Baghdad Noir

by Samuel Shimon

  About a quarter of an hour later, the vehicle slowly turned onto a narrow alley, the palm-shaded facade of the hotel appearing a few meters in front of them. The taxi stopped at the main entrance—a low gate, painted black.

  The inn was a lovely brick building, and its high upper story had large balconies shaded by Chinese-style wooden roofs. The facade of the lower floor was made of glass and elegant ceramic tiles. A large cluster of palms in dense rows shielded the building from the sun and were filled with the nests of birds, chirping at this hour.

  George learned later that Colonel Arnold Wilson had built the inn during the days of British rule—the colonel had been posted in Asia for a long time. Then the Agha family had purchased it and turned it into a hotel.

  George left his luggage in the taxi and entered the lobby, escorted by a valet who sported a white suit and a gray necktie. The cool air inside caressed George’s face.

  The lobby was spacious, and two large mirrors hung on its towering walls. It was sparsely furnished with only some red armchairs and black marble tables. He looked toward the back of the room at the hotel proprietor, Madame Reem, who was exhaling smoke from her cigarette and chatting with an elegant man who sat in a chair upholstered with pomegranate-colored velvet. In front of them, on a table, sat two glasses of orange juice, a pack of cigarettes, and a lighter.

  George walked up to Madame Reem and quickly explained his situation: “I am George Haddad—an accountant with Agha-Porter Automotive. I have come to take Mr. Shukri Jamil’s place . . .”

  “Oh!” she said, surprised. “Another one . . . Aren’t you afraid? The two accountants before you vanished from the same room.”

  The man beside her laughed, but George was too stunned to reply. Finally, he felt obliged to justify himself: “I’m no hero and don’t aspire to become one, but these are my instructions. I assume Mr. Shukri Jamil has left on holiday?”

  “Oh . . . perhaps?” Madame Reem replied.

  “Actually, I’ll just pay for one week now—till the firm puts me on salary here.” He showed her the transfer letter and his identification card.

  Madame Reem smiled conspiratorially at him. Then she rose and crossed the room, swinging her hips.

  * * *

  Madame Reem led him to his room on the ground floor. They both stopped at the door; the room was elegantly furnished and had a balcony overlooking the garden, where stalks of flowering okra with faded red blossoms sought the shade of the wall, and lilies of the valley bloomed near beautiful rows of myrtle. Waving the cigarette in her fingers, Madame Reem gestured toward a little desk that held Arabic and English books, as well as a small record player with a modest collection of records. A diminutive refrigerator contained soft drinks and beer.

  “We provide three meals a day,” Madame Reem said, “according to the menu posted in the kitchen—but eating in the rooms is strictly forbidden.”

  George paid close attention to this lady—she appeared to be in her thirties and wore high heels. Her eyes were intensely black.

  “There are only five residents here,” Madame Reem told him. “In the room across from yours is an engineer named Waheed. He’s a graduate of Cambridge University and has been working for the Anglo-Iraqi Transport Company for two years. Meyer, who owns a nightclub on the banks of the Tigris, sleeps till noon and works all night. An Iranian woman named Rahima lives upstairs with her maid. They have maintained a residence here for a long time. She visits from time to time. There is a Kurdish physician named Barwis in the room across from Rahima’s. She came from Sulaimaniya to open a pediatric clinic here. Barwis is on vacation at the moment.”

  He nodded at everything she said, sweat beading up on his forehead. He was so thirsty that the moment Madame Reem left the room—before even placing his clothes in the wardrobe—he rushed to the fridge. He grabbed a cold bottle of beer and drained it. Afterward he felt slightly tipsy and refreshed. He decided to stretch out on the bed.

  Before he fell asleep, he heard a loud cry from the upper floor of the inn. The sound was muffled and came from deep inside the building. Yet it was followed by total calm. Then, however, he heard a shrill, quavering voice cry out. He went to the door, opened it, and looked across to the lobby—though he saw no one in the corridor. He went back inside his room, but before he fell asleep, he heard some voices on the stairs, and then someone yelling. George rushed out of his room and headed straight to the stairway. There was no one in the lobby, but after a couple of steps he saw the proprietor emerge from the restroom next to the lobby.

  Madame Reem was agitated, and her face was very pale. “What’s this noise?” she asked him.

  “I don’t know. I think it came from upstairs.” He rushed up and found the door to the suite occupied by the two Iranian women wide open.

  From inside the room, Sargon shouted, “There’s been a murder! Call the police!”

  George did not enter the room. Instead, he immediately sped back down the steps to the lobby, hearing a door close upstairs. He asked Madame Reem to contact the police.

  “The police? Why the police?”

  “Someone’s been murdered,” he said breathlessly.

  “Who’s been murdered?”

  “I don’t know exactly, but the crime occurred in the Iranian women’s room.”

  He returned to the crime scene, which was truly alarming. Sargon was nowhere to be seen. When George entered the room, he found Madame Rahima dead, and her maid too. A vase of flowers had shattered on the floor, and a blood-smeared switchblade rested on the table. There was a bloodstain on the floor in front of the window, and a gold chain near it had broken. The maid’s body was by the door, and the expression on her face was glowering. Rahima’s body was spread out on the bed. Blood from her neck pooled on the sheets.

  George returned to his room and waited till the police arrived—approximately half an hour later. They took fingerprints to send off to the lab; a crime photographer went upstairs to take some pictures; then an officer interrogated everyone who had been in the hotel. Since George knew nothing about the two victims, he wasn’t questioned long. He had never even seen them before. The interrogator, though, revealed some information that disturbed him.

  “Did you know the other two accountants?” the officer asked.

  “I met Ted Lancaster only once. I may have met Shukri Jamil a few times, but didn’t know him well.”

  “Fine,” the officer said, nodding. “Would their disappearance cause you to suspect anything?”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. I just wonder whether you have some professional hunch,” the officer replied.

  “I know absolutely nothing about the matter.”

  “Personally, I think it’s suspicious,” the officer told him. “There is nothing that links them, but all the same, each of them disappearing under identical circumstances is fishy.”

  “What do you mean?” George asked.

  “I mean that you should be careful. If you suspect anything, don’t hesitate to contact us.”

  “But Shukri Jamil is on holiday,” George responded.

  “Yes, but where? A person taking a holiday should be somewhere,” the officer said. “But no one knows where he is. Plus, he didn’t even present his own request for leave.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “My meaning is clear: his request for a leave of absence may have been submitted under duress.”

  * * *

  George Haddad was very perturbed when the police left—the evidence was clear and the threat obvious. All the same, he knew nothing about the circumstances and ramifications of the situation in which he now found himself. This crime had also made the matter murkier and more mysterious. Even if the events were unrelated, they were linked in many ways. But he did not know where this puzzle started or ended. The pressing question that engrossed him at the moment and kept him awake was whether there was any real connection between the disappearance of the two accountants and the murders of the Irania
n women.

  By the next morning, most of what he knew about the murders came from details he found in a local English-language newspaper, the Baghdad Times, which published the following story:

  Residents of Baghdad House were frightened by screams of terror that seemed to come from the second floor of the hotel, which is located on al-Rashid Street. Madame Rahima, an Iranian woman, and her maid, Kameel, had resided in a room there for several months. Upon hearing screams, the hotel valet knocked loudly on the suite’s door. He is a brave young man in his thirties named Sargon. When no one answered his knock, he forced the door open and found himself confronted by a gruesome scene. A vase lay broken on the ground, and a knife smeared with blood was found on a nearby table. There was a bloodstain in front of the window, and a gold chain was found on the floor. The maid’s body, which was by the door, was still warm. Her face was stained with blood, and a blue mark around her neck had been caused by strangulation from a strong hand. Madame Rahima’s body was stretched out on the bed, and her neck had been savagely slashed. When the valet tried to lift her, the head separated from the body. Gena, a laundress who was personally acquainted with the two victims, said their only visitor had been a merchant from Shiraz. His name is Hassan, and he was a distant relative of the Madame Rahima.

  Saleem, a grocer, said that Madame Rahima regularly purchased food from his store and that she was a quiet woman. Her maid told him once that she had some relationship with another resident in Baghdad House and that she went to meet him from time to time. This person, however, had vanished awhile ago. Sargon, the valet, thinks he heard a woman’s voice before the murder. But he isn’t sure what language she was speaking. The police say it is unlikely that the killer was a woman, because the lethal hand was that of a powerful man. The question is how the criminal fled without anyone noticing him, given that the doors and windows were locked. Even the window of the bathroom was firmly closed, and its glass had not been broken.

  All clues pointed toward the Iranian merchant, who had disappeared. While the police were searching for him, he surrendered himself voluntarily.

  The newspaper also mentioned some details about the merchant. Hassan was a wealthy businessman from Shiraz who had been previously married. He had divorced his wife after she failed to conceive, and was planning to remarry.

  The merchant claimed that he had visited the two women less than a month earlier, when Madame Rahima had invited him to a dinner party for Shukri Jamil, who lived in the same inn. She had brought him to a fancy restaurant on al-Maghrib Street, but Shukri Jamil never showed up. The merchant thought this was odd. Jamil’s absence had also surprised Madame Rahima and her maid. The accountant had vanished without a trace.

  Although this information seemed straightforward, George pondered a number of key issues as he read the newspaper: first, he wondered where the murderer had entered and exited; secondly, when he was descending the stairs, he had heard a door slam behind him somewhere, though Sargon had forced open the door to the victims’ room, meaning some other door had closed—that must have been the door of Barwis, the Kurdish physician.

  George’s suspicion was strengthened by Sargon’s report of hearing a woman speaking a foreign language with the victims before their murder. George asked himself: A woman’s voice—speaking a foreign language—could that have been Barwis?

  George put his head between his hands as he rode the bus to work. He couldn’t help but think about what might have happened the night of the murders: The killer must have entered and exited through Barwis’s room. That much is certain, because the killer could not have left anywhere else. Time will tell! But Barwis had not aroused the interrogator’s suspicions—because she had been on holiday . . . Then he asked himself: Which of the two missing accountants had an affair with Madame Rahima? And what was the true nature of her relationship with Shukri Jamil?

  * * *

  By the time George Haddad reached his bus stop, he had read the story several times and turned over every possibility in his mind. After exiting the bus, he placed the paper in his briefcase and headed down the street to the office.

  A British woman named Edith ran this office, which was located on the top story of the Najib Building. She was in her fifties and had married an Iraqi. Her two assistants were Khayriya, a youthful middle-aged woman, and Jamila, an older woman. The office had more than ten employees—some Indian, some British, some Iraqi.

  “Oh, you’ve finally arrived! We’ve been waiting for you. But I’m concerned . . .” Edith said.

  “Why?” George asked.

  “Oh—aren’t you staying at Baghdad House? And didn’t a crime occur there?”

  “Yes, I was actually there at the time,” he said.

  “God preserve you! What’s going on here? I’ll ask the director to find different lodgings for you,” Edith said. “We have lost two accountants in a single year. Now you witness a crime the very day you arrive!”

  “Do you believe there’s a link between Baghdad House and these crimes?”

  “God only knows! Ask the police,” she said.

  “I don’t think there is,” I said. “This detestable event could have happened anywhere. I would prefer to stay there—it seems safer to remain somewhere familiar, despite the unfortunate circumstances.”

  * * *

  George Haddad worked till noon. Then he headed downtown, ate lunch, and returned to review more files.

  Something in the budget ledger drew his attention. For June 20, Shukri Jamil had recorded the number 12753 in the creditor column, but the 18th had been the last day he had worked, and the 19th was blank. Yet the 20th contained this strange number to which no value had been assigned, and no details of receipts had been recorded to justify it.

  He rushed to show his findings to Edith. He told her he didn’t understand this entry at all. She was also startled and nodded: “This number is strange. I don’t understand why it’s there either.”

  “They say he sent his letter on June 18. How could he have entered this figure on the 20th?”

  “He kept the ledger with him,” Edith recalled. “Two days after he disappeared, we sent someone to fetch it from Baghdad House. It’s conceivable that he wrote an entry for the 18th on the page for the 20th. In that case, the entry wouldn’t be significant. But do you think he meant to send a message with this number? If so, what’s the message?”

  George loosened his gray tie as he stood and faced her at her desk. “I don’t know, but I wonder if he specified in his letter when he would return.”

  * * *

  The setting sun had painted the massive columns along al-Rashid Street violet. The long street ran from Bab al-Moatham to al-Bab al-Sharqi. The English had named it Rodenburg Street in 1917. This section between al-Sabah Hotel and the Roxy Cinema was the most modern and elegant. The small alley on which Baghdad House stood was known popularly as the Street of the English, and it twisted its way to the river. Another lengthy street stretched along the riverbank. Its clean sidewalks and modern buildings extended to the King Faisal Bridge.

  George looked at the tall buildings topped by signs of the many foreign firms that had offices on the upper floors. Down below were numerous coffeehouses, bars, and nightclubs with flashy facades. At the end of the street, there were upscale hotels, international clothing stores, and two cinemas—the Roxy and the Rex.

  A hunch motivated George to cross the street when he noticed another neighborhood situated behind this trendy front. The low-rent area exuded a distinctive fragrance—inexpensive restaurants offered cheap meals, and the inexpensive hotels and hostels often had very steep and dilapidated stairways out front, housing all types of mysterious women.

  When he walked past the Shahrazad Hotel, he noticed a lovely girl wearing tight-fitting clothes and holding a cigarette in her hand. Her dark eyes aroused him.

  * * *

  Before returning to the hotel, he visited the McKenzie Bookstore, which was run by a British fellow named John McKenzie. It imp
orted Penguin books, newspapers, and current magazines. On entering, George caught sight of his neighbor, Waheed the engineer, standing at the back of the store. Their meeting was quite fortuitous, and they approached each other and left the bookstore together. At the bus stop, George asked the engineer if he would care to join him for a drink, and the other man agreed. So they headed to a dive on the cheaper side of the street.

  The bar, which was dark and reeked of alcohol, was packed with a diverse cast of characters, but most were prostitutes of every age and variety. The male faces there were alert, predatory, and scouting for prospects.

  George chose a booth near the front window. When the two men were seated, the server quickly brought them a pitcher of beer and two glasses.

  Waheed was in his thirties. His complexion was a tawny brown, his eyes were small and intelligent, and his mustache was carefully groomed. He wasn’t elegant, but he dressed conservatively in a distinctive way that was simple and practical—more American than European, perhaps due to living in New York City for five years after completing an engineering degree at Cambridge. He was the sort of person who spoke in a terse, composed way. George listened with great interest to what Waheed told him about the place and was astonished by the scope of his knowledge. After downing a couple of drinks together, George decided to ask Waheed—cautiously—about the disappearances of the two accountants. To start with, he inquired about Ted Lancaster. Initially, Waheed was slow to provide any details. He merely said that some matters relating to Baghdad House were complicated. The crimes were strange, and many vested interests were involved. Then George wanted to know whether the hotel itself was a factor.