by James Grady
“Why are you doing this to me? To my family?”
Derya came to my side. Crouched lower than me.
“Sister, you are trapped by him. But not trapped like you are by al Qaeda. He trapped us both with truth. You will not be alone. I will not let you be alone. We must trust him to help us.”
Don’t contradict her but keep control! “Only your own hands can pull you free.”
That innocent, broken woman pulled off her burka to breathe the shed’s stale air.
We had her.
January 5, year 2000: Two dozen al Qaeda operatives from all over the world drifted into K.L. They rendezvoused for days of planning meetings in a suburban condo.
Derya and I marched through fake lives. We spent nights at our safe house. Kept each other close enough to see. Didn’t touch.
“You are America.” Rain drummed the skylight above the bed where we lay not touching and with our clothes on. “Fancy technologies.”
“Forget what Hollywood tells you. We can’t hack that computer. Disconnected when not in use. Major firewalls. Local al Qaeda insists on that. Plus their standard procedure is to destroy hard drives when they scatter. Using a key before then is our only chance.”
Malay Special Branch followed the al Qaeda crew. Photo surveillance. Street tags tight enough to track them to Internet cafés. Loose enough to let paranoids feel safe. And show up at the tile shop. Across the street, the Special Branch manned a watch post.
January 7. Derya’s cell phone rang. She answered. Listened. Hung up.
Told me: “Tomorrow.”
KISS. Keep It Simple, Stupid. A dead drop blended into our burkaed agent’s established routine. Evening class at the heretical school where the mere woman was learning technology of the decadent West that holy warriors could use for jihad.
KISS. She’d ride two buses. First one from the market near the tile shop to a transfer. She could stand at that bus stop until she caught a second bus that let her out near the school. Or she could walk down a side street, past a store with a TV FIX sign, go to a tea stand and buy a warming cup, then retrace her steps and catch her second bus.
KISS. Snapped into secure pieces or not, the data key was an easy fit through the mail slot of TV FIX’s door. In the rain forecast to be pouring at that hour, even if she were followed, her watcher wouldn’t see her drop something through the door slot, done, free, on her way to the relocation deal being put together by us and the Special Branch.
KISS. Her phone call telling her teacher she’d make it to class signaled that she’d done the dangerous part, plugged and pulled the data key when no al Qaeda eyes were in the tile shop. All she had to do now was ride a couple buses, take a short walk.
Past me.
Rain raged on the city. Blurred the evening light with trillions of streaking gray drops zinging down like jagged diamonds. Vehicles were parked everywhere, pushcarts stood abandoned until the return of quiet skies. Almost no one walked the streets.
I stood in the dripping arch of a shop doorway across the street and up towards the bus stop from TV FIX. A hooded, charcoal Gortex rain shell sheathed me. That blackish jacket blended me into the shadows. Through the rain-blurring vision, neither the burkaed woman I’d hammered into being my spy nor someone following her could easily spot me covering her play.
A blur of light slid to a stop off to my left at the bus stop.
I wiped rain off my face. Can’t see, not yet, not for sure, not—
Bobbing through the rain across the street.
A black shape: burka. No umbrella. And running. Running past my post.
Don’t break cover. Wait. Wait.
A clattering killer bee tore around the corner, skidded onto the side street and crashed into a parked car. The driver flew off, stumbled, staggered, found his balance…
Charged after the running woman in the burka. He wore a green rubber slicker.
Close, he was so close and they were only five feet from the FIX TV door when from behind them, through pouring rain, I saw him punch her in the back.
She staggered, whirled to swing something like a rope at her attacker as I leapt from my doorway, grabbed a six-foot twisted steel pipe from the construction rubble.
Green Slicker man caught the rope-thing and pulled: his jerk ripped the rope-thing from her hands and propelled her into his body punch. She stumbled towards the door. He hit her. She sprawled face-first to the sidewalk.
Puddles splashed beneath my running feet as I threw the pipe. It spun through the downpour like a twisted propeller. The pipe bounced off a parked car, careened over Green Slicker’s head to hit the wall. He whirled and saw me racing towards them.
And fled down the side street into the twisting neighborhood warren.
I lifted the burka woman from a sidewalk lake. Her veiled hood pulled off:
Derya.
Gasping from the punches, rain washing her pained face, she sputtered: “She froze at market. Cell phoned. Came she passed key… Local al Qaeda, jus’ there, market, he… he saw, knew her green shoes. She spooked ’n’ ’e came after us. I took it, ran caught the bus jus’ ’fore doors closed. He banged, wouldn’ let ’im on. Knocked rider off killer bee, stole… Chased bus.”
“Cell phone!” I yelled to her. “Does he have a cell phone?”
“Kill, he’ll kill… Stop ’m!”
“Get inside!”
As I charged away, I spotted the ‘rope-thing’ in a puddle. Her shoulder bag, an accessory only a Western woman carried. Add that to our green shoed agent jumping spooked, no wonder the al Qaeda thug targeted them. He’d been smart enough to chase the stranger who’d been given something. Knew he could always kill a local rabbit.
I ran through a sea of rain.
The sidestreet was a curving obstacle course of parked vans and trucks and cars, of killer bees draped in plastic sheaths, of push carts abandoned like roadblocks across the sidewalks while their owners huddled inside tea rooms. Green Slicker could have dived into one of the tea rooms, into any store that hadn’t locked its doors for the storm, but I didn’t think so. This was Bangsar, lousy with ex-pats. All Westerners were the enemy. He’d want familiar and safe turf to go to ground or to make a stand.
Don’t let him have a cell phone, please, no phone!
Hard as the rain fell, what made it hardest to see in front of me was the jumble of solid vehicles and sidewalk obstacles. I knew this street snaked for a mile before it hit a main road. Alleys spiked off it: as far as I knew, all were dead-ends.
There! Up ahead—truly up: an abandoned skeleton of K.L.’s 1990’s boom.
Back when stock markets soared and money flowed like rain, K.L.’s government decreed a facelift for Bangsar to repair roof gutters so that foreigner shoppers wouldn’t get their shoes soaked. The scheme bolted scaffolds to buildings on this street. Before any actual gutter repair, the economy crashed and left no ringgits to take down scaffolds.
That evening in the first January of the 21st Century, my black sneakers were soaked through as I grabbed a slick scaffold pipe, pulled myself up to the planking.
Stared down at the sidewalks and street. Only falling rain blurred my vision of the obstacle course below. I jogged over the bouncy-planked path, scanned the street below me like a black jacketed raptor.
Roofs of cars. Trucks. A homeless man held his begging bowl out to the rain. Three rain-drenched backpackers dodged around deserted vehicles. Children jumped in a street puddle. A blue neon nightclub sign winked on. Tops of umbrellas bounced below me: he hadn’t had one and no green flashed under them. No—
Half a block ahead: Green Slicker stumbled around a car. He whirled. Saw no human being chasing him. He didn’t look up to see what was hunting him from heaven.
His hands were empty: if he had a cell phone, it was in some pocket.
Moments later I was two stories
above him. I could see his water logged beard.
A coolness flowed through me. I was an angel walking on rain.
The twisted street narrowed. I could see that the path later widened. At street level, Green Slicker thought he was headed towards a dead end.
Green Slicker wiped his face to peer through the rain. He checked back the way he came, saw no hellhound on his trail. He walked down an alley.
Like Batman, I dropped from the scaffold. Followed him in.
Rain poured into this narrow canyon of concrete and brick walls. The alley zig-zagged, a broken and uneven cobblestone path. Storm drains gurgled whirlpools. A rat slogged towards me, didn’t bother to look up or say hello.
Ahead, I heard shoes splash in a puddle, a guttural curse.
I flowed around the corner.
Dead-end. Canyon walls made by cement and brick buildings. And turning to see me standing smack in the middle of the only way out: Green Slicker.
My left hand swept the black Gortex hood back off my head.
Maybe he thought I wanted him to see who I was. Maybe I did, but I pushed my hood off so that it wouldn’t impair turns or vision. Rain drummed my skull. I was here. I was now. I hadn’t come into that alley to transcend.
He kept his hood up. His right hand slid into his slicker pocket.
Gun no gun! K.L. guns rare carrying’s a lethal risk if he’s got a gun I’m dead!
Green Slicker’s fist jumped out of his pocket with a click and a silver flash.
Switchblade! He’s got a switchblade—should be a Filipino banana knife, this is back alley K.L., not Tijuana, he’s al Qaeda not chulo. Should not be a switchblade.
Should didn’t matter. Not in that alley.
Maybe Green Slicker trained in one of al Qaeda’s Afghanistan terrorist camps. Maybe in the dusty hills between Moscow and Kabul, he’d blasted Soviet soldiers with an AK-47 or an RPG. Maybe he’d planted bombs in Algeria or the Philippines. Maybe he’d spent weeks practicing commandos’ hand-to-hand combat.
Those maybes, the rain and slick cobblestones, the ticking clocks of al Qaeda and American ambitions, all that went into the alley’s equation. Plus my decades in dozens of dojos, dojangs, kwoons, classes in the basements of rock ’n’ roll CD shops and over fish stores, in garden courtyards and Japanese parking lots, in Nacogdoches, Texas and Taipei parks and U.S. military combat pits. Plus, this was not my first alley.
Knife fighting is microns and moments. Too little/too much, that way too soon or too slow, your blade stays clean and you get a boot slammed into your groin.
Green Slicker came in fast, his feet spread wide, front to me more like a judo player than a boxer. He stabbed at me but kept enough in reserve so he wasn’t over-extended, so he could dodge my strike to his eyes, my kick to his knee.
I snapped my left hand toward him; he lunged like a fencer.
Without thought, without plan, without Westernized intention, I flowed away from his stabbing blade, slid right—suddenly perpendicular to make his full front ‘open,’ my left hand and foot in a straight line to his groin, his heart, his throat, his eyes.
Green Slicker arced a flat roundhouse hook to stab me as I charged.
Only I wasn’t there. My right fist snapped and I seemed to lunge forward but truly I dropped back with my left side yielding away from his piercing hook.
And there was where his hooking knife slash went. Went through.
My left hand whipped behind the elbow of his stabbing arm, merged with his bones and added push that broke his root. My hand on his elbow aligned with his heart.
He rocked back to recover balance, then with inertia flowed up to—
As he floated between balance points, I pushed his center.
Green Slicker flew backwards and hit the brick wall.
Bounced off the wall knife in hand, changing his flailing to a desperate lunge.
I stepped outside his lunge, met/grabbed his knife’s wrist, pulled—
Slammed my palm into his hyper extended elbow. The switchblade flew from his grip as I heard his elbow snap, his scream. My forearm smashed his throat.
Gurgling/gasping, arm flopping, Green Slicker staggered.
In that moment, I saw his eyes.
I kicked him so hard he bounced off the wall. I grabbed his head, flipped him over my shoulder. Heard/felt his spine break.
Waves sloshed around a human island in an alley puddle. Green Slicker’s hood covered his head with its submerged face. No bubbles marred the surface of that water.
Time! How much time do I have! How soon before someone comes back here?
My hands flew through Green Slicker’s pockets. Stuffed his things in my jacket.
No cell phone. Thank God, he had no cell phone!
As I ran from the alley, I scooped up the switchblade.
Down came the rain. Somewhere beyond its clouds the sun set. By the time I reached the sidestreet and FIX TV, I was stumbling through wet flowing darkness.
A lump dotted the puddle on the sidewalk by the locked door: her shoulder bag, still there, she’d forgotten it—too stormy for scavengers/thieves. My fingers raked the puddle and found nothing spilled from it. Clutching her bag to my heaving chest, I tapped the lock code and the door clicked and I was in.
Dark, she hadn’t turned the lights on. Good! I slid to the floor, my back against the door as I fought to catch my breath, as I sent my hand inside her shoulder bag.
Found foil unwrapped from a condom that was gone, four of its fellow still-sealed warriors, an empty water bottle, her cell phone, brush, a scarf and hairpins for cinnamon–
No data key, in whole or in parts.
Upstairs, she’s upstairs and it’ll be there, said she had it, and it’s all OK.
“’s me!” I weakly called out to the darkness.
Heard nothing back.
In darkness, felt along the wall to the stairs, went up them using my hands and feet like a chimpanzee. Rain rolling off me tapped the grimy, sticky wet stairs.
At the top, realized she’d probably be standing in the dark with a baseball bat, ready to swing and fight until she knew it was me, knew she was safe.
My hand felt along the wall at the top of the stairs, flipped on the overhead light.
Derya slumped on the floor, her back against our bed. Her soaked black burka lay in between us. Her shirt was a motley smudge of rust.
All her blouses, shirts, are white or blue.
Her head rolled up from pointing at the floor, cinnamon hair streaking across her pale face as her eyes opened like snowflakes.
“Doesn’ hurt so much,” came her whisper.
Green Slicker: not hitting her. Not with his fist. With what was in his fist.
Not hitting: stabbing.
Cradling her, finding the holes oozing on her back, her stomach.
“She, ’s she—”
“Safe, she’s safe I promise Derya! And he’s—the son of—GOT HIM. He’s not gonna, we won’t, he can’t hurt anybody any more, can’t hurt y—”
“Thought was gonna catch me, on bus, ’im on stolen kill’bee behind… Smarter, gotta be smarter th’n… Broke the key. Threw two parts on bus floor. Core, core’s so small, so big—’d you know th’ size somethin’ is depends on what time it is? Condom, Shabana b’ so proud, cond’m sealed self tight!
“Swallowed it,” she told me. “Water, needed to… Yucky hurt all the way down, bu’ if he’d caught me, found nothin’, even though I just a woman, don’t belong to him ’n’ he’d have to let me go.”
Hair webbed her face. Her hand tried to brush it away; fell back to her wet lap. I swept matted cinnamon from her eyes as she stared into me with shimmering blueness and confessed: “I’d be a lousy drug smuggler.”
I grabbed my cell phone.
“Don’ you want to talk to me?”
Milk washed through her Tupelo honey skin that felt tepid and wrinkly.
Who could I call.
“I’ll talk to you forever and ever!” I held her face so our eyes could meet.
“Tell me… truth?”
“Always! Forever, the whole truth, I love you, I love you, I—”
“Olacag’ varmis.” The Turkish proverb she’d taught me that I’d joked back to her with the American not-quite-on-target translation of: “That’s life.”
More Turkish babbled from her, so slurred her family might not have understood.
Deep breath she was back, fully there, here, face in my hands as she was oh so still while I trembled. She let her hand float up between us, let her fingers brush my forehead, their stickiness burning a crimson smear on my skin that she saw, whispered: “Tattoo.”
Gone, her hand falling as she was gone.
No, not gone: she was dead.
My sobs and screams washed away my faith.
But not my rage.
Then it came to me: Not all this for nothing.
Not all that I saw unfolding around me like holographic theater where I was on the stage, seeing myself pull my love into the bathroom, seeing me lift her into that tub, lay her on her back like she did when I wasn’t in there with her, when soap bubbles and steaming hot water made eternities we called Italy because me watching her bathe was like an Italian movie. But in this stage play she just lay there. I envisioned dawn as I motorcycled through K.L.’s empty streets, rain washing me and soaking the bundle lashed to the seat behind me, a bundle the size of a mattress, a bundle wrapped in the curtain from the bathtub where Derya who I’d love forever lay with lifeless eyes open like on that July afternoon when I was nine and my Uncle who wasn’t Sam, no he was Jerry, Uncle Sam stood with me near the trout stream, my hands full as he said: ‘Go ahead, son, you caught her, you got to finish the job, an’ now she won’t feel a thing.’
But so much of that was in the future as I bent over the bathtub where my love lay. So much was in a tomorrow where Special Branch experts detected the death of a woman killed by a hit and run driver who exploded her life into a mess that had to be sealed in a steel coffin and flown home to Ankara, a flight that carried her two friends clinging to a haunted American who lied, lied, lied. Lied like the Special Branch who for dollars and comradeship with a tall American woman closed the books on another accident on that January, 2000 night. In that strange event, a former thief who’d allegedly found Allah stole a killer bee and ended up crashing and breaking his fucking neck. All those in the market who’d seen him steal the motorcycle never understood why he’d done what they truly saw him do.