Holding the Zero

by Gerald Seymour

  Pacing around the petrol station, she would be telling the children their father would come soon and wondering where he was.

  He did not try to break the grip of the fingers. He was led, taken, into the building used by the Estikhabarat. The boots stamped in rhythm behind him. He was brought into a room that was fragrantly scented with air-freshener, and there were flowers on the table.

  He saw a desk with papers from files piled on it, and beside the files was a framed photograph of the commander sitting on a sand beach with near-naked children beside him. On the far side of the room a tape-recorder’s spools turned, and another of the brutes, headphones on a shaven skull, sat at the table and wrote busily. Aziz was offered an easy chair and settled into it. Did he want coffee? He shook his head, but asked if water could be brought for his dog.

  The commander walked to the tape-recorder and threw a switch. The sound burst into the room. As if confined in a minuscule space, a guttering, hacking cough came from the speakers, then a slow moan of pain.

  ‘Be strong. We are together. Together we are strong.’

  ‘I told them nothing.’

  He heard the wheezed words of the brigadier, the Boot, and her small, timid voice. He stared expressionlessly ahead of him. The commander had lit a cigarette and was glancing with studied casualness at the front page of the regime’s morning newspaper.

  His conceit had brought him back, and his wife and his children were waiting, would now be anxious because he was late meeting them.

  ‘They ask me, always, who gave me my orders – which officers? The Americans? The pigs, Ibrahim and Bekir? I can tell them nothing because the pigs and the Americans gave me no orders. I have not told them of when we met …’

  He forced himself to listen to the whispered, frightened, hurt voice.

  ‘I have told them nothing. If it were not for your strength I would have broken …’

  ‘Hold my hand tighter.’

  ‘I hold it and I love it as if it were my family.’

  ‘Hold my hand because I am afraid.’

  ‘When you are close, with me, I can survive the pain.’

  ‘How long can we last?’

  ‘Long enough, I pray, for others to escape.’

  ‘What was your dream?’

  ‘I was told I would be the Minister of Defence.’ There was the bitter whinge of his laughter, and the slight motion in his body would have hurt him, because he moaned again. ‘I was told I would be a great man in the new Iraq. I was told …’

  The pain of his gasp sighed in her ear. She felt the grip of his hand slacken and wondered whether he had drifted towards unconsciousness. The comfort she had felt when she had heard the single shot – the faraway crack and the close-by thump – were long gone. In a wild moment of excitement, she had thought that a crescendo of firing would burst around her, and that there would be the fear-driven cries of men in the corridor as they ran and, in the delirium of her terror, she had seen the cell door open and he would have been there with the rifle and would have caught her up in his arms and carried her from this hellish place … But there had been only the one shot and it was long gone, and she had cursed him for not coming, for being safe.

  ‘Hold me, you have to, hold me.’

  ‘I am holding you.’

  She felt the tightening of his fingers on hers, as if she had brought him back to the living, as if she were not alone.

  ‘Hold me because I am afraid, and have nothing to tell them.’

  ‘What is your dream?’

  ‘To be in my village, to be a woman, to be free.’

  ‘Without you, I cannot protect them, buy them their time to escape.’

  Through the conduit of a drain hole between two holding cells, the brigadier of the staff of Fifth Army and the peasant woman from the mountains knotted their fingers to give each other strength.

  The voice seemed to fail, then rise again.

  ‘I was to be paid a million American dollars for taking the armoured brigade south from Kirkūk.’

  ‘I was offered nothing. What would I do with a million American dollars?’

  ‘I would have put you on the lead tank – washed you, cleaned you, carried you into Baghdad.’

  ‘Then I would have gone home.’

  The commander gestured for the switch to be lifted, and the silence fell on the room.

  His smile was easy, affable.

  ‘Major Aziz, it is standard to allow prisoners in adjacent cells the opportunity to communicate with each other. There is a drain between them, and a microphone in it.

  Prisoners who believe they have successfully resisted interrogation always betray themselves when they have been returned to their cells – we learned it from the British, it was their procedure in Ireland. I am surprised that it has taken them so long to find the culvert. It is because we hold her that the sniper, this butcher, has killed so many, yes?’

  ‘I think it was to tell her that she was not forgotten – and to expiate his shame that he did not or could not protect her.’

  ‘The sniper is your target?’

  He said simply, ‘It is important to me.’

  ‘I have finished with her. Is she of use to you?’

  ‘She will be hanged?’

  ‘Of course – she is a witch. Our brave soldiers ran from her. She is talked of in the bazaars and in the souks. It is necessary to hang her.’

  Cold words. ‘She should be hanged in public tomorrow morning at the main gate …’

  He said how the gallows should be built. He thought of his wife and children at the petrol station, angry and fretting for him. He thought of the brigadier, the Boot, denied the strength of the grip of her hand, and the names that were secreted in his mind. He thought of the sniper who would be drawn from a hiding place by the sight of the gallows and the peasant woman standing under the beam.

  The moth would be drawn to the flame. If a moth flew too close to the flame the wings were singed, and it fell. But he was – himself – walking towards a flame and if he was burned he would fall, and if he fell then he was dead. And there had been the great flame burning above the oilfield outside the city that had drawn her fatally nearer. The flame burned for all of them, bright and dangerous, beckoning them.

  A young man, walking back to his village near Qizil Yar, west of the city, had been knifed and his body thieved from. The young man who had thought himself fortunate to find work in Kirkūk, cleaning the tables in a coffee shop, had stayed on in the evening to see a film at a cinema. He had been stabbed in the back, killed, and his identity card stolen. Before his body was cold, while it lay in a road drain and the first of the rats sniffed at it, the identity card was presented at the outer road block on the main route into the city.

  In the next hour, the identity card was presented three more times, studied by torchlight, then the beams switched to a young man’s face, and Omar was waved on.

  He was the observer in the tradition laid down by Major Herbert Hesketh-Prichard.

  Everything he saw was remembered: where the tanks were, and the blocks, and the personnel carriers parked in side-streets with the radios playing soft music from the Baghdad transmitter he remembered.

  He was another grubby, dishevelled young man with unkempt hair padding the pavements of the city. There were many such as him, drawn to Kirkūk in search of subsistence work. He attracted no attention from the soldiers who were only a few months older. He passed among them, drawn forward towards a distant hammering, nails sinking into wooden planks.

  Omar knew he was close to the place where she had been taken. He had heard the mustashar, Haquim, describe the place to Mr Gus and make the excuses. He slipped from the wide main street that led towards faraway arc-lights, the sounds of hammers beating on nails, and drifted through shadows in the narrowed lanes of the Old Quarter. He could smell the burned wood of homes that had been fired in the fighting. There was a line of buildings where the walls were marked by desperate bullet lacerations, a small square, m
uddy roads leading from it, and a broken wall into which the jeep carrying her had crashed. There was a panel-beater’s shop where men worked to the light of oil lamps. It was as Haquim had described it. He saw an open door beyond the panel-beater’s shop, closer to the wall; through the door a family gathered in a dully lit room and watched the television. There were old men, young men, women, children, in front of the television.

  The mustashar, Haquim, had said a family had come from their home and had spat into the face of Meda. He would have liked to have killed them, rolled a grenade through the door or sprayed them with an assault rifle on automatic, but that was not the work of an observer as written down by Major Hesketh-Prichard. He slipped again into the shadows until he could see the lights of the wide street.

  The orphan child of the aid agencies, the plaything of American soldiers, the carrier of ammunition for the peshmerga, the thief from the living and the dead, the friend of Mr Gus had no fear when he was close enough to see the high gallows being built by supervised labourers outside the barricaded gates of the headquarters of Fifth Army.

  ‘Which direction does it face?’

  ‘To the front, towards the wide street.’

  ‘Can you see it from the side?’

  ‘There are screens at the side of canvas. You can only see it from the front, from the wide street.’

  ‘But above it is open?’

  ‘No, Mr Gus. It is covered by a roof of more canvas. You cannot see it from high, not from the side, only from the front … Why do they do it so complicated, Mr Gus?’

  ‘So they can dictate where I will be.’

  The sweat of the day’s heat had cooled long ago on his body and the night wind now insinuated the chill into him. The blister was worse on his heel, aggravated by the charge out of the city after the killings. He had the last of the plasters from his rucksack on the wound and the ache of it was inescapable. When the sun had gone down, the stiffness had gripped his shoulders, pelvis and knees, and he had not slept until the boy returned.

  ‘They do that, the roof and the sides, because of us?’

  ‘Because of me, not you. You have done your work, Omar. If I want to see Meda brought out, see the rope put on her, see … I have to be in front, because they have covered the sides. I cannot be high, because they have made a roof. They hope to restrict me so that it is easier for them to find me. A man never had a better observer, but it is finished for you – you should go.’

  ‘Without me you would not even get into the city.’

  ‘It is not your quarrel.’

  ‘Do you say that she is only yours, Mr Gus, not mine?’

  ‘I want you to go.’

  ‘You are nothing without me – Major Hesketh-Prichard was nothing without his observer. Even he said so.’

  As he had waited for the boy to come back he had gone through the checklist he had been given so long ago. Mechanically, in the darkness, by touch, he had cleaned the breech and felt the firmness of the elevation and deflection turrets. He had tightened the screws securing the telescopic sight, he had massaged the lenses with a cloth, and had wiped each of the bullets of .338 calibre before loading them into the magazine and slotting it back into the rifle’s belly. He could no longer conjure the faces of those who had been important to him so long ago. At each stage of the checklist she had been in his mind, and he had tried to remember the taste of her kiss.

  ‘Afterwards, will you take me with you? Will you take me to your home?’

  Gus let out a low, involuntary chuckle. ‘Ridiculous.’

  ‘Why is that ridiculous?’

  ‘Because …’

  ‘I am your friend here. I can be your friend at your home.’

  He could not see the boy’s face but he sensed the smarting resentment … Yes, he could take him home. The boy could sleep on the floor and each morning he could go out into the handkerchief-sized garden at the back of the block, lower his trousers, squat and defecate. Maybe he could thieve the silver spoons from the drawer. Yes, the boy could go with him to work, could sit in the office and be bored witless and look at the wallets protruding from the inside pockets of the jackets draped on chairs and the women’s handbags with the purses displayed. Yes, he could take him up Guildford’s high street on a Saturday morning. He could watch the snake-like movements of the boy’s hands and see his pockets fill. Yes, he could take him to the pub. He would try to intervene in time to stop the flash of a knife if a lout or a yob laughed at the boy’s appearance. Yes, the boy should see Stickledown Range. He could lay the boy on the mat beside him and ask for him to call the distance and wind deflection and know they would be right. Gus reached out in the darkness and his hand found the thin shoulder. He gripped it hard.

  ‘I would like to sleep now, Omar, and I want you to wake me when it is time to go.’

  ‘I sort of sat on it, Caspar. I don’t like to be a harbinger, the bringer of bad news. And I’m sorry for it.’

  ‘I heard it on the radio, Isaac, on their news bulletin. You have nothing to apologize for.’

  ‘They’re going to hang her in the morning.’

  ‘Jesus – I didn’t get that from the radio.’

  ‘They’re going to hang her in the morning – they’ve told the Party faithful to ensure a good attendance.’

  ‘Jesus Christ.’

  ‘Did you hear about the shooting?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘There was shooting in Kirkūk this morning. You recall the marksman with her?’

  ‘I remember him.’

  ‘After she was taken, the rest of her people came out, all except him. He stayed.

  Kirkūk this morning was like your Dodge City, Caspar. He shot at least seven soldiers before he backed off – long-shot stuff, one bullet for one man.’

  ‘Why would he do that?’

  ‘You met her, Caspar, you saw her. She’d twist a man’s head. It could only be a futile gesture of his commitment to her … I have to believe he cannot turn away from her.’

  ‘Isaac, maybe he should have gone to the Agency’s school. We major in courses on walking out on trusting idiots.’

  ‘There are PhDs on it at the Mossad. You are not alone on the excellence of walking away. Of course, there’s nothing that he can do for her.’

  ‘Isaac, I appreciate your calling. Appreciate the advance warning. I won’t sleep much tonight. She was good and feisty – those bastards in Arbīl and Sulaymānīyah didn’t deserve her. And we didn’t. I hope she knows he stayed when no other fucker did. Shit …

  I have a paper to read so I’m up to speed to entertain a serious asshole who’ll be here about the time she’s dangling … Goodnight, Isaac.’

  He cut the link. He reflected that there might just be a job vacancy, or two, or three, in the classified advertisements of the Baghdad newspapers.

  Wanted: HANGMAN. No previous experience required. Expertise not necessary. Successful applicant must be prepared to work long hours.

  Good career prospects.

  The paper had come in two hours earlier and had clogged thirty-two seconds of time on the secure teleprinter. It took thirty-two seconds to transmit the latest piece of Langley optimism, and the plan on the paper would give work for years to a hangman, or two, or three … He was so goddam tired. He started to turn the pages of the paper – and in a few hours, as she was hanged, a shiny-faced man would step off the shuttle plane from Ankara and would be expecting Caspar Reinholtz to be similarly breezy and cheerful, to say that it was the best plan ever conceived for the toppling of the Boss for Life. He was hunched over his desk, the words in front of him bouncing uselessly in his head.

  First Phase: A core group of 250 Iraqi exiles would be trained in sabotage techniques by US Special Forces. Second Phase: A further 2,000 exiles receive eight weeks’ basic military training. Third Phase: Twenty groups of twenty men infiltrate Government of Iraq territory to blow up power lines and disrupt internal transport. Fourth Phase: More men are pushed across friendly borders and s
et up a liberated enclave. Fifth Phase: The overthrowing of the regime of the Boss for Life.

  It was always that simple and they always sent the plan on ahead of its author so that a dumb field officer, a Caspar Reinholtz, could not plead the need for time to study it. It would be considered defeatist to tell the author that the plan was a piece of crap.

  A plan was dead. Long live the plan.

  The woman, Meda, would hang in the morning and a new thesis of liberation was transmitted to Incerlik.

  There was work for one hangman. There would soon be work for many more.

  Maybe the man coming in on the shuttle would shake the lethargy out of Caspar Reinholtz’s system, and maybe he would not. But, maybe, the man on the shuttle on the last leg of his journey from Langley should be congratulated for a new refinement of warfare: combat by fucking proxy. Maybe Caspar should grip his hand and slap his shoulder and praise him for digging out a plan where someone else did the fighting for America and faced the noose. No-risk fighting, no casualties going home in body bags to Arkansas or Alaska or Alabama, no mothers trying to be brave as the caskets went down into good Virginia or Vermont earth, because the poor bastards getting killed were proxy soldiers and didn’t count.

  Rusty came into the office, and brought coffee with him.

  ‘There’s a call for you, Caspar – the green phone. It’s London – been cleared by Langley. They want to talk to you.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘About that sniper. Do I say you’re available or not available?’

  He thought of the man he had met, and the big rifle, of the man who had not turned, not walked away, of the man who did not know the fucking rules.

  ‘I’ll take it.’

  Long before dawn, while the stars and the moon’s crescent still watched the city, the first of the crowd came, intent on gaining the best places. Those who had risen earliest, or who had not been to bed, pressed against the barrier behind which a solid wall of soldiers stood. They came at first in a dribble and would arrive later in a growing mass.

  Confronting them, above the soldiers, was a wooden platform on which was set a low chair. Above the chair and below a solid crossbeam was a dangling rope with a waiting noose that swayed gently in the light night wind. The same wind rippled the canvas sides of the scaffold and flapped the roof above the crossbeam. Because of the cold, those who had arrived first were well wrapped in thick coats and some carried blankets to drape over their shoulders. Music from transistor radios would help to pass the time before daybreak, and later coffee vendors would come. Warm plastic cups would be passed over heads, money would return on a reverse route, and there was a buzz of talk. Away behind the crowd, stretching into an infinity of dull street lights, was the length of Martyr Avenue. They came to see the death of the witch, but none of them who surged onto the weight of the barrier knew why there was a roof over the gallows and side screens around it.