Who Killed Daniel Pearl Read Free Page A

Pakistan and on the disappearance of this city’s languid past, a city I once liked but which now seemed horribly metamorphosed. So I hadn’t noticed the policeman stepping out of the half-light—long hair, wrinkled peacoat, bloodshot eyes lined with kohl, young but not juvenile, hard features, a machine-gun held nervously at arm’s length and, in the other hand, an absurd flashlight, whose beam isn’t larger than a pencil, which he aims at us.
    â€œYou’ll have to get out. He’s going to ask you something. I was going too fast.”
    The cop—a real cop?—pulls me out of my seat a little roughly, looks me up and down, surveys with some distaste my old leather jacket and three-day beard, and then takes from my pocket the handful of rupees I had changed at the airport, and my passport.
    The passport visibly surprises him.
    â€œLévy?” he says incredulous. “Are you Lévy? Is your name really Lévy?”
    Instantly I tell myself: “Catastrophe! Immediate invalidation of the theory according to which the Pakistanis never having seen a Jew in their life, my name, etc . . . ” And then, the memories of Bangladesh come back to me and I remember that “Lévy” is the name of a prestigious paramilitary battalion, created by the English to police the borders. (To be more precise: the “Levy Malakand,” named for the Malakand, the semi-tribal zone near Afghanistan, where the regular army won’t go, leaving it to the “Levys” to maintain order.) I remember the homonym, almost cheered by it, and sense it will help me out again, like thirty years ago in Jessore when, having gotten somewhat lost, I found myself face to face with an elite unit of the Pakistani army.
    â€œTwo thousand rupees,” he says, softening, in the tone of a merchant giving you a real good deal. “Speeding, your situation is not in order: but, for you, only two thousand rupees.”
    I think about protesting. I could get on my high horse, invoke the respect due the Levy Malakand, call on the driver who has remained in the car with his head on the steering wheel pretending to sleep during the whole incident. But no. Above all, no. I leave the two thousand rupees. And as if nothing had happened, without a word of reproach or the slightest comment to the driver, I get back in the taxi, only too happy to step into the role of a swindled tourist. All is well. Good beginning. Balthasar Gracian: “The things of this world must be looked at in reverse, to be seen the right way round.”

CHAPTER 2 HOUSE OF TORMENT
    I am in the house where Pearl was held captive.
    Well, I say “the” house as if there had been only one and as if I were certain that he was detained, tortured, dismembered and buried in the same place.
    In reality no one knows for sure. There are people in Karachi who believe that, both for purposes of blurring the trail, thwarting the searches of the FBI and Pakistani Rangers, and reducing the risks of being reported by the neighbors, the kidnappers might have moved him from hideout to hideout during those seven days in this sprawling agglomeration of fourteen million people that is Karachi.
    But there is one place, at least, that everyone thinks of, because it is there, on May 17, after months of searching every cemetery in the city, that buttons from Daniel Pearl’s shirt were found, and the car seat where he was seated in the photos sent to the press by his captors—and then, in the garden, three feet under the ground, his body in ten pieces. It is there, in the heart of the neighborhood of Gulzar e-Hijri that in all probability the execution took place, and that is where, one conjecture leading to the next, I suppose he was held from the first night.
    It takes almost an hour to get there by car.
    Ask nothing of anyone, just send the Pakistani “fixer” ahead to make sure there’s no police patrol around the site still