Well?” Helen said. “Have you decided? . . .The doctor wants me to go back to the States, as soon as possible.”
“Can’t I meet you in a week or two?” Alex said.
He looked up at the ceiling. The ceiling, fifteen feet up, was freshly plastered and perfectly smooth. Helen was sitting at an art deco mirror they’d bought, brushing her hair.
“No. I won’t go without you. I don’t understand what could be more important than this, Alex.”
She looked in the mirror at him. He was lying in bed. It was late. He hadn’t had anything to drink at all for two days. She hadn’t said anything about it. She’d probably never known him sober, until recently. He was quieter, not voluble the way he was when he was drinking. There were long spells of silence now. Not angry silence, but silence of a different kind, as if he were taking his sobriety in.
“A week is all I ask,” he said. “Ten days. I promise to come.”
“Did you ever really love me?” she said.
“Yes. I’ve always loved you,” he said. “You have to believe that.”
“Even when you were with other women.”
“Yes. Even then.”
She stopped brushing her hair and put the brush down carefully.
“I’m begging you to go, now,” Alex said.
“I won’t go without you,” she said. “I won’t. I don’t care what happens to me . . . I won’t go. Not unless you come with me.” She snapped off the light and slipped into bed next to him.
“I’m afraid,” he said. “I’m afraid . . . if you don’t go. . . .”
She put her arms around him. It was pitch dark in the room. She loved being alone with him like that.
“Do you remember once we went to London to see your father, when we were first dating?”
“Yes,” he said.
“I was so impressed with your father and mother. I thought, if I can be like her, I’ll be all right. I miss her.”
“So do I,” Alex said.
“We went out every night, remember? We saw The Mousetrap.”
“Ate at a place called the Oratorio.”
“Yes,” she said. “And you took me to the Savoy for lunch with your father, and all those people kept coming by to say hello. Your father seemed to own the city.”
“He’d been there during the war.”
She kissed his neck. “Let’s go see him.”
“Okay.”
“He’s lonely, I think.” she said.
“I think so,” Alex said.
“We’ll go see him,” she said. She touched his lips. “I love you. Is it because of work? Is that it? Why you can’t leave? Is it something you can tell me? Something to do with that man Hussein we visited?”
“Yes, with him,” Alex said. “I’ll quit after this if you’ll just go back tomorrow.” He was cupping her breast, the one with the lump. “Please.”
They made love then. She pretended she was only 22 and they were in London, and there was nothing in front of them but good things. Her mind played tricks on her lately, making the past seem more real than the present.
• • •
There was a good smell even in the stairway. It was the smell of his mother’s cooking. The young man, Omar, walked up the stairs towards his parents’ apartment. They’d come to Mexico from Gaza, after Hamas had killed his uncle for being an informer. No one ever found out if it had been true or not. Enough is enough, Omar’s father had told his mother that night, and they’d borrowed money and flown from Jordan to Mexico because they had a cousin there.
All the children except their oldest boy, Omar, had been born in Mexico. His father had opened up a small market. Now he had four of them, and considered Mexico home. He didn’t miss Palestine. He told his son that Palestine was dead, a land full of killing and suffering. Why in the world would any sane man want anything to do with it? Nothing was worth that kind of suffering, he told his son. Omar thought differently. He had a romantic notion about the place he barely remembered.
The young man carried the package up the stairs with him. A man he knew well, from one of the other apartments, walked down the stairs past him and smiled. Omar smiled back, making sure the man didn’t bump the package.
“May God be with you,” the man said.
“And with you, too,” Omar said.
His mother was cooking. He greeted her and she smiled at him. She was on her cell phone, and he went back to his small bedroom in the flat and put the package on his bed. Then he took it off and tried to put it under the bed, but it wouldn’t fit. He put it on the chair and stood for a moment, trying to decide what to do with it. His mother opened the door to his bedroom, still talking on her cell phone.
“Your father wants to know where you were all morning,” she said to him in Arabic.
“I was. . . .” He was staring at the package. “I was having the bike looked at. I’m thinking of selling it,” he said.
“Praise be to God. I hope you sell it soon, before you’re killed,” his mother said. They’d had a friend of the family killed the summer before on his motorcycle on the road to Puebla, and his parents had been trying to get him to sell his since. It was a lie; he had no intention of selling it. But he knew it would make his mother happy.
“What’s that?” his mother said. She was looking at the package.
“I bought a new computer from Pablo,” Omar said.
“You have two computers already,” she said.
“It’s a Mac,” he said.
“What’s that?” she said. He shook his head and smiled at his mother as she was closing the door. “Lunch will be ready soon. Your father is coming home. He wants to talk to you about store #3.” They’d numbered the stores. Three was in a very tough neighborhood and was being robbed almost continuously.
When his mother left, he suddenly had a strong desire to open the box and see what was inside. It didn’t weigh much, which puzzled him. The box was computer-sized. For some reason, he thought that he should see what was inside.
The cardboard box was bound with string. It looked quite ordinary. He went to the kitchen and came back with scissors and cut the string. He heard his little sister come in from school. She was with a friend. He was about to peel back the top of the box, but stopped.
His sister opened the door. She was 16 and very cute, and he worried about her. He knew what the boys in the neighborhood were like. She was wearing her Catholic school uniform.
“What are you doing?” she said in Spanish. She didn’t really speak Arabic, although she understood it.
“Out,” he said.
“Your porn stash? Why don’t you get a girlfriend?” she said.
“Go,” he pointed.
“Lunch is ready,” she said, and started to close the door. “You look weird.”
He tied the string again, put the box back on his chair, and went and had lunch. He couldn’t really eat. His father was talking to them about store #3 and what to do about security. All the time their father was talking, his sister was looking at him.
“Okay, what’s in that box?” she said.
“What do you mean?” He’d come back to his bedroom after lunch and was staring at the box, trying to decide what to do with it. He’d told his father he would meet him at store #3, and he’d promised not to be late. But he had no idea what he was going to do with the package. He decided at lunch to take it with him to store #3 and leave it there. He thought it would be safer.
“You look weird. There’s something weird in that box,” she said. “I want to know what it is.”
“Don’t act crazy, Sofia.” His parents had given the rest of the children non-Arabic names, all taken from film stars.
“I’m not. But I want to see what’s in that box. It’s drugs, isn’t it?”
“No.”
“You’ve been acting strange. And I don’t believe all this religion crap you’ve been telling mom and dad. Trips to the mosque and all that bullshit. You’ve fallen in with that crowd from Montecitos,” she said. “Are you on crack?” They’d grown up in a rough and tumble neighborhood. A lot of the boys and girls he’d studied with had gone to work for the myriad neighborhood gangs.
“No.”
“Then let me see . . . Mom said it’s a computer.”
“It is,” he said.
“Then let me see it,” she said. She obviously didn’t believe him.
“No. Now I have to go. I promised Dad I’d. . . .”
“Why can’t I see it? If it’s just a computer.”
His mind froze. He didn’t have a quick lie to put her off with.
“Okay . . . it is porn,” he said. “I don’t want you to see it, okay?”
“I thought so. Good Muslim boy . . . yeah. Nasty boy is more like it,” she said. “You’re just like Miguel. God. Yuck! Is it gross?” She smiled, interested. “What’s it called, Booty Call #6?”
She was already having sex with her boyfriend, but she didn’t want to let on, as she knew it would destroy her mother and father. She got her birth control from a women’s group that worked in the neighborhood. The young women there were kind and told her that if she was going to have sex, she should protect herself.
“Yes.”
“Can I see it? I won’t tell mom. I want to see what it looks like. Gross!” She thought that this was a perfect way to prove to her brother that she was still a virgin. She was very worried what he would do if he found out otherwise. In Palestine, there’d been murders when fathers or brothers found out their daughters or sisters had compromised their virginity. The girls had been killed by their own families.
“No! Now can I have some privacy, Sofia?”
“Are you going to watch it now? Can I watch it with you? Yuck!” She shut the door, glad that he wasn’t a drug addict.
• • •
“Shukran,” the tailor said.
“You’re welcome,” Collin said, in Arabic.
The tailor was watching the road carefully, now. Collin had stopped the bleeding from the worst lacerations. The tailor didn’t seem to notice while Collin had been working on his face. Once the tailor had turned and looked at Nickels, and then turned back towards the window.
“Where are we going? He needs rest. His jaw might be broken. I want to take an X-ray,” Collin said.
“X-ray?” Nickels said.
“Yes. He might not be able to eat if it’s broken. He’ll have to have a liquid diet. Anyway, I want to take an X-ray to be sure,” Collin said.
Butch rubbed his hand over his short hair but didn’t answer.
“Are you going to tell me where we’re going?”
“His house,” Butch said.
“What?”
“This guy’s house.”
“Why?”
“I want to have a talk with his family,” Butch said.
“Jesus Christ. Don’t you ever let up?” Collin said.
Nickels looked at him a long time.
“I’m still having that sleeping problem. What do you think it is?” The doctor shook his head, closed up his medical bag, and put it back down on the floor of the car.
“Maybe if you stopped beating the crap out of people, you might sleep a little better,” Collin said.
“No, that’s got nothing to do with it. And I didn’t do it. The Mexicans did it.”
“You were standing there,” Collin said. “In the room, no doubt.”
“Yeah, I was. Come on; you’re supposed to be a doctor.”
“How old are you?”
“57.”
“You’re lying. How old?”
“Okay, I’m 59.”
“Have you been having a lot of sex lately?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“How often do you get up at night to pee? More than twice?”
“Yeah.”
“You might have a prostate infection. Or it’s swollen because of your age.”
“Prostate, huh?”
“Yes,” Collin said.
The car slowed and turned off the toll road they were on. Collin looked out the window and saw one of the countless ramshackle unplanned suburbs that surrounded the city.
“I’ve got a young girlfriend,” Butch said. “I’m trying to keep up. You know what I mean. She likes sex. Hell, I like sex.”
“She may have given you an STD,” Collin said.
“STD?”
“Sexually transmit. . . .”
“Yeah, I know what it means,” Nickels said.
“Maybe you’ve bitten off more than you can chew,” Collin said.
“I’ve been fucking longer than you’ve been alive, kid.”
“Exactly.”
“She’s not that kind of girl.” Collin shrugged his shoulders. “Can you treat it?”
“You need a doctor.”
“You’re a doctor,” Nickels said. “I don’t care if you don’t like me. Can you treat it?”
“Depending on what’s wrong . . . yes, someone can treat it.”
“I want you to treat it. You inspire confidence. Look what you did for him.”
“Why did you bring me?” Collin had never met anyone like Nickels.
“Because you speak Arabic. And we have no one at the embas-sy who does right now. Can you believe it? I’d have to fly someone in from Washington. The Company spends billions of dollars every year, and I can’t get anyone who speaks Arabic to have on hand. It’s a hell of a way to run a railroad,” Butch said.
“I speak it very, very badly,” Collin said. “I can’t be of much use to you.”
“Well, we’re about to find out.”
It was three in the morning, the street lit by weak lights from the top of thin steel utility poles that brought electricity up from the city. A fog that sometimes appeared in the mountains above Mexico City at night shrouded some of the buildings.
The tailor had known for over an hour that they were probably going to his house, but he hadn’t been sure so had kept it off his face. He was sure, now. There was an American car and a police cruiser on the corner with two Coldwater types behind the wheel.
“Pull in behind them,” Nickels said. He got out of their car and went and sat in the American car.
“Why are we here?” the tailor asked the doctor in Arabic. His damaged face was more swollen that it had been before.
“I don’t know,” Collin said. “Do you live here, nearby?”
“Yes.”
“You have to tell them what they want to know,” Collin said in Arabic. For a moment he had to think of the verb to tell, so it came out wrong the first time. But he repeated it.
“Why?”
“Because,” Collin said. “If you don’t, they’ll probably arrest your family and send them out of the country.” Collin turned and looked at the driver. He was looking at them through the rearview mirror.
Nickels came back and slid in next to the tailor. He took out a pistol and laid it on his knee. He looked at Collin.
“Okay. Tell him that if he doesn’t tell us where the package is, we’re going to go down the street and arrest his family. The kids, too. Go ahead and tell him.”
“Children? You can’t be serious.”
“Try me,” Butch said.
“Okay. No need for that,” the tailor said in perfect English. He spoke English, but hadn’t let on until then. The doctor was a little shocked.
“Motherfucker!” Butch said. “You see! You see! He speaks English.”
The tailor looked at the doctor, then. It was a strange look, as if to say he was sorry for misleading him because he’d been kind to him.
“Sneaky motherfucker,” Butch said.
The tailor told them that Madani had, in fact, been the key player in their cell. There were four people in the cell, he told them. One of them was the Imam at the mosque; he’d even given them his name. Collin had wanted to ask if the tailor knew of a girl at the Gobi, but was afraid to. Instead, he’d listened to Nickels question the tailor on the way back into the city. The man tried to prevaricate, saying that he didn’t know anyone’s address, but only met them at his tailor shop. Nickels finally lost his patience and told him that he was going to go back to the tailor’s house and arrest all his family, including his young children, and make sure that he never saw them again. It seemed to work.
The tailor said the person who had the bomb was a young Palestinian man named Omar who still lived with his mother and father. He said Omar had taken the bomb with him the day they were arrested. He gave them the boy’s address.