be happy to send her a photograph of the parchment and a copy of the text.
But in the meantime, there were a few words that could be read on the parchment and he thought the subject matter might prove of interest to her, in view of her previous experiences with relics from this period and location. The period, he went on to explain, was most likely late in the first century BC, perhaps a few years earlier, and the location was almost certainly Judaea. Judaea under the Romans, in fact, because the text on the parchment was clearly written in Latin, implying that it had been penned by an official in either the Roman government or the Roman army. And there were, he finished, two proper names which could be read, at least partially, and he would be interested to know if she had heard of them in any relevant context.
The first name, he explained, was ‘ippori’ with two unreadable letters at the start of the word, which suggested it might be ‘Tzippori’. Nothing else he could think of fitted. That had convinced him that the parchment referred to events in ancient Judaea, because Tzippori, as he was sure Angela knew, was the old name for the town of Sepporis, which had been destroyed by the Romans in 4 BC, following the death of Herod. The second name was clearly Jewish in origin, but was also only partially readable, the letters which could be interpreted with certainty being ef bar he, the bar meaning ‘son of’.