Joel Rosenberg - The Twelfth Imam

“He says you were almost fluent in all those then.”

David said nothing. They walked quietly for several minutes.

“So where in the world are we, anyway?” Marseille finally asked, trying again to break the ice.

“You really can’t stand silence, can you?” David replied.

“Shut up,” she laughed, punching him in the arm, “and answer my question.”

David feigned pain but finally answered. “The Gouin Reservoir.”

“The what?”

“The Gouin Reservoir-or in French, Réservoir Gouin.”

“ Ooh la la , I’m impressed,” she said. “Parlez-vous français, aussi?”

David shook his head. “Je ne remember much pas.”

Marseille laughed. “Je le doute. Anyway, that’s too bad.”

“Why?”

“’Cause we’re in Quebec, and they speak French up here.”

“So you do know where we are.”

“I can read the ticket stub. But Le Réservoir Gouin-what the heck is that?”

“You really want to know?”

“I’d just like to hear you put two or three sentences together in English… you know, just to know that you can!”

“Fine,” David said. “It’s a collection of hundreds of small lakes containing innumerable islands and peninsulas with highly irregular shapes, located in the central portion of the Canadian province of Quebec, roughly equidistant from Ottawa, Montreal, and Quebec City. Its shoreline stretches over 5,600 kilometers, excluding islands. The reservoir was created in 1918 at the upper reaches of the Saint Maurice River and is named after Jean-Lomer Gouin, who was premier of Quebec at the time. Construction was done by the Shawinigan Water and Power Company to facilitate hydroelectric development by controlling the flow of water for the stations downstream.”

Marseille had stopped walking and was staring at David. “How do you know all that?”

“I read a lot.”

“What did you do, memorize an encyclopedia article or something?”

David shrugged and quickly changed the subject. “Hey, over there, grab those old branches and I’ll grab these,” he said. “That’ll be a start.”

For much of the next hour, they gathered firewood, hauled it back to the camp, dropped it off, and went back out for more, avoiding the older boys. In their gathering, they passed by a few cabins farther inland, unoccupied and clearly out of use. They were unlocked and seemed to have been left to the elements. One of them displayed plenty of bear claw scratchings around the door and windows, but another A-frame style cabin was in pretty good shape, just a little dusty. They didn’t have time then to explore, but this little island ghost town fascinated them both.

It had been a long day, and once the gear had been set up or stowed for later, the whole group was sleeping by 9 p.m. The next four days stretched out in front of them with the promise of endless pike and walleye. But the fish would wait till morning.

Sadr City, Iraq

Najjar Malik was exhausted.

Even after a long nap and a simple, home-cooked meal, the morning’s violence, the malfunctioning machine gun, and the strange encounter with the mysterious taxi driver still rattled him.

After dinner, in spite of his weary protests, Najjar’s aunt and uncle took him shopping in the bazaar. At one point, his aunt was haggling with a grocer over the quality of some pistachios while his uncle sat across the street in the shade, smoking a water pipe and chatting with the older men. Najjar looked over a collection of leather boots and wished he had enough to buy himself a pair. But he still hadn’t found his wallet, and when it was clear he wasn’t going to be buying anything that day, the shoe seller told him to go away.

Najjar nervously inched his way through the market, still wondering who the man was who had been kidnapped, still wondering who had kidnapped him and why, and why they had killed his wife and child. The gruesome images were indelibly etched in his mind’s eye. He wanted to forget it all, but he could not. Was it political? Was it for money? He didn’t want to think about any of it, but he couldn’t think of anything else.

Just then he nearly tripped over a beggar sitting cross-legged against a cement wall.

“Forgive me,” Najjar said. “I didn’t see you there.”

“It is not mine to forgive,” said the beggar, a surprisingly young man-hardly older than Najjar himself-covered in a dirty brown robe and wearing no sandals or shoes. His filthy black feet were covered with oozing blisters. “Only Allah can do that, if he so chooses.”

Najjar shrugged. The religious fervor of his youth was dying. What had Allah really given him? Sadness. Loneliness. Poverty. Despair. Were these the gifts Allah gave to his children?

“Come, my friend,” the beggar said, “you look downtrodden. Let me tell you about your future.”

Najjar shook his head, then scanned the crowd to find his aunt and uncle.

“You don’t want to know your future?” the beggar asked. “Or you don’t think I can see it?”

“Both,” Najjar half lied. He desperately wanted to know his future. But he hadn’t time for back-alley charlatans.

“I think you are lying,” the beggar said, his tone suddenly low and sober. “I think you desperately want to know your future. But you think you haven’t time to spare for some back-alley charlatan.”

Startled, Najjar whipped his head around and stared at the young homeless man in disbelief.

“You are troubled by the violence you saw in the street this morning,” the beggar said, his face smudged with dirt. “But all your questions will be answered in due course.”

Najjar was scared. Who is this person? How can he know my most intimate thoughts?

“May I ask you a question?” the beggar said.

Najjar nodded.

“If you could go anywhere in the world, if you could travel anywhere and money was no object, where would you go?”

“I don’t know,” Najjar said blankly.

“Again you are lying,” the beggar said. “You don’t trust me. Fair enough. You don’t know me. But the moment I asked you, you instantly thought of where you would like to go, true?”

Najjar was embarrassed and confused. He nodded again.

“Write it down,” the beggar said.

“Where?”

“On a piece of paper. Don’t let me see it. But I will tell you what you write.”

“That’s impossible.”

“Nothing is impossible.”

Najjar didn’t have a piece of paper on him, much less a pen or pencil, but he turned back to the hustle and bustle of the bazaar and found a grocer nearby. From him, he secured a small pencil, then spotted an empty cigarette pack on the ground. Najjar ripped open the pack and scribbled down a location inside, carefully shielding it from the beggar and any other prying eyes that might be around. When he was finished, he stuffed the pack in his jeans pocket and stared back at the young man who now captivated his attention.

“Bless you,” the beggar said.

“Why do you say that?” Najjar asked.

“Because you just wrote down the Jamkaran Mosque near Qom, Iran.”

Najjar’s eyes went wide. “How did you do that?” he asked, his pulse pounding. “How did you know?”

The beggar didn’t respond. His face revealed no expression whatsoever. Instead, he simply said, “Now write down the name of a world leader.”

Unnerved, Najjar hesitated. “Living or dead?” he asked.

“You choose,” the beggar said.

Najjar pulled out the cigarette pack, scratched out Jamkaran Mosque , and wrote, Saddam Hussein. Then, realizing that would be too obvious, he thought for a few moments, crossed out Saddam , and wrote instead, Fulgencio Batista. Batista, Najjar had recently learned, had been the president of Cuba in the late 1950s. He crumpled up the cigarette pack and put it back into his pocket.