The boy continued to watch Rashid who put his hand into his back pocket making the boy pull out his gun and aim it at Rashid’s body.
‘What are you doing?’ The boy had something cruel in him now. Rashid acted as though he had not seen either the look or the gun.
‘Calm down, calm down,’ Rashid said, bringing his hands in front of him. ‘You know, it’s good I saw you because I’ve got something for you. I was hoping to see you, but then this came up, so it was not going to be possible. Here.’
He handed over the dry-cleaning slip to the boy, who turned it over suspiciously.
‘What’s that?’
‘The ticket to a suit of great beauty,’ Rashid replied. ‘It’s being cleaned at Abu Faris’ and will be ready tomorrow. You take it. You pick it up. It goes with the shoes.’
‘Suit? What kind of suit?’ The boy looked at the ticket under the light. It had a stamped number on it, a perforated edge and nothing else.
‘How can I explain? It’s in the style of what I would call “American Gangster”,’ Rashid said, catching himself thinking how much he would have enjoyed telling Khalil about this scene. Khalil would have loved the whole set-up, loved it so much that Rashid was no longer certain that he wanted to do anything that robbed him of the chance of telling Khalil about the way things had gone.
‘American gangster?’ the boy smiled. It was a great term, and Rashid hung the gun over his head so that he could use his hands.
‘Ah, American gangster. You don’t know this style? Well, the shoulders are hayk, like this, broad, at the shoulders with white lines on the fabric coming down and the lining is red silk.’ Rashid rubbed his fingers together. ‘So soft,’ and then he added, ‘it was made in Paris, by a very high-class tailor.’
‘Paris?’ the boy smiled lopsidedly like they were sharing a dirty joke.
‘Paris.’ Rashid nodded. ‘You know, it’s very lucky that I met you like this, because I thought it was really your thing.’
Rashid worried that he had gone too far, that he had pushed his luck with this boy, whose eyes were now glazing over while staring hard at Rashid.
‘Understand something?’ the boy asked. ‘You want to understand something? Well, I tell you that this show, this part of it: this is my show, fahem keef? You see how it is?’ He lifted the phone up by the chain that it was attached to around his neck. ‘I’ve got the number in here to do the car, see? So it’s my show. But this time, just as, you know, the usual strategy requires, there’s someone else too. He’s just the lookout, but you should know that he’s there.’
‘Where exactly?’
‘OK, well, we’re here, you go straight down here and you hit the playground in front of you, yes? OK, now what you do is… the car is to your right when you turn into the main street. It’s blue, third car along. Opposite where the car is parked down that small side street next to the playground is the lookout. Now…’ The boy licked the end of his index finger repeatedly with his tongue, then looked again at Rashid as he rubbed his forefinger and thumb together as if he was about to start counting money. ‘Fa, this Ayyoubi, batal aanjad?’ he asked. ‘He’s a hero, really?’
‘Batal aanjad. He’s really a hero,’ Rashid confirmed. ‘Aanjad, really,’ Rashid said seriously.
‘Well, if you’re prepared to die for him,’ the boy smirked and puffed himself out a bit, ‘Ya zalame, I’d die for no one. Never,’ he said proudly. ‘Except Palestine, of course.’
‘Of course,’ Rashid replied. ‘I understand.’
‘OK,’ said the boy, rolling his tongue around the front of his mouth between the gums and the lips as he thought, nodding his head in a way that seemed to indicate some kind of delinquent purpose. ‘Shuuf. See here, here’s what you’ve got to do,’ and he told Rashid what it was that Rashid had to do.
‘I can trust you, ya zalame?’ Rashid asked.
‘With your life, brother,’ the boy said, bending the dry-cleaner’s ticket in half and putting it in his back pocket, ‘with your life.’
And with that Rashid had agreed to do what it was that the boy had said he had to do.
Chapter 51
It was just around the corner, but it must have been that Iman had not moved for a while from where she stood. She had been frozen somewhere in time and place on a badly lit street on a strip of land in the far corner of the Mediterranean where people fought over something which she could not remember. ‘We’re two sides of a walnut,’ Rashid had said to her. When was that? When she had cried at school in Switzerland frustrated by another move, another loss of friends, another departure of her parents to greater things? Was it in an airport somewhere? On a border? ‘We’ll never be apart. I’ll always be with you.’
The people were coming out of everywhere with the explosion, out of dark houses with torches and candles. There was a cameraman jogging past her with a furry pink boom microphone and a flak jacket and she was being pushed along too with the crowd around the corner to where the flames fed off tangled cars, fuel and the lives of idealistic people. She found herself in the crowd where she was one of the women, one of many dressed like her in thoubs and scarves, screaming and crying for the loss of her brother, her brother.
‘Ayyoubi!’ the scream goes up. ‘They killed Ayyoubi!’
‘A dead fighter!’ someone is crying as the stretcher is carried above her, past her head, but it is not Rashid; she can see the legs, the size of the body, the feet are not his, the shoes are not his.
‘From the Authority!’ they cry. ‘A fighter from the Authority!’
‘They wired his car! Ayyoubi was the target!’
‘Death to the Islamists!’ a cry went up from a boy. ‘Up with the Mainstream party of the Authority!’
‘I can’t stand it any more!’ a woman next to Iman wailed, beating her chest. ‘I just can’t take it any more, not if we are killing ourselves. No! I can’t take it! Not after all we’ve been through.’
‘What an explosion! The force of it! No trace of him left from the car! Must’ve been right under him!’
‘Just some of his jacket here. See, the green. I would always recognise that jacket.’
‘Rashid.’ Everything was pouring from her nose, her eyes; it was messy, red and stinging all around her face and each time she wiped it away with the arm of the thoub it was back until she could not see. ‘Rashid,’ she was wailing now and there was someone behind her, a figure, the bulk of Umm Nidal from the Women’s Committee, holding her up.
‘You can’t find your brother, habibti? He probably followed the body, with the other men. Go that way. There, go,’ and with that Iman was guided to go back the way she came, with a big warm hand on her back. Not knowing what else there was for her to do or who it was she was to grieve for, Iman joined the crowd mourning the death of the unknown fighter.
Chapter 52
If the boy’s plan had involved taking care of the lookout, then it could have been said to have gone according to plan.
The main street had been even darker than the one he had left the boy in. From the moment he turned into it, he could feel the blood pumping in his ears as though he were in an upturned boat on the shore with the sea pounding at it. The moon was still fat and bright in the sky and he felt his way out into the street, pat, pat, only so many single steps to the car door, only so much space to cover. He concentrated hard on the practical element of it, and by trying hard to forget all else: this new brightness under his skin, the drugged-out beat of his heart. His breathing that was so heavy it was like someone there, behind him, huuh, huuh, huuh, like an obese old man, huuh, but it was him; he knew it was him. If he forgot all else and concentrated solely on the line of cars: the dents picked up in the half-light, the bent wing mirrors, the stickers on back windows, the stuffed dogs and leopard-skin fur on the back ledges. He could move forwards, as he usually did, one step before the other, the one foot picking up and coming down, and then the next.