Final Flight

resumed scanning the warehouses with his binoculars.

* * *

The camel thieves were two young boys, about eleven and twelve years of age. Orphans. His uncle had forced them to deepen the water holes and fill the bags for the camels, which were let out on hobbles to graze. When the work was done, the boys were fed. They had no food of their own. Then the men had lain in the shade as the sun scorched the earth. The two thieves huddled together against a stone below where Qazi and his cousin sat with their rifles across their knees. The old man found a place further away, where he could keep an eye on the camels. Qazi wandered over in late afternoon and found him reading the Koran.

They tied up the thieves for the night. At dawn the next day the animals were watered again and the last of the dried dates and bread were shared.

“Who is the eldest?” the old man asked.

One of the thieves acknowledged that he was.

The old man looked at his son and Qazi. “Seize him. Put his right hand against that rock.” He pointed at a large stone.

“No! Allah be praised, have mercy. No! Kill me instead.” Qazi had helped drag the sobbing boy to the indicated stone.

The old man took his sword from the saddle of his camel. “You have violated Allah’s law. And you know the law.”

The sword made a sickening sound as it bit into the boy’s wrist. It took the old man three chops to sever the hand. He bound the wrist with a tourniquet and his own undershirt.

They set the two on their own camel a beast suffering so badly with the mange that it had only half its hair. The old man jammed their rifle into its scabbard and slapped the beast into motion. The young boy held his brother in the saddle as the animal climbed slowly out of the wadi and disappeared over the rim.

“Uncle …”

The old man’s face was like chiseled stone. He gathered the camels that had been taken and roped them together.

The three had ridden for several miles when they heard the faint echo of a shot.

The old man reined his camel in and looked about wildly. He turned in the saddle and looked toward the west, where the shot must have been fired. Then he dropped the lead rope and beat his mount into a gallop.

Qazi and the cousin followed. They found the lone camel standing amid a patch of lava stones and thorn bushes in a shallow depression. The boy with the missing hand lay on the ground, the barrel of the rifle in his mouth, his toe on the trigger. His brains lay in the sand above the body.

His younger brother sat at his feet.

The old man prostrated himself toward the rising sun.

The sun rose higher and higher into the cloudless sky.

“Allah, I have believed in the words of your Prophet all my days. I have read the book and followed the book. I have kept the faith of my fathers. I have obeyed the law. I have raised my sons to obey the law. But it is not enough.”

“Uncle,” Qazi said. “Do not blaspheme. He hears everything.”

The old man rose from the ground. His face was lined and his beard was gray. “The book is not enough for a simple man like me. Allah knows.” He had looked about him at the stones and sand and the merciless sky and the twisted body. “Not enough.”

They buried the dead boy. They took the other boy home with them and he was taken in by the old man’s eldest son.

Three years later the old man sent Qazi north to the city to join the army.

* * *

The small radio crackled to life. “This one is okay.”

“Roger.”

Qazi started the engine and put the van in gear. As he drove away he looked in the driver’s mirror at the hangar lights and the ungainly machines. The rotors were spread now, and they flapped gently in the rising breeze. The wind was gusting.

The book is not enough. His uncle had been right about that. But perhaps, Qazi thought, the Prophet was right and paradise will be better than this life. Perhaps not. Wherever the old man was, that was where Qazi wished to be. If tonight’s scheme went awry, he well knew, he would join the old man very soon. Ah well, perhaps it was time.

* * *

“You’re really serious about adopting?”

Jake and Callie were walking past the Royal Palace, under the white marble statues of the medieval kings of Naples. They looked, Jake thought, appropriately hairy and fierce, clad in their armor with swords in hand. Across the street, around the fountain in the Piazza del Plebiscito, clusters of teenage girls were flirting with the swarms of boys cruising on their Vespas and motocross bikes. Every now and then a girl hiked her skirt up, swung onto the back of the seat, and the boy blasted off into traffic. Apparently this was the place if you were young and growing up in Napoli.

“I went to see the agency about four months ago. We would have to wait years for a baby. And these older children who need special love and care, they spend their lives bouncing from foster home to foster home.”

“So if we ask for a baby, we really won’t be helping.”

“Oh, Jake.” She squeezed his hand. “That’s precisely it. I’ve met Amy Carol about five times, and she needs a family. And we can be that family for her.”

“Tell me about her.”

Callie began with a physical description. They rounded the corner of the castle and picked their way through the parking lot, past the entrance to the Galleria Umberto, and around the scaffolding on the front of the opera house. Jake noticed several prostitutes standing on the steps to the Galleria, but Callie was describing the little girl’s emotional problems and paid no attention.

A hundred feet further on he saw a tall, willowy woman in spike heels and a black dress standing under the light on the corner across the street. Her low-cut, strapless dress clung to her figure like cellophane and only came down to midthigh. She was busy adjusting her bosom. Callie was reciting Amy Carol’s family history.

Callie stopped dead on the sidewalk, in midsentence, and Jake jerked his head from the far corner. Directly in front of them on the sidewalk a woman with exposed breasts stood talking to a man leaning from a car. She wore high heels and some type of black lingerie, but her breasts were completely bare. A transparent robe was draped around her shoulders.

“Keep walking,” Jake urged.

Callie looked the woman up and down and gave the man in the car a piercing glance, which he ignored.

Ten paces further on three motor scooters drew to the curb. The young male drivers each had a teenage girl behind him. They chatted excitedly, looking back at the working hooker. Jake and Callie kept walking. The boys eased the scooters into motion and made a U-turn. Jake looked back over his shoulder. The scooters made another U-turn and swung into the curb where the car had been. The woman surveyed the teenagers with disdain and the Italian came loud and fast, audible even above the traffic.

“Stop gawking, Grafton,” Callie ordered. “She’s a 36 C-cup and needs dental work.”

She’s lying about the teeth, Jake told himself. Not even Callie had been looking at her mouth. “I wonder where we could get you an outfit like that?”

“Oooh, you men! You like that, huh?” She began to sashay along, rolling her shoulders and hips.

“Just admiring the local color.” Callie was still doing it. Pedestrians were staring. “Stop that!”

“Twenty thousand lire.”

“What?” If she kept on, she was going to need a chiropractor.

“Twenty thousand lire, sailor, and I no givva da kisses.”

“How much for kisses too?”