Florence of Arabia (26 page)

There was, meanwhile, yet another wave of
anti-
French
sentiment in the United States.
French
maitr
e d's were assaulted by gangs of
thugs, champagne was poured into gutters, baguettes were angrily torn in two and hurled across restaurants. Peugeots were splattered with vegetables and their windshield wipers bent. The
French
embassy in Washington, once the scene of glittering soirees, was attacked by a mob of evangelical Christians hurling (innocent) frogs. One member of Congress introduced a bill calling for exhuming and repatriating the remains of American soldiers buried in Normandy. "Digging Up Private Ryan."

The cries of "Who lost
Matar
?" grew more clamorous, despite polls showing that for two thirds of the American people, the more relevant question was "Where exactly
is
Matar?" However, when informed by the pollsters that "perfidious Frogs" and "filthy Wasabis" had taken over the country in order to "make America look bad" and "drive up the price of oil," Americans by a distinct majority responded that their government must do "something" about i
t, as long as it wouldn't cost t
oo much and could be done from thirty
-five
thousand feet. There was little appetite at this point for another Pentagon "boots on the ground" intervention in the region.

Such, at any rate, was the situation two weeks after Florence left Mr. Dera'a's appliance store carrying her shopping bags of electronics.

Renard and George
were back in Washington following their watery exfiltration off Blenheim Beach. The submarine had been smaller than advertised, and its medical officer had had to sedate the claustrophic George with a hypodermic before they could get him down the hatch. The submarine transferred th
em to an aircraft carrier. They
were flown off the carrier—along with crew mail and the corpse of a despondent, homesick sailor who had committed suicide by drinking the hydraulic fluid of an F
-14
—to Bahrain, and from there by commercial aviation to Rome, and from there on to Washington, where they arrived to find that all traces of their mission had been deleted, as if by a single stroke on some master keyboard.

The Alexandria safe house that had been their staging area was now occupied by a middle-aged couple who insisted that they had bought the house on the Internet six months before, and who didn't seem disposed to argue the point with the two forlorn-looking men on their doorstep. George and Rick felt like sailors who come across a ship in the middle of the ocean, eerily empty of human presence but for cups of still-warm coffee and cigarettes burning in the ashtray.

G
eorge telephoned his old desk at the State Depart
ment and got through to Duckett’
s deputy, who said he was under the impression that George had been transferred to Guatemala City. They didn't seem to care whether George came back to the Near East desk. George found himself in a bureaucratic Sargasso Sea.

When he
and Rick went separately to get
money from their ATMs.
T
hey each found in his checking account the inexpli
cable but not unwelcome sum of $
I million. It could have had only one source: the now vanished Uncle Sam. This was, evidently, their severance pay. The sudden largesse left them confused, all the more so when, a few days later, the sum disappeared from their account
s only to reappear the next day,
doubled. They debated the mean
ing of this now-you-see-it-now-y
ou-don't deposit and concluded that it was a message: Keep quiet, or all this money will go away for good. Behave, and it might double.

The discovery that they were millionaires twice over left them temporarily elated, then profoundly depressed, for by now the cataclysmic events in Matar had played on their television screens, and their thoughts were not on how to spend this munificence but on what had happened to Florence.

They were sitting glumly in Rick's apartment off Dupont Circle one evening, eating Chinese takeout and drinking Alsatian beer and watching a television news program in which several Middle Eastern experts, each beamed in from a different city, were screaming at one another about the need to remain calm, when the host interrupted his guests to say that the network's Manama bureau had received a videotape, apparently taken inside Matar. Ina
smuch as the country had been se
aled off from outside m
edia by order of the emir Maliq,
the announcer was excited by what was about to be shown.

Rick and George put down their Kung Pao chicken and inte
ntly watched Rick's spiffv new fifty-f
ive-inch plasma-screen home-entertainment system. Rick thought they might as well spend some of the money, to the dismay of a censorious George, who had not yet decided on the moral propriety of spending the mysterious deposits. Their maxillofacial muscles gaped as a grainy simulacrum of Florence came on-screen, accompanied by scratchy but quite audible sound.

"I speak from inside occupied
Matar
. An iron veil has descended upo
n the country. The sheika Laila,
widow of the late emir, is being held prisoner by the usurper Maliq and
his Wasabi and French puppetmasters. Women are being
tortured and executed. But their spirit is unbroken. They cry out to the civilized nations of the world. Do not allow the forces of corrupted Islam, which make a mockery of a great religion and of its fou
nder, the prophet Mohammed. They
cry out to you: freedom! freedom! freedom!"

The announcer said that not much was known about the person on the videotape, other than that she had apparently
once worked in some capacity at
TV
Matar
,
the formerly pro-women's-rights satellite network. It was thought that she might be an American citizen, a fact that, he pointed out. "could complicate the situation as far as the United States government is concerned."

CHAPTER
TWENTY-FIVE

T
he scaffold h
ad been erected in t
he center of the mall over a fountain so
that the spectators could see.

Florence maneuvered her way as close as she could to the platform without drawing attention. She had contrived a shoulder harness for the video camera, which was tucked under her left arm. A small hole cut in the
ab
aaya
provided an aperture for the lens. There are advantages to a system that forces its citizens to cover themselves from head to toe.

At each corner of the platform stood a
mukfellah. M
ukfelleen
had been trucked into
Matar
from W
asabia in great numbers, to enforce the religious codes. They were like secret police anywhere: they liked a bit of bowing and scraping. When Florence—accompanied by the required male escort—passed one in the street, if the
mukfellah
was looking especially sour, she would bow and say. "God be praised, broth
er, for your presence here!" H
er male escort, his Western features obscured
by
gutra
and large sunglasses, would lug at her and say, "Come along, sister, do not disturb these well beloved of Allah al their blessed labors." To reinforce the illusion that she was just another Matari wife. Florence carried a wicker basket full of fruit and other fresh items from the market. Underneath the produce was a nine-millimeter pistol, and the more she saw of the
mukfellee
n
and their blessed labors, she more she yearned to use it on them. Whatever misgivings she may have
had about Bobby killing Maliq's
man back in the garage were gone now. Her weeks in occupied
Matar
had taught her how to hate.

The crowd stirred. The captain of the detail pushed his way through to the scaffold, four
mu
kfelleen
stood at the corners of the platform. They called for silence and respect.

The captain climbed the steps of the platform and read the sentence. The w
oman, one Ardeesha,
had been caught not only driving a car but trying to escape
Matar
. The imam Maliq. blessings be upon him and his holy work, had compassionately commuted the sentence from death to one hundred lashes. Allah is merciful.

Ardeesha was brou
ght out,
trembling and whimpering and begging for mercy. She was tied down. The
mu
k
brought the four-foot-long rattan cane down again and again on the writhing black shape on the platform
. She screamed throughout the fir
st thirty blows and then fell silent. The women closest to the platform began to cry and beg for mercy. The whole business took about ten minutes.

When it was over, the
mukfcllee
n
captain who had read the sentence praised the imam's compassion, and the order was given for the crowd to dispe
rse. Most
of the audience's male escorts had
been smoking or having coffee at
Starbucks. They gathered up their charges and left. Some decided to remain and do some shopping. The mall's shopkeepers look
advantage of the Punishment Day
crowds and announced sales. Florence's male
escort collected her. and toget
her they left. As they walked past the
mu
kfelleen
guard al the mall's entrance, her escort did not compliment him on his blessed labors.

They g
ot into their car and drove off
in silence. Florence
pressed
the
play
button and watched to make sure
she had gotten it on tape. Bobby
listened to the sound of the cane blows coining from the c
amera's speaker and said quietly
, "Turn it off."

Amo-Amas teemed with Wasabi Friendship Troops. Maliq had also requested
F
rench soldiers, but Paris, already having enough to explain at the Unite
d Nations, demurred: France did,
however, dispatch hu
ndreds of advisers to help with
infrastructure.
Thousands of Mataris had fled (mostly for the South of Fr
ance), producing the usual brain drain.

Bobby and Florence drove north, off the main roads. Traffic slowed to a crawl. Bobby leaned his head out the window and saw police vehicles ten cars ahead. Roadblocks and identity checks had become the norm. Florence removed the tape from the video camera hidden underneath her
abaaya
and substituted a tape containing images of children playing on the beach. Were the camera confiscated, the images would be innocent.

The basket of fruit was between them. They edged forward toward the police.

"God be praised." Bobby
said to the policeman, who leaned in and demanded his and his wife's papers. Bobby's Arabic was without accent and he had darkened his skin with cosmetics. He looked as Matari as the next man.

'T
he soldier did not return the greeting. He examined their papers
, flipping through the pages of
t
he Matari passports. "Where are you going?"

"Home, with your permission."

The policeman lingered over Florence's passport. "Wife?"

"I've got three. But th
is is the good-looking one. so I
took her to see the punishment at the mall. So she won't get ideas. A good example our imam sets."

The policeman looked closer at Florence, who sat staring straight ahead. "What's
in the basket?"

"Figs from the Mashulf Valley." Bobby held the basket to the polic
eman. "H
ave one. as a token of our thanks for protecting us from our enemies. They're delicious."

T
he policeman reached for the basket's handle.

"Brother, please." Bobby
grinned. "They're for the children's supper." He moved his left foot, with its ankle holster, within reach.

The policeman hesitated, h
e picked the
plumpest figs
off the top and gave the basket back and waved the car forward. "Go," he said.

"And Allah be with you." Bobby said. He edged forward and muttered. "Asshole."

There were no more roadblocks, and half an hour later, they reached their drab concrete house in the Sherala district, one of Amo-Amas's poorer neighborhoods, a place of broken glass and spiked walls, starving dogs and Filipino "guest" workers who had been granted permission by their Matari employers to live outside the home. There was an enclosure for the car.

Inside. Florence made duplicates
of the videotape. She took off
the hated
aba
aya.
B
obby aimed the camera at her.