“Mosconi, I have no private places! I cannot take him back to the dentist with me.”
Mosconi smiled slightly. The pope’s sense of humor was well known behind these walls. “Where, then, Holiness?”
“Let’s go to my books.”
He crossed the room, his feet whispering on the carpet—an Arabian design, he recalled, a gift from the king of Jordan—and went to the little nook of chairs that was his private lair, where he indulged himself in history, poetry, and thought. He sat beneath the tall shelves of volumes, every one of which had been read. It was like an extension of his mind, his library. The treasure of his life. “I will receive him now.”
Mosconi turned toward the desk, reaching to press the intercom button.
“Wait. What do I call him? A name? What is his name?”
“You call him Sheikh. He will call you Pastor.” Mosconi picked up the telephone, and in a moment the outer door opened.
The Mufti was tall and very straight, and came striding forward, his spotless white robe whipping behind him. The pope could see a hint of a dark cuff under its hem, and a gleaming shoe peeking out as the Mufti walked. Beneath his robe of ancient design, there was a business suit, no doubt from Savile Row.
As he came closer, the pope rose. This was something the outside world would never see, but he realized that this man could possibly know a great deal about what was happening. He could be a key.
“Pastor, I bring you greetings from the king, as custodian of the Holy Sites of Islam and leader of the Islamic Kingdom, and I greet you from my sad heart and the hearts of all good Muslim people.” He spoke a densely accented but understandable English, and his face—the expression—caused the pope to at once cease to be wary of him. The man was exhausted. His eyes were desperate. Many tears had been there. The pope could imagine this man on the king’s palatial plane, sitting alone, weeping in the privacy of the sky.
Suddenly, as if it was entirely natural, as if it had been meant from the beginning of the world, the two men embraced. The pope felt the trembling bones, then stepped back, holding the Mufti at arm’s length. How fragile was this old man, beneath his robes.
They were silent, and the pope suddenly knew why. He knew that it was because God was there, directly there, speaking to both of them in the eternal language, the pope believed, of truth.
He told the Mufti, “We say that our God is not your God, but it isn’t so. It isn’t so.”
“We have it, ‘there is no God but God.’ ” Then his eyes pleaded. “These people are monsters. Heretics in our faith.”
In English, also, the pope responded, but carefully, “Sheikh, it is a tragedy when holy faith is used as justification for violence.”
“You and I have both been to the Alhambra,” the sheikh said softly. “I know that you have.”
“You and I have both been to the Hagia Sophia,” the pope replied. “I know that you have.”
Their eyes said the rest of this history, and their silence.
“The king has conveyed our sorrow to the president and the American people. I am here because I wish to appear with you before the multitude in the square and before the world.”
The pope was affronted. This lost soul could not appear here, in God’s church. The pope started to speak his refusal—but, again, he felt that presence. This time, there seemed to be a little girl here, she was all burnt, standing behind the Mufti, and with her was an angel of God. They were silent, watching the pope. Even so, he shook his head. A thing this great could not be done in a moment, no, not even for the angels.
Such an event would normally be years in the planning, perhaps decades. There were three congregations that should be involved, and many cardinals who would expect to be consulted, and rightly expect this. There were many orders, also, that would anticipate offering their opinions, not to mention Opus Dei and other powerful lay organizations.
But the child was still there, still watching him. He could hardly bear to look at her blackened flesh, but it would not leave his mind’s eye. “Be as little children.” He recalled his mother saying it to him, recalled her telling him that if he forgot this, he forgot Christ.
He knew what a child would do. He forced himself to smile. “Mufti,” he said, “I sense that God is with us.”
From outside, the roar of the crowd was now enormous, louder than he had ever known it. He thought of each of them, each an astonishing microcosm of the whole. “The Kingdom of God is within you.” The Lord had said that not to kings but to simple folk just like the multitude whose hopeful faces were turned now toward that window over there.
His heart bowed, and he knew that when he and the Mufti went to the window Jesus would be with them.
“We will go before the world, then, you and I.”
The Mufti closed his eyes for a moment. In the tightness of the lines around them, the sunken cheeks, the pope saw that he also was in deepest inner conflict. “There is only one God,” he said. “I will say it.”
“I also.” It was now five fifteen. Less than an hour. He wanted to telephone the president again, to beg him to leave Washington. But the president, he knew, had ascended already into another state. He had observed it in John Paul, the sudden sense of distance that comes as death steals closer.
No, President Fitzgerald was beyond telephone calls now. He was busy, that poor man, with the waiting that comes before dying.
26
TWENTY MILLION DOLLARS
As the president danced on the end of his rope in Washington, in Peshawar birds were making riot in the high morning and it was pleasant in the gardens of the town. Later, it would grow warm, but the heat of summer was gone, and even here there was that sense of echo that haunts autumn days.
Aziz took his tea with careful design, for he knew that history would record his actions in every detail. There would be poetry and song and texts, and each gesture of his that Eshan and the Persian boy Wasim were observing now would become part of the eternal history of human freedom.
He must be seen as the confident servant of Allah, not the man he felt himself to be, full of flutters and fears.
It must be, this thing, for this was be the world’s last chance to join itself to the love of God. In a very few moments now, the Great Satan would be finished.
Aziz wanted to look at his watch, but he would not show anything that might later be taken to mean that he was not entirely surrendered to Allah. He nodded to the Persian, who came forward, his enormous eyes, as always, full of wonder. Again, he nodded.
The tea gurgled into Aziz’s glass. “Thank you, Wasim,” he said, bringing the whisper of a smile to the face of a boy who was just beginning to understand his own role, that not only was he here as a student but also his duty was to serve the Mahdi and give him relaxation when his heart was heavy with cares.
There were sounds coming from outside, voices shouting. The Mahdi allowed himself to wonder if word had come to Peshawar that the Great Satan had been brought down.
“I am not here to give tea,” Wasim said. “I want to return to Tehran. I don’t want to wear this—” He gestured to his djellaba. He shook his head.
“Children are beaten for impertinence.”
“I want my Xbox back! This is all crazy! You live like it was the Stone Age!” The beautiful eyes bored into him; the voice dropped, the lips barely moving. “You’re ignorant and you care about nobody but yourself. You’re a monster.”
Aziz sucked breath. Every cell in his body wanted to strike this insolent boy. Even so, in Aziz’s deepest heart he felt an abiding sorrow for the terrible thing that had been done, and the fact that it could never now be changed.
He shook it off. There could be no faltering now, no weakness.
Outside, more voices were rising.
The boy smiled at him. “When can I go? All Tehran is against you. All Muslims are against you. Even Hezbollah says you’re evil!”
“They are cursed of God. Our Brotherhood is not evil!”
&nbs
p; “The Muslim Brotherhood has also condemned you, whoever you are. Nobody knows! Are you some madman’s stooges? Osama’s? He’s stupid enough to try this. Who are you?”
He would say nothing of Inshalla to this boy. He would not say the name to this rebellious child. “I will ignore your insults now, but later I will beat you.”
The boy looked straight at him, his eyes glinting with accusation. “I hate you,” he spoke with a mildness that was chilling to Aziz. He reflected that this boy had killed, and so become a man. A man could kill again.
“Your father paid a great deal to put you with me.”
“My father is a fool.”
The voices outside had become a roar, and Aziz was beginning to be curious about what might be happening. Surely if the bomb had detonated, Eshan would come and tell him.
Then the boy spoke again. “You lied; you’re not a teacher. You teach nothing. I want to call my father! Why is there no telephone?”
Eshan appeared. His face was impassive. “It is three minutes past the hour now,” Eshan said.
Perhaps Eshan had not heard what the crowd had heard. “History is three minutes long now,” Aziz said to Eshan. “In the first minute Mohammed is born; in the second the Quran is finished. In the third all the world rejoices at the death of the Great Satan.”
Eshan did not respond but only lowered his eyes. Aziz wanted to savor this event, as the people of Peshawar, so used to the oppressive faithlessness of the apostate government and its Crusader-financed police, realized that the Crusader king had been killed.
Aziz got up from the chair where he had been taking his tea, and moved across to the heavy door that sealed the garden off from the outside world.
“Mahdi, perhaps, have a care.”
“Why is that? Do they suddenly know me in Peshawar? Am I not hidden by God himself?” The Twelfth Imam had been rendered occult by Allah. He would not be discovered, could not be, until the time was right.
“I don’t know, Mahdi.”
“I do know, and I tell you that I’m in no danger here.”
“Yes, Mahdi.”
He enjoyed Eshan calling him by his title. Glorious title. Eshan had seen the way his hell-raising boss had changed once the great office was conferred on him, had seen him literally transform into a new man, as the Mahdi’s ancient spirit filled his own young and brash one.
The door in the thick garden wall was kept locked. Aziz approached it, took down the big key, and fitted into the lock. “Are you afraid, Eshan?”
“Yes, Mahdi.”
When he opened the garden gate, he saw a woman rush past with her hair flying, then another in Western dress, who was wearing a blue veil. There were men, too, and he saw a great column of smoke behind the roofs of the houses.
Eshan came behind him. “Master, don’t go far.”
“What is this, Eshan? What’s burning over there?”
“Sethi Mohalla.”
“A mosque is burning?”
“The mosques of the truly faithful are all burning.”
“But—”
“You should look at the news!”
Eshan’s tone astonished Aziz. “Where is your respect? Don’t forget who I am.”
“Then stop sitting around drinking tea and pretending you’re the Prophet’s left foot. We’re having a catastrophe! Anyway, we’ve known each other a long time, Aziz.”
Aziz held in his surprise. First the boy goes mad, and now this. “We must trust in God. God does all.” Some girls passed, again without veils. He gestured at them. “What is this? What is this business?”
“Our women are removing the hijab in protest against the bomb, and Christian women are wearing the blue veil to announce respect for Islam, the Veil of Mary, Mother of Jesus. Christians and Muslims are worshiping together, all over the world. They are praying together everywhere, hand in hand.”
This could not be true. His clerk was overwrought. But the matter of the hijab, this Aziz could see with his own eyes. “This is illegal, to remove the hijab.”
“Not in Pakistan.”
“They must be stoned, Eshan.”
“Mahdi, there are not enough stones. Millions of Muslim women are doing it. The whole Muslim world is united as never before—against you, Mahdi.”
Eshan quoted the great words of the Muslim Brotherhood. “ ‘Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. Quran is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.’ ” He continued, “Conversion is violent, often. It has always been thus. But afterward—what happiness!”
“The Muslim Brotherhood denounces us.”
“We are masters. Above the Brotherhood.”
“We are denounced.”
Anger raced the Mahdi’s heart, but he strove to appear serene. He let the breath of rage slip from his body. “Very well,” he said. He wanted to curse the arrogant devils, especially these females, but he turned, instead, and went back to his garden. He gave the outer door a good, hard slam. They would learn of the power of Islam, these women, all of them! Devils!
From deeper within the house, he heard the voice of Al Jazeera—another female, and she also was speaking of the “universal protest of the Muslims against the monsters who dropped this bomb.”
“Zaaria and the others are watching television?”
“Yes, Mahdi.”
Not even his three wives knew for certain who he was. This was a man’s secret, this secret and sacred life of his. “Go and turn it off! Devils!”
There was movement from behind the black curtain that concealed the women’s rooms. A small hand darted out; then the curtain parted. Slowly, his daughter Jamila came into the garden. At thirteen, she had a roselike purity about her, with flawless skin, her olive cheeks brushed pink, her lips just becoming sensual. It would not be long before she went into purdah, but not just yet. Every father longed to delay that moment, especially when he had such a beautiful child as Jamila.
Jamila wore a blue hijab, not a black one. Black for the heart of the female, black to prevent disturbance among men.
“What is this blue?”
“Oh, I don’t know.” She twirled around. “What if I take it off?”
“You will be stoned, Daughter.”
“Oh, stoned! With little stones or big stones?”
Absently he gestured toward some cinder blocks that were stacked against the garden wall.
“Do only women get stoned, Father, dear Father?”
“Whoever disobeys a law that requires stoning is stoned. Now let’s leave this subject.”
“My mommas say you’re the Dajjal. Are you the Dajjal, truly?”
“This is monstrous! A monstrous lie!” The Dajjal was the antithesis of the Mahdi, an evil being such as the Christians called the Antichrist.
Jamila twirled, and as she did, the blue scarf floated off her head. “Do you like me,” she trilled in the music that was her voice, “or perhaps I’m not pretty to the eyes of a demon.”
“This is madness.” He took her wrist. “Stop this!”
“No! Don’t you touch me!”
“Be silent! I am your father! Get that hijab.”
“Stone me; you’d love to even though it’s not the law! I’m not in purdah yet, and I’ll never go into purdah, not for you. You’re a bloody, evil monster!”
It took all the strength he had in him not to slap her senseless. They had been infected by that accursed Al Jazeera with its rubbish nonsense!
“Wasim! Come stone me; my father commands it!”
Wasim came from inside the house, followed by a scent of cooking spices. “What is this?”
“I’m disobeying the law! I must be stoned!”
Wasim looked toward Aziz. “Mahdi?”
“She will not be stoned.”
“What? But Wasim, you cut off heads! Surely you can stone, too!” She took his wrist. “Here, come to these blocks. Pick one up. I’ll be a good girl; I’ll kneel. You can crush me easily!”
“Mahdi
?”
“Wasim, go back to your cooking.”
But Jamila blocked his way. And then she did more; she did the unthinkable. “Ba-ba-bang,” she chanted as she tore off her blouse. “Ba-ba-biddy-bang!” She bent, then came up again. She stood naked. “Now, Father, I am obscene. The filthy female.” She danced in front of Wasim. “Getting excited? How about you, Father? Is not your filthy daughter pretty? Will you not want me among your virgins in your heaven?”