Baghdad Central (27 page)

“We don't know yet. As far as we knew, everyone on this street was a friendly. They've all been cleared, in any case. We've got about five thousand locals who are cleared. But it's not one hundred per cent secure. Vehicles can't come in or go out without passing through the gates. People can walk through. But even so, we're here round the clock, and nothing happens here without our knowing it.”

“So, this is a big deal?”

“If we got terrorists setting up camp here, it's a big fucking deal. Heads are going to roll. What are you and Citrone looking for?”

Khafaji looks at Ford, who's standing at the door. Frozen like a statue. His face white marble. Khafaji suddenly realizes that Ford knows the girls on the couch. Ford knows this place.

Khafaji turns back to the MP. “We are here because some interpreters have gone missing.” He points to the couch. “We need to examine these bodies – that might be them. You should know these houses usually have an extra crawl space or storage room in them.”

The MP frowns, trying to understand. Khafaji adds, “Under the stairs, maybe.” The man nods and Khafaji continues, “If you've got dogs, you should bring them in and go over the place.”

The MP nods grimly. “Got it. We'll look for crawl spaces, safe rooms or whatever right away.”

“Right. Could we borrow some bags from you? And gloves, too? Thank you.” The man nods again and goes downstairs. Khafaji calls Ford to come over. Ford flinches.

“Do you know this place, Louis?”

When Ford says nothing, Khafaji asks, “We need to take pictures, Louis. Can you get a camera for us?” Ford disappears down the staircase.

For the next two hours, Khafaji goes through the main room on the second floor, and then the bedrooms leading off from it. He touches the powder on the glass table, then licks his fingers. When the tip of his tongue goes numb, he shakes his head and makes a note. There's a stocked liquor cabinet. With bottles never seen before. When the MP returns, Khafaji asks, “If we are inside the Green Zone, how…?”

Belascoaran snorts. “Believe me, I know what you're
thinking. The story is they were supposed to finish the new wall in two stages. The contractor doing the second stage of the job finished fast, while the contractor doing the first stage stopped. He's supposed to work round the clock until it's done, but he doesn't have enough guys to work the shifts.”

Khafaji shakes his head. The other man laughs. “Believe me. We've been telling them there's a problem.”

Khafaji goes through each bedroom carefully. They're mostly empty except for a few things, small nightstands, mirrors, and beds. In each, Khafaji finds personal articles. Lipstick. Lingerie. Blouses. Shoes. They don't mean anything, but he puts them into bags. He finds more ID cards, the same kind as before. In three rooms, Khafaji finds new kinds of IDs. A university identification card. A driver's license. When he matches them up, he is not surprised. Each face has multiple names.

Khafaji taps at the drywall, and notices a hollow sound in the room behind the staircase. At first he assumes it's only a crawl space, but then sees the outlines of the small panel. If the light were brighter, he would have seen it long ago – there's nothing hidden about it at all. He opens the panel and finds himself staring into a small black hole. Khafaji sees a floor lamp on the other side of the room and brings it over. He clicks on the light and points it into the hole. Something on the floor catches his eye. He reaches down and picks up a heavy piece of metal. It sits snugly into the palm of his hand like it was meant to fit there. He takes off his latex gloves and feels the heft on his bare skin. A nickel-plated Smith and Wesson Magnum, .357, short-nosed. Vanity piece. He smells it. Nothing but cold, oiled metal. Enough to confirm it wasn't fired tonight. Khafaji slips the gun into his jacket pocket.

Khafaji shoves the light bulb into the space, then crouches over and enters. In the naked light, he sees a tiny crowded closet. And in there, another body. Not just another body. The body of the last person who should be there.

They gagged and tied Citrone with steel wire before setting him in the chair. His wrists are fastened with plastic zip-ties.

The girls in the room were shot. Downward through the neck. Like before.

But Citrone is different. No blood, no wounds. His face is bright purple. Or blue. Or both. Then Khafaji notices the scarf around his throat. Silk paisley. Tied tight. He looks down at Citrone's socks. No boots tonight.

Khafaji reaches over to touch the body, but something about it looks wrong. He pulls the lamp closer, but his own body blocks the light. He looks around slowly, sees the car battery. He follows the wires with his eyes, then notices the spot where they coil into Citrone's clothes. Where they appear to enter his torso.

Khafaji jerks back. He looks again, and follows the wires again. Trip wires. Citrone isn't just dead. He's also a weapon. Aimed directly at Khafaji.

Khafaji crawls out of the closet and is halfway down the stairs when he thinks again. Slowly, he walks back to the panel and goes through again. The pockets of Citrone's jacket seem clear. Khafaji reaches in, and his fingers pull out papers. He holds them up to the light. Napkins and used tissues. Khafaji tosses them on the floor. He leans over, this time reaching across Citrone into the pocket on the other side. His fingers fumble around, but he can't feel anything. He leans into Citrone's belly and tries again. He touches a cluster of metal pieces. Khafaji's finger pulls it free and he hears the jangle of keys.

Khafaji crawls backwards then starts moving toward the stairs. He looks at the small pile of evidence bags on the floor but decides to forget about them. When he gets to the bottom of the stairs, he runs into a soldier about to enter the building, and shouts, “Do not go in! There is a bomb!”

Khafaji runs around the house and into the street. The MP sees him and comes over. Khafaji is out of breath and manages only to whisper, “There is a bomb there! Bomb!”

The MP begins barking orders at a man next to him before disappearing behind the villa gates. Khafaji looks around for Ford, but he's nowhere to be seen.

In minutes, the villa is evacuated. Two MPs come running out, latex gloves on their hands, masks over their faces. Soldiers in balaclavas mill around under the floodlights, their weapons on their hips. Khafaji lights a cigarette and starts walking down the street. He walks out of the light, back to where they parked their car. It's gone. The other jeeps are also gone, and so are the flashing lights. The men in blindfolds are gone. In the darkness, he notices the doors to the houses. One after another, all wide open. He gets to the end of the street and starts to walk back. He is fifty yards away when the first explosion hits. In an instant, glass windows turn into bursting rainclouds. And then the big explosion erupts, sending bricks and dust and fire in all directions. Khafaji is thrown to the ground. When he stands up again, he can see the bodies of men who only a minute ago had been standing at the entrance to the villa. Too close. He watches one soldier writhing on the street. He sees the man calling out, and looking around for help. Khafaji strains to hear what he is saying, then realizes there are no sounds, only ringing.

Khafaji dusts himself off and looks at the silent scene around him. He begins to run; he runs until gradually he begins to
hear the world around him. First, his breath and heartbeat. Then the sounds of his shoes on the gravel and concrete. He has run half a mile before he sees flashing blue and red lights, and then he begins to hear sirens, first one, then many. When the first fire trucks appear, he leaps across the trench. He's now out of the American Zone and into the shadows. Khafaji runs and runs until he can't breathe. Hundreds of meters behind him, beyond the half-built wall, and beyond the trenches in the street, a convoy of Bradleys fly past in the dark. Khafaji leans against a wall and he reaches for his Rothmans. His fingers find Citrone's keys instead.

Friday Night–Saturday Morning

5–6 December 2003

The taxi crosses the river twice on the way home, and each time they wait at the checkpoint. Near the new headquarters of the Dawa Party, he gets out. He walks along Abu Nuwas Street, past the new headquarters of the Communist Party and past a shadow of Scheherazade entertaining a shadow of Shahryar. When he comes to the statue of Abu Nuwas, he turns off the street and down to the embankment, flooded in blue light. He sits on a low wall and lights a cigarette. He remembers sitting in the same spot thirty years ago with Suheir and her friends from school. Drinking arak on the grass. How did they keep the ice from melting? He can't remember. He flicks the half-smoked cigarette high into the air and watches it disappear over the embankment below.

He lights another cigarette and stares at the bleak orange lights of the city. The moon is almost full tonight. Its glow is useless against the haze of the city, but beneath it the black water glistens here and there. In the silent shadows, the Tigris becomes an empty flood filling the horizon. Khafaji stares at the river until it becomes a moat. Another line of defense protecting this side of the city from the American encampment in Karkh.

Khafaji leans back on the concrete wall and lets the coldness seep into his bones. He thinks about everything from the last days. And then about nothing at all. Nothing, except for the image of Citrone's body. He tries to forget it by thinking about other images. Or words. He tries, again, to remember something from Nazik. A line. A word. Anything. Eventually he has to admit it's not about poems. It's about his ability to remember. Or his ability to forget.

He closes his eyes. He tries to think of Suheir. He wishes she were with him. He imagines her smiling at him, telling him it will be all right. But the face that appears belongs to Zubeida instead. Khafaji breathes, and suddenly Nazik's words come back to him.
Days pass, extinguished. We do not meet. Not even the folds of a mirage can bring us together. Alone, I nourish my hunger with the footfalls of shadows…

Khafaji smiles to himself.
Something has returned
. The poem's first words.
We do not meet
. He closes his eyes and his body seems to float. By the time he opens his eyes, he's forgotten the lines again. He closes them, but now there is no face smiling back at him.

Exhausted, Khafaji stumbles home. He stops to peel a plastic bag off his shoe. Near the corner of his street, he stubs his toe on a broken sidewalk and almost falls. He pauses to rest his ankle, whispering curses at the dark. It's then that he sees red brake lights snap on and then off. The black Mercedes, parked at the end of his street. The flood of red light sweeps across the black night, falls back across the street. Khafaji freezes and tries to think. When his feet begin moving, it's not because he knows what he's doing. He walks up to the window. He peers inside before the driver knows he's there. The thick-necked man from the university. Zubeida's bodyguard. And before he can do
anything, Khafaji smacks his gun on the window so hard it nearly breaks the glass.

The man doesn't put up a fight when Khafaji demands to go to Zubeida. The man doesn't resist when Khafaji reaches into his jacket and takes his pistol. Khafaji takes the clip out and sticks it in his pocket. He pops the bullet out of the chamber and throws it out the window.

The man doesn't complain when Khafaji holds the .357 revolver on him and tells him to drive him to the professor's house. The man doesn't complain when Khafaji dozes off and drops the gun on the seat.

They drive south, then east. Khafaji wakes up in time to see the last slums of al-Dora. By they time they reach Highway Seven, he's asleep. When he wakes up again, they are speeding down a long dirt road. Khafaji rubs his eyes and tries to get his bearings. On the right, the Tigris flows by so slowly it looks like a lake. The car stops in front of a large gate. The driver rolls down his window, and in the darkness a man steps forward to wave them through. They drive for another minute until a villa appears. At some point, Khafaji remembers his gun and picks it up. He waves the driver out of the car and they begin walking along a gravel path toward the front door, the driver in front, Khafaji behind. In the country, the moon is bright, more blue than white. Here, there are too many stars to count. Here, the cane fields sway dark blue, gray and white. And the wind rustles like a whisper. The same lulling sound that the river makes as it pushes toward the sea. It's all enough to make Khafaji want to go to sleep then and there. The only thing keeping him awake is the crunching sound of pebbles beneath his leather shoes.

When they get to the porch, the bodyguard turns aside. Khafaji tells him to go back to the car, and the man does.
Khafaji is almost at the front door when it opens. A warm yellow light spills like a thick carpet unfurling itself across the ground. Without saying a word, Khafaji walks inside. And there is Zubeida wearing nothing but a house robe and an anxious smile.

She walks toward Khafaji, but he pushes her away. He looks at the gun in his hand, and then again at her. The traces of tears in her eyes make him regret his decision to see her.

“What the hell is going on, Zubeida?”

She stares at Khafaji, but says nothing. He raises his voice. “Citrone's dead – and you need to explain.”

She starts to cry, but this time there are no tears.

Khafaji begins to shout. “Zubeida, Citrone's gone. You've got more dead girls. Now it's time to talk.”