Read The Labyrinth of Osiris for Free Online Page B

apologize.
    It was strange the way life turned. How things never quite worked out the way you expected. A few years back he’d been engaged to be married. Then his fiancée Galia had been killed and his world had dropped into the abyss. He’d thought that was it, he was buried for ever, but against all expectations two people had pulled him out. Sarah was one of them.
    Four years they’d been together. Good years. Wonderful years, particularly at the beginning. Galia would always be there, of course, but with Sarah his life had moved on. He’d healed. And not just on a personal level. His career too had got back on track. He’d been promoted to senior detective, won citations for his work on three separate investigations, rediscovered his passion for policing. His obsession with it.
    Which is where the problems came. As any detective anywhere in the world will tell you, finding the balance between upholding the law and upholding a relationship is a tough thing to do. Doubly so in the pressure-cooker atmosphere of a city like Jerusalem. Trebly so in the Old City, where faith and fury, God and the Devil, crime and prayer were so closely entwined it was nigh-on impossible to prise them apart.
    With only a couple of exceptions, all his colleagues had at least one divorce under their belt, usually more. Work and women – the two worlds just wouldn’t be squared. How could you ease off on a drugs bust because your partner wants to have a cosy night in watching TV? How can you romance her in the evening when you’ve spent the day interviewing a serial rapist? How can you not answer the call to attend a corpse in a cathedral because you’re looking at images of your unborn child? Where do you draw the line? How do you draw the line?
    With Galia it had been a whirlwind romance, just a few months together before he’d proposed. There hadn’t been time for the pressure to take its toll. With Sarah there had. She’d tried so hard, cut him so much slack, but there are only so many cancelled dinners you can deal with, only so much self-absorption.
    The confrontations had grown ever more frequent, the distance between them ever wider, the resentment ever deeper. Eventually, inevitably, she’d ended it. They’d had a brief reconciliation – the sex, ironically, the best it had ever been – but his work had got in the way again and two weeks later she’d called a final time out.
    ‘I love you, Arieh,’ she’d said. ‘But I can’t live with only a fraction of you. You’re never here. Even when you are here, your mind’s somewhere else. It won’t work. I need more.’
    He’d moved out of their apartment, got on with his job, tried to persuade himself it was all for the best.
    Five weeks after that she’d called to say she was pregnant.
    ‘Is it mine?’ he’d asked.
    ‘No, it’s Menachem Begin’s. I froze a sperm sample before he died. Of course it’s yours, dafook !’
    He’d lost a lover and gained a child. Strange the way life turned.
    Sarah’s phone went straight to voicemail. He left a rambling message, saying he hoped everything had gone OK, was sorry to have ducked out early, would call later. Then, ringing off, he pressed himself back into the doorway and waited for the rain to ease.
    Normally Armenian Orthodox Patriarchate Road was quiet. With the municipal roadworks closing the Jaffa Gate to outgoing traffic, vehicles wanting to exit the Old City now had to come this way down to the Zion or Dung Gates. The result: an endless stream of cars, taxis and No. 38 buses clogging the narrow thoroughfare and pushing whatever pedestrians there were up against the walls to either side of the street. A pair of Haredim bustled past, their heads down, plastic bags wrapped around their Homburg hats to keep them dry, and then a group of tourists, all wearing matching blue cagoules with the logo ‘Holy Land Travel: Bringing You Closer to God’ emblazoned on the back. They looked miserable. You didn’t expect it to