Florence of Arabia (26 page)

When he
and Rick went separately to get
money from their ATMs.
T
hey each found in his checking account the inexpli
cable but not unwelcome sum of $
I million. It could have had only one source: the now vanished Uncle Sam. This was, evidently, their severance pay. The sudden largesse left them confused, all the more so when, a few days later, the sum disappeared from their account
s only to reappear the next day,
doubled. They debated the mean
ing of this now-you-see-it-now-y
ou-don't deposit and concluded that it was a message: Keep quiet, or all this money will go away for good. Behave, and it might double.

The discovery that they were millionaires twice over left them temporarily elated, then profoundly depressed, for by now the cataclysmic events in Matar had played on their television screens, and their thoughts were not on how to spend this munificence but on what had happened to Florence.

They were sitting glumly in Rick's apartment off Dupont Circle one evening, eating Chinese takeout and drinking Alsatian beer and watching a television news program in which several Middle Eastern experts, each beamed in from a different city, were screaming at one another about the need to remain calm, when the host interrupted his guests to say that the network's Manama bureau had received a videotape, apparently taken inside Matar. Ina
smuch as the country had been se
aled off from outside m
edia by order of the emir Maliq,
the announcer was excited by what was about to be shown.

Rick and George put down their Kung Pao chicken and inte
ntly watched Rick's spiffv new fifty-f
ive-inch plasma-screen home-entertainment system. Rick thought they might as well spend some of the money, to the dismay of a censorious George, who had not yet decided on the moral propriety of spending the mysterious deposits. Their maxillofacial muscles gaped as a grainy simulacrum of Florence came on-screen, accompanied by scratchy but quite audible sound.

"I speak from inside occupied
Matar
. An iron veil has descended upo
n the country. The sheika Laila,
widow of the late emir, is being held prisoner by the usurper Maliq and
his Wasabi and French puppetmasters. Women are being
tortured and executed. But their spirit is unbroken. They cry out to the civilized nations of the world. Do not allow the forces of corrupted Islam, which make a mockery of a great religion and of its fou
nder, the prophet Mohammed. They
cry out to you: freedom! freedom! freedom!"

The announcer said that not much was known about the person on the videotape, other than that she had apparently
once worked in some capacity at
TV
Matar
,
the formerly pro-women's-rights satellite network. It was thought that she might be an American citizen, a fact that, he pointed out. "could complicate the situation as far as the United States government is concerned."

CHAPTER
TWENTY-FIVE

T
he scaffold h
ad been erected in t
he center of the mall over a fountain so
that the spectators could see.

Florence maneuvered her way as close as she could to the platform without drawing attention. She had contrived a shoulder harness for the video camera, which was tucked under her left arm. A small hole cut in the
ab
aaya
provided an aperture for the lens. There are advantages to a system that forces its citizens to cover themselves from head to toe.

At each corner of the platform stood a
mukfellah. M
ukfelleen
had been trucked into
Matar
from W
asabia in great numbers, to enforce the religious codes. They were like secret police anywhere: they liked a bit of bowing and scraping. When Florence—accompanied by the required male escort—passed one in the street, if the
mukfellah
was looking especially sour, she would bow and say. "God be praised, broth
er, for your presence here!" H
er male escort, his Western features obscured
by
gutra
and large sunglasses, would lug at her and say, "Come along, sister, do not disturb these well beloved of Allah al their blessed labors." To reinforce the illusion that she was just another Matari wife. Florence carried a wicker basket full of fruit and other fresh items from the market. Underneath the produce was a nine-millimeter pistol, and the more she saw of the
mukfellee
n
and their blessed labors, she more she yearned to use it on them. Whatever misgivings she may have
had about Bobby killing Maliq's
man back in the garage were gone now. Her weeks in occupied
Matar
had taught her how to hate.

The crowd stirred. The captain of the detail pushed his way through to the scaffold, four
mu
kfelleen
stood at the corners of the platform. They called for silence and respect.

The captain climbed the steps of the platform and read the sentence. The w
oman, one Ardeesha,
had been caught not only driving a car but trying to escape
Matar
. The imam Maliq. blessings be upon him and his holy work, had compassionately commuted the sentence from death to one hundred lashes. Allah is merciful.

Ardeesha was brou
ght out,
trembling and whimpering and begging for mercy. She was tied down. The
mu
k
brought the four-foot-long rattan cane down again and again on the writhing black shape on the platform
. She screamed throughout the fir
st thirty blows and then fell silent. The women closest to the platform began to cry and beg for mercy. The whole business took about ten minutes.

When it was over, the
mukfcllee
n
captain who had read the sentence praised the imam's compassion, and the order was given for the crowd to dispe
rse. Most
of the audience's male escorts had
been smoking or having coffee at
Starbucks. They gathered up their charges and left. Some decided to remain and do some shopping. The mall's shopkeepers look
advantage of the Punishment Day
crowds and announced sales. Florence's male
escort collected her. and toget
her they left. As they walked past the
mu
kfelleen
guard al the mall's entrance, her escort did not compliment him on his blessed labors.

They g
ot into their car and drove off
in silence. Florence
pressed
the
play
button and watched to make sure
she had gotten it on tape. Bobby
listened to the sound of the cane blows coining from the c
amera's speaker and said quietly
, "Turn it off."

Amo-Amas teemed with Wasabi Friendship Troops. Maliq had also requested
F
rench soldiers, but Paris, already having enough to explain at the Unite
d Nations, demurred: France did,
however, dispatch hu
ndreds of advisers to help with
infrastructure.
Thousands of Mataris had fled (mostly for the South of Fr
ance), producing the usual brain drain.

Bobby and Florence drove north, off the main roads. Traffic slowed to a crawl. Bobby leaned his head out the window and saw police vehicles ten cars ahead. Roadblocks and identity checks had become the norm. Florence removed the tape from the video camera hidden underneath her
abaaya
and substituted a tape containing images of children playing on the beach. Were the camera confiscated, the images would be innocent.

The basket of fruit was between them. They edged forward toward the police.

"God be praised." Bobby
said to the policeman, who leaned in and demanded his and his wife's papers. Bobby's Arabic was without accent and he had darkened his skin with cosmetics. He looked as Matari as the next man.

'T
he soldier did not return the greeting. He examined their papers
, flipping through the pages of
t
he Matari passports. "Where are you going?"

"Home, with your permission."

The policeman lingered over Florence's passport. "Wife?"

"I've got three. But th
is is the good-looking one. so I
took her to see the punishment at the mall. So she won't get ideas. A good example our imam sets."

The policeman looked closer at Florence, who sat staring straight ahead. "What's
in the basket?"

"Figs from the Mashulf Valley." Bobby held the basket to the polic
eman. "H
ave one. as a token of our thanks for protecting us from our enemies. They're delicious."

T
he policeman reached for the basket's handle.

"Brother, please." Bobby
grinned. "They're for the children's supper." He moved his left foot, with its ankle holster, within reach.

The policeman hesitated, h
e picked the
plumpest figs
off the top and gave the basket back and waved the car forward. "Go," he said.

"And Allah be with you." Bobby said. He edged forward and muttered. "Asshole."

There were no more roadblocks, and half an hour later, they reached their drab concrete house in the Sherala district, one of Amo-Amas's poorer neighborhoods, a place of broken glass and spiked walls, starving dogs and Filipino "guest" workers who had been granted permission by their Matari employers to live outside the home. There was an enclosure for the car.

Inside. Florence made duplicates
of the videotape. She took off
the hated
aba
aya.
B
obby aimed the camera at her.

"This footage that you are about to witness was taken inside occupied
Matar
on March twenty-seventh at the Chartwell Mall, which the usurper Maliq has turned into a place of public execution ..."

Wh
en they were finished, Bobby put a copy of t
he tape inside a packet of cigarettes and drove to the airport. On the way, he called Fouad, a ground-crew chief with Air
Matar
whom Bobbv had recruited years ago. Seven hours later, the tape was in Nicosia, Cyprus, and in t
he hands of an Armenian named Hampigian,
with whom Bobby had also been doing business for years. In anothe
r eight hours, it had arrived at
the CNN bureau in Rome. Within an hour, following a conference with headquarters in Atlant
a that included the chairman of t
he board, the tape was broadcast.

Among the millions who watched were Renard and George. They had set up a makeshift command center
in Rick's office, using more of U
ncle Sam's severance pay. The tape made for very difficult viewing. Even the cynical Ren
ard was unable to speak after it
was over. George had to get up and leave the room after five minutes. But then few people in the West had watched a woman being slowly beaten to death.

The network was flooded with phone calls, mos
tly from people appalled that it
would show such a gruesome thing—the w
orst, some said, since the pict
ures of Americans torturing Iraqis at Abu Ghraib prison. But there was intense interest in the American woman who had taken the footage, obviously at great personal risk. She was now an object of official curio
sity—in Washington. Paris, Kaff
a and Amo-Amas; indeed, all over the world. Naturally, the media couldn't resist. They dubbed her "Florence of Arabia."

IMAN MALIQ
BELOVED OF ALLAH, emir of the Royal Kingdom of
Matar
, high prince of the H
ouse
of Bin Haz, sharif of the Um-Kat
ush, was less than
pleased to hear that Delame-N
oir of the Onzieme Bureau was in
Matar
and requesting an "audience." It
did please Maliq that he had put it
that way. "audience" being more august than "meeting."

Still, he felt
that Delame-Noir was conde
scending to him. He didn't like
Delame-Noir to begin with, and now that he had achieved the throne, if th
ere was any condescending to do,
by Allah,
he
would do it. He was in no mood f
or one of Delame-Noir's interminable pedantic lectures about the historicity of Hegelian dichotomies. Nor did Mal
iq desire to be reminded that it
was Delame-Noir who had put him on the throne with the scheme of transforming him from
a
cheating race
-c
ar
driver into
a
religious leader.