She nodded and began delicately to eat. “Excellent. You are studying here?”
Now why had she asked that? What madness had gotten into her? But the chatter of the restaurant rose all around her. What are you worrying about, Edith? Surely a civilized conversation, even with a foreign student, could do no harm? She wondered what Herr Gemütlich would think. He would disapprove, of course.
The dark young man grinned happily.
“Yes. I study engineering. At the Technical University. When I have my degree, I will go back home and help to develop my country. Please, my name is Karim.”
“Fräulein Hardenberg,” she said primly. “And where do you come from, Herr Karim?”
“I am from Jordan.”
Oh, good gracious, an Arab. Well, she supposed there were a lot of them at the Technical University, two blocks across the Kärntner Ring. Most of the ones she saw were street vendors, awful people selling carpets and newspapers at the pavement cafes and refusing to go away. The young man next to her looked respectable enough. Perhaps he came from a better family. But after all ... an Arab. She finished her meal and signaled for the bill. Time to leave this young man’s company, even though he was remarkably polite. For an Arab.
“Still,” he said regretfully, “I don’t think I’ll be able to go.”
Her bill came. She fumbled for some schilling notes.
“Go where?”
“To the opera. To see The Magic Flute . Not alone—I wouldn’t have the nerve. So many people. Not knowing where to go, where to applaud.”
She smiled tolerantly.
“Oh, I don’t think you’ll go, young man, because you won’t get any tickets.”
He looked puzzled.
“Oh no, it’s not that.”
He reached into his pocket and placed two pieces of paper on the table. Her table. Beside her bill.
Second row of the orchestra. Within feet of the singers. Center aisle.
“I have a friend in the United Nations. They get an allocation, you know. But he didn’t want them, so he gave them to me.”
Gave. Not sold, gave. Beyond price, and he gave them away.
“Would you,” asked the young man pleadingly, “take me with you? Please?”
It was beautifully phrased, as if she would be taking him.
She thought of sitting in that great, vaulted, gilded, rococo paradise, her spirit rising with the voices of the basses, baritones, tenors, and sopranos high into the painted ceiling above. ...
“Certainly not,” she said.
“Oh, I am sorry, Fräulein. I have offended you.”
He reached out and took the tickets, one half in one strong young hand, the other half in the other, and began to tear.
“No.” Her hand came down on his own before more than half an inch of the priceless tickets had been torn in half. “You mustn’t do that.”
She was bright pink.
“But they are of no use to me.”
“Well, I suppose ...”
His face lit up.
“Then you will show me your Opera House? Yes?”
Show him the Opera. Surely that was different. Not a date. Not the sort of dates people went on who ...
accepted dates. More like a tour guide, really. A Viennese courtesy, showing a student from abroad one of the wonders of the Austrian capital. No harm in that ...
They met on the steps by arrangement at seven-fifteen. She had driven in from Grinzing and parked without trouble. They joined the bustle of the moving throng alive already with anticipatory pleasure.
If Edith Hardenberg, spinster of twenty loveless summers, were ever going to have an intimation of paradise, it was that night in 1990 when she sat a few feet from the stage and allowed herself to drown in the music. If she were ever to know the sensation of being drunk, it was that evening when she permitted herself to become utterly intoxicated in the torrent of the rising and falling voices.
In the first half, as Papageno sang and cavorted before her, she felt a dry young hand placed on top of her own. Instinct caused her to withdraw her hand sharply. In the second half, when it happened again, she did nothing and felt, with the music, the warmth seeping into her of another person’s blood-heat.
When it was over, she was still intoxicated. Otherwise she would never have allowed him to walk her across the square to Freud’s old haunt, the Café Landtmann, now restored to its former 1890 glory.
There it was the superlative headwaiter Robert himself who showed them to a table, and they ate a late dinner.
Afterward, he walked her back to her car. She had calmed down. Her reserve was reasserting itself.
“I would so like you to show me the real Vienna,” said Karim quietly. “Your Vienna, the Vienna of fine museums and concerts. Otherwise, I will never understand the culture of Austria, not the way you could show it to me.”
“What are you saying, Karim?”
They stood by her car. No, she was definitely not offering him a lift to his apartment, wherever it was, and any suggestion that he come home with her would reveal exactly what sort of a wretch he really was.
“That I would like to see you again.”
“Why?”
If he tells me I am beautiful, I will hit him, she thought.
“Because you are kind,” he said.
“Oh.”
She was bright pink in the darkness. Without a further word he bent forward and kissed her on the cheek. Then he was gone, striding away across the square. She drove home alone.
That night, Edith Hardenberg’s dreams were troubled. She dreamed of long ago. Once there had been Horst, who had loved her through that long hot summer of 1970 when she was nineteen and a virgin.
Horst, who had taken her chastity and made her love him. Horst, who had walked out in the winter without a note or an explanation or a word of farewell.
At first she had thought he must have had an accident, and she called all the hospitals. Then that his employment as a traveling salesman had called him away and he would call.
Later, she learned he had married the girl in Graz whom he had also been loving when his rounds took him there.
She had cried until the spring. Then she took all the memories of him, all the signs of his being there, and burned them. She burned the presents and the photos they had taken as they walked in the grounds and sailed on the lakes of the Schlosspark at Laxenburg, and most of all she burned the picture of the tree under which he had loved her first, really loved her and made her his own.
She had had no more men. They just betray you and leave you, her mother had said, and her mother was right. There would be no more men, ever, she vowed.
That night, a week before Christmas, the dreams ebbed away before the dawn, and she slept with the program of The Magic Flute clutched to her thin little bosom. As she slept, some of the lines seemed to ease away from the corners of her eyes and the edges of her mouth. And as she slept, she smiled. Surely there was no harm in that.
Chapter 13
The big gray Mercedes was having trouble with the traffic. Hammering furiously on the horn, the driver had to force a passage through the torrent of cars, vans, market stalls, and pushcarts that create the tangle of life between the streets called Khulafa and Rashid.
This was old Baghdad, where traders and merchants, sellers of cloth, gold, and spices, hawkers and vendors of most known commodities, had plied their trades for ten centuries.
The car turned down Bank Street, where both sides of the road were jammed with parked cars, and finally nosed into Shurja Street. Ahead of it, the street market of spice sellers was impenetrable. The driver half-turned his head.
“This is as far as I can go.”
Leila Al-Hilla nodded and waited for the door to be opened for her. Beside the driver sat Kemal, General Kadiri’s hulking personal bodyguard, a lumbering sergeant of the Armored Corps who had been attached to Kadiri’s staff for years. She hated him.
After a pause, the sergeant opened his door,
straightened his great frame on the sidewalk, and opened the rear passenger door. He knew she had humiliated him once again, and it showed in his eyes. She alighted from the car and gave him not a glance or word of thanks.
One reason she hated the bodyguard was that he followed her everywhere. It was his job, of course, assigned to him by Kadiri, but that did not make her dislike him less. When he was sober, Kadiri was a tough professional soldier; in matters sexual he was also insanely jealous. Hence his rule that she should never be alone in the city.
The other reason for her dislike of the bodyguard was his evident lust for her. A woman of long-degraded tastes, she could well understand that any man might lust for her body, and if the price was right she would indulge any such lust, no matter how bizarre its fulfillment. But Kemal committed the ultimate insult: As a sergeant, he was poor. How dare he entertain such thoughts? Yet he clearly did—a mixture of contempt for her and brutish desire. It showed when he knew General Kadiri was not looking.
For his part he knew of her revulsion, and it amused him to insult her with his glances while verbally maintaining an attitude of formality.
She had complained to Kadiri about his dumb insolence, but he had merely laughed. He could suspect any man of desiring her, but Kemal was allowed many liberties because Kemal had saved his life in the marshes of Al Fao against the Iranians, and Kemal would die for him.
The bodyguard slammed the door and was at her side as they continued on foot down Shurja Street.
This zone is called Agid al Nasara, the Area of the Christians. Apart from St. George’s Church across the river, built by the British for themselves and their Protestant faith, there are three Christian sects in Iraq, representing among them some seven percent of the population.
The largest is the Assyrian or Syriac sect, whose cathedral lies within the Area of the Christians, off Shurja Street. A mile away stands the Armenian church, close to another tangled web of small streets and alleys whose history goes back many centuries called the Camp el Arman, the old Armenian Quarter.
Cheek by jowl with the Syriac cathedral stands St. Joseph’s, the church of the Chaldean Christians, the smallest sect. If the Syriac rite resembles Greek Orthodox, the Chaldeans are an offshoot of the Catholic Church.
The most notable Iraqi of the Chaldean Christians was then Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz, although his doglike devotion to Saddam Hussein and his policies of genocide might indicate that Mr. Aziz had somehow gone adrift from the teachings of the Prince of Peace. Leila Al-Hilla had also been born a Chaldean, and now the link was proving useful.
The ill-assorted couple reached the wrought-iron gate giving onto the cobbled yard in front of the arched door of the Chaldean church. Kemal stopped. As a Moslem, he would not go a step farther. She nodded to him and walked through the gate. Kemal watched her as she bought a small candle from a stall by the door, drew her heavy black lace shawl over her head, and entered the dark, incense-heavy interior.
The bodyguard shrugged and sauntered away a few yards to buy a can of Coke and find a place to sit and watch the doorway. He wondered why his master permitted this nonsense. The woman was a whore; the general would tire of her one day, and he, Kemal, had been promised that he could have his pleasure before she was dismissed. He smiled at the prospect, and a dribble of cola ran down his chin.
Inside the church Leila paused to light her candle from one of the hundreds that burned adjacent to the door, then, head bowed, made her way to the confessional boxes on the far side of the nave. A black-robed priest passed but paid her no attention.
It was always the same confessional box. She entered at the precise hour, dodging ahead of a woman in black who also sought a priest to listen to her litany of sins, probably more banal than those of the younger woman who pushed her aside and took her place.
Leila closed the door behind her, turned, and sat on the penitent’s seat. To her right was a fretted grille.
She heard a rustle behind it. He would be there; he was always there at the appointed hour.
Who was he? she wondered. Why did he pay so handsomely for the information she brought him? He was not a foreigner—his Arabic was too good for that, the Arabic of one born and raised in Baghdad.
And his money was good, very good.
“Leila?” The voice was a murmur, low and even. She always had to arrive after him and leave before him. He had warned her not to loiter outside in the hopes of seeing him, but how could she have done that anyway, with Kemal lurking at her shoulder? The oaf would see something and report to his master.
It was more than her life was worth.
“Identify yourself, please.”
“Father, I have sinned in matters of the flesh and am not worthy of your absolution.”
It was he who had invented the phrase, because no one else would say that.
“What have you for me?”
She reached between her legs, pulled aside the crotch of her panties, and abstracted the phony tampon he had given her weeks ago. One end unscrewed. From the hollow interior she withdrew a thin roll of paper formed into a tube no larger than a pencil. This she passed through the fret of the grille.
“Wait.”
She heard the rustle of the onionskin paper as the man ran a skilled eye over the notes she had made—a report on the deliberations and conclusions of the previous day’s planning council chaired by Saddam Hussein himself, at which General Abdullah Kadiri had been present.
“Good, Leila. Very good.”
Today the money was in Swiss francs, very high-denomination notes, passed through the grille from him to her. She secreted them all in the place she had stored her information, a place she knew most Moslem men deemed unclean at a certain time. Only a doctor or the dreaded AMAM would find them there.
“How long must this go on?” she asked the grille.
“Not long now. War is coming soon. By the end of it, the Rais will fall. Others will take the power. I shall be one of them. Then you will be truly rewarded, Leila. Stay calm, do your job, and be patient.”
She smiled. Really rewarded. Money, lots of money, enough to go far away and be wealthy for the rest of her days.
“Go now.”
She rose and left the booth. The old woman in black had found someone else to hear her confession.
Leila recrossed the nave and emerged into the sunshine. The oaf Kemal was beyond the wrought-iron gate, crumpling a tin can in one great fist, sweating in the heat. Good, let him sweat. He would sweat much more if only he knew. ...
Without glancing at him, she turned down Shurja Street, through the teeming market, toward the parked car. Kemal, furious but helpless, lumbered behind her. She took not the slightest bit of notice of a poor fellagha pushing a bicycle with an open wicker basket on the pillion, and he took not the slightest notice of her. The man was only in the market at the behest of the cook in the household where he worked, buying mace, coriander, and saffron.
Alone in his confessional, the man in the black cassock of a Chaldean priest sat awhile longer to ensure that his agent was clear of the street. It was extremely unlikely that she would recognize him, but in this game even outside chances were excessive.
He had meant what he said to her. War was coming. The Americans had the bit between their teeth and would not now back off.
So long as that fool in the palace by the river at the Tamuz Bridge did not spoil it all and pull back unilaterally from Kuwait. Fortunately, he seemed hell-bent on his own destruction. The Americans would win the war, and then they would come to Baghdad to finish the job. Surely they would not just win Kuwait and think that was the end of it? No people could be so powerful and so stupid.
When they came, they would need a new regime. Being Americans, they would gravitate toward someone who spoke fluent English, someone who understood their ways, their thoughts, and their speech, and who would know what to say to please them and become their choice.
The very education, the very cosmopolitan urbanity that now mili
tated against him, would be in his favor.
For the moment, he was excluded from the highest counsels and innermost decisions of the Rais—because he was not of the oafish Al-Tikriti tribe, or a lifetime fanatic of the Ba’ath Party, or a full general, or a half-brother of Saddam.
But Kadiri was Tikrit—and trusted. Only a mediocre general of tanks and with the tastes of a rutting camel, he had once played in the dust of the alleys of Tikrit with Saddam and his clan, and that was enough. Kadiri was present at every decision-making meeting and knew all the secrets. The man in the confessional needed to know these things in order to make his preparations.
When he was satisfied that the coast was clear, the man rose and left. Instead of crossing the nave, he slipped through a side door into the vestry, nodded at a real priest who was robing for a service, and left the church by a back door.
The man with the bicycle was only twenty feet away. He happened to glance up as the priest emerged in his black cassock into the sunlight and whirled away just in time. The man in the cassock glanced about him, noticed but thought nothing of the fellagha bent over his bicycle adjusting the chain, and walked quickly down the alley toward a small unmarked car.
The spice-shopper had sweat running down his face and his heart pounded. Close, too damn close. He had deliberately avoided going anywhere near the Mukhabarat headquarters in Mansour just in case he ran into that face. What the hell was the man doing as a priest in the Christian quarter?
God, it had been years—years since they played together on the lawn of Mr. Hartley’s Tasisiya prep school, since he had punched the boy on the jaw for insulting his kid brother, since they had recited poetry in class, always excelled by Abdelkarim Badri. It had been a long time since he had seen his old friend Hassan Rahmani, now head of Counterintelligence for the Republic of Iraq.
It was approaching Christmas, and in the deserts of northern Saudi Arabia, three hundred thousand Americans and Europeans turned their thoughts to home as they prepared to sit out the festival in a deeply Moslem land. But despite the approaching celebration of the birth of Christ, the buildup of the greatest invasion force since Normandy rolled on.