?
The next morning Abed takes her around the city. She and Hemingway sit in the backseat of his Nissan. The windshield is so dust-stained and wind-scoured that she can barely see out of it. This makes her feel safer, shielded. They pass an open-topped Jeep filled with men whose arms bristle with rifles, and then they get stopped at a checkpoint by soldiers who stare at her while talking to Abed in their rough, musical voices.
She has three interviews set up that day. The first is at a women’s shelter. A table is pulled aside and a rug lifted off the floor and a trapdoor hoisted to allow her down the stairs, into a hidden basement full of women who have been raped, women who have run away from their marriages, all of them with husbands or brothers or even fathers who have threatened to kill them for their offenses. The women—some only teenagers—coo over Hemingway, who falls onto his back and lolls his tongue and presents his belly for them to rub. Abed translates for her as she scratches notes in her Moleskine and holds out her phone to capture their voices. “I don’t think you hit record,” Abed says, and she says, “It’s fine. Don’t worry.”
Their next stop is a house owned by a white-bearded man in a brown vest who arranges safe passage from the country for these women. He offers Lela a steaming cup of chai and a cold chickpea salad. While they sit in the living room—with the television on but muted—the man falls asleep twice while talking to her. Each time he spills his tea, which rouses him and he begins speaking again as though without interruption. He refuses a photo, but she can feel the slight shudder of the phone as it secures several images of him and the room—not to publish but merely for recollection and editorial verification.
And then it is time for her third and final interview of the day. This takes place at the edge of the city, past the checkpoints, in a walled-in compound with a square-shaped two-story concrete building inside it. A guard with a beard running halfway down his chest stands at the gate. They climb out of the Nissan to speak with him.
The sun is sinking and the air has taken on a hazy, purplish tincture. While Abed and the guard speak, she surveys the surrounding area. Half a block away there is a market with a few tables out front. Juniper sits there, drinking a chai and pretending to read a newspaper.
Abed says, “Lela? They want to know why you have the dog.”
She returns her attention to them. “Just say I have diabetes.”
He does and the guard spits and says to her directly in broken English, “What does dog and diabetes mean? Not sense.”
She tries to look as meek as possible. “He’s a service dog. He helps me.”
Hemingway sniffs the tire of the Nissan and raises his leg to piss on it, and the doofy look on his face seems to relieve the guard. He digs through her satchel, tossing everything onto the ground for her to gather. When he pulls out a bottle of water, he uncaps it, sniffs it, spits in it, and hands it back to her. Then he pats her down, and when he does, his hands linger in the wrong places. He says something and laughs harshly, and Abed does not translate. He only says, “Be safe. I’ll wait here.”
The guard busies himself with his phone, tapping the screen to unlatch the gate. While he is distracted, she leans in to Abed and says, “You need to leave. Okay? Right now.”
Abed has a look of panic on his face. “But—”
She hands him an envelope wadded with cash and puts a finger to her lips. “Trust me. Go.”
The guard waves for her to follow, and she notices then the insignia printed on his back. That of a red right hand.
She enters the compound, and the gate clangs into place behind her. The system beeps and the lock sleeves into place. Off in the distance, from atop a minaret, she hears—again—the muezzin singing the call to prayer. She pauses so that the guard might drop to his knees and bow toward the east. But he doesn’t. He keeps going. He’s deaf to prayer.
The courtyard is obscenely green compared to the rest of the dun-colored city. A lush lawn. A fountain. Pomegranate trees. Benches set along white gravel trails. In the middle of it all is a severed head on a pike. She spots one, two, three more guards stationed around the compound. All of them watching her. All of them carrying the mark of the red right hand. Crows circle high above them, like early slivers of night searching for a place in the sky.
The front door is also secured by an auto-lock system. The guard taps his phone and pushes open the door, and she steps into the dimly lit foyer. She smells tobacco and cooked lamb. On the first floor, she spots a kitchen and a living room packed with mismatched furniture and another room in which at least twenty men work busily at computer terminals. From the wall oozes a giant bloody rendering of the hand. The staircase is barricaded with gated doorways, one on each landing, each boxed with a keypad and wired with an alarm.
On the landing, on her way up to the second floor, she peeks through a doorway. A man sits in a dark room. A man she at first believes to be sleeping upright, his head nodded to the side. He is smiling at whatever dream possesses him. But she realizes he only appears to be smiling because he has no lips. He is tied to the chair and the skin has been flayed from his face and tossed on the floor. In between their footsteps, she can hear the flies buzzing.
On the third floor, the guard escorts her down a hallway and knocks gently on a door and waits for the voice that beckons them inside. At a desk sits a man in desert cammies. A former Marine who one day, without warning, walked away from his unit and over the past two years became the reigning warlord of the insurgency. His name used to be John Slater but now he goes by Wisam. His neck and face appear slim, but his belly bulges so hugely that the bottom three buttons of his shirt are undone, as though something gestates within him. He is balding but he keeps his hair long. The wooden desk is carved with ciphers that she distantly recognizes. The floor and walls and ceiling are busy with painted versions of the same. The room is otherwise crowded with filing cabinets atop which rest several blade servers. In the corner sits a minibar festooned with cut-glass tumblers and bottles of single malt. Beside it is a dead body, bloated with rot. Hemingway perks his ears and whines.
Wisam looks at her for a long minute. “What’s with the dog?”
“He’s a service animal.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“He helps me. I have asthma.”
Wisam gives up on English to ask a question of the guard and then addresses her once more, “He said you said you have diabetes.”
She shrugs. “Translation issues.”