Excerpt of The Messenger by Daniel Silva
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1.London
IT WAS ALI MASSOUDI who unwittingly roused Gabriel Allon from his brief and
restless retirement: Massoudi, the great Europhile intellectual and freethinker,
who, in a moment of blind panic, forgot that the English drive on the left side
of the road.
The backdrop for his demise was a rain-swept October evening in Bloomsbury.
The occasion was the final session of the first annual Policy Forum for Peace
and Security in Palestine, Iraq, and Beyond. The conference had been launched
early that morning amid great hope and fanfare, but by day’s end it had taken on
the quality of a traveling production of a mediocre play. Even the demonstrators
who came in hope of sharing some of the flickering spotlight seemed to realize
they were reading from the same tired script. The American president was burned
in effigy at ten. The Israeli prime minister was put to the purifying flame at
eleven. At lunchtime, amid a deluge that briefly turned Russell Square into a
pond, there had been a folly having something to do with the rights of women in
Saudi Arabia. At eight-thirty, as the gavel came down on the final panel, the
two dozen stoics who had stayed to the end filed numbly toward the exits.
Organizers of the affair detected little appetite for a return engagement next
autumn.
A stagehand stole forward and removed a placard from the rostrum that read:
GAZA IS LIBERATED—WHAT NOW? The first panelist on his feet was Sayyid of the
London School of Economics, defender of the suicide bombers, apologist for
al-Qaeda. Next was the austere Chamberlain of Cambridge, who spoke of Palestine
and the Jews as though they were still the quandary of gray-suited men from the
Foreign Office. Throughout the discussion the aging Chamberlain had served as a
sort of Separation Fence between the incendiary Sayyid and a poor soul from the
Israeli embassy named Rachel who had drawn hoots and whistles of disapproval
each time she’d opened her mouth. Chamberlain tried to play the role of
peacekeeper now as Sayyid pursued Rachel to the door with taunts that her days
as a colonizer were drawing to an end.
Ali Massoudi, graduate professor of global governance and social theory at
the University of Bremen, was the last to rise. Hardly surprising, his jealous
colleagues might have said, for among the incestuous world of Middle Eastern
studies, Massoudi had the reputation of one who never willingly relinquished a
stage. Palestinian by birth, Jordanian by passport, and European by upbringing
and education, Professor Massoudi appeared to all the world like a man of
moderation. The shining future of Arabia, they called him. The very face of
progress. He was known to be distrustful of religion in general and militant
Islam in particular. In newspaper editorials, in lecture halls, and on
television, he could always be counted on to lament the dysfunction of the Arab
world. Its failure to properly educate its people. Its tendency to blame the
Americans and the Zionists for all its ailments. His last book had amounted to a
clarion call for an Islamic Reformation. The jihadists had denounced him as a
heretic. The moderates had proclaimed he had the courage of Martin Luther. That
afternoon he had argued, much to Sayyid’s dismay, that the ball was now squarely
in the Palestinian court. Until the Palestinians part company with the culture
of terror, Massoudi had said, the Israelis could never be expected to cede an
inch of the West Bank. Nor should they. Sacrilege, Sayyid had cried. Apostasy.
Professor Massoudi was tall, a bit over six feet in height, and far too good
looking for a man who worked in close proximity to impressionable young women.
His hair was dark and curly, his cheekbones wide and strong, and his square chin
had a deep notch in the center. The eyes were brown and deeply set and lent his
face an air of profound and reassuring intelligence. Dressed as he was now, in a
cashmere sport jacket and cream-colored rollneck sweater, he seemed the very
archetype of the European intellectual. It was an image he worked hard to
convey. Naturally deliberate of movement, he packed his papers and pens
methodically into his well-traveled briefcase, then descended the steps from the
stage and headed up the center aisle toward the exit.
Excerpted from The Messenger, Copyright © 2006 Danile Silva. Reproduced with permission of the publishers, Penguin Putnam. Reproduction prohibited. All rights reserved.
