The Mirage

  He met Najat around the same time Mustafa met Noor. She was a new tenant in his building, and he got to know her after helping carry some packages up to her apartment. Najat was a Gulf War widow whose husband had been killed by friendly fire on the outskirts of New Orleans. She’d been alone since his death, but was thinking of getting married again. The way she said this—“I’m thinking of getting married again”—as though contemplating a business deal or a career move, piqued Samir’s interest. Marriage as a formal arrangement rather than a romantic adventure: That might suit his needs. But he wasn’t able to bargain in good faith, and Najat showed glimmers of the same perceptiveness Asriyah had had, so he didn’t pursue it.

  Two things eventually changed his mind. The first was a holiday visit to see his sister Johara. Johara and her husband had just had a baby boy—their third—and holding the infant in his arms awakened Samir’s paternal longing. Johara’s husband, seeing his expression, said, “You really should marry, Samir. You could be a daddy too.”

  The other factor was Mustafa’s announcement that he was going to marry Noor. This was a crazy decision, as even Mustafa seemed to recognize, and it was even crazier that Samir would allow it to influence his own behavior. But the night he heard the news, Samir had a dream in which he was being questioned before a grand jury. His inquisitor, who bore a resemblance to his old grade school nemesis Idris Abd al Qahhar, wanted to know why he was still single. “Your best friend has two wives,” the inquisitor said, “while you have none. What is the meaning of this riddle? What defect are you hiding?” Samir looked over at the section of the seating area reserved for upcoming witnesses and saw Asriyah, her eyes full of secret knowledge. He woke up gasping.

  The next day he ran into Najat in the elevator and asked her if she was still thinking about getting married.

  A week before Samir and Najat’s wedding day, Halal raided the home of a bookkeeper in Adhamiyah. The bookkeeper, who unwisely decided to test his quick-draw skills against the agents who broke down his door, did not survive, but they managed to get his laptop computer intact.

  Back at headquarters, it took Isaac all of half an hour to guess the laptop’s password—the bookkeeper’s father’s name, followed by the bookkeeper’s mother’s name, followed by the bookkeeper’s own birth date, backwards—and another hour to go through the files. By then most of the other agents had gone out for a post-raid dinner; only Samir, who’d gotten hung up booking some other seized items into evidence, was still around.

  “What’s wrong?” Samir said, seeing Isaac’s expression as he came out of his office. “Don’t tell me the encryption defeated you.”

  “No, I got in,” Isaac said. “I found a list of payoffs to Baghdad PD officers—including that patrolman you suspect in the Ghazi al Tikriti murder.”

  “Well, that’s great, man! Why the long face?”

  Isaac pulled up a chair beside Samir’s desk. “I found another file as well,” he said. “Payoffs to federal agents. Including Halal.”

  “Ah,” Samir said, feeling the same nervous flutter he always did when the subject of corruption came up. Though he’d never taken a bribe, like every Halal agent he’d committed other infractions—sampling the wares of the bootleggers they arrested, now and then taking a bottle home with him, or when they found cash, letting a few bills stick to his palms on the way down to evidence. In fact at this very moment he was sitting on five hundred riyals that had, until a few hours ago, been in the dead bookkeeper’s wall safe. A little wedding bonus. “So who’s on the list?” he asked Isaac. “Anyone I know?”

  “No one on our team, thank God,” Isaac said. “But you know Habib Murad?”

  “Yeah, sure.” Habib worked upstairs, in the department that handled confidential informants. Samir actually knew him quite well—and not just from work.

  Isaac ran a hand through his hair. “I fucking hate this. You know I’m a team player, right? And it’s not like my own hands are spotless. With small stuff, I’m happy to look the other way. But if a guy in the CI’s office is taking Saddam’s money, he could be getting people killed. I can’t look away from murder.”

  “No,” Samir said. “Of course not.”

  “Right, of course not.” Isaac laughed, then sighed. “All right,” he said, standing up, “let me go report this before I lose my nerve.”

  Samir watched him walk out. Then he got up himself, and went to find a pay phone.

  The following evening Samir stopped on his way home to drop off a check at the hall where the wedding reception was due to be held. As he was getting back into his car, Habib Murad drove up alongside him and gestured for him to follow.

  They drove to a nearby parking garage. Habib went all the way to the top level, which was deserted at that hour. By the time he turned off his engine and opened his door, Samir was already coming around the car. He dragged Habib out by the collar and began pummeling him.

  “Hey!” Habib shouted, putting his arms up to block the blows. “Knock it off! I just want to talk! Hey! Hey!”

  Samir shoved him back and drew his pistol. “What the fuck are you doing here?” he demanded. “All of Halal is looking for you.”

  “I know, I got your message . . .” Eyeing the gun warily: “It’s not just Halal. Saddam knows you have the bookkeeper’s list and he’s cleaning house. Anybody on there who’s not already in custody is due to have a bad accident. They’d have got me already if not for your warning.”

  “Why are you here, Habib?”

  “To thank you for saving my ass.”

  “To thank me! You think I did it for you?”

  “No, I can see that was too much to hope for,” Habib said, with a trace of bitterness. “But if you did it to protect yourself, you’re a fool. Go ahead, threaten me, but it’s true! What were you afraid I was going to do, out you as a faggot to the DA as part of some deal? How paranoid do you have to be to think they’d even care about that?”

  Samir shrugged. “Who knows what you might try, if you get desperate enough? A guy who’d throw in with Saddam—”

  “Yeah, and if I wanted to screw you over, that’s who I’d betray you to. Halal would kick you out for being gay. Big deal. But Saddam? If he knew? He’d put you to work, just like he put me to work. Yeah, that’s right, smart guy,” Habib said nodding. “That’s why I did it.”

  Samir took a step back. “When?” he said.

  “A few months ago. Right after you broke up with me, as a matter of fact.” He looked away. “I went home with the wrong guy. They got pictures. They said they’d tell my parents if I didn’t play along.”

  “But the bookkeeper’s list . . . They’re paying you!”

  “Of course they’re paying me. They pay everybody—and once you take the money, they’ve got that to hold over your head, too. I tell you what, I’m actually glad this happened. I’d been thinking of running anyway. Of course I’d hoped to have a bit more cash saved up before I did it.”

  “So that’s why you’ve come to me? You want money?”

  “No,” Habib said, and once again there was bitterness in his voice. Then, saying, “Don’t shoot me,” he reached into his jacket for a blue envelope marked POSEIDON LINES. Inside the envelope were two ferry tickets from Haifa to Piraeus; the departure date was three days from now.

  “What is this?” Samir said.

  “An invitation.”

  “A—”

  “I still like you, Samir,” Habib said. “I know it’s a long shot, but it’d be nice to run away with someone I like, and I thought, maybe you didn’t warn me just for your own sake . . .”

  “Are you insane?” said Samir. “Did you really think for one second that I would throw away my whole life, to—”

  “We could have a life in Greece. A better one, in some ways. You still have to be discreet, but they won’t hound you like here. I’ve heard the same is true of Paris, but I like the water . . .”

  “Well I don’t.” Samir threw the tickets back at him. Habib caught
one, but let the other fall to the ground. “You go to Greece, or Paris, or wherever the hell else you want that’s not here,” Samir said. “I’m staying in Baghdad and getting married.”

  “Yes, I know, you’ve told me,” Habib said. “You’ll have a wife, and children you adore, and you’ll live happily ever after. The part about the children I almost believe. But the wife? The happiness? That I don’t think will last.”

  “It’ll last longer than you will if you don’t get the fuck out of here.”

  “OK, OK, I’ll go,” said Habib. “But if you change your mind before Saturday, I’ll see you on the boat.”

  He got in his car and a minute later he was gone. Samir put away his pistol and remained standing in the empty garage, looking down at the ticket on the ground at his feet.

  Madness, he thought. Madness. How wrong in the head must the guy be, to think there was even a chance I’d say yes? It isn’t possible. It’s totally not even within the realm of the possible. Well yeah, of course. But what if . . . What if—in some other world, not this one—what if it were possible? What if that, or something like that, could really happen, and work out? Hah! Right! If only . . . If only . . . I w—

  No.

  No. It wasn’t possible. It wasn’t even conceivable.

  That isn’t how the movie ends.

  He rode the number 6 train to the end of the line. The last stop was aboveground, the elevated station heavily graffitied and lit by harsh fluorescents that made it much brighter than the neighborhood below, where most of the streetlamps were out. As always at this point, Samir thought about crossing to the far platform and heading for home, but with no wife or children waiting for him there, the thought was only a formality.

  He descended to the street of shadows. Along the curb near the base of the station steps, a pile of rubbish had been set ablaze. At the edge of the firelight two women loitered in an open doorway. Samir moved swiftly past them, trying to project the lawman’s sense of immunity he was no longer even close to feeling. In the next block more rubbish piles were burning, and in the next. He passed more open doors, each offering some hint or glimpse of depravity within; in front of one, a very young boy serving as a tout tried to latch on to his sleeve, but Samir pulled free and quickened his pace.

  A half kilometer from the station he turned left into an alleyway, bracing himself as he did so, for predators sometimes lurked here. Tonight the alley was empty. He followed it to where it dead-ended at a blank iron door. A bulb in a wire cage was socketed into the wall above the doorframe and a security camera was mounted beside it. The camera, Samir knew, was there to warn of incoming police raids and wasn’t normally set up to record, but all the same, he was careful not to look up as he rang the door buzzer.

  The door opened and Samir stepped inside, into soft red light and the thump of disco music. The doorman was new. He was handsome in a rugged sort of way—his chin and cheeks were rough, and it looked as though he’d cut himself several times while shaving. He smiled a welcome, nodding in gratitude at the twenty-riyal note Samir offered him. He placed a hand in the small of Samir’s back and propelled him gently forward, then turned to shut and bolt the door.

  A beaded curtain separated the entryway from the club proper. As Samir passed through it, more hands reached out from either side to catch him above the elbows. Iron grips crushed his biceps, lifted him up, and pitched him headlong into the center of the room.

  The music stopped. The lights came up. Samir pushed himself to his knees and stood, eyes adjusting to the brightness. The club had been gutted: The bar that had just three nights ago taken up the entire right-hand wall of the room was gone, ripped out, leaving only a few bent nails and bits of broken mirror and bottle-glass. All the tables and chairs were gone too, except for a single high stool at the center of the room on which a man sat perched like a dark-eyed bird of prey.

  His identity at least was no surprise.

  “Idris.” Samir let out a sigh, more dazed than frightened at first, some part of him clinging desperately to the hope that this was all a bad dream. He turned to see who had thrown him to the floor. There were four of them, all rugged types like the doorman but with their beards intact. They stood in a line, blocking his escape, and Samir noted with dismay that they were all holding bludgeons of some sort: a wooden plank; a steel reinforcing rod; a splintered chair leg; a crowbar.

  “Idris,” he repeated, this time with panic edging into his voice. “Please—”

  “Be silent, sodomite,” Idris said. “I did not come to listen to you beg.” A braver man might have challenged that assertion. Looking him in the face, Samir saw the same Idris he had known and feared back in grade school: a religious thug who claimed to love God, but who also loved bullying—and therefore loved sin, as a pretext to violence. You disgust me, his expression said. I’m so glad you disgust me. Now I can hurt you with God’s blessing.

  “I offered Mustafa a chance to work with me, but he refused,” Idris continued. “He is proud and he is not afraid of dying. So I am forced to deal with weakness and perversity instead.” He waved a hand at the blank wall where the bar should have been. “This is overkill no doubt. You are a coward, and cowards break easily. But Senator Bin Laden has instructed me to make certain you understand how serious we are, and what lengths we are willing to go to, to destroy you, if you don’t do exactly as you’re told.”

  The doorman appeared beside Samir, holding a stack of photographs. Like a sorcerer weaving a magic circle, he began walking counterclockwise, peeling photos off one by one and dropping them at Samir’s feet. Samir looked down to catch a glimpse of himself in an embrace with another of this club’s patrons; then he shut his eyes.

  “For what you are you deserve to be put to death,” Idris said. “And you know I will gladly do this. But understand, if you give me cause, I won’t just kill you. I will bury your memory in shame. Everyone who knows you, everyone who has ever called you friend, or spoken a single kind word about you, will learn precisely what sort of person you are. Everyone. I swear it.”

  Samir opened his eyes again as the doorman finished his third and final circuit. The doorman held up the last photo from his stack, a blow-up of Samir’s wallet snapshot: Malik and Jibril, smiling, happy, maybe a little sad too that their father no longer lived with them—but innocent, thank God, as to the reason why.

  “Everyone,” Idris said.

  THE LIBRARY OF ALEXANDRIA

  A USER-EDITED REFERENCE SOURCE

  Republic

  A republic is a government whose chief of state is not a monarch, and which is to some degree answerable to its citizens. The term was coined by the Christian philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli from the Latin phrase res publica, “a matter for the people . . .”

  Like “democracy” and “freedom,” the word “republic” is sometimes used by tyrants to create the suggestion of limited government without its substance. Thus the phrase “people’s republic,” which at first glance appears redundant, but is in fact an example of reinforcing a lie through repetition.

  The Israelis were bombing Vienna.

  Over the weekend, Roman Catholic guerrillas had attacked an IDF patrol along the border west of Salzburg, capturing two soldiers and carrying them back into Austria. The hills around Salzburg were riddled with tunnels and fortifications, and so many hidden rocket launch sites that the region had been nicknamed Peenemünde South; Israeli troops attempting to rescue the kidnapped soldiers came under heavy fire, and as they pressed the attack the Von Brauns up in the hills began lobbing terror bombs at Jewish settlements in Bavaria.

  The Israeli Air Force blasted Salzburg and its environs for two days without letup, but the rocket attacks continued. On the third day the prime minister in Berlin decided to adopt a new strategy, holding the Viennese parliament and the Austrian people collectively responsible for the guerrillas’ misbehavior. Israeli bombers began hitting infrastructure targets all over the country: highway bridges and tunnels, railroad yards, r
iver ports, as well as any vehicle that looked like it might be transporting rocket parts. Now the capital had made the target list. Vienna’s airport was a cratered ruin, and the bridges over the Danube were all heavily damaged or destroyed, cutting the city in half.

  “Samir,” Mustafa said. “Are you all right?”

  “What?”

  They were in the black van, driving west on the BIA Expressway at dawn. For the entire ride Samir had been staring out the window with a scowl on his face.

  “What’s eating you?” Mustafa said. “You’ve been like this for days.”

  “It’s nothing,” Samir said, forcing a smile. He nodded at the radio. “I’m just bummed I won’t be able to go skiing in the Alps this winter.”

  “Samir . . .”

  “Also, I heard the Israelis blew up that hotel where they make the chocolate cakes with the apricot filling. I always wanted to try one of those.”

  “Seriously, Samir. Is it something to do with Najat? Or your boys?”

  “Najat hates me, which as we know is perfectly normal. And the only problem with Malik and Jibril is that I haven’t seen them in months.”

  “So what is it, then? Are you still worried about Idris coming after us?”

  Samir sighed. “And what if I was, Mustafa? What would you do about it, threaten to beat him up for me?”

  “Samir—”

  “Please, just drop it. I’m OK, really.”

  Baghdad International Airport was just ahead. Mustafa took the exit lane marked FREIGHT TERMINAL and followed the signs to the Arabian Parcel Service hub.

  The man at the customer service counter was reading a Syriac New Testament. He greeted Mustafa and Samir warmly but turned hostile when he saw their Homeland Security IDs. “Is this about a missed delivery?”

  “No sir,” Mustafa said. “We’re here to intercept a package containing evidence that pertains to an investigation. I spoke about this on the phone to a supervisor named Abd al Shakur. He—”