thinking there was an expensive restaurant in Castletownbere called The Warehouse?”
“There was a pr icy restaurant for the occasional tourist, but it wasn’t named The Warehouse. It was called The Bank because it was in the old bank, one flight up on Main Street. Still had the bank vault in the back when I was there. I seem to remember a Mary McCullagh ran it in the sixties. I went to school with one of her daughters, a pretty little thing we called Deidre of the Sorrows because she made so many of us sorry when we discovered we couldn’t sweet talk her into bed.”
“You were arrested by Scotland Yard following the explosion of a bomb on a bus near Bush House, the BBC building in London.”
“Is that a question or a statement of fact?”
“A statement of fact that I’d like you to corroborate, Mr. Pippen.”
“I was killing time in London when the bus blew,” Dante said, his eyes blinking innocently. “The coppers barged into a licensed tabernacle and more or less picked up anyone who spoke the King’s English with an Irish accent. They were obliged to release me after forty-eight hours for want of evidence. Bloody bastards never even apologized.”
“Did you blow up the bus, Mr. Pippen?”
“I did not. But the two who did learned which side was up from yours truly.”
The imam smiled thinly. Glancing at a wall clock with a silhouette of Ayatollah Khomeini on its face, he pushed himself to his feet and started to leave. At the door, he turned back. “I seldom have the chance to speak with an Occidental nonbeliever, Mr. Pippen, especially one who is not in awe of me. Talking with you is going to be an enlightening experience. One must know the enemy before one can defeat him. I invite you to visit me in my study after your afternoon classes, every day of the week except Friday. I will offer you mint tea and honey cakes, you can reciprocate by offering me insights into the secular mentality.”
“The pleasure will ” Dante started to say but the imam had already vanished through the latticed door, which squeaked back and forth on its hinges, evidence of his passage.
Dante was taken to his living quarters, a room in the back of one of the low brick houses with flat roofs at the edge of the village beyond the perimeter of the Hezbollah camp. At sunup an elderly woman with a veil over the lower part of her face appeared with what passed for breakfast: a steaming pot of green tea to wash down the chalk-dry biscuits covered with an oily paste made from crushed olives. Dante’s bodyguard, who trailed after him everywhere, including to the outhouse, led him down the dirt path to the lip of the quarry. Several young boys in dusty striped robes were already tossing stones at a troop of goats to steer them away from the perimeter fence and up a nearby slope. A yellow Hezbollah flag decorated with a hand holding aloft a rifle flapped from the pole atop the brick building where the explosives and the fuses were stored. High overhead the contrails of Israeli jets on their dawn patrols crisscrossed the sky. Dante’s students, nineteen fedayeen, all in their late teens or early twenties and wearing identical baggy khaki trousers and blouses and thick web belts under their robes, waited at the bottom of the quarry. An older man with an orange and white kaffiyah draped over his shoulders squatted on the rocky ground, setting out cartons filled with pentaerythritol tetra nitrate commonly known as PETN, along with latex, coils of electric wire and plungers powered by automobile batteries. “I, Abdullah, will translate for you,” the man informed Dante when he reached the floor of the quarry. “Please to speak slow in consideration of my English, which is curdled like last week’s goat milk.”
Dante inspected the cartons, then kicked at the coils of wire and the plungers. “We will need modern detonators that can be tripped by radio-controlled devices from distant locations,” he informed Abdullah.
“How
“There was a pr icy restaurant for the occasional tourist, but it wasn’t named The Warehouse. It was called The Bank because it was in the old bank, one flight up on Main Street. Still had the bank vault in the back when I was there. I seem to remember a Mary McCullagh ran it in the sixties. I went to school with one of her daughters, a pretty little thing we called Deidre of the Sorrows because she made so many of us sorry when we discovered we couldn’t sweet talk her into bed.”
“You were arrested by Scotland Yard following the explosion of a bomb on a bus near Bush House, the BBC building in London.”
“Is that a question or a statement of fact?”
“A statement of fact that I’d like you to corroborate, Mr. Pippen.”
“I was killing time in London when the bus blew,” Dante said, his eyes blinking innocently. “The coppers barged into a licensed tabernacle and more or less picked up anyone who spoke the King’s English with an Irish accent. They were obliged to release me after forty-eight hours for want of evidence. Bloody bastards never even apologized.”
“Did you blow up the bus, Mr. Pippen?”
“I did not. But the two who did learned which side was up from yours truly.”
The imam smiled thinly. Glancing at a wall clock with a silhouette of Ayatollah Khomeini on its face, he pushed himself to his feet and started to leave. At the door, he turned back. “I seldom have the chance to speak with an Occidental nonbeliever, Mr. Pippen, especially one who is not in awe of me. Talking with you is going to be an enlightening experience. One must know the enemy before one can defeat him. I invite you to visit me in my study after your afternoon classes, every day of the week except Friday. I will offer you mint tea and honey cakes, you can reciprocate by offering me insights into the secular mentality.”
“The pleasure will ” Dante started to say but the imam had already vanished through the latticed door, which squeaked back and forth on its hinges, evidence of his passage.
Dante was taken to his living quarters, a room in the back of one of the low brick houses with flat roofs at the edge of the village beyond the perimeter of the Hezbollah camp. At sunup an elderly woman with a veil over the lower part of her face appeared with what passed for breakfast: a steaming pot of green tea to wash down the chalk-dry biscuits covered with an oily paste made from crushed olives. Dante’s bodyguard, who trailed after him everywhere, including to the outhouse, led him down the dirt path to the lip of the quarry. Several young boys in dusty striped robes were already tossing stones at a troop of goats to steer them away from the perimeter fence and up a nearby slope. A yellow Hezbollah flag decorated with a hand holding aloft a rifle flapped from the pole atop the brick building where the explosives and the fuses were stored. High overhead the contrails of Israeli jets on their dawn patrols crisscrossed the sky. Dante’s students, nineteen fedayeen, all in their late teens or early twenties and wearing identical baggy khaki trousers and blouses and thick web belts under their robes, waited at the bottom of the quarry. An older man with an orange and white kaffiyah draped over his shoulders squatted on the rocky ground, setting out cartons filled with pentaerythritol tetra nitrate commonly known as PETN, along with latex, coils of electric wire and plungers powered by automobile batteries. “I, Abdullah, will translate for you,” the man informed Dante when he reached the floor of the quarry. “Please to speak slow in consideration of my English, which is curdled like last week’s goat milk.”
Dante inspected the cartons, then kicked at the coils of wire and the plungers. “We will need modern detonators that can be tripped by radio-controlled devices from distant locations,” he informed Abdullah.
“How
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