NINE
The unhooded prisoner turned and cringed when he saw the scimitar. He lost control of his bladder. Courage could only carry him so far.
"There's no need for this," Ghaith sighed. "He's not worth your trouble. Besides, where's your video setup? Don't you people usually film these things?"
"Not in this case." Omar looked at him closely. "Why isn't he worth our trouble?"
Well...maybe it will help.
"Aziz Shahristani, a veteran of the first war against the Americans. He fell on hard times during the embargo and was caught pilfering...I don't know what, exactly." Ghaith closed his eyes for a moment, matching the face to the file. "During his stay in Abu Ghraib he met with a little accident during interrogation, losing the small finger..."
"Which one?" Omar asked.
"Both of them."
"I noticed that when I tied him up," one of the guards said.
"And there is no way Ghaith could have seen them," Omar said, meaning the prisoner's bound hands had been out of sight the whole time.
Aziz Shahristani's dread lifted momentarily. He was staring at Ghaith.
"Do I know you?"
Ghaith shook his head.
"But he knows you," Omar said, turning back to Ghaith. "So what they told me is true."
"Now you know. I'm a clerk, I file things away."
"You supervised the Ministry database," Omar added.
"There were many databases...at least, until the fall," Ghaith observed, giving a mocking glance at the scimitar. "Before the Americans got there, the looters took every last computer server and paper clip."
"Everything but this." Omar once again tapped his old friend on the side of the head. "I see now why the Ministry wants you dead. They want to start from a clean slate."
“And these…?” Ari nodded at the bound prisoners.
"They meet the same fate," said Omar harshly. "They were caught helping the Americans."
"Not me," Ghaith shook his head.
"It's only a matter of time." Omar made a swooping motion with his arm. Using both arms, the guard raised the scimitar over his head.
"Don't move," he told the first prisoner. "That would only make it more painful."
The next morning the rain came. Cats and dogs, was the meaningless analogy in English.
Ari scratched Detective Carrington and the kayakers from his To Do List, at least for that day. Which was just as well. He wasn't feeling particularly sharp. Gulping down cup after cup of hot tea, he spent his pre-noon hours squinting at his computer screen.
There was no need to purchase a bird guide. He found what he needed at Wikipedia. Whoever was monitoring his browser would be stumped by his sudden fascination with geese. Particularly interesting was the tidbit about the Capitoline geese, who alerted the ancient Romans when the Gauls were sneaking up on their last citadel in 390 B.C. The Empire might have been snuffed in its cradle, leaving the world to the Persians and fucking A-rabs. The geese outside the master bedroom window (although he couldn't see them with the rain bashing against the panes) were Canadian. Many had abandoned the tribulations of migration and taken up permanent residence in the Chesapeake Bay and on the James River.
Leaving off avian research, Ari checked his email. Nothing. He hadn't expected a reaction from his employer this soon, one way or another.
Sphinx seemed to have nothing better to do than to take up space on his camper mattress. Ari swiveled in his office chair and gave the cat a baleful eye. Sensing it was being observed, Sphinx opened its own eyes to find a menacing scowl directed its way. The cat stretched leisurely and seemed on the verge of going back to sleep when Ari stomped his foot on the wood floor. Sphinx jumped up, pupils wide with alarm. Ari stood. Finally recognizing the threat, Sphinx ran out the studio door, Ari hot behind it.
Sphinx flew straight for the stairs. Bleary-eyed, his temples pounding, Ari nearly went head over heels as he tried to leap several steps at one go, only saving himself by grabbing hold of the handrail.
"Sphinx!" he shouted. "I'll skin you alive!"
He stopped and steadied himself.
"If I don't break my neck, first."
There was no sound. With a grunt, he proceeded with yet another search of the house. On the first floor he double-checked closets, stomped for hollows in the floor, tapped on the trim work to make sure it was secure. A small makeshift door the size of four playing cards laid out in a rectangle opened up on a water valve, which apparently controlled the line to the bibcock out front. Squeezing his arm past the pipe, Ari ran his hand along the floor behind the wall. There was something grainy at the bottom of the frame. Drawing out, he found his fingertips coated with white powder. He sniffed at it gingerly. It was gypsum that had rained off the sheetrock during the construction of the house, plus something else. Some kind of oil. It reminded him of cosmoline.
"Here, Sphinx. Be a good girl. Talk to me. Meow...meow..."
In the basement he tapped at the wall paneling. Here and there he struck a hollow spot. It would be an easy matter to pull out a section and bury something in the insulation. But if the idea had occurred to him, it would have occurred to whoever else had searched the house over the last nine months. He scrutinized the heads of the small brown panel nails, but it was impossible to say if they had been tampered with. Besides, the theoretical searcher could have easily bought new nails to hammer the panels back into place. In any event, the cat had no access to the gaps in the walls--at least, none that Ari could find.
He went into the kitchen and opened a can of cat food. He tapped a spoon on the edge of the can, a signal Sphinx had already learned to recognize. But Ari had thrown too much of a scare into it. With a sigh of resignation that merged effortlessly with the rain hissing on the roof, he doled out a couple of clumps into the cat dish. The water had gone down in the second dish. He topped it off.
Squeezed between a Big Lots and a lawyer who specialized in divorces and traffic injuries--two very similar types of accidents--Moria's Notions was a nondescript niche in an anonymous cluster of shops along the mishmash of malls on Broad Street, itself a salute to indiscriminate entrepreneurship. Shoppers were undeterred by the weather, with every car shooting off hip-high water wings, splashing themselves and other cars (there were no pedestrians to spatter, which Ari found enormously odd, even spooky). Shop-hopping was the universal pastime, and few stores were excluded from the itinerary.
Moria's Notions seemed to be one of them. Sitting in his car, working himself up for a dash across the parking lot, Ari saw no one coming out or going in--unlike the Big Lots next door, which attracted throngs of bargain-hunters.
In the time it took him to reach the overhang, a pair of girls had slipped out of the shop door and were scratching cigarettes out of a battered soft pack. Ari thought they had been severely beaten, until a closer look revealed the bruises to be black lipstick and mascara. One of them was evenly plump all over, the other plump in the abdomen. They drew back as he stomped his feet on the pavement and shook his arms, as if he was trying to fling the bad weather in their faces. He nodded at them, smiling. Assuming that he was headed for Big Lots, they made way for him to pass. They were nonplussed when he took out his pack of Winstons, found one that had not gotten soaked, and asked for a light. With what might have been a surly pout, which under all that makeup might have been a bright smile, one of the girls handed him a tiny red lighter.
"Is the shop open?" he asked after starting his cigarette and handing the lighter back. The storm reflected off the plate glass storefront. The interior of Moria's Notions looked dark.
"You have to go in over there," the evenly-plump girl said, folding one arm across and resting her other elbow on top of it, as though her cigarette was so heavy that additional support was necessary.
"You have to enter the sewing shop through Big Lots?"
"Oh...you want to come in here?" the evenly-plump girl said in bored astonishment, nodding at the door by which they were standing.
"Some people come in the wrong door, the middle-plump girl said quickly. She too had levered her forearm under her elbow. As Ari began to enter, she turned the end of her cigarette toward him, as though warding him off with its glowing tip. "You can't smoke in there."
"Ah," Ari nodded understandingly. "They're afraid the cloth will catch fire."
"You can't smoke in any stores," the evenly-plump girl said, looking at him with thickly applied suspicion. "We can't smoke inside either." As evidence, she nodded at the cigarette butts strewn thickly on the walkway.
"You work here?" Ari asked.
"Well yeah," both girls snorted defensively, as though he had questioned their ability to earn a living.
"You sell costumes, then?"
"Costumes?" The girls checked each other out, making sure their black rags were properly out of alignment. "These are our clothes."
"I beg your pardon. I'm new to this country."
"Well..." the evenly-plump girl tapped her foot with contingent forgiveness. "Your English is good."
"I'm a translator at the UN."
"That's in New York," the middle-plump girl snapped, less forgiving, then cocked her head along with her cigarette. "What country?"
"Why France, of course." Ari assumed a prim stance.
The girls gave him a collective moony look.
"Je suis arrivé au summum de la Folie des 'Freedom Fries'. J'ai reçu des regards très particuliers, je dois le dire. En fait, certains de ces regards étaient identiques à celui que vous me jetez maintenant."
"Anyone can learn a language," the middle-plump girl said with all the disdain of someone who had never troubled to learn a second tongue.
"I'm visiting relatives during the U.N. Rosh Hashanah break," Ari continued. "My sister needs some...notions."
"Why didn't she come herself?" the evenly-plump girl asked.
"She broke her leg while skiing."
"At Wintergreen?"
"I'm not familiar with that resort. No, she was at Chamonix. Poor thing had to fly back to the States in a cast. Can you imagine being crammed, in a full leg cast, in a 767 with over three hundred passengers? She's still distraught."
"But she can still sit at a sewing machine?" the middle-plump girl shot.
Ari had overplayed his improvised persona. He took a shallow draw from his Winston, wanting to stretch out the smoking break, and repaired his bona fides. He gave a shrug that he hoped was Gallic enough without slipping into cliché.
"Not very well," Ari admitted. "But I wanted to help her out while I was in town. She needs something called a bobbin."
"We've got plenty of those," the middle-plump girl rolled her eyes. The evenly-plump girl shrank with practical wariness. Was he going to insist on her helping him, forcing her to stub out her half-smoked cigarette?
"There's no rush," he assured them.
They could not relax entirely. His presence alone, interfering as it did with gossip and complaint, was enough to put them on guard. But they seemed to resign themselves to the intrusion.
"One of you wouldn't happen to be Tina, would you?"
"She's the owner," said the evenly-plump girl. The inference from her tone was that he should know better, that owners did not dress like this. Which seemed to Ari to conflict with their implication that they were dressed perfectly normally.
"You should turn on more lights," he suggested. "From the parking lot your store looks abandoned."
"Like that would help."
"Business isn't booming?"
"Business is busting," the middle-plump girl answered sourly. "See that across the road? That mall over there?"
"I'm afraid..."
"If it wasn't raining so hard, you'd see Hancock's Fabrics. People only come over here when Hancock's doesn't have something they want. And since Hancock has everything..."
"Has Tina ever thought of expanding?" Ari inquired, glancing over at the lawyer's office, as though that would be the perfect place to start. "Or of moving to another location?"
The middle-plump girl took out a dainty handkerchief and dabbed at her nose. "Don't even try to mention it to her. We tried, and she almost took our heads off."
"Not that, surely," said Ari.
"She thinks this is the best location in the county."
"Yeah," the middle-plump girl joined in. "That's why Hancock's is here."
"You know--" The evenly-plump girl stopped.
Both girls fell into a prudent silence that was unnecessary, unless they had toed a dangerous line.
The middle-plump girl honked into a handkerchief identical to the one held by her coworker.
"If I had a cold I would cut back on my smoking."
Ari's helpful suggestion was greeted with a howl of silence.
"Do you think Tina would mind talking to me?" Ari asked.
The girls registered mild alarm.
"About that?" the middle-plump girl said.
"My sister moved into the house of the previous owner."
"Moria's house?" The girls froze for a moment, then drew towards him. He was suddenly a very interesting fellow.
"They were partners," said the evenly-plump girl. "They only named it Moria's Notions because--"
The middle-plump girl shot her a warning look.
"Well," she continued, "It sounded better than Tina's Tinkles."
Both girls laughed. For a moment, their inherent meanness dropped away.
"They were drunk when they came up with that one," the middle-plump girl explained.
"If you bring up the Rigginses with Tina..." the other one began.
"She took their deaths hard?"
"More than you can know."
The middle-plump girl tossed a dismissive hand in front of Ari. "And she doesn't like Frogs. I heard her say that once."
'Frogs'. Right to his face. Ari took offence--and he wasn't even a Frog. He smiled.
"So Moria Riggins drank a lot?"
"No more than anyone else," the evenly-plump girl shrugged.
Ari refrained from pointing out that there were hundreds of millions of people in the world who didn't drink at all. They would no doubt interpret the observation as a criticism. America, Land of the Lushes.
"Moria and Tina used to go bar-hopping during happy hour. Sometimes they took us along after we closed up shop."
"Yes?"
"Well, you know. 'Happy hour'. They got happy."
The evenly-plump girl made it sound as if the rest of the day was reserved for sheer misery.
"They did this often?" Ari asked.
"Not really. A couple times a week."
"Moria's children were being watched by a nanny?"
The girls found this word amusing. The proposition itself was subjected to a barrage of ridicule.
"That was Jerry's job. His studio was at home, so he became babysitter."
"While the mother was out..." Ari found the idea ludicrous and repulsive. "And this continued up to the time of Moria's death?"
The girls had gone into gossip mode and did not question Ari's inquisitiveness. There was a less-than-endearing lack of respect for their employers' privacy--and for the dead.
"Like clockwork."
"There were specific days when Moria and Tina went out together?"
"Tuesdays and Fridays."
The evenly-plump girl finished her cigarette and crushed it under her toe. She glanced toward the window, as though concerned that Tina might see them talking to Ari.
"Were there any specific bars that they went to?"
"No place special. Andy's, The Shamrock...they pretty much stuck to them."
She stopped at a nudge from the evenly-plump girl, who had apparently decided Ari was a bit too nosy for anyone's good.
Feigning indifference, Ari smiled, shrugged, and leaned towards the window. "You really must turn on more lights. I was ready to pass by without stopping." He cupped his hands against window, blocking out the reflected parking lot. "Ah, but I see that you really are open..."
A tall, narrow woman was standing near the front counter. Her head was nodding forward as she spoke into a cell phone. When she saw him, she stood straight, said a few more words into the phone, then snapped it shut. She stormed to the front.
"Hey!" the evenly-plump girl protested as Tina violently threw open the door and fetched her in the shoulder.
"You'll get a lot worse if you don't get back to work," Tina said with the harshness of a mother and the authority corporate magnate. She nodded at the middle-plump girl. "You, too."
"You can't talk to us like that!"
"What? I can't talk to you like your boss?"
"Like we're nothing."
"You want your pay, don't you?"
The girls both opened their mouths--and gulped down their comebacks. They were filing into the store, Tina holding the door open for them, but stopped when they heard her next words, directed at Ari:
"There's nothing I can help you with. If you don't like being stuck in the Riggins house, you can go back where you belong. I'm right, aren't I? You're the Cinnamon guy?"
Ari offered a confessional grimace.
"You moved into--" the evenly-plump girl gawked. “Not your sister?”
"I knew it." The middle-plump girl's scowl was made positively menacing by her eye-shadow. "I bet you're not French, either."
"French!" The sound Tina made came out like jagged glass. "He told you that? He's totally Italian!"
This was just as problematically Eurocentric, as far as the girls were concerned. They were balefully reconfiguring his identity when Tina pointed inside. As they slumped away, Ari smiled at the middle-plump girl.
"My apologies, and my congratulations."
As the middle-plump girl turned, Tina let go of the door, letting it close.
"She's not pregnant, Mr. Cinnamon," Tina said sharply.
"Ciminon," Ari absently corrected her. Unaccustomed to embarrassment, he shrugged contritely at the bared teeth bordered by black lips on the other side of the glass.
"What kind of nonsense have you been telling them?" Tina demanded.
She was a half inch shorter than Ari. Her cropped red hair seemed to flame out behind her head, giving her the appearance of a trapeze artist who had just finished her act. She was dressed in a blouse and slacks.
"Forgive me. You can imagine that I would be curious about the Riggins family."
"Then why didn't you just come in and ask?"
"A cultural fault, I'm afraid. In Sicily we never approach a sensitive subject directly. It could get us killed. I'm sorry I misled your employees."
He was banking on American misconceptions and ignorance. And American cinema. Tina produced a slight but satisfactory flutter of uncertainty as she was racked by episodes of the Sopranos.
Ari was in a rush. He did not want to meet Carrington under these circumstances, and everything Tina had said indicated the detective was the one she'd been talking to on the phone. Chances were he was roaring up Broad at that very moment. With plenty to mull over for the next few days, there was no need to accept unfavorable terrain. He doffed a non-existent fedora.
"Je vous demande pardon, Madame. J'ai un engagement antérieur, je dois y assister."
He did not relish the startled expression Tina wore as he forged once again into the deluge. He had probably made trouble for himself in that direction, and had little doubt it would not be long in coming. But he hadn't foreseen that Moria's Notions would be such a sore point with Carrington, with such abundant cause. If he had had any preconceptions, they had to do with the Riggins' standing in the community. He had already learned that Jerry and Moria were not only upstanding citizens, but outstanding upstanding citizens. They had won accolades for their work with the disadvantaged, the disabled and the disinherited. Not very long ago, there had been some protests lodged in the local paper's Letters to the Editor when Moria did not win Mother of the Year.
That she had not won was no surprise to Ari, now that he knew about her after-hours activities vis the bar scene. To his way of thinking, she was totally unfit. Being a mother, she should not even have held a job, let alone run a business.
But at least this confirmed his second preconception: between their two occupations, painting smudges and selling needles and thread, the combined income of the Riggins household should have been barely enough to rent a mid-sized flat. Unless one of them had come into a sizable inheritance, the house on the river was inconceivable.
Still unfamiliar with the local roads and highways, Ari avoided high speed and quick, unexpected exits by taking Broad Street back to the city, keeping one eye peeled for an alternative source of groceries. He would have given his eyeteeth for a good, basic guss. Over the last few days the only food he had enjoyed had been Jack Daniels and Fritos, neither of which could be considered part of a normal diet. His roasted chicken had been spongy, his vegetables lacking in variety and the canned food was as monotonous as the tin it came in. The paneer cubes had been eaten and the chaats were unfulfilling snacks on a par with Fritos. The roti turned out to be his most meaningless purchase, there being nothing to eat it with; the curry he had attempted to make had failed miserably. Ari was not accustomed to cooking for himself, so it was reasonable to suspect this was due to his lack of culinary talent. After all, chick peas were about as basic as you could get. Yet the result of his labor had been half soft, half hard, and totally inedible.
At the intersection of Three Chopt Road he spotted an ethnic food market. He pulled into the parking lot and realized immediately that he had made a mistake when he stopped to let a Chinese family hurry past. But as he circled around to return to the exit, he braked again when an Indian woman rushed by, her Salwar kameez and dupatta flowing magically in defiance of the rain. He pulled into a space and trotted inside.
The clientele was eclectic enough to raise Ari's expectations. The store itself was much larger than the Indian grocer he had visited. But after he took up a hand basket and strode down the first aisle his heart sank. While the fruits and vegetables looked fresh, he was overwhelmed by the very variety he had been seeking. Bok choy, tat soi, purple kohlrabi, foot-long beans called dau gok…he had never heard of any of these, and even the ones that looked familiar bore unfamiliar names, and were probably cooked in unfamiliar ways.
To his left the shelves were stocked with small glass jars. If Jerry Riggins' smudges had been packaged, they would have looked like these Chinese condiments. As he ventured further down the row, two women in jilbabs stopped and eyed him warily. Finally, a reaction he was accustomed to. As he passed them they drew their hands under their chins, as though guarding themselves against a sudden chill. Their dread was a little disconcerting, but there was no way they could have known him, except as a type. And, as a type, they had picked him out instantly from the crowd. Was there anything he could do about that?
Stay away from Arabs, was his sad but inescapable conclusion.
At the rear of the store was a long glass display. Inside, packed in ice, were fish both local and from well beyond the horizon. In front of the display was a line of crates and barrels that had been pried open to reveal fresh herring, red snappers, rockfish, and a gooey mass of squid, their gray tentacles compacted, eyes gaping forlornly. Against the rear wall was a fish tank filled with their still-living relatives drifting obliviously in dreamy innocence.
Behind the refrigerated display cases men in white paper caps and bib aprons wielded filleting knives with sweeping strokes. Fish blood and entrails were piled in reassuring heaps, pleasing reminders of where food really came from. It took Ari a moment to gain the attention of one of the workers.
"Excuse me..."
The man pushed a codfish to the side and began working on another. He offered a brief upward glance, then swooped with his blade from the gills to the vent. He scooped out the fish guts with fingers encased in clear polyethylene. He looked up. There were customers of all shades and hues calling out. The man frowned, as though trying to figure out which voice belonged to Ari. He looked down again, because he was again making broad swipes with his knife and had to take care not to dissect his hand.
"Which one of these would make a good masgouf?"
The man stared up at him for a moment. “Deng yīxìa, deng yīxìa,” he said, then turned and spoke to one of his coworkers.
"No," Ari interrupted, counting his luck. His smattering of Mandarin was usually useless around Chinese workers, the majority of whom spoke Cantonese. "It won’t be braised."
The fish processors froze when they realized Ari had understood them. The man Ari had first addressed tapped his hat with his bloody thumb. Then, very tentatively, he said, “Cùipí yú?"
Ari nodded. "Yes, crispy skin."
A collective sigh both pensive and delighted arose from the workers and some of the customers--even among the non-Chinese. Their linguistic bubble had been burst by an outsider, giving pleasure and pain. Had they been trespassed against, or had an unexpected and welcome guest arrived at their doorstep?
The opinion of the man to whom Ari had been conversing was obvious. His grin was almost ecstatic. No, Ari amended. It was ecstatic.