THE room was tiny, more like a cell, sparsely furnished with a pine foot-stool, a sagging rope bed, and a row of wooden hooks from which hung several large bags, bulking black in the yellow light. The room had no windows and smelled fetid and damp, a queasy amalgam of scent and sweat and the oil that smoked blackly from the lamp.
The person whose room it was moved swiftly toward the bags and fumbled at the neck of the smallest, fingers groping around inside before closing on another, smaller bag, that they proceeded to pull out, plucking at the drawstrings. The contents fell onto the mattress with a soft, metallic chink.
A pair of glittering black eyes stared with hatred at the jewels that glittered back. There was a golden chain bearing a dark lapis. There was a silver brooch, a perfect oval, set with diamonds the size of new peas. There was a bracelet—a smaller version of the gold chain, its clasp hidden beneath a ruby anchored to a silver roundel—and a pair of earrings. There was no doubting where the jewels had originated. On every face, painstakingly inlaid into the lapis, between the diamonds, over the ruby, that loathsome and idolatrous symbol, Z or N, zigzagging back and forth, crooked as the man.
That was the way it had all begun, for sure. It wasn’t easy to follow the exact steps—those Franks were cunning as foxes—but Napoleon had been the author of it all. What was it that the French kept pressing on the world? Liberty, equality, and something else. A flag with three stripes. There was something else. No matter, it was all lies.
That flag had fluttered over Egypt. Men like scissors had gone about scratching, scraping, digging things up, writing it all down in little books. Other scissor men, led by a half-blind infidel, had burned their ships within the shadow of the pyramids, and Napoleon himself had run away, sailed off in the night. Then those infidels had marched and starved, thirsted for water, and died like flies in the deserts of Palestine.
But that was only the beginning. You would have thought, wouldn’t you, that everyone would see the folly of the foreigners? But no: the Egyptians tried to be more like them. They’d seen how the French had gone about, behaving like the masters in the dominion of the sultan. They put it down to the trousers, to the special guns the French had left behind, to the way the French soldiers had marched and wheeled, fighting like a single body in the desert, even while they were dropping like flies.
New ways. New stuff that came out of little books. People always scribbling and scribbling, sticking their noses into books until their eyes went red with the effort. Pretending to understand the French gibberish.
Napoleon. He’d killed the French king, hadn’t he? Invaded the Domain of Peace. Thrown sand in the eyes of his own men and all the world. Why else could no one see what was going on? And these jewels—were we to sell ourselves for baubles?
It was a pity that the girl had seen. That killing had been an unexpected duty—and dangerous. Perhaps an overreaction. She might have seen nothing, understood nothing. Other things on her mind. A secret smile of triumph and expectation on her pretty face. Nothing like the bewilderment with which she fought for breath, seeing whose hands lay around her neck. The hands that had taken the jewels.
Ah, well, there were the others. In here it paid to act swiftly, without remorse.
A ball of spit landed on the lapis and began to trail slowly down the upright of the letter N.