Robert Ferrigno - Prayers for the assassin

“I don’t.”

“That is your loss.” Redbeard waved to an annex. “What have you learned?”

“I talked to one of her colleagues…one of her friends. A sociology professor named Marian Warriq. They used to have tea, but she hasn’t spoken with Sarah for weeks.”

Rakkim slowed as they passed the D.C. Qur’an. The clicking of prayer beads from a hundred hands echoed off the gently sloping dome.

“I said, is that all you’ve accomplished?” said Redbeard. “I would have thought you had some method of contacting Sarah.” He stood up as they entered the annex, left the wheelchair behind.

“We had a method. I’ve used it. No response.”

“So much for the power of love.” Redbeard stretched, seemed to expand to twice his former size. “You must be disappointed.”

“I’ll find her.”

“We haven’t much time.” Redbeard took Rakkim’s hand, the two of them strolling the perimeter of the museum. “Do you know who Ibn Azziz is? No? He’s the new grand mullah of the Black Robes.”

“So what? He can’t be any worse than Oxley.”

“Don’t be a fool. Oxley was predictable, content to bide his time, gathering power slowly. He would never have gone after Sarah. Ibn Azziz is a zealot, angry and impatient. He’s the one who sent the bounty hunters after Sarah. He acted in secrecy before, fearing Oxley’s displeasure. Now…there is no one to stop him.”

“I’ll stop him.”

“Tempting, but, you’re needed to find Sarah. I’ll take care of Ibn Azziz.”

“I discovered that Sarah didn’t run away from an unwanted engagement. That’s something useful, isn’t it?” Rakkim leaned closer. “Did you say something? Or was that the sound of your story collapsing.” He locked eyes with Redbeard. “She was working on a book. She seemed to think it was dangerous.”

“If this book was dangerous, she should have stayed where I could protect her.”

“Maybe she didn’t think you could protect her.” Rakkim patted Redbeard on the back and he stiffened. “You should have told me the truth, Uncle. You wasted our time, and as you said, we don’t have much of it.” Rakkim gave a perfect bow. “Go with God.”

Rakkim sensed something wrong as soon as he pulled up to the security gate at Marian’s hillside community and saw the guard shack empty. He waited in his car, engine idling as he looked around. He hadn’t called Marian before driving over, certain that Redbeard already had her phone bugged. No reason to let him think that Marian was more than a colleague of Sarah’s, a good Muslim intellectual she shared only tea with. A follow-up call from Rakkim would tell Redbeard that she merited closer scrutiny. Better to show up unannounced. Marian had told him he could come by anytime.

He wasn’t sure how China and the Three Gorges Dam figured into Sarah’s research, but Sarah had been looking for something in Warriq’s journals. Besides, he wanted to talk more with Marian, she might have remembered something. Something that Sarah said. Something she didn’t say. First contact was always awkward. Trust took time. Distrust was immediate. For an instant at the War Museum this morning he had actually considered telling Redbeard about the journals. The impulse had passed. He tapped his fingers on the steering wheel, watched another car drive into the resident’s lane and flash an entry code. The gate flew up, then back down as the car zipped past.

Rakkim backed up and parked in the visitors’ lot, then slipped into the guard shack and buzzed Marian’s house. No answer. Marian and her staff might have gone into the city, or shopping, or left for afternoon prayers at the mosque, but he took off toward her house, walking at first, then faster, until he was running flat out up the steep, winding streets.

He was out of breath when he got to Marian’s front door, chest aching. He rang the bell, then beat on the door before anyone inside would have had a chance to answer it. The door was locked. A good lock too, and he didn’t have any tools. He trotted around to the back, peeked through the windows but couldn’t see inside. The back door was ajar, an invitation. The knife was in his hand.

He slowly opened the door, moved inside on the balls of his feet, taking a few steps, listening, then taking a few steps more. A fly hovered around his ear. He swatted it away, but it returned, a sluggish, fat green fly humming an ugly tune as Rakkim silently worked his way across the kitchen. No sound other than the ticking of the antique grandfather clock in the foyer. And the buzzing of the flies.

Rakkim put the knife away. Even before he caught the smell, he knew that whoever had been here had left hours ago. He took a deep breath, walked out of the hallway and into the living room. A few moments later he was back in the kitchen, hands on his knees and grateful that he hadn’t had breakfast. He had seen men blown apart by land mines and bullets, guts and glory flung to the winds, some dying with a surprised how-the-fuck-did-that-happen expression, some dying quietly, dead before they were even aware of it. He had seen all that and more, but one glance into the living room and he could barely contain his anger and revulsion. The other dead had been outside of him somehow, killed in action, part of some greater process that anesthetized guilt and left Rakkim a bystander, albeit not an innocent one. This was different. The living room was an atrocity exhibition arranged for his private benefit. He washed his face in the kitchen sink, but the cold water did nothing to numb his rage. Then he walked back into the living room. He didn’t bother holding his breath. It wasn’t the smell that tore at him.

The flies stirred at his entrance, rising up in a buzzing, dark cloud, then settled back down on the heads of the bodyguard and his wife. Terry and his wife sat beside each other on the purple, floral-print sofa as though sitting for a formal wedding portrait. Terry cradled his wife’s severed head in his lap. She did the same for his head. Their hair was matted with blood, their eyes staring straight ahead. Blackened blood crusted their gray clothes like a rusty carapace. Flies moved across the soaked sofa, the carpet shimmering with their metallic green brightness. Green, the color of Islam, green the color of the Prophet’s banner, green the color of the robe of Ali, the fourth caliph. Rakkim remembered his lessons well. The flies squirmed, green the color of obscenity.

Rakkim moved closer, wanting to see, needing to see, not to turn away. This tableau was a challenge someone had laid down, a moral and visual dislocation. Closer now. Marian’s bodyguard was a seasoned warrior, but someone had killed him easily, killed him and his wife while they sat there waiting to die, then left them with their heads exchanged as a greeting specifically meant for Rakkim. On the wall behind them, scrawled in blood, was written, R U Having Fun Yet? The same slogan Mardi had in neon on the wall of the Blue Moon. In spite of his efforts to hide his tracks, Rakkim must have led the killer here…and the killer had left a calling card that could not be ignored.

Rakkim wasn’t sure how he knew that it had been a lone individual who had done this…perhaps it was the singularity of the aesthetic. The killing had a grotesque artistry; the mocking phrase from the club, the switching of heads, all spoke to a unique point of view. A joker who didn’t want or need assistance.

He waved away the flies, bent down, and looked into the bodyguard’s dead eyes. It had been a long time since Rakkim had prayed, but he said a prayer now. A prayer that Terry forgive him for bringing death to the house, and a prayer that Terry be welcomed into Paradise, that he spend eternity in the company of the faithful. Those who have fear of God will have gardens wherein streams flow and wherein they will live forever with their purified spouses and with the consent of God. Then he closed Terry’s eyes and did the same for his wife. Rakkim didn’t even know her name.