Like its porter, the lobby of the Hotel Bristol seemed to lay claim to a history it didn’t actually possess. With its red carpets, mahogany and leather, and English gentility, it made a halfhearted attempt to mask being part of an international hotel chain.
‘By the way, Mr Shammosh, someone left a message for you,’ the porter said and slid a thick, carefully sealed envelope across the counter.
Mahmoud’s room was predictably small and sandy-colored. The décor was flat, like in a soap opera. There were no halfhearted attempts at English eccentricity here. Only hotel chain monotony and familiarity. Mahmoud opened the curtains as far as he could. The window overlooked a small, dirty atrium. A few snowflakes swirled alone out there. They seemed confused, as if they had gotten lost on their way to a sledding hill or a skating rink.
Mahmoud dropped his backpack onto the bed and sat down in the well-worn armchair by the window with the padded envelope in his hands. On one side his name was written with black marker in block letters.
With trembling fingers he tore open the glued flap. He sat with the package open in his hands for a moment while watching a few snowflakes randomly swirl outside the window. He took a deep breath and poured out the contents.
A clumsy cell phone, a charger, and a carefully folded piece of paper fell onto his lap. Mahmoud picked up the phone. It was a cheap Samsung. The kind of prepaid phone you buy for forty euros at a gas station. He put in the battery, which had been lying separately in the package, and pressed the power button. It turned on with a buzz. The contact list was empty. No messages.
After taking another deep breath Mahmoud unfolded the piece of paper. Inside of it was another paper, which fluttered down and landed on the carpet. The paper Mahmoud held in his hands contained a short, typed message in Swedish:
Mahmoud,
I have information, and I don’t know what to do with it. I need your help. I think it might have something to do with what you’re researching. We need to meet after your meeting tomorrow. Keep your phone switched on between 13:00 and 13:30 tomorrow and be ready to move out. Otherwise keep it turned off and remove the battery. I will contact you.
Determination, courage, and endurance.
Mahmoud refolded the message and glanced at the phone. ‘Ready to move out.’ ‘Determination, courage, and endurance.’ Words from another time, what seemed like another life. Someone knew things about him that he himself had almost forgotten.
Slowly, absentmindedly, he leaned forward and picked up the page that had fallen onto the floor. He unfolded it and instinctively shrank back from what he saw.
It was a fuzzy, printed photograph. Grainy and pixilated. A digital image file printed out on a common, older printer. But the scene was all too clear.
The photograph appeared to have been taken with a pocket camera or with a fairly good cell phone and took up nearly the entire A4-size page. A man was lying in the foreground, tied down on a stretcher with straps. The clothes he’d once worn were so tattered, they barely covered his body anymore. Through the rips, Mahmoud could see skin that looked soiled and raw. Down his arms, neck, and chest ran a trail of small, round burns. Cigarettes. Someone had burned him with cigarettes over and over again. But that was far from the worst.
The worst thing was his eyes. It took Mahmoud a terrified second to realize that the man’s eye sockets looked empty because they were empty. He forced himself to hold the paper closer in order to see more clearly. The hollows of those eyes were dark abysses. Their edges were caked with coagulated blood and dirt. With queasiness, it dawned on Mahmoud that the eyes must have been torn or burned away from the man’s face. It was impossible to see if he was dead or alive.
Mahmoud stared at the picture as if paralyzed until he couldn’t stand to look at it any longer, and he turned it over on his lap. It was a vision of hell. The clinical room in the merciless light of the camera flash. The stretcher with its straps. The blood.
Mahmoud had seen his share of suffering, misery, imprisonment, and even torture. A total of three months in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past three years had exposed him to more misery than most. But this… This was worse than Abu Ghraib.
‘Oh my God,’ Mahmoud whispered to himself, even if his own God was much more complicated than the exclamation might suggest.
Brussels, Belgium
She smelled his cologne—rich with tobacco and vanilla, as sweet and dense as ambition—before she felt him gently grab her right elbow. The morning meeting she was on her way to, everything, fell away, and she willingly let him lead her out of the wide hallway and into the narrow light wood-paneled passageway outside of a European Parliament committee room. Wall-to-wall carpeting dampened the din from the hallway and the press bar nearby.
‘I missed you,’ Cyril Cuvelliez said in English and pressed his lips against hers.
His American pronunciation didn’t disguise his French diphthongs. His soft, insistent lips. The natural way he helped himself to what he wanted.
‘I didn’t know you’d be here this week,’ murmured Klara with her lips against his.
She felt how her body immediately, uncontrollably, came alive.
‘I didn’t think I would be.’
He said something more, but it was drowned out by the buzz in her ears. Blood was suddenly pumping through her. The pure physical attraction. He pulled away from her and smiled.
‘As if I needed an excuse to come back to you,’ he added.
‘You could have texted me,’ Klara said. ‘But I’m glad you’re here.’
As she stretched up to his lips again, she closed her eyes, determined to ignore how simplistic and seductive what he said was. Meanwhile her fingers snapped open the only button on his charcoal gray suit jacket. She slipped her hands under it and felt his skin shiver through the thin, light blue shirt. He sighed with pleasure. How she loved that he sighed when she touched him.
‘I was a bit tied up,’ murmured Cyril. ‘But I’m here now.’
‘How long? Can we meet?’
Klara inhaled his scent. As if she could keep him captive inside of her by breathing him in.
‘Just until tomorrow. I have a dinner tonight until quite late, I’m afraid.’
She felt his breath on her cheek, his stubble, and his warm, dry hands. She was defenseless against this. Against him, against the disappointment she felt that she wasn’t able to see him more often. She nodded.
‘Not even a lunch date?’ she said, and nibbled his ear.
‘You’re terrible,’ he said. ‘In a wonderful way. How could I refuse? Today?’
Klara nodded, felt a surge of excitement.
‘I have a meeting until one. One-thirty at my place?’
Cyril fished out his phone, checked his calendar.
‘I’ll push my staff meeting forward to four. The dinner doesn’t start until eight.’
Klara stretched up and kissed him before pushing him away.
‘Now go away,’ she said. ‘I’ll see you in a few hours.’
He smiled.
‘I miss you already,’ he said.
She nodded, exhilarated, but also deflated. Like always after one of their brief encounters.
‘It’s best if you leave first so we won’t be seen coming out together.’
He nodded and kissed her again as he buttoned his jacket. He straightened his tie.
‘I’ll see you later,’ he said.
And with that, he disappeared without turning around, back out into the everyday of the European Parliament.
Klara stood there, leaning against the wall, the taste of Cyril still on her lips. She opened her eyes slowly. Her ears were still ringing. Her heart wouldn’t stop racing. She blinked a few times. Ran her hands through her hair. How had this happened?
How had Cyril managed to get through her defenses, her searchlights and alarms, her locks and her barbed wire, everything she’d put in place to protect herself from this very thing? Or not this. This, whatever it was, was wonderful, as long as she managed to ignore what would inevitably follow. The inexplicable. The emptiness. The unfathomable opposite of what had slowly started to take root inside her.
Why now? Why couldn’t she distance herself now? She looked good, she knew that. She wasn’t starved for attention, quite the opposite. The European Parliament was full of young, intelligent men, a majority of whom she suspected she’d be able to enchant without much trouble. At least for a while.
And it wasn’t that she hadn’t tried. During her first six months in the European Parliament, she’d slowly come back to life. After Mahmoud. After her year in London had turned out the opposite of how she’d imagined it. The city she’d dreamed of living in since traveling there by herself the summer after high school. Dancing to soul at the 100 Club on Oxford Street. Buying 1960s dresses in Camden and scratched seven-inch singles at Spitalfields Market. The cafés on Old Compton Street just before dawn, the night buses and the awkward hookups with floppy-haired, anorexic boys in small, damp flats in Brixton and Islington.
But instead London had been a rainy, lonely prison. She could hardly remember the first few months. No details, just the purely physical sensation of spending the autumn in a miserable dorm room a few blocks from the Strand. The chill coiled its way through the thin walls and poorly insulated windows, and there wasn’t a hot water bottle in the world big enough to keep it out. She had a vague memory of the endless hours spent at the library on Portugal Street that she escaped to with her textbooks and her emptiness. It felt like an eternity of nothingness.
And worst of all was the guilt. The feeling that she had let herself down. She was exactly where she’d wanted to be, where she’d always strived to be. At a prestigious postgraduate program in a city she loved. But for the first time in her life, she had no idea where she was going.
But then Gabriella had finally come to visit her for a short weekend in December. Klara would never forget the sight of her through the frosty window of her completely empty room. How Gabriella jumped out of the cab onto the street, the early winter snow in her red hair. How she paid so nonchalantly, with the sophistication of someone who’d already started to work her way up the winding steps of a law office. How she’d looked up and through the snowflakes and caught sight of Klara in the lighted window on the third floor. How Klara, even at that distance, could see the obstinacy in her eyes, the warm and indomitable determination.
They’d circled around each other in law school. Although they were in the same year, Klara hadn’t initially been receptive to making friends at all, really. She’d met Mahmoud during her second semester, and that felt like more than she’d ever hoped for. She’d called him Moody from the first day. Because he looked moody. Temperamental. A little confused, as if he was brooding about something, like he was hiding a hot temper under that controlled surface.
Klara couldn’t remember ever having a best friend while growing up on Aspöja. When she’d finally ended up in the same group as Gabriella halfway through law school, it was a revelation almost as palpable as when she met Moody. She couldn’t comprehend that another person felt the same way she did about northern soul and vintage dresses. It had been an infatuation that Moody had made fun of. But Klara had thought it’d be good for them, good that she was looking outside of their airtight sphere.
But then, much later, in the darkest days of that dreary autumn in London, Klara sometimes thought that all of the terrible things had happened because she’d let Gabriella into her life. If she’d just stuck to Moody, if she’d just sealed the walls around them, never allowing anyone else to get close to her, maybe it would have worked out.
But that night, in the snow, when Klara saw Gabriella on the street in London, full of vigor and determination, she knew just how crazy those thoughts were. Sometimes there is no explanation. Sometimes you just die. And that bitterly cold Friday in December, Gabriella had come to save her life.
And she’d succeeded. London never became exactly what Klara dreamed about, but she got her strength back, though not her desire. She passed her exams, wrote her thesis, and sent out her job applications. When Eva-Karin Boman, a well-known, respected politician with international ambitions, said she wanted to meet Klara for an interview, even Klara’s desire returned. The unimaginable thrill of being around high-stakes politics, the important decisions, the money, the power.
The first six months with Eva-Karin had been wonderful. Klara had indulged her boss’s whims and demands. And the world seemed full of men with good shoulders, acceptable taste in music, and freshly cut hair. Guys that, just a few months ago, she wouldn’t even have noticed. It was exciting, fun, sometimes even really hot.
But what was happening with Cyril was different. Although it too had started out as a game, now she could feel herself teetering on the edge of losing control. Maybe she’d already lost it. She smoothed down her skirt and sighed. She thought of Mahmoud involuntarily. Maybe it was the e-mail he’d sent her almost two weeks ago which she still hadn’t replied to. She shook her head.
‘Moody, Moody,’ she whispered. ‘What is going on?’
Brussels, Belgium
‘Mr Shammosh? Do you have anything to add? I’m referring specifically to the last part of Professor Lefarque’s argument; that is, to the effects of the continuing persecution and radicalization of resistance fighters in Iraq and Afghanistan.’
The former ambassador, Sir Benjamin Batton, moderator extraordinaire for the International Crisis Group Conference on the role of private contractors in war zones, leaned over the table with his kind, vigilant gaze.
Mahmoud looked up from his notebook calmly. A smile played on his lips. He was in his element. He hardly remembered the almost paralyzing nervousness he had experienced earlier in the morning, when he took his seat in front of the audience of fifty or so policy makers, journalists, and assorted dignitaries.
‘Absolutely,’ he nodded. ‘I think there’s no doubt that gruesome acts like the ones we saw at Abu Ghraib, for example, lead to radicalization. To put it plainly…’