Empire of Lies

by Raymond Khoury

  He couldn’t find any shoes, but he knew why.

  He rolled her clothes up into a large bundle and climbed out the window. He made his way back along the wall until he reached the brightly lit room. He set the bundle down and peered inside. As he expected, the men were wearing soft, mule-like indoor shoes. The outdoor shoes would be by the front door.

  Kamal pulled back, saw the door that led into the dormitory, and decided it was worth the risk. Besides, everyone seemed busy with dinner.

  He made sure no one was heading back from the paths behind the building, then made his way over to the door, and, slowly, carefully, he pushed it open. He poked his head in for a quick look and saw a row of leather shoes lined up by the door. He hesitated, then heard a woman’s voice. She seemed to be getting closer.

  He decided to make his move and darted in, grabbed the closest two pairs, and slipped out again, not bothering to close the door behind him.

  He hugged the building wall and shrank back into the shadows as the light from inside grew wider before the woman stepped outside. She stood there, looking around curiously. He held his breath as she looked left, then right, but didn’t see him. She lingered there for a moment longer, looked up at the sky, as if to judge the weather to come, then disappeared back inside, shutting the door behind her.

  He scooped up the bundle he’d collected for Nisreen and made a run for it, scampering out the gate before joining her under the trees.

  “I got what I could,” he said as he handed her the clothes. “It might not be your best look, but at least they’re dry.”

  “I don’t care if it’s a circus costume. I’d still wear them,” she said as she grabbed them from him. Then she gave him a pointed look and made a twirling gesture with her finger.

  Taking the cue, he turned around while she dressed.

  The warmth felt better to them, but they were still dazed by the day’s events, and they were hungry.

  “What now?” she asked. “Should we stay here? They’d take us in, wouldn’t they?”

  “In their stolen clothes?”

  “It’s a big enough place. We can seek shelter in their hospice.”

  Kamal shook his head. “No. It’s too close to where we arrived. And it’s the first place they’d come looking for us if they decided to come after us. They know I know this place well.”

  “What then?”

  He’d been thinking about that since they arrived.

  “Paris.”

  47

  At the clearing by the lake, Taymoor stood between the SUV Kamal and Nisreen had escaped in and the water’s edge.

  A couple of other agents were close by. One of them was inspecting the inside of the vehicle. The others had been sent into the woods to look for the escapees. Taymoor’s attention, however, was riveted on the spot behind the SUV, the empty ground between it and the lake.

  The ground where Kamal and Nisreen were last seen.

  The place where they had been cornered.

  The spot, according to the agents and the cops who had chased them there, from which there was no possible escape.

  No possible escape. And yet they weren’t there. They had done just that—escaped.

  How?

  He’d sent out men to search the woods, to see if they could find any clue as to the couple’s disappearance. And as he stared at the bare, dry earth at the banks of the lake, to his left and to his right, and at the stagnant, shimmering water, he knew he was missing something. Something major. Something he hadn’t been deemed worthy to be informed of—neither by his partner nor by his superiors at the Hafiye.

  He heard some commotion and turned his attention toward its source. Four cops were coming out of the forest. They had a couple of others with them, civilians, and were shoving them forward, herding them toward Taymoor’s position.

  “Taymoor Agha,” one of them called out. “We found these two hiding in the woods.”

  They jostled them over to face him. They were both male. The older man looked like he was in his forties and had a craggy, unshaven face. The younger man was somewhere in his twenties and had a handsome, clean face but was a little frail of build. They both looked terrified.

  Taymoor knew where the fear was coming from. He knew what they had been doing there.

  “They were hiding behind some bushes at the edge of the forest,” one of the cops told Taymoor.

  “Hiding in the bushes? Doing what? Having a private little picnic,” he sneered, his anger at being kept in the dark about whatever the hell was going on overcoming his revulsion at having to play the gruff bigot.

  “We didn’t see anything,” the younger man blurted nervously. “We just hid because of the shooting.”

  “I didn’t ask you if you saw something,” Taymoor replied, his tone clinical. “But I’m now rather convinced that you did.”

  He took a step closer to the young man, who dropped his gaze and was now visibly shaking. He held there for a long moment, giving the fear time to percolate across every pore of the young man. Then, in a lower, almost conspiratorial voice, he added, “We both know what you two were doing here. And we both know the consequences if I were to take you in for it. But if you tell me what you saw, then I might elect to forget certain things. Maybe a lot of things. What do you say, habibi?”

  In the Ottoman Empire, beauty had been ungendered for centuries. It was very common for older men to pursue younger, beardless boys both romantically as well as for mentoring. Ottoman culture was rife with homoerotic poetry that extolled the virtues of this spiritualization of love. Palace elites and even some sultans engaged openly in pederasty. Things had changed, however, under Abdülhamid’s rule. Intolerance of anyone who didn’t fit the state’s vision of the ideal citizen became policy. Any form of homosexuality was now deemed to be a grave moral transgression and was unofficially criminalized, its practice driven underground.

  The young man hazarded a glance up at Taymoor, then looked at his friend nervously. The older man’s face was stiff with fear and dripping with sweat, but his eyes were clearly signaling for him to keep quiet.

  Which Taymoor caught.

  He slapped the young man briskly, then used a firm grip to clasp his jaw and force him to face him. “My memory has a nasty habit of solidifying alarmingly fast,” he told the young man. “You really don’t want to let that happen.”

  His scowl and his silence had visible consequences to the young man, whose face rippled with dread before contorting into reluctant, grudging compliance.

  “There were two of them,” he told Taymoor. “A man and a woman.”

  “And?”

  “It all happened very fast. They rushed out of that car and hid behind it; then the others arrived. Two cars. The man started shooting at them.” He stopped and his eyes narrowed, as if he were studying the result of his revelations and hoping they were having a favorable effect on his inquisitor.

  “Then what?”

  “They shouted to each other. The officers wanted them to give themselves up. Then there was more shooting. A lot of it.” He paused again.

  “Then what? What happened to the man and the woman?”

  The young man’s eyes flashed wider. Then he dropped his gaze to the ground. And said nothing.

  “Where did they go?” Taymoor repeated in a low, harsh hiss.

  The young man remained silent.

  Taymoor crept closer so he was now looming over the cowering man. “Where. Did. They. Go?”

  The young man peered up at him from the corners of his eyes, then, his lips quivering, he said, “They disappeared.”

  Taymoor’s face tightened. “What do you mean, they disappeared?”

  The young man was now shaking uncontrollably and barely able to look at Taymoor. He hazarded a quick glance before he fell to his knees and cupped his face in his hands and started to sob.

  “I asked you a question,” Taymoor raged.

  “They disappeared,” the young man mumbled through soggy, shivering lips
, barely daring to glance up at the agent who was towering over him. “They just vanished into thin air.”

  Taymoor flew into a rage. He grabbed him by the hair and pulled him up with one hand while his other arm swung up and wide, his hand open and ready to deliver another monster slap. The young man yelped and curled into himself defensively. “It’s the truth—I swear it,” he blurted out in a rush to avoid the coming blow. “They just disappeared. I swear it.”

  Taymoor held him there for a moment, then dropped him. The man cowered on the ground by his feet. Taymoor studied him. He didn’t know what to make of his answer. What he did know was that it didn’t make sense. He’d need a more private session of questioning to get to the truth.

  He turned to face the other man. “What about you? Do you have anything to add?”

  The older man looked just as fear-stricken as his younger companion. “It’s like he said,” he managed hesitantly. “They really vanished. I know it sounds crazy, but that’s what happened. I can’t explain it.”

  Taymoor shrugged in resignation. “Fine. Have it your way.” He nodded to his men. “Take them away. We’ll try this again later.”

  The cops took hold of the men and started pushing them toward their cars. The two men tried to resist, with the younger man pleading, “It’s the truth—I swear it.”

  Taymoor just nodded for his men to carry on.

  “He’s telling the truth,” the older man insisted, his voice breaking. “That’s all we saw. They were just there. Then the man threw something into the lake, and they just disappeared.”

  Which froze Taymoor. He snapped his fingers, which made his men stop in their tracks.

  He marched closer to the old man and grabbed him by the hair, spinning his face so he was looking him squarely in the eyes.

  “He threw something in the lake?”

  The man nodded feverishly.

  Taymoor’s eyes narrowed. “Show me.”

  48

  The darkness was a boon, but they didn’t need to remain hidden anymore. Any observer would simply assume the two humbly dressed figures walking along the edge of the unpaved road were husband and wife or brother and sister. There was nothing remarkable or noteworthy about them as they exchanged polite greetings with those they encountered on their way to the river’s edge.

  The docks of the town of Fontainebleau weren’t far from the old palace. Kamal had a strong feeling they’d find what they needed there. He knew that the Seine, which snaked into the old town before winding its way to Paris and, beyond, to the port of Le Havre and the English Channel, was a busy transport artery, perhaps even more so back then, before trucks were ubiquitous. Barges plied its waters continuously, ferrying goods back and forth across the breadth of the French province. It was a reasonably safe and inconspicuous way to reach Paris.

  After a few cautious inquiries, they came across a captain who wasn’t overly inquisitive and agreed to give them free passage. They settled onto a small, clear section of deck at the bow of the river barge, their backs resting against a tarpaulin that covered some pallets of roof tiles. The temperature had dropped considerably now that the sun was long gone, with the air on the river much cooler than it was on land regardless. But the skies had cleared, and it didn’t look like more rain was on its way.

  Kamal and Nisreen huddled close together under a blinking canopy of countless stars as the barge set off into the night.

  For a long while, neither of them said a word. They just stared into the distance, lost in their own thoughts.

  It was Nisreen who eventually broke the silence. “What happens now?” she asked. “What’s going to happen to us? What if we can’t get back to our time?”

  He inhaled deeply and let out a tired sigh. “I don’t know. This wasn’t something I saw coming.”

  He watched her as her eyes roamed the infinite darkness overhead, as if looking for a sign, a signal, a message from the unknown. “It’s insane, isn’t it? We wake up every day, thinking it’s just going to be another normal day, oblivious to how lucky we are, unaware about how damn vulnerable we are. And then, in one moment, it’s all taken away. Everything falls apart. Everything you hold dear, your whole life, is just cruelly wrenched away from you, and there’s nothing you can do about it. It’s just gone. Just like that.” She stared deeper into nothingness. “What kind of a God allows that to happen?”

  “I don’t have an answer for you, Nisreen. But if I ever do meet Him, we’re going to have a very unpleasant chat.”

  She went silent again.

  After a while, she said, “I feel like I’m in prison. The worst kind of prison. A prison without walls, one that I’ve put myself in. And I know I’ll never be freed.”

  Kamal didn’t reply. He knew her mind would be prey to a poisonous darkness for some time. He wanted to hug her tightly, to find some way to comfort her, to tell her things would get better, to give her some clichéd line about how time would heal her. But he couldn’t bring himself to do that, not with her, not given what had happened.

  He was in that same prison himself.

  “We’re here now,” he finally offered. “We’re here, we’re safe, we have each other, and we have this thing, this incredible, scary, horrible ability to go where or when we like. Maybe we need to give ourselves some time to catch our breath and think things through and figure out what’s best.”

  “I’ve been thinking about it all day.”

  “Me too,” he said.

  She went quiet, then said, “We haven’t even been born yet. In this time. We don’t exist yet.”

  “And yet here we are.”

  She shrugged. “So what if there was a way to leave a message for ourselves—for our future selves?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What if we could leave ourselves a message about what happened—about what will happen? A warning for Ramazan to stay away from a tattooed patient who might show up at the hospital, to not go anywhere near him. Then maybe none of this will happen. We wouldn’t know anything. They wouldn’t come after us.” Her voice cracked as she added, “Ramazan, Tarek, and Noor wouldn’t have to die.”

  She choked on those last words, her lower lip taking on a small quiver, her damp eyes visibly holding back tears just as they moved off him—then failing and succumbing to the overwhelming sadness.

  Kamal felt his heart shatter.

  He considered her words as he gave her time for the tears and the sobs to subside.

  “Maybe,” he said. “But if we did that, how would it work in terms of us being here now? What would happen to us?”

  She wiped her face with her sleeve. “I don’t know.”

  “We wouldn’t have a reason to travel back. We wouldn’t even know about it. Which means if we saved our future selves, we’d still be there. Another version of us, I suppose. But we can’t be in two places at the same time, can we?”

  “He said we can’t. It’s one of the rules. It doesn’t allow it.” She went silent for a moment as she wondered about it. “I suppose we’d need to die here. In this time. To make room for our future selves.” She gave Kamal a weary, uncertain shrug. “I don’t know, Kamal. It all sounds so crazy.”

  He nodded. Then he asked, “But … would you?”

  “What?”

  “Want to die here? In this world?”

  “If it meant they could live? If it meant I could be with them again? Of course.”

  “But it would be a different you. Not this you.”

  “If I can be with them again—this me, or any other me—I’d die here for that.” She paused, studying him. “Would you?”

  He hesitated for the briefest moment, but before he could answer, she added, “I’m sorry. It’s not fair of me to ask you that.”

  “There’s nothing unfair about it.” He took her hands in his. “Of course, I would. I’d give anything to undo all that’s happened. To give you back your family. Our family. No hesitation. But I want it to be for ‘this’ you. And ‘this’ m
e.”

  “But that’s not possible.”

  “I know.” He shrugged and looked away. “Maybe we should do that. Maybe I need to send myself a message, too.”

  “What would you tell yourself?”

  “To be more aware. To warn myself about getting swept up by the wrong ideas and taken in by the lies, to be aware about what was happening in our world. Maybe I’d try to change things before they went too far.”

  This visibly surprised Nisreen. “You’d want to change things?”

  “I could try … knowing what we know, having lived through these last few years. I could try.” The thought bloomed across his mind. “That’s what Rasheed did, right? He went back and changed his world. Maybe that’s something I could do, too. Maybe there’s a way to avoid how it all turned out—not just for us. For everybody. I mean, look at this world, this time we’ve landed in. We haven’t seen much of it, but from what we know about it, it was a better place, wasn’t it?”

  “Things were different then—now,” she corrected herself, evidently still having a hard time adjusting to the new reality. “Bayezid was a noble man. Things were good. The Arabians hadn’t yet started their attacks, and the Americans hadn’t killed our economy. People felt safe and weren’t worried about ending up in a jail cell for saying the wrong thing or some nut blowing himself up next to them.” She tilted her head back and stared up at the heavens. “It was a better time to be alive, to be sure.”

  He watched her, studying the lines of her face, every feature that he’d memorized and fallen in love with back in their earlier incarnations—and felt a savage, primal rage at the pain she’d been made to suffer.

  “It’s just a shame we couldn’t all be here together,” she added before turning away. “I mean, if only we could travel into the future, we could go get them—before any of it happens. Bring them all back here. Start a new life.” She sighed heavily. “It’s all so … hopeless.”