“That’s the mother of Jesus. Why would anyone do that?” he asked, touching the broken pieces of plaster, then brushing his hand as if he didn’t want to get involved in any accidental sabotage.
Hadi felt sick when he remembered all the money he had made from selling the furniture from the Orouba Hotel that had now gone missing. An hour later he came to his senses. He told his assistant to go buy some polish, nails, sandpaper, wood filler, and other things for preserving and maintaining old furniture. They would work on the battered old wardrobes, then take them to market and sell them as soon as possible.
When everyone was gone, Hadi noticed the plaster icon of the Virgin. He used to wonder whether it might be possible to get it free in one piece and sell it to a church. He pulled out smashed parts of the icon, then looked at the hole that the statue had left in the wall, and brushed aside the dust to reveal a dark wooden plank two feet high and a foot wide. He wiped it again and uncovered an engraving in the shape of a tree. In fact, it was a large candelabra with writing above and below in what Hadi soon realized was Hebrew. When he was younger he had seen similar things on the walls of some of the houses in Bataween, and he immediately thought this, too, was something he could sell. When this occurred to him, he felt a pang of fear, thinking of the interrogators. He remembered his resolutions of the previous night and made up his mind to change everything.
Hadi heard something at the door—his assistant must have come back from the market. He dragged a folded rug from the corner of the room and propped it up against the wall in front of the statue niche and the wooden plank, hiding them completely.
5
Nader Shamouni, the deacon, had trouble reaching Elishva’s house. The Americans had blocked the road at Tayaran Square because of a car bomb close to the Gilani gas station and another explosion in the Sadriya market that had killed dozens of shoppers and shopkeepers. Nader wanted to get out of his car, but a policeman warned him that he couldn’t park there. He thought about calling Father Josiah to tell him he couldn’t complete his mission, but wiser counsel told him it might be like this every day. He should complete his mission whatever it took, especially as he wasn’t going to have problems like this often in the days to come: he had decided to leave Baghdad with his family. He had told Father Josiah a long time ago but kept postponing the move, realizing he would be leaving his home, his neighbors, and his life in Baghdad to move to Ankawa at the behest of his daughters and relatives who had been living there for several years. When the move was still tentative, Nader discovered one morning that the keyhole on his front door had been filled with some kind of glue. He tried to remove the glue but wound up having to replace the lock. Before a week had passed, he discovered that the new lock had been filled with the same sticky substance. Someone was harassing them, he told his family—probably just some kid—and he decided not to repair the lock and to make do with bolting the door from the inside.
But he found the lock on the door leading from the kitchen to the garden had also been filled with this sticky substance. Angry and tense, he called a quick family meeting. At first he suspected his daughters and his wife, but soon dismissed that idea. Someone must have climbed the fence and come in when they were asleep.
Many similar incidents had taken place over the past three years, and given the deteriorating security situation in Baghdad, there was no authority that could be trusted to help him. The father of one family in the congregation had recently been abducted. The family persuaded the kidnappers to free him only by paying a large ransom. Nader called his brothers and relatives in Ankawa and told them of his decision.
“It’s a temporary measure. We’ll leave home till things calm down in the capital,” he said. He didn’t foresee the possibility that never coming back would become a very real option.
Nader parked his small Volga at the end of the lane and walked to Elishva’s house. He wouldn’t see her again, he reckoned, and that was reason enough to make his last meeting with her more friendly. He had known her and her late husband and her children for decades and could see that the old woman was tired—she had new lines on her face and around her eyes behind the big glasses she wore. Maybe he noticed all this because he hadn’t sat so close to her for a long time: she hadn’t been to church in about a month.
Elishva’s daughters, Hilda and Matilda, kept calling Father Josiah, and he kept assuring them that their mother was healthy and safe, but they asked to hear her voice—they knew she was angry, and they wanted to make up with her. Nader told her all this and said that the priest was asking her to come see him next Sunday after Mass. Elishva just scowled.
“Matilda’s going to come to Iraq for you,” Nader continued. “She said she’d come see you and then take you back with her.”
“She won’t do it. She’s a coward.”
“She will do it. She was crying during her conversation with Father Josiah.”
“I’m not going anywhere. I won’t leave my house.”
“But what use is the house, Umm Daniel? What use is it when you’re alone, like someone sitting in a tent in the desert?”
“My family are here and my neighbors. My life is in this house.”
“I know, but don’t you miss your daughters?”
“They’re fine. Why are they asking me to leave my house?”
“Well, you know, life’s getting hard here. What use is the house if life is hard? Fear, death, anxiety, criminals in the street, everyone watching as you walk past. Even when you’re asleep, it’s nightmares and jumping in fright all the time. The whole country’s starting to look like the Jewish ruin next door.”
“‘Fear not those who kill the body but are not able to kill the soul.’”
“Yes,” replied Nader, who had no ready reply to the biblical reference. Without intending to, he started to share his own personal worries.
“You must come on Sunday, for my sake, Umm Daniel. If you like, I’ll come and pick you up. Would that be okay?”
She agreed.
In the three days before Sunday, Nader was consumed with preparations. He had listed his house with a realtor and sold much of his furniture, storing the rest on the upper floor. He was so busy that he didn’t even attend Mass on Sunday. On Monday morning he left the house keys with a friend, asked him to arrange for the things in the storeroom to be sent to Erbil by truck, and set off with his family in his small Volga, bound for the north.
He either forgot about or deliberately ignored the old lady. From the way she looked, he thought, she might not last another year, and he would never see her again. For her part, Elishva didn’t think she would see the deacon with the Turkish mustache ever again either, but both of them were wrong.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
TRACKING AND PURSUIT
1
BRIGADIER MAJID WAS in his office watching Farid Shawwaf speak on television about Criminal X, as the journalists were now calling the One Who Has No Name. The television channels were covering the criminal almost every day, showing Identikit drawings of his face, with a caption stating the reward for anyone who provided information leading to his arrest. If he could arrest this nameless criminal, the brigadier thought, it would be the crowning glory of several years’ efforts. The criminal was a television star, and when the brigadier caught him, he too would immediately become a celebrity.
“They’re offering money they know very well they’ll never have to pay out,” Brigadier Majid told one of his junior officers. He felt instantly that this was the kind of sentence the well-dressed man on television might have said—the man who always wore suits the brigadier coveted but knew he would never wear as long as he was stuck in his office at the Tracking and Pursuit Department.
He took a small mirror out of his desk drawer and studied the black rings under his eyes and the way his face sagged. He wiped his face with the palm of his hand—something he did habitually but only when he was alone
in the office. For the last three years his work had been proceeding without great surprises. With his eccentric assistants, he drafted predictions about explosions on the streets of Baghdad, picked up rumors and analyzed them, provided confidential advice to politicians who were forming alliances for the coming elections or thinking about entering into business partnerships. He would get upset when his rank and military career were ignored and someone from government headquarters would call him after midnight to ask how to interpret some dream. He spent much of his time on such nonsense.
In the golden age when life was easy, before the criminal without a name appeared, he had sometimes been taken by surprise by a visit from a prominent politician. Their names were all the same to him, and they would ask him many questions, as if he was the one who could read the tea leaves and foretell the future, but he knew there was only one question that brought them all the way to his office:
“When and how will I die?” It usually came at the end of an exhausting list of questions, to give the impression that it was just one of many.
“Should I order an armor-plated car, or don’t I need one?” one of the politicians once asked him. His parliamentary bloc had been assigned only three armor-plated cars, the politician explained; should he fight to obtain one?
Anyone else in his place would have exploited these politicians to promote himself, to try to obtain a more senior position and escape being trapped in the Tracking and Pursuit Department, but Brigadier Majid wanted to demonstrate his worth through real effort, not by telling the fortunes of politicians but by arresting criminals. All this changed, though, with the appearance of the dangerous criminal.
Farid Shawwaf had disappeared from the television screen and the news had come on, when one of the officers took the brigadier by surprise with a terrifying idea that Majid had never thought of before.
“If bullets really don’t kill him and he knows we’re trying to track him down, what if he followed us, found our headquarters, and then came here to wipe us all out?”
2
The senior astrologer was pondering the same question as he turned over the playing cards in the room he shared with the junior astrologer. He shuffled them again, like a skilled poker player, then drew a single card and held it right in front of his eyes. He stared at it as if he could see in it a deep chasm or a door that opened onto a whole world only he could see.
He knew that one day he would come face-to-face with the criminal and would recognize him. But for the moment, the face was vague and refused to take shape. He stroked his long white pointed beard and closed his eyes. The criminal was running over the roofs of the buildings in a poor part of Baghdad, but there was no point in telling Brigadier Majid about it because the criminal never stayed where he was, and he moved at an extraordinary speed that no human could match.
The junior astrologer was watching his master’s studied movements carefully. The senior astrologer was annoyed that his young disciple seemed so relaxed.
“He could very well burst in on us now and kill us both,” said the senior astrologer.
“If that’s what’s going to happen in the end, then what’s the point of doing anything? What can we do to stop him? Are we gods?”
“If you can foresee what’s going to happen, then that’s a gift from God, and He’s telling you that you can change fate for the better. I’m the god showing you what will happen because what happens depends on what you do. If you don’t do anything, then what you foresee will come about. If you act, you can take advantage of God’s permission to change what’s going to happen.”
“Yes, you always say that,” replied the junior astrologer, hinting that the conversation was over and he no longer wanted to listen to any more lectures from his master, who didn’t seem able to teach him anything new.
The junior astrologer stood up and stretched. He picked up his bag of sand from the table, stuffed it in his pocket, and went off to bed.
3
There were still fine grains of red sand on the edge of the wooden table where the senior astrologer was sitting. He stood up and wiped the table with his hand, then wiped his fingers on his flowing robe. He decided to go out for a smoke, despite the cold. He needed air.
As soon as the senior astrologer left the room, slamming the door behind him, the junior astrologer sat up straight in bed. There was a mission he wanted to carry out that night.
He got up and sat down at the table, ruling out the possibility that his master would suddenly change his mind and come back. He took a bag of red sand out of his pocket, poured it all onto the table, and started to play with it. He made it into a large ring, then took another handful of sand in his fist and carefully poured a thin line of sand inside the ring. It was stupid child’s play, Brigadier Majid once told himself when he saw the junior astrologer playing with his bags of sand. But the sand was from a special place in the Empty Quarter of Arabia, and it had magical powers appreciated only by those who knew how to exploit them. Brigadier Majid misjudged the importance of the young astrologer’s work.
The senior astrologer felt the cold of the night seeping into his bones. He tossed his cigarette butt and decided to go back to his room to sleep. At the same time, his young disciple was about to finish his secret experiment. He was trying to make contact with the spirit of the One Who Has No Name. While his superior was interested in knowing what the criminal’s face looked like, the junior astrologer was interested in his soul. Over the past weeks he had managed to contact the family of Hasib Mohamed Jaafar, the guard who was killed at the Sadeer Novotel and whose soul settled in the body that Hadi had assembled in his shed.
The junior astrologer succeeded that night in making a connection with the spirit of the monster. There were cell phone vibrations between him and the monster, through which he transferred something into the monster’s brain that made him stop moving for a minute. If the senior astrologer had been there, he would have seen in his playing cards that the monster really did stop. He was leaning against the wall of a tall building on a dark street lined with car repair shops and looking at the wall of an abandoned secondary school somewhere in the southern suburbs of Baghdad. The junior astrologer now felt he was superior to his superior.
When the senior astrologer came back into the room, he shut the door behind him, then looked at his disciple’s bed and saw his disciple was sleeping with his face to the wall, just as he had left him. He walked past the wooden table and noticed grains of sand on it. He was sure he had wiped it clean an hour before.
4
The Whatsitsname stopped suddenly in the middle of a side street and turned to look back in the direction he had come from. There were few cars driving along the main road. As if emerging from a long daydream, he realized he didn’t remember how his feet had brought him there. Neither did he know where he was heading or where he would spend the night. The few people who crossed his path when he moved around at night either ran away from him or were old disciples who would spring to his assistance.
In his mind he still had a long list of the people he was supposed to kill, and as fast as the list shrank it was replenished with new names, making avenging these lives an endless task. Or maybe he would wake up one day to discover that there was no one left to kill, because the criminals and the victims were entangled in a way that was more complicated than ever before.
“There are no innocents who are completely innocent or criminals who are completely criminal.” This sentence drilled its way into his head like a bullet out of the blue. He stood in the middle of the street and looked up at the sky, waiting for the final moment when he would disintegrate into his original components. This was the realization that would undermine his mission—because every criminal he had killed was also a victim. The victim proportion in some of them might even be higher than the criminal proportion, so he might inadvertently be made up of the most innocent parts of the criminals’ bodies.
&n
bsp; “There are no innocents who are completely innocent or criminals who are completely criminal.” The sentence drilled its way into his head once again, and he stood there, clearly visible in the headlights of a car that had turned onto the side street. The driver stopped for long enough to recognize what he was seeing in the middle of the street, then turned slowly and went back the way he had come.
5
The senior astrologer went into Brigadier Majid’s office with some of his colleagues—but not his young subaltern—while the brigadier was having breakfast on the sofa opposite his vast desk. He handed the brigadier a pink envelope, in line with the usual procedures.
“At eleven o’clock this morning a car bomb is going to explode outside the Ministry of Finance,” said the senior astrologer before the brigadier could even open the envelope, which contained the same information. Brigadier Majid put a piece of bread with clotted cream in his mouth, then stood up. He called a number on his cell phone and waited till someone answered, then asked to be transferred to a more senior officer. He relayed the substance of the prediction, then sat back down at his table and resumed his breakfast.
Two years earlier, when the senior astrologer would come in with information like this, the brigadier would treat it as an emergency. He would get in touch with the security commanders, and he would be devastated when he heard on the news that the explosion had taken place despite his warning.
“Idiots. When they identify the car bomb, they prefer to run away rather than dismantle it,” he would always say. But now he was calmer, especially when he saw that there were other crimes and security incidents taking place and that his own team was failing to detect them.
“We mitigate the effects, but we can’t stop them all. If they want to establish complete security, let them put us in charge of the country,” he sometimes said, with exaggerated confidence in himself and in the competence of the team of magicians and astrologers who worked under him. But he was deluded.
Frankenstein in Baghdad Page 19
