The Mahdi, page 11
“Exactly. So next I’ll head off to joust with my target world.” Kufdani chuckled. “They may well see me as an unarmed jouster.”
“Good luck with the meeting. I’m off for a few days on Old Fashioned. Gonna head up the coast from Connecticut to Maine, and then back to Annapolis.”
Old Fashioned was a fifteen-year-old, ocean-going, 48-foot sailing vessel that Brooks had ordered from Taiwan, built to his specifications. It boasted many gadgets that real sailors found enviable, and Brooks kept it compulsively up-to-date with maintenance and modern electronics.
“I do so miss that boat. Tell Jimmy I said hello,” Kufdani sighed. “May there be fair winds ahead of us both, my friend.”
NORTH OF JERUSALEM
TUESDAY
KUFDANI PUSHED THE LITTLE RENTED FIAT ALONG THE ROUTE NORTH from Jerusalem, following the GPS directions toward the old Jerusalem airport. From the tinny speakers of the car radio came the voice of Professor Alan Charles Kors from Penn, lecturing on Isaac Newton. He had heard this lecture once before—it was part of a Great Courses class—but he still liked it. Brooks was a historian of some note when it came to seventeenth-century Enlightenment thinkers, and Caitlin knew more about how Newton thought than maybe anyone alive. They verbally abused him when he fell behind.
Ha! He thought. I’ll be ready for them next time.
Reaching the outskirts of the old city, he saw a road sign for the airport and continued heading north. Soon enough, he entered the parking lot for a small block of one-story buildings. He checked his notes and began to look for one with the proper marking. After a few minutes, he saw several cars and a panel truck outside a building with 2443 stenciled on the hangar door and pulled up to a halt.
As Kufdani exited his car, the marked door opened and a tall man, somewhat overweight, stepped out. The man wore a black fedora, a white shirt, and a black tie. His hair appeared in an arrogant show of enviable payot curling chaotically from beneath the hat. He was approaching quickly. Kufdani’s hostility detector went through the roof.
“Mr. Kufdani? Please,” the man said in Russian-accented English. He pointed inside the building.
Through the door, Kufdani saw a small room where five men dressed almost identically in Orthodox attire were seated around a table. One man stood and said in English, “Mr. Kufdani,” indicating a seat beside another large man. He did not meet Kufdani’s eye or offer to shake hands. “I am Yakov Bernstein. We met at the office of the Prime Minister.”
Kufdani nodded, thinking, No, we didn’t “meet.” You didn’t even acknowledge my presence.
“We understand you have new evidence in the matter of construction of settlements for our people on the West Bank of the Jordan River,” Bernstein said. “Please, do fill us in.”
Kufdani flattened his gaze, trying to maintain his cool. He hadn’t driven here only to get spat on again. Maybe I’ll rip your face off and feed it to the swine someday.
“There is only history,” he said in an even tone. “The lands you confiscated belonged to Israeli citizens in 1948 and for two hundred years before that. Those lands are stolen and should be returned. The United States, the United Nations, and the International Court of Justice have officially and loudly condemned this travesty.”
“So, no news,” Bernstein spat. “You waste our time with the same flawed arguments your people have tried for years.”
“You don’t seem to be listening to me, Bernstein. Your government stands alone in the world with its regrettable public views on this issue.” And maybe when I rip your face off, I’ll eat one of your ears. Just give me a reason.
Bernstein snorted. “The Bedouins are Muslim. They have no rights in Israel, no matter when or where they were born. Israel is a Jewish state.”
“Your arrogance is unfortunate,” Kufdani growled. “We Bedouins will fight you for every inch of that land.” He stood in order to stalk from the room.
A sudden burning sensation struck his left triceps. Someone was holding his arm with two hands. Kufdani spun and hit the man in the throat, then ducked as he felt a swinging motion behind him. The punch went over his head. Kufdani reached to pick up the man’s legs from behind the knees, then stood quickly. As the man fell, Kufdani lunged for Bernstein, but the strength suddenly drained from his hands.
His legs wobbled beneath him. Everything went dark.
Someone grabbed the back of his shirt as he fell.
From a distance, he heard Bernstein say, in Hebrew, “Put him in the truck.”
KTZI’OT PRISON, SOUTHERN ISRAEL
TUESDAY
THE SOUND WAS INSISTENT: AN ANNOYING SCREECH WITHIN AN ERRATIC, abrasive scratching. Kufdani moved his head, and a lightning bolt passed between his eyes, then worked its way up the front of his skull. His brain pounded against his eardrums.
He opened his eyes.
A rat was digging at a crack in a concrete wall—the source of the insistent roar in Kufdani’s head. The pain in his left ear seemed determined to split his skull in two.
A thin, brown wool blanket was rolled under his head like a pillow. He discovered that, under another thin blanket, he was naked.
When he swung his legs from the narrow steel bunk and sat up straight, a shooting pain drove across his hips and buttocks. The head pain settled down one level to marginally less than excruciating. Something had spilled across his hamstrings and buttocks, and his inner thighs were sticky with it. Bleeding scratches irritated his hips, and a foul, unfamiliar taste clotted his mouth. His teeth were scummy against his thick, pasty tongue.
Kufdani turned his head very slowly to see a small man, perhaps in his fifties, watching him. The man’s remaining hair stuck out from the sides of his head like tiny white pom-poms, and his nose was crooked, newly healed but poorly set from a recent break. An orange canvas shirt, washed to near white, hung from his scrawny shoulders. Faded pant legs drooped over his rubber sandals.
“What are you staring at?” Kufdani asked in classic, unaccented Arabic, the dialect used almost exclusively in commerce and among the intellectual elite of Morocco and the Middle East. It hurt to talk.
“I’m supposed to keep an eye on you until Boxley gets back,” the scrawny man replied with Bedouin-inflected Arabic. “He wants to talk to you. I think they’re going to auction you off.”
“Auction me off? What the hell—”
“Somebody doesn’t like you very much. You’re lucky you were out cold.” The man paused. “The first time really hurts, and there were a lot of them.”
Partial memories flooded back: bouncing along in a truck, bound, drugged. Tossed on a floor, clothes ripped off. Darkness—then the light, unfamiliar bodies, and new pain. Kufdani’s face tightened as he decoded what the little man had said.
“Uh-huh. What do you do around here? Besides supervising sodomy, that is.”
“You mean when I’m not on the wrong end of that act myself?” the man scoffed. “I run errands. I’m the house mother who cares for the cherries after they arrive at our hallowed correctional doors. They get broken in, just like you. One of the boys can always give Boxley a few shekels to organize a blowjob or back-door sex from me. I’m Boxley’s property, so he won’t allow use of me for free.”
Kufdani pulled the flimsy blanket tighter around his shoulders. His mind flashed to a man behind him, holding onto both hips and digging in with ragged fingernails, having his rough way. Oh, Bernstein. You got me.
“Where are my clothes?” he asked, standing.
His cellmate shrugged. “House rules. You get clothes sometime after the second round, when no one else wants you. Right now, it’s more convenient that you’re naked.”
Oh, Bernstein, Kufdani thought again. He had to admit: no one had ever gotten him this bad. I’m going to find a way to hurt you.
“And when, pray tell, does the second round commence?” he asked. “And how do I avoid it?”
“There’s no avoiding it. They’ll be coming soon, and you’d have to kill them all.”
“Ah, necessity,” Kufdani replied, moving toward the wall. The rat scurried away to parts unknown. “Your accent says you’re a desert creature. Where?”
“Bedouin, from here in Israel. I ran off twenty years ago, fell in with the wrong crowd, and here I am.”
“What’s your name?”
The little man watched as Kufdani turned upside down against the wall in a handstand, stretching his legs by letting them drop to one side, then another. “Baadi. Thanks for asking.”
“Okay, Baadi, you watch the door. Let me know when the first of them is coming. Then get out of the way. If you’re useful to me, I’ll let you live.”
Baadi looked unconvinced, but still stepped up to the cell’s opening and peered through the bars. After a few moments, he ducked back into the cell.
“They’re here,” he cried out. “Three of them—the guys who bought first, second, and third on your ass. One will hold your arms while the other two control your legs and take turns fucking your ass. The one holding your arms will go first on fucking your face.”
Kufdani spun to his feet with a quick push and glided to a spot near the cell door. His hands were loose, and his thighs quivered slightly as he balanced in a slight crouch.
Now I guess we improvise.
The first man came through the door. Kufdani uncoiled to punch the spot on the human temple where bone is the thinnest. He felt the bone give way, under a single, extended right-index knuckle, to a mushy sensation. The man was dead before he hit the floor, convulsing.
The second man planted his feet to avoid the flopping mass below him. The follow-through from the temple blow had coiled Kufdani’s muscular torso, sending the entire force of his well-trained, unwinding body behind the heel of his left hand. It hit the man just under his left cheekbone, driving his head into the steel and concrete of the cell door’s edge. A gray mass tangled with red stripes exploded from his cranium and stretched in the air, splattering the third man’s neck and face.
The third man moved to clear his face as the rebound from Kufdani’s blow allowed him to slide his hand behind the man’s neck, grabbing hair and ear while the right hand rose to grasp jawbone and whiskers. A quick counter-snap with both hands generated a sound like a broken twig.
Kufdani looked back at Baadi, who was hunched over with his rheumy eyes wide. “Three men,” he muttered through bad teeth. “You killed three men in five seconds.”
Backlit, Kufdani loomed like the naked Incredible Hulk, his lats pushing his scarred arms from his side and highlighting massive, veined deltoids. His face had transformed: The skin at the edge of his eyes swelled, hooding them atop the faint knife scar that furrowed through the wrinkled skin to his jaw. The tiny, curved scars on his forehead stood out against his darkened face. Breath whistled through his nose like an oncoming train.
“Probably more like four seconds,” he murmured.
“The rest will show up soon,” Baadi whispered.
Kufdani took one leg and pulled it up to his head until his toes pointed at the ceiling. He held it for a second. The stained thigh beside his face stank. He dropped it, his anger tugging at his control. Blending the two would be necessary.
“Don’t get in my way once it starts, Baadi,” he ordered. “And if you betray me, you’ll know serious pain every day for the rest of your life.”
Baadi scuttled to the corner of the cell and squatted with his hands against the opposing walls, his jaw quivering.
“Who’s the big boss around here,” Kufdani said, hovering over him, “and why?”
“There’s somebody over Boxley, but I don’t know who. You just deal with Boxley. He holds the power.”
“And his chief enforcer?”
“Mustapha. Palestinian, I’d guess. Close to two meters tall, weighs a hundred kilos at least. Shaved head, thick scar tissue on his eyebrows. He’s a brute, and he’s big. Likes it rough. He rents me once a month or so.” Baadi shrugged. “I’ll be here for another eighty-four months, by my count, so I’ll see a lot of rough. After a while, big doesn’t matter.”
Kufdani looked at him in wonder.
Then he heard his next set of friends approaching and peeked out through the open cell door. A ragged crowd, dressed uniformly in un-ironed orange prison garb, pushed, punched, and guffawed along a narrow concrete corridor, a steel railing on their right and the welded prison bars of repeated cells on their left.
Time for me to figure out how I survive this, he thought. I’m supposed to be the planner here.
His planning horizon had shrunk to today, not weeks or months from now, and he had about thirty seconds to figure things out. It occurred to him that a bunch of angry Muslims resided within those very prison walls. He wanted them to work for him, to be angry for him and along with him.
It’s good to have the beginning of a plan.
“Shall we greet them?” he said calmly.
The lead man in the crowd appeared at the open door, large and thick with a ragged beard. At the sight of three inert bodies, he dug in his heels but could not stop. Slipping on the pool of red and gray matter, he crashed to the cement floor. The men just behind him stumbled over him. Two of them fell, and one caught himself against the corridor’s steel railing. Behind him, another six or seven men managed to stop. They all gaped at the pile of live and dead men, and the naked man standing beyond it.
“Gentlemen,” Kufdani said, seeming to fill the cell with his naked bulk. “Is there something I can do for you?”
“Yeah, cherry boy, I’m Abdul,” said the man against the railing in a muddled Gazan accent. He was enormous—tall and wide, with loops of fat hanging from his chin—and breathing hard, partly from the short run and partly from violent lust. He stepped forward. “Nice dick, but I like your ass better. We came for a little more fucking. Maybe another blow job, too.”
Kufdani shifted his balance forward and drove his right hand into Abdul’s wide neck. Curling a thumb and three fingers around the man’s larynx, he squeezed until the veins in his forearm stood out in thick cords.
The cracking sound was loud in the sudden silence.
Kufdani ducked slightly, then lifted with his legs, pushing the man hard. Once the man’s back hit the railing, his obesity carried him slowly over the railing, his feet pointing up as they trailed the falling torso. There was no scream—only the slap of an inert mass hitting the concrete floor two levels below.
Take that, Bernstein. Your time is coming.
“He wasn’t very polite,” Kufdani said, “and I didn’t like his agenda.” He smiled at the man on the floor and then at the others just outside the cell door. His face was a caricature of malice. “If there are no more social comments, please come into my humble cell.”
The prisoners pushed forward, forcing the first two men into the cell. “Baadi, what the hell is going on here?” one of them roared, staring at Kufdani. “That was my cousin. Who do you think you are? You’ll pay for this.”
“Maybe, but first take off that jumpsuit,” Kufdani said. “It looks like it will fit me.”
“Well, try and take it!” the man yelled, pulling his fist back.
Kufdani rolled his head to let the punch slide past his cheek, simultaneously grabbing the man by the face and slamming the back of his head against the steel bars of the cell, then again. Seizing the front of the orange jumpsuit, he pulled the man forward, then spun with the weight and threw him at the back wall. The man hit with a thud and slipped to the floor, perfectly still.
“I hate that kind of garbage. Baadi, take that jumpsuit off him. And try not to get any blood on it,” Kufdani said. “It’s mine now.”
Baadi scrambled to his feet, stepped over the bodies on the cell floor, and began to strip the uniform from the inert man.
“So, gentlemen,” Kufdani exclaimed, “I suppose you’re my new best friends. Who’s in charge around here?”
The remaining man in the cell stood with his jaw agape, but no sound came out. Kufdani moved to him and, taking the man’s elbow in his left hand, dug two fingers into the socket where the nerves crossed. The man gasped and crumpled to his knees. Kufdani reduced the pressure and pulled him back up to standing.
Kufdani had practiced a certain look in front of the mirror a hundred times until it was exactly what he wanted. It was sometimes useful. Now was one of those times.
Allowing his head to sink to his chest, he then raised it with his face stretched into a grimace, his eyes slitted. The scars on his face stood out in white, and his muscled neck seemed larger than his head. He flicked his tongue in and out like a snake, turning slowly to gaze at the frozen crowd, sensing them.
The cell was eerily silent.
“Come on, people,” Kufdani hissed, looking every bit the Gila monster. Brooks Elliot was always telling him to lose that look to avoid terrifying the civilians. “I’m not in a very good mood. Who’s in charge?”
“That would be me,” said a deep, calm voice from the back of the crowd.
The men outside the cell parted as a wheelchair emerged carrying a bearded man, in his fifties, with a pockmarked face. Pushing the chair was a very large man with a shaved head who glared at Kufdani from beneath bulging, tangled eyebrows. Beside the chair was a small, slim, nervous man who moved like a feral cat.
“You seem to have created quite a stir among my friends,” the man in the chair said.
Kufdani scrutinized the man. “Boxley, I suppose?”
“I am Amad Boxley. This is my assistant, Mustapha. He is unhappy with you, it seems.”
“Mustapha probably is worried I won’t hire him down the road,” Kufdani said. “And indeed I may not. He’s too big to be useful.”
“In that case,” replied Boxley, “I think I’ll just have him hurt you.”
Mustapha shifted his weight to his front foot.
Time slowed down for Kufdani once again, into the freeze-frame slow motion that had evolved after countless hours of practice under the tutelage of the one and only Tang, one of the world’s master artists of violence in motion. Kufdani’s body turned, as his knees flexed. Then everything uncoiled in sequence: from his feet to an exploding drive of the legs, to a release and twist of the upper body, to a final snap of his arm, which drove a single, gnarled knuckle into that same point just below the center of the forehead.
“Good luck with the meeting. I’m off for a few days on Old Fashioned. Gonna head up the coast from Connecticut to Maine, and then back to Annapolis.”
Old Fashioned was a fifteen-year-old, ocean-going, 48-foot sailing vessel that Brooks had ordered from Taiwan, built to his specifications. It boasted many gadgets that real sailors found enviable, and Brooks kept it compulsively up-to-date with maintenance and modern electronics.
“I do so miss that boat. Tell Jimmy I said hello,” Kufdani sighed. “May there be fair winds ahead of us both, my friend.”
NORTH OF JERUSALEM
TUESDAY
KUFDANI PUSHED THE LITTLE RENTED FIAT ALONG THE ROUTE NORTH from Jerusalem, following the GPS directions toward the old Jerusalem airport. From the tinny speakers of the car radio came the voice of Professor Alan Charles Kors from Penn, lecturing on Isaac Newton. He had heard this lecture once before—it was part of a Great Courses class—but he still liked it. Brooks was a historian of some note when it came to seventeenth-century Enlightenment thinkers, and Caitlin knew more about how Newton thought than maybe anyone alive. They verbally abused him when he fell behind.
Ha! He thought. I’ll be ready for them next time.
Reaching the outskirts of the old city, he saw a road sign for the airport and continued heading north. Soon enough, he entered the parking lot for a small block of one-story buildings. He checked his notes and began to look for one with the proper marking. After a few minutes, he saw several cars and a panel truck outside a building with 2443 stenciled on the hangar door and pulled up to a halt.
As Kufdani exited his car, the marked door opened and a tall man, somewhat overweight, stepped out. The man wore a black fedora, a white shirt, and a black tie. His hair appeared in an arrogant show of enviable payot curling chaotically from beneath the hat. He was approaching quickly. Kufdani’s hostility detector went through the roof.
“Mr. Kufdani? Please,” the man said in Russian-accented English. He pointed inside the building.
Through the door, Kufdani saw a small room where five men dressed almost identically in Orthodox attire were seated around a table. One man stood and said in English, “Mr. Kufdani,” indicating a seat beside another large man. He did not meet Kufdani’s eye or offer to shake hands. “I am Yakov Bernstein. We met at the office of the Prime Minister.”
Kufdani nodded, thinking, No, we didn’t “meet.” You didn’t even acknowledge my presence.
“We understand you have new evidence in the matter of construction of settlements for our people on the West Bank of the Jordan River,” Bernstein said. “Please, do fill us in.”
Kufdani flattened his gaze, trying to maintain his cool. He hadn’t driven here only to get spat on again. Maybe I’ll rip your face off and feed it to the swine someday.
“There is only history,” he said in an even tone. “The lands you confiscated belonged to Israeli citizens in 1948 and for two hundred years before that. Those lands are stolen and should be returned. The United States, the United Nations, and the International Court of Justice have officially and loudly condemned this travesty.”
“So, no news,” Bernstein spat. “You waste our time with the same flawed arguments your people have tried for years.”
“You don’t seem to be listening to me, Bernstein. Your government stands alone in the world with its regrettable public views on this issue.” And maybe when I rip your face off, I’ll eat one of your ears. Just give me a reason.
Bernstein snorted. “The Bedouins are Muslim. They have no rights in Israel, no matter when or where they were born. Israel is a Jewish state.”
“Your arrogance is unfortunate,” Kufdani growled. “We Bedouins will fight you for every inch of that land.” He stood in order to stalk from the room.
A sudden burning sensation struck his left triceps. Someone was holding his arm with two hands. Kufdani spun and hit the man in the throat, then ducked as he felt a swinging motion behind him. The punch went over his head. Kufdani reached to pick up the man’s legs from behind the knees, then stood quickly. As the man fell, Kufdani lunged for Bernstein, but the strength suddenly drained from his hands.
His legs wobbled beneath him. Everything went dark.
Someone grabbed the back of his shirt as he fell.
From a distance, he heard Bernstein say, in Hebrew, “Put him in the truck.”
KTZI’OT PRISON, SOUTHERN ISRAEL
TUESDAY
THE SOUND WAS INSISTENT: AN ANNOYING SCREECH WITHIN AN ERRATIC, abrasive scratching. Kufdani moved his head, and a lightning bolt passed between his eyes, then worked its way up the front of his skull. His brain pounded against his eardrums.
He opened his eyes.
A rat was digging at a crack in a concrete wall—the source of the insistent roar in Kufdani’s head. The pain in his left ear seemed determined to split his skull in two.
A thin, brown wool blanket was rolled under his head like a pillow. He discovered that, under another thin blanket, he was naked.
When he swung his legs from the narrow steel bunk and sat up straight, a shooting pain drove across his hips and buttocks. The head pain settled down one level to marginally less than excruciating. Something had spilled across his hamstrings and buttocks, and his inner thighs were sticky with it. Bleeding scratches irritated his hips, and a foul, unfamiliar taste clotted his mouth. His teeth were scummy against his thick, pasty tongue.
Kufdani turned his head very slowly to see a small man, perhaps in his fifties, watching him. The man’s remaining hair stuck out from the sides of his head like tiny white pom-poms, and his nose was crooked, newly healed but poorly set from a recent break. An orange canvas shirt, washed to near white, hung from his scrawny shoulders. Faded pant legs drooped over his rubber sandals.
“What are you staring at?” Kufdani asked in classic, unaccented Arabic, the dialect used almost exclusively in commerce and among the intellectual elite of Morocco and the Middle East. It hurt to talk.
“I’m supposed to keep an eye on you until Boxley gets back,” the scrawny man replied with Bedouin-inflected Arabic. “He wants to talk to you. I think they’re going to auction you off.”
“Auction me off? What the hell—”
“Somebody doesn’t like you very much. You’re lucky you were out cold.” The man paused. “The first time really hurts, and there were a lot of them.”
Partial memories flooded back: bouncing along in a truck, bound, drugged. Tossed on a floor, clothes ripped off. Darkness—then the light, unfamiliar bodies, and new pain. Kufdani’s face tightened as he decoded what the little man had said.
“Uh-huh. What do you do around here? Besides supervising sodomy, that is.”
“You mean when I’m not on the wrong end of that act myself?” the man scoffed. “I run errands. I’m the house mother who cares for the cherries after they arrive at our hallowed correctional doors. They get broken in, just like you. One of the boys can always give Boxley a few shekels to organize a blowjob or back-door sex from me. I’m Boxley’s property, so he won’t allow use of me for free.”
Kufdani pulled the flimsy blanket tighter around his shoulders. His mind flashed to a man behind him, holding onto both hips and digging in with ragged fingernails, having his rough way. Oh, Bernstein. You got me.
“Where are my clothes?” he asked, standing.
His cellmate shrugged. “House rules. You get clothes sometime after the second round, when no one else wants you. Right now, it’s more convenient that you’re naked.”
Oh, Bernstein, Kufdani thought again. He had to admit: no one had ever gotten him this bad. I’m going to find a way to hurt you.
“And when, pray tell, does the second round commence?” he asked. “And how do I avoid it?”
“There’s no avoiding it. They’ll be coming soon, and you’d have to kill them all.”
“Ah, necessity,” Kufdani replied, moving toward the wall. The rat scurried away to parts unknown. “Your accent says you’re a desert creature. Where?”
“Bedouin, from here in Israel. I ran off twenty years ago, fell in with the wrong crowd, and here I am.”
“What’s your name?”
The little man watched as Kufdani turned upside down against the wall in a handstand, stretching his legs by letting them drop to one side, then another. “Baadi. Thanks for asking.”
“Okay, Baadi, you watch the door. Let me know when the first of them is coming. Then get out of the way. If you’re useful to me, I’ll let you live.”
Baadi looked unconvinced, but still stepped up to the cell’s opening and peered through the bars. After a few moments, he ducked back into the cell.
“They’re here,” he cried out. “Three of them—the guys who bought first, second, and third on your ass. One will hold your arms while the other two control your legs and take turns fucking your ass. The one holding your arms will go first on fucking your face.”
Kufdani spun to his feet with a quick push and glided to a spot near the cell door. His hands were loose, and his thighs quivered slightly as he balanced in a slight crouch.
Now I guess we improvise.
The first man came through the door. Kufdani uncoiled to punch the spot on the human temple where bone is the thinnest. He felt the bone give way, under a single, extended right-index knuckle, to a mushy sensation. The man was dead before he hit the floor, convulsing.
The second man planted his feet to avoid the flopping mass below him. The follow-through from the temple blow had coiled Kufdani’s muscular torso, sending the entire force of his well-trained, unwinding body behind the heel of his left hand. It hit the man just under his left cheekbone, driving his head into the steel and concrete of the cell door’s edge. A gray mass tangled with red stripes exploded from his cranium and stretched in the air, splattering the third man’s neck and face.
The third man moved to clear his face as the rebound from Kufdani’s blow allowed him to slide his hand behind the man’s neck, grabbing hair and ear while the right hand rose to grasp jawbone and whiskers. A quick counter-snap with both hands generated a sound like a broken twig.
Kufdani looked back at Baadi, who was hunched over with his rheumy eyes wide. “Three men,” he muttered through bad teeth. “You killed three men in five seconds.”
Backlit, Kufdani loomed like the naked Incredible Hulk, his lats pushing his scarred arms from his side and highlighting massive, veined deltoids. His face had transformed: The skin at the edge of his eyes swelled, hooding them atop the faint knife scar that furrowed through the wrinkled skin to his jaw. The tiny, curved scars on his forehead stood out against his darkened face. Breath whistled through his nose like an oncoming train.
“Probably more like four seconds,” he murmured.
“The rest will show up soon,” Baadi whispered.
Kufdani took one leg and pulled it up to his head until his toes pointed at the ceiling. He held it for a second. The stained thigh beside his face stank. He dropped it, his anger tugging at his control. Blending the two would be necessary.
“Don’t get in my way once it starts, Baadi,” he ordered. “And if you betray me, you’ll know serious pain every day for the rest of your life.”
Baadi scuttled to the corner of the cell and squatted with his hands against the opposing walls, his jaw quivering.
“Who’s the big boss around here,” Kufdani said, hovering over him, “and why?”
“There’s somebody over Boxley, but I don’t know who. You just deal with Boxley. He holds the power.”
“And his chief enforcer?”
“Mustapha. Palestinian, I’d guess. Close to two meters tall, weighs a hundred kilos at least. Shaved head, thick scar tissue on his eyebrows. He’s a brute, and he’s big. Likes it rough. He rents me once a month or so.” Baadi shrugged. “I’ll be here for another eighty-four months, by my count, so I’ll see a lot of rough. After a while, big doesn’t matter.”
Kufdani looked at him in wonder.
Then he heard his next set of friends approaching and peeked out through the open cell door. A ragged crowd, dressed uniformly in un-ironed orange prison garb, pushed, punched, and guffawed along a narrow concrete corridor, a steel railing on their right and the welded prison bars of repeated cells on their left.
Time for me to figure out how I survive this, he thought. I’m supposed to be the planner here.
His planning horizon had shrunk to today, not weeks or months from now, and he had about thirty seconds to figure things out. It occurred to him that a bunch of angry Muslims resided within those very prison walls. He wanted them to work for him, to be angry for him and along with him.
It’s good to have the beginning of a plan.
“Shall we greet them?” he said calmly.
The lead man in the crowd appeared at the open door, large and thick with a ragged beard. At the sight of three inert bodies, he dug in his heels but could not stop. Slipping on the pool of red and gray matter, he crashed to the cement floor. The men just behind him stumbled over him. Two of them fell, and one caught himself against the corridor’s steel railing. Behind him, another six or seven men managed to stop. They all gaped at the pile of live and dead men, and the naked man standing beyond it.
“Gentlemen,” Kufdani said, seeming to fill the cell with his naked bulk. “Is there something I can do for you?”
“Yeah, cherry boy, I’m Abdul,” said the man against the railing in a muddled Gazan accent. He was enormous—tall and wide, with loops of fat hanging from his chin—and breathing hard, partly from the short run and partly from violent lust. He stepped forward. “Nice dick, but I like your ass better. We came for a little more fucking. Maybe another blow job, too.”
Kufdani shifted his balance forward and drove his right hand into Abdul’s wide neck. Curling a thumb and three fingers around the man’s larynx, he squeezed until the veins in his forearm stood out in thick cords.
The cracking sound was loud in the sudden silence.
Kufdani ducked slightly, then lifted with his legs, pushing the man hard. Once the man’s back hit the railing, his obesity carried him slowly over the railing, his feet pointing up as they trailed the falling torso. There was no scream—only the slap of an inert mass hitting the concrete floor two levels below.
Take that, Bernstein. Your time is coming.
“He wasn’t very polite,” Kufdani said, “and I didn’t like his agenda.” He smiled at the man on the floor and then at the others just outside the cell door. His face was a caricature of malice. “If there are no more social comments, please come into my humble cell.”
The prisoners pushed forward, forcing the first two men into the cell. “Baadi, what the hell is going on here?” one of them roared, staring at Kufdani. “That was my cousin. Who do you think you are? You’ll pay for this.”
“Maybe, but first take off that jumpsuit,” Kufdani said. “It looks like it will fit me.”
“Well, try and take it!” the man yelled, pulling his fist back.
Kufdani rolled his head to let the punch slide past his cheek, simultaneously grabbing the man by the face and slamming the back of his head against the steel bars of the cell, then again. Seizing the front of the orange jumpsuit, he pulled the man forward, then spun with the weight and threw him at the back wall. The man hit with a thud and slipped to the floor, perfectly still.
“I hate that kind of garbage. Baadi, take that jumpsuit off him. And try not to get any blood on it,” Kufdani said. “It’s mine now.”
Baadi scrambled to his feet, stepped over the bodies on the cell floor, and began to strip the uniform from the inert man.
“So, gentlemen,” Kufdani exclaimed, “I suppose you’re my new best friends. Who’s in charge around here?”
The remaining man in the cell stood with his jaw agape, but no sound came out. Kufdani moved to him and, taking the man’s elbow in his left hand, dug two fingers into the socket where the nerves crossed. The man gasped and crumpled to his knees. Kufdani reduced the pressure and pulled him back up to standing.
Kufdani had practiced a certain look in front of the mirror a hundred times until it was exactly what he wanted. It was sometimes useful. Now was one of those times.
Allowing his head to sink to his chest, he then raised it with his face stretched into a grimace, his eyes slitted. The scars on his face stood out in white, and his muscled neck seemed larger than his head. He flicked his tongue in and out like a snake, turning slowly to gaze at the frozen crowd, sensing them.
The cell was eerily silent.
“Come on, people,” Kufdani hissed, looking every bit the Gila monster. Brooks Elliot was always telling him to lose that look to avoid terrifying the civilians. “I’m not in a very good mood. Who’s in charge?”
“That would be me,” said a deep, calm voice from the back of the crowd.
The men outside the cell parted as a wheelchair emerged carrying a bearded man, in his fifties, with a pockmarked face. Pushing the chair was a very large man with a shaved head who glared at Kufdani from beneath bulging, tangled eyebrows. Beside the chair was a small, slim, nervous man who moved like a feral cat.
“You seem to have created quite a stir among my friends,” the man in the chair said.
Kufdani scrutinized the man. “Boxley, I suppose?”
“I am Amad Boxley. This is my assistant, Mustapha. He is unhappy with you, it seems.”
“Mustapha probably is worried I won’t hire him down the road,” Kufdani said. “And indeed I may not. He’s too big to be useful.”
“In that case,” replied Boxley, “I think I’ll just have him hurt you.”
Mustapha shifted his weight to his front foot.
Time slowed down for Kufdani once again, into the freeze-frame slow motion that had evolved after countless hours of practice under the tutelage of the one and only Tang, one of the world’s master artists of violence in motion. Kufdani’s body turned, as his knees flexed. Then everything uncoiled in sequence: from his feet to an exploding drive of the legs, to a release and twist of the upper body, to a final snap of his arm, which drove a single, gnarled knuckle into that same point just below the center of the forehead.
