Florence of Arabia (22 page)

"The person who regularly gives the news on this program." Florence began, "is Falima Sham. Fatima disappeared following a broadcast in which she reported that the Wasabi royal family had sentenced one of its own princesses to be stoned to death for the crime of petitioning the king to stop the persecution of women.

"An extensive search by the authorities was undertaken to find Ms. Sham. The investigation produced no result.

"Then, four days ago, a videotape was anonymously delivered to TV
Matar. Y
ou are about to see that videotape. Be warned: It depicts Ms. Sham being killed. If you have no stomach or desire to witness a young woman being slowly stoned to death, then you should not watch this. If there are children present, you should send them from the room.

"It is being shown on my initiative, and mine only, for one reason: to honor a brave woman who dared to speak out against a terrible injustice, and who for that was herself savagely murdered. The term 'martyr' h
as been debased and corrupted. Y
ou are
about to witness an actual martyrdom
."

Florence had instructed the staff to switch off the telephones and to bar all the doors to the control room. She also specified that the power source be switched to the emergency generators, so the broadcast would continue if the outside power was shut oil".

The tape ran for its full twenty minutes. Though they had seen it before, the staff again wept. Florence had to struggle to keep her own composure. She had dispensed with makeup so her eyes would not become a caricature of muddy mascara.

It t
ook a few moments after the tape ended before she was able to continue. "It is not known precisely who did this deed. However, this method of execution is regularly employed in Wasabia.

"F
atima Sham was twenty-six years old. She is survived by her family, by her friends, by her co
lleagues and by millions of sist
ers throughout the Arab world.
Etemen dan mouwt
'ha
yekoon ai
ndee manaa"

In minutes there was a pounding on the steel doors to the control room. The staff's blood was up. They armed themselves with lire extinguishers, axes, steel pipes, electrical tubing. Watching them, Florence felt mixed sensations of pride and futility.

"No," she comm
anded, "put those down." She uncl
ipped her microphone, checked herself in the mirror and walked to the door. She gestured to a technician who had positioned himself to bash the invaders with a wastebasket. He opened the door. A half-dozen men burst in with drawn weapons.

Florence addressed them sternly. "Put your weapons down. We have none."

The security agents froze, startled by this unexpected temerity. Then one of them, apparently the leader, approached and cuffed Florence hard across the face. The blow caught her off balance. She
fell. The staffer with the wast
ebasket moved toward the attacker and got the butt of a pistol in his face, breaking his nose and misting the air with blood. Florence, dazed, felt the cold snap of metal around her wrists. She was pulled to her feet and dragged out of the control room.

They
hustled her into the back of a car and threw a blanket over her head. Whether this was to humiliate her or to keep her from seeing where they were taking her. Florence could only speculate.

She knew the loca
tion of police headquarters and,
from the cars movements, tried to calculate whether this was the destination. After a quarter hour of turns that she could not follow, she had no idea where they were taking her. Th
e leader sitting in the front se
at did not respond to her questions.

It was only ten miles to the Wasabi border, and it was this directional scenario that was the least pleasing. But there was another possibility: that she might be on her way to the same fate that had befallen Fatima. Florence imagined the car stopping, the blanket being pulled from her head, the neck-deep hole dug in the sand, the basket full of small stones, a video camera mounted on a tripod. They'd want a record of this one, too.

Her face flushed hot, and she felt like she was going to throw up. But then the image of herself covered in her own mess, as she was executed, overrode her nausea. If this was to be her fate, Florence was res
olved to meet it with such dig
nity as she could, head high, and serene, w
ith maybe even a shouted "Fuck y
ou!" at her killers. Well, perhaps something more elegant than "Fuck you!" She mused on her final words.

A half hour passed. Finally, the car slowed, made a series of turns and stopped. She heard voices. She w
as pulled from the backseat and, with each arm f
irmly grasped, was marched across a stone floor. She remembered from her State Department hostage tr
aining to notice every
detail, but with the blanket over her head, it wasn't easy. She thought.
There's the floor. I m
ight as well notice
that. But in the end,
it was only a floor.

CHAPTER
TWENTY-ONE

S
he was taken to a windowless room of ambiguous architectural purpose. It
could serve as a cool cellar for fresh foodstuffs, Kaffir limes and Damascus melons. S
uch subterranean spaces had oth
er, less pleasant uses. The thickness of the door that shut behind her. the sparseness of the furnishings before her—a wooden chair and table, an overhead lightbulb. a bedspring cot and plastic tub—bespoke austerity. The one item out of place was a video camera mounted on a tripod.

By her wrist watch, its face scuffed by the handcuffs, it was going on three in the morning when the door opened. The man confronting her wore Western dress that might have been a military uniform minus insignias.

"You are being
deported,"
he said. He put some papers on the
table before her. "Where you are
deported to, it depends."

She read the papers. It was a confession in the form of a script
.
Presumably, she was to read it for the video camera.

In it,
she admitted loan "unnatural and immoral relationship"—not with the sheika but with her TV
Matar colleague Fatima Sham. Florence had become enough of a journalist to know a good lead paragraph. She read on. She was further admitting to trying t
o blackmail the Wasabi Royal House of Hamooj. H
er "shameful plot" was to demand $20 million from
them. When they refused— "as, G
od be praised, they should have"—Flor
ence's lover Fatima Sham put on
television the "wicked and untrue" story about Princess Hamzin.
Someone put a lot of thought into this,
Florence mused as she read. It
went on to say that Florence and her "accomplices" then avenged themselves on the "
honorable Wasabis" by killing F
alima in the gruesome manner depicted and sending a copy of the tape to Kaffa
, saying they would put it on TV
Matar and blame them for it if a ransom of $40 million weren't paid. Again, the "upright" Wasabis hel
d fast. But then "the police"—th
e script did not specify whose police—caught her. She could no longer live with the shameful things she had done, so she was recording this "true confession." It concluded with an apology to the emir of Mata
r and the king of Wasabia for perpetrat
ing such vile doings while a guest on "holy" soil.

"Well." she said finally, l
ooking up at her dour jailer. "I
seem to have been very busy."

He pressed the record button on the video camera. "Begin," he said.

Florence looked into the camera. "My name is Florence Farfaletti," she said. "I'm an American citizen. It appears that I am being held in some basement somewhere. It's a bit damp, but otherwise tolerable. Have a nice day."

The man pressed the stop button. "You won't like it in Kaffa." He came toward her. Florence recoiled, thinking he was going to strike her, but instead, he unlocked her handcuffs.

"You run a t
elevision station." he said. H
e pointed to the video camera. "So, here is television camera. In two hours I come back. Make the film."

She used the next hour to explore every inch of the room. She tried to pry a piece of wire from the cot, with the idea of fashioning a tool to pick the door lock, but gave up after five minutes. There were problems with this approach, the first being that she did not know how to pick a lock. They'd taught her the rudiments of the skill during her weekend of hostage training in Virginia, but she had never really gotten the hang of it. She thought of buying herself sometime by sabotaging the video camera, but that seemed like feckless temporizing. Perhaps if she kept talking but never quite confessed until the tape ran out—a video Scheherazade, with the tape counter stopped at 1001.

She wondered what was going on back in Washington. What was Uncle Sam doing? Pulling strings or erasing computer files? Or sitting down to a martini and medium-rare porterhouse with onion rings at the Palm?

She missed Bobby. She missed George. She missed Rick. George and Rick wouldn't be much good, but they'd cheer her up. She shut her eyes, headachy with fright and fatigue, and dreamed of the conning tower of a U.S. nuclear submarine breaking the glass-still surface beyond the snaky beach. Where was Laila? The hours passed.

A few minutes
before seven
a.m
. by the sculled watch, she heard the sound of the door being unlocked. Her heart was pounding. The door opened, admitting the jailer and another man, a torturer by
his looks. The jailer went to th
e video camera and examined the coun
ter. It was still set at 003. H
is face creased with displeasure. He nodded to the tortur
er, who look out a nine-millimet
er pistol and pressed the muzzle against Florence's forehead. It was as cold as a doctor's stethoscope.
She swallowed and closed her ey
es.

"You make confess?"

"No."

"Kill her," the jailer said.

Florence shut her eyes. She smelled gun oil. She wondered what they would do with her body. Feed it to the sharks beyond the reef? The crabs would finish it off. She saw her own bones, bright white, phosphorescently aglow against the blue of the water, resting placidly at the bottom.
Get it over with.

The hammer snapped forward against the action. Florence emitted a little shriek and opened her eyes. The men were smiling cruelly, but there was the unmistakable element of defeat in their eyes. They left. She stood and kicked the plastic bucket ac
ross the room. It ricocheted off
the wall. Then, from terror and exhaustion, she passed out.

In the dream, she was thirsty, very, very thirsty. She was biting down on her lips to draw blood to drink. She was in the desert. It was a furnace. In the attack on Aqaba. it was so hot that Lawrence's hands blistered on the metal of his rifle. There was a submarine.
A submarine in the middle of
the
desert? Don't ask. Go aboard
—
listen
—
they're calling
you.

“What day is it?
"
she said t
o Laila. "Thursday."

Florence had been in the subterranean room
for five days before the door fl
ew open and in rushed Colonel Boutros of the Royal Matar Constabulary, along with two of his men.

"
God be praised, you are safe, madame. Are y
ou grievously injured? What did they do to you? Did you see their faces? Can you give a description?"

When they brought her out, she saw that she had been in the basement of some abandoned factory
-
like building on the edge of Amo-Amas. She asked Colonel Boutros at least a hundred questions on the drive to the constabulary headquarters. His answers seemed guarded. And when they arrived at the HQ. there was a crowd of reporters with cameras wailing. Colonel Boutros preened, posing with Florence. "God be praised, we have found her!"