Raymond Khoury - The Sanctuary

Mia urged her driver on with frantic gestures and manic pleas, bullying and badgering him as he bolted and chopped his way forward while dodging the maze of fenders and bumpers crowding them. A dozen curses and some threatening hand gestures later, they finally burst onto the open road ahead.

The traffic got much busier as they got closer to the pedestrian zones, and a hundred yards or so ahead, Mia spotted Evelyn getting out of her taxi and disappearing into a bustling arcaded street.

“There, that’s her,” she exclaimed, pointing at the distant figure — only to have her surge of adrenaline brusquely cut off by the realization that her taxi was now stationary again. Between it and Evelyn was a solid sea of other stopped cars, densely packed and three across, held in check by a lone, Moses-like traffic cop while cars lumbered and fought their way across from an intersecting street.

Mia’s eyes raced left and right, trying to gauge the best move, then she spotted the android and another man stepping out of the BMW — which was also mired in the blocked traffic — and slipping through the cars, heading in Evelyn’s direction. The area was swarming with people — dinner in Beirut was never before nine o’clock, often later, and on a mild October night like this, the eateries and the wide pedestrian piazzas of the downtown area were a popular draw, staying open until well after midnight. The choice before Mia was suddenly no longer theoretical: Tailing Evelyn from the relative safety of a car with a reasonably chunky driver to boot was one thing; actually reaching her, and possibly drawing out her pursuers, was something entirely different.

She had no choice.

She reached into her pocket, thrust a ten-dollar bill in the driver’s hand — U.S. dollars were the currency of choice in Lebanon — and with her heart in her mouth, she bolted out of the car and cut through the snarled traffic, hoping her instincts were way off the mark and wondering what she’d do if they weren’t.

Evelyn’s mind had been swirling with questions ever since Farouk had bailed on her in Zabqine. True to his word, he was standing there, puffing away nervously, waiting for her by the clock tower that stood at the center of the Place de l’Étoile.

A little over a hundred years old, the tower had seen the worst of the civil war and had remarkably survived despite sitting right on the notorious Green Line that divided East from West Beirut. Almost fifteen years after each crenellation of its exquisite Ottoman craftsmanship had meticulously been restored, it now stood sentinel over a city that was once again seething with anger and outrage. Lebanese flags and highly charged antiwar banners fluttered from its sides, while graphic images of the horrors of the recent fighting loomed over its base.

Farouk had chosen well. The piazza was brimming with people, some of them taking in the display in stunned silence, others striding past carrying shopping bags or chatting on their cell phones with detached insouciance. It was easy to go unnoticed in the crowd, which was exactly what he needed. Having the Parliament building across the square, with the handful of armed soldiers posted there, was also a plus.

He stubbed his cigarette out just as Evelyn reached him and, after casting an apprehensive glance over her shoulder, led her away from the tower and down one of the radiating, arcaded streets.

Evelyn dispensed with the small talk and jumped right in. “Farouk, what’s going on? What did you mean by Hajj Ali’s being dead because of these? What happened to him?”

Farouk stopped at a quiet corner by a shuttered art gallery. He turned to her, his fingers trembling as he pulled out and lit another cigarette. A shadow fell across his face as he seemed to struggle with some evidently painful memories.

“When Abu Barzan — my friend in Mosul — when he first showed me what he was trying to sell, I immediately thought of you for the book with the Ouroboros. The rest…they were very nice pieces, there’s no doubt, but I knew you wouldn’t be interested in being a part of anything like that. But you have to understand, the other pieces, they’re the ones that are more obviously valuable, and, as I said before, I needed to get some money, as much as I could, to get away from that cursed place for good. I tried to contact some of my clients who were, shall we say, less conscientious, but I don’t have many of those. So I also told Ali about it. He had some good contacts, a different clientele than mine, ones who ask fewer questions…. And I was in a rush, I had to find a buyer before Abu Barzan did, even if I had to split my share with a third party like Ali. Half of something was better than nothing, you see, and if Abu Barzan managed to sell them before I did, I’d end up with nothing. When I told Ali about them, I gave him photocopies of the Polaroids that Abu Barzan had given me.” Farouk shook his head, as if berating himself for a terrible mistake. “Photocopies of all the pictures.”

Farouk took a long drag on his cigarette, as if steeling himself for the more difficult part of his tale. “I don’t know who he showed them to, but he came back not even a week later saying he had a buyer, at the agreed price, for the whole lot. The whole lot. I wanted to keep the book outside the sale — I knew how interested you were at the time in anything with that symbol on it, and I thought it might entice you to help me with selling the rest, or at least, help me find a job here in Beirut — so I told Ali to tell his buyer that he could have all the other pieces in the Polaroids, everything apart from the book, but that we’d give him a small discount to make up for it. Ali agreed that it seemed to be a reasonable counteroffer, the two alabaster figurines alone were worth far more than we were asking for the whole lot, and the book, well…surely it wouldn’t be missed.” He swallowed hard. “I couldn’t have been more mistaken.

“I didn’t hear anything for a week or so, then one morning his wife called me up. She was frantic. She told me some men had come for him, at his shop. She said they weren’t Iraqis. She thought they were Syrian, and that they might even be”—he rubbed the bridge of his nose, as if the word itself was enough to conjure up physical pain— “mukhabarat.”

Mukhabarat.

A ubiquitous term in the region, commonly uttered in careful, hushed tones, and one of the first words Evelyn had gotten to know when she’d first hit Baghdad all those years ago. In the literal sense, it simply meant “information” or “communications,” but no one used it in that context. Not anymore. Not since it became the shorthand name for the secret police, the ruthless “information purveyors” no tyrant could rule without. Not that such internal security agencies were limited to the Middle East. In the disturbingly brutal new world order of the twenty-first century, pretty much all countries — except for, maybe, Liechtenstein — were wielding them with abandon, and they all seemed to treat their victims with an unrepentant savagery that made Ivar the Boneless’s demented practices seem lame.

“They kept her outside while the two men talked to him,” Farouk added dolefully, “then she heard some shouts. They wanted to know where the pieces were. They hit him a few times and then they dragged him out of the shop, bundled him into a car, and drove away. They took him, just like that. It’s a common occurrence in Iraq these days, but this wasn’t political. Before they left, Ali’s wife overheard them talking about the pictures. The photocopies I gave him. They were the buyers, Sitt Evelyn — or, more likely, they were there on behalf of the eventual buyer. And one of them told the other, ‘He just wants the book. We can sell the rest ourselves.’ Just the book, Sitt Evelyn. You understand?”