Through Darkest Europe Read online

  Khalid hadn’t looked at it from that angle. Dawud always had a different slant on things—that was one reason he made a good investigator. But Khalid’s gaze went up to the black flag with the red cross and the defiant motto flying atop the Aquinas Seminary. If those people were the way God meant them to be, He had a really nasty sense of humor.

  And maybe He did. Given the way the world worked, the odds He did were pretty good. When Khalid said as much, Dawud nodded. “This surprises you because…?” he asked.

  “It doesn’t surprise me. It just makes me sad.” Khalid glanced over at the black flag again. “A few hundred years ago, they would have strung us up for making cracks about God’s sense of humor. And if the people in there get their way”—he pointed toward the seminary—“they’ll start doing it again.”

  “One more thing to look forward to,” Dawud answered.

  There didn’t seem to be much to say after that. They walked away from the fortresslike building. A spot between Khalid’s shoulder blades itched, and it wasn’t the unfamiliar tunic he wore. Was somebody watching him from one of those windows? Was somebody drawing a bead on him from one of them? Or was his imagination working too hard for its own good?

  He hoped it was just his imagination. He wished he had an easier time believing it.

  * * *

  The guards outside the Ministry of Information were every bit as careful checking Khalid and Dawud’s IDs the second time the Maghribis visited the building as they had been the first. Khalid recognized one of the men from the first time. “You see us before,” he said—he wasn’t quite stuck in the present indicative in Italian, but he came close. “Why so, uh, worried now?”

  “Routine,” the man answered. “I may have seen you, but the rest of the boys here haven’t.”

  “All right,” Khalid said. It wasn’t really, but what could you do? Routine was a powerful god, one with many worshipers all over the world. Plenty of people bowed before him in Tunis, as Khalid had reason to know.

  An underofficer with an assault rifle escorted him and Dawud to Major Badoglio’s office. People who didn’t work for the Ministry of Information weren’t allowed to wander around with no one watching them. Strangers ambling through a similar establishment in Tunis would soon have had somebody keeping an eye on them, too.

  “Good day, my masters,” Badoglio said in his trilled classical Arabic. “You will have seen the Aquinas Seminary by now?”

  “Oh, yes,” Khalid replied. Speaking the language he used most of the time felt good. “An impressive place—maybe for the wrong reasons, but impressive all the same.”

  “I would not argue with you,” Badoglio said.

  “How can the Pope let the Aquinists get away with what they do and what they teach?” Khalid asked. “He is like a Caliph in the old days, only he can pronounce on doctrine, too—is it not so?”

  “That is our tradition, yes,” Badoglio replied: not the most ringing agreement Khalid had ever heard.

  He pressed ahead even so: “Then if he says to the Aquinists, ‘Your doctrine is bad, and you cannot get to heaven by blowing yourselves up,’ they have to listen to him, don’t they?”

  The Italian security man looked up at the fluorescent lights set into the ceiling. “In theory, yes,” he said, picking his words with obvious care. “But theory is not always real. There is religion, you will understand, and then there is politics. And there is … passion, I suppose you would call it. If a man believes something strongly, and you tell him he must not any more, what will he do?”

  “Try to kill you,” Dawud ibn Musa said at once.

  That also struck Khalid as likely. But he said, “The Aquinists already want to kill Pope Marcellus. How could this make matters worse there?”

  “There are other possibilities. The Aquinists might stop recognizing that his Holiness has any authority over them if he orders them to do something they believe to be wrong,” Major Badoglio said. “They may bring many believers with them if they do, too. The Church has seen too much schism and heresy these past few hundred years. Christians cannot afford to fight among themselves, not when—” He broke off. He was swarthy, but he flushed all the same.

  “Not when you’d rather be fighting Muslims,” Khalid finished for him.

  “I was not speaking for myself. I was talking about the Church,” Badoglio said with as much dignity as he could muster.

  “Of course,” Khalid said. Christians often came unmoored in these modern times. Not many felt as comfortable in the secular world as Muslims did. Christianity had to try to assimilate in a generation or two what had developed over centuries in Islam. No wonder even people who most wanted to be modern often found themselves betwixt and between instead. They couldn’t stay the way they had been, but they couldn’t turn into what they wanted to be, either.

  “God will sort things out in His own time,” Badoglio said. “I truly believe that.”

  “Maybe He will. But don’t hold your breath waiting,” Dawud told him. “And trust me, my friend—you’ll never get better advice from a Jew.”

  Christians were convinced Jesus was the Messiah. Jews didn’t believe it. Muslims proclaimed Muhammad as the Seal of Prophets. Jews didn’t believe that, either. They went on waiting … and waiting … and waiting longer still. They’d started the monotheistic faiths that now sprawled over more than half the world, and by all appearances they intended to finish them, too.

  Major Badoglio eyed Dawud. By the look on his face, he wasn’t used to getting any advice from Jews. There weren’t many in Italy to get advice from. The handful who stubbornly stayed on had far fewer civil rights than their coreligionists enjoyed in Muslim lands. But the major prided himself on being modern. He couldn’t tell the Jew in front of him what he thought. He might be embarrassed, even ashamed, to think such things.

  In the end, all he did say was, “Well, you may be right.” He seemed astonished when Dawud grinned at him. That polite putdown was common in the Muslim world. Khalid wouldn’t have been surprised if Major Badoglio had found it all by himself.

  “Can we get back to business?” Khalid asked.

  “That might be nice,” Dawud said.

  “Yes. It might,” Giacomo Badoglio agreed primly.

  “All right. There are two of us here. We are not miracle workers,” Khalid said. “How can you use us so we do the most good? I don’t think we can storm the Aquinas Seminary by ourselves.”

  “Neither do I,” Dawud said. “We’d need four or five men for that—maybe even half a dozen.”

  Just for a moment, Badoglio took him literally. Then the major realized the Maghribi was having him on. He wasn’t used to foolishness from a Jew, either. “Heh,” he managed, and then, “You will understand, I hope, that I do not quite know what to do with the two of you. I was told you were coming, and I was told to make the best of it. That is what I am trying to do.” He spread his hands in resignation, or perhaps despair.

  Khalid looked over at Dawud. His partner was glancing toward him. Before they’d set out from Tunis, their superiors told them the Italians were screaming for any help the Maghrib could send. The right hand and the left hadn’t been talking to each other again. What a surprise!

  “We’ll help any way we can,” he said. “It’s in the Pope’s interest, and the Grand Duke’s, to keep the Aquinists from getting any stronger than they are already.” And it was in the Maghrib’s interest, and that of the secular Muslim states all over the world, and, as far as Khalid was concerned, that of civilization in general. He didn’t want to offend Badoglio, so he didn’t say anything about that.

  By the Italian’s raised eyebrow, he could read between the lines. “No matter how you think of us, my master”—he packed the polite Arabic phrase with reproach and resentment—“we are not barbarians. We have our own past, our own heritage, and we are proud of it. It is older than yours. In some ways, it is wiser than yours.”

  Khalid was tempted to throw Well, you may be right in his face. People
who weren’t satisfied with having all their material needs met went on and on about the spiritual wisdom of the ancient West, as they did about that of the Far East. If they didn’t do a stretch in a Buddhist stupa in Siam, they would visit a monastery in Ireland—one not associated with the Aquinists, needless to say.

  “A long time ago, we said something like that to Christian kings,” Dawud said before Khalid could speak. “They didn’t want to listen. To be fair, Muslims didn’t want to hear anything like that from us, either. When it’s not their worry, people don’t care about other people’s problems.”

  “Indeed,” Major Badoglio replied. “Then what are you gentlemen doing here, if I may make so bold as to ask?”

  “Oh, that’s simple, Major,” Khalid said. “The Aquinists are our worry, too. The Aquinists are everybody’s worry.”

  * * *

  “Oh, yes, my masters. When we say beef, we mean beef. When we say veal, we mean veal. You may rely on it.” The waiter in the hotel restaurant spoke classical Arabic at least as well as Major Badoglio. He probably—no, certainly—used the language more than Badoglio did. Not without pride, he added, “The qadi examined the halal part of our kitchen just last week. No pork comes near it.”

  Khalid had heard those assurances from the hotel staff ever since he and Dawud checked in. He believed them; he didn’t think any qadi could be bribed into approving a kitchen that harbored forbidden food. Sipping from a glass of grappa, he asked, “And if we should care to eat from the Christian side of the menu?”

  The waiter’s face lost its professional blandness. All at once, he might have been a man selling filthy pictures, or even his “virgin” “sister.” “Well, then, my masters, you can do that, too,” he said, his voice cloyingly sweet. “You wouldn’t be the first fellows from across the sea who wanted to find out what the pork roast tastes like. No, indeed—not even close.”

  Yes, there were tours where Muslim travelers roistered through the taverns in Europe’s big cities. Were there also tours where Muslim travelers—and maybe Jews, too—gorged themselves on pigs’ feet and ham and the pork roast proffered here? There would be if a tour booker thought he could turn a profit from them.

  Across the table from Khalid, Dawud drank Italian white wine. That was permitted him, even if pork wasn’t. Khalid took another sip of grappa. Liquid fire slid down his throat. Alcohol was every bit as haram as pork, of course. But drinking alcohol didn’t feel anywhere near as transgressive—no, be honest: as dirty—as a fat slice of pork roast would have.

  Why not? Khalid wondered. He suspected it was because you could do without pork more easily than you could do without alcohol. Odds were there’d never been a human being born who couldn’t use a drink now and then. But the lure of pork for a Muslim or Jew could only be the thrill of the illicit.

  “Would you care for the pork roast, my master?” the waiter asked. “People from your side of the water like it fine. A little something you can’t get at home, eh? Why else would you travel, if not for that?”

  Christians said Shaitan had tempted Jesus. Now Khalid knew exactly how the Devil would have sounded. He had a pretty good notion of the oily gleam that would have been in Shaitan’s eye, too. He looked back at the man standing there expectantly, pencil poised above notebook. “The veal and artichoke hearts will do very well for me, thanks.”

  “However you please,” the waiter said, writing it down. You don’t know what you’re missing! every line of his body proclaimed. When Khalid didn’t change his mind, the waiter turned to Dawud. “And you, my master?”

  “I’d like the clams and mussels in cream sauce, with linguine,” Dawud said.

  “I will take your orders to the cooks.” The waiter bustled off.

  Muslims could eat any kind of seafood they pleased. Jews … Khalid wagged a finger at Dawud. “What are you doing? That’s as haram for you as pork would be.”

  “I know,” Dawud said placidly. “But I like clams and mussels, and I can’t get all that excited about how pork tastes. If I’m going to break a law, I may as well have a good time doing it.”

  At the madrasa in Cairo, Khalid had eaten pork. He’d broken a law for the sake of breaking the law. Wasn’t that part of being modern?—shoving aside the outmoded ethics of the past? He’d been sure it was when he was twenty. He wasn’t so sure any more. He took another respectful pull at the glass of grappa. Yes, he was enjoying himself breaking a law, too.

  In due course, the waiter came back with a tray on his shoulder. He ceremoniously set Khalid and Dawud’s meals before them. “May your appetites be good, my masters,” he said. “Do you require anything else?”

  “I think we’re all right,” Khalid said, and Dawud nodded. With a stiff little bow, the waiter went away. The two men from the Maghrib dug in. The veal was tender and tasty. “How’s yours?” Khalid asked after a while.

  “Just fine,” Dawud answered. He didn’t seem to take any perverse delight in eating shellfish barred by his faith. Their taste pleased him, so he chose them.

  Italian desserts were not to be sneezed at, either. Khalid patted his belly as he and Dawud walked to the elevator. “If I keep eating like this, you can roll me here tomorrow.”

  “We can roll each other,” Dawud replied. Grappa made that seem funnier than it was.

  They’d just opened the door to their room when the telephone rang. Khalid picked it up. “Yes?” He wondered if he’d forgotten to sign the chit in the restaurant.

  But it wasn’t the waiter, or even the man’s boss. “You saw the outside of the seminary,” an unfamiliar voice said. “Come in, if you please. Give your names to the guards at the third hour. They will know what to do.” The line went dead.

  III

  “Are you sure we should be doing this?” Dawud asked as he and Khalid walked up to the guard post in front of the Aquinas Seminary. “Someone could be setting us up.”

  “Someone could be, but I don’t think so,” Khalid said. “The timing on that phone call was just too good. Somebody—that pimp of a waiter?—was keeping an eye on us. The fellow on the other end of the line knew when we’d get back. Or the snoop could have been someone from the Ministry of Information.”

  “If Major Badoglio doesn’t have somebody watching us, he’s missing a trick, and he’s too sharp to miss many,” Dawud agreed. “So they might have tipped off the Aquinists. Isn’t that a cheerful thought?”

  “All kinds of interesting possibilities,” Khalid said.

  “One of which is that the guards shoot us as soon as we tell them who we are,” Dawud said.

  “We’re about to find out,” Khalid said.

  The checkpoint was very close now. One of the guards stationed there, a pimply youth with a submachine gun, looked at the newcomers with gray eyes as chilly as the glaciers of northern Europe. “Who are you? What do you want?” he asked in Italian. If ever there was a place where classical Arabic was unlikely to be heard, this was it.

  “I am Khalid al-Zarzisi. This is my friend, Dawud ibn Musa. Last night a man call us and invite us here. We come.” No, Khalid’s Italian wasn’t good. He hoped it was good enough to get the job done.

  Then he hoped he lived through the next few seconds. The gun swung sharply toward his chest. But the guard caught himself. He went back and forth with one of his comrades, an older man with four hashmarks on his left sleeve. The senior man listened, then gave forth with a magnificent gesture of contempt. The young guard with the icy eyes quailed before it. Khalid didn’t blame him; he would have, too.

  “Please excuse Luigi here,” the man with the hashmarks said to Khalid. “The only thing wrong with him is, he’s an idiot. We are expecting the two of you.”

  “He isn’t—uh, wasn’t.” Khalid nodded toward Luigi.

  “I told you—he’s an idiot. What, they don’t have idiots in your country?” the older man replied. “Come on. Show me your papers so I know you’re really you, and we’ll get on with things.”

  He might not care to sp
eak Arabic, but the way he inspected the ID cards made Khalid pretty sure he read it. And, after carefully patting down the Maghribis, he ordered Luigi to escort them into the seminary to meet … whomever they were supposed to meet. He named no more names. In his position, Khalid wouldn’t have, either.

  “Well, come along, then,” the young, acne-spotted guard said roughly. He didn’t apologize for almost plugging Khalid. As far as he was concerned, that was all part of the day’s work.

  He did lead Khalid and Dawud past the other checkpoints in front of the fortresslike seminary. Some of the guards there gave them hard looks, but no one tried to stop them. Khalid wouldn’t have wanted to attack the place with anything short of an armored regiment. Even that might have run into trouble: one of the checkpoints had rocket-propelled grenade launchers ready to grab.

  As soon as the guard passed the threshold of the seminary, he crossed himself. He paused, plainly waiting for his charges to do the same. When they didn’t, he muttered “Heathens” under his breath, as if reminding himself. He waved, urging them to follow.

  Khalid didn’t, not right away. He was looking at the two images just inside the entrance. That they were there didn’t offend him; only very pious Muslims still objected to pictures of human beings—and, in Persia and India, not even those. But they certainly gave him pause.

  One was of Christ: Christ stern in judgment. The somber dark eyes in that long, harsh face captured and held Khalid’s. He could easily believe he stood before Someone Who knew everything and forgave nothing. Who could hope to pass into heaven if it had such a Guardian as this?

  And beside that image hung one of Saint Thomas Aquinas. Muslims said that, if there could have been a Prophet after Muhammad, al-Ghazali would have been the man. Plainly, Christians—or at least Aquinists—thought the same about their leading theologian. This Aquinas wasn’t the jut-jawed street fighter of the propaganda posters. If anything, he was more frightening. That round, proud face said he knew … oh, maybe not so much as Christ, but as much as a man could know. But however much he’d learned, he approved of none of it.