The Caliphate, André Gallo [best books to read ever .TXT] 📗

talking with parishioners. Kella looked for Steve but did not see him.

     The area in which she stood was partially occupied by rows of chairs in the middle flanked by wide columns rising up about thirty meters toward the vaulted ceilings. Statues and mausoleums took up the far half of the Basilica. Not far from her in the public area and on the right was a small souvenir shop. Further away from her in the center of the mausoleum area a guide was leading a tour group. Kella started walking toward the tour, in the hope that Steve was with the tourists. But a railing about a foot and half high that divided the public area from the tombs stopped her. Kella saw a side door that the tourists must have used to enter and guessed that the ticket booth to pay for the tour was outside that door.

     Not seeing any authority that might object, Kella quickly stepped over the railing and headed toward the tour now behind a large monument with four arches on one side and two on the other. She noticed two effigies inside the monument, and with great relief, saw Steve listening to the guide and reading an inscription beneath the figures of Anne de Bretagne and her husband Louis XII.

     Steve saw her, moved closer and, with a false intellectual air, said, “I’ve always wanted to know more about Anne de Bretagne. Did you know that her marriage made Brittany a part of France?”

     Kella was not listening. She tried to peer through the openings of the arches but could not see over the effigies inside.

     She looked around the monument and was terrified to see Hamad inside the Basilica. Kella grabbed Steve’s arm and pulled him away from the tour group but still behind the monument. In a low, breathless voice she said, “Steve, something terrible has happened. That’s Hamad, Faridah’s father. He just killed her. I saw it.”

     A sob escaped, and she put a hand to her mouth.

    “Killed her? Is that what you said? No!”

     He put his arms around her for an instant until she stepped back, having regained control.

Hamad had stopped very close to the spot where Kella first paused to look at her surroundings. He seemed hesitant to go further into what to him must have seemed a strange but sacred place.

     “I was there. It was awful. I ran. Now, he’s after me,” Kella said.

     “That guy over there?” he said looking in Hamad’s direction, “Show me.”

     She pointed from behind the monument. Hamad was moving forward, getting closer to the railing. Kella and Steve stayed with the tourists and their guide as they moved. The tour guide was speaking about Anne de Bretagne’s marriage.

     Then Hamad, with stains on his clothes, stepped over the railing and came toward them. Steve stepped in front of Kella. A woman who came out of the souvenir shop said in a raspy, vernacular accent that told Kella volumes about the owner’s view of Arab immigrants, “Alors, look at you! Where are we going―and without a ticket?”

     Hamad looked back and spotted the source of the voice, a red-faced female walking toward him, an infidel not fit to clean up behind him. But he felt intimidated.

     The woman continued, the superior acoustics of the church lending her words additional authority.

     “Have you no respect for the house of God?”

Kella watched Hamad’s anger turn first to puzzlement then fear as he looked to the far end of the church toward the altar and the cross. Then Kella’s and Hamad’s eyes locked for an instant. She saw him turn away in extreme frustration. With fists tightly clenched and the muscles of his jaw bulging he strode out of the church.

     Steve whispered, “You stay with the tour, I’m going to take a breath of fresh air.”

     Before Kella could reply, he left the group, walked past the woman in the souvenir shop telling her, “You’re right, Madame. I’m going to make sure he doesn’t hang around the front.”

     When Steve stepped outside, he saw Hamad standing on the steps that led to the Basilica’s main entrance, motioning to another man coming in their direction about fifty yards away on the sidewalk. He went up to Hamad, who appeared surprised.

     “I don’t ever want to see you again,” he said, “and neither does the woman you followed here. If either you or your friend…” he pointed toward Hamad’s friend who was now running toward them, “are still here when we come out of the church, your days in sunny France are over, unless you want to spend them in a prison cell.”

     Hamad reacted instantly with a wild swinging right fist. Expecting it, Steve stepped forward under Hamad fist and he caught him under the chin with an open palm. The force of the blow was multiplied by Hamad’s forward motion. His head jerked back and he fell backward on the stone surface of the parvis. When the other man reached them, Hamad seemed unconscious. Hamad’s friend looked down at Hamad, undecided, but reached in his pocket and produced a knife.

     “Don’t make it any worse,” Steve said. “Take care of your friend. Maybe he’ll live.”

He turned around and went back into the church.

     When he rejoined the tour, Steve whispered, “Let’s stay with the tour to give Hamad a bit longer.”

     They went downstairs to the crypt. Kella was in a daze. She stayed close to Steve, trying to keep out images of Hamad’s knife thrusts into Faridah’s body. When the guide explained that Saint Denis had been beheaded in Montmartre in the third century and had carried his head in his hands for several kilometers to this spot, where the church had been built to honor him two centuries later,