"Armand, I love you."

Chapter Twenty Three

Need I say they are the perfect companions? Neither of them cared about the murders.

I could not for the life of me understand it. They cared about other things, such as world peace, the poor suffering homeless in the waning winter cold of New York, the price of medicines for the sick, and how dreadful it was that Israel and Palestine were forever in battle with each other. But they did not care one whit about the horrors they'd beheld with their own eyes. They did not care that I killed every night for blood, that I lived off it and nothing else, and that I was a creature wed by my very nature to human destruction.

They did not care one whit about the dead brother (his name was Fox, by the way, and the last name of my beautiful child is best left unmentioned).

In fact if this text ever sees the light of the real world, you're bound to change both her first name and that of Benjamin.

However, that's not my concern now. I can't think of the fate of these pages, except that they are very much for her, as I mentioned to you before, and if I'm allowed to title them I think it will be Symphony for Sybelle.

Not, please understand, that I love Benji no less. It's only that I haven't the same overwhelming protective feeling for him. I know that Benji will live out a great and adventurous life, no matter what should befall me or Sybelle, or even the times. It's in his flexible and enduring Bedouin nature. He is a true child of the tents and the blowing sands, though in his case, the house was a dismal cinder block hovel on the outskirts of Jerusalem where he induced tourists to pose for overpriced pictures with him and a filthy snarling camel.

He'd been flat out kidnapped by Fox under the felonious terms of a long-term lease of bondage for which Fox paid Benji's father five thousand dollars. A fabricated emigration passport was thrown into the bargain. He'd been the genius of the tribe, without doubt, had mixed feelings about going home and had learnt in the New York streets to steal, smoke and curse, in that order. Though he swore up and down he couldn't read, it turned out that he could, and began to do so obsessively just as soon as I started throwing books at him.

In fact, he could read English, Hebrew and Arabic, having read all three in the newspapers of his homeland since before he could remember.

He loved taking care of Sybelle. He saw to it that she ate, drank milk, bathed and changed her clothes when none of these routine tasks interested her. He prided himself on the fact that he could by his wits obtain for her whatever she needed, no matter what happened to her.

He was the front man for her with the hotel, tipping the maids, making normal talk at the front desk, which included remarkably finespun lies about the whereabouts of the dead Fox, who had become in Benji's never ending saga a fabulous world traveler and amateur photographer; he handled the piano tuner, who was called as often as once a week because the piano stood by the window, exposed to sun and cold, and also because Sybelle did indeed pound it with the fury that would indeed have impressed the great Beethoven. He spoke on the phone to the bank, all of whose personnel thought he was his older brother, David, pronounced Dahveed, and then made the requisite calls at the teller's window for cash as little Benjamin.