Who Killed Daniel Pearl by Bernard-Henri Lévy Read Free Book Online Page A

sweat turning cold.
    His Adam’s apple that struggles in his frail neck.
    He is seized by a huge hiccup, and he vomits.
    â€œStraighten him up!” says the Yemeni killer. The other Yemeni, behind him, grabs him under the arms like a sack of potatoes and sets him up straight.
    â€œBetter than that!” he says, stepping back, like an artist getting a better view of his painting. And now it is Karim’s turn to pull his head up, face towards the ceiling, the bared neck straining with the shout that is about to come, though leaning a bit to the side.
    â€œGet out of the way!” the killer says to the Yemeni with the camera, who is too close and will hamper his movements. The man with the camera steps aside, very slowly, as though filled with a sacred terror at the thought of what is about to happen.
    His eyes closed, Pearl feels the motion of the knife as it approaches his throat. He hears a rustle in the air next to him and realizes the Yemeni is practicing. He still cannot believe it. But he’s cold, he’s shivering, his entire body recoils. He would like to stop breathing, make himself small, disappear. At least, he would like to lower his head and cry. Has he done this before, he wonders. Is the man a pro? And what if he’s not? What if he bungles it and has to start over again? His sight is going foggy. His last vision of the world, he tells himself. He is sweating and shivering at the same time. He hears a dog barking, far away. A fly buzzing, close to him. And then, the squawk of a chicken that gets mixed up with his own cry, astonishment mixed with pain, inhuman.
    And that was it. The knife entered the flesh gently. Gently, ever so gently, he began under the ear, far back on the neck. People have told me it is something of a ritual. Others, that it’s simply the classic method for cutting the vocal chords and preventing the victim from screaming. But Pearl reared up. He gasped furiously for air through his butchered larynx. And his reaction was so violent, the strength he finally summoned so great, that he bucked out of Karim’s grip, roaring like a beast, and collapsed with a groan in his own blood, that gushed like water. The Yemeni with the camera is shouting too. Half way through, his hands and arms covered with blood, the Yemeni killer looks at him and stops. The camera was jammed. Because of the camera, they have to stop, and begin all over again.
    Twenty seconds, perhaps thirty, go by, time for the Yemeni to start over again and reframe the image. Pearl is lying down on his stomach now. The half-severed head is separated from the torso and lies far back on the shoulders. The fingers of his hands dig into the ground like claws. He is no longer moving. He moans. He splutters. He is still breathing, but in fits and starts, a groan cut with gurgles and whines like a puppy’s. Karim puts his fingers in the wound to clear the way for the knife. The second Yemeni inclines one of the lamps in order to get a better look and then, feverishly, as though drunk on the sight, the odor, the taste of hot blood that spouts from the carotid as though from a broken pipe, splashing in his face, he cuts Pearl’s shirt and then rips it off. The killer, too, finishes his task. The knife slides back into the first wound, the cervical vertebrae crack and blood spurts in his eyes again, blinding him. The head, rolling back and forth as though it had a life of its own, finally comes off and Karim brandishes it, like a trophy, for the camera.
    Pearl’s face, crumpled like a rag. His lips, at the moment the head is detached, seem animated with a last movement. And the black liquid, of course, flows from his mouth. I’ve often seen people who had been killed. None, for me, can be worse than this one face I did not see and continue to imagine.

CHAPTER 5 WITH THE PEARLS
    â€œNo, that’s not it . . . ”
    I’m in Los Angeles, Mulholland Drive. Sky that color you see only here.