Dorothy Mcintosh - The Witch of Babylon

He finally located a side street and parked the van. “We walk from here,” he said. Heat beat down on us unmercifully. I shuffled along beside him, images of Laurel flaunting themselves in my brain. They would have drugged her probably with some kind of tranquilizer to make her suicide more convincing. Had one of Ward’s men clasped her in his arms, lifted her cleanly over the rail, and cast her body down? Even with drugs in her system, a minute or so of total panic would have taken hold as she plunged toward the murky river. What a desolate way to die.

Was there anything I could have done differently? Had she simply been condemned the minute we began working on Hal’s game? Everything I touched withered and died.

Mazare seemed to grow less tense as we mingled with the crowds, although he looked back every couple of minutes.

He waved his hand. “This is al-Mutannabi Street; you’ll see the book bazaar. We still have culture here, no matter how hard you Americans try to kill it.” If he was trying to shame me, he was doing a good job.

“Did you know my brother Samuel?” I asked indignantly.

“I met him once.”

“He was an American and did everything he could to save Iraqi culture. He loved this city.” “Well, he failed then.”

“It’s not his failing only.”

Mazare gave a disdainful laugh and I looked away. There were no vehicles on al-Mutannabi, at least not while the bazaar was on. It was a little crescent of peace compared to what we’d just driven through. Antiquated buildings, a number of them housing bookstores, walled off the street. Towering stacks of volumes lined their dim interiors. Outside, cheap plastic tarps were covered with periodicals, pamphlets, pirated DVDs, and tomes in English and Arabic. High metal filing cases, their doors propped open, burst with musty old pages.

Above a poster stand, an image of Saddam Hussein had his face crossed out. A neighboring stand displayed a framed portrait with Arabic script. “Who’s that?” I asked Mazare.

“Ayatollah Muhammad Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr. Assassinated in Najaf in February of 1999. A very revered man in Iraq,” he said.

Almost all the shoppers were male; very few women ventured out onto the street. We walked past a cleared space occupied by three men standing on a wooden platform. Two were on their knees; the third stood over them with a baton, pretending to hit them. An enthusiastic audience yelled out comments. “Actors,” Mazare said. “This is an old tradition.”

We followed a bend in the road. I could see the glassy water of the Tigris at the end of the street. A little farther on Mazare pointed to a semi-circular, single-story building with tables strung along its front. “The al-Shabandar. A famous place in Baghdad.”

The café was filled to the brim, again with men, almost all of them smoking. Some pulled sweet oriental tobacco through their narghile pipes, others smoked cigarettes. I thought I could detect the vanilla perfume of hashish. You could almost taste the mingling scents in the air. Tumblers of steaming tea sat on the tables. A fan revolved slowly from the high ceiling. Framed paintings and photographs in all sizes crowded the walls—portraits, landscapes, still lifes. A generator buzzed. Dominoes clacked. A couple of backgammon games were in progress.

A helicopter passed overhead the moment we sat down, its big rotors making the building shake. Mere seconds later we heard a terrific explosion. A mortar going off, I guessed.

The room froze.

Mazare frowned and shook his head. “Look at us,” he said.

“We stink of fear.”

I leaned over, lowering my voice. Knowing Laurel was dead had put an end to everything. I just wanted to escape. “Listen. Can’t you get me out of Baghdad? To Jordan or Turkey? Anywhere, I don’t care. I don’t need to see Tomas and I’m sure he’d be just as happy not to see me. I was forced to come here.” He dismissed this idea quickly. “Tomas said nothing about that. I’ll get some coffees.”

He brought back two and set them on the table. The rich mocha scent should have been appealing but did not tempt me. Mazare checked his watch for what seemed like the hundredth time and looked outside, scanning the faces. Was someone else out there scouting for him? His coffee sat on the table, untouched.

I fumbled around for something to say. “You were speaking Turkish to Eris?”

“I am Assyrian but I grew up in Istanbul. We Assyrians are spread out in many places. Even in Europe. Even in your country.”

A whistle sounded from somewhere in the street. Mazare jumped up abruptly.

“Come. Leave your drink. We must go right now.”

He walked rapidly. I had a hard time keeping up with him. He wouldn’t speak to me, his lips pressed together so hard they’d turned white. His eyes darted from side to side, checking out the street. We took a circuitous route back to the van.

When we drove away I said, “I appreciate the tour and all, but why bother going there?”

“Escaping Ward’s people is not easy. They’re trailing us. We need to lose them somehow.”

“Where are we going now?”

“Suq al-Haramia, the Thieves Market. Do you know it?”

“I’ve heard of it.”

We headed north on Khulfafa Street, away from the city core. On the outskirts of Sadr City, we ran into an American patrol. Mazare pulled over while they passed. “Things are bad again after the Jordanian embassy.” He let out a cynical laugh. “No, that is wrong. Bad is what every day is like here. Is there a word in your language for something worse than hell? If there is, we are inside it.”

The thought occurred to me that I’d been living in that domain for the last week. “What happened?”

“A truck bomb killed seventeen people. It blew cars onto roofs. And yesterday they attacked an American Humvee outside the Rabiya Hotel. Then the soldiers came to this market. Some men were testing guns to buy, shooting them in the air, and the soldiers fired, thinking the shots to be aimed at them. We have much fury over that. There will be no fast end to this war.”

We left the van once more and proceeded on foot. The place seemed to go on forever. A black market version of London’s Portobello Road. Samuel had said you could buy almost anything here, and he was right. Despite yesterday’s events, an arms seller had filled the cargo bed of his pickup with guns. A clutch of men checked them out, but no one seemed inclined to test shoot today.

Another vendor stood over two large containers—rusted oil drums cut in half and filled with water, turbulent with the writhing bodies of fish. Mazgouf, the green carp caught in the sluggish Tigris. “Poison fish,” Mazare said. “Once they were good. Now this war has filled the river with filth.”

A strange assortment of things lay on a dirty carpet: squeezed toothpaste tubes, women’s pink razors, half-full bottles of Detol, small one-serving containers of peanut butter and MREs—the army’s meals ready to eat. Mazare gestured toward the wares. “They sift through the garbage from the army bases and take this stuff to sell.”

A nearby table was piled with phones, DVD players, TV sets, computers—products of the looting or goods stolen from people’s homes. The next vendor displayed strange-looking chunks of meat. Mazare told me they were sheep’s lungs. A cloud of flies buzzed over the mutton. The raw flesh had a greenish tinge and steamed in the heat. When I expressed my distaste he shrugged. “People are starving. What do you expect?” Another whistle sounded. No one else paid it any heed, but Mazare whipped out his phone and made a call. After a short burst of words he clutched my arm and hustled us along a different route back to the van. I could tell this was going badly and thought he must be running out of options, so it was a surprise when he said, “Tomas will come to us at our next stop. God willing.”