Book of Stolen Tales (40 page)

I could hardly believe it. “Then you've got him for killing Fraser! He admitted it?”

“No. He sidestepped it and I didn't press him. That issue's outside the purview of my job.”

Not mine
, I thought grimly. I couldn't stand the prospect of him getting away with the murders and his treatment of Dina. If Mancini had discovered that the fifth volume was in Iraq, maybe Renwick had too—it made a rough kind of sense. Renwick must have learned the volume was here, hence his visit to Iraq last August. “Why would Bakir be interested in an old Italian book?”

“For a very good reason. He's a world authority on another set of tales,
The Arabian Nights
. Bakir was interested in tracing the tales and believed some of Basile's stories came from
The Nights
and originated in Baghdad.”

“And you know where we can find him? But if Mancini knew who it was, why not get the book back himself?”

“He tried and failed,” Shaheen said. “Since the war started, Assyrians have come under attack. Bakir had to flee with his family and leave behind the collection he'd spent a lifetime assembling. He donated his collection to the national library of Iraq before he left.”

My heart sank. I knew what happened to the library. The volume had probably been destroyed some time ago, if not looted and cast to the four winds. “Did Mancini think Bakir's collection survived?”

“That I don't know. Apparently it had been assigned for safekeeping—to the place I told you about called the House of Wisdom.”

“Okay, pal. I've been patient. Now tell me why the army's involved.”

Shaheen shifted closer in his seat and chugged down some Coke. “We sent two microbiologists named Loretti and Hill to Iraq to search for bioweapon sites. They turned up nothing. Back home they came down with plague-like symptoms. We know they picked up something in Iraq but not where or what caused it. Did they stumble upon a production site or was their illness just a fluke? All we're certain of is they had a number of meetings with Charles Renwick in their off-hours and there are several coincidental links with Renwick's theories about plague and folk tales. The job now is to figure out whether Renwick actually found the location he believed Basile hid in the book and if he told Loretti and Hill.”

“Can't the scientists tell you? Where are they now?”

“Dead. And Loretti's wife's close to dying now too.”

“It's something you can catch then?”

“Looks that way. You can see we've got to get on top of this.”

My skin crawled and I touched my neck gingerly. I'd had direct contact with Alessio
and
with the book. “How long did it take for their symptoms to show up?”

“That we don't know for sure. Loretti and Hill arrived in Iraq last May, shortly after we took control of the country. If the contagion is just some kind of weird virus, they could have picked it up anytime after that. No symptoms showed until a couple of weeks after they'd gone back home.”

I first met Alessio two weeks ago. I tried to reassure myself with the knowledge that the doctor at the Naples hospital gave me a thorough going-over, so surely he would have caught anything serious. “Why include me in all this? That's something you could find out more easily yourself. I know next to nothing about locations in Baghdad, and if you need archaeological advice, any number of experts are better than me.”

“You're more familiar with Renwick's line of thought and the particular role that book has played than anyone else at this point. If we need to fill any gaps in your knowledge, then, as you say, that's easy enough to do. There must be a lot of unemployed museum staff in Baghdad these days.”

I looked out the window at the golden arches with the MacDonald's name in Arabic script underneath. You could travel thousands of miles from home and some things never changed. I decided to trust Shaheen and dropped a present in his lap. “I know what the round stone artifact is. The one stolen from Renwick's shop.”

“Really?”

“It's a spindle weight, believe it or not, called a whorl. It helps moderate the movement of a spindle as fibers are pulled and made into thread. Mesopotamians used them when they wove linen textiles made from flax.”

“So how does this fit in, do you think?”

“If the Babylonians wanted to preserve lethal grains of a virulent strain and keep them perfectly dry, a hollow spindle whorl sealed with pitch on its underside would have done the job nicely.”

Most border crossings have an ugly air about them. Utilitarian buildings, glaring warnings, lines of idling vehicles, drivers cranky from long waits. The Kuwait–Iraq border was even less appealing than most. The buildings were dirty and makeshift and looked as if they'd been damaged in Desert Storm and never repaired. Large signs in Arabic clustered on both sides of the main highway. Other than the buildings, they were the highest objects in sight. Vast stretches of wasted brown soil extended flat out to the horizon. Gas fumes and exhaust from the ranks of trucks and U.S. army vehicles waiting to cross hung in the air. Many were fuel tankers. Ironic that in a country with one of the world's largest supplies of petroleum, fuel had to be trucked in.

The border crossing itself was a breeze thanks to Shaheen's bona fides. We hooked onto the back end of a convoy headed to Baghdad. Much safer traveling in their company.

We spent the early part of the drive debating the various options ahead of us and working out what our first step should be. Later, I found a treasure trove in the back seat. In an old plastic case Shaheen kept a killer CD collection of mostly seventies bands. AC/DC's
Highway to Hell
, the Allman Brothers, Van Halen's debut album, and music by the little alien, the great Joe Satriani. As frosting on the cake, at the very bottom I found Dylan's
Highway 61 Revisited
. More or less the perfect choice for the road we now traveled on.

Cranking Shaheen's boombox up to full throttle, we sailed through the brown wastelands, getting high on the music. By the time we reached the outskirts of Baghdad we were both in great moods.

Reality hit home at the first checkpoint, a mountain of sandbags and lines of orange cones. Gun turrets swiveled toward us on two Bradley fighting vehicles. Soldiers took long hard looks at our Jeep. Shaheen held up his ID. They gave it a thorough scan and waved us on.

“Damn dangerous road we're headed down,” Shaheen said. “Although take your pick. They're all bad.”

He stopped talking and sped up. His head turned ever so slightly as he glanced rapidly to the right and left. As fast as our vehicle was going, a black Ford SUV overtook us. All four men inside carried weapons and wore flak jackets and wraparound sunglasses.

Farther along an Iraqi man and his wife stood at the side of the road next to a cart heaped with melons for sale. The SUV slowed. One of the men stuck his M1 out the window and yelled,
“Imshl, Imshl!”
He shot at the cart. It exploded, showering the couple with wood splinters and red melon pulp and rinds. The woman shrieked then stumbled and fell. Her husband struggled to lift her up.

“Assholes,” Shaheen said over his shoulder.

“Who are those guys?”

“Mercenaries from Sierra Leone or some other goddamned place. More and more of ‘em flooding in here every day. Makes it hell for the rest of us.”

It felt bizarre to be back in the city with its frenetic traffic and blasted-out holes where buildings used to be, people passing by the craters as though they'd always been part of the streetscape. I'd spent some of the worst moments in my life here, but I'd also come to appreciate why my brother loved it so.

Our destination, the Palestine Hotel, was a monotonous eighteen-story slab with a colonnade of salmon-colored arches at ground level. The parking lot looked like a Saturday-morning flea market. Dilapidated cars crowded the lot with trunks full of used CDs, DVDs, and cellphones, useless now that most electric circuits in Baghdad were dead. Open side doors on vans revealed boxes of chocolate bars and soda. Some vendors threw carpets onto the asphalt and set cardboard boxes on top with huge pear-shaped bunches of fresh dates. Two green donkey carts piled high with more fruit stood off to one side. They looked like miniature gypsy caravans on truck wheels. One of the mules brayed loudly and a boy in a long white
dishdasha
standing between the animals jerked hard on its tether to quiet it.

The hotel lobby was packed. Sweaty-faced cameramen lounged next to piles of equipment; hotel staff scurried by with messages on trays and mounds of luggage. A woman journalist in D&G sunglasses, a tight-fitting tank top, and jeans held out a mike to some military honcho.

We registered and went into the hotel restaurant. I would have sold my soul for a steak and salad. On the limited menu were hardboiled eggs, dried figs, and a bowl of lukewarm goat stew. Shaheen tucked in with appetite after our food was served.

“Do you know what the world's oldest recipe is? It's on a tablet.”

“No idea,” he said with his mouth full.

“You mix up snake skin, plums, and beer then cook it.”

“Sounds wonderful.”

“It's got all the key nutrients.”

Shaheen chuckled between forkfuls. “Not on this menu though,” he said. “Wonder why.”

After leaving the restaurant we went up to our room on the top floor. A room like this was a luxury in Baghdad. It had twin beds and a colorless shag carpet. Shaheen flopped down on the right-hand bed and waved toward his pack. “We probably can't get TV reception. Help yourself. There are some great X-rated movies in there. One of ‘em's got a chick with a rack the size of two water-melons. And you should see what she can do with—”

“Have to check it out for sure,” I laughed.

I was hot and dusty from the long trip. I went into the bathroom for a wash and ran my fingers through my hair. When I opened the bathroom door, Shaheen had the window curtain pulled back and the balcony door partly propped open.

“You like the view that much?” I joked.

Shaheen motioned for silence and peered out the window. “Shit!”

He dove toward me, crashing me backward into the bathroom. I had no time to defend myself and cracked into the side of the tub. Shaheen kicked the bathroom door shut.

A thud followed by the rapid shattering of glass and the room exploded. The force of the blast blew the bathroom door offits hinges, bringing with it missiles of scorched plaster and flaming carpet. Shaheen soaked a towel and shouted at me to put it over my mouth and nose. I grabbed my pack as we fled the room, hacking on the toxic smoke flooding into the hallway.

Forty-One

December 4, 2003

Baghdad, Iraq

S
haheen's sharp eye saved us. As he looked down from the hotel balcony at the parking lot, he'd noticed the boy tending the donkeys had vanished. No one in Iraq left their goods untended. The merchants selling their wares scattered rapidly too, overturning baskets of vegetables and knocking piles of CDs to the ground. The blast had two immediate consequences. It delayed our plans by a day and changed my opinion of Nick Shaheen for the better.

Once we settled at another hotel I set about locating the House of Wisdom. One of the staff working at the museum knew my brother and laughed when I asked him about it. “You're about twelve hundred years too late,” he said. “Mongols destroyed it when they attacked Baghdad. Some walls still exist. It's adjacent to the national library.”

At the same time, Shaheen focused on the scientists' activities outside their regular work hours. He took me with him to see the woman in charge of Loretti and Hill's security detail to fill in the gaps.

“She's waiting for us in the Green Zone—ever been there?” Shaheen asked.

“Nope.”

“It's sort of like Valhalla dropped into the middle of Purgatory. If there's time we can have drinks with a few party girls around Saddam's palace pool.”

I didn't hate the sound of that. Maybe this would end well after all.