She shouldn’t have come back,” Collin said. “Your wife should be in the States with real doctors and real hospitals. Not here in Mexico City.”
“Can I come in?” Alex said. Collin nodded and let him pass.
It was very early, before nine in the morning, when Collin heard a knock at the door. He was on his way out to the hospital. He opened the door and was surprised to see Law, sober, standing in his doorway alone. No guards, no one with him, in a sweater and looking less glamorous than when he was with his retinue of security men.
“Yes, well, I know all that,” Alex said. He’d driven himself alone to the doctor’s apartment. Alex had expected him to be angry because the old man had died the night before.
“Can I sit down?” Alex said. “It’s been a long night.”
Collin led him into a kind of anteroom where he saw some of the local people for free, and then past that into the living room. Alex had caught the doctor on the way out; he was holding his medical bag.
The doctor cleaned off a chair piled with art books so Alex could sit down.
Collin was frightened that Dolores might be involved somehow in the plot, but he couldn’t or didn’t want to believe it. He didn’t know what to do. He’d sat wide awake in bed for hours, putting it all together. If she’d had a passport, it would all be different—but she didn’t.
He’d asked her point blank where it was. If it was stolen, why hadn’t she allowed him to apply for a replacement at the embassy? He decided she was an innocent—an illegal immigrant, most likely, nothing more. Probably an illegal Arab trying to get into the States. But that, he’d told himself, certainly didn’t make her a terrorist.
He judged her on the quality of her spirit. He was attracted to her, not just physically but emotionally, as if she needed something from him but was unable to tell him what. She was no mass killer; he was certain of that. He felt as if he were treating a very young child who had come into the office crying, and he had to guess the nature of its malady.
“I’m sorry, but your wife is not my patient. Under the circum-stances, I don’t think it’s a good idea that I see her again. Besides, she needs a specialist,” Collin said.
Alex didn’t sit. Collin looked for a place for his stack of books, and finally found one.
“What circumstances?” Alex said.
“You’re my boss. You call me in the middle of the night and have me go see people who end up dead. You say that if I don’t help you, I’m helping terrorists do something horrific. I think I’m busy, don’t you?”
Alex rubbed his hands together. He saw the postcard of the Zócalo that Dolores had left for the doctor to post for her. He picked it up off the coffee table.
“Were you good friends? You and the old man?” Alex asked.
“Yes. Friends. We played chess. I let him win on occasion—and now he’s dead, and you say it’s fine because he was a terrorist. I’m not convinced. In fact, I very much doubt it.” He watched Law look at the postcard.
“My parents have a place near this address in London,” Alex said, glancing at the card. “Well, my father now. My mother died. Two years ago.”
“How interesting,” Collin said. “I’m sure it’s very nice. Now I’d like to go out, as I have real patients whom I’ve had to neglect—unless someone else is chained to a bed somewhere, waiting to be helped into the next world.”
“He confessed, your friend,” Alex said. “Before he died. He said that an al Qaeda cell is active in the city, and they are in possession of a bomb.”
“And you learned this on the basis of torture? I’m sure I would confess, too.”
“Interrogation,” Alex said.
“I don’t believe it. I would tell you I was Bin Laden’s best friend if you beat me long enough.”
Alex looked at him. “Why are you living like this?” he asked. He looked into the tiny, dark bedroom and saw the watercolors taped to the wall.
“I like it,” Collin said. “It suits me.”
“Does it have to be quite so grim? . . . I suppose so.”
“It’s always been a doctor’s office. Remember? I’m a doctor.”
“So it suits you?” Alex said.
“Is that a crime? Anyway, it was part of keeping me gray. No one to notice me, just an eccentric young doctor’s choice of digs. Very suitable, I thought. Lots of drunks in the neighborhood.” He eyed Alex.
“My wife likes you,” Alex said, ignoring the remark. He looked at the postcard again, then set it down. He saw Collin’s work book; the doctor had been practicing his Arabic. “I didn’t know you wrote Arabic. Very impressive.”
“I’m studying it,” Collin said. “It’s in my file if you want to check. Will I be arrested? You should know I also have French and some German. Is that a crime, too? Will I be arrested and chained to a bed because I speak a little German? Perhaps you’ll want to arrest my parents too—waterboard my mother? Her father was Dutch. Very dangerous, the Dutch.”
“This isn’t going well,” Alex said. “You’re very angry.”
“No, it isn’t. I told you, I can’t see your wife . . . as a patient. I’m sorry.”
“But she wants to see you. You made an impression on her. She says you’re kind.”
“I’m sorry. It’s impossible,” Collin said.
“All right, what do I have to do to get you to see my wife?”
“What do you mean?” Collin said.
“Come on. There must be something. New car? A trip home after all this is finished? Whatever it is, I’ll do it. I’m very rich. I don’t care what it costs. Do you want out of this assignment? I can arrange that, too. The Embassy in Paris?”
“You’re joking?” Collin said.
“No. I’m not joking,” Alex said.
It took a minute for Collin to realize that his boss was black-mailing him. The outrage turned quickly into something else. He did want out, he thought; not just from the assignment at the embassy, but out of the service altogether. He could not help them do again what they’d done last night. He was in danger of losing something about himself that he couldn’t afford to lose.
Then he thought of what was at stake and realized he couldn’t leave the assignment, not right now. No matter how awful it might be, he had to try to help. It was oddly because he was a doctor that he couldn’t just turn and quit. First, do no harm, he thought.
“I have a friend. I think she’s an illegal of some kind. I want her to have an American passport,” the doctor said.
“Jesus, is that all?” Alex said.
“That’s all. But I want her to be able to go to the States on a plane. Throw in some kind of background story for her and a Social Security number while you’re at it. Her name is Dolores Rios.”
“Fine. She’ll have it by tomorrow. I’ll need a photograph. How old is she?”
“Just like that?” Collin said.
“Just like that,” Alex said.
“She’s about my age. Thirty or so. Make her twenty-seven.”
“Now will you come see my wife?”
“Yes. This afternoon, send a car here at three,” Collin said.
“Thank you,” Alex said, and stood up. “How much Arabic?”
“Enough to get into trouble,” Collin said.
“I wouldn’t have let you leave—if that’s what you were thinking. I need you right now. I was lying about that part.”
“And if I refuse to help again?”
“You won’t. I understand you.”
“Do you?”
“You’re like me. You just don’t want to admit it,” Law said.
“Like you! Hardly,” Collin said.
“Everyone thinks you’re soft. Butch, everyone at the station says so—but you’re not. You’re very hard, in fact. You just don’t show it. That’s why I know you’ll help find the package. You don’t give a damn that Butch hates you or any of the rest of it. In fact, I doubt you give a damn about much. That’s what they liked about you in the first place. You’re arrogant. Aren’t you?”
“Maybe,” Collin said.
“You’ll stay because you always want to do the right thing. It’s a curse. I have it, too. It doesn’t seem like it, I know. But I do. Not about the small things, God knows, but about the big things. You care.”
“And you think doing the right thing was letting that old man be taken away by those thugs,” Collin said.
“I couldn’t have just let him go. Could I? You were so sure he was innocent. And it turned out he wasn’t.”
The doctor had no reply to that. It was true, he’d thought the old man was an innocent who had somehow gotten involved with terrorists without realizing what it was really about.
“Three o’clock,” Collin said.
“Would you like me to mail that card?” Alex offered. “I could send it out in the pouch. Get there quicker. You know what the Mexican mail is like.”
“Sure,” Collin said. He picked up the postcard and handed it to Law. “You’re right; the mail service is shit,” Collin said.
“Glad to do it,” Alex said.
The doctor walked him to the door and watched him leave. Law got into a car with embassy plates that he’d parked illegally at the corner. The doctor watched it disappear into the traffic on the boulevard and was relieved he was gone.
• • •
“Allahu akbar,” someone said to Hussein in the parking lot.
“Salaam Aleikum,” Hussein answered.
The mosque was near the archeological museum. It had been built in the Sixties. It had a golden dome reminiscent of Qubbat As-Sakhrah, the Dome of the Rock, as it was known in the West. It had been built with money from Saudi Arabia and from a few rich Muslim families in Mexico who’d come to settle after the Six-Day War. The mosque became a Wahhabi stronghold in the Eighties. Hussein’s brother had been part of the transformation, having come back from a long stay in Pakistan, a changed man whom he barely recognized.
Hussein took off his shoes. It was a Wednesday morning, and few people were at the mosque at that time of the morning. The mosque’s offices were on the second floor, but he’d wanted to pray for a moment.
He stepped onto the floor and walked under the brightly painted classical arches, similar to what he remembered as a child in Cairo. Hundreds of empty rugs lay in lines across the floor. For a moment he stood and looked at the morning light that streamed through the door. It illuminated the dome, and he felt he was certainly in a blessed place. In God’s place.
It had been a long time since he’d gotten on his knees and prayed. He was a man without God, without even the need for a God. He always thought of himself as a man of this world. Money had been his god. Money had given him everything he’d ever wanted. He’d been good at making it, good at keeping it. It had given him the power over other men that he found satisfying; he remembered what it was like to be powerless, something he dreaded even now. God had a brother, he thought, as he entered and bowed his head. He was called Mammon, and each had his place.
Hussein had married an American girl, an airline hostess, part of his escape plan from everything he’d known and had been taught by his father. She knew nothing of his God, and he wanted it that way. His children didn’t think of themselves as Arabs, even though they had their father’s dark skin and black hair.
It wasn’t until the morning the twin towers fell that he’d thought seriously about his father’s God, about how—if he existed—he could let that happen to innocent people. What kind of God was he? His wife had lost a brother in the towers. She wasn’t the same after she got the news. She wasn’t the same toward Hussein either, because he was an Arab. He tried to tell her that he was innocent and she tried to listen, but something had been poisoned between them. She’d left him and gone home to New York, and never came back to him. Even his children had treated him differently afterwards. They saw him as part of that strange world they’d heard about on CNN.
He knelt down now on a prayer rug. He’d been a very young boy when his father first brought him to the mosque in Cairo. He remembered the trip in the car, the riotous street, and the call to prayer. It had been the week that England and France had invaded the Suez Canal.
“I want to see Abd,” Hussein said in Arabic.
The young man in the white keffiyeh looked at him from behind a computer screen. He was black and his black skin looked very dramatic in the traditional dress. He was from Nigeria.
“He’s with someone,” the man said.
“Please tell him his brother Hussein is here to see him,” he said, in such a way that he couldn’t be put off. The man picked up the phone and called into the inner office.
“He asks you to please wait a few moments,” the man said.
Hussein nodded and went to the couch. Above him, on the wall, was a framed quote from the Koran: “God loves the clean.”
“You can go in now,” the man said, finally.
Another man, in western dress, came out of his brother’s office as Hussein was entering. He was carrying a briefcase and didn’t bother to look up at Hussein as he passed.