Death of the Black-Haired Girl (28 page)

If he heeded Charles’s warning, Lucas considered, and left the corruption and contraband story alone, he had a different piece in reserve: a human rights number in Gaza. It was a place he liked very little to go. Unlike Judea, it had neither relics nor scenery, and the only antiquities were squalid piles in which, for all the world knew or cared, Samson might still be turning a wheel—blind, in irons, supervised by bored, unhappy young men chain-smoking in their green berets and slung machine guns. Gaza’s only resource was bad history on a metaphysical scale; it sat on a joint aslant the beam in the Almighty Eye, attracting retribution in advance, forsaken on credit. Long ago Jeremiah had recommended howling as the most suitable public activity there, and the locals had never been allowed to unlearn it.

Gaza was the data that threatened the human reference point, the degree at which informed engagement began its metabolic breakdown. For the journalistic traveler, the big attraction had always been unrequited man, the thing itself. Seven hundred thousand strong, unrequited man could still support a feature.

A woman Lucas knew in the International Children’s Foundation had given him a tip about some Israeli hoodlums who specialized in the beating of teenagers and children whom they suspected of rock throwing near the settlements. The beatings were egregious and outside the rules as generally understood by both sides. Two Foundation workers and a UN Relief and Works Agency employee, trying to protect the kids, had also been attacked.

In the hours before dawn the hoodlums would turn up at the alleged miscreants’ homes and beat them senseless, usually leaving a few broken bones. At least one of the band was Arabic-speaking, and their leader had assumed the nom de guerre Abu Baraka, the Father of Mercy. He was said to be a North American and a serving soldier in the Israel Defense Forces.

Nuala Rice, the story’s source at the Children’s Foundation, was an odd number herself. She was Irish, a hard-case aid worker, a veteran of Beirut, Somalia and the Sudan, who seemed to divide her time between good works and various intrigues, erotic and otherwise. Lucas was somewhat smitten with Nuala but their relationship had always proceeded on the understanding that he was not her type.

Nor, he was discovering, was he necessarily the type for freelancing. It was so hard to get it right, working without the assignment, the rubric, the refuge of a word count. No one behind you. And you represented no one, nothing but your own claim to rectitude in a world of mirages, obsidian mirrors and the mist of battle.

He was still pondering it when the mullah wandered back along the cobbled street. The
majnoon
went out from the shop and smiled his Jerry Lewis smile on the young mullah and kissed him. A biblical kiss, Lucas thought. The mullah beamed and glanced at Lucas to see if the foreigner had seen, in turn, the tenderness, the compassion. Life was so self-conscious in Jerusalem, so lived at close quarters, by competing moralizers. Every little blessing demanded immediate record.

As soon as he stood up, the proprietors of the juice shop commenced to haul their corrugated shutters down. Lucas wandered along the old street in the direction of the Haram. The Bab al-Nazir, the Watchman’s Gate, was a treasure trove of Islamic history. He had once been conducted through it by a colleague who knew the Mamluk lintels from the Ottoman, and Umayyad from Ayyubid springing.

The one structure he remembered from the previous tour was an ancient building with five windows and a wide arch of rosy stone, as dizzying and inviting a doorway as Lucas had seen in the city. It was close by the Haram gate itself and according to his colleague had been a guesthouse for Sufis visiting Jerusalem. Passing, he saw that the doorway was open and, on impulse, he went in. Inside he found a hallway with an ornate vaulted ceiling supported by columns that looked older than the Crusades. Lucas took off his shoes and carried them in his hand.

The hallway led to a dusty open courtyard in which potted trees grew. It was overlooked by arched windows covered in filigreed screens. Beyond the courtyard was another, even larger one, surrounded by flat, single-story rooftops with trellises and flower boxes planted with marigolds.

When Lucas turned to retrace his steps, he found a child in his path. The child was about five years old, wearing a gorgeous, velvety flowered dress that looked as though it had once clad the ornament of some faraway cold-weather Christian nursery. She was deeply dark-skinned, as black as a West African, her woolly hair arranged in twin pigtails.

“Hello,” said Lucas to the little girl.

The child stood motionless and regarded him sternly. Her eyes were huge and profound. Two small wrinkles of disapproval appeared above one eyebrow. When he stepped toward her she fled, padding barefoot across the court, increasing her speed with each stride. Then Lucas saw that lean figures had appeared at the far end of the court. Men in white turbans, tall, black and lean, were staring at him. Some stood in the courtyard he had passed through earlier, and there were others watching from the low roofs where the marigolds grew. From somewhere inside, he heard a trilling female voice.

It occurred to Lucas that he might have gone where he was unwelcome. He was glad he had taken off his shoes. Ahead of him, the courtyard ended in another doorway that he thought might lead to the street. When he followed it, though, it led nowhere, ending at an ocher wall in which the outline of a sealed doorway still showed faintly.

He turned and walked as briskly as he could in stocking feet, back into the courtyard he had just left. The tall men in turbans stood exactly where they had been, motionless. Lucas nodded cheerfully as he went by. The men were utterly without expression, simply alert, offering neither menace nor comfort. He went by them into the first courtyard, not troubling to look over his shoulder, and went back into the hall of columns. The street door through which he had come was now closed, and the hallway was in cool semi-darkness. The street outside seemed strangely quiet. Then the call to prayer sounded from the Haram a short distance away, and its amplified verses echoed among the columns.

Lucas found himself fascinated by the stone vaulting overhead. It was a beautifully fluted half dome, with lacy lines suggesting the metaphysical. He could well imagine it as the work of dervishes; it seemed impossibly old. And how typical of the city, he thought, that it should be tucked away so obscurely, on an unvisited street behind a moldering door.

Absorbed in the fluting overhead, he was surprised by the slamming of a door. Unshod footsteps sounded from an upper story of the inner court. Out of instinct he moved into the shadow of a column.

A young Arab woman appeared in the hallway. She was drawing a wrap about herself, disappearing into a whirl of cloth. As he watched, she went to the street door and opened it, bringing the daylight down on herself.

Her face and hair were still uncovered, and Lucas saw to his surprise that she was wearing a close-cut afro. Her eyes were striking, enhanced with kohl. Leaning against the doorway, she put her sandals on. Flower patterns were traced on her ankles and the brown skin of her feet, and under her djellaba she appeared to be wearing khaki slacks. Lucas pressed himself farther into the column’s shadow. He had the feeling that his several weeks of Arabic classes at the Aelia Capitolina YMCA would not support the weight of explanation that might be required for his eccentric concealment.

Struggling with one sandal, the young woman began to sing.

“Something cool,” she sang, to Lucas’s astonishment. “I’d like to order something cool.”

She flatted her fifth very nicely, and Lucas, who happened to know the next verse, was tempted to sing along. Indeed, he could hardly resist. But he watched silently as she put on the second sandal, pulled up the hood of her robe and hurried outside, leaving Lucas in the timeless gloom.

When he got to the street, she had vanished. He wiped his brow. Who knew to what arcane aspect of the city she might attach? The place was full of secrets.

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R
OBERT
S
TONE
is the acclaimed author of seven novels and two story collections, including
Dog Soldiers,
winner of the National Book Award, and
Bear and His Daughter,
a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His memoir,
Prime Green,
was published in 2006.