Zak translated. “Father Arturo says we’re welcome to leave now or stay through the mass.”
The deacon shoved aside an altar boy on route to the door.
“He’s going ahead with the service?” I asked.
“His death on the altar would bring life.” Zak wiped his streaming eyes on his sleeve. “Life everlasting.”
“What incredible faith,” I said, awed. Faith that deserved a witness.
Hamid let out a piercing scream. “It would be wrong for us to leave,” I shouted above his sobs. “We’ll stay.” I dried his tears with the fringe on the blanket. His sobs escalated, and I asked myself if I had the right to impose my convictions on this little guy.
“Cut the fucking nonsense.” Zak took my elbow.
I yanked my arm away. “How can you turn your back?”
“Watch me,” Zak said.
I looked down at Hamid, up at Zak. “Then take him somewhere safe.”
Zak’s gaze never left mine as he cradled the screaming Hamid against his shoulder and rubbed his back. “Where will you be?”
“After mass, I’ll find you.” I hadn’t the guts to add, ‘if I’m still alive.’
Zak stepped into the center aisle and joined the human stream flowing toward the door. He looked over his shoulder. “You’ll be okay?” A question spoken as a fact.
The pews were empty. The urns holding the lilies lay on their sides. Silent bursts of fiery light flashed through the hole in the wall. Despite the relentless rat-a-tat of distant gunfire, Father wiped the chalice with steady hands.
I approached the altar.
Father placed the wafer in my cupped hands. It dissolved it in my mouth, as I crossed myself, turned and stumbled toward the door. Broken glass crunched underfoot. Another mortar; a close call somewhere behind me, and coward that I was, I ran down the aisle, panting until I hit the street.
Dazed, I stood in the entrance to the square. A crater gaped in the middle of the pavement. A geyser shot from the town’s water tank. No traffic, only a Red Cross van parked on the sidewalk. Screams came from the row of shops. I crossed the cobblestones to where a man in a tracksuit lay face down. The downpour diluted his blood into pink rivulets flowing in the grout between the stones. On the other side of the square, a woman smoked a cigarette in the shelter of the awning. “Poor sod’s gone to his maker,” she called. “If you want to see a cock-up emergency room, take a look in there.” She motioned to the tapas bar and flipped the butt into the gutter where it hissed in the rain.
Inside the bar, one of the concrete walls had been bombed to smoldering rebar. The air stank of sweat, burnt electrical wire, and fear. Too many people—villagers, back-packers, tourists and families—competed for the same oxygen. White plaster footprints covered the wet floor. A fallen bullfight poster lay in soggy sheds.
Wreckage: walls, bodies, and lives. My throat tightened. How long would it take before the bar was rebuilt? Before the wounds on the bodies turned to scars, and before what was left of the broken lives was salvaged. Behind the takeout counter, a man wept with his forehead against a wall. Other victims paced. A few huddled on the floor. An old man sat on a spindly plastic chair. Blood soaked his tee-shirt. He raised his head as if to say something, but instead of words, blood spilled from his mouth. In a bizarre attempt at normalcy, a waiter slowly wiped the bar, the same spot, back, forth and around. I wondered why helplessness is so often expressed in futile action.
A young boy mumbling in Spanish lay twisted on his side. When I tried to determine the source of the bleeding, two aides lowered a stretcher and I moved aside to give them room. A third attendant checked to be sure the boy’s arm, severed from his body, was secure in a clear plastic bag at the foot of the gurney.
A Red Cross crew had set up a temporary triage station. A line formed at a folding table. An aide took names and identifying information of those waiting to be seen. I looked around for the crash cart and saw a pathetic collection of torn boxes and red bio-hazard bags filled with used syringes. A trash can overflowed with bloody gauze. When a woman with a caduceus on her jacket hurried past, I said, “Wait. I’m a doctor and can help,”
She stopped and looked me up and down.
“Put me to work.” I dug through my bag and held out my ID. One glance at the laminated card, and she shook her head. “No possible en Espñna. No numero nationale.”
I hadn’t the language to argue.
A familiar voice called my name. I made my way through the labyrinth of overturned tables to where Casey presided over a bottle of Harvey’s Bristol Cream. He was in jeans and a red Henley jersey. Running his fingers through his tousled hair, he said, “They’re out of Johnny Walker, so I’m rat-assed on sherry. Where’s Tony and the kid?”
“Tony said he’d wait in the car while Zak and I were in church. He’s not there. Zak took Hamid somewhere safe.” I glanced around the room. “Now I don’t know where anyone is.”
I reached for Casey’s Styrofoam cup and downed the rest of his sherry.
“There’s a good girl,” he said. “Christ on a bike, you see the impressive shit the Sons of the Prophet have? Brand new gear, weapons. His head lolled back and forth as he refilled the cup. And talk about organshun—organization. Gotta’ remember the long ‘a.’ Anyway, their drones came right on schedule.”
It took a minute for this to sink in. “Schedule? You knew they were coming?”
He looked at me with red rheumy eyes. “I guessed.”
“Guess my ass.”
“Okay,” he said with a dramatic sigh. “Call it connections.” With an exaggerated show of nonchalance, he leaned back and crossed his arms over his chest. “Friends in high places.”
“London?” I assumed he had a clandestine career, an undercover life of some sort.
Fortyish was young to retire. Consulting? Training? Or peddling secrets from one enemy to another.
Testing the waters, I asked, “How’s your Farsi, Dari, Hebrew?”
Casey held the fingers of his right hand, over his left wrist, his annoying habit of taking his pulse.
“You know the Maghreb dialect?” I asked.
“Oh, bloody hell. You made me lose count.” He started over. His lips silently moved… one, two.
Laughter from three Knights next to us. They sat with their heads together, focusing on a phone in front of them on the table. Their blue berets hung on the backs of their chairs. They passed a half-gallon of vodka hand to hand.
Finished counting, Casey said, “I can even speak English and talk to your shirty compatriots on the front line.”
“What front line?”
“The world’s soldiers of fortune: Americans fight their wars with contractors. No dirty hands. Their blokes who snatched the kid in the church with the ugly old hag and—”
“Kidnapped Hamid? They were mercenaries?”
“Couldn’t you tell? Christ, they spoke American.”
I reconstructed the events. “They knew where to find us because you told them.”
“It wasn’t hard.”
Whatever that meant. “Casey?”
He lifted his head. “Sorry, I lost your thread.”
“Who hired those guys Who’s the middleman?”
He put his index finger to his lips and rocked back and forth.
I held my breath until my surge of anger was overtaken by resignation. Plus, an eerie mix of exhaustion and disgust. “You sold me out.”
“He is one smart-ass beltway bandit,” he said.
I had nothing more to say. Without proof of a conspiracy, there was no crime. Nothing arrest-able. Nothing sue-able
.
Outside, the sirens that were in the distance came close, closer.
Casey reached for the bottle. I held his arm. “You’ve had enough.”
He jerked his hand away, and poured.
Through the front window—floor to ceiling glass still in one piece—I watched two Guardia Civil officers pull up on the sidewalk and get out of their Humvee. I could barely make out the head of a passenger in the cage behind the driver’s seat. A prisoner, no doubt.
I turned back to Casey, looking for signs of remorse. None. But why was he telling me this now? Drunk, yes. Or maybe he adhered to the notion that confession—even without remorse—eradicates the offense. Confession as a sort of sin-ectomy.
His right hand reached for his left wrist, and once more he began his silent count.
“Knock it off,” I said.
Before he could argue, both of us turned to the commotion in the doorway. The Guardia Civil officers were dragging in a teenager with an Emir’s Army logo on his sweatshirt. His feet scraped the floor. Blood from a head wound soaked his collar. Medics rushed over and eased him onto a gurney. The officers conferred with the medics and pointed to the clock over the counter.
“Un hora,” I heard one say.
“Leaving him here for emergency treatment,” I said.
“I hope the doc kills him,” Casey replied, then laughed.
As soon as the officers left, the three Knights quickly rose—so quickly one knocked over the chair behind him. Shoving the medics aside, the Knights took over the gurney. A group of high-school-aged backpackers, boys with their dyed hair in fashionable green spikes, gathered around the captive. Wearing tee-shirts emblazoned with the Union Jack, they giggled and punched each other playfully while tagging along behind the Knights who were wheeling the prisoner outside.
It seemed everyone in the room stopped breathing at once. No sound except the rustle of a medic rooting through a box of supplies and the hum of the refrigerated display case.
The door flew open, and one of the boys shot back inside, trembling. “They got the bloke starkers out there,” he gasped. Tears ran down his face. “They had a knife what done his eyes. I think I’m going to sick up.” A woman in a mini-skirt hustled the kid toward the bathroom. Too late; the sound of gagging echoed from the hall.
“I have to find Hamid,” I said, getting to my feet.
Casey motioned to me to stay put. “Hold off, love, until the place calms down soon as the pious jihadists save us from the pious Knights.”
29
I had to get Hamid. The rain slacked off, but I was chilled to the bone despite the ninety-degree temperature. I struck off down a cobbled street, not knowing where I was going or where to go.
A woman in a print housedress knelt on a front stoop. Never mind the town was under siege, and that drizzle slicked the pavement. She splashed Don Limpio into a bucket, balanced the scrub brush on the edge, shook off the excess water, and set to work. Helplessness expressed in futile action.
I waited until she raised her head. “Hospital?” I asked.
She wrung out a rag.
“Red Cross? Gente enferma? Doctor?” I said, trying for a hit.
She pointed to an alley.
Only the statue of Saint Clare marked the site where the rectory once stood. Red roofing tiles lay over what used to be a yard. Granite blocks, slabs of drywall—the leg of a piano smoldered next to a hot water tank. Where was I going? Trying to recall Zak’s exact words brought momentary panic. He did agree the hospital was the safest place, didn’t he? Yes, the hospital. Of course, that’s what he said.
The inward-facing halves of my eyes—the halves that track imagination and memory, saw Zak with a spoonful of carrot mush. Saw the orange slop sliding down Hamid’s bump of a chin along with the carroty slivers that escaped the spoon. The image was reassuring: if normalcy happened once, it could happen again.
The alley widened into a street open to two-way traffic. No signs of jihadis, but flocks of helicopters churned overhead. One khaki low-flyer bore a Spanish flag painted on its flank. Curious pedestrians crept from doorways to check if the bombing was over. A sputtering fire died on a vacant lot.’ Morelas ferreteria was now three walls and a charred beam. Two men wheeled a sheet of plywood toward the broken window of the Super-Sol. Against looting, I thought skirting their dolly.
A screech of brakes and an ambulance pulled alongside. Tony leaped to the curb. Wrapping his arms around me, he swung me off my feet and shouted, “Thank God,” Stepping back, he asked, “Where’s the little bloke?”
“Zak took him somewhere safe.”
“He’s okay?”
“I don’t know.”
“We’ll find out.” Tony hustled me toward the vehicle. A driver in sweats hunched over the wheel. Squawks resembling words crackled through the static on his radio. Tony climbed in next to me on the bench seat. He now wore a waterproof Red Cross jacket.
“You volunteered?” I asked. A pinprick of annoyance when I recalled the bureaucratic doctor who blew me off.
“Wrong not to,” he said. In the rear of the van, a medic steadied the IV pole connected to a patient on the fold-out cot. “Cardiac. She’s stable,” Tony said.
“We’ve got to get Hamid to the Catholics.”
Tony smiled slightly. “Otherwise you’ll be stuck with him.”
I sat back. “That’s so harsh. After all, I am responsible for him.”
“He isn’t yours.”
“You’ve said that.”
The service road to the hospital wound through groves of palms and rose beds. We rounded the curve and came to a brick guardhouse without a guard. An overhead light blinked red. “A camera instead of a person,” Tony said. The driver pulled forward on green.
Uniformed security forces milled around the grounds. Guardia Civil, Policia National, Spanish Army Reserves and, of course, the Knights of Constancia playing soldier in their blue berets. Parked near the guardhouse, three white SUVs flanked the green Mercedes.
“The one we saw it earlier,” I said. “Who’s is it?”
“Some Moroccan, judging from the plates.”
Our driver slowed at a four-way stop and motioned for a Rolls Royce limousine followed by four black sedans to make a turn.
Tony whistled. “Take a look at that. See the Vatican decal? The black cars must be part of their entourage. Check out the press pennant on the aerial of the lead car.”
Our driver swung onto the concrete parking zone at the entrance to the emergency room. He and Tony jumped from the front and went around back.
“Look for Hamid inside the hospital,” I called.
Tony disappeared into the building and came back with a gurney. He and the medic wheeled the patient and her IV pole through the swinging doors. I slid from the high seat onto the ground. The driver got out, circled the hood, and lit a cigarette on his way to the smokers’ shack.
In the waiting room, patients lay cheek by jowl on stretchers, on chairs shoved together as make-shift beds, and on the floor, while nuns in old-fashioned white habits bustled back and forth. Sharp-eyed Policia National scrutinized the crowd. The overheated air reeked of urine and burnt coffee. A corridor beyond the waiting room led to exam cubicles. “Let’s go check,” I said.
“You would need Spanish ID,” Tony said.
A desk in a far corner was mobbed by a hysterical crowd harassing the clerk with shouts, threats, and desperate pleas. Tony plowed through the milieu and signed a clipboard. When he made his way back, I said, “How on earth will we find Hamid in this mess?”
Across the room, a boy about five or six on tip-toe tried to
reach a drinking fountain. Tony went over and lifted him up.
“Tony, for God’s sake,” I shouted. “Get Hamid.”
The kid raised his head. Water from his mouth dripped onto Tony’s shirt. “What did you say?” Tony called.
He should be checking the roster, checking the exam cubicles. “Goddamnit.” I lit into him, not caring who heard me. “All you think about is your self-importance.” Knowing I was being irrational spurred me on. “He could be dead while you’re so busy saving mankind—” My attention swung to the other side of the room where an attendant pushed a gurney along the wall toward an exit. A body bag rested atop. Ordinarily, a hospital’s service door was blocked from the public, but today the partitions lay stacked against a wall.
Tony’s eyes followed the gurney. “It’s not a baby-sized body. It’s an adult,” he said stiffly. “Meanwhile, staff might have Hamid in the nursery on the third floor. Physical therapy would have mats for kids. Getting you an ID in this madhouse would be dodgy. Wait here.”
I nodded.
On his way to the elevator, Tony turned. “And bugger all, Paige, the next time you want to improve my character, fuck off.” He entered the lift without a backward glance,
I sat on the edge of a table that held magazines. I opened one with a glossy cover, flipped through the pages and closed it. A typical waiting room rag advertising expensive meds—drugs the National Health Insurance would never approve.
Where was Hamid? My stomach churned. Dead? He and Zak could have run into jihadists, been hit by a grenade. My placating inner voice warned my imagination was running amok. Hamid was fine. The Knights were armed. Zak wouldn’t allow anything to happen.
The Loss of What We Never Had Page 24