The thought occurred to me that I’d been living in that domain for the last week. “What happened?”
“A truck bomb killed seventeen people. It blew cars onto roofs. And yesterday they attacked an American Humvee outside the Rabiya Hotel. Then the soldiers came to this market. Some men were testing guns to buy, shooting them in the air, and the soldiers fired, thinking the shots to be aimed at them. We have much fury over that. There will be no fast end to this war.”
We left the van once more and proceeded on foot. The place seemed to go on forever. A black market version of London’s Portobello Road. Samuel had said you could buy almost anything here, and he was right. Despite yesterday’s events, an arms seller had filled the cargo bed of his pickup with guns. A clutch of men checked them out, but no one seemed inclined to test shoot today.
Another vendor stood over two large containers—rusted oil drums cut in half and filled with water, turbulent with the writhing bodies of fish. Mazgouf, the green carp caught in the sluggish Tigris. “Poison fish,” Mazare said. “Once they were good. Now this war has filled the river with filth.”
A strange assortment of things lay on a dirty carpet: squeezed toothpaste tubes, women’s pink razors, half-full bottles of Detol, small one-serving containers of peanut butter and MREs—the army’s meals ready to eat. Mazare gestured toward the wares. “They sift through the garbage from the army bases and take this stuff to sell.”
A nearby table was piled with phones, DVD players, TV sets, computers—products of the looting or goods stolen from people’s homes. The next vendor displayed strange-looking chunks of meat. Mazare told me they were sheep’s lungs. A cloud of flies buzzed over the mutton. The raw flesh had a greenish tinge and steamed in the heat. When I expressed my distaste he shrugged. “People are starving. What do you expect?” Another whistle sounded. No one else paid it any heed, but Mazare whipped out his phone and made a call. After a short burst of words he clutched my arm and hustled us along a different route back to the van. I could tell this was going badly and thought he must be running out of options, so it was a surprise when he said, “Tomas will come to us at our next stop. God willing.”
This time as Mazare drove he didn’t enlighten me about where we were. We’d turned southwest and traveled to a busy street, that’s all I knew. He swung off the road onto a driveway and we slowed down. A sign announced the North Gate Cemetery, burial ground for Commonwealth soldiers of the 1917 campaign against the Ottoman Turks. Had Tomas taken a page out of Hal’s book and chosen a hiding place similar to the one in New York?
Rusted metal gates hung open. We drove through on a path intended only for walking. He turned the van around and parked then yanked out his phone to make another call. After hanging up he said, “We wait for Tomas now. He’ll come soon.”
A broad center aisle was flanked by tall, scruffy palms; around the perimeter, grasses grew as tall as a man. The aisle led to a mausoleum, a four-pillared stone canopy erected over a base, clearly intended for someone important in contrast to the simple crosses and eroded headstones of the rank-and-file graves.
“This is a British cemetery? So many graves, it must have been a terrible battle.”
Mazare shook his head. “Not all died from bullets and swords.” “What then?”
“The cholera.” He pointed toward the rows of white crosses.
“They got so sick they coughed their own guts up. So far away from home. Why did they even come?”
I had no answer for that.
Perhaps it was just the contrast between the quiet in the cemetery and the traffic noise in the rest of the city, but there was a stillness here that felt anything but peaceful. No birds chirped their evensong; no small animals scampered in the grass. We waited.
Near dusk, the sun limped lower in the sky. My attention was caught by a shadow out of keeping with the forms surrounding it. It seemed too tall and appeared to move toward us. It was as if a stone monument had suddenly come alive. Shim moved into view.
The white Humvee burst into the cemetery. On its tail, Ward’s sedan. Mazare yelled and dove for the floor. He pulled out a semi-automatic from underneath the seat. I lunged for the door handle. Mazare grabbed me and pulled me back.
Truly lethal sounds have a soft edge. I heard a pop off in the distance, followed by a crump. The shock wave of a blast blew me against the door. A second wave resonated and held me there. The metal window frame of our van glowed, the heat scorching my arm. I yanked it back. The white Humvee exploded into a cauldron of orange flame. Its doors burst open and Eris’s body tumbled out, a bloody hole in her ravaged torso, her hair on fire. A bloom of oily smoke gushed into the air.
Shim reached the sedan, flung open the door, and hauled Ward out, keeping his massive body between Ward and the locus of the attack. With the force of a pneumatic drill, a series of shots tore up the grass in front of him. One of the guards spilled out of the sedan, spraying gunfire toward the mausoleum. Mazare hit the handle on his side, kicked open the door, and got off a few rounds. The shots tore into the guard’s left side; his body bucked under the force of the bullets and he collapsed.
My own arteries felt close to bursting, my heart was pumping so hard. At the same time it seemed strange, as though I were watching all this happening to someone else.
A second missile hit the front of the sedan, throwing it into the air like a toy. It landed on its roof, shrapnel from the car whipping into us. Out of instinct I flung my hands up. Mazare jerked his body back when our windows shattered. I could smell burning rubber. I tried the door again; my hands shook so badly I could barely grasp the handle. I slammed against it and fell out. Mazare followed. I tried to get up but suddenly felt too weak to rise. Mazare looked at me for an instant, his face splintered with cuts, then ran.
Shim reversed course, trying to drag Ward behind the wrecked hulk of the sedan. More shots rang out. He shuddered and swayed but kept going, the bullets having about as much effect on him as if they’d been aimed at gravestones. But the sedan’s gas tank blew and Shim was too close. The explosion showered them with fire. Ward’s clothes burned; he screamed and flailed on the ground. Shim twisted and turned, caught in a violence of flame. He appeared to shrink and grow black, stone turning into cinder, and toppled to the ground.
I tried to stand up again. Another volley of shots hit the front of our van. A blinding pain ripped through my head. I became oddly aware of gravestones glowing with a white radiance as if they were embedded with internal lights. I remember forcing myself to breathe. Someone leaned over me, trying to say something. I could see a mouth moving but couldn’t hear the words, as if I’d been submerged under fifty feet of water. The person faded away. And then I was underwater, green fish coiling around my legs, blankets of emerald seaweed wrapping my arms, Laurel’s body rolling in the current, her skin silver like a mermaid’s, her brown hair fanning out, her limbs moving as if she were dancing in the stream. My last thought—surprise—that a river could spring up so suddenly in a graveyard.
Thirty-three
Two spears of pain drilled through my temples. I opened my eyes and saw only the gray, amorphous screen that is the landscape of the blind. I blinked and rubbed my eyes, trying to force my vision back. My sight cleared and I could tell the environment actually was gray: concrete block walls, a floor painted prison gray, no furniture, the only daylight coming from a small window near the ceiling.
I lay on a foam rubber mat wedged into a corner of the room. I could hear nothing and prayed that didn’t mean the explosion had destroyed my eardrums. A rough bandage applied to my forearm covered the burn from the hot metal of the van.
When I tried to get up I collapsed on legs so weak it felt as though my bones had been somehow extracted, leaving the flesh intact. I raised myself to my knees and crawled to the outline of a door on the opposite wall. There was no handle or lock so I struggled back, slumping once more onto the foam mat.
When the door did open, a beam of light hit me full in the
face. I gave my head a shake and saw Tomas standing in the doorway.
“Well, John,” he said, “welcome back to the world.” It sounded as though he were speaking from far away, but I was relieved that my ears hadn’t been deafened in the firefight.
One of his men had to help me upstairs. It felt like I was climbing a small mountain of mud. On the second floor we went up another staircase to a little rooftop terrace with a stone statuette of a faun, a rust stain marking the path where the water would have tinkled out from his set of pan pipes. I slumped into a plastic chair.
Tomas handed me a glass of tea. “Drink this,” he said. “It will refresh you.”
Any resistance I might have summoned had been wiped out by the trauma of the blast. The cool menthol of the tea slipped agreeably down my throat. Over the wall I could see other rooftop terraces crowning modest buildings in shades of butterscotch, peach, and henna against the backdrop of an azure sky. Clumps of palms waved in the distance. I felt the sun on my face, soft in the cool breeze. I could have been sitting in a pension on the Côte d’Azur. I wanted to stay here forever.
Tomas had acquired a bit of a tan. He looked relaxed and settled, glad to be home.
I finished my tea and set the cup down. Tomas reached for a tray of dates and nuts, asking if I’d like something to eat. I shook my head. Just drinking the tea had produced little spurts of nausea. I didn’t want to push it.
“You’ll feel better in a while,” he said, “no serious damage done.” “Is it true about Laurel?”
Tomas’s air of comfort lessened; he tightened up again. “She’s dead, John.”
Weak though I was, I pushed myself out of the chair and threw myself at him. “You piece of shit. You betrayed us. You may as well have killed her yourself.” His men dragged me away. One of them pulled out a gun. Tomas waved him off and rubbed the spot where my fist had connected with his jaw. “Put that away; it will not be necessary.” His gaze shifted to me. “You aren’t doing yourself any favors, Madison.”
Silence reigned for a few minutes before Tomas spoke again. “They’d already taken her by the time I picked up the engraving. There was nothing I could have done.”
“Ward wanted it. He was willing to make an exchange.”
“You don’t really believe they would have gone through with that, do you?”
“It was my only hope to save her. I was trying to work out a way I could involve the police without Ward finding out. You blew that all to hell and took any chance I had away. How did you know enough to look in the mausoleum anyway?”
“Laurel mentioned Hal’s attachment to his mother. Then Ari passed on what you’d said about the tomb at Trinity. I remembered that place because I’d lived nearby when I went to Columbia. You’d told him you couldn’t get into it. I found the mausoleum with no name and brought a cutting tool with me.”
“And what about me? You abandoned me.”
Tomas did not have a large measure of tolerance at the best of times; it didn’t take much for his patience to break. He yelled, “What did you expect me to do? I had one of Ward’s thugs on my back and barely made it out of the country as it was. Mazare and I took huge risks to bring you here. Consider yourself fortunate. We could have left you to die.”
“Why did you bother?”
Tomas allowed himself a smile. “Perhaps I’m not as bad a man as you like to think.”
“Really? After you killed people in cold blood.”
“Like they were getting ready to do to us, you mean?” “Did they all die?”
“Eris and Shim did. And the two contractors. About Ward, we’re not sure. He was seriously injured, at least. You can appreciate my men didn’t want to linger.”
“How did they find us?”
“The jacket they gave you had tracers sewn into it.”
“They let me escape so they could follow you?”
“Yes.”
“But Mazare checked my jacket and found nothing.”
Tomas smiled again. “Yes, he did check it.”
Seconds elapsed before it dawned on me what he’d done. “Mazare knew the tracers were there. You wanted them to chase us.”
Tomas was actually beaming now. “We trawled for them and they fell for it.”
Anger broke through my exhaustion again. “You and Ward are the same, you know. Human lives mean absolutely nothing to you.”
Tomas dismissed this with a flick of his hand. “Not nothing. But not the most important thing either.”
I let that hang in the air for a minute. “Someone needs to tell the New York police what really happened.”
“When you get back, feel free to tell anyone you like. I certainly won’t. Be careful, though. You were one of the last people seen with both Hal and Laurel. You could be stepping onto a minefield.”
“I’ll take my chances. Where’s Nahum’s engraving? At least let me see that.”
“In due time.”
“What are you talking about—due time? You must have it here. You wouldn’t let it out of your sight.”
Tomas flipped his hand back and forth as if he were swishing away a bothersome fly. “Even this place isn’t safe enough. It must be protected.” My temper surged again. “I don’t believe a word of that.”
My only answer was his contempt. He knew he was in the position of power.
“After what happened to Samuel, everything he went through, you have no right to keep it from me.”
This touched a nerve. “Don’t lecture me about Samuel. I was the one he could count on. You were nothing but a thorn in his side. People felt sorry for him having to put up with you. Laurel told me that back in New York.”
Had she really said that or was he making it up? My own hot shame told me all I needed to know.
His men moved between the two of us. Tomas turned to leave, making it clear our yelling match had come to an end. He’d kept himself under better control than I had. It seemed the city had somehow transformed him. Or perhaps it was simply the luxury of seeing an enemy vanquished. “I have to go out for the rest of the day,” he said casually as he went down the stairs. “My men will care for you while I’m gone.”
He had no need to issue threats about what would happen if I tried to leave.
Not much was left of the afternoon. I struggled up, dragged my chair over to the parapet, and sat there until the sky took on flamboyant pinks and violets, grew murky and then dark. I was glad they left me alone. Despairing thoughts crowded in, reminders of all my failures. The car crash had set off the downward plunge. Even if I managed to stay alive, I didn’t believe I’d ever recover.
Toward the end of the evening my thoughts turned to Samuel. I remembered a train trip we’d taken after one of his long absences to visit friends living near Utica. I’d sat, my face pressed against the glass most of the time, taking in the country landscape. We passed farmers’ fields turning golden in the sun; long-forgotten waterways, their still surfaces covered with verdant water plants; luxuriant vines draped over telephone lines; roads leading to nowhere; stands of forest; brown deer nuzzling grass on stream banks. I’d imagined on that day I was the last human left on the planet, watching the earth reclaim itself.
At one point we crossed a vast plain of marshes, the rushes standing straight as swords, pointing to the sky. Idyllic days, those times I’d spent with him in my youth. How had it gone wrong? What flaw had produced a personality that brought harm to everyone I cared for?
I recuperated for the next six days. My hearing gradually returned to normal. The burn on my arm became less painful. My memory of the attacks and the fight at the cemetery began to fade like a bad dream. Physically, I gained strength. Emotionally, I veered from self-recrimination over Laurel’s death to deep depression, some of the blackest moods I’d ever experienced.
They had no TV or radio. The terrace quickly became my own private refuge; here at least I was blessedly cut off from the world. The only sliver of happiness, weak though it was, came through a developing af
fection for the city. Out of character for me, I’d get up early in the morning so I could see the boxy forms of its buildings emerge along with the first shafts of sunlight. Night animal though I was, my patterns became almost rural, rising at dawn and retiring at sunset so that when there were brownouts or, frequently, no power at all, I barely noticed. Central Baghdad had many high-rises and I could see few, so I guessed our location to be well into the outskirts.
Reminders of the war intruded, of course. The sky would occasionally buzz with military helicopters, circling like angry wasps overhead. One day a bright arc of fire flared on the horizon, followed by a loud boom that seemed to go on forever. That did not cause me any real concern. Like a moth wrapped securely in its cocoon, I felt safe from the tempest raging outside. The next morning I noticed the rooftop furniture coated with grime. I got a cloth and wiped everything clean again. It seemed that easy, banishing the horror of a bomb with a flick of my hand. Perhaps that was my way of trying to regain some sense of stability.
Once, I thought I heard Laurel’s voice. I rushed over to the parapet. In places the street was so narrow it looked as though you could touch the facades of opposite buildings just by stretching out your hands. I saw three women, each wearing a black chador, walking at a leisurely pace down the street. Their laughter rose up to me, bell-like. One extended a delicate foot; a filigree of silver circled her ankle. Her headscarf slipped back, revealing glossy dark hair. She looked up, sensing me watching from above. Not Laurel, of course. Just my mind playing a vicious trick.
Whether it was the new connection with the city Samuel had loved, my near-death experience, or my somber thoughts about Laurel, this was when I took my first faltering steps toward making peace with Samuel’s death. I did not forgive myself for the accident, but the ceaseless voice of denial stopped and I more readily accepted that my own actions had played a role.
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