The Culprits by Robert Hough

Author:Robert Hough [Hough, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-36958-1
Publisher: Random House of Canada
Published: 2007-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

He walked in a shuffle, a blanket over his shoulders. The moon was lost behind a matting of black clouds. Already he’d forgotten why, or where, he was going. Still, when they opened the trunk of a Mercedes S-series, he lay down in the darkness and felt at peace with the movement. For an hour they drove through the city, circling and backtracking to make sure they weren’t followed. Thinking himself dead, Ruslan fell asleep smiling. They finally stopped. The trunk was opened, and Ruslan was helped from it. He was standing before a falling-apart building. And though it may have looked like every other building in the city’s bleak suburbs, it wasn’t. Here, on the whole second floor, women wore burkas and men dressed in djellabas. All the meat was halal and washed down with juices. Arabic was spoken with every manner of accent, and walls bore the portraits of Palestinian martyrs. Music was forbidden, as was wearing a watch on your left wrist, or buying supplies from Semitic grocers. So fervent was the adherence here to the majesty of Allah that the power brokers of Peshawar had deemed this floor already liberated by the Islamist revolution—an honour likewise bestowed upon the Belleville district of Paris and the neighbourhood surrounding Finsbury Park mosque in east London.

Ruslan, of course, knew nothing of this. He knew only that his feet were cold, and that he whimpered as they led him up a crumbling, dark stairwell, the walls kaleidoscopically tagged with pro-9/11 graffiti. They walked along a dim, littered hallway. Children stopped playing and looked up at Ruslan, their bent, dirty fingers inserted in noses. The four men then stepped into a hot, dank apartment. A half-dozen Wahhabis were sitting cross-legged on a silk Persian carpet. Six funnel-shaped beards lifted toward him in concert. Ruslan, in turn, felt lost and embarrassed. Though he’d been told where they were going, the information had been swallowed by N20 confusion; it now whipped round in circles, like house shingles torn off by a force-four tornado. His ears reddened, and his breathing turned shallow, and suddenly he was straddling two places at the same time, the old men sitting before him in the filtration camp forest, their words accompanied by the shooshing of pine trees and the shuffling of animals who stayed awake in cold weather. He fought tears, and failed. They broke free one by one, till his thin face was dampened. The old men sipped tea and revealed no emotion.

“This soldier,” announced Khassan, “has suffered indignities at the hands of the infidels.” There was a consoling murmur. “Inshallah, he’ll be an aid to our cause.” This time there were head nods and murmurs and a few solemn Allahu Akbars.

“Come,” Khassan said. “Please, Ruslan, come. The women have made a bed and it is now waiting for you.”

The council returned to their meeting. Khassan led Ruslan toward the rear of the apartment. They passed a bedroom clearly in use as an office; he saw a computer and fax machine, and he heard the soft bubbling sound of an aquarium screen saver.

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