Jihadi (17 page)

‘Who on earth is this? Tell me no lies!’

Ummi had entered, taken a look at Ra’id and been properly scandalized. The presence of an uninvited, unknown man in the home was, historically, forbidden.

‘Only the son of the prime
min
ister,’ Noura said, on her feet in an instant, in obedience to the uniqueness of the moment. ‘Fatima pretended he didn’t even ex
ist
. But he
does
.’

Ra’id stood for inspection. Noura mimicked and exaggerated his shoulders-back stance.

‘Sit down, Noura,’ Mother ordered. Noura did not sit. Fatima raised an eyebrow. Noura sat.

‘We will be moving out of the city, Mother,’ Fatima said.

Noura began meowing like a cat.

At the heavyset woman’s urging, Abu Islam began stressing the specifics of The Point in all his talks.

The killing of Americans by gunfire, explosion, hand-to-hand combat, or any means whatsoever – any American, at any time, in any situation, playing any combat role or no role at all, of any age or gender, of any mental status, while located within the Islamic Republic or in any other locality – was a binding religious obligation upon all Muslim males who had passed the stage of puberty.

He supplied no scriptural evidence for this amplification of The Point.

He pressed it anyway, and returned to it with an energy that seemed superhuman to his admirers. Here is why: One of them, the heavyset woman (to whom he had recently married himself without witnesses) procured amphetamines for him.

Ever cautious, she did some online research and warned him sternly about the dangers of mixing the pills and the bourbon. She took responsibility for his intake, ensuring at least twelve hours lapsed between the stimulant and the alcohol. She monitored his sleep patterns over four consecutive days. He averaged ninety daily minutes of slumber. Acceptable.

And he much preferred being awake, preferred spending his waking hours shouting in the streets about the necessity of killing Americans wherever they could be found. The number of his followers had grown in direct proportion to the intensity of his insistence upon this new religious obligation, The Point. Barely a week after he began preaching along this line, his Friday jumuah exceeded five hundred. He was in his element.

This destitute with no religious credentials, this wanderer toting a small boy like a pet, this roving gambler with his new wife and his grey-wheeled suitcase, beamed at the crowd.

Another grey haze had filled the cell. After lunchtime, Thelonius asked the Raisin: ‘Do you think we could discuss the smoking?’

‘Certainly. We can discuss anything you like.’

‘It’s just that smoke makes goodwill in here more difficult.’

The Raisin smiled, exhaled a grey jet and tipped ash into that waiting can. ‘A priority for you, is it? Creating and sustaining goodwill in the Islamic Republic?’

Thelonius sighed and ran a hand through his hair. ‘Backtalk. Every time. You’re a hard man to connect to, you know that?’

‘Am I?’

The Raisin crushed the nearly full-length cigarette along the palm-ridge of a hand red and thick with calluses.

‘Victory,’ he said. ‘Until the next skirmish, at any rate. Another victory for the Americans.’

The Raisin dropped the remnants of the smoke into the can and caught Thelonius staring at the ruined terrain of the slender hand that had consumed the ember. ‘It doesn’t hurt anymore when I put them out that way, you know.’

‘Whatever. For your information, I didn’t want a victory. I wanted a discussion.’

‘Hard to tell the difference, perhaps.’

One bright, hot Monday morning, Mike Mazzoni and his commanding officer, Captain X, reported to Alpha Station and swore under oath that Mazzoni had been involved in no illegal or dangerous behavior involving alcohol or dogs. They also swore that rumours to the contrary were the work of local insurgents working under the influence of terrorist cells. The affidavit was submitted. The legal problems appeared to have vanished. Then the letter from Washington came.

Jamal had requested a day of personal testimony before the Council from both Mazzoni and his captain. The Council had agreed to his request and had filed an appeal with both the Adjutant General’s office in Washington and the American embassy in Islamic City.

More court time. More red tape. All because some raghead wanted fifty percent that he didn’t fucking deserve. All because he couldn’t tell when a certain subject was closed.

‘If a man ever got into an accident, it would be a shame,’ said Captain X one morning, to no one, as he slowly passed the table where Mike Mazzoni was eating breakfast.

He was gone and they could all speak freely again.

Ummi had at first been hesitant to say much about the prospect of her daughter’s returning to work at the BII, but the immense raise and the social status of their unexpected visitor went a long way toward overcoming her misgivings. She nodded at Fatima’s recapitulation of each point she had negotiated.

Two additional weeks of vacation, making up four now. Two days to be taken immediately, for the move. Fatima would report directly to Rai’d; she would never have to enter the compound
again; she would receive an advance on her first month’s salary sufficient to pay off the outstanding debt on her sister Wafa’s house in the village of D—. Rai’d had granted all of this without hesitation before he left, leaving Fatima wondering what more she should have requested.

Ummi asked: ‘Does all this mean we can leave the city?’

There was happiness in Ummi’s voice and a new vulnerability, such that the question gave Fatima a strange sensation in her stomach. Not fear exactly. The queasy feeling of something important definitely being over. It was the first time in her life her mother had openly acknowledged Fatima’s role – obvious but unspoken over the past months – as head of the family.

‘Yes. As soon as possible,’ Fatima said, almost without missing a beat. And looked out the window at the fluttering bird that had soared away from its tree in search (she assumed) of food for its young.

Ummi supposed aloud that all the painful things likely to happen in Wafa’s village must surely have already happened. She sniffed and touched the tip of her nose and then her cheek with the back of her hand. Noura stared fixedly at some Intimate Companions that had congregated in the corner of the room.

In the parking lot outside a mosque far too small to accommodate his purposes, Abu Islam led the late-evening prayer before perhaps seven hundred sweating people. Then, after his own remarks, which he had delivered with a bullhorn, he asked the congregation to listen to a few important words from his wife about an American she had encountered.

She took up the bullhorn and announced that she had seen an
American urinating upon the Koran, swearing vile oaths against it all the while and predicting the literal, global obliteration of the faith. Her pronouncements spread like a flame through the city.

One of her pronouncements in particular caught the public imagination and was much repeated: ‘He came from nowhere, this American. Like Shaitan. And he will return like Shaitan.’

Unbidden, a restless crowd began to jostle in the darkness around the American embassy, not quite so calm or organized or patient as before. The Americans turned on the emergency lighting. Several thousand people, many of them dressed in the long white cloth favoured by Abu Islam, could be seen milling about, failing to disperse as ordered. Water cannons did not clear the street. They seemed only to draw more white robes.

The next morning, with white still surrounding the embassy, Abu Islam’s heavyset wife stood on a car parked in front (a Lincoln Continental, as it happened) and used her megaphone to repeat, with previously undisclosed, thrilling details, the story of the man who had slandered the faith and urinated upon the Koran. Her account had gained potency. Its pacing had improved with every retelling and it was now as eloquent as the tail of a rattlesnake.

She had seen these events herself. She was prepared to swear it was the very man who had just been taken into custody for murdering a father and his daughter in the street in broad daylight. She had seen that crime too. And so forth.