“Are you still with your old warrant officer?”
“Where else could I go? With him, at least, when things get tight, I know he’ll advance me some cash. He’s a nice guy. And you still haven’t told me what you’re up to around here.”
“Nothing. All I do is go in circles.”
“I see. Look, I don’t have to tell you, you can always count on me. If you want, I could talk to my boss again. We might be able to work something out.”
“You wouldn’t be thinking about paying a visit to Kafr Karam, would you? I’ve got a little money I want to send to my family.”
“Not anytime soon. Why don’t you just go back home — I mean, if you think there’s nothing for you in Baghdad?”
Omar was trying to sound me out. He was dying to know whether he could bring up certain delicate subjects again without making me mad. What he read in my face made him recoil. He lifted up his hands and said in a conciliatory voice, “It was just a question, that’s all.”
According to my watch, it was a quarter past three. “I have to go back,” I said.
“Is it far?”
“A fair distance.”
“I could give you a ride. You want? My van’s in the square, close by.”
“No, I don’t want to trouble you.”
“You won’t be troubling me, cousin. I’ve just dropped off a sideboard, and now I’ve got nothing else to do.”
“Well, I’m warning you, it’s ’way out of your way. You’re going to have to go the long way around.”
“I’ve got plenty of gas.”
He downed his lemonade in one swallow and signaled to the cashier not to let me pay. “Put this on my tab, Saad.”
The cashier refused my money and jotted down the amount of the check on a piece of paper, next to Omar’s name.
Night was starting to fall. The last glints of the sun splashed the upper stories of buildings. The noises of the street subsided. The day had been a rough one: three attacks in the city center and a skirmish around a suburban church.
We were in Tariq’s house. He, Yaseen, Salah, and Hassan had shut themselves up in a room on the second floor, no doubt refining the plans for the next operation. Hussein and I weren’t invited to the meeting. Hussein pretended not to care about this slight, but I sensed that it had stung him. As for me, I was beside myself, and like Hussein, I brooded over my anger in silence.
The upstairs door creaked, and a babble of conversation signaled the end of the conference. Salah came down first. He’d changed a great deal. He was enormous, with a mug like a bouncer and hairy fists constantly clenched, as if he were strangling a snake. Everything in him seemed to be boiling, like the inside of a volcano. He seldom spoke, never gave an opinion, and maintained his distance from the others. All his attention was focused on Yaseen, from whom he was inseparable. When we saw each other for the first time since Kafr Karam, Salah hadn’t even greeted me.
Yaseen, Hassan, and Tariq stopped and chatted for a while at the top of the stairs before coming down to join us. Their faces expressed neither tension nor enthusiasm. They all sat on the padded bench facing us. With great reluctance, Hussein picked up the remote control that was lying on the floor at his feet and turned off the little set.
Yaseen asked him, “You burned up the engine on that car of yours?”
“No one told me I had to put oil in it.”
“You have a warning light on your dashboard.”
“I saw a red light come on, but I didn’t know why.”
“You could have asked Hassan.”
“Hassan pretends I’m not there.”
“What do you mean by that?” Hassan asked angrily.
Hussein made a vague gesture with one hand and detached himself from his armchair.
“I’m talking to you,” Yaseen said in an authoritative voice.
“I’m not deaf; I just gotta go piss.”
Salah quivered from his head to his feet. He was none too pleased with Hussein’s attitude. Had it been up to Salah, he would have fixed Hussein’s ass on the spot. Salah couldn’t bear it when anyone disrespected his leader. He snorted loudly, crossed his arms tight against his chest, and clenched his jaw.
Yaseen gave Hassan an interrogatory look. Hassan spread his arms to show he was powerless and then walked toward the bathroom. We heard him talking softly to his twin brother.
Tariq offered us a cup of tea.
“I don’t have time,” Yaseen said.
“It won’t take more than a minute,” our host said.
“In that case, you’ve got fifty-eight seconds.”
Tariq made a dash for the kitchen.
Yaseen’s cell phone rang. He put it to his ear and listened; his face contracted. He stood up abruptly, walked over to the window, and, with his back against the wall, cautiously lifted the curtain.
“I see them,” he said into his phone. “What the fuck are they doing there? Nobody knows we’re here. You’re sure they’re after us?” With his free hand, he ordered Salah to go upstairs and have a look at what was going on in the street. Salah took the steps four at a time. Yaseen kept talking into his mobile phone. “As far as I know, this area has been fairly calm.”
Hassan, on his way back from the bathroom, immediately saw that something was wrong. He slipped to the other side of the window and gently moved the curtain aside. What he saw made him spring backward. He cursed and ran to an armoire, where a light machine gun was concealed. Along the way, he looked into the kitchen and alerted Tariq, who was still busy preparing tea.
Salah came back downstairs, unperturbed. “There are at least twenty cops around the house,” he announced, pulling a huge gun out from under his belt.
Yaseen examined the roof of the building opposite and then twisted his neck in order to see the terraces of the buildings closer to us. He spoke again into his cell phone: “And you’re where, exactly? Very good. You take them from behind and cut a hole in their trap big enough for us to get through…. By the street the garage is on, you’re sure? How many are there?…That’s how we’ll do it. You keep them entertained on your side, and I’ll take care of the rest.”
He snapped his phone shut and said, “Looks like some bastard’s ratted us out. There are cops on the roofs north, east, and south of here. Jawad and his men are going to help us get out of this. We’re going to charge the garage. There’ll be three or four collaborators for us to deal with.”
Tariq was panic-stricken. “I swear to you, Yaseen, there’s no mole in this sector.”
“We’ll talk about that later. Right now, you have to concentrate on getting out of here in one piece.”
Tariq started to fetch a Soviet-made rocket launcher, but as he reached the middle of the living room, a windowpane burst into fragments, and he fell over backward, already dead. The bullet, probably fired from a neighboring roof terrace, had shattered his upper jaw. Blood began spurting from his face and branching out across the tiled floor. Immediately, a hail of projectiles crashed into the room, demolishing the silver, riddling the walls, and raising a tornado of dust and unspecific fragments all around us. We threw ourselves on the floor and began crawling toward anything that might pass for shelter. Salah fired blindly through the window, howling like a savage as he emptied his clip. Calmer than Salah, Yaseen had crouched down in the spot where he’d been standing. He stared at Tariq’s contorted body as he pondered our next move. Hussein was hunched in the hallway with his fly open. When he saw Tariq stretched out on the floor, he burst out laughing.
Salah sprang to the rocket launcher, loaded it, and, with a movement of his head, ordered us to leave the living room. Hassan covered Yaseen, who ran for the hallway. The automatic-weapons fire abruptly stopped, and through the ensuing deathlike silence, we could hear the distant crying of women and children. Hassan took advantage of the lull to push me ahead of him.