Jihadi (13 page)

A phase of calm, easy to maintain for Noura’s sake, had given way to worry once Noura had gone to bed. Worry had given way to something else, something hard to name.

Fatima had estimated her return at eleven p.m. It was nearly two hours later, and no way of determining anything. Ummi paced.

This cursed night. Well. Her Baba had said she should work if she wished. Gone. And Wafa gone. Well. Do people think that they shall be left at ease only on their saying ‘we believe’, without being put to any test? And Wafa so close to delivery. Butchers. And Wafa laid out like that. Making a mother identify that. Well. Fury at the heart. Not how one lives. Life a parting, she knew. But this cursed night. We shall test you with a bit of fear and hunger, plus a shortage of wealth and souls and produce. Announce such to patient people, who say, whenever some misfortune strikes them: ‘We belong to God, and are returning to Him!’ Well.

Ummi checked the window again. No one.

She heard her own breath. The whole week swept through her, dark and cold. To fend it off, she recited aloud:
Oh, God, forgive me, eliminate my anger, and protect me from Satan
. She recited for some minutes. When the fit passed, she opened her hands, saw that the nails had bitten into the flesh of her palms, stood, and went to the window. It was most likely that Fatima would return in a vehicle of some kind. She could not imagine they would send her into the dark to walk home alone through those streets.

At the same moment Ummi stared out the window in search of her eldest daughter, Staff Sergeant Mike Mazzoni was passing the night shift in an entrepreneurial frame of mind.

Miles away from Islamic City, he was reading
TIME
magazine beneath a high-mounted sodium light that glowed orange in the night. He was surrounded by a system of high, metal fences describing a rectangle a quarter of a mile in length and an eighth of a mile in width. Neither the orange-lit razorwire atop those fences, nor the steep, bleak, nearly naked, orange-lit hillside that he was supposed to be monitoring for movement, distracted him.

TIME
said dogfighting, ‘banned under the country’s late and unlamented hard-line regime as un-Islamic’, was experiencing a resurgence in certain corners of the Republic. Mazzoni, who had pulled night watch, chewed down a tough stick of jerky, wondered just how much ragheads really knew about dogfighting and wondered, too, what a sensible, experienced impresario from Atlantic City might be able to lend in the way of razzle-dazzle, in the way of upping the game, in the way of show business consultation.

He read in
TIME
how several thousand men and boys, most under twenty, gathered in ‘empty fields on the outskirts of Islamic City’ every Friday for some free entertainment. Betting was still prohibited.

Empty fields. No bets. Please. The whole point was for the action to take place in private, in a spot only certain privileged insiders could reach, a spot you had to know someone in order to get to. That place had to be enclosed. It had to be relatively small. To make it exciting enough to pay for, the venue had to carry at least the possibility of getting busted in a small room, had to deliver the visceral, physical sensation that the dogs might manage to tear the roof off of your life.

Mike Mazzoni, who had twenty-eight years on his back, was not,
strictly speaking, supposed to be reading on duty. Or eating. He was protected by a good relationship with Captain X, a relationship that permitted him, most of the time, to float in a broad, open and improvisatory space of his own choosing whenever a manpower shortage forced him to pretend to guard a site – in this case, a supply depot.

Now he shook his head in disbelief as he read in
TIME
magazine about how the economics of the thing worked. The crowds got in for free. Nobody (he had to read it twice to make sure, but it was there in black and white) actually bet on anything. The ringmasters played for tips from the dog owners. The owners of impromptu food stands hawked fried potatoes to spectators. People crouched in that idiotic pose where their butts almost touch the ground. A judge, who worked for free, said which dog had won and which dog had lost. He screamed the results to the crowd, who applauded politely. The fights were always stopped – either with a stick or a bucket of water dumped on top of the competitors’ heads – before a dog died or was injured seriously. What crap.

One dog had to die. At least.

TIME
said the fighting dogs were ‘massive’. Judging from the photo in the article, they looked like mastiffs. It took two men to hold one of them back, each holding a leash made from metal cable. This part impressed Mike Mazzoni. There was potential here. The dogs, at any rate, meant business.

But what about Bobbler?

At 1:21 a.m. by the living-room wall clock, Ummi spotted from her window a small, distant figure that could have been her daughter: a young woman, covered, illuminated by occasional white streetlight, walking alone down the long, dark alleyway that led to their apartment.

Ummi held her breath. The figure drew closer.

Her.

Having confirmed her daughter’s light, steady, rapid gait, Ummi began sobbing. Fatima home. That was the important thing. The reprimand would wait. The demand for an explanation of that absurd decision to take the mobile phone, that late arrival, that shameful, reckless walk home alone, all of those discussions would wait, too. Now Fatima was home and safe and untouched, glory to God.

Ummi’s weeping, too loud, awakened Noura, who stood now in the middle of the dining room in her nightgown. ‘Nine was right about Fatima coming back, wasn’t he?’

Ummi looked up at her daughter, wiped her eyes, nodded.

‘Is the nudie-butt coming in, too?’

Ummi ignored this question, choosing instead to affirm with two open, upraised palms that all was well.

The familiar rhythm of Fatima’s tread up the two flights of stairs. All was well, yes? The sound of Fatima’s hand on the door. And the sound of the door opening. All well, yes?

Dear God. Her face. Expressionless. Bruised and streaked with blood.

‘I shall need to find a new job, Mother, if we are ever to leave this city. Which we will, Godwilling.’

The large cloth bag, tied behind and pulled tight around his head, had once, perhaps, held rice. The bag was wet now. Thelonius sagged upon his X.

‘This,’ a deep, low voice said slowly, in heavily accented English, ‘is what a lapse in morale looks like.’

Thelonius sucked air from the cloth, with his mouth open wide.

‘Contrary to popular belief, we are all quite interested in morale here,’ the voice said, in English. ‘So we now reach an intermission in the programme. He is tired?’

Bound Thelonius fought back a gag, nodded. Then a fearful blow struck his knee again, and a double-jointed fire-arc wound its way down his shin and up his spine. This new blast of pain took his breath away, and he heaved and writhed on the X.

Someone untied and removed the big wet cloth bag. The brightness wounded Thelonius, whose eyes shut tight. He took in air and strained against the wrist and ankle bindings. After a few seconds, he was able to look around. Fatima was gone. So was the little plump man. Half a dozen uniforms now stood before him.

A burly guard unbound him, stood him up briskly and walked him out of the basement room, unsteady and naked as the day he was born.

That throbbing knee refused to bear weight. Leaning against his assailant, Thelonius proceeded down a long, dark-orange-linoleum-lined hall, favouring his good leg and stumbling from time to time. The cold, inadequately fluorescent-lit corridor seemed to follow a slight upward incline, forever, and appeared to narrow as he walked – that might have been fatigue, though, or hunger.

‘You will not like this place.’

The hallway turned abruptly, became a narrow wooden staircase that Thelonius mounted with agony, and eventually turned into a long row of prison cells. All that cold orange linoleum was back. Thelonius’s bare feet went numb on it, and his knee ached with every step. They arrived, finally, at an unlit cell.

The big guard gave one of the bars a bang with his nightstick. From within the cell came a sudden rustle from a small, dark, blanketed figure, who sat up in shadows. Keys in the guard’s burly hand unlocked the metal gate, its top-click and bottom-click sudden and not reminiscent of any kind of home. The metal gate opened into the cell.

‘Yours. Until we learn who told you about that location you were photographing.’

The guard (whose bass voice Thelonius recognized as that of Morale Specialist) gestured for him to enter. Thelonius did.

‘We ask the prisoner whether he would care for a Koran of his own to read, translated ably into English.’ Morale Specialist produced, from a small cloth satchel slung across his shoulder, a black, leather-bound volume.

‘Does it tell you to break my other knee if I refuse to read it?’

Morale Specialist pretended he had not heard.

‘Put it back,’ Thelonius said.

Morale Specialist, apparently incapable of displaying emotion, closed the cell door, which top-clicked and bottom-clicked again. He replaced the Koran in his satchel and began walking down the hallway. Other prisoners in other cells began talking again as Morale Specialist put distance between himself and them.

Thelonius noticed the silence, heard the whispers and shushes. Saw a wound on his wrist from the plastic handcuff.

Bleeding for this. Might as well go out big. Eat or be eaten.

‘It’s an abomination,’ Thelonius said, loudly and carefully enough to keep slowly-walking Morale Specialist from missing a single word, ‘your Koran.’

The murmurings in the cell block dropped a level.

‘You speak English well enough to know what an abomination is? It’s something that causes disgust. Your Koran disgusts me. It brings nausea to me when I think what it has created here. That makes me an infidel, a limping infidel. A kafir.’

At this word, Morale Specialist stopped.

‘KAFIR. Yes, I speak that much Arabic, just for you. I am a KAFIR. I reject your prophet and I reject his message and I condemn him as a reprobate. That is SHARYAR. RASOOL. SHARYAR. Got that?’

The huge guard stood motionless. The corridor had become quiet.

Thelonius pounded his own chest three times. The sound of the pounding echoed through the hall. ‘KAFIR. Allah made me a KAFIR. Get it?’ he asked.

There was a rustling behind Thelonius. He paid it no mind.

Morale Specialist turned his head, stared back toward Thelonius, then turned away again, made his way slowly down the long, orange corridor.

‘KAFIR! KAFIR!’ Thelonius shouted at him again from the cell, pounding his own chest after each repetition of the word. ‘KAFIR!’

From the shadows came a low disapproving sound –
Ah
– made with a voice so raspy as to sound only partly human.