The man who guided the little boy with the scarred arms through the streets, the man who found places for them both to sleep and pray, was no longer Atta. He was Abu Islam: the father of Islam.
He wandered Islamic City as though inspecting it prior to demolition. Often and loudly, he recited certain verses from the Koran. His father had taught him passages, years ago, and as a youth he had been praised for the accuracy of his recitation and for the strength of his voice, which one of the judges wrote was ‘loud as the blows of a hammer’. He had even won a contest at the age of fourteen. He thought he’d forgotten it all. But he still knew many passages. He knew, for instance, the ‘Verse of the Sword’. He now ended every day by reciting it in great, keening peals that could be heard for blocks until after dawn.
People gave them food. They took it and walked away as silent itinerants, in obedience to the Prophet. From a black-market warehouse he burgled one night, Abu Islam stole a decanter of bourbon meant for Americans. He drank it as though in a private place, yet the boy saw. Abu Islam found, in the days that followed, that the bourbon, when consumed surreptitiously, helped him identify which words, which intonations, which emphases were likeliest to draw a large crowd.
24 In Which the Guns Continue To Warm
When asked about ‘this crap I’m hearing about dead dogs and some kind of Raghead Council’, Mike Mazzoni suggested to Captain X, his commanding officer, that he might want to deny all the allegations that might be coming down the pike, because that’s what he, Mazzoni, planned to do. This proposal wasn’t well received.
The captain, stone-faced and fuming, was more pragmatic than he let on: He was not eager to alienate a figure the men looked up to, the elder brother of his best (and only available) sharpshooter. Even so, it was time to make a point.
Seated behind his desk, he asked Mazzoni point-blank whether all this dog business would be going away. Stared him down.
Yet Mazzoni, standing, knew that he was actually being cut slack. He held the necessary awkward silence. He inspected his boot-tops and, after half a minute or so, said, ‘Yes, sir.’
By ‘away’ (the captain explained), he really and truly meant away. The operation that Mazzoni had been running would have to be put out of commission, at least until things cooled down. Did Mazzoni understand that?
Mazzoni nodded.
Was Mazzoni familiar with how a hammer worked? How nails penetrated certain objects? What plywood was?
Mazzoni nodded again.
‘I treat you like my own boy, Mike. Maybe I shouldn’t. But I do. Now go clean up your mess.’
By reveille the next night, he and Bobbler had boarded up the Wreck Room, and he had sworn with every other swing of his hammer that Jimmy would pay.
xcii. pay
I pay fifty-eight dollars a night for this place. And for what? The peremptory ineptitude of that nigger cleaning lady. Bustling in after a single knock like she owns the place.
Crouching in a corner, Noura watched the well-dressed man who had emerged from the limousine as though he were a film projected into the good chair near the dining-room table. He would not smile.
Ra’id, the son of the most famous man in the country, had made a point of not becoming famous. He did not enjoy being stared at, so he turned away from Noura, but he remained polite. ‘What we want you to do,’ Ra’id said to Fatima, putting down his teacup with practised grace, ‘is keep an eye on things. Converse with people. Pay attention to them. Compliment them. Decode whether or not they’re interested in overthrowing the government, and let us know, discreetly, if it appears that they are. I should be happy to double the salary that Murad is paying you. To make amends.’
‘And to keep me quiet,’ she said. He did not disagree, did not agree. ‘Well. I know fewer people than you imagine.’
‘Would you be willing to talk to individuals we pointed out to you? Virtually or otherwise?’
‘I suppose.’
‘Then we are in agreement? You accept the raise, you accept the assignment, you update me once a week at least, and more often as you see fit, and you agree not to speak of what happened with Murad last night?’
A bird called to Fatima from the broad, convenient tree outside her open window. She turned to look at it. Ra’id took this for a sign of assent.
This was how these people operated, how they secured agreements. They made silence mean whatever they wanted. But it was good this way. It was what she wanted. She allowed him to believe he had manipulated her.
‘Your face,’ he said, smiling at last, ‘is now a state secret. To be clear: You have not spoken of last night online? Or anywhere else?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I told no one what happened.’ That was true.
‘Good. And you are willing to undergo another background check? A rather more thorough one?’
‘Of course.’ (This second background check never materialized, as she suspected it would not. He was testing her for compliance, as men do.)
‘You may consider yourself provisionally reinstated. There is one other question. Do you happen to recall that man you saw interrogated? The American?’
Fatima was thinking of Wafa’s house. Of her mother no longer having to work. Of Noura: of her safety, finally, from these unpredictable streets. Of those many secret worlds of Noura’s, of their persistence, of the difficulty of keeping them unexamined by strangers here in the city. Of the possibility of political instability.
Without a pause, though, she said: ‘Yes. I remember the American.’
xciii. American
Clive agreed, though not as quickly as one might like, to confiscate that nigger woman’s key. Not my country when their kind can waltz, while talking on a cell phone, into a white woman’s room. Left me his direct number. Said I could call any time if I ever had any problem. Wished he didn’t have to go. Asked me if I believed in love at first sight. Why not?
There was no ambiguity in the New Imam’s scholarship. His sermons centred on a single religious obligation: that of killing Americans.
xciv. killing Americans
The (apparent) disapproval of T’s tone here is a trapdoor through which many an untrained analyst has fallen. Misdirection on any and every topic is to be expected from traitors who have lost their way.
‘We are reclaiming the true belief system of the Muslims,’ he told his little boy, who nodded.
The boy knew well enough what consequences accompanied not nodding at the appropriate moment, and how much weightier these consequences had become since the nightly bourbon sessions had begun. The boy strongly resembled his father and often reminded him of his own childhood, a circumstance not always to the boy’s advantage.
Abu Islam began transporting four or five bottles of bourbon at a time in a little grey-wheeled suitcase that some admirer gave him. He kept his Koran in there, too.
Whatever Abu Islam found in that Koran that seemed to support killing Americans, he shouted in the streets. He ignored everything else. He also ignored the life, teachings, and practice of the Prophet. That particular life was full of complexities he could not manage. His own, thankfully, had become considerably simpler. Kill the Americans: That was his message and, now, his life. He called it The Point.
‘We two have dedicated our lives to The Point,’ the New Imam said in public, and the boy always nodded. ‘We two against an empire. With Allah, that is a majority.’
Those believers who got The Point, and they were more numerous each day, began to express concern for him and for the boy, offering them living rooms and spare bedrooms to sleep in. He turned them down. They would sleep only in abandoned buildings or on the floors of mosques, he insisted. When the building was dark enough, when the mosque had emptied, he flicked on a little flashlight, jotted notes in a tiny memo pad and consumed Styrofoam cups of bourbon, an increasingly important scholarly tradition.
People began following them around the city, even quoting memorable bits of The Point. Among the earliest of these followers was a
heavyset woman who told him he was too important to the Rising Nation to sleep in abandoned buildings and unlocked mosques. There were, she argued, security issues to consider.
Thelonius took a deep, woozy inhale of the tobacco-stained air, and the room slowed down, and then it stopped. He continued breathing in this way for some time, to keep the room steady.
Lack of food, lack of sleep. Bad breathing. That was probably why the room did that. And of course auditory hallucinations were a possibility. Which would account for …
‘I studied such difficulties, you know,’ the Raisin said, eyes aglow, ‘difficulties arising from childhood trauma. When I took my degree in psychology.’
xcv. degree in psychology
I here record my considered opinion that T received nothing resembling therapy from this individual.
The Raisin mouthed both cigarettes expertly, drew one last double puff from them, removed them and crushed them on a raw open palm before depositing them in a tin can. The fluorescents shut down and the room was much darker.
And then it was later and the sun had considered rising again and the Raisin was praying again before it did. The Raisin sat and read the Koran for a long time, then prayed for a long time, then returned to bed, then slept. Then awoke and then lit up with another double glow, familiar by now to Thelonius and not as threatening as before, and then the cigarette smoke swirled in the light of the flowing dawn.
The Investigating Representative of the Council of Elders filed a formal demand that the Americans court-martial Staff Sergeant Michael Mazzoni. The letter was returned unopened.
With the unanimous approval of the Council, the Investigating Representative used email to appeal to various individuals in the American command chain for guidance on the matter. These appeals were ignored as well.
The Investigating Representative made personal contact with a high-ranking, charismatic American general whose name need not be repeated here. Their unscheduled discussion occurred during a party hosted at the embassy by the Cultural Attaché.
‘We will take care of this,’ the general said over his Tom Collins, all business. ‘I promise. You will hear from us.’
The next day, Captain X received a call from Central Command informing him that, while he did not have to press charges against Mazzoni, he did have to make a written response to the Council. There had to be a formal denial. A sworn affidavit that no betting on dogs and no consumption of alcohol had taken place would do the trick.
xcvi. affidavit
The affidavit under discussion is on file and was indeed submitted to the Council of Elders. There is no reason to doubt its authenticity or the veracity of the circumstances it describes.
‘Who on earth is this? Tell me no lies!’
Ummi had entered, taken a look at Ra’id and been properly scandalized. The presence of an uninvited, unknown man in the home was, historically, forbidden.
‘Only the son of the prime minister,’ Noura said, on her feet in an instant, in obedience to the uniqueness of the moment. ‘Fatima pretended he didn’t even exist. But he does.’
Ra’id stood for inspection. Noura mimicked and exaggerated his shoulders-back stance.
‘Sit down, Noura,’ Mother ordered. Noura did not sit. Fatima raised an eyebrow. Noura sat.
‘We will be moving out of the city, Mother,’ Fatima said.
Noura began meowing like a cat.
xcvii. meowing
Yet another wounded, self-indulgent reference to Child. Also, I think, a grating attempt to build sympathy for a halfwit girl who was, in all likelihood, genetically predisposed, like her older sister, to early-onset promiscuity.
At the heavyset woman’s urging, Abu Islam began stressing the specifics of The Point in all his talks.
The killing of Americans by gunfire, explosion, hand-to-hand combat, or any means whatsoever – any American, at any time, in any situation, playing any combat role or no role at all, of any age or gender, of any mental status, while located within the Islamic Republic or in any other locality – was a binding religious obligation upon all Muslim males who had passed the stage of puberty.
He supplied no scriptural evidence for this amplification of The Point.
He pressed it anyway, and returned to it with an energy that seemed superhuman to his admirers. Here is why: One of them, the heavyset woman (to whom he had recently married himself without witnesses) procured amphetamines for him.
Ever cautious, she did some online research and warned him sternly about the dangers of mixing the pills and the bourbon. She took responsibility for his intake, ensuring at least twelve hours lapsed between the stimulant and the alcohol. She monitored his sleep patterns over four consecutive days. He averaged ninety daily minutes of slumber. Acceptable.
And he much preferred being awake, preferred spending his waking hours shouting in the streets about the necessity of killing Americans wherever they could be found. The number of his followers had grown in direct proportion to the intensity of his insistence upon this new religious obligation, The Point. Barely a week after he began preaching along this line, his Friday jumuah exceeded five hundred. He was in his element.
This destitute with no religious credentials, this wanderer toting a small boy like a pet, this roving gambler with his new wife and his grey-wheeled suitcase, beamed at the crowd.
xcviii. new wife
The gathering of mobs in the streets of Islamic City appears to have been a turning point in T’s psychosis. This woman, her name still unknown, inflamed the crowds by (literally) calling for his head. The precise nature of her relationship to Fatima Adara remains obscure.
Another grey haze had filled the cell. After lunchtime, Thelonius asked the Raisin: ‘Do you think we could discuss the smoking?’
‘Certainly. We can discuss anything you like.’
‘It’s just that smoke makes goodwill in here more difficult.’
The Raisin smiled, exhaled a grey jet and tipped ash into that waiting can. ‘A priority for you, is it? Creating and sustaining goodwill in the Islamic Republic?’
Thelonius sighed and ran a hand through his hair. ‘Backtalk. Every time. You’re a hard man to connect to, you know that?’
‘Am I?’
The Raisin crushed the nearly full-length cigarette along the palm-ridge of a hand red and thick with calluses.
‘Victory,’ he said. ‘Until the next skirmish, at any rate. Another victory for the Americans.’
The Raisin dropped the remnants of the smoke into the can and caught Thelonius staring at the ruined terrain of the slender hand that had consumed the ember. ‘It doesn’t hurt anymore when I put them out that way, you know.’
‘Whatever. For your information, I didn’t want a victory. I wanted a discussion.’
‘Hard to tell the difference, perhaps.’
One bright, hot Monday morning, Mike Mazzoni and his commanding officer, Captain X, reported to Alpha Station and swore under oath that Mazzoni had been involved in no illegal or dangerous behavior involving alcohol or dogs. They also swore that rumours to the contrary were the work of local insurgents working under the influence of terrorist cells. The affidavit was submitted. The legal problems appeared to have vanished. Then the letter from Washington came.
Jamal had requested a day of personal testimony before the Council from both Mazzoni and his captain. The Council had agreed to his request and had filed an appeal with both the Adjutant General’s office in Washington and the American embassy in Islamic City.
More court time. More red tape. All because some raghead wanted fifty percent that he didn’t fucking deserve. All because he couldn’t tell when a certain subject was closed.
‘If a man ever got into an accident, it would be a shame,’ said Captain X one morning, to no one, as he slowly passed the table where Mike Mazzoni was eating breakfast.
xcix. If … breakfast
Yet another evidence-free calumny against the memory of Staff Sgt. Michael Mazzoni. Sounds of a stor
m.
He was gone and they could all speak freely again.
Ummi had at first been hesitant to say much about the prospect of her daughter’s returning to work at the BII, but the immense raise and the social status of their unexpected visitor went a long way toward overcoming her misgivings. She nodded at Fatima’s recapitulation of each point she had negotiated.
Two additional weeks of vacation, making up four now. Two days to be taken immediately, for the move. Fatima would report directly to Rai’d; she would never have to enter the compound again; she would receive an advance on her first month’s salary sufficient to pay off the outstanding debt on her sister Wafa’s house in the village of D—. Rai’d had granted all of this without hesitation before he left, leaving Fatima wondering what more she should have requested.
Ummi asked: ‘Does all this mean we can leave the city?’
There was happiness in Ummi’s voice and a new vulnerability, such that the question gave Fatima a strange sensation in her stomach. Not fear exactly. The queasy feeling of something important definitely being over. It was the first time in her life her mother had openly acknowledged Fatima’s role – obvious but unspoken over the past months – as head of the family.
‘Yes. As soon as possible,’ Fatima said, almost without missing a beat. And looked out the window at the fluttering bird that had soared away from its tree in search (she assumed) of food for its young.
Ummi supposed aloud that all the painful things likely to happen in Wafa’s village must surely have already happened. She sniffed and touched the tip of her nose and then her cheek with the back of her hand. Noura stared fixedly at some Intimate Companions that had congregated in the corner of the room.
Jihadi Page 14