HOFFMAN WOKE UP IN DISARRAY, HIS EYEBALLS TURNED INSIDE out, his throat raw from smoke, and a midget triphammer gunning in his cortex. His first instinct was to reach for his cigarettes, which were gone from their usual place beneath his pillow. Half awake now, he fumbled for his 9 mm, which also was not under the pillow. His Navy MK III knife, won at cards from a disgraced admiral, was not in his boot, where it normally spent nights. For that matter, his boots were not there on the floor beside his bed either.
A slow reconnaissance was in order, and he performed this with due stealth. The room was unfamiliar and elegant. The sun streamed in from an open window, and it was this brutal light that had woken him. He got to his feet, found his way into a dressing room. Propped up on a stool was the full complement of his gear, his clothes pressed and folded, the knife sheathed to the boot, his holster and gun placed thoughtfully on top.
He dressed, lit a cigarette, winced at the drumming in his head, and started to wander out. Avicenna’s house, he vaguely recalled from last night, was a series of deliberately confusing passages. He caught the smell of black coffee and followed it blindly, reaching the courtyard eventually, where a small table had been laid in the shade.
A dark-haired lady sat under the stunted olive, sporting oversized dark glasses and a floral patterned Hermes scarf tied loosely around her neck. She was drinking coffee from a glass and smoking a thin, elongated cigarette, flipping through some glossy magazine, one slim Chanel enclosed foot tapping impatiently against the flagstones.
This sight was so incongruous that Hoffman stood slack jawed for several moments, the cigarette hanging from his lip like a hook from some kind of giant idiot fish. She deigned to notice him after a minute, looked up, and scowled at him.
“Don’t stand there like a damned fool,” she said. “What’s the matter with you? Are you autistic?” Her voice was gravelly, attractive. Not least because, Hoffman had to admit, she didn’t look at all like a mustachioed elephant draped in black, the standard of Iraqi ladies he’d normally met during his rounds on the streets of Ghazaliya.
“What? No.” Hoffman shuffled forward, trying to avoid the sun.
“I heard many Americans are autistic,” she said. “Some kind of genetic defect, I think.”
“I’m just hung over,” Hoffman said. He paused at the edge of the table and offered a snap salute, marred somewhat by his misshapen posture. “Sergeant Hoffman at your service… er, ma’am.”
“We were introduced last night, idiot,” she said. “You were drunk.”
“Ah well, Avicenna offered me a whole bunch of bottles,” Hoffman said. “You must be his…girlfriend? Nurse? Fourth wife?”
“My name is Sabeen. Granddaughter,” she said. She pointed at the coffee pot with one manicured finger. “Help yourself. You look like something unpleasant died in your throat.”
“Thanks,” Hoffman said, pouring some into a chipped white mug. “I don’t remember anything from last night. Did I do anything embarrassing?”
“Well, you ate and drank like an ill-bred buffoon. And then near the end, you puked and passed out,” Sabeen said. “So, no, you simply reinforced my view of uncouth Americans. I’d say you behaved perfectly.”
Hoffman tried for a winning smile and failed. “I hope I didn’t offend you in any way.”
“Not specifically, no,” Sabeen said. She went back to flipping the pages of her magazine.
Hoffman said after some time. “Could I speak to Avi, maybe?”
“No,” Sabeen said.
“Er, ok,” Hoffman said. “Behruse then?”
“I sent that oaf out to work,” Sabeen said, not looking up.
“None of your business,” Sabeen said.
“Listen, I really don’t remember about last night. I’m sorry if I pissed you off,” Hoffman said, extending his hand. “Can we start over?”
“You probably think that’s charming,” Sabeen said, not moving an inch.
“Your English is really good,” Hoffman persevered.
“I was at Oxford,” Sabeen said.
“What did you do there?”
“Studied English.”
“What do you do now?”
“My grandfather controls numerous assets,” Sabeen said. “I am his chief of security. I make sure no one bothers him.”
“Hey, Behruse brought me here,” Hoffman raised his hands in the air. “I’m not a hostile.”
“I know. Grandfather sent me to protect you,” Sabeen said. “He finds you interesting for some reason. He’s finally gone senile I think.”
“Protect me? Ma’am, I’m a United States Marine.”
“Marine?” Sabeen smiled genuinely for the first time. “Your uniform is infantry, and your sergeant’s stripes look pretty new, so either they’re fake, or some other moron saw fit to actually promote you.”
“There is a Humvee full of extremely dangerous men at my beck and call,” Hoffman said. “I am a death dealing machine, armed to the teeth.”
“Have you actually looked at your gun?” Sabeen asked.
Hoffman pulled his prized desert eagle out with a flourish and cocked it theatrically. The sound was hollow, decidedly wrong. A closer inspection revealed that the clip was empty, as was his ammunition pouch. His face fell.
“I’m pretty sure I didn’t shoot anyone,” he said.
“No. But you passed out with your gun aimed at your crotch and the safety off,” Sabeen said. “Anyone that moronic doesn’t deserve to play with bullets.”
“Heh, you’d love the other guys in my squad.”
“Thank God I won’t have to meet them.” Sabeen stood up. Hoffman tried to rise and leer at her at the same time; blood rushed to his head, and he fell backwards, sending his chair sprawling.
“Sorry,” Hoffman said, climbing to his knees. “I feel like I’ve been run over by a truck.”
“No need to apologize,” Sabeen said, helping him up. Her hand was surprisingly strong. “You’ve been poisoned. The head spinning is a common side effect.”
“Eh? Poisoned?” Hoffman said.
“My grandfather is somewhat of a savant when it comes to chemistry,” Sabeen seemed amused. “Or alchemy, if you prefer.”
“Ohmigod my throat is seizing,” Hoffman said. He clutched at his face convulsively. “I can feel my eyeballs popping. Are my eyeballs popping? Help me!”
“Relax, that’s probably the alcohol,” Sabeen said. “The poison is real, of course. It’s slow acting, however.”
“What kind of lunatics are you?”
“Stop whining,” Sabeen said. “You don’t think I’d just let you loose around my grandfather without any insurance, do you?”
“I just wanted to know about the Druze watch,” Hoffman said. “I’m going to kill Behruse when I see him.”
“Don’t cry,” Sabeen said. “I’ll give you an antidote. It binds with the chemical compound currently in your blood. It should neutralize it in a week or so.”
“A week or so? Should? Don’t you know?”
“Well, it’s not an exact science, is it?” Sabeen said. “Just tell me when you start feeling ill, and I’ll give you a pastille.”
“I’m feeling ill now,” Hoffman moaned. “This isn’t fair. What kind of person poisons an innocent stranger?”
“Really?” Sabeen said. “What kind of person makes up ridiculous lies about a random country, invades it, destroys all its civil institutions, brands all its citizens as terrorists, causes a civil war, and then pretends everything is alright?”
Hoffman glowered with righteous indignation but said nothing.
“Right. We have to go now,” Sabeen said, adjusting her scarf around her head in one practiced motion. “Behruse is waiting. I’ll drive.”
There was a nondescript Toyota up front, which had the unnaturally scrubbed appearance of a car straight from the lot. En route, Sabeen informed him it was part of a fleet of “dead cars” they maintained. With the huge, unrecorded number of civilian deaths and migrations in the city, perfectly clean, registered cars were floating around with no legal owners. A cadre of bureaucrats from the General Directorate of Traffic with ties to the Mukhabarat had started a quiet side business of selling these “safe” cars. For a premium, one could borrow the identity of the deceased owner too: doctored licenses, registration papers, fitness records, even parking fines. Then too, there were many people who had to commute through Sunni and Shi’a strongholds and thus needed two separate identities. Anbar license plates, in particular, were anathema in Shi’a areas, where death squads, often the police themselves, hunted and shot motorists from that locality.
Sabeen drove with the exacting precision of a German car mechanic maneuvering a prototype. Iraqi police, she explained, loved pulling over women drivers, especially ones who did not wear the full hijab. While she carried a revolver in her purse and a shotgun under the passenger seat for exactly these kinds of emergencies, it was just common sense to follow traffic rules. She had been, she said, obliged to shoot two would-be rapists so far. Silly men, they had come at her with knives. Hoffman could only marvel at her blunt pronouncements and spent the entire ride staring with idiotic rapture at her profile.
The café they pulled into promised Lebanese food in big green lettering and was just short of swanky. She was evidently known here. As she set foot inside, the entire staff, including the cashier and the owner, converged on her, each one trying to outdo the next in salaaming deeper. Hoffman noted genuine respect, lust, and even downright terror in the menagerie; she must have shot some of them in the past too.
Behruse sat in a corner table facing the door, eating and drinking, his neck and shoulders creating an obscene shadow on the tablecloth. An array of half-finished dishes, Lebanese and otherwise, said that far from working, Behruse had, in fact, been sitting here for most of the day.
“God, how can you eat like that, Behruse?” Hoffman flopped down across from him.
“Eh? You want some lamb?” Behruse waved his hand unenthusiastically at him. “No? More for me. Have coffee instead. Americans love coffee.”
“You’re a sick man. I need some beer.”
“This is lunch for me,” Behruse said. “I already had breakfast.”
“What the hell did you guys do to me last night?” Hoffman asked.
“You told him about the mushrooms?” Behruse looked at Sabeen, who shrugged.
“Mushrooms?”
“Sure,” Behruse said. “Very rare stuff. It acts like a kind of retrovirus. Nestles in your spine in a dormant state for days. Then it starts releasing chemicals into your bloodstream. You start seeing shit. Grade A hallucinations, believe me.”
“That doesn’t sound so bad,” Hoffman said.
“And then you start bleeding from all your orifices,” Sabeen said.
“Oh.”
“Don’t worry. Sabeen has the stuff to keep it in check,” Behruse said. “So long you don’t piss her off, of course.”
“After all our scams, all the money we’ve made together, this is what it comes down to?” Hoffman asked, with feeling. “We were brothers, man—and you go and poison me? What would your mom think?”
“Hell, the boss poisoned me too, first time he met me,” Behruse said. “It’s standard operating procedure with him. It messed up my metabolism. That’s why I’m fat. You should have seen me before. I was like Mr. Baghdad. Eventually it goes away. By that time, he either trusts you or kills you.”
Hoffman could only whimper.
“Stop your whining,” Sabeen said. “Last night you couldn’t wait to eat the mushrooms. Behruse, you have anything on the watch?”
“I checked all the drop boxes,” Behruse said. “Mostly crap. Oh, Maliki is a fag apparently.”
“Drop boxes?” Hoffman asked.
“Old school stuff,” Behruse said. “You guys monitor cell phones and air waves. Heh, like pros use phones anymore. We got mailboxes rigged up all across town. Paper and pencil, baby, that’s the way to go.”
“I gotta remember this,” Hoffman muttered.
“Don’t worry. You work for Sab now,” Behruse said. “I once saw her kill a man just by touching some nerves on his neck. Dim Mak, you know, the death strike.”
Sabeen ignored the comment, asking: “Did you do anything at all useful today, Behruse? I’m not paying for this lunch by the way.”
“It’s on Hoffy’s tab,” Behruse said with a belch. “While I was sitting here resting after breakfast, I started thinking about the Druze stuff. I remembered an old report. Underneath the basement of the Al-Rashid Mental Hospital, there is a hidden ward for violent mental patients. About nine months ago, some Blackwater guys accidentally bombed it. Word was, they thought the crazy fucker Uday had stashed some of daddy’s gold in there. Couple of his friends had suites there. Come to think of it, he even visited them sometimes. Anyways, I digress. After the Blackwater guys killed the guards and searched the place, they found no gold bars, so they pulled out. The place was wide open for like ten days before government officers came to lock it back up. A lot of patients simply wandered out.”
“Behruse, is there a point to this?” Sabeen asked.
“One of our old Mukhabarat boys was put in charge of covering it up,” Behruse said. “And he told me about a very interesting inmate. Their most dangerous inmate, in fact. They kept him sedated and shackled at all times. Apparently, he had the strength of ten men and could take 200 volts and keep walking. They used to trank him up and run bets on how many tazer hits he could take. His file name was Afzal Taha. Some of his ramblings included crazy religious stuff about reincarnation. As I always say, after breakfast my brain reaches genius levels. Superhuman strength, nutty attitude, religious crazy—something clicked. So right before lunch, I went over and got the file from my friend. Do you want to see it?”
“You haven’t even looked at it yet? Give it here.” Hoffman snatched it from Behruse’s pudgy fist. It was a yellowed file discolored from water damage, tied with red string, bristling with papers of different sizes. The latest noting was done in a close, formal English handwriting in red ink, affixed with numerous seals. Hoffman read the script with his finger, his lips moving laboriously.
“Behruse, you’re a genius!” Hoffman announced, forgetting momentarily that he had been effectively kidnapped and poisoned. “This man is the Lion of Akkad.”
Then the smell of the lamb hit him, and he promptly threw up over the file, Behruse, and a tiny part of Sabeen’s shoe.