Baghdad Noir

by Samuel Shimon

  Suddenly, we heard the sound of heavy gunfire. We were frightened; we had not been able to get used to the shooting since we came to Iraq, although it had entered the general climate of the country and the Iraqis no longer paid it any attention. Next, we heard an Iraqi voice beside us saying: “Don’t panic, dude! These are just firecrackers from a wedding in al-Karkh.” But we did not see a trace of fireworks or anything else in the sky.

  I turned to speak to Sabah, but she was no longer there. I looked around but could not find her.

  “Leave Sabah in peace. She isn’t your spoiled child,” Jamal said, noticing my concern. He laughed, and everyone else began to laugh with him.

  I waited a long time and busied myself talking to some younger people. After an hour had passed and Sabah had still not appeared, I began to feel anxious, but no one else seemed to notice. The corniche area gradually began to empty, the Iraqi families having gone home after the soap operas. As the crowd thinned out, the few remaining students noticed Sabah’s absence.

  At first, we figured that she had gone to walk by the river, as was her habit. Jamal took Nawal by the hand and they hurried along the riverbank, following Sabah’s usual path, while Ahmed went to search elsewhere. We conducted a visual sweep of the whole garden but we did not see anything. By now, it was almost two in the morning.

  “Sabah disappeared well before the shooting, but you didn’t notice,” said Da’ad.

  We went into nearby restaurants, passing quickly between the tables, asking about her; perhaps she had gone to use the telephone or the bathroom. Some of our other friends soon joined the search. We looked everywhere, to no avail. When we gave up for the night, Nuha said that the matter must be related to what had happened today at the dorm.

  Ahmed soon returned from the statue of Abu Nuwas, exhausted by crazy questioning from the Iraqi Intelligence Services about the wiretap story that had spread in the dorm earlier that day: Who spread the story? Who was there at the time? How did everyone react? What did Sabah say about it? This increased our own frenzy and we fell once again under the oppression of the state, just when we had thought we could go out to Abu Nuwas Street and rid ourselves of it. Khuddouj watched the scene coldly, scornfully, like she was not there with us at all—and she had been behaving that way since our arrival at the corniche.

  Eventually, Jamal returned with Nawal, both out of breath and shaking their heads, indicating that the search had been in vain.

  “Maybe Mohammad came and took her,” Ahmed guessed.

  We told him that it was impossible that Mohammad would come and not say hello to us, or join in the party. He was our friend too. Besides, we had a later appointment with him at the dorm; he did not know where we were, unless the dorm supervisor told him we had gone to the corniche. It seemed very unlikely that he had come and taken her secretly, like a thief, without seeing or telling us.

  Nawal jumped up suddenly and asked: “Shouldn’t we call the dorm supervisor before doing anything else, in case Mohammad did call for us?”

  Jamal took her by the hand and they went to the nearest restaurant to contact the dorm and inquire about Mohammad.

  The night supervisor, Um Sa’d, told them that she had not seen Sabah, that Mohammad had not arrived yet, and that she too was waiting for him. We all knew that Um Sa’d longed for Mohammad’s arrival, since she loved the Rothman cigarettes that he usually brought her from Kuwait.

  “In that case,” Jamal said, “the lieutenant must have kidnapped her.”

  “That’s not funny,” I said tersely.

  “I’m not joking,” he said. “I never did feel comfortable about that officer since he started coming out with us. I think he’s hiding something. And why did he start the relationship with Sabah, even though he knew she was engaged? Maybe he was carrying out some other mission . . .”

  “And what mission might that be . . . huh, Mr. Imaginative?” I asked him.

  Playing devil’s advocate, Jamal described a possible scenario: “He took Sabah away from Mohammad to marry her in secret—before Mohammad arrived tonight—to prevent any possibility of Sabah returning to her fiancée. You know officers . . . they have no limits. And he had obtained official permission, or so he claimed.”

  “She wouldn’t have told him about Mohammad’s visit tonight,” Nawal said.

  “Even if she didn’t tell him, the lieutenant knows everything about his future wife.”

  “Why couldn’t Mohammad have kidnapped her after he found out about the lieutenant?” Da’ad interjected. “You know how possessive and madly jealous he is. When he drinks, doesn’t he always say he would kill anyone one who might take Sabah away from him?”

  “Enough!” cried Nuha. “Stop making up crazy stories, like we’re talking about Georgina Rizk.”

  At that point I left the group and raced to Faris, since he would surely know how to help us with this calamity. I rushed across the sand, stopping when I reached the studying tables where I had first spotted him. But I could not find him, so I went back, dragging my feet, miserable and disappointed.

  A few of us suggested that we inform the police, but the majority objected, fearful that we would be detained and subjected to another Q-and-A session, beginning with what happened today at the dorm—which might have been a trap in the first place. We were once again overcome with suspicion of one another. Why had Nuha egged on Sabah, warning her to hold her tongue and not repeat what she was always saying about Saddam Hussein ruling with iron and fire?

  Meanwhile, Ahmed came running back to us, saying that about an hour earlier one of his Syrian friends had seen Sabah get into a taxi with Faris—they were going off somewhere together.

  I became frantic and was seized by the fires of jealousy. How could she go with Faris when it was she who kept me away from him all the time? I remembered Nuha’s claim that Sabah had secretly gone out with Faris, although I had not believed her at the time. I looked at Nawal and saw the same suspicion in her eyes.

  I was overcome with anger, and a cold sweat trickled down my neck. I had been stabbed in the back and betrayed by my closest friend. I immediately hailed a taxi and grabbed Nawal by the hand, dragging her with me to bear witness. I called out to the others to join us at Faris’s house. Jamal opened the front door and got in beside the driver, directing him to al-Maghrib Street in al-Waziriya, near the al-Ma’moun school.

  In the taxi, I felt like I was sitting on hot coals. Nawal tried to get me to calm down until we knew all the facts. I leaned back into the comfortable backseat, trying to hold it together.

  I had known Faris since I joined the Faculty of Arts. He had been at the service of new students; he was one of the most long-standing of the master’s students, and he had helped me solve a lot of my problems. He asked about me every day. The truth is, he was obliging and charming. He won the respect of everyone and was sincere, decent, and noble. His personality was cheerful despite his seriousness. He bestowed lavish generosity on you, but if you wanted to get close and intimate with him, he was an impenetrable fortress.

  Faris was tall, and he had a fair complexion; his wide, almost emerald-green eyes were unlike anything I had ever seen in my life. They were like spring pastures, or the reflection of a pine tree on the water’s surface. So I fell in love with this good and handsome young man, who was well mannered and upright. One Friday, he had invited me to have lunch with him—just the two of us—at a Lebanese restaurant in the upscale al-Adhamiya neighborhood. I wore a dress the color of spring grass; I did my hair; I passed a crimson lipstick over my lips; I put on French perfume and then went out to meet him.

  After we had eaten, he invited me to walk along the al-Adhamiya riverbank. We sat on a wooden bench and I watched the river flow by. A verse from Abu Qasim al-Shabbi was transformed on Faris’s tongue, as the boats drifted across the water and carried me away: “You are sweet, like childhood, like a melody, like a new dawn, like a beaming sky, or a moonlit night, like a rose, or the smile of a newborn.”

 
I recalled that when he had taken me back to the dorm by taxi, he had asked me to call Sabah—he even stayed to wait for her. I did not think anything of it at the time; I had fallen under his spell and the sweetness of our meeting had afflicted me.

  When the taxi stopped at 68 al-Maghrib Street in the al-Mashtal District, we were immersed in darkness—there was nothing but a faint light, as if candles were burning in the living room. I got out, rushing toward the front door, and started knocking. My heart was pounding harder than my hand against the door. Nawal was behind me, trying to calm me down again. A curious silence reigned and no one answered. We knocked again. Jamal went to check the back garden, but a few moments later we glimpsed a shadowy figure behind the curtain at the window. Then we heard footsteps approaching cautiously from inside. Suddenly, the door opened.

  We were all stunned when we saw the figure of Lieutenant Najim Abbas filling the doorway. Cold sweat broke out on my skin. I did not know whether to be pleased or perplexed.

  The lieutenant reassured us that Sabah was safe inside, and that she was fine. Faris, behind him, closed the door after inviting us in.

  We sat down in the semidark living room, where Sabah was holding the telephone receiver and weeping—we knew that she was speaking to her mother.

  “I received an urgent call from Sabah’s mother today, in the late evening,” Najim explained, his voice tinged with concern. “She asked me on my honor to save her daughter tonight and protect her from Mohammad, who had left Kuwait in the blackest mood, with sparks flying from his eyes, promising to kill both me and Sabah—after he heard that we had married in secret. She was frightened for her poor daughter because of his wickedness, his crazy love, and his drunkenness—which blinded him. At the time, I was away on a mission in al-Fallujah. I thought about it and I contacted Faris, who Mohammad doesn’t know, and asked him to get Sabah and take her to his house as quickly as possible . . . somewhere safe until I could join them, and to make sure she didn’t go back to the dorm at all tonight.”

  * * *

  In the morning, the news reached us that Mohammad had been found dead on the road between Basra and Baghdad. Police reports subsequently recorded the perpetrator as Unknown.

  Translated from Arabic by Becki Maddock

  Room 22

  by Mohammed Alwan Jabr

  Bab al-Sharqi

  From the moment he entered the hotel’s courtyard he realized what a huge challenge he would face in coping with these new developments. The leather case he carried made him feel increasingly uncomfortable, and with every step he took toward the lobby his anxiety about the possibility of a confrontation increased. He would be meeting with them face-to-face now, after suffering and waiting for days, unable to communicate with them except by phone. For this reason, he knew he needed to pull himself together. He finally approached the doorway of the hotel, which was located beside the entrance to the Granada Cinema, across from Hadiqat al-Umma in Bab al-Sharqi.

  I must be steadfast, he told himself several times, as he tried to calm his nerves and dispel the fear that threatened to overwhelm him. He wanted to appear strong to them.

  He had insisted on meeting the officer, who had begun by asking him many questions—a lot of similar questions. He recalled the policeman’s face and queries the previous day, when he asked about new developments in the case of the kidnapped child. He didn’t know why the officer had seemed frightened yesterday.

  “They’ve made contact,” he had revealed to the officer, tersely.

  “When?”

  “This morning.” In a low murmur, he had started to explain, and the officer didn’t interrupt him. “They told me: Memorize what we tell you, word for word. Bring the money. Head to Baghdad. Bab al-Sharqi—the area opposite the garden. You will find a small wooden placard. The hotel beside the Granada Cinema entrance—the al-Bataween Hotel.”

  He wrote these instructions on a piece of paper and gave it to the officer.

  Then, with the same calm, commanding, and self-confident intonation as the caller, he repeated the threat: “Don’t tell the police. You know the rest.”

  The officer had removed his dark glasses and held the paper close to his face.

  “They want the meeting to take place at al-Bataween Hotel.”

  The officer studied the paper and then asked the question the man had been asked time and time again, since he had reported to the police that his sister’s young son had been kidnapped: “Do you suspect anyone?”

  “Certainly not,” he had replied for the hundredth time.

  But this time he really wondered: Is there really no one I suspect? Is it ridiculous to suspect someone? Let me try to reconstruct what happened, step by step.

  He began with the moment he had answered the telephone. His sister’s agitated husband, whose eyes never left her face, had handed him the receiver. He had heard a raspy voice that sounded like wind whistling through a small opening. It was a cold voice, but sharp as a knife. “Your child is with us,” the voice said. It was the voice of a confident, domineering man.

  He had not been able to achieve much in the negotiations, which ended after several calls to a number they had specified. All his subsequent attempts to contact them had failed. Whenever he rang the number, no one answered. When they renewed contact with him, they excoriated him: “Why did you try to call us?”

  “She did it,” he had answered, referring to his sister, who was wailing nearby. “She wants to hear her son’s voice.” He had become quite emotional and declared that he would not honor their demands if he did not hear the child’s voice. His efforts succeeded.

  When they next rang him, they said the child would come on the line. Upon handing the phone over, the boy cried out: “I want my mother!”

  His sister grabbed the phone and sobbed loudly. Then she tossed the phone back to him and collapsed to the floor. The voice spoke to him again—specifying the sum he had to deliver in exchange for the child’s safety. A threat followed: “Follow our instructions. Beware of disobeying them. Beware!”

  He had recognized a dialect and accent that had been etched into his brain, but he couldn’t quite place it. He should have been able to distinguish it from a thousand other voices and accents he knew. Was it a familiar voice? He needed to search his memory’s recesses for the person the voice belonged to. At first, he suspected that his search was in vain. Later, he thought the voice resembled that of Mullah Hassan, the imam of the mosque near his house. But he then attributed this association to the fact that he heard that voice daily, especially at dawn, when everything was pristine and disrupted only by the mullah’s voice. He began to pay more attention to the voice that sundered the dawn’s stillness—to the mullah’s voice as he recited the same prayer every day, right after the morning call to prayer, always the same words. The accent was definitely similar to the voice of the kidnapper.

  Why his sister’s son? They lived in a neighborhood where almost everyone knew each other. Relative to Baghdad as a whole, it was very small. He assumed they understood that his sister’s husband was not an entrepreneur, nor did he possess a fortune. He was just a low-ranking civil servant with no political leanings or patronage. So why had his brother-in-law’s son been taken? How could these people expect a large sum from him? The proposed amount had to be raised with great difficulty. Was it conceivable that Mullah Hassan had kidnapped the boy?

  He kept a lid on his mounting suspicions about the mullah. He decided not to tell anyone about them, not even the police.

  * * *

  “Did they set a time and place?” the rugged officer had asked, removing his glasses and then putting them back on.

  “Yes. Next Sunday. I should be in room 22.”

  “Why room 22? How?” The officer in charge of the investigation had started to repeat his own questions.

  He now pondered this same question, as he made his way through the dark courtyard between the hotel’s entrance and the steps that led to its lobby. There, at the center of the
large room, he found a man with a big head and eyes that protruded as if they were ready to pop out of their sockets.

  The big-headed man smiled in welcome. On learning that he wished to book a room, just for himself, the hotel’s proprietor pointed to a chair nearby.

  Before he sat down, he added in a shaky voice, while staring at the red sign with white letters that read, al-Bataween Hotel: “With only one bed, please.”

  Four men sat opposite him, near the proprietor’s table, smoking quietly. The proprietor, meanwhile, examined his ID card and the money he had handed over before he sat down.

  He started to wonder: Why is this place called the al-Bataween Hotel? Especially since the area is named after al-Fanahira and the Shukr Café . . . not al-Bataween? Since he left al-Saidiya, where he lived, even before he reached the outskirts of Baghdad, he had been thinking about the name of this hotel, where he needed to wrap the affair up all by himself.

  He studied the four men. The first was portly and sat at the far right, next to the proprietor’s table. He did not stare at him for long. The man’s waxy face had no distinguishing features. He moved his gaze to the man sitting beside him. What drew his attention to this guy was his head, which kept moving in all directions, as if he were searching for something. Finding the man’s jerky gestures annoying, he felt he could skip an inspection of the other two. He turned to face a wall, attempting to free himself of the sense that he had entered a machine that would squeeze him from all sides. He could already feel the first hint of pressure on his body. These premonitions of imminent torture increased, emerging from the darkness that dominated his mind. He slowly became more conscious of the weight of the leather case he had placed on his thighs.