“That night I killed the militia leader and fifteen people who were defending him. On the advice of the Sophist, I used the revolver because the unconventional means of killing with which I started my campaign no longer worked. I left the militia leader’s massive body lying in the courtyard of his house, his guts full of lead, while his mother, wife, and sisters hovered around it in black clothes, beating their breasts and cheeks in grief and anguish.
“Using one of the militia leader’s cars, I got back to Dora, and I heard the sound of gunfire as I approached our base. In the absence of the Americans and the Iraqi army, the militias were fighting to gain territory. I abandoned the car and made my way through gaps in the walls, following the route the Magician had given me.
“In the meantime my eyesight had turned cloudy again. I leaned against a wall, staying like that for some minutes, then wiped my eyes and felt my right eye had turned into something like dough or paste. I pulled at it gently, and it moved with my hand. Then the whole thing came out, like a dark lump, and I tossed it aside. I was worried the same thing might happen to my left eye and I would lose my sight completely. Sitting by the wall, I listened to the gunfire—it came from every direction. Eventually the light returned to my left eye. I peered up and down the street through a big gap that some shell had made in the wall, then noticed something black coming toward me in the distance. The outlines became clearer: it was a man. Some light fell on his face, and I could see him even more clearly. He was in his sixties, fat, with a paunch, wearing chinos and a short-sleeved shirt, and he was carrying some black bags. I later found out that one bag contained bread and the other fruit. It was odd for him to turn up here. Perhaps he had come the wrong way. Where had he come from, and where was he going?
“As I watched him, he turned down a side street. He was heading straight to the building where I lived. The gunfire seemed to be louder in that direction. Had the militias surrounded the barracks the three madmen had set up?
“I walked behind the man, keeping enough distance so he wouldn’t notice me. I remembered what the Magician had said about everyone being a criminal to some extent and the Sophist’s objections to this. I didn’t forget for a moment that I was about to lose my eyesight, maybe even before I reached the area around the building.
“The fat man stopped every two or three paces, looking around in fear. He looked as if he had been crying or was about to cry. I wanted to get close to him and ask what had brought him this way, but I was distracted and everything in my head got mixed up. The man stopped again and listened to the bullets hitting the upper floors of the surrounding buildings. He was frozen to the spot, and I couldn’t help stopping too, about twenty yards away from him. If he had looked back, he would have seen me. My left eye started to mist up again, and I felt it would run down my face like leavened dough. I raised my revolver and aimed at the innocent old man. He was definitely innocent, not one of those people that the three madmen had brought to replace my body parts and keep me going.
“I fired one round from my revolver, just as I began to lose all sensation in my eye. I heard nothing after that—the shelling by the rival groups had stopped, and there were no footsteps or crying or even the sound of breathing. Now blind, I took some cautious steps forward until my shoe hit something. Bending down, I felt around for the warm body of the frightened old man. The bullet had hit him right in the skull. He had been expecting death to come from the upper floors of the buildings or from the ends of the streets in front of him, but it had come from behind.
“I took out a little knife and did my work quickly. What would the Magician say now? These are eyes from the body of an innocent victim. The proportion of criminal parts in my body wouldn’t increase. But what should I tell him? In retribution for this victim, who should I exact vengeance on?
“The Sophist would say I’ve realized the Magician’s vision and turned into a criminal who kills innocent people. He’d say the Magician has pushed me in that direction with the help of the djinn he had enlisted to influence my thinking. The Magician would speak more calmly, explaining that I was responding to the impulses of my criminal body parts and that, in order to break away from this frightening path, I would have to get rid of all this flesh of ill repute. They would argue, and we wouldn’t come to any conclusion, like the conflicting ideas in my head right now.
“I managed to install my new eyes and could see again. Seeing the body of the innocent old man, I had an idea and I clung to it—it looked like the truth I had been seeking. The old man was a sacrificial lamb that the Lord had placed in my path. He was the Innocent Man Who Will Die Tonight. So that was that. He had been going to die in a few minutes, or within half an hour at the most. The bullets from the fighters were bound to hit him, and he would have died right here. His body might have been mistaken for the body of one of the criminals and none of the madmen or their followers would have been able to find him.
“So all I had done was hasten his death. All the other innocent people who came down this desolate street would die too.
“My eyes needed stitching to hold them in place. My followers would do that when I got back to base, but until I got there I had to be careful not to look down. So I took the old man’s glasses, which I found in the top pocket of his shirt, and put them on to hold my eyes back if they worked loose.
“I went into the lane that led to the wall of sandbags that the followers of the three madmen had built around the buildings they had taken over as their barracks. My head was swimming with conflicting thoughts, but I held firm to the idea that I had only hastened the old man’s death. I was not a murderer: I had merely plucked the fruit of death before it fell to the ground.
“The sound of fighting had died down, but it turned out my assumption had been wrong. It wasn’t the militias that had been fighting because the Americans and the Iraqi army had left the area. It was the followers of the three madmen who had sparked the hostilities that night. That was the last thing I had expected to happen, but the Magician had predicted that disagreements would break out when outsiders started joining my first six followers.
“I didn’t have a chance to find out more from the Magician or talk to him about his prediction. He was lying on a pile of stones in front of the building where I live. There was a bullet hole in the middle of his forehead.
“I went to my apartment on the third floor; no one was there. The state of the furniture suggested a fight had taken place. When I looked out from the balcony, I saw the Magician’s body right below me. He must have been thrown from the balcony after he was shot. My intuition told me that only the Sophist could have done this. But where was he?
“The next morning I went out to inspect the area. There were bodies everywhere—on the street, on the sidewalk, some propped up against the walls, others slumped over balconies or piled at the entrances to apartments or rooms. Only the young madman was around, and he seemed completely insane. I took him to my third-floor apartment and questioned him. Apparently those who had survived the massacre had fled, many never to return. The elder madman and the eldest madman had been killed. The Sophist had killed the Magician and then escaped.
“The young madman looked pale and spoke slowly, as though he might lose consciousness. When I looked at him with the innocent eyes I had taken from the old man, he looked like a total criminal. He had survived the festival of death because he was more murderous and more criminal than the others.”
“The battery’s going to run out, sir.”
“Yes, I know.”
“It’s the last battery we have. The batteries in the bag have all run out.”
“I know. I won’t need any more batteries. I’ve finished recording.”
“The recording’s finished? What will you do now?”
“Only one thing—this.”
“No, sir. No, master. I’m your slave and your servant. Why are you doing that? No, sir. I’m your slave, your
sla . . . ve.”
“Hello, hello, hello. Yes.”
• • •
“JEEZ, I’M RUNNING OUT OF TIME. You wasted so much time, damn it!”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE INVESTIGATION
1
THIS WAS THE SECOND or third time Mahmoud had listened to the Whatsitsname’s recordings. He couldn’t get over the shock of the story or the soft, calm voice in which it had been recounted. He opened the laptop the editor had given him and copied the audio files from the digital recorder. Then he saved a copy to his flash drive and put the flash drive in a pocket of the pants lying on the chair next to him. Returning to his comfortable bed in his room on the second floor of the Dilshad Hotel, he succumbed to the faint hum coming from outside as the afternoon turned to evening and the August heat abated.
Dozing again, he may have been almost unconscious when the phone rang. He picked it up and heard the voice of Hammu, the fat man who worked around the clock at the reception desk.
“Sir, there are people asking for you, some visitors,” he said. Mahmoud got dressed and descended the green-carpeted staircase. He noticed his stomach was rumbling: he had had breakfast late and hadn’t had lunch yet.
The visitors were four men in civilian clothes. He thought he recognized one of them: a young man in a striking pink shirt, with hair so short there would be nothing to grab. The young man pulled him to one side. “Brigadier Majid wants to see you,” he said in a low voice.
“Why? Has something happened?” asked Mahmoud.
“I don’t know. He says you’re friends, and he wants to see you urgently.”
“Okay,” said Mahmoud, looking toward the reception desk, where plump Hammu was scrolling through the television channels with the remote, oblivious to what was happening around him. Mahmoud thought of calling Saidi to see what he knew but realized he had left his phone in his room, along with his identity card and money.
“I’ll just run upstairs to get my ID and some cash,” he said.
“There’s no need. We’ll bring you back right away,” said the man with the crew cut, with a firmness and determination that made Mahmoud anxious. If he didn’t cooperate, maybe the man would rough him up. He clapped his key with the heavy brass tag onto the reception counter. Hammu came to his senses.
“I’m off,” said Mahmoud. He spoke with a tremor, trying to convey his anxiety and imprint the moment in the receptionist’s memory. But Hammu’s face showed no emotion, as if Mahmoud didn’t exist. If something bad happened to Mahmoud and Hammu was questioned, he might not remember anything.
With the four young men, Mahmoud got into a new GMC truck with tinted windows and went down the same streets that he and Saidi had taken on their ill-fated visit to Saidi’s mysterious childhood friend. The CD player was playing “The Orange,” and the song summoned conflicting emotions in Mahmoud, who was growing more anxious and frightened. He had noticed the truck had government license plates, but that wasn’t enough to reassure him—because he knew of many abductions that had been carried out with government vehicles. Looking at the four men, he tried to work out their social origins. He knew that such things were very much in play these days, that in many cases they determined the course of events, as well as the fate of those who were abducted.
The CD player kept repeating “The Orange,” and one of the men tapped his fingers to the rhythm. Finally the truck reached the headquarters of the Tracking and Pursuit Department, which Mahmoud had visited earlier.
Mahmoud was brought into the office of Brigadier Majid, who was sitting in his grand chair with a fat, unlit cigar in his mouth and his ankles crossed on his large table. Mahmoud detected the distinctive smell of apples as the brigadier rose from his seat and, without taking the cigar from his mouth, welcomed him, inviting him to sit down. Then a muscular young man came in, put two cups of weak tea on the table between them, and left.
Brigadier Majid told Mahmoud that he had given up smoking years ago but that these days he missed cigars. He used to smoke cigars to excess until the doctors told him to stop. But life was going well.
“The smell of tobacco is better than the smell of smoke, isn’t it?” the brigadier said.
Mahmoud agreed, aware that his emotions had changed in the half hour or so since he had left the Dilshad Hotel. The sound of “The Orange” was still ringing in his ears, and there he was—looking at Brigadier Majid’s face, which seemed friendly enough, smelling the scent of apple, and tasting the slightly bitter astringency of the weak tea before it slid down into his rumbling stomach.
The whole conversation in that office took Mahmoud by surprise. Brigadier Majid was no friend of his. His loyalty was to the government, and the fact that he was a childhood friend of Saidi’s meant nothing. Mahmoud realized why Saidi had been making fun of Brigadier Majid. He knew the man and others like him well. The man would have no qualms about using brute force to serve those in power, whether Saddam Hussein, the Americans, or the new government. Brigadier Majid had served or would serve them all.
The brigadier could have asked Mahmoud directly for the information he wanted, because Mahmoud was not a criminal and harbored no hostility to him or the government or the regime he represented. But he wanted to frighten Mahmoud, to intimidate him. He wanted to undermine Mahmoud’s confidence so he would more readily give up the information he wanted. It was a vile method suited for use more on criminals than on the colleague of a childhood friend who had already drunk tea with you. Real, dark, sweet tea, not the mysterious tea at this meeting.
“It’s not tea,” said Brigadier Majid. “It’s an herbal mixture, with oxtongue leaves, sparrows’ tongue leaves, pigs’ tongue leaves, and several other tongue leaves. I call it the ‘tongue loosener’ because it makes the person who drinks it give up his secrets. You can see that I drank it with you, and that’s because I felt embarrassed by the fact that we’re friends, and I have to get over that in order to do my job and ask the essential questions.”
Mahmoud was speechless. What was the man talking about? Did he really think they were friends? What did he mean by oxtongue leaves and giving up secrets? And what did he put in the weak tea, Mahmoud wondered.
2
Brigadier Majid did in fact give up some secrets. He had contacted his sources in the security services and obtained information about Mahmoud. He had easily got hold of the registration number of a complaint filed against Mahmoud about a year earlier in Balda Police Station in Amara. The plaintiff was a man of influence in the province.
Mahmoud was surprised to hear this. He felt this visit and the interrogation were becoming more mysterious. But Brigadier Majid didn’t seem to know anything more that would flesh out the details of Mahmoud’s secret, which was unknown to everyone other than his photographer friend, Hazem Abboud.
The complaint accused Mahmoud of inciting murder, with the means of incitement a story that Mahmoud had written in Sada al-Ahwar, the local newspaper where he had been working. That’s all Brigadier Majid knew, and Mahmoud didn’t want him to find out anything more. He would do his best to make sure the “tongue loosener” he had drunk did not work.
Brigadier Majid brought up other incidents of a year ago that hadn’t resulted in any legal proceedings against Mahmoud, but he didn’t spend much time on these. He then swung round and took a copy of the latest issue of al-Haqiqa off a pile of files. He waved it at Mahmoud, pursing his lips as if to say, “This is what we’re really here to discuss. All the earlier stuff was interrogation nonsense to shake your confidence. Now you’ll have to give me some answers.”
“What’s this extraordinary story?” asked the brigadier.
“What about it?”
“Who’s the guy telling this story?”
“It’s a guy who sells junk in the area. It’s fantasy. The editor liked it and told me to write it up.”
“Fantasy? Hmmm,” whispered the brigad
ier. He then started to browse through the magazine, while asking Mahmoud a series of questions. Mahmoud answered confidently and calmly. The brigadier didn’t want to give away any secrets. He didn’t want to tell Mahmoud that the Whatsitsname he had written about—the Frankenstein’s monster in his article—was not fantasy but a real person, or that he had spent most of his time for the last several months trying to have him arrested, or that his personal life and his professional future were riding on this strange man, or that he was trying to dispel the aura of mystery with which the man surrounded himself, or that he had sworn to grab him with his own hands and expose him on television so the whole world could see he was nothing more than a useless, despicable, lowly person who had made himself into a myth by exploiting people’s ignorance and fear and the chaos around them.
“Is this junk dealer in the area?” asked the brigadier.
“Yes, he lives on Lane 7 in Bataween. His house is in ruins. They call it the Jewish ruin; you can’t miss it. You’ll recognize it right away.”
“Yes, yes.”
Mahmoud kept talking casually. He could see the focus was shifting away from him and toward the mystery man. Hoping to win back the brigadier’s friendship and restore his own confidence, he reached into his pants pocket, took out the digital recorder, and handed it to the brigadier.
Frankenstein in Baghdad Page 15
