The Sirens of Baghdad (18 page)

“Nothing. All I do is go in circles.”

“I see. Look, I don’t have to tell you, you can always count on me. If you want, I could talk to my boss again. We might be able to work something out.”

“You wouldn’t be thinking about paying a visit to Kafr Karam, would you? I’ve got a little money I want to send to my family.”

“Not anytime soon. Why don’t you just go back home—I mean, if you think there’s nothing for you in Baghdad?”

Omar was trying to sound me out. He was dying to know whether he could bring up certain delicate subjects again without making me mad. What he read in my face made him recoil. He lifted up his hands and said in a conciliatory voice, “It was just a question, that’s all.”

According to my watch, it was a quarter past three. “I have to go back,” I said.

“Is it far?”

“A fair distance.”

“I could give you a ride. You want? My van’s in the square, close by.”

“No, I don’t want to trouble you.”

“You won’t be troubling me, cousin. I’ve just dropped off a sideboard, and now I’ve got nothing else to do.”

“Well, I’m warning you, it’s ’way out of your way. You’re going to have to go the long way around.”

“I’ve got plenty of gas.”

He downed his lemonade in one swallow and signaled to the cashier not to let me pay. “Put this on my tab, Saad.”

The cashier refused my money and jotted down the amount of the check on a piece of paper, next to Omar’s name.

Night was starting to fall. The last glints of the sun splashed the upper stories of buildings. The noises of the street subsided. The day had been a rough one: three attacks in the city center and a skirmish around a suburban church.

We were in Tariq’s house. He, Yaseen, Salah, and Hassan had shut themselves up in a room on the second floor, no doubt refining the plans for the next operation. Hussein and I weren’t invited to the meeting. Hussein pretended not to care about this slight, but I sensed that it had stung him. As for me, I was beside myself, and like Hussein, I brooded over my anger in silence.

The upstairs door creaked, and a babble of conversation signaled the end of the conference. Salah came down first. He’d changed a great deal. He was enormous, with a mug like a bouncer and hairy fists constantly clenched, as if he were strangling a snake. Everything in him seemed to be boiling, like the inside of a volcano. He seldom spoke, never gave an opinion, and maintained his distance from the others. All his attention was focused on Yaseen, from whom he was inseparable. When we saw each other for the first time since Kafr Karam, Salah hadn’t even greeted me.

Yaseen, Hassan, and Tariq stopped and chatted for a while at the top of the stairs before coming down to join us. Their faces expressed neither tension nor enthusiasm. They all sat on the padded bench facing us. With great reluctance, Hussein picked up the remote control that was lying on the floor at his feet and turned off the little set.

Yaseen asked him, “You burned up the engine on that car of yours?”

“No one told me I had to put oil in it.”

“You have a warning light on your dashboard.”

“I saw a red light come on, but I didn’t know why.”

“You could have asked Hassan.”

“Hassan pretends I’m not there.”

“What do you mean by that?” Hassan asked angrily.

Hussein made a vague gesture with one hand and detached himself from his armchair.

“I’m talking to you,” Yaseen said in an authoritative voice.

“I’m not deaf; I just gotta go piss.”

Salah quivered from his head to his feet. He was none too pleased with Hussein’s attitude. Had it been up to Salah, he would have fixed Hussein’s ass on the spot. Salah couldn’t bear it when anyone disrespected his leader. He snorted loudly, crossed his arms tight against his chest, and clenched his jaw.

Yaseen gave Hassan an interrogatory look. Hassan spread his arms to show he was powerless and then walked toward the bathroom. We heard him talking softly to his twin brother.

Tariq offered us a cup of tea.

“I don’t have time,” Yaseen said.

“It won’t take more than a minute,” our host said.

“In that case, you’ve got fifty-eight seconds.”

Tariq made a dash for the kitchen.

Yaseen’s cell phone rang. He put it to his ear and listened; his face contracted. He stood up abruptly, walked over to the window, and, with his back against the wall, cautiously lifted the curtain.

“I see them,” he said into his phone. “What the fuck are they doing there? Nobody knows we’re here. You’re sure they’re after us?” With his free hand, he ordered Salah to go upstairs and have a look at what was going on in the street. Salah took the steps four at a time. Yaseen kept talking into his mobile phone. “As far as I know, this area has been fairly calm.”

Hassan, on his way back from the bathroom, immediately saw that something was wrong. He slipped to the other side of the window and gently moved the curtain aside. What he saw made him spring backward. He cursed and ran to an armoire, where a light machine gun was concealed. Along the way, he looked into the kitchen and alerted Tariq, who was still busy preparing tea.

Salah came back downstairs, unperturbed. “There are at least twenty cops around the house,” he announced, pulling a huge gun out from under his belt.

Yaseen examined the roof of the building opposite and then twisted his neck in order to see the terraces of the buildings closer to us. He spoke again into his cell phone: “And you’re where, exactly? Very good. You take them from behind and cut a hole in their trap big enough for us to get through…. By the street the garage is on, you’re sure? How many are there?…That’s how we’ll do it. You keep them entertained on your side, and I’ll take care of the rest.”

He snapped his phone shut and said, “Looks like some bastard’s ratted us out. There are cops on the roofs north, east, and south of here. Jawad and his men are going to help us get out of this. We’re going to charge the garage. There’ll be three or four collaborators for us to deal with.”

Tariq was panic-stricken. “I swear to you, Yaseen, there’s no mole in this sector.”

“We’ll talk about that later. Right now, you have to concentrate on getting out of here in one piece.”

Tariq started to fetch a Soviet-made rocket launcher, but as he reached the middle of the living room, a windowpane burst into fragments, and he fell over backward, already dead. The bullet, probably fired from a neighboring roof terrace, had shattered his upper jaw. Blood began spurting from his face and branching out across the tiled floor. Immediately, a hail of projectiles crashed into the room, demolishing the silver, riddling the walls, and raising a tornado of dust and unspecific fragments all around us. We threw ourselves on the floor and began crawling toward anything that might pass for shelter. Salah fired blindly through the window, howling like a savage as he emptied his clip. Calmer than Salah, Yaseen had crouched down in the spot where he’d been standing. He stared at Tariq’s contorted body as he pondered our next move. Hussein was hunched in the hallway with his fly open. When he saw Tariq stretched out on the floor, he burst out laughing.

Salah sprang to the rocket launcher, loaded it, and, with a movement of his head, ordered us to leave the living room. Hassan covered Yaseen, who ran for the hallway. The automatic-weapons fire abruptly stopped, and through the ensuing deathlike silence, we could hear the distant crying of women and children. Hassan took advantage of the lull to push me ahead of him.

The firing began again, as intensely as before, but this time we weren’t the target. Yaseen explained that Jawad and his men were creating a diversion and that this was the signal for us to abandon the house by the rear entrance. Salah aimed his launcher at a terrace and fired. A monstrous, eardrum-jangling explosion was followed by a huge conflagration, which masked the living room in a cloud of thick caustic smoke. “Run!” Salah shouted. “I’ll cover you!”

Stunned, I started running behind the others. Deafening bursts of reciprocal gunfire greeted me outside. Bullets ricocheted around me and whistled past my ears. Folded in half, my hands on my temples, I felt as though I were going through walls. I slipped past a doorway and fell onto a pile of garbage. Hussein laughed and ran straight ahead. His brother caught up with him and forced him into a side street. Gunfire broke out in front of us; a rocket exploded behind us. Someone screamed, apparently struck by the fragments. His cries pursued me as I clenched my teeth and ran, ran as I’d never run before in my life….

16

Yaseen was in a red rage. In the hideout where we’d gone to ground after managing to escape the police raid, he was all we could hear. He punched the furniture and kicked the doors. Hassan stood with folded arms and kept his eyes cast down. His twin brother was in a heap at the end of the entrance hall, sitting on the floor with his head between his knees and his hands on the nape of his neck. Salah was missing, and that fact redoubled Yaseen’s fury. He was used to ambushes, but leaving behind his most faithful lieutenant! “I want the head of the traitor who ratted on us,” he fumed. “I want it on a tray.”

He considered his cell phone. “Why doesn’t Salah call?”

Yaseen’s coolheadedness was gone, lost to a combination of anger and anxiety. When he wasn’t spraying us with his whitish spittle, he was knocking over everything in his way. Although we hadn’t occupied our new refuge very long, nothing was where it had been when we entered.

“There was no mole in this sector,” Yaseen repeated. “Tariq was adamant. We were in that house for months, and we never had any sort of problem whatsoever. Somebody must have made a mistake, and I have no doubt it was either you”—he jabbed his finger at me—“or Hussein.”

“I didn’t make any mistake,” Hussein growled. “And stop treating me like a retard.”

Yaseen, irritated by our silence, had been waiting for just such an opening as this. He leapt on Hussein, grabbed him by his shirt collar, and lifted him off the floor. “Don’t talk to me in that tone. Understand?”

Hussein let his arms hang down in a sign of submission but lifted his head high enough to show his leader he wasn’t afraid of him. Yaseen pushed him away brutally and watched him slide down the wall to his initial position. When Yaseen turned in my direction, I felt his burning eyes go all the way through me.

“How about you?” he asked me. “Are you sure you haven’t been dropping any white pebbles along your trail?”

I was still dazed. The explosions and the screams resounded in my head. I couldn’t believe we’d escaped from that deluge of projectiles, running like madmen through a warren of side streets, ducking past more than one murderous cross fire, and now we were safe and sound. Although unable to feel my legs, I was still, somehow, on my feet, but wrung-out, dumbstruck, undone, and I really didn’t need to be subjected to another ordeal. Yaseen’s glare menaced me like a blade.

“Have you made some new friend? Or told somebody something you shouldn’t have?”

“I don’t know anyone.”

“No one? Then how do you explain the shit that just went down? For months, Tariq’s place is a cozy hideout, and then, all of a sudden…Either you’re jinxed or you’ve been careless. My guys are veterans. They look twice before they take a step. You’re the only one who’s not completely up to speed. Who do you hang out with outside our group? Where do you go when you leave the hideout? What do you do with your time?”

His questions landed on me like blows, one after the other, without leaving me time to get a word in or catch my breath. My hands couldn’t stifle them or fend them off. Yaseen was trying to push me to the limit. He was in a fury, he needed someone to take it out on, and I was the weak link in the chain. It was the age-old story: When you can’t make sense of your misfortune, you invent a culprit for it. I strung together denials, trying hard to resist, to defend myself, to keep from getting upset, and then, suddenly, in a cry of outrage, and without realizing what I was doing, I let slip the name of Omar the Corporal. Maybe it was fatigue, or vexation, or just a way of removing myself from Yaseen’s thoroughly vile scrutiny. By the time I recognized my blunder, it was too late. I would have given my soul to have my words back, but Yaseen’s face had already turned crimson.

“What did you say? Omar the Corporal?”

“I see him every now and then, that’s all.”

“Does he know where you live?”

“No. Once he gave me a ride to the square, but only once. He never saw the house—he left me at the gas station.”

I hoped that Yaseen would drop the subject and go back to harassing Hussein or maybe even turn on Hassan. I hoped in vain.

“Am I dreaming, or what? You led that worthless prick to our hiding place?”

“He picked me up along the way and kindly agreed to drop me off at the service station. Where’s the harm in that? The station’s a long way from Tariq’s place. Omar couldn’t possibly have guessed where I was going. And besides, we’re not talking about just anybody; we’re talking about Omar. He’d never give us up.”

“Did he know you were with me?”

“Come on, Yaseen, it doesn’t make any difference.”

“Did he know or not?”

“Yes.”

“You idiot! You moron! You dared to lead that yellow coward to our—”

“He had nothing to do with the raid.”

“How do you know? Baghdad—no, the whole country—is full of snitches and collaborators.”

“Wait, Yaseen, wait. You’re wrong about—”

“Shut up! Not another word! You have nothing to say. Nothing, you understand? Where does that fat fuck live?”

I saw that I’d made a serious mistake; Yaseen wouldn’t hesitate to shoot me down if I didn’t try to redeem myself. He made me guide him to Omar’s place that very night. Along the way, seeing that he seemed to have relaxed somewhat, I begged him not to do anything rash. I felt sick, very sick; I didn’t know where to turn, and I was consumed by remorse and by the fear that I had caused a terrible misunderstanding. Yaseen promised me that if Omar had done nothing wrong, he’d leave him alone.

Hassan was at the wheel. He had a skinning knife hidden under his jacket, and the rigidity of his neck muscles gave me gooseflesh. Yaseen, in the front passenger seat, examined his fingernails, a blank look on his face. I cringed in the rear seat, my hands damp, my guts roiling, my thighs squeezed together to suppress an irresistible need to piss.

Avoiding the roadblocks and the main thoroughfares, we surreptitiously made our way to the poor neighborhood that had been my home for a brief while. The building in question reared up in the darkness like a landmark in the underworld. There was no light in any window and no sign of any living thing outside. It must have been three o’clock in the morning. We parked the car in a small, damaged courtyard and, after a quick look around, slipped into the building. I had a copy of the apartment key, which Yaseen confiscated and inserted into the lock. He slowly opened the door, groped for the light switch, and flicked it on. Omar was lying on the straw mattress on the floor, stark naked, with one leg wrapped around Hany, whose pallid flesh was likewise completely unclothed. At first, the sight threw us into confusion; Yaseen was the first to recover. He drew himself up, hands on his hips, and silently contemplated the two nude bodies at his feet.

“Get a load of this,” he said. “I knew Omar the Drunkard, and here we have Omar the Sodomite, getting off with boys now. A charming sight.”

There was so much contempt in his voice that I gulped.

The lovers were sound asleep, surrounded by empty wine bottles and soiled plates. They stank, the two of them. Hassan prodded Omar with the tip of his shoe. The Corporal shook himself heavily, gurgled, and resumed snoring.

“Go and wait for us in the car,” Yaseen said. It was an order.

I was four or five years younger than he was, and he considered me insufficiently mature to witness such a spectacle, particularly in his presence.

“You promised me you’d leave him alone if he had nothing to do with the raid,” I reminded Yaseen.

“Do what I tell you.”

I obeyed.

A few minutes later, Yaseen and Hassan joined me in the car. Since I’d heard no screams and no shots, I believed the worst had been avoided. Then I saw Hassan wipe his bloodstained hands under the armpits of his shirt, and I understood.

“It was him,” Yaseen announced as he got into the car. “He confessed.”

“You stayed in there less than five minutes. How did you make him talk so fast?”

“Tell him, Hassan.”

Hassan put the car in first gear and drove out of the courtyard. When we reached the end of the street, he turned to me and declared, “It was him all right, cousin. You’ve got nothing to reproach yourself for. That piece of shit didn’t hesitate a second when he saw who we were. He spit at us and said, ‘Go fuck yourselves.’”

“He knew why you were there?”

“He figured it out the second he woke up. He even laughed in our faces. Look, cousin, some things are clear, and this is one of them. We’re talking about a disgusting son of a bitch, a pig and a traitor. His wild nights are over.”

I tried to find out more; I asked exactly what Omar had said and what had happened to Hany. Yaseen pivoted in his seat and growled in my direction: “You want a notarized report, or what? This is war, not lace-making. If you think you’re not ready, then get the hell out, right now. No one has to know.”

I hated him. God, I hated him more than I believed myself capable of hating anyone. For his part, he was fully aware of the hatred he inspired in me. I know because I saw his vaunted stare waver a little before my eyes. At that precise moment, I realized I had just made myself a sworn enemy, and I understood that Yaseen would seize the next occasion to do me wrong.

Shortly after noon, when we were sitting around gnawing our fingernails in our new hideout, Yaseen’s mobile phone rang. It was Salah, who had miraculously made it out of Tariq’s house unscathed. The television news reports declared that the house itself was completely in ruins. It had collapsed under a barrage of artillery shells, and then fire had devastated a good part of the remains. According to the local residents, the pitched battle had lasted all evening, and the reinforcements sent to the scene of the clash had only intensified the confusion; electrical power had long since been cut, and after some of the neighbors were struck by stray bullets or grenade fragments, panic had spread throughout the area.

When Yaseen recognized his lieutenant’s voice on the telephone, he nearly burst into tears. He chided the fortunate survivor, reproaching him for his “radio silence”; then he consented to listen without further interruption. He nodded, running his finger under his collar again and again as we watched him in silence. At last, he raised his chin and spoke into the handset: “You can’t bring him here? Ask Jawad. He knows how to transfer a parcel.”

Yaseen snapped the phone shut and, without a word, hurried into the next room and slammed the door in our faces.

The “parcel” arrived for us that evening, in the trunk of a car driven by a uniformed police officer, a tall, strapping fellow I’d seen two or three times in Sayed’s store, ordering television sets from us. Whenever he’d come in, he’d been wearing civilian clothes. Now, it turned out, he was Jawad—his nom de guerre—and, to my great surprise, he was the deputy superintendent of this police district.

He explained to us that he’d been returning from a routine mission when he discovered that his unit’s assault team had been sent into action. “When the duty officer read me the coordinates of the operation, I couldn’t believe it. The superintendent’s target was your hideout. He wanted to conduct the action on his own and score points on his rivals.”