The Witch of Babylon

he finished the shot. He didn’t appear to be aware of the military vehicles behind him. Had seeing me distracted him? I called out once more and gestured emphatically, trying to draw his attention to the convoy. Ari waved again and smiled, not understanding me.

I put on speed.

I looked toward the lead Bradley again. It kept coming. Something about the body language of the soldier manning the gun alarmed me. Not much time left. Ari had almost no chance of escaping arrest now. I notched my voice up and shouted, “Turn around—they’re at your back!” Ari’s ginger hair ruffled in the breeze, the light making it look like spun gold. He began edging his camera off his shoulder, preparing to greet me. He grinned. Said something to me. I felt the warmth of his smile link the two of us. But I couldn’t hear him and that meant he still hadn’t heard me.

The gun on the Bradley fixed on him. They were getting ready to make a move.

Look behind you, Ari! Get back in the car and get the hell out of there.

What sounded like firecrackers went off. Ari buckled as if a missile had struck him. His camera toppled to the ground. He screamed and grabbed for his chest. One of the journalists lurched out of the press car, blurting out a volley of Italian. Ari crumpled into the dirt, a geyser of blood bursting over the front of his shirt.

“They shot him. They shot him!” I screamed this as I ran the last yards. I threw myself down beside him. Ari struggled for breath. Wheezing sounds rushed out of his throat. His eyelids flickered and his whole body shook with convulsions. I had no idea what to do.

Soldiers appeared on either side of me. It took two of them to pull me away. “Let me alone,” I said. “I’ve got to do something; he’s hurt, you can see that.”

“There’s other people coming,” one of them said. “Let them take care of it. Who are you?”

I looked toward Ari, military men now crowding around him, attempting to stanch the flow of blood. I sank down on my knees, shuddering. “His friend,” I said. “I’m his friend.” I could no longer talk, the agony as great as if it were my own life draining away. The soldier set his gun aside and crouched down beside me, putting his hand on my shoulder. He said, not unkindly, “They’ll try to save him. You can’t make any difference now anyway.”

When the team around Ari finally stepped back it was clear nothing more could be done. His body lay in the dust. The soldier guided me toward him, let me stand near Ari for a few moments to say goodbye. They assumed I was with the press team. I took off the sun medallion Ari had given me and wound it around his hand, recalling Diane Chen’s prediction: Only the sign of the sun can save you.

The Italian crew eventually drove me back to the city. Mazare was nowhere to be found. I asked the journalists to take me to the al-Mansour Hotel. I got thoroughly tanked in the hotel bar and spent the rest of the night wandering the grounds, wishing the dogs would come to finish me off, the scene of Ari’s last moments competing with the horror of Laurel’s fate playing over and over again in my mind.

I finally came to my senses with the dawn.

A freelance journalist planning to leave for Kuwait City agreed to give me a ride late that afternoon. The day was an oven again, the heat so thick it seemed to take on a material form. As we drove out of Baghdad I took one look back. The waning sunlight had turned the buildings into orange flares. It looked like the city was burning.

Thirty-eight

Friday, August 22, 2003, 12 P.M.

Three days later I returned to New York. In three more days my grace period would be over and the new owner would be installed in the condo Samuel and I had shared.

Amir brightened up when he saw me. “You keep vanishing and then reappearing. I’m beginning to think you’re a ghost.”

I gave him a weak smile. He had no idea how close he was to the truth.

“How come you sold your place?” He looked a little hurt, as though my leaving was a personal affront. I rubbed my thumb and forefinger together in the universal sign for money.

He pursed his lips. “A lot of people came looking for you. I wrote them down.”

He hunted for something under the front desk counter and retrieved a scrap of notepaper. “The first was a policeman, I’m guessing in his late fifties. He came on August 4, over two weeks ago. A man built like a wrestler with holes in his face.” Amir peered at his handwriting. “Detective Gentle.”

“Gentile,” I said.

“Yes, that’s it. He seemed mad. Like angry mad.”

“Who else?”

“Next day the black lady came back again.”

“You mean the lady who dresses in black.”

He nodded. “Yes, her. A sad person.”

“That was Evelyn.”

“And last came a beautiful stranger. An angel woman. Hair shining like ice, blue eyes.”

“When was this?”

“They all came in around the same time.” He looked down at his paper again. “The light-haired woman showed up on August 5. Nobody since.” He crinkled up the paper. “You have mysterious friends.”

I explained I’d lost my keys and got a duplicate from him, then grabbed the armload of mail stuffed into my box. The elevator door had almost closed when he called out to me.

“I forgot one more thing. The carpet fitters came last week.”

Carpet fitters? The new owners must have been in already.

Since they came from Dubai, I wasn’t sure whether they planned to rent the place out or keep it for occasional use. What if they’d already removed my property?

I opened my front door with great reluctance, expecting to see the place stripped bare. Instead it looked like a drunken football fan’s hotel room.

Graffiti had been sprayed across the walls, quite unimaginative taunts like up yours and your mom is a whore. They were a careless bunch who did this, spraying right across the paintings when the mood struck them. The sofa was ripped to shreds with the stuffing left intact, so it was plain they weren’t searching for anything. Huge gouges had been scraped in my teak media cabinet, a retro piece I was particularly fond of.

Bleach had been poured over every one of my precious Turkomen carpets, eating through the fabric in places. On the floor in front of the cabinet it looked as if a mirror had been smashed into tiny shards. All my CDs had been taken out of their cases, broken to pieces, and dropped on the floor.

It made me sick to see what they’d done. I bent down and found fragments of my Steve Vai DVD. I gathered them up in my hands, wishing them back together. This was his performance two years ago at London’s Astoria; one cut, “Whispering a Prayer,” was one of the best guitar solos ever recorded. A personal anthem for me.

“Watchtower” on the Ali soundtrack, Jimmy Page and John Mayall with Mick Taylor on lead. What a travesty. Some of those disks were irreplaceable.

I wandered from room to room. The kitchen counters of Brazilian black slate and the stainless steel cupboards had been criss-crossed with lurid green spray paint.

My bedroom was a similar mess. Scrawled on my mirror with Magic Marker were the words Dear John, Thanks for your hospitality. Sorry for leaving things in such a mess … The Rap. It would be impossible to tie him to the crime, of course, safely stashed away in jail as he was. His friends had done this job.

There was no way to set things right in three days. Our insurance had terminated with the sale. I assumed the new owners had some and hoped it would cover the damage. Visions of lawsuits danced before my eyes. I was heading for bankruptcy anyway—this would just get me there a bit faster. My emotional reservoir had already been drained dry, but I seemed to find room for another wave of despair.

I wasn’t sure I had the guts to open the door to Samuel’s suite. I pried it open a crack and peered in. More graffiti was sprayed on the walls, but their energy must have flagged at this point because other than the books pulled from the shelves, I couldn’t see too much damage.

I hauled my treasure chest from the closet. All the items were still inside. Samuel’s secretiveness about the