“Get a load of this,” he said. “I knew Omar the Drunkard, and here we have Omar the Sodomite, getting off with boys now. A charming sight.”
There was so much contempt in his voice that I gulped.
The lovers were sound asleep, surrounded by empty wine bottles and soiled plates. They stank, the two of them. Hassan prodded Omar with the tip of his shoe. The Corporal shook himself heavily, gurgled, and resumed snoring.
“Go and wait for us in the car,” Yaseen said. It was an order.
I was four or five years younger than he was, and he considered me insufficiently mature to witness such a spectacle, particularly in his presence.
“You promised me you’d leave him alone if he had nothing to do with the raid,” I reminded Yaseen.
“Do what I tell you.”
I obeyed.
A few minutes later, Yaseen and Hassan joined me in the car. Since I’d heard no screams and no shots, I believed the worst had been avoided. Then I saw Hassan wipe his bloodstained hands under the armpits of his shirt, and I understood.
“It was him,” Yaseen announced as he got into the car. “He confessed.”
“You stayed in there less than five minutes. How did you make him talk so fast?”
“Tell him, Hassan.”
Hassan put the car in first gear and drove out of the courtyard. When we reached the end of the street, he turned to me and declared, “It was him all right, cousin. You’ve got nothing to reproach yourself for. That piece of shit didn’t hesitate a second when he saw who we were. He spit at us and said, ‘Go fuck yourselves.’”
“He knew why you were there?”
“He figured it out the second he woke up. He even laughed in our faces. Look, cousin, some things are clear, and this is one of them. We’re talking about a disgusting son of a bitch, a pig and a traitor. His wild nights are over.”
I tried to find out more; I asked exactly what Omar had said and what had happened to Hany. Yaseen pivoted in his seat and growled in my direction: “You want a notarized report, or what? This is war, not lace-making. If you think you’re not ready, then get the hell out, right now. No one has to know.”
I hated him. God, I hated him more than I believed myself capable of hating anyone. For his part, he was fully aware of the hatred he inspired in me. I know because I saw his vaunted stare waver a little before my eyes. At that precise moment, I realized I had just made myself a sworn enemy, and I understood that Yaseen would seize the next occasion to do me wrong.
Shortly after noon, when we were sitting around gnawing our fingernails in our new hideout, Yaseen’s mobile phone rang. It was Salah, who had miraculously made it out of Tariq’s house unscathed. The television news reports declared that the house itself was completely in ruins. It had collapsed under a barrage of artillery shells, and then fire had devastated a good part of the remains. According to the local residents, the pitched battle had lasted all evening, and the reinforcements sent to the scene of the clash had only intensified the confusion; electrical power had long since been cut, and after some of the neighbors were struck by stray bullets or grenade fragments, panic had spread throughout the area.
When Yaseen recognized his lieutenant’s voice on the telephone, he nearly burst into tears. He chided the fortunate survivor, reproaching him for his “radio silence”; then he consented to listen without further interruption. He nodded, running his finger under his collar again and again as we watched him in silence. At last, he raised his chin and spoke into the handset: “You can’t bring him here? Ask Jawad. He knows how to transfer a parcel.”
Yaseen snapped the phone shut and, without a word, hurried into the next room and slammed the door in our faces.
The “parcel” arrived for us that evening, in the trunk of a car driven by a uniformed police officer, a tall, strapping fellow I’d seen two or three times in Sayed’s store, ordering television sets from us. Whenever he’d come in, he’d been wearing civilian clothes. Now, it turned out, he was Jawad — his nom de guerre — and, to my great surprise, he was the deputy superintendent of this police district.
He explained to us that he’d been returning from a routine mission when he discovered that his unit’s assault team had been sent into action. “When the duty officer read me the coordinates of the operation, I couldn’t believe it. The superintendent’s target was your hideout. He wanted to conduct the action on his own and score points on his rivals.”
“You could have warned me immediately,” Yaseen said reproachfully.
“I wasn’t sure. You were in one of the most secure refuges in Baghdad. I didn’t see how they could have gotten close to you, not with all the alarm bells I’d set up all around. Somebody would have warned me. But not wanting to take any chances, I went to the area where the raid was about to take place, and that’s when things became clear.”
He lifted the trunk of his car, which he’d parked in the garage. A half-smothered man was lying curled up inside, wrapped like a sausage in a roll of clear packing tape. His mouth was gagged, and his face looked lumpy and battered.
“It was him. He’s the one who gave you up. He was there before the operation began, showing the superintendent your hideout.”
Yaseen shook his head sadly.
Thrusting his muscular arms into the trunk, Salah violently extracted the prisoner, threw him to the ground, and kicked him away from the car.
Yaseen squatted down beside the stranger and tore off his gag. “If you yell, I’ll poke out your eyes and throw your tongue to the rats.”
The man must have been around forty years old, with a scrawny body, a malnourished face, and graying temples. He wriggled in his bonds like a maggot.
“I’ve seen that face before,” Hussein said.
“He was your neighbor,” the policeman said, strutting a little with his thumbs hooked in his belt. “He lived in the building on the corner next to the grocery, the one with the climbing plants on the front.”
Yaseen stood up. “Why?” he asked the stranger. “Why did you give us up? We’re fighting for you, dammit!”
“I never asked you to,” the informer replied disdainfully. “You think I want to be saved by hoodlums like you? I’d rather die!”
Salah gave the man a brutal kick in the side, knocking the breath out of him. He rolled about, gasping for air. But as soon as he got his wind back, the snitch took up where he’d left off. “You consider yourselves fedayeen,” he panted. “But you’re nothing but murderers. Vandals. Child-killers. I’m not afraid of you. Do what you want with me, you won’t change my mind. I think you’re a pack of mad dogs. Criminals, heathens, head cases. I loathe you!”
He spat at us, one after the other.
Yaseen was astounded. “Is this guy normal?” he asked Jawad.
“Perfectly,” the police officer declared. “He teaches in a primary school.”
Yaseen thought for a while, holding his chin between his thumb and index finger. “How did he spot us? None of us is on any poster anywhere. None of us even has a police record. How did he know what we were?”