by Thomas Hopp
Once she had passed the window, all three of us - in a fit of unhealthy curiosity - grabbed the log porch railings and drew ourselves up for a better look. Seemingly determined to take every stupid chance possible, we peered over the windowsill like three idiots in a Hollywood movie.
The house’s interior made my mouth hang open. Huge raw timber beams supported a roof forty feet above us, like in a National Park hotel. The fireplace opening was as tall as a man and held a bank of embers that radiated warmth I could feel through the window glass. The rustic beauty of the place was a backdrop for fine Middle Eastern furnishings: silk draperies in Chinese red with black Arabic lettering were hung from the balconies. Persian rugs with tan-and-maroon patterns covered much of the wooden floor. Lacquered wooden chests were scattered around, punctuated by polished brass floor lamps with tiffany shades. On the fireplace mantel were gold boxes, jade vases and an antique ebony clock with its hands showing 10:05. Above the clock, mounted on the chimney was a huge painting in an ornate gilded frame: a harem of semi-naked and diaphanous-veiled pale-skinned Arab ladies frolicking around a fountain, guarded by a huge scowling black eunuch in a green turban, blue vest, baggy pink silk pants and red curly-toed slippers, with crossed burly arms and a scimitar in his right hand.
A heavy, ornate table in a dining area on one side of the fireplace could easily have seated two dozen for dinner. Khadija joined an older and plumper woman at the table, and poured tea from the sterling service. The two then turned their attention to the menfolk, who were gathered in a portico on the opposite side of the fireplace.
There were six men, most wearing turbans and Arabian frocks, sitting on a semicircle of silk floor cushions and smoking an elaborate golden hookah. They talked and laughed and puffed on individual smoke hoses. Mike pointed out a fellow in a green-and-tan sheriff’s uniform, with short cropped blond hair and an evergreen smoky bear hat he’d set on a pillow beside him.
“Sheriff Barker,” he hissed. “In the thick of things.”
“Who’s that tall fellow?” McKean pointed to a man dressed in a black robe and white turban, facing away from us.
“The owner of this spread,” said Mike. “Sheik Abdul-Ghazi.”
The Sheik sat erect on a purple silk cushion. He took a deep draw on the hookah, and let it out slowly. He made a remark with thick smoke curling around his head and gestured toward the other people in the room: three young teenaged girls dressed in austere brown frocks, dancing on the open floor space between the men and the old women. The dancers made girlish approximations of belly dancers’ motions, keeping time to the music, which came from speakers mounted on the fireplace wall. The girls, whom I assumed were the daughters of one or more of the men, smiled in naive enjoyment of their dance, and the men and women watched them fondly.
“What do you think those guys are smoking?” I whispered.
“Sheesha,” said McKean. “Flavored tobacco.”
Suddenly, a dark-haired woman in her early twenties entered the room from a far doorway and walked past the men, turning every head - including ours. She was tall and straight and dressed in a British equestrian outfit minus the jacket and helmet. Her khaki Jodhpur riding pants, black leather jackboots and white shirt hugged a body fit to make any man’s tongue hang out. She went for a wooden staircase that climbed to the balcony, but the girls waylaid her and begged her to join their dance.
Tugged by the hands, she agreed with a good-natured smile. Raising her arms over her head, she snapped her fingers in time to the rhythm. Extending a booted foot, she took a small half step forward and swayed her hips to the music. The girls mimicked her moves enthusiastically, while the old women shook their heads in disapproval. The men gawked. So did I.
The young woman ignored the attention, dancing only for the girls’ benefit, moving with a grace that emphasized the beauty of her fine curves, scarcely hidden by her clothes. Ignoring the leering men, she moved her torso in a serpentine motion and wove her arms like minaret spires over her head, while the girls did their best to emulate her.
The Sheik tugged at his long grey beard, seeming particularly riveted on the woman’s body as she swayed to the music. Then a remark from Sheriff Barker brought rude laughter from the other men. Knowing she was the butt of the joke, the woman stopped and lowered her arms. She eyed the men with sharp disdain, and then spun on a boot toe and went to the stairs, ignoring the girls’ pleas that she stay.
I tracked her movements like a radar lock. Watching her long dark hair sway fluidly as she mounted the steps, I understood why Mohammed had urged Arab women to cover their faces and bodies - lest they tempt men to distraction. And I was distracted in the extreme by her beauty - a face of a light tan tone, an oval jaw and small chin that were delicate and haughty at the same time. As she moved up the stairs, she cast another disdainful glance down on the men and I saw her face in profile. Something about her regally sculpted features - something about her eyes, naturally lined by dark lashes and framed by coal-black brows - made me think of Cleopatra. Could this woman have descended from the bloodline of the Pharaohs?
She so mesmerized me that I lingered a moment despite McKean and Mike hissing at me to move on with them. Instead, my eyes followed her boot-steps up the staircase, and watched her cross a log-balustraded balcony to a door where she disappeared into a room. When the door closed, I was left shaking my head and blinking my eyes to get my bearings. Bewitched, I had nearly forgotten my risky circumstances. I had gawked at the woman with mouth agape like some country yokel.
Suddenly, my enchantment ended in a blaze of adrenaline. The Sheik’s wife Khadija reappeared at the window, seemingly out of nowhere. Although her face was mostly hidden by her black hijab, her dark eyes peered straight in my direction!
I crouched behind the porch rail, frozen like a jackrabbit in car headlights. My pulse raced. But, immobilized by the effects of marijuana and the hypnotizing beauty I had been watching, I couldn’t force myself to flee. I kept as still as a statue.
Khadija came quite near the window glass. Her eyes seemed to pierce the darkness, seeking me out. She stared intently in my direction, increasing my mesmerization and mixing in a measure of terror. I expected her to cry out and raise an alarm, but she didn’t.
She looked even more searchingly into the window glass. It dawned on me she wasn’t looking for me at all. She was seeing her own reflection on the inside of the window, and was studying her looks, with me an unwilling voyeur.
Appraising herself intently, she raised her hands and lowered the lower veil panel, uncovering, in the process, features neither refined nor beautiful. Her nose was long and wide. Her lips were small, permanently puckered and wizened. She opened them in a smile that was more like a grimace, showing teeth that were uneven and yellowed.
She raised the upper panel of her veil, revealing a forehead that bore two heavy horizontal lines across a lumpy, heavy brow. Her eyebrows were thick, even though they lacked penciling, and merged in the middle.
And the eyes that stared at all this unloveliness were themselves unlovely. Dark, puffy-lidded things, they were yellowed where they should have been white. Matted, stringy, long, gray-streaked black hair drooped in wispy, snake-like half-curls to frame her Medusan visage.
Eventually, with eyes glaring self-contempt, Khadija pulled the forehead wrap down, raised the chin veil, and turned from the window. Released from her awful spell, I tumbled backward from the railing and sprawled on the shadowed ground at the base of the porch, near a mock orange bush. I caught my breath as a flurry of fragrant white mock-orange petals settled over me. My heart pounded in my throat. My head spun dizzily, full of Arabian drums rat-tattling and cymbals chink-chinking and the loveliness of the young woman and the horror of the old witch. As Khadija moved away from the window without calling an alarm, the thought crossed my mind that, for some women at least, Mohammed might have had a compelling reason for the call to wear the veil - to hide such ghastly features from human sight.
Som
eone touched me on the shoulder, and I jumped about a foot. It was Mike. “C’mon, dude,” he whispered. I scrambled after him and the three of us crawled along the front-porch shadow and then crept past a second house, a two-story, rectangular, bunkhouse-like structure that might have been the ranch’s main residence back in homesteader times.
“Did you get a look at her hair?” McKean whispered over a shoulder to me.
“Uh huh. Black snakes.”
He looked at me peculiarly, but pressed on, following Mike past a parked semi truck with a white box trailer. Ahead of that were three white vans with no windows on their sides or backs. We moved past them and slunk across the driveway toward a pair of barns connected by an equestrian fence.
The first of these buildings was a modest-sized horse stable, whitewashed and thirty feet on a side. We moved in front of its double barn doors and slipped into the moon shadow under an eave. Mike pointed to the next building, a long, white, barn-like structure.
“They took her in there,” he whispered. “That’s where the lab is, too.”
We moved to the corner of the horse barn, preparing for a dash to the next building. Suddenly, a horse’s loud whinny ripped through the night air. We ducked back into the shadows.
The source of the noise made itself known just inches from us. Where the barn connected with the equestrian fence, a black Arabian horse jutted its head over the top fence rail. The whites of its eyes were wide and its nostrils flared to take in our unfamiliar scent. Its hooves pounded the ground.
Mike, who was nearest the animal, pressed himself against the barn doors in a vain effort to disappear from the horse’s sight. I followed his example, squashing myself as flat as a bug on a windshield. Not so, Peyton McKean. He stepped away from the barn and moved toward the horse.
“What are you doing?” I hissed.
He ignored me. Crooning to the horse in a low voice, he asked, “Whatsa matter boy? Did we upset you? How ‘bout a treat?’ He pulled a packet of sugar like you find in coffee shops out of a coat pocket, shook it twice from the corner to settle its contents, and ripped an end off, all the while edging closer to the stallion. The horse ceased its agitated movements and eyed the sugar packet with interest. McKean poured the packet’s contents into the palm of his left hand and held it out. There was a moment of absolute silence and immobility, but the animal’s curiosity gave way to fear. It bolted from the fence and trotted away with ears pinned back and tail high, letting out another loud whinny.
“They must have heard that inside,” I hissed.
“Yeah,” Mike agreed, eyeing the houses nervously. So far, however, no one had come to a window to see what the trouble was.
“Ah,” said McKean in a soft, reassuring voice. “And how about you, my lady? Sugar?” He held out his hand again and a second, slightly smaller horse stretched its muzzle out of the darkness - a pure white Arabian mare. She thrust her pink nose tentatively beneath the top slat and sniffed the sugar in McKean’s hand. She began to nibble, and the stallion settled down, curious about the favor given to his more docile mate.
The mare’s eyes mellowed, enraptured by the treat. Her ears swiveled calmly as she nibbled the sugar from McKean’s hand with her dainty pink muzzle. The stallion’s agitation bled off and soon he was crowding her, stretching his head over the top rail to make it clear he expected a similar favor.
Mike and I came away from the barn and approached McKean and his new friends. McKean reached his right hand into his coat pocket while still holding his left out to the mare. He pulled out a second sugar packet, which he handed to me.
“For the stallion,” he said. I ripped open the package and poured the contents into my left hand as McKean had done, offering it to the stallion. Soon he was as calm as the mare, licking the sweet stuff from my hand. His whiskers brushed my palm softly, his tongue lapped up the sugar gingerly. I calmed down too, drawing a deep breath of sweet pasture air and noticing that these were incredibly fine animals, one black, one white, and both of regal bearing. They seemed like pampered pets. Their coats shone in the moonlight, their long manes and tails flicked like fine silk.
As the horses finish their sweets, Mike chuckled. “What else you got in your pockets, Cousin Peyton?”
“A stir stick,” whispered McKean. “And some packets of powdered milk. You don’t know how often I’m offered coffee that is insufficiently light and sweet for my tastes.”
When the stallion finished his sugar, he draped his chin across the mare’s withers and settled down, like he was ready to nap. He made a soft chuggaring noise as if to say that no more alarms would be going up from him. We slunk away to the poultry barn and Mike crept to its double front doors, silently undoing the latch. He moved inside in a combat crouch, eyeing every corner of the dimly lighted interior. My heartbeat accelerated as McKean and I followed Mike in, making no sound whatsoever. Just inside the double doors was a white, plywood-screened wall situated to hide the building’s interior from any eyes that might peer in through the front entrance. An inscription was painted on the wall in black Arabic lettering with an English translation below it:
ENTRY STRICTLY FORBIDDEN WITHOUT SHEIK’S PERMISSION
My pulse edged up a notch as we rounded the barrier. But there was nothing beyond except the wide, dim, empty space of a poultry-raising facility. Low feed troughs of stainless steel ran the length of the floor - an empty floor, glistening clean and bare, where a thousand chickens could have been fattening for market. The area was spotless and free of any smell of livestock. Instead, I caught a whiff of disinfectant. Along the far wall were several laboratory benches. Mike led us to them, signifying by pointing that these were the source of his suspicions about a virology lab. The equipment covering the bench tops defied my powers of identification, but McKean examined everything quickly and turned to Mike with a wry look on his face. He pointed to each piece and whispered its identity, “Feed mixer, refrigerator, chick incubators, egg candling light.” He shrugged his shoulders and opened his hands wide. “Haven’t you ever seen this sort of stuff before, farm boy?”
Mike looked embarrassed. He shrugged. “I seen a meth lab once.”
McKean shook his head. “Nothing but animal maintenance equipment. If it’s a genetic engineering facility, it’s not like any I’ve ever seen.”
Mike went red enough to see even in the dim light. “I guess I didn’t have time to get a very good look.”
McKean and I exchanged perturbed glances.
“Maybe we should go,” I suggested.
McKean nodded. We turned for the door, but Mike hissed, “Wait! I still want to know what happened to that redhead.”
McKean paused, and then cocked an ear. He raised a cautionary thin index finger to his lips. “Listen.”
A low murmur could be heard at the far end of the room. The three of us went dead silent. Straining my ears, I made out two masculine voices carrying on a conversation in Arabic. Mike moved swiftly and silently toward the source of the sound, which was a large side room fifty paces from where we had entered the building. Its door was ajar. Strong light from within streaked the floor. In fact, this light was the sole source of illumination by which we had been observing the room and its contents. I suddenly got a panicky urge to scurry back the way I had come. Instead, I tiptoed behind McKean meekly, following Mike as he made what seemed like a big mistake. Mike pressed his back against the wall beside the doorway. As we stole to his side, he crouched low and peeked around the doorjamb.
The voices droned incomprehensibly in Arabic, while Mike scanned the room for a few seconds. Then he motioned with a couple flicks of his fingers for us peek around him. McKean bent and peered over Mike’s head. I went up on tiptoe and looked over McKean’s shoulder, thinking we must look comical, all peeking around a doorframe, one face above another, like three Hollywood idiots again.
But what we saw inside that whitewashed room wasn’t funny. In a space that had once been the office of the animal facility, stood two men in l
ong white cotton thawb robes with white ghutra scarves on their heads. Their backs were toward us. They leaned over a third person, who sat in a heavy wooden chair - or rather lay in the chair, because the person, a woman with bright red hair, had collapsed so utterly that I thought she must be dead. Her head lolled on the wooden back of the chair at an impossible angle. Staring at her, all doubt fled my mind. This was the kidnapped woman! These men were her captors! Mike’s story was true! Every hackle on my neck went up when I realized what commanded the men’s attention. The girl’s arms were strapped to the arms of the chair, and the back of her left forearm bore a long slash, splotched hideously with dried blood. Worse, the skin of her arm was swollen and dotted with thumbtack-sized white spots.
McKean mouthed one word almost inaudibly. “Smallpox.”
Suddenly, my mind boggled at how far I had allowed myself to be dragged into jeopardy. Kidnappers! Terrorists! Mad schemes with deadly viruses! All suddenly real beyond question. A new, panicky notion jangled my nerves - we would be discovered instantly if either of the men turned in our direction.
But I didn’t have more than a moment to worry about that.
A shrill cry came from behind us. It was a woman’s voice, screaming an alarm in Arabic. I turned to find the beauty in the riding outfit ten paces behind us, calling to the men in the room. Although she was screaming, she showed no fear of us. Her eyes glared to match the stallion’s rage a few minutes before. She was like a she-devil, warning not only the men inside the room, but anyone else within a hundred yards.
I glanced back into the room. The men had turned to stare at us with confused, surprised expressions. Then a third Arab man, dressed in a tailored dark gray suit, burst from the doorway of an adjacent room. He coolly drew a pistol from a shoulder holster and pointed it at us. “Stop where you are!” he shouted in Arab inflected English.
We straightened up, caught between the woman’s raging and the pistol’s aim. Mike had reached for his pistol, but too late. He raised his hands along with McKean and I.