The 56th Man (27 page)

"Okay, I couldn't read her mind. But I never
saw anything that would make me think she lusted after me."

"Did you know her parents well?"

"I only went to her house a few times. You
know, the middle class piece of shit visiting the palace."

"They didn't make you feel welcome."

"As welcome as a worm."

"So you don't know if Heather was the type of
woman..."

"To have a bastard? You never know. Moria
never said anything about it." Tina paused to catch her breath. She
had warmed to the discussion. "They came by the shop on opening
day. All I remember was her sneer. ‘My little girl going into
trade!’ You would have thought she preferred streetwalking. They
liked Jerry, though."

"Did you?"

"He was weird. All the artists I've met are
rebels or art-for-shit's-sake types. Jerry was super patriotic,
super community involvement. That's why old Tom took a shine to
him. Maybe he thought Jerry would put Moria on track. Not that she
was ever off-track. She was never a wild girl."

"Except when it came to sharing product with
friends."

Tina froze. Ari had taken the risk because he
was sure Tina would never reveal Moria's source.

"Why did you use that word?"

"Product? That isn't the correct word?" Ari
smiled stupidly.

"It's all right," Tina said, the alcohol
allaying her suspicion.

"Did Moria have a cat?"

"Huh? Yeah, she did, come to think of it. A
big yellow tabby. Moose?"

"Marmaduke?"

"Oh yeah, Marmaduke. How did you know? Is he
still hanging around the house? Did he give you his name?" Tina
barked at her wit.

"Heather must have thought a lot of her
daughter. I mean, for her to leave money to her daughter, in spite
of everything."

"Maybe. And maybe she felt
sorry...finally."

"Did her parents know about her dealing
‘product’?"

"Not that I know of."

"Did she take any of it?"

Tina twisted her lips.

"How about Jerry?" Ari continued.

"Ha! Pure as the driven snow." She thought
the pun funny and waited for Ari to laugh. He chuckled
obligingly.

"I'll take that as 'no'. Where are Jerry's
parents?"

"Dead. No siblings."

"And no inheritance from them?"

"Nothing comes from nothing."

"Ah..." Ari nodded sagely. "Would you excuse
me for a moment?"

He stubbed out his cigarette and walked over
to the bar. The bartender had been called to the kitchen. Marybelle
gave him an inquiring look. He smiled and shook his head. When the
bartender came back, Ari asked where the bathroom was. In the back,
across from the kitchen. As he passed Marybelle, she smirked:

"You could've asked me."

In the john he relieved himself of several
ounces of Canada Dry and Long Island Tea, studying the graffiti
above the urinal as his bladder relaxed.

'For the best BJ call Tina'...followed by a
phone number.

His Tina? Napkins might not be the only cause
of wear on her lipstick. He had not noticed a wedding band.

He noted a rubber strainer in the base of the
urinal. It bore the slogan, 'Beat Drug Addiction'. He flushed. It
was like pulling the lever on a voting machine. Of course, he had
only ever voted for one man--as had they all.

When he came out, Tina was gone. Marybelle
and the bartender were intent on being preoccupied. Ari left.

As he walked briskly up the sidewalk, Tina
half stumbled out of the cobblestone alley that ran behind Ali's
Market. She had reapplied her lipstick--without, it appeared, the
aid of a mirror.

"Mr. Simon."

Ari stopped and looked down at her.

She waited for him to respond, then said,
"You didn't ask where she got the product."

"No, I didn't." He resumed walking. She
stutter-stepped beside him, struggling to keep up.

"Hold on, will you?"

"Why? You want to tell me? Why? Because
you've changed your source? Because it no longer bothers you to
betray your old provider?"

She hesitated only for a moment, but it was
long enough to put her well behind. She raced after him.

"They kicked me out of the Shamrock because
of you."

"They'll let you back. They only wanted to be
rid of me."

"But it hurts, you know? It hurts."

Ari found it embarrassing to have a woman
chasing after him. He turned to face her. "You'll make it up."

"It hurts..."

She was encompassing much more than an
evening's income. Everything hurt. It had a sorrowful effect on her
appearance. Invisible weights dragged at her face, her unbuttoned
jacket, even her black hosiery, wrinkled at the knees.

"Stop using your product," he said. "And stop
drinking so much. Maybe then you can pull your life together."

"And if that doesn't work?" Her voice had the
plaintive edge of a child or a hoarse old woman.

"We all take risks." He turned away from
her.

"Could you at least give me a ride home?"

"I have an appointment."

"You're loaded with appointments, aren't you.
Listen, I don't think I can drive like this."

"How do you usually get home?"

"All right. I usually risk it. But for
once...can't we give the world a break?"

Give the world a
break
....

He glanced at his watch. It was only 8:30. He
looked on as she wobbled unsteadily on her shoe heels. They weren't
especially high, but she might as well have been teetering on a
mountain ledge. He imagined her careering into an oncoming car.

Give the world a
break
.

"Very well. Do you live far away?"

FOURTEEN

The heat in the Bradley would have been
tolerable under normal circumstances, but the balaclava made it a
torment. Ghaith told Captain Rodriguez he preferred getting blown
up in the open to dying of heat stroke inside the fighting vehicle.
Rodriguez was preoccupied punching grid coordinates into his GPS
and nodded absent-mindedly. But he defeated Ghaith’s intention when
he glanced up and called Sergeant Mastin over.

“
Our interpreter wants to
dismount. See that he has some proper chicken plates.”

Mastin returned with a flak jacket. Hot.
Heavy. In no time Ghaith was in worse shape than before.

“
You sweat like Tom Jones in
concert,” Mastin joked. He too was dismounted.

They had no trouble keeping up with the
convoy, which was moving at a crawl and stopped whenever they
spotted someone who might have information. Since there were very
few people on the harsh, sewage-filled streets deep inside the
former Saddam City, they stopped just about everyone they saw

“
Ayna howen?” Ari
asked.

“
No!” was the universal
answer. Sometimes they added, in English, “No mortars!”

“
RPG?”

“
No RPG!”

“
Mahdi?”

“
No Mahdi!”

That was a howler. The Mahdi Army practically
ran the district.

“
Ask him if Muqtada al-Sadr
is hiding under his sister’s bed,” Mastin snarled. He too suffered
from the heat, but Ghaith shot him a critical look anyway. So much
for sensitivity to local customs. He did not translate the
question.

They arrived at an empty playground.
Rodriquez went on the commo net to tell them that, according to the
Q36, this was where some mortar rounds had come from two nights
ago. The deathly gray of the playground would have seemed unnatural
elsewhere, but was perfectly normal in Sadr City. All the buildings
were a harsh, desert brown-and-gray. In other neighborhoods, even
poor ones, residents would try to enliven their surroundings with
plants or colorful outdoor murals. Not here. The few windows were
heavily barred, or bricked up, or both.

Ghaith took out an enchilada that Ropp had
given him from an MRE. Ropp had told him they had field rations
that were halal, and was surprised when Ghaith shrugged off the
offer. He took the enchilada without sauce, tearing off the wrapper
and eating it plain.

Not bad.

Rodriguez radioed the lead platoon, out of
sight up ahead, while several squads spread out across the
playground, looking for hidden weapons caches. But it appeared as
if the mortar tubes were long gone--as the skeptical lieutenant had
earlier told Rodriguez they would be.

Ghaith was walking about ten feet behind
Mastin when the sergeant cupped his hand over the side of his
helmet and listened. Ghaith was not supplied with a communications
link and had no idea what orders were coming down.

Mastin nodded, then called out to his squad.
“Blue Platoon reports IP’s in the AO headed our way. Don’t get
trigger-happy.”

Iraqi police in the Area of Operations. Sure
enough, a minute later two men came around the corner and began
walking along the edge of the playground. They wore light blue
shirts and dark trousers. Their baseball hats said POLICE in large
white letters, while their brassards repeated the message in
English and Arabic. Their body armor looked fragile. They were both
carrying Kalashnikovs.

Captain Rodriguez was down from the Bradley
and went up to the policemen to shake their hands. Knowing he would
be summoned, Ghaith began sauntering over. After a closer look at
the two policemen Ghaith’s face twisted up. Two more criminals from
the pre-invasion release. This was getting ridiculous. On the other
hand, it only made sense. Most of the inmates at Abu Ghraib and
other prisons had been Shia, all had been poor, and a large
percentage of them had gravitated to Saddam (now Sadr) City upon
their release. Ghaith could expect to see plenty of scum on this
patch of earth. And in spite of the power shift at the Ministry of
Interior, there were still a lot of Shia in the police force, so it
was not inconceivable that these two cops were legitimate. Sending
Shia to police a Shia neighborhood only made sense, even if one was
a counterfeiter and the other a serial rapist of both boys and
girls.

Rodriguez was busy schmoozing the pair of
them. Ghaith finished off his enchilada, wiped the grease off his
mouth with his bare hand, and wiped his hand off on one of the blue
shirts speaking pidgin to the captain. The policeman turned, saw
what had been done to his clean shirt, and raised his eyes to
Ghaith.

“
What is this, brother?” he
demanded.

“
Ayri bi
rabbak
,” Ghaith answered,
smiling.

A look of disgust came over both policemen.
Captain Rodriguez, who had thought he was doing so well winning
over these particular hearts and minds, shot Ghaith a warning
look.

“
It’s nothing, Captain,”
Ghaith told him. “I know Dalash and Abu Shihab from before the war.
We didn’t get along all that well. But that’s all in the past,
now.”

The policeman Ghaith had used as a napkin
broke out in a rapid-fire Arabic dialect that Rodriguez could not
begin to follow. Which was just as well, since he was denouncing
the Americans for hiring vulgar idiots to be their interpreters. Of
course, neither Dalash the serial rapist nor Abu Shihab the
counterfeiter had any clue who Ghaith was.

Gesticulating, swearing, all but spitting out
their wrath, the insulted policemen resumed their march past the
armored column. Ghaith thought it quite a subdued reaction to what
he had said and done. His suspicion mounted. He watched as the two
of them turned left, away from the column.

“
What did
you say to piss them off so much?” Rodriguez asked. “What
does
Ayri bi rabbak
mean?”

“
Oh, it’s an old Iraqi
greeting.”

“
Meaning?”

“’
My dick in your god’ is a
reasonable translation.”

The captain had begun to
climb up the side of the Bradley. He froze, one hand stretched
towards the turret, craned his head back, and said incredulously,
“You said
what
?”

Ghaith saw one of the policemen reach under
his body armor for his shirt pocket.

And a cell phone.

“
IED!” he yelled, throwing
himself to the ground.

But the explosion was further up the road.
Rodriguez jumped into the Bradley turret and grabbed his headset.
He heard an unfamiliar voice.

“
Where is Lieutenant Baker?”
Rodriguez demanded, focusing on what had happened several blocks
away.

“
This is Sergeant First
Class Morrison,” came a voice. “They got one of the soft-skin
Humvees. It’s a mess—“

“
Secure the site. Do you
hear me? Work the medevacs—“ Rodriguez raised his eyes and saw two
full squads of men racing away from him, led by the platoon
commander. In the distance was his interpreter, chasing after two
policemen.

“
Jesus clusterfuck!”
Rodriguez swore, bringing up his hand mike and shouting, “Deadly
force! Deadly force!”

He entered the house through the garage and
automatically checked the tape at the top of the back door. It was
unbroken. No one had entered through here since that second night,
when Sphinx slipped indoors. Had the intruder given up? Or had he
found what he was looking for?

He went back into the bare living room and
looked at the chimney. If it was Howie Nottoway who had searched
here, his fear had been a first-class act--because he already knew
nothing was hidden in the fireplace. And if he had found something,
there would have been no cause for fear or thespian antics.

But Howie must be involved. Unless someone
was staked out in the woods across Beach Court Lane (which Ari
thought unlikely, but he would check it out next morning), he had
the only feasible post from which to track Ari's comings and
goings. Ari would have spotted anyone watching from a car. Howie
had spoken to the two officers who had found the bodies, and
probably knew Carrington through the Neighborhood Watch
Association. If he had seen Ari's distinctive xB depart for the
Firefox Gallery that night, he could have alerted any of them that
the house was empty.