The firing began again, as intensely as before, but this time we weren’t the target. Yaseen explained that Jawad and his men were creating a diversion and that this was the signal for us to abandon the house by the rear entrance. Salah aimed his launcher at a terrace and fired. A monstrous, eardrum-jangling explosion was followed by a huge conflagration, which masked the living room in a cloud of thick caustic smoke. “Run!” Salah shouted. “I’ll cover you!”
Stunned, I started running behind the others. Deafening bursts of reciprocal gunfire greeted me outside. Bullets ricocheted around me and whistled past my ears. Folded in half, my hands on my temples, I felt as though I were going through walls. I slipped past a doorway and fell onto a pile of garbage. Hussein laughed and ran straight ahead. His brother caught up with him and forced him into a side street. Gunfire broke out in front of us; a rocket exploded behind us. Someone screamed, apparently struck by the fragments. His cries pursued me as I clenched my teeth and ran, ran as I’d never run before in my life….
16
Yaseen was in a red rage. In the hideout where we’d gone to ground after managing to escape the police raid, he was all we could hear. He punched the furniture and kicked the doors. Hassan stood with folded arms and kept his eyes cast down. His twin brother was in a heap at the end of the entrance hall, sitting on the floor with his head between his knees and his hands on the nape of his neck. Salah was missing, and that fact redoubled Yaseen’s fury. He was used to ambushes, but leaving behind his most faithful lieutenant! “I want the head of the traitor who ratted on us,” he fumed. “I want it on a tray.”
He considered his cell phone. “Why doesn’t Salah call?”
Yaseen’s coolheadedness was gone, lost to a combination of anger and anxiety. When he wasn’t spraying us with his whitish spittle, he was knocking over everything in his way. Although we hadn’t occupied our new refuge very long, nothing was where it had been when we entered.
“There was no mole in this sector,” Yaseen repeated. “Tariq was adamant. We were in that house for months, and we never had any sort of problem whatsoever. Somebody must have made a mistake, and I have no doubt it was either you”—he jabbed his finger at me—“or Hussein.”
“I didn’t make any mistake,” Hussein growled. “And stop treating me like a retard.”
Yaseen, irritated by our silence, had been waiting for just such an opening as this. He leapt on Hussein, grabbed him by his shirt collar, and lifted him off the floor. “Don’t talk to me in that tone. Understand?”
Hussein let his arms hang down in a sign of submission but lifted his head high enough to show his leader he wasn’t afraid of him. Yaseen pushed him away brutally and watched him slide down the wall to his initial position. When Yaseen turned in my direction, I felt his burning eyes go all the way through me.
“How about you?” he asked me. “Are you sure you haven’t been dropping any white pebbles along your trail?”
I was still dazed. The explosions and the screams resounded in my head. I couldn’t believe we’d escaped from that deluge of projectiles, running like madmen through a warren of side streets, ducking past more than one murderous cross fire, and now we were safe and sound. Although unable to feel my legs, I was still, somehow, on my feet, but wrung-out, dumbstruck, undone, and I really didn’t need to be subjected to another ordeal. Yaseen’s glare menaced me like a blade.
“Have you made some new friend? Or told somebody something you shouldn’t have?”
“I don’t know anyone.”
“No one? Then how do you explain the shit that just went down? For months, Tariq’s place is a cozy hideout, and then, all of a sudden…Either you’re jinxed or you’ve been careless. My guys are veterans. They look twice before they take a step. You’re the only one who’s not completely up to speed. Who do you hang out with outside our group? Where do you go when you leave the hideout? What do you do with your time?”
His questions landed on me like blows, one after the other, without leaving me time to get a word in or catch my breath. My hands couldn’t stifle them or fend them off. Yaseen was trying to push me to the limit. He was in a fury, he needed someone to take it out on, and I was the weak link in the chain. It was the age-old story: When you can’t make sense of your misfortune, you invent a culprit for it. I strung together denials, trying hard to resist, to defend myself, to keep from getting upset, and then, suddenly, in a cry of outrage, and without realizing what I was doing, I let slip the name of Omar the Corporal. Maybe it was fatigue, or vexation, or just a way of removing myself from Yaseen’s thoroughly vile scrutiny. By the time I recognized my blunder, it was too late. I would have given my soul to have my words back, but Yaseen’s face had already turned crimson.
“What did you say? Omar the Corporal?”
“I see him every now and then, that’s all.”
“Does he know where you live?”
“No. Once he gave me a ride to the square, but only once. He never saw the house — he left me at the gas station.”
I hoped that Yaseen would drop the subject and go back to harassing Hussein or maybe even turn on Hassan. I hoped in vain.
“Am I dreaming, or what? You led that worthless prick to our hiding place?”
“He picked me up along the way and kindly agreed to drop me off at the service station. Where’s the harm in that? The station’s a long way from Tariq’s place. Omar couldn’t possibly have guessed where I was going. And besides, we’re not talking about just anybody; we’re talking about Omar. He’d never give us up.”
“Did he know you were with me?”
“Come on, Yaseen, it doesn’t make any difference.”
“Did he know or not?”
“Yes.”
“You idiot! You moron! You dared to lead that yellow coward to our—”
“He had nothing to do with the raid.”
“How do you know? Baghdad — no, the whole country — is full of snitches and collaborators.”
“Wait, Yaseen, wait. You’re wrong about—”
“Shut up! Not another word! You have nothing to say. Nothing, you understand? Where does that fat fuck live?”
I saw that I’d made a serious mistake; Yaseen wouldn’t hesitate to shoot me down if I didn’t try to redeem myself. He made me guide him to Omar’s place that very night. Along the way, seeing that he seemed to have relaxed somewhat, I begged him not to do anything rash. I felt sick, very sick; I didn’t know where to turn, and I was consumed by remorse and by the fear that I had caused a terrible misunderstanding. Yaseen promised me that if Omar had done nothing wrong, he’d leave him alone.
Hassan was at the wheel. He had a skinning knife hidden under his jacket, and the rigidity of his neck muscles gave me gooseflesh. Yaseen, in the front passenger seat, examined his fingernails, a blank look on his face. I cringed in the rear seat, my hands damp, my guts roiling, my thighs squeezed together to suppress an irresistible need to piss.
Avoiding the roadblocks and the main thoroughfares, we surreptitiously made our way to the poor neighborhood that had been my home for a brief while. The building in question reared up in the darkness like a landmark in the underworld. There was no light in any window and no sign of any living thing outside. It must have been three o’clock in the morning. We parked the car in a small, damaged courtyard and, after a quick look around, slipped into the building. I had a copy of the apartment key, which Yaseen confiscated and inserted into the lock. He slowly opened the door, groped for the light switch, and flicked it on. Omar was lying on the straw mattress on the floor, stark naked, with one leg wrapped around Hany, whose pallid flesh was likewise completely unclothed. At first, the sight threw us into confusion; Yaseen was the first to recover. He drew himself up, hands on his hips, and silently contemplated the two nude bodies at his feet.