At the cafeteria, one of the Indian men waves to Khafaji from behind the counter. Khafaji walks over and the man smiles and serves him a cup of hot sweet tea. Khafaji thanks him and goes over to an empty table where he sits down by himself. He watches a discussion of an American sport on television as he eats. He follows every word, but can’t understand a thing. He finishes quickly, reaches for a cigarette and lights it. He looks around him for an ashtray, but someone shouts, “No smoking! Excuse me – there’s no smoking here!”
Embarrassed and angry, Khafaji gets up and walks toward the nearest door. As he walks down the hall, he hears a frantic voice behind him. “Khafaji! Khafaji!”
The assistant is at his arm as he turns. “Citrone called and needs you now. You need to put that out.”
Khafaji throws the butt on the ground and stamps on it and the assistant shakes his head. Then they start quickly down another hall, and a narrow set of stairs. They are almost running, and the assistant speaks in a rushed voice. “They just turned up something at a safe house. Bodies. Citrone was on his way there. He thinks our missing interpreter may be among them. They’re holding the place. Crime-scene protocol – he wants you to see what you can find. A carrier is coming to take you there right now.”
They wait in an alley until a Humvee pulls up. The assistant walks forward, shows his identification and begins talking to the driver. The door opens and a hand motions for Khafaji to get in. There are two black men in the front seat, and one white boy in the back. Khafaji slides into the open seat and straps on his seat belt before they tell him to. Then they are off. From the window, Khafaji watches the Victory Arch. It seems to turn and spin as they drive around it. When they drive closer, he can see the bulging muscles. The forearms grasping giant swords. Khafaji turns to look at his feet, somehow embarrassed.
They depart from a small gate onto Damascus Street. They’re speeding toward Mutanabbi, then veer right at Mansur Street. When that ends, they turn right onto 14th of Ramadan. Khafaji never looks up and his companions are pretty quiet. The soldier in the front passenger seat reads out directions and the driver answers him, but in a voice so small Khafaji can’t make out a word. The soldier next to him looks out the window the whole time. Though Khafaji looks over at him a few times, he never once sees the man’s face. The car is quiet. The traffic thin. They speed.
Khafaji’s heart explodes when the car is hit. Not once, but lots of times. At first it sounds like bullets and he imagines the worst. But then he notices that no one else reacts in the slightest. The navigator turns on the stereo. Khafaji peers out the window for the first time and watches as a crowd of boys hurling clods and bottles recedes in their wake. He keeps his eyes on the floor after they turn left at 14th of July Street.
When they hit traffic, Khafaji speaks up. “Mosul Street is easier.” The navigator looks at Khafaji in confusion. Khafaji looks at the map, and points. “Michigan Avenue, right? It’ll be easier.”
Two troop carriers stand at one end to the street. A third blocks off the far end. Khafaji moves to get out, but is stopped by the hand of the soldier who’s been sitting next to him. The man shoulders his weapon as he gets out and walks over to the other Humvee parked in front of a long row of villas. Khafaji stares at them. This could have been my street.
A brown-skinned sergeant gets out of the other vehicle and the two men talk for a moment. Then the soldier walks back, and waves Khafaji over. Khafaji shakes the sergeant’s hand. He is young and friendly, with piercing green eyes. He explains the situation. “Our informants have been telling us about this villa for a couple weeks. Abandoned months ago. Then suddenly men coming through at all hours of the day and night. Jihadis. We wanted to make sure we knew who we were dealing with, so the place was put under round-the-clock surveillance. Yesterday, there was a spike in chatter, and so we decided to go in. They had a loud night in the house last night. Must have been a party!”
He laughs and shakes his head in fatigue. “We waited as long as we could then went in when the first call to prayer went out. Most had already split. By the time we came in, there were only four of them. Two were killed in the gunfight. The other two were pretty badly hurt.”
Khafaji nods and looks around the street again. Not a person in sight. The other man takes out a pack of cigarettes and offers Khafaji one. Khafaji lights both their cigarettes.
“Where is Citrone?” Khafaji finally asks.
“He got called away. He was one of the first to get here, you know. We’ve seen some shit out here, but nothing like this. These are the bad guys. Kidnapping girls for sex or ransom. They must have killed their victims last night, but that’s not our business. We had our orders to wait until you got here.”
“Where did they take the ones they captured?”
“The PUCs? It looked like they were going to take them to the hospital before sending them to hell. Need anything else? No? We’re out of here.”
He shakes Khafaji’s hand, slaps the top of his jeep and they drive off. Khafaji looks around and realizes that the other soldiers aren’t Americans. It’s not even clear if they are soldiers at all. The logo on their troop carrier reads Meteoric Tactical Solutions.
Khafaji turns, and notices the jeep that delivered him has also sped off. As the two jeeps drive away, neighbors begin to come out of their houses.
Khafaji flashes his ID to the armed men at the gate and walks in. He doesn’t ask for a tour of the place because he already knows the two-story layout. Men’s sitting room, women’s sitting room, two bathrooms, a kitchen and then upstairs.
The smell in the front room nearly makes Khafaji vomit. He doesn’t have to look hard to know it’s coming from the downstairs bathroom. Who knows how many men were staying here when the toilet stopped working? Khafaji lights a cigarette and keeps it perched on his lips to block out the stench. He peeks into the kitchen. Trash cans overflowing with garbage. Piles of plastic bags and plastic Coke bottles on the counters. Carcasses of roast chicken. Pieces of dry bread on the floor. The refrigerator wide open. Nothing in the cupboards. A shell of a house.
If the living room looks like a filthy barracks it’s because that’s what it was. Blankets and clothes strewn across old threadbare couches and the floor. Khafaji walks through a dining room that is filled with dirty cots. More than a dozen in all. A single bare light bulb. A quick check on the back patio tells nothing. The smell in the bathroom makes Khafaji avoid it completely. He turns toward the stairs, but pauses at the open door. He opens it and shuts it and looks closely at the unusual configuration of thick deadbolts. Could be locked on both sides. Khafaji taps on the thick metal and wonders why such a heavy door was put here.
Before he even reaches the landing on the second floor, he can hear the flies. From below a voice calls out, “Hello there, Hajji! Come here! Arms up and easy.”
Khafaji turns to see a blond man with a saccharine smile. His puffy face stuffed under a tight blue beret. His puffy chest stuffed into a black T-shirt.
“This is a closed military zone, Hajji. Arms up. That’s right. Easy now.” The man’s accent is peculiar. English, but not English. “What are you doing here?”
He fingers the identity badge hanging around Khafaji’s neck.
“What’s this?” He removes it, and holds the picture up next to Khafaji’s face. Khafaji’s smile has disappeared.
“Listen. Do you speak English?”
“Do you?”
The man stops and takes a step back. “Whoa now, Hajji.” He looks at Khafaji’s ID again, then begins to speak deliberately slowly. As if Khafaji were a child. “You’re down range, Hajji. This area is secure, as you can see. And then suddenly you show up. What the hell are you doing?”
“I was sent here to investigate.”
“You need to explain, Hajji – I don’t know about this.”
“I was explaining. If you can’t understand my English, talk to Citrone.” For the next fifteen minutes, Khafaji gets to know his new cigarettes.
“…well, you can understand why we needed to ask. We don’t even know yet if the place is secure. We knew you were sending someone, but we weren’t expecting natives.”
“…”
He looks Khafaji over from head to toe, then turns away. “Well then, don’t send them out in civvies.”
“…”
“I’ll let him get on with it.”
The man tries to make peace with Khafaji by offering one of his cigarettes, but Khafaji ignores him. He takes out one of his Rothmans and lights it as he walks back upstairs. The cloud of flies is buzzing even more furiously. The door to the master bedroom is cracked open. Khafaji pulls out a dirty paper napkin and opens it the rest of the way. The first thing he sees are three splatters in the middle of the wall. Then the three women, face-down in a row. Long, loose peasant robes flare up and outwards to reveal bare legs and thighs and torn underwear. The spectacle is indecent. Khafaji pulls the cloth down past their knees, and notices that their wrists are deeply lacerated. They were bound at some point, then released. He looks around and finds some plastic cuffs on the ground, covered in blood. As he picks one up, his leather soles start to slide in a sticky, slippery half-congealed pool. He throws the cuffs in an empty pillowcase.
Each was shot in the back of the neck with something small. It could have been a lot messier. The killers must have forced them to stand facing the wall before he shot them. Their wrists were still bound when they were shot. The killer was tall – tall enough to hold and shoot a steady pistol at their neck so the bullet would travel down into their torsos. An inefficient way to do things, Khafaji thinks. Plenty of mess. But it would silence the noise.
Walking into another bedroom, Khafaji stumbles across a fourth body sprawled across a bed. This one has multiple cuts to the neck and torso, and sits in a pool of filth. The stench of emptied bowels fills the room. She must have seen her attackers. Death did not come quickly. The sheets and mattress are saturated with blood and shit and piss. A banquet for the flies. This one is facing up, staring at the ceiling. She’s young. Her brown eyes are small but pretty, darkened with heavy kohl and blue eyeshadow. Her painted purple lips are strangely serene. Khafaji looks at her fragile, pale wrists. This one was never bound. He picks up her right hand and lets it drop. The rigor mortis has just started to set in. He looks at her fingers and glimpses blood and skin under her nails, though the filth of the scene makes it hard to tell for sure.
Khafaji pulls on her necklace, and jostles a plastic identification card. Almost identical to the one around Khafaji’s neck. There’s her picture. There’s her name. In English: Sally Riyadi. US Army issue. Khafaji takes it, then goes to the bathroom to rinse it off. He cleans his hands on a pink bathrobe, then he puts the card in the pillowcase.
Now he goes back to the other bodies. One by one, he rolls them over. They’re all just beginning to stiffen up. He imagines that one is almost warm, then checks again. The first one wears an identification card, and Khafaji removes it. The picture matches the face. Another name, Candy Firdawsi. He can’t find an ID on the next girl, but as Khafaji looks at her, he’s struck by how pretty she is. How pretty they all are. And made up like they were going out dancing.
As soon as Khafaji rolls the third body over, he regrets it.
He regrets coming to this house. He regrets his deal with the Americans. He regrets having to see any of this.
Khafaji doesn’t need to read the girl’s card to know who she is. For the second time in three days, he sees Suheir’s face staring at him. She looks at Khafaji with the same eyes, the same faint smile. The same beauty mark. The same beauty. Only now it’s cold and stiff.
Khafaji collapses on the ground. He beats on the concrete floor until his knuckles start to bleed. At first he’s crying over Suheir, then over his niece Sawsan whose body he never intended to find. Then he weeps for the other girls.
Khafaji slumps against the wall and takes in the scene for a second time. Only then does he see how neat the room is. Except for the bodies and blood splatters, it could have been any rich girl’s room. The purple overstuffed sofa, the purple pillows, the purple drapes. The poster of Kadhim al-Sahir. He wipes his eyes and puts Sawsan’s card into the bag with all the others. Then he starts to explore the other bedrooms on the second floor. Each is decorated with the kind of bordello luxury you expect to see in the home of any high-ranking member of the Party. Lush feminine pinks, fuchsias and lavenders. Lace and satin and velvet textures. He opens one closet door. It leads to a separate staircase on the outside of the building.
Each floor of the house tells a separate story. Downstairs, it’s all guerrilla safe house. Upstairs, all Baathist brothel, complete with murder. Khafaji walks downstairs and stops at the wall just behind the bathroom. He taps at the concrete, but doesn’t need to. He can picture Uday and Mrouj as children. Playing and hiding in the same crawl space.
Before leaving, Khafaji tries to tell the soldier about the crawl space. The man looks at him confused, and Khafaji walks him over to the access panel in the bathroom. Khafaji holds his breath until he is outside again. Then he lights another Rothman and breathes the fresh air. Outside, over the wall, he sees the neighbors attempting to talk with the men in the troop carriers.
Later, as they drive Khafaji to a checkpoint in Karrada, the South African shakes his head and says, “My God, man. That was a huge stockpile. We thought we’d cleaned that house top to bottom.”
“If you want to find the explosives, you need to bring the sniffing dogs.”
The man insists on shaking hands when Khafaji gets out and walks into the night.