The Prince of Bagram Prison

by Alex Carr

  Colin touched her arm. “What's wrong?”

  “Nothing.” She slipped on her boots and pulled the laces tight, trying not to look at him.

  He twisted around until he was in her line of sight. “What is it?”

  “Nothing. Really. It's just this place, everything. Aren't you afraid?” She had not meant to say it, but now that she had there was no going back.

  Colin shook his head. “Afraid of what?” he asked, as if he hadn't even considered the idea until now.

  What wasn't there to be afraid of in this place, Kat thought. Death. Pain. The loss of all those things that kept one human. And now, despite her best attempts to hold her feelings for Colin to a minimum, there would be him to fear for as well. Kat stood up without answering him.

  “I should go,” she said. “He'll be wondering what's keeping me.” She looked back at Colin. “Ten,” she told him, softening just slightly. “I'll be here at ten if I can.” Then she made her way out into the chill morning.

  Kurtz was waiting for her outside the front gate with a look of stern impatience on his face.

  “I hope you know what you're getting yourself into,” he said as they started down Disney Drive together.

  What a father would tell a child, Kat thought. “I can take care of myself,” she snapped.

  “DON'T EVER DO THAT to me again,” Kat said, tossing her bag aside and sloughing her jacket.

  The hotel Kurtz had chosen was a dingy establishment, with tiny beds and claustrophobic rooms, greasy windows that looked out onto an industrial view of the Algeciras waterfront, and a shared cold-water shower down the hall. One star, Kat thought, only by the grace and muscle of a well-placed fifty-euro note. It was not unlike the hotel where she'd spent the night before making the crossing to Morocco three years earlier, only that establishment had been farther inland, in the squalid backpackers' quarter near the outdoor market.

  “Do what?” Kurtz asked, feigning ignorance.

  “I'm serious,” Kat warned him. “Orders or no, you undermine me like that again and I'm on the first flight home. Understand?”

  She stepped over to the window and looked across the ferry docks, from which the day's last boat to Tangier had departed some time earlier. Down on the pier's concrete apron, several dozen trucks were already massed for the morning crossing, their cabs dark. Across the bay, Gibraltar rose magnificently from the darkness, its scarred cliff face lit from below, solemn and intimidating.

  A reckless choice, Kat told herself, thinking of Jamal, wondering just how much it would take to get her into one of those containers. Fear and desperation, degrees of which she could not even pretend to imagine. She knew for a fact that more died than lived on the trip across, many more. And to go this way, in the opposite direction of hope, back to the place from which one had run, from which one had already risked one's life to escape. To know how it would end even, in the untempered darkness, falling to final sleep.

  Kurtz laughed mirthlessly. “How many people know you're here, Kat?”

  Kat wheeled to face him. His eyes in the room's bald light were dull and impassive. “Is that a threat?”

  “Just making an observation.”

  Despite everything, Kat had never feared Kurtz before. From the beginning, she had taken his anger as an expression of powerlessness. She had been alternately pitying and repulsed, but never afraid. Now, suddenly, she understood and she was.

  It was well into spring before Harry saw Susan again, nearly eight months since their meeting at the Hotel Duc, a stifling winter of interminable cocktail parties and elaborate dinners, of deflecting the none too discreet advances of languishing consular wives.

  For the first few weeks after their indiscretion, Harry had worried that Morrow would find out. Saigon was not a city known for keeping its secrets, and Harry thought it more than possible that Susan would choose to tell Morrow herself. After all, revenge was effective only when both parties were aware of what had happened. But if Morrow did know he showed no indication of it, and eventually Harry gave the whole thing less and less thought. He even managed a sporadic affair with one of the wives from the Hungarian delegation, an unnatural blonde named Marta with a Teutonic ferocity in bed.

  When Morrow called in April to say he'd be coming up to Nha Trang, Harry's first thought was that Susan had finally played her hand. He had not known quite what to expect—affairs like his and Susan's were not uncommon in the world in which they revolved, and these types of indiscretions were generally forgiven—but he prepared himself for the worst nonetheless, putting aside enough alcohol to dull himself against whatever pain—mental or physical—he might have to endure.

  Harry wasn't sure whether to be relieved or not to see a figure in the passenger seat as he watched Morrow's Mercedes pull in through the gate from his second-floor office. He'd known people to bring backup to confrontations like this, either as witnesses or as extra muscle, though he couldn't see Morrow as someone who resolved his problems through physical means. Perhaps, he thought, the other person was there to make sure Harry went peacefully.

  But when the door swung open it wasn't Janson or Robinson or any of the others from the Saigon station who stepped out onto the drive but Susan. She was wearing a lavender shirtwaist dress with a patterned chiffon scarf knotted at her throat, and she looked both ridiculously out of place and strikingly at ease against the tattered colonial backdrop of the villa.

  She shaded her eyes with her hand and looked up, her gaze directed toward the exact spot where Harry stood. Harry ducked away from the open window.

  “He's hiding from us,” he heard her say to Morrow, laughing. “I saw him in the window.”

  Then Morrow, also amused. “I think he has a bit of a crush on you.”

  “We see you up there, Harry!” Susan called out. “You know, we won't bite!”

  Harry flattened himself against the wall, desperately wishing he could replay the previous moments, knowing exactly how foolish he looked. “Just coming down,” he called out as breezily as he could.

  Susan and Morrow had let themselves inside and were already making themselves comfortable in the first-floor sitting room by the time Harry got downstairs. The villa wasn't Harry's, and he wasn't proprietary about the place, but the booze was his, and he was displeased to see Morrow helping himself to a bottle of twelve-year-old single malt from the liquor cabinet.

  “I didn't realize you were bringing someone,” Harry said testily.

  Morrow set three cut-crystal glasses on the bar cart. “Susan's been bothering me for months about coming to see that telescope of yours. She said you invited her up.”

  Harry glanced over at Susan.

  “You did invite me,” she said, winking at him. “That afternoon at the Duc, or don't you remember?”

  “I never thanked you for looking after her. I'm afraid I got hung up at the station. Susan speaks very highly of you, you know?” Morrow poured out two glasses of scotch, then gestured to Harry with the bottle. “You'll join us?”

  Harry nodded eagerly. God, how he needed that drink. “Are you staying for dinner? I'll need to let An know.”

  “And breakfast, too. For Susan, that is.” Morrow offered Harry a glass. “I'd stay the night as well, but I have to get back to Saigon. You won't mind showing her the ropes, will you?”

  “No.” Harry gulped the scotch. Over Morrow's shoulder, Susan winked at him again. “Not at all.”

  “Good. You can bring her back down tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow?” Harry asked.

  “Yes,” Morrow replied. “I've scheduled a meeting for the afternoon. Is there a problem?”

  “No,” Harry mumbled. “Of course not.”

  “It's settled, then.” Morrow raised his glass in a toast. “To Harry and his Celestron.”

  “Yes,” Susan said. “To Harry.”

  “DON'T THINK I don't know I'm being used,” Harry told Susan later that night, after Morrow had left. They were sitting on the veranda waiting for An to fin
ish her work and retire to her quarters. It was a futile pretense at propriety, for the housekeeper had already made it clear that she knew exactly what was going on, but by now they were all too committed to the deception to stop.

  Susan took a long, satisfied drag off her cigarette, leaned her head back, and looked up at the sky. “It's clouding over,” she remarked.

  “Does he know?” Harry asked, still unsure of exactly how to interpret Morrow's earlier comments.

  Susan laughed. “Of course not. He'd kill you if he did.”

  The way she spoke made Harry understand that the last comment was literal.

  “You won't be a bore about this, will you?” she asked. “I mean, you of all people, getting bent out of shape.”

  “What's that supposed to mean?”

  “You're not exactly a stranger to using people, are you? At least I've got my cards on the table.”

  She was right, of course.

  She touched his hand. “I like you, Harry. Can't we just have a little fun?”

  She had a smell to her, a rich smell, like that of a French department store. The perpetual scent of expensive perfume and cosmetics and tissue paper. Like a gift that had been wrapped just for him.

  He took her face in his hands and kissed her. It was reckless, he knew, but he did it nonetheless.

  And then, from inside the house, came An's voice. “Mr. Harry. I finish with the mademoiselle's room now. You need anything else?”

  “No, An.” He pulled away from Susan. “We're fine, thank you. Thank you for your help.”

  “Yes, Mr. Harry. Good night.” As the woman turned to go, her eyes caught Susan's and a look of utter disapproval crossed her face.

  Susan blinked then, and in that brief moment Harry could see that she was not all she claimed to be.

  “You know he won't leave her,” he said after An had finally gone. “His wife, I mean. They never do.”

  “I suppose you're right,” Susan agreed, recovering herself, though it was obvious that she didn't believe what she said. She looked up at the overcast sky again. “No stars tonight.”

  “No,” Harry said. “I guess you'll have to come back.”

  AND SHE HAD, Harry remembered now as he drove north out of Kailua into the charred landscape of the lava fields, keeping an eye on the white Escort in his rearview mirror, the two heads silhouetted behind the glass. Not as often as he would have liked, but she had come nonetheless, through the summer and into the next year, into that last long winter of collapse. Sometimes, as on that first visit, Morrow brought her himself. On those occasions Harry would be obligated to unsheathe the Celestron and put on a real show. But more often it was just the two of them, with An lurking reproachfully in the background, like the unacknowledged specter of Harry's own conscience.

  Looking back on their affair from the cusp of old age, it was almost impossible for Harry to recall the frenzy of it, the urgency with which he had approached her, as if sex and ownership were one and the same, as if through mere possession he could be transformed.

  He had wanted her physically, certainly, but it was the other, less tangible things that he had not been able to resist. Like her ease with the servants, even An, who hated her. Those ephemeral marks of class which Harry did not possess.

  In the distance, the prehistoric mass of Mauna Loa rose from its black skirts. Fourteen thousand feet, and another sixteen thousand to the ocean floor, nearly the height of Everest. Along the high, sloping crest, a row of observatories shimmered, miragelike, in the thin air.

  Harry rolled down his window and let the hot breeze flood the car, the sulfur and asphalt smell of the volcanic plain. After so much time in the lush uplands, the starkness seemed like a modernist's vision of hell. Penance for what? Harry wondered. He glanced at the envelope on the passenger seat, Irene's familiar scrawl on the shipping label. Gluttony? Greed? The sin of self-deception?

  Along the highway, island graffiti, written in white coral, studded the black berms of lava rock: marry me kaipo. The message was inscribed inside a large heart. Here and there a delicate tuft of pili grass or the scorched and gnarled skeleton of a kiawe bush fought its way up out of the rocks. But apart from these small concessions to life the plain seemed utterly uninhabited.

  Of course, Morrow had known all along. If it hadn't been you, it would have been someone else, he had said. This, years after it was all over. You didn't really think she'd pick you?

  The sign for the old Kona airport loomed out of the wasteland and Harry tapped the brakes, the old anger getting the better of him, the old shame. Dodging oncoming traffic, he veered sharply to the left and started down the long dirt road that led to the water, slowing just slightly to make sure the Escort followed behind.

  The old airport, perched at the edge of the Pacific, had been out of commission for several decades, since a larger facility was built farther north, but the state had wisely taken advantage of the property's proximity to one of the island's nicer beaches and turned it into a state park, using the runway as a parking lot and the old terminal buildings as administration facilities.

  Harry wasn't much for the beach, but Char had dragged him here a couple of times, and he clearly remembered seeing a pay phone. They would take care of this now, he told himself, glancing back at the Escort. They would finish things once and for all.

  It was a weekday, early still, and the beach parking lot was nearly deserted, only a handful of spaces claimed by salt-eaten island vehicles. Harry pulled up in front of the old terminal building and climbed out of his car, trying to conjure Mor-row's home number. He'd had an impeccable recall for numbers at one time, photographic even, but his mind was not what it used to be and he was unsure as he strode to the pay phone on the breezeway. Behind him, the Escort pulled into a space on the far side of the lot, close to the beach.

  Harry pushed a pocketful of change into the slot and waited for the dial tone, then punched in the number.

  Two rings. Four. Six. Perhaps he had gotten it wrong.

  Eight rings and then a click. “Hello?” It was Susan.

  He fumbled for something to say.

  “Hello?”

  “I'm calling for Dick Morrow.” Harry swallowed hard, tasting panic in the back of his throat.

  She paused. “Harry? Is that you?” Her voice on the line was exactly as he remembered it.

  “I'm sorry?” What was he afraid of? he wondered. Why did he feel the need to lie?

  “Never mind.” She sounded almost disappointed. “I thought you were someone else. I'll see if I can find him.”

  There was a rustling as she set the phone down, then her voice, distant. “Marina! Marina, is my husband home?”

  Another female voice, this one foreign. Footsteps and the sound of a door slamming. The click of a second line.

  “Yes?” Morrow.

  “Call your dogs off, Dick.” Harry said.

  He could hear Morrow's hand cover the receiver and a muffled shout. “Marina! Hang up the line.” Then Morrow was back. “Calm down, Harry.”

  “I am calm.” And he was, surprisingly so. “I don't know anything about the boy or where he's run off to, and I'd appreciate being left alone. I've got your goons right here. You can talk to them now if you'd like.” He waved to the men in the Escort, motioning for them to join him. “Hey! Starsky! Hutch! Over here!”

  The pair glanced awkwardly at each other, then looked out toward the beach.

  “Calm down,” Morrow repeated. “We know about the phone call, Harry. We know he tried to contact you. You gave him your number, didn't you?”

  “A minor lapse in judgment,” Harry said. Then, in an effort to deflect the question, “What could you possibly want with the boy, anyway? He was a dead end.”

  “No, Harry, you were the dead end.”

  “He didn't even go to the mosque,” Harry protested. “He spent his Fridays cruising for johns in the Rosaleda, for God's sake.”

  “That's not what he told your replacement.”


  “I don't believe it.”

  “Believe what you like,” Morrow told him. “But I'm afraid I can't turn you loose just yet. What if the boy were to call you again? What if Irene were to somehow pass him on to you this time?”

  “Leave her out of this,” Harry said, though he knew the protest was futile.

  “I wish we could trust you, Harry, I really do. But what's to say you won't have another one of your minor lapses in judgment? No, I'm afraid the goons, as you refer to them, will have to stay.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “You, too,” Morrow said cheerily. “You'll call me if you hear anything.”

  Where had this woman come from? Manar wondered as she stepped out onto the street and pulled the gate shut behind her, hearing the iron latch click firmly into place. Who was she, this other self who was afraid of nothing, who needed, suddenly and without question, to know?

  Manar had told no one of her visit to Asiya's house, or of what had taken her there: the fragile hope she had allowed herself to nurture. To her mother, Manar knew, any thoughts of the child were merely reminders of the shame they had all been forced to endure because of Manar's choices, like the scar on their household that Manar herself had become—the thing about which one spoke only in whispers, and never to those outside the immediate family.

  Manar had tried hard to put the idea of the boy aside. She knew the kind of lives for which the children of the charity houses were destined, knew desperation and its consequences intimately. She understood what the old woman had meant when she said Manar was better off not knowing. But she had not been able to let her thoughts of the child go.

  After her visit to the housekeeper she'd lain awake remembering those few moments in the prison hospital, his smell when she'd held him to her. And for the first time since they'd taken him from her all those years ago, she had begun to hope, not for his death but for his survival.

  From the dark city came the mournful call of the muezzin, the first of the day's five reminders. Not of God, for Manar had long since ceased to believe in God, but of his betrayal.