Broadmoor, New Orleans: 4 June 11:00 P.M. Central time
Barid Hafezi stood in the doorway to his daughter’s darkened room and watched her sleep.
Yasmina was eight years old, a small, wiry tomboy with laughing brown eyes and a mischievous grin. Her ten-year-old brother Faraj was the serious one. He was probably reading a book with a flashlight under the covers in his room down the hall. But Yasmina was like her mother, a carefree spirit who drew like an angel and could charm the squirrels out of the trees.
Barid sucked in a deep breath, but it did nothing to ease the tight pain in his chest. Twenty-five years. It had been twenty-five years since he’d fled the turmoil of Iran for the United States. He’d built a new life for himself here, a safe life for his wife and children. It hadn’t been easy, but he’d managed to get a Ph.D. in journalism from NYU while his wife, Nadia, earned her Ph.D. in microbiology from Columbia. Now he was a professor at the University of New Orleans, while Nadia had just earned tenure at Loyola. They owned a graceful old cottage in the Broadmoor neighborhood of New Orleans. Hurricane Katrina had made them refugees again for a while, but now they were back home and soon, Inshallah, the repairs on the house would finally be finished. Only, he was very much afraid he wouldn’t be here to see that happen.
It had been four months now since the man he called “the Scorpion” had first come to him. Barid had never learned the man’s real name. The man wore cowboy boots and a Stetson, and had a tattoo high on his bulging bicep—a tattoo of a scorpion superimposed on two crossed arrows with the words DE OPPRESSO LIBER beneath. Barid had looked it up on the Internet. It was a United States Special Forces tattoo.
At first the Scorpion had smiled and talked pleasantly, although even then the man made Barid nervous. He had known men like the Scorpion before, in Tehran. In Tehran, such men had been agents of the SAVAK, the Shah’s old secret police. The SAVAK might not have worn Stetsons and cowboy boots, but at heart such men were all the same. Perhaps such men had believed in something, once. But soon they believed only in their own power.
Like the agents of the SAVAK, the Scorpion was well versed in the use of fear and intimidation to control men. He showed Barid pictures of his children: candid shots of Yasmina at school; of Faraj walking down the street; of brother and sister at play with their white bunny, Cupcake, in the backyard. The message was implicit: Your children are not safe from me. I can get at them anytime, anywhere.
Then Cupcake disappeared and the Scorpion had shown Barid more photos—ghastly, sick images that haunted his dreams. This time the message was explicit: Follow instructions or what was done to your children’s bunny rabbit will be done to your children.
At first the Scorpion’s orders were simple. Barid was to form a small group of Islamic students who would meet once a week to study the Koran. Jamaat Noor Allah, they were called: the Light of God. Some of the students were politically moderate, others more angry. Did that matter? Barid had no way to know.
Then he was told to assign certain journalism students to certain projects. Again he reluctantly complied. Surely no harm could come from that? But the requests soon became more ominous. He was given the funds to buy a derelict house in the Lower Ninth Ward. Then he was told to rent another house, this one in the Irish Channel in the unflooded part of the city near the river. Because of the way the Scorpion phrased his instructions, Barid knew there were more men than the Scorpion involved. “This is the house we want you to buy,” the Scorpion would say. Or, “Here are the Korans for the group’s meetings. We want you to make certain each student has one.”
Barid never asked why he was being made to do all these things. At first he hoped that if he did as he was told and kept his nose out of it, the men might spare him. But eventually he’d had to admit that he was only fooling himself. He might not know what these men were doing, or why. But he knew too much to be allowed to live.
At one point he’d given some thought to going to the American authorities, but the memory of that Special Forces tattoo always stopped him. He had no way of knowing whom the Scorpion worked for, and so he knew there was no one he could trust. Ever since 9/11, too many Americans treated Muslim citizens the way the Nazis had started treating Jews in 1930s Germany. If the Americans locked him up as a suspected “enemy combatant,” his family would be left completely vulnerable. And so for the sake of his children, he continued to cooperate. And he kept his mouth shut.
“Barid?”
He felt his wife’s hand touch his shoulder, slide down his arm in a gentle caress. “You’re doing it again. Watching them. Why?”
He turned to enfold her in his arms and draw her close so she couldn’t see his face. He longed to tell her the truth, to say, I watch them because there are evil men out there who have threatened to kill my children if I don’t do what they say. And even though I have done all that they have asked, I know it won’t be enough. I know that one day they will kill me, if for no other reason than to keep me silent. And so I watch my children because I know that someday, soon, I will never see them again.
Except of course he couldn’t say any of that to Nadia, because when he was gone, his children would need their mother, and he couldn’t do anything that might put her life in danger, too. So all he said was, “I watch them because it brings me peace.”
And even though he knew she didn’t believe him, she said no more.