The Godless One (5 page)

But he had never been
known as a cook. True, collard greens were not particularly
aromatic, but he never thought they could smell
this
badly.

The gentle knock on his front door
could not have been more inopportune. A genteel visitor would be
repulsed by the smell and conclude Ari was a pig. A less than
genteel visitor might try to kill him.

The tameness of the knocking lent
credence to gentility. It might even be his handler, Deputy Karen
Sylvester (aka ‘Deputy Sandra’) of the U.S. Marshals Service,
although such nicety was probably not listed among her keynote
abilities. It might also, of course, be an 800 pound gorilla
pretending to be a child.

He lowered the burner to simmer and
leaned down to remove the bottom access panel of the stove. It was
in the air duct tubing under the Jenn-Air that he had discovered a
cache of cocaine that had helped him unravel the mystery of who had
murdered the previous owner of the house and his family. The actual
discoverer of the hiding place was a tabby cat who was now upstairs
sleeping on Ari’s mattress—or so he had been when Ari last saw
him.

Putting the Glock in the tubing would
have been impractical, since the fragile aluminum would tear from
the weight. And yet, in spite of its slight dampness, he found the
niche an ideal hiding place. The pistol’s ferritic nitrocarburizing
protected the metal parts from corrosion, and leaving the screws
out of the panel gave him reasonably quick access to the weapon.
There was the risk, of course, that Deputy Sylvester would take it
into her head to search the house for weapons and find the handgun.
If she did the job properly, she would also uncover the assorted
weapons in the gazebo facing the James River. But because CENTCOM
found him to be such a valuable boy (and something of a hero,
having saved American lives while acting as a translator in Iraq),
he would, hopefully, be punished with nothing more than a slap on
the wrist. Unless they traced the guns to something worse than
possession of unlicensed firearms.

Knock-knock-knock
.

The traditional three-knock pattern
hinted at legitimacy. Naturally, this could be playacting, although
the various authorities who had shown up on his doorstep had shown
little variation from interminable banging and would see no need
for discretion.

He took out the gun, closed the panel,
and approached the door.

Here he was presented with one of the
drawbacks of having no furniture: there was no temporary hiding
place for a weapon near the door. Slipping the gun into his
waistband, he peeked out through the sidelight. Unless the person
was very short, there was no one on the stoup. It dawned on him
that he should remove the large urn on the porch and the decorative
mahonia bush that partly blocked his view.

Hoping the visitor had gone away, he
began to move silently back to the kitchen.

Tap-tap-tap
.

The visitor was losing resolution, the
tap being a resignedly weak postscript to the knock. Ari would have
left it at that, except he now had a good idea who it was and why
she was here. Also, if she did not get an answer now, she would
return later. He hurried into the kitchen, placed the gun on top of
the refrigerator, and returned to the foyer.

"Diane," he greeted when he opened the
door and saw the girl on his porch craning her head up to him. She
was startled and a little dismayed. Her eyes widened, as if she had
stumbled upon an oversized ogre.

"How do you know my name?" she asked
warily.

"Mr. Nottoway told me. We saw you on
the street one day while I was visiting him. You saw us,
remember?"

"I was looking for
Marmaduke."

Ari feigned ignorance by raising his
eyebrows.

"My cat."

"Ah."

She risked lowering her eyes to see if
the body attached to that menacing face looked just as ominous. She
gave a little cough.

"Do you really live here?"

"Why, don’t I look like I live
here?"

"You look like a homeless person who
broke in. Are you a burglar?"

Offended, Ari’s scowl deepened. The
girl’s amiable courtesy (‘homeless person’) was freighted with
rudeness that would have been unthinkable in his homeland. The most
flea-bitten Sadr City street urchin might filch your wallet, but he
would never accuse you of looking like a vagrant. Diane, her rumba
dress peeking out from under a wool coat, looked like someone from
a good family, or at least a family with financial
resources.

Suddenly, Diane’s hand went to her
mouth and she laughed, "Mr. Snail, Mr. Snail!"

Hmmm
…? Ari glanced down. To his intense mortification, he saw
that his fly was undone. He had not felt well lately and his
appearance had suffered. Also, it seemed, his sense of propriety.
Growling, he turned away to zip up.

"Eeew, what’s that smell?" The girl
pinched her nose theatrically.

"Can I help you, child? Are you
lost?"

"I only live on the other
side of Mr. Nottoway! How can I be lost?" Her face was
super-charged with childish innocence, making her appear like one
of the most wicked little girls Ari had ever seen. Not that he knew
much about girls. All three of his children had been boys—for
which, had he been so inclined, he would have praised Allah. The
girl continued: "Mr. Nottoway says he thought he saw Marmaduke…my
cat…hanging around your house. Has he come in here? I’ve heard of
cats getting trapped in houses by accident. I’ve heard…well some
people…like from far away…even
eat
them!"

"That is not a cat in my stew pot," Ari
said irately, though he was not as put off by the idea as the girl
obviously was. Sometimes you just had to eat what was
available.

"Can I look around? Maybe you missed
seeing him. He’s yellow, like a rose."

"Roses are not yellow," said Ari
authoritatively.

"They can be. They even wrote a song
about them."

Ari’s protest was brought up short by
an awareness of ignorance. He had only taken red roses to his
fiancé during his Western-style courtship (drawing the ire of his
conservative prospective in-laws). There may have been yellow roses
at the florist but he had been too blinded by love to notice. Or,
perhaps, yellow roses only existed here, in America. It often
seemed Americans had no time for anything else beyond being clever
and inventive.

"Very well," he said to Diane, but not
without annoyance. It was as rude to tell someone that his house
stank as it was to comment on the owner’s own malodorous hygiene.
This would not usually bother Ari who, in the Army and on covert
field operations, had been surrounded by men so pongy they could
make a camel retch. It was the bold rudeness of the child that
nonplussed him. Bad girls in Baghdad got whipped as a matter of
course. Really bad girls got much worse. Diane’s behavior bordered
on the perverse. Ari gave her the same look that had sent
recalcitrant soldiers unquestioningly to their deaths.

She shrugged it off. "Oop-de-doo-doo.
That’s cat poop."

"No it isn’t."

"I know cat poop."

Ari thought this was probably true. If
he conceded this point, however, her argument would be clinched.
Yes, her beloved Marmaduke was in the house. Ari called him Sphinx.
He found it hard to admit that he had grown fond of the filthy
beast, or at least dependent upon him. Whenever Sphinx was not
there to curl up alongside Ari on his mattress, he found it hard to
sleep. But denying that the smell came from cat droppings meant
admitting he ate food that smelled like cat droppings.

Diane was leaning past his legs for a
better look inside the living room.

"You don’t have much
stuff." She cocked her head the other way. "You don’t have
any
stuff. Are you
poor?"

"
Io sono povero in canna
."

"Huh?" she said, looking at him
suspiciously.

"It means, ‘where are your parents and
why aren’t you with them’?"

"They’re divorced. Mom’s at work and
Dad’s wherever."

"Then where is
your…nursemaid?"

"What’s that?"

"Maybe I chose the wrong word.
‘Nanny’?"

"You better learn English if you’re
going to live around here. Everything’s English around
here."

"I’ll bear that in mind," said Ari,
thinking that you couldn’t get more English than ‘nanny’. When
Diane tried to muzzle her way past his legs, he was reminded of a
mastiff he had encountered at the Republican Palace. This
particular dog had been trained to rip out throats and testicles,
talents he could almost imagine belonging in this girl’s
repertoire.

"It’s near here. I can tell. It’s—" She
let out a shout and bolted into the living room.

"
Bint saie’a
!" Ari bellowed, racing
behind her.

"Here!" she exclaimed,
pointing.

"Stop this! You have to leave!" But he
was brought up short when he saw the pile of cat feces against the
baseboard, directly under the air register where Ari had discovered
a murder weapon. Had Sphinx been making a comment on the lurid
history of the house and the untimely demise of his former
masters?

"See!" Diane demanded, as if Ari was
the one with criminal bowels.

"Yes," he said.
But don’t rub my nose in it
….

"But that’s not all," the girl said
with all the concentration of an artist in hot pursuit of
inspiration. Before Ari could stop her, she had skipped into the
short hall between the kitchen and stairs. "Oh!"

Ari raced into the hall to find her
gawking at the kitty litter box.

"Eeew!
Oop-de-doo-doo-
doo
! Don’t you ever scoop?"

"What do you mean?"

"Scoop the kitty poop!"

Ari looked over her head
and noted the numerous dark clumps and soggy swaths of urine. He
sniffed. Yes, what he had thought was dinner was,
instead…
this
.

"No wonder Marmaduke did it on the
floor. You need to clean out the box. Didn’t you know?"

The need to shovel feline excrement out
of the box had never occurred to Ari, although now it seemed
self-evident. Sphinx had spent many of his days and nights
wandering the woods, or visiting Diane, or else the problem would
have become apparent far sooner.

"You have a scoop," the girl continued,
bending down and touching the vented shovel leaning against the
box. "It’s never been used!"

The scoop had come with the litter box.
Ari had thought it was a complimentary kitchen utensil, like the
free prizes that used to come in Cracker Jack boxes. Before he
could speak…before he could come up with something that would not
make him sound like an absolute fool…a yellow phantom streaked down
the stairs.

"Marmaduke!"

"Sphinx!"

They rushed into the living room but
the cat was gone. Familiar with the cat’s primary interests, Ari
outwitted the girl by pointing at the open door, then slipping
through the dining room into the kitchen.

She wasn’t tricked for long. She found
Ari standing next to the refrigerator, holding the cat in his
arms.

"Marmaduke!" she said soulfully. When
the cat began to squirm, Ari tightened his hold. "Stop, you’re
hurting him!"

How often we claim moral
righteousness to suit our ends
, Ari
thought sourly.

"He’s just hungry," he said.

"He wants to come to me!" Diane shot
back. "Get your own cat!"

"But this is his home," Ari tried to
reason as Sphinx pinked his forearm with a single extended claw.
And then he mentally rolled his eyes in dismay. He had touched on a
topic not suitable for children: the murder of children. Joshua and
William Riggins had died upstairs, one by an accidental drug
overdose, the other shot by his own mother, who had in turn been
killed by her father. It had been worthy of Greek tragedy (which
Ari thought also unsuitable for girls like Diane), heavily plotted
with incest and eye-gouging and other unsavory topics, such as the
sacrifice of Iphigenia—a very well-behaved girl.

"I know he used to live here," said
Diane. "But he’s gotten over all that and moved on."

Forget psychic wounds. The deaths of
the Riggins boys had, for Diane, been no more than a psychic
scratch. Had her parents’ divorce toughened her?

"He moved back," he said.
"Obviously."

"But he was with me all last week,"
Diane complained. "You tricked him into coming back here! I bet I
can prove it. Where’s your family? They would tell the
truth."

Now
she
was the one opening wounds. Ari
had lost two boys during the invasion of 2003. The third was with
his mother in Iceland, where she lay blind and mangled after being
wounded by the same CBU that had killed his youngest son. They had
been sent there when Ari came to the U.S. The reason for this was
not quite specious, but not entirely legitimate, either. There were
about 90,000 Iraq-born immigrants now in this country, most of them
of Chaldean and Assyrian descent. They had settled, for the most
part, in and around Chicago, which was the location of the oldest
and largest community of American-born Iraqis. Though carefully
vetted by the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services, a few
bad eggs would inevitably squirm through the net. More likely, a
perfectly honest man would be coerced by threats to his family back
in the homeland. Hunting down a former member of Saddam Hussein’s
Special Security Organization who was now collaborating with the
Americans would have a high priority on any insurgent’s list.
Keeping Rana and Qasim half an ocean away was intended to protect
them from becoming collateral victims in case Ghaith/Ari was
located by the enemy. But the bonus for the Americans was that they
had the perfect whip to keep Ari cooperative. One day, he might be
allowed to join what remained of his family. If.