Jihadi (14 page)

The silence broke only when Morale Specialist disappeared. A careful murmuring, from no single cell and from all of them at once, followed the guard’s final, smartly executed left turn. From behind Thelonius, a voice roughened by smoke, a voice that cut like acid, said, ‘Allah ya firullana’ – ‘God forgive us.’

Great. Another fanatic. Thelonius turned, forced a hello smile in the direction of his roommate, received none in return. He held the smile, making it harsh, and nodded.

‘Howdy,’ nude Thelonius said, trying to sound as much like the President as possible.

Within a week of reading that
TIME
magazine article, Mike Mazzoni had sworn Bobbler to secrecy and enlisted his help in establishing an underground dogfighting operation. He did this for at least three reasons: out of a nagging sense that cutting Bobbler out of the project would only fuck things up worse between them, because he had promised his mother he'd Take Care of Dayton, and because he needed operating capital. This kind of thing took work, though: Mike Mazzoni had to pretend, to his brother's face and at family events, that Bobbler was not the kind of person who always screwed things up. Which he was.

They decided to run it out of D— Base, where their unit had been stationed after rotating out of the embassy assignment. D— Base was near, but not in, the village of D—, where Wafa and her unborn, unnamed daughter had died.

The first dogs had cost serious money, but people paid even more serious money to watch them fight in earnest at night. People paid to place bets with the house. They paid for things to eat and drink. Usually they paid to drink beer, too. Beer was illegal and drinking it felt dangerous. Danger made everything more expensive.

The fights consumed the take-home pay of U.S. servicemen looking for a quick thrill, as well as the pocket money of aspiring local troublemakers who saw the servicemen as role models. All of them convened after midnight in a repurposed canteen that served as the venue for the show.

A dog, Wreck, died that night. Mike Mazzoni named the place the Wreck Room.

‘Don't you dare screw this up on me,' he muttered, counting the first night's take, thinking that his brother couldn't hear.

The betting in the Wreck Room spun off profits in three directions. One was the owner of the winning dog; another was the local municipal official, Jamal, who spoke good English and promised to keep quiet about the matter; the third was Mike Mazzoni and his younger brother Bobbler. Roughly equal amounts of cash reached these three groups of stakeholders, every bit of it darkly illegal under Islamic law.

Everything aside from the money earned from wagers went directly to the senior partner, Mike Mazzoni.

Eleven dogs died in the Wreck Room in the first two weeks. Mike Mazzoni marked off a square of rough terrain behind the shack.

‘Dig the holes deep, Bobbler,' he said, handing a shovel to his smaller, gentler associate.

Bobbler was Mike Mazzoni's junior partner. His real name was Dayton. Nobody knew how they came to be assigned to the same unit.

Mike Mazzoni liked being the senior partner, just as he liked occupying a higher rank than his brother. He'd nicknamed his brother Bobbler because of his supposed inability to field ground balls back in Little League. There was irony here: Dayton had taken the starting shortstop's job away from his older brother that year. Yet Mike Mazzoni, a restless, unwilling second-stringer who talked a lot on the bench, had somehow made sure that the nickname stuck. A reputation for clumsiness attached itself to the boy, though his mother insisted, once it stuck, that her two sons were equally likely to spill beverages or drop glasses. Whenever you rename something, you control it.

Mike Mazzoni renamed his commanding officer ‘Captain X', which stuck, too. He renamed the dogs he bought. He renamed just about everything he ran into in the Islamic Republic. He said it kept him from going crazy.

Wafa had always insisted it was their father's passing that brought on Noura's hallucinations.

This was tact. Fatima was certain Wafa had only pressed the point to comfort their mother, who did not like to imagine any influences besides grief upon Noura's state of mind. A great-grandmother on their mother's side had been institutionalized for similar problems.

Fatima recalled many early clues that there was something different about her sister. Some of these extended back to their days in New Hampshire. Noura had been staring too intently out the car window. The sun had set. Fatima could no longer tell in what
direction Baba was driving. Mother and Wafa were singing. They were on the way to the mall to buy something for Noura. Fatima interrupted the song, sought a promise that, wherever they ended up, something would be bought for her. Baba said they would see. Fatima, unhappy with that response, had wished aloud that SHE had been the younger sister. Baba had reminded her – gently – that wishing for the past to have been different was sinful. He flicked on the interior light. Fatima saw his hazel eyes smile in the rear-view mirror. Fatima glared at her younger sister, then whispered a coarse word. Apparently Baba heard. Fatima heard his tisk, saw his eyes darken in the mirror.

‘No dessert tonight. And nothing at the mall.'

Off went the light. But Noura hadn't heard. She was still staring out the open car window at … something.

Mother asked: ‘What are you watching, Noura?'

‘Devils, probably,' Fatima said in a sour voice. ‘Her best friends.'

‘You are a better girl than that, Fatima,' Baba said, sad.

Silence. Mother turned on the radio. A newscast played.

Noura leaned over. ‘I do see them,' the three-year-old whispered to Fatima, as though imparting a deadly secret. ‘And hear them, too. Devils.'

Now, ten years on, there were, for Noura, no more secrets to keep. This morning, she entered with groceries and announced loudly that a red-haired boy named Crazytown was outside writing out detailed instructions for blowing up their building. She insisted that his intricate bomb designs were laid out on the sidewalk in luminescent purple chalk, as was his lifelike sketch of Fatima laid out ‘naked, naked, like you were coming from the shower, but also how you are right now'.

‘That's none of his business,' Fatima said, opening her laptop. ‘Or yours.'

‘He said you'd say that.'

‘Put away the groceries, please. No point standing there all day.'

‘He said you'd say that, too.'

‘Just put them away, Noura.'

Why was Noura as she was? Fatima had given up on that question. She no longer wasted energy determining a single cause for something. It was her experience that important circumstances usually existed in a vast, elusive cloud of correlation, rather than in a single chain of cause and effect. The will of Allah was what counted, and that was beyond appeal. She booted up her computer, saw a dark bruise on her face in the black screen's reflection, then the screen flashed blue and then mostly white and the bruise was gone. There was work to do.

‘Crazytown sees you, but not like I see you,' Noura shouted out of the open window at a puzzled, matronly pedestrian. ‘He sees you naked.'

Fatima rose and closed the window. ‘I said put those groceries away, please.'

Crazytown had become a regular visitor. Once, Noura had ordered him out of her bedroom at three in the morning.

Noura put down the bags at last and informed Fatima that the man she had seen in the car outside had decided to wait there until he was permitted in for a cup of tea.

Fatima, back at her laptop, feigned interest, asked what the man in the car looked like and continued to search for career opportunities.

Noura humphed. ‘He is
really out
there, Fatima.'

The refugee camp was (the government insisted) to be called Camp Rahma, but all the workers, including Indelible, called it what the residents called it, which was Camp Jahannam. Rahma means ‘mercy’. Jahannum means ‘Hell’.

Indelible, who worked as a paediatrician there, ended up missing four straight days of work. No one who reported to him knew why. He had warned each staff member privately that such an absence was possible, that this was in the course of things. The staff were to assume that such an unanticipated absence might last for a week. If it continued for longer than that, they were to contact Indelible’s wife, face to face and voice to voice, no telephone and no email.

Among the patients Indelible had been unable to treat because of that unscheduled absence was a boy with bleeding, swollen arms, whose father carried him everywhere. The staff at Jahannum had found the pair wandering through the barren stumps of what had once been a grove of olive trees. The father repeatedly muttered a single word: ‘Sorry.’

When pressed by a nurse, the man had called himself Abu Islam. That, the nurse assumed, made the son Islam. The father’s eyes gleamed.

The boy he carried, dangerously dehydrated, perhaps eight years old, swung in and out of consciousness. He had dozens of puncture wounds on his arms, but none elsewhere. The wounds were from flechettes, all of which someone had extracted. Now both arms were angry, alive, weeping with infection. It took two hours for the staff to extract the boy from the man’s grasp. They cleaned the wounds, administered the first rounds of medication, gave the father a handful of blister packs. The next morning, both of them had vanished.

Before murdering his wife, George Liddell boasted to customers that he was not a jealous man, but, to the contrary, rather a free thinker on sexual matters.

George had moved his small family from Los Angeles up to San Francisco – this was before any ‘hippie scene’ emerged there – where he ran a used bookstore that became popular among aspiring beatniks, jazz freaks, poets, artists, restless businessmen in search of illegal words and images, and professional nonconformists. George was all of these.

Thelonius’s first clear memory is of the helpless, unsorted cardboard boxes in the back room of this shop: the hundreds of varied book spines, the scent of decaying paper, the long wait for proper public display. Among those boxes was one containing used comic books his father had not yet sorted into subgroups (Marvel, DC, Other). Thelonius, an early reader, was five when he set up a folding chair next to this box. Without prompting, he inspected all new arrivals, instinctively treating the delicate colour masterpieces with care and respect.

The grown-up volumes in the main store were displayed mostly from the ground up, their titles reading left-to-right in vaguely accessible stacked towers, and only occasionally on shelves in boring, horizontal rows. The whole floor-to-ceiling collection was marked with thematic overhead clues. These were hand-painted in huge, fantastic letters on signs suspended, miraculously, by invisible fishing-wire: OLD LIES. FANTASY. ALLEGED HISTORY. JAZZ.
SELF-RELIGION. BLIND-RELIGION. EXPLOITATION. PHYSICAL ROMANCE.

There must have been thirty or more of these huge signs hanging down, announcing the corridors of a palace: his father’s domain, immeasurable, unfathomable, stuffed at every corner with gigantic ideas. A hall of miracles. But.

When Thelonius revisited the place in 1990, it was shockingly tiny. It had become a soap shop, and smelled no longer of dying paper, but of warring perfumes – lavender versus patchouli versus musk – and, beneath that, the faint, ancient stench of blood.

In the bookstore he now wandered in his memory, though, the scent was still that of books. OLD LIES was still classic fiction. Perhaps there had been another sign, NEWER LIES, for the contemporary fiction of the period. Thelonius was uncertain whether he actually remembered this sign or had concluded it into existence. There was nothing pejorative in the ‘LIES’ tag. George considered inspired, shameless lying a prerequisite of good storytelling, and could cite essays to support the point.

FANTASY was definitely Tolkien and Carroll and such, and those beloved comic books. When George wasn’t in the office or at the counter, Thelonius spent most of his time in FANTASY. ALLEGED HISTORY was, in all likelihood, history. His father would never have raised a sign that said HISTORY. PHYSICAL ROMANCE was pornography, much of it visual and explicit. Technically, PHYSICAL ROMANCE was off limits to the boy, but George always pretended not to notice brief visits. George, unlike Irene, was inclined to let Thelonius read anything from any stack. ‘Good and bad are whatever the hell you say they are,’ George had told his son. ‘Slap anybody who tells you that a book that he hasn’t read is bad.’ PHYSICAL ROMANCE must have been an important profit centre. Thelonius recalled seeing a slow parade of grim men in dark suits under this sign. He also recalled an argument there, a loud one, between his mother and father, who happened to be standing in PHYSICAL ROMANCE when the subject of Irene’s unexpected pregnancy came up.

It was well after hours. Thelonius, presumed asleep on the little mat that served as an alternate bedroom, was wide awake, having munched a handful of what he thought was some exotic dried fruit, but turned out to be hallucinogenic mushrooms. He had just been reading a comic book:
SERGEANT USA #109, THE HERO THAT WAS
.

Thelonius, pondering an impossibly coloured butterfly that had just settled onto Sarge’s troubled red-white-and-blue head, heard his father shouting the unfamiliar phrase ‘knocked up’, then a scuffle and a scream. He ran to investigate. He left the back room, which opened onto FANTASY.

The sudden undulation of the store’s walls notwithstanding, he made up the distance between FANTASY and PHYSICAL ROMANCE in no time, having long ago memorized the maze. There, in PHYSICAL ROMANCE, he saw his mother’s opened throat spouting blood like wine.