“Yes, we do that all the time back in New York. I hope it’s not a felony here. I’m willing to pay the fine, whatever it is, and I’ll pay it now, if you like.”
“Did you refuse to pay a late fee to Bolero Rent-a-Car, and did you threaten to write negative comments about that agency in your travel articles?”
I took a deep breath, exhaled slowly. “I was about an hour late, but I explained the situation to them and they seemed to be satisfied. If they’re not, then I’d be glad to pay the fee.”
“May I have your passport.”
I gave it to him. “Why?”
“You can get in the car now. An officer will drive you back to your hotel. Thank you for your help.”
“I need my passport,” I told him. “I’m flying home in three days. Sunday afternoon.”
“I know,” he replied. “We will contact you.”
I tried to talk to the driver on the journey back into town, but he ignored me. I was furious, but frightened as well. The whole thing was a grotesque charade. They didn’t need me to identify Basma, but they made me go through with it, knowing that I wouldn’t have the courage to accuse them of his murder. Take a good look in that ditch, they were saying to me, this is the kind of thing we can do. They were toying with me, because it’s their nature to toy with people.
What, if anything, could Basma have done to bring about his own destruction at the hands of these people? Had he been involved in some way with a radical faction in Lebanon? Did the authorities here think they were eliminating a Muslim terrorist? Was he a crook or a smuggler, a charming criminal who had escaped from Beirut only to run out of luck in Blanca? To me he seemed a pleasant, fairly idle fellow with an agreeable manner and a taste for godless liquor. But, in fairness, I hardly knew him. We had a few dinners together, a lot of drinks, that’s all. It was a brief acquaintance. Our backgrounds and our circumstances were totally different. They couldn’t do that to me.
Common sense told me I had nothing to fear. The parking ticket and the rental agency were trivial matters that could be settled with a little cash. I was an American, a travel writer for a major international magazine. They might push me around, but they wouldn’t hurt me.
All the same, I decided to take certain precautions. The next morning I tried to contact the nearest American consulate, which was some four hundred miles away. At first the operator of the hotel switchboard told me that all long-distance lines out of Oranien were engaged. After an hour of fruitless attempts she said she had learned that they were “down,” and that she had no idea how long it would be before they were working again. So I went to the central post office and tried their telephones, but with the same result.
I tried to rent another car—at a different agency. I’m not sure what I intended to do with it, but I was refused one because I could not produce my passport.
I didn’t bother with lunch. I drank a couple of beers and smoked a lot of cigarettes. I wandered around until I found the railroad station. I bought a ticket on the next departing train, although I wasn’t even sure where it was going. Then a uniformed policeman confiscated the ticket, smiling.
“We don’t want you to disappear on us, sir.”
Of course. They got the parking ticket from the wastebasket in my room. They’d talked with the rental agency about me. They’d been watching and following me all the time. It was pointless to wonder why. I went back to the hotel and, as calmly as possible, I wrote a letter to my lawyer in New York, telling him where I was, that I had a problem with the authorities, and that if he hadn’t heard from me—my voice on the telephone—by the time he got the letter, he was to do whatever it took to get me out of Blanca—press conferences, congressmen, the State Department, the works. I wrote more or less the same thing to my editor. I used hotel stationery and did not write my name on the envelopes. The hotel was unsafe and so were the streets, but I thought my chances were a little better outdoors. I went for a walk and slipped the letters into the mailbox on the corner as inconspicuously as possible. I crossed into the park and sat on a bench for a while, smoking. Nothing happened. I got back to my room just in time to look out the window and see a silver Mercedes pull away from the mailbox.
This is my last nigh in Blanca. Tomorrow I am supposed to be on the noon flight out of here. I still have that ticket. I do not have my passport. For two days and two nights I have waited. Nothing happens. I am waiting. There’s nowhere to go, nothing to do, except smoke and drink and wait.
I think of them all the time, the handsome man in the linen suit and the beautiful young woman. Mostly I think of her, with her blouse open three buttons deep. Her breasts are not large because I saw no cleavage, but I know they are perfect. Her skin finely tanned with the faintest trace of sun-bleached down. I would like to have her, to lick her, but she is impossible to touch. You can only look at a woman like that and wonder what it would be like to fuck death.
Tonight when I ask at the desk for a wake-up call they smile and say yes, of course, and smile some more. No one writes it down. The porter says I don’t look well. Would I like dinner in my room? Some company? Clean, he adds encouragingly.
It’ll be over long before noon. Around four or five in the morning the silver Mercedes will arrive, the van right behind. The men in the van are there to strip the room of my possessions after I’m gone. Some morning in the future you can look out one of these windows and see how it happened, too late for me—and for you.
I hope I’m not alone, I hope there are others. Many will be arguing, begging, screaming, shitting their pants, but some will walk unaided, with quiet dignity. If I have to, that’s what I want to do.
Not that it matters.
I crush out a cigarette. I open another bottle of beer, reach for another cigarette. I don’t have to go to the window to see what is happening outside. There is light in the sky.
Look for me.
IAN WATSON
The Eye of the Ayatollah
IAN WATSON was born and raised on Tyneside, and after receiving a first class honours degree in English and a research degree from Oxford, he lectured on literature for several years in Tanzania and Tokyo. He currently lives with his wife and daughter in the small Northamptonshire village of Moreton Pinkney, and is an active member of CND and the Labour Party.
His novel The Embedding was nominated for the John W. Campbell Memorial Award in 1974 and won the Prix Apollo in its French translation the following year. Since then he has written many acclaimed book and stories in both the science fiction and horror genres. Recent titles include the novel The Flies of Memory and the collection Stalin’s Teardrops, as well as a gaming novelisation for GW Books, Inquisitor. The Work of Ian Watson: An Annotated Bibliography & Guide by Douglas A. Mackey appeared earlier this year from Borgo Press.
Interzone had the courage to originally publish the following story, and despite being a work of fiction it touches upon some important recent issues that affect us all.
THREE YEARS EARLIER Ali lost his right eye and part of his face during one of the battles against Iraq. Which battle? Where? He didn’t know. His cloaked, hood-clad mother had joyfully seen him off en route to paradise on the back of a fume-coughing truck packed with trainee revolutionary guards, all of about his own age, which was sixteen. Blood from Mother’s finger adorned his forehead; she had cut herself deep with a kitchen knife.
What did Mother look like? Almond eyes, broad nose, big creamy cheeks, generous lips. The only time Ali ever saw more of her body was briefly when he was born, an incident which he neither understood at the time nor subsequently remembered. Her blood on his forehead was sacramental.
The truck drove all day and all night through dust—towards, latterly, the dawning thud and crump of heavy artillery. The recruits chanted and sang themselves hoarse and prayed for death, the door to paradise.
Arriving at a shattered moonscape masked by smoke, Ali and his companions were issued with hand grenades and sent out across a mine-field in the direction of
the thunder. Ahead, a torrent of boulders could have been tumbling from the sky—as though here he stepped close to the very heartbeat of God, the compassionate, the merciful. The land-mine which blew his neighbour apart, arms and legs flying separately in the direction of heaven, tore off the side of Ali’s face.
The next few weeks were nebulous for Ali. He himself existed inside a black, mute thunder-cloud occasionally riven by the red lightning of pain. Finally the crowded hospital released him, since he could walk and his mattress was needed; and hidden Mother welcomed half a martyr home. Neighbours admired Ali’s scars and the remains of his empty eye socket.
Yet the war ended inconclusively.
Ali often visited the Fountain of Blood downtown to gape at the plumes of red-dyed water spurting as though from severed arteries. Part of a host half a million strong, he screamed for the death of the Satan-author, blasphemous apostate lurking in that Western devil-land.
Yet it wasn’t the Satan-author who died; it was the Ayatollah, father of truth, beloved of God, the merciful, the compassionate.
Grief racked Ali, grief wrenched a million hearts, five million. Ali burrowed like a mole through the dense conglomerate of one of the hugest crowds in history, millions of pebbles of flesh cemented by the sand of rageful sorrow—through into the Beshte Zahar Cemetery. No, not so much cemented as surging, churning like the ballast and cement and liquid in some giant, horizontal concrete-mixer. Fainting, shrieking, reaching, clawing, crazed with bitter woe: a million locusts, and only one leaf to feed at—the coffin, soon to arrive. He fought his way into the inner square built of freight containers. Thousands of mourners were beating their heads with their fists in unison. Mystics were harvesting bowls of earth from the bottom of the grave, and passing these out—the crowd ate the precious soil.
A helicopter landed. Moments later, a tumult of young men hauled the shrouded body from its coffin. Hands tore the shroud to pieces, each scrap a precious relic. “Ya Ali, Ya Hussein,” cried ten thousand voices. The thin white legs of the holy man jutted aloft like bare sticks, as his corpse slumped.
Ali, clawing, was in the forefront but his defective vision foxed him. As he fought his way to the rear through the tide of bodies he puzzled at what his right hand clutched, something resembling a slippery ping-pong ball. Panting, he paused long enough to glance. His palm cupped a glazed, naked eye. With a tail of optic nerve: a kind of plump, ocular tadpole.
Had a miracle happened? Had a piece of the shroud transmuted itself into Ali’s own lost eye, now restored to him? Was he not himself named in honour of the martyr Ali, who founded the true school of Islam?
At last his brain caught up with what his fingers and their nails had done: he, Ali the half-faced, had torn out one of the Ayatollah’s eyes.
Behind him, shots rang out. The helicopter landed once more . . .
Later, Ali heard how the corpse eventually entered its hole in the ground, to be covered by flagstones heaved hand over hand, and how a dozen of the cargo containers were piled across the grave. No one would or could say what state the body had been in finally.
The eye sat on a shelf by Ali’s bed, staring unblinkingly at him. (For, lacking eyelids, how could an eye blink?) Its gaze appeared to track him about the little room, the pupil stretching into a squint to follow him.
Ali prayed. He thought about preservatives. He wondered what best to do. How could he possibly plunge that holy eye into alcohol even of the medicinal variety? So he visited a pharmacy to ask advice about—so he said—pickling a dead frog; he returned with a jar of formalin. Once afloat in that solution of formaldehyde, the eyeball definitely swung from side to side keeping an eye on him.
On him, on mere Ali the half-face? Oh no. Simply alert, awaiting, on the look-out. Ali prayed. Ali dreamed. A vision visited him. The holy man had been a hawk. What was that hawk’s eye hunting for? Why, it was surveying all of the Earth, searching for the hiding place of the Satan-author.
Events deployed as the will of God decreed. Truly dreams were troubled in Tehran during those days. Angels guided Ali to the office of Dr Omar Hafiz, doyen of the country’s ballistic missile programme, who for his part had dreamt originally—
—of exploding a nuclear weapon on Tel Aviv to free the Palestinians. Those high-explosive birds aimed at Baghdad were a side-show. Alas, lack of a warhead derailed the project. So next, Dr Hafiz dreamed of a reconnaissance satellite to spy on Iraqi army positions; but peace had been declared. Lately Hafiz dreamt of using the prototype rocket to put a communications satellite into orbit to criss-cross the whole face of the Earth: the Voice of God, broadcasting the truth . . .
An angel had also visited Dr Hafiz.
“We can fly your hawk,” he assured Ali. “The cold of space will preserve the eye from corruption. It will look down on Europe, America, Africa. That Satan-author may have hidden anywhere. He may have bought plastic surgery. The eye will find him. With its miraculous perception it will recognize him. He is what it seeks; for fifty years, if need be.”
“And I, the half-face,” said Ali, “need to be on hand when our hawk finds its prey, do I not? For the eye was given into my hand, was it not?”
Events unfolded like a fragrant rose from a bud. Surgeons renovated Ali’s face, rebuilt his orbital bone, gave him a glass eye. Tutors nurtured his smattering of English and French into something resembling fluency. Commandos offered him the sort of weapons training he’d sorely lacked when he rode to war. His forged passport identified him as a naturalized Australian.
Soon his country launched its first Earth satellite named the Eye of the Ayatollah, and announced to the world (as well as to the Satan-author, wherever he was) that the orbiting instrument package did indeed contain exactly that. Benighted infidels outside the harbour of Islam laughed—uneasily. Corrupted souls within the harbour of Islam glanced askance at the night sky.
No one beyond the inner hierarchy knew the whole truth about Ali. Whenever Ali shut his left eye, he looked down through his artificial eye upon the countries of the Earth from space. For his glass eye was more than a bauble. Through it, miraculously, the youth could see whatever the holy man’s searching eye could see through the zoom-lenses of the satelite; as had been promised in the vision confided to Dr Hafiz . . .
In the cold void above the topmost air, the Eye of the Ayatollah orbited for a year, two years, five years . . . Disguised as a dinkum Aussie immigrant on holiday, Ali wandered the world as frugally as he could, financed by an American Express gold card. Universally acceptable; he still regretted the expedient.
The orbiting eye seemed to twitch as it was passing over Pakistan, and there went Ali; a solar flare must have been responsible. Again, over Nicaragua, it spasmed; thus Ali went to that strife-torn land. Perhaps a cosmic ray had hit the eye.
He found himself in Sweden, in Ireland, in America, England, France. Always keeping watch. From his hiding place the Satan-author published another book, redoubling Ali’s fervour.
Seven years passed. The eye watched. Ali watched.
At long last the eye throbbed. It was gazing down upon an island off the south-west coast of Scotland; upon a tiny isle that nestled against a bay of its parent island like a new-born baby whale beside its leviathan of a mother. The eye passed over, but not before imprinting Ali vividly.
He flew to London, collected a gun and grenades from a certain embassy, and caught a train to Glasgow.
He would need to wait there for some weeks till the satellite would be poised to pass over the same part of Scotland again. Buying maps and guides, he soon learned that the name of the mother island was Arran, and of the islet: Holy Island, a title which set his teeth on edge.
As the time approached, Ali took a bus to the coast then a ferry to Arran. Renting a modest car, he reconnoitred this pinnacled island of granite bens and fells, glens of bracken and frisky streams rushing amidst great boulders, mounds of moraine, dark conifers, and wild red deer—suddenly giving way in the south to rolling heathery hills,
calm pastures, sandy beaches with a few palm trees.
Ali checked in to a hotel in the small sea-side town of Lamlash opposite Holy Island. He had brought a hammer, and was pretending to be an enthusiastic amateur geologist. Binoculars too; he was an eager bird-watcher.
How that islet dominated the shore. Its two-mile stretch of jagged cliffs and rugged moorland sheltered wild goats, long-legged diminutive Soay sheep, shaggy Highland cattle; and birds, birds. Holy Island was a nature reserve, a field study centre. From its southernmost tip a lighthouse beaconed across the Firth of Clyde.
Unholy island, thought Ali.
Apparently a Christian saint called Molaise lived on the isle in the time of the prophet Mohammed, bless his name. The saint’s cell could still be visited; Vikings had defaced it with runic inscriptions. The Satan-author also skulked in a kind of cell. Did he think he could walk free in safety upon those moors amongst the goats? The bars of his cell were the eye-beams of an authentic holy man, whose organ of vision lived on.
But first the instrument package enshrining that organ of vision must re-enter the atmosphere and parachute down to Earth; for such had been Dr Hafiz’s design. Thus the hawk would pounce.
Studying his maps, Ali chose a glen leading to a ben. He telephoned a cover number in Australia, to alert Tehran. Next evening, the important part of the Eye of the Ayatollah descended and soft-landed in the bonnie upland heather.
The following morning, Ali took the ferry over to Holy Island in company with half a dozen ornithologists. The sea was choppy, the breeze was brisk, so spindrift soon coated the lens-studded box that held the eye, which Ali wore around his neck like some gold-plated camera. Already that camera-that-wasn’t had attracted a few curious glances. Was Ali some aviphile oil sheikh travelling incognito who couldn’t forsake at least one token of ostentation?
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