For my part, I was a little uncomfortable. I didn’t know whether I should play the brick-fronted hero or the aw-shucks kid who just happened to be in the right place at the right time. The truth was, I only wanted to get out of there as fast as I could with another thick envelope of reward money, and never have anything to do with the old son of a bitch again. He was making it difficult. He kept kissing me.
At last it got thick, even for an old-fashioned Arab potentate like Friedlander Bey. He let me go and retreated behind the formidable bastion of his desk. It seemed that we weren’t going to share a pleasant lunch or tea and swap stories of mangled corpses while he told me how terrific I was. He just stared at me for a long time. One of the Stones crept up beside me, just behind my right shoulder. The other Stone planted himself behind my left shoulder. It felt eerily reminiscent of my first interview with Friedlander Bey, in the motel. Now, in these grander surroundings, I was somehow reduced from the conquering hero to some slimy miscreant who’d been caught with his hand in someone else’s pocket, and was now on the carpet. I don’t know how Papa did it, but it was part of his magic. Uh oh, I thought, and my stomach started to grumble. I still hadn’t learned what his motives had been.
“You have done well, O excellent one,” said Friedlander Bey. His tone was thoughtful and not wholly approving.
“I was granted good fortune by Allah in His greatness, and by you in your foresight,” I said.
Papa nodded. He was used to being yoked together with Allah that way. “Take, then, the token of our gratitude.” One of the Stones shoved an envelope against my ribs, and I took it.
“Thank you, O Shaykh.”
“Thank not me, but Allah in His beneficence.”
“Yeah, you right.” I pushed the envelope into a pocket. I wondered if I could go now.
“Many of my friends were slain,” mused Papa, “and many of my valued associates. It would be well to guard against such a thing ever happening again.”
“Yes, O Shaykh.”
“I have need of loyal friends in positions of authority, on whom I can rely. I am shamed when I recall the trust I put in Hassan.”
“He was a Shiite, O Shaykh.”
Friedlander Bey waved a hand. “Nevertheless. It is time to repair the injuries that have been done to us. Your task is not finished, not yet, my son. You must help build a new structure of security.”
“I will do what I can, O Shaykh.” I didn’t like the way this was going at all, but once again I was helpless.
“Lieutenant Okking is dead and gone to his Paradise, inshallah. His position will be filled by Sergeant Hajjar, a man whom I know well and whose words and deeds I need not fear. I am considering a new and essential department — a liaison between my mends of the Budayeen and the official authorities.”
I never felt so small and so alone in my life.
Friedlander Bey went on. “I have chosen you to administer that new supervisory force.”
“Me, O Shaykh?” I asked in a quavery voice. “You don’t mean me.”
He nodded. “Let it be done.”
I felt a surge of rage and stepped toward his desk. “The hell with you and your plans!” I shouted. “You sit there and manipulate — you watch my friends die — you pay this guy and that guy and don’t give a good goddamn what happens to them as long as your money rolls in. I wouldn’t doubt that you were behind Okking and the Germans and Hassan and the Russians.” Suddenly I shut up quick. I hadn’t been thinking fast, I’d just been letting my anger out; but I could tell by the sudden tightness around Friedlander Bey’s mouth that I’d touched something pretty goddamn sensitive. “You were, weren’t you?” I said softly. “You didn’t give a flying fuck what happened to anybody. You were playing both sides. Not against the middle — there wasn’t any middle. Just you, you walking cadaver. You don’t have a human atom in you. You don’t love, you don’t hate, you don’t care. For all your kneeling and praying, you got nothing in you. I’ve seen handfuls of sand with more conscience than you.”
The really strange thing was that during that whole speech, neither of the Stones That Speak came any nearer or shoved me around or broke my face for me. Papa must have given them a signal to let me have my little oration. I took another step toward him, and he lifted the corners of his mouth in a pitiful, ancient man’s attempt at a smile. I stopped short, as if I’d walked into an invisible glass wall.
Baraka. The charismatic spell that surrounds saints and tombs and mosques and holy men. I couldn’t have harmed Friedlander Bey and he knew it. He reached into a desk drawer and brought out a gray plastic device that fitted nicely into the palm of his hand. “Do you know what this is, my son?” he asked.
“No,” I said.
“It is a portion of you.” He pressed a button, and the screaming nightmare that had made an animal of me, that had driven me to rend and tear Okking and Hassan, flooded my skull in its full, unstoppable fury.
I came to in a fetal position on Papa’s rug.
“That was only fifteen seconds,” he told me calmly.
I stared at him sullenly. “That’s how you’re going to make me do what you want?”
He gave me that piece of a smile again. “No, my son.” He tossed the control device in a gentle arc, and I caught it. I looked at him. “Take it,” he said. “It is your loving cooperation I desire, not your fear.”
Baraka.
I pocketed the remote control unit and waited. Papa nodded. “Let it be done,” he said again. And just like that, I was a cop. The Stones That Speak moved closer toward me. In order to breathe, I had to keep skipping a couple of feet in front of them. They squeezed me out of the room and down the hall and out of Friedlander Bey’s house altogether. I didn’t have another chance to say anything. I was standing in the street, a lot richer. I was also some kind of imitation law-enforcement agent with Hajjar as my immediate boss. Even in my worst drug-induced half-crazed nightmares, I’d never concocted anything as horrible as that.
As the word does, it got around fast. They probably knew about it before I did, while I was still recuperating and playing solitaire with the Sonneine. When I went into the Silver Palm, Heidi wouldn’t serve me. At the Solace, Jacques, Mahmoud, and Saied stared about six inches above my shoulder into humid air and talked about how much garlic was enough; they never even acknowledged my presence. I noticed that Saied the Half-Hajj had inherited custody of Hassan’s American kid. I hoped they’d be very happy together. I finally went into Frenchy’s, and Dalia set a coaster in front of me. She looked very uncomfortable. “Where you at, Marîd?” she asked.
“I’m all right. You still talking to me?”
“Sure, Marîd, we been friends a long time.” She gave a long, worried look down at the end of the bar, though.
I looked, too. Frenchy stood up from his stool and came slowly toward me. “I don’t want your business, Audran,” he said gruffly.
“Frenchy, after I caught Khan, you told me I could drink free in here for the rest of my life.”
“That was before what you done to Hassan and Okking. I never had no use for either of them, but what you did … ” He turned his head aside and spat.