Who Killed Daniel Pearl (7 page)

Ruth has tears in her eyes. Judea's looking up at the ceiling and holding back tears of his own. He gets up and goes to get me a plate of cookies. A hair-dryer for her because her hair is damp and he's afraid she'll catch cold. I'm thinking about those Isaac Babel characters in
Red
Cavalry
who, until the very last minute when the cossack is about to slash their faces or cut them to pieces keep repeating, “I am a Jew.” I'm thinking about that old rabbi in I-don't-remember which Isaac Bashevis Singer novel, confronted during a pogrom by a brute about to strike him, cut his beard off, humiliate him, who surreptitiously repeats his prayer and with a thousand little gestures too subtle for the thug to perceive and visible only to He Who Sees All, persists in affirming, without arrogance, calmly, with that inner steadfastness that forges great heroes and martyrs, his unswerving loyalty to his hated community. Why didn't I think of this sooner? How could I have kept saying, like everybody else, and even here in this book, “Forced to proclaim his Jewishness, humiliated”? It was the opposite! A gesture of pride! A moment of dignity! Completely in keeping, in fact, with many of the stories I had heard about him: the party in Islamabad at the home of Khalid Khawaja, bin Laden's former pilot and friend, where everybody started to condemn Israel and the Jews, and he froze the assembly simply by saying “I'm a Jew”; the conversation in Syria with seven militants from Hezbollah discussing the “two religions,” Islam and Christianity, and he chimes in, speaking softly and without emphasis, to add a third, his own, Judaism. But Judea is coming back. And I sense that it's my turn to speak.

“What you're saying sheds so much light, suddenly. It's perfectly obvious. Because I saw the video. I watched it dozens of times, frame by frame, image by image. And there were things I couldn't decipher. Disruptions of tone and rhythm . . . different expressions . . . the beard that wasn't the same, the state of his clothing . . . Times when Danny is talking to the camera and others when he's oblivious to it . . . Shots facing the camera, others in profile. When he lowers his eyes . . . He's sarcastic when he's saying ‘nowhere where Americans will be safe, nowhere where they will be able to go freely' . . . convincing when he's talking about his great-grandfather . . . bizarrely brutal, adamant, the words cracking like a whip, in that crucial part where he says ‘my father is Jewish, my mother Jewish, I am Jewish . . . ' Sarcastic again, or no, delighted, smiling like a child, when he utters the words that in theory condemn him: ‘On my father's side I come from a family of Zionists . . . ' If you're right, my dear Judea, everything becomes clear. It's a long interview, isn't it, almost a conversation, shot over a period of time, maybe hours or even the whole day, or even several days—and then afterwards the cuts, the editing.”

Judea nods his head. He looks worn out, ten years older in ten minutes, but he's nodding his head silently.

“There's something else I was thinking that goes with what you're saying. I too was struck by how self-assured he looks in certain shots. I'm not talking about the video any more, no. Although when you think about it even in the video he doesn't have the look of a man who knows he's going to die. In the last sequence, for instance, about the relationship between the U.S. and Israel, he really seems to be making fun of them. No. I'm talking about the photos. You know those photos where he's wearing the top of his track suit and he has chains on his legs, the ones they sent to the media when he was being held. There are two photos that were not published in which—”

Judea's face changes once more. He leaps up again.

“What do you mean, not published? There were photos of Danny that weren't published, are you sure?”

“I think so, yes. That's my impression. At least I didn't see them anywhere. I read and saw just about everything that was published on your son's death and those two photos, in which he seems so confident, almost happy, I don't think I saw published anywhere . . . ”

The truth is that I don't know any more. His emotion, his excitement, and the importance he is giving to this detail are starting to perturb me and make me uncertain.

“Is it so important?” I ask him.

“Yes, of course. Think about it—there are four photos. Four. Imagine there's a fifth. Where did it come from? Who gave it to whom? You see—what a difference it makes! Come with us, we'll check.”

He gets up. Ruth gets up. They take me into the next room, which functions as the modest headquarters of the Daniel Pearl Foundation they have created in memory of their child, and where they keep, on the floor, in cardboard boxes, all the folders, everything that was written, the tributes, the articles. And there we are, all three of us crawling around, moving boxes, searching, looking for every single photo published, even in the most obscure paper. “Maybe in this box. No, the one underneath. Further down. Wait, let me do it, it's too heavy. Take that folder instead, the one with the Israeli clippings . . . ”

I'm suddenly ashamed to have unleashed this frenzy.

I can feel that they are in the same state of agitation at the idea of an unpublished photo as they must have been last year, when Danny's death was not yet a certainty and one clutched at every clue, a detail, any fragment of information to rekindle hope.

There is something so utterly poignant, given that the tragedy has already taken place, about searching in the past, in a brief episode from a time now sadly irretrievable, for one last retrospective reason to believe and hope, that I am overwhelmed by emotion.

All the more so when, after ten minutes of showing me photos, always the same ones, among which I could never find my supposedly new picture, they finally hand me an issue of the
Jerusalem Post
. And there, I am forced to admit, was indeed the photo; it was rare, but not unpublished. I'm sorry . . .

“Let's go back to the video,” says Ruth, exhausted by our absurd quest. I had noticed immediately that she had respiratory problems. She is very small. Very slight. But she gets out of breath in a way that is usually associated only with diabetics and the overweight. And then it's awful—she struggles to get her breath back. She pants. She looks like a survivor, I tell myself—still so youthful, so graceful, but with the look of a survivor. How do you live after such a disaster? Where do you find the strength to go through the motions of living? “Let's go back,” she says. And I can see that she needs to go back to sitting on the couch.

“We haven't seen the video. We were told about it. We were given the transcript. But actually seeing it, no, we haven't seen it—how could a mother watch such a thing? We would have preferred that it not be aired at all. When CBS showed it, and from CBS it got on to the Internet, we were very angry, my husband and I. You have to show what these people are capable of, the CBS ‘expert' on Islamic issues said—and showing it will discourage people from turning to Islam. What a joke! It's the opposite. Instead, for a lot of people, it was an incentive. Used for recruiting and propaganda in the mosques. But what do you think?”

I say you can make a case either way. But in cases like this, when in doubt, censorship is the worst solution. She shrugs—as if to say that in any case the battle is lost.

She goes on: “Since you've seen it, I have a question. How is he dressed? Does he wear his top the whole time?”

She sees that I don't quite grasp the meaning of her question.

“What I mean is whether there's any part of the video where he doesn't have his sweat suit top on. Did you see my Danny bare-chested?”

I know that there is indeed such a moment on the tape. I know that when the hand has finished its butchery, when you see it moving around in the wound, he is in fact bare-chested, but then there's a bizarre final shot, where he's wearing his pink and blue top again. But I don't dare tell her. I sense so much pain in her question, such secret entreaty, that I would like to tell her what she wants to hear, what she is hoping for—but what? I am silent.

“And another thing. Can you explain why they killed him the way they did? The way they cut him in pieces then put him back together to bury him.”

I hear Judea, the scientist, the man of rigor, grumbling in his corner: “Too many questions at the same time!”

And she's like a little girl who's been scolded, close to shame:

“It's true. But I would really like to know.”

His voice is dull, constrained:

“They didn't cut him up just so he'd fit more easily into the plastic bags.”

I don't know how to respond to that, either. I'd like to tell them what they so much want to hear, what would make them feel better, or at least not as bad. But again, how can I know? So I chanced to say:

“You have to look at the Algerians, who are the great experts at this kind of set-up. It seems to me that it's a message. A proclamation to the West. This is how we will treat you from now on. This is what we will do to you. What's more—”

I am thinking that 31 January, the probable date of Pearl's death, is close to the Islamic holiday on which sheep are sacrificed.

“What's more, it must have been not too long before the Aïd. So perhaps they wanted to tell us that from now on we won't just be slitting the throats of sheep, but also yours, you American, Jewish, European dogs.”

I sense that Judea is trying to figure out with his rigorous, scientific mind whether we were in fact close to the Aïd in early February. That's what he used to do when his beloved Danny would call him urgently when a story deadline was looming: Dad, can you figure out for me the dates of Ramadan twelve years ago? What time is high tide in Karachi next week? What kind of weather they had during the battle of Waterloo? The next solar eclipse? What time the sun rose on the day Louis XVI was guillotined?

“As for your second question, Mrs. Pearl, as to why they felt the need to put him back together to bury his—”

She cuts me off. And in one breath, very fast, her little voice choked by oncoming sobs, she says:

“Maybe at the end somebody wanted to take care of him.”

CHAPTER 6
DANNY'S FACE

I met again with the courageous parents, Ruth and Judea, and I corresponded with them.

I met Daniel Gill, Pearl's childhood friend, who started a boy's club with Danny at age six or seven, and who was best man at his wedding twenty years later.

I met colleagues, Americans and others, who had crossed Pearl's path in Karachi and in the rest of his professional life.

I read Steve LeVine, his
Wall Street Journal
colleague who was following developments in an investigation for the paper, and who in fact should have been in Karachi instead of Pearl, but, as it happened, he was getting married, and Danny was assigned instead. The assignment also led to a last-minute cancellation of a Pearl family reunion planned for 18 January in San Francisco.

And of course Mariane, almost immediately—I was in New York to show my movie
Bosna!
, and she was there with Tom Jennings, another friend of Danny's. Beautiful, dignified, like a modern Antigone, Mariane was considering making a film with Jennings in Karachi about her husband— a film of duty and truth. Go back to Karachi? To follow Daniel Pearl's path, when your name is Pearl? Yes! Without hesitation! To prevent pain and memory from solidifying, to prevent oneself from becoming rigid with grief, and dissolving in mourning. And then there was Adam. She had to think about little Adam Pearl, born after his father's death, who had become her reason for living. She sent me a sweet photo of him for New Year's 2003.

So, Mariane Pearl: The virginal demeanor with ash-gray eyes. Curly black hair pulled back into a chignon, as in the photos. The lovely nape of her neck. Such an odd mixture of French, and now American, and a little bit Cuban, and Buddhist, and Jewish because of Daniel. Mariane, in an uncomfortable and empty apartment downtown in the Stuyvesant Towers: I sense it will be a long time before she can accomplish more than the merest gestures necessary to ensure her baby's well-being. Mariane at the restaurant, that night and the following—her olive skin, no makeup, only the mask of misfortune; an old loose T-shirt thrown on, in contrast to how chic she looks in the photos in the Pearl living room showing happy times. Her answers are brief. She resists pathos. She creates a slight distance whenever the questioning gets too precise—“I pass . . . I can't answer that . . . no, really, that's not possible. . . I can't answer that question . . . ” Mariane Pearl, who every time she hears that I'm going back to Karachi sends me a friendly, sisterly little message:
Prenez garde à vous
— “Take care.” I remember seeing Mariane in an old BBC interview, when things were at their greatest uncertainty, when everybody was still hoping that the kidnappers had not committed the irreparable: She was six months pregnant, shattered and full of hope, intense. I remember her pleading, “If somebody has to give their life to save him, I'll do it. Please get in touch with me. I'm ready.”

With her and the others, I asked the same questions.

Each time I gleaned photos, documents, scraps of memories, shreds of a life.

Searching through a man's past as if I were rummaging in a bag.

Poking, with the end of my pen, through the little heap of secrets and clichés.