Baghdad Noir

by Samuel Shimon

  I tried to release myself from his grip, but he was too strong. I realized in that moment just how broad-shouldered and powerful Abu Habiba really was. There was a mole on the side of his nose. He had a habit of squeezing it sometimes. He did it now. I kicked him hard. My foot caught him in the pelvis but he didn’t budge.

  “I can’t let you leave. You have to catch this murderer,” he pleaded.

  Maybe this was all a dream, or I was losing my mind. Down below, on the street, the familiar song of the roaming gas-cylinder van settled into the neighborhood. I sat down.

  My voice was tired, fed up: “What do you want from me, Abu Habiba?”

  “Catch me. Please.”

  “No one cares about these murders,” I said. “They care about the bombings in Sadr, in Karrada, in Bab al-Sharqi, in Zayouna. You hardly even make the news. Do you want to make the news? Is that what you want?”

  “No. I don’t want news. No news. I want . . .” Abu Habiba didn’t go on and we sat in silence. Minutes may have passed before he blurted out: “They deserved to die! I was in exile seventeen years. Seventeen years I drank the blood of sorrow from Saddam and his men.”

  “How do you know that the men you killed were all Saddam’s people? You could be killing innocents. Men who were nothing but conscripts back then, men who didn’t want to be there at all.”

  “I know who they are. I do my research! I don’t go after just anyone. I have files. I worked in the Ministry of Interior for six years after I came back. I worked in Defense too.”

  He sounded so logical when he spoke. As if his having been in the Interior Ministry absolved him of wrongdoing. I wasn’t sure what to say or do. I was on thin ice and knew it. One wrong step and, instead of thinking of me as his confidant, he’d grab that pistol and kill me. Even if I managed to wrest the weapon from him, what then? This was his town. Everybody down there in the souk was probably his first or second or third cousin.

  Also, to be perfectly honest, I didn’t care. I didn’t care if he killed another fifty of these men. Men like them had trapped me in an internment camp for a year. I’d been a dumb teenager and shouldn’t have volunteered to fight. But they’d attacked us, hadn’t they? Men like Abu Habiba had fought for our side, and now he had an impulse he couldn’t control. I understood him. I understood his pain. They’d leveled Khorramshahr, and when they left it, there were only wild dogs remaining in that once-flourishing city—dogs and the piss stains of men like Mahdi Kadhim and Osama Ben Zayd. Why shouldn’t Abu Habiba kill them? Let him! I had a mind to help him do his work even faster, with more efficiency—though he seemed to be doing quite a fine job on his own.

  We just talked. We talked about cars, about Abu Habiba’s children and grandchildren. We talked about the war, about my internment, about his years fighting to liberate his own country. We talked politics, the Sunni-Shia divide. We talked about the Kurds. We talked about women. We talked about the guns and cell phones we preferred to use. We talked about my work as a private investigator. We talked about what a shithole Saddam had left of Khorramshahr after the Iranians finally ran him out of there. We talked about what a perfect disaster Saddam had been. We talked about the disaster that followed Saddam, namely the Americans. We talked about Beirut and Istanbul, two cities that we both had a weakness for. We talked about the afterlife, and God, and the meaning of the martyrdom of Imam Hossein, peace be upon him.

  When the muezzin’s call for midday prayer came, Abu Habiba stood up to wash his hands and get ready. I did the same, because I didn’t want him to feel alone. We prayed together. I could have taken him then, while he was praying. I was praying behind him, and there was nothing stopping me from grabbing the gun that he laid to the side, and then clobbering him over the head with it. But I didn’t do that. Instead, I just prayed. And when we were done, we sat back down, facing each other once more.

  “Is this why you called me here, just to share in your secret?” I asked him.

  “No,” he replied.

  “Why, then?”

  “I need you to do something for me.”

  “What?”

  “Stop me. Please. Stop me from doing what I’m doing,” he said, desperation rising in his voice.

  “You think you’re committing a crime?”

  “No. Not a crime.”

  “What, then?”

  He spoke softly, slowly: “I’m not sure God approves of what I do.”

  “I can tell you right now that He doesn’t. I’m sure of it. So why do you do it?”

  “Because I can’t help it,” he whispered.

  “Just throw away the files from the ministry. You have a big beautiful family, Abu Habiba. You have grandchildren who adore you. You spent seventeen years in the wilderness and now you’re finally home. Why do you want to throw it all away?”

  “Nobody cares about those dead men,” he murmured. “I can keep doing what I do.”

  “Then why are we having this conversation?”

  “I want someone to stop me.”

  “How?”

  He grabbed the pistol again and pushed it toward me.

  “I can’t kill you, Abu Habiba,” I said. “You know that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I don’t make a habit of killing my clients.”

  “I’m not a client. I’m a murderer.”

  It was like speaking to a child. I took the gun, got up, and laid the thing back in front of him on the floor. “You’ll have to stop yourself. I can’t do it for you.”

  There were tears in his eyes. He’d had to reach way beyond his comfort zone to find someone like me. He had reached all the way to the country next door. I still didn’t know exactly how he’d found me, but he had; and it didn’t matter now. Nothing made sense. Why did Abu Ali’s place have to go up in smoke while I was here? Why not last year or five years earlier? I had no luck when it came to Iraq. Being their prisoner had sucked away my youth, and coming here on the job had drained my spirit and reminded me of all the lives Saddam had wasted—including Abu Habiba’s life, and my life, and even the lives of all those young Americans in uniform, who’d been sent here to die or go crazy.

  As I closed the door behind me, I heard his whisper: “Please, my friend, your flight is ten hours from now. Talk to me still. I don’t want to do this anymore. I will have to answer to God.”

  I hope you answer to someone—God will do! I thought to myself.

  I imagine it won’t always be this way, but in the year 2016, the year of my story, I got on my airplane at Baghdad International Airport only after passing through no less than seven security checkpoints, the first one starting a good few miles before I even got anywhere near the airport proper. Somewhere along the line I simply ran out of steam. My heart was not in it. How many more men was Abu Habiba going to kill? The crux of it was that I caught myself siding with him again; it wasn’t the men he killed that I cared so much about, but Abu Habiba himself. I found myself worrying about his mental state. I’d known a few Badr guys in my time. Good men, fine soldiers. They’d given up every comfort, for years and years, just like Abu Habiba, to fight against a beast of a man who fancied Stalin as a role model. They’d finally won. It was a strange and roundabout win, because it had something to do with the Americans, who had subsequently reduced the country to an oil-pumping urinal. But, for better or worse, there it was! And Abu Habiba, this serial-killing granddad of fifty—I could not let him go on suffering. I truly cared about him. He was my man, not the victims. Fuck the victims!

  I took a cab to Gejara. I was almost happy to be going back. It had felt as if I were betraying the Iraqis and Baghdad, and the memory of men like Abu Ali and Anwar Little, by leaving like that. There was unfinished business and it wasn’t only about Abu Habiba. It was about myself: I’d been carrying a burden since I was sixteen, a love and hate for a people I’d fought against and who had imprisoned me. I’d been too young back then to know that I was suffering. But I was old enough now to know that Abu Habiba was.
I had to do something for Iraq and Baghdad—and do it quietly—then take my leave. I didn’t know what I could do; I just hoped that I would know when the time came to do it.

  Hearing again the relentless sounds of the fruit hawkers in Jamila made me positively ecstatic, and I felt even better when I realized I still had the key to the place in Gejara in my pocket. When I opened the door, he was still there. The entire quarter’s electricity was, as often happened, out. Abu Habiba was not using the emergency light, but a candle lit his lower chin, and he held a long knife in his hand.

  “I knew you’d come back,” he said.

  “What do you plan to do with that knife?”

  “Tonight’s the night.”

  “Abu Habiba, last night was the night too, it seems. Can’t you at least pace yourself?” As I kept up this ridiculous conversation, I wondered to myself what page in the book of photographs the next victim appeared on.

  “This man tonight . . . do you know what he does? He collects food and medicine for the men fighting up north right now,” Abu Habiba shared. “He pretends to be one of us. But I know his history. I have read his file. I know what he did thirty years ago.”

  “Let it go,” I demanded.

  “He is not even in that book of photographs. But I know about him. He’s like a disease among us.”

  “My friend, listen, you would have to kill half the men on Earth if you keep going this way. No one is perfect. Sometimes men do things and they are not proud of it.”

  “But this man . . . he will settle his debts tonight,” Abu Habiba vowed. “He’s here—we don’t even have to drive.”

  * * *

  We traveled the maze of the souk in semidarkness. People were closing up shop to head to the mosque for evening prayer. The harsh sound of electric generators penetrated the alleyways. Men greeted Abu Habiba and he greeted them back. I had pulled my cap on as far down as I could, hoping in this low light no one would know or recognize me. The strong diesel smell of the generators turned my stomach, as always, and I tried to imagine what it would have been like had Abu Habiba and I fought side by side three decades earlier during the war, instead of meeting only now—too late to repair any damage and be of help to one another.

  The back of the souk opened out to an area where men grilled masgouf over a half-dozen flames. The fish made my stomach growl. If I decided to turn back, I still had a good six hours before the flight. But instead I followed Abu Habiba’s deliberate steps. We moved past the fish, and another small mosque, and more closed-up shops and stalls, until we came to a quiet area where an idling pickup truck’s headlights illuminated the back of a small government building, its wall flanked by a pile of garbage. Boxes of dates, bananas, apples, flatbread, onions, tomatoes, frozen chicken, and red meat were all stocked in the back of the truck.

  “This man pretends to be one of us—helping our brothers up north fight Daesh scum,” Abu Habiba whispered. “But he’s not. He changed his name. He changed everything. He became another person and thought he could get away with it. But I have his file. I have it on me. I told you before.”

  “Where is he?”

  “He’ll come out.”

  I felt illegitimate. I had felt a lot of things in my life, but never that, not even when I first opened the detective agency without a clue how to go about it. “What if you’re wrong?”

  “I’m not wrong. I tested him,” Abu Habiba answered confidently. “I told him I knew who he was. I told him that he must bring me money at this hour or I would inform on him. I told him I would leave a copy of his file in a safe to be opened by the police, and by my family, in case something happened. He is scared. He told me to meet him in this deserted place.” Abu Habiba paused for a second and listened to the sounds around us. “Here,” he said, giving me his pistol. Then he told me to move into the shadows.

  Now I felt as absurd as I had felt when that American Stryker had trained its gun on us ten years before. I wasn’t sure what to do. So I waited. And it didn’t take long for our man to emerge. He was smaller than I had imagined he’d be. Short and thin, with a white shawl draped over one arm. He wiped his face with it and regarded Abu Habiba.

  “I’ve done nothing wrong,” the short man announced.

  “Not lately,” Abu Habiba said, with something of a sneer. I hadn’t heard that tone from him before.

  I expected an effort, the man pleading, telling Abu Habiba that times change and people change—anything—anything to get himself off the hook and keep Abu Habiba from committing another murder. I was rooting for this guy to make his case, make it for all of us. But he just stood there for a minute, and then started to put his right hand in the inside pocket of his coat. Abu Habiba walked swiftly over to the man, and I remained tongue-tied. I didn’t see the knife or the strike. He seemed to be holding the man up with the blade of the knife thrust deep inside his flesh. Abu Habiba twisted it deeper as I stepped in closer, and the man uttered a barely audible moan.

  “This is for all the martyrs who waited for this night,” Abu Habiba hissed, pushing the man back until he fell to the ground.

  The car was still idling. I felt exposed. I ran to the car and turned off the ignition. We were plunged into darkness. Way over where they were cooking fish, I heard the distant laughter of men. Abu Habiba’s gun was still in my hand. I went up to him. He was kneeling over the dying man. “Here!” I tried to hand him the pistol back. He pointed his cell phone flashlight at something. The man had been taking an envelope out of his pocket.

  “Money. This son of a whore was going to give me money. Take it!” He shoved the envelope of cash into my hand, and simultaneously I heard a sound that was something between a gurgle and a cough. The cell phone dropped to the ground but the flashlight remained on, shining away from us. I was momentarily blinded.

  “Abu Habiba, we need to get out of here. Get your phone and let’s go.”

  Nothing. I was struck by fear for a moment, then reached where Abu Habiba should have been. He was there, but horizontal, the gun by his side. I took out my own phone and flashed it. He’d slit his own throat—both carotid arteries, from the looks of it. It was the kind of deep, clean job that’s nearly impossible to do right. But if you did it, your victim didn’t stand a chance. It was said there were Daesh women up north who had been taught to do this with their teeth; they called them “biting women.”

  I heard footsteps, but they were distant, not coming this way. Abu Habiba remained prone, and there was still gurgling . . . but which one did it come from? I couldn’t tell if it was the other man or Abu Habiba. I brought my ears closer. Nothing. How could a man cut himself like that? Surely it didn’t come with practice! I stood still, in a desert of my own thoughts, not feeling much of anything, except that maybe it was time to leave Baghdad after all. Abu Habiba hadn’t given me a warning, hadn’t given me enough time to consider he was capable of killing himself with such fierceness. Had he only wanted me here as a witness to his last act? Or was I here to make sure this last act looked genuine? I put the envelope in my pocket, then took the shawl the man had worn and wrapped it around my hands. I rolled the two men into each other and my hand brushed against something thick underneath Abu Habiba’s shirt. I knew what it was—the dossier he had on the man. It would be a hell of a stretch to believe that a single knife had killed them both in a struggle. But Baghdad needed its heroes, and Abu Habiba would be one tonight.

  The private detective in me wanted to know a few things: One, how had Abu Habiba known I’d come back? And two, had I not come back, would he still have carried out this murder-suicide? Had the hour been fixed, or were we in some random loop of belated vengeance that wanted me to be the last man standing? There were too many variables, and because this was Baghdad, and all the security checkpoints in the city didn’t mean a thing if your time had arrived, I chose to leave my questions for another day. Even if that day was never to arrive.

  I went to the back of the truck and picked out a carton of tomatoes and bananas. I
dumped the produce over the corpses, along with the knife and the gun. My clumsy way of creating a scene of struggle, I suppose. I’d have to get rid of that bloodied white shawl somewhere between here and the airport. Or, more likely, between here and the next checkpoint—plenty of time for my midnight flight. And if they ever brought me back here to explain what had happened (I doubted that they would, since Abu Habiba needed to be made a hero), I would just tell them that some of us have known the kind of pain that requires a few more killings before you’re truly done.

  This story was originally written in English

  Post-Traumatic Stress Reality in Qadisiya

  by Hadia Said

  al-Qadisiya District

  For Jalil and Sumer

  The First Day

  He said he’s coming tomorrow and affirmed his arrival dozens of times by phone, on WhatsApp, and via that damn attorney. He asked me to trust him—and I want to. Indeed, I need to trust him, and not just him, but all the demons claiming a piece of this pie.

  I know full well that it’s my pie and that I’m the one who worked, struggled, and wore myself out constructing it from the ground up. The ground? No—sorry—from a rocky hole in the earth. I leveled the ground and built a foundation for a house, then added walls. Next came the roof, followed by an entire ground floor. After that, I added the upper story. All of this was accomplished by matching my labor with that of my unfortunate late sister, Nabiha. She saved up dinars from her paltry salary, while I exhausted my arms, time, health, and . . . what else?

  Never mind. What matters is that he comes and that the final act of this comedy concludes—meaning the house in Qadisiya returns to its rightful owners.

  Yes, yes, yes—you thieving relatives and strangers. You swarmed into the house like flies, after it became a paradise—and we left like frightened mice instead of migratory birds. God forbid! I never was a mouse. Everyone knows that I held out steadfastly, till my grandmother said: “Go! Don’t be afraid. I have the title to the house, and it will always be safe in my pocket or Nabiha’s.”