The Sanctuary

Chapter 6

Evelyn’s mind had been swirling with questions ever since Farouk had bailed on her in Zabqine. True to his word, he was standing there, puffing away nervously, waiting for her by the clock tower that stood at the center of the Place de l’Étoile.

A little over a hundred years old, the tower had seen the worst of the civil war and had remarkably survived despite sitting right on the notorious Green Line that divided East from West Beirut. Almost fifteen years after each crenellation of its exquisite Ottoman craftsmanship had meticulously been restored, it now stood sentinel over a city that was once again seething with anger and outrage. Lebanese flags and highly charged antiwar banners fluttered from its sides, while graphic images of the horrors of the recent fighting loomed over its base.

Farouk had chosen well. The piazza was brimming with people, some of them taking in the display in stunned silence, others striding past carrying shopping bags or chatting on their cell phones with detached insouciance. It was easy to go unnoticed in the crowd, which was exactly what he needed. Having the Parliament building across the square, with the handful of armed soldiers posted there, was also a plus.

He stubbed his cigarette out just as Evelyn reached him and, after casting an apprehensive glance over her shoulder, led her away from the tower and down one of the radiating, arcaded streets.

Evelyn dispensed with the small talk and jumped right in. “Farouk, what’s going on? What did you mean by Hajj Ali’s being dead because of these? What happened to him?”

Farouk stopped at a quiet corner by a shuttered art gallery. He turned to her, his fingers trembling as he pulled out and lit another cigarette. A shadow fell across his face as he seemed to struggle with some evidently painful memories.

“When Abu Barzan — my friend in Mosul — when he first showed me what he was trying to sell, I immediately thought of you for the book with the Ouroboros. The rest…they were very nice pieces, there’s no doubt, but I knew you wouldn’t be interested in being a part of anything like that. But you have to understand, the other pieces, they’re the ones that are more obviously valuable, and, as I said before, I needed to get some money, as much as I could, to get away from that cursed place for good. I tried to contact some of my clients who were, shall we say, less conscientious, but I don’t have many of those. So I also told Ali about it. He had some good contacts, a different clientele than mine, ones who ask fewer questions…. And I was in a rush, I had to find a buyer before Abu Barzan did, even if I had to split my share with a third party like Ali. Half of something was better than nothing, you see, and if Abu Barzan managed to sell them before I did, I’d end up with nothing. When I told Ali about them, I gave him photocopies of the Polaroids that Abu Barzan had given me.” Farouk shook his head, as if berating himself for a terrible mistake. “Photocopies of all the pictures.”

Farouk took a long drag on his cigarette, as if steeling himself for the more difficult part of his tale. “I don’t know who he showed them to, but he came back not even a week later saying he had a buyer, at the agreed price, for the whole lot. The whole lot. I wanted to keep the book outside the sale — I knew how interested you were at the time in anything with that symbol on it, and I thought it might entice you to help me with selling the rest, or at least, help me find a job here in Beirut — so I told Ali to tell his buyer that he could have all the other pieces in the Polaroids, everything apart from the book, but that we’d give him a small discount to make up for it. Ali agreed that it seemed to be a reasonable counteroffer, the two alabaster figurines alone were worth far more than we were asking for the whole lot, and the book, well…surely it wouldn’t be missed.” He swallowed hard. “I couldn’t have been more mistaken.

“I didn’t hear anything for a week or so, then one morning his wife called me up. She was frantic. She told me some men had come for him, at his shop. She said they weren’t Iraqis. She thought they were Syrian, and that they might even be”—he rubbed the bridge of his nose, as if the word itself was enough to conjure up physical pain—“mukhabarat.”

Mukhabarat.

A ubiquitous term in the region, commonly uttered in careful, hushed tones, and one of the first words Evelyn had gotten to know when she’d first hit Baghdad all those years ago. In the literal sense, it simply meant “information” or “communications,” but no one used it in that context. Not anymore. Not since it became the shorthand name for the secret police, the ruthless “information purveyors” no tyrant could rule without. Not that such internal security agencies were limited to the Middle East. In the disturbingly brutal new world order of the twenty-first century, pretty much all countries — except for, maybe, Liechtenstein — were wielding them with abandon, and they all seemed to treat their victims with an unrepentant savagery that made Ivar the Boneless’s demented practices seem lame.

“They kept her outside while the two men talked to him,” Farouk added dolefully, “then she heard some shouts. They wanted to know where the pieces were. They hit him a few times and then they dragged him out of the shop, bundled him into a car, and drove away. They took him, just like that. It’s a common occurrence in Iraq these days, but this wasn’t political. Before they left, Ali’s wife overheard them talking about the pictures. The photocopies I gave him. They were the buyers, Sitt Evelyn — or, more likely, they were there on behalf of the eventual buyer. And one of them told the other, ‘He just wants the book. We can sell the rest ourselves.’ Just the book, Sitt Evelyn. You understand?”

Evelyn felt a searing nausea rising in her throat. “And they killed him?”

Farouk couldn’t quite bring the words out. “His body was found that evening, thrown in a ditch by the side of a road. It was…” He shook his head, wincing, clearly haunted by the thought, and let out a pained breath. “They’d used a power drill on him.”

“What did you do?”

“What else could I do? Ali didn’t know about Abu Barzan. I didn’t tell him where the pieces came from. Although I knew him well, times are desperate right now, we live in a state of constant fear and paranoia, and I’m ashamed to admit that I didn’t trust him enough to tell him about Abu Barzan so that he wouldn’t deal with him behind my back.”

Evelyn saw where this was leading. “Which means Ali could only tell them about you.”

“Exactly. So I ran. I packed some things as soon as I put the phone down and I left my house. I had some money there — we all keep whatever we have at home, the banks aren’t safe anymore. Not a lot, but enough to get me out of Baghdad, enough to bribe the men at the border posts. So I took it and I ran. I hid at a friend’s house, and that night, after Ali’s body was found, I knew for certain that they’d be looking for me. So I left the country. I took buses, paid for rides on trucks, anything I could find. First to Damascus — it was the less obvious route than through Amman, and it’s closer to Beirut, which was where I wanted to reach. To see you. I asked at the university, and they said you were in Zabqine for the day. I couldn’t wait. I had to see you.”

Evelyn hated the question she just had to ask. Despite feeling sick to her stomach over the horrific fate that had befallen Ali, and her deeply felt grief for Farouk — not just for his ghastly current predicament, but also for the nightmare he must have lived through during the last few years — she couldn’t push the image from the Polaroid out of her mind.

She put her warring emotions in check. “What about the book? Did you see it? Do you know where it is?”

Farouk didn’t seem to mind. “When Abu Barzan came to see me, I asked him to show me the collection, but he didn’t have anything with him. It was too dangerous for him to travel with them. Too many roadblocks and militias. I imagine he must have kept them in his shop, or at his home, somewhere safe. He only needed to move them once he had a buyer, across the border into a safer place to conclude the deal, in Turkey or Syria — Turkey would be more likely, it’s not that far from Al-Mawsil — without having to risk coming through Baghdad.”

More questions were swamping Evelyn’s mind. “But how did he get it? He didn’t say where he found it?”

Farouk didn’t answer. He was looking beyond Evelyn, and all of a sudden his eyes lit up with fear. He grabbed her hand. “We have to go. Now.”

For the briefest of moments, his words didn’t register with her. They just seemed to hang in midair, a detached parallel conversation that wasn’t meant, couldn’t be meant, for her, a conversation she was witnessing remotely. Then she felt her head turn, almost by reflex, beyond her control, following his alarmed glare, and noticed two stocky men, the same two men she seemed to remember from an earlier sighting, moving forcefully through the crowd, their mouths set in tight lines under thick black mustaches, their eyes like dark slits in a pockmarked helmet and just as devoid of life, and heading straight for them.

Then Farouk almost yanked her arm out of her socket and they were moving rapidly through the unsuspecting crowd.