The Flaming Sword. Breck England

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owed him money.”

      “No!”

      “He wanted you to pay him. You thought no one would miss him, so you killed him.”

      “No!” The shopkeeper stared miserably at the gun as Nasir held it a little higher. “You are his friend? I was his friend, too. I gave him a place to live. A place to hide.”

      “He gave you money.”

      “He gave me some money, yes.”

      “So you killed him rather than paying him back. You lured him here and left him dead inside that hole where he would never be found.”

      “No! He came here by himself.”

      “Why?”

      “I don’t know why.”

      “You know. He wanted to use your shop. You told him about the tunnels. Why did he come here?”

      “I don’t know.”

      “You know. He came to meet someone. Who?”

      “I don’t know who.”

      “What did he tell you? He didn’t crawl through that filth for nothing. He wanted to get into your shop. Why?” For the first time Nasir raised his voice.

      The shopkeeper trembled as if with cold. He wiped his face again and again; the hair on his forearm was like mud.

      “All right. He was angry. He said someone had betrayed him, and he was going to make him pay.”

      “Who?”

      “Who?”

      “Please. The man who betrayed him. Who was he? Did Talal say it was me?”

      “No! I don’t know. I don’t know.” The shopkeeper moaned over and over.

      Nasir was satisfied. He knew it wasn’t likely that Bukmun would have confided much to this sopping jelly of a man.

      But then the jelly surprised him.

      “I think it must have been the man who bought the rockets from him. But I don’t know who he was,” the shopkeeper whispered. “It was the man in Rome, he said. The man in Rome.”

      “What man in Rome?”

      “A man he saw on the television.”

      Seconds later, the shutter was open to the cooler air from outside and Nasir was gone.

      ***

      Down the street, in the white van, Toad watched Nasir walk briskly from the shop. “He’s had quite a discussion with the shopkeeper,” Toad reported from the driver’s seat.

      “What’s the story?”

      Toad was relieved to hear Ari’s voice from the other end. “You’re back?”

      “Came in last night. I’ll put you in the picture when you come in. What’s the story?”

      “He was drilling the shopkeeper to find out how much he knew, how much he might have told us.”

      “And?”

      “He talked. He told Ayoub that we had his picture. Said Bukmun was in a stew over a ‘man in Rome’ who betrayed him, a man he saw on television.”

      “So Ayoub and the shopkeeper don’t know each other?”

      “Apparently not—only from the photo. At least that’s what we’re meant to believe.”

      Ari chuckled. “Not everything people do is a ruse.”

      “It’s possible that Ayoub didn’t know we were listening…or didn’t care,” Toad replied dryly. “It’s also possible Ayoub did not kill Bukmun and is really trying to find out who did. But start multiplying possibilities and the product is less and less certainty.”

      Back in the headquarters building, Ari smiled at this; he knew that Toad thrived on low levels of certainty. He was the only man Ari knew who could keep a thousand possibilities in his mind at once without paralyzing himself. Most of his colleagues were too quick with theories—Toad, on the other hand, very slow coming up with a certainty. With Toad, it was partly that he had been trained in the severest tradition of the yeshiva, and partly that he believed in nothing.

      “So if Ayoub did kill Bukmun, he was just trying to find out how much the shopkeeper knew. But what’s the connection with a ‘man in Rome’?”

      Toad thought for a moment. “Pictures of Ayoub’s meeting in Rome have been on TV for days. Bukmun may have caught sight of Ayoub and realized he was the man who bought the Hawkeyes. The man who betrayed him.”

      “Betrayed him?”

      “I haven’t worked that out. It’s new. Shop Man was a little more open with Ayoub than he was with us.”

      “Could Ayoub have entered the shop Tuesday night through the tunnels and got out fast enough to show up at the front door?”

      “Yesterday we found a tunnel grate in the next street that showed evidence of recent entry. A person could crawl through that tunnel from the shop, get out into the street, and walk around the corner to the front door of the shop in about five minutes.”

      “Where’s Ayoub now?”

      Toad checked with the agent following Ayoub. “He just walked through the Damascus Gate. Looks like he’s making for home.”

      Salah-eddin Street, Jerusalem, 1000h

      “After today,” Hafiz al-Ayoub thought, as he lay on his couch and rubbed the ring with his thumb. Its worn gold felt like part of his body. “There will be no more heat, no more blood. Only a green and quiet peace.”

      For a second day, the old sheikh had eaten no breakfast. He felt he would never eat again. He wished only to lie quietly and enjoy for as long as possible the diminishing breeze that came through the window of his room. From the table by his couch, he picked up his book of Shirazi’s poems. Hafiz did not believe in the legend that this book could be used for divination, but he enjoyed the game; he would ask himself a question and then open the book to find the answer. These days his question was always the same.

      He opened the book at random and read:

      Dim, drunk, I crawled the years along

      Until, wiser, I locked away my passion;

      Then I rose a Phoenix from my dust;

      I closed my story with the bird of Suleiman.

      Satisfied as always, he closed the book again and contemplated the verses he had read. Outside his window the morning birds had gone quiet from the heat; they would not be heard again until sunset. Tonight, the sword would pass into his son’s hand and then he could rest.

      For

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