The Abrupt Physics of Dying (24 page)

Prophets of Chaos

It was dusk by the time they reached Al Mukalla. They checked into a small local hotel and were directed to a second-floor suite
overlooking
the sea. Dressed as a Yemeni, bearded, Clay didn’t draw a glance from the hotel staff.

Hussein checked the windows, searched the bedrooms, and then placed a bottle of whisky, J&B, and a black Beretta 92 on the kitchen table.

‘Don’t leave the room. I’m going to the mosque to pray.’

Clay raised his brows, surprised.

‘I won’t be back ’til after dark.’

Clay jutted his chin towards the pistol. ‘And that?’

Hussein looked at Clay through a wreath of cigarette smoke. ‘
Inshallah
, you won’t need it.’

‘And if I do?’

Hussein smiled. ‘Then God help you.’ He stepped into the hall, closed the door behind him.

Clay stood on the balcony and watched the sun set over the Indian Ocean. Haze cloaked the ragged seafront. Grey fingers rose up from the town as if from the grave, wood smoke from cooking fires, toxic vapours from heaps of burning garbage scattered along the roadside and smouldering in vacant lots. Low clouds scuttled in from the sea. A solitary minaret pierced the brume like a lighthouse on a dangerous shore. Its upper turret gleamed in the last of the sun, and he could see the loudspeaker from which the muezzin would soon broadcast to the faithful, Hussein apparently among them.

Clay walked into the kitchen and poured himself a whisky. The gun, ugly and mean, was there on the table where Hussein had left it. His hand shook as he poured and some of the alcohol splashed onto the table. He walked out to the balcony, leaned against the railing and drank, watching the sun disappear into the sea. After a while he went back inside and sat at the table and poured himself another drink and sat staring at the gun for a long time.

There was a knock at the door. The call to prayer had not gone out yet. Even if he had returned early, Hussein had taken a key. Clay got to his feet and slid the fingers of his right hand over the Braille of the Beretta’s grip and pushed the weapon into the waistband of his trousers at the small of his back. He padded to the door and stood against the wall, tried to control his breathing. He would wait until whoever was there went away.

More banging, harder this time. Clay reached back and touched the grip. It was damp with sweat.

Jesus, he thought, just go away.

Again, banging at the door, this time with what sounded like an open palm, louder than before, more insistent. His heart hammered like a piston but he stayed where he was, the Beretta now drawn, safety off.

Then a voice from the other side of the door, in English: ‘Open up for God’s sake.’ A woman’s voice, a boy’s.

Clay unlocked the door, pulled it open. A woman stood in the doorway, covered head to foot in a black
burqa
; even her eyes were shrouded. She inclined her head, nodded in the direction of the gun still hanging from Clay’s hand.

‘Sorry,’ said Clay, pushing the pistol back into his trouser band.

She set down her bag, unfastened the cover-all and let the shroud float to the floor. Then she removed the veil. Rania. She smiled and threw her arms around his neck. ‘
Al hamdilluluah
,’ she whispered. ‘Thank God you are safe. I was so worried.’

He held her tight, closed his eyes. Something hard pressed into his hip bone. He stood back, looked down. ‘What’s that?’

Rania looked down at the protrusion, barely noticeable. ‘It is nothing.’

Clay reached down to touch it but she stepped back. She looked deliberately into his eyes for a long time, never wavering her gaze. But it wasn’t the stare-down look he expected, it was something altogether different, as if she were trying to unpeel his retina and look into whatever lay behind, nerve endings, ocular fluids. He did not look away.

She reached into a fold of her dress and withdrew a pistol. Clay recognised it – French, a PA-15, rare enough. An SAAF Mirage pilot he had met once in South-west Africa had had one, let him try it, said he got it from one of the French pilots who came down to train them on the Mirage. She held it there for an instant and then replaced it.

‘Standard AFP issue?’ he said, shocked, not sure why.

‘Certainly not. Please do not tell anyone, Claymore. It makes me feel safe. I know it is silly. I have never even fired it.’

‘I’ll teach you.’

She smiled, just a flash. Beautiful. ‘They said you had disappeared, vanished.’

‘Who did?’

‘Petro-Tex. They held a press conference in Sana’a.’

Clay held her at arm’s length, looked her up and down. She looked tired. Dust covered her face. Her hair was a hive of tangled wire.

‘How did you find me, Rania?’ He had a pretty good idea.

She reached up, touched the sutures on his lip, ran her fingertips over the bruises under his eyes. Her touch sent neurons firing.

‘What happened to you, Clay?’

‘I made some new enemies.’ He told her some of what had happened since he’d seen her last. ‘And now I’m a terrorist, apparently, and a murderer.’

‘What about the children, the people of the village?’ she asked.

‘Tomorrow you can see for yourself,’ he said. ‘I assume that’s why you are here.’

She nodded yes.

‘Did you get the story published, Rania? About Al Urush?’

She frowned. ‘Yes, in the
Yemen Times.
’

‘When, Rania? When did it appear?’

Rania looked down at the ground. ‘I am sorry, Clay,’ was all she said.

Clay’s heart lurched, tumbled. ‘When?’

‘I wrote it the night you called. I went to Dhamar with the editor to meet you, as we had agreed. But because you missed our rendezvous, he did not want to publish the piece. It took me three days to convince him.’

Clay dropped his hands to his sides, let the implications of this surge over him like a barrage. ‘Three days?’

Rania stepped back. ‘The editor insisted on checking the data with contacts in the Health department. In the end he agreed to publish a warning about suspected water contamination, advising people to look for alternative sources in the affected area. He would not add a statement about ongoing investigations, and he declined to name Petro-Tex as the possible source. I tried with AFP, too, Clay, but they turned it down, as I knew they would. I am sorry. I did my best.’

Clay nodded. ‘Then Abdulkader is dead.’

‘You do not know that.’

Abdulkader’s severed hand was there at his feet, the fingers reaching up to him, signalling him come closer. The moon had waned away; his friend’s time had run and he’d been unable to stop its course. ‘Some things you know,’ he said.

They stood for a while, close but not touching, looking at each other, saying nothing. There was nothing to say. After what felt like a long time she frowned and looked away. ‘I feel so dirty,’ she said, reaching for her bag. ‘I am going to take a shower.’

Clay pointed to the far end of the suite. ‘Over there.’

Hussein returned while Rania was in the shower. ‘I need a drink,’ he said, slumping onto the couch. He was red-eyed and jumpy from qat. A burning cigarette hung from his mouth. It looked like he hadn’t slept in days. Clay went to the kitchen and returned with the whisky and a pair of glasses. He set the glasses on the table and poured two measures.

‘The South will announce secession tomorrow morning,’ Hussein said, crushing out the cigarette in a stone ashtray. ‘Troops are mobilising on both sides. Tomorrow Yemen will be at war with itself. Again.’ Hussein leaned forward and picked up the glass, examining its contents intently. ‘Cheers,’ he said, and knocked back the whisky.

The last major civil war, between the royalists, led by Crown Prince Muhammad Al-badr and supported by the Saudis and Great Britain, and the rebels, led by Nasserite army officers backed by the Egyptians and the Russians, had lasted eight years. By the time it ended in 1970, five percent of Yemen’s population lay dead and the country was near economic collapse.

The call to prayer filled the air, echoed through the open room, overlapping pleas from a half-dozen minarets: God is great, Muhammad is his prophet, there is no other God but God; and from the bathroom the sound of falling water.

Hussein glanced towards the bathroom, pulled a softpack of Marlboros from his jacket pocket and cantilevered out a cigarette.

Clay declined, palm over his heart, reached for his whisky. ‘Remember what I told you about those,
broer
.’

Hussein edged a smile. ‘Every day, one step closer.’ He tapped the cigarette on the back of his hand, closed his lips around the filter, flicked a cheap plastic lighter and lit the tobacco. ‘So,’ he said, exhaling a stream of smoke towards the ceiling., ‘She’s arrived, then.’

Clay hung on this, the
then
arcing up towards him like ground fire, the tracer past before you’d even registered it, like a memory, an afterthought. ‘You knew she was coming?’

Hussein drew on the cigarette, squinted, nodded through the smoke.

‘Why the hell didn’t you tell me?’

‘I didn’t expect her until later.’

‘That’s not an answer.’

‘I thought you’d be pleased.’

‘Fuck you, Hussein.’ Clay pulled the pistol from his waistband and put it on the table. ‘And you forgot this,’ he said.

Hussein reached into his pocket and placed two fresh magazines on the table, pushed them towards Clay. ‘Keep it.’

Clay stared down at the pistol and the magazines. ‘How did you find me at that prison, or whatever it was?’

‘Pour me some more of that whisky.’ Hussein drank. ‘Your detention was not legal, not even registered. The Oil Ministry acted outside its jurisdiction. There is a lot of that going on.’

‘You didn’t answer my question.’ He was getting used to it.

Hussein looked into his glass, drew the last breath of smoke from his dying cigarette, filter viced between thumb and forefinger. ‘I am with the government, like I said. I have connections.’

‘The same government that wants Al Shams dead, that massacres its own people, that colludes with terrorists? That one?’

‘The situation is complex.’

‘I didn’t expect you to tell me anyway.’ He pulled out D.W. Greene’s passport, flipped to the inside of the back cover. ‘Tell me this then. What are these numbers?’

Hussein smiled. ‘That is for later, when this is finished. Not now.’

Just like the Battalion. No one tells you a goddamned thing.

Hussein leaned forward and pressed his hand around Clay’s forearm. ‘Please, Clay. Be patient. As soon as we are done, I will explain. It is safer for you this way.’

‘I don’t need looking after.’

Hussein ignored this, finished his smoke, lit another. It was about then that Rania emerged from the bathroom. She’d put her hair up in some sort of chignon, wisps coiling like black lichen around her ears, feathering her jaw. Her dress breezed around her legs, her bare arms, the thin cotton the colours of an oasis: water and cloud and
frond. She sat next to Clay and ran her finger across his lower lip. For a moment he thought she was about to kiss him, but she turned away and exchanged glances with Hussein.

‘I am sorry, Clay,’ she said.

He swallowed hard, fifteen years of death and disappointment in one brutal pill. ‘It’s not your fault, Rania,’ he said. ‘You tried.’ Abdulkader was dead. And in the dulled, washed-out, bruised prison of his psyche, something flared – a flame of sadness perhaps, of guilt, or regret, burned for a moment, and was gone before he could grasp it.

Rania looked at Hussein, he at her. They sat a moment like that, staring into each other’s eyes. ‘Not that,’ she said.

Clay looked at Hussein. ‘What is that supposed to mean?’

‘Ask her,’ said Hussein.

Rania unfolded a copy of the
International Herald Tribune
and slid it across the table. It was dated 18th May, three days ago. The headline read:

A
MIDST
R
UMORS OF
W
AR
, Y
EMEN
O
IL
C
ONSPIRACY