The Prisoner's Wife

by Gerard Macdonald

  On the day Shawn arrived in the village, men were practising complex, dervishlike dances—until enforcement squads of students swept down from the hills, and the music stopped.

  Turning to Akmal in the jeep, Shawn said. “I’ve seen one of your weddings. But we, down here, we’re not military. We don’t control air attacks. What can I say? I’m sorry?”

  “I don’t know what you can say,” Akmal replied. “Or what would make a difference. My people believe Americans are all the same. You will tell us it was okay to kill these families. You will say it is insurgents who died.”

  Shawn nodded; he did know that. “You’re telling me this because?”

  “Because we Pashtun, we live on both sides of the border. Pakistan, Afghanistan. Many relatives of those killed live here.” He pointed up the dusty street. “Here, in Peshawar. You will understand, they are angry.” He nodded across the road, in the direction Shawn had come. “They are planning to burn your office.”

  Shawn was quiet a moment. Then he said, “Say again? There’s people planning to burn it?” He pointed across the road. “Burn that building?”

  Akmal nodded.

  “When?”

  Akmal said, “The time I left, they were gathering up there. Praying to God for guidance. I think perhaps they are here soon.”

  “Believe me, Akmal, the White House won’t like it. Not one little bit. There will be a shitstorm. More than one village will be taken out.”

  Shawn swung himself out of the jeep and hustled off to the Agency building.

  * * *

  In the Agency building, Shawn spoke with his lover. “Khalida,” he said, “tell the women in the office, go home now. You, too.”

  “I have told them,” Khalida said. “They are gone. For me, I am not going. Mr. Walters asked me to burn the papers—do you say documents?—in the room below.”

  Shawn followed Khalida down to the metal-lined cellar. He said, “You don’t understand what’s happening.”

  She was collecting documents in piles. She said, “I live here. These are my people. I understand better than you.”

  “What do you understand?”

  Khalida pointed north. “They are on their way. Now, I think, nothing will stop them.”

  * * *

  In the basement, Bobby called Langley. Waiting for a connection, he said to Shawn, “Give us a hand here. Khalida, you, too. Stuff we need to burn.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like confidential papers. Code books. Remember what happened with the Iranian Embassy? Reassembled all the shit from the shredder? I’m not about to go down as the chief who lost the Company records.”

  In the basement safe room, an incinerator was already lit. Documents were fed into it, one page at a time. The heat, on that hundred-degree day, was intense. The air conditioner died. One file cabinet had been cleared by the time Lewis Jeffers beat on the metal-lined door of the safe room.

  Bobby used the door’s spyhole, then let the man in. His size made the small room feel smaller. Even out of uniform, Jeffers looked like the marine sergeant he was.

  “Lewis,” Bobby said, “what the hell are you doing here?”

  “Sir, I could ask you the same question. Big crowd of men outside. Some preacher—I think the guy’s a preacher—he’s standing there, telling them we planned to kill their families.” He pointed west. “Up in the hills. Which is where I was this week. Excuse my language, sir, it’s a ratfuck outside. Can I ask, sir, what you’re planning to do?”

  “Stay here,” Bobby said, “is what I’m planning to do. This room’s designed to resist attack.”

  “For how long?”

  “God willing,” Bobby said, “long enough for Langley to get some more guys in here.”

  Khalida, forgetting modesty, took off the scarf that covered her head. “It is so hot.”

  “Incinerator in a metal-lined room,” Shawn said, “that’s what you get.”

  “No,” she told him, “no. It’s more. Can’t you smell? Can’t you hear?” She pointed. “Up there, I think the building is on fire.”

  * * *

  The heat. When it was over, it was the heat, the unendurable heat, that Shawn remembered. There were other things, too—Pashtun men beating with hammers at the door of the safe room; men trying to pry open the security-locked ceiling hatch—but the heat was the worst. Inside the metal basement room, it was like being slowly cooked in a high oven.

  Khalida—in daylight, usually modest—shed her burka and took off her shoes. Lewis and Shawn were down to shirtsleeves, their shirts unbuttoned. Bobby—already struggling with the weight problem that would, in coming years, blight his life—had the worst of it. Stripped to his undershirt, his soft white flesh ran with sweat.

  He took one call from Rawalpindi—the Pakistan army base—before the phones went dead.

  The room grew hotter. Lewis was the first to break. He said to Bobby, “Sir, if I’m going to die, I don’t want to do it down here.” He collected a submachine gun. “I’m heading on out. That okay with you, sir?”

  Bobby had trouble speaking. He nodded his head.

  “Secure the door behind me, sir.” Moments later, Lewis went, firing ahead of him. That was the last time they saw him alive.

  Shawn, too, was preparing to take his chances outside the safe room. He said his farewells to Khalida. She murmured something he couldn’t hear.

  “Say again?”

  She said, “I wish you could marry, before we die.”

  “Me, too,” Shawn said, thinking of Martha, not Khalida.

  Moments later, they heard the sound of helicopters.

  “You think that’s the Pakistan army?” Bobby asked.

  “If it’s not,” Shawn said, “we have a problem.”

  Khalida brushed sweat-drenched hair from her face. Still in Shawn’s arms, facing death, dreaming of weddings, she murmured, “Inshallah.”

  31

  PESHAWAR, PAKISTAN, 1 JUNE 2004

  It was late in the day when Shawn and Danielle arrived at Peshawar’s Indus Grand Comfort Hotel, a tall and narrow unpainted building in the poorest section of the town. In the lobby, Danielle collapsed into a faded purple fake-leather chair. Shawn approached a portly middle-aged man behind the hotel’s faux-marble desk. The receptionist wore thick and misted glasses and a tightly fitting greenish-black suit that shone where it caught the light. His face, lacking expression, was smooth-skinned: younger than the rest of his body. His hair—so black it might have been dyed—parted in a straight white furrow along the center of his skull.

  He coughed behind a manicured hand. “I wish you good morning, sir.”

  Shawn checked the time.

  “I should correct this statement,” the receptionist said. “I see it is afternoon. Your documents, please?”

  Shawn laid two passports on the desk. The man inspected them closely, holding them in the air above his head, looking upward, as if secret writing might reveal itself. “You are married to the woman?”

  “He is,” Danielle said from her chair, before Shawn could deny it. She was standing now, holding the counter to support herself. “I am his new wife. In our country, the woman keeps her own name.”

  The receptionist surveyed her. “Not good,” he said, unmoved. “I think,” he added, “you are not really well, madam.” He pointed at the newspaper she was holding. “That is Urdu. You will not read it. Tomorrow, maybe, we have English news.” He turned to take down a key. “Maybe not. Room six hundred and twenty-seven. Very nice room. Fourth floor.”

  Shawn asked why, if it was the fourth floor, the room number did not start with a four. The receptionist looked past him, as if he had not spoken.

  “Is there an elevator? A lift?”

  “There is a lift indeed,” the receptionist told Danielle. “It is broken.” He pointed. “Stairs are there.”

  “Dear God.” She was shouting. “You drag me around these shitty places, Shawn, you make me ill, you say you’re helping, all you want to
do is get in my bed. You don’t care about Darius—you don’t care about anyone. Not anyone. You make this big deal about your wife—the way she died—and you were cheating on her. You didn’t give a damn.” She was weeping now—“you don’t give a damn about me … you just … you don’t give a damn—”

  The receptionist coughed twice and shuffled papers, announcing his continued presence. Ignoring him, Shawn took Danielle in his arms, holding her until the sobs subsided.

  “Shawn, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said—I mean, about your wife—”

  “Stairs,” said the receptionist, raising his voice. “They are there.”

  “Bellboy?” asked Shawn.

  The receptionist merely smiled.

  Danielle was calmer now. “You’re not good on stairs,” she told Shawn. She struggled for breath. “Today—today, I’m not good on stairs. We have to help each other.”

  As Shawn turned Danielle toward the stairs, the receptionist called him back. Considering Danielle, he shook his head. He passed over a folded yellow note.

  “A message,” he said to Shawn. “From Mr. Walters.” His expression changed to what might have been a smile. “A man we believe is an American spy. He will urgently wish to see you.”

  “How does he know I’m here?”

  The receptionist shrugged. “Is it not a spy’s business to know such things?”

  * * *

  The hotel room was small, hot, and crowded with five items of furniture. An iron-framed double bed occupied most of the room. Hung on the wall above the bed was a gilt-framed mirror and a vast, rusty air conditioner, which carried a notice saying that it was out of order. Cold flickering light fell from ceiling-mounted neon tubes. On lime-green-painted walls hung framed portraits of Pakistan’s president, each showing a different aspect of the general’s unsmiling and vigorous youth.

  On one wall, a sign said that an operator would, for a fee, make international telephone calls before nine at night. Beyond the beds, a closet had been turned into what passed for a shower room.

  “This whole room is a closet, no?” Danielle asked. “If I was not feeling like this, I would say we should look for something else. Right now, no. I have started my period. I can take a T-shirt from your carry bag, okay?” She opened the door of the shower room, then hesitated. “God. Don’t look. I’m getting undressed. I need bed.”

  The room had a single window, looking out onto the street below. While Danielle changed, Shawn stood staring down at the crowd in the square below. “I spent months in this town,” he said. “Never seen so many people.”

  From the shower room, she called, “The paper says it’s an election. Prime minister comes.”

  Shawn thought back to their time in Fes: to when he learned that Danielle spoke Arabic. Now, it seemed, she knew Urdu.

  “The guy downstairs was wrong? You could read the paper?”

  She was calmer now. “Of course. You know Nashida Noon won? Apparently a landslide. Power to women, one might say. They say she takes office next week. Now, she crosses the country—what do you call it? Meet-the-people tour?”

  Shawn turned away from the window to watch her get into the bed. He was trying to make sense of what she’d said. “You never told me where you learned your languages. What else did the paper say?”

  She turned on her side, away from him. “About Nashida? You know this. She promises to fire the president.”

  “Because he hanged her father?”

  “Because he is an American puppet.”

  Shawn stood for a moment, wondering whether he could articulate what was in his mind. “Dani? Can I tell you something? Will you listen to me, please?”

  The wings of her shoulder blades moved in the slightest of shrugs.

  “What I’m trying to tell you,” Shawn said, “you think I’m addicted to—to sex—”

  “It is what you said.”

  “Maybe I was like that,” Shawn said, “back in the day.” He paused, then said, “Even men like me—it’s not impossible. We can straighten up and fly right.”

  Without turning toward him, she murmured something he couldn’t hear.

  “I’m just saying, give me a break. I didn’t play around, not after Ellen. Are you hearing this? I changed. I go to meetings—”

  The phone rang—an old-time ringtone, reminding Shawn of childhood.

  Danielle, her face still to the wall, said, “You get it.”

  Calling from the lobby, the receptionist told Shawn that Mr. Walters, the American spy, was arriving in five minutes. He would be waiting in the lobby.

  “Someone told Bobby we’re here. I wonder who that was.”

  “Does it matter?” she asked. “Go. Look after yourself, my love.”

  Shawn pulled on a jacket. “Could you say that again?”

  “Look after yourself, my love,” she said, without turning her head. So soft he could hardly hear.

  Leaving the room, Shawn closed the bedroom door behind him. He paused a moment outside, thinking it was the first time he’d heard her put those two words together, at least for him; thinking, too, that Danielle had started her period in Fes.

  Which was nearly a week ago.

  32

  U.S. MILITARY JAIL, PESHAWAR, PAKISTAN, 1 JUNE 2004

  In a newly built boutique jail on the edge of Peshawar’s market, Darius Osmani sat shackled to a shiny metal chair manufactured in Rome, Georgia. Otherwise naked, he was head-bagged and wore two conjoined baby’s diapers from which twin electric cables ran to a small portable console some feet away. From overuse, the cable insulation was in places worn down to copper wire.

  The room, belowground and damp, was lit by a single high-white fluorescent strip light. At the door, Hassan Tarkani spoke to a very young pink-skinned man in a white coat sprayed delicately with blood.

  Looking around the room, the man in the white coat said, “Video off?”

  Hassan nodded.

  The intern said, “No terp?”

  “Hey,” said Hassan, “this hajji talks better English than you do.” He glanced back at the detainee. “Speak to me. I’m interested. Tell me why you think he needs a doctor?”

  Both men turned to look at the prisoner.

  The intern—who had trained as a psychiatrist in Atlanta—shrugged. “It’s not what I think. It’s what the Company thinks. You know the procedure. Detainee dies, they don’t like it. They say you’re doing it wrong.”

  Hassan said, “I see that. Tough getting intel off a body bag. But take a look there. Just look at him. Is this guy fit, or is he not?”

  “Well,” the doctor said, “I don’t know. I mean, he’s bleeding. Mouth, ear—broken cheekbone—that’s something, you know—Red Cross might notice.”

  Hassan shook his head. “No way, José. Red Cross, forget. They go to the main jail. Not aware that we exist.”

  “Please,” said the doctor. “This is Peshawar. There are no secrets.” He moved to the prisoner’s side and took his wrist to check a pulse. The prisoner struck out blindly, although—his wrist being shackled—he did no harm.

  “At least,” the intern said to Hassan, “he has a pulse.”

  The trainee spent moments checking the prisoner’s heartbeat. Beneath his head bag, the man made a sound that might have been rage or might have been distress.

  The doctor said to Hassan, “Try and keep him that way, will you? I mean, breathing.”

  “Why is it,” Hassan asked, smiling, “I keep hearing that line?”

  * * *

  An hour later, Darius sat in another, slightly larger, room. Here, the floor was tiled, the chair unpainted and wooden. He was now completely naked except that he wore a brassiere made for a very large woman, had panties with hearts on his head, and was blindfolded. Except for his ankles, the prisoner was now unshackled. He bled a little from one ear. As the intern had noted, it did seem as if one cheekbone might be broken.

  This room had a small barred window, shaded with a torn blind, which had once been cream. I
n another chair—this one lined with plastic leather—sat Calvin McCord. He reached out a hand to touch the prisoner’s arm. Darius jumped as far back as the chair allowed.

  “It’s okay,” Calvin said. He spoke gently. “It’s okay. Relax. No one’s going to hurt you.”

  Though he disliked the whole process of interrogation, it was, he believed, a necessary evil. For his country, to save American lives, Calvin would do worse things than this.

  Darius, feeling the agent’s touch, turned blindly to his left. His fingers clenched and loosened. He tried, behind his back, to unsnap the bra but could not manage the clasp. He said nothing.

  “Two things you should understand,” Calvin said. “You love your country. I love my country. Difference is, my country’s winning. Yours is losing. You follow me? Maybe you should think about what side you’re on.”

  Calvin waited. The prisoner shifted in his chair, said nothing.

  “Tell me, Darius. Tell me, is there something I can do for you? Talk to me. Is there some way I can help?”

  Darius turned his blind head, seeking the voice. “Do you,” he asked, “do you really, sir—do you mean that? Can you stop the electricity? The drowning?”

  “Sure,” Calvin said. “I can do that. I can do both those things. You just have to ask.”

  Wincing, the prisoner touched his face. “I need medical treatment.”

  “Come on,” Calvin said. “Don’t give me that. We have a doc. He’s seen you.”

  “The doctor looks at me. He takes my pulse. He checks that the other man has not killed me. This is not treatment.”

  “Now, now,” Calvin said. “Be fair. We’re not expecting gratitude, but a thank-you would be nice.”

  There was silence for a moment. Darius cupped his hands over his genitals, hiding them. Calvin noted that this was the first time the prisoner had registered his nakedness.

  “What do you want from me?”

  “I want to help you,” Calvin said. He went behind the prisoner to unfasten his brassiere. He said, more to himself than to the detainee, “I really wish they wouldn’t do this shit. Such kid stuff.” He took the panties with hearts from the prisoner’s head. “It’s, like, give and take, Darius—we can help each other. I understand you, brother. Those guys back there, giving you a hard time, they have no spiritual dimension. The bad dude downstairs—the one who hurts you—what can I tell you? He’s a Paki. Uncivilized. Myself, you might not think so, but I’m a Catholic. You may be a Muslim—”