“Do you want a piece of mine?”
And that was how Abdelatif snagged himself a quarter of Theo’s dinner, the best one he’d had since being kidnapped, without so much as a threat. It was the kind of thing I usually would have spoken up about, but ever since that little stunt Theo pulled during the bathroom run back at the villa, I figured he was pretty much on his own when it came to the Moroccan.
We were given blankets, but as at the villa there were not enough. Once the entire floor was covered, except for the space immediately in front of the door, there were a limited number left to cover up with, and the Moroccan and I had to share. At first Theo didn’t get one at all, but when the guard noticed, he left and came back, bringing him both a blanket and a flat foam pillow with a SpongeBob SquarePants pillow-case. When it came time for us to go to sleep, it was a tight fit, with everyone’s feet overlapping those of the men sleeping opposite. Theo got stuck in front of the door with no blankets beneath him and had to fold his and curl up inside it to avoid sleeping on the concrete. Because this was the only area not covered, it became the place where everyone shook their blankets off and would get particularly dirty, but by now that didn’t matter to Theo.
Obviously, none of us were looking Rico Suave at the moment, but Theo’s appearance was the worst by far. He only had one pair of pants and one tee shirt, originally white, but now so far past the yellow stage that it had turned a light gray. All of his other clothes had been stolen by the other prisoners at the villa after the jihadis did a wash and then dumped everything in a pile for us to go through. Here he’d walk around the cell with his tee shirt tucked into his boxer shorts in an attempt to thwart the bedbugs, SpongeBob pillow tucked under his arm for safekeeping. Some of the men began to call him a kalb, which meant dog, and one day I accidentally nicknamed him Scrappy because he really did resemble a stray. The name didn’t stick for long, but it was funny as shit watching the Moroccan use it whenever he wanted a massage.
“Hey, Scrappy!” he’d call, and then whistle, snapping his fingers. “Come here, boy!”
I knew it was insensitive, but it was hard not to laugh when his flea-ridden ass actually came running over, looking like Old Yeller after he’d been bitten, in a hurry to obey his master’s every command.
When I awoke on our first morning in the stores, the room was filled with a yellow glow from the sun reflecting off the stone wall of the neighboring building and in through the bars to our cell. A few hours later we were each given a piece of bread and a hard-boiled egg, which would have constituted a feast at the villa.
Shortly after breakfast we got our first glimpse of the Wolfman, a jihadi whose appearance made our blood run cold. He was not a large man, standing about 5′9″ with an average build, wearing a pine-green Adidas knockoff jumpsuit. His hair, which he kept pushed back, was wavy and very long, but this wasn’t his defining feature. His defining feature was his beard, which was a sight to behold, growing well down his chest and covering nearly his whole face, springing thick and bushy from right below his eyes. When he walked in nobody looked at the wall; instead we all stared at him in awe as he stepped to the Shabiha, sized them up without saying a word, and then left the room as silently as he had entered it.
“He looks like he’s ready to blow himself up, man,” the Moroccan whispered in my ear.
A minute later the emir arrived, with three men—visitors. After looking us over they walked up to the Shabiha, who were sitting by their mattress. As the emir looked down on them he began to roll up his sleeves. Shabiha Ali and his little friend stared steadily down at the Korans open in front of them as if they were the only people in the room. Then the emir said something in Arabic and the little one looked up and handed him the Koran. The emir passed it to one of his friends, and that’s when the show began.
Slap! Slap! Slap! Slap! Slap!
The emir’s hand colliding with the little Shabiha’s face made a sound so loud it barely sounded real, like something out of a seventies porno flick. Defenseless, he had no choice but to sit there and take the blows as they came, one after another after another.
“Holy shit!” I whispered in the Moroccan’s ear. “I’ve never heard slaps like that in my life! No wonder he doesn’t have any wrinkles in his clothes.”
When the emir was done he turned his attention toward the third Shabiha, but one of the emir’s friends, who was wearing an untucked purple dress shirt, grabbed him by the arm and yelled something in Arabic.
“They’re fighting over who’s going to get to hit him!” the Moroccan said. “He’s saying, ‘No! No, this one is mine!’”
The emir politely stepped aside and let his buddy go to work. The slaps were the same, the only difference was that this guy didn’t bother rolling up his sleeves. As for Shabiha Ali, who never once looked up from his Koran, they left him alone, and when the man in purple was finished they all left the room. Not one of us said a word and a few seconds later we heard somebody coming back and the emir’s voice calling to the little Shabiha. Face full of dread, the Shabiha slowly got up and made his way to the door, shaking. We all sat tense with anticipation as he stood there,
