The Sirens of Baghdad

by Yasmina Khadra

  Sayed said, “I swear I thought he’d left, Captain.”

  The captain knocked on the door. “Open up, pal, or I’ll kick my way in.”

  “Just a moment. I’m soldering something. Almost finished.”

  You could hear creaking sounds, followed by some metallic screeching; a key turned in the lock, and the door opened. The engineer, wearing an undershirt and tracksuit bottoms, peered out. The captain saw a table cluttered with wires, tiny screws, screwdrivers, little pots of paint and glue and soldering material, and, in the midst of the clutter, a dismantled television set. Its back cover, which had been replaced too hastily, hung askew, revealing a skein of multicolored wires inside the shell. The captain squinted his right eye again. The moment he detected the bomb, which lay half-concealed in the place where the picture tube should have been, his throat tightened, and then his face suddenly turned somber when the engineer poked the mouth of a pistol into the back of his neck.

  The detective, who had remained in the background, didn’t immediately comprehend what was going on, but the heavy silence that had just fallen on the room caused him instinctively to bring his hand to his belt. He never reached his weapon. Amr jumped him from behind, put one hand over his mouth, and with the other thrust a dagger deep into his back, just under the shoulder blade. His eyes wide in disbelief, the detective shivered from head to foot and slowly collapsed onto the floor.

  The captain was trembling in every limb. He could neither lift his arms in surrender nor lean forward. He said, “I won’t say anything, Sayed.”

  “Only the dead know how to keep their mouths shut, Captain. I’m awfully sorry for you, Captain.”

  “I beg you. I’ve got six kids—”

  “You should have thought of them before.”

  “Please, Sayed, please spare me. I swear I won’t say anything. If you want, take me into your cell. I’ll be your eyes and ears. I’ve never cheered for the Americans. I hate them. I’m a cop, but—you can check—I’ve never laid a hand on anyone in the resistance. I’m on your side, all the way…. Sayed, what I said was true: I’m hoping to get out of here.

  Don’t kill me, for the love of heaven, don’t. I’ve got six kids, and the oldest isn’t even fifteen yet.”

  “Were you spying on me?”

  “No, I swear I wasn’t. I just got a little greedy, that’s all.”

  “In that case, why didn’t you come alone?”

  “He was my partner.”

  “I’m not talking about the jackass who came in with you. I mean the boys waiting for you outside in the street.”

  “No one’s waiting for me outside, I swear to you….”

  There was a silence. The captain raised his eyes; when he saw Sayed’s satisfied smile, he realized the seriousness of his mistake. He should have been a little craftier and pretended he wasn’t alone. The unfortunate man had no luck at all.

  Sayed ordered me to go to the front of the store and lower the rolling shutter completely. I did as he said. When I returned to the storeroom, the captain was on his knees, with his hands tied behind his back. He’d shit his pants and was crying like a child.

  Sayed asked me, “Did you look around outside?”

  “I didn’t notice anything unusual.”

  “Very good.”

  Sayed slipped a plastic packing bag over the captain’s head and then, with Rashid’s help, forced him to the floor. The officer struggled wildly. Mist filled the plastic bag. Sayed held its mouth closed very tightly around the captain’s throat. He ran out of air quickly and started wriggling and writhing. His body was racked by violent convulsions; it took a long time for them to become less frequent and then subside; after a final jerk, they stopped altogether. Sayed and Rashid kept bearing down on the captain with all their weight; they didn’t let up until the corpse was completely still.

  “Get rid of these two stiffs,” Sayed ordered Amr and Rashid. Then, turning to me, he said, “And you, clean up this blood before it dries.”

  14

  After Sayed charged Amr and Rashid with making the two corpses disappear, the engineer proposed demanding a ransom from their families. The idea was to throw people off by making them think the men had been kidnapped. Sayed’s response was, “It’s your problem,” and then he told me to follow him. We got in his black Mercedes and went across the city to the other bank of the Tigris. Sayed slipped a CD of Eastern music into the slot, turned up the sound, and drove calmly. His natural composure made me relax, too.

  I’d always dreaded the moment when I would step over the line; now that it was behind me, I didn’t feel anything in particular. I’d witnessed the killings of the two officers with the same detachment I observed when I contemplated the victims of terrorist attacks. I was no longer the delicate boy from Kafr Karam. Another individual had taken his place. I was stunned by how easy it was to pass from one world to another and practically regretted having spent so much time being fearful of what I’d find. The weakling who had vomited at the sight of blood and lost his head when shots rang out was far, far away, and so was the wimp who’d passed out during the screwup that cost Sulayman his life. I was born again as someone else, someone hard, cold, implacable. My hands didn’t tremble. My heart beat normally. In the side-view mirror on my right, my face betrayed no trace of an expression; it was a waxen mask, impenetrable and inaccessible.

  Sayed took me to a posh little building in a residential neighborhood. As soon as the security guards recognized his Mercedes, they lifted the barrier. Sayed seemed to receive a great deal of deference from the guards. He parked his car in a garage and led me to a luxury apartment. It wasn’t the same one where he’d convened Yaseen, the twins, and me. The place had a caretaker, a secretive old man who served as a general factotum. Sayed suggested that I take a bath and join him later in the living room, whose windows were festooned with taffeta curtains.

  The bathtub had a chrome faucet the size of a teakettle. I took off my clothes and stepped in. The scalding water quickly warmed me to my bones.

  The old man served us a late supper in a small dining room filled with glittering silver objects. Sayed was wrapped in a dark red dressing gown, which made him look rather like a nabob. We ate in silence. The only audible sound was the clicking of the silverware, occasionally interrupted by the ringing of Sayed’s cell phone. Each time, he looked at the dial and decided whether or not to answer the call. Once, it was the engineer, calling about the two corpses. Intermittently grunting, Sayed listened to him and then clicked his phone shut. When Sayed looked up at me, I understood that Rashid and Amr had carried out their assignment successfully.

  The old man brought us a basket of fruit. Sayed, as before, scrutinized me in silence. Perhaps, I thought, he expects me to make conversation. I couldn’t imagine any topic of mutual interest. Sayed was by nature taciturn, not to mention haughty. I didn’t like the way he ordered his employees around. He had to be obeyed to the letter, and once he’d reached a decision, there was no appeal. Paradoxically, I found his authority reassuring. Working for a guy of his stature meant I had no reason to ask questions; he saw to everything and seemed prepared to face any eventuality.

  The old man showed me to my room. Pointing to a bell on the night table, he informed me that should I require his services, I had only to ring. Having ostentatiously verified that everything was in order, he withdrew on tiptoe.

  I got into bed and turned off the lamp.

  Sayed came to inquire as to whether I needed anything. Without turning on the light, he hovered in the doorway, with one hand on the doorknob. “Everything all right?” he asked.

  “Everything’s fine.”

  He nodded, closed the door halfway, and then opened it wide again. “I very much appreciated your composure in the storeroom,” he said.

  The next day, I went back to the store and my upstairs room. The business resumed at its normally accelerated pace. Nobody came to inquire whether we’d seen two police officers in the area. A few days later, photo
graphs of the captain and his detective adorned the front page of a newspaper that announced their kidnapping and the amount of the ransom demanded by the kidnappers in exchange for the officers’ liberation.

  Rashid and Amr no longer shunted me off to one side and no longer slammed the door in my face; from this time forward, I was one of them. The engineer continued installing his bombs in place of television picture tubes. To be sure, he modified only one set out of ten, and so only a minority of his customers was engaged in the transport of death. I noticed that the people who took delivery of the TV bombs were always the same, three large young men squeezed into mechanics’ overalls; they arrived in small vans stamped on the sides with a huge logo, accompanied by writing in Arabic and English: HOME DELIVERY. They parked behind the storeroom, signed some release papers, loaded their merchandise, and drove away again.

  Sayed disappeared for a week. When he returned, I informed him that I wanted to join Yaseen and his group. I was dying of boredom, and Baghdad’s diabolical odor was polluting my thought processes. Sayed asked me to be patient. To help me occupy my nights, he brought me a selection of DVDs. On each of them, someone had written a place name with a felt-tipped pen—Baghdad, Basra, Mosul, Safwan, and so forth, followed by a date and a number. The DVDs contained videos recorded from televised newscasts or made by amateurs on the spot, showing various atrocities committed by the coalition forces: the siege of Fallujah; the racist assaults carried out by British troops on some Iraqi kids seized during a popular demonstration; a GI’s summary execution of a wounded civilian inside a mosque; an American helicopter’s night attack on some peasants whose truck had broken down in a field—the visual chronicle, in short, of our humiliation, and of the awful blunders that had become so commonplace. I watched every DVD without blinking. It was as if I were downloading into my brain all the possible and imaginable reasons I’d need to blow up the fucking world. The result was, no doubt, just what Sayed had hoped: I got an eyeful, and my subconscious stored away a maximum load of anger, which (when the time came) would give me enthusiasm for whatever violence I might commit and even lend it a certain legitimacy. I wasn’t fooled; I figured I’d already had an overdose of hatred and it wasn’t really necessary to add any more. I was a Bedouin, and no Bedouin can come to terms with an offense unless blood is spilled. Sayed must have lost sight of that constant, inflexible rule, which has survived through ages and generations; his city life and his mysterious peregrinations had surely taken him far from the tribal soul of Kafr Karam.

  I saw Omar again. He’d spent the day bouncing around from dive to dive. He suggested we go and get something to eat, his treat, and I accepted on condition that he not start in on me again. He understood, he said, and during the meal everything was fine until, all at once, his eyes filled with tears. For the sake of propriety, I refrained from asking him what was bothering him. Nevertheless, with no prompting from me, he spilled the beans. He told me about the little problems his roommate, Hany, was causing him. Hany was planning to leave the country and go to live in Lebanon, and Omar didn’t like the idea. When I asked him why Hany’s decision troubled him so much, he declared that Hany was very dear to him and that he wouldn’t be able to survive if Hany should leave. We said good night on the banks of the Tigris; Omar was dead drunk, and I was disgusted at the thought of returning to my room and my melancholy cogitations.

  The store routine started to seem like a sentence to the gallows. The weeks passed over me like a herd of buffalo. I was suffocating. Boredom was slicing me to pieces. I had long since stopped going to the sites of terrorist attacks, and the sirens of Baghdad no longer reached me. Since I almost never ate, I grew visibly thinner, and every night I lay in bed with my head on fire, waiting to fall asleep. Sometimes, when I was hanging around in the store, I caught my reflection in the shop window, soliloquizing and gesticulating. I felt as though I’d lost the thread of my own story; all I could see was exasperation. At the end of my rope, I decided to talk to Sayed again and tell him that I was ready, that this farce was unnecessary, that I didn’t need to be drawn in any further.

  He was in his little office, filling out some forms. After contemplating his pen at some length, he laid it down on a stack of papers, pushed his glasses up on top of his head, and pivoted his chair to face me.

  “I’m not trying to string you along, cousin. I’m awaiting instructions in your behalf. I think we have something for you, something extraordinary, but it’s still in the conceptual stage.”

  “I can’t wait any longer.”

  “You’re wrong. We’re not trying to get into a stadium; we’re at war. If you lose patience now, you won’t be able to keep cool when you have to. Go back to your work and learn how to overcome your anxieties.”

  “I’m not anxious.”

  “Yes, you are.”

  And with that, he dismissed me.

  One Wednesday morning, a truck detonated at the end of the boulevard; the explosion leveled two buildings, left a crater two meters deep, and destroyed most of the storefronts in the area. I’d never seen Sayed in such a state. He stood on the sidewalk, holding his head with both hands and teetering as he contemplated the devastation. As the neighborhood had been spared ever since the beginning of hostilities, I assumed that things hadn’t gone according to plan.

  Amr and Rashid lowered the metal shutter in front of the store, and Sayed and I immediately drove to the other side of the Tigris. Along the way, he spoke to several “associates” on the telephone, telling them to meet him at once at “number two.” He used a coded language that sounded like a banal conversation between businessmen. We came to a suburban area bristling with decrepit buildings and inhabited by a population abandoned to its own devices; then we turned into a courtyard and parked next to two vehicles that had arrived just ahead of us. Their occupants, two men wearing suits, accompanied us into the house. Yaseen joined us there a few minutes later. Sayed had been waiting for him to begin the proceedings. The meeting lasted barely a quarter of an hour and essentially concerned the attack that had taken place on the boulevard. The three men looked at one another with inquiring eyes, unable to propose an explanation. They didn’t know who had been behind the explosion. It looked to me as though Yaseen and the two strangers were the leaders of the groups that operated in the neighborhoods traversed by the boulevard; the attack had clearly taken all three of them by surprise. Sayed therefore concluded that a new, unknown, and obviously breakaway group was trying to horn in on their territory. It was absolutely imperative, he said, for the other three to identify this group and stop it from interfering with their plans of action and, as a consequence, disrupting the operational schedule currently in force. The meeting was adjourned. The two men who’d arrived before us left first; then Sayed also drove away, but not before consigning me to Yaseen “until further orders.”

  Yaseen was not exactly delighted to take me under his wing, especially now that some unknown rivals had encroached on his turf. He contented himself with driving me to a hideout on the north side of Baghdad, a rat hole a little larger than a polling booth, furnished with a bunk bed and a miniature armoire. The place was occupied by a spindly young man with a face like a knife blade, its prominent feature a large hooked nose, whose effect was softened by a thin blond mustache. He was sleeping when we arrived. Yaseen explained to him that he would have to share the place with me for two or three days. The young man nodded. After Yaseen left, my new roommate invited me to have a seat on the lower bunk.

  “Are the cops after you?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “Have you just arrived in Baghdad?”

  “No.”

  Seeing that I was in no mood for conversation, he gave up. We remained seated, side by side, until noon. I was furious at Yaseen, and also at what was happening to me. I had the impression that I was being tossed about like some worthless bundle.

  “Well,” the young man said. “I’m going to buy some sandwiches. Chicken or lamb brochettes?”
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br />   “Bring me whatever you feel like.”

  He slipped on a jacket and went out onto the landing. I heard his footsteps going down the stairs, and then nothing. I listened closely. Not a sound. It was as though the building had been abandoned. I stepped to the window and watched the young man hurrying toward the square. A veiled sun shed its light on the neighborhood. I felt like opening the window and puking.

  The young man brought me a chicken sandwich wrapped in newspaper. After two bites, my stomach tightened. I put the sandwich on top of the little armoire.

  “My name’s Obid,” the young man said.

  “What the hell am I doing here?”

  “Dunno. I’ve been here only a week myself. Before that, I lived downtown. That was where I operated. Then the police raided the place, but I got away. Now I’m waiting to be assigned to another sector, if not to another city. How about you?”

  I pretended I hadn’t heard the question.

  That evening, I was relieved to see one of the twins, Hussein, turn up. He informed Obid that a car would come to pick him up the next day. Obid leapt for joy.

  “And me?”

  Hussein favored me with a broad smile. “You? You’re coming with me pronto.”

  Hussein piloted a beat-up little car. He kept running into curbs and drove so badly in general that people got out of his way instinctively. He laughed, amused by the panic he was causing and by the things he was knocking down. I thought he was drunk or drugged, but neither was the case; he simply didn’t know how to drive, and his license was as fake as the car’s registration papers.

  I asked him, “Aren’t you afraid of getting busted?”

  “For what?” he replied. “I haven’t run over anybody yet.”

  I relaxed a little once we’d made it out of the heavily populated areas. Hussein was giggling and making jokes. I’d never known him to be like that. In Kafr Karam, he’d certainly always seemed like a nice guy, but a bit slow on the uptake.