by Saad Hossain
Hoffman blinked at her and then at Sabeen and Behruse who had sat there listening to what had become an intimate exchange. “This poison is really something else,” he said finally. “You got anything to make my nose stop sweating, doctor?”
16: THE BELLY OF THE BEAST
DAGR TURNED THE WATCH OVER AND OVER IN HIS HAND, AS HE had a hundred times before. His fingers had become attuned to the nuances of its surface, its peculiar weightiness. It was heavier than other watches, although Dagr assumed that was because all of his previous watches had been cheap and strictly functional. Kinza had once told him that mechanical watches were heavier, as they relied on actual moving parts, a technology wholly removed from the quartz movements of the cheap Japanese products he had been used to.
Kinza paced in front, with a seething impatience that had been wearing their nerves thin for days. The man had gone silent, but Dagr knew enough to sense the rage boiling close to the surface, and to fear it. Days had passed in discussion of Xervish’s offer, slim hopes at first, burgeoning later into something desperate, when the actual contractor had come for a midnight meeting.
Xervish had indeed delivered. The meeting had been brief but convincing, even for Hamid’s paranoia. The contractor was middle American, nothing more than a glorified truck driver, earning hazard pay by a peculiar permutation of fortune, hailing from a small town in some state called Idaho, a man so far removed from war that he seemed to carry about him a bubble of disbelief.
He had with him papers, permits, contracts, documentation beyond dispute, and an open friendliness, a desire to repay a debt to Xervish, a clearing of some unknown slate, and with their own assurances of harmlessness, a willingness to bend the rules of war. Dagr had been convinced that the offer was genuine. Hamid, who suspected traps, had run his own interrogation and then grasped at this escape route.
He now whispered in Kinza’s ear like some dark crow, day and night stalking him, urging haste, extolling the virtues of moving fast, of arriving at a place that Sunnis considered a fort, where old guard influence still held sway, of connecting once again with men Hamid considered allies, far from Shi’a madness, of Mosul, Mosul, Mosul. Where he had once urged caution, he now urged immediate action.
Still Kinza refused to give him a date. Hamid grew desperate, thinking that perhaps Kinza considered leaving him behind and redoubled his efforts. Dagr knew, however, that it was not so much which two would escape that vexed Kinza. It was the act of running that hurt him, almost physically rooting him down. Hassan Salemi had called him out, put a price on his head, hunted him now like a dog, and Kinza’s instinct was to strike back at his enemy, to leave the cover of this house and hit out on the street, into the heart of Shi’a power, and die perhaps.
Either way, Dagr reflected, his own chances were not good. This fact did not disturb him much. Kinza would decide sooner or later, and then the matter would be over. He rose finally, put the watch in his pocket. The feel of it was alluring, a heavy gold nugget in his hand and the slight whirring vibrations it made sometimes, as if the broken mechanism was on the verge of working.
“Where are you going?” Kinza asked.
“Library,” Dagr said. Anything is better than watching you grind your teeth.
“How goes the mystery of the watch?” Kinza asked. “Found anything yet?”
“I took the casing off yesterday,” Dagr said. “The insides are not normal. We’re going to really take it apart today.” He paused at the door. “You want to come? Might take your mind off…”
“Down there?” Kinza seemed to consider the rabbit warren of the library as some part of the underworld.
“Mikhail is very interested in mechanical objects.”
“I don’t think he likes me,” Kinza said.
“He’s afraid of you perhaps,” Dagr said. “It took me a few meetings to befriend him. He loves the watch, though, so I don’t think he’ll mind.”
“Alright then, but only for a little while.”
“No pacing around though. Don’t make him any more nervous with your jumpiness.”
“I’m not jumpy.”
“Sure.”
“Really, I’m calm.”
“You’ve decided then?” Dagr asked.
“I didn’t say that.”
The librarian awaited them eagerly behind a mountain of books he had gathered: old watch catalogues, extracts on gears and screws, mechanical principles, tomes on the history of watchcraft, trade books, and encyclopedias on mechanical engineering, among many others of dubious use. Some of these were ancient, literally disintegrating at first touch.
Mikhail had raided the volumes of discarded luggage to good effect. There were tweezers, clippers, a magnifying glass, and nail files from some beauty’s valise. A physician’s case had yielded small hammers, scalpels, needles, clamps, and other surgical tools. A pocket geometry set carried protractors, measuring rulers, and a compass. Then there were toolkits of various provenance, where minute screwdrivers, vises, calipers, tongs, and more had been unearthed.
Mikhail was thrown off by Kinza and hesitated for long moments, unsure of what to do, but the latter was on his best behavior and offered a smile between sips of tea and sat quite still with his hands visible. For all that, he still looked like a wolf that had wandered into the parlor. Refreshments dealt with, they got to the matter at hand.
Dagr fitted the watch face down on the tabletop clamp. He made small jabs at the metal case, at strategic places, small measured blows that in the right sequence caused the back of the case to spring loose. This they had learned by accident.
Inside was the same nightmare of unfamiliarity, bizarre despite hours spent pouring over watch diagrams. There was a spring, attached to the winding mechanism. That much was clear. The purpose of everything else was opaque.
“See the spring,” Dagr peered through his handheld microscope. They each had one, different colors and sizes. His one was horn rimmed and with the best resolution since he was doing the actual work. “I don’t understand what it’s connected to. The gears are all wrong. Maybe they used to do it differently back then?”
“Not really,” Kinza said. “The basic watch mechanism has been more or less unchanged from the first Breguets.”
“There should be a gear like this,” Dagr pointed at a glossy diagram, their principal source for identifying parts. “The main gear, which should connect to the catchment. And this spring basically retains the tension, which makes the watch go round until it’s time for a winding.”
“Did you try winding it up?”
“We did that yesterday. The hands don’t move.”
“But look at the spring. There’s tension there. And this gear seems to be moving.”
“So it’s working?” Dagr looked again.
“It’s doing something.”
“The hands haven’t moved even a single micrometer,” Dagr said. He turned the watch over and put a piece of gridlined tracing paper on top to show them. “See, I took the measurements before.”
“You’re having fun with this, aren’t you?”
“It’s like a science project,” Dagr shrugged. “We have nothing else to do.”
“No, I mean, it’s good,” Kinza said. He smiled reassuringly at Mikhail. Dagr noted Mikhail’s immediate alarm and reminded himself to advise Kinza to avoid reassuring people in the future.
“Back to the spring. It obviously works.”
“Are the gears really moving? I can’t tell.”
“Try to hear it. You might get a sound.”
A few minutes of concerted silence, with all three of them bending their ears to the job, their heads comically placed, almost touching, the sound of breathing at first discordant, and then, in fine rhythm, as all three of them adjusted. Five minutes like that, straining—
“I heard that,” Dagr said. “Did you hear that?”
“I heard that,” Kinza confirmed.
“Yes,” Mikhail said, as they both turned their eyes to him.
“Ok so it’s a slow tick,” Dagr said.
“Wait, be still!”
“What?”
“I heard it again.”
“Shhh.”
“Hear that?”
“I missed it.”
“Dagr stop breathing for God’s sake.”
“I heard it. I heard it!” Mikhail, excited, clapped his hands.
“It’s irregular then,” Dagr said. “The beats are irregular.”
“It can’t be if it’s a watch.”
“Something might be jammed,” Dagr said. “It could be a broken part somewhere inside, and this is just two gear heads rubbing against each other.”
“I can’t see anything broken.”
“Nor can I, but we’d have to take it apart a bit more.”
“Can you put it back together again?”
“Maybe. Probably not. I’m going to count the vibrations.” Dagr put his finger on the round flat gear and closed his eyes. They sat still for ten minutes. “Ok, there are definite tremors. And it’s completely without pattern. It doesn’t feel broken. Should I take it apart?”
“I’d hold off,” Kinza said.
“Why?”
“Well, either it’s broken, or it’s not. What if it’s not broken?”
“Someone made a watch that tells irregular time?” Dagr looked at him strangely. “And the hands don’t move. Not an iota. Either it’s broken, or it’s not a watch at all.”
“That could be it, couldn’t it?”
“It’s not a watch?” Dagr stared at it, his left eye grown hideously distended through the microscope. “Not a watch. Superficially it looks like one, but it isn’t. But someone went to great trouble to disguise it as one.”
“The Druze?”
“Hmm, yes, since it’s their watch,” Dagr said.
“That’s an odd thing to do.”
“Well, they’re Druze, aren’t they?”
“True.”
“Not that I’m anti-Druze or anything.”
“The imam at our mosque always preached that they weren’t really Muslim. The Druze, and Ahmadiyas. And on a good day, even Agha Khanis were out.”
“You went to a mosque?”
“I used to walk past it sometimes.”
“Never went in, did you?”
“To a mosque? Are you mad?”
“I haven’t either, in a long time,” Dagr said. “Perhaps I should have.”
“How would that have helped?”
“Might have learned something about these Druze.”
“Don’t think an imam would be of much use there.”
“I see.” Dagr tapped the gear with his tweezers, a little bit disappointed. The urge to take apart the machine was almost unbearable. “Let’s assume, for conjecture, that these Druze made a fake watch. What could be some reasons? A practical joke?”
“No one would bother preserving a joke watch,” Kinza said. “It was given to Fouad Jumblatt. He’s a bigshot, right?”
“Chief of all Druze in Syria at that time, I think.”
“Plus, it’s made of gold. The case, I mean,” Kinza said. “It would be an expensive practical joke.”
“Not a joke then,” Dagr said. “What else?”
“Really useful if we could get hold of a Druze.”
“Yes, even better if we had old Fouad with us.”
“Joking aside, there must be a Druze somewhere around here. How did this watch get to Baghdad in the first place?”
“Maybe it’s actually junk.”
“It’s a gold watch with Fouad Jumblatt’s name on it. So, not junk.”
“Why did the Lion have it?”
“Perhaps he stole it?”
“Perhaps it was his to begin with. Perhaps he is the Druze.”
“Maybe we should ask him.”
“Maybe we should.”
17: GUN DAY
MONDAY WAS GUN DAY. OR GUN DELIVERY DAY RATHER. LIKE A man worrying at a sore tooth, Xervish seemed to be unable to stop himself from returning to them much more often than was safe for him. Today was to fulfill a longstanding request from Kinza. Guns and ammunition and the last of their cash, extracted from a safehouse stash they had previously maintained.
It was a sign of the times that nothing retained stability, not even a hitherto thriving black market business. Without Hoffman’s access and Kinza’s ferocity to back it up, there remained virtually nothing of their criminal enterprise. Contacts switched off, customers moved on, suppliers dried up, safehouses were overrun: In effect, it was as if someone had taken a gigantic brush of whitewash to their past.
Guns and cash, however, were enough for Dagr, who had not been overly fond of their previous line of work to begin with. In the city, guns and cash opened up vistas of possibility. Yet when he saw Kinza stripping down the Makarov pistols, hands moving in a blur like some kind of violent pianist, he felt a moment of disquiet. There was in his stance a subconscious intent. Dagr wondered if, in the end, he would leave this city so quietly.
Xervish for once was in high spirits, regaling them with wild adventures from his childhood, in which Kinza figured as a chief tormentor and instigator. The haggard lines from his face faded and he appeared youthful again when he described how, at age five, they had attempted to rob the neighboring carpet store of its chief window display, had staggered down a side street with a twenty foot long roll at a snail’s pace, been caught and soundly thrashed.
They heard about the girls Kinza had stolen from him, the broken Chevrolet they had inherited from an uncle, which Kinza had gradually fixed, the nights they had cruised happily in this vehicle, the bathtub brewery Kinza had persuaded him to make, with a view to augmenting their beer supply, and the acute poisoning Xervish had suffered as a result.
In all of these, Xervish cut a comical or desperate figure and Kinza as some kind of devil. Later, too, there were oblique references to the sister Xervish had lost, and Dagr guessed that she must have been one more thread tying them together, a big one, for Kinza’s fingers tightened, and the rage flared in his eyes at any mention of her. Dagr could see the furnace at his core bellowing, could guess that the violence Kinza offered the world was in part still recompense for that previous episode of his life.
Guns. Kinza’s choice was the Soviet made Makarov, a snub-nosed semiautomatic, reassuringly heavy. It had been the official Red Army sidearm for forty years, from 1951 to 1991. True to Soviet scorched earth logic, the gun used a 9×18 mm cartridge, where the bullets were 0.2 mm larger in diameter than the standard NATO-issue cartridges used by all other “western” handguns. In case of a full blown NATO attack, the pesky capitalist invaders would not be able to use any Russian ammunition in their fancy designer weapons, and the soldiers of the motherland would be spared the indignity of getting shot with their own bullets.
The Iraqi army had used the Makarov for a long time because it had relatively few moveable parts, rarely malfunctioned, and could be repaired in the field by a one-armed halfwit; also, the Spetsnaz used these guns, and those nightmarish Russian commandoes were held in awe by all the Arab militaries.
For the same reasons, it was a weapon in high demand among the insurgency. It was easily concealable and could be pulled up in a flash to assassinate an unsuspecting collaborator.
Kinza had two of them, but his were actually the much rarer East German model, manufactured in Suhl. The grip bore a stamp of the name Ernst Thaelmann that, for all anyone knew, was either a very popular East German or, bizarrely, the name of the factory. The East German pistol had always been considered the finest of all the Makarovs, as any fool knew that German engineering, even the lunatic East German sort, was a thousand times better than Russian or Chinese or Bulgarian or any other communist-inspired state. Then too, the aficionados were well aware that the original designer of the Makarov, one Nikolai Federovich Makarov, had basically copied his design from the inestimable Walther PP sidearm, used by the Luftwaffe in WWII, so it was only fitting really that the best Makaro
v be manufactured in German soil. And if anyone thought they knew better than the Luftwaffe, well…
With the nonexistence of that country and the discontinuation of the original line, this gun had earned a cult following. Kinza, who had a healthy interest in concealable semiautomatic handguns, had acquired these from some retired (dead) Republican Guard army buddy, and now had a gaggle of gun enthusiasts following his every move. Many times, on the way to some rendezvous, they had been stopped in dark corners by furtive, bearded men wanting to get a look at the Makarovs. Kinza had turned down offers of hard cash, bricks of opium, titles to bombed out houses, and even gratuitous bearded male sex.
Dagr, who could not be trusted with such serious weapons, was given an old .45 caliber US army issue gun, a sort of hand cannon for amateurs of the point and pray mentality. It had originally been won in a game of cards from Hoffman, himself a terrible shot, who normally called in air cover for anything more serious than a bazaar pickpocket.
Today they were in a celebratory mood, were in fact passing around a bottle of single malt, and using Mother Davala’s best crystal glasses. Xervish had fixed up back-to-back trips, an entire convoy heading to Mosul on staggered days with empty trucks, following their own arcane schedule of profit and loss. Xervish, plugged into this system somehow, had put an end to their concerns. Kinza and Hamid would go next Friday, a week from now, and Xervish and Dagr would follow the very next day. They would rendezvous in a safehouse in Mosul, also arranged.
That left a week of upcoming idleness, a period in which Kinza planned to find the Lion of Akkad and wrest from him, if possible, the secret of the watch. Their curiosity had grown; Dagr had kept his finger on the watch doggedly for the past three days and marked down the intervals of the errant fluctuations. Held against a time chart of minutes and seconds, this faint mechanical thrumming took on a different look, a numeric pattern of some sort.
At first, it had been random but finally, on the third day, Dagr had discerned a repetitive sequence. In effect, he had reached the end of a cycle, which indicated to him that either the machine was malfunctioning repetitively, or there was a code of vibrations embedded in it, which was more or less three days long.
