Through Darkest Europe Page 5

  Dawud touched Khalid on the arm. How long had he stood there, half hypnotized by those images? Too long, evidently. He shook himself like a dog scrambling out of a cold stream and followed the impatient-looking guard.

  He didn’t have to follow him very far: only to a bank of elevators a third of the way down the long central hall. The elevators came from Abd-al-Latif and Sons, a reputable firm from one of the countries in the Sunset Lands—Khalid recognized the logo. That made him easier in his mind as he got into the car; he might not have cared to trust his carcass to some rickety European model. Evidently the Aquinists didn’t care to, either.

  This elevator was modified for European use, though. Like everyone else, the Christians of Western Europe did use Arabic numerals—the Roman ones they’d had before were impossibly cumbersome. But, just as they clung to the Roman alphabet instead of the more widely used Arabic script, so their numbers had different shapes from the ones most of the world knew. Abd-al-Latif and Sons had numbered the buttons for the various floors with European-style numerals. Anyone who didn’t know them was out of luck.

  The guard punched 14: the top floor. The elevator rose as smoothly as it might have in a building in Damascus or Isfahan. It stopped several times on the way up. Some of the men who got on and off were in ordinary European clothes. Others wore black or brown monk’s robes. The lights in the top of the elevator car gleamed off their tonsured pates.

  None of the Aquinists paid any special attention to Khalid or Dawud. They assumed that anyone who got into the seminary belonged there. Khalid could see circumstances where that might be used against them. Riding this elevator didn’t seem likely to be one of those circumstances, though.

  When the elevator stopped on the fourteenth floor, the guard got out ahead of his charges. He gestured to the left with the barrel of his gun. To the left Khalid and Dawud went. “Never argue with a man who wants to shoot you,” Dawud remarked in Arabic.

  “I wasn’t going to,” Khalid replied.

  “Talk so I can understand you!” the guard snapped in Italian.

  “Vaffanculo!” Dawud told him. “There. Happier now?”

  Khalid would have thought insulting a man who wanted to shoot you was as bad as arguing with him—as bad or worse. The guard’s expression might have shown any of several different emotions, but happiness wasn’t one of them. He growled like an angry bear, down deep in his throat. The gun barrel jerked, then steadied again. The guard said not another word till he got to a door warded by two much smarter-looking fellows with assault rifles. Then he snarled, “Here are the heathens. You’re welcome to them.”

  “You are Khalid al-Zarzisi and Dawud ibn Musa?” one of the men in front of the door said as the fellow from outside stomped back toward the elevator.

  “That’s right,” Khalid replied.

  “Your papers.” The guard held out his left hand to take them. The right stayed on his weapon.

  “We showed them before,” Dawud said. “Why do we have to do it again?”

  “Because we haven’t seen them yet,” the guard said. “We are the people responsible for protecting the Corrector. So if you’ll please show them…”

  Every Aquinas Seminary was headed by a Corrector. Add them all together and they were the most dangerous dozen and a half men in Europe—probably in the world. Khalid hadn’t expected to talk to the Rome Corrector. He’d thought getting inside the seminary would be interesting enough, if he and Dawud could even manage that. If he had to show his ID again to meet one of the great foes of Muslim civilization, he’d do it. Dawud followed his lead.

  The guard examined the cards with a jeweler’s loupe. He compared photos to faces. It was routine, but not the lazy kind of routine that often turned slipshod. Then he handed back the cards. “Yes, you’re you. They patted you down outside, too, right?”

  “Right,” Khalid said.

  “Well, we’re going to do that one more time, too. Nothing personal. We do it with everybody.” The guard was good at it. Had Khalid been carrying anything nasty, it would have been found.

  “Why don’t we just take off all our clothes out here?” Dawud asked.

  “You aren’t pretty enough to be interesting naked,” the guard answered. For once skewered instead of skewering, Dawud shut up. The guard finished searching him. “You’re clean. I figured you would be, but you never can tell. Go on in.” He stepped aside.

  FATHER DOMENICO PACELLI, said the nameplate on the Corrector’s desk. The man behind the desk looked like neither the stern Christ nor the dyspeptic Aquinas portrayed downstairs. Khalid also had to admit that he bore not the slightest visible resemblance to Shaitan. He was about sixty, with pinched cheeks, a thin, sharp nose, and pale eyes behind gold-framed spectacles.

  “Buon giorno, Padre,” Khalid said. As long as he stuck to set phrases, he was fine.

  But Father Pacelli surprised him by replying in classical Arabic: “Peace be with you, my master.”

  “And to you also peace,” Khalid answered automatically. Then he said, “I did not think you would know this language.”

  “Why not?” Father Pacelli said. “We need to know it. It is the world’s language of commerce. It is the world’s language of scholarship. It is the world’s language of lies—about us and about many other things. Oh, yes, we need to know it.”

  “Not everything the world says about Aquinists is a lie,” Dawud ibn Musa said.

  “Not everything the world says about Jews is a lie, either,” the Corrector answered. “Does that make you happier to hear the lies that do get said?”

  “I haven’t killed anyone on account of them. Not lately, anyhow—I would remember,” Dawud said.

  Father Pacelli’s nostrils flared. His nose was so bladelike, Khalid hadn’t been sure they could. How long had it been since someone talked back to him? Years, unless Khalid missed his guess. But the priest’s voice remained mild: “Nor have I.”

  He looked like a scholar. Meeting him in a Muslim land, Khalid would have figured him for a professor of mathematics, or perhaps a doctor. It wasn’t easy to imagine him carrying a grenade launcher or an assault rifle. But you didn’t have to do it yourself. Khalid thought of Faruq al-Ghaznavi, at whose orders four million Tamils had died in the wars that roiled India a lifetime earlier: not because they were enemy combatants, merely because they were Tamils. In photos taken before he himself was beheaded for crimes against mankind, Faruq looked like the chicken farmer his grandfather had been. You never could tell.

  Dawud’s mind must have been going down the same path, for he said, “I haven’t told anyone else to kill on account of them, either.”

  “Nor have I,” Father Pacelli repeated. “The Aquinist movement is not what you imagine it to be. That is why you were asked to come here: so I could begin to set the record straight.”

  “That will … take some doing,” Khalid observed. The three simultaneous truck bombs that destroyed the Majlis Hall in Alexandria and left Egypt essentially without a government … The blast that shattered a dam in Arkansistan, flooding a hundred square parasangs and drowning thousands … The false pilgrims who blew up not only themselves but those who came to Mecca with nothing but prayer and fasting on their minds … The filmed execution of hostages for the greater glory of God … The list was long, but those were some of the examples that sprang to mind.

  “We seek equality. We want the right to live our lives according to our principles, and not to have yours rammed down our throats,” the Corrector said. “Your filthy, leering music, your brazen films, the garbage—there is no other word—on the television at every hour of the day and night…” His hands, long and thin and pale, twisted in a gesture of disgust.

  “I haven’t heard of anyone holding a gun to Europe’s head and making you watch the movies and the TV or listen to the music,” Khalid said. His own opinion of some of what his civilization produced wasn’t far from Pacelli’s, but that wasn’t the point. That it wasn’t the point went to the heart of this dis
pute. He asked, “Don’t you believe everyone has the right—has the duty, even—to choose for himself? We call that freedom.”

  “Sticking a name on it does not make the name true,” the priest snapped, showing asperity for the first time. “We call it license.”

  “Which doesn’t make what you call it a true name, either,” Dawud said.

  Father Pacelli glowered at him. Khalid always found light eyes unnerving because they were so uncommon on the other side of the Mediterranean. He didn’t know whether Dawud felt the same way. More than a few men found fair-haired, light-eyed women exciting—not a word that would ever have applied to the Corrector. Right now, Pacelli was trying to make Dawud afraid.

  If he succeeded, Dawud didn’t let on. “I don’t know what you’re waiting for, looking at me like that,” the investigator said. “I won’t turn red. I won’t grow horns and cloven hooves and a barbed tail. And I’m sure I can’t fit batwings under this tight tunic.”

  “No, you are not Satan,” Father Pacelli said; even speaking Arabic, he pronounced the Devil’s name in the hissing European fashion. “You are only a Jew who thinks he is funny. But Satan inspires your shameless culture all the same. And we will fight him wherever we find him.”

  “Freedom is—”

  “Overrated,” Father Pacelli finished for him. “You Muslims will not eat swine, but you act like them. You coddle your lusts. And the worst of it is, you provoke us to coddle ours—and you expect us to pay for the privilege. God will not permit you to proceed with your wickedness.”

  “And you know this because He told you?” Dawud suggested.

  “I know this because I have studied the Bible. You might do well to try it,” the priest said. “We will spread God’s word any way we can—and we will make our voices heard round the world.”

  “Believe whatever you please. That’s freedom, too,” Khalid said. “But you have no right to impose your beliefs on people who don’t share them.”

  “You misunderstand,” Father Pacelli said sadly. “We are not imposing our beliefs. I agree with you—that would be wicked. We are carrying out God’s will. If I have to choose between the word of God and the word of man, I choose God’s. And we will see in the world to come who made the better choice.”

  He and Khalid looked at—looked through—each other in perfect mutual incomprehension. Khalid wondered if the Corrector had ever read the Apology of Socrates. It was probably too secular for him. The Greek philosopher had said something similar, but in a very different context. Socrates meant he would keep looking for truth even if people told him to stop. Father Pacelli was convinced he already had it, and aimed to shove it down everyone else’s throat.

  “Have we anything more to say to each other?” Pacelli asked.

  “Only this: we will stop you if we can,” Dawud said.

  “I am trying to stop everything your world has been doing to mine for the past five hundred years,” the Christian priest said. “You learned from us, you stole from us, and then you decided everything we knew was old and out of date and of no account. And now you laugh at us behind our backs, and even in our faces. Well, the day will come when you laugh out of the other side of your mouth. God wills it, Jew, and God’s will shall be done.”

  “Of course it shall. How could it be otherwise?” Dawud answered. “Where you’re making your mistake is, you think you’re the ones working it.” He turned to Khalid. He would have been more impressive heaving his bulk out of a chair, but they hadn’t been invited to sit down. “Come on, boss. He’s right about one thing, anyhow: we’ve said everything that needs saying.”

  Khalid took a small boy’s pleasure in turning his back on the Corrector. Out in the corridor, one of Father Pacelli’s guards held up a hand when he and Dawud started to walk toward the elevators. “We know what you are,” he said, and signed himself with the cross to show what he thought of what they were. “You don’t go wandering around without an escort.” His gesture might have been medieval, but the little radio on his belt was as modern as next week. He spoke into it, then nodded to the investigators. “Wait here. Someone is coming up for you.”

  In due course, the somebody arrived: the pimply youngster who’d brought Khalid and Dawud up to Father Pacelli’s sanctum. Luigi gave them a dirty look as he marched them away. Khalid would have bet he hadn’t been back at his post long when his superior got the word they needed somebody—and sent him back up to the fourteenth floor. A senior underofficer in the Muslim world would have done the same kind of thing. Some bits of business didn’t change much from one culture to another.

  The guard muttered a few unpleasantries in Italian as he took them down the elevator and out of the seminary. Khalid wasn’t sure whether they were aimed at him and Dawud or at the underofficer. Since Dawud held his peace, Khalid suspected the latter.

  Once they’d made their way past the last checkpoint on the way out, Dawud remarked, “If they were only a little looser in there, I’d feel like I was getting out of jail.”

  Khalid looked back over his shoulder at the massive concrete pile. “Now that you mention it,” he said, “yes.”

  * * *

  After the Aquinist Seminary, even the Ministry of Information seemed a lighthearted, carefree place the next day. It also seemed small to Khalid. The Aquinists were training hundreds—no, thousands—of young men in their rigid theology and in who could say what all else? Far fewer people here seemed to have the job of dealing with (or, better, preventing) the trouble they caused.

  He was not surprised to learn that Major Badoglio knew where he and Dawud had gone the day before. He would have been surprised and disappointed if the major hadn’t.

  “You should be honored,” Badoglio said. “Father Pacelli doesn’t invite just anyone into his lair.”

  “I don’t think he meant it as a compliment,” Khalid said.

  “No. He wanted to frighten us.” Dawud ibn Musa paused meditatively. “He knows how to get what he wants, too.”

  “Imagine how frightened we would have been if he’d let us see more of what they’re up to in there,” Khalid said. Dawud mimed a fit of the shivers. Khalid snorted.

  “He might have done it,” Major Badoglio said. “Making people afraid is one of the things the Aquinists do best.”

  “Why does the Grand Duke put up with them? They’re a state within his state,” Khalid said. “They fly their own flag. They have their own soldiers and their own weapons. I’m surprised they don’t mint coins with the Corrector’s face on them.”

  “You just answered part of your own question, my master,” Badoglio replied. “They have soldiers. They have guns. Putting them down would mean civil war.”

  “Sometimes you have to do those things, or else your country isn’t yours any more,” Dawud observed. “It starts to belong to the people who have the guns and don’t worry about using them.”

  “You have a point,” the Italian security man said. “But the only thing worse than starting a civil war is starting one and then losing it.”

  Dawud winced. So did Khalid. No one who’d briefed them in Tunis had thought that was even a possibility. If Major Badoglio did … “What do you think the chances are?” Khalid asked.

  Badoglio spread his hands in a gesture an Arab might also have used. “To tell you the truth, I don’t know. I don’t want to find out, either. Neither does the Grand Duke. His Supreme Highness will stay cautious as long as he can—and then, it could be, a little longer than that.”

  “What would happen if the Pope ordered the Italian people to back the Grand Duke if there is a civil war?” Khalid inquired.

  “You keep asking questions I have no answers for,” Major Badoglio said. “But, as I told you a few days ago, I would be surprised if Pope Marcellus were eager to find out. The Aquinists might proclaim him an Antipope and elevate someone else in his place. No one except maybe the Aquinists wants to see another civil war in the holy Catholic Church.”

  In Islam, Sunnis and Shiites had had
their quarrels. These days, nationalism drove people harder than religion through most of the world. To imagine a religious dispute inflaming a big part of a continent … It seemed so medieval, Khalid had trouble believing in the possibility. Or he would have, if he hadn’t just had a visit—an audience—with Domenico Pacelli.

  “They want what they want with all their hearts and with all their souls and with all their might,” Dawud said. “If you don’t want to stop them just as much as they want to go forward—or backward—you’ll lose.”

  “I do,” Major Badoglio said simply.

  “I believe you,” the Jew said. “But you’re only one man. If Grand Duke Cosimo and everyone he works with don’t want it as much as you do, you still have a problem.”

  “Of course we have a problem.” Major Badoglio sounded testy. He made a small production out of lighting a cigar. “If we didn’t have a problem, and if we didn’t take it seriously, would we have asked for you?”

  Instead of answering, Dawud fired up his own large, odorous cigar. Khalid thought he understood how meat felt in a smoker. All the oxygen seemed to have left the room, or, more likely, to have been used up. Eyes watering, Khalid said, “It depends. If you called us because you really want us to accomplish something, that’s one thing. But if you called us because calling somebody from the Maghrib makes you look good—well, that’s a different story.”

  “One without a happy ending: for us, for you, for anybody,” Dawud added.

  “I assure you, my masters, we truly do oppose the Aquinist madness,” Major Badoglio said.

  Khalid nodded. Showing he didn’t trust the major’s assurances would only cause trouble. Christians had been giving assurances like that ever since the radicals in their midst became a problem—for more than a generation now, in other words. Sometimes they seemed to mean them. More often, they wanted nothing more than to keep states that had reason to be angry from taking revenge. So it often looked to exasperated Muslims, at any rate.