The Prince of Bagram Prison (31 page)

“No one, sister,” Asiya assured her. “We will tell no one.”

Sitting in the courtyard of Abdul Moussaoui's villa just south of the Parc de la Ligue Arabe, drinking fresh mint tea and listening to the sound of water in the basalt fountain and the gentle laughter of the home's unseen female inhabitants, Harry could scarcely imagine the existence of anything beyond the windowless walls. That was the point of such architecture, of course: to separate the luxuries of civilization from the arid outer world, to protect the family and its guests. But Harry had never been entirely comfortable with the opacity of Arab life. He knew that what happened behind the locked doors of these homes was not always pleasant, and that evil could be sheltered as easily as good.

How many had disappeared from this very spot, leaving only the dregs of their tea behind, how many had heard the soothing gurgle of the fountain and mistakenly thought it signaled their reprieve, Harry could only guess. But he was not naïve enough to be fooled by Moussaoui's genial smile and Hermès slippers into thinking him untainted by the horrors of the previous regime.

Once, Harry remembered, after a South African arms dealer they'd been working with had shorted them on a shipment, Moussaoui had the man's Moroccan lover picked up by the secret police and tortured to death. Harry had seen the pictures of the girl—Moussaoui made sure everyone got a look—and it was her face he was thinking of, the eyes swollen shut, the nose flattened to one side, the left cheek stippled with four small bruises, one for each knuckle, as he watched Moussaoui perform the ritual of lighting a fresh Cohiba.

“I'm telling you this as a friend,” Moussaoui said, once the cigar was burning to his satisfaction. “People know you are here. I received a call from Pete Janson this morning. He said you'd be coming to see me.”

Morrow, Harry thought. After all these years, Janson was still doing his dirty work. He couldn't help wondering if Mustafa the son had gotten a similar call. Rafa's name would have cropped up on the same short list as Moussaoui's.

There was a noise on one of the upper balconies, and Harry glanced up to see an Asian woman in maid's attire carrying a stack of folded linens.

Moussaoui chuckled. “It's the life of a pasha, no? Even I am embarrassed sometimes.”

Harry took a sip of his tea, wishing desperately that it was vodka. “The boy,” he prompted Moussaoui. “We were talking about the boy.”

“Yes. The boy.” Moussaoui leaned back in his chair and sucked appreciatively on his cigar, producing a large and aromatic cloud of smoke. “There were not as many cases like this as you would imagine. I remember only two or three in my time. Though undoubtedly there were others I was not aware of. When did you say he was born?”

“Nineteen eighty-three,” Harry said, quoting the boy's file. “Give or take a year.”

“You're not going to make this easy for me, are you?” Moussaoui observed.

Harry tried to smile. Dirty hands all around, he reminded himself. That girl's death on his conscience as surely as if it was his fist that had broken her nose.

“I'll make some phone calls,” Moussaoui said. “Discreetly, of course. See if I can turn anything up. It shouldn't take more than a few hours. You can call me later this afternoon.” He produced a business card from a pocket with a phone number printed in small black type, then rose and gestured to the way out. “My driver can take you somewhere?”

Harry contemplated the offer.

“Yes,” he told Moussaoui at last. “I would like to see the Blue Mosque.”

“A
N HOUR
,
TWO AT MOST
,” Harry had told Kat when he'd dropped her off at the gate of the medina. He hadn't volunteered where he was going and she hadn't asked. There was a kind of inviolable sadness about the man that she couldn't breach. All his failings on his sleeve.

Inside the medina, the few befuddled tourists who hadn't yet been picked up by guides moved cautiously forward past souvenir stalls and spice shops, shadowed by the Al-Djemma Mosque's minaret. Up on the flat rooftops a garden of rust-pocked satellite dishes bloomed, their faces turning in unison, like morning glories to the sun. Farther down the lane, above the poultry merchant's cages and the limp and flightless bodies of the dead, a Coca-Cola billboard loomed in red and white, the script familiar even in Arabic.

Kat paused briefly outside a clothing shop on the Rue Centrale, shuddering at the racks of loose-fitting dresses visible from the street, the bright colors and fabrics struggling to lend an air of individuality where none was possible. Inside, a woman in a full chador, her hands in black gloves, her face hidden behind a
niqab,
was browsing through a rack of children's clothing, while a girl of three or four tagged along behind.

Mother and child, Kat thought, watching the pair with horror, the woman gliding through the shop, silent and substanceless as a ghost. The girl stopped to do a ballerina's twirl and her hair swung dark and lush against her back.

It seemed foolish to be afraid of this woman, and yet Kat was, not of her necessarily but of what she represented. There was something perverse in such utter abandon of self, in allowing one's identity to be consumed entirely, as Kat's mother had allowed herself to be. Offering herself, piece by piece.

The woman looked up from her shopping then, and Kat, feeling herself caught, turned quickly from the window and hurried along the street.

It was almost noon when Kat finally returned to the hotel. Nearly time for
Asr,
she thought, already measuring the day in prayers instead of hours, anticipating the muezzin's call. She let herself in the front door and climbed the narrow steps to the second floor.

When Kat opened the door to their room, Jamal was sitting by the window, staring down at the lane below. His eyes, when he swung his head toward the door, were wide with panic, his face ashen.

“It's okay, Jamal,” she told him gently, forcing a reassuring smile. “It's just me.” Then, noticing the grease-stained paper bag on the table, she winced. “You went out?”

Jamal nodded.

“Did something happen?” She locked the door behind her and stepped forward. “What happened, Jamal?”

“Nothing,” he insisted. But his face, flushed, said otherwise.

A child, Kat thought, a child who'd been caught doing something he knew he shouldn't. “It's okay, Jamal,” she repeated. “I'm sure it's okay.”

But he was crying.

Kat reached out her hand and laid it on his shoulder. It was, she realized, the first time she had touched the boy. Physical contact had been strictly forbidden at Bagram, such a gesture entirely unthinkable.

His body beneath her fingers was even frailer than she had expected, his bones grazing the skin, brittle as spun glass.

He took a deep breath and shuddered, then turned his face up to hers. “I was hungry,” he said.

“K
URTZ
?
” Janson's voice on the phone was clipped and nasal, the words chopped short, punctuated by the telltale ping of the satellite transmission. “You still there?”

A bad sign, Kurtz thought, that it was Janson calling and not Morrow, notice that Morrow was washing his hands of the whole affair. Kurtz pressed the phone closer to his ear. “What do you have?”

From his seat on the patio of the Café National, Kurtz could see the Avenue Lalla Yacout in all its sun-struck squalor, the neglected Art Deco façades and the sagging balustrades, works of art in wrought iron and stucco, the aspirations of French culture left to the care of drug addicts and whores. Directly across from the café, in the doorway of the Wafa Bank, two boys were hustling the tourists who came and went from the ATM.

“There's a man named Rafa,” Janson said. “Runs a print shop out near Voyageurs. It's a family business. We used to work with his father. You know him?”

“I've heard of him.” Kurtz leaned back in his chair, watching the boys work. They had a system going, a divide-and-conquer routine that appeared to be serving them quite well. No doubt they shared a part of their profits with the bank manager in return for such a choice spot.

“Well, our Mr. Rafa claims he got a visit from two Americans this morning. A young woman and an older man looking for a passport.”

Kurtz sat up. “Who's the man?”

Janson paused, another bad sign. “His name is Comfort. He retired this past spring, out of the Madrid office. I can't imagine you would have known him. He was a bit of a dead weight at the end. You know the type, gin blossoms and the pre-lunch shakes. Endless stories about the old days.”

Kurtz shuffled through the Agency Rolodex in his head, failing to locate the name. He'd never been especially familiar with the European Division. “What's he doing here?”

“Apparently he developed some kind of friendship with the boy. Slipped him his home number before he left.”

“You're joking!” Kurtz had heard rumors of this kind of thing happening, but he'd never actually believed them.

“I wish I was,” Janson said.

A perfect pair, Kurtz thought, Kat and this sentimental spy. “So she's found the boy, then?”

“It looks that way.”

“And the boy found his… what's his name again?”

“Comfort. Harry Comfort.”

Kurtz managed a laugh. “Fits, doesn't it?” But Janson wasn't listening.

“Rafa's got them coming back at six to pick up the passport. I told him to expect you. He should be quite accommodating.”

“What should I do about Comfort?”

This time Janson didn't hesitate. “Find out what he knows and put him out of his misery.”

S
TANDING IN THE VAST GRANITE COURTYARD
of the Hassan II Mosque, surrounded on all sides by the most perfect expressions of geometry, Harry couldn't help wondering what Kepler, whose life work had been the unification of mathematics and the divine, would have thought of the structure.

Like all good Christians of his age, Kepler had both feared and hated the Moors; one of his greatest discoveries, the Supernova of 1604, he had interpreted as a harbinger of the downfall of Islam and the return of Christ. But Harry suspected that even Kepler would have been awed by the elegance of Hassan II's vision, by the flawless repetitions of shape and line, the archways moving forever outward, the rectangular minaret towering above it all like some primitive phallus.

Here, Harry thought, watching a group of schoolchildren navigate the mosque's massive tiered esplanades, each with room for several thousand adults, was a place meant to obliterate the individual, to merge the singular into the vast and infinite whole. Here was the Roman Forum of prayer, room for a hundred thousand worshippers. An Army of God at the ready.

There was a gust from the Atlantic, and Harry felt momentarily light on his feet. A wave surged forward and broke against the seawall, spraying a group of teenage girls who had gathered for a photograph, sending them shrieking and laughing, their bright-colored
hijabs
flapping recklessly in the breeze.

Suddenly Harry understood, as he had not allowed himself to understand before, that things were going to end badly for him. He would die as he had so often feared he would, faithless and unredeemed, in some foreign city to which he had no claim.

“Before the universe was created,” Harry said to himself, conjuring the text of the
Mysterium Cosmographicum,
“there were no numbers except the Trinity, which is God himself. For the line and the plane imply no numbers: here infinitude itself reigns.”

It was a passage in which he had at times found solace or even release but which now sounded as hollow as the wind in the mosque's empty
haram.

It was a warm afternoon, even for September, the palm trees along the Boulevard Sour Jdid tousled and dry, the colonial buildings brilliant in the sea-light, white and sun-scoured as beached bones. Harry, who for some foolish reason had chosen to walk back from the mosque to the medina, was sweating profusely as he crossed the Place de l'Admiral Philbert and stepped into the old post-office building. It was not the healthy perspiration of an athlete but the rancid sweat of a body unused to exertion and in desperate need of a drink.