The Witch of Babylon

by Dorothy J. Mcintosh

  “Yes. Al-Mansour.”

  “I presume you don’t speak Arabic?”

  I shook my head.

  “Their staff are very competent and speak English. I’d suggest you enlist their help in your search. They will have directories and other resources.” He moved over to the door. “I’m afraid you’ve caught me at a busy moment. You’ll excuse me now, I hope.”

  I thanked him and walked away. What else could I do? I had about two minutes to forge a story that would satisfy Ward. I desperately searched for ideas and came up with something that might work.

  Ward and Eris met me when I reached the taxi. “Well?” he asked. “Tomas didn’t show up, as you predicted. The man I spoke to claimed he’d never heard of him. But I saw something.”

  “What?” Ward thrust his face closer to mine. Streaks of sweat ran from his temples to his chin.

  “The guy was lying. At least Ari’s there—that much I’m sure of.”

  “Why do you think so?”

  “I saw his camera propped up against a cabinet in the front room. The same one he carried in New York. If he’s here, Tomas has to be close by.” I decided this sounded more convincing than saying I’d seen either of them in person.

  The flush left his skin; the tension that had produced crevices of worry between his brows and around his mouth subsided. Ward was clearly not prepared to raid the house right now. By the time they stormed the place, interrogated the owner, and discovered there was nothing of substance to my story, I might have found a way to extricate myself from this nightmare.

  Eris pulled out her phone.

  “Who are you calling?” I asked.

  “There are people who need to be alerted if Ari Zakar is back,” she responded. She saw the question mark on my face. “It’s nothing to do with our little venture. Just a quid pro quo for some important people.”

  “Why do they care?”

  “A story he’s working on. Something about Abu Ghraib. Nothing to do with us.” She punched in a few numbers and delivered the information I’d just given her to the voice on the other end. I smiled inwardly. Ari had that prison story to thank for being safely holed up in London.

  When we reached the hotel room we saw the button on the hotel phone flashing. Ward picked it up while Eris went back into the bedroom. Just as she was about to lock me up again Ward called out. “Hold on, we’ve got a new development.”

  I pushed my way past Eris. Ward beamed. “Congratulations, you delivered.”

  I managed to cloak my shock at this news.

  “We just missed a message for you.”

  “I’m officially registered here?”

  “We had to.”

  “What’s the message?”

  “You’re to meet a contact of Tomas’s at the museum. Three o’clock.”

  Thirty-two

  The instantly recognizable facade of the Children’s Museum, featured on the front pages of the international press this spring, sat at the intersection of Qahira and Nasir streets behind a high wrought-iron fence. Its sand-colored limestone structure— two square towers joined by a bridge over the central arch—was a handsome example of museum architecture. Distinctly Islamic with classical grace.

  Between the central frieze and the roof of the arch, a black circle—a shot from an American cannon—looked like the point on an exclamation mark. The arch was impassable now, the space taken up by a tank.

  A little late, I thought grimly. Probably just there for show. The place looked forlorn. It reminded me of those abandoned factories in the Rust Belt, once thriving concerns built at the turn of the century, now lonely outposts without a purpose.

  The museum’s story was familiar to me. Founded at the zenith of British power in the Middle East, when the boundaries of modern Iraq were carved out, it was at first only one room in a Baghdad building. When more space was needed a small museum was built overlooking the Tigris. Inaugurated in 1926, the museum resulted from a collaboration between the Iraqi king Faisal and a remarkable Englishwoman, Gertrude Bell. Al-Khatun, they’d called her. An explorer, writer, and archaeologist, she’d dedicated a good part of her life to protecting Mesopotamian culture.

  The present site, a complex of buildings, was established in the sixties. The main galleries were housed in a rectangular structure with an inner courtyard. Since the museum’s establishment, periodic bouts of looting had broken out, the most notorious occurring during the Gulf War. It had been shut off to the public since then.

  After I walked through the gate I handed the passport Ward had restored to me to an American Marine, who helped me locate the right entrance. I was met by an older woman wearing black-rimmed glasses and a hijab who introduced herself as Hanifa al-Majid. This was Tomas’s colleague; I’d imagined someone much younger. “Much welcome, sir,” she said after I greeted her. Her English was rocky but we managed to communicate well enough.

  I recalled all the times in my youth when I’d daydreamed about walking these corridors with Samuel. The thrill of actually being here momentarily overwhelmed me. Our route took us through the Assyrian gallery. At its entrance loomed the massive Lamassu, with their bull bodies, wings, human-like heads, braided hair, and horned helmets. Each statue had five legs positioned so they could be seen as four-legged from either the front or the side. Inside the gallery the floor was strewn with debris, but the life-sized reliefs of Assyrian royal figures and Apkallu around the perimeter were blessedly intact. I paused in front of a magnificent portrayal of a man grasping the bridles of two horses, sculpted as beautifully as anything done by the Greeks and Romans.

  My guide summoned me. As we hurried away our footsteps echoed in the emptiness of the hallways. I felt saddened by what had been stolen, trampled underfoot, lost forever. Nothing really changes. All the great Mesopotamian cities had been destroyed in antiquity. More than two millennia later it was happening all over again.

  I could see efforts underway to clean up some of the disorder, although many areas were still in a shambles. We traipsed through a wide hallway, one side patterned with small squares of openings to admit natural light. On a low podium a headless statue stood to one side. When she saw me glance at it, Hanifa flushed and said, “Always the head was gone. Done in the past, not looters.” I sympathized with her obvious distress over the state of the museum.

  An Iraqi guard with an AK-47 sat at a small desk in one of the restoration rooms, surrounded by banks of shelving holding hundreds of dusty clay vessels and jars. Broken bits lay heaped in piles on the floor, some shards with the museum ident marks still visible, all of them crushed by the looters. I wondered whether this was the room where Samuel had kept the engraving.

  She pointed to the piles. “I’m sorry for it—how it looks. No electricity is here. Most staff are gone. No security system. It takes us long time to fix up because of this.” The poor woman looked as if she carried the weight of the entire building on her shoulders.

  I moved closer to her. “Do you have a phone? I have to make a call urgently.” From the look on her face I could see she hadn’t understood. I mimicked making a call and she got the idea. She shook her head. “No—sorry.”

  My hopes sank again. It had been a long shot anyway. Even if she had a working phone, putting a call through to New York would probably be impossible.

  She took paper and a ballpoint pen from the desk and scribbled a note, passing it to me. It read Follow me, please. I started to speak, but she put two fingers up to my lips to signal silence. She grabbed the paper, turned it over, and wrote, Someone else waits for you. She stood up and said in a voice loud enough for the guard to hear, “Please come. I will get us tea.”

  Several hallways and rooms later, we met up with a Middle Eastern man wearing sunglasses, his dark hair shot with gray. The woman gestured toward him as if she were offering me up as a gift, and giving me a weak smile scurried away. Mazare extended his hand and said hello.

  I stepped back from him. “You’re not carrying any explosives today, I
hope. And what a surprise. You speak English.”

  He grinned. “Sorry for that.”

  “You’re sorry? You almost fucking killed me.”

  “I tried to tell you. Make you come closer to me. You didn’t read my signs soon enough.”

  “It was a touch difficult to appreciate nuances with four people at my back looking for an excuse to shoot me.”

  His good humor faded. He checked his watch and said, “Tomas and I are taking many chances to save you now. Stay with Ward and you’ll be dead by tomorrow. Come with me or not. I caution you to make up your mind fast.”

  I cast my memory back to the tunnel in the underground city and remembered Mazare gesturing for me to come forward, murmuring something. It was possible he’d been trying to alert me.

  “I can’t go with you. They’re holding a woman back in New York. They’ll kill her if I escape.”

  Mazare’s face fell and I could read sympathy in his expression loud and clear. “That woman—Laurel, is it her name?”

  “Yes.”

  “I feel in my heart this sad for you. She is dead. Drowned in the river.”

  Oh God. It can’t be true. “Are you sure? How do you know that? Did Tomas tell you?”

  “Not Tomas. Ari. He found it out. Just today. The news said she went onto a high bridge and jumped in Harlem’s river, sick because of losing her husband.”

  Scrambled though his expression was, there was no way he could have made up the reference to the High Bridge and the Harlem River. And the story had logic. When Ward and Eris spirited me away to Baghdad she was nothing but a liability. Ward could still threaten me about harming her because I’d have no way of knowing her fate. Mazare said something. I barely heard him, the news about Laurel bearing down on me like a thundercloud.

  He grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me hard. “I said we have to go. Now.” He half dragged me to the dusty Toyota van parked in the shaded lane outside. He opened the back doors and pushed me inside before climbing in himself and putting the key in the ignition.

  “Stay in the back where no one can see you. I’m taking you to Tomas.”

  I slumped against the side of the van, not caring where we were headed. He drove for a few minutes then braked, rolled down the window, and spoke a few words in Arabic to a guard. An anxious minute of silence passed before he stepped on the accelerator and took off.

  I tried to pull myself together. Mazare wasn’t tearing up the pavement. That is to say he was speeding like crazy but no faster than most Iraqi drivers. Fifteen minutes later we halted again. “Come into the front now,” he said. I sighed and clambered onto the passenger seat beside him. We were parked behind a strip of bombed-out buildings. The stench from the garbage outside was overwhelming. Rotting fish parts and bones were scattered everywhere.

  “Are these clothes yours?”

  “The pants are mine and the shoes. They gave me the jacket and shirt back in New York.” He opened the glove compartment and extracted something that looked like a cellphone. Pressing one of the buttons, he ran it over the arms, lapels, and back of the jacket.

  “Take your jacket off and pull the shirt out at the waist.” He repeated the exercise over my shirt then looked at the screen, clicked the device off, and put it back.

  “What were you looking for?”

  “They can weave those tracers into material now. We have to be careful.”

  I took in a few deep breaths, tried to calm down and remember the risks the guy was taking on my behalf. “Thank you. I know how dangerous it is, doing this.”

  He shrugged. “Whatever Tomas wants we do.”

  His dark eyes bored into mine and he pointed his index finger at me like a teacher getting ready to scold. “The places we’re going, you’ll only be safe with me. Speak to no one.”

  We crossed a bridge and turned onto al-Rashid, Baghdad’s main commercial street. Closer to the bridge buildings showed the impact of the war, windows blown out with ragged frames, starbursts of soot on facades, blackened wounds on the cladding.

  The street was thick with traffic. Leaning on the horn was simply a normal part of driving, like hitting the brakes or changing gears. Buses jockeyed for space, boys staggered under carts flush with goods, vehicles fought for every inch of pavement. I could have been back on Broadway.

  We jerked to a stop, cars pressing in on all sides. Exhaust fumes swirled in a suffocating haze. Mazare threw up his hands and swore.

  He finally located a side street and parked the van. “We walk from here,” he said. Heat beat down on us unmercifully. I shuffled along beside him, images of Laurel flaunting themselves in my brain. They would have drugged her probably with some kind of tranquilizer to make her suicide more convincing. Had one of Ward’s men clasped her in his arms, lifted her cleanly over the rail, and cast her body down? Even with drugs in her system, a minute or so of total panic would have taken hold as she plunged toward the murky river. What a desolate way to die.

  Was there anything I could have done differently? Had she simply been condemned the minute we began working on Hal’s game? Everything I touched withered and died.

  Mazare seemed to grow less tense as we mingled with the crowds, although he looked back every couple of minutes.

  He waved his hand. “This is al-Mutannabi Street; you’ll see the book bazaar. We still have culture here, no matter how hard you Americans try to kill it.” If he was trying to shame me, he was doing a good job.

  “Did you know my brother Samuel?” I asked indignantly.

  “I met him once.”

  “He was an American and did everything he could to save Iraqi culture. He loved this city.” “Well, he failed then.”

  “It’s not his failing only.”

  Mazare gave a disdainful laugh and I looked away. There were no vehicles on al-Mutannabi, at least not while the bazaar was on. It was a little crescent of peace compared to what we’d just driven through. Antiquated buildings, a number of them housing bookstores, walled off the street. Towering stacks of volumes lined their dim interiors. Outside, cheap plastic tarps were covered with periodicals, pamphlets, pirated DVDs, and tomes in English and Arabic. High metal filing cases, their doors propped open, burst with musty old pages.

  Above a poster stand, an image of Saddam Hussein had his face crossed out. A neighboring stand displayed a framed portrait with Arabic script. “Who’s that?” I asked Mazare.

  “Ayatollah Muhammad Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr. Assassinated in Najaf in February of 1999. A very revered man in Iraq,” he said.

  Almost all the shoppers were male; very few women ventured out onto the street. We walked past a cleared space occupied by three men standing on a wooden platform. Two were on their knees; the third stood over them with a baton, pretending to hit them. An enthusiastic audience yelled out comments. “Actors,” Mazare said. “This is an old tradition.”

  We followed a bend in the road. I could see the glassy water of the Tigris at the end of the street. A little farther on Mazare pointed to a semi-circular, single-story building with tables strung along its front. “The al-Shabandar. A famous place in Baghdad.”

  The café was filled to the brim, again with men, almost all of them smoking. Some pulled sweet oriental tobacco through their narghile pipes, others smoked cigarettes. I thought I could detect the vanilla perfume of hashish. You could almost taste the mingling scents in the air. Tumblers of steaming tea sat on the tables. A fan revolved slowly from the high ceiling. Framed paintings and photographs in all sizes crowded the walls—portraits, landscapes, still lifes. A generator buzzed. Dominoes clacked. A couple of backgammon games were in progress.

  A helicopter passed overhead the moment we sat down, its big rotors making the building shake. Mere seconds later we heard a terrific explosion. A mortar going off, I guessed.

  The room froze.

  Mazare frowned and shook his head. “Look at us,” he said.

  “We stink of fear.”

  I leaned over, lowering my voice.
Knowing Laurel was dead had put an end to everything. I just wanted to escape. “Listen. Can’t you get me out of Baghdad? To Jordan or Turkey? Anywhere, I don’t care. I don’t need to see Tomas and I’m sure he’d be just as happy not to see me. I was forced to come here.” He dismissed this idea quickly. “Tomas said nothing about that. I’ll get some coffees.”

  He brought back two and set them on the table. The rich mocha scent should have been appealing but did not tempt me. Mazare checked his watch for what seemed like the hundredth time and looked outside, scanning the faces. Was someone else out there scouting for him? His coffee sat on the table, untouched.

  I fumbled around for something to say. “You were speaking Turkish to Eris?”

  “I am Assyrian but I grew up in Istanbul. We Assyrians are spread out in many places. Even in Europe. Even in your country.”

  A whistle sounded from somewhere in the street. Mazare jumped up abruptly.

  “Come. Leave your drink. We must go right now.”

  He walked rapidly. I had a hard time keeping up with him. He wouldn’t speak to me, his lips pressed together so hard they’d turned white. His eyes darted from side to side, checking out the street. We took a circuitous route back to the van.

  When we drove away I said, “I appreciate the tour and all, but why bother going there?”

  “Escaping Ward’s people is not easy. They’re trailing us. We need to lose them somehow.”

  “Where are we going now?”

  “Suq al-Haramia, the Thieves Market. Do you know it?”

  “I’ve heard of it.”

  We headed north on Khulfafa Street, away from the city core. On the outskirts of Sadr City, we ran into an American patrol. Mazare pulled over while they passed. “Things are bad again after the Jordanian embassy.” He let out a cynical laugh. “No, that is wrong. Bad is what every day is like here. Is there a word in your language for something worse than hell? If there is, we are inside it.”