Yasmina Khadra - The Sirens of Baghdad

Yaseen asked him, “You burned up the engine on that car of yours?”

“No one told me I had to put oil in it.”

“You have a warning light on your dashboard.”

“I saw a red light come on, but I didn’t know why.”

“You could have asked Hassan.”

“Hassan pretends I’m not there.”

“What do you mean by that?” Hassan asked angrily.

Hussein made a vague gesture with one hand and detached himself from his armchair.

“I’m talking to you,” Yaseen said in an authoritative voice.

“I’m not deaf; I just gotta go piss.”

Salah quivered from his head to his feet. He was none too pleased with Hussein’s attitude. Had it been up to Salah, he would have fixed Hussein’s ass on the spot. Salah couldn’t bear it when anyone disrespected his leader. He snorted loudly, crossed his arms tight against his chest, and clenched his jaw.

Yaseen gave Hassan an interrogatory look. Hassan spread his arms to show he was powerless and then walked toward the bathroom. We heard him talking softly to his twin brother.

Tariq offered us a cup of tea.

“I don’t have time,” Yaseen said.

“It won’t take more than a minute,” our host said.

“In that case, you’ve got fifty-eight seconds.”

Tariq made a dash for the kitchen.

Yaseen’s cell phone rang. He put it to his ear and listened; his face contracted. He stood up abruptly, walked over to the window, and, with his back against the wall, cautiously lifted the curtain.

“I see them,” he said into his phone. “What the fuck are they doing there? Nobody knows we’re here. You’re sure they’re after us?” With his free hand, he ordered Salah to go upstairs and have a look at what was going on in the street. Salah took the steps four at a time. Yaseen kept talking into his mobile phone. “As far as I know, this area has been fairly calm.”

Hassan, on his way back from the bathroom, immediately saw that something was wrong. He slipped to the other side of the window and gently moved the curtain aside. What he saw made him spring backward. He cursed and ran to an armoire, where a light machine gun was concealed. Along the way, he looked into the kitchen and alerted Tariq, who was still busy preparing tea.

Salah came back downstairs, unperturbed. “There are at least twenty cops around the house,” he announced, pulling a huge gun out from under his belt.

Yaseen examined the roof of the building opposite and then twisted his neck in order to see the terraces of the buildings closer to us. He spoke again into his cell phone: “And you’re where, exactly? Very good. You take them from behind and cut a hole in their trap big enough for us to get through…. By the street the garage is on, you’re sure? How many are there?…That’s how we’ll do it. You keep them entertained on your side, and I’ll take care of the rest.”

He snapped his phone shut and said, “Looks like some bastard’s ratted us out. There are cops on the roofs north, east, and south of here. Jawad and his men are going to help us get out of this. We’re going to charge the garage. There’ll be three or four collaborators for us to deal with.”

Tariq was panic-stricken. “I swear to you, Yaseen, there’s no mole in this sector.”

“We’ll talk about that later. Right now, you have to concentrate on getting out of here in one piece.”

Tariq started to fetch a Soviet-made rocket launcher, but as he reached the middle of the living room, a windowpane burst into fragments, and he fell over backward, already dead. The bullet, probably fired from a neighboring roof terrace, had shattered his upper jaw. Blood began spurting from his face and branching out across the tiled floor. Immediately, a hail of projectiles crashed into the room, demolishing the silver, riddling the walls, and raising a tornado of dust and unspecific fragments all around us. We threw ourselves on the floor and began crawling toward anything that might pass for shelter. Salah fired blindly through the window, howling like a savage as he emptied his clip. Calmer than Salah, Yaseen had crouched down in the spot where he’d been standing. He stared at Tariq’s contorted body as he pondered our next move. Hussein was hunched in the hallway with his fly open. When he saw Tariq stretched out on the floor, he burst out laughing.

Salah sprang to the rocket launcher, loaded it, and, with a movement of his head, ordered us to leave the living room. Hassan covered Yaseen, who ran for the hallway. The automatic-weapons fire abruptly stopped, and through the ensuing deathlike silence, we could hear the distant crying of women and children. Hassan took advantage of the lull to push me ahead of him.

The firing began again, as intensely as before, but this time we weren’t the target. Yaseen explained that Jawad and his men were creating a diversion and that this was the signal for us to abandon the house by the rear entrance. Salah aimed his launcher at a terrace and fired. A monstrous, eardrum-jangling explosion was followed by a huge conflagration, which masked the living room in a cloud of thick caustic smoke. “Run!” Salah shouted. “I’ll cover you!”

Stunned, I started running behind the others. Deafening bursts of reciprocal gunfire greeted me outside. Bullets ricocheted around me and whistled past my ears. Folded in half, my hands on my temples, I felt as though I were going through walls. I slipped past a doorway and fell onto a pile of garbage. Hussein laughed and ran straight ahead. His brother caught up with him and forced him into a side street. Gunfire broke out in front of us; a rocket exploded behind us. Someone screamed, apparently struck by the fragments. His cries pursued me as I clenched my teeth and ran, ran as I’d never run before in my life….

Yaseen was in a red rage. In the hideout where we’d gone to ground after managing to escape the police raid, he was all we could hear. He punched the furniture and kicked the doors. Hassan stood with folded arms and kept his eyes cast down. His twin brother was in a heap at the end of the entrance hall, sitting on the floor with his head between his knees and his hands on the nape of his neck. Salah was missing, and that fact redoubled Yaseen’s fury. He was used to ambushes, but leaving behind his most faithful lieutenant! “I want the head of the traitor who ratted on us,” he fumed. “I want it on a tray.”

He considered his cell phone. “Why doesn’t Salah call?”

Yaseen’s coolheadedness was gone, lost to a combination of anger and anxiety. When he wasn’t spraying us with his whitish spittle, he was knocking over everything in his way. Although we hadn’t occupied our new refuge very long, nothing was where it had been when we entered.

“There was no mole in this sector,” Yaseen repeated. “Tariq was adamant. We were in that house for months, and we never had any sort of problem whatsoever. Somebody must have made a mistake, and I have no doubt it was either you”—he jabbed his finger at me—“or Hussein.”

“I didn’t make any mistake,” Hussein growled. “And stop treating me like a retard.”

Yaseen, irritated by our silence, had been waiting for just such an opening as this. He leapt on Hussein, grabbed him by his shirt collar, and lifted him off the floor. “Don’t talk to me in that tone. Understand?”

Hussein let his arms hang down in a sign of submission but lifted his head high enough to show his leader he wasn’t afraid of him. Yaseen pushed him away brutally and watched him slide down the wall to his initial position. When Yaseen turned in my direction, I felt his burning eyes go all the way through me.

“How about you?” he asked me. “Are you sure you haven’t been dropping any white pebbles along your trail?”