The Prince of Bagram Prison

by Alex Carr

  Crouching on his good leg, Jamal pushed the bed aside and ran his fingers along the bottom of the wall, searching for the loose seam he knew by heart, popping the baseboard free. He'd discovered this makeshift safe several months after moving in, its contents left by some former inhabitant. Faded pictures of a woman and three children. A letter in a language Jamal had been unable to read, its creases worn to loose fibers from constant folding and unfolding.

  Jamal stuck his hand into the blind niche and pulled out the small metal box he'd stashed there. On the rare occasions he had extra cash, this was where he kept it. But since Harry's departure there had been fewer and fewer of these occasions, and there was no money in the box now, just a ragged scrap of paper, a string of digits in a drunken scrawl. And the letters es kepler, the print bisected where the paper had been torn away.

  If you're ever in real trouble, Harry had said as he scribbled the number in the thumb-worn book he always carried in his coat pocket—My Koran, he'd called it. And then, as if suddenly realizing what he'd done, I can't promise anything, you know.

  Moving quickly, Jamal stuffed the paper into his pocket, then gathered a change of clothes from the cardboard box that held his belongings. Everything else he would bequeath to the room's next tenant, as the former inhabitants had done for him.

  He headed back out onto the landing and down the stairs to the foyer, then down one more flight into the building's dank basement. Suleman, the butcher, slept here sometimes, when his wife kicked him out, but Jamal was relieved to find the narrow cot behind the stairs empty tonight.

  Switching on the bare overhead bulb, Jamal lifted the mattress from the cot's frame and pushed aside Suleman's stash of magazines, searching for the spare shop key he'd seen on previous visits. You like? Jamal could hear the butcher, his fat face flushed and sweaty with expectation as he displayed his collection to Jamal, his teeth sharp as a jackal's. And Jamal had nodded, understanding perfectly what was required of him.

  Jamal took the key and unlocked the door that led to the butcher shop's basement storeroom, then stepped inside. There had been lambs here just days before, and their odor still filled the room—the pungent smell of lanolin and shit, the sourness of adrenaline and fear.

  Choking back panic, the boy groped his way forward through the darkness. Out into the basement abattoir and up the narrow stairs to the shop. It was a thief's work, a trade he knew well, but he hadn't come to the shop to steal, knew from experience that Suleman never kept money in his battered old register.

  Jamal skirted the butchering tables and moved toward the front counter, inhaling the death stink of the shop. Rancid fat and curing flesh. Bleach in the mop bucket. The light from the street filtered in through the metal window gates, casting a checkerboard of shadows across the hulking refrigerator case, the bloody and tongueless lambs' heads laid out in a neat row on the bottom shelf.

  Jamal had never made a phone call, not once, had never had a reason to, and he was nervous as he set his hand on the heavy black receiver and pulled the paper from his pocket. He lifted the receiver to his ear, as he'd seen others do so many times, then put his finger on the key pad and punched in the numbers.

  There was a tone in his ear, and another, each ring long and flat. And then a voice, so much closer than Jamal had imagined it would be. Not Mr. Harry but a woman.

  “Hello?”

  Jamal hesitated, suddenly flustered. He hadn't expected this, hadn't prepared himself for the possibility that someone besides Harry would answer, and now he didn't know what to say.

  “Hello?” the woman repeated.

  “I speak to Mr. Harry, please,” Jamal blurted out.

  “You've got the wrong—” the woman began, but Jamal didn't wait for her to finish.

  “Mr. Harry,” he insisted, and then, glancing down at the scrap of paper in his hand, “You are Es Kepler?”

  There was silence on the other end. For a moment Jamal thought the woman was gone, then he heard her laughing.

  “Of course. Mr. Harry,” she said, leaning hard on the “mister.”

  “Please.” Jamal took a breath and gathered himself, trying to piece the words together so the woman would understand. The phone was much more daunting than he'd thought it would be, his normally steady English failing him fast. “Please,” he repeated. “It's important. Real trouble here.”

  “Yeah?” she said, suddenly bitter. “Well, if you find Harry, tell him there's real trouble here, too.”

  NOT EVERYONE HAS IT as easy as you do. It was the last thing Kat had said to her brother, at least the last thing of any real substance.

  It was July of that summer, his last summer, and Kat, facing a six-hour layover at JFK on her way to Paris, had suggested they meet. They'd never been particularly close. Max was six years younger than she, the product of her mother's third marriage, one husband removed from Kat's father. Normally, Kat wouldn't have thought to tell him she was passing through, but just a month earlier their mother had announced that she was getting divorced for the fifth time. When Max e-mailed, obviously wanting to talk, Kat proposed a rendezvous.

  They met in Brooklyn, at a Greek diner halfway between the airport and the city. It was a weekday, midafternoon, and Max had left work early to come. He hadn't taken the job at the Trade Center yet but was temping at an office in midtown. He had a girlfriend, he said, and was making enough money to pay the bills.

  Kat wanted to be happy for him, and she told him she was, but there was a mean part of her that hated him for the ease with which he navigated life. Part of it was the luck of the draw, the fact that his father had money, while Kat's did not. That while Kat had paid for college with ROTC scholarships and part-time jobs, Max had skated through without so much as a student loan. But there was an effortlessness to Max and his dealings with the world that had nothing to do with wealth, a facility Kat simply did not possess, and for which she could never forgive him.

  “So what are you doing in Paris?” he asked at last, then added, “I almost forgot. This'll be your first time out of the country, won't it?”

  “I finally downgraded to ready reserve,” she explained, conscious of the fact that Max had spent an entire year abroad after finishing college. “I thought I'd do some traveling. Maybe try to pick up some teaching jobs along the way.”

  “You're planning to stay in Europe?”

  “Europe. North Africa. Egypt. Turkey. Who knows?” Finally finished with her dissertation, freed from the yoke of her weekend and summer reserve duties, Kat was hoping to become acquainted with the world with which she had fallen in love from afar.

  “Sounds ambitious,” Max remarked. “I've got a friend in Cairo who runs a language school. Guy I met in Essaouira. Now, that's a beautiful place; you should really try to make it down there. In any case, I'll e-mail you his information if you want it. I'm sure he could find work for you.”

  Kat shrugged. She knew he was trying to be helpful, but she felt patronized by the offer. “Sure,” she said. “Whatever.”

  When they finally broached the subject of the divorce, Kat found herself defending her mother's actions, not out of reason but out of spite. Wanting, she knew, to beat her brother down.

  “Not everyone has it as easy as you do,” she'd told him, cruelly, after he'd expressed his concern.

  Max had let the comment go, but they had parted soon afterward, Kat insisting that she had to get back to the airport, though she still had two hours to spare. They had not hugged, as siblings—even those who were angry with each other—might have done, but shaken hands. Then Kat had climbed into a cab, leaving her brother standing alone on the sidewalk outside the diner, looking uncharacteristically ill at ease.

  THE COMMANDANT OF CADETS shook Kat's hand and gave her a stiff little bow. One of the many obligations of her grief, Kat thought, the terms of which were not hers to dictate. She nodded in somber acknowledgment, as she knew she was expected to do, then watched the man turn and make his way to the front of the chapel.

>   From the walls on either side of her, the dead and dying looked down. The faces of young men in battle preserved on canvas. Wounds in garish crimson, the artist's hundred-year-old brushstrokes visible still, the violence with which he had painted the scene.

  During the Civil War, the school's cadet corps had been called to the aid of a badly diminished Confederate unit, and had ended up winning a key battle against Union troops. Some fifty boys had died in the fighting, and had been rewarded here on earth with permanent residence in the school's pantheon. The myth of the battle was invoked at nearly every school gathering. Each year on the day of their deaths, the cadets' names were read at the roll call and places were set for them in the mess.

  The commandant took his place at the pulpit and began the brief ceremony. Then the school chaplain gave a sermon about God and righteousness, about the courage of those who had died and the cowardice of their murderers, and God's mercy at the end.

  Kat had heard it all too many times before, and she let her eyes wander across the mural as he spoke, over the faces of the cadets charging determinedly forward. She knew for a fact that the artist had not been there that day, but had reenacted the scene decades later, using his own son as one of the models, and that the charge then had been on a hill of sweet pea and clover, with nothing but the breeze pushing them back. She also knew that the artist had returned years later, after his son had gone to Europe to fight in World War II. And that cadets had found him late one night, trying desperately to erase the boy's image from the canvas.

  “Judge me, O Lord,” Kat heard the voices behind her say in practiced unison, the first words of the Twenty-sixth Psalm. “For I have walked in mine integrity: I have trusted also in the Lord; therefore I shall not slide.”

  Kneeling, she ducked her head and glanced back at the rows of cadets, the sea of gray uniforms and bent shoulders, heads stubbled like those of newly hatched chicks.

  Examine me, O Lord, and prove me:

  try my reins and my heart.

  For thy loving-kindness is before mine eyes:

  and I have walked in thy truth.

  I have not sat with vain persons,

  neither will I go in with dissemblers.

  I have hated the congregation of evildoers;

  and will not sit with the wicked.

  I will wash mine hands in innocency:

  so will I compass thine altar, O Lord.

  “She's awake?” Dick Morrow asked, watching Marina set the kettle on the stove.

  The woman nodded, then turned away from him and busied herself with Susan's breakfast tray. A pot of tea and two sturdy mugs. One of those horrible canned shakes. Chocolate this morning, Morrow noted, remembering Susan's fondness for the truffles at Fauchon and wondering how she stomached these drinks.

  “Today, maybe good day,” the old nurse remarked with characteristic Russian grimness, as if this scrap of positive news served only to remind her of the bad days to come.

  It had been Susan's decision to hire her. This woman, out of all the nurses they had seen. It was almost, Morrow concluded, as if Susan had chosen the Russian to punish him.

  I suppose you want the pretty Filipino, Susan had snapped when he'd questioned her choice. And Morrow had thought, no, any of them would be fine. Anything but this beast.

  He'd even gone so far as to have Marina checked out through the old channels. But, to Morrow's disappointment, she'd turned up clean, the product of American evangelicals who sponsored believers from the former Soviet Union. Just a nurse from Leningrad who'd whored herself to God for a plane ticket and a green card.

  And now here she was in his house, a ghost of all the Russians he'd known. Grim-faced, suffering the burdens of life. The two of them knocking into each other in the early-morning stillness that, by all rights, should have been his alone.

  The kettle shrieked, and Marina's knobby hand sprang for it. She filled the teapot, spooned a generous dollop of blackberry jam into each mug. The jam was hers. She had canned it herself, for all Morrow knew. The first time he'd seen the label-less jar on their kitchen counter, Morrow had thought immediately of Moscow—of the horrible little grocery store near the embassy, half-vacant shelves stocked with sticky bottles of fruit syrup and conserves that looked as if they'd been fabricated in some babushka's kitchen. Misstamped cases of Cuban peanuts one week, moldy Syrian oranges the next. Leftovers to feed an empire.

  Marina lifted the tray and turned back to face Morrow. “You take?” she asked.

  Goading him, he thought, already fully aware of his answer. He shook his head. “She's expecting you.”

  “Yes,” she agreed. But as she moved past him she grunted just slightly, as if to remind him of the boundlessness of her contempt.

  Morrow listened to her trudge down the hall, then poured himself a cup of coffee and climbed the stairs to his office. The second floor was his, and his alone now. Susan couldn't climb the stairs, and Marina wouldn't, having made it clear from the beginning that her services were for Susan alone. When she'd first arrived, Morrow had made the mistake of slipping a shirt into Susan's laundry, and Marina hadn't acknowledged him for a full week afterward.

  The kind who would have fingered her own mother to the NKVD for a bag of sugar or a week's ration of toilet paper, Morrow had thought then. Yes, Comrade. The woman is a traitor, Comrade. I have seen it with my own eyes.

  Morrow checked his watch, then picked up the phone and dialed Peter Janson's home number in McLean.

  “Hi, Dick.” Janson's wife, Anne, answered before Morrow had a chance to speak.

  The miracle of caller ID, Morrow reminded himself, quelling decades of habitual suspicion. Yet another battle Susan had won. For chrissakes, Dick, I want to live like a normal person for once.

  “Good morning, Anne. Is Pete still around?”

  Morrow heard her move the phone from her mouth, call out, “Pete! It's Dick Morrow.” Then she was back. “How's Susan doing?”

  “She has her good days,” he lied.

  “I've been meaning to come by,” Anne offered.

  Silence, then the merciful interruption of Janson's voice. “I've got it up here, Anne.”

  “Tell Susan I said hello,” Anne said hastily.

  Morrow listened for the click that told him she had hung up, then waited a moment more before speaking. “Any word on the boy?” he asked finally.

  “Nothing since Andrews and Damien lost him. They're pretty sure he's bolted. It looks like he cleared some stuff out of his room.”

  “Any idea where to?”

  “It's anyone's guess. But he's a smart kid. He won't stick around Madrid. I'm thinking he may be heading home.”

  “To Morocco?” Morrow was skeptical. It had been more than four years now since the boy left, with less than nothing to go back to.

  “He's scared, Dick,” Janson offered. “And it's close.”

  “Anything more on Bagheri?” Morrow asked.

  “Nothing.” Janson was silent for a moment. “I've been looking at the kid's file,” he said at last. “There's a woman. One of the interrogators from Bagram. Apparently they were pretty close.”

  “Agency?”

  “Army,” Janson answered. “She teaches Arabic at a military college out in the Shenandoah Valley.”

  “She's retired?” Morrow asked.

  “Ready reserve,” Janson said. “So technically she's still ours.” And then, as if anticipating what Morrow was about to say, “I feel good about this, Dick.”

  “Well, I don't. We'd need someone on her, in case she actually finds the boy.”

  “Andrews and Damien are still in Madrid.”

  Morrow thought for a moment. “The boy saw them?”

  “Andrews, yes. Damien, maybe.”

  “No. We'll use Kurtz. I assume everything's cleared up on the London end of things.”

  “They might know each other,” Janson reminded him. “From Bagram.”

  Morrow thought for a moment. A bad idea, and getting worse, he tol
d himself. But then Kurtz had as much to lose as the rest of them. More, in fact. “Fax me what you have on the woman,” Morrow said. “I'll drive out to see her this morning.”

  A DECADE PREPARING FOR THIS MOMENT, Kat had thought as she stood at the Tangier ferry dock, paralyzed by fear. Ten years of study, and now that she was facing the place she wanted nothing more than to turn and run. She had expected a different Morocco altogether, Africa and Islam tempered by years of colonial rule into something pleasantly and unthreateningly foreign. But for this—the formless women in their black chadors, the grubby children who would not be put off, the frightening men with their leering offers of assistance—she had not been prepared.

  Europe. North Africa. Egypt. Turkey, she could hear herself say, Who knows?

  That first night, humiliated by her own weakness, recoiling at the filth and desperation of the place, she had gratefully allowed herself to be driven past the squalor of the medina, past the African prostitutes ranting outside the Bab el-Marsa and the mass of child beggars at the port entrance, to a tourist hotel in the ville nouvelle.

  Later, safely ensconced in her room, with its beige furnishings and fleur-de-lis wallpaper, she had assured herself that her discomfort had been a product of exhaustion; that, once she ate and slept, the panic she'd felt since stepping off the ferry would fade. The next day she would get up early and have coffee at one of Burroughs's little cafés on the Petit Socco, then hike up through the crooked streets of the old city to the casbah.

  But in the morning, after sleeping late, she ordered room service instead: strong French coffee and croissants, with two fried eggs. Sustenance, she told herself, for the day ahead. And what did it matter if she lingered? She had weeks here, months if she so chose.