Baghdad Noir

by Samuel Shimon

  The autopsy in the forensic department later showed that Jibran had taken a mixture of poisonous herbs—a strange, rare mixture. According to the doctor who examined the body, this meant that Jibran had probably committed suicide.

  * * *

  Yasser kept the suicide theory to himself, and instead told the family that Jibran had suffered a heart attack—which many people expected, since he’d been drinking so much in recent years. He had finished off three-quarters of a bottle of Asriya arak every evening. His family’s attempts to make him cut down on this lethal intake had come to nothing. Cause of death: drinking. It was the logical conclusion.

  Jibran’s suicide remained a personal preoccupation of Yasser’s. He didn’t share it with anyone, not even his closest friends. He didn’t tell his other brother Tahseen, who was Jibran’s partner in a car repair shop on Sheikh Omar Street, close to Bataween.

  Tahseen had been having problems with Jibran over their stake in the workshop. Yasser thought they were both greedy and it was hard to see how either of them was more in the right than the other.

  At the funeral, Tahseen looked relaxed—no sign on his face that he was upset or grieving his eldest brother’s death. To Yasser, he almost looked relieved to be rid of a nuisance, though in recent months Jibran hadn’t really been annoying Tahseen as much as he annoyed his wife and children at home. He’d been spending a lot of time at home just drinking, and would often wake up with such a hangover that he wouldn’t stir till midday.

  * * *

  Several months after the funeral ceremonies ended, Yasser was the only person who was still troubled by Jibran’s death.

  Jibran’s family—his wife and daughters—didn’t waste their time. The sixth week after Jibran’s death, his wife knocked down the front wall of one of the rooms in the old house in Lane 7 and turned the room into a shop. Her teenage daughters sat in the shop till late at night—selling cigarettes, sweets, chewing gum, and other things that neighbors often needed.

  There was every reason to expect Jibran to fade gradually from Yasser’s memory, especially as he was busy at work, where he heard stories that were much more horrific; stories of vendettas and revenge killings and the strange crimes that began to take place in Baghdad after American forces occupied the city in April 2003. Murder in its many varieties was commonplace.

  Yasser was so busy with the killings, which could strike anyone at random, that the mystery of Jibran’s death did gradually recede into the background. After weeks of thinking about it, and trying to analyze the little evidence available on whether a crime had been committed, Yasser had not reached any definitive conclusions. Then something happened that revived his interest in the question of whether or not Jibran had been murdered.

  Yasser had read a succession of reports about similar deaths by means of the same substance that killed his brother. The people who died were generally old, some of them older than Jibran. There were no young people among the dead. Could it be that certain old men are prone to some form of suicidal depression? he wondered. Was it because of the war and the chaos?

  “These are crimes, and we don’t know how far this will go,” Yasser’s boss said, as he flipped through the autopsy reports on seven bodies. The bodies had turned up in recent weeks in circumstances roughly similar to the ones in which Jibran’s body had been found. They had died in bed or at tables where they drank. One of the victims was found kneeling at the door to his house, as if he were trying to knock but couldn’t because of the effects of the poison.

  With help from two of his assistants, Yasser questioned the families of the victims but couldn’t identify the source of the poison. Most of the families were unaware that the powder even existed.

  One man had told his wife about the powder and how effective it was, but he hadn’t told her where he had obtained it. The man’s widow was living alone in a dilapidated house near the Jewish synagogue in the middle of Bataween. She was morose, spoke curtly, and was unenthusiastic about dealing with strangers. Yasser kept trying to persuade her to open up, and eventually she told him something interesting.

  “He used to say that he wanted to feel remorse, and that this was a medicine that would make him feel remorse,” she revealed.

  “Why did he want to feel remorse?”

  “He’d had problems in the past that he didn’t want to tell me about,” she said.

  Yasser left the old woman to her memories and the darkness of her run-down house and went out into the street with his assistants. He had the distinct impression he had put his finger on some clue. This old woman’s husband had died in much the same way as Jibran, and probably for the same reason: a desire to feel remorse. It was a clue, but it wasn’t clear where it led. He put aside the reports, which concluded that these were merely cases of suicide by poison. But the cases weren’t completely closed as far as Yasser was concerned—not until the evening he met Hannoun al-Saher—also known as Hannoun the Magician.

  * * *

  Jumaa al-Nouri was a childhood friend of Yasser’s. He was an intelligent and adventurous young man, and everyone expected him to use his intelligence to improve his social and financial position. But he kept taking risks and engaging in unsuccessful commercial ventures; he ended up an alcoholic, living in a miserable room at a lodging house called the Happiness Motel—waiting for miracles. Despite the political turmoil that transformed the face of the country after April 2003, Jumaa didn’t change at all. During the day he worked as a clerk for a shipping company, and he spent the afternoon drinking in his room, sitting with his next-door neighbor, Hannoun the Magician.

  Hannoun’s situation wasn’t any better than Jumaa’s. He was a man in his fifties, and one of his legs had been amputated below the knee due to a disease he had contracted in prison, where he had spent more than ten years. His time in prison ended suddenly when the United States prepared to attack the regime—for mysterious reasons, Saddam Hussein had felt compelled to set all the prisoners free, emptying out the jails before the invasion began. When Hannoun emerged from prison, he found that his family had dispersed and his only son had left Iraq. Even the house where Hannoun had lived for years was no longer there. Yet Hannoun seemed unmoved; perhaps he already knew his family had fallen apart and that he wouldn’t find the house where he had grown up.

  Hannoun had been sentenced to prison for helping people avoid military service. He used to make amulets and talismans that supposedly saved soldiers on the run from arrest by the military police or by Baath Party members—who took on security functions in the towns. At the time, his case was blown out of proportion and Hannoun was held responsible for many soldiers deserting. The soldiers had supposedly believed that with Hannoun’s help, they would be able to escape, and soon the bars on Abu Nuwas Street and the nightclubs on Saadoun Street were full of young men avoiding the war, clinking glasses instead of shooting at the enemy. Hannoun was portrayed as a very dangerous man. Although he denied he was responsible for a single soldier’s desertion, the authorities sentenced him to life imprisonment.

  His reputation had reached the prison before he arrived, and he found the other inmates hovering around him, curious to discover what this extraordinary man could do for them. They all asked him to help them escape by giving them amulets that would prevent the guards from seeing them as they climbed the high concrete walls or slipped through the barbed wire. He didn’t want to give them the real reason why that was impossible: if he had had such powers, he wouldn’t have stayed trapped with them one minute longer. One old prisoner came up to Hannoun and sat in front of him as though he were a god or some highly influential imam. “I’ve been waiting for you,” the old man said. “You haven’t come to prison in vain. You’ve come in answer to my prayers to God.”

  As far as that man was concerned, Hannoun was a divine envoy, as he was for others—even the guards and cooks in the prison canteen. Everyone expected salvation at his hands—but he didn’t have anything real to offer them. The most he could do was help t
hem imagine life outside prison. In the absence of more realistic options, this delusion was perhaps a good solution, especially for those serving long sentences. Jumaa al-Nouri spoke about Hannoun at great length to Yasser, and it was clear that he admired the man and was fascinated by him.

  “You could ask him who killed your brother,” Jumaa said, without expecting Yasser to react to the offer. Maybe Jumaa had gotten the wrong end of the stick since his life was so chaotic; maybe he couldn’t think straight and believed the nonsense of soothsayers—but there was no obvious explanation for why his friend, a police officer, would believe such things. To put questions about a police case to a fortune-teller was clearly ridiculous.

  Yasser was sitting in Jumaa al-Nouri’s room, subjecting himself to blasts of warm air from the ceiling fan and looking at the flame from the small kerosene heater that kept sputtering because of the draft from the fan. Jumaa picked up a teapot from beside the heater and poured two small glasses without stopping his chatter.

  “He’s here in the room next door,” Jumaa told him. “People come and see him every day. He was well known before he went to prison, and when he came out, he soon regained his reputation. Someone like that couldn’t possibly just be telling lies, or else how could he be so popular?”

  “People will believe anything,” Yasser said. “Reading the future and discovering people’s secrets are like conjuring tricks.”

  “Let’s go and say hello to him before the weather cools down and people come flocking to see him.”

  * * *

  Jibran was killed by someone close to him.

  This sentence, attributed to Hannoun, stuck in Yasser’s head for many days. Jumaa al-Nouri, despite Yasser’s refusal, had taken the initiative to put the question to Hannoun, to try to find out who killed Jibran.

  Hannoun was well aware of the story and he didn’t wait long—to think, for example—before making his interesting pronouncement: “Jibran was killed by someone close to him.”

  Yasser couldn’t ignore this remark, although it seemed illogical to him. He thought it must be his brother’s wife. She had slipped some poison into his glass that night and made him quietly breathe his last at his table. Or it was his other brother, Tahseen, who wanted to get rid of him to obtain sole ownership of the workshop.

  He went back to Jibran’s house, sat down with his wife, and started a new round of questioning. Jibran’s room had been turned into a storage space for furniture and there were other changes to the house, making it livelier than it had been. The wife, deferential and composed, didn’t provide any new information. When Yasser looked deep into her eyes, he sensed she was telling the truth. She hadn’t done anything to her husband. She had suffered from his angry outbursts and the way he mistreated her, but she didn’t hate him. How could she hate the father of her children?

  Interrogating Tahseen didn’t work either. Nothing new. Hatred doesn’t lead directly to murder. Not as easily as that.

  * * *

  The weather was changing. The summer heat was rapidly easing off and the nights were becoming milder. Hannoun was drinking with Jumaa al-Nouri. Saadi al-Hilli’s tormented singing played in the background. Hannoun was less reserved than on previous nights. He chatted cheerfully, telling jokes and laughing at anything Jumaa said.

  Hannoun told Jumaa that for the previous ten years he’d been afraid of dying, but that now he wasn’t afraid of anything. All he could do was breathe in and breathe out, no longer wishing that the foot he had lost would come back, or that he could go back in time and be young and strong again. He no longer had a desire for women, and his body was letting him down more and more. He would probably die in his sleep in this miserable lodging house—but that in itself didn’t upset him or frighten him. He was now prepared to die, more than at any time in his past.

  “Why do you say that? We were just laughing and singing. What changed your mood?” Jumaa asked.

  “No, my mood hasn’t changed or anything—I’m just talking with you frankly.”

  “Really?”

  “I was afraid of dying before my enemies died.”

  “Do you have many enemies?”

  “Not many, but I did, though now they’re gone,” Hannoun said.

  Jumaa thought that his friend was a little drunk. He had knocked back more than usual, and since he was speaking so openly it didn’t seem right to interrupt him or leave the room before he had finished.

  Hannoun explained that he had found out who’d written the security report that sent him to prison. They were from his part of Bataween—two people from the ruling party—and after all these years, he’d also managed to find out the name of the officer who had questioned him and the name of the judge who had sentenced him.

  One of the Baath Party members who’d helped write the security report had been ambushed one night by a group of young men who were sons of his victims. They sprayed him with bullets, and his mangled body was found the next morning, thrown in front of the large Armenian church near Tayaran Square.

  The other Baathist was the original informer, and the person that Hannoun hated most of all. The man was an old neighbor of Hannoun’s family. He remembered the time when he used to play dominoes with the man in local coffee shops, or when they would help each other unload gas cylinders from the trucks that drove around selling them. He was almost a friend, though they didn’t exchange many words, and Hannoun had no idea why the man had dared to write that report about him helping people to escape military service. Perhaps he was jealous, or perhaps he desired Hannoun’s young wife. The name of that horrible Baathist was Jibran.

  Yes, he wanted to marry Hannoun’s wife—that’s why he had him sent to prison.

  The officer who had questioned him had lost his job in the de-Baathification campaign, but came back later under a political deal that reinstated a large number of junior officers. Unfortunately, this officer had also died before Hannoun could get to him. A car bomb had exploded close to the officer’s vehicle while he was standing outside his office, and his body was blown to pieces.

  The judge was just an old man, and he too died before Hannoun could take his revenge.

  Jibran was the sole survivor at the time, though deep down, he had hoped someone would kill him—pull the trigger and blow his head off with a single shot—rid him of his frustration and distaste for life.

  Hannoun had been absolutely sure about two of them: the security officer who interrogated him and the judge who sentenced him. But it wasn’t till later that he found out about the two Baathists who had written the report that led to his arrest.

  * * *

  One evening, before Jumaa al-Nouri moved into the Happiness Motel, Jibran suddenly came into Hannoun’s room. He greeted Hannoun and sat down opposite him like any other customer coming to have his fortune told or to get an amulet that would ward off the evil eye, secure a livelihood, divert stray bullets, or any other purpose that preoccupied people in Baghdad. It took Hannoun a long time to recognize the person sitting across from him, and when he realized it was Jibran, he treated him like a friend. He shook his hand and smiled at him, but Jibran didn’t smile back. He looked like someone who hadn’t been able to smile for ages. His face was frozen. He looked awful. He wasn’t at all the way he had been in 1980—smart and clean-shaven, with gelled hair, fancy aftershave, and expensive Italian shoes. Now he was just a rickety skeleton, more like a beggar or a tramp.

  Hannoun talked to him at length and found that his old neighbor was in a bad way—on the verge of madness. Jibran told him stories about how his old Baathist comrades in the area had been assassinated, then suddenly moved on to talk about how long his grandfather and father had lived. They were both over a hundred when they died, and he didn’t want to live to that age. He was afraid it might be hereditary. There wasn’t much that he wanted in this life. Even drinking was no longer enjoyable. Quite simply, he was an old man who wanted to die, and that’s why he had come to Hannoun.

  “I sent lots of people to
the front in the Popular Army,” Jibran told Hannoun. “I wrote hundreds of reports that led people to their graves. I did lots of horrible things. Why doesn’t anyone take revenge on me?”

  Hannoun didn’t know how to reply, and he didn’t know why Jibran was telling him about his death wish.

  “I want to feel remorse,” Jibran continued, “to cry about the terrible things I did, but it looks like I’m hopeless. I’m a demon, and I’ll admit to you right now that I enjoyed doing what I did. It was fun. It gave me an amazing sense of power and control. Is that what a normal person would say?”

  Hannoun remained quiet, waiting for Jibran to finish.

  “I think you’d be interested to know that it was me who had you put in prison,” Jibran confessed. “It was me who wrote the security report, with help from a comrade in the party. The two of us had you put in jail for fifteen years. Aren’t you going to hate me now?” He saw the signs of shock on Hannoun’s face.

  Hannoun hadn’t expected to find other men to take his revenge on, and yet a monster had appeared in front of him; by the logic that had governed him for many years, he had to take his revenge on Jibran. This was his opportunity. But how could he do it? He was an old man with an amputated leg. He didn’t have a gun with which to shoot Jibran. He couldn’t get up and strangle him. Even if he tried, he probably wouldn’t be strong enough to strangle him properly. What does this madman want? he wondered. Perhaps he was lying; perhaps he was just looking for someone to kill him and had chosen Hannoun at random.