Escape from Baghdad! (36 page)

The Old Man had been affable the last time, offering them refreshments. He sat like an emperor now, granting an audience. Hassan Salemi's stock had diminished somewhat in recent times. Kinza had burnt down his house and killed his men. His retaliation had netted him a few hostages and little else. No Kinza, no professor,
no watch
. What was the world coming to when any random street tough could come and rough up a Sadr parliamentarian candidate in Shulla? They were at the denial stage now. No mention was to be made of the name Kinza ever.

“So, Salemi,” he said. “I cannot say this meeting brings me any great pleasure.”

“You sent us into a trap, Old Man.”

“A trap? Of what? Women and servants? Mad librarians?” Avicenna laughed. “Your reputation has been exaggerated indeed.”

“There were djinns there, Old Man,” Salemi's voice was flat. Yakin could see a little muscle jumping in the side of his neck. The lunatic
was on the verge of doing something stupid. “The demons made of smokeless fire.”

Yakin tried to maneuver himself away from his master, but an enormously brutish looking man with a shotgun glared at him. He looked like a torturer. They said he was Mukhabarat and that the Old Man was Mukhabarat through and through. Just that word alone was enough to make most people piss their pants. Yakin slumped. He was so tired he wanted to lie down on the floor and go to sleep.

“Djinns were there? Floating around? Possessing the furniture perhaps?”

“No,” Hassan Salemi said. “They were in jars. Great earthenware jars stoppered with red wax, which were cold to the touch and covered with sediments from the ocean. Do you think me stupid, Old Man? There was a room full of sealed jars!”

“Jars, you say?” Avicenna leant forward. “Now you interest me. Have you brought them?”

“My men shot them,” Hassan Salemi said.

“Oh dear.”

“Everything exploded then.”

“Yes,” Avicenna said bitterly. “If one is stupid enough to shoot up a room full of djinns, then anything might happen. I trust that you searched the wreckage of the house?”

“What house?” Salemi laughed bitterly. “The entire block was destroyed. Cluster bombed, more like. I have lost all my men but four.”

“So the witch Davala held the djinns of Solomon, it seems,” Avicenna said to the lady beside him. “I wonder why she never unleashed them. Is she dead at least?”

“I don't know about the old witch,” Hassan Salemi said. “But you spoke of three women there. I have brought you two of them.”

“Have you now?” Avicenna said. “Well, that is good. Very good. I warned you that the women were dangerous. Still, you haven't done too badly.”

“What now then?”

“Now we must prepare. Imam, I must open your eyes. You have stumbled unfortunately into a war long in the making. It is, I believe, reaching a watershed moment,” Avicenna said. “Our enemies have never been weaker. You have broken the witches' power. The cursed Druze is addled and alone. The watch is in the hands of a petty psychotic who lacks the intelligence to even know its value. We are in a position, imam, to sweep the board. You will be in at the death, imam. In the end, I will restore you to your former puissance and fearsome reputation.”

Yakin groaned. Big words aside, the Old Man was ready to fuck them all over again.

Hoffman had crafted a diabolical escape plan. It would end with Behruse incapacitated, the Dog Boy out of commission, and Sabeen completely in his power and lovingly grateful to him for saving her life. The plan involved rope, a belt, Scotch tape, nails, a Swiss army knife—a plan of such genius that it could not help but succeed through sheer chutzpah alone.

All he needed to do was kill time now. It occurred to him that Behruse was taking overly long to visit him this time. Normally the fat man came every three days to change the water, food, and slop buckets. It was now the fourth day. Hoffman wasn't hungry or thirsty because he had appropriated Dog Boy's rations. Dog Boy was on hunger strike, refusing any food and only drinking a third of his portion. Hoffman had tried to reason with him, but Dog Boy wasn't having any of it.

He wanted his own cell back and a return to the old administration. In his more lucid moments, he made a list of demands that included immediate reinstatement of Dr. Sawad, single cells for every prisoner, and at least one electro-therapy a week to keep the juices flowing. Hoffman spent his idle time trying to train Dog Boy to use the slop bucket properly and dreaming about taking revenge on Sabeen,
which would involve her being wrested from her evil grandfather and somehow converted into his caring, devoted follower, perhaps a second lieutenant to replace Tommy.

Her casual betrayal had in fact enflamed his passion from mere love to something transcendental. He craved physical contact with her, was sure he could turn her! He wrote poetry about her (not rhyming) and recited these verses to Dog Boy, taking care to ensure that Dog Boy understood clearly that the poetry was not meant for him, and he should not take it as any sign of encouragement. By the fifth day, he was getting a bit worried. Behruse still hadn't arrived. It was possible that something had happened to the fat man.

By the sixth day, he was hungry and thirsty and starting to rethink his strategy. He had almost despaired when loud noises at the door woke him from lethargy. There was a small explosion, the wood splintered out, cutting him in some places and setting off Dog Boy into fairly weak paroxysms (he was near dead from the hunger strike).

When Hoffman managed to open his eyes, he saw in front of him a most fearsome old woman holding a gnarled walking stick and an ancient six-chambered revolver, still smoking. Her face was singed: eyebrows gone, the wispy hair on her head burnt off in patches. She had lost her dentures and so spoke with a lisp, a single tooth sticking up visibly like a decrepit building.

“You're welcome, soldier,” said Mother Davala.

“What? Er, you're not Behruse.”

“No.”

Hoffman scratched his head. “Well could you fix up the door again?”

“You want to stay in your cell?”

“It's just that I had this great plan for him.”

“He's left you for dead, soldier,” Mother Davala said. “You and your men.”

“Dead?”

“All of them. Butchered in the street like dogs. The shell of your big car lies in a fronted garage in Shulla.”

Hoffman shut his eyes. “I was afraid of that.” He looked ready to cry.

“So rise up now, soldier,” Mother Davala said. “Throw off this sheep's clothing and show yourself true. Like you, my children lie slaughtered, my sisters taken, my house razed to the ground. Yet we still stand. It is time to strike back at the betra—”

“Wait a minute. You want me to kill Behruse and Sabeen?”

“Of cou—”

“Are you crazy? I don't want to kill them,” Hoffman said. “I love Sabeen. I want to marry her.”

“Pardon me, boy?” “Yeah, I love that girl,” Hoffman said, “There's this little snoring sound she makes when she's napping in the car.”

“You are serious?” Mother Davala looked stunned.

“Yeah, it's the cutest thing.”

“She left you for dead and killed all your men,” Mother Davala said.

“Sure, we're gonna have to talk about that,” Hoffman said, “and Behruse is gonna get fixed. Don't get me wrong. Plus he might have to get with Dog Boy here. But—”

“Do you know who these people are?” Mother Davala demanded.

“Sure, this Avi character is like a thousand years old,” Hoffman said, “and he's been looking for this Lion dude, some kind of old grudge or something. It's like Battle of the Titans, man. Oh, and they want the watch that the professor's got. It has some kind of immortal life secret thing in it. Yeah, we gotta stop Avi for sure. Can't have him going around living forever and shit. I mean, he'd like take over the world or something. But Sab's not like that. I mean, she's really pretty and even when she was like thinking about killing me, she just couldn't do it. I mean, there's a heart underneath all that.”

“I don't believe this.”

“Hey, when we get out of here, can you take me to a store? I wanna buy some flowers.”

For the first time in almost six hundred years, Mother Davala was literally bereft of speech.

“I'll kill them all,” Kinza said. “Salemi and every man living who was in the room when they cut Xervish. Every man who burnt down that house. And then I'm going to start killing old men. I'll kill every old man in Shulla, every old man in Baghdad if I have to. If Hoffman is dead, you can add that to my account too. I'm not running anymore.”

And then he sat back, exhausted. His face was a pasty gray, eyes rimmed with fever, the skin taut over his bones, hands trembling as he tried to drink his broth. There was nothing left in this thin, broken man. His words were laughable. Yet whenever he looked at Kinza, Dagr saw the bodies of dead men piled up in grenade-charred rooms, saw the fire from the awful burning of Salemi's house. He smelled the blood and heard the Makarovs barking. And so he said nothing and prayed for God's forgiveness.

“It is not easy to kill the Old Man,” Afzal Taha said. “It will not be easy to even
get
to him. The entire neighborhood is designed to hide and protect him. There will be Mukhabarat, mercenaries, random street thugs who don't even know whom they are working for. And Salemi took hostages from the safehouse, more friends of yours, I think.”

“Salemi thought he was safe too,” Kinza said, in a hoarse whisper. “Everyone thinks they are safe.”

“And whom can we count on?” Afzal Taha asked. “You three are half dead, even worse off than me. I'm beginning to have grave doubts.”

“You think that will stop him?” Hamid laughed bitterly. “You think logic operates anywhere in this entire fucking circus?”

“You were free to leave a long time ago,” Kinza said.

“Leave? Leave? Fuck you, Kinza. I've been shot thirteen times since you fuckers took me in. Thirteen times. I've lost two fingers, four
pints of blood, and just recently I've got two cracked ribs, never mind the cuts, bruises, and internal organ damage—”

“What the hell are you complaining about? You're walking around, aren't you?”

“The entire fucking Republican Guard didn't see this much fighting during the war,” Hamid said. “The entire fucking fedayeen didn't go so far out of their way to get killed.”

“You know, Hamid, for a torturer, you're getting damned squeamish,” Kinza said, “plus you weren't exactly stellar back there.”

“The guy had a heart condition,” Hamid said. “He was two months from dying. You can't expect me to…aw fuck it. We should get some vests.”

“What?” Dagr asked, surprised out of his comatose state.

“Vests,” Hamid said. “You know, the suicide bomber ones with the detonators.”

“You want to wear a bomber vest to a gunfight?”

“It's perfectly safe,” Hamid said. “They don't blow up without the detonator.”

“Hmm, vests wouldn't be bad,” Kinza said, leaning forward, exhaustion apparently forgotten. “We can always bluff with them, and if everything fails, we can just blow it all up.”