Jihadi (16 page)

It was hard to tell with the blankets, but Thelonius guessed that the Raisin could not have weighed more than a hundred and ten pounds. Someone that size, and unarmed, would not last more than a few moments in a toe-to-toe with him. If it came to that.

Which it might. The Raisin blew a long jet of smoke, stared at Thelonius and frowned.

‘I don't like repeating myself,' Thelonius said, ‘but I'll do it this
once. Just for you. Because you've got a lucky face. Suppose you were to put those goddamned cigarettes out for just a few minutes, chief? And spare yourself a hard time? What do you say?'

The Raisin stood, removed both mouth-bound cigarettes with a scrawny hand, held the half-smoked filters at a distance, cupping their orange embers gracefully to one side, looked the opponent over, and said: ‘I had a dream about you …'

‘Really. Did your dream tell you how long it would take me to clean the floor of this cell with you?'

‘… and about your mother,' he continued as though Thelonius had not spoken. ‘The dream was about you and your mother. You miss her a great deal now, I think.'

Wreaths of smoke rose from the two palmed cigarettes. The Raisin brought them back and began to suck on them deeply.

‘In my dream, you were both in San Francisco. It was some time ago. You were a small child.'

Thelonius looked away, held himself immobile. He listened to the Raisin drawing yet more mouthfuls of smoke out of those two foul death-sticks. He listened to the expulsion of the smoke, to the purposeful sound of someone breathing uneasily, someone with a great deal of time to waste. The smoke danced upward. He took a stress breath and then looked back, with purpose, toward the figure behind the two glowing cigarette-ends.

‘What about my mother?' he said, his voice more raw than he intended.

‘I dreamt that you saw her die when you were a child. You watched something kill her in your presence. Your father, I think. Or a beast. Or both. There was a great deal of blood.'

More smoke. More silence.

‘I dreamt that when you saw her die,' the Raisin continued, ‘you began a period of trial and hardship and pain. I dreamt that delusions followed you through childhood, that you fought them off through sheer force of will. I dreamt that you convinced others that you were healed. I dreamt that your wife, alone, suspected you might not be.'

The room began to writhe.

‘It was not an unpleasant dream at all,' the Raisin remarked.

In the aftermath of his disorderly discussion in the Wreck Room with Mike Mazzoni, Jamal filed a formal written complaint with a representative of the Council of Elders. The letter set forth piously and movingly against what Jamal believed to be an illegal dogfighting and alcohol ring being operated out of D— Base.

He pleaded with the elders to take action. From such pits of corruption sprang vipers of secular influence, eager to spread their poison throughout the state. His own faith and that of his fellow believers, he warned, indeed their entire way of life, was under direct American assault.

Testimony concerning these vipers and their low desires came from Jamal and several pious associates, all of whom happened to be male members of his own family. They all swore that numerous bets had been placed, that numerous dogs had died and that much alcohol had been consumed. They all proclaimed their love for and allegiance to the Republic and all repented any past association and/or familiarity they might have had with such vipers.

The dead guy writing this ponders the fatal mistake of defining love for country by identifying the people one hates.

‘Yeah, the man
wait
ing out there in the car looks pretty im
por
tant,' Noura said.

‘Mm hmm.'

‘Pressed suit. White shirt. Dark tie. Good hair. He asked me if you lived here, and I said yes. He asked me if you got home late last night, and I said yes. He asked me if Mother had gone to work, and I said yes. He told me he wanted to have a cup of tea with you. It's fine with him if I serve as
chap
erone.'

‘Mm hmm,' Fatima said, still perusing job openings on her computer. ‘What kind of car? Purple, I suppose.'

‘Hmph. The car is big and black, like all those limousines, and he's sitting all a
lone
in the back seat. I think a driver must be in the front seat. The glass is dark. I wouldn't have seen the man in the back seat if he hadn't unrolled the window and called to me. He
said
he was from BII.'

Fatima looked up. ‘What?'

‘B.' (Pause.) ‘I.' (Pause.) ‘I.'

‘Noura, are they real? The man and his driver?'

Noura's face darkened. ‘You and Mother tell the entire
un
iverse,' she said, ‘that everyone I meet is a halluci
na
tion, but what does that make
you
?'

Fatima scoffed, approached the window sidelong, spotted a black limousine.

‘What does he want, Noura?'

‘Well, how should
I
know? Nobody I ever talk to is really
there
, are they?'

The man who guided the little boy with the scarred arms through the streets, the man who found places for them both to sleep and pray, was no longer Atta. He was Abu Islam: the father of Islam.

He wandered Islamic City as though inspecting it prior to demolition. Often and loudly, he recited certain verses from the Koran. His father had taught him passages, years ago, and as a youth he had been praised for the accuracy of his recitation and for the strength of his voice, which one of the judges wrote was ‘loud as the blows of a hammer'. He had even won a contest at the age of fourteen. He thought he'd forgotten it all. But he still knew many passages. He knew, for instance, the ‘Verse of the Sword'. He now ended every day by reciting it in great, keening peals that could be heard for blocks until after dawn.

People gave them food. They took it and walked away as silent itinerants, in obedience to the Prophet. From a black-market warehouse he burgled one night, Abu Islam stole a decanter of bourbon meant for Americans. He drank it as though in a private place, yet the boy saw. Abu Islam found, in the days that followed, that the bourbon, when consumed surreptitiously, helped him identify which words, which intonations, which emphases were likeliest to draw a large crowd.

When asked about ‘this crap I’m hearing about dead dogs and some kind of Raghead Council’, Mike Mazzoni suggested to Captain X, his commanding officer, that he might want to deny all the allegations that might be coming down the pike, because that’s what he, Mazzoni, planned to do. This proposal wasn’t well received.

The captain, stone-faced and fuming, was more pragmatic than he let on: He was not eager to alienate a figure the men looked up to, the elder brother of his best (and only available) sharpshooter. Even so, it was time to make a point.

Seated behind his desk, he asked Mazzoni point-blank whether all this dog business would be going away. Stared him down.

Yet Mazzoni, standing, knew that he was actually being cut slack. He held the necessary awkward silence. He inspected his boot-tops and, after half a minute or so, said, ‘Yes, sir.’

By ‘away’ (the captain explained), he really and truly meant away. The operation that Mazzoni had been running would have to be put out of commission, at least until things cooled down. Did Mazzoni understand that?

Mazzoni nodded.

Was Mazzoni familiar with how a hammer worked? How nails penetrated certain objects? What plywood was?

Mazzoni nodded again.

‘I treat you like my own boy, Mike. Maybe I shouldn’t. But I do. Now go clean up your mess.’

By reveille the next night, he and Bobbler had boarded up the Wreck Room, and he had sworn with every other swing of his hammer that Jimmy would pay.

Crouching in a corner, Noura watched the well-dressed man who had emerged from the limousine as though he were a film projected into the good chair near the dining-room table. He would not smile.

Ra’id, the son of the most famous man in the country, had made a point of not becoming famous. He did not enjoy being stared at, so he turned away from Noura, but he remained polite. ‘What we want you to do,’ Ra’id said to Fatima, putting down his teacup with practised grace, ‘is keep an eye on things. Converse with people. Pay attention to them. Compliment them. Decode whether or not they’re interested in overthrowing the government, and let us know, discreetly, if it appears that they are. I should be happy to double the salary that Murad is paying you. To make amends.’

‘And to keep me quiet,’ she said. He did not disagree, did not agree. ‘Well. I know fewer people than you imagine.’

‘Would you be willing to talk to individuals we pointed out to you? Virtually or otherwise?’

‘I suppose.’

‘Then we are in agreement? You accept the raise, you accept the assignment, you update me once a week at least, and more often as you see fit, and you agree not to speak of what happened with Murad last night?’

A bird called to Fatima from the broad, convenient tree outside her open window. She turned to look at it. Ra’id took this for a sign of assent.

This was how these people operated, how they secured agreements. They made silence mean whatever they wanted. But it was good this way. It was what
she
wanted. She allowed him to believe he had manipulated her.

‘Your face,’ he said, smiling at last, ‘is now a state secret. To be clear: You have not spoken of last night online? Or anywhere else?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘I told no one what happened.’ That was true.

‘Good. And you are willing to undergo another background check? A rather more thorough one?’

‘Of course.’ (This second background check never materialized, as she suspected it would not. He was testing her for compliance, as men do.)

‘You may consider yourself provisionally reinstated. There is one other question. Do you happen to recall that man you saw interrogated? The American?’

Fatima was thinking of Wafa’s house. Of her mother no longer having to work. Of Noura: of her safety, finally, from these unpredictable streets. Of those many secret worlds of Noura’s, of their persistence, of the difficulty of keeping them unexamined by strangers here in the city. Of the possibility of political instability.

Without a pause, though, she said: ‘Yes. I remember the American.’

There was no ambiguity in the New Imam’s scholarship. His sermons centred on a single religious obligation: that of killing Americans.

‘We are reclaiming the true belief system of the Muslims,’ he told his little boy, who nodded.

The boy knew well enough what consequences accompanied not nodding at the appropriate moment, and how much weightier these consequences had become since the nightly bourbon sessions had begun. The boy strongly resembled his father and often reminded him of his own childhood, a circumstance not always to the boy’s advantage.

Abu Islam began transporting four or five bottles of bourbon at a time in a little grey-wheeled suitcase that some admirer gave him. He kept his Koran in there, too.

Whatever Abu Islam found in that Koran that seemed to support killing Americans, he shouted in the streets. He ignored everything else. He also ignored the life, teachings, and practice of the Prophet. That particular life was full of complexities he could not manage. His own, thankfully, had become considerably simpler. Kill the Americans: That was his message and, now, his life. He called it The Point.

‘We two have dedicated our lives to The Point,’ the New Imam said in public, and the boy always nodded. ‘We two against an empire. With Allah, that is a majority.’

Those believers who got The Point, and they were more numerous each day, began to express concern for him and for the boy, offering them living rooms and spare bedrooms to sleep in. He turned them down. They would sleep only in abandoned buildings or on the floors of mosques, he insisted. When the building was dark enough, when the mosque had emptied, he flicked on a little flashlight, jotted notes in a tiny memo pad and consumed Styrofoam cups of bourbon, an increasingly important scholarly tradition.

People began following them around the city, even quoting memorable bits of The Point. Among the earliest of these followers was a heavyset woman who told him he was too important to the Rising Nation to sleep in abandoned buildings and unlocked mosques. There were, she argued, security issues to consider.

Thelonius took a deep, woozy inhale of the tobacco-stained air, and the room slowed down, and then it stopped. He continued breathing in this way for some time, to keep the room steady.

Lack of food, lack of sleep. Bad breathing. That was probably why the room did that. And of course auditory hallucinations were a possibility. Which would account for …

‘I studied such difficulties, you know,’ the Raisin said, eyes aglow, ‘difficulties arising from childhood trauma. When I took my degree in psychology.’

The Raisin mouthed both cigarettes expertly, drew one last double puff from them, removed them and crushed them on a raw open palm before depositing them in a tin can. The fluorescents shut down and the room was much darker.

And then it was later and the sun had considered rising again and the Raisin was praying again before it did. The Raisin sat and read the Koran for a long time, then prayed for a long time, then returned to bed, then slept. Then awoke and then lit up with another double glow, familiar by now to Thelonius and not as threatening as before, and then the cigarette smoke swirled in the light of the flowing dawn.

The Investigating Representative of the Council of Elders filed a formal demand that the Americans court-martial Staff Sergeant Michael Mazzoni. The letter was returned unopened.

With the unanimous approval of the Council, the Investigating Representative used email to appeal to various individuals in the
American command chain for guidance on the matter. These appeals were ignored as well.

The Investigating Representative made personal contact with a high-ranking, charismatic American general whose name need not be repeated here. Their unscheduled discussion occurred during a party hosted at the embassy by the Cultural Attaché.

‘We will take care of this,’ the general said over his Tom Collins, all business. ‘I promise. You will hear from us.’

The next day, Captain X received a call from Central Command informing him that, while he did not have to press charges against Mazzoni, he did have to make a written response to the Council. There had to be a formal denial. A sworn affidavit that no betting on dogs and no consumption of alcohol had taken place would do the trick.