Читать книгу A Cold Flame: A gripping crime thriller that will keep you hooked - Aidan Conway - Страница 21

Jibril wiped the steam off the mirror to make sure he didn’t cut himself with the new razor. Olivia had been surprised. Yes. Very surprised. So, she was finding out that he wasn’t quite as shy and reserved as she had thought him to be. And he had made the first move. Well, really the first move had come from her and not just the invitation. That had been an open invite. But giving him her phone number as she had a few weeks earlier. Then the other stuff. Picking him out with her eyes every time there was a question that needed answering. She was drawn to him. And he’d let it happen whether he had needed it or not. It was true that she would be part of his cover but he realized he had wanted it too. So, in a corner of his battered heart, perhaps not all hope was lost. Some innocence maybe still thrived. And the others must have known too. But what of it. The class favourite? The teacher’s pet? He’d already learnt about that from his own school days in the village and after. Days that had finished so abruptly, so cruelly.

He stopped himself. Have to keep focused. He rinsed and wiped his face with a towel then slipped his shirt on and adjusted the collar so that the chain hung around his neck against his skin just above the topmost fastened button. He smoothed his chin with one hand. His beard was gone but he’d never really got used to having it. When the rebels had first tried to reimpose the old ways on the men in the village, his father and uncles and many others had laughed at their attempts, calling it out as the harking back to some failed distant ideal, their new-found love affair with ideology, with ancient Wahabist rules and certainties.

Yet things had changed somewhat since then, and Jibril had also lived a little in the true believers’ shoes. Now that his journey had brought him to the point where he’d understood the need for decisive action, such symbols were only that: symbols and nothing else. He’d made his case and made it well. He had bided his time with the brothers. In his hour of need they had been there for him. This much was true. He was strong, had always been, but embracing his religion and its comforts had helped him to be stronger. He had felt weakness when he had first come to Rome. Fatigue and hunger, but the strength of true brotherhood had quickly lifted him. There were decent, honest brothers who acted in good faith, but there were those, he knew very well, whose minds and hearts dwelt elsewhere. Such was life. But he was taking control in that regard too and the younger ones knew it.

So, as he had explained, first, you had to fit in. Be like those of the country where you are a guest, or be their idea of how you should be. Play to your strengths, exploit their weaknesses. Ali had protested strongly and some of the others hadn’t been so sure either at first, but as he spoke, building an argument with patient explanation, he had begun to convince them even as he had convinced himself. The more attention you bring to yourself by your difference and your separateness, the more chance they will have of hunting you down, spotting you against the horizon. It was urban camouflage, brothers. Then you could strike unseen when the time was right. But only then. Haste was a fool’s game. Our revolution wears no watch, so it can come at anytime, when least they expect it. Let them sweat it out while we, with cool heads and focused determination, construct the perfect plan.

He walked back across the hall into his room and picked up his phone off the nightstand. It was new. New second-hand. A decent model about whose provenance he hadn’t been encouraged to enquire. It would give him relative anonymity, linked as it was to a new identity. He would need it for everything legitimate now. There was work lined up, hopefully. He would talk to Olivia about that tonight. She would help and had already proved invaluable as a key to opening the intricacies of Italian society. She was always keen to know how he was “getting on” and whether he was going to get his permit to stay. Well, the story he would recount was that he had every intention of making a go of it and she was an attractive young woman with many of the qualities he admired. Somewhere, behind it all, if he hadn’t been at war, she might have even truly touched his soul. But he had no time for that. Not now. Not after what they had done to him.

Perhaps they made an unlikely couple: an Italian woman and a Nigerian man. A teacher and an illegal immigrant with false papers? But he was also a care worker now, a social assistant. Once that was his identity it would not seem so strange. And that was where he was heading, on a fast track, and there was plenty of work to be had. These Italians didn’t lock their old people away like they did in some countries, but instead paid carers to shoulder the drudgery of looking after them. And yet they complained about the numbers of foreigners, the hordes of stranieri they had to put up with.

This Christian nation. Love your neighbour, said Christ. But where was their gospel now? When I was sick, did you care for me? When I was in prison, did you visit me? He thought then of Victor, his friend murdered in Rome some six months before. He recalled their many long discussions before they had been separated. But in those days, so much of it was theory while theory had now become practice. Reality now had grown harsh. “Remember, Jibril,” Victor would say, “when the day comes, what He will say to those on his left. ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels’.” Well, they had killed him – his own Christian brothers – and they would have to pay for it.

“So, my friend,” he said out loud, as if someone might be there to hear him, “who is the devil now?”