The Prisoner's Wife

by Gerard Macdonald

  She watched Shawn shed his shirt. Drinking less these days, he was back in shape. He changed to a clean shirt: the last he’d have until their baggage arrived.

  Over the past month, he’d gotten near to his military weight.

  “In the end,” Danielle said, “my father brought me to America. Ivy League education—he thought it would make me a good conservative. Too late. I never wished to be near him.”

  “Uh-huh,” Shawn said. “I’ve been there. What you learn, it’s a circle. More you run, closer you get to home. Back where you started.”

  She spread her fingers, letting polish dry. He stood and checked his watch.

  “We should go meet this guy—who is—remind me?”

  “Younis Khreis. My godfather.”

  The morning was cool; she was still pale, pulling on a cashmere jumper.

  “Background?”

  “Lawyer. Pay attention. He worked with my stepfather. Benoit.” From the doorway, she beckoned. “Come. It’s a start. I mean, God, we don’t even know Darius is here.”

  “I believe he is,” Shawn said. “I talked to people.”

  “The woman in England? Ashley?”

  “Her, yes, and others. My guess, your man’s a frequent flyer, he may not stay. Right now, he’s here.”

  * * *

  They left the room then. Shawn double-locked the door, though he knew that anyone who wanted to get in would do it. He followed Danielle down a staircase on the hotel’s outside wall. It led to the riad’s interior courtyard, blue-and-white tiled, planted with fruit-bearing palms. At the courtyard’s center, fountains filled a blue marble basin. In the water, fish, smooth, sinuous, and blue. Trout, maybe, though, in his years of fishing, Shawn had never seen a blue trout.

  A fountain’s soft plashing; a murmur of doves.

  “Another morning,” she said, “if we’re still in this town, I’ll buy you breakfast. Under the palms.”

  “You can buy me breakfast today. Just tell me where we’re going.”

  “Café Maroc, in the medina.” She glanced sideways. “What’s wrong?”

  He was following, trusting that she knew the way. “What you said about your life. Some things don’t add up.”

  “Have you ever known a life where everything adds up?”

  “Plus,” he said, “makes me edgy, being with a person knows a place better than I do.”

  Danielle took his arm, amused. “Tough, no? Being alpha male.” Her bare arm on his. Could she feel the acceleration of his pulse when she touched him?

  From a side street came an old, robed man who gripped Danielle’s fingers in a clutching, withered hand. With his good hand he held a girl, dark-haired, six or seven years old, Shawn guessed. The man spoke a language Shawn did not understand, though he’d heard it before.

  Danielle hunkered down to run her hands through the girl’s hair. The kid came close and whispered something. For a long minute the man spoke, low-toned; then Danielle ended the conversation. She kissed the girl. The man, his face hooded, hailed a petit taxi and was gone.

  “You know that guy?” Shawn asked.

  Danielle was walking on, toward the medina. “Mmm. From when I lived here. The girl’s his granddaughter.”

  “You were speaking Arabic?”

  “Maghrebi Arabic.”

  “I never knew you could do that.”

  She glanced at him. “Many things you don’t know about me.”

  A vendor’s cart, laden with herbs, forced them across the sidewalk.

  She said, “This morning, you’re not easy company.”

  “I’m never easy,” he told her, “in places I might get killed.”

  He hadn’t mentioned his nighttime meeting with the lethal handyman. Or with Abbasi.

  Danielle turned to consider two women who sat beside of the road on hanbel rugs dotted with trinkets. Their heads were darkly covered. Without hope their eyes moved among passersby, Danielle, and the arrays of bright toys. They looked up at her as she bent to give them dirham notes. They murmured thanks, making no judgment and no attempt to sell.

  She hesitated, deciding whether to turn left or right. She went left, into rue Ed Douh. “Remember?” Danielle asked. “Your little village in Sussex? Phosphorus in the roof of your house? It’s not just Africa where they try to kill you.”

  He told her that was no help. He didn’t want to die in either place.

  Laughing, she stopped at a coffeehouse, considering a crowd of seated, suited men. “This is it,” she said. “This is where we find Younis.”

  20

  FES, MOROCCO, 27 MAY 2004

  Danielle led Shawn into Café Maroc, edging a path through terraces crowded with seated coffee drinkers. All male; a mélange of sartorial styles. Some of the men wore Arabic garments, others Western clothes, favoring three-piece suits, double-cuffed shirts, and lightly tinted Ray-Bans. All were grave; none were young.

  Above the seated men was a blue canvas awning, drawn halfway back, advertising Fanta in both English and Arabic. At this cool time of day, men chose to sit in the morning sun. Shawn had never understood it, the sexual balance in these countries. All men on this street; no women, save Danielle.

  How did that work? He did know it wouldn’t suit him, living here for long. Though he’d sometimes wished it otherwise, Shawn needed women. He learned that during his time in the marines—an all-male bunch then, all heterosexual. The unit ran on testosterone.

  Shawn recalled waking in a hooch near Vietnam’s DMZ. That night, deeply asleep, he’d seen with surprise that he was alive: alive and dreaming. At times, south of the Zone, he’d dreamed of women: narrow-hipped hoochgirls; girls like boys. Dream-women expect nothing, not even cash. These, though, were not frequent dreams.

  Recurrent dreams were different. Worse. They came on hot nights when roaches ran down walls to pause above beds, bright, alert, shiny, antennae quivering: creatures that would one day inherit the postnuclear world. Meantime, they’d eat the skin from the soles of your feet so subtly you might not even wake. Old hands slept with socks on, inured to the smell of their flesh. In the morning, the boots—the FNGs, the fucking new guys—they’d swing off their racks and fall around yelling, trying to walk on skinless feet.

  Men laughed. What could you do? Fucking new guys.

  Shawn slept in socks, in swamps of his stink. Rather that than having to march across country with no goddamn skin on your feet. The nightmares were worse than the insects. From some dreams Shawn woke sweating and shaken, whispering aloud, his body rocked by the arrhythmic clamor of his heart. There were times when he woke in the echoes of error. Sometimes the mistake was aboveground, sometimes in Cong tunnels below. Always it was terminal, always incorrigible. Shawn’s dreams were full of death. There were times he’d thank God for waking him to the sad damp heat of day; for dragging him back from his dreams of dissolution. In the end, though, when they blew away his buddy Charlie Slocum, days weren’t much better than nights.

  In the Café Maroc that morning, with the prisoner’s wife, he thought back to this.

  * * *

  Danielle went ahead into the café, through glassed doors to inner rooms with mirrored walls and chandeliers and floors patterned in blue and white geometric tiles. When Shawn caught up, she was standing by two seated men. The older of the two wore a dark and shiny suit, plain black, with a thin black tie. He was small, almost bald, physically constricted, hunched in his chair. His left eye was infected, weeping. His remaining hair, combed across his skull, was dyed a light-absorbing black, though his sideburns and mustache were gray. His projectile breath took Shawn back to the silage smell of southern farms. The man looked exhausted; no, in some state beyond exhaustion. Through rimless square glasses, he considered his visitors.

  “Younis Khreis,” said Danielle. “This is the man I told you about. Shawn Maguire.”

  Younis did not rise or offer a hand. He said to Shawn, “You have been here before, I think. In Rabat?” He gestured to the giant beside him.
“This is Tariq.”

  Shawn had been staring at Tariq: one of the biggest men he’d ever seen, Texans included. Tariq was not just tall—though, even sitting, he came close to Danielle’s height—but broad as well. What intrigued Shawn was this: The guy was huge, massive indeed, but not fat, his polished skin underlain with smooth layers of, what? Subcutaneous muscle?

  Whatever his composition, this was a man who’d break a neck like snapping a match. A man to treat with care.

  Shawn could not shift his gaze from Tariq’s dark bulk. He’d never seen anything like it.

  Tariq looked calmly back.

  Younis said, “Bodyguard.”

  Tariq shook his head. “Pas seulement.”

  “He is a student of art also. What you would call Moorish art, is that word right? The geometric and the calligraphic.”

  “Symbols of a single perfection,” Danielle said.

  “There, you see,” said Younis. “My goddaughter knows. Once again, the divine harmonies. There is no God but God.” To Danielle he said, “Your territory, I think.” To Shawn he said, “Are we speaking English or French?”

  “We started in English, let’s keep it that way,” Shawn said. “Plus, it’s all I understand.” He took a seat, still considering the taut immensity of Tariq. Danielle sat on the far side of the table, where, Shawn guessed, she could see the terrace and dodge her godfather’s breath. “You know what we’re like,” he said. “Gringos. Lucky if we speak one language. Why do you need a bodyguard?”

  Younis wiped his weeping eye. “I work for those in our prisons. Here we have our own little war. I think it does not make your press. We are not kind to men who go against the state. When I find them in prison, I offer legal help. Mostly unpaid, since their possessions, if they have such, are confiscated. It is not a popular thing to do, helping these men. Not in this place. My wife was, what is it? Carjacked?” He waved to a waiter, who held a small child by the hand. The child was a tiny plump version of Tariq, as if the man had been magically reduced to a hundredth of his size. “She was shot in the neck, my wife. Maybe for money, maybe not. Maybe for my sake, maybe not. Now she is crippled—paraplegic, is that what we say? I have three children, a sick wife. I am more tired than you can believe. If I knew how to stop my work, I would.” He pointed to the terrace. Shawn watched Danielle move away from the slipstream of the lawyer’s breath. “You said you speak just one language, Mr. Maguire. You should learn from your colleague there. He speaks many.”

  The waiter brought four small cups of coffee. Shawn willed himself not to turn toward the terrace. “Who is my colleague?”

  “A man called Hassan Tarkani. Pakistani, but we believe he is an American agent. Intelligence agent, a spy, though of course he does not acknowledge this, and we ourselves are not supposed to speak of it.”

  “Pakistan,” said Tariq. “ISI.”

  “Maybe, also,” Younis agreed. “A busy spy.”

  The waiter returned with dishes of nuts and dried apricots. Danielle’s gaze shifted between Younis and Shawn.

  “Hassan Tarkani,” Shawn said. He recalled the man sitting in his kitchen, his feet on the pinewood table. “Is he by chance with a guy called Calvin McCord?”

  Younis said, “Ask him.” He shifted in his chair. “I see him sitting out there, to the right. He came just after you arrived.”

  Danielle was visibly impatient. “They can wait. I need to know about Darius. My husband. Seven weeks now, Younis, I’ve not heard from him. Imagine what that’s like—”

  “Darius Osmani. Yes.” Younis took two smoked almonds between thumb and forefinger. He considered them. “I have heard of Mr. Osmani. I am afraid they have him”—he pointed westward—“our police, over toward New Town. Ironic, they should bring him here, no? They delivered him the other day to Temara.”

  “Temara?”

  Younis nodded at Shawn. “Your friend will know. South of Rabat. Near the zoo. Prisoners there hear the animals, caged like them, though not, we hope, tortured. Temara is our main, but not only, enhanced interrogation facility—is that not right, Mr. Maguire? State of the art, they say. Enlarged with American money. Used by American military intelligence. Now, I hear, they transferred your husband. He is in the jail”—he pointed—“here, in Fes.”

  Danielle sat for a while, saying nothing. When her breathing was easier, she said, “I keep asking—no one tells me—what will they do to him?”

  Tariq, expressionless, said, “Farruj. Grilled chicken.”

  Danielle glanced at the waiter, who was out of hearing. She looked back to Tariq. “What does that mean?”

  “No,” Shawn said. “Leave it. You don’t want to know.”

  “Don’t tell me what I want. Tariq?”

  Younis said, “Tell her, Tariq. You have done it, after all.” To Shawn he added, “Art history is not his only talent.”

  Tariq, too, was watching the terrace. He spoke without turning his head. “Grilled chicken, you handcuff the mec, the prisoner, you cuff him behind his legs, like this”—he bent vast arms behind him—“you put a rod through here, you hang him upside down, the circulation stops. Then you beat his feet until the flesh is a mess. Sometimes electricity also. Next comes falaqa.”

  “Please,” Shawn said. He was aware of Danielle, watching him. He didn’t want her thinking badly of him. “Enough already.”

  “No,” Tariq said. “Falaqa is easy. Just, you pour water on the guy, you make him walk across salt. That’s all. I don’t know myself, but they say it is painful, after the feet are beaten.”

  Danielle said to Shawn, “Did you do that?”

  He shook his head. “I have seen it done.” To Younis he said, “How do we get into the jail?”

  “You still have a security clearance? Not canceled?” Shawn shrugged. If his clearance had been revoked, he doubted jailers here would know. “That, and money maybe,” said Younis, “that will get you in. We might both go. There is one man, a client, so-called—once a month they let me see him.”

  Tariq moved surprisingly easily, for so large a man. He took the hand of a bearded coffee drinker at the next table and raised the man’s arm until he hung like a doll, his feet high off the floor. The man screamed. His companions stared, motionless, expressions congealed like lard.

  The waiter stood still. For some reason, the child ran to wrap his arms around Tariq’s leg.

  A nickel-plated handgun the bearded man was holding fell to the floor. It was small, a short-barreled thing, the kind Shawn preferred. Younis bent to pick it up. “A precaution,” he said. “I hate it when they scream.”

  Shawn looked around, checking the room for other weapons.

  Danielle threw herself against the mortal bulk of Tariq’s body.

  “Put him down,” she cried, “God’s sake, put him down, you ape! You’ll pull his arm out! Déposez-le! Vous allez déchirer le bras!”

  Over the bawling of the hanging man, Tariq said, “I am human. Don’t call me ape.”

  “Pardon,” she said. “Mais lâchez-le! Lâchez-le!”

  Tariq lowered the bearded man. He staggered and whimpered; his freed arm hung limp from its socket. Shawn walked to the terrace and seated himself at a metal table, opposite Hassan Tarkani. The agent’s presence in Fes made him uneasy. What, he wondered, brought the man to Morocco?

  For a moment, there was silence: each watching the other, and the door of the inner room. “How about this?” Shawn said finally. “Last time we met, remember? You were in my kitchen with your feet on my table. You recall that?”

  Hassan sat silent, watching a man who’d come from within the café. Turning, Shawn saw Calvin McCord, unshaven, unwell. He sat on a metal chair beside Hassan and put his feet on another. Shawn saw that the man’s hands still shook with the slightest of tremors.

  “I was just saying, Calvin, back in England, you guys moved into my house. Uninvited.”

  Calvin said, “We did apologize. Why would you bring that up now?”

  “Someone left an
incendiary device in my roof space. White phosphorus.”

  Calvin shook his head. “Hard to comprehend,” he said, “the evil in the world. But hey, you’re still with us. You survived. Any suggestion who could have done such a thing?”

  “I think,” Shawn said, “it might have been you.” He glanced from Calvin to Hassan, who was attending to the conversation. “Or your sidekick there.”

  “Paranoia,” Calvin said. “Did you fingerprint the device?”

  Shawn shook his head. “Pay attention. White phosphorus. Burns to ash.”

  “There, you see. No evidence. No suspects. Be careful, my friend. In your position—making accusations you can’t prove.” He captured Hassan’s coffee. “I have a question for you. How does it feel to betray your country? To work for a man like Ayub Abbasi? You know, high on our blacklist?”

  Shawn thought about that. “Who put him there?”

  “Not important,” said Calvin. “Answer the question, Maguire. Your country’s at war. You work for the other side. There’s a word for that.”

  Hassan smiled. “We have faults,” he said, “but we know which side we are on.”

  “How about we trade?” said Calvin. “You tell me what you know about Abbasi. About Dr. Khan and the nukes. We tell you what we know of Osmani.”

  Shawn said, “I don’t want information. I want access. What exactly is he charged with?”

  “Osmani?” Calvin shook his head, clicked his tongue. “Come on. We don’t charge these people. You know that. Charge them, you’ve got lawyers, publicity, fucking court case. We wait until they confess.”

  Shawn thought back to a day when Martha gave him a book about a trial—a man on trial for unknown crimes. The prisoner, of course, admits his guilt. How could he not?

  Watching Hassan rise and walk to the inside room, Shawn turned back to Calvin. “Confess what?”

  “What they wish to confess,” said Calvin. “You’ve seen it happen. We all have things to confess. You, for example. You call yourself a patriot, yet you steal classified documents. You work with people who have no love for America. Like the girl in there. Like Abbasi. Or”—he pointed—“that lawyer. Younis Khreis.” Calvin touched his cup without lifting it. “You see? Crimes confession could extricate.”