“Justice,” he said. “Justice for Mahmood Razaq. He is to be tried for treason, with his brother and son. Then they will be hanged.”
Skelly looked over at Najeeb, then muttered a short sentence, barely audible.
“What?” Bashir asked. “What is he saying?”
Najeeb recognized the words well enough, having heard an American professor use them long ago in response to some legal outrage or another. It was a line that had intrigued him enough to go and look it up, finding to his surprise that it came from a children’s book, an imaginary world where animals and playing cards had walked and talked, a place where logic and order were turned upside down.
“What he said was, ‘First the sentence, then the trial.’ ”
Bashir nodded. He seemed to find the concept to his liking.
“Come,” he said again, eyes blazing. “You must see it.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
THE TRIAL WAS unlike anything Skelly had ever seen, made all the more surreal by the recurring waves of fever.
Bashir had chivvied them into a low plaster building where at least fifty men squatted on a concrete floor beneath a dangling forty-watt bulb, barely brighter than a candle. Razaq stood defiantly at the front along with his son, Haji din Razaq, his brother, Salim, and two other men from his caravan, one of whom was wrapped around the middle with bloody bandages, hunching forward with his face in a permanent grimace. Every time he sagged farther, or tried to sit, a man with a long switch would rise from the front row to swat at his ankles, to the delight of the crowd, which didn’t so much laugh or cheer as huzzah, heads nodding, as if he’d had it coming.
Opposite the defendants—that was the word Skelly put in his notebook, unable to come up with anything better—was a tall elderly man with a graying beard and a soiled white turban, clutching a brown blanket around his chest like a shawl. Kudrat stood nearby with a watchful eye, seeming firmly in control of the proceedings.
When the older man began to speak the crowd went silent, Skelly scribbled a description of the place while trying not to notice how bad he felt. He’d swallowed another pill with the last of his water just before leaving their room.
“What time is it, anyway?” Skelly whispered, causing a few heads to turn toward him with scowls of disapproval.
The floor was stone cold, like sitting on an ice rink, and there wasn’t a rug or cushion in sight. The whitewashed walls—or what you could see of them—were scuffed and pocked. A chill breeze wafted through an open window, the remnants of the panes swept into a pile of broken glass.
“Almost four in the morning,” Najeeb said, leaning closer, again placing a palm on Skelly’s forehead, a look of concern creasing his brow. “We have to find you some food and water.”
“Just tell me what they’re saying.”
“Blather mostly.”
More heads turned, the scowls deepening, and Najeeb lowered his voice to a whisper, causing Skelly to cup a hand to his ear. “He is calling them traitors. Spies for America. He asked them what they had to say for themselves but he kept on talking. He is preaching a sermon, really.”
“Some sort of imam?”
“No. Just a blowhard. A political.”
Skelly looked at Razaq, the only one of the defendants who seemed to have held on to his pride. The others were downcast, looking at the floor, but Razaq glared at anyone who caught his eye, first at the speaker and then at the crowd. For a moment his gaze seemed to settle on Skelly at the back, although it was doubtful the man could have picked him out of the crowd in the dimness. The overhead bulb flickered once, then twice, making it seem even more like candlelight, but the crowd took it in stride as the speaker droned on, now raising his right arm and shouting.
“He is saying that the penalty for treason is death. That they must pay with their lives as a lesson to others.”
Razaq suddenly spoke up in a booming voice. Skelly remembered the big sword and saw that it was gone. He wondered who had taken it as a trophy. Kudrat, perhaps. He tugged at Najeeb, wanting words, but Najeeb shook him off, attentive to the unfolding scene. The judge, if the man indeed called himself that, was now shouting back at Razaq, and for a moment their voices canceled each other out in a blur of noise, the foreign words buzzing past Skelly’s head like bad music. He felt dreamy, weakened, and he stopped writing for a moment to steady his posture, placing a palm on the chilly floor. He wished he had a blanket to pull around himself, and he didn’t like the concerned look on Najeeb’s face whenever he looked Skelly’s way. The man’s quiet and careful translations seemed as much in deference to his fragile condition as to keep from offending Kudrat, who had flinched and frowned at the first of Najeeb’s interludes, but now seemed to tolerate them as one would the buzzing of a fly.
The man with the stick, sitting in the front row, rose again, this time to lash Razaq across the side, the big man fending the blows off with his left hand. He didn’t look proud anymore.
“Razaq said he is a Pashtun, a Durrani of the Lokhali tribe, and that all of them should be ashamed, taking orders from an Arab slave. You saw what happened next.”
Skelly told himself he would write it down later. It was good stuff, but he was suddenly too weary to move. Then the crowd began to stand, bursting into excited chatter. Before Skelly could even get to his feet, men were pushing past him, the smell of sweat and onions and tobacco everywhere. His knees felt creaky, and Najeeb took his arm, pulling him along, the young man’s grip strong.
The voice in his ear said, “Come on. Try to keep moving.”
Skelly’s head swam, then he steadied. He panicked for a moment, thinking he’d dropped his notebook, then realized it was still clutched in his left hand, the pages sweaty.
“I feel awful. Where are we going? Is it over?”
“They are going to be hanged now. All of them. Everyone is going to watch.”
Skelly shuddered, whether from his fever or from the thought of witnessing an execution he wasn’t sure, but he suddenly felt more attuned to the proceedings, and horrified at what he was about to witness.
They were among the last ones out the door, the crowd shoving ahead at an eager pace. In Skelly’s clouded state of mind he couldn’t help but think of store openings and giveaways he’d had to cover in the United States. Free gift to first fifty customers. Free hanging to first fifty Pashtuns. He experienced a wavery déjà vu from the grand opening of a Warren County Wal-Mart, overweight women pushing past him through a bank of doors toward a counter beneath a sign with a yellow smiley face. He stopped, if only to shake the weirdness of the image, Najeeb still trying to tug him along.
“Just give me a second. I’m about to pass out.” Then a rush of panic seized him. “Have you seen the Arabs again?”
“No. Come on.”
Skelly checked again for his notebook. Still there. Still in his left hand, which clutched it like a claw. He thought again of the Wal-Mart, a woman in flowered capri pants nearly knocking him to the ground by the drink machines out front. Cokes for thirty-five cents. He would do some damage for one of those right now, a cold and fizzy swallow of sugar. The thought seemed to clear his head, and he was moving again, out the door into the night, following the crowd by its smell and shuffle.
The gallows was as crude as the courtroom, and the process just as peremptory and raucous. Someone had taken a twenty-foot pole—the kind often used as a checkpoint barrier—and lashed it between two eucalyptus trees, about twelve feet high. A camp lantern hung from one of the trees, and the mob swarmed toward the light like a mating frenzy of night bugs, shouting and raising their arms, sharp cries to Allah and deep, throaty rasps. Razaq and the other four had disappeared into this maelstrom, and Skelly was struggling at the rear, grasping at Najeeb’s sleeve but feeling steadier now that he was back in fresh air. He looked upward. The stars were out, no hint of dawn yet visible in the east. A rope soared into the air up front, tossed as crisply as a lasso, but it struck the pole, then fell to the ground. A second attempt put it across. Then four more ropes followed in succession, spaced evenly down the pole. This was their gallows, then, a crude make-do affair, but it certainly seemed up to the task at hand. The ropes jiggled for a second, charmed snakes all in a row, and Skelly raised on his toes just high enough to see men below fashioning nooses.
“Jesus,” he gasped, causing Najeeb to turn his way, clutching him as if Skelly might be about to fall. “No. I’m all right. I just can’t believe this.”
He looked at Najeeb, whose eyes were wide, glazed in the light of the lantern. These were his people, Skelly suddenly realized, in a way he never had before. What must he think of all this?
The two Razaq men whom Skelly hadn’t recognized were the first to be hanged, and they went in a hurry. Their mouths were open and moving, and you could see the crazed look in their eyes, but the din of the mob was too loud to hear a thing they were saying as men rushed to either side of the tableau for a better view. Najeeb took advantage of the surge to push forward a good fifteen feet or so. Skelly pulled out his notebook, his head still clearing.
“Shouldn’t someone be selling popcorn?” he croaked, the dark joke ringing hollow even to his own ear as the first two bodies twitched into view, eyes bulging, tongues lolling and the baying of the crowd rose to a roar.
He looked again toward Najeeb, who was expressionless now, watching his people swarm and surge around the bodies while two volunteers tugged again at the ropes, as stout as seamen reefing sails in a storm. Then Skelly looked around at the faces of the crowd, their teeth showing as they shouted and bounced, and he realized he’d seen them all before in one place or another across the world, his own country included. At wars and demos and sporting events, calling for blood and victory. These were Skelly’s brothers, too.
Skelly’s fever suddenly blasted him with a wave of cold, a chill that threatened to drop him to his knees, so he grasped Najeeb’s shoulder, nearly letting go of his notebook. Najeeb gripped him around the waist and held on until the moment passed, Skelly nodding to let him know it was all right, the crowd surging around them once again.
Razaq’s brother and son were next, handled clumsily as attendants thrust them toward the ropes. One was stoic, the other shouting, which caused the spectators at the front to spit—lunging motions that produced trailing gobs of brown liquid from the hash and tobacco they’d been chewing. Other men leapt forward in ones and twos to slap at the victims’ heads and kick at their calves, the shouts coming in great bursts now.
Nooses slipped over their heads, then tightened, and the attendants stepped back. The two men then rose next to the previous victims, twitching and kicking as they lurched upward, heave by heave, toward the branches of the eucalyptus. Skelly now recognized Salim as the one on the right, the one who’d been shouting defiantly. He remembered him from Razaq’s house, gracious and quiet, and he felt sick to his stomach, no trick of fever this time. Someone bumped him from behind and he shoved defiantly back, the brief surge of strength departing as suddenly as it had come, so that he nearly fell. Najeeb caught him, pulling him forward. Skelly looked again toward the gallows and saw Salim still kicking, baggy garments fluttering as his knees pumped, face turning purple. One knee, then the other, like a beetle on its back. Then slower. Then nothing, head sagging but still with a face the color of raw meat.
A man standing near the front, the old fellow from the courtroom who had wielded the switch, raised both arms, and the crowd began to go quiet, because now it was time for the main event. The shouting died quickly, and every head turned toward the right, because there he was, the one they’d all come to see.
Razaq merited three escorts to the gallows, not that he was struggling in the least. His mouth was shut, drawn in a prim line. There was a purplish bruise across his left cheek where someone must have struck him on the way out of the courtroom, but if the man was in pain he did a fine job of hiding it. Skelly touched his notebook, then thought better of it. He would have no trouble remembering a single detail of this. The problem would be in forgetting it, and a shudder momentarily gripped him as if his body were already trying.
The last of the crowd’s noises vanished as the noose went round Razaq’s neck. The atmosphere was almost one of reverence now, or perhaps it had finally hit home to everyone exactly what they were doing, killing this man who could claim hundreds, perhaps thousands, of followers. This moment would either make their names or mark them for life.
The tugs now came, with audible grunts and heaves, two men pulling together. Razaq’s answer was a gargling cry, as if he’d at last thought of something to say but had waited too late, the words trapped below the knot. You could actually hear the rustle of his
kameez,
the scuffle of sandals in the crowd, then a lonely cough. Razaq made one feeble kick, then another. Then his face went dark and the light left his eyes. Skelly sighed loudly, Najeeb’s grip tightening around his waist.
The crowd stirred, still transfixed by the body that now swayed gently above them, high toward the leaves. Then Kudrat stepped before them. Where was Bashir for all this, Skelly wondered, feeling sickened and angry. Was the man gloating? Accepting congratulations? Counting up the payment for his services?
Then Skelly spotted him over to the right, nearly as much in the margins as Skelly and Najeeb, almost as if he were trying to melt into the surroundings. He no longer looked either triumphant or eager, and it dawned on Skelly that some strange new dynamic might now be in motion. But as far as Skelly was concerned, Bashir’s place in this tiny moment of history was ensured—he was the blackguard, the betrayer, the Taliban henchman who had delivered Razaq to the mob. The thought seemed finally to stir his professional instincts, and Skelly sensed the story beginning to percolate in his mind—an exotic and horrifying morality play, even though he wasn’t yet sure of some of the roles. Was Sam Hartley really a player? And if so, for whom? To what end? And where were the Arabs he had seen earlier?
The extra thinking took energy, and it cost him. A new blaze of fever took hold, consuming all the questions he’d been mulling. He looked back up at Razaq, the big man’s body now still in the glow of the lantern. It felt as if he were viewing the scene through thick glass, while a weary heaviness settled in his bowels.
Looking left to the fringes of the crowd, there they were once again, he realized. It was the Arabs he’d seen earlier, plus about half a dozen more, seemingly having materialized from nowhere. Perhaps they had arrived in the middle of the proceedings, while his attention had been turned toward the front. Some were on horseback, and now he could smell the animals. Manure and hay, the sweat of their hides. The longer he looked, the more of them he saw, although it was back toward the limits of the lantern’s lighting, so he couldn’t be sure of their numbers. Toward the rear of the scene, fainter still, was a new arrival on horseback, this one tall and lanky, almost abnormally high in the saddle. He wore a green camouflage jacket around a white
kameez.
Salt-and-pepper scraggle of a beard, and the long face everyone knew so well, topped by the white pillbox that he wore in every poster in every bazaar. Skelly shivered, feeling that even his illness had suddenly turned melodramatic. He didn’t dare take out his notebook now, not wanting to be seen scribbling any description of these men, but he furtively squinted toward them, wondering if he could really be seeing what he thought he was. Then the horse turned, and the tall rider drifted into shadow. Skelly looked to Najeeb for confirmation of the sighting, but the young man’s eyes were still locked on Razaq, a forlorn gaze bereft of hope.