themselves little gods. Too good for the ugliness they brought into the world.
He should be out there now, he thought, with his comrades or even with the janissaries, whom he had to admit were just as deeply invested in this fight as the faithful. Their aims were not righteous by any means, but they served God nonetheless.
He should be there.
A knock at the door drew his attention away from the park. He was surprised and not a little embarrassed to find Ahmet Ozal standing at the entrance to the hotel suite. Yusuf was naked and felt his face grow warm with shame. Ozal just laughed.
'You are recovered from your adventures, then?' said the fedayeen commander before grinning mischievously. 'These American women, they do not have the modesty of good Muslim women. But they have their uses, yes.'
Yusuf also grinned, unsure of himself. He moved toward the bed to put his pants on.
'Yes, get dressed,' Ozal said. 'We have much to discuss, and then we must both get back to the fight. There will be time for this later.' He waved a hand at the the American girl.
Yusuf could see her eyelids fluttering as she desperately tried to maintain the facade of being asleep. He dressed as quickly as he could. His clothes, a black battle dress uniform, were new and unfamiliar, but his old keffiyeh had been laundered and returned to him. It was torn and a few bloodstains still showed, but he was glad to have it back. His boots took a few moments to lace up, and he worried that Ozal would lose patience with him, but whenever he looked up, he found the giant Turk smiling indulgently.
'Tuck your pants into your boots so you don't trip on them,' Ozal said.
Yusuf, flushed with embarrassment, did as he was told. Then he tucked in his T-shirt for good measure, pulled on the black battle dress jacket, and hurried over to the door without a backward glance at the slave girl. He wondered if she would have to clean the room.
He found two more men outside wearing the same type of uniform, fedayeen bodyguards for Ahmet Ozal. The corridor was dark, with no natural light to illuminate it at this point. A few ceiling lamps threw small pools of yellow light down on the green-bordered carpet, presumably powered by a generator somewhere in the building. Patterned wallpaper and the shadows of square columns that jutted into the hallway every few feet lent the area a gloomy, almost spooky atmosphere. Yusuf could very easily imagine himself being pursued down this corridor by the ghosts of those who had lost their lives and souls here. A service cart stood abandoned outside one room, still stocked with hundreds of little plastic bottles of shampoo and shower gel. He recognized them from the bathroom in his own suite. A maid's uniform lay next to the cart, rigid and unclean with whatever dried-up soup remained of its owner. Yusuf grimaced with distaste. So excited had he been when he was first escorted up here, he had not even noticed the relic, and he wondered now why it had been left to clutter up the emir's personal harem.
He wanted to ask Ozal how the struggle was going, but his jaw seemed to have been wired shut and his tongue was thick with shyness. The great Turkish warrior, for his part, seemed perfectly happy to amble along smoking a thin cigar he produced from a breast pocket and humming an unfamiliar tune. They entered a fire escape at the end of the hallway and climbed down three flights of stairs. The floor at which they exited was decorated in the same fashion, with old opulent-looking rugs and long golden drapes that had not been dusted in many years. Yusuf could tell immediately that this level was different. The rooms here did not appear to be for the accommodation of guests. There were only a few of them, and they were very large.
'This way, through here,' Ozal said. 'I'm afraid the facilities are very spare. The Americans are devils for tracking our movements through the city and sending their warplanes against us whenever we let our guard down.'
He waved his cigar around as they entered what looked like a large ballroom with a glass roof. There were no tables in there, just row upon row of stackable chairs facing a small raised dais. Yusuf felt his skin crawl as he realized that most of the chairs were occupied by the remains of the dead. There must have been hundreds of them in there when Allah swept up their souls and cast them down into hell.
'The emir has not long been in this hotel,' said Ozal, who seemed not to care. 'But within a day we shall be gone again. It is not safe to remain anywhere for very long.'
'Not even with the prisoners we hold here?' Yusuf asked when he found his voice again. His found it very difficult not to stare at the dark, contaminated piles of clothing, all so neatly laid out in rows. And their shoes, he thought with renewed horror, look at their shoes. Aloud, he went on, 'Would they bomb us here knowing they would kill their own kind?'
Ahmet Ozal seemed to give the question serious consideration as he drew a few deep puffs from his cigar.
'It is hard to say,' he admitted. 'Their leader, this Kipper, he is not a man given to making hard choices, which are the only kind available in war. But some of his officers? Yes, they would attack in a second. Or perhaps they might send some of their special forces soldiers in an attempt to rescue their women. They are weak like that, the Americans. You will often draw many of them to their doom by staking out just one or two of their number as bait.'
Yusuf felt greatly honored to be privy to the grand strategies of his superiors and again reflected with some disbelief that it was not so long ago he had found himself questioning those strategies as he quaked under the ferocious assault of the American war machine. Now he kept his mouth shut and was glad of it when his eyesight adjusted to the gloom of the darkened ballroom and he realized there were other men in there, sitting clustered in a small semicircle of chairs in an alcove off to the side of the room.
Bandits. 'This is Yusuf Mohammed, one of my warriors and the only one to survive the American counterattack on Ellis Island,' Ahmet Ozal declared in an almost proprietary tone. Yusuf winced as the Turk's enormous hand smacked into the meat of his shoulder.
'I may be wrong,' said one of the bandits, a black man but not an African as best Yusuf could tell, 'but weren't your fedayeen ordered to give up their lives rather than be captured by the Americans?'
He was dark-skinned with a wild explosion of black dreadlocked hair and a face marked by what looked like ceremonial scars. He spoke in English. Yusuf did his best to keep his expression neutral when confronted with the unspoken accusation.
Ozal nearly growled in reply. 'But the Americans did not capture him. Yusuf evaded them as the Prophet evaded the assassins of Mecca.'
The hot flush that seemed to suffuse Yusuf's entire upper body was fueled by a sense of shame that anyone would compare him with the Prophet. He tried to speak up, but Ozal held up one hand in a peremptory warning. The boy soldier fell silent. His Turkish commander plowed on.
'The emir is not foolish or wasteful with the lives of his followers. He does not ask that they give up their lives needlessly. By surviving the attack on the island and coming safely back to us, Yusuf provides us with information that we would otherwise not have.'
Another of the bandit leaders spoke up. Yusuf had to assume these men had some leadership role, given that they were here. This man spoke Arabic, but his complexion was sallow. He looked European, perhaps from the south, where there was much fighting between the faithful and the unbelievers. Yusuf's own Arabic was still very basic, and he was not yet confident in conversation with fluent speakers, although he was able to follow what others said in the language if he concentrated.
'Your emir might dole out the lives of his own men with the parsimony of an old Jew,' said the man, 'but he spends the lives of our men like a drunken fornicator.'
Yusuf expected Ozal to flare in anger at the insulting comparison, but he was wrong. The Turk simply grinned and folded his arms, which emphasized his huge physical stature.
'We are all bleeding, Jukic,' he said with an undertone of threat. 'Very few of the fedayeen I have sent to fight the Americans have come back. And then only to have their injuries treated before returning to the fray, as Yusuf soon will. Is that not so, boy?'
Realizing he had been drawn into the conversation, Yusuf nodded. It was not a lie. He desperately wanted to get back to the front. He had something to prove to himself, to the emir and Ozal, but most importantly to God. Of course that meant nothing to the bandit leaders sitting in a rough semicircle in front of him. They all regarded him suspiciously.
'So what is it you have brought us here to learn, Ozal?' asked the one called Jukic.
Ozal pulled up a chair and gestured at Yusuf to sit in it.
