Jihadi

by Yusuf Toropov

  c. the room

  The Album knew (though I did not) that a blackout would darken our little compartment of Motel 6, as indeed it has. No lights visible elsewhere. Writing this on battery power! Need to secure perimeter. Back soon. Storm still.

  In the parking lot outside a mosque far too small to accommodate his purposes, Abu Islam led the late-evening prayer before perhaps seven hundred sweating people. Then, after his own remarks, which he had delivered with a bullhorn, he asked the congregation to listen to a few important words from his wife about an American she had encountered.

  She took up the bullhorn and announced that she had seen an American urinating upon the Koran, swearing vile oaths against it all the while and predicting the literal, global obliteration of the faith. Her pronouncements spread like a flame through the city.

  One of her pronouncements in particular caught the public imagination and was much repeated: ‘He came from nowhere, this American. Like Shaitan. And he will return like Shaitan.’

  Unbidden, a restless crowd began to jostle in the darkness around the American embassy, not quite so calm or organized or patient as before. The Americans turned on the emergency lighting. Several thousand people, many of them dressed in the long white cloth favoured by Abu Islam, could be seen milling about, failing to disperse as ordered. Water cannons did not clear the street. They seemed only to draw more white robes.

  The next morning, with white still surrounding the embassy, Abu Islam’s heavyset wife stood on a car parked in front (a Lincoln Continental, as it happened) and used her megaphone to repeat, with previously undisclosed, thrilling details, the story of the man who had slandered the faith and urinated upon the Koran. Her account had gained potency. Its pacing had improved with every retelling and it was now as eloquent as the tail of a rattlesnake.

  She had seen these events herself. She was prepared to swear it was the very man who had just been taken into custody for murdering a father and his daughter in the street in broad daylight. She had seen that crime too. And so forth.

  She assured the crowd she had many sources. This infidel, she predicted, would soon be returned to America. Heads in the crowd shook. Voices shrieked ‘No!’ Fists shook in time with her chants of Allahu Akbar.

  Somewhere within the tightening knot of dissatisfied citizens, a man stumbled while attempting to extract himself from the centre of the throng. Word spread that he was a recently unmasked spy eager to return to his American handlers.

  In fact, he was a tow-truck driver who had been summoned, via his cell phone, to retrieve a crashed vehicle.

  Someone shouted that the spy must be stopped.

  Someone else repeated the order.

  Soon it rang out everywhere.

  Before he was a block away from the embassy gate, some faithful citizen or other pulled the man to the ground, produced a box-cutter and slit his throat.

  The crowd, dense and sweaty in the morning heat, withdrew on sudden instinct from the space surrounding the prone body, like the tentacles of a sea anemone retracting when touched by a foreign object. Whoever had severed the jugular withdrew too. The man bled to death in the street, but the heavyset woman kept shouting into her megaphone. Worshippers were advised to wear white when attending the New Imam’s sermon that afternoon. Brothers only, please.

  The dimensions of that day’s crowd of worshippers at Abu Islam’s formal Friday sermon became difficult to calculate. All that could be said for certain was that people occupied all available space on all the sidewalks and all the streets for at least four square, downtrodden city blocks in the poorest, grimmest and oldest sector of the city. Maybe there were ten thousand of them – overwhelmingly male in proportion, whatever their number – waiting as the necessary acoustic adjustments were made. They remained in their ranks, rapt and silent, as Abu Islam finally gave his salaam and began outlining the moral obligation to obliterate soldiers and anyone else born in the United States, and not stop doing so until the American military presence in the Islamic Republic was broken.

  A few police officers predicted an uprising that afternoon.

  When the time came, eighty-five minutes later, the sea of white robes prayed toward Mecca without incident. The worshippers bowed and supplicated in straight lines that intersected disjointedly with the crooked, filthy and ancient streets they occupied. They shone in the harsh sun. They waited for instructions. They did not disperse.

  Secular commentators began referring to the white-clad crowd that followed Abu Islam as ‘the great White Beast’.

  ‘Your Mr. Bush Two,’ the Raisin said, extending a long gaze out the tiny window and over the cityscape, ‘is a Bolshevik and nothing more.’

  There was no smoke at the moment. They had reached a compromise: staring at the walls for what turned out to be the better part of a day. The Raisin’s sudden pronouncement suspended itself in midair. Outside, visible from the window, the gathered white crowds issued well-coordinated shouts.

  ‘How do you reckon that?’ leaning, yellow-smocked Thelonius asked at last, aslant the window. The Raisin looked satisfied, as though tired of the distant noise and glad to have a replacement for it.

  ‘Two and a half years ago,’ the Raisin answered, not looking at Thelonius, ‘your Mr. Bush Two ordered his armies and his bombers to dismantle this country and overthrow our leader. A bad man. A bloody man. A man to be despised. Many of us were in the streets, shouting for joy, after he was hanged. But the question remained: what, exactly, was to come next? Not the Islamists who had preceded him? Then what?’

  Thelonius shrugged and looked away.

  ‘Your Mr. Bush Two said it was more satellite dishes and more computers and more music and more women naked on the billboards. The young men scale the billboards now and rip off the images, sheet by sheet. They destroy music where they find it. They chant in the streets for the death of your Mr. Bush One and Mr. Bush Two. And, the guard says, for your death.’

  At these words, Thelonius felt his insides tighten and go cold. A drumbeat took over his head. The Raisin looked him over, as though assessing a captured insect. There was more noise from the late-afternoon street.

  ‘I still don’t see how that adds up to Bolshevism,’ Thelonius said, in a careful, even tone.

  ‘The earliest Bolsheviks comprised a loosely knit gang of thugs,’ the Raisin continued, more than prepared for the challenge. ‘They had convinced themselves the people of Russia would rise up in righteous rage and overthrow their oppressors if only Czar Alexander II were assassinated. One morning, they stationed three men with bombs to follow the Czar as he went to observe a military roll call.

  ‘As it started to snow, the Czar emerged from his carriage. The first thug threw his bomb. It misfired. The second thug threw his bomb. It blew the Czar’s legs off.

  ‘The Czar died that night. A third thug had been ready with a third bomb in case the first two failed.

  ‘But the people of Russia did not do as the thugs believed they would. Even though the serfs were oppressed. Even though there was poverty and abuse of human rights. Even though there was torture of political prisoners. Even though there was oppression and had been oppression for centuries, the people declined to play their role. They did not gather in the streets and demand the abolition of the Czars. They refused to follow the script the thugs had handed them.

  ‘The Bolsheviks served only their own theory. Not the people.

  ‘The assassination of the Czar did not ignite any progressive revolution. It left the nation numbed, confused, humiliated, paralyzed. It produced nothing.

  ‘If you had been there that morning, if you had looked through the falling snow at the carnage outside the Czar’s carriage, you would have seen that third bomber shivering in his boots, clutching his undischarged explosive, imagining himself the agent of history. There is always some idiot Bolshevik in the crowd.

  ‘Your Mr. Bush Two is such an idiot, such a Bolshevik. He imagines a new kind of society, or thinks he does. But he believes
he can impose it by sheer force of will. He imagines history is a script he has written. And yes, there are Bolsheviks out there, in our streets, too, waiting with bombs in their hands.’

  The Raisin took a pair of cigarettes from a box labelled Elite Tobacco, then stopped and put them back and said, ‘Sorry. In honour of our agreement: not until sunset.’ And a smile Thelonius could not manage to return. His hands were trembling.

  ‘Are they really calling for my death?’

  The Raisin listened, nodded, and waited for the sun to set.

  The sound of the Raisin mustering the rough consonants of the Koran still set Thelonious’s teeth on edge. He shifted back and forth uneasily on his cot. A few minutes later, the two cigarettes glowed. Then, when they were extinguished on a rough palm, Thelonius heard the Raisin gasping and wrestling onto the bed, and then, finally, he heard the Raisin snoring.

  ci. heard

  Heart still racing. I can hear it. Literally hear the noise of my heart. Twenty-seven minutes spent near our doorway in the security stance. I held that purloined grey-handled steak knife aloft the whole time, switching hands as necessary. For you, Prudence. Then the power returned, the lamps reignited. Bright again. I feared the worst. False alarm. Heavy, unseasonable desert tempest outside. Power line down somewhere, according to Clive, who checked in personally, tried to kiss me. Still a bit jittery. Not from that, though.

  Mike Mazzoni’s incident report noted that a local man, Jamal F–, also known as Jimmy F–, wandered into U.S. munitions storage facility DJL-66 late one night, presumably intoxicated. At the time of the incident, Staff Sergeant Mazzoni, the officer on duty, had issued a clear order for the individual to stop and raise his hands in the air and cease all movement. This order had been issued in the native language. The individual continued movement of a threatening nature. Staff Sergeant Mazzoni repeated his order. The individual made an approach toward Staff Sergeant Mazzoni and intimated in English that he had a firearm. The report stated that he then reached inside his clothing.

  At that point, Sergeant Mazzoni discharged his weapon in self-defence.

  The concealed firearm had been found in the individual’s clothing. The body had been returned to the family.

  cii. The body

  Excuse me. There are stumblers into unauthorized areas and threateners of our men. There are regions of the world that we may set apart. We need not make martyrs of every single one of these people. They do die from time to time.

  After this report was filed, the case was closed.

  All of this grass had been soaked in blood.

  Mother and Noura were shopping, which left Fatima to deal with the neglected lawn. No trace of the flechette attack was visible now, praise God, a circumstance probably due, at least in part, to the vigorous rainstorm that had cloaked the suburbs yesterday. She was glad it had rained, but the thought that the overgrown tangle beneath her feet had been fed with her sister’s wounds and the wounds of others still sickened her.

  ciii. rainstorm

  Clive ‘keeping an eye’ on me ‘till the storm passes’. In case I ‘need help’. Something amusing about all this. We will keep an eye on each other.

  She called the number her mother had given her for a gardener, heard an old man answer the phone, introduced herself and asked if he could come in and mow the place immediately. Told that he would be at least three days in arriving (he was now the only landscape man in the district, and his list of outstanding obligations was long), she thanked him, confirmed him for the following weekend and went to the shack out back. There she rummaged around.

  When she came out, she had a machete in her hand.

  She set to work on the wet grass beneath the spot where she had been told that Wafa had fallen. She worked her way outward in concentric circles. Within forty minutes the portion of the home visible to the winding road, at least, was presentable again. Not manicured, to be sure. But presentable. Even clean again. Her back ached and there were blisters on two of her fingers, and she had piled a great heap of grass in a corner.

  civ. clean

  Clive suggests I take a bath to calm down, but that damnable nigger woman did not bother to scrub out the tub. I informed him of as much. Did he relieve her of her key? He isn’t sure. He might have. Oh, he makes my blood just boil. I order him out of the room.

  She was glad to see it clean.

  Nine Bearded Glarers were selected at some point as Abu Islam’s bodyguards and advisers. Discreetly, they located the necessary pills and liquor to support his work, citing among themselves an obscure ruling about the demands of necessity in wartime.

  No one was quite sure where they came from, but evidently the New Imam approved of them. They constituted an inner circle that gave the appearance of having been in place for months or years, surrounding their man in perpetual shifts of three and providing brisk, elaborately polite clarifications to curious members of the congregation on such issues as access to the New Imam (none was available at present), the status of the New Imam’s family (they were well), and what should be said or done concerning inquisitive members of the congregation who appeared to be, and in fact were, spies (their names, whereabouts and images, if known or possessed, should be forwarded directly to the bodyguards of the New Imam). They settled disagreements in his name and forwarded all their decisions to him. Some of them he reversed. Most of them he let stand.

  cv. stand

  I was up and in position for far too long. That little test of the emergency response system left my hips, my knees and my turgid feet throbbing. Here they are again: my sad, bare, puffy, unworshipped feet.

  (After his commanding officer casually mentioned the possibility of an accident befalling someone, but before the accident actually took place, Mike Mazzoni made certain remarks to Jamal. He made them while holding Jamal face-down on the ground and digging one knee into his back. Jamal, his mouth duct-taped, did not respond intelligibly at any point.)

  Jimmy. Let me bring you up to date. Everything out here is legal until I say otherwise. Nothing spots what you’re doing out here but me and this sky. (Here Jamal’s face tilted up wildly to embrace the sky of the Islamic Republic.)

  Does that sky look like it has a problem? (And plunged back down into the dust.)

  Rule number one under this particular sky: Don’t be the bait dog. That’s a dog you draw blood from on purpose, Jimmy. You tie that dog down, pull out your pocket knife, dig a hole clean through his paw, let him start bleeding. You want that scent of blood in the air.

  cvi. scent of blood

  All of this libel against the Mazzoni family provokes rapid page-turning, sours my mood. I’ve read this passage dozens of times by now, and I do so want a bath. Could have asked Clive to scrub it out, and I’m in no condition to do it myself. Damn. How many niggers are there in Death Valley, anyway? What are the odds?

  You want him bleeding all over the goddamned ring. Because that’s how you train the good dogs. By rewarding them for killing the dog that’s bleeding. That bait dog is going to die anyway, Jimmy. So sick and thin and scared and screwed up he won’t last a week out on the street. You know it just from looking at him. And that little pussy dog knows it, too.

  So you do that dog a favour. You get it over with tonight. And that dog becomes your bait. You throw a big glass jar on that bait dog’s head. That way he can’t defend himself and it’s all over a hell of a lot quicker.

  He is checking out tonight, Jimmy, and he knows it.

  So you throw him into the fighting cage with a real dog, and you watch your serious fucking gladiator dog get to work on that bait dog wearing the suicide jar. You watch your gladiator tear that bait dog to shreds. Then you give your gladiator the raw steak.

  Start off with two dogs in a cage, end up with one dog who knows how to win you money. That other dog died for the cause. The dog who dies for the cause is always the bait dog. Now, I may be a dog, Jimmy, but I am nobody’s goddamned bait dog. I am a fighting dog, and I may or may not mak
e it home, but I will run with the fighting dogs while I’m here. I know I will never have that jar over my fucking head. And Jimmy, you know you will.

  (And Jamal saw a handgun.)

  cvii. handgun

  With a salute to doo-wop that verges on religious devotion, John Lennon offers an ode to self-defence, to the silent gunslinger willing to take a stand for his freedom, to the great struggle against the forces of chaos and darkness: the brilliant track eight.

  cviii. track eight

  We know nobody can do us harm! Lennon knew – all four of them knew, but only he had the courage to admit in words – that violence was to be a prerequisite of the ninth great revolution, the revolution on behalf of the White Race, the revolution for which, you, dearest Prudence, would be reborn.

  25 Important Reminder

  From this point onward, never more than an initial pass on these notes. Much to be redacted before submission to Directorate. Some cut-and-paste here, all of which has to be double-checked. Placing this reminder to myself prominently, at the beginning of this chapter. Just in case memory fails.

  Becky Firestone refused to tolerate being at a disadvantage in any undertaking. She equated that with betrayal, with personal disrespect, with a certain unacceptable loss of control.