Dorothy Mcintosh - The Witch of Babylon

I recalled all the times in my youth when I’d daydreamed about walking these corridors with Samuel. The thrill of actually being here momentarily overwhelmed me. Our route took us through the Assyrian gallery. At its entrance loomed the massive Lamassu, with their bull bodies, wings, human-like heads, braided hair, and horned helmets. Each statue had five legs positioned so they could be seen as four-legged from either the front or the side. Inside the gallery the floor was strewn with debris, but the life-sized reliefs of Assyrian royal figures and Apkallu around the perimeter were blessedly intact. I paused in front of a magnificent portrayal of a man grasping the bridles of two horses, sculpted as beautifully as anything done by the Greeks and Romans.

My guide summoned me. As we hurried away our footsteps echoed in the emptiness of the hallways. I felt saddened by what had been stolen, trampled underfoot, lost forever. Nothing really changes. All the great Mesopotamian cities had been destroyed in antiquity. More than two millennia later it was happening all over again.

I could see efforts underway to clean up some of the disorder, although many areas were still in a shambles. We traipsed through a wide hallway, one side patterned with small squares of openings to admit natural light. On a low podium a headless statue stood to one side. When she saw me glance at it, Hanifa flushed and said, “Always the head was gone. Done in the past, not looters.” I sympathized with her obvious distress over the state of the museum.

An Iraqi guard with an AK-47 sat at a small desk in one of the restoration rooms, surrounded by banks of shelving holding hundreds of dusty clay vessels and jars. Broken bits lay heaped in piles on the floor, some shards with the museum ident marks still visible, all of them crushed by the looters. I wondered whether this was the room where Samuel had kept the engraving.

She pointed to the piles. “I’m sorry for it—how it looks. No electricity is here. Most staff are gone. No security system. It takes us long time to fix up because of this.” The poor woman looked as if she carried the weight of the entire building on her shoulders.

I moved closer to her. “Do you have a phone? I have to make a call urgently.” From the look on her face I could see she hadn’t understood. I mimicked making a call and she got the idea. She shook her head. “No—sorry.”

My hopes sank again. It had been a long shot anyway. Even if she had a working phone, putting a call through to New York would probably be impossible.

She took paper and a ballpoint pen from the desk and scribbled a note, passing it to me. It read Follow me, please . I started to speak, but she put two fingers up to my lips to signal silence. She grabbed the paper, turned it over, and wrote, Someone else waits for you. She stood up and said in a voice loud enough for the guard to hear, “Please come. I will get us tea.”

Several hallways and rooms later, we met up with a Middle Eastern man wearing sunglasses, his dark hair shot with gray. The woman gestured toward him as if she were offering me up as a gift, and giving me a weak smile scurried away. Mazare extended his hand and said hello.

I stepped back from him. “You’re not carrying any explosives today, I hope. And what a surprise. You speak English.”

He grinned. “Sorry for that.”

“You’re sorry? You almost fucking killed me.”

“I tried to tell you. Make you come closer to me. You didn’t read my signs soon enough.”

“It was a touch difficult to appreciate nuances with four people at my back looking for an excuse to shoot me.”

His good humor faded. He checked his watch and said, “Tomas and I are taking many chances to save you now. Stay with Ward and you’ll be dead by tomorrow. Come with me or not. I caution you to make up your mind fast.”

I cast my memory back to the tunnel in the underground city and remembered Mazare gesturing for me to come forward, murmuring something. It was possible he’d been trying to alert me.

“I can’t go with you. They’re holding a woman back in New York. They’ll kill her if I escape.”

Mazare’s face fell and I could read sympathy in his expression loud and clear. “That woman—Laurel, is it her name?”

“Yes.”

“I feel in my heart this sad for you. She is dead. Drowned in the river.”

Oh God. It can’t be true. “Are you sure? How do you know that? Did Tomas tell you?”

“Not Tomas. Ari. He found it out. Just today. The news said she went onto a high bridge and jumped in Harlem’s river, sick because of losing her husband.”

Scrambled though his expression was, there was no way he could have made up the reference to the High Bridge and the Harlem River. And the story had logic. When Ward and Eris spirited me away to Baghdad she was nothing but a liability. Ward could still threaten me about harming her because I’d have no way of knowing her fate. Mazare said something. I barely heard him, the news about Laurel bearing down on me like a thundercloud.

He grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me hard. “I said we have to go. Now.” He half dragged me to the dusty Toyota van parked in the shaded lane outside. He opened the back doors and pushed me inside before climbing in himself and putting the key in the ignition.

“Stay in the back where no one can see you. I’m taking you to Tomas.”

I slumped against the side of the van, not caring where we were headed. He drove for a few minutes then braked, rolled down the window, and spoke a few words in Arabic to a guard. An anxious minute of silence passed before he stepped on the accelerator and took off.

I tried to pull myself together. Mazare wasn’t tearing up the pavement. That is to say he was speeding like crazy but no faster than most Iraqi drivers. Fifteen minutes later we halted again. “Come into the front now,” he said. I sighed and clambered onto the passenger seat beside him. We were parked behind a strip of bombed-out buildings. The stench from the garbage outside was overwhelming. Rotting fish parts and bones were scattered everywhere.

“Are these clothes yours?”

“The pants are mine and the shoes. They gave me the jacket and shirt back in New York.” He opened the glove compartment and extracted something that looked like a cellphone. Pressing one of the buttons, he ran it over the arms, lapels, and back of the jacket.

“Take your jacket off and pull the shirt out at the waist.” He repeated the exercise over my shirt then looked at the screen, clicked the device off, and put it back.

“What were you looking for?”

“They can weave those tracers into material now. We have to be careful.”

I took in a few deep breaths, tried to calm down and remember the risks the guy was taking on my behalf. “Thank you. I know how dangerous it is, doing this.”

He shrugged. “Whatever Tomas wants we do.”

His dark eyes bored into mine and he pointed his index finger at me like a teacher getting ready to scold. “The places we’re going, you’ll only be safe with me. Speak to no one.”

We crossed a bridge and turned onto al-Rashid, Baghdad’s main commercial street. Closer to the bridge buildings showed the impact of the war, windows blown out with ragged frames, starbursts of soot on facades, blackened wounds on the cladding.

The street was thick with traffic. Leaning on the horn was simply a normal part of driving, like hitting the brakes or changing gears. Buses jockeyed for space, boys staggered under carts flush with goods, vehicles fought for every inch of pavement. I could have been back on Broadway.

We jerked to a stop, cars pressing in on all sides. Exhaust fumes swirled in a suffocating haze. Mazare threw up his hands and swore.