Eight Months on Ghazzah Street: A Novel

There was a low, distant rumble of thunder, as she put the phone down on Daphne. Yesterday’s newspaper had exhorted Muslims all over the Kingdom to join the Isteska, or rain-prayer; the King himself recommended it. Soon those prayers will be answered. She let herself out and crossed the hall.

There was no answer when she rang Yasmin’s doorbell, but then she had not expected it. She rang again; she put her finger on the buzzer and left it there. There seemed no occasion for politeness anymore.

After a moment or two, Shams opened the door. Her head and shoulders were swathed in a dark cloth, and her face itself looked dark and strained. Unsmiling, she held the door open only so far as she needed; her eyes passed over Frances, and then she spoke. “Gone away,” she said. “Everybody gone. Finished.”

When the phone rang again it was Rickie Zussman. “You heard about your neighbor? Jesus, Frannie, what a week for you! This guy they shot was some kind of arms dealer or something, he might have been from Iraq, and Raji was doing some go-between business. Or at least, they’ve found an arms cache somewhere, I don’t know. They say this guy was shot in the stomach, that he’s in intensive care. Raji was lucky, eh?”

And then Jeff Pollard: “Did you hear about Raji? They say some pro- Iranian group took a shot at him while he was out with some business crony. They say they’ve been after him for months, waiting for an opportunity. Did you ever see anybody hanging around the flats? Anyway, they missed Raji and got the other guy. They say he was dead on arrival.”

In daylight, she could see that the hospital was some kind of government institution; a collection of long low huts, widely spaced, within a perimeter fence. The gateman raised the barrier for them, and they parked the car in a featureless compound, marked out by low concrete blocks. Eric was there already, sitting in his car, with Hasan in the passenger seat and his windows wound up tightly to keep out the dust. It swirled and hissed about his ankles as he got out to meet them, a nest of corroding serpents shaped by the hot wind.

He took her arm, oddly formal, hesitant. “Frances? Did you sleep well?”

“I don’t want to talk about Raji,” she said. “Let’s just do this first.”

“Well,” Eric said, “there’s no connection, is there? Yes, you’re quite right, let’s do this. But you know about the wife, don’t you? Raji’s wife? I’ll tell you later.”

Andrew said, “Did you go to the airport? How did you get on?”

“Oh, it will be okay, the airline will fix it,” Eric said vaguely. His eyes seemed unfocused. “They’ve done it before. People have accidents. But do you know, Andrew,” he shook his head, “I never thought I should land in the middle of a situation like this. When I have been so careful. When everyone has been so careful. When Turadup’s reputation has always stood so high.”

“Fairfax was careless,” Frances said. “Dying like that. He could jeopardize the contract, couldn’t he?”

“Don’t jump on me,” Eric said. He seemed almost cowed. The morning had changed him. “I know you’re not a fool, Frances. I never thought you were.” He took out his handkerchief, crisp and folded; dabbed at his lip, as if he might find blood there. “I just thought that you were rather—pressed upon by your environment, if I can put it like that. I thought from the beginning that you were one of those people who should never have come here.”

“Yes, I know. You accused me of exercising my imagination, didn’t you? Are you trying to tell me that I have been right about something?”

“Come on,” Andrew said. “Let’s not waste time.”

In the tiny office of the man in charge of the mortuary, there were four or five hangers-on whose function was uncertain; perhaps they were his cousins, or merely his cronies. Eric and Andrew seemed to take it for granted that these men should be there, leaning on the walls, reading the newspapers, smoking and chattering. They stood in the doorway, keeping Frances blocked from view with their shoulders, and waiting for some attention to come their way.

It was a while before the man in charge extricated himself, came out from behind his untidy desk, and held some conversation with Hasan. He was desultory, and scratched his head, and he seemed to say, though she could not follow any of his Arabic, that he did not know if what they wanted could be done. Then at last it seemed that Hasan uttered certain unspecified threats, which he indicated came from the khawwadjihs, and which he only translated; and at this the little man, who was jaundiced and paunchy, became agitated, and gave vent to a stream of invective, and a series of operatic gestures; his cronies put down their newspapers, and stood up straighter around the walls, and looked vaguely interested and alert. Hasan said, “He tells you this body cannot be released until he has the paperwork. He tells you he has been brought two bodies this morning and that is enough. But,” Hasan added surprisingly, “he says he can do what you ask.”

They followed him out of his office, and through a corridor. Two hospital trolleys were parked at an angle, their wheels askew, and on them were bundled the two burdensome corpses to which the man had referred: white sheets covered them entirely, knotted casually above their heads. They turned into a long cold room that was itself like a corridor, with walls of steel, and a blue-burning striplight overhead. The man made a fussy gesture, to hurry them on; then briefly slid open the mortuary drawer, and showed them Fairfax’s dead face. There was no error, no mistake in identity, and for all the inexpert eye could tell, he had died just as the police had given out. The head seemed twisted on the spinal column, the face was clamped, jaundiced, marked by a trickle of black blood; the expression was meaningless.

They went outside. A security guard with a rifle lounged against Eric’s car, and as they came toward it he shifted unwillingly, his eyes moving above the bandanna he wore. “It is a quarantine hospital,” Hasan explained. “That is why the guards. The man says he will fix up the body to send it to its home, he says he is the best for doing that in the whole of the Kingdom.”

“So that is what he was doing,” Frances said. “Boasting.”

She thought of the two corpses in their knotted sheets. She had passed them with scarcely a look; they were not her affair. She felt cold, and strange, and speechless, and removed from what was happening about her. Once again Eric put his hand on her arm; perhaps he wondered if she might faint, or hoped she might, or do something else to discredit herself. But no, he was trying to get her attention; and she realized that he had been talking to Andrew, that he had begun some narration whose beginning she would never hear. “ … with so much going on,” Eric said, “we will never sort out the facts from the rumors, even if it were our affair, and I only tell you because you are the neighbors, you are in some sense caught up in it.”

“Is Yasmin dead?” she said.

Eric turned to her, surprised. “Oh, no, thank God, nothing like that. Didn’t you hear me, weren’t you listening? She tried to leave the country. They stopped her at the airport. I was there this morning and I saw it with my own eyes, that’s how I know, and Hasan here, he caught the drift … She had a ticket for Amman, but they think she was trying to pick up a connection from there to Tehran. The security men weren’t happy, she—well, obviously she didn’t have permission to travel from her husband. And the next thing was the police turned up, and took her away.”