Through Darkest Europe Read online

  “Would it be possible for us to confer with the Grand Duke?” Khalid asked.

  The request seemed reasonable enough to him. But Badoglio got touchy about it. “If two men from the Ministry of Information came to Tunis, would the Sultan grant them an audience?” he asked.

  “Probably. It would give him something to do besides watch horse races and look official,” Khalid answered. Major Badoglio blinked. Khalid went on, “Chances are you’d have more trouble getting in to see the Wazir. He rules—as long as he keeps his majority, anyhow. The Sultan only reigns.”

  Badoglio muttered under his breath. Strongmen thrived in Europe. They always had, all the way back to the days of the Roman Empire. More recently, the Europeans had justified their penchant for one-man rule by what they called “the divine right of kings.” To Khalid, that seemed as foolish as the Chinese “mandate of heaven.” The Chinese didn’t believe in the mandate of heaven any more. Europeans still clung to the divine right of kings—and of other rulers, too. The people were there to give them what they needed, nothing more.

  When the major didn’t say yes or no, Khalid asked him again: “Can we?” You had to be firm with these people, not let them sidetrack you.

  “I’ll see what I can arrange,” Badoglio said, which might have meant anything—or nothing. Promises on this side of the Mediterranean were too often written on water.

  All the same, Khalid said, “Thank you.” Here even more than in the busy lands to the south and east, politeness mattered.

  Dawud kept trying to accomplish something: “If you can’t close down the seminary, can you arrest that Father Pacelli? He can’t spend all his time in the building, and if he’s not a dangerous man I’ve never seen one.”

  Major Badoglio looked delicately distressed. “That might also touch off the strife we fear,” he said. “And, even if we were to seize Father Pacelli, the Aquinists would only choose another Corrector. Besides, there is no guarantee the father would not be able to keep on conducting his affairs from inside a jail cell.”

  That shouldn’t happen. Khalid didn’t say it. Such things did happen, even in places like the Maghrib. There’d been a scandal a couple of years ago, where a felonious olive-oil merchant went right on planning how to adulterate his firm’s stock in trade after he went to prison for six years. And if he could do it there for profit, someone like Father Pacelli could do it here for the greater glory of God.

  Something else occurred to Khalid. “Please believe me, Major, that I mean no offense when I say it seems as though you and the Grand Duke are looking for excuses not to antagonize the Aquinists.”

  “I take no offense. How can I, when what you say is true?” Badoglio answered. “But I mean no offense when I say you want us to solve your problems for you on our soil, and to pay the cost in blood and trouble.”

  “Hmm. That could hold some small bit of truth,” Khalid said. Beside him, Dawud’s cough had nothing to do with the tobacco smoke in his mouth and throat. What the Italian major said held a great whacking lot of truth. The advanced nations to the south and east were no more immune to self-interest than anyone else. Of course they wanted the Christian countries to solve their problems for them. That way, they wouldn’t have to spend money or lives themselves.

  Badoglio’s raised eyebrow argued that he understood the facts of political life at least as well as the Maghribis. “If you were to give us more assistance than you have been in the habit of contributing, my masters…”

  “I doubt that would change things much,” Dawud ibn Musa said. “What would the Aquinists do then? They’d start yelling ‘Infidels! Heretics!’—that’s what. And then you’d end up with the rising you don’t want.”

  “It could be,” the Italian said. The long and short of it was, nobody wanted to do anything serious about the Aquinists. Everybody hoped somebody else would do something serious about the fanatics.

  Everyone wants to go to heaven, but no one wants to die. Khalid shook his head. Even that wasn’t true, not in Italy, nor in most of Western Europe. The Aquinists had shown that they had plenty of young men—and women—ready to head for heaven (or maybe for a warmer clime) right away, so long as they could hurt their foes in the dying.

  The meeting with Major Badoglio petered out a little later. No one tried very hard to keep it going. No one seemed to have much left to say.

  * * *

  For the next couple of days, Khalid and Dawud might as well have been tourists in Rome. They looked at ruins and antiquities. No one bothered them: not the Aquinists, not the Ministry of Information, not the Pope’s partisans, not even the greasy waiter in the hotel restaurant. Maybe he worked for one of the Italian factions; maybe he worked for all three of them.

  “They were a great people once,” Khalid said, looking up and up at the Arch of Septimius Severus. The Maghrib had its share of Roman ruins, too—many from Severus’ reign, as he came from the province called Africa—but those of the imperial capital outdid them. This was where all the tax money from the outlying provinces came in, and where most of it got spent.

  “They were,” Dawud agreed, “but this isn’t what they remember when they think of that. They keep this going for the tourist trade. Otherwise, they’d tear it down and build over it.”

  Sure enough, most of the people ambling through the Roman Forum were travelers from far-off lands. A couple from somewhere in the Sunset Lands argued in an Arabic dialect Khalid could barely recognize, much less follow. A local guide lectured a group of Egyptians (whose country had ruins and antiquities of its own). An Asian man snapped pictures relentlessly, one after another, click! click! click! He might have come straight out of a comedy bit on a bad TV show—Korean shutterbugs were always good for a laugh, or at least a tired smile. A nearby Italian constable, one of many around the Forum, looked bored. Only the assault rifle slung on his back argued that the scene might be less peaceable than it seemed at first glance.

  Signs and maps in Italian and bad Arabic directed the curious from one site to another and explained what they all were. Trajan’s Column, off to the northwest, commemorated a war that would have been nineteen centuries forgotten without it. After studying a map, Dawud pointed east across the Forum toward another arch. “If I ever felt like not being a Jew any more but I didn’t want to say the shahada three times and become a Muslim, all I’d need to do is walk under that.”

  “Huh?” Khalid said brilliantly.

  “That’s the Arch of Titus,” Dawud said. “Five hundred years before Muhammad was born, Titus captured Jerusalem, destroyed the Second Temple—it sat right where the Dome of the Rock is now, you know—and brought the loot back to Rome. The arch shows him parading through the streets here with it. And to this day, some rabbis say that any Jew who walks under it stops being a Jew because he did.”

  “Really? You aren’t pulling my leg?” Khalid asked.

  “Not this time.” His partner spoke with unwonted solemnity.

  “Well, that’s a new one on me,” Khalid admitted. It was a pretty peculiar one, but he didn’t say that for fear of offending Dawud.

  He might as well have, because Dawud seemed to pluck the thought right out of his head. “Every religion has some strange bits in it. They’re easier to spot when they belong to somebody else’s, eh?”

  “Mm—yes,” Khalid said. Then he too busied himself with a map. If he was studying, he didn’t have to dwell on Dawud’s … thought-provoking comment. He could have denied that Islam had any strange bits—but not with a straight face. He’d made the Haj to Mecca, more because of what it had meant to his great-grandfathers than because of what it meant to him. And he’d stoned Shaitan, just as other pilgrims had stoned him for 1,400 years. He hadn’t thought that was peculiar till this moment, but he would have bet Dawud ibn Musa did.

  Then, suddenly and unexpectedly, he jerked as if a bee had stung him. “Oh!” he said, or maybe it was more like “Ooh!”

  “What is it?” Dawud asked. “Except for Titus’ arch, I d
idn’t see anything to get that excited about.”

  “It’s the Column of Phocas!” Khalid exclaimed. “It’s right over—there!” It couldn’t have been more than sixty cubits away. It wasn’t anything special to look at, not in this square of architecture magnificent even in ruins: a single column about thirty cubits high standing all by itself. All the same, Khalid hurried to it and read the sign at its base: “‘In 608 AD, Pope Boniface presented this column to the Byzantine Emperor Phocas to honor the Emperor for permitting him to convert the pagan Pantheon into a church.’”

  He was practically jumping up and down. Dawud followed him over much more slowly and eyed him as if wondering whether he’d gone out of his mind. “And this excites you because…?”

  “Because it’s Phocas. Because it’s 608 in the Christian calendar. Muhammad was alive then. Alive and still an ordinary man, I think—wouldn’t that have been a few years before God started giving him revelations?” Khalid pointed to the column. “If he were here, he could have seen this going into place!”

  “If he were here, he never would have founded Islam back in Arabia, and then where would the world be?” Dawud answered his own question: “Upside down and inside out, that’s where. Not where it is now, for sure. And I don’t know whether 608 is before or after he said he started hearing God. I don’t care, either, to tell you the truth. Who but a Christian would keep track of the old-time Christian calendar that closely?”

  “But he was here—he was on the earth—when this went up.” Khalid was a secular man. To him, religion was for weddings and funerals, not for swallowing up your whole existence. He hadn’t had even a taste of the wonder, the awe, it could inspire for many years. Now he did, but Dawud, not being Muslim, didn’t understand it and couldn’t share it.

  Khalid felt like grabbing the first obviously Muslim traveler he found and dragging him over to the Column of Phocas to see if it thrilled him, too. No, thrilled her: that black-haired beauty with a tunic that displayed her dimpled knees and shapely calves was no priggish European. The Italian cops were leering at her and making what Khalid thought were rude, lewd comments. And if he himself did drag her over here, she’d think he was thinking of his own risen column, not Phocas’.

  Life could be very frustrating sometimes.

  “Why aren’t you a beautiful woman who appreciates what the Column of Phocas means?” Khalid demanded of Dawud.

  “Oh. Her.” The Jew must have been watching her stroll through the ancient ruins, too. “For all you know, she’s a Copt.”

  “You’re no fun!” Khalid exclaimed. Like Jews in the Muslim world, Egypt’s native Christians were far more emancipated than their coreligionists in the Old World’s isolated north and west. They didn’t bow before Saint Thomas Aquinas and his doctrine of piety and forgetfulness. Unfortunately, millions of people did—and the world was still facing the consequences.

  IV

  When the telephone in the hotel room rang, Khalid had just come out of the shower. Dawud was just going in. They stepped past each other, one wearing a towel, the other his drawers. Khalid’s pace picked up as he hurried to the nightstand to answer the phone. Dawud paused at the bathroom door in case it was for him.

  “Pronto,” Khalid said in Italian. Go on—speak!, it meant. Italian was a more direct language than Arabic.

  But the answer came back in good classical Arabic: “Are you one of the gentlemen from the Maghrib, my master?” It was a woman’s voice.

  “That’s right. I’m al-Zarzisi. Who’s this?” he said in the same tongue. Dawud raised an eyebrow. Khalid shrugged at him, which almost dislodged the towel.

  As he grabbed for it with his free hand, the woman said, “My name is Annarita Pezzola. I have the honor to serve his Supreme Highness, Cosimo III, Grand Duke of Italy, as administrative assistant.”

  “Do you?” Khalid hoped he didn’t sound too surprised. In the Muslim world, a woman in a position like that wouldn’t have been so startling. Several women had served their states as Wazir, and some of them had done quite well. But this Pezzola woman had to be uncommonly talented (or, perhaps, uncommonly beautiful) to rise so high in a retrograde Christian country. No more than a beat slower than he might have, Khalid went on, “What does his Supreme Highness want with us?”

  Dawud raised that eyebrow again, higher this time. Khalid gave back another shrug. Annarita Pezzola said, “He has asked me to invite you to an entertainment at his palace tomorrow at the second hour of the evening. He hopes to meet you there—informally and unofficially, you might say.”

  “Please thank him for us and tell him we’ll be there,” Khalid said at once.

  “Just as you say, so shall it be,” she replied, and the line went dead.

  Khalid whistled softly as he hung up. “What was that all about?” Dawud asked.

  “The Grand Duke. We’re invited to his palace tomorrow, the second evening hour,” Khalid told him. “An entertainment, his aide called it. A woman, by the way.”

  “That’s interesting,” Dawud said. “And so is the other. Major Badoglio didn’t think he’d want anything to do with us.” Before Khalid could say anything, the Jew added, “Of course, Badoglio doesn’t think anybody wants to do anything. Something might—God forbid!—happen if somebody did.”

  “You’re not being fair,” Khalid said. “He has more problems than he knows what to do with.”

  “You said it. I didn’t.” Dawud closed the bathroom door, giving himself the last word.

  When he came out, Khalid asked him, “What do we wear to an entertainment at the Grand Duke’s palace?”

  “Clothes would be good, I expect,” Dawud said helpfully.

  “Thank you so much, O wisest of the wise!” Khalid exclaimed. Arabic was often most sarcastic when it sounded most flattering.

  Dawud bowed as if Khalid meant the compliment literally. “I am your servant,” the Jew said. “The way it looks to me is, we can either look like white crows if we put on our robes and keffiyehs while everyone else is in European garb, or we can look like jackasses if we wear the European stuff ourselves and find out everyone else has the international style on.”

  “Rrr.” Khalid made a rumbling noise down deep in his throat. Either one of those things could happen. The Grand Duke was a progressive European. If he hadn’t been, he never would have invited investigators from the Maghrib to come to Italy to begin with. He would have backed the Aquinists instead. But he was a European, progressive or not. If he wanted to wear native styles, or wanted his henchmen to do the same, no one could blame him for it. Khalid did some more rumbling and muttering. “His assistant didn’t tell me what we were supposed to do.”

  “Well, why don’t you call her back and ask her, then?” Dawud said. “Or if that’s beneath your dignity, my master, I’ll take care of it for you. After all, what else is a Jew good for? What’s her name?”

  Khalid laughed. “What’s a Jew good for? Making trouble, that’s what. Her name is Annarita Pezzola, and I’ll call her myself.”

  “That means you think she’s pretty,” Dawud said.

  “I think you’re pestilential, is what I think,” Khalid said. “Where’s the damned phone book? It’s not in my nightstand. Nothing but the Christian Bible in there, in Latin and Arabic. They could at least have put a Qur’an in there, too, couldn’t they?”

  “That’s in the nightstand on my side of the bed, actually,” Dawud said. “So is the phone book. How long do you think you’ll need to get through to her?”

  “Good question,” Khalid said. “She’s close to the Grand Duke, so there are liable to be half a dozen layers of flunkies between the switchboard and her.” He eyed Dawud. “Maybe I should have had you do it after all. Your Italian’s a lot better than mine, and heaven knows if the flunkies speak Arabic.”

  “I’ll take care of it if you want.”

  “Never mind. If you’ve been hiding the phone book, give it to me.”

  Dawud did. Khalid looked up the number for the Grand D
uke’s palace. He checked it carefully. European versions of Arabic numerals still seemed strange to him. When he dialed, he asked to speak to Signora Pezzola. “Signorina,” the man on the other end of the line corrected. Then he paused for close to half a minute. “Who’s calling? How do you know to ask for her?”

  “I am Khalid al-Zarzisi. I just speak—ah, spoke—to her on telephone.” He hoped he was making himself understood.

  Another pause, this one even longer, made him wonder all the more. At last, the Grand Duke’s hireling said, “Please hold the line.” Music replaced his voice. Through most of the world, it would have been something popular and disposable—maybe a song by Dawud al-Buwayhidi. Here, it was a sonorous Latin chant: a chorus, perhaps of priests or monks, singing Christian hymns. Progressive or not, the Grand Duke had given ground to the backward-looking Aquinists here. Khalid wondered if Cosimo III realized as much.

  The chant held a certain grim grandeur, even if Khalid couldn’t understand a word of it. As soon as it finished, another began: dozens of deep voices rising and falling together. That one went silent halfway through. There was a click, and then a woman’s voice: “This is Annarita Pezzola.”

  “Oh, good!” Khalid said in glad surprise: he hadn’t expected to reach her so soon. And good for another reason—now he could go on in Arabic. He did; he wasn’t sure he could have framed the question in Italian.

  “You may wear whatever you please,” Signorina Pezzola answered, with something that might have been amusement in her voice. “The Grand Duke himself sometimes chooses national attire, sometimes international.”

  Khalid wasn’t sure that helped. “Would he take it for a compliment if we wear your styles, or would he think we look like buffoons?”

  “It depends,” she said judiciously. “If you do look like buffoons, you might do better to stay with your familiar clothes.”

  “Er—thank you,” Khalid said, and hung up. The Grand Duke’s aide had never seen Dawud ibn Musa in robes and keffiyeh. The Jew could look like a buffoon no matter what he wore.