“I know, Ralph,” the Scorpion said quietly.
“There’s nowhere to g-g-go, Nicky. Don’t you know that?”
“I know, habibi, I know,” the Scorpion said, closing the door quietly behind him.
After a moment Braithwaite went and stood by the window, listening to the footsteps fading in the darkness. In the distance he could hear the faint barking of a dog. He poured himself another drink and swallowed it with a shudder. It had been a close call; only he knew how close. He had survived because the Scorpion thought he was too old.
He paused in front of a small bronze-framed mirror speckled with yellowing spots and patted down a stray hair. Old isn’t dead, he thought. He liked the sound of that and said it out loud.
“I may be old, b-b-but I’m not d-d-dead yet, am I, darling?” he said, pausing to stroke the cobra. The snake flared its hood and stared back with its unblinking gaze.
The Scorpion sat cross-legged on the prow of an old wooden dhow, its lateen sail bellied out with the breeze. The deck rolled as the fishing boat slid through the dark waves. The night was full of stars and the wooden deck was rank with the oily smell of barracuda, the usual catch. Back at the stern, the old nakhoda kept one arm on the tiller while he brewed coffee on a small primus stove. The only sound was the young boy, the nakhoda’s son, singing an ancient shanty in a clear voice, punctuated by the slapping of the waves against the hull.
Oh Allah, be my guardian,
Oh Allah, watch over me always,
Oh Allah, bring me home again,
To the one who waits for me.
It had cost him plenty of baksheesh to persuade them to take him to the coast near Doha in the middle of the night. But he knew that with Abdul Sa’ad and Nuruddin after him, he was definitely persona non grata and couldn’t just fly in to Riyadh. When he’d gone back to the hotel, he found that the hair he’d stretched across the doorposts was broken. The keys he’d left in a careful pattern in a drawer had been moved. The keys themselves were of no use to anyone. One of them opened the trunk of a car he’d sold six years ago and the other was for the apartment of a young lady in Georgetown who’d told him she never wanted to see him again, back in the days when he was still a CTP trainee.
He was almost spotted when he left the hotel and had to bribe a night porter to show him out through the kitchen to a back exit. He had reversed on foot through the souk to make sure he was clean, before making his way down to the wharves, where he had finally roused the boy and the old man.
He tapped his pocket where he kept the film cartridge. The next step was to get it to Macready in Doha. They’d be ringing alarm bells like crazy at Langley, trying to figure when the balloon was going up. Harris, of course, would act as if he knew it all the time, and would try to pressure him into finding out when and where Abdul Sa’ad would make his move.
He wondered if he had made a mistake letting Braithwaite live. Koenig would have said so, but Koenig didn’t owe Ralph a life as he did. Nor had Koenig ever been schooled in the harsh desert code of treachery and honor. Only once before had he been soft-hearted and it had cost Tuyet her life. Forget Saigon, forget Braithwaite, he told himself. Concentrate on the mission.
His excitement quickened as they approached the shore. Whatever was going on, the answer lay in Arabia. It was a strange excitement, part danger, part contentment, because in a certain sense he was coming home. Ever since he was a boy, he had known that Arabia was his destiny. “There is only the desert for you,” Sheikh Zaid had told him when he had first decided to return to the States. At the time, he hadn’t understood what Zaid had meant and had thought that the old man was full of hot air. Later, in Nam, he had discovered that it was a kind of prophecy. And now, his kismet was bringing him back.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out the photo of the girl, studying it in the faint light from the primus stove. There was something very fragile about her healthy young beauty, almost as if she were pleading for help with those wonderful eyes. Or perhaps he was just creating his own fairy tale, a romantic fantasy that had nothing to do with the real flesh and blood woman at all.
“Kelly love,” the Scorpion said to himself. “I sure hope you’re worth all this.”
The young sailor fell silent as he began to work the ropes. The boat creaked in the night like an old house full of secrets. Ahead, like a low dark cloud brooding against the stars, lay the mainland of Arabia.
Arabia
OUTSIDE THE NIGHT WIND stirred the desert to silent life, spinning dust devils that the Bedu believe are the visible manifestations of evil spirits called zars. It was that dark hour before midnight when men are moved by a strange restlessness as old as firelight on cave walls and shadowy sexual fantasies dance across the mind.
In the bathroom of her quarters, Kelly marked the seconds with the rhythmic stropping of the gold letter-opener she had stolen from Abdul Sa’ad’s desk. Relentlessly she scraped the blade against the edge of a pried-up floor tile. Every so often she would test the edge, honed to razor-sharpness, on her finger. Finally satisfied, she went back into the bedroom. She hid the letter-opener in her handbag and walked aimlessly around the room, as though she were waiting for a phone call. In the light of a gold and ivory lamp her eyes appeared to be hollow, like bottomless blue holes in her skull. Soon, she knew, he would send for her.
“How good a slice of bread tastes depends on how hungry you are,” Kelly’s father once told her. They were sitting in his den, the walls covered with plaques and civic awards. Even in a sports shirt he looked distinguished, as if he never sweated. His face was attractively tan and glowing from a recent “fact-finding” trip to the French Riviera with his latest mistress, who was younger than Kelly. He jokingly told her that the trip had been arranged by the famous Congressional travel agency: Boon & Doggle.
That was the time when she had discovered that in exchange for a large campaign contribution from a building contractor, he had agreed to push an important contract the builder’s way. What made it doubly hypocritical in Kelly’s view was that he was running on a reform platform, accusing his Democratic opponent of underworld ties.
“In the real-world jungle, morality is a luxury of the well-fed,” her father had declared in that self-righteous tone of voice she had associated with his lectures ever since she was a little girl. No matter how hard she tried, that tone always made her feel as if she could never do anything right.
“You don’t look like you’re starving,” Kelly had retorted, her eyes darting blue flames, like a gas jet. She felt that he had betrayed her. God, she had been so naive, she thought. Robert had shown her the truth. But that was a secret she would never reveal, no matter what they did to her.
She went to the night table and picked up the compact Abdul Sa’ad had given her and began to do her make-up. The compact was solid gold and on the lid her new name, Saria, was spelled out in Arabic letters made of perfect blue-white diamonds. Abdul Sa’ad was generous that way, she conceded as she brushed her cheeks with powder. Her face revealed no more emotion than a doll’s face as she worked on it.
The name might be Saria, but the face was still Kelly, she thought, studying her features in the compact mirror. Like a soldier seeing to his equipment, she adjusted those ridiculous tassels hanging from the bodice of her belly-dancing costume. Fatma, another of Abdul Sa’ad’s concubines, had told her to put it on this evening. Abdul Sa’ad liked to have her wear it when she danced for him to disco records. While she smiled and danced, she would think about the one idea that had become an obsession with her. As her thoughts grew increasingly darker, the only image she could seem to focus on was murder.
In the end, the only choices we have are murder and suicide, Kelly thought, wondering if she was still sane. If they really wanted to prepare students for the real world, that’s what they should have been teaching in Philosophy 101, she thought grimly. The fact that she could even contemplate the idea astonished her. Ever since she could remember she had always been so s
queamish that she couldn’t stand to squash a bug. Perhaps it was all this religious crap she had been getting from Fatma, because Kelly had correctly gambled that her treatment would be better if she expressed interest in becoming a Moslem.
Well, religion was a pretty bloodthirsty subject, she’d discovered. Something Fatma had said about the Koran had triggered a Sunday-school memory. She was sure that a woman in the Bible—was it Jael, or Judith?—something with a J—had slept with her enemy and then murdered him by pounding a tent spike into his head, thereby delivering the Israelites. The blood pounded in her temples as the idea struck her. But if she murdered Abdul Sa’ad, whom would she deliver? Because if she did it, they would kill her. Abdul Sa’ad had explained that early on.
“We Arabs are a simple people,” Abdul Sa’ad had said in perfect Oxford-educated English.
They were in the tiny whitewashed hut in the courtyard which had been her cell when they first brought her to this place. The hut was hot as a furnace and her clothes clung wetly to her body like a clammy outer skin. That was in the first phase, what he called her “education.”
“All our laws are also simple, as are the punishments. The only law is the Koran, which is the Word of God and the only court is the ulama, which is the council of religious elders. If a man is a thief, we cut off his hand. If the man commits libel, we cut off his tongue. If a man commits a violent act, we cut off his head. You see, it is very simple,” he explained.
“What if a servant escapes?” Kelly asked, her eyes flashing. She still couldn’t bring herself to say the word “slave.”
“For a male servant, flogging. For repeated escapes, death.”
“What about females?” she prompted.
“Females cannot escape,” Abdul Sa’ad declared, raising an eyebrow to let her know that he knew what she was driving at. “We are well-guarded here, but even if you should manage it, where could you go? If you went into the desert, you would die. If you went into a city, anyone who saw a lone woman would turn her over to the religious police, who are everywhere,” he said.
That was true enough, she thought. She had seen the religious police during her brief ride in the Cadillac through Riyadh. They wore white thaubs and black-checked head-cloths and carried long wands to whip anyone who violated a religious law. The slightest infraction, a woman unveiled or wearing short sleeves, a shopkeeper who didn’t close up the moment the muezzin called to prayer, a man who passed a beggar without dropping a coin, resulted in a few taps from the switch, or worse.
“What would they do?” she asked, licking her dry lips with a tongue that rasped like a file.
“They would return you to me,” he said.
For a long moment they looked at each other. The bright sunlight from the open doorway dazzled her eyes. It reflected off Abdul Sa’ad’s white robe, seeming to clothe him in a nimbus of light.
“Why are you doing this to me?” she asked.
His answer terrified her.
“Because I can,” he said.
And then he was gone. The fat eunuch assigned to guard her locked the door and once again she was alone in the dark oven of her cell.
She lay curled in a ball, as far away as possible from the stinking hole in the corner which served as a toilet. It had been days since they had given her anything to drink and her mouth tasted as foul as that disgusting hole in the corner. She no longer had any spit to swallow and thought of begging for water again. But all her cries had been ignored. When the fat eunuch did come in once, she had pleaded for water in the one Arabic word she had learned.
“Maya … maya,” she begged, going down on her knees, but the eunuch simply shook his head and left the bowl of bland hummus paste which she had learned not to eat, because it only made her thirstier. Her tongue felt enormous. It seemed to completely fill her mouth. She licked at the sweat on her forearm like a cat, but it didn’t help. Now and again she gagged with dry heaves, her body wrenching like a half-crushed insect. If she didn’t get some water soon, she would die. In her fevered mind she saw flowing streams sparkling in the sun, pouring endlessly into a clear lake the color of the sky. Her body was a useless burden to her, she thought desperately as she tossed like a restless sleeper. This water torture was worse than drugs, worse than anything she had ever imagined.
She felt herself losing consciousness again, but some part of her was screaming inside, warning her that if she let go she would die. She looked down at her lifeless hands. They were dirty and clammy. It was as if they belonged to a stranger. How could this be happening to her? And then, a more insidious question. What could she have done? Nothing, she tried to tell herself over and over. She had been helpless from the moment she drank the champagne. And after they had raped her, she had been a virtual basket case.
She remembered only the occasional pinprick of the hypodermic during the trip. There was a haze of people and jets, but no matter how hard she tried to call out, nothing came from her throat. She remembered seeing Gerard, a nasty smile on his face, looking as if he was very far away, as though seen through the wrong end of a telescope. And then she was surrounded by Arabs and people speaking a strange guttural language that she couldn’t understand. She didn’t know what drug they had used, but it made her skin tingle with electricity and try as she might, she couldn’t move. Through the plane window she saw a vast brown plain far below that seemed to go on forever and then blackness came.
She remembered how everything seemed to be moving in slow motion when they took her down the rear exit of the jet. Her legs were wobbly and the blinding light and heat almost knocked her over as they walked across the tarmac to a waiting limousine. It was like walking through boiling water. Inside the limo, a fat middle-aged Arab took her face in his hand and turned her this way and that, inspecting her as if she were a horse, even poking his fingers in her mouth to examine her teeth. They loaded her on a private Lear jet, its interior thick with oriental rugs and painted with intricate arabesques, looking like a flying Moroccan seraglio. The furnishings were covered with velour upholstery and the jet was filled with expensive stereos and electronic gadgets. It was as if Hugh Hefner had employed Sanford the Junkman as an interior decorator.
Once the jet took off, she was taken in tow by two veiled women, who led her behind an ornate screen, chattering away in the language she couldn’t understand. The women bathed her in a solid silver tub, splashed her with enough perfume to float a good-sized ship and dressed her in a black robe and veil. By the time they landed, her mind had finally begun to clear from the effects of the drug, except for the strangeness of everything around her and the sweet reek of the perfume which enveloped her like a cloud. They led her from the plane to a Cadillac parked on the tarmac and drove her through an immense modern city, thronged with Arabs in western clothes, which she later learned was Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia.
The Cadillac sped past squat adobe huts on the outskirts of the city and turned on to a modern two-lane asphalt road which led straight into the al Aramah desert. The road was virtually empty and the honey-colored desert lay flat as a table as far as she could see. Through the tinted windows the desert sped by, unpopulated by houses or any living thing. There was only the flat land and sky and the endless highway unrolling before them.
After several hours they turned into a dirt side road that led to a large featureless house surrounded by a thin border of grass and palm trees. It looked like a giant yellow brick on a billiard table. There were barbed-wire fences and soldiers in gun emplacements all around the house. It was a fortress.
The car pulled into a courtyard where two Mercedes and a gold Rolls-Royce were parked. In the center of the courtyard stood a stone fountain that was dry as a bone. A fat eunuch with a hairless face and pendulous female breasts waddled out to the car and led her to the small stone hut, her cell. They left her there for days, apparently to die of thirst, until Abdul Sa’ad came and explained what he wanted.
Prince Abdul Sa’ad was a strongly built man in his
thirties. He was dressed in a simple white linen robe. At his belt he wore a beautiful gold-handled dagger. His brown face with its trim black beard and desert hawk’s nose was striking against the contrast of his white headcloth. His eyes, under thick black brows, were impressive. Liquid brown, they were at the same time both expressive and implacable. He looked like a prophet! In truth, he was almost handsome, she thought.
He told her that she was his slave and would remain so for the rest of her life. When she argued and demanded that she be allowed to go and that he contact the American Embassy, he almost smiled. Later, of course, she realized how ridiculous she must have seemed. A woman claiming her rights in Arabia was like a hen claiming parental jurisdiction over her eggs.
“Be careful, mister. I’m an American. The daughter of a congressman,” Kelly warned.
“I know who you are,” Abdul Sa’ad said.
Then he left her alone with her thirst.
She lay curled on the dirt floor, her eyes filled with visions of sparkling fountains, water spurting wastefully from hoses as people washed their cars, cans of beer in ice and sunlight sparkling on the surface of Lake Tahoe, where her family would go for the summers when she was a girl. She was dying, dying because Abdul Sa’ad wanted a little nookie, she thought grimly.
Everyone likes to think he’s unique, she thought. Whenever she had read about people dying of panic in a fire, or heard on TV about a POW who had succumbed to brainwashing, an inner voice would reassure her that they had been weak, that she would have been able to resist. That was all nonsense, she now realized. Anyone can succumb. It didn’t even require any sophisticated technique. She was willing to sell her soul, for that was surely the price, for a glass of water. You’re easy, Kelly. You come cheap, she accused herself.
Later, she woke and lay staring into the darkness, shivering despite the burning heat. Her throat felt so dry she could barely breathe. She was waiting, she realized. Waiting for something to happen, or—tell the truth, Kelly—waiting for someone to save her. That’s what women do; we wait, she thought, blinking eyes so dry her lids felt like sandpaper. We spend our lives waiting for a man to rescue us, from home, from being single, from boring marriages. We wait, forever going on diets, buying clothes, fixing ourselves, so that the label will be so attractive that we’ll be the one piece of goods he picks off the shelf.
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