YAKIN DIDN’T KNOW THE WOMAN WHO STOOD BESIDE THE OLD Man, but she was clearly a class apart from anything he had ever seen in his short life. This was, he reflected bitterly, the kind of woman he deserved. The way she wore her scarf, it was a fashion statement, a sex bomb, not what the clerics had had in mind when they had dreamt up the hijab. This was the kind of piece he should have been with. But would he ever get the chance? Would she ever give him a second look? Fuck no. She was even throwing the imam off balance. He could literally see the smoke coming out of Hassan Salemi’s ears. Or actually that was real smoke, for bits of his clothing were smoldering. Not for the first time Yakin wondered whether the Imam was actually mentally impaired.
The Old Man had been affable the last time, offering them refreshments. He sat like an emperor now, granting an audience. Hassan Salemi’s stock had diminished somewhat in recent times. Kinza had burnt down his house and killed his men. His retaliation had netted him a few hostages and little else. No Kinza, no professor, no watch. What was the world coming to when any random street tough could come and rough up a Sadr parliamentarian candidate in Shulla? They were at the denial stage now. No mention was to be made of the name Kinza ever.
“So, Salemi,” he said. “I cannot say this meeting brings me any great pleasure.”
“You sent us into a trap, Old Man.”
“A trap? Of what? Women and servants? Mad librarians?” Avicenna laughed. “Your reputation has been exaggerated indeed.”
“There were djinns there, Old Man,” Salemi’s voice was flat. Yakin could see a little muscle jumping in the side of his neck. The lunatic was on the verge of doing something stupid. “The demons made of smokeless fire.”
Yakin tried to maneuver himself away from his master, but an enormously brutish looking man with a shotgun glared at him. He looked like a torturer. They said he was Mukhabarat and that the Old Man was Mukhabarat through and through. Just that word alone was enough to make most people piss their pants. Yakin slumped. He was so tired he wanted to lie down on the floor and go to sleep.
“Djinns were there? Floating around? Possessing the furniture perhaps?”
“No,” Hassan Salemi said. “They were in jars. Great earthenware jars stoppered with red wax, which were cold to the touch and covered with sediments from the ocean. Do you think me stupid, Old Man? There was a room full of sealed jars!”
“Jars, you say?” Avicenna leant forward. “Now you interest me. Have you brought them?”
“My men shot them,” Hassan Salemi said.
“Oh dear.”
“Everything exploded then.”
“Yes,” Avicenna said bitterly. “If one is stupid enough to shoot up a room full of djinns, then anything might happen. I trust that you searched the wreckage of the house?”
“What house?” Salemi laughed bitterly. “The entire block was destroyed. Cluster bombed, more like. I have lost all my men but four.”
“So the witch Davala held the djinns of Solomon, it seems,” Avicenna said to the lady beside him. “I wonder why she never unleashed them. Is she dead at least?”
“I don’t know about the old witch,” Hassan Salemi said. “But you spoke of three women there. I have brought you two of them.”
“Have you now?” Avicenna said. “Well, that is good. Very good. I warned you that the women were dangerous. Still, you haven’t done too badly.”
“What now then?”
“Now we must prepare. Imam, I must open your eyes. You have stumbled unfortunately into a war long in the making. It is, I believe, reaching a watershed moment,” Avicenna said. “Our enemies have never been weaker. You have broken the witches’ power. The cursed Druze is addled and alone. The watch is in the hands of a petty psychotic who lacks the intelligence to even know its value. We are in a position, imam, to sweep the board. You will be in at the death, imam. In the end, I will restore you to your former puissance and fearsome reputation.”
Yakin groaned. Big words aside, the Old Man was ready to fuck them all over again.
Hoffman had crafted a diabolical escape plan. It would end with Behruse incapacitated, the Dog Boy out of commission, and Sabeen completely in his power and lovingly grateful to him for saving her life. The plan involved rope, a belt, Scotch tape, nails, a Swiss army knife—a plan of such genius that it could not help but succeed through sheer chutzpah alone.
All he needed to do was kill time now. It occurred to him that Behruse was taking overly long to visit him this time. Normally the fat man came every three days to change the water, food, and slop buckets. It was now the fourth day. Hoffman wasn’t hungry or thirsty because he had appropriated Dog Boy’s rations. Dog Boy was on hunger strike, refusing any food and only drinking a third of his portion. Hoffman had tried to reason with him, but Dog Boy wasn’t having any of it.
He wanted his own cell back and a return to the old administration. In his more lucid moments, he made a list of demands that included immediate reinstatement of Dr. Sawad, single cells for every prisoner, and at least one electro-therapy a week to keep the juices flowing. Hoffman spent his idle time trying to train Dog Boy to use the slop bucket properly and dreaming about taking revenge on Sabeen, which would involve her being wrested from her evil grandfather and somehow converted into his caring, devoted follower, perhaps a second lieutenant to replace Tommy.
Her casual betrayal had in fact enflamed his passion from mere love to something transcendental. He craved physical contact with her, was sure he could turn her! He wrote poetry about her (not rhyming) and recited these verses to Dog Boy, taking care to ensure that Dog Boy understood clearly that the poetry was not meant for him, and he should not take it as any sign of encouragement. By the fifth day, he was getting a bit worried. Behruse still hadn’t arrived. It was possible that something had happened to the fat man.
By the sixth day, he was hungry and thirsty and starting to rethink his strategy. He had almost despaired when loud noises at the door woke him from lethargy. There was a small explosion, the wood splintered out, cutting him in some places and setting off Dog Boy into fairly weak paroxysms (he was near dead from the hunger strike).
When Hoffman managed to open his eyes, he saw in front of him a most fearsome old woman holding a gnarled walking stick and an ancient six-chambered revolver, still smoking. Her face was singed: eyebrows gone, the wispy hair on her head burnt off in patches. She had lost her dentures and so spoke with a lisp, a single tooth sticking up visibly like a decrepit building.
“You’re welcome, soldier,” said Mother Davala.
“What? Er, you’re not Behruse.”
“No.”
Hoffman scratched his head. “Well could you fix up the door again?”
“You want to stay in your cell?”
“It’s just that I had this great plan for him.”
“He’s left you for dead, soldier,” Mother Davala said. “You and your men.”
“Dead?”
“All of them. Butchered in the street like dogs. The shell of your big car lies in a fronted garage in Shulla.”
Hoffman shut his eyes. “I was afraid of that.” He looked ready to cry.
“So rise up now, soldier,” Mother Davala said. “Throw off this sheep’s clothing and show yourself true. Like you, my children lie slaughtered, my sisters taken, my house razed to the ground. Yet we still stand. It is time to strike back at the betra—”
“Wait a minute. You want me to kill Behruse and Sabeen?”
“Of cou—”
“Are you crazy? I don’t want to kill them,” Hoffman said. “I love Sabeen. I want to marry her.”
“Pardon me, boy?” “Yeah, I love that girl,” Hoffman said, “There’s this little snoring sound she makes when she’s napping in the car.”
“You are serious?” Mother Davala looked stunned.
“Yeah, it’s the cutest thing.”
“She left you for dead and killed all your men,” Mother Davala said.
“Sure, we’re gonna have to talk about that,” Hoffman said, “and Behruse is gonna get fixed. Don’t get me wrong. Plus he might have to get with Dog Boy here. But—”
“Do you know who these people are?” Mother Davala demanded.
“Sure, this Avi character is like a thousand years old,” Hoffman said, “and he’s been looking for this Lion dude, some kind of old grudge or something. It’s like Battle of the Titans, man. Oh, and they want the watch that the professor’s got. It has some kind of immortal life secret thing in it. Yeah, we gotta stop Avi for sure. Can’t have him going around living forever and shit. I mean, he’d like take over the world or something. But Sab’s not like that. I mean, she’s really pretty and even when she was like thinking about killing me, she just couldn’t do it. I mean, there’s a heart underneath all that.”
“I don’t believe this.”
“Hey, when we get out of here, can you take me to a store? I wanna buy some flowers.”
For the first time in almost six hundred years, Mother Davala was literally bereft of speech.
“I’ll kill them all,” Kinza said. “Salemi and every man living who was in the room when they cut Xervish. Every man who burnt down that house. And then I’m going to start killing old men. I’ll kill every old man in Shulla, every old man in Baghdad if I have to. If Hoffman is dead, you can add that to my account too. I’m not running anymore.”
And then he sat back, exhausted. His face was a pasty gray, eyes rimmed with fever, the skin taut over his bones, hands trembling as he tried to drink his broth. There was nothing left in this thin, broken man. His words were laughable. Yet whenever he looked at Kinza, Dagr saw the bodies of dead men piled up in grenade-charred rooms, saw the fire from the awful burning of Salemi’s house. He smelled the blood and heard the Makarovs barking. And so he said nothing and prayed for God’s forgiveness.
“It is not easy to kill the Old Man,” Afzal Taha said. “It will not be easy to even get to him. The entire neighborhood is designed to hide and protect him. There will be Mukhabarat, mercenaries, random street thugs who don’t even know whom they are working for. And Salemi took hostages from the safehouse, more friends of yours, I think.”
“Salemi thought he was safe too,” Kinza said, in a hoarse whisper. “Everyone thinks they are safe.”
“And whom can we count on?” Afzal Taha asked. “You three are half dead, even worse off than me. I’m beginning to have grave doubts.”
“You think that will stop him?” Hamid laughed bitterly. “You think logic operates anywhere in this entire fucking circus?”
“You were free to leave a long time ago,” Kinza said.
“Leave? Leave? Fuck you, Kinza. I’ve been shot thirteen times since you fuckers took me in. Thirteen times. I’ve lost two fingers, four pints of blood, and just recently I’ve got two cracked ribs, never mind the cuts, bruises, and internal organ damage—”
“What the hell are you complaining about? You’re walking around, aren’t you?”
“The entire fucking Republican Guard didn’t see this much fighting during the war,” Hamid said. “The entire fucking fedayeen didn’t go so far out of their way to get killed.”
“You know, Hamid, for a torturer, you’re getting damned squeamish,” Kinza said, “plus you weren’t exactly stellar back there.”
“The guy had a heart condition,” Hamid said. “He was two months from dying. You can’t expect me to…aw fuck it. We should get some vests.”
“What?” Dagr asked, surprised out of his comatose state.
“Vests,” Hamid said. “You know, the suicide bomber ones with the detonators.”
“You want to wear a bomber vest to a gunfight?”
“It’s perfectly safe,” Hamid said. “They don’t blow up without the detonator.”
“Hmm, vests wouldn’t be bad,” Kinza said, leaning forward, exhaustion apparently forgotten. “We can always bluff with them, and if everything fails, we can just blow it all up.”
“Right, half those Mukhabarat fuckers will shit their pants when they see us in vests,” Hamid said. “Trust me. I know these fuckers. They act all tough and CIA, but when some peasant in a homemade bomb suit walks up, they all piss themselves and run.”
“And we need a sniper. Where’s Mikhail?”
“Dead or with Salemi,” Dagr said. “And we dragged him into it.”
“Ok, we’ll get him back,” Kinza said. “Dagr you’re the tank, again. We’ll need a lot more firepower this time, I think.”
“Yeah, it’s a whole neighborhood this time, not one fucking house,” Hamid said. “Mortars and bombs, I think. Maybe a car or two rigged with IEDs.”
The Lion, who had been staring at them in bemusement, finally managed to edge into the conversation. “Are you all insane?”
“You’ve been hiding too long, Druze,” Kinza said. “You want to kill this guy, right? We’ll go right down his throat and kick in his door.”
“Can you get some guns, Druze?” Hamid asked. “I’m making a list here.”
“Ye-es,” Afzal Taha said, after a long pause. “Yes, I’ve got all the guns in the world.”
“Behruse, you fat fuck, he’s gone!” When Sabeen was truly angry, she resorted to two things: foul language and waving her gun around. It was, Yakin reflected, both terrifying and exciting at the same time. Hassan Salemi would have burst a blood vessel. There was nothing in the imam’s lexicon to even describe a woman like Sabeen. If he was thinking by now that he had allied himself with the devil, this display would have easily pushed him over the edge. Hassan Salemi wasn’t the big man in town anymore, however. He was off sulking and plotting, and Avicenna felt no need to pander to him.
Yakin, with all the carefully honed instincts of a turncoat, had found it prudent to slowly detach himself from Salemi. Not only was the casualty rate in Salemi’s camp prohibitively high, he also knew from experience that the man called Kinza was a murderous bastard who took things very personally. This lunatic, despite everyone’s best efforts, was still very much at large and might be inclined to hold a grudge against the barbarisms practiced upon his friend.
According to the new strategy, Yakin simply took to following Behruse around. Behruse was an affable fat man, fairly high in Avicenna’s command and therefore unlikely to meet the enemy on the field. By running his menial errands and assiduously plying him with compliments, Yakin was able to squirm into his circle fairly quickly. And now, as was their wont, Avicenna and Sabeen treated him like the furniture, or some sort of barely tolerable pet-type creature.
“Yes,” Behruse said, dejected.
“The door was blown open, and he’s gone,” Sabeen said. “Also that other test case. Both of them are gone. What the fuck were you doing?”
“I had a guard posted outside,” Behruse said. “He’s gone too.”
“You’ve lost the American,” Avicenna said. “Well done. Why did you not kill him, Sabeen?”
“I—” For once, Sabeen seemed at a loss for words.
“Eh? I thought you wanted us to keep him alive?” Behruse asked.
Avicenna was staring at Sabeen. “I must not have been clear. I believe I wanted him alive as long as he was useful. And controlled. Having him roam around at will is neither, is it?”
“He was to be our leverage with the Americans,” Sabeen said. “I had him pinned for all the murders.”
“Do you know something interesting, Sabeen?” Avicenna said. “I made some queries about this Hoffman. No American agency or service acknowledges him. He appears to be a bumbling idiot criminal deserter. Yet he’s traipsing around Baghdad with impunity. He is getting into sensitive information with impunity. He is getting out of locked rooms with impunity.”
“He’s a fool, grandfather, an infatuated buffoon,” Sabeen said with a wave of her hand. “You can’t spend five minutes with him without realizing that.”
“The situation speaks otherwise,” Avicenna said coldly. “Perhaps you are the fool, Sabeen, you and Behruse both. Perhaps you are infatuated with him. Six months ago, I had Taha in my grasp, I was about to find the watch, and no one knew I was alive. Now I don’t have Taha, some two-bit criminal has my watch, the old witch is riled up, I have to deal with Salemi, and your fucking Hoffman knows my face. Do you think this is under control, hmmm, Sabeen? Do you?”
“No,” Sabeen said, defeated by his cold will. “What do you want us to do?”
“We must find and kill the peons who burnt Salemi’s house. Kill them, and take the watch. That is the most important thing,” Avicenna said. “Hoffman is worrying me. He knows all of us. He can place all of us. He knows where we live. He knows about Dr. Sawad and Geber and all that ancient history. We will have to negotiate with him, I think.”
“I can handle him, grandfather.”
“No,” Avicenna said. “No. He’s done something to you. Don’t go near him.”
“I can spread the word if you want,” Behruse said. “We want to talk. He might turn up.”
“Yes, do that,” Avicenna said. “But do not underestimate him again. And call the Mukhabarat. I want protection doubled here. I want absolute calm. I do not wish to leave Baghdad, but if there are any more fireworks, we will have to.”
“Leave? Surely you’re overreacting,” Sabeen said.
“Do you think I have survived for a thousand years by making explosions in the streets and firing guns in the air?” Avicenna was livid. “Do you think no one will notice a massacre in Salemi’s house? Do you think this is the time to take part in a pitched battle? I’m telling you, get me my watch, and then we’re getting the hell out of here.”
The Druze safehouse was under a very old mosque, a relic of the Baghdad of the Caliph Harun ur Rashid. In 1258 A.D., the Mongols had sacked Baghdad, massacring up to a million people and destroying almost the whole city, including its famed libraries and universities. It was the end of the Golden Age of the alchemists, the end of the caliphate, a most emphatic end to Baghdad. That dream city, home to all the knowledge of the world, torch bearer of the new science and philosophy, was gone utterly.
The Mongols had taken the books from the libraries and used them to block the Tigris, creating great soggy bridges of ink and paper. It had amused them for a time, watching the scholars throw themselves into the water in despair. The world up to this point had never known a more terrible race than the Mongols.
The Mosque of the Red Corner was reputedly one of the few buildings that had survived, by some accident surely since Mongols did not spare mosques by rule. Still, after the weeklong raid, things returned somewhat to normal. The new governor, by order of Helugu Khan, brother of the Great Khan in Karakorum, set down to rebuild the city and try and knock it back into some sort of profitable venture. The Mosque of the Red Corner served as a prison for some time, then as a bureaucratic headquarters, and then as a tax office, before finally returning to its primary function.
In the course of all of this, the city had somehow been infiltrated by the Druze. In times of chaos, many secret sects descended upon Baghdad, vultures on the bloated corpse of the caliphate, to steal treasures or books or to cement power in the new city. Thus, the Mosque of the Red Corner was one of the humblest, but oldest, Druze quarters in the city, a most hidden place run by a very old imam still faithful to the precepts of the caliph Hakim.
This saintly old man recognized the signs of the Druze and led them down into the cellar, which was a small room stocked with foodstuff. Under a hidden trapdoor, there was a subbasement, which was a kind of walk-in closet filled with guns: semiautomatics, machine guns, mortars, grenades, and an old RPG, plus rifles with sniper scopes and boxes of ammunition. They were still in their original boxes; American, French, British—a last chance saloon for lost weapons, like forlorn prom dates sitting in corners, waiting, waiting. Kinza saw them, and something in his expression flickered. A calm acceptance came over him, as if some decision had been settled. The fever tremor left his body. He limped into the room.
“I don’t understand this,” said the Lion. “There is no plan here, no advantage. What am I missing? How many countless men are we facing?”
“Don’t ask me. I never wanted any of this,” Dagr said, leaning over the steps. The smell of gun oil made him nauseated.
“He can barely walk. He’s half dead with fever. Is he mad?”
“It won’t make a difference,” Dagr said. “When the fight comes out, it makes no difference at all. Just stay behind him.”
“What?”
“He’s a berserker, see?” Dagr said. “With Kinza, life is the enemy, really. He wants the world to be still, and when it doesn’t comply, he’s willing to force it. Don’t worry. After a while, it just becomes normal. I always thought violence wasn’t the solution. But then, look where we are. It certainly buys you some space. When the rage comes, just stay behind him, that’s all. I used to be scared all the time. But even that gets old.”
“You are frightened?” Afzal Taha looked puzzled. “You defied all these men for no reason. You attacked Salemi’s house for no reason. You held the watch.”
“I used to have a family, Druze,” Dagr said. “Three years ago, I had a daughter and a wife and a job. We had enough money, friends. We used to worry about promotions and schools for the little one, and cholesterol. My wife used to worry about getting fat. Do you know that? She used to look in the mirror backwards with her head screwed damn near all the way around and keep asking: Am I fat? Am I fat? Three weeks ago I would have died to get those worries back again. If I could, I would fill my head with those worries. I would breathe them into my lungs. I would smother myself with them and die laughing. But then you have to wake up. Reality isn’t there anymore. What do I have left? The world is gray to me, Druze. What would I miss that is so frightening?”
“You have no hope then?”
“Hope? Not that kind. I think I’ve finally realized that. The clock will never go back again. That life is over,” Dagr said. “Whatever happens now, I can never return to that. We’ve waded through blood, Druze.” He glanced down into the darkened cellar where Hamid and Kinza stood in silence, stripping guns, their conversation one of metallic clicks and ratchets, with no disagreements. “Two friends left in all the world. What’s the point of running now?”
“And I have none,” the Druze said. “After centuries, half my brain scooped out and no friend left alive. You’re right, professor. What’s the use of running now?”
Dagr sat back. It was the second time he had impressed himself before this half-god. He had, in effect, convinced the Lion to give up. The cost of it was another matter.