Spoils of War, page 9
Jack, however, had his own misgivings about dealing with Dale Griggs. The tough, unisex name seemed intimidating in itself.
The stadium loomed out of the smoke. The main entrance that gave access to the indoor sports centre was locked, but they found one of the gates to the spectator stands open. They climbed a wide flight of stairs that led out on to a middle tier of grandstand seats. The field below was a bleak oval of uncut grass, dead and dying, with the faint whitewashed markings of a soccer pitch still visible here and there. A running track with a damaged Sportflex surface encircled the pitch, and on its far side a solitary figure moved through the gloom at a steady, middle-distance canter.
‘Miss Dale,’ Tewfiq announced.
They went down an aisle to the low barrier at the edge of the track. Approaching them as she came out of the nearest curve into the straight, the woman must have seen them but did not acknowledge their presence. She wore black running shorts and a green T-shirt, white spiked shoes and a headband from which a long tail of blond hair bounced in time with her steps. She passed by the two spectators and began another lap, moving in the easy but concentrated way of a natural runner, harnessing energy, long legs with strong, stringy muscles going in rhythmical strides, her arms pumping close to her sides. Her head was thrust forward, showing straining tendons in her neck. Her profile was lean and angular, her face reflecting a bare minimum of stress.
She ran two more laps at the same pace and took the final hundred metres at a sprint, checking her watch at the moment she crossed an imaginary finish line. She wound down her stride over a dozen more paces, then lowered her head, coughing and resting her hands on her knees for a minute before straightening up. She walked to where a sports bag stood beside the barrier, took out a towel and buried her face in it.
‘Come,’ said Tewfiq.
He led the way along the railings and stopped a few feet from Dale Griggs. She still seemed in no hurry to acknowledge them, dabbing the sweat from her face and her neck. Jack had had an impulse to clap her performance and was glad he had resisted it. Finally she said, ‘Hello, Tewfiq.’
‘Miss Dale, I have brought a man to see you.’
Dale Griggs looked coolly at Jack and said nothing, waiting for an explanation. Seen close up she was tall and square-shouldered, her figure spare, small-breasted and supple. Her features were sharply chiselled, the cheekbones high, the nose and chin both prominent. Her eyes were light green and her skin had a natural tan. At a guess, she was in her early thirties.
‘Hello, Miss Griggs,’ Jack said. He leaned over the barrier and offered his hand, which she shook after a moment’s hesitation. ‘My name is Jack Rushton. Vincent Hand suggested where I might find you, and Tewfiq kindly took over from there.’
‘What can I do for you?’
‘It’s a bit complicated to cover in a few words. I used to live here until last July and I’ve just got back from London. I’m a business consultant, but what I want to ask is more a personal favour . . .’He sensed that he was babbling a bit. ‘Am I interrupting your training?’ he asked.
She had taken off her spikes and was slipping the two halves of a grey, brushed-cotton track suit over her running gear.
‘Business consultant?’ Repeating the words, she seemed to be testing them for some hidden meaning. She pulled on a worn pair of Reeboks, then suddenly turned away and coughed again at some length. ‘Goddam smoke,’ she said when she’d recovered. ‘No, there’s nothing to train for. I was just timing myself at the end of my usual workout.’
‘How was your time?’
‘Bad. Around four minutes thirty.’
‘For fifteen hundred metres? That sounds bloody good to me.’
‘It’s lousy,’ she said dismissively. ‘I used to run the mile in less than that. And my best over fifteen hundred was just under four-oh-four.’
‘All the same, on this track, in these conditions . . .’
He gestured around at the smoke-laden air, but his attempts to praise her seemed only to irritate her. ‘No credit where it’s not due, please. My times these days wouldn’t get me a place on my old college squad, not even in the best conditions. I peaked around ten years ago. It doesn’t bother me. I do it now because it’s a therapy, or maybe a compulsion.’
‘What was your college?’
‘Louisiana State, Baton Rouge.’
The way she pronounced it, he could now catch the hint of a Southern accent in her voice. ‘What I wanted to talk about,’ he said, ‘was something that happened here during the occupation. Something you might be able to shed some fight on.’
‘Uh-huh? Is this the business part, or the personal?’
‘A bit of both, really. Vincent said you could help me if anyone could. He told me you were involved with the resistance.’
‘That’s a delicate subject right now, Mr . . . Rushton?’ She looked at him speculatively, clutching the towel to the side of her face. ‘What’s your interest in it?’
Jack glanced at Tewfiq, who hadn’t joined in the conversation but appeared to be following it closely. ‘I feel we ought to talk in private. No offence,’ he said to the boy, ‘but I’d like to have a few minutes alone with Miss Dale. If that’s all right with you?’ he asked her.
She thought about it for a moment. Tewfiq looked crestfallen, but then she spoke to him in Arabic and he brightened up. ‘See you later,’ he said in English, and scampered away up the steps.
Dale Griggs slung the sports bag over her shoulder and vaulted the barrier. She pulled off the headband and shook loose her hair, which fell, rather to Jack’s surprise, in thick blond tresses all the way to her shoulders. Now that she stood beside him her face was almost on a level with his; its outlines, softened by the hair although devoid of make-up, no longer seemed so sharp. What he had seen as a rather scrawny toughness was really a healthy absence of spare flesh.
‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘I was a bit worried about offending Tewfiq’s male pride.’
‘Oh, he’s not too bad. I’ve been educating him. Actually, he’s jealous of my company. I told him I’d go with him to visit his father in the hospital this evening.’
‘He tells me his father was wounded in some shoot-out after killing a lot of Iraqis.’
‘A forgivable overstatement. He did go out with a rifle when the allies invaded, but before he could do any damage he was hit by some shrapnel from what my countrymen are pleased to call “friendly fire”. He’s a brave man, though. They all were. After the first few weeks of the occupation they had to give up any idea of serious armed resistance. Too big a threat of reprisals.’
With the change in her looks had come a slight relaxation of her manner. She was friendlier, but the green eyes remained guarded. ‘I’m heading for what passes at present for my home,’ she said. ‘We can talk on the way if you like, but I don’t promise to be of any help.’
‘My car is at Tewfiq’s place. Can I give you a lift?’
‘No. I’m just down the road, but in the other direction.’
They climbed the steps together and at the top Dale Griggs halted and looked around the stadium. She said: ‘Do you find this place creepy?’
‘No. A bit depressing, perhaps.’
‘Then I guess you don’t know what the Iraqis used it for. Torture. Executions. They brought the overflow here from the Nayef Palace. The wrong people, mostly: innocent civilians, women, young boys. They were kept in the changing-rooms downstairs, and when they were killed they were thrown in the swimming-pool. I’m the only one who uses the place now. I thought it might help exorcize my ghosts.’
‘And has it?’
‘I’m not sure yet.’
Her reference to the Nayef Palace had given him an opening. He said, ‘Actually, it’s one of those victims I’d like to talk to you about. I asked Vincent for an introduction to someone who had worked with the resistance. He gave me your name and then mentioned that you’d been a friend of Noura Hamadi’s.’
She gave him a wary look. ‘Noura? You knew her too?’
‘No, but I met her father yesterday and he told me what had happened to her. And Vincent said he thought you were one of the last people to see her before she was arrested.’
‘Maybe I was.’ She shrugged. ‘So?’
‘I’m trying to find out more about it, Miss Griggs. I’ve taken on a kind of business commission from Dr Hamadi, and what happened to Noura has some bearing on it.’
‘Ah. Money and Dr Hamadi. I’m not surprised you mention them in the same breath. By the way, I’ve always been charmed by British formality, but I’d feel more comfortable at this point with Dale and Jack.’ She turned and began tripping down the steps towards the exit, leaving him to follow. She called over her shoulder,
‘Did the doctor have anything to say about me?’
‘No.’
‘That doesn’t surprise me either. I guess my name is haram in that family now. Forbidden, I mean. The old man blamed me for talking Noura out of her wedding ' plans. The fact is he didn’t like to believe the girl had a mind of her own, however liberally he thinks he raised her. Easier to point the finger at infidel feminist trash putting wrong ideas in her head.’
‘Did you?’ Jack caught up with her halfway down the steps.
‘Not intentionally. She came to me for advice and I gave it as objectively as I could. But I’d seen, months earlier, that marrying someone like Ahmed Khalid would be a disaster for her. They were both students of mine. That’s to say, they were both spoilt, rich kids who’d been to school in England and were sent to while away some time at college until they were ready for their pre-ordained roles in life. In Ahmed’s case, that meant attending a few classes in between partying and jetting around Europe, preparing himself for the family profession of international playboy. And Noura . . . well, I guess her father thought there was nothing wrong in letting her spend a few years studying something harmless like sociology, just as long as she was ready in the end to become a good Arab wife. But she’d begun to see herself differently. She was bright, eager to learn. She’d got some benefit from her education, and that made her confused. She was caught between the conflicting demands of her independence and duty to her family.
‘She told me she wanted the perspective of another woman, a Western woman, on the problem, but I think what she was really looking for was confirmation of her own feelings. She was . . . like a little sister, looking to an older one for reassurance. And I’m ready to admit to a prejudice: I didn’t want Noura to repeat my mistake. I was married to my own Arab playboy. And I left him. Which in Daddy’s eyes made me unqualified to give any advice to his daughter, and probably a brazen slut as well.’
Dale gave an unexpected, self-deprecating grin. Jack had begun to like her directness. He remembered what Hamadi had said about Noura falling under the spell of people without respect for her own traditions.
They emerged from the stadium into the smoky half-light and walked across the street. ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘I guess that stuff isn’t what you came to hear. What can I tell you that the doctor hasn’t already?’
‘When was the last time you saw Noura?’
‘That’s easy. Monday, September third. The night they arrested her.’
‘You mean you were there when it happened?’
‘Not exactly. But I’m not sure I should go into the details.’
‘Can they matter now?’
‘Now that the poor kid is dead? Maybe they don’t matter to you, but in my case there are other considerations. I was told some things that I wasn’t supposed to know. Daddy is a powerful man, and he doesn’t like me. He and the other sheikhs who endured the occupation at a distance, like from Bahrain and Palm Beach and Monte Carlo, have reacted against people like me who were in here at the sharp end. Plus, my professional position here is uncertain. Until the university reopens later this week I don’t know whether I still have a job. And they still owe me money. In a nutshell, I could easily lose my livelihood and my residence permit, especially if the good doctor should decide to put a word in the right ears. You must know how things work around here.’
‘Perhaps I could help straighten that out. I seem to have wasta with the doctor.’
‘Thank you, but that might just make further complications. Noura took me into her confidence about some arrangements her father had made.’
‘I think I know about those arrangements. You wouldn’t be breaking any confidences by talking to me about them. And none of it has to get back to him.’
‘Then why don’t we level with each other, Jack? Where do you come into this?’
They had gone a short way down a sidewalk, deserted apart from a group of small children who halted a desultory game to stare at them as they passed. Jack thought for a moment and said, ‘We seem to be discussing more or less the same thing. Fill me in on what you know and I’ll tell you as much as I can afford to about what Hamadi wants.’
‘That sounds like a pretty one-sided bargain.’ But she laughed and said, ‘Well, what the hell? There’s another thing the doctor wouldn’t like. The reason I was with Noura that night is because I was staying in her house. In the annexe that was being prepared for her and Ahmed, in fact. The servants knew, of course, but Noura swore them to secrecy. I was on the lam. After the invasion the Iraqis stopped all Westerners from leaving, and then they started rounding them up. I decided to go into hiding rather than risk what might happen to me if I turned myself in.
‘Noura was a sweet girl. As I said, she’d started treating me like a big sister. I asked if I could stay out of sight with her over in Salamiya for a while, just until I could make other arrangements, and she didn’t hesitate. It turned out I couldn’t have had more seclusion, because Daddy had been fixing things behind the scenes. He’d bribed an Iraqi officer to have his soldiers protect the place . . .’
‘Colonel Jalloul,’ Jack said. ‘The man who was supposed to help Noura leave the country.’
‘You know the bastard’s name? Then you probably know at least as much as I do. For what he called security reasons he never told Noura who he was, and he was using a false name that night, anyhow. He’d been in touch with her for two or three weeks. He’d send messages and sometimes he’d visit the house.’
‘What kind of messages?’
‘Just reassuring her that his plans were going ahead, I guess. He didn’t give her many details, and I didn’t ask for any. I did warn her to be careful about trusting him, but I have to say I saw no particular reason why she shouldn’t. Obviously I was wrong.’
‘Did you ever actually see him?’
‘No, I kept out of the way when he was around. Except on the last night, when he arrived to collect her and I snuck out to see them leave. Even then, he was just a shadow in the courtyard.’
‘Then how do you know about the name he was using?’
‘Because I overheard him saying it. He was briefing her about their travel plans. They would be going together, on false papers showing them as man and wife. He would be called Ghani and she would be Fatma Al-Falaki. You know that Arab women keep their own names when they marry, even if they get to keep nothing else? He also gave her a wedding ring to wear.’
Jack nodded thoughtfully. ‘What else did you hear?’
‘He said he had a plane waiting at the airport, as he’d already promised. And then they left. I assumed she had got away, and then a few days later I heard she was being held at the Nayef Palace. By then I’d left the house and moved down here to the Al-Fadnis’. That’s about it.’
Dale had stopped walking. They were at the entrance to another building similar to Tewfiq’s. ‘This is home,’ she said. ‘In fact, the apartment belongs to an American friend who turned himself in, and I just sort of took it over. I won’t invite you in. It’s not exactly equipped for receiving visitors.’
‘Mine is much the same.’
They strolled into the open-fronted lobby. She took a key from the pocket of her track suit and paused by one of the doors. ‘Aren’t you forgetting your side of the deal, Jack? What is it about all of this that interests you?’
‘As you guessed, it’s to do with money. Indirectly, anyway. Hamadi wants me to tie up some embarrassing loose ends that were left over when Jalloul reneged on the deal with him. That is, assuming he did renege.’
‘What do you mean, assuming?’
‘Doesn’t it strike you as odd that he should go to so much trouble over Noura if all he intended to do was betray her? I mean the visits to the house, the travel arrangements, the details – right down to the wedding ring?’
‘I guess I’ve never thought about it that way. I’ve never thought of him as anything but a double-crossing bastard. Are you trying to tell me different?’
‘I don’t know. I’m just thinking aloud.’
‘Well, you can spare me the facts of Daddy’s anguish, whatever they are. And if that’s all, I’ll say goodbye now.’ She opened the door and he caught a glimpse of a hallway leading into an almost bare living room; behind another half-open door a mattress lay on the floor with bedclothes and a patchwork quilt neatly spread over it. She thrust out her hand and shook Jack’s, more firmly this time. ‘I’m sure I haven’t been much help, but good luck anyway.’
‘No, you’ve been terrific.’ He hesitated. ‘Do you have a phone here? In case I think of anything more to ask you?’
‘It’s not working. And I promise I’ve told you everything I know. It’s been nice meeting you, Jack.’
‘Goodbye, Dale. And thank you.’
She closed the door and he left the building. He walked to his car with an odd feeling of anticlimax, sorry that their talk had ended so abruptly, with such apparent finality. He’d begun to enjoy Dale’s company. The sight of that mattress on the floor had been strangely moving, suggesting a precarious quality to her life that she was trying to disguise, that he sensed might even be something like his own.
