Gorgeous East by null Read Free Book Online Page B

desert cats.

    8.
    T hey went by Toyota Land Cruiser, fast, slamming painfully over the rough terrain, the remaining twenty-kilometers to Awsard. Blindfolded, Phillipe sensed the evil presence of the camp hanging in the air—a spiritual pressure that was the weight of despair, a thick brown stench that was the odor of the waste pits, of thousands of hopeless human beings densely packed into a couple dozen square kilometers of corrugated shacks and ragged tents with no sewage facilities or running water and nothing to do except wait for a salvation that would not come. Phillipe’s hands, tightly tied with abrasive nylon cord, went numb.
    The Toyota stopped abruptly. Phillipe, shoved out of the back, was forced to trot along at a quick pace through the warren of alleys between the hovels. They had fixed the rag around his eyes carelessly and he was able to wiggle it loose by moving his ears up and down—an ability inherited from his father, a natural comedian, who used ear wiggling to great comic effect at the stuffy Sunday dinners of Phillipe’s childhood. But, even without this blindfold, the darkness was such that Phillipe couldn’t see much of anything: only the faint green glow of a kerosene lamp burning from an open tent flap; the white bones of an animal left to rot in the middle of the sandy path; the dark shapes of the hovels like termite mounds. Veiled faces peered out at him once or twice from the shadows—uncurious, hollow-eyed—then fell away. A dog whimpered from somewhere.
    At last, they reached the central area, a sandy plaza the size of a soccer field set behind a perimeter of barbed wire. This was the nucleus of the slowly expanding amoeba that was the Awsard refugee camp. Here stood the UN administrative buildings, square, ugly cinder block constructions; the supply depots; the communal showers. Banks of electric lights glared down on UN food reserves left out in rotting mounds in the open air.
    More veiled men in long, hooded djellahs—clearly blue, Phillipe saw now—guarded the gates with Kalashnikov assault rifles. A few words were spoken, the gates slid apart, then one of the men noticed Phillipe’s blindfold had come loose. He tied it around his captive’s head, this time very tightly, and Phillipe was led through the gates and across the plaza and into one of the buildings. He could sense the closeness of walls, the presence of a ceiling. Someone forced him to his knees and removed his blindfold. He was in a low, featureless room, staring up at a trio of blue djellah-wearing veiled men. They stared down at him as if in judgment.
    “What have you done with my colleague, Herr Dr. Milhauz?” Phillipe demanded in French.
    When no one responded, he repeated the question in Spanish, then in English.
    “That odious nonbeliever has been dealt with,” one of them responded in Arabic-inflected English. “He has been judged according to our laws. He was a known drinker of alcohol, which is an abomination to God.”
    The veiled man in the middle removed something from his robe—an empty bottle of Johnnie Walker Red—and threw it hard at Phillipe, who ducked out of the way as best he could, but not before a corner of the square bottle caught him sharply on the forehead. Phillipe saw a painful flash of light, felt the welt rising on his skull; then his vision cleared and he got a better look at his attacker: The one who had thrown the bottle was shorter and stockier than the other two but clearly held authority over them. His hands and the only other visible square of flesh—the narrow margin between veil and hood—showed the intricate, spidery webbing of a design done with henna. This surprised Phillipe, as such decorations were usually reserved for young women, especially brides. On his feet, just visible beneath the hem of his robes, the blunt toes of ugly orthopedic shoes—also unusual among men who usually went booted or barefoot.
    “You mean you’ve killed him,” Phillipe said quietly.