Escape from Baghdad! (18 page)

“I don't understand.”

“I am going to publish the case study,” Dr. Nur said. “A joint work, with both our names.”

“What? You'd rather we didn't find your father's killers?”

“Look, my father was a genius, and this case study was the culmination of his best work,” Dr. Nur said. “It's my inheritance. I intend
to cash in on it. It will make me famous. I might even get some sort of prize.”

“You do understand, that people killed him to keep him silent?” Sabeen asked. “We need to remove these things from you for your own safety.”

“Yes, well, I doubt these thugs read medical journals,” Dr. Nur said. “Ours is a rarified world of academics, dear. You all wouldn't even understand half of the language being used. I'll just make some cosmetic changes to protect names and identities; it's done all the time in psychiatric case studies.”

“All the same, we need the papers,” Sabeen said. “Look, I'll write out a full receipt on my legal pad. You can reclaim them after the investigation is over.”

Dr. Nur said. “Yes, fine, I'll show you what I have. But I want it in writing that you will return everything undamaged. No one knows I have them, and they won't know until I'm ready to publish. And if you find the remainder of his papers, I need your word in writing that I will have access to them first and that eventually they will be returned to me as part of his estate.”

“Yes, fine,” Sabeen said. She wrote out a contract on her legal pad.

“Wait here then,” Dr. Nur said. “And don't touch anything.”

She returned moments later struggling under the weight of a black Samsonite briefcase. She cracked it open and stroked the papers lovingly, like a miser polishing her horde. Grudgingly, she turned the case around. The briefcase was stuffed with a cacophony of papers, sealed, yellowed, typed, handwritten, some documents heavily scored with notes, many bound loosely together with yarn, and a few ancient-looking texts laminated in plastic to hold them together. Each document had been lovingly tagged with markers, numbered, and there were letters interspersed with them, handwritten in Sawad's script, presumably the silent conversation he had been having with his daughter in the days preceding his death.

“Like I said, dear, you probably won't understand half of it.”

“Yeah, we're stupid, doctor,” Hoffman leapt to his feet, pushed up by a poisoned anxiety. “Can you kinda give us the gist of it?”

“Gist of it?”

“Like give us the cliff notes version. The summary,” Hoffman said. “What's this all about?”

Hoffman's presence, like a pointlessly cute kitten, seemed to soothe the woman somehow. Her gaze softened and she addressed him directly: “The patient Afzal Taha was one of the special cases of the restricted ward. He had been placed in absolute isolation by my father's predecessor. That itself was—is—unusual in a mental institute.”

“OK,” he said gently. He glanced at Sabeen and Behruse, motioning them to be still.

“He had attacked the security guards several times. Two of the men assaulted had actually died, although that was not common knowledge in the ward. The old administrator had been using isolation and electric shock treatments on Taha. The man had just been a stupid thug, not a scientist like my father. He didn't study the results on Taha nor did he notice anything unusual. Because he was in isolation for almost five years, none of the staff knew much about him either.”

“So what did your father find out?”

“Well, first of all, that Taha had already been partially lobotomized earlier,” Dr. Nur said. “Although there was no record of it at the Al-Rashid. The scars were there, and the kind of incision made indicated a method that is now out of date.” She tittered. “I mean, dear, out of date in circles where lobotomy is still practiced, of course.”

“Carry on.”

“My father was the first one who had actually bothered doing a physical examination of all the patients, including the violent ones,” Dr. Nur said. “Like I said, he was a real scientist. The lobotomy greatly intrigued him. He had been doing research along those lines earlier, I know, before I had been born. Anyway, he found some other anomalies too. For example, Taha's physical strength. He could—and had—torn through the normal shackles on several occasions. These were
the times he had killed his guards, of course. The old administrator kept Taha sedated, and even then, the sedations were far too strong for a man: enough to knock out a horse, in fact. His was normally tied to a bed with heavy iron chains around arms and legs, as well as the straight jacket.”

“A scary guy,” Hoffman said.

“Many mental patients are prone to violence,” Dr. Nur said. “But Taha actually seemed to want to escape, to retain a sense of purpose, if you will, despite the long period of institutionalization and the drugs. This was unusual.”

“What else?”

“Taha's resistance to electric shock was the highest my father had ever seen in any human. I remember the day that he did his final tests. He was so excited, giddy like a school boy. It apparently took a hippo-sized dose to finally put Taha down. My father thought he must have built resistance to shock therapy over time, perhaps. It was very unusual.”

“Go on, please, doctor, this is really helpful,” Hoffman said gently, brushing at a bead of sweat he had not noticed before, dangling from his nose.

“My father took Taha off the tranquilizers. He started interviewing Taha. He was astonished. The man was extremely lucid and intelligent at some points and then completely hallucinating later. My father thought it was auditory command hallucinations: where the patient believes some external force is commanding him to act in a certain way. These are people who see angels or demons or whatever and are compelled by these visions to act out.”

“What did Taha see, doctor?”

“That's the thing I don't know. My father did not share everything with me,” Dr. Nur said. “Taha was paranoid. He never spoke about his visions, even under stress. It is unusual. Normally in these cases it is fairly simple to get an idea of what the patient is seeing. My father thought at one point that these visions must be the key to Taha's
mystery. He started looking at old files, talking to old patients, anything to find out about the man's past.”

“And what did he find then?” The bead of sweat was back, and he swiped again.

“The most unusual thing of all,” Dr. Nur said. “He found records of Taha going back, and back, before the restricted ward had even been set up. He found police records years ago of violent crimes committed by Taha, prison records, different doctors testing him, treating him.”

“So, he's a psycho with a long history.”

“You don't understand,” Dr. Nur said. “According to the oldest credible record, Afzal Taha is over a hundred years old.”

Hoffman blinked at her and then at Sabeen and Behruse who had sat there listening to what had become an intimate exchange. “This poison is really something else,” he said finally. “You got anything to make my nose stop sweating, doctor?”

16: THE BELLY OF THE BEAST

D
AGR TURNED THE WATCH OVER AND OVER IN HIS HAND, AS HE
had a hundred times before. His fingers had become attuned to the nuances of its surface, its peculiar weightiness. It was heavier than other watches, although Dagr assumed that was because all of his previous watches had been cheap and strictly functional. Kinza had once told him that mechanical watches were heavier, as they relied on actual moving parts, a technology wholly removed from the quartz movements of the cheap Japanese products he had been used to.

Kinza paced in front, with a seething impatience that had been wearing their nerves thin for days. The man had gone silent, but Dagr knew enough to sense the rage boiling close to the surface, and to fear it. Days had passed in discussion of Xervish's offer, slim hopes at first, burgeoning later into something desperate, when the actual contractor had come for a midnight meeting.

Xervish had indeed delivered. The meeting had been brief but convincing, even for Hamid's paranoia. The contractor was middle American, nothing more than a glorified truck driver, earning hazard pay by a peculiar permutation of fortune, hailing from a small town in some state called Idaho, a man so far removed from war that he seemed to carry about him a bubble of disbelief.

He had with him papers, permits, contracts, documentation beyond dispute, and an open friendliness, a desire to repay a debt to Xervish, a clearing of some unknown slate, and with their own assurances of harmlessness, a willingness to bend the rules of war. Dagr had been convinced that the offer was genuine. Hamid, who suspected traps, had run his own interrogation and then grasped at this escape route.

He now whispered in Kinza's ear like some dark crow, day and night stalking him, urging haste, extolling the virtues of moving fast, of arriving at a place that Sunnis considered a fort, where old guard influence still held sway, of connecting once again with men Hamid considered allies, far from Shi'a madness, of Mosul, Mosul, Mosul. Where he had once urged caution, he now urged immediate action.

Still Kinza refused to give him a date. Hamid grew desperate, thinking that perhaps Kinza considered leaving him behind and redoubled his efforts. Dagr knew, however, that it was not so much which two would escape that vexed Kinza. It was the act of running that hurt him, almost physically rooting him down. Hassan Salemi had called him out, put a price on his head, hunted him now like a dog, and Kinza's instinct was to strike back at his enemy, to leave the cover of this house and hit out on the street, into the heart of Shi'a power, and die perhaps.

Either way, Dagr reflected, his own chances were not good. This fact did not disturb him much. Kinza would decide sooner or later, and then the matter would be over. He rose finally, put the watch in his pocket. The feel of it was alluring, a heavy gold nugget in his hand and the slight whirring vibrations it made sometimes, as if the broken mechanism was on the verge of working.

“Where are you going?” Kinza asked.

“Library,” Dagr said.
Anything is better than watching you grind your teeth.

“How goes the mystery of the watch?” Kinza asked. “Found anything yet?”

“I took the casing off yesterday,” Dagr said. “The insides are not normal. We're going to really take it apart today.” He paused at the door. “You want to come? Might take your mind off…”

“Down there?” Kinza seemed to consider the rabbit warren of the library as some part of the underworld.

“Mikhail is very interested in mechanical objects.”

“I don't think he likes me,” Kinza said.

“He's afraid of you perhaps,” Dagr said. “It took me a few meetings to befriend him. He loves the watch, though, so I don't think he'll mind.”

“Alright then, but only for a little while.”

“No pacing around though. Don't make him any more nervous with your jumpiness.”

“I'm not jumpy.”

“Sure.”

“Really, I'm calm.”

“You've decided then?” Dagr asked.

“I didn't say that.”

The librarian awaited them eagerly behind a mountain of books he had gathered: old watch catalogues, extracts on gears and screws, mechanical principles, tomes on the history of watchcraft, trade books, and encyclopedias on mechanical engineering, among many others of dubious use. Some of these were ancient, literally disintegrating at first touch.

Mikhail had raided the volumes of discarded luggage to good effect. There were tweezers, clippers, a magnifying glass, and nail files from some beauty's valise. A physician's case had yielded small hammers, scalpels, needles, clamps, and other surgical tools. A pocket geometry set carried protractors, measuring rulers, and a compass. Then there were toolkits of various provenance, where minute screwdrivers, vises, calipers, tongs, and more had been unearthed.

Mikhail was thrown off by Kinza and hesitated for long moments, unsure of what to do, but the latter was on his best behavior and offered a smile between sips of tea and sat quite still with his hands visible. For all that, he still looked like a wolf that had wandered into the parlor. Refreshments dealt with, they got to the matter at hand.

Dagr fitted the watch face down on the tabletop clamp. He made small jabs at the metal case, at strategic places, small measured blows that in the right sequence caused the back of the case to spring loose. This they had learned by accident.

Inside was the same nightmare of unfamiliarity, bizarre despite hours spent pouring over watch diagrams. There was a spring, attached to the winding mechanism. That much was clear. The purpose of everything else was opaque.

“See the spring,” Dagr peered through his handheld microscope. They each had one, different colors and sizes. His one was horn rimmed and with the best resolution since he was doing the actual work. “I don't understand what it's connected to. The gears are all wrong. Maybe they used to do it differently back then?”

“Not really,” Kinza said. “The basic watch mechanism has been more or less unchanged from the first Breguets.”