CHAPTER

26

• Tuesday, November 21, 1995, Amman to Karak, Jordan •

IT WAS EARLY; pillars of dust-spun light filled the room when Amani left the guesthouse. At the big stone house next door, she’d reached between the scrolls of iron work and rapped on her cousin’s window. Omar was doing push-ups, his hair shiny with sweat. He met her at the side of the house. His mother was out in her car and Aunt Lamise had taken the loaner. Gesturing to his cousin, he slipped into the garage with the spare key to Farouq’s Mercedes. The driver appeared, scolding vigorously—red-checked keffiyeh knotted around his shoulders and a loaf of pita in one hand—and shooed them away.

They walked from the house to Zahran Street and tried to negotiate with the cabbies who pulled up, but none would make the trip for less than fifty dinars. Omar clicked his tongue in annoyance. “It’s a long way—they can’t afford the petrol.”

From there, they’d walked fifteen blocks into Hafez’s leafy neighborhood. The house looked closed-up. Samir was in front polishing the silver sedan, a filterless cigarette between his fingers, another behind an ear.

“Hey man.” Omar leaned against the car. “Hafez come back?”

Samir clicked his tongue, flicking his chin up—no. Gone. Impatiently, he waved Omar away from the car.

Amani touched Omar’s shoulder and said to Samir in English, “We’d really be grateful if you could help us. It’s kind of urgent.”

With a sigh, Samir lowered his cloth, his eyes shaded under the brim of his baseball cap.

They wanted to go to Karak, Amani explained. She and Omar had twenty-seven dinars between the two of them, but Omar could get more if they could stop at the ATM in Abdoun Circle. Samir turned away, said he had to stick around in case Hafez needed him.

“But Hafez isn’t actually here, is he?” Amani asked, glancing at the house. The big iron shutters were closed on the front windows. She’d left several messages on his phone. “Has he called or anything? Is Carole here?”

The driver shook his head. He didn’t look at them. He fingered the edge of his ear, then jerked his head toward the car. “Come, come.” He took their twenty-seven dinars. “It’s enough. Yella.” Samir opened the backseat doors. Once they were all in, he rolled down the long drive and turned the wrong direction on to Zahran Street.

“Wait.” Amani leaned into the front seat. “It’s south! We need to go south.” She and Omar glanced at each other as Samir rounded another corner, bumping a yellow-and-black striped curb. They passed a construction site—the grounds broken up with cement, rebar, orange flags—made two more turns, and pulled in front of the stone faun. Omar said something in Arabic about Karak, which Samir ignored. Amani tossed a hand up, exasperated. “What’s going on?”

“We don’t go without the baba.” Samir bounced his fist against the center of the wheel, horn bleating.

“He’s asleep!” Amani protested.

“Samir policy,” the driver said.

Gabe’s face appeared in the upstairs window. Moments later, he emerged in shorts, T-shirt, and sandals, put a hand on the top of the car and bent to peer in. Amani saw pouches under his eyes. “Yella.” He climbed in front. “Any word from Musa?”

“Nothing,” Amani slumped back against her seat. “I kept calling the Petra Desert Patrol. The last guy I talked to acted like he didn’t even know who I was talking about. I started thinking maybe Musa found a way back to Karak.”

“Inshallah,” Omar said.

“So that’s where we’re going. No one answers at the convent number. And no Hafez either,” Amani added. “We went to his house.”

“No, I know,” Gabe said. “Hafez is gone. Like the Phantom.”

The late light burnished the interior of the car and created an aura through the top of Samir’s hair. Samir glanced at Amani in the mirror; he looked anxious. He whistled as he drove, his fingers drumming on the wheel. They spoke little.

On Sunday, Amani and Gabe had waited for hours at the visitor’s center in Petra, expecting someone would release Musa. The officers avoided them. A deputy sheriff finally sat across from them in the lobby and informed them that, apparently, Musa and Hafez had left.

“Apparently?” Carole’s forehead lifted. “Left where?”

No one seemed to have any idea where they had gotten to—or if they did, they weren’t telling. Samir reported the car was gone. Carole alternated between fury and panic. “What has that idiot done?” she ranted, pacing through the center lobby, twisting her shawl around her shoulders. “He goes off without a word. I honestly don’t think he’s in his right mind. He’s been acting so—so bizarre—for days now! I couldn’t get him to sit still. I never can. He doesn’t drive, either. I don’t even know if his license is still good. That man must’ve driven! Do you think that man kidnapped my husband?”

The police assured her this was unlikely. One of the palace officials had offered her and Samir a ride back to Amman, but Carole decided to wait for Hafez at the hotel. Eduardo wanted to stay with Gabe and Amani, but the officer encouraged them to head back home: there was nothing they could do in Petra. He promised to call immediately if they heard anything. Amani thought her father looked drawn, his face nearly gray with fatigue.

Now Gabe spoke into the silence of the car as Samir drove. “Things will be okay.”

She knew he wanted to believe Farouq, who had made inquiries of his own. One of his sources claimed that the Palace had quietly arranged to send Musa to a facility, a nice place, where he was being examined and tended to. Practically a spa, Farouq said, very modern, with doctors. They just want to check him out, make sure he was all right on his own . . .

Gabe sighed through his nose.

This morning, Amani had called the Royal Hashemite Court Office, then police headquarters downtown: she dialed a number one of the police had given her for a Mukhabarat agent, and then a security specialist with the American embassy who asked where she’d gotten his number, then suggested she try the court office. After that, she’d tried contacting hospitals and mental-health facilities in Amman, then in Beirut, Damascus, Jerusalem. No one had information on Musa, though everyone seemed reluctant to disappoint her, and she was given more names and numbers—all dead ends. She called the convent in Karak repeatedly. Were the nuns no longer there?

The highway was lined with ragged billboards and structures of pitted concrete block. The land stretched out. They drove past fruit stands, herds of sheep, camels decorated with tasseled bridles, and parched miles of pavement, before pulling into Karak. The convent’s carved doors were propped open; the young nun, Sylvain, rested on an entryway bench in a band of light, a pair of worn work gloves and two geraniums in ceramic pots beside her. Rising, she put her arms around Amani, Gabe, then Omar, and brought them into the office. “I’m so sorry we missed your calls,” she told Amani. “The day was so beautiful, I’m afraid we all went outside to work in the dirt.” She looked from Amani to Gabe as they sat down, her eyes almost transparent in the watery light. A cedar crucifix and a cross of palm fronds hung on the back wall above her chair. “Is Musa not with you?”

“He’s not here?” Amani sat nearest the nun. “We were hoping somehow he might have found his way back home.”

But Sister Sylvain had no information: there had been no word from Musa. And when last they’d heard, the government scouts had come through and sealed off his cave. “Come, come—we’ll check the cave.” The nun stood and Amani, Gabe, and Omar followed her out.

Sylvain led the group back up the ridge to Musa’s cave. Strands of police tape blocked the opening. With swift, impatient movements, Sylvain tore away the tape. The place was desolate; gray cinders covered the fireplace. His burned pot was on the sand floor. Beside it, a plate with a cracked glaze and blue rim, the image of a faded gazelle at the center. A withered T-shirt. The place smelled of cypress and crushed herbs. Amani rubbed her hands over her arms and surveyed the folding purple hills, the serpentine road in the distance. Omar stooped near the fireplace and tipped the little pot; water swirled in the bottom. “I forgot—he was making tea when I came for him,” he said, replacing it. “He expected to be right back.”

“Dammit,” Amani said. “Where is he?” She surveyed the ground beside the knife, the pot, and the cold ashes, the air swaying and soft inside the bowl of the open cave. It seemed almost possible that Musa would be back at any moment. She muttered, “Where is he?”

Within the cave, she noticed a bit of fabric poking out of a chest and tugged it free. It was like the one that Musa had shown them on their visit, covered with chalky white strokes. She picked up the cloth, folded it carefully, and put it in her bag beside the onionskin envelope with the scraps of blue letters. Touching the inner wall of the cave, smooth as one of her father’s planed boxes, Amani took a last look before they departed.

BACK AT THE CONVENT, Sylvain said, “You will let us know if you hear of anything?” She wrote her personal phone number on the back of a receipt. “I’ll do the same.”

Amani nodded.

The nun walked them to the car: Samir was still outside, wiping down Hafez’s silver Mercedes, talking with the gardener, who wore canvas gloves, a trowel under one arm. “Oh, your driver! I would have invited him in for tea.” Sylvain took a rosary of olivewood beads from her pocket and gave them to Samir, saying, “To keep you safe on the job.” She patted his arm. “May you be protected and guided.”

Amani saw the driver look surprised. He laid his hand on his chest in thanks. “Isn’t Samir Muslim?” she asked Omar quietly.

Sylvain said, “My beads are nondenominational.”

AFTER THEY DROVE OUT of Karak and pulled onto the highway, Omar said, “Well, that was a bust.”

“And where is Hafez?” Gabe asked darkly, arms still folded over his chest. “That’s what I want to know.”

“If he’s with Musa, I have to believe they’re both okay,” Amani said. “I mean—it’s Uncle Hafez, right? He wouldn’t let anything happen—I mean, he’s a big official, he—”

Samir’s head jerked, his focus shifted in the mirror. “He took the car.”

Omar looked at Amani, eyebrows lifted.

“He doesn’t stop to tell me. He just goes and he takes it.” Samir’s voice was low and terse. “The car—it’s my job. My responsibility.” Samir took a long breath and Amani sensed something giving way in the driver. “Do you know he never even lets me inside of his house? He said because of Mrs. Carole. But I don’t think that’s true.”

In the backseat, Amani noticed the prayer beads wrapped around his wrist. After a moment, she sat forward. “You’ve worked for Hafez for a long time, I guess.”

Samir didn’t meet her eyes in the mirror; his gaze shifted back and forth over the highway, as if tracking thoughts. Finally, he said, “You’re looking for that one—the one the desert guards stopped?”

Amani glanced at her father. Beside her, Omar sat up, but Amani made a settling gesture. “That’s right,” she said. “Musa.”

“Hafez took him, you know. He put him in the back of the car. I saw it. I saw everything. They were gone for maybe three, four hours. When he comes back to Petra—no Musa.”

Amani put her fingers over her mouth. Gabe’s head turned toward the driver. He and Omar began to speak at the same time. “Do you know where they went?” Gabe asked. Omar held the back of Gabe’s seat.

Samir made the hard clicking sound, no. “The guards tell me in secret. They give him to Hafez. He bribed them. A lot of rashwa. They tell me this later while we’re waiting for the boss. Miss Carole, screaming where is Hafez? Could be anywhere. But the car—covered in sand when he got it back. There was a khamseen starting in Petra. Hafez told her he took him to the tabeeb. For checkup. All I know is no Musa. Only Hafez, and he doesn’t say anything, only that Musa is majnoon.” He tapped his temple. “That he needs all kinds of doctors.”

Scarcely breathing, Amani glanced at her cousin: she felt a growing unease. Up front, Gabe muttered what sounded like a string of curses. “Kelb.” Dog. “He did something. What did he do?”

“What doctors? Where?” Omar asked. “Did he take him to Amman?”

Amani asked Samir to pull onto the side of the road.

“You really don’t know where Hafez is now?” Gabe asked Samir.

The driver shook his head. “I drove them home from Petra last night. This morning, he and Mrs. Carole are going on vacation. Maybe Turkey, he says. Maybe to the Gulf. Missus wants to go to France. They take two suitcases to the airport.” He gave a short whistle between his teeth and lip, dipped his fingers through the air. “All gone.”

“Are there, like, any hospitals around Petra?” Omar asked.

Amani said, “I’ve called clinics and medical facilities all over the place. Petra, Amman, Zarqa, Aqaba. No record of Musa anywhere.”

“Musa’s not in a hospital,” Gabe said. “I know it.”

“For years—for so many years I’m working for your brother,” Samir said to Gabe, his face darkening. “I was a boy when he takes me from school. He tells us he is the best boss because he doesn’t whip us. I think maybe it’s true. But I think he has beat the house girls. Last year I want to get married to a nice girl—the boss says no. I must not. He says I don’t make enough to support a family. He says now I’m married to him. I listened to him. I don’t know why.”

“Dude does that to people,” Omar said. “He can tell you that you’re eating ice cream when he’s feeding you khara.” Shit.

“Khara,” Gabe muttered.

“You said when he came back, the car was covered in sand?” Amani asked.

“It took me all day to polish it. Still dull.”

“Was it just like the sand from Petra? Like he’d just been driving around town?”

Samir’s eyes stopped, his face narrowing. He opened the car door and got out, Amani and the others following. Samir stooped, running his finger along the headlights, the undercarriage. Gabe joined in, checking under the door handle, the grille, the neck of the rearview mirrors.

“I wasn’t looking so closely yesterday when I polished. But my whole family are Bedu—I know what Petra dust is. If I can see it again, I would tell you.” Samir fingered the license plate.

“There’s nothing left,” Omar said, wiping a palm along the sleek cartop. “It’s like a skating rink.”

“Wait.” Samir opened the driver’s door and squatted. He scanned the floorboards; after a moment he shook his head and stood to close the door. Then stopped and crouched again. There was a thin ridge of powder between the door and the interior carpet. The powder was almost the same color as the carpet.

“I didn’t have a chance to vacuum this side yet.” He pressed his index finger into the powder and brought up a bright fingertip. “Petra dust is softer, more like sunlight. You see this? Hard, red?” He squinted up at them. “This is Wadi Rum.”