Who Killed Daniel Pearl (6 page)

And the gaze of this man, he thinks, looking at the Yemeni with the knife. For a fraction of a second their eyes meet, and he realizes, at that instant, that this man is going to slit his throat.

He would like to say something.

He feels he must tell them, one last time, that he is a journalist, a real one, and not a spy. He wants to shout—“Would a spy have trusted Omar Sheikh? Would a spy have come here so confidently, without any cover?”

But it must be the drug, having its final effect.

Or else it's the rope cutting into his wrists and hurting him.

The words won't come.

Talking becomes difficult, like breathing under water.

He tries to turn his head, to beseech Karim with his eyes one last time. The cigarette, remember the cigarette you offered me last night? Don't you remember everything I told you about the way we American journalists helped the Afghan mujahideen during the jihad against the Russians? Don't you remember, you were so moved by it, you put your hands on my shoulders, your brusque and brotherly embrace? But Karim holds him with an iron hand so that he can't move an inch.

And then, like static jamming his mind, thoughts seem to slither in lazily from obscure corners: His bar mitzvah, in Jerusalem. His first ice cream, in a café on Dizengoff, in Tel Aviv with his father. George, the Bulgarian shoe salesman he met in the tube in London. His friend, the Belgian bass player. The Irish fiddler he had played with last year in a Soho bar. The soft, whiney sounds of the shelling by the liberation army of the Tiger, that last night at Asmara. His wedding to Mariane, in a chateau near Paris. And Hemingway's matador, leading with his left shoulder, the sword that strikes the bone and refuses to go further. Yet it takes only a third of the blade, if it comes from high enough, and if the matador's aim is true, to reach the aorta of the bull, if he is not too massive. His father, again, carrying him on his shoulders coming home from a walk. His mother's laugh. A round loaf of French bread, the deep, tasty crevices of its crust.

As the Yemeni killer grabs the collar of his shirt and rips it open, he thinks for a moment of other hands. Caresses. Games of his childhood. Nadour, the Egyptian friend at Stanford he used to spar with, between classes, for fun—whatever became of him? He thinks of Mariane, that last night, so beautiful, so desirable—women want what, in the end? Passion? Eternity? She was so proud, Mariane, when he got his Gilani scoop! And he misses her so! Had he really been reckless, should he have been more wary of this Omar? But how could you know? How could you suspect? He thinks of the dying Kosovar refugee who clutched his hand. He thinks of the sheep he saw suffocate, last year, in Teheran. He thinks he prefers Bombay and the
Secret Book of the Brahmin
to Karachi and the Koran
.
His memories are like horses on a carousel whirling round in his head.

He feels the hot, slightly rank breath of the panting Yemeni.

From the courtyard, he smells a sweetish odor that, until now, he hadn't noticed and that, absurdly, bothers him: Funny, he thinks, when you haven't bathed for eight days . . . you can easily get used to your own stench. . . but that of others . . .

He hears strange noises that come from far away and sound like the echo you hear when you put a conch shell to your ear. He even thinks, for an instant, are those footsteps? Voices? Someone coming to save me?

It's funny, up until this morning he would have thought the courtyard was silent, you couldn't hear anything. But now, he hears everything. You can hear a rustling, a furious murmur of sounds, all blending together. An avalanche of unsuspected sounds. Never before had he listened so closely to the background sounds of silence, the sounds he wishes would block out the breathing of the Yemeni.

A moment of dizziness.

His sweat turning cold.

His Adam's apple that struggles in his frail neck.

He is seized by a huge hiccup, and he vomits.

“Straighten him up!” says the Yemeni killer. The other Yemeni, behind him, grabs him under the arms like a sack of potatoes and sets him up straight.

“Better than that!” he says, stepping back, like an artist getting a better view of his painting. And now it is Karim's turn to pull his head up, face towards the ceiling, the bared neck straining with the shout that is about to come, though leaning a bit to the side.

“Get out of the way!” the killer says to the Yemeni with the camera, who is too close and will hamper his movements. The man with the camera steps aside, very slowly, as though filled with a sacred terror at the thought of what is about to happen.

His eyes closed, Pearl feels the motion of the knife as it approaches his throat. He hears a rustle in the air next to him and realizes the Yemeni is practicing. He still cannot believe it. But he's cold, he's shivering, his entire body recoils. He would like to stop breathing, make himself small, disappear. At least, he would like to lower his head and cry. Has he done this before, he wonders. Is the man a pro? And what if he's not? What if he bungles it and has to start over again? His sight is going foggy. His last vision of the world, he tells himself. He is sweating and shivering at the same time. He hears a dog barking, far away. A fly buzzing, close to him. And then, the squawk of a chicken that gets mixed up with his own cry, astonishment mixed with pain, inhuman.

And that was it. The knife entered the flesh gently. Gently, ever so gently, he began under the ear, far back on the neck. People have told me it is something of a ritual. Others, that it's simply the classic method for cutting the vocal chords and preventing the victim from screaming. But Pearl reared up. He gasped furiously for air through his butchered larynx. And his reaction was so violent, the strength he finally summoned so great, that he bucked out of Karim's grip, roaring like a beast, and collapsed with a groan in his own blood, that gushed like water. The Yemeni with the camera is shouting too. Half way through, his hands and arms covered with blood, the Yemeni killer looks at him and stops. The camera was jammed. Because of the camera, they have to stop, and begin all over again.

Twenty seconds, perhaps thirty, go by, time for the Yemeni to start over again and reframe the image. Pearl is lying down on his stomach now. The half-severed head is separated from the torso and lies far back on the shoulders. The fingers of his hands dig into the ground like claws. He is no longer moving. He moans. He splutters. He is still breathing, but in fits and starts, a groan cut with gurgles and whines like a puppy's. Karim puts his fingers in the wound to clear the way for the knife. The second Yemeni inclines one of the lamps in order to get a better look and then, feverishly, as though drunk on the sight, the odor, the taste of hot blood that spouts from the carotid as though from a broken pipe, splashing in his face, he cuts Pearl's shirt and then rips it off. The killer, too, finishes his task. The knife slides back into the first wound, the cervical vertebrae crack and blood spurts in his eyes again, blinding him. The head, rolling back and forth as though it had a life of its own, finally comes off and Karim brandishes it, like a trophy, for the camera.

Pearl's face, crumpled like a rag. His lips, at the moment the head is detached, seem animated with a last movement. And the black liquid, of course, flows from his mouth. I've often seen people who had been killed. None, for me, can be worse than this one face I did not see and continue to imagine.

CHAPTER 5
WITH THE PEARLS

“No, that's not it . . . ”

I'm in Los Angeles, Mulholland Drive. Sky that color you see only here. Light that hurts your eyes. A small house by the side of the road, with a garage, potted flowers hanging from balconies, a profusion of small cacti. Cautiously, discreetly, with all possible tact, I am in the process of sharing my preliminary conclusions with Daniel Pearl's parents, including my version of their son's death.

“No, no, that's not it,” interrupts the father, Judea, who looks to me like the genial French humorist Francis Blanche, with kind intelligent eyes that occasionally flash with infinite sadness. “It's true there was a video tape. But it was in two parts. I'm sure it was taped at two different times of the day. You can't go ahead as if the two parts say the same thing, or as if they're said in the same tone.”

What are these two parts? And what does that change?

“Everything,” he replies. “It changes everything. You have the part when he talks about the United States, the prisoners in Guantanamo. There he actually talks like a robot. The words are obviously dictated. Maybe he's even being shown cue cards, off camera. He trips over certain words. He puts in these long ‘uhhhs' between words. He deliberately mispronounces things. He says ‘Amrica,' for instance, which is what they must have written on the card. What I mean is that he's doing everything to let us know, we who are going to get the message, that he doesn't believe a word of what he's saying. And then you have the second part, where he says, ‘My name is Daniel Pearl . . . I am a Jewish-American . . . I live in Encino, California . . . On my father's side I come from a family of Zionists . . . My father is Jewish . . . My mother is Jewish . . . I am Jewish.”

Judea knows these words by heart. I sense that he could recite them to the end, like a poem. At certain points he takes on intonations and a voice that are not entirely his but Danny's, his son's . . . As for the other part of the message, which concerns Guantanamo and American policy, I find it strange that he seems so certain that it was dictated and that Danny is reciting it against his will. I would have thought otherwise. I had thought and written otherwise, but I let him speak.

“Just listen to this second part. Listen . . . ”

His face has brightened. He's smiling. He's looking at his wife who is smiling too. She's fragile, heartrending, a sharp pretty face half hidden by a fringe of jet-black hair and a pair of glasses, a tiny figure who floats in her shift, halfway between the living and the dead. He takes her hand, strokes it imperceptibly. They have the same look that they have in the magnificent photo in the staircase to the office, dating from the time, forty-three years ago, when they arrived from Israel. The house is full of photos of Danny, of course. But there are also photos of his sisters, Michele and Tamara. Of Mariane, his wife, and little Adam. And there are two magnificent, glorious, resplendent portraits of them—the little Iraqi Jewish girl and the little Polish Jewish boy landing in America like the Ellis Island immigrants, because they know that this is the land of liberty. And suddenly that's what they look like.

“That part about being Jewish, he said that. Those are his words. Those are his sentences. Nobody is forcing him to do anything at that point. There are no cue cards. How many times do I have to tell you that two plus two makes four, that I'm a Jew, that I'm proud of it—that's what he's telling them. I imagine at that point he still trusts them. He doesn't know what's going to happen. So he's talking to them, telling them where he comes from, his background. We all have roots, don't we? And these are mine. You're Moslems. I'm a Jew. But ultimately we're human before anything else.”

Another glance towards his wife, who has the same fond look she had when she showed me her son's room earlier, with his stuffed animals, his football trophies, and the diary he kept when he was little and was making New Year's resolutions: to not pick his nose and to do better in math. The next day he wrote, “I am doing better in math but I am still picking my nose.”

“And then . . . in that first part of the message, there's something that's absolutely incredible. It's the sentence where he says, ‘In B'nei Brak, in Israel, there is a street called Chaim Pearl Street, named after my great-grandfather . . . '”

“Yes,” I say. “It was a sentence that I found very odd, too. First of all, is it true? Is there really a street with that name in B'nei Brak? And if so, how the hell did they know about it?”

“Exactly!” exclaims Judea. “Exactly!”

Now he seems euphoric. His expression is that of a great scientist making a major discovery—this must be what Professor Pearl, member of the National Academy of Engineering, world authority on artificial intelligence, looks like in his great moments of heuristic victory.

“They couldn't have known—exactly! No one in the world could have known that! Of course it's true. My grandfather was a local hero in B'nei Brak, a town ten miles outside of Tel-Aviv where he settled in the 1920s, with twenty-five other Hassidic families who, like him, were from Ostrowitz in Poland. But nobody knows that except us. Nobody. Which means . . . ”

His face darkens. Often, with both of them, I see euphoria alternating with profound sadness. I assume those are the moments when the most unbearable images return, when everything is erased, everything— the tales and the testimony, the analysis, the courtesy towards the French stranger who is investigating the Pearl affair, the exchange of ideas, effort to understand—and suddenly nothing exists except the face of their child, tortured, calling out.

“Which means that sentence is a message. To his kidnappers, he's saying, ‘This is who I am, I'm proud of it, I'm from a family who built cities, for whom building cities, digging wells and planting trees was the most beautiful thing you could do on earth—take that, you who love death and destruction!' But primarily it's to us, his mother and me, the only ones in the world who remember that in B'nei Brak there is a street named after my grandfather. So what is he saying to us? As you can imagine, I've asked myself that question thousands and thousands of times, for months. And my theory is that it's a coded message that means ‘I'm Danny. Everything is OK. I'm being treated well. I'm speaking freely, since I'm saying something that nobody else could know except you and me. I am your beloved son. I love you.'”