The Mirage

by Matt Ruff

  Baghdad

  The city of Baghdad, population 6.5 million, is the largest city in Iraq and the second-largest city (after Cairo) in the United Arab States. Founded in the year 762 by Abu Jafar al Mansour, it was the capital of the Abbasid Caliphate until its sack by the Mongol Hulagu Khan in 1258. Under the Ottoman Turks, who ruled the city from the 16th through the 19th centuries, Baghdad went into decline, but its role in the founding of the UAS helped restore its fortunes. Today it is once again an important commercial and cultural center.

  Baghdad has many nicknames, among them “The City of Peace,” “The City of the Future,” and “The City That Never Sleeps.” Less flattering nicknames include “The Crime Capital of Mesopotamia” and “The Modern Babylon.”

  Since the 11/9 attacks, Baghdad and its residents have become symbols of Arab resistance to Western terrorism . . .

  BAGHDAD IN POPULAR CULTURE

  The diversity of its population has made Baghdad a popular setting for films and TV series—like the children’s program Open Sesame!—that seek to promote greater religious and ethnic tolerance. One of the high-water marks of televised ecumenism was surely Baghdad Police Story, which debuted on the Arabian Broadcast Company in 1971 with the tagline “Shafiq: he’s Sunni. Hassan: he’s Shia. They fight crime.” Part cop drama, part soap opera, part morality play, the series concerned the lives of two undercover detectives on Baghdad’s east side. The recurring cast included characters who were Sufis, Christians, and Jews; there was even a Zoroastrian, a Persian counterfeiter named Qaisar. Episodes typically offered one or more moral lessons, the most common of which was “Respect the other People of the Book—even if you don’t like them very much.”

  A very different Baghdad—one sadly more representative of the post–November 9 ethos—is seen in the contemporary hit series 24/7 Jihad, each season of which chronicles a single day in the life of anti-terrorist Jafar Bashir. Bashir is a Unitarian Sunni, a portrayal that has drawn criticism from religious authorities who feel that his casual use of violence and torture is un-Islamic. Still greater controversy surrounds Jihad’s depiction of Shia. Although the series’ main villains are Christian fundamentalists, Bashir must also cope with double agents within his own organization. Of the six identifiably Shia characters who have appeared on Jihad to date, all have been traitors (and all have died horrific deaths). In a 2007 interview on Al Manar, Jihad executive producer Jamal Sur insisted that this was a coincidence, and that the show in no way intended to suggest that Shia Muslims as a group were disloyal to the state. He added, “I think certain people are a little too in love with the idea of being martyrs.” This prompted Omar Karim of the anti-defamation group Shia in Media to respond, “Chapter 25, verse 63 of Holy Quran instructs us to meet the taunts of the ignorant with the blessing of peace. Mr. Sur: Peace be unto you.”

  Mustafa lived with his father, Abu Mustafa, in a two-bedroom apartment in Baghdad’s Rusafa district, east of the Tigris.

  Abu Mustafa was a retired BU history professor. For a long while after the death of Mustafa’s mother, he had chosen to live alone, the better, he said, to entertain the rich Baghdad widows who find elderly bachelors irresistible. The line about the widows wasn’t entirely a joke—Abu Mustafa had always appreciated the company of women—but Mustafa knew he also enjoyed being on his own, free to socialize when he wanted to, to visit with family and friends, and then relax, at the end of the day, with his books and his own thoughts.

  Mustafa had helped find and pay for the apartment, which was in an older building convenient to the riverside promenade and the shops and cafes along Sadoun Street. The neighborhood was religiously mixed, which, at the time they’d first got the place, hadn’t been a problem. Since 11/9, though, hate crimes were up all over the city, and you didn’t have to be Christian to find yourself in trouble. Mustafa’s father was Sunni; his mother had been Shia. Asked what that made him, Mustafa had always replied, “A Muslim, of course.” But to some Baghdadis, who’d seen God’s judgment in the fall of the towers, that was no longer a good enough answer. Almost every day now the news carried a report of some Muslim getting roughed up, or worse, for belonging to the “wrong” sect.

  Mustafa worried about his father becoming the target of some idiot who thought “God the All-Merciful” was code for “God the Head-Basher.” He worried, as well, about his father’s declining faculties. Sometimes when Abu Mustafa went out these days, he had trouble finding his way home. He blamed his confusion on mysterious changes to the city—once-familiar landmarks that had been altered, or that weren’t where they were supposed to be. No doubt some of this was due to new construction, but when Abu Mustafa began talking about the streets being laid out differently, Mustafa knew something more was going on.

  Abu Mustafa dismissed any suggestion that he move to a quieter, “less confusing” neighborhood, so the family had come up with an alternate plan. Mustafa’s uncle Tamir and aunt Rana took an apartment in the same building. They had eight children, so there was always a spare niece or nephew available to keep an eye on Abu Mustafa. Mustafa himself, after protracted negotiations, moved into his father’s spare bedroom. The face-saving cover story was that this was for Mustafa’s convenience, to shorten his commute to work.

  Mustafa and his father got on OK, as long as Mustafa was careful not to be overly protective. It wasn’t always easy. Recently, Abu Mustafa had developed an animus towards air-conditioning. At first Mustafa thought it was the sound that bothered him, and he offered to pay to have the apartment refitted with a quieter system. But Abu Mustafa said it wasn’t the noise; the problem was that the air-conditioning was wrong.

  “What do you mean, wrong? You think it’s a sin to be comfortable?”

  “I didn’t say sin!” Abu Mustafa grew flustered. “It’s not immoral, it’s just . . . wrong.”

  Two or three times a week now—invariably on the hottest nights—Mustafa would wake up sweating because his father had shut off the AC. Then, last week, there’d been a new development: Mustafa had awakened to find the air-conditioning still running, but his father’s bedroom empty. After a frantic search, he discovered that Abu Mustafa had taken a mattress pad and gone up to the apartment building roof to sleep in the open air—the way Baghdadis had used to do, long ago, before the city was electrified.

  “What’s the matter?” Abu Mustafa asked, puzzled by Mustafa’s concern. “You think I’m going to fall off?”

  “In your sleep, anything is possible,” Mustafa said. “It’s not safe up here.”

  “God willing, it’s as safe as anywhere in the city. And I like it up here. Even with the city lights, you can still see the stars. The stars are as they should be.”

  Talking to Farouk from his hospital bed, Mustafa had been embarrassed, but he didn’t feel true shame until he saw his father in the hospital waiting room. As Abu Mustafa embraced him and kissed him on both cheeks, Mustafa felt his eyes welling up, and he apologized through tears for his carelessness in nearly getting himself killed. Of course, Abu Mustafa forgave him; but he knew he’d be reminded of it the next time he told Abu Mustafa to be careful. So for that, as much as for his own sake, Mustafa resolved to be less foolish in the future.

  It was not the first time in his life he had made that particular pledge.

  Mustafa spent the next day resting at home, but he asked Samir and Amal to come by and update him on the investigation.

  It was Amal’s first time at the apartment, and like many first-time visitors, she was drawn to the bookshelves that covered every free centimeter of wall space. While Samir went into the kitchen to help Abu Mustafa make tea, and Mustafa relaxed on a couch by the window, Amal stayed on her feet, moving from shelf to shelf.

  “How many languages does your father know?” Amal asked.

  “Half a dozen well, and another half dozen well enough to muddle through. Which sounds impressive, unless you’d met my mother.”

  “What was she, a translator?”

  “Restless,”
Mustafa said. “She always wanted to travel around the world, but North Africa on holiday was as far as she ever got. So she took foreign language courses, scores of them. As a boy I was her study partner.”

  Amal had come to a shelf filled with photographs instead of books. “Is this her?”

  Looking where she pointed, he said: “Yes. That’s from the honeymoon—she and my father took a boat trip on the Nile.”

  “She’s beautiful,” Amal said.

  “She was,” Mustafa agreed. “That next picture, in the silver frame, that’s my uncle Fayyad and my sisters, Nawrah, Qamar, and Latifa.”

  “Do your sisters live in Baghdad?”

  “Nawrah and Qamar live in Fallujah. Latifa lives in Palestine; her husband manages a beach resort in Haifa.”

  Next in line were Mustafa’s own wedding pictures. Amal glanced at them but didn’t say anything.

  “Yes,” Mustafa said, broaching the subject for her. “My two wives. That’s Fadwa on the left, Noor on the right. I’m sure the office gossips have told you all about them by now.”

  “It’s not my place to gossip about my colleagues.”

  “You’re kind, but it’s OK. I’m used to it . . . You know, I heard the speech your mother gave in the Senate last month, about the Marriage Reform Act. I thought she was very courageous to challenge the House of Saud the way she did.”

  “ ‘Courageous’ is not the word her own colleagues would use,” Amal said. She continued, choosing her own words with care: “My mother feels strongly that polygamy, however much tradition defends it, is fundamentally unfair to the women involved.”

  “Your mother is right,” said Mustafa.

  The most famous photograph of Amal’s mother had been taken just after sunrise on the morning of November 10, 2001. Mayor Al Maysani had been up all night directing the emergency response, shuttling about the city from trouble spot to trouble spot; she’d been to Ground Zero twice already, but as dawn broke she set out again, intending to get her first clear look at the site in daylight.

  She left her command post at City Hall and stepped out onto Haifa Street. Eschewing her official car, she headed north on foot, trailed at first only by a handful of aides and security people. Within a block, others began to fall in behind her: exhausted cops and firefighters, paramedics and EMTs, as well as scores of ordinary Baghdadis who, out of stubbornness or shock, had ignored the evacuation order.

  By the time a bend in the road brought the shattered ruin of the towers into view, the procession numbered in the hundreds. When the mayor raised a defiant fist into the air, the multitudes behind her did the same, and the cry went up: “God is great!” That moment, captured on camera and published in newspapers across the country, became known as The Moment: The Moment we got to our feet; The Moment we began to fight back; The Moment we said, we will never be broken.

  The Moment, as well, that Anmar al Maysani was transformed from a failed one-term mayor into a politician of national standing.

  Amal had seen the picture many times, of course. People liked to show it to her, and to describe, often through tears, what it meant to them. These outpourings of emotion could be difficult to listen to, and while Amal did her best to be courteous, she was always a bit on guard around new acquaintances, never knowing when they might spring The Moment on her.

  Today she was spared that. The tea conversation focused on Amal’s own heroism—a novel topic, but not an unpleasant one—and when Abu Mustafa inquired about her family, he showed more interest in her father than her famous mother. Amal’s father had been a police union official, murdered in the line of duty, so the subject was not without pain, but Amal was grateful to anyone who remembered that her dad, too, had once been a hero.

  “I’m sure he would be very proud of you,” Abu Mustafa said.

  “I would like to think so,” Amal said. “Did you ever meet him, Abu Mustafa?”

  “Once,” Abu Mustafa said. “At a Baath function, a union fundraiser held on the university grounds. It was not a great evening—there were some unsavory characters there, I’m afraid—but your father impressed me. A good and decent man . . . We’re fortunate you follow in his footsteps.”

  Amal blushed.

  “Well,” said Abu Mustafa. “I will thank you once more for saving my son’s life and remind you that you are always welcome in my home, and then I will leave you to your official business.”

  “You’re going out?” Mustafa said, as Abu Mustafa stood up.

  “Just downstairs, to see your uncle Tamir. Don’t worry.”

  “I’m not worried,” Mustafa lied.

  With a smile and a nod to Amal, Abu Mustafa turned and left. After the apartment door clicked shut behind him, Mustafa sat quietly for a moment. Amal did too, thinking of her own father. Samir poured more tea.

  “All right,” Mustafa said. “Tell me where we’re at.”

  Amal went first. The search of James Travis’s hotel room, she said, had turned up nothing of interest, other than the tools he’d used to assemble the suicide vest. “The bomb-disposal guys say it was a decent job. He’d been well trained by somebody.”

  “So it definitely would have gone off?”

  “Oh yes.”

  “Do we have any idea what his target was?”

  “The Abu Nuwas Street Mall,” Samir said. “Travis had a tourist map of the waterfront. The mall complex was circled.”

  “And what’s Riyadh saying? Do they have any new intel for us? Preferably something more in line with reality?”

  “They’re ‘reevaluating their sources, in light of recent events,’ ” Amal said. “The good news is, we may have caught a break in Kufah . . .” For the past few weeks, Travis had rented a room at a guest workers’ hostel not far from the Kufah army base. “My old Bureau partner Rafi has been working down there on a different investigation, so I asked him to tag along when ABI swept the hostel yesterday. The room was clean—Travis threw out everything he didn’t take with him—and according to the manager, garbage pickup was yesterday morning. So at first it seemed like a dead end . . .”

  “What did they do, search the garbage dump?”

  “There was some discussion of doing that. But then Rafi got suspicious and made a phone call.”

  “Turns out the manager was lying,” Samir said. “Garbage pickup in that part of Kufah is actually on Mondays—if you’ve paid your garbage bill. But the manager discontinued the service over a year ago, without telling his boss. He was pocketing the money for himself and having whichever tenants were behind on their rent help him haul the trash to bins on other people’s property. So, long story short, ABI had the guy out dumpster-diving all night.”

  “They found Travis’s garbage around three o’clock this morning,” Amal said. “They’re still sifting it for clues, but one of the first things they found was a camera—”

  “A broken camera,” said Samir. “Smashed, like Travis took a hammer to it. Only he must have been asleep the day they taught destroying evidence in terror school, because he screwed up and left the memory card intact . . .”

  Amal switched on her cell phone. “Rafi emailed me the pictures. Take a look at this.”

  The scene was of four men seated at a long wooden table, indoors, in a close and poorly lit space. Travis, the picture-taker, was in the foreground, holding the camera at arm’s length, the flash highlighting the pinkness of his cheeks. He’d evidently consumed a large quantity of alcohol—Mustafa could make out the tops of several foam-flecked glasses on the table in front of him. Behind Travis, holding glasses of their own, were two blond men; their features were hard to discern on the small screen, but an enlargement might provide enough detail for computer identification. The fourth man, a surly red-haired fellow, had been caught in profile jabbing a finger at Travis, his mouth open to deliver a rebuke.

  “What do you think?” Amal said.

  “I think this redhead may be the one who smashed the camera. And if I’m counting empty glasses correctly, I think I
know why he overlooked the memory card.”

  “But do you think these are our guys? The rest of the cell?”

  “It’s possible,” Mustafa said. “Though I’m frankly stunned that even drunk crusaders would be this stupid. This room that they’re in . . .”

  “A rat cellar,” Amal said. “Rafi’s checking with Halal to see if they can identify it.”

  A rat cellar: an illegal bar catering to foreign guest workers, primarily Europeans. There’d be home-brewed beer, misappropriated Sabbath and communion wine, and probably hard liquor as well, though not the good stuff. As for the location, it might be a literal cellar or an aboveground structure like a warehouse—any place the local cops could be bribed to turn a blind eye to.

  “Those blond guys in the back,” said Samir. “They look like Germans, don’t they?”

  Mustafa smiled. “I suppose they might be German, or Austrian. But I don’t know, Samir—they could be Scandinavian.”

  “Scandinavian terrorists? Mustafa, please!”

  “As long as their faces are clear enough for a computer match, what difference does it make whether they’re German or Scandinavian?” Amal asked. “Shouldn’t ICE have them in the system either way?”

  “ICE should, which doesn’t mean ICE will,” said Mustafa. “But if they’re German, Samir has an excuse to call in our friend Sinbad.”

  “And who is Sinbad? Naval intelligence?”

  “Mossad,” Samir told her.

  “There’s an Israeli named Sinbad?”

  “It’ll make sense once you’ve met him,” said Mustafa.

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  Israel

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  The modern State of Israel is a country in Central Europe. It is bordered on the north by the North Sea, Denmark, and the Baltic Sea, to the east by Poland and the Czech Republic, and to the west, in part, by the Netherlands. The rest of its western and southern borders are officially defined by the courses of the Rhine and Main rivers, but since the 1967 Six-Day War Israel has occupied most of Bavaria, Swabia, and the West Bank of the Middle Rhine. Israel’s capital is Berlin . . .