The Mirage: A Novel (11 page)

The street in front of the courthouse had been closed to regular vehicle traffic, and the police had set barricades along the far curb to keep pedestrians at a distance. A limousine idled near the foot of the courthouse steps, ready to whisk the man of the hour away to his victory celebration.

But Saddam was in no hurry to leave. As he came out of the courthouse—flanked by his sons, his legal team, and his buddy Tariq Aziz—he raised his arms and called to the crowd behind the barricades: “Hel-
lo
, Baghdad!” A cheer went up. Saddam’s most fervent supporters—Baath organizers receiving bonus pay for their presence here—raised signs bearing his picture and the phrase
LONG LIVE THE KING!
A chant began: “Saddam! Saddam! Saddam!”

Saddam kept his right arm in the air, rotating his hand in a regal wave. His eyes grew distant as he soaked in the adulation. After about a minute, Tariq Aziz touched him gently on the shoulder, as if waking a sleepwalker, and guided him down the steps towards a waiting gaggle of reporters and news cameras.

The chief defense lawyer had prepared a statement, but Saddam cut him off almost immediately and began to take questions: Yes, praise be to God, he was pleased with the trial’s outcome. No, he wasn’t surprised that the jurors—“honest Baghdadis”—had chosen to do the right thing. No, he held no ill will against the prosecutors, though as an honest citizen himself, he did wish the district attorney would focus more on
actual
criminals . . .

While his father held court with the press, Qusay Hussein kept his eyes on the crowd. His older brother was supposed to do the same, but Uday’s attention focused instead on a young female journalist who’d been shoved to the back of the gaggle. Uday circled around to her and asked if
he
could answer any questions.

Across the street there was a commotion as someone in the crowd held up a new sign, a homemade placard showing a caricature of Saddam with bloodstained hands, its one-word caption reading
BUTCHER!
The nearest Baathists reacted furiously, using their own signs as bludgeons. As the police moved in to prevent a riot, a portion of the barricade was left unguarded.

Two men slipped through the gap. They crossed the street undetected and approached along the sidewalk, drawing snub-nosed pistols from their waistbands. Qusay spotted them just as they were taking aim; he cried out a warning and knocked his father to the ground.

The press scattered as the men opened fire. Uday, his face registering glee rather than shock, turned towards the gunshots. He drew his own pistol and shot the closest assassin twice in the chest. The second gunman panicked and tried to flee back into the crowd. Heedless of the other people in the line of fire, Uday squeezed off several more shots, one of which connected. The gunman stumbled and fell to his knees; before he could get up, the police piled onto him.

Qusay helped his father to his feet. Saddam checked himself carefully for bullet wounds; finding none, he looked around at his entourage. “Tariq?”

“I’m OK,” Tariq Aziz said, though in truth he looked ill. He was staring at Saddam’s lead attorney, who lay gushing blood from a hole in his Adam’s apple. One of the other lawyers bent down with a wadded handkerchief, saying, “Put pressure on it, put pressure on it.” Aziz turned away and vomited, and Saddam raised a hand to his own throat, feeling a sudden chill. “God is great,” he whispered. He said it again, louder: “God is great!”

Uday meanwhile strolled over to where the cops were sitting on the second gunman. As he approached, more police moved in around him, forming a ring that screened him from the view of the cameras. He held out his hand, and an officer passed him a wooden baton.

“Please,” the gunman begged. “Mercy! In the name of God, mercy!”

“Hold him tightly,” Uday said.

T
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Saddam Hussein

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Saddam Hussein Abd al Majid al Tikriti
(born April 28, 1937), a
Sunni Muslim
, is an Iraqi labor organizer, philanthropist, bestselling novelist, and reputed gangster and bootlegger. Though he emphatically denies having anything to do with the manufacture or sale of
alcohol
, he is more coy on the question of whether he has other ties to
organized crime
. To date, he has been indicted nine times on various felony and racketeering charges. He has never once been convicted.

EARLY LIFE

Saddam was born in the village of
Al Awja
, near
Tikrit
. His father,
Hussein Abd al Majid
, died while Saddam was still in the womb, so Saddam was raised by his maternal uncle,
Khairallah Talfah
, in
Baghdad
.

In 1957 Saddam became an organizer for the
Baath Labor Union
, which represented construction, garbage collection, and river transport workers in
Iraq
and
Syria
. The
Arab Bureau of Investigation
suspected that the Baathists were also engaged in smuggling and other illegal activities, but did little about it. At the time, the ABI was far more concerned with investigating corruption among two other, much more powerful Iraqi labor unions: the
Royal Order of Hashemites
, which was controlled by the
Hashem family
, and the
Free Officers Union
, led by retired Iraqi state police colonel
Abd al Karim Qasim
.

THE LABOR DAY MASSACRE AND THE RISE OF THE BAATHISTS

On the morning of July 14, 1958, the Hashem clan leader
Faisal
II was on his way to a
Labor Day
celebration when he was approached outside his Baghdad home by a group of men in police uniform. Faisal, his bodyguards, and several other Hashem family members were ordered to stand against a wall with their hands raised; when they did so, they were machine-gunned. By the time the real police arrived on the scene, reports were flooding in from all over Iraq of other Hashemites being murdered or simply disappearing.

It was widely believed that Abd al Karim Qasim had organized the massacre, but local law enforcement would do nothing against him, and federal agents found their own investigation stymied at every turn. Meanwhile, the surviving Hashemites decided to take matters into their own hands. An orgy of violence ensued, with the Hashemites taking the worst of it; by the end of the year, most members of the clan had either died or left Iraq.

In October 1959 masked gunmen ambushed Qasim as he left the Free Officers Union Hall. This was only the most recent of a series of attempts on Qasim’s life, and like the previous attempts, it failed. What was different was that this time the attackers were not Hashemites, but Baathists. Five of the six gunmen were killed by Qasim’s bodyguards; the sixth escaped. An hour later, Saddam Hussein showed up at a nearby hospital with a bullet wound in his leg. He claimed to have been mugged.

Qasim went into seclusion and Baathists began to die in large numbers. Saddam boarded a plane to
Egypt
, where he remained for the next four years. In interviews he has said he went to
Cairo University
to study law, “something I had long planned to do,” and that his departure from Iraq on the eve of a major gang war was a coincidence in timing.

The Free Officers and the Baathists traded bullets and bombs until February 1963, when Qasim was caught in another ambush and shot 82 times at close range. Following Qasim’s death, ABI agents—having received a mountain of incriminating evidence from an anonymous source—swooped in and arrested over two hundred Free Officers, effectively breaking the union’s back. Most of the professions that had been represented by the Free Officers now switched their allegiance to Baath.

In March 1963 Saddam Hussein returned to Baghdad and was appointed secretary treasurer of the Baathists. In 1968 he was promoted to union vice president. Finally, in 1979, after the surprise resignation of union president
Ahmed Hassan al Bakr
, Saddam was elected leader of the Baathists, a position he holds to this day.

PHILANTHROPIST, NOVELIST . . . AND PROFESSIONAL DEFENDANT

1979 also marked the first time Saddam was indicted by the federal government. The case, which concerned the bribery and intimidation of workers on an oil pipeline between
Kurdistan
and Iraq, never went to trial. A furnace malfunction at the hotel where the government’s witnesses were sequestered flooded the guest floors with carbon monoxide, asphyxiating four dozen people.

In 1982 the government tried again, accusing Saddam of having rigged the election in which his uncle Khairallah became mayor of Baghdad. On the morning of the second day of jury deliberations, the jury foreman was found hanged in a courthouse restroom. An alternate juror was summoned and deliberations continued; Saddam was acquitted.

By 1986, with two additional acquittals to his name, Saddam had become a national celebrity. He gave regular press interviews and went on television to proclaim, with a wink, his innocence. He suggested that his legal troubles were a result of “high and mighty persons in
Riyadh
” failing to understand “the rough and tumble nature of life in Iraq.”

In 1987 Saddam established the
Saddam Hussein Foundatio
n, a charitable trust that gave money to schools, mosques, and hospitals, and the
Baath Union Scholarship Program
, which helped Iraqis from poor families attend college. Federal prosecutors, noting that Saddam’s personal charity donations exceeded his declared income by a factor of ten, charged him with
tax evasion
. He was found not guilty . . .

In December 1998 Saddam held a press conference to announce he was publishing a
pulp-fiction novel.
“For years, government lawyers have been telling outrageous stories about me,” he said. “I thought it was time to try telling one of my own.” The book,
Zabibah and the King
, concerns a labor organizer from Tikrit who reluctantly turns to a life of crime after his mistress, Zabibah, is murdered by gangsters; in due course, having exacted revenge on the killers, he becomes the (benevolent) king of the underworld.

The
Baghdad Post
called
Zabibah and the King
“sublime,” but most other reviews were lukewarm at best, and initial sales were disappointing. Then the Baghdad district attorney attempted to use the book as the basis for a murder conspiracy charge, arguing that the climax of the story was a thinly fictionalized account of the killing of Abd al Karim Qasim that included details only someone privy to the murder plot would know. A grand jury rejected the DA’s request for an indictment, but the resulting publicity pushed
Zabibah
onto the bestseller lists.

Saddam Hussein has since written three sequels to
Zabibah
, also bestsellers:
The King’s Castle
(2001),
The King and the City
(2003), and
The King Says Devil, Begone
(2006). According to Saddam’s literary agent, a fifth “King” novel is nearing completion; state and federal prosecutors are said to be eagerly awaiting their advance review copies.

FACTS ABOUT SADDAM HUSSEIN

·
He married his cousin
Sajida Talfah
in 1963. They have five children, including two sons,
Uday
(b. 1964) and
Qusay
(b. 1966).

·
In 1986 Saddam married a second wife,
Samira Shahbandar
. Owing to “friction” between her and Saddam’s first wife, Shahbandar lives abroad in an undisclosed location. It is not known whether she and Saddam have any children.

·
Saddam’s eldest son, Uday, was arrested in 1988 for pistol-whipping a valet outside a Baghdad discotheque. He has had numerous other run-ins with the law since, and unlike his father, he has not always been successful at avoiding jail time. Most recently, he spent three months in
Abu Ghraib
for assaulting a model he had been dating.

·
Saddam’s personal net worth is not known, but he and his family have extensive property holdings, including at least seven houses in Baghdad. In addition to the salary he draws as head of Baath and the royalties from his novels, his primary declared source of income is what he describes as a “small” import/export business he “runs on the side . . .”

T
hat night, Mustafa found himself suddenly wide awake for no reason he could determine. The neighborhood was quiet; the air-conditioning in the apartment was still on, and when he stood outside his father’s bedroom, he could hear Abu Mustafa snoring steadily within. All seemed well, but a quickening in his blood told Mustafa he wouldn’t be getting back to sleep anytime soon. Rather than fight insomnia he decided to make use of it, taking a mat from a closet shelf and heading to the roof to catch up on his prayers.

As a boy he’d rarely missed a prayer time; his mother had seen to it. Whenever he tried to beg off—most commonly in the dawn hour, when a few extra minutes’ sleep seemed more compelling than submission to God—his mother told him to think of the millions of other Muslims all around the world, all bowing to Mecca at that very moment. Did Mustafa really want to exclude himself from that community? This was usually enough to get him out of bed.