silence. She grabbed the paper, turned it over, and wrote,
Several hallways and rooms later, we met up with a Middle Eastern man wearing sunglasses, his dark hair shot with gray. The woman gestured toward him as if she were offering me up as a gift, and giving me a weak smile scurried away. Mazare extended his hand and said hello.
I stepped back from him. “You’re not carrying any explosives today, I hope. And what a surprise. You speak English.”
He grinned. “Sorry for that.”
“You’re sorry? You almost fucking killed me.”
“I tried to tell you. Make you come closer to me. You didn’t read my signs soon enough.”
“It was a touch difficult to appreciate nuances with four people at my back looking for an excuse to shoot me.”
His good humor faded. He checked his watch and said, “Tomas and I are taking many chances to save you now. Stay with Ward and you’ll be dead by tomorrow. Come with me or not. I caution you to make up your mind fast.”
I cast my memory back to the tunnel in the underground city and remembered Mazare gesturing for me to come forward, murmuring something. It was possible he’d been trying to alert me.
“I can’t go with you. They’re holding a woman back in New York. They’ll kill her if I escape.”
Mazare’s face fell and I could read sympathy in his expression loud and clear. “That woman—Laurel, is it her name?”
“Yes.”
“I feel in my heart this sad for you. She is dead. Drowned in the river.”
“Not Tomas. Ari. He found it out. Just today. The news said she went onto a high bridge and jumped in Harlem’s river, sick because of losing her husband.”
Scrambled though his expression was, there was no way he could have made up the reference to the High Bridge and the Harlem River. And the story had logic. When Ward and Eris spirited me away to Baghdad she was nothing but a liability. Ward could still threaten me about harming her because I’d have no way of knowing her fate. Mazare said something. I barely heard him, the news about Laurel bearing down on me like a thundercloud.
He grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me hard. “I said we have to go. Now.” He half dragged me to the dusty Toyota van parked in the shaded lane outside. He opened the back doors and pushed me inside before climbing in himself and putting the key in the ignition.
“Stay in the back where no one can see you. I’m taking you to Tomas.”
I slumped against the side of the van, not caring where we were headed. He drove for a few minutes then braked, rolled down the window, and spoke a few words in Arabic to a guard. An anxious minute of silence passed before he stepped on the accelerator and took off.
I tried to pull myself together. Mazare wasn’t tearing up the pavement. That is to say he was speeding like crazy but no faster than most Iraqi drivers. Fifteen minutes later we halted again. “Come into the front now,” he said. I sighed and clambered onto the passenger seat beside him. We were parked behind a strip of bombed-out buildings. The stench from the garbage outside was overwhelming. Rotting fish parts and bones were scattered everywhere.
“Are these clothes yours?”
“The pants are mine and the shoes. They gave me the jacket and shirt back in New York.” He opened the glove compartment and extracted something that looked like a cellphone. Pressing one of the buttons, he ran it over the arms, lapels, and back of the jacket.
“Take your jacket off and pull the shirt out at the waist.” He repeated the exercise over my shirt then looked at the screen, clicked the device off, and put it back.
“What were you looking for?”
“They can weave those tracers into material now. We have to be careful.”
I took in a few deep breaths, tried to calm down and remember the risks the guy was taking on my behalf. “Thank you. I know how dangerous it is, doing this.”
He shrugged. “Whatever Tomas wants we do.”
His dark eyes bored into mine and he pointed his index finger at me like a teacher getting ready to scold. “The places we’re going, you’ll only be safe with me. Speak to no one.”
We crossed a bridge and turned onto al-Rashid, Baghdad’s main commercial street. Closer to the bridge buildings showed the impact of the war, windows blown out with ragged frames, starbursts of soot on facades, blackened wounds on the cladding.
The street was thick with traffic. Leaning on the horn was simply a normal part of driving, like hitting the brakes or changing gears. Buses jockeyed for space, boys staggered under carts flush with goods, vehicles fought for every inch of pavement. I could have been back on Broadway.
We jerked to a stop, cars pressing in on all sides. Exhaust fumes swirled in a suffocating haze. Mazare threw up his hands and swore.
He finally located a side street and parked the van. “We walk from here,” he said. Heat beat down on us unmercifully. I shuffled along beside him, images of Laurel flaunting themselves in my brain. They would have drugged her probably with some kind of tranquilizer to make her suicide more convincing. Had one of Ward’s men clasped her in his arms, lifted her cleanly over the rail, and cast her body down? Even with drugs in her system, a minute or so of total panic would have taken hold as she plunged toward the murky river. What a desolate way to die.
Was there anything I could have done differently? Had she simply been condemned the minute we began working on Hal’s game? Everything I touched withered and died.
Mazare seemed to grow less tense as we mingled with the crowds, although he looked back every couple of minutes.
He waved his hand. “This is al-Mutannabi Street; you’ll see the book bazaar. We still have culture here, no matter how hard you Americans try to kill it.” If he was trying to shame me, he was doing a good job.
“Did you know my brother Samuel?” I asked indignantly.
“I met him once.”
“He was an American and did everything he could to save Iraqi culture. He loved this city.” “Well, he failed then.”
“It’s not his failing only.”
Mazare gave a disdainful laugh and I looked away. There were no vehicles on al-Mutannabi, at least not while the bazaar was on. It was a little crescent of peace compared to what we’d just driven through. Antiquated buildings, a number of them housing bookstores, walled off the street. Towering stacks of volumes lined their dim interiors. Outside, cheap plastic tarps were covered with periodicals, pamphlets, pirated DVDs, and tomes in English and Arabic. High metal filing cases, their doors propped open, burst with musty old pages.
Above a poster stand, an image of Saddam Hussein had his face crossed out. A neighboring stand displayed a framed portrait with Arabic script. “Who’s that?” I asked Mazare.
“Ayatollah Muhammad Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr. Assassinated in Najaf in February of 1999. A very revered man in Iraq,” he said.
Almost all the shoppers were male; very few women ventured out onto the street. We walked past a cleared space occupied by three men standing on a wooden platform. Two were on their knees; the third stood over them with a baton, pretending to hit them. An enthusiastic audience yelled out comments. “Actors,” Mazare said. “This is an old tradition.”
We followed a bend in the road. I could see the glassy water of the Tigris at the end of the street. A little farther on Mazare pointed to a semi-circular, single-story building with tables strung along its front. “The al- Shabandar. A famous place in Baghdad.”
The cafe was filled to the brim, again with men, almost all of them smoking. Some pulled sweet oriental tobacco through their narghile pipes, others smoked cigarettes. I thought I could detect the vanilla perfume of
