Osama Read online

  contour of a woman through the rain

  ——

  The rain fell down all at once. In the distance thunder broke into shards of sound and exploded in the vast open skies above the Mekong, and lightning flashed blue against grey. Joe stared out of the window, watching a barefoot child run through the puddles, a large green leaf, as large as a serving-tray, held above his head against the rain. The air was humid and smelled of vegetation and earth, and Joe knew that later, in the night, the snails would come out and glide across the road like sedate locomotives, leaving their rails behind them as they passed, and that the frogs would be luxuriating in the pools that were, to them, grand palaces of water. A burst of song came and went on the wind, bookended by static. A solitary bird flew high overhead, swooped and disappeared out of sight, little more than a black dot on the horizon.

  It was when the rain had began to ease, and sunlight streamed down through the fresh incisions in the cloud cover, that he first saw her. She was crossing the road, head bent, intent on the path she was following. There was no traffic. Light rain fell and sunlight came through behind her, but he couldn’t see her face. For a moment it seemed to him the whole world was still, a frozen backdrop, the moving girl the only living thing inhabiting it. Then the clouds closed overhead and the girl was gone, and Joe sighed, and turned away from the window and reached for his cigarettes.

  ‘Hello,’ a soft voice said, close by, and Joe started, dropping the Zippo lighter he was in the process of picking up a half-inch above the table. He looked up. She looked back at him. The window was behind her, and behind the glass the sunlight was passing through the rain, and for a moment the raindrops seemed like thousands of miniature prisms hovering in the air. ‘I didn’t hear you come in,’ he said. He glanced at the half-open door. The girl smiled. ‘You looked thoughtful,’ she said. ‘I didn’t want to disturb you.’ She had long brown hair and was quite petite, with eyes that were slightly almond-shaped, and though she was clearly European, she looked more like an Asian girl in her build. She looked like a girl who would always have a problem buying the right-size clothes in Europe, and no problem at all here. There were fine lines at the corners of her eyes when she smiled, and he wondered if they were from laughing or crying, though he didn’t know why. He said, ‘Can I help you?’

  ‘You are a detective?’ She didn’t sit down and he didn’t offer her a seat. She seemed comfortable standing there, while rain and sun clashed behind her. He wondered what her accent was. He said, ‘I—’ and shrugged, his hands encompassing the bare office, the silence of the rain. Then he said, ‘What is it you want?’

  She came closer then, standing against the edge of the desk, looking at him. She seemed to study him, as if there were more behind his question than he understood. Her hand fell down to the surface of the desk, resting on the paperback that lay there, and she turned. Her fingers felt the book’s spine and cover, and she picked it up, taking a step back from the desk, her back still to the window. She opened the book and leafed through the yellowing pages.

  ‘The Hilltop Hotel stands on Ngiriama Road in downtown Nairobi,’ she said, reading. He realised she had no problem pronouncing the road name correctly. ‘On the busy street outside are shoe-shiners and scratch-card stands and taxi-drivers—’

  ‘No, that’s wrong,’ Joe said.

  ‘No?’ She looked taken aback, for some reason.

  ‘I think there is a pause there, not an “and”,’ he said. It reminded him of something, as if he had once known someone to do this, to substitute words for punctuation when reading a book out loud. Someone who liked to read out books; it made him uncomfortable. ‘It’s just a pulp novel,’ he said, feeling defensive. ‘It helps pass the time.’ He didn’t know why he was apologising, or trying to justify himself to her. The girl closed the book and laid it back down on the desk, doing it carefully, as if handling a valuable object. ‘Do you think so?’ she said. He didn’t know what to answer her. He remained silent. She remained standing. They looked at each other and he wondered what she saw. Her fingers were quite long and thin. Her ears were a little pointy. At last, she said, ‘I want you to find him,’ and her fingers caressed the book; he couldn’t put a name to the look she had in her eyes then; he thought she looked lost, and sad, and a little vulnerable.

  ‘Find who?’

  ‘Mike Longshott,’ she said, and Joe’s surprise became a laugh that exploded out of him without warning.

  ‘The guy who writes this stuff?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, patiently. Behind her the rain was petering off. Her voice seemed to be growing quieter, as if she were standing farther away than she was. Joe went to pick up the book and his fingers touched hers. He looked up, suddenly without words. She was bending down, her hair falling around her face, only a small gap of air separating them now, and she moved her hand over his, and there was something terribly intimate, intimate and familiar about it. Then she straightened up, and her hand left his, and she shook her head and gathered her hair behind her shoulders. ‘Expense is not an issue,’ she said, and she reached into a pocket and brought a slim, square object out and put it on the table.

  ‘What is it?’ he said.

  ‘It’s a credit card.’

  He looked at it, shook his head, let it pass. Instead he said, ‘How will I contact you?’

  She smiled, and again he noticed the fine lines around her eyes and wondered.

  ‘You won’t,’ she said. ‘I’ll find you.’

  He picked up the card. It was matte-black, with no writing on it, merely a long string of numbers. ‘But w—’ he said, looking up, and saw that, just like that, she was gone. Behind the window the rain had finally stopped, and the sun shone down through the breaking clouds.

  — second bomb —

  The second bomb exploded four hundred and fifteen miles away, in the compound of the former Israeli embassy to Tanzania, which had since been taken over by the American diplomatic mission. Tropical heat lay over the asphalt road and the low stone buildings. In the fish market, flies already hovered above the corpses of karambesi, yellow-fin tuna and wahoo. In the sea-shell market beyond, hundreds of exoskeletons of critters in the phylum Mollusca lay on tables, shining a multitude of colours in the sunlight.

  The American embassy was located on 36 Laibon Road, Dar es Salaam. It consisted of a three-storey Chancery originally built for the Israelis, and a four-storey annex added later by the Americans. The threat of political violence in Dar es Salaam had been classified as Low. That was later revised.

  Ahmed the German drove the bomb truck. He spent the night before in House 213 in the Ilala. District of Dar es Salaam. He was blond and blue-eyed. The truck was a Nissan Atlas. He stopped the truck at Uhuru Street and his passenger, K.K. Mohamed, climbed out, returning to the safe house to pray, as the German drove on to the embassy compound.

  Blocking the way to the compound was a water tanker. The driver, a Tanzanian, was called Yusufu Ndange. He was the father of six children. It was 10:30am. Perhaps unable to penetrate into the compound, perhaps aware of the pressure of time, Ahmed the German pressed the detonator at that time. He was less than eleven meters from the embassy wall.

  The water tanker absorbed much of the blast. It was lifted three stories in the air and came to rest against the Chancery building. Yusufu Ndange died instantly. So did the five local guards who were on duty that day. The remains of the assistant of the tanker driver, who was seen by witnesses shortly before the blast, were never found. The ceiling collapsed at the American ambassador’s residence, but no one was home at the time. Five African students standing nearby also died. In total, the attack claimed eleven lives; Ahmed the German made twelve.

  K.K. Mohamed abandoned the safe house and boarded a flight to Cape Town. The flight time was four hours and thirty five minutes. When he landed, he took a deep breath of the cool, winter air, and went to find a phone box.

  an otherworldly map, like the surface of the moon

  ——r />
  Joe laid down the paperback face-down on his desk, its pages open and touching the unvarnished surface of the desk like a palm print. There were many questions, but he did not feel like asking them. He opened the drawer and extracted the bottle of Red Label. He stared at it, shaking the bottle just to see the amber liquid slosh inside. There was a question: did he want a drink?

  He contemplated the bottle for a moment longer, then unscrewed the cap and drank from the bottle. The whisky burned his stomach. He screwed the cap back on and put the bottle back in the drawer, shutting it. He stared at the book.

  He picked up the credit card and examined it, then put it back down. How did he even go about using it? None of it seemed right. He picked up the book again and turned to the copyright page. The publisher was called Medusa Press. It had a Paris address. The copyright notice was for Medusa Press. There was no mention of Mike Longshott. It was unlikely to be the man’s real name in any case. No one could really be called Mike Longshott. He stood up and went to his bookshelf and scanned the spines. He had two more Osama Bin Laden: Vigilante books, and he took them off the shelf now and returned to his desk. He checked the copyright pages, and they were identical. Medusa Press, Paris, and the address was merely a post office box, not a street address. He lit another cigarette and wondered why that was, and how he should go about finding out more, and then there was a loud bang from downstairs and someone cursed, volubly, in English, and Joe smiled. Alfred had evidently surfaced and was in the process of opening his bookshop.

  He got up, tucking the black credit card into his pocket, and went downstairs. There was a connecting door into the bookshop and he used it. As he stepped inside he could smell the lingering scent of opium in the air. Sometimes when he came through it smelled sweet; sometimes it smelled like burned foliage; and if Alfred was forced to comment on the persistent smell that clung to his aging body so devoutly, he would have quoted the painter Picasso, who he claimed to have once known, and call it the least stupid smell in the world. Whatever it smelled like, what words were described to use it, it was always there, in Alfred’s clothes and his black beard flecked with white, and in the books themselves that, when opened, would exude a faint trace of the scent from their pages. ‘You no-good, son of a bitch,’ Alfred said. ‘Oh, hi, Joe.’ Joe smiled and waved with the hand holding the cigarette. Alfred turned back to May. ‘Get out of my sight, May. I never want to see you again. Go!’

  ‘Hi Joe,’ May said, and Joe smiled and waved again. There was a chair wedged in between two tall book cabinets and he sat down. ‘You smoke too much, old man. Every night you need more. Soon you will do nothing but smoke.’

  May was strikingly pretty. She had long black hair and delicate features, and though she never, as far as Joe knew, had the operation below, she had small, firm breasts proudly displayed by her tight, red top, courtesy of her regular dose of estrogens. She was kathoey, and had been Alfred’s girlfriend for a long time.

  ‘Nonsense,’ Alfred said. ‘I have a perfectly healthy opium habit. Had it for years. Marvellous plant.’

  ‘Makes you slow.’

  ‘Makes me strong!’ Alfred shouted. ‘Strong like an ox!’ he made an unmistakable, lewd gesture with his fist, and he and May collapsed in laughter. ‘I would give you many babies if you weren’t half man,’ Alfred said sadly when they had calmed down.

  ‘I might be half man but I am all woman,’ May said. Joe knew she could match Alfred’s smoking with her own.

  Alfred nodded and sighed. ‘That is true,’ he said.

  ‘I love you,’ May said.

  ‘I love you too, sweetheart. Now go and leave this old man to run his business.’

  May blew him a kiss, waved to Joe, and disappeared into the sunlight outside. Alfred sighed again and turned to Joe. ‘Silly girl,’ he said. ‘And if I didn’t smoke? I might not even see you.’

  Joe wasn’t sure how to take that, and let it pass. You had to let things pass, with Alfred. ‘You want some coffee?’ Alfred said.

  ‘Sure.’

  Alfred got up and went to the small electric plate, single ring, which sat on a low table beside the open door. He spooned coffee into a long-handled pot already filled with water and turned on the dial. The electric ring began to glow.

  He was a tall man, Alfred, though a little stooped now; he wore jeans and a chequered shirt and a belt with a large metal buckle. His feet were bare. He moved softly, making almost no sound: he claimed to have been with the Foreign Legion, fighting on the French side in the Vietnam War, and sometimes that he’d been an adviser to the Khmer king before a misunderstanding — whose nature he never expounded on — made him depart the country in some haste. Alfred was a man full of stories; now he filled his life with those of others, the small shop filled with worn and battle-weary books that had seen more of the world in their time, he liked to say, than he had and, like himself, had finally come to rest, for a while at least. He was a reluctant seller of books, which was, Joe thought, not a bad thing seeing that he rarely had any customers.

  ‘Did you see a girl walk out of the building as you came in?’ Joe said. Alfred turned towards him, his eyes bright, and chuckled. ‘That’d be the day,’ he said.

  ‘Did you?’

  Alfred shrugged. ‘I’ve not seen anyone. Why, you working a case?’ he chuckled. ‘Is she a suspect? You should have tailed her. You could do with finding yourself a piece of tail, Joe.’

  Joe let that, too, pass. The water was coming to a boil, and Alfred stirred in sugar and then poured the black, muddy drink into two small glass cups. ‘Salut,’ he said. He drank the hot coffee noisily.

  ‘You know those books you gave me a while back?’ Joe said. Alfred had recommended them, almost pushing them into Joe’s hands. ‘This Osama Bin Laden series?’

  Alfred sat down behind his desk and put the coffee cup directly on the table, where it would leave a ring to join the countless others that had turned the surface into an otherworldly map, like the surface of the moon. ‘You got a cigarette?’ he asked Joe.

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Ta.’

  He accepted the proffered cigarette and Joe sat back between the bookcases. ‘What about them?’ Alfred said.

  ‘You know who wrote them?’

  ‘Got a light?’

  ‘Sure.’ He got up again, flicked the Zippo, and offered the flame to Alfred, who inhaled deeply and blew out a ring of smoke. Joe sat back.

  ‘Longshott,’ Alfred said. ‘Mike Longshott.’ He giggled. ‘I assume it’s a pseudonym.’

  So did Joe, but — ‘What makes you think that?’

  ‘Come here,’ Alfred said. He rose and circumnavigated the desk, heading for a bookcase two down from Joe. ‘Let’s see, Medusa Press… the only titles I seem to sell. To be honest, the only books I don’t mind selling. Very popular, in certain sections of society.’ His fingers ran along the shelf, plucking out books. ‘There you go.’ He thrust them into Joe’s hands and went back to the desk, leaving behind gaps on the shelf like the white keys of a piano. Joe looked at the books.

  They were identical in size and look to the Vigilante books he already had. The first one was called I was Commandant Heinrich’s Bitch. Joe stared at the cover. It depicted a blond man in uniform holding a horse-whip in one hand. Behind him were guard towers, a barbed-wire fence. At his feet was a large-breasted girl in badly-torn clothes that revealed a lot of her flesh. She was holding on to the man’s leg, looking up at him with an undecipherable look in her eyes.

  ‘Smut,’ Alfred said. ‘Filth. Utter junk, of course. Wonderful stuff.’

  Joe put it down carefully and looked at the next one. Confessions of a Drug-Crazed Nymphomaniac. The cover showed a bare-chested blonde woman reclining on a sofa while the sinister shadow of a man towered above her, administering an opium pipe to her slack mouth.

  The third book was simply called Slut.

  The author of the first two books was called Sebastian Bruce. The author of the third title went by the mon
iker of Countess Szu Szu.

  ‘Medusa Press,’ Alfred said through the smoke of his cigarette, ‘are, on the whole, purveyors of unadulterated pornography. Uncut, I should say. Dirty books, in common parlance. Sell quite well, too, when I can get them past customs. Which is most of the time, to tell you the truth.’

  Pornography? And yet it seemed to fit. Sex and violence, he thought. Hand in hand through the smoke. The image startled him, seeming to awaken something inside. The smoke smelled sweet and the silence was complete — he shook his head, searched for his cigarette, realised he had left it in the dirty-glass ashtray on the second shelf and that it had burned away. He shook the pack out of his pocket, liberated a cigarette and lit it. ‘Know anything else?’ he said.

  Alfred looked at him and the old eyes were suddenly hooded. ‘No,’ he said. ‘If it’s Mike Longshott you’re looking for — if it’s Osama Bin Laden you’re after, for that matter — then I suspect you would not find the answer here. But Joe—’

  ‘Yes?’

  The old man stood up. There was ash in his beard. He scratched a vein in the craggy, limestone visage of his face and lumbered towards Joe. Suddenly the space in the bookshop felt that much closer. ‘Are you sure you want to find out?’

  a man reading a newspaper, standing up

  ——

  When he slept, he no longer dreamed, if he ever had. Sleep was a blankness, an empty space. When he woke each morning, the bed remained undisturbed as if no-one had slept there. He rolled over and went to the window, staring out at the busy road outside. A young girl was cycling past, holding a parasol above her head, the road rolling below her. A brown mongrel dog chased a goat. Already coals were being lit, meat prepared on top of miniature grills, the smoke of burning fat rising in the air. Scooters went roaring past. Students in white shirts and pressed black trousers congregated around a drinks stand. There was a man outside reading a newspaper standing up.