Vito Barbaccia, capo mafia, Lord of Life and Death…
I was working my way through my freshman year at Harvard when there was a sudden banging above my head, a chain rattled, and from the scraping I knew that the stones were being pulled away. When the wooden trap was lifted, the sunlight flooded in, mo-mentarily blinding me. I closed my eyes, blinked and looked through a soft, golden haze that told me it was late afternoon.
Major Husseini crouched at the edge, small and wizened, dried up by the Sinai sun that had deranged him, his olive face pitted from the smallpox. A couple of soldiers stood beside him and Tufik was there look-
ing distinctly unhappy.
‘So, Jew,’ Husseini said in English, for although my Arabic had understandably improved over the past ten months, he considered it an insult to use the language of his fathers with someone like me.
He stood up and laughed contemptuously. ‘Look at him.’ He gestured to the others. ‘Squatting in his own excrement like an animal.’ He looked down at me again. ‘Do you like that, Jew? You like to sit there smeared with your own dung?’
‘It’s not so bad, major,’ I told him in Arabic. ‘A monk once asked Bodidharma, what is Buddha? The master replied dried dung.’
He stared down at me in a kind of bewilderment, so perplexed that he momentarily lapsed into Arabic himself. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘You’d need brains to make sense of it.’
The trouble was that as I’d used Arabic, they all understood. The skin tightened across his cheeks and the eyes contracted. He turned to Tufik.
‘Have him up. Hang him in the sun for a while. I’ll deal with him when I get back.’
‘Something to look forward to,’ I said, and for some reason started to laugh weakly.
There wasn’t much to Fuad; forty or fifty small flat-roofed houses around a wide square, a crumbling mosque, no more than a couple of hundred inhabitants. It was miserably poor like most of these Egyptian vil-lages, although the new pier was supposed to change all that. The sea was about four hundred yards away, the blue Mediterranean. Nice to be beside if you were on the beach at Antibes. I got a quick glimpse of it before they removed my halter and strung me by the wrists from a kind of wooden gallows in the centre of the square.
It was supposed to be painful and would have been under normal circumstances, but I had been through so much during those past months that pain in itself meant very little to me any longer. In the heat of the day it would have been unpleasant, but not now in the late afternoon. In any case I had discovered, from past experience, that by focusing on some object in the middle distance, a kind of self-hypnosis could be in-duced that made two or three hours seem considerably less.
Beside the guard post, a United Arab Republic flag drooped from a white-painted flagstaff, and beyond three men and a boy were driving a flock of several hundred sheep in from the desert. The thick cloud of dust raised by their hooves was blown towards the vil-lage like spreading smoke and the flag listed momen-tarily.
It was all very biblical, very Old Testament except that one of the shepherds carried an automatic rifle which proved something although I wasn’t sure what. God, but I was dry. I closed my eyes and breathed deeply for a while. When I opened them again nothing had changed. The same square, the same squalid little houses, the same uncanny lack of people. They had sense and were staying indoors while Husseini was around.
Tufik emerged from his office with a canteen of water and crossed towards me, sweat springing from every pore. It was an effort for him to scramble up on to the old packing case that the two guards had stood on when stringing me up, but he made it and forced the neck of the canteen between my teeth. He gave me a short swallow and poured the rest over my head.
‘You will be reasonable, Mr. Smith, when he returns. Promise me that. It will only be worse for you if you annoy him further.’