hashish. You could almost taste the mingling scents in the air. Tumblers of steaming tea sat on the tables. A fan revolved slowly from the high ceiling. Framed paintings and photographs in all sizes crowded the walls—portraits, landscapes, still lifes. A generator buzzed. Dominoes clacked. A couple of backgammon games were in progress.
A helicopter passed overhead the moment we sat down, its big rotors making the building shake. Mere seconds later we heard a terrific explosion. A mortar going off, I guessed.
The room froze.
Mazare frowned and shook his head. “Look at us,” he said.
“We stink of fear.”
I leaned over, lowering my voice. Knowing Laurel was dead had put an end to everything. I just wanted to escape. “Listen. Can’t you get me out of Baghdad? To Jordan or Turkey? Anywhere, I don’t care. I don’t need to see Tomas and I’m sure he’d be just as happy not to see me. I was forced to come here.” He dismissed this idea quickly. “Tomas said nothing about that. I’ll get some coffees.”
He brought back two and set them on the table. The rich mocha scent should have been appealing but did not tempt me. Mazare checked his watch for what seemed like the hundredth time and looked outside, scanning the faces. Was someone else out there scouting for him? His coffee sat on the table, untouched.
I fumbled around for something to say. “You were speaking Turkish to Eris?”
“I am Assyrian but I grew up in Istanbul. We Assyrians are spread out in many places. Even in Europe. Even in your country.”
A whistle sounded from somewhere in the street. Mazare jumped up abruptly.
“Come. Leave your drink. We must go right now.”
He walked rapidly. I had a hard time keeping up with him. He wouldn’t speak to me, his lips pressed together so hard they’d turned white. His eyes darted from side to side, checking out the street. We took a circuitous route back to the van.
When we drove away I said, “I appreciate the tour and all, but why bother going there?”
“Escaping Ward’s people is not easy. They’re trailing us. We need to lose them somehow.”
“Where are we going now?”
“Suq al-Haramia, the Thieves Market. Do you know it?”
“I’ve heard of it.”
We headed north on Khulfafa Street, away from the city core. On the outskirts of Sadr City, we ran into an American patrol. Mazare pulled over while they passed. “Things are bad again after the Jordanian embassy.” He let out a cynical laugh. “No, that is wrong. Bad is what every day is like here. Is there a word in your language for something worse than hell? If there is, we are inside it.”
The thought occurred to me that I’d been living in that domain for the last week. “What happened?”
“A truck bomb killed seventeen people. It blew cars onto roofs. And yesterday they attacked an American Humvee outside the Rabiya Hotel. Then the soldiers came to this market. Some men were testing guns to buy, shooting them in the air, and the soldiers fired, thinking the shots to be aimed at them. We have much fury over that. There will be no fast end to this war.”
We left the van once more and proceeded on foot. The place seemed to go on forever. A black market version of London’s Portobello Road. Samuel had said you could buy almost anything here, and he was right. Despite yesterday’s events, an arms seller had filled the cargo bed of his pickup with guns. A clutch of men checked them out, but no one seemed inclined to test shoot today.
Another vendor stood over two large containers—rusted oil drums cut in half and filled with water, turbulent with the writhing bodies of fish. Mazgouf, the green carp caught in the sluggish Tigris. “Poison fish,” Mazare said. “Once they were good. Now this war has filled the river with filth.”
A strange assortment of things lay on a dirty carpet: squeezed toothpaste tubes, women’s pink razors, half- full bottles of Detol, small one-serving containers of peanut butter and MREs—the army’s meals ready to eat. Mazare gestured toward the wares. “They sift through the garbage from the army bases and take this stuff to sell.”
A nearby table was piled with phones, DVD players, TV sets, computers—products of the looting or goods stolen from people’s homes. The next vendor displayed strange-looking chunks of meat. Mazare told me they were sheep’s lungs. A cloud of flies buzzed over the mutton. The raw flesh had a greenish tinge and steamed in the heat. When I expressed my distaste he shrugged. “People are starving. What do you expect?” Another whistle sounded. No one else paid it any heed, but Mazare whipped out his phone and made a call. After a short burst of words he clutched my arm and hustled us along a different route back to the van. I could tell this was going badly and thought he must be running out of options, so it was a surprise when he said, “Tomas will come to us at our next stop. God willing.”
This time as Mazare drove he didn’t enlighten me about where we were. We’d turned southwest and traveled to a busy street, that’s all I knew. He swung off the road onto a driveway and we slowed down. A sign announced the North Gate Cemetery, burial ground for Commonwealth soldiers of the 1917 campaign against the Ottoman Turks. Had Tomas taken a page out of Hal’s book and chosen a hiding place similar to the one in New York?
Rusted metal gates hung open. We drove through on a path intended only for walking. He turned the van around and parked then yanked out his phone to make another call. After hanging up he said, “We wait for Tomas now. He’ll come soon.”
A broad center aisle was flanked by tall, scruffy palms; around the perimeter, grasses grew as tall as a man. The aisle led to a mausoleum, a four-pillared stone canopy erected over a base, clearly intended for someone important in contrast to the simple crosses and eroded headstones of the rank-and-file graves.
“This is a British cemetery? So many graves, it must have been a terrible battle.”
Mazare shook his head. “Not all died from bullets and swords.” “What then?”
“The cholera.” He pointed toward the rows of white crosses.
“They got so sick they coughed their own guts up. So far away from home. Why did they even come?”
I had no answer for that.
Perhaps it was just the contrast between the quiet in the cemetery and the traffic noise in the rest of the city, but there was a stillness here that felt anything but peaceful. No birds chirped their evensong; no small animals scampered in the grass. We waited.
Near dusk, the sun limped lower in the sky. My attention was caught by a shadow out of keeping with the forms surrounding it. It seemed too tall and appeared to move toward us. It was as if a stone monument had suddenly come alive. Shim moved into view.
The white Humvee burst into the cemetery. On its tail, Ward’s sedan. Mazare yelled and dove for the floor. He pulled out a semi-automatic from underneath the seat. I lunged for the door handle. Mazare grabbed me and pulled me back.
Truly lethal sounds have a soft edge. I heard a pop off in the distance, followed by a crump. The shock wave of a blast blew me against the door. A second wave resonated and held me there. The metal window frame of our van glowed, the heat scorching my arm. I yanked it back. The white Humvee exploded into a cauldron of orange flame. Its doors burst open and Eris’s body tumbled out, a bloody hole in her ravaged torso, her hair on fire. A bloom of oily smoke gushed into the air.
Shim reached the sedan, flung open the door, and hauled Ward out, keeping his massive body between Ward and the locus of the attack. With the force of a pneumatic drill, a series of shots tore up the grass in front of him. One of the guards spilled out of the sedan, spraying gunfire toward the mausoleum. Mazare hit the handle on his side, kicked open the door, and got off a few rounds. The shots tore into the guard’s left side; his body bucked under the force of the bullets and he collapsed.
My own arteries felt close to bursting, my heart was pumping so hard. At the same time it seemed strange, as though I were watching all this happening to someone else.
A second missile hit the front of the sedan, throwing it into the air like a toy. It landed on its roof, shrapnel from the car whipping into us. Out of instinct I flung my hands up. Mazare jerked his body back when our windows shattered. I could smell burning rubber. I tried the door again; my hands shook so badly I could barely grasp the handle. I slammed against it and fell out. Mazare followed. I tried to get up but suddenly felt too weak to rise. Mazare looked at me for an instant, his face splintered with cuts, then ran.
