The Fist of God

Much had changed. The city he remembered had been very much an Arab city, much smaller, grouped around the central districts of Shaikh Omar and Saadun on the northwestern bank of the Tigris in Risafa, and the district of Aalam across the river in Karch. Within this inner city was where most of life had been; here narrow streets, alleys, markets, mosques, and their minarets had dominated the skyline to remind the people of their subservience to Allah.

Twenty years of oil revenue had brought long divided highways plunging through the once-open spaces, with rotaries, overpasses, and cloverleaf intersections. Cars had proliferated, and skyscrapers pushed upward into the night sky, Mammon nudging his old adversary.

Mansour, when he reached it down the long stretch of Rabia Street, was hardly recognizable. He recalled wide open spaces around the Mansour Club where his father had taken the family on weekend afternoons. Mansour was still clearly an upscale suburb, but the open spaces had been filled with streets and residences for those who could afford to live in style.

He passed within a few hundred yards of Mr. Hartley’s old preparatory school, where he had learned his lessons and played during the breaks with his friends Hassan Rahmani and Abdelkarim Badri, but in the darkness he did not recognize the street.

He knew just what job Hassan was doing now, but of Dr Badri’s two sons he had heard no word in almost a quarter of a century. Had the little one, Osman, with his taste for mathematics, ever become an engineer after all? he wondered. And Abdelkarim, who had won prizes for reciting English poetry—had he in turn become a poet or a writer?

If Martin had marched in the manner of the SAS, heel-and-toe, shoulders swinging to assist his moving legs, he could have covered the distance in half the time. He could also have been reminded, like those two engineers in Kuwait, that “you may dress like an Arab, but you still walk like an Englishman.”

But his shoes were not laced marching boots. They were canvas slippers with rope soles, the footwear of a poor Iraqi fellagha , so he shuffled along with bowed shoulders and head do

wn.

In Riyadh they had shown him an up-to-date map of the city of Baghdad, and many photographs taken from high altitude but magnified until, with a magnifying glass, one could look into the gardens behind the walls, picking out the swimming pools and cars of the wealthy and powerful.

All these he had memorized. He turned left into Jordan Street and just past Yarmuk Square took a right into the tree-lined avenue where the Soviet diplomat lived.

In the sixties, under Kassem and the generals who followed him, the USSR had occupied a favored and prestigious position in Baghdad, pretending to espouse Arab nationalism because it was seen to be anti-Western, while trying to convert the Arab world to Communism. In those years the Soviet embassy had purchased several large residences outside its main compound, which could not accommodate the swelling staff, and as a concession these residences and their grounds had been accorded the status of Soviet territory. It was a privilege even Saddam Hussein had never gotten around to rescinding, the more so as until the mid-eighties his principal arms supplier had been Moscow, and six thousand Soviet military advisers had trained his Air Force and Armored Corps with their Russian equipment.

Martin found the villa and identified it from the small brass plaque that announced this was a residence belonging to the embassy of the USSR. He pulled on the chain beside the gate and waited.

After several minutes the gate opened to reveal a burly, crop-haired Russian in the white tunic of a steward.

“Da?” he said.

Martin replied in Arabic, the wheedling whine of a supplicant who speaks to a superior. The Russian scowled. Martin fumbled inside his robe and produced his identity card. This made sense to the steward; in his country they knew about internal passports. He took the card, said, “Wait,” in Arabic, and closed the gate.

He was back in five minutes, beckoning the Iraqi in the soiled dish-dash through the gate into the forecourt. He led Martin toward the steps leading to the main door of the villa. As they reached the bottom of the steps a man appeared at the top.

“That will do. I will handle this,” he said in Russian to the manservant, who glowered at the Arab one last time and went back into the house.

Yuri Kulikov, First Secretary to the Soviet embassy, was a wholly professional diplomat who had found the order he received from Moscow outrageous but unavoidable. He had evidently been caught at dinner, for he clutched a napkin with which he dabbed his lips as he descended the steps.

“So here you are,” he said in Russian. “Now listen, if we have to go through with this charade, so be it.

But I personally will have nothing to do with it. Panimayesh ?”

Martin, who did not speak Russian, shrugged helplessly and said in Arabic:

“Please, bey ?”

Kulikov took the change of language as dumb insolence. Martin realized with a delicious irony that the Soviet diplomat really thought his unwelcome new staff member was a fellow-Russian who had been sicced onto him by those wretched spooks up at the Lubyanka in Moscow.

“Oh, very well then, Arabic if you wish,” he said testily. He too had trained in Arabic, which he spoke well with a harsh Russian accent. He was damned if he was going to be shown up by this agent of the KGB.

So he continued in Arabic.

“Here is your card. Here is the letter I was ordered to prepare for you. Now, you will live in the shack at the far end of the garden, keep the grounds in order, and do the shopping as the chef instructs. Apart from that, I do not want to know. If you are caught, I know nothing except that I took you on in good faith. Now, go about your business and get rid of those damned hens. I will not have chickens ruining the garden.”

Some chance, he thought bitterly as he turned back to resume his interrupted dinner. If the oaf is caught up to some mischief, the AMAM will soon know he is a Russian, and the idea that he is on the First Secretary’s personal staff by accident will be as likely as a skating party on the Tigris. Yuri Kulikov was privately furious with Moscow.

Mike Martin found his quarters up against the rear wall of the quarter-acre garden, a one-room bungalow with a cot, a table, two chairs, a row of hooks on one wall, and a washbasin set in a shelf in a corner.

Further examination revealed an earth-closet close by and a cold-water tap in the garden wall. Hygiene would clearly be pretty basic and food presumably served from the kitchen door at the rear of the villa.

He sighed. The house outside Riyadh seemed a long way away.