Cat In An Alphabet Endgame

39

Past Acts

Once they were bowed out of the Paris Ritz by an elderly doorman who might possibly have done the same for Princess Diana and the owner’s beloved late son, Dodi—although the hotel had been massively renovated since then—Max took Kathleen’s left arm and steered her away from the brightly lit tourist areas.

As in all major world cities, the distance between dazzling affluence and exclusivity was as thin as the gap between a five-star restaurant and the Dumpster behind its back entrance.

Max sensed the excitement in Kathleen’s rigid frame as he pulled them down a narrow, filthy-smelling street to a tiny European Car with No Name.

Once inside, he handed her a black hoodie and donned a black leather jacket over his fine suit coat.

“I would have preferred a motorcycle,” she said.

“Too unprotected. We’re going into a No Go zone.”

“Like Belfast was during the Troubles.”

He nodded. “The French authorities do not want us going there and the residents do not want us going there.”

“Defying both sides. I love it!”

“No swagger until we’ve found our connection.”

She was gazing out the small windows. “Drug connection?”

As the streets narrowed, the stench of food and raw sewage deepened. Max’s moving gaze flicked on idling teenage punks and drug dealers watching them pass with the eyes of starving wolves.

He twisted in the cramped driver’s seat to pull the Beretta 92 FS pushed into the back of his belt out and into a side jacket pocket, feeling like a slumming Fontana brother.

Kathleen was scanning from left to right. “Men in skirts and women in head scarves. Oh, my. Reminds me of the priests and nuns in the Magdalene asylums.”

Max ignored her. He had to spot a specific mid-rise building that had an open market in front. Under a striped awning, a mélange of scents and people and various languages roiled.

“Men in robes and caps, women in black, like me,” Kathleen commented. “One with a white tote bag over her shrouded shoulder. Shades of Temple Barr. Excuse me, Temple Devine. Bet she loves that surname.”

“Not much. She still works under her maiden name.”

“Strange to view the world from an eye-slit in the fabric covering your head and face and neck, like a wimpy balaclava, or…a nun’s wimple and veil among those orders who still wear habits.”

Max sighed. “Speaking of that, put on this Hijab before you exit the car. The world is different, and the same.”

He jerked the car to a stop near a brass monger’s tables, and hustled Kathleen out of the car. Wearing the expensive flats he bought her and the long black gown and long-sleeved top with hoodie, which he jerked down over her scarf-covered head, she passed for a Burqa-clad woman.

Inside the carpet-hung doorway were dim, shawl-covered lights and another woman swathed in the ISIS-required full-face black Niqab to reveal only her hands and eyes.

Max nodded to the woman and indicated Kathleen. “Rebecca.”

Kathleen flashed him an accusing glance. That was the name the Magdalene nuns had forced upon her when young.

“Sidra,” Max said, “this is the woman I told you about.”

“Her skin is pale, she is green-eyed, obviously a Westerner.”

“She’s a master of disguise, a skilled undercover agent, strong and clever,” he said.

In acknowledgment, Sidra’s lids closed over her beautiful black-brown eyes, framed by midnight-black kohl. “Woman from Ireland rebellion,” she said, her English words thick and halting. “We need teachers for English, for girls. Brave teachers.”

Kathleen’s dark brows frowned. “I am not a teacher.”

Max answered, “If you can’t feel anything but hatred, what about feeling useful?”

She cocked her head. “Is that why you brought me here? To teach children whose language I’d have to learn? Who’s the teacher? Why do they need an experienced agent in the schoolroom?”

Sidra followed their interchange. “I was student who would be a teacher in my time.” She dropped the lower part of her Hijab. “I was lucky. The acid missed my eyes.”

Kathleen stared expressionlessly at the ruin of the woman’s cheeks, nose, lips, and neck, melted to the bone. No wonder her speech was altered.

She turned on Max, the shocked, savage, betrayed look she’d been deprived of doing for seventeen years. “You’ve brought me here against my will, deceived me.”

In answer, he clipped out the familiar ISIS/ISUL “religious” credo: women as chattel, cattle, slaves. Sex slaves, from prepubescent girls to unbelievers’ mothers, wives and daughters. Mothers of young girls spared long enough that their daughters would mature to become eight-year-old concubines and their sons turned into slaughtering machines.

“Your old cause is settled, Kathleen,” he told her, “but you’re needed in a new one.”

Kathleen stroked her smooth pale cheek with the almost invisible pale scars. “I’ll go with you,” she told the woman, “but I am not merely a teacher of girls. I will be a teacher of men.”

“They already have their schools.”

“Mine would be different.”

Sidra reinstalled her veil, looking at Max.

Kathleen interrupted any answer he would give. “I have an ear for languages. I can change my eye and skin color. I am a chameleon.”

The beautiful eyes held a question.

Kathleen realized the comparison was unfamiliar. “Like a lizard whose scales turn color to blend into its background. These men like to bomb, torture, destroy, enslave, and behead. I wonder if there is something they would very much not like to have beheaded?”

The woman’s eyes widened, then narrowed.

Kathleen continued. “What’s good for the…she-goat, is even worse for the goat. An American saying. It would certainly put a crimp in recruitment.”

The woman nodded. “You mean, we could…?”

“We always could, we just didn’t. Us.” She pounded her breast bone with a fist. “No more enslaved sisters and mothers and daughters.”

Kathleen eyed Max and said under her breath. “I won’t bother telling her that I hate men.”

Sidra nodded. “Once we are in Afghanistan, we will pass unnoticed unless they wish to beat us for being seen on the streets. I envy Western women. They are so…inventive.”

“I’ll leave you then,” Max said. “Remember, Sidra. She is small but fierce.”

Kathleen put a clutching hand on his arm. “You’ve always had a nerve on you, Max Kinsella.” She lowered her face veil. “And so have I.”

He watched the black-shrouded women leave the tented room to blend into the Parisian night. Black-shrouded ghosts, indistinguishable.

“Her eyes they shone like the diamonds,

You’d think she was queen of the land,

Only alternate closing lyrics resonated in his mind.

And her hair flowed back from her shoulders,

unbound underneath a black linen band.