The Convert's Song (24 page)

The sandstorm relented. The morning was dusty and punishingly hot. He put on his vest over his holster. Raymond announced at breakfast—bread, dates, more nasty Turkish coffee—that a rendezvous was set in a Shiite neighborhood with the brigadier’s security people, who would escort them to the meet. The Quds Force moved quietly in a web of safe houses, secret bases, and front companies. Iran wielded great influence, but the relationship with Iraqi Shiites was complex.

“Even though they’re all Shiite, there’s the Arab-Persian thing,” he said. “The Iranians see themselves as the great ancient empire. The Iraqis think they’re uppity pains in the butt.”

With Mustafa at the wheel, the Suburban rolled through crowded streets past sand-colored walls. Posters of martyrs and ayatollahs adorned markets and billboards. People wore black. The neighborhood, the site of a Shiite shrine, was poor but vibrant. Traffic caused the Suburban to reduce speed. Raymond talked on the phone. Pescatore caught glimpses of the golden domes of the shrine above the rooftops. It looked shiny and unreal, like a giant toy palace.

The Suburban turned onto a street choked with cars and pedestrians. They slowed to a crawl. Raymond cursed. He was complaining to the driver when the explosions went off.

Three blasts. Loud, but not deafening. Reaction rippled through the crowd. Gunfire rattled faintly. People stampeded around the vehicle. Police in berets and fatigue uniforms ran by. Mustafa tried to advance, then to back up, but it was hopeless. They were hemmed in.

Mustafa conferred with someone through the window. Sirens approached. They learned there had been an attack inside the shrine. Suicide bombers. Emergency vehicles rolled up, further blocking the street. The Suburban sat motionless in the hubbub. Raymond hollered Arabic into the phone. His eyes darted back and forth.

“Listen, man,” he said to Pescatore. “We’re jammed up here. Our guys are a few blocks away. We’ll find them on foot. Okay?”

“You’re the expert.”

Mustafa watched them go, torn between protecting his clients and remaining with his marooned vessel.

After the air-conditioned cocoon of the Suburban, it seemed hard to breathe in the heat and dust and tumult. Pescatore followed Raymond at a fast walk past a group of women in black veils and robes who wailed and thumped their chests in lamentation. Raymond and Pescatore rounded a corner into a boulevard, a pedestrian zone from the look of it, that ended in the shrine. There was a melee of people, vehicles and flashing lights. He didn’t see damage; the blasts must have been relatively small. Militiamen helped clear the way for ambulances and fire trucks. He avoided eye contact, feeling conspicuous and exposed.

Raymond said they needed to work their way around the shrine to meet the brigadier’s operatives. Trouble surfaced. A group of men detached themselves from a wall and hurried through the crowd, on course to intercept.

“Thugs at ten o’clock,” Pescatore muttered.

“I see them,” Raymond said. “They made us for outsiders.”

“What do we do?”

“Stay cool. Follow my lead.”

The half a dozen men blocked their way. They seemed to be unarmed. But in the phantasmagoria of the street, their leader had the face that Pescatore would have least preferred to encounter. Gaunt, sallow, predatory: a land pirate. A black headband encircled sweaty unkempt hair. A scar twisted down out of the headband to the left cheek. The pirate was whip-thin, twenties, dressed in black. Long sleeves on long arms despite the heat. He looked twitchy, like a heroin addict.

The pirate went jaw-to-jaw with Raymond. It sounded like he was demanding that Raymond prove he was not the enemy. A crowd gathered. People jostled and chattered. Sirens wailed. Raymond’s tone in Arabic was earnest, respectful and aggrieved. He put his hand on his heart. He flashed a smile at the circle of faces. Even in this moment of tension, the smile said, he saw absurd humor in the fact that he was perceived as a threat. The smile conveyed confidence that his listeners would come to their senses. And they would all share a laugh.

The pirate switched to English. “Where you from? English?
Amriky
?”

“Argentina!” Raymond declared. “Messi!”

“That’s right,” Pescatore said. “Argentina. Maradona!”

He pantomimed kicking a ball and raising his arms to celebrate a goal. A spectator next to him delivered a burst of words. The young man wore mechanic’s overalls and yellow plastic gloves that were stained, like the rest of him, with grease. He pointed at Pescatore and said, “Maradona.”

Pescatore wasn’t sure if he was saying that he reminded him of Maradona, or was expressing admiration for Maradona, or was mocking him. But he responded in English, “You got it, man. Maradona. Argentina!”

The pirate glowered. Raymond raised his phone, indicating that he could resolve everything with one call. The pirate shook his head. His men deployed around Raymond and Pescatore. The crowd parted. Raymond and Pescatore were walking briskly again; now they had an escort. They conferred side of the mouth in Spanish, surrounded by the pirate and four more toughs.

“Who are these guys?” Pescatore asked.

“Like a neighborhood watch. He says they’re taking us to a command post for questioning. Because of the attack.”

“You believe that?”

“No. They’re
chorros.
They’re looking to rip us off.”

The pirate led the way across the sunbaked boulevard. He strode toward one of the side streets in the row of storefronts, cafés and vending stands. A man rushed by carrying a little girl in a pink dress. Her hands and head were wrapped in bloodstained strips of cloth. Her sobs made Pescatore wince. People congregated to help. A merchant swept wares off a sidewalk display table to make room for the girl. An old woman gave her water from a bottle and dabbed at her face with a rag.

The place is full of stand-up citizens and we get hijacked by the lowlifes,
Pescatore thought.

Raymond appealed to the pirate, who retorted over his shoulder.

“He won’t let me call my guys to vouch for us,” Raymond murmured.

“They’re gonna jack us.”

“Listen, I’m gonna do him just like that Croatian who called you a taco. We hit and run like hell.”

“No
cuetes
?”

“Hell, no. Not unless someone else pulls one. We’d get lynched.”

Although Pescatore was itching to draw his Beretta, he understood. The narrow street curved left. A tangle of electrical cables hung overhead. They went by barred windows, a barbershop decorated with a poster of Imam Ali, handsome, bearded and backlit like a movie star. The street was dark, cool and quiet. The frenzy seemed far behind them. Pescatore could taste the adrenaline, the inevitability of combat.

“Now’s the time,” Raymond said impassively.

He had been serious about repeating the incident on the soccer field in Chicago. He did a stutter step, spread his arms, and slammed his hands against the ears of the pirate, who had his back to him. The move was as ruthless and effective as it had been years ago. The pirate toppled as if his bone and cartilage had liquefied.

A big guy lunged at Raymond. Pescatore hit him as hard as he could in the kidney and, when the head descended, tagged it with a left and a right and a left. That ended the boxing phase of the encounter. It became a sloppy brawl. They battled in workmanlike silence except for grunts and impacts. Pescatore saw Raymond deliver a kick to a kneecap while fighting off a smaller man climbing his back. An assailant swung a length of pipe at Pescatore, landing a sharp blow on the left shoulder. Pescatore used a forearm to the throat to drive him up against an air conditioner jutting out of a ground-floor window.

He found himself next to Raymond, their backs to the rusty shutters of a shop, facing three opponents. The pirate and the big man were horizontal.

“We need to get the fuck out of here,” Raymond gasped.

“Let’s shoot these
comemierdas.
”

The murderous instinct bubbled up along with a premonition. The gunfire would bring a horde of militiamen, police and soldiers, who would mow them down. Pescatore would die without even getting within range of his target.

Then a voice echoed. A grizzled, rotund man stormed into the fray. He wore a dishdasha, the gownlike garment favored by Iraqi men, and a knit skullcap. He delivered a tirade in Arabic. He held rank; the Iraqis dropped their eyes and fists. The newcomer marched over to the pirate, who was on all fours shaking his head as if he had water in his ears. The older man put his hands on his ample hips and spewed words. The pirate responded balefully from his knees. A woman in an abaya appeared behind the older man and joined the argument, hovering in the hooded garment like an aerial creature, her tone melodic and indignant. Voices echoed from windows and doorways. The seemingly empty street had come alive with witnesses, and they had opinions. The assailants glanced around uneasily.

“What the fuck?” Pescatore whispered.

“Apparently this gentleman’s a local sheikh,” Raymond whispered back.

“A what?”

“Like a precinct captain, an alderman. He’s tearing them a new one. Bad Muslims, messing with visitors, disgracing the neighborhood.”

The sheikh concluded his remarks with a grand dismissive gesture. No translation needed:
Beat it, get the hell out of here.
The gang helped their chief to his feet and slouched away.

The sheikh turned back to Raymond and Pescatore. He extended his arm full-length, palm down, and flapped the fingers as he spoke. The woman repeated the motion, her hooded head bobbing. Raymond answered appreciatively and pressed his hand to his heart.

Sotto voce, he told Pescatore, “Follow the sheikh.”

The sheikh’s name was Raheem. He and his wife, who was a good twenty years younger, took them down an alley to their home, a boxlike edifice behind a high cement wall. In the doorway, Raymond removed his shoes and told Pescatore to do the same. Pescatore unlaced his black Timberlands reluctantly, worried what would happen if they had to run.

The Arabic word for “thank you” was
shukrun.
Pescatore uttered it repeatedly during the next half hour. He put his hand on his heart as often as a man with chest pains. Sweaty, aching, fists clenched, he sipped tea and slumped in a red velvet armchair. Three identical armchairs were occupied by Raymond, the sheikh, and his eldest son, a lupine man in sweatpants with a pencil mustache. The son clutched a book, an old paperback English version of
Doctor Faustus.
Perhaps he had been reading the book when company dropped in. Perhaps he had pulled it off a shelf as a conversation piece with foreigners. Eight or nine other teenage and adult males sat or knelt on the crimson carpet, an attentive audience.

Raymond translated bits and pieces. Sheikh Raheem and his wife had been on their way to help the victims at the shrine when they came upon the fight. The assailants were incorrigible neighborhood hoodlums known to prey on outsiders, especially foreign pilgrims and journalists. His hands folded on his belly, the sheikh explained that he had invited them to his home so they could recover from the unpleasantness and he could apologize in the name of a pious, hospitable community. Raymond thanked him. He said he and Pescatore were Argentines of Lebanese descent in town for business. They had decided to visit the shrine at precisely the wrong moment.

“You are welcome,” the sheikh said in labored English, patting Pescatore’s knee. He had merry eyes above a scraggly gray beard. “Most welcome.”

“Really appreciate it, sir,” Pescatore said.

He was hyperconscious of his body language. The CIA officers in Madrid had drilled him about Iraqi customs. Don’t show the soles of your feet, they had said. He kept his socks flat on the floor. Don’t give the thumbs-up, that’s like the middle finger for us. He had refrained from using the gesture twice in the past ten minutes. Don’t eat or touch things with your left hand, that’s the one they wipe with. He was safe because his left arm was numb with pain. Don’t look at, talk to, or ask about the women. Not a problem—the wife had disappeared. The young men served the tea.

The sheikh excused himself and left the room. Raymond had brief conversations on the phone with Mustafa and the brigadier’s security men.

“The sheikh is going to bring us to the shrine,” Raymond said to Pescatore. “We’ll meet our guys there. You okay?”

Pescatore nodded. He noticed that Raymond had a black eye. Raymond smiled. For a moment, he seemed much younger.

“Hell of a scrap, man,” Raymond exclaimed. “You kicked ass. I likes that in you.”

“You threw hands like a pro,” Pescatore said.

They bumped fists. This Western cultural interaction elicited interest and amusement in the audience on the carpet.

The sheikh returned wearing a wrinkled gray blazer over the dishdasha. A new expedition set off: Pescatore and Raymond accompanied by the sheikh and his boys.

The sun inflamed the domes and towers rising in fairy-tale splendor over the chaos. In the street market outside the walls of the shrine, Pescatore stepped over pools of blood mixed with water from the fire hoses. Many of the ambulances had departed with the dead and badly injured. Medics and volunteers tended victims with minor wounds in the street or on tables of the market. The sheikh led them to an entrance of the shrine. Police and militiamen greeted him, stepping out of his way. He turned and spoke solemnly to Pescatore and Raymond.

“He wants to show us what happened,” Raymond translated. “He wants us to know the tragedy of his country. Let’s humor him.”

That’s a pretty disrespectful way of putting it,
Pescatore thought.

The marble surface of the courtyard was littered with shoes. One of the blasts had gone off near the racks where worshippers stored their shoes for prayer. The bombers had waded into a crowd of congregants, forming a deadly triangle. The twisted wreckage of an oak door resembled a battered raft; it had been blown off its hinges. The starbursts of glass in the expanse of debris were the remnants of ornate chandeliers like the ones still hanging in archways farther away. Intricate designs covered the tiled walls.