The Labyrinth of Osiris Read Online Free PDF Page A

was inclined to agree, although not in such in flammatory terms. The Wall had reduced the number of bombings, no question, but at what cost? He knew a Palestinian garage owner, a mild-mannered man up in Ar-Ram. Every morning for twenty years he had walked the fifty metres from his house across the road to his garage, and every evening he had walked the fifty metres back again. Then the Wall had been built and suddenly there were six metres of vertical concrete separating him from his place of work. Now to get to his pumps he had to go round and through the Kalandia checkpoint, turning a thirty-second journey into a two-hour one. It was a story that was repeated the length of the barrier – farmers cut off from their fields, children from their schools, families divided. Go for the terrorists by all means, smash the bastards, but to punish a whole population? How much more anger did that generate? How much more hatred? And who was on the front line dealing with all that anger and hatred? Schmucks like him.
    ‘Welcome to the promised land,’ he muttered, turning as lift doors pinged open behind him.
    Down in the car park he got into his white Toyota Corolla and drove out and down on to Hebrew University Road and then Derekh Ha-Shalom, back towards the Old City. The morning traffic was light and he reached the Jaffa Gate in ten minutes. Once through the gate, however, he found himself locked in a vice of stationary traffic. The municipality were upgrading the road system around the Citadel, reducing two lanes to one, clogging Omar Ibn al-Khattab Square and the top end of David Street. They’d already been at it for eighteen months and by all accounts had at least another year to go. Normally the traffic managed to get through, albeit at a crawl. Today a lorry was stuck trying to reverse out of Greek Catholic Patriarchate Street and no one was going anywhere.
    ‘ Chara ,’ muttered Ben-Roi. ‘Shit.’
    He sat tapping the wheel, staring ahead at a large hoarding carrying an artist’s impression of what the new road layout would look like, accompanied by the logo: ‘Barren Corporation: Proud to be sponsoring Jerusalem’s future history.’ Occasionally he pumped the horn, adding to the cacophony of irate hooting that already filled the air, and twice lowered the window and bellowed ‘ Yallah titkadem, maniak! ’ at the truck driver. The rain hammered down, sending rivulets of muddy water streaming across the street from the roadworks.
    He gave it five minutes, then lost patience. Retrieving his police light from the passenger footwell, he slapped it on to the roof, plugged the jack into its socket and hit the siren. That got things moving. The lorry driver shunted forward, the log-jam broke and Ben-Roi was able to drive the hundred metres round the corner to the David Police Station.
    Kishle, as the station was generally known – the Turkish word for prison, the purpose it had served under Ottoman rule – was a long, two-storey building that dominated the southern end of the square, its grilled windows and stained, stone-block walls lending it an air of dour shabbiness. There was another Kishle up in Nazareth, widely considered the most beautiful police station in Israel. It was not an adjective Ben-Roi would have used to describe his own workplace.
    The guard in the security post recognized him and retracted the electronic gate, waving him past. He drove through the arched entranceway and along the twenty-metre tunnel that cut through the middle of the building, emerging into the large compound at the rear. A stable block and horse exercise area occupied the compound’s far end, with beside them a low, innocuous building that looked like a storehouse but in fact housed the city’s bomb-disposal unit. All the rest of the space was taken up with parked cars and vans, a few with police number plates – red with the letter M for Mishteret – most with yellow civilian ones. Ben-Roi had a set of both, although he