Book of Stolen Tales

by D J Mcintosh

  We spent the early part of the drive debating the various options ahead of us and working out what our first step should be. Later, I found a treasure trove in the back seat. In an old plastic case Shaheen kept a killer CD collection of mostly seventies bands. AC/DC’s Highway to Hell, the Allman Brothers, Van Halen’s debut album, and music by the little alien, the great Joe Satriani. As frosting on the cake, at the very bottom I found Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited. More or less the perfect choice for the road we now traveled on.

  Cranking Shaheen’s boombox up to full throttle, we sailed through the brown wastelands, getting high on the music. By the time we reached the outskirts of Baghdad we were both in great moods.

  Reality hit home at the first checkpoint, a mountain of sandbags and lines of orange cones. Gun turrets swiveled toward us on two Bradley fighting vehicles. Soldiers took long hard looks at our Jeep. Shaheen held up his ID. They gave it a thorough scan and waved us on.

  “Damn dangerous road we’re headed down,” Shaheen said. “Although take your pick. They’re all bad.”

  He stopped talking and sped up. His head turned ever so slightly as he glanced rapidly to the right and left. As fast as our vehicle was going, a black Ford SUV overtook us. All four men inside carried weapons and wore flak jackets and wraparound sunglasses.

  Farther along an Iraqi man and his wife stood at the side of the road next to a cart heaped with melons for sale. The SUV slowed. One of the men stuck his M1 out the window and yelled, “Imshl, Imshl!” He shot at the cart. It exploded, showering the couple with wood splinters and red melon pulp and rinds. The woman shrieked then stumbled and fell. Her husband struggled to lift her up.

  “Assholes,” Shaheen said over his shoulder.

  “Who are those guys?”

  “Mercenaries from Sierra Leone or some other goddamned place. More and more of ‘em flooding in here every day. Makes it hell for the rest of us.”

  It felt bizarre to be back in the city with its frenetic traffic and blasted-out holes where buildings used to be, people passing by the craters as though they’d always been part of the streetscape. I’d spent some of the worst moments in my life here, but I’d also come to appreciate why my brother loved it so.

  Our destination, the Palestine Hotel, was a monotonous eighteen-story slab with a colonnade of salmon-colored arches at ground level. The parking lot looked like a Saturday-morning flea market. Dilapidated cars crowded the lot with trunks full of used CDs, DVDs, and cellphones, useless now that most electric circuits in Baghdad were dead. Open side doors on vans revealed boxes of chocolate bars and soda. Some vendors threw carpets onto the asphalt and set cardboard boxes on top with huge pear-shaped bunches of fresh dates. Two green donkey carts piled high with more fruit stood off to one side. They looked like miniature gypsy caravans on truck wheels. One of the mules brayed loudly and a boy in a long white dishdasha standing between the animals jerked hard on its tether to quiet it.

  The hotel lobby was packed. Sweaty-faced cameramen lounged next to piles of equipment; hotel staff scurried by with messages on trays and mounds of luggage. A woman journalist in D&G sunglasses, a tight-fitting tank top, and jeans held out a mike to some military honcho.

  We registered and went into the hotel restaurant. I would have sold my soul for a steak and salad. On the limited menu were hardboiled eggs, dried figs, and a bowl of lukewarm goat stew. Shaheen tucked in with appetite after our food was served.

  “Do you know what the world’s oldest recipe is? It’s on a tablet.”

  “No idea,” he said with his mouth full.

  “You mix up snake skin, plums, and beer then cook it.”

  “Sounds wonderful.”

  “It’s got all the key nutrients.”

  Shaheen chuckled between forkfuls. “Not on this menu though,” he said. “Wonder why.”

  After leaving the restaurant we went up to our room on the top floor. A room like this was a luxury in Baghdad. It had twin beds and a colorless shag carpet. Shaheen flopped down on the right-hand bed and waved toward his pack. “We probably can’t get TV reception. Help yourself. There are some great X-rated movies in there. One of ‘em’s got a chick with a rack the size of two water-melons. And you should see what she can do with—”

  “Have to check it out for sure,” I laughed.

  I was hot and dusty from the long trip. I went into the bathroom for a wash and ran my fingers through my hair. When I opened the bathroom door, Shaheen had the window curtain pulled back and the balcony door partly propped open.

  “You like the view that much?” I joked.

  Shaheen motioned for silence and peered out the window. “Shit!”

  He dove toward me, crashing me backward into the bathroom. I had no time to defend myself and cracked into the side of the tub. Shaheen kicked the bathroom door shut.

  A thud followed by the rapid shattering of glass and the room exploded. The force of the blast blew the bathroom door offits hinges, bringing with it missiles of scorched plaster and flaming carpet. Shaheen soaked a towel and shouted at me to put it over my mouth and nose. I grabbed my pack as we fled the room, hacking on the toxic smoke flooding into the hallway.

  Forty-One

  December 4, 2003

  Baghdad, Iraq

  Shaheen’s sharp eye saved us. As he looked down from the hotel balcony at the parking lot, he’d noticed the boy tending the donkeys had vanished. No one in Iraq left their goods untended. The merchants selling their wares scattered rapidly too, overturning baskets of vegetables and knocking piles of CDs to the ground. The blast had two immediate consequences. It delayed our plans by a day and changed my opinion of Nick Shaheen for the better.

  Once we settled at another hotel I set about locating the House of Wisdom. One of the staff working at the museum knew my brother and laughed when I asked him about it. “You’re about twelve hundred years too late,” he said. “Mongols destroyed it when they attacked Baghdad. Some walls still exist. It’s adjacent to the national library.”

  At the same time, Shaheen focused on the scientists’ activities outside their regular work hours. He took me with him to see the woman in charge of Loretti and Hill’s security detail to fill in the gaps.

  “She’s waiting for us in the Green Zone—ever been there?” Shaheen asked.

  “Nope.”

  “It’s sort of like Valhalla dropped into the middle of Purgatory. If there’s time we can have drinks with a few party girls around Saddam’s palace pool.”

  I didn’t hate the sound of that. Maybe this would end well after all.

  Once we were underway, Shaheen loosened up even more. Cracked a few jokes. I responded in kind. The guy had an in-your-face style, no question. He was as rough as sandpaper. But he also had a quick mind and he’d already proven that he had my back.

  Gaining access to the Green Zone took ages even with Shaheen’s ID. Fittingly, the formal gate we passed through looked like a Disneyfied version of a medieval keep.

  The area was like a prison, cut off from the rest of the city with inmates happy to be incarcerated. Formerly a collection of wealthy residences, institutions, palaces, and ponds, it was a place ordinary Baghdadis knew to keep their distance from. Nothing, therefore, had changed.

  After keeping us waiting for almost an hour, Corporal Evers, a steely-eyed soldier who looked like she could bench-press two hundred and fifty pounds in her sleep, greeted us. Guiding us through a jumble of partitioned blast walls and barbed wire, she told us she was currently assigned to protect one of the civilian lawyers.

  Once we’d reached a place where we could talk comfortably, she said, “Not sure how much I can help you. I was only on security with the scientists’ official team when they assessed sites and I’m told you’ve already been briefed on them.”

  Shaheen nodded. “Yes. Unfortunately they didn’t keep records of their off-time.”

  “There wasn’t a whole lot of that. We worked twelve-, fourteen-hour days. And we spent that wearing hazmat s
uits during the summer when the heat was a bugger. So when you were finished all you wanted to do was drink gallons of water, have about ten showers, and sit with a fan blowing in your face until you hit the sack.”

  “Loretti and Hill did have time off, though?”

  “Oh yeah. Usually we’d work straight through a couple of weeks and then knock off for three-, four-day stretches. They stayed in the al-Rashid in the zone here. You probably heard. It got hit with rocket fire a few weeks back.”

  “We just got nailed the same way. At the Palestine,” Shaheen said. “Tell me, what were the scientists like to work with? Did they have any particular interests? What did they talk about?”

  “Loretti was an extrovert. Cracked jokes, kept trying to hustle me in a fun way, stuff like that. Nice guy. Hill was the quiet one. Didn’t have a lot to say. Kind of got the impression he looked down on us. He was scared shitless to be here, that was obvious.”

  “They never told you what they did in their time off?”

  “No. But Loretti did mention something that struck me as odd. Asked if I knew where he could find the House of Wisdom. I thought it was another one of his jokes and then realized he was serious. Loretti was kind of a history buff. Always talking about how civilization began here and shit like that.” She cracked a smile. “Not too civilized these days.”

  “Did he ever tell you he’d found it?”

  “What?”

  “The House of Wisdom.”

  Evers thought for a minute. “Not that I can recall.” “Anything else?”

  “Word has it the two of ‘em picked something up over here and are in a bad way. That true?”

  The last thing Shaheen wanted was to fan the flames of gossip about nasty viruses in the country. “They’re recovering from pneumonia. Just being extra cautious because of the work they were doing over here.”

  “Okay,” Evers said, drawing out the last syllable. “Then why couldn’t they tell you what you want to know themselves?”

  Shaheen looked annoyed at her comeback. “They were pretty sick for a while, and their memory’s hazy. We’re just double-checking everything.”

  “All right then. Good.” Although Evers saw through Shaheen’s hasty coverup she didn’t push the issue. She hesitated as if weighing her next words. “I don’t want to disrespect them or anything. You appreciate that, right?”

  “Whatever you say stays with me.”

  “Okay. Loretti wanted to see some archaeological sites. He tried to get access to the museum. They turned him down flat on that one. He was pissed. Let’s face it, old objects are lying around everywhere. Pieces of jars and things. Nothing worth anything. He wouldn’t be the first guy to want a souvenir, if you know what I mean.”

  “Of course.” Shaheen thanked her and we said goodbye.

  “She caught you out pretty good there,” I said as we walked away. “If you’re going to lie, always best to have a plan first. Take it from an expert.”

  “I had to think of something. What did you find out about that House of Wisdom?”

  “One of the first libraries and research centers in existence. Parts of it still remain.”

  “Where?”

  “In the old city. The Crusades destroyed all the power structures in the Middle East and left it wide open to Mongol raids. In 1200 they sacked Baghdad and the House of Wisdom along with it. It was never rebuilt. You grew up here. How come you’ve never heard about it?”

  “I wouldn’t exactly call it growing up; surviving’s more like it. Lived on the streets from the time I was five. With that kind of pedigree you don’t exactly get to visit the cultural hot spots.”

  “How did you end up in the U.S. then?”

  “I was just entering my teens when the Gulf War broke out. Found a way to make it into Kuwait because I heard with so many Americans there, money was flowing. Got a job at a residence with a major general and his wife. They ended up taking me back to the U.S. They had no kids of their own. Great people. I got a scholarship to West Point but they paid for a lot of stuff the army doesn’t cover.”

  The man was chock-full of surprises. “Do you want to check out the House of Wisdom?”

  “Sounds like the only move we’ve got right now. We have to make a detour first though.”

  “Why?”

  “If I’m going to do double duty as a translator we need to pick up a guy for a second pair of eyes on the street.”

  Shaheen made a call and after a tortuous half-hour route south pulled up in front of an aging Soviet-style apartment block. A squat, tough-looking man waited outside the entrance. Shaheen got out to open the trunk and opened one of the metal gun cases, handing an M4 Carbine to the man who jumped into the rear seat beside me.

  “Meet Ali” was all Shaheen said by way of introduction. Ali, chewing a fat wad of gum, grinned, exposing both the gum and a gold-capped row of brown teeth. He patted the gun. “Safe with me,” he cackled and grinned again. My trust in Shaheen dipped a little.

  As we drove I looked out the dusty window and saw what I thought was a kid playing on a handmade wagon. His mode of transport was a flat piece of plywood tied onto the frame of a baby stroller. He lay flat on his stomach on the plywood. From the knees down, he had no legs. His skin had been crudely stretched over the stumps and tied off like the ends of sausages. On both hands he wore a pair of battered sneakers to propel himself along the cracked pavement. He was covered in dust.

  Shaheen stopped the Jeep and spoke to Ali in Arabic while handing him something. When Ali jumped out of the car the kid looked terrified and held up both shoe-clad hands as if to ward offsome new misery. Ali spoke to him quietly and gave him a fifty-dollar bill.

  “Don’t usually do that,” Shaheen said after we took off again. “Some things you just can’t let go.”

  Forty-Two

  In the golden Islamic age, the eighth century, Baghdad was the global seat of learning, the Athens of its day. The House of Wisdom, Bayt al-Hikma, boasted the first university and a library that rivaled Alexandria’s. We strolled through a tight trapezoid-shaped passageway of well-preserved baked brick. It reminded me of the cloistered corridors in ancient monasteries. I touched the walls as we passed through, awed to think that along these hallways the greatest scholars of the world once walked. In the Baghdad library proper, we found a skeleton staff engaged in cleaning and repairing the damage incurred during the April invasion.

  When Shaheen handed around photos of Loretti and Hill and asked about the scientists, the librarians shook their heads. My mission was to trace the fifth volume of Basile’s book, and in that I had a smidgen more luck. The staff knew of George Bakir, the Assyrian scholar. They told us that to find out anything more we’d have to talk to Syed Al Asiri, head librarian at the time of the invasion.

  Syed lived farther south in Dora District. Shaheen was less familiar with this part of the city and it took him some time to locate the man’s home. A wind kicked up when we got out of the car. The all-pervasive ash blew into our faces, making even the short walk to Syed’s building unpleasant. Late in the afternoon, the sun was a faint bronze circle low in the sky, shrouded by the fine soot stirred up by the winds.

  Two four-story buildings, throwbacks to the sixties, faced each other across the street. Considered upscale before the war, the twin buildings now looked unkempt. Their upper floors cantilevered over recessed ground-level shops, many with grates firmly shut over their front windows. Sheets and clothing hung from balcony railings to dry. We climbed a dirty stairwell that smelled unpleasantly of decomposing garbage. Dull light in the hall leading to Syed’s apartment made it hard to see.

  Shaheen knocked. Someone spoke in Arabic through the door and moments later we were let in. Ali remained on guard outside. Syed introduced himself and pointed across the room. “My father-in-law and daughter,” he said. A single bed, surrounded on three sides by a makeshift frame hung with curtains, stood against the east wall. A girl who looked around twelve lay half propped up on the bed. Besid
e her sat an older man dressed in a traditional white thawb. On his head he wore a richly embroidered taqiyah. He’d been reading to the girl from a large, colorful picture book. When the old man saw us, he glared.

  Clearly the apartment had been without electricity for some time. Weak light seeped in from windows overlooking the balcony. A kerosene lamp and tallow candles were placed in holders around the room. None had been lit and I assumed they were being conserved for evening. A large clear plastic jug of water sat on the counter beside the kitchen sink.

  Syed motioned for us to sit at the table and got a bottle of sherry and three tumblers. “I brought this back from England,” he said, “when I attended a colloquium at Cambridge, my old school, last winter. I planned to serve it when my British colleagues came to visit me.” He smiled ruefully. “I think it will be quite some time before my guests arrive.”

  He offered cigarettes from a crumpled pack. I thanked him and declined. Flicking on his lighter, Shaheen lit Syed’s cigarette and plucked a cigarillo from his breast pocket.

  “How may I help you?” Syed asked politely.

  Shaheen took a drink. “We’re interested in a book left with the national library in a collection donated by a professor, George Bakir.”

  “I know of Bakir. Can you describe the book?”

  “Italian fairy tales, published in the seventeenth century. The author’s name is Giambattista Basile.”

  Syed took a few drags of his cigarette and sat back, crossing his legs. “Yes. It came in with Bakir’s collection.”

  I sensed this whole thing might be breaking our way. “We’d like to look at it. Could you help us find it?” I said.

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “Why?”

  “For a very good reason. Surely you know what happened to our library. Looters made off with many precious things. The Koranic library fared far worse. It was deliberately set on fire. So many precious books, some going back to the twelfth century, all burned. Pages of ancient Arabic script floated like dead leaves on the wind. A colleague of mine was killed when he ran around trying to gather them up. Whole shelves of volumes that look perfect but, when you touch them, fall away to ash. I can’t bear to go there anymore.”