stone in it has been soaked in blood.” A bad sign for the encounter I was about to have? I hoped not.
I arrived late. The times I’d been there with Samuel the place had been hopping, but I’d always gone late in the evening. Today, only one customer sat at a small table on the postage-stamp-size patio out front. He pushed back his chair and rose, giving me a slight nod. Shorter than me and with a slender build, Zakar was conservatively dressed. He had a formal, ascetic look, with sharp features, dark hair and eyes, and olive skin like mine.
“You’re Tomas Zakar?” I extended my hand.
“Yes.” He returned my handshake and murmured, “Thank you for coming.” He’d obviously recognized me immediately. I felt a touch discomfited that he had an edge on me.
He gave his watch a cursory glance. “Not too late, I hope,” I said.
He waved away my remark. “You’re here. That’s the important thing.” He indicated the entrance. “Shall we go in?”
Inside, we walked down a few steps into a room redolent of the Orient. Afghani music wafted from a nearby speaker on the wall. The place was richly decorated in a cacophony of reds, from deep burgundy to scarlet. Each table was covered with a handwoven rug, a sheet of glass placed over top. The hostess directed us to a banquette beneath the bay window at the front.
“This is the best table for our discussion—the most private,” Tomas said after we were seated. “Would you care for a pipe?” He waved toward a collection of large narghile pipes in ruby-red and cobalt-blue cut glass on the bar. A menu had been placed on our table with a choice of fruit-flavored tobaccos.
“No thanks,” I said.
His dark eyes registered a hint of surprise. “Samuel loved to take the pipe.”
I’m sure he didn’t intend it that way, but his statement came out as something of a put-down. As if I couldn’t quite measure up to my brother.
“A drink then?” he said.
I passed on alcohol for the time being, wanting my wits about me, and chose instead an espresso. He ordered mint tea and smiled ruefully. “Mint tea. The only thing in America that reminds me of home.”
“Speaking of home, how did you know where to find me?”
“Oh, I’ve been to New York a couple of times before with Samuel.”
I suppose my brother had no particular reason to introduce us, but somehow this felt like another bolt from the blue. I wondered how trustworthy the guy really was. “I hate to ask, but since we’ve never met, do you have any ID?” I already knew what he looked like, but I didn’t want him to think he could take my trust for granted.
He seemed taken aback by my request but leaned down and reached into a pocket on his backpack, handing me his passport and a picture of him and Samuel at some gathering, the two of them smiling into the camera, palms and potted plants filling out the background.
He told me he’d grown up in Mosul and had received his degree from Oxford. We found a bit of common ground when I learned he’d taken some exchange courses at Columbia. Samuel had employed him as his assistant for the past three years, their work focusing on the Nineveh site. He’d come to America in search of the engraving. Hence the urgent plea to meet with me.
The waiter brought our drinks. I added sugar to my espresso and gave it a stir.
Tomas blew on his tea to cool it down. “My condolences to you,” he said.
“Thanks. It’s been hard.”
“Yes. Even now I can’t believe he’s gone. Samuel was so much more than my employer. He financed my last year at Oxford and helped out my parents when they lost their home. I can’t describe the sadness I felt when I got the news. It made me ill.”
I felt a touch of jealousy listening to this. He’d obviously grown very close to my brother, but I was also reassured to hear that his motives were genuine. The shock on his face was plain when I told him Hal had died after stealing the engraving. “Do you know anything about it? It was Neo-Assyrian and it looks like Samuel shipped it home from Iraq.”
“Exactly why I’ve come over here. To bring it home. But surely you know what it is? You must have had it assessed when you found it.”
“There’s a problem. Hal hid it, and I have no idea where.” For the time being I omitted any mention of Hal’s game. Tomas folded a napkin around the tumbler of tea and sat silently, wrapped up in his thoughts, digesting this turn of events.
I gave it another try. “The engraving. It may somehow be related to the old science of alchemy—do you know anything about that?”
He toyed with his napkin and mumbled, “I’m sorry. What you’ve told me is very upsetting.”
Was this an attempt to avoid answering me? I decided it was better not to press him too hard right away, and asked how he’d met Samuel.
“On my first job at the National Museum. As you know, your brother consulted for them regularly. The staff totally trusted him. They couldn’t afford to pay him, but he always found research money from somewhere. Did he never speak of me?”
“The last while he didn’t talk a lot about his work.”
Once again I held off plunging right in with the questions I most needed answers to, afraid of putting him off. I wanted to read the guy a little better, so I tried to come up with something to get him to open up a bit. “Were you able to get out of Iraq before the war?”
“No, we couldn’t leave until after the Americans entered Baghdad. The entire city was in a state of extreme denial. An orgy of wishful thinking that was. People bought into the delusion that last-minute diplomacy would deliver a miracle. Then the bombs started dropping. It was the most bizarre thing. Until we lost power we could actually see the buildings around us exploding on CNN. Unbelievable. I was watching a disaster happen while I was actually in it.”
I sensed a few cracks opening in his armor. An experience like that would shake anyone up.
“Once I visited Amiriyah, an air-raid shelter bombed by the American military during the Gulf War. You could still see the bodies of the poor souls who’d been clustered in there, imprinted on the walls by the heat of the blast, like shadow people. A modern version of what we see in excavations. Forgotten battles brought to light, once- great cities destroyed, mounds of bones, broken up and burned. You’ve seen Pompeii?”
“Yes.”
“The shelter reminded me of that. Corpses frozen in time. When this war started it felt the same, as if our entire population had suddenly been vaporized. No cars on the roads, none of the usual buzz of the city. Then we’d see the sky light up. That eerie, phosphorescent green on the TV screen. We could hear the blasts from the real bombs outside and feel the floor shake, like earthquakes hitting over and over again.”
What could I say to this? War was completely alien to my own experience. I felt the same stumbling incoherence I’d shown when a friend told me he had cancer and I’d responded with only vacuous, limp-wristed reassurances.
Tomas took a hesitant sip of his tea. “At times the oxygen seemed to vanish and we breathed in soot. Our bodies were covered with it. We kept coughing it up. Without water, we had to use old cooking oil to clean it off. It was impossible to sleep. We never knew where the next missile would hit. Like an assassin waiting for you—you can’t tell from which dark doorway or hidden wall he’ll suddenly appear. We lived in perpetual fear.” He set his glass down. That sounded convincing enough. I had the strong impression of someone who kept his distance, who wasn’t one to wear his emotions on his sleeve, but a tautness around his mouth and eyes told me that talking about the experience cost him something.
I murmured some words to convey my sympathy. “You’re bringing back memories for me too—of 9/11. An artist friend of mine had a son who died in the towers. I spent a few days trying my best to console him. The impact of it spread so far. In my friend’s case, his family ruptured. He and his wife ended up getting a divorce.”
“A terrible event to be caught up in.”
“I wasn’t here. I was in Miami that day. Like everyone else, I was mesmerized by the TV, watching over and over again the planes hit, the towers crumple, people materializing out of the clouds of chalky dust, the wrecked bones of the skyscrapers jutting out of the ash. Being away when my city was under siege felt like a sin of omission.”
