She walks through the rooms in silence. Everything is in its place. She counts all the objects once again and recalls that twelve years ago, in 2003, she did the same thing, walking through the rooms first this way then that, but everything was different then: windows smashed, chairs overturned, objects on the floor, display cases emptied. Together with several other people her age who had come to help the director they walked back and forth, discovering the spectacle of the pillaging. She may have been young then, but she still clearly remembers how stunned she was. A great crime had been committed, there before their eyes, a senseless, ugly crime. A crime that went against the enlightenment of civilizations, and together, for hours, they crouched down to pick up the debris, to sweep, to inventory what was missing, but everything was missing . . . More than ten thousand items had been lost. Iraq was a vast playground for dealers of all sorts. They had witnessed the looting and could do nothing. Baghdad was being torn apart. She remembers how angry she was, when the looters had emerged out of nowhere in the blazing city, forcing their way into the museum, helping themselves in broad daylight. She remembers the American soldiers who just stood by and did nothing, didn’t budge, watched the organized gangs making off with the riches of her country’s heritage. She had gazed on helplessly, like so many others, while the museum was plundered. Like others she had yelled at the American soldiers to get them to do something. The impunity of the looters. That was where her life was born. From that day on, after the dictator had fallen for good, she would devote her life to hunting down the stolen artwork. With Interpol or UNESCO. Whenever an artifact surfaced in the back room of a Swiss antique shop or at the bottom of a GI’s duffle bag, they called her. Twelve years. Perhaps that is why today she walks up and down, alone, through the vast rooms of the museum, taking the time to look at everything, in silence.
Grant advances, like a bulldog. He must take no notice of the distraught faces, the pain of the wounded, the doubts. He must take no notice of his own hesitation but remain focused on one thought alone: advance. Whatever the cost, day after day. That is how wars are won. You have to be stubborn. So he insists, forces his men to strike camp every morning despite their fatigue, to march again, fight, die, and keep going . . . History is hesitating, has not yet made its choice. After every battle they have to get back up, regardless of the outcome of the confrontation. Thirty days of fighting without a break, and still History has said nothing. It doesn’t pick sides, it can’t decide, in spite of the battering he is delivering. Three days after the fighting in the Wilderness forest the two armies face each other yet again at Spotsylvania. The Union forces are twice as numerous, and Grant knows that this is his only trump card, as it has been every time since the beginning of the conflict: flood the battlefield with his troops and to hell with the losses. How else could they survive eighteen hours of fighting at Bloody Angle? Twenty thousand dead in that place alone. The shower of bullets is so heavy, the gunfire so sustained that the soldiers are not so much shot down as cut to pieces by bullets. How can anyone witness this and still be alive? General Ewell collapsed in the middle of the battle. Without a scratch. He had seen too much. He lay on the ground and blocked his ears. He was not afraid of dying—he had accepted the prospect long before—but he couldn’t stand the sight of everything around him anymore. It was too much. His mind went. He curled up. Why hasn’t he, Grant, ended up like Ewell? What is it about him that can bear it? General Ewell will never return from Spotsylvania. The soldiers took him to the rear but he has gone mad and talks to himself. Eighteen hours of fighting and twenty thousand dead. When evening came, Grant tallied the numbers. He can’t help it. He wishes he wouldn’t do this, he knows it’s pointless. He smokes his tenth cigar of the day and does the figures, like a demented man: that makes one thousand one hundred and eleven casualties an hour, so that’s eighteen dead per minute, or three dead every ten seconds, times eighteen hours . . . He’s the one who has orchestrated all that, and he hasn’t gone mad?
In one display window she recognizes a few of the lost artifacts. Six hundred and thirty-eight items that the US Army gave back to Iraq after the looting in 2003. And yet, for two years, these items were nowhere to be found. General Petraeus’s services certified that they had sent the crates, and the museum insisted that they had not received anything. She persisted, with the help of Interpol, hounding David Petraeus’s offices to get them to send her the proof of shipment. Nothing. The artifacts had vanished. Not a trace. And then finally one fine day in 2010 the crates were found. The boxes containing the artifacts had been stored by mistake in a warehouse full of kitchen equipment. She did not know, that day, whether to cry for joy or weep with rage. Two years lost. Six hundred and thirty-eight priceless artifacts stored among the hot plates and worktables. Now they are here. The Baghdad museum is on its feet again. It is a response to the bulldozer in Nimrud and the angle grinder in Mosul. For twelve years she’s been fighting art trafficking, for twelve years she’s been trying to stop the hemorrhage of Iraq’s archeological heritage. So many artifacts will disappear. The men in black are marching on Hatra. The looting will go on. Then a thought comes to her, and she suddenly wonders whether she is not going mad. It feels as if she is walking back and forth, up and down through the deserted rooms so that the items will look at her. So that they will see that, yes, there are men and women who care about their conservation. Who are keeping watch over them. That the world that removed them from the earth is not only a place of rapaciousness and violence.
After Spotsylvania, they have to keep going. He orders his men to march, and they come upon Lee’s army again at Cold Harbor. No one knows yet who has won and who has lost the overland campaign. They have already left forty thousand dead in their wake, but up to now it has served no purpose. And in Cold Harbor he makes a mistake. It won’t cost him his life. It won’t even cost him the victory. A mistake that changes nothing, or almost nothing regarding the evolution of things, it won’t even stop him from continuing to progress, to advance southward and put an end to this long march of thirty days of horror outside the walls of Petersburg. But now he knows what the men are murmuring in their camps in the evening: “The Butcher.” At Cold Harbor, in the space of seven minutes, he sent seven thousand men to their deaths. There are no more limits. He no longer thinks in terms of lives. If he did his tally now he would learn that this amounts to more than sixteen dead per second. It’s like sending cattle into machine gun fire. Sixteen dead per second. Every man who falls had a life, with his own history, the village where he was born, parents who are waiting for news; every one of his men was afraid but charged anyway because there was nothing else to be done. Now he knows he must accept the name they have given him, “the Butcher,” he accepts it and from now on he will hear it everywhere, murmured in his ear, transforming joy to shame and moments of calm to harassment. He will hear it when Lincoln leans over to congratulate him, “butcher,” he will hear it when his wife tries to murmur in his ear that she loves him, “butcher,” he will hear the crowd screaming it when he marches by, right up into his old age, “butcher,” every second, “butcher” at every light-filled moment when he wants to be glad he’s alive, “butcher” because the seven thousand dead at Cold Harbor served no purpose. He accepts the name, “butcher,” and he will always remember it, even when he looks at the defeated Lee, and later still, when he is president of the United States, “butcher,” yes, he has no right to deny it, he who did not go mad like Ewell. Unless, on the other hand, that’s just it, he did go mad, but without realizing it, without falling to the ground: mad, yes, because he has reached such a terrifying point, this place that consumes everything, where only the victory matters and everything can be sacrificed to obtain it.
Who has opened the gates to Capua? How many hours of hesitation and discussion or obedience to what sudden impulse led someone—an official representative of the city or a simple citizen, unable to stand the siege another moment—to open the gates to the city and allow the
odors of the perfume market to escape? There must be a hand gripping the heavy iron bars, a voice shouting to let people know the city is surrendering. There must be a hand turning the key in the lock. Do they realize that they have just caused History to change course? That one empire will fall and another one will triumph? The inhabitants of Capua have allowed themselves to be taken in by the ruse Hannibal was hoping to use on the Romans. He wanted Rome to feel it was under threat, that he was going to concentrate all his forces on the city. The Romans didn’t believe it, but Capua did. The city thought Hannibal had abandoned them. They did not understand that the maneuver was merely to loosen the vise that had them in its grip, and that later the Carthaginian leader would come to set them free. Someone’s hand has opened the gates. They thought Rome would send negotiators. They thought the Empire would order them to disarm and perhaps even punish them severely with heavy taxes. They spoke about it among themselves and agreed to the idea. They did not think Rome would make them serve as an example. The gates of Capua are open. The long period of hesitation is over, this infinite time during which Hannibal has been going back and forth beneath the ramparts of Rome so that everyone would see him and panic would invade the streets of the Forum. History has chosen, the gates have opened and now Capua is overwhelmed not by negotiation and endless discussions but by anger and punishment. The Romans enter and they ransack everything. So that no city will try to stand up to them ever again. So that no one will boast that they caused Rome to tremble. They enter and they make Capua pay for the nights of insomnia, for their patrician wives’ fear. They make them pay for those hours they spent wondering whether they would live or would soon be bodies lying in the cold mud of the battlefield. Capua must bleed, and before long the sweet smells of the Selpasia market will be covered by the heavier, more nauseating smell of warm blood spreading across the ground. When the messenger informs him, Hannibal looks at the walls of Rome one last time. He knows that he will not be able to bring the Empire to its knees at this time. Perhaps he will never see these walls again . . . So he takes his time, then gives orders to withdraw. He says nothing. Everyone around him knows what the fall of Capua means. It is their turn now, to retreat to the south. It is their turn to go through three years of traps and waiting. They will have to dig in, in the hills of Calabria, and live there like mountain boars while they wait for reinforcements. It is their turn to live through a siege. History has chosen. It is their turn to flee with the enemy at their heels, day and night. The victory at Cannae is far behind them. Capua is burning and it is their turn to weep.
VII
GENEVA
Addis Ababa. Why did Job choose that city? This was the first thing Auguste asked him when they sat down on a bench on the promenade de la Treille, underneath the leaning chestnut tree Genevans refer to as a sign of the arrival of spring. “I don’t know,” answered Assem. Auguste seemed annoyed. They spoke for a bit then went to a little restaurant with a pretty wooden façade on the rue Jean-Calvin for their appointment with Dan Kovac. The American was expecting news, wanted Assem to tell him whether Job was insane or not, whether he represented a threat, was preparing an attack against American interests, or was in league with enemy agencies, or whether his mental state indicated he was in any way a security risk. He wanted Assem to answer all his questions but the first thing the Frenchman said was: “He talked about relics . . . ”
Kovac looked annoyed, just as Auguste had.
“What did he say, exactly?”
“That for a bone to become a relic, it requires zeal, and he knows where to find it . . . ”
There is that long-ago day when they stormed the house in Abbottabad. In the helicopter on the way back, no one says anything. All the members of the commando team are silent. They know that as long as they are in Pakistani airspace anything can happen. Two aircraft came to help with their exfiltration. They had to leave the crashed helicopter behind, in the courtyard, and they blew it up before they left the site. That all took time, and made noise. Abbottabad has woken up. The Pakistani command is certainly in the process of giving orders and it’s anyone’s guess whether they won’t try to intercept the American helicopters, to indicate their displeasure . . . There is that long-ago day, in the aircraft, when they clench their jaws and count the minutes. And then at last the pilot informs them that they have just flown over the Afghan border, and all at once they go wild with joy. Some remove their helmets, give a shout, hug one another. But Sullivan Sicoh doesn’t move, he leaves the exultation to others. The mood in the helicopter is one of victory, there are words of congratulation, relief, and pride, but he doesn’t shout, doesn’t smile. His mission is not over.
When Assem says “relics,” Kovac pinches his lips and frowns. Assem goes on, talking about the place where they met, the personal bodyguard, the way Job looks like he’s in charge of a gang of smugglers. He tells Kovac that Job seemed “perceptive” to him. He uses the word and sees that Kovac looks surprised. What more can he say? That he is eager to see him again? That he is afraid of only one thing: that at the end of the meal Kovac will get up and thank them for their help, and inform them that the Americans will take over and deal with the matter themselves from then on? He does not want to be shunted aside. He thinks again of his appointment in Addis Ababa and he wants to be there. “Don’t let the world steal your words,” said Mahmoud Darwish. Is this what binds him to Job, makes him eager to see him again? Is it because—strangely, with his murky, unsettling behavior—Job has put words back into the world?
“Can you give me more detail?” says Auguste eventually. Before asking his question, he waits for Dan Kovac to come back down from the toilets—looking as if he is about to take the entire little spiral staircase with him along the way.
“If you want us to go on with you, you’ll have to tell us a bit more. No one believes these stories about trafficking in stolen artworks. Even Job seems to know why you sent someone.”
Assem knows Auguste is going for broke now. If Dan Kovac balks and won’t tell them anything, his mission will be over right then and there and he’ll never see Job again. The Americans will mount an operation to pick him up in Addis Ababa and he’ll be found strangled in a hotel room with all the clues of a sordid petty crime—a prostitute after his money, a sexual game gone awry . . . Unless they take him back to the States. Then he’ll begin a lifetime of debriefings, interrogation, incarceration, and always the same questions, repeated a hundred times over, until he goes mad or manages to hang himself. Assem holds his breath. He is aware now how much he wants to see Job again, and this surprises him.
“It’s tricky,” says Kovac in a hushed voice, and Assem exhales, because if the American is giving them an answer it’s because he wants to go on working with them. “You know that after we eliminated bin Laden, there was a problem with the body. The sort of corpse that burns your fingers a little and you don’t really know what to do with—”
“What does that have to do with Job?” interrupts Auguste.
On the bridge of the aircraft carrier the wind is blowing, swelling waves that are as calm and powerful as hills rolling one after the other. The weather is fine. Sullivan Sicoh looks out at the horizon. He has just joined McRogan, who is wearing his dress uniform, smoking a cigarette while he waits for the imam to be ready. Sullivan says nothing. Before long the imam appears with four sailors in tow, carrying a wooden crate. They come closer. Flags snap in the wind. There are no birds in the sky, they are too far from land. The imam begins the ceremony. They have asked him to make it as brief as possible. The body has been wrapped in a white cloth. Sullivan has not left it even once since Abottabad. Samples were taken to verify his identity and compare the DNA. He recalls the shouts of celebration at the base in Afghanistan when the results of the tests confirmed it was indeed bin Laden. And then the whole world found out. There was an outpouring of joy all over the country. For ten years an entire nation had been calling for revenge. And now there is not
hing left but ocean. When the imam finishes his prayer, Sicoh and one of the sailors seize hold of the wooden plank and lift it above their heads. The body begins to move, sliding along the plank, faster and faster, propelled by its own weight until it seems to leap then fall past the hull of the huge military vessel. For a few seconds it is suspended in space, then they hear the splash of water and nothing more. Sullivan stares out at the vast, shifting ocean, rumbling, rolling. He wonders what the ocean thinks of this body they have just entrusted to it, and how long it will take to dissolve it . . . Then all of a sudden McRogan’s voice rouses him from his thoughts, cracking into the damp air:
“Well, gentlemen, let us go get our medals.”
Dan Kovac has paused for a moment. He must be wondering what he can say and what he must keep quiet, unless it is all an act, unless it has all been thought up ahead of time and he is hesitating simply to make it seem more natural, to give them the impression they are coming closer to the heart of the matter and that once he has said his piece the French will know everything.
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