T hree hours later, Sameh left his office and entered the old town on foot. His destination was quite a ways off, and the day was blistering hot. But he needed time to sort through his thoughts, and he did some of his best thinking while alone in a crowd. Just another city dweller, walking and breathing the city’s fearful and frenetic energy.
The imam had left one of his aides to help maintain the orderly procedure. A few of the families had allowed panic to color their claims, but nowhere near as many as Sameh had feared. Most who could not find their child on his walls left voluntarily, after handing over photographs and depositions and tearful pleas. Sameh carried their desperation with him as he walked.
The entire group had been processed in three hours. The families had brought photographs of their own, along with written lists of distinguishing marks and characteristics. They had all been through such procedures endless times before. The photographs were compared and the hospital phoned when a match was made. A nurse was on duty to check the child in question. As Major Lahm had thought to number both child and photograph, this took very little time. Once confirmed, the families were told to arrive at the hospital the next morning. A number of the children had been so traumatized they had required sedation. The doctors wanted to keep them all under supervision for another day.
By the time Sameh had left his office, all but four of the children had been identified. For those four, no family members had come forward. Which presaged a different tragedy. But that would have to wait.
Sameh passed Tayeran Square and remnants of the city’s most ancient walls. Baghdad had been erected upon ruins that predated Babylon. It originally had followed the Persian design, a series of tight collectives, similar to guilds but structured as separate villages. One for carpenters, one for goldsmiths, another for healers and herbalists, and so on. One village farther north had been reserved for those noncitizens described by the Koran as “People Of the Book,” meaning Christians and Jews. The old city was vibrant again, the war damage not so much erased as joined to a myriad of more ancient scars. The traffic was chaotic, the smells and sounds and people a vibrant mix.
Sameh crossed Nafura Square and took Kifah Street. His route took him by one of modern Iraq’s many anomalies, a brand-new Persian market sprawling around the sides and rear of the Al-Gailiani Mosque. Sameh was astonished at how fast the market had grown. Sheikh Abdul Kader Al-Gailiani, a tenth century Shia leader, was buried across the street from where Sameh stood. It remained a pilgrimage site, and Persians were bused in on government-run package tours. Sameh had no problem with pilgrims, Persian or otherwise. But his sentiments toward the Iranian regime and their ultra-orthodox clergy were something else entirely.
Initially, this market’s traders had served the Iranian pilgrims. But increasingly these unlicensed hawkers offered everything from Persian mountain honey to Iranian toothpaste to boxy air-conditioners to diesel generators. All at prices below anything manufactured locally or brought in from the West. This was possible because the Iranian government secretly offered these traders a substantial bonus.
The deeper the United Nations sanctions bit into the Iranian economy, the more desperately these traders and the Persian manufacturers clung to the Iraqi market. Tehran subsidized the pilgrim bus services, charging the traders pennies for their transport. They doubled the number of vehicles in service. These days, more than half the buses coming from Iran carried no pilgrims at all. Seats were stripped out to increase the space for products. Freezers, motorcycles, even sacks of Persian cement were coming through border stations as “pilgrims.”
Iran’s largest bank had opened an office across the street from the mosque, despite the fact that it was under UN sanctions for its ties to Iran’s nuclear program. Another bank on the UN watch list had just acquired a building near the market’s ever-expanding northern border. Sameh knew this because his closest friend in the legal profession had handled the building permits. Sameh was always very careful never to publicly voice his opinions. Iran’s spies were everywhere. But he refused to do business with them. He would rather bed down with a nest of vipers.
Iran had sought to oppress and dominate Iraq for more than thirty centuries. The two nations had fought war after war. Sameh was a passionate student of history, and he knew Iran’s habit was to smile and embrace, then slip in the unseen blade.
But their poisonous influence was far more immediate, far more dangerous. Iran was home to the most strident and conservative strains of Shia Islam. Their oppressive regime stifled everything Sameh held dear. The Christian minority of Iran had been crushed, expelled, reviled, decimated. In his opinion, Iran’s current government was Iraq’s most dangerous enemy. This stroll past the new Persian market was Sameh’s chance to take the pulse of a plague carrier.
He rounded the corner leading to Sheikh Omar Street, where the market spilled over the curb and slowed traffic to a snarled mess. Suddenly he was surrounded by young bearded clerics, all wearing the starched garb of Iran-style conservatives. When Saddam Hussein had tried to eradicate Iraq’s Shia majority, most scholars and clerics had fled east to Iran where they had been welcomed. An entire generation of Iraq’s clerics had studied their theology in Farsi, rather than Arabic. The clerics who surrounded Sameh wore black trousers, scuffed black shoes, white shirts buttoned to scrawny necks, and scraggly beards.
One of the students revealed awful teeth as he hissed, “There is a dagger pointed at your heart.”
The cleric was in his early thirties, a bad age for fanatics. It meant he would never be recognized as a leading scholar yet was still young enough to volunteer for foolish acts. He also spoke Farsi. In which Sameh was fluent. Even so, Sameh responded in Arabic, “Sorry, brother, may I be of service?”
The man switched to heavily accented English. “We know you are facile with languages. We also know you are a betrayer of the worst kind. One who is disloyal to his own people.”
Sameh again replied in Arabic, raising his voice so it carried to others forcing their way around the tight cluster of clerics. “You want my watch?” Sameh lifted his hands in the manner of a supplicant begging for the attention of passersby. “Take it, please, it is yours.”
Two of the younger clerics dragged down Sameh’s hands as their spokesman switched back to Farsi. “If I wanted your watch, I would have cut off your hand. Which is the proper fate of all thieves.”
Sameh knew it was very unwise to bait a man with a knife. But he had not survived Saddam to be frightened by this bearded mob. “Brush your teeth.”
The man’s eyes narrowed to slits. “You would die for that, except I was ordered to stay my hand. And I obey orders, unlike traitors like you. But here is an order you will obey, thief. Stop your investigation into the missing young man.”
Sameh’s voice lost its edge. “Whom do you mean?”
“The eldest son of el-Waziri. He is an apostate and deserves his fate.” The cleric’s gaze shone with pleasure from shaking Sameh’s composure. “Leave this alone. For the sake of your family. Go back to begging the Americans for crumbs. For myself, I consign you to the dark and the void.”