Bestiary

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

“Jakob,” al-Kalll said, from behind the easel.

“Yes, sir?”

“You see where I’ve placed that wheelbarrow?”

Jakob looked down the line of jacaranda trees, their branches in full purple blossom, to the rustic wheelbarrow artfully positioned at the far end.

“Could you move that forward, more into the frame of the picture?”

As Jakob went to do as he was bid, Mohammed sat back in his canvas lawn chair, under the shade of the towering beach umbrella. In the afternoons, he often liked to set up his easel somewhere on his estate — it afforded him so many different views and scenes — and paint, quickly and with as free a hand as he could muster, a watercolor impression. He had a good eye — his art instructor at Harrow had thought he should pursue a career in art — but he did it chiefly to relax, to take his mind off more troubling things, things that might be preying on his mind.

He was given, as had been all the members of his family, to dark fancies.

Jakob moved the wheelbarrow a few inches forward, and al-Kalli cried out, “More! More!”

It was an old wooden barrow that al-Kalli had seen in a plant nursery and purchased, though it hadn’t been for sale. He had immediately spotted its potential.

“Right there — stop.” Al-Kalli sat back, studied the composition of the scene one more time — the row of jacaranda trees, the winding flagstone path, the worn-out wheelbarrow placed as if about to be put to use — and nodded his head. He idly rinsed his brush in the Baccarat crystal vase he used for that purpose, dried it, then dabbed it against his palette; it was so hard to get a color that matched the gorgeous purple and lavender, with an undertone of blue, that the blossoms took on at this time of year. Their flowering lasted only a matter of weeks, and al-Kalli wanted to capture it, as well as he could, on his canvas.

But even as he made a few tentative strokes, a cloud passed overhead, subduing the colors of the scene, and al-Kalli checked his pocket watch. It was four-thirty in the afternoon, and the light was becoming too sharp, too slanting. He’d really have to start again tomorrow.

“We’ll leave everything just as it is,” he said to Jakob, placing his brush and palette back on the supply table and standing up. But it was a promising arrangement that he would return to tomorrow.

He wiped his hands on the linen cloths, drained the last of the Boodles gin in the chilled glass, and turned toward the house. Jakob, as usual, was three steps behind him.

“Why don’t we pay a visit to our guest?” al-Kalli said without turning around.

Jakob didn’t answer; he knew it wasn’t a question.

“Perhaps he has some new stories he wishes to share.”

Al-Kalli skirted the black-bottomed swimming pool, crossed the wide portico behind the main house, and was just about to go inside when he bumped into his son, Mehdi, who was sauntering outside with a towel, emblazoned with the al-Kalli peacock on it, thrown over his arm.

“Have you done your homework?” Mohammed asked him.

“If I said yes, would you believe me?”

“No.”

“Then what difference does it make?”

Al-Kalli had to concede the point, but not the actual battle. “Have you done it?”

“It’s not due till next week; it’s a long report. I have time.”

Mehdi scooted past before they could go another round. Mohammed loved him with all his heart — he was literally all of his family that he had been able to spirit out of Iraq — but ever since the boy had become a teenager, he had been surly and argumentative, and their relationship had become one of bickering and evasion. Mohammed wondered if that was how it was in all families; he wondered if his own parents had felt the same way.

But there was no one left to ask, was there?

Al-Kalli led Jakob to the back servant stairs, but left it to him to open the padlocked door. After they had made their way through several storage rooms beneath the house, they came to another sealed door; this was the wine cellar, built in this cool, out-of-the-way spot decades before, by the oil tycoon who had once owned the Castle. He had designed it to hold ten thousand bottles of his finest wine. Al-Kalli had never been much of a wine connoisseur, but now, quite unexpectedly, he’d found a novel and imaginative use for this cellar.

Jakob flicked on the overhead light — an incongruous chandelier — and the room suddenly sprang from utter blackness into twinkling, bright light. There were indeed a few hundred bottles gathering dust on wooden racks along one wall — after all, al-Kalli did do a fair amount of entertaining — but the most startling feature of the room was the metal stool against the back wall, on which al-Kalli’s guest was seated. His head was thrown back against the concrete, his eyes closed, and a chain, bolted to the wall, shackled his hands. Jakob had gone to a lot of trouble, and asked a lot of odd questions at Home Depot, in order to find out how best to install the bolt and chain.

“Sleep well, Rafik?” al-Kalli asked, in Arabic. The room reeked from the chemical toilet stashed in the far corner. Beside it lay several plastic bottles of Calistoga water and the remains of a sandwich. His guest didn’t seem to have much of an appetite.

“You can open your eyes,” al-Kalli said, again in the tongue he had barely used since leaving the Middle East. He was rusty, but it came back well enough.

Rafik didn’t respond. He was as still as death — though al-Kalli hadn’t decided to bestow that gift on him yet.

“We’re just here to talk,” al-Kalli went on, in entirely reasonable tones. “To pick up where we left off.” He cocked his head at Jakob, who slapped Rafik on one cheek, and then the other; his head lolled forward, his eyes slowly rolling open.

“That’s better,” al-Kalli said.

The prisoner’s face was bruised, and his lip had been split. His black hair hung down over his forehead in limp tendrils.

“Do you remember what you were telling me the last time we talked?”

Rafik’s head kept lolling around as if it were barely connected to his neck.

Al-Kalli nodded at Jakob, who picked up one of the Calistoga bottles, opened it, and then held Rafik’s head back; he poured the water over his broken, half-open mouth, and only stopped when the prisoner began to sputter.

“We were talking about that party at Saddam’s palace.”

Rafik’s tongue touched his parched, cracked lips.

“The one where you served my daughter her soup.”

Rafik’s head dropped, but held steady.

“I was asking if you knew that the soup had been poisoned.”

Rafik didn’t move.

“You were saying, as I recall, that you were just doing what you were told.”

“Why,” Rafik muttered, in barely audible Arabic, “don’t you just get it over with?”

“Because we’re not in any rush,” al-Kalli said, sharing a half smile with Jakob, who stood, hands folded, to one side of the metal stool. “And I still want to know who the other waiter was — the one with the mustache, who served my wife.”

“I told you,” Rafik croaked, “I don’t know.”

Al-Kalli barely had time to signal his desire to Jakob before the bodyguard lashed out, knocking Rafik off the stool with a single punch to his face. The man fell, the chain dangling, to the concrete floor.

“Oh, I don’t think Saddam would have entrusted such an important job — murdering my family — to strangers.” Al-Kalli shook his head, as if debating the point with himself. “No, I think you were all well trained, together. I think you were specially chosen.”

Rafik didn’t stir.

“I’ve already found the other two.” He didn’t say what he had done with them. “And I went to a lot of trouble to track you down.”

Indeed, the search had cost him nearly a million dollars in bribes, and as much again in transportation costs. Rafik, at the time he found him, was living in Lebanon, under another name, working as a garage mechanic. He had been smuggled across several borders tied in a sack, under the floorboards of a van that had been in the shop for repairs.

“Straighten him up,” al-Kalli said; Jakob bent down and, with unexpected care, righted Rafik with his back against the wall. Above his head, hung there many years earlier, was a framed Campari poster, covered with dust.

Al-Kalli crouched down in front of him, so he could look directly into his eyes. What he saw there was defeat, resignation, even the acceptance of death. What he didn’t see — and had hoped for — was fear. Out of fear, he would talk.

But that could be remedied easily enough.

“Rest,” al-Kalli said, first in English, and then, remembering himself, again in Arabic. “You’re going to need your strength.”