Jihadi (15 page)

Indelible had been brought in for questioning for one reason: He was the proprietor of a website that featured videos showing American soldiers being shot, incinerated, detonated and beheaded. Truth be told, there was only one beheading video, but it was very popular. ‘Politically extreme' websites were illegal in the Republic.

Asked whether he would do all Murad Murad ordered, and thus avoid a prison term, Indelible swallowed hard and replied: ‘Insha Allah.' His new handler smiled.

Indelible's site would have to be shut down, of course, and it was assumed from this point forward that he accepted that. The site having existed, though, provided the perfect cover for the work he would now be doing for the BII. Something he could boast about once having created.

Murad Murad opined that there was no limit to where this might go.

Indelible insisted that there was only one online source for his videos: a foreign site he suspected was affiliated with Al Qaeda. He
quickly volunteered its details, including his own login and password information, so that the BII could track down who ran it before the Americans did. Insha Allah. He shot Murad Murad a suitably servile glance, then supplied the email address of the unknown person who had advised him of the site's existence.

That address was fabricated. It ended up connecting to no one.

Standing naked in his cell in the Islamic Republic, Thelonius examined his surroundings.

A window, barred from the inside with iron grating, suggested vaguely either that dawn had risen or that the sun was about to set. A hole cut dead centre in the floor issued a smell that said ‘toilet'. His roommate was sitting and coughing between pleas for forgiveness.

‘Allah la firullana.'

Racking cough.

‘Allah la firullana.'

Another racking cough, but longer.

‘Allah la firullana.'

The longest racking cough yet, followed by a deep, nicotine-scarred inhale.

Thelonius shared this musty, pungent space with an old, transparent-looking being whose face was wrinkled like paper, who huddled in a gold blanket smoking two cigarettes at once, who gestured toward a cot on the other side of the cell. Another blanket, grey, and a set of yellow prison clothes lay folded there. The being exhaled a long jet of smoke. Thelonius sat on the cot, wrapped himself and shivered.

Slight brightening at the window. So sunrise.

It probably wouldn't be all that hard to get through the day. The thing would have to stop smoking eventually.

The usually taciturn local official whose bribes had been set at thirty-three percent was named Jamal, but Mike Mazzoni called him Jimmy, a nickname this official disliked. Whatever one called him, he got more chatty late in the evening over illegal Heinekens. While Bobbler pursued shovel duty outside, Mazzoni heard this local official announce, without warning, ‘the new terms of agreement'.

He now expected, he announced in English, to be called by his actual name, preceded by the word Mister.

He expected a cut of fifty percent from Mike Mazzoni from that night forward on all earnings, including the illegal wagers.

He expected weekly written reports.

Mike Mazzoni inquired as to what the hell all this was about.

Jamal shared some income figures he could only have received from Bobbler.

Disagreement followed.

Outside digging, Dayton Mazzoni heard each man offer his own colourful metaphors and emphatic predictions as to how the conflict would be resolved. Somebody took a swing at somebody. The place was empty by the time Dayton made it back in, having buried another dog.

The next morning, in the mess hall, the brothers discussed, at some length, a controversial question: what the fuck was wrong with Bobbler. It was resolved, not without acrimony, that he would stop answering questions from ragheads. It was further resolved that his primary skill set out here was keeping his mouth shut and doing what he was told and that he would continue to cultivate and expand those skill sets, inasmuch as they had kept him alive so far.

The loss of his eldest and youngest sons had changed him.

Before that loss Atta had (like everyone else in his family) been only intermittently religious, praying on the two major holidays and during the month of Ramadan. He now walked the streets of Islamic City in rags, reciting the Koran. He fasted three days a week. He made his ablutions in public fountains and he slept according to the model of the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, upon his right side with both hands placed below his head as a pillow. He ordered his sole surviving child to sleep likewise, despite the open wounds on his arms.

They slept in alleys. The boy woke often, choosing always to let his father sleep.

Before the flechette attack, Atta had worked sixty to seventy hours a week as a chemical engineer and had created a colour-coded printed schedule for the four babysitters he engaged. Now his chief, and for all anyone in his family could tell, his only obligations were religious. The Prophet said to be as an itinerant, and so Atta was no longer fond of houses.

He awoke well before dawn, in time to make both the extra prayers and the obligatory prayers. He learned to avoid police, who had a habit of preventing him from reciting and telling him to go home. His little boy, he insisted, did not want them in a house. They
were
home.

He began by giving a loud speech to his son at around the time of the midday prayer. The next day, Atta renamed himself the New Imam and called the city to prayer, proving, if nothing else, that he still had a vigorous set of lungs.

A few vagrants came to listen.

The next day, there were a few more vagrants and they stayed to pray. The next day, there were a dozen men. The day after that, there were about seventy. And the day after that, it looked like four hundred, most of them better dressed than the vagrants.

The following day, they started to dress in white because he told them all to do that. The white they used to dress themselves was as empty as a politician's promise, as empty as Becky's eyes staring him down between compliance blows, as empty as the rest of this guilty dead guy's page.

Having slept a dreamless morning, Thelonius awoke and regarded his shrivelled, inscrutable cellmate. Was it possible the little heap had stared at him, chain-smoking two cigarettes at a time, since sunrise?

They inspected each other. Without warning, the figure in the blanket extinguished the latest pair of cigarettes and stood in preparation for the noonday call to prayer. How it had anticipated the squawking ‘Allahu Akbar' of the speaker system by ten or fifteen seconds was unclear.

Thelonius counted twenty orange linoleum floor tiles. Some of them were fractional, though. The squares surrounded the pungent hole in the middle of the floor.

A tasteless lunch – rice and disintegrating, overcooked lamb on a metal plate – slid through the slot at the bottom of the cell door. Thelonius ate it and slid the plate back again at the barking of some foreign word or other from the guard. Time passed.

A bland chicken dinner on a similar, but not identical, metal plate slid through the slot. Thelonius ate it.

In between those meals, several dozen pairs of cigarettes had illuminated and extinguished themselves, using his roommate as a kind of bellows, and several prayers had come and gone. Not a word was spoken in the cell, beyond the occasional dull mutterings of the prayers, until Thelonious, having delivered his latest plate to the unseen barking voice, turned to his cellmate and said: ‘So. Were you
asking for God to forgive me, or to forgive you for being in the same room with me?'

The little wrinkled figure stared back at him from beneath the blanket, which covered everything up to the chin. The two cigarettes kept glowing in the dark and the smoke from them kept rising in twin clouds that played in synchronous, complementary pirouettes above the spindly prisoner's shaved head.

Tired of waiting for an answer, Thelonius limped across the room and checked the window. It was bolted shut. The glass was thick and shatterproof. Late evening drew itself in.

Half an hour later, night had taken over the city completely, and the sharp, insistent chord of the fluorescents hummed on and on overhead. The endless smoke was getting ridiculous.

‘That's not good for you, you know,' he said. ‘Sucks you dry. If you're not careful, it will make you look like a raisin. Well. More like a raisin than you already look.'

The prisoner across the room ignored the insult, or perhaps occupied a dimension where nothing had been said, and kept staring, blowing more smoke.

‘Look,' Thelonius said, ‘I'm a patient man.'

‘Not from what I've heard.'

That raspy, acid voice again. So: it spoke English.

‘Regardless,' Thelonius said. ‘This window doesn't open. We're likely to be here together for a while, and I've been more than fair about the smoke so far. But if you don't lay off those cigarettes, we're going to have to have ourselves a problem. Now, do you think you can take a break so we can clear the air in here, Raisin?'