Harsh Oases

by Paul Di Filippo

  Rangley smiled wryly. “I can’t answer that, Leon. Besides, you know those initials stand for ‘No Such Agency.’”

  I had known Rangley since my days with the LAPD, when we had worked together on various cases of national importance, and we had been going through this identical ritual exchange of dialogue ever since.

  “I assume you’re here about the Major.”

  “Of course. I just want to impress on you, Leon, how important Zaid and his country are to us. If it was up to me, we’d have him stashed away out of the public’s eye in a safe house somewhere. But he is the head of his nation, and he’s stubbornly insisted on buying this house and spending his time here. It’s this reputation the Hesperides has as a playground of the rich. It’s irresistible to someone like Zaid, who’s hardly ever left his own country before, and is out now to flaunt his new stature and the global importance of his nation.”

  I was as aware of the Mideast situation as any ardent newsbuff could be, but I tried to probe Rangley now for his insider’s view. “Is the unification of North and South Yemen really that crucial? It’s not as if they’re big oil producers or anything .…”

  Rangley looked uneasy, and it flickered across my mind that I had said something important. But for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out what. I filed the notion away for later.

  “It’s true they don’t have any petro-resources,” he said. “But the chance to bring South Yemen out of the Soviet sphere is too vital to pass up, in and of itself. The Russians have their hands full consolidating their hold on Greece, and battling the Turkish-Afghani incursion into Kazakhstan. They’re quite willing to relinquish South Yemen as a client-state, now that Zaid has made overtures of unification. But the whole process has to be conducted with the utmost delicacy. Zaid’s the linchpin. He seems to be popular in both his native North and neighboring South, and he’s acceptable to not only our government but also the Russians. Without him, the whole scheme fails. We have to keep him safe and happy.”

  “I’ll wait on him hand and foot.”

  Rangley said dryly, “That won’t be necessary. He has enough retainers. Just make sure he doesn’t break his fool neck diving or something, and we’ll be happy.”

  “Okey-doke.”

  Rangley had been holding a package wrapped in brown paper all this while. Now he tossed it on my desk. “Open it.”

  I did. It was the leaves I had sent away for analysis. I was baffled.

  “It’s qat” Rangley said. “The Yemeni national drug. They grow it only for domestic consumption. It’s not a habit anywhere else, even in the Arab world. There’s not even any law on the books here against it. The men sit around in social groups and chew it in the afternoons. I understand it gives you a dry throat and a pleasant megalomania. Can’t say I ever tried it myself. Nasty habit. Can run into fifty dollars a week and bankrupt the average worker. It’s one reason the Yemenis have remained so poor. That and the lack of natural resources. Al-Qasimi lost this bundle on his last visit.”

  Rangley paused. “We don’t want to publicize this vice. All we need to queer this deal is for the media to run a lot of stories on how the U.S. is supporting a nation of dope fiends. That’s why I’m making a point of returning this.”

  The picture of the innately dangerous al-Qasimi having his sense of self-importance exaggerated by a dmg didn’t make me very happy. But what could I do about it?

  “All right, Dick. Say no more, the case is closed. But I can only overlook so much. If Zaid and his friends break any serious laws, I’ll be down on them faster than a scramjet. They may have diplomatic immunity, but they can still be booted off the islands. The Hesperides is a private corporation.”

  “Fair enough, Leon. I don’t think they’ll be much trouble. Zaid’s still a little shaken-up from what happened last week in LA. Seems one of his wives ran away.”

  “Goodness. I can’t see why.”

  Rangley laughed. We shook hands, and I saw him to the ferry.

  Two days passed after Rangley’s visit. Zaid and his retinue presented no problems. Rumor—usually sourceless and omnipresent in the Hesperides, but in this case based on persistent glassy glints from the vicinity of the Yemeni estate-had it that Zaid and his male staff spent most of their day watching nude sunbathers through digitally-enhanced binoculars. It was a harmless enough pastime—even the tourists were less circumspect—and anyway, what kicks would the exhibitionists get without voyeurs? It was a complete closed ecosystem, each half dependent on the other.

  Al-Qasimi and two of his men showed up at the shops one afternoon to purchase supplies. They drove down in one of the carts, paid for everything in mint-fresh bills without letting slip an extraneous word, and drove back.

  Throughout the transaction, al-Qasimi had disdained to participate, touching neither goods nor money, but merely standing to one side, supervising, his left hand on his belted rhino-horn dagger. (An invaluable item now, since all the rhinos outside of zoos were extinct, slaughtered for such weapons, or to compound Asian folk medicines.) Walking by, I happened to catch sight of the shoppers. Al-Qasimi ignored me. I tried to imagine what was going through his head. I failed.

  Everyone wondered why they laid in no stock of alcohol. It was common knowledge that many visiting Arabs from the stricter states used the opportunity of going abroad to sample what was forbidden them at home. No one could figure out why Zaid and his crew broke the stereotype.

  No one but me knew they had something better: their qat.

  As for Zaid’s wives, we saw not so much as the hem of a chador. They were immured as ruthlessly as if in prison. I supposed that Zaid was leery of another desertion. So far as I knew, nothing had been learned of his missing wife, although I’m sure it wasn’t for lack of hunting.

  I was closing up the office one evening, intent on heading home to relax, when I got a visit from the last person I would have expected.

  Ruth looked awful. She had let herself in while my back was turned, as I was powering down the office computer. I looked at her now as she leaned against the door, one palm braced behind her against the wood panels, as if to hold it shut in the face of an intruder, and I doubted whether—had I been seeing it for the first time—I would have recognized her distressed new face, even given as much time as I had had the other day. She looked drawn, as if she had been spending hours under interrogation—a look I knew. She wore workclothes—a plain blue business suit under a labcoat—and couldn’t have resembled less the insouciant Robin Hood of last week.

  “Hello,” I said. “Is this a business or a personal call, and why do you look like you’ve just stepped out of an all-night horror-movie marathon?”

  She tried to smile, but her heart just wasn’t in it. It seemed like all she could do not to cry. She straightened up, pushed a hand through her mousse-stiff thicket of hair, and said, “A little of both, and because I’m in big trouble.”

  “Since it’s half personal, let’s go to my house. You can relax better there.”

  “Okay.”

  After we each had part of a drink inside us—hers a vodka, but mine only a beer—and were seated opposite each other in comfortable chairs, Ruth started to talk. Her face, half-lit by a dim lamp, seemed somewhat less tense. Watching her, I tried to recreate what I had once felt for her, the mixture of love and tortured abusive behavior, the lashings-out followed by my drunken sobs and apologies, her recriminations and salty kisses. But I couldn’t do it; that whole gestalt of feelings was gone, dead and buried. We were two different people now.

  “She came into my office the same day I saw you,” began Ruth, “after I got back to the mainland. She was scared, Leon, with nowhere to go. It was my day off, you remember, but my receptionist found me at home. I went in to see what the fuss was all about. What I learned made me take the woman home with me.”

  Somehow I didn’t even have to ask who we were talking about. The fatal coincidence of it was as starkly obvious as a blow to the face.

  “Her name is N
adya—Nadya Tajir, although legally it should still be Zaid. But she refuses to call herself that anymore. In her mind she’s divorced from that—that pig.”

  “Why did she come to your clinic?” I asked, trying to get a handle on this whole disturbing mess.

  “It’s the only place in LA that still does D&C abortions and the necessary before-and-after counseling. That was what she wanted, and what Zaid wouldn’t let her have.”

  I thought I had the picture now, but I was still far offbase. “She’s young, then, first pregnancy, afraid, doesn’t know what to expect—?”

  “No. She’s thirty, and this is her second pregnancy. But that’s the trouble.”

  “I don’t understand .…”

  Ruth sipped at her drink, as if she found the next part hardest to tell. “Have you ever heard the term ‘atresia?’”

  “No.”

  “It refers to the abnormal shrinkage or closure of an orifice. Nadya exhibits it vaginally. Natural childbirth would probably kill both her and the fetus.”

  “Doesn’t her husband know this?”

  “He should. He caused it.”

  “Huh?”

  Ruth assumed a clinical tone. “It’s an ancient Middle-eastern practice, I’ve learned, to restore vaginal tightness after the first birth with an internal application of rock salt. Hardly any country allows it anymore. Except Yemen.”

  I swallowed the remainder of my beer. It had gone warm and flat. “Christ.”

  “Well put. But there’s more.”

  “When the hell isn’t there?”

  “When I was performing the abortion—she was too far along for the pill—I saw that she had been—mutilated. Female circumcision. Labial and clitoral. I knew it was common in the Third World, Leon, but I had never seen it before. It was awful, Leon, just awful. But I can fix it all. The atresia, the outer damage, all of it. A little cellular regeneration, a course of nerve-growth factor, try some of those techniques that emerged from the fall of the South African biolabs—I could make her whole, Leon, cosmetically and functionally.”

  I felt sick to my stomach at the tale, and I knew we hadn’t even got to the crux of it yet.

  “Well, why don’t you go ahead?”

  “Three men came into my office today, Leon, looking for Nadya. Somehow they knew she was with me. They were so determined to find her, I’m sure there’s more to Nadya’s fleeing than she’s told me so far. I denied I knew anything about her, of course, but they wouldn’t let up. Finally they left. I rushed home, got Nadya, and stashed her in a hotel. Then I came here.”

  “Why?” I asked, although I knew the answer.

  Ruth’s stare implored me. “She’s not safe in the hotel, Leon. That’s just the kind of place where they expect to find her. I need to hide her somewhere safer, just till Zaid goes back to his own country. But it has to be with someone competent, whom I can trust. You’re the only one I know who fits that description.”

  “It’s insane. You know of course that her husband’s right here on the island .…”

  “Exactly why they’d never expect her to show up in the Hesperides. Don’t you see—it’s like the Purloined Letter.”

  “That’s shit. Life doesn’t work like that. You’ve been reading too many friggin’ detective stories.”

  Ruth set down her glass and stood up. Her lips were tightly composed. “So you won’t help then. I thought—But never mind. I’ll be going—”

  “Sit down. I didn’t say I wouldn’t help. I just said it was insane.”

  Ruth collapsed. “Oh, Leon, thank you!”

  “Don’t thank me,” I said, “until it’s all over.”

  We brought her across to the Hesperides that very night, in the small launch, with its quiet, fuel-cell-powered motor, which I used for shore patrol. It was just Ruth and I, with Nadya huddled in the bow like some Lady of Shallot too withdrawn or preoccupied to be aware she was being carried to her island chambers. I had failed to get a good look at her face in the darkness on the mainland when we hustled to board. All I had noted was that the Major’s runaway wife was dressed in loose black trousers and shirt, with a black denim jacket to cut the night-chill. She moved ill-at-ease in pants, as if conscious of wearing a disguise, or some alien male garb.

  The two-mile crossing was easy, the water placid. There was only the slightest breeze, like an infant’s slow breathing. No one said anything during the whole trip.

  Keel grooved sand, as we coasted in on a wavelet. My company-rented house at this time was near the disused end of the beach, in an isolated spot, and we soon had Nadya inside.

  Ruth had told me that the woman’s English was fairly good.

  “You understand that you’ll be safe here, but that you’re not to leave for any reason? That your husband is right here on the island?”

  She nodded. Her face was youthful, rather long and oval and curtained by long black hair: dark eyes, prominent nose, skin a muted, dusty shade of olive. She wore no makeup, and her lips, at least now, seemed bloodless. We left her sitting in a deep cushioned chair, legs drawn up beneath her, hugging herself and shivering.

  I had to run Ruth back to the mainland. We didn’t want to risk any of Zaid’s men seeing her depart on the morning ferry and drawing entirely warranted conclusions. Lord knew it was chancy enough—her having come to my office that afternoon, being potentially seen by anyone—without further strengthening the link between us. I was counting on Ruth’s using her maiden name for the clinic to obscure any older connections.

  The trip back was as wordless as the trip out. As I was helping Ruth alight on the strip of weedy urban waste from which we had set out, where a car hulk lay half buried in the mire like the bones of a mechanical beast, she spoke.

  “I feel better already, Leon, leaving Nadya with you. You’re like a rock. I know I can trust you.”

  “I’ll do my best. No promises, though.”

  “Good enough.”

  She leaned down to kiss me. There was a thin but impermeable sheet of years between her lips and mine.

  By the time I returned to the main island, dawn was threatening to bloody the eastern sky’s face. I felt exhausted, my head like a ten-pound bag of sand that was leaking into my eyes.

  Back at the house, I found Nadya still in the chair, asleep. I covered her with a blanket. She stirred but didn’t wake. I had a cold shower that refreshed me somewhat, left her a note explaining where I was, then headed for my office.

  To tell the truth, I was glad for any excuse to leave her alone. I felt I knew too many personal things about this abused woman, and her presence made me nervous. Try as I might, all I could think of when I looked at her was her wounds.

  I got through that day somehow, mainly by promising myself a good night’s sleep. Nothing untoward happened. Unless you counted the usual numerous thefts, brawls, lost children, scams, broken limbs, and idle complaints by rich residents who felt they deserved more for their money. Along about two I grabbed a sandwich. At four I checked my electronic bulletin board and found a message from HQ notifying me that they had on tap a promising replacement for the guy I had fired. That made me feel a little better. Assuming I survived till he showed up to help.

  I stayed in the office as long as I reasonably could, without attracting undue attention. Then, feeling guilty for neglecting Nadya, but also foolishly irritated at her intrusive presence, I headed home.

  I was glad to see that all the shades were down. I had forgotten to pull them myself, and hoped my guest had managed to do so without being spotted.

  Inside, the house smelled wonderful. I found Nadya—still in black—in the kitchen, standing at the stove, stirring something in a skillet.

  “Hello,” I said. “How’re you doing?”

  She stared at me unwaveringly, but without any discernible emotion. This was certainly not the look of helpless appeal I had half expected. There was no defiance, no imploring, no curiosity, no overt gratitude. Her gaze was simply a calm objective assessment of my ca
pabilities, specifically my potential to aid her. In her eyes I instantly read a character both determined and ingenious, realistic yet always questing for the main chance, however improbable.

  I hope I am not making Nadya Tajir sound like a calculating, cold-hearted schemer. She was anything but. Still, her hard life had tempered her in a certain way, which I do not choose to misrepresent

  “Hello,” she answered. “I am fine, thank you. I cook something now for our supper. I hope you do not object”

  “No, go right ahead. Smells great.”

  I sat at the kitchen table and watched her. She moved completely unselfconsciously, as if I weren’t there.

  At one point, she burnt her finger.

  “Bloody hell!”

  I repressed a smile. “Where did you learn your English?”

  “From the shortwave BBC. Is ‘bloody hell’ wrong?”

  “No, just—not American.”

  She sniffed. “So what then? America is no big deal. Except maybe in her own eyes.”

  “Got me there, Nadya.”

  “Yes, thank you, I think so too.”

  The meal was just some kind of lamb couscous, with a light homemade bread cooked in a pan atop the stove, but it tasted like nothing I had ever eaten. I cleaned my plate twice.

  “That was great, Nadya. Thanks.”

  “I am glad you liked it. Now you can do the cleanup, please.”

  “Sure. No sweat.”

  She looked puzzled, then said, “Oh, ‘no sweat,’ right.”

  Nadya retreated to the living-room and I washed the dishes. While they were air-drying, I poked my head in. She was reading an old copy of Newsweek. I noticed the headline on the page facing me: YEMEN REUNIFICATION: “ARABIA FELIX” ONCE MORE.

  “Do you drink beer, Nadya?”

  “You have Guinness?”

  “Yup.”

  “If that mean yes, I will have some, please.”

  I popped two and brought them in. (The Guinness brewery had reluctantly switched to twist-tops, in the face of consumer-demand, just that year.) I handed Nadya one and sat down opposite her. She continued to read the article on her homeland, taking grateful pulls from the bottle. When she was finished, she laid the magazine down carefully and again treated me to one of her unflinching stares.