Submission

by Harrison Young

  She accepted that. Her entire body was pulsating. People were talking again. The sounds of forks and glasses began. “I have pleased you?”

  “Yes, you have. To do it on a night when no other women were keeping you company. And the first time you were here. And only eighteen years old. When we go upstairs for coffee, you must tell everyone how it felt.”

  “You know everyone here?” Allison said, amazed. “These are people I will have to know? And see again?”

  “Oh, yes, my dear. This is not a place for strangers, only anonymity. They will all insist I bring you.”

  At that moment, a waiter brought over an ice bucket and a bottle of Cristal. “With the compliments of the lady you met earlier,” he said in lovely accented English. “You were marvellous. And after dinner may she and her companion inspect your tattoo?”

  Dinner stretched out for more than an hour. At about ten o’clock a woman came in who, when her coat was removed, also proved to be naked. Naked with pearls. That made Allison feel much better. As did the two flutes of Champagne Maloof permitted her. At the end of the meal they actually did go to a library for coffee. And the Swiss lady came over and examined her tattoo. It was a cluster of Arabic script, intricate and beautiful, about an inch and a half wide. “It means what?” the lady asked. Allison gave the answer Maloof had told her to use. “It’s private.”

  Allison herself had a rough idea what it meant, but she didn’t know what her friends would make of it, for summer was coming, and to a girl from California that meant the beach. It gave her a rush. She stared at it each evening when she undressed. A tattoo was something you could not turn back from.

  But neither was whatever Maloof had introduced her to. This night had only been a culmination. When you have taken a lover who barely touches you, practised driving both men and women wild with desire (Maloof had lately had her select a “boyfriend”), become a competent shoplifter, learned to pick locks, learned to take pictures in the girls’ locker room with a camera disguised as a compact, changed your name, acquired a very legitimate-looking Lebanese passport, been caned once or twice – somewhere in that process you become new. And now, in a luxurious room in a strange little secretive European country, men and women in beautiful clothes were congratulating her on her self-possession. Perhaps tonight at last Maloof would deflower her.

  13

  Philip found there were two problems about running with Allison Baxter. One was that she didn’t want to sing Sergeant Webster’s running chants. The other was that he couldn’t take his eyes off her. While this had no effect on his motivation, it played hell with his cadence and breathing.

  The course they’d got into the habit of following was a kind of steeplechase: down the street from her house in the compound she and Tom lived in, along the highway for a few hundred yards, across it when the traffic thinned, over the low guard rail, through some scruffy vegetation between the highway and the beach, along the shore for a couple of miles, and back.

  “Back” for her meant the foot of the gentle incline up to her house. There they would stop and she would smile and say, “Philip, that was really nice,” like a well brought up nineteen year old who has been taken to a play that was hard to get tickets for, and she’d walk up the hill to her house, where presumably she locked the door, and took off her wet running clothes, which went plop on the linoleum floor in the kitchen, and opened the refrigerator door and got out a bottle of mineral water, drank half of it, put her shorts and T-shirt and whatever in the washing machine, and walked into the bathroom carrying the bottle of mineral water – it was from Germany, the brand they sold in the whatever you call a PX that isn’t a PX because this isn’t the army – and turned on the shower and let it get hot, took another drink of the mineral water, put it on the edge of the sink and got into the shower and got really clean, and afterwards finished the mineral water while she dried off in front of the air-conditioner, and put on a pretty dress and waited for her nice husband to come home, or if he was away, made herself a little something for supper and curled up with a history book. Presumably.

  Philip theorised that Allison ran to exorcise personal demons, for she rather aggressively didn’t mind the thick dust on the bushes beside the road, or getting splashed, or the patches of rough ground. And she never asked how far they were going before they turned back. Sometimes, on humid days, he pushed her a little. Ran farther than he figured she expected. Her only response was to get red in the face, and sometimes to run farther out into the sea, when occasion offered, so they got wetter, and cooled off, and with the water up to their knees had to slow down. One time, instead of going round the rocks on the way back, he ran right up over them like it was an obstacle course, and they were both tired and got pretty banged up, because the rocks were unexpectedly slippery, and he pretended they hadn’t done anything different. And so did she. All this was subtext to the agreed program, however, which was that they would run and talk.

  Much of the talking was done by Allison. She was curious about Sheik Fawzi, whom she so often saw at Ian’s, but had never met.

  Why didn’t she just ask Ian to introduce her?

  “Not my type.”

  Not actually an answer – but the prime minister’s conversation was pretty scandalous, and it would do Allison’s reputation no good to be seen at his table. Wouldn’t help Tommy’s career much either.

  Why did Fawzi go to Paris so often?

  No idea, said Philip. Perhaps for female companionship. No, Philip didn’t think Mrs. Sullivan was his mistress, though, yes, she was certainly striking. No, she was actually very nice. Yes, extremely good-looking women sometimes made men uncomfortable, but Cassandra wasn’t like that.

  Why had Fawzi come home from Egypt?

  Philip supposed Ian Elliot was being truthful when he said the prime minister had supported himself by acting in bad movies. Alidar hadn’t been rich then. Perhaps he hadn’t liked that job. So now he was director of a grade-B country. Philip had come to think of Fawzi as a man in a monkey suit – though, out of loyalty, he didn’t share this thought with Allison. You had to ignore the costume – the jokes, the grimaces, the blasé attitude about things Philip would have said were important – and figure out what was going on inside. He prayed at the appointed times, and Philip suspected it wasn’t just for show. Philip would have liked to ask him about the history he had learned from Ian, and Mubarek’s balancing act, but he guessed that wouldn’t be a conversation Fawzi would welcome.

  Philip had once seized an opportunity to ask about Egypt.

  “It was a wonderful time,” the prime minister had said. “The quote ‘Suez Crisis’ had just happened, which lifted the last colonial yoke from the Egyptians. ‘Arab nationalism’ bloomed. Here in the Gulf we saw nationalism – or, I should say, the Buhara saw it, because in those days the Alidi were pretty uneducated – as a way to get beyond Sunni–Shia prejudice. For a while that looked like it might happen. In 1959, al-Azhar University in Cairo, which is the leading centre of learning in the Sunni world, authorised courses in Shia jurisprudence. Imagine!”

  “You studied there?”

  “I was just a tourist,” Fawzi had said, changing his tone. “My father was tired of listening to me, I think, so one day he handed me a ticket. Will you excuse me, Cooper?”

  Philip couldn’t very well ask Allison why she was married to her husband, but he wondered about it. Tommy worked for the bank Philip’s firm was traditional counsel to. Or was Philip the firm’s? He no longer felt he was. Running in the heat allowed what was left of your consciousness to try out new truths, new identities. Philip was not a sixth-year associate anymore. He might not be one of the diplomat adventurers he’d read about, but neither was he someone who took the Lexington Avenue subway downtown and played pretty good squash.

  Anyway, Tommy was one of those soft, intelligent people who think with their brains. Nothing wrong with him. Made sense when you talked to him. Just didn’t make sense as Allison’s husband.

&n
bsp; Why not? Tommy probably played pretty good squash too. He was a good commercial banker, and Philip actually knew what that meant: extreme courtesy and quiet hard-headedness, plus numbers. No, the incongruity was Allison. Like the prime minister, she wore a costume. What was she, inside her Allison suit? Unlike the prime minister, she hadn’t come home from Egypt. Wherever home was for her, if anywhere, this wasn’t it. The pretty dresses couldn’t disguise the fact that she had no anchor.

  It was certainly hot on the beach. You could feel the heat come up through the soles of your running shoes. Philip’s feet throbbed like the sound of Allison’s voice. Her voice wasn’t as good as the rest of her. If you didn’t look at her, it was like you were being briefed. If you did look at her it was heartbreaking. She had all of Sergeant Webster’s earnestness and none of his practicality. And a quietly muscled body made for Olympic fucking.

  One day Allison asked about the scar on his leg. There was an excuse. He’d barked his shin going over the guard rail, and it wouldn’t stop bleeding completely, and on the other side of the rocks she made him stop for just a minute so she could try to stop it with a handkerchief. Which allowed her to confront the scar. In answer to her questions, he took off his T-shirt, so that she got to see how thoroughly he had been privileged to serve his country. She touched his chest cautiously with her fingertip, as if he might be electric.

  About Ian Elliot. There was a man who believed in Olympic fucking. Or let people believe he did. Allison was somehow under his protection. Maybe she worked for him.

  Worked for him? That wasn’t what he’d meant – or was it? Sergeant Webster used to tell them, “Pay attention to what you happens to do. Especially in the ’Nam. All you got there is your weapon and your instinct.” Sergeant Webster took the Third Platoon out in the woods one night. Deep in the woods. Damp, pitch-black Georgia woods. Made the privates all set down. Not lie down, set down. Wet bottoms. And shut your mouths. After what may have been forty minutes and may have been half the night, he said, real quiet, “Third Platoon, do you know where you is?” They whispered that they did. “Well, then, walk home. Slow now. Two at a time. Don’t make no noise. The animals is sleeping.” So maybe she did.

  And Fawzi, with his Iranian grandmother, who did he work for? A prime minister couldn’t be freelance. But clearly he didn’t work for the king. Why clearly? Nothing about the king was clear. Cream-coloured Bentley, Olympic mind, large contributions to Wahhabi charities. Cassandra was getting sweet on him, so perhaps he hadn’t told her about that last bit.

  Funny the way you could be below stairs with some people. Philip and Cassandra had no secrets from each other. They just had laughs. She and the king presumably talked in heroic couplets. Very stately, very sexy. The prime minister, by contrast, was a limerick. Was it possible he got the job because no one else applied? It was a small country, after all. And now, like a mouse in a spotlight, he didn’t know what to do, so he scurried on and off stage, to France and back, making jokes.

  Wrong. In this woods of humans, Fawzi Alwara was not asleep. Didn’t know the way home, but was home. Had teeth. Not clear what he used them for, but worth remembering. Thank you, Sergeant Webster.

  Did Fawzi really rent women when he went to France? Unlucky girls. Eight times in a night. Burdened with the need. Rather not do it, rather not get children as ugly as me, but since you insist, since my body insists, since this monkey suit insists, I’ll do it quickly. And if you insist I run the country, you wise, handsome, lucky fool, I’ll scatter influence, eat lunch at Ian’s, and leave town when I can. What else can I do? We don’t chop off hands very often. Money grows on trees now, even if our trees are pretty scrawny. And the people love you, no matter what I do, at any speed, with or without grace.

  No amount of conversation stopped Philip looking at Allison. One day they ran entirely too far. Past being winded. Far enough to be alarmed by the unfamiliarity of the terrain. And she ran into the sea like a maiden in a fairy tale. And they were close to kissing. And he said, “Allison, Allison, what are you doing in this stupid country?”

  And she said, “Same as you. I’m a spy.”

  This was a problem. It seemed ungallant to say he wasn’t.

  “Are you really married to Tom?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you love him?”

  “Not enough.”

  14

  After Brussels he took her south, still a virgin, to a resort where she could be naked beside the pool and get used to being stared at. “You must learn to feel invisible, that you can wear any mask you choose – or none.” At night, he began to let her please him.

  “Very gently, Allison. I must almost not know you are there. That way, it is possible to go on for hours.” It was a week past the end of Spring Break, but it never occurred to her to mention it. Life had become a dream.

  Lying in the sun, Allison told herself this was not the life she had planned, and it would not last, something was radically wrong. Another part of her would answer that she had met many challenges, had for six months now received meticulous attention from a man she knew to be violently impatient with others, and had clearly been chosen.

  She did not believe Maloof loved her. She faced honestly the fact that she wished he did. She did everything she could to win his approval, wished passionately he would let her please him more, craved further tests. Indolence was driving her crazy. Awake at three in the morning, she would imagine outrageous acts.

  Tripoli was not a place an American could go.

  “Do not speak,” Maloof instructed her as they landed at the airport. “We will be here only a few days. Everything will be taken care of. No one will question you. I will be watching over you, even when I have business to attend to.”

  Once in their hotel room, he motioned for quiet.

  “See?” he said, as there was a knock at the door and a waiter came in. “I knew you would be thirsty. Do not utter a word. Think of it as a trial if you like. Find it restful if you like.”

  For answer, she did not drink from the glass of mineral water, which had been placed in front of her, but waited. After a few minutes he noticed, and lifted it to her lips.

  Maloof left her alone for more than a day. Food appeared. Maids came and drew her bath, rubbed oil on her, cut her toenails. Most of the time she just sat in silence. There was nothing to read. The television was unintelligible. And in any case she disliked the noise. The second morning, clothes arrived, suitable for a trip into the desert, she was told in English. Then Maloof, as if he had never been gone.

  “I would like you to see an execution, Allison. I don’t know that you will enjoy the experience. Myself, I find it increases the sense of being alive.”

  Allison remained mute.

  “Tie your hair up in this scarf,” he said, “so that none of it shows. And wear these sunglasses. You will find it very bright outside.”

  It was two hours’ ride in a jeep sort of vehicle, much of it over dirt and gravel roads.

  “I want you to prepare yourself, Allison,” said Maloof after the first hour. “This is a harsh country. Penalties are extreme. It is our way. I want to see if it can be yours.”

  Maloof had never mentioned religion before – for that was what she assumed he was talking about. Islamic justice. There had been readings about it in his course. It occurred to her that she might be about to witness a beheading. She had thought that only happened in Saudi Arabia, but perhaps not. She wondered if Maloof was talking about religion because he wanted to marry her. Impossible.

  They came to a place among some rocks. Men were standing around. A European woman was sitting on one of the rocks with her hands behind her. Her hair blew across her face, and she tossed her head. Maloof and Allison got out of the vehicle and walked toward the group.

  “She is Italian,” Maloof said quietly. “There are quite a few of them in this country. A colonial remnant. She has been unfaithful to her husband, and foolish enough to brag about it. Unfortunately for her, his pos
ition does not allow him to be forgiving.”

  Allison realised that the woman’s hands were tied, and that she’d been hit in the face quite a lot. Nevertheless, she sat upright, showing off her figure. One of the men now went to her, ripped open her blouse and pulled it down behind her, so as to uncover her shoulders and breasts.

  Maloof handed Allison a pistol. “Aim for the middle of her chest,” he said. “And do it from as close as you think you can manage. It is best not to miss.”

  Allison walked up to the Italian woman, placed the pistol between her breasts, and fired immediately. Everyone was impressed. As she had been instructed, Allison said nothing, handed the pistol back to Maloof, and walked back to the car. Breathe, relax.

  That night he released her from one of her vows: poverty. Making it very clear that she was still not to speak, Maloof explained – in fact he wrote it down, letting her watch as his pen ran across the page – that she now had an account in a very quiet bank in Geneva, in which fifty thousand dollars had been deposited. It was hers. No strings.

  She kissed him on the cheek.

  The next morning they flew to Paris and checked into yet another very discreet hotel.

  “You may speak now,” he said.

  Allison walked over to the bar, picked up a glass, and hurled it into the fireplace. She did it again and again, saying loudly after each explosion of crystal, “I’ve killed a woman...I’ve killed a woman...I’ve killed a woman.”

  To punish herself she walked on the shards and made bloody footprints on the rug. Then she lay face down on the bed while Maloof picked the splinters out of her feet.

  “All right, Allison. I think you’re done.”

  “Thank you,” she said, “and would you please fuck me now, before I have to kill you too?”

  He did. Under the circumstances, there was not a lot of call for finesse. Nor did she desire it.

  “What you will learn from this, I hope,” he said afterwards, “is how much energy killing a person releases, and the consequent importance of leaving quickly and quietly. I asked you not to speak for the past few days in part so you would see how possible it is to hold your tongue, and in part out of concern for what you might say or do, once you found release. I think we have the answer.”