hours, since seven the previous evening, when they had arrived at Abu Ghraib. So far, the fools had held out.
From the courtyard below his window came the sound of a hiss, a thwack, and a low whimper. Khatib’s brow furrowed in puzzlement, then cleared as he recalled.
In the inner yard below his window an Iraqi hung by his wrists from a crossbeam, his pointed toes just four inches above the dust. Nearby stood a ewer brimming with brine, once clear, now darkly pink.
Every guard and soldier crossing the yard was under standing orders to pause, take one of the two rattan canes from the jar, and administer a single stroke to the back of the hanging man, between the neck and the knees. A corporal under an awning nearby kept the tally.
The stupid fellow was a market trader who had been heard to refer to the President as the son of a whore and was now learning, albeit a trifle late, the true measure of respect that citizens should maintain at all times in reference to the Rais.
The intriguing thing was that he was still there. It just showed what stamina some of these working-class people had. The trader had sustained more than five hundred strokes already, an impressive record. He would be dead before the thousandth—no one had ever sustained a thousand—but it was interesting all the same. The other interesting thing was that the man had been denounced by his ten-year-old son. Omar Khatib sipped his coffee, unscrewed his rolled-gold fountain pen, and bent over his papers.
Half an hour later, there was a discreet tap at his door.
“Enter,” he called, and looked up in expectation. He needed good news, and only one man could knock without being announced by the junior officer outside.
The man who entered was burly, and his own mother would have been hard put to call him handsome. The face was deeply pitted by boyhood smallpox, and two circular scars gleamed where cysts had been removed. He closed the door and stood, waiting to be addressed.
Though he was only a sergeant, his stained coveralls carried not even that rank, yet he was one of the few men with whom the brigadier felt any fellow feeling. Alone among the staff of the prison, Sergeant Ali was permitted to sit in his presence, when invited.
Khatib gestured the man to a chair and offered him a cigarette. The sergeant lit up and puffed gratefully; his work was onerous and tiring, the cigarette a welcome break. The reason Khatib tolerated such familiarity from a man of such low rank was that he harbored a genuine admiration for Ali. Khatib held efficiency in high esteem, and his trusted sergeant was one who had never failed him. Calm, methodical, a good husband and father, Ali was a true professional.
“Well?” he asked.
“The navigator is close, very close, sir. The pilot ...” He shrugged. “An hour or more.”
“I remind you they must both be broken, Ali, nothing held back. And their stories must conform to each other. The Rais himself is counting on us.
“Perhaps you should come, sir. I think in ten minutes you will have your answer. The navigator first, and when the pilot learns this, he will follow.”
“Very well.”
Khatib rose, and the sergeant held the door open for him. Together they descended past the ground floor to the first basement level, where the elevator stopped. There was a passage leading to the stairs to the subbasement. Along the passage were steel doors, and behind them, squatting amid their filth, were seven American aircrew, four British, one Italian, and a Kuwaiti Sky hawk pilot.
At the next level down were more cells, two occupied. Khatib peered through the Judas-hole in the door of the first.
A single unshaded light bulb illuminated the cell, its walls encrusted with hardened excrement and other brown stains of old blood. In the center, on a plastic office chair, sat a man, quite naked, down whose chest ran slicks of vomit, blood, and saliva. His hands were cuffed behind him, and a cloth mask with no eye-slits covered his face.
Two AMAM men in coveralls similar to those of Sergeant Ali flanked the man in the chair, their hands caressing yard-long plastic tubes packed with bitumen, which adds weight without reducing flexibility.
They were standing back, taking a break. Before their interruption, they had apparently been concentrating on the shins and kneecaps, which were skinned raw and turning blue-yellow.
Khatib nodded and passed to the next door. Through the hole he could see that the second prisoner was not masked. One eye was completely closed, the pulped meat of the brow and cheek knit together by crusted blood. When he opened his mouth, there were gaps where two broken teeth had been, and a froth of blood emerged from the mashed lips.
“Tyne,” the navigator whispered, “Nicholas Tyne. Flight lieutenant.
Five oh one oh nine six eight.” “The navigator,” whispered the sergeant. Khatib whispered back, “Which of our men is the English-speaker?”
Ali gestured—the one on the left. “Bring him out.”
Ali entered the cell of the navigator and emerged with one of the interrogators. Khatib had a conference with the man in Arabic. The man nodded, reentered the cell, and masked the navigator. Only then would Khatib allow both cell doors to be opened.
The English-speaker bent toward Nicky Tyne’s head and spoke through the cloth. His English was heavily accented but passable.
“All right, Flight Lieutenant, that is it. For you, it is over. No more punishment.”
The young navigator heard the words. His body seemed to slump in relief.
“But your friend, he is not so lucky. He is dying now. So we can take him to the hospital—clean white sheets, doctors, everything he needs; or we can finish the job. Your choice. When you tell us, we stop and rush him to hospital.”
Khatib nodded down the corridor to Sergeant Ali, who entered the other cell. From the open door came the sounds of a plastic quirt lashing a bare chest. Then the pilot began to scream.
“All right, shells!” shouted Nicky Tyne under his cowl. “Stop it, you bastards! It was an ammunition dump, for poison gas shells. ...”
The beating ceased. Ali emerged, breathing heavily, from the pilot’s cell.
“You are a genius,
Khatib shrugged modestly.
“Never underestimate the sentimentality of the British and the Americans,” he told his pupil. “Get the translators now. Get all the details, every last one. When you have the transcripts, bring them to my office.”
Back in his sanctum, Brigadier Khatib made a personal phone call to Hussein Kamil. An hour later, Kamil called him back. His father-in-law was delighted; a meeting would be summoned, probably that night. Omar Khatib should hold himself available for the summons.
That evening, Karim was teasing Edith again, gently and without malice, this time about her job.
“Don’t you ever get bored at the bank, darling?” “No, it’s an interesting job. Why do you ask?” “Oh, I don’t know. I just don’t understand how you can think it interesting. For me, it would be the most boring job in the world.”
“Well, it’s not, so there.” “All right. What’s so interesting about it?”
“You know, handling accounts, placing investments, that sort of thing.
It’s important work.”
“Nonsense. It’s about saying ‘Good morning, yes sir, no sir, of course sir’ to lots of people running in and out to cash a fifty-schilling check.
Boring.”
He was lying on his back on her bed. She walked over and lay beside him, pulling one of his arms around her shoulders so that they could cuddle. She loved to cuddle.
“You are crazy sometimes, Karim. But I love you crazy. Winkler Bank isn’t an issuing bank—it’s a merchant bank.”
“What’s the difference?”
“We have no checking accounts, customers with checkbooks running in and out. It doesn’t work like
