“We’ll go together,” he insisted.
She had leaned against the doorjamb, watching him. I love you, she said, whoever you are, but I’m better now. Thank you for being here.
As she turned to go, he lurched toward her and grabbed her wrist. “Yes, let’s do that. Let’s leave. But where shall we go, Prudence?”
Not together, she said, wincing.
He was hurting her and didn’t care. “It’s late. There’s no one about. We’ll walk by the sea.”
No.
“You want to see the sea, don’t you? I’ll take you. I’ll take you right now.”
No. Her voice had rumbled then, reached into his chest like a quake deep in the earth. It frightened him, but when he tightened his hold, Prudence whipped, lashed, spun out of his grasp, and made across the room. He lurched again, got hold of her elbow, but she fought dirty, scratching, spitting, a cat gone wild. Still, he managed to pick her up, though the twisting creature he carried was no longer a beautiful woman, erotic and supine, but an evil grunting thing with foul breath, and when, near the threshold, he reached for the door handle, he was suddenly overcome, knocked down by a cacophony of voices—his father’s, his mother’s, his aunts’, even his brother’s—and a hologram of faces, all of them hissing at him, cursing and berating him, and he wished it was Max in his arms, that he might carry him away from the place in which he had left him, but the clatter of condemnation grew louder until he pulled his arms around his head and begged them for quiet.
By the time they fell silent, Prudence had slithered away, like water into a drain, steam into the air.
Since then, he had tried to conjure up an alternative departure—Prudence walking out of the door with a fond farewell and a backward glance, as lovers do—and he could almost see it, just as he had almost heard the scrape of stockings and the sea moaning and the rain falling on broad green leaves.
All imagined, perhaps. All imagined.
Annie was still there, seated right by him. “Come with me, Gabriel. Please. This is over now.”
II
Into Temptation
Red double-deckers crossing the bridge in the post-dawn gloom; palm trees and minarets; low white buildings in mud-brick enclosures, and the river, lazy blue in the early light. . . . Thea stepped onto the balcony, into the cool morning air. How peculiar, she thought, that this should be her first sight of the East: London buses.
Rush-hour in Baghdad.
Reggie, her new boss, had unruly light brown hair and a shaggy beard to match, and had seemed on first impression to be genial, a bon vivant Englishman who loved Iraq. When he had picked her up at the airport the night before, he had told her that, jetlag notwithstanding, she would have to be in the lobby at ten to seven the following morning.
“Because of the intense heat in the summertime,” he had explained, “everyone starts work at seven and finishes at three.”
But this was not the summer: it was cold and still dark when her breakfast was brought by a young waiter wearing a gray jacket and white gloves. Hotel living had its advantages, she would discover, such as breakfast in bed every day, which was just as well, since her team was likely to be there for some time. The company intended to find apartments for them, but nothing happened fast in Iraq, Reggie had warned her, and finding suitable accommodation would be a laborious process, so this dim hotel bedroom, with its narrow windows (to keep out the heat) and the balcony shaded by another balcony overhead (to keep out the heat), with its single beds and limited leg-space, was home for the foreseeable future.
She made it to the lobby before seven and met up with the rest of her cadre—Kim, an American girl who had been living in London, and an English surveyor, Geoffrey. They set off in a jeep to drive the short distance to the office. Kim was slim, pretty—blond hair in a tight curly perm, light brown eyes—and lively. So lively, and unspeakably chatty at that ungodly hour. She had been in Baghdad for a month and liked it, she said, but she longed to get out of the hotel and into proper housing. “I feel as if I’m passing through, you know? Like a tourist. Not someone who’s going to be living here for a few years.”
Thea found it difficult to look out without being rude, but she wanted to see the city rather than hear about it, especially since Baghdad was standing there, like a debutante in her ball gown, waiting to be noticed and admired.
Or pitied. The war was on every corner. Sandbags, piled high, concealed the soldiers but not the barrels of their protruding guns. Thea was more interested than alarmed, which was curious, since it was alarming—the Iranians might invade and then she’d be done for, caught, trapped, unable to get home, but what of it? She had made the decision to come; she had arrived. If the war should go badly for Saddam Hussein, there was nothing she could do about it now. Saddam was everywhere: posters, flyers, graffiti, photos dangling in the rear windows of cars. The cult of personality was doing its work. No space in Iraq could be left bare of his image.
The first thing she noticed about their otherwise unremarkable office building was the cold. It was freezing. There was no heating, even in the middle of winter, and that, Thea realized too late, was why Kim and Geoffrey looked conspicuously bulky. “Layers,” Kim explained. “It’s the only way to keep warm.”
“Jayzus, I only brought a couple of sweaters. I never imagined it could be so cold.”
“Me too. They should have warned us.”
Their offices, on the fifth floor at the top of the building, were bright and a little chaotic—the desks sprinkled around large
