Donna Andrews - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 130, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 793 & 794, September/October 2007

“Okay. You said us. Who’s us?”

“Me, my brother Virgil, a woman, maybe Donahue, if I can talk him into it.”

“Who’s the woman?”

“An Afghani broadcast journalist. She’s clean but doesn’t have a passport.”

“Who the hell does these days?” Benny grunted. “Baggage?”

“Carry-ons, two or three personal weapons per man.”

“What can you pay?”

“What do you want?”

“What I want is a hundred thousand per person, but what I’ll take is five per. Twenty thousand.”

“Deal. Payment in the air?”

“Deal.” Benny bobbed his chin at the bottle of water Morgan was drinking. “You shouldn’t be drinking that shit.”

“Why? It’s Fiji water.”

“It’s a Fiji water bottle , probably been refilled a dozen times from the tap.” He took a pewter flask from his inside pocket and passed it over. “Here, gargle and rinse your mouth out with this.”

Morgan took a swig, rinsed, gargled, nearly choked, and spat it on the floor behind his chair. “Jesus!” he said. “What the hell is it, cyanide?”

“You’re close. It’s Kazakhstan bootleg vodka. Tastes like hell, but it kills bacteria. I never leave home without it.” Benny rose. “I have to get back or Moazzah will piss his pants. He’s edgy today.” He took back his flask and held out a hand. “See you Tuesday.”

“Tuesday,” Morgan said.

Back in town, late in the afternoon, Morgan looked for Donahue at the Dingo Club.

“He ain’t here, mate,” one of the Irishman’s cronies told him.

“Know where I can find him?”

“I do. But he don’t like to be bothered on Sunday afternoons.”

“It’s important. He’ll want to see me.”

The crony studied Morgan for a moment, then said, “You’ll find him at the Italian Embassy, out on Great Massoud Road.”

Morgan frowned. “The Italian Embassy?”

“That’s what I said, mate. But don’t expect him to be in a jolly mood. Like I told you, he don’t like to be bothered on Sunday afternoons.”

Outside, Morgan found a dilapidated taxi whose driver, incredibly, knew exactly where the Italian Embassy was located. But what in hell, Morgan wondered, would Donahue be doing there? He was an Irish Free State national traveling on Swiss and Swedish passports, none of which had anything to do with Italy. Just what, Morgan puzzled, could the old Black Irishman be up to?

When he got to the embassy grounds, Morgan found it to be casually guarded by several carabiniere wearing sidearms but without heavier weapons. He was courteously directed toward a small group of people congregating in a flowery ornamental garden near a small chapel. One of the people was Donahue, clean-shaven, wearing a starched white shirt, appearing unarmed, talking to two nuns. When he saw Morgan, he smiled, excused himself, and came over to him.

“What the hell are you doing here?” he asked irritably. Morgan, seeing a priest join the two nuns and go into the chapel, quickly said, “Going to Mass. You?”

“Well, I’m going to Mass too,” the Irishman growled. “But I didn’t expect to see you here.” He squinted suspiciously. “How’d you find the place anyway? It’s the only Catholic church in the whole of Afghanistan.”

“Taxi driver told me.”

“I’ve a feeling you’re lying.”

Morgan shrugged. “Why would I lie?”

“Well, tell me, then, Morgan Tenny, if you go to Mass, who will you pray to?”

“The usual people. Jesus. Blessed Mother Mary—”

“No, no,” Donahue challenged. “I mean, who specifically ?”

Morgan caught on quickly and outsmarted him. “St. Philomena,” he said confidently.

“Ah,” said Donahue, surprised, a little chagrined. “The Patroness of Desperate Causes. A good choice.”

Morgan tilted his head. “And you, Donny? Who do you pray to?”

“Me?” The big Irishman shrugged. “I go straight to the top. Jesus himself. I used to pray to St. Michael the Archangel, you know, to protect me in battle. But he let me get shot by an Orangeman in Derry some years ago, so I dropped him. Now it’s between me and Jesus on the Cross. My best hope at this point is to get into purgatory.” He patted Morgan on the shoulder. “Yours too, I’d wager.”

“I’m not even counting on purgatory,” Morgan said. “I expect to go directly to hell.” He put his own hand on Donahue’s shoulder. “And you will, too, Donny. Neither of us will ever see heaven.”

From inside the chapel, chimes sounded. The two men fell in behind others and entered, dipped a fingertip in holy water, walked down the narrow center aisle, genuflected, made the sign of the cross, and entered a pew made of hardwood where they knelt and closed their eyes in prayer.

There was nothing much different about them from the rest of the mixture of U.N. employees, Europeans, and Americans in the congregation, except for the few whispered words they exchanged upon entering.

“Are we set?” Morgan had asked.

“We’re set,” Donahue said.

“Okay,” Morgan told him. “We go day after tomorrow.”

“Tuesday?”

“Tuesday. At noon.”

Their killing schedule was on, now firmed up in the little Catholic chapel.

Morgan spent all day Monday and Monday night with Lee.

During the day they walked around, exploring the parts of the once-great city that were being rebuilt after being pillaged, looted, and desecrated first by Russian soldiers, then by Taliban officials, finally by rogue mercenaries from around the world.

“Not all of it is the wreckage you see around you,” Lee told him. They were having a Western lunch at the new Marco Polo restaurant. All the patrons were Westerners, with not an Afghani to be seen. “I will show you something very beautiful that is still intact after four centuries.”

After lunch she took him there, to Babur’s Gardens, a terraced hillside resplendent with flowers, leading up to a pristine white mosque and a small marble gravestone, and two others on the terraced garden just above it.

“This is the burial place of Babur, who founded the Mogul Empire — not ,” she emphasized with a pointed finger, “the dreaded Mongol Empire, which was something altogether different. Of course, it is true that Babur was a great warrior and led his people in overcoming Turks and Indians and many others, but he was also a very gentle man, a poet, a writer of history. Nearly everything good in our culture began under his rule. This,” she drew in the gardens, the mosque, the gravestones with a sweep of her arm, “he designed himself more than four thousand years ago as the final resting place for himself, his wife, and their daughter.”

“It’s very beautiful,” Morgan said, impressed.

But the memory of the place became tainted in his mind later that day when they walked past the ruins of the Kabul Museum and Lee said sadly, “It was once one of Asia’s greatest museums. Now see what unscrupulous men, vulgar men, have reduced it to.”

Men like me, Morgan thought, oddly uncomfortable.

In the evening they had dinner at the elegant Khyber Restaurant, eating a mixture of Western and Afghan foods. They were both aware now that the hours before Tuesday were passing quickly.

“At times like this,” Lee asked, “do you worry much?”

“No,” Morgan said. “Worry is like thinking about a debt you may not have to pay.” It was a lie. He always worried. Before a battle, he felt as if live things were crawling around in his intestines, eating away at them.

Later he told her, “Tomorrow pack only a small bag. Stay home all day. I’ll come for you in the afternoon.” And he asked, “You’re still sure about going?”

“Yes, still sure.”