Jihadi (19 page)

Nine Bearded Glarers were selected at some point as Abu Islam’s bodyguards and advisers. Discreetly, they located the necessary pills and liquor to support his work, citing among themselves an obscure ruling about the demands of necessity in wartime.

No one was quite sure where they came from, but evidently the New Imam approved of them. They constituted an inner circle that gave the appearance of having been in place for months or years, surrounding their man in perpetual shifts of three and providing brisk, elaborately polite clarifications to curious members of the congregation on such issues as access to the New Imam (none was available at present), the status of the New Imam’s family (they were well), and what should be said or done concerning inquisitive members of the congregation who appeared to be, and in fact were, spies (their names, whereabouts and images, if known or possessed, should be forwarded directly to the bodyguards of the New Imam). They settled disagreements in his name and forwarded all their decisions to him. Some of them he reversed. Most of them he let stand.

(After his commanding officer casually mentioned the possibility of an accident befalling someone, but before the accident actually took place, Mike Mazzoni made certain remarks to Jamal. He made them while holding Jamal face-down on the ground and digging one knee into his back. Jamal, his mouth duct-taped, did not respond intelligibly at any point.)

Jimmy. Let me bring you up to date. Everything out here is legal until I say otherwise. Nothing spots what you’re doing out here but me and this sky. (Here Jamal’s face tilted up wildly to embrace the sky of the Islamic Republic.)

Does that sky look like it has a problem? (And plunged back down into the dust.)

Rule number one under this particular sky: Don’t be the bait dog. That’s a dog you draw blood from on purpose, Jimmy. You tie that dog down, pull out your pocket knife, dig a hole clean through his paw, let him start bleeding. You want that scent of blood in the air.

You want him bleeding all over the goddamned ring. Because that’s how you train the good dogs. By rewarding them for killing the dog that’s bleeding. That bait dog is going to die anyway, Jimmy. So sick and thin and scared and screwed up he won’t last a week out on the street. You know it just from looking at him. And that little pussy dog knows it, too.

So you do that dog a favour. You get it over with tonight. And that dog becomes your bait. You throw a big glass jar on that bait dog’s head. That way he can’t defend himself and it’s all over a hell of a lot quicker.

He is checking out tonight, Jimmy, and he knows it.

So you throw him into the fighting cage with a real dog, and you watch your serious fucking gladiator dog get to work on that bait dog wearing the suicide jar. You watch your gladiator tear that bait dog to shreds. Then you give your gladiator the raw steak.

Start off with two dogs in a cage, end up with one dog who knows how to win you money. That other dog died for the cause. The dog who dies for the cause is always the bait dog. Now, I may be a dog, Jimmy, but I am nobody’s goddamned bait dog. I am a fighting dog, and I may or may not make it home, but I will run with the fighting dogs while I’m here. I know I will never have that jar over my fucking head. And Jimmy, you know you will.

(And Jamal saw a handgun.)

Becky Firestone refused to tolerate being at a disadvantage in any undertaking. She equated that with betrayal, with personal disrespect, with a certain unacceptable loss of control.

The dead guy telling this story knew this trait of hers first hand. He had built his career on its back.

There came a time when this non-negotiable thirst for primacy of hers was no longer necessarily operating in his favour – a time when, to the contrary, he was rather inclined to conclude that it meant he wasn’t getting out of here alive. Becky had refused to remain at a disadvantage in an important conversation. She had resumed control of that conversation by drawing a line, a line that excluded him forever.

Once he knew for sure he was on the wrong side of that line, once he knew he was never, ever coming back again, he began to work on this book. He began to pray it might not be destroyed. Might repay a debt. Might get him out of here safely. Get him home.

He owed Becky so much.

The blisters on her hand wept raw blood. She opened the door to the shed.

You might wonder why someone like Fatima, who had been
subjected to such degrading treatment, would agree so readily to work on behalf of the Islamic Republic’s security network. Why she would help to identify subversives plotting to overthrow a government that colluded in the death of her sister. Why she didn’t agitate online to dismantle certain native institutions she knew to be corrupt, or organize a group of protesters to gather in front of the BII building, where she had been attacked and verbally abused, or create a movement demanding, say, the suspension of the country’s constitution.

The reason she did none of these things was this: She held firmly to the rope of the Koran and the Sunnah, the traditions and the teachings, of the Prophet of Islam. These hold that even a tyrannical government is preferable to no government. And no government whatsoever – she had sensed during that protest – was what lay ahead.

‘The best scholarship,’ Fatima had once written in her diary, ‘has insisted for fourteen centuries that dismantling an established ruling governmental authority is a major sin unless certain clear conditions exist. These are: ejection of the Muslims from their homes; violation, destruction or shutting-down of the mosques; or a just ruling declaring a state of war from the legitimate leader of the Muslim community. These conditions do not obtain here.’

Meaning: Fatima herself was safe in a new home.

Meaning: The mosques were open to her.

Meaning: There
was
no legitimate leader of the Muslim community. The prime minister, installed by the Americans and promptly ratified by a close but vaguely plausible popular vote, was an ancient secularist. He had not, so far as anyone could tell, mentioned the Koran in public at any point in his career. Neither, for that matter, had Ra’id, his son. Whether these were the men she would have first chosen to obey, whether they had been selected by a process she would have endorsed, was irrelevant. They were the country’s leaders and were accepted as such by a clear if distracted majority of its people.

So: None of the three necessary preconditions for revolution now existed within the Islamic Republic. Even on those days when its leaders did the bidding of the Americans, even when it was feckless or corrupt, even when it imprisoned and abused its opponents, the government served a purpose. It registered vehicles, prevented looting and offered occasional imitations of pension management, road maintenance, criminal justice and garbage collection. It ensured a certain essential social order. It was
regarded
as the government. That was a blessing. If the present regime had accepted too many bales of hundred-dollar bills, bought off too many imams, promoted too many incompetents, well, these were points justifying discussion and reform, not points justifying anarchy. Anarchy was, quite literally, a sin.

She had helped to organize the protest after Wafa’s death because she wanted to ensure that such an attack never happened again – not because she wanted the skullcap-clad freaks who shouted bilge in the streets running the country.

And now it seemed there were dozens of them: self-proclaimed scholars with no credentials beyond their own grievances. They pronounced the necessity of the overthrow of the government and all manner of similar nonsense, as though compliance with their every shouted syllable were some religious duty.

Duty could never be so wild-eyed, so desperate, but were there so many people who imagined obeying those rantings to be a duty? That would make the place unliveable. Those grave doubts of hers about the wisdom of living in the city had only deepened since the demonstration. Now she was free of it, praise God, and in no danger, Godwilling, of ever having to return.

Barring brief trips for work, of course.

Ra’id had promised to send her a driver.

She would pass these so-called Islamic revolutionaries in the streets, then. In a limousine. Watch them through a window. Lock them out. Stay off their corners. That was where they issued their so-called rulings. In the street.

The very sight of them made her livid. For years, whenever she
had been obliged to walk near them, seen their long robes and their dead eyes, heard their shouting, she had always kept a wary distance and walked a little faster. Like that heavyset woman who had tried to make such a commotion in front of the embassy.

Fatima never said so out loud, but she trusted these revolutionists even less than she trusted the fools who had launched the lethal attack on her sister’s village. The revolutionists who blew themselves up, who told others to do so, who called for the dismantling of the government in the name of Islam, had no excuse for their excesses. They knew, had to know, that Islam means knowing when to stop. Such knowledge carries responsibility. These people were accountable to God to identify, uphold and model civilized behaviour. Instead, they took Islam, turned it inside out and left it on the pavement like a dead glove with its seams showing. As though Islam meant
never
knowing when to stop, as though it were nothing but a groping backwards in the darkness, naked, forever. The revolutionists were the worst.

They had a thousand schools, ten thousand grievances, a hundred thousand gory personal traumas. They claimed to pursue the same political goal – the Caliphate – but were famously incapable of finding common ground with each other. Their final, unifying theology was
dispute
. Beyond that, they agreed only on the perversions of the faith that the foreigners noticed: suicide, violence, intolerance, barbarity, hatred. They were spiritually dead. Worse than corpses in fact. Zombies.

Fatima wanted the Americans out of her country, but she wanted the zombies out, too. She was more than content to identify troublemakers for the government, because a nation of zombies was too terrifying to consider.

In the shed, with the door left open for light, Fatima replaced the machete, examined the gleaming, green-streaked blade as it hung on its nail on the wall. Such an edge should not be allowed to become dull.

She resolved to sharpen it.

Wafa must have left a whetstone around here somewhere.

Jahannum: a busy place.

The conflict consumed, as its primary fuel source, the innocence of young people. On any given day during the government’s ongoing campaign against the insurgents, Indelible treated between a hundred and a hundred and fifty children whose parents had been killed, maimed, imprisoned or driven insane by one side or the other. He had his own opinions as to which side bore the greatest responsibility for this sea of wounded bodies and wounded minds. Mostly, he kept those opinions to himself.

The children Indelible treated at Jahannum presented with typhus, with malnutrition, with exposure, with shock, with anaemia, with various infectious skin diseases, with wounds accumulated in crossfire, with psychological disorders of unknown nature and indefinite duration. All but the most recently admitted of the children called him by the name Doctor Indelible, which was a kind of pleasant tongue twister in the native language. It could be mastered after a few tries. Even the most dazed survivor, upon meeting him, could eventually be made to laugh while trying to pronounce it for the first time. Doctor Indelible was the only name he liked.

Although he was not present for the fitting, the dead guy sharing this story insists that, on the day Doctor Indelible returned to work, a graduate of Jahannum – an eight-year-old with severe scarring on his arms, a boy with whom the Doctor had no relationship whatsoever – was two miles away. He was being measured for a suicide vest.

The next morning, Thelonius hobbled to the window hoping for a glimpse of the sun, but found only a throng of darkening clouds and an English translation of the Koran on the sill.

‘How the hell did this get here?’

The Raisin did not look up from the prayer beads. Thelonius felt his teeth grinding, stopped them with an effort.

‘I will not open that book, you know. It’s an abomination. Good for crowd control, though. I will say that.’

‘As you say. You speak with the confidence of a scholar.’

Thelonius heard chanting from the direction of the embassy.