Obsession (Year of Fire) (31 page)

The participants of the convention entered first. The hotel employees showed them to their places, opened bottles of Perrier, filled glasses, arranged the programs, answered questions and closed the curtains. Finally the advisers and journalists filed in; there weren’t many of the latter in spite of Shiloah’s efforts. This group settled to the sides to keep the exit clear. A master of ceremonies opened the act with a presentation in English, the chosen language for the convention. Immediately afterward, Shiloah Moses appeared at the lectern, smiling and bursting with energy, and started to speak. Matilde was immediately fascinated.

“As Jean-Paul Sartre said, I distrust the incommunicable; it is the source of all violence. That is why we’re here today: to have a dialogue. And when we get tired of dialoguing, we’ll do it some more. We must
always keep a dialogue open. And we’ll do so with humility, because as Saint Augustine said, the first virtue is humility, the second is also humility and the third is continued humility.” He paused and surveyed the other participants with a friendly expression. “There are two peoples. One calls this land”—he pointed to the screen projected on the wall—“Israel, the other, Palestine. Each one of these peoples possesses the firm conviction that this country is
his
country. This is the situation and nothing can change it. Another reality is that the dominant power is in the hands of Israel and that it is perfectly willing to defeat the daring offensives of the Palestinians by violent means. And the Palestinians, in an effort to recover this land, will continue to use violence. The Oslo Accords are a sham that will be exposed in time. But when that happens, the world must be ready to face the new challenge. Because there are only two alternatives: perpetual violence or the creation of a single state.”

Matilde didn’t know much about the positions of the Israelis or the Palestinians, but she knew that this was undoubtedly a challenging argument. Around the circle of tables there were Arabs in the traditional keffiyeh popularized by Yasser Arafat and Jews in
kippah
skullcaps that served to remind them of the existence of someone superior; the circle included people of different ages and included some women, though the majority were men.

This was the moment in Shiloah Moses’s speech when he was to announce the presence of the writer Sabir Al-Muzara. The double doors opened and a path cleared for the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, who entered with his eyes downcast, dressed simply in a blue jacket, sky-blue shirt and gray wool pants. The flashes went off again and again, the click of the cameras mingling with the murmurs of the participants. The people sitting at the round table got up and applauded him; the whole audience followed suit. Although Sabir Al-Muzara lacked political contacts, Matilde could feel the respect and admiration that radiated toward him from the presenters. Matilde’s excitement was focused in her chest; her heart was beating wildly. She didn’t notice Al-Saud standing behind her until he put his arms around her waist. He whispered, “This was my surprise. You told me on the plane that Sabir is your favorite writer, I didn’t forget.” After a silence, he added, “Matilde, I haven’t forgotten anything we experienced on that journey.”

Matilde turned her head until her lips met his and told him, “Neither have I.” Paradoxically, she would have liked to confess to him that
Rendezvous in Paris
was lying dormant on her bedside table and that she had been spending her nights rereading
The Perfumed Garden
and dreaming of them together, naked, tangled up among the pillows.

Then, as she turned back to Sabir and Shiloah, who hugged, provoking more applause, Matilde caught sight of the bellboy among the crowd. He still looked pale.

“Eliah?” Al-Saud bent down to hear her. “Why is that bellboy armed?”

“What bellboy?” he asked, concerned.

“That one.” Matilde pointed at him.

“What are you talking about? What do you mean the bellboy is armed?”

“I saw it with my own eyes. We were together in the elevator, and that boy has a pistol under his jacket.”

Al-Saud left her side, and Matilde couldn’t hear what he muttered into the microphone. In a rapid glance, Eliah had sized up the situation. The bellboy was standing slightly apart from the small crowd; his uniform made him stand out. He spotted Michael Thorton’s black hair; he was in the best position to neutralize the suspected threat.

“Mike, at your nine o’ clock, red alert. The bellboy. Apparently he’s armed.”

Al-Saud watched his partner locate the objective and move to the left, making his way through the journalists and advisers, and he also saw the boy put his hand into his unbuttoned jacket and take out a gun.

“Mike!” he shouted, instinctively pulling out his Colt M1911 and throwing Matilde to the ground against the wall.

At his shout the applause ended, and the crowd was thrown into turmoil. Realizing that Mike wouldn’t have time to cover the distance that separated him from the assailant, he took the risk of shooting through the middle of the crowd. He hit the assailant in the hand and watched him crumple onto the carpet. Another shot, which hadn’t come from Al-Saud’s pistol, rang out in the room. The screams became deafening. The crowd dispersed in a panic, and the room suddenly descended into pandemonium.

Al-Saud, with his Colt M1911 held high, barked orders to the guards through the microphone and ran toward Moses and Al-Muzara, who were staring at the chaos, unable to do anything. Sándor and Dingo got to the lectern first and shielded Shiloah and Sabir with their bodies as they hustled them out of the room. Diana collected Matilde from the corner where Al-Saud had shoved her and accompanied her to Mercure Inc.’s suite, following her boss’s orders.

At one thirty in the afternoon, Al-Saud found some time to return to the Mercure suite. He opened the door to find his Matilde, pale and small, sitting on the sofa, with her head bent over a notebook, knees curled up together to one side and her diminutive feet in the black ballerina flats resting on their sides on the carpet. Now that he thought about it, he had never seen her with her legs crossed.

Matilde noticed his presence and turned her head toward the door. She tossed aside the notebook and ran into his arms. They stood together in silence. Victoire and Thérèse got up to go to the kitchen. Eliah and Matilde hadn’t seen each other since he threw her to the floor; they had only exchanged a few words on the phone. Matilde lifted her face and Eliah saw the trail of tears on her cheeks; other evidence of crying could be found in her wet eyelashes.

“How are you? How is everyone?”

“Thanks to you,” Al-Saud said, “everyone is fine. The shot from the attacker’s gun wounded an Al-Fatah member in the calf. Nothing serious. They extracted the bullet and he’s recovering in hospital.”

“What happened? Why did that bellboy act like that?”

Al-Saud shrugged and pulled a grimace to indicate his ignorance. He wouldn’t go into details with Matilde; he could see that she was already too upset. He didn’t want to reveal that the whole thing was a damn mess. The bellboy had escaped amid the chaos, splattering the carpets with the blood that flowed from his wounded hand; the trail ended after a few yards. Although they had ordered that the hotel be sealed off—nobody could get in or out for the time being—his men and the police had found him dead, not from Eliah’s shot from the Colt M1911, but another that
had hit him in the left eye; the projectile had opened a hole in his head and his brains were spilled out on the tiled floor of the men’s employee bathroom. They concluded that, in spite of his damaged right hand, he had been trying to escape through the small window at the back of the toilets, when he had been shot. His friend Edmé de Florian, from the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire, the domestic French intelligence service, agreed with him that, judging by the damage inflicted, it must have been an expanding bullet, one with a hollow point. The point then implodes on impact, causing severe pain to the victim.

“A dumdum bullet,” Al-Saud opined, “or a THV.”

“We’ll know when we get the ballistics report,” Edmé de Florian said. “He would have lost his hand,” he stated as he studied the cadaver.

Specialists were working at the crime scene. An agent came over with the bellboy’s gun in a sealed bag, which he handed to de Florian.

“It’s a Glock 17,” Al-Saud said.

A voice came through the radio asking de Florian to go to the staff dressing room. Al-Saud guided him through the kitchen to the first-floor basement. A policeman in latex gloves approached with a weapon.

“Sir, we found it in the bellboy’s locker.”

It was a Beretta 92, one of Al-Saud’s favorite pistols.

“It could be the murder weapon,” de Florian suggested. “If it is,” he speculated, “if it really is the weapon that killed the bellboy, the murderer probably left it behind because he couldn’t take it with him without the metal detectors going off. That makes me think that the murderer just strolled in through the front door of the hotel.”

The forensics experts worked for hours before they sealed off the men’s bathroom and the bellboy’s locker.

“Eliah,” Edmé de Florian said, “you’re lucky that they’re treating this as a terrorist attack. That way, the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire will take charge, and I’ll be able to facilitate things.”

“Thank you, Edmé.”

“Tell me, what was it that alerted you? What made you tell Mike that the bellboy was armed?”

Al-Saud wasn’t going to mention Matilde; he didn’t want to involve her, especially without knowing how she had come by such a relevant piece of information.

“I just thought that the bellboy shouldn’t be there. That was the first thing that caught my eye. Then I noticed that his jacket was unbuttoned. And his stance, Edmé, there was something in his look that made me uneasy. Call it instinct, I don’t know.”

“Who do you think he wanted to assassinate, the Israeli or the Palestinian?”

“Shiloah and Sabir were standing together at the lectern at the time. It’s impossible to know. They both have very powerful enemies.”

“Why not both of them?” de Florian suggested.

Al-Saud shook his head and answered, “Shiloah’s enemies aren’t the same as Sabir’s. I don’t think Mossad would have gotten into bed with Hamas to carry out a double assassination.”

“Can you tell me anything about their personal enemies, people who have nothing to do with politics?”

Al-Saud thought about Gérard Moses and Shiloah’s statement:
He hates me. You know that, right? He hates me.
Still, he didn’t think that Gérard was capable of going that far. He also thought about Anuar Al-Muzara.

“Both Shiloah and Sabir are public figures in their countries, loved by some, hated by others. It’s difficult to know.”

“I’ll speak to them.”

“I’ll go with you. They’re in Shiloah’s suite, being guarded by my men.”

De Florian stayed with his friends, and Al-Saud took the opportunity to dash to Mercure’s offices. He was anxious to see Matilde. He was still having trouble getting rid of the feeling of vivid anxiety he’d had in the convention room, when he was running toward his friends and she was left alone on the floor, exposed to danger. In all his years as a pilot and soldier he had never felt that agonizing uncertainty.

Finding her sitting quietly on the sofa, reading her French notebook, in that elegant position, with the curve of her waist, her legs under the tartan skirt and her blonde curls resting on a pillow, he felt a wave of tenderness wash over him. He had never looked tenderly at the women who excited him, not Samara, Céline or Natasha. None of them had awakened this contradictory feeling in him. Matilde did. Everything was different with Matilde.

They sat down to talk.

“We don’t know why the bellboy acted like that,” Al-Saud admitted. “The police are investigating.” She massaged his shoulders. “Matilde, tell me how you knew that the man was armed.” She told him the story from the elevator, and Al-Saud pulled his face away and bit his lip. “My God, Matilde, he could have killed you.”

“It was only thanks to the fact that I saw the gun that I was able to warn you. And only thanks to my warning that you were able to stop him from hurting whoever he wanted to hurt.”

“Yes, yes, that’s true, but I can’t get it out of my head that you were trapped in an elevator with that guy, that you touched him. You saw his gun.” He saw she was trembling and drew her close to him. “My love, don’t mention this to anyone. I’ll tell the police that the bellboy made me suspicious and that’s why I told Mike to intercept him. I don’t want to expose you to an interrogation. I don’t want you to get into trouble so far away from home.” Matilde nodded. “Have you eaten?”

“Yes, with Victoire and Thérèse. They were very sweet to me.”

“I’ll ask Medes to drive you to the institute.”

“No! I don’t want to leave you alone! Not today,” she added, less insistently, intimidated by his reaction. “But what can I do, right? I’d just be a nuisance, nothing else.”

“
Jamais!
” he uttered, switching back to his native tongue in his emotional excitement. “Never,” he repeated in Spanish. “Matilde, Matilde,” he said, and crushed her against his chest. A man of few words, generally laconic and mistrustful, he didn’t know how to communicate how much it moved him to know that she was concerned for his well-being, that she wanted to stay to take care of him. Instead he spoke to her with a long, slow, deep, moist kiss and was delighted by her surrender, the way she opened up to receive the caresses of his tongue. They separated, and he ran his dark hands up her pale, naked forearms; he had already noticed that she didn’t have any hair on her arms, not even blonde down, nothing. Did she wax her forearms?

“I’d feel better knowing that you’re at the institute, far away from this mess. Medes will come to pick you up. I don’t think that I’ll be able to do it myself.” He didn’t want to explain that over the next few days, his life was going to descend into chaos. The security failure was unforgivable,
and the mistake would have a negative impact on Mercure Inc.’s accounts. From the base on Avenue Elisée Reclus, his employees were closely following the world news channels; the majority of the media was covering the attack at the George V, none of them neglecting to mention that Mercure Inc. was in charge of security. Avenue George V had become blocked with news channel and radio station vans, all swarming around the entrance to the hotel. In addition to having to deal with his clients and partners, Eliah would have to face the wrath of his older brother Shariar.