“While we wait? Wait that long for a copy to be made of my passport?”
“In the Old City nothing happens fast.” He eyed Jack’s black bandanna. “Dig your head rag, man.”
“And you are,” Jack asked, reluctantly abandoning the check-in counter for the couches.
“Sampson al-Addin. Dr. al-Addin, but friends call me Sam.”
“You can call me Jack.” He wasn’t about to divulge any more than was necessary. “You studied medicine in the states?”
Sam’s mouth crimped sheepishly. “It’s a PhD in archeology and boring things like ancient languages and such. I work at the National Museum but hang out here because the hotel has the most reliable wireless internet in the Old City.” He leaned across the coffee table and poured from the brass coffee pot’s spigot a cup for Jack, then himself. “I miss the States and its people, so please forgive my pushiness.”
Jack made a gut decision. “Pushiness? Sam, pushy is what I need.” In less than three minutes, he briefed the young man about Janet’s arrest, admitting only to their being in pursuit of a criminal wanted by Homeland Security.
His expression gloomy, Sam shook his head, his frothy cap of curls swishing. “If she’s being held at Central Prison, she may be eligible for Social Security before she’s eligible for release.”
“That’s not going to happen. The American Embassy will – ”
“Alas, my friend, it’s after five. You’ll get no assistance from the American Embassy. And when you do, it could be days or weeks before they can leverage any help for you. If they do, at all. As I told you, time stands still here.”
“I don’t have time, damn’t!” Janet was in jail, and Nuke was gaining time on disposing of the crystal chip. Once out of his hands, tracking it down would be about as possible as tracking a photon with all its wave-particle duality.
“Look, man, let’s collect your passport and head out for the British Embassy.”
“The British Embassy?”
“Well, a watering hole operated by the British Embassy. It’s in the upscale Hadda neighborhood, where most diplomats live. Expats gather at The British Club – oil workers, diplomats, professors, and an occasional journalist – all of us escaping Yemen’s prohibition against imbibing. The bar’s a perfect place to connect with friends, pick up gossip, and you know, learn the layout of the land, which is what you seem to be badly needing at the moment.”
Janet had told him to wait at the hotel. But waiting was not his kind of game. Something had to be done and quick.
They caught a cab, its driver steering with one hand on the wheel and the other on the horn. The cab waded through traffic hampered by skinny children selling packages of tissues and gum. They grabbed onto the cab, perching on the bumpers and fenders. Sam leaned out the window and gestured colorfully for them to desist. Jack had to admire the young man’s lack of impulse control. But time was wasting. Jack tossed a few ryals out the window, and the children scrambled for them.
At last, the cab broke free and headed out along a dusty road speckled with construction equipment. “Chinese are building the president’s new mosque and a ring road around Sana’a,” Sam explained, his Bollywood smile lighting up the cab. “In the monsoon season, the road is more like a river.”
The cab hurtled past neon-bright supermarkets, passport agencies, clothing stores, and spice markets. Jack learned from the loquacious Sam that the young man’s father was a Jewish Yemeni who had immigrated via Israel to Dearborn, Michigan, home to America’s largest Yemeni population. Sam had come to Yemen to care for his aging mother, who had never adapted to the Free World ways.
The taxi let them off on a street banked by tall date palms. The street’s gated, walled mansions were incongruous in an area full of broomstick-thin people, begging children, and squalid, improvised shacks for houses. “The Beverly Hills of Sana’a,” Sam said, waiting for Jack, who realized he was expected to pay the taxi driver.
Soldiers in army fatigues armed with AK-47s and grenade belts stood guard at virtually every corner. Above one palatial building the Union Jack waved desultorily in the cool evening air. Sam led the way to the British Embassy’s set of high solid steel black gates and approached a small window. A wizened old Yemeni leaned out and verified the membership card Sam flashed. A door within the gated ground opened upon a scattering of parked cars – among them a silver Porsche, a black Rolls Royce, a red Jag, and a battered green Toyota pickup.
Inside the club house – hallelujah, it wasn’t a mirage – inside was a bar!
At opposite ends of the long, dimly-lit room, large TV screens were hosting the British Golf Open and The British Premier Soccer Tournament. The tangy smell of Yorkshire beer and frying fish and chips slammed Jack. In response his stomach growled. He hadn’t realized how long he had gone without eating. Yet what he wanted now was the hard stuff. A gin and tonic would do for a start. A recovering alcoholic like Janet would probably cast him the Evil Eye. No, she wouldn’t. She didn’t hold other people to her standards. He could, at least, give her that.
Taking a seat at one small table, he scoped the room and despaired. The room was relatively vacant but for a few Brits, judging by their accents. Not much hope there.
Sam ordered for the two of them, then leaned across the table toward Jack. “The dude there in the corner in the Stetson, that’s Boyd Grainger. ‘Tex’ to the locals here. Frac truck driver for Hunt Oil. He tosses American dollars around like they’re confetti.”
Jack surveyed the man. Beneath the Stetson’s rim, shaggy gray brows lowered over a morose expression. He beer belly separated him from the table by a good foot. His fleshy hands clutched his long-neck beer bottle like it contained holy water. “And he could help how?”
Sam’s black eyes danced, and he spread his palms. “Hunt Oil? He could pay our bar bill tonight.”
Just great! I’m on a wild goose chase. So much for trusting gut feelings. Goddamnsonofabitch!
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The large, low-ceilinged cell was part of Yemen’s political security compound. Apparently one of several holding rooms, the prisoncell was somewhere a couple of levels below the main floor of small offices and the processing room, where Janet had been relieved of her passport and cell phone and her fingers dusted for gunpowder. Judging by the scads of shuffling, shackled detainees getting processed that afternoon, her existence could quickly get lost in the lackadaisical paperwork and be forgotten for years.
Graffiti adorned the begrimed damp, stone walls. Only two other women occupied the cell with Janet. Or rather one other woman and a girl. A red and blue-patterned cloth draped the old woman who sat placidly on a thin sleeping mat and chewed on a fat leafy cud tucked inside her left cheek. She smelled of curry and old, sweaty skin. Occasionally, she spit and replenished the wad from a pink plastic bag of shiny little fronds. “Qat,” she explained in passable English and displaying stained teeth, offered Janet some of the plant.
Politely declining, Janet turned her attention to the girl. Looking to be around eleven or twelve and dressed in a grimy taffeta princess dress, the pig-tailed girl huddled in one corner, quietly crying.
The old woman told Janet that the girl had run away from her husband’s sexual violations. According to the girl’s story, she had been pushed into the marriage after an agreement between her brother and her future husband to marry each other’s sisters in order to avoid paying expensive bride prices. It seemed that as Yemen grew poorer, brides grew younger. A dowry paid by the husband-to-be relieved the father of the bride of a mouth to feed.
Janet could not afford the luxury of compassion. She had to operate as a cold, heartless machine if she was going to break out of this hole in hell. And she had thought Kosovo was the armpit of suffering.
Then she saw the girl’s white sneakers with a picture of Simba from The Lion King on the side. A peripheral part of Janet, that professional side of her, noted the shoe’s tips, where most children wear away their shoes first until they learn
to become heel walkers, like most of society. The core of Janet bled instantly. She hunkered before the girl and smoothed tangled, sweaty, dirty dark hair back from the girl’s face. This could have been Molly.
With a heart-wrenching yearning, Janet wanted to corral the girl in her arms, but her concern was jerked behind her, to the sound of the cell gate creaking open. She whirled. A spindly turbaned guard armed with both an AK-47 and a jambiya belted at his narrow waist shoved into the cell an exotically beautiful young Middle-eastern woman and vanished into the corridor’s darkness. The young woman, twenty-five if that, was cocooned in the traditional abaya -- all but her hair, swirling free about her hips. Her hair could have been a beautiful Madison Avenue ad for expensive hair products.
Instantly, Janet hated her– until she saw the blood-dripping fingers, stripped of their nails. The young woman collapsed in a petal-pile of black polyester.
Janet deserted the weeping girl to kneel at the side of the nigh-unconscious prisoner. A closer look at her rapidly swelling, hennaed hands with their mutilated nail beds made Janet shudder. Trained in survival, her mind darted here and there, focused, sorted through its mental Rolodex cards. She spun back to the old woman. “Give me your qat!”
The old woman blinked, glanced down reluctantly at her plastic sack of leaves.
“No! No!” Janet jabbed her finger toward her own cheek, which she puffed up like a root canal gone bad. “The qat in your mouth!”
After a puzzled second, the woman nodded. Obediently, she spit the brownish-brackish gump into Janet’s outstretched palm. She took the macerated wad and rubbed it between her hands as if she were lathering soap, then applied the sticky pulp to the young woman’s mangled fingertip. More was needed, and Janet gestured to the old woman to chew more.
Chew, chew. Pass, pass. Press, press.
The young woman’s giraffe-like lashes lifted to reveal absurdly colored eyes, turquoise. “Thank you,” she murmured in lovely accented English.
Chew, chew. Pass, pass. Press, press.
“Why did they do this to you?”
“You’re an American?”
“Well, if you want to be precise, a Native American.”
The eyes flashed in the narrow face. “The Yemen government locked me up once before, because I was wearing red nail polish. But this . . . she raised her mangled hands . . . they did this because I dared to speak out against our government’s oppression of women.”
Chew, chew. Pass, pass, Press, press.
Something in Janet wanted to laugh hysterically at the “I Love Lucy” conveyer belt process, except for the gaze of suffering that fastened on her. Then, the young woman’s doe-like eyes closed, and the full lips moved in a tortured whisper. “It is one of your people who have made it possible for this to be done to me. I should kill you, you know.”
The thick black slashes of Janet’s eyebrows swept up and her gaze dropped to the almost lifeless, leaf-clotted, henna-colored hands. “Knock yourself out.”
The young woman flushed, then shrugged. “So, then I will find him, instead, and I swear by Allah I will scoop those ice blue eyes out with a rusty grapefruit spoon!”
When the young woman described her rapist, the shaved head, ice-cold blue eyes, and ubiquitous toothpick, Janet knew she had an ally in her hunt for Nuke – an ally who was a fearless activist and, even better, was intimately familiar with Yemeni customs. How ironically frustrating that Nuke had left the Hotel al-Salam just before she and Jack were to have checked in. The only glimmer in all this was apparently Nuke’s lead time on them at this point was reduced to four, maybe five hours.
Escape from Central Prison remained the only problem. A superhuman one, given the circumstances. She was sorting out and discarding possibilities, when forty-five minutes later a guard, the same scrawny one who had dumped the woman, Yasmin, in the cell, arrived with the evening meal. A large wooden bowl, obviously meant for the three of them, contained a soupy broth.
She took one look at the floating dead vermin. She grabbed up the bowl and hurled it at the guard’s back.
He spun, his white headdress splaying about him. Astonishment displayed on his brown face. Clearly, he had not expected reprisal from the women’s holding cell. His cradled AK-47 swung toward her. She was quicker, kicking at his grip. The assault rifle clattered on the cement floor. He scrambled to snatch it.
That was his mistake. She hopped on his back like a tarantula on a toad. A sharp twist of her hands produced a sudden cracking sound, like a rotten branch snapping. She dropped the dead soldier to the ground.
The older woman stared at her in disbelief; the girl in bewilderment; the young woman in delight.
Straddling the body, Janet scooped up the semi-automatic rifle and rose to face the three. “Who’s coming with me?”
The old woman stood like Lot’s wife, a terrified pillar of salt.
The girl scurried to the old woman and clutched her about her thick waist.
Yasmin wobbled to an erect position, her palms dripping blood and qat juice. Her eyes glittered like turquoise bathed in Arizona’s pure sunlight. “I’m in for the kill.”
Janet smiled drily. “You’ll have to wait your turn.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Hands behind his head, cowboy boots crossed at his ankles, Jack lay in the dark on the Hotel al Salam’s double bed, contemplating his dilemma. In the background, the room’s air conditioner hummed in tempo to his rumbling stomach and rambling thoughts.
The Bollywood guy, what was his name? Sam? Yeah, Dr. Sampson al Addin. He could be a Black Swan. The Arab-American author Nassim Nicholas Taleb had first coined the designation. A Black Swan meant randomness and uncertainty. When a Black Swan showed up, it mean the unexpected, unseen, unanticipated, improbable, and unpredictable. It turned everything upside down, for better or for worse.
What did Sam really want? Returning from The British Club this evening, he had patiently waited while Jack paid off a taxi driver yet again then jovially announced that by lunch tomorrow he would come up with some kind of lead not only on Janet but also on any Anglo males who had entered Yemen in the last forty-eight hours. His introduction to Tex, Boyd, whoever the Hunt Oil guy was, had not even resulted in the drunk coming up with the cash to cover Sam’s ale and Jack’s gin and tonic. Maybe it was the alcohol consumed at Sana’a’s high altitude that rattled his brain and tossed his stomach.
So what did Sam want?
He wanted a free lunch tomorrow.
If Sam was possibly a Black Swan, Janet was definitely a Black Swan. When she had shown up, she had turned everything upside down – getting him thrown into jail on a murder charge for starters. She had been unanticipated and unexpected and had proven herself improbable and unpredictable – and had changed his world forever.
She was nothing like Linda, who had been a sweet constant in his constellation. He had been her only lover. Janet was always outrageously naughty and sometimes unpredictably nice. Capricious and feisty. The way she took on whatever Life flung at her, with a laugh in its face, most likely she had taken on scads of lovers, as well. Just imagining her coupled with another man skyrocketed his blood pressure.
Linda had faced life differently. A Hippy term came to mind . . . Linda would just go with the flow. So why had her death brought him not only unlivable grief but also unfaceable guilt, as well?
If only the hum of the air conditioner could drown out this thoughts, because it was the guilt he had yet to face. Damn’t, why should he feel guilty? Had he not taken care of Linda over those last years, never once shirking his duty? Had he not always been there for Charley and her? Unless Jack counted the times he snarled and scrapped and snapped – usually over something small. And always he had seen the infinitely patient look reflected in her once lovely eyes slowly being hollowed and darkened by disease.
Toward the end, those last months, her eyes had all too often held little recognition. Still he had cared for, twenty-four/seven, giving her injections, changing her
diapers, clipping her nails, carrying her match-stick of a body to the tub to bathe her . . . and sometimes toward the last secretly wishing she would give it up, surrender to death.
“Oh, God!” He swung his boots over the bed and jerked up right. The monster in him was more than he could face right now. Sightlessly, he stumbled toward the porcelain throne and found the lid just in time to throw up.
No sooner had he wiped his forearm across his sweaty face, then he heard his bedroom door open. He stepped through the bathroom door and was blinded by the dazzle of light from the hotel hallway. Two figures were silhouetted. One was unmistakably that of Janet’s, supporting that of another.
Relief and rage fought each other for dominance within him. “Hell’s fire, you could have at least called and let me know you were okay.”
“Damn’t, Jack, I told you I’d return.”
He blinked. He was back on the path of the Circle of Life.
* * * * *
The baths in the Old City of Sana’a existed before Yemen was a British protectorate and centuries before Islam prevailed over the country. The oldest baths were built on the form of the provincial Roman ones – roofed with domes and vaults surrounding a large, central room containing a cold-water pool replete with fountains. Underground, smaller rooms were naturally insulated on cold nights via flues in the gypsum walls. The water of these rooms was heated from burning the excrement from neighboring houses.
On entering the bath, Sam took off his shoes and left them with the bath-keeper. Next he went to the changing room, where he removed his clothing, tidily placing each item in one of the wall’s niches. Lastly, he donned the modest cloth wrap, or futah, and took his valuables, his most precious being his Mickey Mouse watch, to deposit with the bath keeper. After washing his feet on the stone steps leading down to the central pool and quickly washing himself, he proceeded straight through the temperate rooms to one of the heated, smaller ones below ground.
Call Me Crazy (Janet Lomayestewa, Tracker) Page 8