Frankenstein in Baghdad Read online

  CHAPTER SIX

  STRANGE EVENTS

  1

  TWO POLICE TANKER trucks arrived, blocking off access to Lane 1. Five armed Iraqi policemen and a U.S. military policeman got out. They pushed onlookers behind the two tankers. The lane had been empty since morning, and many of the residents had managed only a silent, wary peek from the rickety old mashrabiya, or wooden latticed windows, that overlooked the lane. All was calm while a policeman took photographs.

  A few minutes later Faraj the realtor arrived out of breath, his thick beard swaying with every step he took. Under his arm was a small leather briefcase in which he kept documents and official papers for his visits to government offices.

  The American immediately accosted Faraj and asked him about one of the houses—who lived there and whether he knew anything about an incident that had taken place outside. An Iraqi in police uniform was translating the American’s questions into Arabic and looking accusingly at Faraj, who appeared stunned. Although he had clout in the neighborhood, he was still frightened by the Americans. He knew they operated with considerable independence and no one could hold them to account for what they did. As suddenly as the wind could shift, they could throw you down a dark hole. Faraj opened his dry lips and explained that he owned the house, or rather he had been renting it from the government for fifteen years, and he paid the rent regularly to the lawyer in the department of frozen assets. As he spoke he took some papers out of his bag and, with a trembling hand, showed them to the policemen.

  The American left him to talk. Nearby sat the bodies of four beggars who had been found sitting upright in the lane. He turned back to Faraj to ask again if he knew them. Faraj nodded. He felt the blood in his veins run cold. What a terrible start to the day. Who had killed these poor beggars? Had an act of God struck them dead in an instant while they were sitting like that?

  Each of the beggars had his hands around the neck of the man in front of him. It looked like some weird tableau or theatrical scene. Their clothes were dirty and tattered, and their heads hung forward. If Hazem Abboud had seen this and taken a picture, he would have won an international prize for it.

  More and more onlookers gathered at the ends of the lane, and timid heads started to look out cautiously from behind the mashrabiya screens and wooden windows. The American didn’t like that there were so many onlookers. With a wave of his hand he urged the Iraqi policemen to speed things up. They took Faraj’s phone number and asked him to drop in at the Saadoun police station if he came across any information about the crime or found any witnesses. Faraj breathed a sigh of relief and started to stroke his thick beard. He took out his prayer beads, plucked up his courage to move closer to the beggars’ corpses, and looked at them with disdain.

  Some of the policemen put on white rubber gloves and started to unlock the hands gripping the necks. They carried the bodies quickly to one of the vehicles, and then they all left.

  People suddenly poured into the lane and gathered around Faraj to ask him about the incident. He dismissed them with a wave, hit some of the boys with his long string of black prayer beads, and walked away.

  Up above, from a wooden window of the derelict old house opposite the one where the beggars had been squatting, another old beggar was furtively watching what was happening. He had been in the same place the previous night when the crime took place, drinking by himself, and had drunk half a bottle of Asriya arak when he heard the fighting in the dark lane. He dismissed it at first as just one of the usual drunken brawls between beggars returning to their wretched rooms at the end of the night. They had insulted one another and suddenly remembered what a terrible state they were in, and they got it into their heads that the problem lay with the creature that happened to be standing in front of them, who was usually one of their fellow beggars.

  The brawling continued and the curses grew louder, mixed with gasps, groans, and screams of pain. The drunken beggar poked his head out the window, but he couldn’t see anything. Then, in the headlights of a car that was turning at the far end of the lane, he was able to see five figures holding hands and moving in a circle.

  On the evening of the same day that the bodies of the beggars were found, the drunken beggar was brought to Faraj’s office. He started to blabber, and word soon reached Faraj, who saw him as a possible opportunity to enhance his authority. The man still hadn’t recovered from his drinking binge. In fact, he was always drunk and it didn’t make sense to rely on what he said, but there was no harm in taking advantage of it.

  Faraj shouted a string of invective at the beggar, insulting him and all the drunks in the world. He prayed that God would rid the country of them and their disgusting behavior. He blamed the government, saying it was frightened of the Americans and wouldn’t apply sharia law to save people from this scourge. As Faraj issued this frightening tirade, the drunken beggar looked on like a terrified, helpless mouse.

  Faraj asked the beggar what he had seen, and the beggar repeated what he had started spreading in the neighborhood an hour after the police patrol left: that one of the five men was a horrible guy with a big mouth.

  “But there were four of them!”

  “No, five. Each of the four wanted to grab the throat of the fifth man, but they grabbed each other’s throats instead.”

  “What kind of nonsense is that, for God’s sake?”

  Faraj slowly took a sip of tea and looked with contempt at the old beggar. At the same moment someone else was drinking his tea—Brigadier Sorour Mohamed Majid, the director general of the Tracking and Pursuit Department. One of the brigadier’s assistants came into his office and put the “four beggars” file on his table. The brigadier put the glass of tea on the saucer, picked up the file, and turned it over to check that the case was the responsibility of his department. It was a summary of a police report indicating that the four beggars had died by strangling one another.

  2

  Mahmoud and Ali Baher al-Saidi left the office in Saidi’s black Mercedes. Saidi invited Mahmoud out sometimes, and Mahmoud didn’t have much choice about whether to go. Saidi would call Mahmoud, who would find Saidi standing at his door, holding his black leather briefcase and about to depart.

  “We have to go on a small errand, and I want you with me,” Saidi usually said, and Mahmoud would be curious to find out what he meant by this mysterious expression. Saidi was addicted to expressions like this, ones with hooks to pull the other person along behind him. He would never tell you the whole story in one sentence: he would tease it out in dribs and drabs. When he was with Saidi, Mahmoud might end up going into the Green Zone and being thoroughly searched. Or they would take an elevator with familiar-looking senior officials. He once met the minister of planning in an elevator and saw how the minister shared a laugh with Saidi. Wow, they were friends! Many women shook Saidi’s hand—translators, civil servants, journalists, and others who worked in parliament. Mahmoud looked at himself in the mirrors that were everywhere, but what he saw meant nothing. All he saw was Saidi and his network of relationships.

  “Where are we going?” Mahmoud asked as they got into Saidi’s car. Daylight was fading, the sky gradually turning black. Mahmoud had had to cancel an appointment with his friend Hazem Abboud. In the morning Hazem had invited him to an exhibition of photographs by some of his friends who worked for the news agencies. Maybe he would go the next day, he said to himself.

  “We’re going to meet an old friend. You might get some useful information out of him.”

  “Information about what?”

  “I’ve been working on him for a while. There are things happening on the ground that we know nothing about. What’s behind all the insecurity? We need to exploit any piece of information we can get to embarrass the Americans and the government,” said Saidi.

  Mahmoud clearly didn’t understand anything. He had imagined Saidi was friends with the Americans and the government; why did he want
to embarrass them? He didn’t have the courage to ask. He would find out when they met this old friend, as Saidi described him. They drove into Karrada and ran into a traffic jam created by a patrol of American Hummers. The troops on top of the vehicles were pointing their weapons at the cars behind, which kept at least twenty yards back.

  Saidi turned on the stereo, and a Whitney Houston song came on. Saidi didn’t seem bothered by the scene in front of him. In fact, he rarely seemed bothered by anything. He believed in the future, as Farid Shawwaf put it. But Farid said that with a touch of sarcasm, meaning Saidi knew he himself would be better off in the future. It had nothing to do with the country or what was happening in it. Mahmoud was confused about what Farid said. He didn’t want to think too much about his own attitude toward Saidi or Saidi’s attitude toward the general situation. These things required a level of effort, concentration, and mental distance that Mahmoud just didn’t have right now, or else he was just trying to trick himself into thinking he didn’t. He knew that Farid Shawwaf was spiteful and hard to please and always trying to discredit people. He wasn’t even grateful for the trouble Mahmoud had taken to keep him on at the magazine and save him from being fired along with Zaid Murshid, Adnan al-Anwar, and Maysa, the thin girl, who wept bitterly when she was told she was being dismissed.

  Saidi’s car approached an imposing gate flanked by enormous concrete walls of a kind Mahmoud had never seen before in the streets of Baghdad. Night had fallen, and Saidi had taken a series of turns in Jadriya to avoid a traffic jam, so Mahmoud no longer knew where they were. The gate opened, and they drove down a long, deserted street lined with bushy eucalyptus trees. The farther they went, the quieter it became. The sound of the traffic and the police sirens faded into the distance.

  At the end of the street they turned into a side lane, and Mahmoud saw police cars parked alongside an American Hummer and some civilian cars. A man in uniform waved them into a parking space.

  Mahmoud and Saidi got out of the car and were escorted into a two-story building by a man in civilian clothes. Saidi turned to Mahmoud. “So, you don’t have any appointments or anything?” he said with his usual smile. “Today we’re going to have lunch together.”

  They went into a grand office, and as soon as they entered, Mahmoud could smell an apple-scented air freshener. A short white man with a shiny bald patch, dressed in civilian clothes and chewing something, stood up behind his desk. He and Saidi embraced with jovial laughter; then he shook hands with Mahmoud, and they all sat down on plush sofas in front of the man’s desk. Mahmoud learned that the man was Brigadier Sorour Mohamed Majid, the director general of the Tracking and Pursuit Department. But tracking and pursuit of what, Mahmoud wondered. He assumed he would find out in the course of the meeting.

  Saidi had said the visit would be short, but it lasted over two hours. The conversation ranged widely, and sometimes they laughed so much they cried. Mahmoud laughed too; he had no problem with that. He had nothing else on his schedule; he was his own man. All he had to look forward to was going back to his miserable hotel room in Bataween. But he did want to have a smoke, and the smart man whose office smelled of apple didn’t look like he would welcome smokers. Saidi himself hadn’t lit a cigarette. Mahmoud gathered from the meeting that Brigadier Majid was an old friend of Saidi’s. They had gone to middle school together, but the years had kept them apart. Now they were meeting up again, perhaps as part of the same assignment: serving the new Iraq.

  Brigadier Majid had been a colonel in the intelligence service of the old Iraqi army, and for his new position, he had obtained an exemption from the de-Baathification regulations, as well as a promotion to a sensitive post that was rarely mentioned in public. He was responsible for a special information unit set up by the Americans and so far kept largely under their supervision. Its mission was to monitor unusual crimes, urban legends, and superstitious rumors that arose around specific incidents, and then to find out what really happened and, more important, to make predictions about crimes that would take place in the future: car bombings and assassinations of officials and other important people. The department had provided a good service in that field over the past two years. They were doing it all undercover, and the information they obtained was being used indirectly. The Tracking and Pursuit Department was never mentioned in public, to preserve its secret status and protect the people working there.

  Mahmoud couldn’t understand why Saidi had arranged for him to be briefed on all this. Why did Saidi trust him so much that he would take him along on these mysterious missions? It wasn’t the first time, and it didn’t look like it would be the last. He had spent the last two months driving around with Saidi in his black Mercedes, going from one place to another. He knew, and he thought Saidi also knew, that the recent assassinations targeted not just prominent people but anyone like Saidi who wore a smart suit and drove a fancy car. Someone was bound to assassinate him one day. Whoever was with him at the time might well die too. The story of Mahmoud al-Sawadi and his dreams of professional advancement could come to an abrupt end.

  Saidi might be a fool or a hero, someone oblivious to what was happening around him or a courageous adventurer. Mahmoud preferred to see himself as stupid, at least in his dealings with himself rather than with others, because the turning points in his life had come about because of stupid things, not because of planning or intelligence. His coming to Baghdad, for example, was because of a big mistake he had made back in Amara.

  A muscular young man put a tray with some bulbous teacups on the table next to them. Mahmoud came out of his reverie. Brigadier Majid kept declining to give Saidi any information that could be published.

  “We have analysts in parapsychology, astrologers, people who specialize in communication with spirits and with the djinn, and soothsayers,” said the brigadier.

  “Do you really believe in such things?”

  “It’s work. You don’t know how many weird stories we have to deal with. The aim is to get more control, to provide information about the sources of violence and incitement to hatred, and to prevent a civil war.”

  “A civil war?”

  “We’re now in the middle of an information war. An information civil war. And some of my soothsayers are talking about a real war within the next six or seven months.”

  Mahmoud’s heart raced when he heard what Majid was saying. His head was spinning like a jet engine. He tried to digest this deluge of strange ideas but couldn’t. He was frozen silent, holding the glass handle of his teacup but not drinking. He felt as if he had turned into just a massive pair of ears.

  “Should I buy that printing press I told you about? Should I or shouldn’t I expand my operations?” asked Saidi. Brigadier Majid stood up to turn off his cell phones, which had all started ringing. He looked over his glasses at Saidi in the distance. “I don’t think so,” he said. “I’d leave that aside for now.”

  Saidi didn’t press the subject. He went back to trying to obtain information to report in the magazine. Brigadier Majid picked up a folder from his desk and waved it around. “This is the file on four beggars who were strangled to death a few days ago in Bataween. They strangled one another. It was meant to send a message. There are people who are trying to convey something. We don’t have much information yet, but you can follow the case by keeping in touch with the Saadoun police station.”

  Saidi looked at Mahmoud as if to say he should take on that task. Then he looked back at the brigadier, who was still standing by his desk. From the sofa, Saidi asked him about similar stories, but the brigadier said he couldn’t say any more. After a pause, the brigadier came back to stand in the middle of the room.

  “There are reports about criminals who don’t die when they’re shot,” he said. “Several reports from various parts of Baghdad. The bullet goes into the criminal’s head or body, but he just keeps walking and doesn’t bleed. We’re trying to collate these reports because I don�
�t think they’re just exaggerations or fabrications.”

  He went up to the edge of the desk and pressed a buzzer. Before the muscular young man had time to respond, Brigadier Majid looked at his old friend and smiled. “You came about the printing press, didn’t you?” he said. And then, as if he realized his confidences might lead to trouble, he added: “If you were to write a story for the magazine, who would believe you?”

  The older men laughed, and Mahmoud noticed that he was laughing with them.

  3

  In the evening, lying on the bed in his room at the Orouba Hotel, Mahmoud turned on his digital recorder and spoke into it:

  “Very strange . . . Saidi was making fun of his friend’s bizarre responsibilities. He was making fun of the djinn and the fortune-telling, but then he asked his advice on whether to buy the printing press. He must have obtained some information based on predictions. He didn’t dispute it. He just took what the man said as given. He must be receiving similar information at regular intervals, so he feels safe moving around Baghdad. He isn’t frightened of going out openly, not because he’s courageous but because he knows he’s not going to die.

  “He spoke about civil war as if it were a film they were waiting to see in the cinema. They were laughing. So things definitely won’t get too bad. If I stay close to Saidi, I can be sure that things won’t go badly, at least for me.

  “Saidi’s an Islamist, and his friend’s a Baathist. But Saidi’s a lapsed Islamist. His ideas changed while he was living abroad. And his brigadier friend is a lapsed Baathist. He has strong feelings toward Saidi and is an old friend, and they seem close. But why was Saidi making fun of Majid on the way back? He made fun of the apple scent that the air freshener on the wall squirted out in small doses every minute or so, saying that Baathists loved the smell of apples. ‘The chemical weapons they dropped on Halabja smelled of apple,’ he said with a laugh.