The Tower (38 page)

‘No! Do not bring this crime upon yourself! He is your . . .’

But the whirling wind had now invaded the tower, blinding the two contenders. Desmond stumbled backwards, trying to shield his eyes from the burning dust while holding the sabre out before him. He fell back against the wall and, when he was able to see again, Selznick was gone. Only the bare sarcophagus remained before him. The wind had swept away the thick layer of dust that had covered its surface, uncovering seven inscriptions. He scanned them feverishly, one after another. All said the same thing in ancient lost languages, all screamed the same tremendous words:

The sabre dropped from his hand and he raised his eyes to the heavens, crying out between his tears, ‘Why? Why?’ As he looked up, he saw that the dome was perforated in the same pattern as the constellation of Scorpio and he saw the gelid light of Acrab piercing the middle hole. He remembered the words of Baruch bar Lev: ‘when Acrab in Scorpio enters the centre of the firmament over the Tower of Solitude’. The ‘firmament’. In Hebrew ‘firmament’ could also mean ‘dome’!

‘Run!’ he shouted. ‘Flee this place, everyone!’

Outside, Father Hogan was on his knees in front of the door in the raging wind when he heard the signal increasing beyond measure in both intensity and frequency, until it became a paroxysmal fibrillation that shattered his eardrums and made his whole body clench in stabbing pain.

‘Get out!’ yelled Desmond, running out of the entrance. ‘Out of here!’

But Father Hogan was not moving. His brow was beaded with sweat, his jaw tightly clenched. ‘I must stay,’ he said. ‘I must receive the message.’

Desmond saw a figure arriving against the wind at a gallop: El Kassem.

‘Get him out of here!’ he shouted. ‘Take him away with you! Now!’

El Kassem ripped the backpack from Father Hogan’s shoulders, knocking him to the ground. He grabbed him by an arm and dragged him off in the dust, as Desmond tried laboriously to run after them, fighting against the wind. The signal, still growing, had became an acute, lacerating whistle. The dome of the monolith was now red hot and was flashing with a blinding light. It exploded, suddenly, with a fearful roar, raising a globe of fire that scorched the sky all the way to the horizon.

Desmond turned. ‘The fire of Yahweh . . .’ he murmured, as if speaking to himself.

The signal was extinguished into a deep, dull tone. Darkness and silence descended over the deserted expanse.

C
OLONEL
J
OBERT APPEARED
before their eyes just then. His figure emerged slowly, like a ghost, as the wind cleared away the smoke and soot. He had his back turned to them and was kneeling over the body of a dead Blemmyae, which had been mangled by machine-gun fire. When he stood up and came towards the hill, his eyes were as empty and dull as though he had left his soul on that battlefield. He looked back. Nothing remained of the tower except for the great black stone sarcophagus, which the desert wind was already slowly covering with sand.

He turned to the others. ‘I’ve seen nothing,’ he said. ‘Those of my men who have survived will be split up and sent to distant outposts. The desert swallows up everything, even memory. Farewell.’

He observed the march of the Hallaki warriors with shining eyes: they bore the dead bodies of Amir, Rasaf, Altair. He touched his spurs then to his horse’s flanks and rode off to reach those of his unit who remained.

Father Hogan packed his equipment onto a couple of mules and took them by their halters. ‘I’m going with Colonel Jobert,’ he said. ‘May God bless you all.’

Philip turned to Desmond. ‘Farewell, father,’ he said. ‘I’m going to remain at Kalaat Hallaki. Maybe I’ll succeed in doing what you never could. I have someone to love, someone who needs me to share the burden of pain and grief . . .’

They embraced. Then Desmond leapt onto his horse.

‘Will I see you again?’ shouted Philip with moist eyes as his father rode off.

El Kassem turned back. ‘
Inshallah!
’ he shouted. ‘Farewell,
el sidi
!’ He spurred on his thoroughbred and disappeared with his companion in a cloud of dust.

S
ELZNICK WAS CAPTURED THE
next day as he was dragging himself through the desert. He was on his last legs and put up no resistance. Colonel Jobert took him into custody and continued down Wadi Addir until they reached the redoubt where he had left his garrison.

Jobert entered, accompanied only by Father Hogan, as his men watched silently without dismounting from their horses. He found no one waiting for him because they were all dead. The corpses lay where each man had breathed his last and the Legion standard still hung limply from its pole, even more faded than it had been. No one had lowered it.

He did not dare to bury them, afraid of risking contagion, but above all so as not to further unsettle his surviving men, who were still reeling from what they had been through. Father Hogan recited the De Profundis and made the sign of the cross over each dead body.

‘I’ll leave him here,’ said Jobert suddenly.

‘That would be condemning him to death,’ said Father Hogan. ‘You may as well have him court-martialled.’

‘No,’ said Jobert. ‘The reason for which my superiors would like to see him executed is even more despicable than his misdeeds. I won’t absolve them of their nightmares. I’ll set him free tonight and I’ll say that he escaped. At least he’ll have a chance. No one should be denied a chance, not even the worst of murderers.’

T
HEY REACHED
B
IR
A
KKAR
on the day of the winter solstice and Father Hogan waited there two more days for the plane to come and fetch him. When he was told that the pilot had arrived, he went to say goodbye to Colonel Jobert. The officer was standing in front of the window looking out, just like the first time they had met.

‘Mission accomplished, Father Hogan,’ Jobert said as soon as he heard him enter. ‘You’ve imprisoned the message in that machine of yours and now you’re taking it home. I’d be willing to wager that no one will ever hear another word about it. Although, in theory, we should be kept informed . . . Wasn’t that the deal?’

‘Yes, you’re right,’ said Father Hogan. ‘That was the deal. But even I don’t know what’s been recorded on that memory. It will take time – a long, long time, I suppose. But would you really like to know?’

Jobert shook his head. ‘I want to know nothing. I want only to forget.’

Father Hogan approached him with his hand extended, but when Jobert turned towards him, he let it fall and said, ‘You didn’t tell me everything either, Colonel. I saw you lift the veil that covered the head of one of the fallen . . . one of the Blemmyae. But nothing has happened to you. Nothing that I can see.’

Jobert’s face tensed, his eyes clouded over.

‘What did you see, Colonel?’ insisted Father Hogan.

‘Do you really want to know?’

‘Yes.’

‘Myself,’ he said with a disturbing light in his eyes. ‘A shapeless, repugnant mass, which transformed under my eyes into my face but it was . . . different. I saw an atrocious mask and yet it was my own. The dark side that we hold prisoner in the bottom of our souls so that no one will ever glimpse it. The wickedness, corruption, unconfessed foulness that we’ve removed from our conscious minds. Shameful desires, bestial violence, infamy. I saw all of it in that horrendous mask. They are us, those monsters . . .’ he said. ‘They are us . . . So now you can imagine what you would have seen had you been in my place, Hogan. Force yourself, strain your imagination . . .’

His voice trailed off and Father Hogan looked at him in silence. That hollow tone, that bleak gaze, left no doubt that he was telling the truth.

‘Evil always seems invincible to us,’ replied the priest. ‘Especially the evil within us, but that’s not true. When you wake up tomorrow, before dawn, watch as the light advances over the world, stare at the rising sun. You will find your face there as well, Jobert, the part of you destined to live. For ever.’

He went to the airstrip, where the plane was waiting to take him to El Kef. Jobert did not accompany him, but Father Hogan caught a glimpse of his dark, still shape, arms folded, behind his office window, through the swirling dust raised by the plane’s propellers.

F
ATHER
H
OGAN REACHED
R
OME
one stormy night a few days before Christmas. The rain pounding on the shiny tarmac, the dark, swollen clouds in the sky and the air laden with humidity made him feel as if he were on another planet.

He waited on the airfield as the big black oilcloth-wrapped crate was unloaded. A cart was ready to transport it to a warehouse. He followed it on foot, as one does a coffin. Two security men who were there to ensure its safety brought up the rear of the little procession.

When he walked out onto the street, he saw a man dressed in a raincoat, with a hat low over his eyes, waiting. Father Hogan approached him. ‘You’re already here,’ he said. ‘I would have kept my promise to come to see you.’

‘I know,’ said Marconi. ‘But I couldn’t sit there waiting. Come with me. I have a car.’

Father Hogan returned to make sure that the warehouse was locked and guarded, then got into the car that was waiting for him, shiny under the rain, door open.

The two of them dined alone in Marconi’s house, in the big library, and Father Hogan told the scientist everything that had happened from the moment he had landed at Bir Akkar. Marconi listened intently, never missing a word, never interrupting.

‘What became of your friends?’ he asked at the end.

‘Desmond Garrett disappeared into the desert with El Kassem and I don’t think we’ll hear from him, or of him, again. He lives in a place now where time and space fade into infinity.’

‘And Philip?’

‘His life is in Kalaat Hallaki now. He was the one who saved us, you know, with the silvery sound of his sistrum . . . My God, it was incredible . . . As we were leaving that awful place I asked him how he could explain such a miracle. He told me that he had no idea of how it had happened.

‘ “The sistrum saved us like it did an Etruscan haruspex two thousand years ago,” he said. “He was the only survivor of a Roman army unit that had ventured into the desert and been attacked by . . . that very same creature, I suppose . . . I was in an absolute panic until I thought of the sistrum, and when I held it out and shook it, the fury stopped all at once. And then something extraordinary happened. For just a moment all of that horror surrounding me disappeared, the screaming and shouting were hushed and that field of blood and fire was transformed into the most peaceful setting you can imagine. I was in a field of grass, flocks of sheep all around. I heard the voice of a little child crying, crying in despair, and I saw a woman, a beautiful woman with black hair, bending over a rough cradle and singing. Singing and shaking a rattle made of little bits of bone and wood. And the baby stopped crying, all at once. The sound, that sound, was the same as that of the sistrum.”

‘That’s what Philip told me before he joined the woman he loves and has bound his life to . . . before he disappeared into the shadows of that marvellous, forgotten place. Perhaps the vision that he had – of such a remote event – gives us the key to understanding not only what happened out there in the desert, but perhaps even, who can say, the mystery of our life on earth and of our death.

‘As for me, I managed to save the machine from destruction, at the risk of my own life. The recorder received the flow of that signal which originated from the furthest reaches of space. You deserve credit for the success of this operation as well, Mr Marconi, and I intend to respect the pact that you made with Father Boni. The recorded memory is not in the crate that I left under lock and key in the warehouse. It is in a crate that is being unloaded at this very moment probably, along with a consignment of Oriental carpets. That’s what you wanted, isn’t it? Isn’t that why you wanted me to come to see you first?’

The scientist stared deeply into his eyes in silence for a moment. Then he said, ‘No, that’s not the reason. I wanted to prevent Father Boni from having access to that memory. There’s only one man on this earth who can decide the fate of that message and he’s waiting to see you. Go now, Hogan, go to him and tell him how you saw the fist of God strike down the Tower of Solitude in a lonely spot in the middle of the desert.’

‘But what about Father Boni?’

‘I don’t know. I’ve heard that he has fallen gravely ill and that he’s been taken to a quiet, secluded place where he may be able to recover his health and, above all, the serenity of his mind and spirit. If that’s possible.’

From the street Father Hogan could hear the muted, singsong notes of a shepherd playing on an Italian bagpipe. He felt a lump in his throat and thought of a bare room and an old priest who died trembling with fear and pain. He took his leave and went down to the street, where a car was waiting to take him to the Vatican.