The Ambassador's Wife (7 page)

Instantaneously the women scramble to their feet, stuffing everything haphazardly back into their packs without speaking. They have all made the same assumption; they are trespassing and the man and his posse want them off of his land. Miranda looks up for Mukhtar. He will know what to do. The others are starting down an incline to the dusty trail, moving as fast as they can. But Mukhtar is frantically waving her back.

“We can't go,” Miranda calls, interpreting her bodyguard's gestures. “They want us to go up there.” More men have appeared now, spreading across the ridge.

The other women stare at her but quickly realize they have no choice. While it is counterintuitive to walk toward a group of men pointing guns to their heads, they cannot outrun bullets. Slowly, her heart shuddering through her rib cage with each beat, Miranda climbs toward the men. Perhaps Mukhtar has sorted something out. Some kind of agreement. They could just apologize and promise never to walk here again.

But when they reach the group of men, it doesn't look that way. Mukhtar is arguing with the turbaned man, who is the obvious leader of the group, and the others join in, everyone talking at once. The old man has seated himself on a rock, clutching his rifle with two hands like a walking stick. He is small, with a faceful of concentric wrinkles.

“They think you are all spies,” Mukhtar tells Miranda. “And that you are here to look for treasure on their land. To look for gold.”

“Gold?” echoes Miranda. “There is gold here?” Surely a country this poor didn't have secret reserves of gold.

“I told them you were all doctors,” Mukhtar continues. “French doctors. But they want to know why you have a guard. Doctors don't usually have guards.”

“What did you say?” Mukhtar would not have told them he was a guard. But it is fairly obvious. His fatigues, the heavy pack, the suspicious
bulges under his shirt. The fact that he is the only Mazrooqi man with a group of foreign women.

“That your company requires you to have a guard.”

Miranda hardly has time to assess the situation before Mukhtar takes her arm and leads her directly toward the old man on the rock. “Mira, let me introduce you,” he says. Mukhtar is the only one of the guards who calls her Mira, mimicking Finn. He knows she speaks some Arabic. This is his attempt to humanize me, she thinks. She has no time to become nervous.

“Salaam aleikum,”
she says, looking the old man in the eyes. He won't look back at her. His greenish eyes are hard and remote, trained on the air above her right shoulder. He does not return her greeting. The silence closes cold fingers around her heart. Never, since she arrived in this country, has anyone ever failed to respond to this greeting with
“aleikum salaam.”
Every Arab knows that a person who refuses to return this greeting intends harm.

“She said
‘salaam aleikum'
to you,” Mukhtar prompts the silent old man in Arabic. “Respond to her. Show some respect.”

Avoiding the sheikh's eyes, Miranda stares at the gold paisleys on his turban.
Paisleys
. Which she associates with hippies, with peace. The old man mumbles something under his breath, clinging tightly to his gun. The countryside around her falls away. The rocky hills, the puffs of dust rising from the trails, the spiky shoots of aloe plants fade from her periphery. There is only this man before her.

“Kayf halak?”
Miranda continues. How are you? No response. “I am a friend,” she tells him in Arabic. “I want no problems.”

“She's a
woman
,” says Mukhtar, just in case the man has missed this fact. She is, after all, dressed in men's clothing, with the baseball cap covering her hair.

Their entreaties are ignored. When Miranda looks again in the man's eyes, her fear grows. His eyes absorb nothing; he cannot
see
her. They are the blind, decided eyes of a lunatic set on an irrevocable path. Miranda is not a woman to him. She is not even human.

The man begins shouting at Mukhtar again, and Miranda cannot understand what he is saying. As Mukhtar murmurs placatingly, she looks around for the other women. They are huddled a bit farther
down the hill, inching away from the confrontation. A willowy young man, not more than eighteen, stands next to the sheikh, his AK-47 pointed at their heads. Slowly, Miranda steps away from Mukhtar and the men, toward the women.

“We're all French,” Doortje whispers to her. The two women had tried to pick a benign nationality, a country less hated than America. A language they all spoke.

“That's what Mukhtar told them,” said Miranda. “Thank god.”

She keeps her eyes on the men and their guns. There are a dozen of them now, all in white
thobes
, like angels in a school Christmas pageant. Bloodthirsty angels. She counts them again. There is one on the ridge above, one standing protectively at the sheikh's shoulder, five in a knot at the top of the hill engaged in fierce debate, and five arranged around the periphery like the points of a star.

She cannot make sense of the situation. What do the men want? Surely they don't want to kill them for trespassing? Do they really think they are spies? Will they search them? And when they find nothing, will they let them go? Or are they among the fanatics who loathe all Westerners and want them dead? Is this what happened to the group kidnapped up north? The whole thing is surreal. Is it possible that all these men want are government concessions of some kind? A few tribesmen sprung from jail? Or are these men—at least their leader—simply crazy? Crazy men with guns. The thought is not comforting.

We still have phones, she realizes. She can call Finn, if she can get a signal out here. She has no idea what he can do to help, but she has to let him know what is happening. She puts her hand into her front pocket, searching for her phone. But it is gone. “My phone,” she says aloud. “My phone is gone.” She must have dropped it near the old man, but she is not eager to return to him to search for it.

She stands there thinking what a ridiculous way this would be to die. To be shot—on purpose or even accidentally, given the very casual way the men are handling their weapons—by crazy men who think they are spies. The thought that her selfish desire for exercise and fresh air could deprive Cressida of a mother and Finn of a wife nauseates her. How could she have been so careless with her life, with
theirs? It was all well and good to be bold and free when she was single, but now there are people who need her, people for whom she is responsible.

These thoughts take less than a millisecond to fly through her mind while she searches all her pockets again for her phone. The other two women stand close, cracking nervous jokes. Neither is panicking, no one is in tears.

Mukhtar is suddenly at her side. “They want you to walk toward that house,” he says, pointing to a stone structure across the valley.

“No,” Miranda says reflexively. “Not into a house.” For some reason she feels that would be the end of them, to enter an enclosed structure. As long as they stay outside, there are escape routes. Still, inspired by the approach of several rifle barrels, the three women begin to slowly shuffle in the direction indicated.

Miranda's hands continue to fruitlessly search her pockets.

“Here,” whispers Doortje. “Use mine.” She slips Miranda her phone. Turning away from their captors, Miranda flips it open. Thank god she has memorized Finn's number. With shaking fingers, she dials.
Please pick up
, she silently pleads.
Please pick up
. It isn't easy to reach him during the workday. He is often in meetings, and his cell phone doesn't work in the embassy.

But Finn answers immediately. “Sweetheart?” she says, weak with relief. “We're in trouble.”

“What's happened?” His voice is steady and alert.

“There are men with guns who have us, they are trying to corral us somewhere—” She struggles to string words together in a way that makes sense.

“Where are you?”

She turns to Kaia. “Do you know where we are?”

Kaia takes the phone and gives Finn directions to the beginning of their hike. But they have been walking into the mountains for more than two hours, and they don't know exactly where they are. Finn asks to speak with Mukhtar. Miranda looks up. Mukhtar is still arguing with the men. She isn't sure she should interrupt. “We'll call you back,” she tells Finn.

“I'm ringing the Minister of the Interior,” he says. “We'll find
you. Tucker knows your route.” How could Miranda allow herself to become hysterical when he is so calm? It's as if she has called to give him the weather report or ask what he would like for dinner. Just hearing his voice steadies her.

The tallest man in white moves slowly down the ridge toward them, never lowering his weapon. Mukhtar leaves the group of men and joins them.

“Do not worry, Miranda,” he says cheerfully. “You will be okay. You will be okay even if I have to give my life.”

“Thank you, Mukhtar, but I hope that is not necessary.” Miranda smiles at him. “Would you talk with Finn?” She hits redial and hands him the phone.

A shot suddenly explodes the air by her head. Miranda didn't see who fired it or from what direction it came. But she is facing Mukhtar, and she sees the expression of surprise on his face as a red bloom spreads across his cheek. His ear is gone, the phone gone. Slowly, with a helpless look at Miranda, he crumples to the ground. She stares at him in horror.

“Yalla!”
a man yells at them. The man in white is behind them now, indicating with his rifle the direction they are to walk.
“Yalla, ilal bait,”
he says. Miranda cannot move her legs. Her knees fold beneath her and she reaches for Mukhtar, touching his face. His cheek is damp and warm.
“Sadeeqee,”
she says. My friend.

JANUARY 2007

Miranda

Struggling with several bags of produce, she had turned a corner onto a nameless cobblestone street of the Old City as twilight approached and nearly knocked Finn over. He was just standing there, a still island in the river of humanity swirling past him, conversing with a Mazrooqi in fatigues. Small boys steered their wheelbarrows of mangoes around him with snorts of annoyance and shadowy women shrank toward the limestone walls of the surrounding houses. In a city of white-robed men, he wore a navy pin-striped suit with a sunflower tie. He was hard to miss.

Miranda had been walking with her eyes to the ground, both to avoid the gaze of the men and to keep from breaking an ankle on the uneven stones. The five plastic bags she was carrying, bulging with the heavy orbs of pomegranates, onions, tomatoes, and oranges, had started to cut into the skin of her wrists, and she was eager to get home.

Just in time she saw Finn in her path, though one of her bags, carried forward by momentum, swung wide and hit him in the leg, causing the man next to him to jump and fidget with something underneath his jacket.

“So sorry,” she said, curious as to who would choose to shop the Old City markets in a pin-striped suit. “I hope you don't bruise easily.”

He laughed. “Actually, I get lost easily, which is why I'm standing
in your way. Do you have any idea where I might find the silver souq? I'm looking for a gift.” He spoke in English.
English
English, though she thought he'd been speaking Arabic with the man beside him when she socked him with a pomegranate.

“It's kind of impossible to give you directions. There aren't any street names.” He looked disappointed. “But I could show you? If you're willing to follow me into the labyrinth?”

“Only if you promise to lead me back out again.”

“Call me Ariadne.”

“Somehow that's not entirely reassuring.”

“Theseus made it out okay.”

“But he was such a horrid man in the end. It always made me sad, that story.”

It made him
sad
? Greek myths made him
sad
? What kind of man goes around confessing something like that? She liked him already.

Miranda glanced at the Mazrooqi man standing at Finn's left shoulder, who was frowning at her. The intensity of his gaze sent a slight shiver down her back.

“Was I interrupting? You were talking—”

“Oh no, Mukhtar is just…He's…Well, we have plenty of time to talk. Don't worry about him.”

Miranda shifted the bags in her hands and took a step forward. “This way.” For a moment they walked in silence, Miranda aware of Mukhtar's presence just behind them.

“Forgive my rudeness,” he finally said. “I'm Finn.”

“Miranda. Tour guide to the stars.”

He smiled. “I'm hardly a star.”

“Normal people don't walk around with a bodyguard. Even here.”

“Um,
bodyguards
, actually. I think I've got ten with me today.”

Miranda glanced around them, but Mukhtar was the only one she could identify. “They must be good,” she said.

“Oh, they are.”

Miranda turned to study him for a moment. Curly, honey-brown hair, hazel eyes, dimples in both cheeks. “So. Do-gooder film actor, Russian oligarch, or the foreign minister of a Western country?”

“Nothing so thrilling, I'm afraid.”

Miranda waited for a moment, but he didn't say anything more. “Come on, you're really not going to tell me?”

“And lose my air of mystery? Never.”

“Do you want to actually get to the silver souq, or be left to wander a maze of twisty little passages until the end of time?”

He paused to consider this. “I'm just trying to avoid being written off as boring and stuffy before we've had a chance to talk.”

“You have your chance to talk right now. I'll give you until we find your gift, but I'm not leading you home until you tell me who you are.”

“Done. That is, if you'll do the same.”

“The same?”

“Tell me who you are.”

She smiled. “I don't want to be written off as Bohemian and flaky before we've had a chance to talk.”

“Fair enough. So. Talk.”

She took him the long way. The streets of the Old City were such a maze that he'd never know. She just didn't want the conversation to be over. Her bags were no longer heavy and her exhaustion had lifted, leaving her buoyant and breezy.

“Did you know that the entire Old City is carved out of the same chunk of rock? If you were a giant you could just pick the whole thing up and use it as a centerpiece for your dining room table.”

“Or a playhouse for the kids.”

“More like a play city.”

“I wonder how long it took them. To chisel every one of these.” Finn reached out to touch the cold wall next to him. On every side rose similar buildings, tall and immovable.

“Generations. Generations of people who didn't feel the need to see it finished in their lifetime.”

“How did we lose that kind of patience, I wonder.”

Miranda shrugged. “That's one reason I loathe modern architecture. So rushed. It's all gone downhill since the Romans, in my opinion. I look at this, this million-year-old
sculpture
of a city, and then look at the new condominiums and McMansions outside of town and I think, This is
progress
?”

“I take it you like it here.”

“This city has ensorcelled me. So much that I don't seem to be able to leave.” What could possibly lure her from a home in a living work of art? She was in awe of a culture that could create this. Mazrooq had its flaws, but it had created this—and preserved it.

“You have rather old-fashioned tastes.”

“Medieval,” she agreed. “Though not when it comes to politics.”

“What politics would those be?”

“Surely you don't want to ruin the afternoon?”

As they walked, Miranda greeted several people she knew: neighbors, grocers, professors from the local university.

“You've obviously lived here awhile.”

“Nearly three years.”

“On your own?”

“Not even a single bodyguard.”

“Very brave.”

“I'm very unimportant.”

“You must be important to someone.”

“Not anymore.” Not since Vícenta left, not really.

So engrossed was she in talking with Finn that it took her half a dozen turns before she realized that she kept seeing the same men at intersections. They wore no uniform but were all in pants and long-sleeved shirts and jackets, not the traditional
thobe
, and they carried suspiciously bulky backpacks. A few stayed ahead of them, sometimes just a few steps ahead, and sometimes they would vanish into the crowd only to reappear at the next turning. Since she was leading Finn, she wondered how they knew where she was going. Mukhtar stayed by Finn's side the entire time. Several others seemed to be following them. She admired the grace of their choreography.

When they ducked into Miranda's favorite stall in the silver souq, Finn took over, chatting easily and fluently in Arabic with the diminutive shopkeeper, asking questions about the jewelry, the city, the weather. He looked oversized in the tiny, dark stall, having to fold himself nearly in half to avoid knocking his head on the ceiling. Miranda marveled at his ability to charm, even from this awkward
posture; after a few minutes the shopkeeper dove through a curtain of jangling plastic beads into the back room and emerged with two small glasses of tea and a plate of cookies. “You seem at home here,” she said, sipping her tea.

Finn smiled, fingering a string of beads. “I'm at home everywhere.”

After she had helped him pick out a silver-and-coral necklace and matching earrings for his aunt, he asked where she lived. She gestured through a stone arch, down a narrow alley in the general direction of her house. “You take a left there, then veer right at the bakery, take two more lefts, a right, and then at the square with the best
fasooleah
in town, you turn left again and go straight until you see the blue gate with the bougainvillea climbing over it. You're welcome to come along for tea.”

She hadn't meant to invite him home, but the words slipped out. Could you even invite a man with ten bodyguards home for tea? She wasn't sure. Would they all come too? She would need a bigger teapot.

“I'm afraid I can't. I've got a national day of some sort tonight that I am afraid I can't get out of. Perhaps another time? Look.” He searched his coat pockets. “Here's my card. I've only been here a week, so I'm sure there's plenty more you could tell me. You are, after all, the only person who has managed to infiltrate my security team to get close enough to wound me.”

“I didn't wound you; the pomegranate did. You know weapons aren't properly regulated here. Besides, you aren't limping.”

“I'm limping on the inside. I'd better be off; the guys are starting to get twitchy.” He gave her his hand, warm, thin-fingered, and dry, and vanished into the crowd.

Miranda looked down at the card in her hand.
FINN FENWICK, BRITISH AMBASSADOR
.

N
O ONE WAS
home when she got there. “Madina?” she called. “Mosi?” Nothing. No one. Good. She put on the teakettle and tipped her bags of produce out onto the counter. The pomegranates were fat and yellow, a shiny blush of pink staining their sides. She rolled one
under her palm, feeling the nubs of seeds pushing through the skin. If Madina were home, she would be tempted to tell her about Finn, and Miranda wanted to keep him all to herself for a little while longer.

Ever since Vícenta left, her home had become a kind of hostel for lost and wandering souls. She didn't plan it that way. She had always loved living alone; she wasn't looking for housemates. They just kind of showed up, like stray kittens. Now she can't imagine life without friends wandering in and out of her house all day and night.

She had met Madina at the gym. It was a women's gym up in the ritzier part of town, and it was Miranda's first (and last) visit. Gyms hadn't exactly caught on in this country, and the few that existed outside of the luxury hotels were minimally equipped. She had tried the bicycle and the rowing machines, both of which were broken, before ending up on one of the two treadmills. They were the only things in the gym that worked, aside from a vibrating platform that one of the staff members told her would jiggle off fat.

She was mid-run, watching with great interest a heavy woman standing on the platform, the folds of her thighs flapping up and down as it vibrated, when Madina climbed onto the treadmill opposite. Even had she not been directly in Miranda's line of vision, she would have been hard to miss. Her thick black hair wasn't covered but pulled back in a ponytail. She was very dark, espresso rather than cappuccino, with dramatic cheekbones and enormous eyes. She was beautiful. But that wasn't the first thing Miranda noticed. No, the first thing she noticed was that the girl was wearing a form-fitting black T-shirt emblazoned with the words I AM A VIRGIN (this is an old T-shirt) in white. Which isn't something you see every day on the streets of this or any other Muslim city.

She spoke to Miranda first. “How do you work this thing?” she said in flawless English. “I don't really do exercise.”

“You're at a gym,” Miranda pointed out. “Exercise is kind of what it's
about
. That platform aside,” she said, waving at the vibrating woman.

The girl laughed. “I thought maybe it would be a good place to meet some girls. I don't know anyone.” Miranda briefly recalled a
time when she too visited gyms in the hopes of meeting girls but suspected this girl's intentions were less salacious. Still, you never knew.

Panting slightly (the city was eight thousand feet above sea level, so even minimal exertion resulted in panting), Miranda told her how to set the controls on her machine and introduced herself.

“Madina,” the girl said. “As in the Arabic word for city.”

She was nineteen and had arrived just nine days ago from her home in Kenya, where she lived with her Somali mother and Italian father. At the moment she was renting a room from a family in the Old City, but living with Mazrooqis was cramping her style. “I just want to have some fun,” she said. Which wasn't the usual reason people come to Mazrooq. But, she quickly added, “I also came to learn a little more about Islam. Or at least that's how I convinced my parents.” She had started attending classes at a local university, which already bored her. “The teachers are kind of a pain. So serious! And what's with all the black? At least we African Muslims have a bit of style. As long as we cover our hair it doesn't matter what color we wear.”

She spoke like an American teenager, though she had never lived outside of Africa. She spoke Swahili, Somali, Italian, Arabic, and English, all fluently. Which made Miranda feel rather half-witted for knowing only English, French, and basic Arabic. Americans were so pathetic about languages.

They left the gym together, Madina's scandalous T-shirt now hidden under the voluminous folds of an
abaya
, and Miranda scribbled down her phone number and rough directions to her house. Without street names in the Old City, you had to use the ubiquitous mosques as guideposts.

Two days later she came home from the swimming pool at the InterContinental to find a note from Mosi, a Kenyan friend who worked for the Ministry of Education and who had moved in soon after Vícenta left. “Just to let you know, we seem to have acquired a cat,” he wrote, “and a teenage daughter.”

Madina had discovered the white fluff ball of a kitten limping on the streets outside of their house. “She's little,” she pleaded to
Miranda. “She won't take up too much space.” The kitten was small enough to fit in the center of Madina's dusky palm.