I loved this man; he had a selflessness that was infectious. You never went hungry at Abu Ali’s, no matter how much money you had or didn’t have. He was Iraq at its best—stoic, solid, kind, and given to moments of ecstatic anger that was pure art. You haven’t seen anger unless you’ve seen an angry Iraqi—I admit, it is kind of beautiful to watch. It is so all-encompassing and passionate that you too wish you could get angry that way. It turns you into a believer.
“My heart will always stay in Baghdad. You know this, Abu Ali.”
We looked at each other for a while. Silent. There are things that are unspeakable. Men don’t talk about it—at least not inside a dining joint off a side street in Karrada, Baghdad. There had been a war once, and I’d run to it, because I thought that if I didn’t, the war would end, and I wouldn’t have my glory. I was sixteen and stupid. It didn’t take long before I was in an Iraqi prisoner-of-war camp. I spent twelve months there, until the eight-year war between us and the Iraqis ended, and it was another six months before I got home.
Suddenly I was a hero. I looked around and saw all the mothers holding pictures of their missing sons. Everyone wanted to hear good news from a boy like me. They wanted me to tell them I’d seen their sons in a camp or, at the very least, that I’d seen them die in front of me. The worst thing is the not-knowing. You stare into a mother’s eyes and you wish you could give them 100 percent proof, but you can’t. Maybe that was why I had accepted the MIA case ten years earlier. I was trying to make up for all the good and bad news that I couldn’t provide before.
I’d learned to speak Arabic in the camp. I’d learned that some of the guards were sadistic sons of bitches, and others would have given a sixteen-year-old boy the food off their plate if they could be sure they wouldn’t get in trouble for it. I’d come home, finished high school, studied for college, and began reading books and watching films only in English. After a year of college, I dropped out. That one year in the camp had made it hard to sit still. You’d think it would be the opposite, but it wasn’t. Why did I start reading only in English? After a while, I ran out of detective books to read in Persian translation. There were only so many of them. Dashiell Hammet . . . Raymond Chandler . . . I swear I could have taken my clients’ heads off when they asked if I’d read those writers. They were hitting a nerve, but for all the wrong reasons. After ten years of trying my hand at everything else, the day I announced I was opening a detective agency, my mother thought I had finally lost my mind. She had been watching some foreign TV show and called it post-traumatic stress.
Then, after two months, some guy from the municipality showed up and said exactly this: “Who do you think you are to open a . . . what? Detective agency?” He laughed in my face. “You were never even on the police force.”
Was there a law that said I had to be a police officer before becoming a private detective? The guy had no answer to that, and at the end of the day, I was a war hero—wasn’t I?
“You need a license,” he said.
“Is there such a thing here?” I asked.
“No,” he replied. “But I’ll make you one if you like.”
We agreed on a sum to get him and the municipality off my back, and therein was the beginning of my career as a PI in Tehran.
Now, back to Baghdad. Abu Ali was asking: “How can you leave your heart in a country that almost killed you and put you in jail?”
“Oh, Abu Ali. In my book, a man doesn’t salute a badge, he salutes the man underneath the badge. My heart is right here, in Iraq still.”
He smiled. “What brings you here then, aside from your heart and my teman wa marag?”
“I have a case that disturbs me,” I said.
“Shouldn’t they all?”
“No. Most are just about jealousy and boredom and greed. This one . . . I don’t know. It eats at me.”
“Let’s have it.”
I laid out several postcard-size photos that Abu Habiba had given me after our first meeting. It’s not my style to share the details of a case I’m working on with anyone. But this was Baghdad, not my native territory, and I needed all the help I could get. I could rely on Abu Ali.
He looked up at me questioningly. “Why are you chasing after some writings on a wall from a war that ended almost thirty years ago?”
“A man came to see me in Tehran.”
“An Iraqi?”
I nodded and told him the story, or as much of it as I’d pieced together from the photos and Abu Habiba’s words. Men had started getting murdered around Baghdad about a year earlier—strangled, necks twisted, laden with explosives and blown to pieces, burned, chopped up, faces melted by acid. The list went on. There was no shortage of murder in Baghdad the past thirteen years, but these were different. There was an MO. This was the work of a serial killer with a purpose. Each time, he (and I could only assume it was a he) left a calling card: a photo of a graffitied wall with the names of the Iraqi soldiers who had left their mark there. One of the names always belonged to the victim. The killer had thirteen on record so far. He made sure his handiwork was discovered.
“And the police?” Abu Ali asked.
“Abu Ali! You know better than me how many bombs went off in Karrada just this past month alone. How many dead? Sixty? A hundred? Two hundred? Even if the Baghdad police have the resources to go after a serial killer, which they don’t, I doubt they have the stomach for it right now.”
Abu Ali glanced outside. There was a roadblock just fifty meters down the street. There were so many roadblocks in Baghdad, you would have thought this was the safest city in the world. A roadblock, though, is a sure sign of weakness. It stops nothing. It is only decoration. A suicide bomber would not be deterred by that decoration.
“Who brought this case to you?”
“A man named Abu Habiba,” I told him. “He lives over by the Souk al-Gejara in Sadr City.”
“And this Abu Habiba travels all the way to Tehran to bring you his case? Why is this so important to him?”
It was the most obvious question in the world, and I realized I didn’t have an answer to it.
Abu Ali got up to attend to some customers and I continued staring outside. Next door at the café, Anwar Little was serving no less than nine cups of tea at the same time. Anwar could pour tea with his eyes closed; he could pour while standing; he could pour while upside down or with his arms wrapped around his torso and legs; he could make a tea glass roll off his side and land on his thigh, then proceed to pour with his teeth. A TV station from Dubai had once made a short documentary about him, then one day, while watching satellite television in Tehran, I’d seen that the famous Anwar Little of Karrada had been burned in a bombing. Now he was here again, with a half-scorched face that still did not stop smiling. He tossed four tea glasses in the air, caught them neatly on a tray, held the tray behind his back, and began pouring with the other hand. Not a drop of tea spilled. You had to love this country. And feel its pain.
It was why the Americans never stood a chance here.
* * *
Over the next couple of weeks I tried to see if I could find a pattern in where the killer had struck. It wasn’t hard to figure that all the victims had been staunch Saddam supporters. The writings on the walls literally said it all. When you came across something like, Saddam is the hammer and we are the nails—commandos of Tikrit Police—Ali al-Marsouli, Luay al-Toogh, Najmeddin al-Bakr, you knew these were not men who went grudgingly to war. They no doubt received every kind of bonus Saddam’s Baath Party regime offered in those days, and God help anyone who ran afoul of them. However, Luay al-Toogh was dead. He had been killed in the Mansour District, a Sunni neighborhood. Yet neither his name nor where he was killed told me anything of consequence. There was one guy from another photograph who had been killed in a staunch Shia neighborhood, Hayy-Ur. And I couldn’t figure out if the killer had lured the victims into these places (I didn’t think so), or what kind of access the killer had to so easily move into such wildly differen
t neighborhoods. There was a third question too: where did these photographs come from?
While I contemplated my puzzle, I also familiarized myself with where I was living. Abu Habiba had set me up near his place, in an apartment overlooking the souk. I had a bird’s-eye view of Gejara from my window and spent the mornings watching the quarter slowly come to life. Everybody knew each other; the section I was closest to was mostly stalls selling household plastic goods from Iran, and clothes and shoes from Turkey. Abu Habiba would visit me each morning and we’d have the same breakfast of bread with fresh cream, hard-boiled eggs, and tea. Only once did he ask if I was making progress with my research. Otherwise, he left me alone and went to visit with one of his two wives; one lived on this side of the souk and one on the other side. Another time, he took me to the mechanic’s shop he partly owned, deep in the bowels of Sadr City, where for dozens of blocks in each direction there was nothing but car graveyards and repair shops. Two of his sons were there—tough-looking young men who smiled encouragingly and tried their hands at speaking in stumbling Persian.
As it turned out, being in Baghdad was also an opportunity to simply run away from myself. I could get lost in the sounds of this long-suffering city. Twice in the last year, female clients in Tehran had told me in no certain terms that they wanted to sleep with me. Maybe they thought if their husbands could have extramarital affairs, so could they. And who better than the guy you hire to find out the truth? I disliked myself for saying no to them, and disliked myself equally for thinking that I should have said yes. Business had been getting better over the past couple of years, but I went to the office with a dread of some sort—that maybe one day I’d wake up and have to settle for a real job. Maybe my mother had been right, and I had trauma of some sort from the war and the incarceration. In Baghdad, there were so many men who had either been in a recent war or were still at war right now—to think about these things was ridiculous. It was like wondering why you didn’t get your after-dinner dessert when everybody around you hadn’t had a proper meal in two months.
I needed an ear to speak to and went back to Karrada to find Abu Ali. Even as I turned onto the street, something was not quite right. Soon I was standing in front of the shell of what had been the restaurant. The teahouse next door where Anwar Little had worked was also just a skeleton of half-burned debris. No point asking what had happened. I hadn’t been watching the news and no one needed to tell me—just another bombing in Karrada. Maybe my face betrayed something, because just then, a regular came up to me and said: “He didn’t make it. Not this time.”
“Who?” I asked.
“Abu Ali.”
“What about Anwar Little?”
“They didn’t find even a pinkie.”
I walked away.
Why had I come to Baghdad? The money I was getting from Abu Habiba hardly covered my travel and food. What did I think I’d find here? The answer to a war I should have never been in thirty years earlier? I went inside Ridha Alwan Café and ordered one of their famous bunduqs. Writers and TV people sat at different tables with no care in the world—or more likely with all the care in the world. No sign that a few blocks from here Abu Ali’s was no more. How did these people go on? I couldn’t figure it then, and I can’t figure it now.
On my second bunduq, I laid out the photos on the table and examined them for the hundredth time. They were pictures from a book—but this was the first time I caught that. In the bottom right-hand corner of one of the photos, there was a very faint trace of a page number: 77. This was negligent and amateurish of me; why hadn’t I seen it before?
* * *
The next morning, I didn’t ask Abu Habiba anything about a book, but spent several days roaming the weapon-sellers area of the Maridi Souk in Sadr.
“You never buy anything here, so why do you keep coming back?” The guy who asked this was an AK parts dealer who had a stall in the far corner of the weapons lane. He had the look of a sad middleweight boxer who knew he’d never graduate to the big leagues. He’d never sell a Glock pistol for $2,500, and had to settle for hawking refurbished parts of AKs in a half-hidden corner of the market.
The first thing I did was buy several grips, magazines, and rail side mounts from him. I paid twice what he asked for, and when his eyebrows furrowed and he came close enough that I could smell the onion from his lunch, I told him: “I have a few pictures I want you to look at.”
The spare-parts dealer quickly confirmed what I’d begun to suspect—the murders had barely been reported. He said he’d know if they had been, and there was no reason not to believe him. The puzzle was changing. Why was Abu Habiba so hell-bent on discovering a killer no one cared about? In fact, most of the people in a place like this souk in Sadr City would have applauded the deaths of former Saddam lackeys.
The next day, I went by the Tigris and old Mutanabbi Street. The celebrated booksellers’ quarter was bustling again. When I’d been here last, it was pretty much a no-go area. I have no other word for it, except to say it was heartwarming—to see books in the stalls and shops and on the sidewalks of this quarter of Baghdad—after dealing with Abu Ali’s death. But I wasn’t here to be a literary tourist. I started from one end of the street and worked my way down, showing the photos to every bookseller I found. Most just shook their heads and wouldn’t give me the time of day, and I couldn’t afford to buy something from each one so they might deign to give my pictures a second glance.
I was working my way back toward the old Shabandar Café when a young guy with an unlikely ponytail and devilish sideburns gave a long glance at one of the photos, then looked at me. “Yes, this is from a book,” he observed. “But it’s not a book that was printed here or that you’ll find in Mutanabbi. I saw a copy of it at the Tehran Book Fair last year.”
“Can you order me a copy?” I asked.
He said he could.
* * *
Abu Habiba was leafing through the book. The title said it all: Memoir from the Neighbor. An Iranian photographer had taken the pictures just after Khorramshahr had been liberated. The only things that had been left behind in that port city were heaps of war slogans and graffiti by Iraqi soldiers who had occupied the place for more than a year and a half. I had marked the pages that were related to the murders in Baghdad; it didn’t take a genius to figure out the killer had picked his targets based on the men who’d written their names on the walls of Khorramshahr and were therefore a part of this book.
Abu Habiba took his reading glasses off and sighed. “You think the photographer killed these men?” he asked.
I smiled, almost embarrassed at how patently insincere the question was. “This book came out a quarter of a century ago. It was republished two years ago. The photographer . . . he died over a decade ago.”
“Then . . .”
“Abu Habiba, when did you last renew your passport?”
He gave me a confused look. “Two years ago. Why?”
“Can you bring your passport tomorrow morning?”
His voice went flat: “Why?”
“I want to see your visa stamps for Iran,” I told him.
“To prove what?”
“To see how many times you’ve been there in the past couple of years,” I told him. “And to find out if you happened to visit a few bookstores or the book fair.”
“Are you suspecting me?” he asked, clearly offended.
“No . . . yes.”
There was a tray of our usual breakfast food between us, and we could hear the sounds of the souk down below. Birds chirped on a nearby roof, where a woman was laying out some laundry. I could see her silhouette from where I sat. I had thrown something into the wind, not at all sure if what I suspected was even remotely true. But now, suddenly, I was sure. It may have been the way Abu Habiba reacted—a combination of disingenuousness, curiosity, and something akin to pleasure at having been discovered. It was an odd moment, made all the more odd by Abu Habiba taking a Colt pistol out of his pocket and setting it
between us.
“I served, like I told you, seventeen years in Badr. I can kill you right now for what you accuse me of. No one will know or care,” Abu Habiba said.
“Why did you go all the way to Tehran and bring me here? This is what I can’t understand. Do you have a copy of the book? Did you buy it in Tehran in the last couple of years?”
“As a matter of fact, I do have a copy of the book,” he answered, standing up. He looked very tall all of a sudden—imposing, dangerous, yet strangely vulnerable and bewildered at the same time. I didn’t know whether to fear him or feel sorry for him.
“Abu Habiba, what’s going on?” I asked, bewildered myself.
He took his gun and walked out, leaving me with a long day ahead in a Baghdad that felt a lot less friendly than an hour before.
* * *
The next morning, when Abu Habiba came back with our breakfast, I had my bag packed.
“I booked a seat on the midnight flight.”
“I can’t let you go,” he muttered.
“I have no idea why I’m here. I have a business I have to run back in Tehran,” I replied.
“Here!” He threw another photograph onto the floor between us. I picked it up. Page 92. He hadn’t even tried to hide the page number this time. Two names appeared in the photo: Mahdi Kadhim and Osama Ben Zayd. There was a nonsensical sentence below it that read: The Fallujah people martyr path in heat.
I stared into his eyes. “Which one did you kill?”
“Huh?”
“Which one?” I repeated.
It was as if he were speaking through a medium: “Mahdi . . . Mahdi Kadhim. May . . . he . . . burn . . . in hell.”
I grabbed my bag and tried to walk past him, but he reached for my hand. “Do you not want to know where it took place? It happened yesterday, after I left you.”
I raised my voice: “I don’t give a damn where Mahdi Kadhim was killed or when! I’m leaving.”
“I did it at Madinat al-Tib, Medical City. It was a beautiful job. The man had gone to get his eyes checked. So I started with his eyes.”
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