The Labyrinth of Osiris (50 page)

‘Where are you?’ he said out loud. ‘Where the bloody hell are you?’

‘Standing right behind you!’

He turned. Mohammed Sariya was in the doorway, holding a paper plate with two slices of
basboussa
on it.

‘Working late?’ he asked.

‘Just following something up,’ said Khalifa. ‘I was about to leave.’

‘Well, before you do you can help me with these.’

Sariya held up the
basboussa
slices. Khalifa protested, said he wasn’t hungry, but his deputy insisted.

‘You’ll be saving me from myself,’ he chuckled. ‘I’m getting fat enough as it is.’

Khalifa relented and the two men sat.

‘Who’s “you”, then?’ asked Sariya, handing over one of the slices and biting into the other one.

‘Hmmn?’

‘
Where the bloody hell are you?
’

‘Oh, right. Long story.’

‘As in one you don’t want to tell me?’

‘As in one whose plot doesn’t seem to be making a whole lot of sense,’ replied Khalifa, nibbling on a corner of his own pastry. For a moment his thoughts veered off to a morning in the distant past when he and Ali had eaten
basboussa
at Groppi’s in Cairo. Ali had insisted on having a second slice, had got halfway through it, then had to rush off to the toilet to be violently sick. Khalifa stayed with the memory a moment, cherishing it, then, pushing it away, filled Sariya in on what he’d discovered these last twenty-four hours. Just a basic outline – the mine, the poisoned wells, the water analysis results. He didn’t mention Ben-Roi or the Kleinberg woman. Although Sariya was one of the more mellow people on the force, even he would have frowned on the idea of doing spadework for the Israelis.

‘Have you told the Attias about this?’ he asked when Khalifa had finished.

‘Not yet. I was hoping to clarify a few more details first.’

‘You want me to take a run out there? I’m off tomorrow, and we should probably let them know. Put their minds at rest that it’s not an anti-Christian thing after all.’

‘Would you do that?’

‘It would be my pleasure. Any excuse not to spend a morning with the mother-in-law. She told me a story the other day that was so boring I thought I was going to pass out.’

Khalifa smiled at that.

‘Do you want me to drop into Bir Hashfa as well?’ asked Sariya.

‘Leave that for the moment. I don’t want to be getting people into a panic. Let me try and track down the mine, then we can go out and speak to them when we’ve got some hard facts.’

Sariya nodded and took another hefty bite of his pastry. There was a silence, then:

‘I found that family, by the way.’

Khalifa didn’t know what his deputy was talking about.

‘You know, the one from Old Qurna. The El-Badris.’

Of course. The family of the girl Pinsker had raped. He’d asked Sariya to check up on them. It no longer seemed particularly relevant now that he’d found out about the gold mine.

‘And?’ he asked, more out of politeness than interest – he wouldn’t want Sariya to feel that he’d wasted his time.

‘And not very much,’ replied the sergeant through a mouthful of pastry. ‘Like you said, most of them got moved up to El-Tarif when Old Qurna got bulldozed. Although the sister had already left.’

‘Sister?’

‘The one you mentioned. She’s down in a village near Edfu. Been there thirty years or more.’

Khalifa was confused.

‘Three brothers and a sister,’ Sariya reminded him, his tone that of a father explaining something to a forgetful child. ‘The brothers are all long buried, but the sister’s living down near Edfu.’

‘Iman el-Badri?’

‘Exactly.’

Khalifa shook his head. ‘I think someone’s got their wires crossed, Mohammed. Iman el-Badri died years ago. This must be a different one.’

‘Not what I was told,’ said Sariya. ‘There were three brothers – Mohammed, Said and another one whose name I can’t remember. Ahmed, I think it was. And the sister Iman. And she’s living just outside Edfu. Some sort of holy woman, apparently. Spends her time doling out blessings to expectant mothers.’

Khalifa started to object, to tell Sariya that he had to be mistaken, only to fall silent. Now that he thought about it, no one had actually told him the woman Pinsker had raped was dead.

‘But it’s not possible,’ he murmured. ‘She must be well over a hundred.’

‘A hundred on the dot, actually. And still going strong, by all accounts.’

From being not especially interested, Khalifa’s mind was suddenly fully engaged.

‘You’re sure about this?’

Sariya gave him an admonishing look.

‘Do you know the name of the village?’

Sucking honey off his fingertips, Sariya picked up a pen and scribbled on a sheet of paper. Khalifa examined the sheet, then folded it and slipped it into his pocket.

‘Near Edfu, you say?’

‘About five kilometres north.’

Khalifa looked at his watch, calculating. Then, giving Sariya a slap on the shoulder, he stood and headed for the stairs, cramming the rest of the
basboussa
slice into his mouth as he went. It was at least an hour’s drive either way down to Edfu, and that was most likely going to be the only dinner he got.

R
OAD
TO
J
ERUSALEM

Earlier that day Ben-Roi had put his foot to the floor for the journey from Jerusalem down to Mitzpe Ramon.

On the way back he practically put his foot
through
the floor, covering the distance twenty minutes faster than he had on the outward trip, his siren raging all the way, which pretty much reflected his mood.

As he drove he ran and reran the afternoon’s events in his head, trying to splice them into the framework of the case he’d already built up.

The Nemesis woman being Kleinberg’s daughter certainly explained a few things. At the same time, it raised a whole tangle of new questions, not the least of them why the hell Kleinberg should have wanted to keep the fact she had a daughter so quiet (although hadn’t her editor said something about her keeping her life rigidly compartmentalized?).

With a bit of luck Zisky would dig up some answers. Ben-Roi’s more immediate concern lay with what the Dinah woman had told him about Barren Corporation. Specifically, her insistence that it was Barren, or someone working for them, who had killed Kleinberg.

It wasn’t like the idea had come as a bolt from the blue – Barren had been looming over the case almost from the word go. What had struck him was the absolute conviction with which she had pointed the finger. For Dinah Levi, Elizabeth Teal, whatever the hell her real name was, Barren were guilty. Not possibly. Not probably. Definitely.

How could she be so sure? Was she keeping something back, not giving him the full story? Had the Nemesis Agenda turned up some sort of concrete evidence? But then why not reveal it – if not to him, then on the Nemesis website. Given their history with Barren, you would have thought they’d have gone public the instant they found anything even remotely incriminating.

No, he reckoned, she’d been telling the truth – at least so far as what they’d found out about the murder was concerned. Evidence-wise they were as empty-handed as he was. So the question remained: how could she be so certain Barren were responsible? Was it that her loathing for the company – whatever its root cause – was such that she simply couldn’t imagine them
not
being guilty? Was she playing some sort of elaborate game with him, sending him off on false angles for reasons only she understood?

Or was it rather that she knew something else about Barren – something so damning, so bad (‘disgusting’, that’s the word she’d used to describe them), that Kleinberg’s murder was somehow an inevitable corollary of it? Which once again raised the issue of why, if they had such knowledge, Nemesis hadn’t gone public with it.

It didn’t make sense. None of it did. Although one thing at least was clear – whoever she was, Dinah Levi had some personal issue with Barren. Something that stretched way beyond the mere dislike of an anti-capitalist campaigner for a global megacorporation. He’d seen it in her eyes; in her body language; in the way her face had seemed to tighten whenever the name Barren was mentioned, as though someone was winding a screw deep inside her skull.

For Rivka Kleinberg’s daughter – if that’s indeed who she was – Barren Corporation were the Devil.

And now he was rushing back to Jerusalem to meet the Devil. Like he’d said to Zisky before he’d set out that morning: it was high time they found out what these people had got to say for themselves.

Barren’s representatives had requested that the interview take place at the King David, Jerusalem’s most famous, and most exclusive, hotel. The corporation kept a suite there, apparently, used it as a sort of informal Jerusalem office, with a ready-installed conferencing hookup with the organization’s headquarters in Houston. Normally interviews around a murder investigation would be conducted in a police station, but Ben-Roi had gone with the flow. At the end of the day talking was talking, wherever you did it. So long as they answered his questions he would have met them in a public toilet.

He arrived with two minutes to spare. In 1946 much of the hotel’s southern wing had been destroyed in an Irgun bombing – the largest single terrorist atrocity in the history of the region. You wouldn’t know it today. The place was a testament to opulent tranquillity, its lavish décor and rich furnishings about as far removed from the cares of the real world as it was possible to get. Ben-Roi had been here a few times over the years and never felt at ease, and he did so even less tonight, given the reason for his visit. With barely a glance at his surroundings he marched across the carpeted foyer and took a lift up to the fourth floor, sharing the carriage with an elderly couple over from England for their grandson’s Bar Mitzvah.

The Barren suite was at the back of the building, at the end of a long, softly lit corridor. He paused a moment outside, gathering himself, swiftly running through his plan of attack, then knocked. The door opened immediately and he was ushered in.

The room was a duplex – huge lounge, stairs up to a bedroom area, windows affording spectacular views east across the Hinnom Valley to Mount Zion and the floodlit jumble of the Old City. There were five people waiting inside, which struck him as slight overkill: two men in suits – Barren executives – and, side by side on a sofa, a man and woman whose sharp features and icy stares marked them straight out as legals.

Those were the extras, the supporting cast. It was the fifth person who immediately grabbed Ben-Roi’s attention and who was clearly the one in overall charge, his presence dominating the space even though he wasn’t physically there. Instead, his face loomed on a giant TV screen at the suite’s far end – bearded, bloated, grizzled, like some glowering Old Testament prophet. Nathaniel Barren.

‘You’re late, sir.’

The voice was a rasping growl. The sort of sound you could imagine issuing from the faces on Mount Rushmore.

‘I don’t appreciate being kept waiting. We were due to start at one o’clock Houston time.’

It was now two minutes past. Hardly an outrageous delay, but Ben- Roi apologized nonetheless, not wanting to raise hackles before the interview had even started. Plenty of time for that later. The old man eyed him out of the screen – a disconcerting experience, like being watched by a character in a TV programme. Then, with a shunt of the hand, he motioned the detective to sit.

‘When I said we wanted to speak to someone in authority, I wasn’t expecting to get the head of the company,’ said Ben-Roi as he lowered himself into the only vacant chair.

Eleven thousand kilometres away, Nathaniel Barren’s shoulders pulled back slightly, his jacket rucking beneath the armpits.

‘When
I
am informed that the good name of Barren Corporation has been dragged into a homicide inquiry,’ he growled, ‘that is not an issue I care to delegate. I might have taken a step back from the day-to-day running of the company, but it is still
my
company. And
my
family name. I trust you appreciate what I’m saying, Mr . . . ?’

‘Ben-Roi,’ chipped in one of the executives.

‘Senior Detective Ben-Roi,’ said Ben-Roi. And yes, he could appreciate it.

‘I’m glad we understand each other.’

The conferencing technology was clearly top-of-the-range, because despite the distances involved there wasn’t even a fractional time delay on the old man’s voice, his image so clear you could make out the individual liver spots on his giant hands. The left one, Ben-Roi noticed, was clasping a plastic oxygen mask.

‘Would you care for refreshments, Mr Ben-Roi?’

Ben-Roi said he was fine.

‘In that case I suggest we get straight down to business. Ask what you need to ask.’

The fingers of Barren’s right hand drummed a slow beat on the surface of the desk at which he was sitting. Although it was still early afternoon in Houston, the room around him – some sort of study or library – appeared sunk in gloom. Even viewing it through a television screen from a third of the way around the world, Ben-Roi could sense the oppressiveness of the place. He rubbed at his wrist, which was still sore from the cuff, flipped through his notebook to a blank page and got going.

‘Twelve days ago a journalist named Rivka Kleinberg was murdered in Jerusalem,’ he began. ‘In the Armenian Cathedral. She was garrotted.’

The statement brought no visible reaction from Barren. He just drummed his fingers and stared out at Ben-Roi through eyes that were at once both rheumy and piercing. The others were staring at him as well – five pairs of eyes boring into him from all directions. Not exactly threatening, but not particularly comfortable either. He was going to have to play this carefully.

‘Would you happen to know if there was any recent contact between Mrs Kleinberg and your company?’ he asked.

On the screen, Barren’s eyes angled towards the two executives, both of whom shook their heads.

‘You obviously believe there’s a reason for there to have been contact.’