Looking for the Mahdi

by N Lee Wood

  As the tapes were being blipped, I thought about why I was really calling, hesitant to drag up the bloody past. I was only supposed to be running an errand, not doing investigative reporting.

  KICK IT UP A PEG, OK? I finally typed after the footage had been blipped. If there was anyone tapping, that would perk their interest, but I had to take the risk. I was asking Cairo to go to the next tighter security scramble, make it that much harder for little ears.

  WHATCHA NEED SAILOR? Cairo came back in a few seconds. The extra scramble would make transmissions fractionally slower, but people aren’t machines, and the time lag isn’t that noticeable.

  LOOKING FOR A FRIEND. CHK BK ARK—I gave him the month and year for the archives—HAMID IBN RAZAILI. APX 45? LAST NOK KUZLAT.

  CUT N CALL 10 MN. BYE-BYE.

  I shut off the PortaNet, signaling the waiter for another coffee, and waited. My friend in Cairo was sharp and efficient, for which I was thankful. No questions about why I was typing instead of getting on the handheld. No long chats and no “hold one moment while I check, please” which only gives the opposition more time to home in on a transmission. I had no illusions that given time, if the Government was tapping, they’d crack it. There are thousands of journalists all filing reports in dozens of languages every minute of the day. It would take thousands more Government agents whose only job it is to cover each and every transmission they could, to unravel it all. Agents like John Halton. I was taking the chance that they hadn’t caught up, and that the scramble would hold.

  Ten minutes expired, and I punched in the PortaNet again. The satellite hadn’t moved too far, and apparently nobody else had used it to go on-line elsewhere. It was up and running within a second.

  CAIRO RELAY. DAT U SAILOR?

  YO HO HO.

  LST KWN MEHEMET ST 56 BIS. X EL KAASEM. LUCK.

  THNX. BYE.

  I had the PortaNet shut down the next moment. Cairo had known I was in a hurry, and the last transaction had taken less than fifteen seconds. If someone was snooping, they’d have to be damn good. But I wasn’t going to let that make me too confident.

  I didn’t write down the address, just kept it in my head. I had figured that this time through Nok Kuzlat all I’d have to worry about was getting caught squatting to piss in the men’s toilet with my shirttails dragging down into the open hole of Turkish jakes. The country wasn’t at war, no bombs and bullets to worry about.

  But the little chat in the abandoned café had set me operating on a much higher level of paranoia. The kind of furious, jittery paranoia I hadn’t felt since I was a kid and my father told me God was so powerful, He could watch everything I did and hear every thought in my head. God apparently didn’t believe in the right to privacy, and neither did the CDI.

  I was folding the PortaNet back together as the waiter brought out my breakfast on a heavily engraved silver tray. “Have you finished, sir?” he said in perfect snotty English, even a trace of Oxbridge.

  I was, and he popped an umbrella open over my head with the kind of superior flourish reserved for exclusive use by English royalty and waiters. I sat in the shade and ate slowly, thinking as I watched the baked air shimmer across the rooftops of Nok Kuzlat.

  ELEVEN

  * * *

  Under the baleful eye of the maitre d’, I swiped an orange from the buffet table to take down to the room for Halton. He thanked me politely, put it in his pocket and we casually strolled down through the lobby and out onto Qaiyara Avenue, a busy thoroughfare cutting through the heart of Nok Kuzlat. I had the PortaNet draped over one shoulder like a carryall bag, and Halton had the HoloPak braced against his chest, partly covered by a loose zhuhba-t vest to make us less conspicuous.

  The desk clerk had stared at me as if I were insane when I asked if he had a more current city map. The one he’d given me had been published in 1942, in Russian Cyrillic. New maps were not exactly prohibited, but they were regulated by the government and not handed out freely. Since the natives all knew where they lived, only enemies would want such information. You want to go somewhere, take a taxi, the clerk advised. Taxi drivers know all of Nok Kuzlat. Right. I knew that.

  “How good is your mental map, Halton?” I asked. The noise of traffic forced me to half-yell to be heard. Ancient buses wheezed along crowded with people, some hanging on to the sides without a care. Old pickup trucks with bleating sheep in the back vied with new Mercedes and classic BMW’s ruining their hydroglide brakes slamming to a stop, honking madly, then stomping on the gas for another three yards. Teenaged boys hauled handcarts stacked high with wares, straining undernourished muscles to their limits. Adding to all the entertainment were hundreds of shoppers and shoppers, dashing in and out of traffic with goods for sale, goods they’d bought, goods they wanted you to buy and were being thoughtful enough to bring right to your car door, whether you wanted them to or not.

  “I can find my way around,” Halton said. I’d bet he could.

  “How’s your radar?” He glanced at me, puzzled. “Do we have any unwanted company following us?”

  He didn’t look around, or hesitate. “Yes.”

  “Shit.” I cursed quietly. “CDI?”

  “No. Too obvious, too clumsy,” he answered. He didn’t seem concerned about it, and probably he wasn’t.

  “Can we lose them?”

  “If you like.”

  I liked, and we had the first fun I’d had since we arrived in this shithole, walking briskly and turning quick corners, slipping through the endless coffee houses to come out in connecting back alleys. We jumped a fence into the back end of a covered suuq, buying things from the tiny stalls along the narrow bazaar streets at a near run. I draped a cheap rug woven with hideously bright colors over my PortaNet, and Halton’s HoloPak ended up stuffed in a rattan-type suitcase. Both of us now had checkered kaffiyehs covering head and shoulders, held precariously in place with cheap beaded cords jammed around our crowns. I had bought the shabbiest-looking native wrapcoat from an elderly man’s pile of secondhand clothes laid out on a piece of cardboard on the ground, doing a token bargaining at breakneck speed, then handing him far more money than it was worth and tugging it on regardless of possible lice, as we scurried off. The old man’s eyes were both delighted and contemptuous of this sudden windfall from yet another stupid Western tourist.

  This kind of amateur night wouldn’t have shaken arthritic fleas off a bald dog, but somehow we lost our tail, and emerged at the edge of the slum growing along the border of the city center.

  I told Halton where I wanted to go, and not to make it a direct route, either. We wandered, stopping occasionally to sniff whether or not our tail had caught up, then headed down El Kaasem Avenue deeper into Nok Kuzlat’s ghetto where the sleaze hadn’t been varnished into sanitized, touristified “quaintness.” The poverty here was very real, and very grubby.

  El Kaasem Avenue twisted and turned chaotically around tenements and old buildings, as if the buildings had been plunked down whole and the road forced around them. Other streets, not even wide enough to be called alleyways, perforated El Kaasem at odd intervals, the stench and squalor intensifying, and the helpful English subtitles on street signs completely vanishing as we finally located Mehemet Street. We were lucky Mehemet Street even had a sign, still having illusions it was a part of the city proper.

  Number 45 bis Mehemet Street was a sort of convenience grocery and hardware store, a tiny, dim shop, vegetable racks made from stacked wooden crates on the outside, a few carcasses in various stages of dissection hanging in the window as enticement. There was no name written on the door or window, only prices listed in Arabic script on scraps of paper shoved into the cracks between the window frame and dusty glass. No English. This wasn’t a place the usual gawking tourists would find easily or would be welcome in.

  A group of elderly men loitering by the door eyed us with hostile suspicion, gnarled hands languidly brushing away the omnipresent flies. A pair of small boys pulled a mangy goat tied on a ro
pe past us, their own skin as patchy as the animal’s, their eyes runny with the yellowed grime of untreated infection, as they squinted up at the strangers invading their territory.

  “Hamid’s come up in the world,” I remarked, smiling to hide my anxiety. I was suddenly afraid, wanting to turn around and go back.

  The door hung precariously on rusty hinges and whined loudly as I pushed it open, no need for a bell to signal the arrival of customers. Inside, a teenaged boy dressed in a stained smock peered out at us, warily curious. On either wall were shelves crammed with a little bit of everything, boxes and bags labeled in Arabic rising close to the ceiling, the top shelf holding various brass pots and cooking utensils, carpentry tools, dangling daggers in dull pewter-colored scabbards. I knew Hamid would also be the local money-changer as well as having a few odd pistols, rifles, grenades and spare ammunition available for his regular patrons. The narrow room terminated at the opposite end, screened with a beaded curtain, the faint outline of a staircase behind it.

  I asked for Hamid, and the kid called toward the back, keeping his contentious eye on us. Down the stairway came a short, round, powerfully built figure, a white butcher’s apron tied around his middle, not bothering to hurry. I was grinning uneasily, my nerves tense as he swept the beads to one side and squinted at us for a moment before he recognized me.

  “Yah salaam hkhala khee’dha!” Hamid blurted out, and fell upon me as if I were a long-lost brother back from the dead. “Peace to you, and the blessing and mercy of Allah, Kay Bee. I never expected to see you again!” He was kissing both my cheeks.

  “Hamid… Hamid…” I was wheezing, trying to catch my breath. I don’t know if I was more relieved or surprised.

  “Ahmat—” He turned to the kid. “Do you remember my son, Kay Bee?” I should have guessed.

  Ahmat didn’t recognize me. Only seven when I’d seen him last, the stoic little boy clutching the hand of his father and staring at the ruins of his life had grown up into a dark-eyed young man with whip-thin strong muscles in his arms. He stared at me gravely, as if trying to superimpose this strange face on a blurred memory and whatever stories his father might have told him.

  “Jamilah!” Hamid bellowed, still holding on to me as if to prevent me from running away. “Come here! J’ahkzhil!”

  “Hamid…”

  “H’asaleet ilb-araka!” Hamid was running on. “My house is blessed with your return, I’ve always wondered what happened with you after the war, where the hell have you been keeping yourself, anyway, you never wrote, you never called…”

  He was beginning to sound like my mother. More than that, we both knew it was a charade, acted out for the benefit of the curious hanging around the doorway. While I’m sure his emotions were genuine, when he pulled away from me I could see the sharp, gauging eyes boring into me, wondering what I was doing here. He glanced around the street, alert to any suspicious types who might be watching and reporting, before smiling reassuringly to his friends and firmly closing the door behind us.

  A woman shrouded head to toe in a henna-dyed cotton aba’ayah, all but her eyes covered with an embroidered yashmak, came down the stairs to stare out through the beads at us in curiosity. Hamid introduced us to his wife, Jamilah, before he sent her back upstairs into the family’s apartment above the store to make coffee for their guests.

  Hamid ibn Razaili had been a lot younger, a lot thinner and a lot more sour, the last time I’d seen him. He was a few years older than I, a displaced fhalell’ha, born in the ruins of a remote village of Khuruchabja. While I had been pestering my parents to buy me a pony, he had been riding a secondhand bicycle, no tires on its metal rims, carrying contraband across half-swept mine fields, making a fragile living doing business with rival armies.

  By the time he was fourteen, his father and older brothers had been killed off one by one in factional violence. His widowed mother had died from a combination of exhaustion, too many childbirths and untreated syphilis. His sisters had all expired from the extensive list of diseases widespread in the country; one from typhoid, another from cholera, one bled to death after a miscarriage, another bled to death after she’d been stabbed by a jealous husband. Orphaned and alone, he fled into the slums of Nok Kuzlat. Nowhere else to go, getting too old to prostitute his body for food, he had been pressed into the army and chosen to remain there, rising as far as his non-blue blood would allow him.

  In Hamid’s second year in the army, Khuruchabja had briefly joined in a small conflict between Shi’as and Sunnis duking it out for possession of a border town already ground into bits, useless to whichever side was ultimately victorious. The officers had abandoned the front lines, exhorting the ragged farm boys they left behind to fight on to glorious martyrdom. After shrewdly appraising the situation from his pitiful foxhole in the sand, Hamid had stuck his hands in the air, handed his antique rifle over to the nearest Damascus Coalition soldier he could find, and rode in the back of a flatbed truck to spend six months in a “relocation camp.”

  There, he met the first Westerners he’d ever seen, learning his English from an American Air Force sergeant stationed in Kuwait, a homesick rancher with a sixteen-year-old son back in Wyoming worrying about his pimples, virginity and the high-school prom. Hamid was no naive teenager—his childhood had been brutal, nasty and short—but he was a survivor, knew how to trade cigarettes and hashish when he had them, and smiles and innocence when he had nothing else. English was just another tool he could use in a never-ending chain of bribes given, baksheesh taken, staying alive.

  He was still in the Khuruchabjan army years later when I’d hired him as my driver to take me out to the front lines. Then, he supported the Behjars, with the nominal allegiance necessary for whichever faction held power. Money and survival, not politics, was his main concern. Like most other drivers in the motor pool for the local army contingent, he made a little extra tax-free cash off journalists desperate for transportation out to where the actual fighting was going on. Unlike most other drivers, however, Hamid actually knew how to drive.

  The Behjars had secreted their infrafusion bombs, holding on to the capital of Nok Kuzlat and most of Khuruchabja while attempting to exterminate pockets of resistance fighters begging for help from the West and the allied Damascus Coalition. When public opinion polls finally allowed the West to send cavalry riding over the hill in the form of black unmarked jets and bombers screaming overhead, the Behjars lost ground quickly.

  Hamid didn’t seem to care that he was on the losing side; he’d been on the losing side before. He didn’t have strong political beliefs of any kind, didn’t much care if the journalists he hauled back and forth from the front lines were from countries siding against his employers. Journalists, even the most ignorant wandering al-wabâhr understood, had no country. They were strange creatures dressed in their own version of uniforms, bright, gaudy Hawaiian shirts to clearly demarcate them from soldiers. They asked foolish questions in their clumsy accents and seemed delighted when their own Western leaders were called blood-drinking bastard sons of diseased pigs.

  Hamid’s uniform was secondhand, and he wore sandals on his feet, a frayed, checkered kaffiyeh on his head. The belt around his waist was old, the leather repaired, but the gun inside his holster was polished and clean, as functional as the man himself regardless of how he dressed.

  The driver always came with the jeep, since each driver was responsible for his machine, not daring for any price to hand over the keys to a stranger. Hamid drove me and the idiot optics kid GBN had stuck me with around for several weeks, anywhere we requested him to go. He asked no questions and said even less, silently watching and listening for planes overhead, ready to turn the sandjeep off the road if it seemed that bombs were imminent. He could look at the burnt corpses of villagers slaughtered outside their bombed houses with a dour, impassive face, holding the edge of his kaffiyeh over his mouth and nose to filter the stink, languidly brushing the ever-present flies from his eyes while we filmed.

/>   The nation-state is still a relatively novel idea in the Middle East, one of those strange Western ideas that ignores the longer history of land divided between tribes, political ideology not enough to replace traditional blood ties. The dead weren’t his family, the killers not his tribe, it was not his fight. He didn’t pretend to understand the politics killing his countrymen, the senseless civil war sucking Khuruchabja’s neighbors into the conflict. He was but a simple soldier; his sole ambition was to stay alive and make a little money. At least that’s what he claimed.

  Contrary to what the West wanted to believe, al-Husam and his Behjars had come to power by popular demand, and the charismatic leader had enjoyed wide support among Khuruchabjans for quite some time. With the sudden power of infrafusion bombs in his hands, it seemed to many in the country that the time had finally arrived for evening up the score after years of humiliation from the imperialist Zionist scum and their sycophants—traitorous, greedy, oil-rich Arabs. The average Khuruchabjan was a faithful Behjar enthusiast—

  Until desperate Behjars started killing Khuruchabjans wholesale in the capital, their paranoia agitated by rumors of rebel terrorists hiding in the twisted alleyways of the slums. Hundreds disappeared in the night, the mutilated bodies of some dumped in their families’ doorways as a warning, others never seen again. Soldiers herded women out of their cloistered quarters at gunpoint and into the streets as instant rent-a-crowds, eyes wild with either fervor or fear, chanting their praise for the Behjars and their hatred for the rebels in front of cameras. Once the camera crew had finished, the chants were abruptly switched off and the trembling women vanished silently, escaping like so many henna-shrouded ghosts back inside their anonymous stuccoed houses until the next staged rally.