Deadline Yemen

by Peggy Hanson

  Adding a few choice bits to the wad in his cheek, he felt the warmth of self-confidence that often came with qat. He turned to one of his companions, Larry, a pony-tailed volunteer who was stationed way off in the Wadi Hadhramaut, a good twelve hours across desert tracks in an uncomfortable taxi loaded down with people and animals.

  “So did you hear about Petrovich?”

  Larry looked startled. “What about him? Is he here now?”

  “He’s dead,” stated Tom. “Killed last night at the Dar al-Hamd. They found him this morning.”

  Larry was quiet for what seemed a long time. “What happened?” he asked, finally.

  “I guess he ticked off some Yemeni. There was a jambiya in his chest.”

  Tom glanced at Christine, who had in fact been the person who related some of the details. She sat frozen this afternoon, none of her usual vitality showing through. How well had she known Petrovich? “Christine, how did you learn about it?”

  There was a long pause. Then Christine roused herself to speak delicately around her own qat wad. “I went over to talk to him this morning, but an American woman told me he was dead. She told me about the jambiya.”

  “Well, that’s one problem we won’t all have to face anymore,” muttered Larry.

  “Whadya mean?” Tom looked sharply at Larry. “Did you have problems with him, then?”

  “Oh, not real trouble. I just thought he stuck his nose in where it wasn’t wanted.”

  “Like where?” Tom was deep enough into qat to not care much about the answer. He felt above it all, full of lofty thoughts.

  “He kept asking us stuff that didn’t have to do with our project. He was a pretty bad supervisor, for being an expert and all that.”

  “What did Petrovich say? What did you talk about?”

  Christine, who had sat quiet, now chimed in. “When he came to my village, he asked about things—about volunteers in the Hadhramaut, how they were doing.” She glanced in Larry’s direction.

  He leaned over and lounged even more extravagantly against the cushions. “Which project? The beekeeping one? The one for marketing the honey?”

  Christine looked startled. “Yes. Your projects, no, Larry?”

  “Maybe. I work on them sometimes. Go ahead with your story.”

  Christine sat quite still, as though thinking it over. “He said something about the gossip. About how volunteers who are supposed to be working have been going out of Seiyun at night with a couple of local guys. I told him maybe they were doing something with drugs?” Christine looked even paler than before and kept her eyes down.

  “Drugs!” sniffed Tom. “Of course they were doing something with drugs. I’d just forget about Petrovich if I were you.”

  CHAPTER 29

  “From their slanting walls and upper lattices they look on dusty streets unpaved and silent, and solitary save for a woman here and there trailing her long blue gown by some carved doorway, or beduin camels that brush the roughened mud-built corners with their loads. The houses are rich with every variety of delicate lace-work: from the warm shadows below, their parapets rise into sunlight, often with outcrops like the machicolations round old castles where hot oil was poured on assailants, but here made with the more peaceful object of letting the harim look down invisible on what goes on below.”

  Freya Stark, The Southern Gates of Arabia

  My muscles ached and my knee hurt—just one more depressing sign I’d lost some attributes of youth. I wanted to make my way back to the hotel, maybe to read or to fall asleep. I bought six cans of tinned sardines at a little shop on my way, along with the mandatory bottles of water for the room.

  As I stepped out of the taxi and entered the Dar al-Hamd, a man stood near an outside corner of the building. He was tall and slim. He had a scar on his face. He was beginning to make me nervous.

  I ran, not walked, up the stairs. It didn’t help my knee but at least I could do it. Nothing an aspirin couldn’t resolve.

  Once in my room, I opened the window and petted Mrs. Weston, who had waited on the windowsill. Caressing the cat eased the heart-thumping anxiety from Scarface’s presence. I had one friend here. She had decided my casa was her casa, a position with which I agreed. I’m not sure which of us needed the other more. I opened the blue plastic bag with the hubz in it, pulled it apart and set it on a newspaper. She sniffed it superciliously, looked up and gave a small protesting meow. But all that changed when I took out the chicken bones I’d begged from Nello. Her eyes gleamed and, once more, the claws came out in a firm but ladylike way. It would be a pleasure to see her relate to the sardines when I opened them.

  My call to the front desk to ask if Halima had called—if, indeed, anyone had called—was fruitless. “No, madame.”

  I jotted a quick note to Mac Snyder back in Washington, telling him what little I’d learned about Michael’s murder. I left out all the good parts, like the arms smuggling rumors. Journalists can’t report one-source information, and how would I research that, anyhow?

  Then I fell into a deep jet-lagged sleep on my utilitarian bed, Mrs. Weston comfortingly at my feet, and woke groggily at quarter to four. Shoving the cat gently with my foot, I got up.

  Time for tea before meeting Tom to go downtown. I ordered extra milk with my tea, for Mrs. Weston, and lay there remembering the cast of characters from my stint covering the civil war.

  Tom Reilly was a major player, mainly because he lived here permanently and had his ear to the ground. He came as an independent writer in the early eighties, looking for a story or an adventure that would suit his red-haired Irish background. He’d found both, I suspect, but never seemed to come to the end of either. He lived in a small house in al Qa’a, the old Jewish quarter, wore Yemeni garb, and chewed qat every afternoon. He invited the other international journalists—five of us, most of the time—over often. Heaven to have a taste of scotch in our sweet sodas.

  And yes, we all chewed qat, when the war activity allowed. And smoked the narghile, the water pipe, where tobacco was laced nicely with marijuana. Neither young nor invincible, we felt both in those troubling but exotic days.

  Could that be such a short time ago?

  I would take tea on the hotel roof. During the war, we’d gone up there for brief periods after loud explosions to get glimpses of black smoke rising from one part of the city or another, and to try to figure out what was going on. At that point, there was little incentive to sit around, but I remembered the commanding views.

  No one else was up there but a waiter carrying my tea. He was young, with an attractive lopsided grin. He told me, before I asked, that his name was Yahya. Simple plastic chairs were set around small tables to allow views through arched openings in the six-foot walls. The view encompassed hundreds of rooftop walls scattered across the dusty city, their arches usually bricked up to allow women more privacy as they hung up clothes or got a little sun and air. Higher than the other buildings were beautiful minarets all over Sana’a.

  Feathery tips of tamarisk trees drooped gracefully over the wall, creating dappled shade. The sun had lost intensity this late in the afternoon.

  Mrs. Weston had accompanied me up to the roof and now sunned her ovoid stomach full length. Yahya took an interest in her and squatted down to stroke and scratch her.

  I stretched my legs across two chairs, took out my laptop and began the general introduction to my background piece:

  “Despite a glorious ancient past as the spice and coffee route, picturesque Yemen at the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula is one of the least-known, most exotic countries in the world. With a per capita income of $270, it is also one of the poorest, with low life expectancy and literacy, and high maternal-child mortality rates.”

  Here I stopped to accept the tea and sign for it. The waiter seemed amused that I was up there alone, but through our mutual friend, Mrs. Weston, we trusted each other to some extent. I turned back to my piece:

  “Yet Yemen boasts some of the finest ethnic arch
itecture in the world in its graceful mud brick palaces and fortress-like villages, and is caught in a struggle to modernize while maintaining its unique culture. Its population of 18 million is a highly-independent, freedom-loving people grouped in tribes. The structure is still loose enough to be volatile, as shown by the 1994 civil war between the north and the south, four years after they officially reunified.”

  I paused to look across the legendary city of my report. Children below were playing a lively game of hide and seek, which occasionally erupted into shouting and accusations. Women called to each other and to the children from latticed windows in the screechy tones one gets accustomed to in Yemen. Not surprisingly, the languages of men and women in Yemen, like all aspects of their lives, are separate.

  Turning back to international news demands, I plunged ahead:

  “Not yet an oil power, Yemen is involved in disputes with Saudi Arabia about unexplored areas of the famous Empty Quarter, on the unclear desert border between the two, where oil reserves are known to exist.”

  Well, that would take a conclusion and some more work, but along with the dramatic pictures I’d been taking, it should be within striking distance by the DHL pick-up time tomorrow. Good thing. I needed to reserve my time for Halima, whenever she could contact me. I turned off the laptop.

  When I’m worried or on edge, Jane Austen is my refuge. Halima plus the murder were causing both states right now. Time for a little Emma. I picked up my book and turned to one of the scenes where Emma and Mr. Woodhouse enjoy the company of Mr. Knightley, none of them realizing how much a family they had become. The irrelevance of the story to my current situation comforted and soothed me. I tried to forget all about Michael Petrovich and that beautiful but deadly jambiya.

  Lukewarm tea, the presence of a contented cat, and the usual uninspired biscuits mellowed the sharp drama of housetops with lengthening shadows against craggy mountains on all sides. I fell asleep.

  CHAPTER 30

  O greetings, [as great as] what fills the wadi’s gap,

  O tribes clutching onto honor.

  The custom of friends, if anything happens,

  Is for the one friend to give the other his life.

  Traditional Yemeni poetry translated by Steven C. Caton, “Peaks of Yemen I Summon”

  Halima sat in the mufraj and tried to strategize. With his son in crisis, her father was desolate. Ali was a fugitive, at the very least. If the authorities were correct, he could even be in danger of killing himself in a misguided effort to kill others. Certainly, he was now a target for the government. Sheikh Abdullah refused to leave his room, accepting only tea and a little food placed there by his daughter, his niece, or the servants.

  Zuheyla was no help, either. She sat about, asking a servant for tea, looking out the window—a dangerous pastime for a woman in Sana’a.

  It was all up to Halima. She hated having to close Friends of Yemen, but it was far too dangerous for her to go out openly. Security forces would keep tabs on her. She could even make life more dangerous for the women who depended on her. They hoped to achieve freer lives through training and literacy and working on projects.

  Halima had friends in the expatriate community, but none she could trust with a secret like this. Tom Reilly? Since he occasionally taught English at the university, she had met him at meetings, and sometimes the faculty was included in a diplomatic function, where she always wore a modest all-covering gown and scarf.

  Tom was pleasant. And she had heard Elizabeth mention him as one of her journalist companions during the war. But no. Not possible. She could not confide in him a secret that had put her entire family in jeopardy. Elizabeth was the only one.

  And Elizabeth was now in Sana’a. Where and how to meet her safely?

  What of Jemal, who worked at the Dar al-Hamd? One of his sisters volunteered at Friends of Yemen. A note could be smuggled, surely.

  Yemenis were good at quite a few things—and one of those was subterfuge.

  CHAPTER 31

  “…There had been misunderstandings,” he decidedly said. “The present crisis, indeed, seemed to be brought on by them; and those misunderstandings might very possibly arise from the impropriety of his conduct.”

  Jane Austen, Emma

  When I woke from my nap, the sun was setting and I shivered. Mrs. Weston had apparently abandoned me. After a quick tepid shower in the basic bathroom attached to my room, I pulled on clean but wrinkled khaki trousers, an ironed white shirt, and a mid-thigh navy silk jacket. It felt like dressing up in casual Yemen—I was off to the Taj, after all. And nights cool off quickly at this altitude.

  Mrs. Weston purred her way in through my window again. I explained to her that I’d pick something up for her after she ate her bread and milk like other cats, and left her making a nest on my bed.

  I didn’t want to encounter Scarface outside the hotel, so I slipped out the side door and exited through the little garden gate beyond the patch of golden, broken sorghum stalks—the same direction the Brit had disappeared two nights before. What could he have been doing? Did it have anything to do with Michael’s murder? The route was on my way. I’d see what I could learn.

  The houses in al Qa’a were not palatial like those in the Old City, but they were pleasant two-story dwellings with the same white designs and colored fan-like windows. Each house had a small garden enclosed by high walls. Narrow alleys wound from compound to compound, leading from the Dar al-Hamd to a main thoroughfare whose name translated into Agricultural Street. Other than a few tan-green leaves peeping over garden walls, there was no sign the street deserved its name.

  At a dirt path intersection, a few shops clustered. A shop selling kerosene and a stall overflowing with small black eggplants and red-green tomatoes. A tiny general store sold everything from clothespins to bottled water. A fourth shop had a big barrel of honey out in front, with a sign: “Hadhramaut Honey. From ilb tree.” Ilb was a spindly tree in the Hadhramaut. This shop must be where the Dar al-Hamd got its breakfast honey. Before leaving, I’d buy some.

  The man running the honey shop was in deep conversation with two customers. One was pudgy. The other was tall and thin, with a scar across his face. The guy who’d watched me at the Embassy and at the hotel, and his cohort who met with him and the Brit in the sorghum patch. I thought of them as the Brit’s henchmen already.

  They were looking the other way. Heartbeat rising, I walked faster. Were these guys and the Brit all involved in something clandestine? Probably illegal? Why else would they all be sneaking back here?

  What was their relationship to Michael? If he really were a spy, maybe he’d been here to check on them. And that could mean a motive for his killing. Or if, as Nello claimed, Michael Petrovich had been running guns and drugs, maybe they were authorities of some sort. Or members of a rival gang?

  I was out of my depth. As before, Yemen was dangerous. But this time it wasn’t because of war, or because of Yemenis themselves. This time it had to do with expatriates. Expats were a group I had no natural protection from, being one of them.

  My clothes and skin were covered in fine dust by the time I reached the Jewish Quarter, where I would meet Tom. It was hard to see the difference between my sandaled feet and the dirt; I could have taken root except that the rise in adrenaline from seeing the conclave near the honey shop kept me in motion.

  As I neared Tom Reilly’s neighborhood, I wasn’t sure which house was his. A chance for some language practice.

  “Salaam aleykum. God’s greetings. Feyn al beyt ferengi? Where is the house of the foreigner?” I banked on Tom Reilly’s being the longest expatriate resident, if there were others, and thus the best-known.

  Women enveloped in red and blue cloth giggled at my pronunciation and pointed eagerly ahead. Acknowledging my femininity, they pulled aside the black face scarves on which garish red eyes were painted. Bright dark eyes drew my own, and I felt a sense of unity—and of my own good fortune at being born where I was. These women’s e
yes had to do all the identification and expression we Westerners could count on a whole body for: joy, fear, seduction, teasing, unease, supplication.

  Yet there was a sisterhood. As I had said to Michael at Nello’s, a Western woman could fit in with either of the separated segments in Yemeni society. Men accepted me as a kind of third sex. Women instinctively knew I shared their feelings, if not their cultural orientation.

  Though not at all intimidated by the men, I felt even safer among the women.

  A chorus of “bakshish!” and “kalem!” broke my thoughts. Ragged, eager urchins, not discouraged by their mothers, surrounded me, suggesting handouts of money and pens. The kids’ hands were dirty, and they smelled of the garbage they’d rummaged through.

  Annoying though it was, their boisterous enthusiasm was infectious. I couldn’t help grinning even as I tried to be firm. “Mafish, nothing. I have nothing today.” I made a mental note to self: Buy some pens to hand out.

  And I looked back once more to see if anyone had followed me. A tall, thin guy in a futha walked away when I looked. At least, I thought he did. I couldn’t see his face, so I couldn’t tell if he had a scar. I rather despised my own paranoia. Yemen is full of tall thin men in futhas.

  CHAPTER 32

  “But why do you ask?” I said to the old man.

  “I would have liked to go with you.”

  “Have you friends there that you wish to see?”

  “No,” said he. “I have no reason to go, except that I have never been, and knowledge is better than ignorance.”

  Freya Stark, A Winter in Arabia

  Tom’s house I remembered from before, once the women and children had pointed the way, a modest two-story dwelling behind a high wall.

  A lively, plain-featured woman answered the door.

  “Who is it, Zahra?” came her master’s voice, and then we tripped up the whitewashed stairs toward the upper dining room. They smelled faintly of the manure that goes into the mud-brick of such buildings. I took off my shoes before entering the mufraj, off the dining room. The furnishings consisted of nothing but floor pillows around the room, with other cushions for backs, all covered by a kaleidoscope of oriental carpets.