Who Killed Daniel Pearl (11 page)

“I have nothing to say to you,” Saeed Sheikh, the father, told me one evening, in a weary and constrained voice, when, after a long wait, I managed to catch him leaving his house, in a dark blue gabardine suit and felt hat. “No, I have nothing to say to you. Leave me alone.” But I did have the time to make out, in the cold night air, his eyes like an aged child, the myopic look of his wan smile, his stiff, fan-shaped beard, the oddness of a drooping eyelid which gives him an air of perpetual irony. I had the time to observe in the lamplight what had struck me in a picture I had seen in the
Guardian
—he was the epitome of Commonwealth chic.

I met Awais Sheikh, the younger brother. He had also, over the telephone, after consulting with his father, refused to see me. But early one afternoon I surprised him in the store on Commercial Road. “I was passing by, Mr. Sheikh . . . Just a little hello, to see if you've changed your mind, if your father still forbids you to talk to me? I'm writing a book on Daniel Pearl, it's true, but it's also about your brother, so, can't we talk? Why not tell what you know about the trial, and your brother? I think the trial was botched, a parody of justice—it's incredible, I've never seen anything like it . . . am I wrong?” And Mr. Awais Sheikh, twenty-five years old, in a T-shirt like a young Englishman on vacation, with an Oxford accent, an intelligent look, and a boyish handsomeness, offers me tea and a bit of conversation, which proceeds haphazardly among the cardboard boxes.

“No, no, my sister went to Oxford. I'm Cambridge. Law studies at Cambridge. For that reason, if we decide to talk, we won't need a lawyer to set the rules of the game. You and I will do it, it'll be like child's play for me. The problem, you understand, is the appeal. My brother has filed an appeal and our father insists that nothing be said that could interfere with the procedure. Have I always worked here? No. I first worked in the city. I was a stock broker. And then came this misfortune. My father was all alone. Completely alone with my mother and our lawyers. And I had to come help, join him at Perfect Fashions, comfort him. We're a close family. We've pulled together in this ordeal—and what an ordeal! What a disaster! Can you imagine having a brother condemned to death when he's innocent?”

The telephone never stops ringing. Mohammed, the employee, in Pakistani dress with the flowing pajamas and traditional white tunic, answers in perfect English. I notice that, contrary to Awais, he has a beard. I also notice, above his head, a poster resembling a calendar, with various “Words of the Prophet” for each of life's great moments: births, mourning, greetings, partings, condolences . . . Mohammed or Awais? Employee or boss?

“And you, Mr. Lévy—tell me a little about yourself. What do you think about Palestine? The war in Afghanistan? Chechnya? Iraq? Bosnia?” And after I established my credibility: “You say that my brother's trial was a travesty, that it was a parody of justice—OK! But don't say it's incredible, never before seen. Just look at Guantanamo. How do you explain Guantanamo? Isn't Bush's justice as bad as Musharraf's?”

We talk for half an hour. I sense the young intellectual, very concerned about what he calls the
massacre
of Moslems in Europe and the world. I also sense the little brother, fascinated, no matter what's been done, by the elder, whom he can't see as a criminal. In 1994, when Omar had organized, in India, his first hostage-taking, the English press descended on Awais to ask him about this big brother, who had cast his lot with jihadist groups fighting for the liberation of Kashmir, and was now rotting in the prisons of Uttar Pradesh. Awais confided: “Omar is a good man, a noble soul.” And again today, even though his brother has committed a crime that has horrified the world and linked forever his image to the mutilated body of Daniel Pearl, Awais continues to see him only as a good boy, a defender of the widow and the orphan, always ready with passion for the noble cause. “The American journalist who was beheaded? Yes, of course, it's terrible. I feel the family's pain . . . But it's not like my brother. I repeat that I don't believe he did it. Do you know he was such a gentle soul that he avoided reading about crimes in the newspapers for fear of becoming enraged, of taking up a victim's cause? Did you know that one time, in London, he jumped on the subway tracks just before the train arrived to rescue an old woman who had fallen off the platform?” But in the end, I don't sense an ideologue. I don't sense a fanatic. I have before me, in other words, a Moslem who is conscious of his identity and concerned—who can blame him?—for the fate of Chechens and Palestinians; but at no time do I have the feeling that he's a militant Islamist disguised as a Cambridge graduate.

I went from there to Leydenstone Station, which is an open air station not far from the family home. Too long ago, of course—no one among the employees could remember the event, but I tried to imagine this big, strapping and agile fellow jumping down, stopping the train, and extricating the old woman. Why not?

I went to the Nightingale Primary School, the pretty little school, typically English, close to home and almost like the country, where he spent his early years. No one there remembers him either, but I imagine him as a good pupil with no problems, the children's drawings on the walls the same as they are today, easy, happy school days . . . It's so close, isn't it? The little boy can come home alone on foot, with his friends . . .

I went to the Forest School in Snaresbrook, a rather upscale private school—which counts among its former students the film director Peter Greenaway, the actor Adam Woodyatt, and the English cricket captain Nasser Hussain—where he completed the major part of his secondary studies. Georges Paynter, the headmaster, who was an economics professor at the time, still has very precise recollections of him. He remembers a bright student with exceptional grades. He remembers something in particular which attests to this: “School fees—the educational costs at the Forest School, at that time, must have been close to ten thousand pounds a year—well, we have a tradition of exempting each year a handful of particularly brilliant students. And Omar was among them. Let me turn on the computer . . . yes, here it is. The family had the means to pay but, because of his merit, we gave him a scholarship. So you see, that proves what I'm saying . . . ” He remembers Omar in the first row, so attentive, so concentrated, setting the example. He remembers him as “head of house,” helping the smaller boys, organizing theatrical evenings or the distribution of awards, assisting the cafeteria supervisors, polite with parents, good-natured with his classmates, charming with the teachers, blushing, helpful. Never unruly? Never. Never violent? Insolent? Never. Just an odd way, when I had finished my lecture and there was some point he thought remained obscure, of crossing his arms and leaning back in his chair and declaring in his loud, precocious adolescent's voice, “No Sir!” His voice was so sonorous, that the class, by now used to it, waited in anticipation, then burst into laughter. And when I had elucidated the point, he uncrossed his arms and, satisfied, in the same tone, said “Yes Sir!” which again made the class laugh. But would you call that insolence? He just wanted to understand! He didn't like not understanding. And I liked him very much, one of the students I was most attached to.

I took advantage, during a trip to Lahore, Pakistan, of the opportunity to visit Aitchinson College, where he spent a parenthetical two years, before returning to Forest School. Why these two years? Was it because Omar himself, as he later asserted, felt the need to reconnect with his Muslim “roots”? Or was it because his father, Saeed, had to return to Pakistan for business reasons? The question is not unimportant because its answer determines when he began his return to Islam and his future as a Kashmiri militant. What I do know, which supports the idea of a decision by the father, is that Saeed and a cousin created, in Lahore, a new company called Crystal Chemical Factories, and it was when this company failed that the family returned to London. Most important is my discovery that the Forest School (where he was a student from nine to thirteen years old, then again after Aitchinson, from fifteen to seventeen) is a school with a certain religious traditions. At least twice a week all the students have to assemble in the Anglican chapel—a practice that seems not to have posed a problem for the young Omar who, in his second enrollment as well as the first, if only because of his role as “head of house,” was always present in the chapel, in the front row, seemingly unperturbed.

So, I visit Aitchinson College. I don't believe, then, that his reasons for being here were tied to his faith or his roots. But all the same, even if Pakistan corresponded, however little, to some desire to return to his ancestors, the reality is that the place would have been ill-chosen. With its perfect lawns, soccer and cricket fields, its beds of hibiscus from Bergerac and La Rochelle, its Olympic-sized pool, its colonnaded verandas, its bamboo screens and its rocking-chairs, with its strict hierarchy of the “lower boys” in short pants and the “grands” who had earned the right to “go into tails” and to wear at last a tail-coat, with its busts of Gladstone and Shelley in the classrooms, its illustrious parliamentarians present at award ceremonies, its soldiers at the entrance saluting in the purest Indian army style—Aitchinson is, in the heart of Pakistan, an enchanted place, an enclave, an aristocratic world preserved from the violence outside, a piece of England, congealed in its décor and conventions, a college more British than the most British of London colleges.

I met the headmaster. I found professors who had known Omar and agreed to share their memories. I was shown pictures of him where he still had that chubby-cheeks, good-boy look, cursed with thick glasses, and sideburns. In one, he is wearing the school uniform, navy blue vest and white, short-sleeved shirt with the V-shaped open collar of the school seniors; he is letting fall a stack of books held by an elastic band as he breaks into childish laughter. In another, he wears a colorful, shiny shirt and jeans with rolled cuffs, making his legs look a little short, and he dances a kind of twist or jerk. “He was a good young man,” I'm told by the headmaster and former economics professor, who with his silvery hair is a very elegant double of a French poet friend of mine. Respectful of his “masters.” Obliging with his “fellows.” He loved poetry and flowers, and the sweetness of life. “Ah! the flowers . . . Who remembers the beauty of the flowers and their perfumed mazes? Often, when my predecessor made his rounds and he came by here to check the color of his pansies”—he bends over a bed of blooming petunias, picks one, grimaces, signals to a gardener who rushes over, and says, simply, with slight disgust: “That's not it, too pink”—“yes, often he was among the pupils my predecessor found sensitive enough to take along. Do you know why he left the college? Because he systematically took sides with the weak, the scapegoats, and since he was a scrapper, it ended in blows. The Professors, who appreciated his mettle and considered him a gentleman, protected him. But, one day, he broke the nose of a nasty kid whose father was a tycoon from Lahore, and then nobody could do anything for him—what a pity! What heartbreak! I'm sure, if we had kept him, we could have prevented this accident. And his manners! What behavior! No Pakistani ever had such manners. No one was ever as faithful to the Aitchinson spirit as Omar Sheikh.”

Forgive me, Ruth. Forgive me, Judea. I realize that, to evoke the Sheikh family and the London childhood and adolescence of their son, who became your son's assassin, I've used the same words, or almost, as those which were inspired, in Los Angeles, by the images from your shattered happiness. But what can I do? How can I rid myself of the feeling that these are parallel destinies? Is it my fault that Omar was, too, before dissolving into the quick-lime of perversion and murder, a kind of wonder child? I have a photo of him at the age of ten or twelve. He is wearing the pearl-gray school uniform. An escutcheon. A rose in the lapel. He is holding a trophy. And he has in his smile, in his look, at the same time shy and proud, and especially in his haircut, long and straight and falling in his eyes, something which truly and irresistibly reminds me of pictures of Danny with his football or his baseball bat.

I went to the London School of Economics where Omar enrolled, at the age of eighteen, in the Mathematics and Statistics Department which is, if not the most difficult, at least the one requiring the most assiduity. Attendance normal, there, as well. Grades normal and even brilliant. He who, according to George Paynter, didn't read much at the Forest School began to frequent the library and devour literature, politics, and economic treatises. According to those of his friends I managed to find, he was nice, hard working, obsessed by exams, a good friend, not particularly religious, still not Islamist. Saquib Qureshi, who is also of Pakistani origin and whose recollections are the most precise said: “No, I don't remember seeing him pray . . . It's been a long time, but I think I would remember that . . . He knew, we knew, that we were Muslim . . . Maybe we had the idea that, in different parts of the world, Muslims were being attacked, but we were liberal, not at all proselytizing, we were moderate . . . ”

In his spare time he plays chess. He plays better and better. (It occurs to me that Quaissia, his mother's name, is also, in Greek mythology, Caïssa, the name of the goddess of chess . . . ) He is seen in the major London chess clubs where he gives the city's best professionals a run for their money. But it's especially at the Three Tuns Pub—a café in the heart of the little city that is the London School of Economics—that he is challenged to duels, which he always wins. He has a motto—which, in retrospect, doesn't lack piquancy—borrowed from one of the all time great players, his idol, Aaron Nimzovitch: “The threat is stronger than the execution.”