M ia made it out of the hotel lobby and into the street just in time to see a gray Mercedes taxi disappearing down Rue Commodore. Through its rear windshield, she could just about make out the back of Evelyn’s head. Several taxi drivers who hung around outside the hotel angling for fares came up to her, offering their services, and in the muddle, another car slid past her, a black BMW sedan with four men in it—and through its front passenger window, Mia glimpsed the android from the bar, talking into a cell phone while staring intently ahead, his granite-black eyes laser-locked on Evelyn’s taxi.
There was now no doubt about it in her jumbled mind: Evelyn was being followed.
This can’t be good.
A thought cut through Mia’s sauvignon glaze for a nanosecond—call her on her cell phone, warn her—before she remembered that her mom’s cell phone was right there, in her own hand.
Brilliant.
She looked left, right, adrenaline coursing through her and clearing her mind, the urgency and absurdity of what she was thinking battling it out for control, the cacophonous, confusing offers of the taxi drivers crowding her mind even more—then she grabbed the driver closest to her, shouting, “Where’s your car?”
In broken English, he told her his taxi was just there and gestured towards another Mercedes—there had to be more of them in this town than in Frankfurt, Mia had thought when she first arrived—that was parked a few cars back and across the street from the hotel.
Mia pointed at the receding BMW. Two other cars had now slipped in behind it. “You see that car? We have to follow it. We have to catch it. Okay?”
The driver didn’t seem to get it and shrugged while sliding an amused glance at his pals—
But Mia was already hustling him over to his car. “Come on, let’s go, yalla,” she insisted forcefully, “we have to follow that car, do you understand? Follow? The car?” She was gesticulating wildly and enunciating the syllables slowly, as if that would magically make her foreign words comprehensible.
Something, though, did the trick, as the driver seemed to get the message that whatever she was rambling on about was pretty urgent. He led her to his car and ushered her into the backseat while he slid behind the wheel, and within seconds the car was barging out of its parking spot and into the chaotic evening traffic.
MIA WAS LEANING far forward, practically sitting on top of the driver as the taxi stop-started its way across the narrow, congested streets of West Beirut. They drove all the way down Rue Commodore, Mia rapiering looks at each intersection to make sure Evelyn’s taxi hadn’t turned off into another direction, finally catching a glimpse of the distant Mercedes as it veered right and headed up towards Sanayeh Square.
The black BMW, trailing by a car or two, followed suit.
Mia’s head was spinning. She was struggling to get through to the driver, trying to get him to maintain a delicate balance between making sure he didn’t lose Evelyn’s car and not making it obvious to the android and his pals that they were tailing them—not an easy thing to communicate when you’re basically miming your instructions through a rearview mirror.
Concurrently, a barrage of questions was pummeling her mind. Why was her mom being followed? Who was following her? Were they just keeping tabs on her? After all, this was a “secret police” kind of place, and with the recent war, foreigners were suspect, weren’t they?—though what threat a sixty-year-old woman could possibly pose escaped Mia. Or were they out to harm her? Kidnap her? There hadn’t been any kidnappings of foreigners in Beirut since the Wild West days of the 1980s—Mia had done her homework after the rep from the foundation had first approached her—but the whole region was careening out of control, extremists on all sides of the great divide were dreaming up new ways of inflicting pain and causing outrage every day, and nothing, really, was unimaginable.
All right, now you’re being ridiculous. Calm down. She’s an archaeology professor, for God’s sake. She’s been living here for years. It’s probably just some routine formality. You’ll give her back her phone, she’ll be off to her rendezvous, and you’ll be back at the hotel in time for Jon Stewart.
She didn’t buy it.
This just felt very, very wrong.
Flashing over the evening in her mind, and despite that Mia didn’t really know her mom that well, she’d still registered the discomfort and feigned reassurance in her voice the second they’d first sat down that evening.
In fact, it was a small miracle that their bond was anywhere near as strong.
Mia had really been raised by her mother’s sister, Adelaide, and Adelaide’s husband, Aubrey, in Nahant, a tiny island north of Boston linked to the mainland by a causeway, since the age of three. She only got to see her mom at Christmas, when she visited, and during the summers, when Mia would travel to whatever sweat-hole she was digging up.
Shortly after Evelyn had given birth in Baghdad, it had become apparent to her that bringing Mia up in Iraq was going to be far from ideal. Being a single mother in the Middle East, at the time, was an invitation for whispered disdain. The political situation wasn’t great either. A year after Mia’s birth, Saddam Hussein had grabbed power in a bloody coup, plunging the country into fear and paranoia. Iraq had severed diplomatic relations with Syria, and skirmishes along its border with Iran led to a ten-year war that started in 1980. Evelyn’s digs were a source of pride for the new regime, and so she was safe. But the conditions around her grew bleaker by the day, and before long, she was on a plane to Cairo. Egypt embraced Evelyn, and the work was hugely rewarding. The schools and the health care were another matter. Evelyn struggled through her first year there, juggling motherhood with her digs, trying to provide a decent life for Mia while knowing that sooner or later, she’d have to make a choice. A cholera epidemic that hit the country when Mia was three convinced her that she couldn’t keep her there. Medicine was scarce, children died, and Evelyn had to get Mia to a better, safer place.
The thought of leaving the region had gutted Evelyn. Her sister, Adelaide, provided her with a difficult compromise. She and her husband had one child, a girl who was five years older than Mia. Complications during the birth meant that Adelaide couldn’t have more children, even though she and her husband desperately wanted them. They’d been considering adopting when Evelyn visited that Christmas. And one evening, as the snow blanketed the beach outside their house, Adelaide made the suggestion. They were a caring, solid couple—both were college professors—and Evelyn knew they could provide Mia with a loving home and a sister.
They’d been true to their word and had given Mia a great home. She’d gone on to college, and as was often the case with the onset of adulthood, she’d drifted away from Evelyn.
And then this project had come up.
Mia’s DNA snooping was closely linked to the more traditional research and stones-and-bones sleuthing of historians and archaeologists. The project had a couple of local Phoenician experts on board, but a lot of the information she needed was second nature to Evelyn. And so they’d hooked up the day of her arrival in Beirut, more as tentative friends than as mother and daughter.
Mia would have liked to warm up to her, but Evelyn was hard work. Whereas she had an explorer’s instinctive curiosity about people’s lives, she rarely invited them into her own. Mia shared the fascination, but was far more forthcoming—too much so, if you believed her mother. And so Mia had initially found Evelyn distant and aloof, and her initial feeling was that they’d collaborate cordially and that would be it. But after a few long drives to distant archaeological sites, and a couple of arak-fueled dinners in traditional mountain tekhshibis, Mia was pleasantly surprised to discover that the efficient and coldly rational excavator that was Evelyn Bishop was powered by a big, human heart.
A big, human heart that was now being shadowed by men with uncertain intentions.
KEEPING HER UNEASE IN CHECK, Mia concentrated on the road ahead. For a moment, she lost sight of the Merc, then it reappeared half a dozen or so cars ahead, ru
shing across town, its stealthy shadow close behind.
Evelyn’s taxi led the way off the Ring and descended towards the downtown area. Gutted during the civil war, the heart of the old city had been rebuilt with no expense spared and was now teeming with shopping arcades and restaurants. The Merc and the BMW made it through before traffic closed in around Mia’s taxi, with cars from three different directions converging on the intersection just ahead of them in a frenzied free-for-all and cutting them off.
Mia urged her driver on with frantic gestures and manic pleas, bullying and badgering him as he bolted and chopped his way forward while dodging the maze of fenders and bumpers crowding them. A dozen curses and some threatening hand gestures later, they finally burst onto the open road ahead.
The traffic got much busier as they got closer to the pedestrian zones, and a hundred yards or so ahead, Mia spotted Evelyn getting out of her taxi and disappearing into a bustling arcaded street.
“There, that’s her,” she exclaimed, pointing at the distant figure—only to have her surge of adrenaline brusquely cut off by the realization that her taxi was now stationary again. Between it and Evelyn was a solid sea of other stopped cars, densely packed and three across, held in check by a lone, Moses-like traffic cop while cars lumbered and fought their way across from an intersecting street.
Mia’s eyes raced left and right, trying to gauge the best move, then she spotted the android and another man stepping out of the BMW—which was also mired in the blocked traffic—and slipping through the cars, heading in Evelyn’s direction. The area was swarming with people—dinner in Beirut was never before nine o’clock, often later, and on a mild October night like this, the eateries and the wide pedestrian piazzas of the downtown area were a popular draw, staying open until well after midnight. The choice before Mia was suddenly no longer theoretical: Tailing Evelyn from the relative safety of a car with a reasonably chunky driver to boot was one thing; actually reaching her, and possibly drawing out her pursuers, was something entirely different.
She had no choice.
She reached into her pocket, thrust a ten-dollar bill in the driver’s hand—U.S. dollars were the currency of choice in Lebanon—and with her heart in her mouth, she bolted out of the car and cut through the snarled traffic, hoping her instincts were way off the mark and wondering what she’d do if they weren’t.
Chapter 6
E velyn’s mind had been swirling with questions ever since Farouk had bailed on her in Zabqine. True to his word, he was standing there, puffing away nervously, waiting for her by the clock tower that stood at the center of the Place de l’Étoile.
A little over a hundred years old, the tower had seen the worst of the civil war and had remarkably survived despite sitting right on the notorious Green Line that divided East from West Beirut. Almost fifteen years after each crenellation of its exquisite Ottoman craftsmanship had meticulously been restored, it now stood sentinel over a city that was once again seething with anger and outrage. Lebanese flags and highly charged antiwar banners fluttered from its sides, while graphic images of the horrors of the recent fighting loomed over its base.
Farouk had chosen well. The piazza was brimming with people, some of them taking in the display in stunned silence, others striding past carrying shopping bags or chatting on their cell phones with detached insouciance. It was easy to go unnoticed in the crowd, which was exactly what he needed. Having the Parliament building across the square, with the handful of armed soldiers posted there, was also a plus.
He stubbed his cigarette out just as Evelyn reached him and, after casting an apprehensive glance over her shoulder, led her away from the tower and down one of the radiating, arcaded streets.
Evelyn dispensed with the small talk and jumped right in. “Farouk, what’s going on? What did you mean by Hajj Ali’s being dead because of these? What happened to him?”
Farouk stopped at a quiet corner by a shuttered art gallery. He turned to her, his fingers trembling as he pulled out and lit another cigarette. A shadow fell across his face as he seemed to struggle with some evidently painful memories.
“When Abu Barzan—my friend in Mosul—when he first showed me what he was trying to sell, I immediately thought of you for the book with the Ouroboros. The rest…they were very nice pieces, there’s no doubt, but I knew you wouldn’t be interested in being a part of anything like that. But you have to understand, the other pieces, they’re the ones that are more obviously valuable, and, as I said before, I needed to get some money, as much as I could, to get away from that cursed place for good. I tried to contact some of my clients who were, shall we say, less conscientious, but I don’t have many of those. So I also told Ali about it. He had some good contacts, a different clientele than mine, ones who ask fewer questions…. And I was in a rush, I had to find a buyer before Abu Barzan did, even if I had to split my share with a third party like Ali. Half of something was better than nothing, you see, and if Abu Barzan managed to sell them before I did, I’d end up with nothing. When I told Ali about them, I gave him photocopies of the Polaroids that Abu Barzan had given me.” Farouk shook his head, as if berating himself for a terrible mistake. “Photocopies of all the pictures.”
Farouk took a long drag on his cigarette, as if steeling himself for the more difficult part of his tale. “I don’t know who he showed them to, but he came back not even a week later saying he had a buyer, at the agreed price, for the whole lot. The whole lot. I wanted to keep the book outside the sale—I knew how interested you were at the time in anything with that symbol on it, and I thought it might entice you to help me with selling the rest, or at least, help me find a job here in Beirut—so I told Ali to tell his buyer that he could have all the other pieces in the Polaroids, everything apart from the book, but that we’d give him a small discount to make up for it. Ali agreed that it seemed to be a reasonable counteroffer, the two alabaster figurines alone were worth far more than we were asking for the whole lot, and the book, well…surely it wouldn’t be missed.” He swallowed hard. “I couldn’t have been more mistaken.
“I didn’t hear anything for a week or so, then one morning his wife called me up. She was frantic. She told me some men had come for him, at his shop. She said they weren’t Iraqis. She thought they were Syrian, and that they might even be”—he rubbed the bridge of his nose, as if the word itself was enough to conjure up physical pain—“mukhabarat.”
Mukhabarat.
A ubiquitous term in the region, commonly uttered in careful, hushed tones, and one of the first words Evelyn had gotten to know when she’d first hit Baghdad all those years ago. In the literal sense, it simply meant “information” or “communications,” but no one used it in that context. Not anymore. Not since it became the shorthand name for the secret police, the ruthless “information purveyors” no tyrant could rule without. Not that such internal security agencies were limited to the Middle East. In the disturbingly brutal new world order of the twenty-first century, pretty much all countries—except for, maybe, Liechtenstein—were wielding them with abandon, and they all seemed to treat their victims with an unrepentant savagery that made Ivar the Boneless’s demented practices seem lame.
“They kept her outside while the two men talked to him,” Farouk added dolefully, “then she heard some shouts. They wanted to know where the pieces were. They hit him a few times and then they dragged him out of the shop, bundled him into a car, and drove away. They took him, just like that. It’s a common occurrence in Iraq these days, but this wasn’t political. Before they left, Ali’s wife overheard them talking about the pictures. The photocopies I gave him. They were the buyers, Sitt Evelyn—or, more likely, they were there on behalf of the eventual buyer. And one of them told the other, ‘He just wants the book. We can sell the rest ourselves.’ Just the book, Sitt Evelyn. You understand?”
Evelyn felt a searing nausea rising in her throat. “And they killed him?”
Farouk couldn’t quite bring the words out. “His body w
as found that evening, thrown in a ditch by the side of a road. It was…” He shook his head, wincing, clearly haunted by the thought, and let out a pained breath. “They’d used a power drill on him.”
“What did you do?”
“What else could I do? Ali didn’t know about Abu Barzan. I didn’t tell him where the pieces came from. Although I knew him well, times are desperate right now, we live in a state of constant fear and paranoia, and I’m ashamed to admit that I didn’t trust him enough to tell him about Abu Barzan so that he wouldn’t deal with him behind my back.”
Evelyn saw where this was leading. “Which means Ali could only tell them about you.”
“Exactly. So I ran. I packed some things as soon as I put the phone down and I left my house. I had some money there—we all keep whatever we have at home, the banks aren’t safe anymore. Not a lot, but enough to get me out of Baghdad, enough to bribe the men at the border posts. So I took it and I ran. I hid at a friend’s house, and that night, after Ali’s body was found, I knew for certain that they’d be looking for me. So I left the country. I took buses, paid for rides on trucks, anything I could find. First to Damascus—it was the less obvious route than through Amman, and it’s closer to Beirut, which was where I wanted to reach. To see you. I asked at the university, and they said you were in Zabqine for the day. I couldn’t wait. I had to see you.”
Evelyn hated the question she just had to ask. Despite feeling sick to her stomach over the horrific fate that had befallen Ali, and her deeply felt grief for Farouk—not just for his ghastly current predicament, but also for the nightmare he must have lived through during the last few years—she couldn’t push the image from the Polaroid out of her mind.
She put her warring emotions in check. “What about the book? Did you see it? Do you know where it is?”
Farouk didn’t seem to mind. “When Abu Barzan came to see me, I asked him to show me the collection, but he didn’t have anything with him. It was too dangerous for him to travel with them. Too many roadblocks and militias. I imagine he must have kept them in his shop, or at his home, somewhere safe. He only needed to move them once he had a buyer, across the border into a safer place to conclude the deal, in Turkey or Syria—Turkey would be more likely, it’s not that far from Al-Mawsil—without having to risk coming through Baghdad.”