Jihadi

by Yusuf Toropov

  Sullivan Hand had dreams, you know,

  Of you above, of him below.

  Sullivan Hand, whose knees were sound,

  Whose back was strong,

  whose heart was brown,

  Sullivan Hand adored red hair.

  He worked in the dark when no one was there.

  Sullivan Hand sought a secret untellable,

  But only wound up, in the end, with …

  16 In Which the Bitch First Encounters Liddell

  ‘AMERICA UNDER ARREST NOW,’ one of the Islamic City police officers shouted in Thelonius’s ear, slamming the side of his face into the hood of someone’s Lincoln Town Car, snapping off the little cross-but-not-a-cross ornament. The rectangled lower-case T skittered onto the pavement, into the pool of spreading blood.

  That stylized four-pointed star, just a few seconds earlier, had projected wealth, power, prestige, thoughtful engineering and, just perhaps, the desire of the Ford Motor Company’s design team to allude to the NATO seal’s compass rose. A few seconds earlier, the four-pointed star of the Lincoln Town Car spoke to stability, to certainty, to safety and to Freedom in the north, south, east and west, to the possibility of a direction home. Now the metal emblem, shiny in a puddle of mingled blood, projected nothing but failure.

  Intelligence failure. Design failure. Mission failure. Execution failure. Every imaginable variety of failure.

  The little girl’s opened head released a raw, mottled mushroom, streaked with crimson. Her hand lay near the ornament.

  She had not wanted to leave her father.

  ‘UNDER ARREST,’ the policeman shouted again, pulling Thelonius’s right hand behind his back. The handcuff snapped into place around his wrist.

  From the hood of the Town Car, Thelonius took in the scene at an angle – the cool sideways-slanting daytime light of late afternoon, the upended city aligning itself along the black street, the shops open and active, their gravity-defying customers still and curious and cautious at the windows. A group of covered, chittering women scurried toward a misplaced horizon. Away from him. He closed his eyes. The metal of the Lincoln was cold. The officer pulled Thelonius’s left hand smartly into place and handcuffed that wrist too.

  Alone with Fatima in his first-floor office, Murad Murad began his ‘private briefing’. A high-value American had been detained that afternoon.

  He had shot a father and daughter on a busy street, in front of dozens of witnesses, within a few hundred yards of the lamp-lit street scene now visible to Fatima through Murad Murad’s window. Both the father and daughter had died. The Justice Ministry had assumed authority over the case. The father’s suitcase had contained nothing untoward, despite the American’s fixation upon it.

  Before them were the American’s possessions. Fatima, seated in a high-backed chair that had, for some unfathomable reason, been bolted to the floor, looked at the crowded surface of Murad Murad’s large desk. On the desk were the following items:

  A backpack, emptied.

  A Glock handgun.

  Bullets for same.

  An infrared light.

  A portable telescope.

  A U.S. passport, held open with a plastic clip.

  ID cards – a driver’s licence, an employee pass – at odds with each other and with the passport.

  lxiii. ID cards

  The White Album here notes T’s fixation on shifting identities, viewpoints and epistemologies by choosing this point to unveil track three, which I now place on repeat in the hope of sailing over a few of the manuscript’s more nauseating passages. Feeling queasy and restless. That blue, unhappy heart.

  A wallet.

  Currency in large denominations, presumably extracted from the wallet.

  A small camera. Murad Murad assured her it contained pictures of prohibited areas, installations along the border. This appeared to be precisely the kind of surveillance that regional enemies of the Republic might conduct.

  A comic book, SERGEANT USA #109. Its purchase price was listed as twelve cents. Pristine condition, secured within a transparent plastic sleeve. Fatima picked this up, extracted the issue, made a brief examination of its fragile pages. She closed it, surveyed the troubled, resigned rear-cover visage of Norman Rockwell (‘We’re looking for people who like to draw’), and slipped it with care back into its sleeve, face-up.

  At the time of his arrest, Murad went on, this individual had been attempting to steal the suitcase found near his two victims. Why? What did he believe it contained? How had he come to make obtaining it a priority worth two lives and possibly his own? Certain prominent persons had taken a deep interest in the case. Certain figures, certain military figures (here he paused to let the words sink in) had demanded the postponement of the diplomatic discussions the American embassy was now pressing. It was, some felt, long past time to let the Americans know they did not have a free hand in this Republic.

  Trails such as these tended to grow cold with alarming speed. He had been instructed to take aggressive action, to use his own best judgement. They were to learn, ideally tonight, what they were dealing with. Who the man was, to whom he reported within the American intelligence network, what potential threats to national security he had uncovered and so forth. The Americans were always busy concealing a great deal. Any marriage incorporates certain evasions.

  The prisoner’s photography had been reviewed closely by people at the very highest levels of the government. Certain long-standing assumptions about their relationship with the Americans now appeared less reliable than before. It had been concluded, within the hour, that this man would not leave the country at the present time.

  No other translator had been available for the interrogation. He was glad of that, though. He knew he could count upon Fatima. She would of course be compensated at double her pro-rated hourly rate. This was a significant career opportunity for her, and he wanted to be sure she understood that.

  Fatima understood.

  The prisoner was now being processed. There was a certain strategic advantage in allowing him to ponder his situation. Questioning was scheduled to commence thirty minutes from now. Her security clearance had been upgraded, yet another opportunity for her. Could he count on her discretion once the interrogation began?

  Fatima would be discreet.

  Murad Murad smiled that indigestion smile of his.

  He was proud of her now. Confident she would help him to do the right thing for the country. He felt a certain protective instinct toward her, hard to describe, but perhaps she would respect it. While they waited, might she allow him to view her hair, as a father views his daughter’s hair?

  Fatima’s jaw clenched.

  He assured her that they were alone, that the door was closed, that no one would know and that it was all he would request of her on a personal level this evening.

  Fatima stared at the plump little man in the uniform. Whispering, she informed Murad that she wished him to understand two things. First, there was a witness to his actions, and that witness was Allah. Second, she was capable of screaming quite loudly. She would do so the moment he attempted to prevent her from exiting the room and taking up quarters in the employee lounge. She preferred to wait there until the interrogation began. That would be all.

  She stood and made her way out of the office.

  Becky’s mom died on May 2, 1972.

  She succumbed to wounds she received on a trip she and her family had made to Venezuela back in 1968. Some Communists killed her.

  Becky’s mom’s real name was Prudence. Of course, Becky never called her that. Becky called her Mother. So that’s what the dead guy telling this story will call her.

  The Communists threw a bomb into a beach cottage Mother and her family had rented. Mother had been reading A.C. Bradley’s Shakespearean Tragedy. She was lying on her side, re-engaging with one of the passages on Desdemona, when the explosion went off beneath her bed. It shredded the iron frame of her bed into fragments, lodged shrapnel at the base of
her nose, destroyed both her eyes and disabled certain important parts of her brain. The attack left the set of Mother’s mouth off, too. For nearly four years, though capable of intermittent speech, she usually looked half-aware, determined to sleep her way through a special kind of hangover.

  The Communists hadn’t meant to kill Mother – or, to put it more accurately, they hadn’t cared much about whether they killed her or not. The Communists had meant to kill Becky’s father, Ryan Firestone, known familiarly to those who reported to him as ‘Dad’.

  Dad had been out golfing at the time the bomb detonated. Becky had been golfing with him. Her long hours of practice were paying off. She was beating Dad fair and square for the very first time, though it was still quite early in the round. They were beginning the fifth hole. Becky was leading, but furious.

  Dad was, in the adult Becky’s words, a ‘control freak’. She insisted that, after the third hole, Dad had broken his promise of not trying to lose to her. He couldn’t handle losing to her fair and square.

  Dad had indeed broken any number of promises.

  A running man emerged, agitated, from the distant pro shop. Something had happened at the cottage. Becky and Dad never finished that fifth hole.

  Prudence Firestone, née Sharp, aka Mother (1931–1972) grew up in the same Salem, Massachusetts foursquare that she later shared with Ryan Firestone, and that Becky would later share with Thelonius. Too late, and only in hindsight, long after he left that house, Thelonius came to see Becky’s insistence on living in this particular home and no other, ever, under any circumstances, as a signal of something being not quite right within the family.

  lxiv. Prudence … Thelonius

  I have skipped over some pages, having read quite enough already. We endure from T in these passages, have endured, continue to endure, considerable provocation. All such travesties, insensitivities, and treasons appearing in Jihadi are preemptively identified in track three as libellous. None of it is real.

  ‘You are a guest of the Islamic Republic,’ said a teenaged girl, wearing a white robe and a gold headscarf, who appeared to be staring at Heaven. ‘Please permit me to apologize in advance for any discomfort or inconvenience.’ Her voice awoke Thelonius as from a dream.

  lxv. Her voice

  Enter the Bitch.

  Clive (rapt, obedient, seated) has procured a bowl of onion soup, a traditional Sharp Compound delicacy, and placed it nearby. Through my headset, Lennon answers (stoic, synchronistic): Oh, yeah. Pressing pause.

  17 In Which Liddell First Covets Her

  Fastened by his wrists and ankles with transparent plastic cord to a pair of large, crossed planks, a human X on a low, grey slab, Thelonius found himself pinned, a butterfly on an examining-board. His cat had not yet been poisoned by antifreeze. He had not yet become a trophy to be displayed at the Freedom Banquet. He did not yet have a limp. Back in the Republic now, back in that close, stinking, windowless basement, under interrogation and naked (which explained, he reminded himself, the translator’s refusal to meet his eye), he didn’t yet know the girl’s name was Fatima. He didn’t know anything about her.

  Thelonius must have been quite a catch for the intelligence arm of the Islamic Republic. From the stuff they found in his backpack, they probably deduced two things right away. First, that he was someone involved at a high level in the exciting world of American espionage. Second, that he was taking photographs of military facilities the Americans weren’t supposed to see close up.

  Thelonius took those pictures because people in Washington wanted to be sure no one in the Islamic Republic was building a nuclear weapon or giving nuclear materials to terrorists. They weren’t. Perhaps they are now.

  The plump, dark-eyed little man standing in front of him gabbled something to the girl. He scowled at Thelonius.

  ‘Who are you?’ the girl translated. There was something odd about her voice.

  ‘I pass,’ Thelonius said. ‘The embassy will lodge a protest, you know. I’m an employee. You have no right to hold me here.’

  The girl translated. The dark-eyed man chuckled, then said something in a high-pitched, contemptuous tone that rose to a peak at the end. ‘That is a debatable point,’ the girl pronounced carefully.

  Now Thelonius knew what had struck him as strange about her cadence and inflections. They were American: a miraculously clear, upper-tier, New England-accented tongue, set off with only the vaguest hint of the Republic. She appeared to be eighteen or nineteen. She was still staring at the ceiling.

  ‘I am a contractor who works on air-conditioning projects for the U.S. embassy here,’ Thelonius said. ‘And I want my passport back.’ That part was true.

  The plump little dark-eyed man nodded to someone almost out of Thelonius’s field of vision, a uniform standing in an obscure corner of that large, dank, concrete-and-vomit-scented room. Thelonius heard the uniform retrieve something from a rack of some kind, heard him carry it across the room using brisk steps. He looked at the little man, who was staring back at him as one would stare at a trapped animal. Thelonius’s eyes returned to the dark, gold-framed face of the teenage girl transfixed by a point somewhere near the dead ceiling fan above him.

  A wall of water slammed into his face, roared at him. An instant later, someone’s fist in his solar plexus. Then an exquisitely targeted, rapid blow to his right knee, no seeing it coming or going. It might have been a crowbar or a baseball bat. The girl gasped.

  Despite his training, Thelonius had been distracted. Caught unawares, seized deep in the throat and nose by a burning, tentacled wave of pain now working its way through his sinuses, assaulted by simultaneous missiles howling through his abdomen and the angle of his newly dead right leg, he still did not regret looking at her face.

  He hadn’t protected anything. He spent a few long moments reassembling himself, hacking, coughing up blood and water and straining with his bound hands, in vain, for his howling knee. She was staring upward again, or still, at any rate staring away from him.

  lxvi. away

  Breathing normally again. Tedious Clive still thinks my hands are pretty. That thin, unpersuasive, warmed-over onion beverage of his was not in the least soul-restoring. Not at all track three, which spins and beckons from its hibernative pause. Do I want to talk about where things went wrong with my husband? I do not.

  The little man, who wore a gold ring, jabbered for some time. He had a high-pitched voice, much higher than the girl’s, and he seemed to speak too rapidly for any language.

  ‘Oddly,’ the olive-skinned girl continued impassively, ‘the senior representatives of the State Department disagree with you. I might add that they also disagree with your passport, which, of course, the State Department issued. They are apparently under the impression that you are a diplomat. Yet your passport makes no mention of this.’

  The tiny dark-eyed man paused, then posed, in that unique, irritating upper-register intonation of his, what must have been another question. ‘It is a bizarre discontinuity,’ the girl pronounced flatly, ‘your having no prior knowledge that you are a State Department official rather than an air-conditioning repairman. Wouldn’t you agree?’

  ‘Tell him I want my passport back,’ Thelonius said, staring straight at the girl, who would not look at him. He coughed and spat water and snot, then laughed. ‘Tell him I’ll fix the air conditioning in this place if he does.’

  lxvii. air conditioning

  T’s cover had indeed been that of a facilities repairman. The first argument put forward by the President to resolve the crisis and secure T’s release went to our primary diplomatic contacts, intelligence backchannels having, overnight, grown cold and unresponsive. His appeal incorporated the quiet revision of T’s cover to include diplomatic duties. Diplomats, my father assured the President in a private, late-night call, could not legally be held by a foreign power. Of course, there was no way for T to have known of this gambit in the early hours of his captivity. It failed. An altogether different solution
was in order.

  The little man bleated something in reply, but Thelonius understood only his own cover name, Davis Raymonds.

  ‘Shall we go for another swim, Davis Raymonds?’

  She didn’t mean it. Her voice still soft, incongruous. Her eyes still inaccessible, trained upward. His leg still shrieking and throbbing.

  Thelonius’s real name was Thelonius Liddell, of course, but he wasn’t supposed to tell that to anyone. Davis Raymonds: He wasn’t sure why the handlers always chose such implausibly normal-sounding names as false identities for the people doing covert operations. The generic names sounded instantly fake to anyone with American connections and only made life more difficult. (By the time he got to the Beige Motel, the dead guy recalls, he didn’t have a name anymore.)

  ‘Tell him my name,’ Thelonius said, ‘is Chad Reese.’

  lxviii. Chad Reese

  I met this fellow during a trip to Oregon with T right after we were married. He tried, for days on end, to get both of us to do the Landmark Forum training. No thanks. Men are such control freaks. Clive asleep on the little couch. Possibilities there.

  This was another lie. Chad Reese was an old friend of Thelonius’s from high school. He was a drama geek with long, dirty-blond hair, who had tried in vain to get Thelonius to smoke marijuana in his dank basement, which, as it happened, vaguely resembled this basement. Thelonius, who had refused any and every mind-altering substance offered to him since The Accident, had insisted that Chad not smoke pot around him because of the danger of a contact high.