The Mammoth Book Best International Crime Read online

  I look out the window and see that it’s raining. I hadn’t noticed. I don’t know what time it is. It must be very late cuz there’s no one on the corner and I’m a little hungry. There are some burned papers on the floor. Of course, we must have smoked some pot. But I don’t remember. There’s a liter bottle with three fingers of rum left. I drink it to calm my hunger then lay back down. But beforehand, I suck Vanessa’s tits again for a little while, thinking the whole time about the mulatta’s pussy.

  Since El Kakín hasn’t shown up, we take off for the coast, where the water’s just fine. The drag here are the rocks on the bottom. One time, I almost cracked my head open. Of course, I dove in drunk. You can still see the scar:They gave me sixteen stitches, and since I was so drunk, the anesthesia didn’t take. Better to forget about all that. I drink some more rum and listen to El Cao, who just yaks on like a fucking parrot.

  “So I go up to the Yuma and say, Míster, guat yu guan? Girls, rum, tobacco, marijuana? And the guy’s a little scared. Since he was blond and pink, he got red. Nosing, nosing, he tells me, and I say, No problem, míster, yo tengo lo que yu guan. And the guy, Nosing, nosing, but by then Yovanoti was right behind him and I just landed one, and Yova got one in behind his ear, and I grabbed his backpack and kicked him in the balls so hard, I think one came out his ear . . . I swear! So we took off and when I turned around about a block later, there’s the guy still shaking on the ground, so we slowed down a little. We went through the backpack and trashed all the crap, until we found his wallet and realized the sucker was German. And you know how much money he had? Ten miserable dollars. Yovanoti had to hold me back, cuz I just wanted to go back and give him two more kicks. What the fuck is that, all the way from Germany with only ten dollars on him? That’s what we used to buy these liters . . .”

  We laugh, a lot. And we drink more rum.

  Then Yovanoti says, “Let us drink to the solidarity between the German and Cuban peoples!” And we drink some more.

  Alexis doesn’t drink this time. He says, “So you gonna get me your father’s piece?”

  “You’re still tripping on that?”

  “Are you gonna get it for me or not?”

  “Fuck, Alexis, you know he doesn’t let it out of his sight, not even when he’s taking a crap.”

  “He sleeps with it?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Then . . .”

  Alexis laughs when he sees the gun. It’s a Makarov and it’s so clean, it looks new. I hand it to him and he just stares at it. He really does like pieces like that. Not me.

  El Cao and Yovanoti also look it over. “That’s a nice one,” they say.

  Alexis takes out the clip and empties it. He puts in his own bullets, one by one.

  “Tomorrow, the whole world should pay me tribute,” he says. “There are gonna be two fewer black guys. Let’s go,” he says, and we leave.

  But first we take a couple swallows of rum. Or three.

  “I’m sure they’re there,” Alexis says, and he shows us the house. “That’s where they go to drink beer.”

  And so we wait at the corner. No one speaks. While we wait, I look at the moon. Tonight, it’s round and very bright. This corner’s shitty, I like mine better. It smells of piss here. Yovanoti is smoking cigarette after cigarette. Richard El Cao is sitting on the ground; he’s singing, softly. Alexis just stares at the house.

  “That’s where those mothafuckas are,” he finally says.

  The two black guys come out and head for the other corner. We go after them, unhurried. We turn the corner and see them make like they’re looking into this one house. They’re probably gonna pull something there. All black guys are the same. Well, almost all. My father says not all black guys are thieves but that all thieves are black. And he says black people have five senses, just like whites. Except that they have two for music and three for stealing. He should know, since he’s a cop. That’s why he laughs so hard when he tells these jokes and when he talks about the black guys they’ve arrested. When they’re in jail, he says, those black guys aren’t so tough.

  We continue along the sidewalk and when we get near the black guys, they feign indifference and light cigarettes. Even though there’s so much moonlight, they don’t seem to recognize us. As soon as we’re in front of them, we jump them and Alexis shows the piece. The black guy who held the knife sees it first. What a black rat he is. He takes off and that costs him his life: Alexis lets fly some lead and the guy falls to the ground. He starts thrashing, like a rabid dog, and Yovanoti and I kick him and yell at him, Black faggot, you got scared, huh, you black faggot. We do that until he shivers really weird and gets stiff, with his tongue hanging out. The other black guy’s just standing there, frozen, seeing how his buddy’s dead as a doornail. Alexis stands in front of him.

  “Now you’re gonna pay me my hundred pesos, aren’t you?” he says, and hits him on the nose with the piece.

  “Fuck, white boy, no need to be this way,” the guy says, and shoves his hand in his pocket.

  “Careful!” screams El Cao, and Alexis doesn’t think: He shoots him right in the head. The black guy’s head explodes and rolls back. Even I get splattered with his blood. It’s practically black, like the dog’s, although it’s got little white dots. Then the black guy falls and Alexis leans down to talk to him, though I don’t think the guy can hear him anymore.

  “See what happens to tough little black guys like you and your buddy?” He takes the guy’s hand out of his pocket. The black guy doesn’t have a gun today, just a roll of bills: more than five hundred.

  Since everybody on the block’s already looking and screaming, we start running. That’s when everything gets fucked up: Two cops appear on the corner and Alexis doesn’t even give it a thought. He never gives anything a thought. And with the aim he’s got. He shoots and downs one, and the other one flees. We run off and no one else comes after us.

  If you kill two black delinquents, you get in trouble. But if you kill a cop, then things go from bad to the very worst. We know this, which is why we all agree when El Cao speaks up.

  “Let’s steal a boat from the river and head for La Yuma, cuz this is really bad now; this is what happens when you hang out with punks like this,” he says, taking the gun from Alexis. When Alexis starts to say something, El Cao interrupts him: “Shut up or I’ll shut you up.”

  It’s been two hours now I’ve been staring at the sun. I like looking at the sun. I can look at the sun without dropping my lids, with my pupils intact, and without tears. It’s been two hours since the boat ran out of fuel and more than four that we’ve been without water. It’s been at least an hour since Alexis slipped off the side, when he went to drink some sea water and never came back. Yovanoti says a shark probably got him. Then he starts to cry and babble, “I’m glad, I’m glad,” and to spit in the water. I don’t like that. I think Alexis was my best friend.

  I’ve never worried so much about time passing. Richard El Cao says it’ll be dark in two hours, and that this is good. I don’t know if it’s so good. The best thing would be to be on the corner, listening to the bitching of the old women, singing a little, and staring at the sun. Without water, without food, without rum in the middle of the ocean, yeah, there’s nothing better . . . It stinks of vomit and shit. If an American coast guard doesn’t show up, we’re fucked. And if one does show up, we’re even more fucked. I ask myself,What the fuck am I doing on this boat? I wanna throw myself in the water like Alexis, but I control myself.

  It’s night-time and I fall asleep.

  The sun’s fucked up, intense. My head hurts a little. I’m really sleepy. It’s been awhile since Yovanoti has said anything about what he’s gonna do when he gets to La Yuma. He’s thrown up so much he doesn’t have anything left to throw up. He’s just oozing green spit. El Cao says we should think about good things, we shouldn’t think about how thirsty we are. That’s hard to do. I think about sucking Vanessa the blonde’s tits and then I think about being in
church and then about the corner. Later, still, I think about the mulatta’s pussy, the one from the movie. And, to be honest, I do feel better, I even get a hard-on.

  When El Cao speaks up again, he says, “Now it’s night-time again.”

  Yovanoti starts to cry and El Cao slaps him twice. So that he’ll calm down. Then Yovanoti throws up a little more. There’s not much moon tonight and I can’t see anything; I don’t stare at anything either.

  When I wake up, I see the sun and I see the helicopter. It doesn’t look like the Cuban police. From way up there, with a bullhorn, they shout down something in English. When I look around the boat, I see only El Cao, just lying there, fainted, I think. Yovanoti is nowhere to be seen. To think he was the one who most wanted to go live in Miami. Tough luck. I really need a chug of rum right about now. I splash some water in El Cao’s face and he wakes up, but he stays down.

  “We’re saved,” I tell him, but I’m very sleepy again. I open my eyes real wide and look up at the sun, just as if I were back on my corner, and I sing a little of that song about the bitter smell of desperation.

  Translation by Achy Obejas

  The Sword of God

  Josh Pachter

  In the neighborhood where Mahboob Chaudri grew to manhood, where his beloved wife and children still lived, in the Defense Housing Society a safe distance to the southeast of the incessant clamor of central Karachi, Westerners were an infrequent sight. Oh, dearie me, yes, occasional tourists passed through on their way to the Tuba Mosque, in horsedrawn Victorias hired for a hundred rupees a day with driver, but otherwise the pale-skinned foreigners were scarce.

  Here in Bahrain, though, Chaudri had lived among them for six years, and he had developed an amused tolerance of their curious ways. From time to time, of course, they still were able to surprise him. Take this remarkable game of theirs, this – this golf, they called it.

  There stood Senator William Adam Harding, an eminent statesman, tall and athletic and attractively graying, one of the highest-ranking members of the American government ever to visit the emirate. Chaudri could not recall which of the forty or fifty states the Senator represented, but it was one of the larger ones, that much he knew, one of the more powerful ones, one of the ones with oil and cowboys.

  It was oil that had brought the Senator to Bahrain, where he had spent most of the last three days touring the Sitrah refinery and meeting with executives of BAPCO, the Bahrain Petroleum Company.

  Yet there he stood, that distinguished gentleman, hunched over a pockmarked orange ball on a square of artificial grass in the middle of the fiery desert, waggling a long metal stick foolishly in his thick hands and fully intending to smite the little ball with the stick, to smash it away into the distance, only in order to trudge after it and place his bit of plastic sward beneath it and hit it away from him once more, again and again until at last he succeeded in tapping it into a metal cup with a flag on a pole sticking out of it, the flag now barely visible through the shimmer of heat which rose from the desert surface several hundred yards away.

  This was obviously not recreation for the body, Chaudri mused, as beads of itchy sweat trickled within the blouse of his olive-green uniform. Nor, in its pointlessness, could he conceive of it as recreation for anything but the most limited of minds.

  Why, then, did they bother with it, the Senator and his deferential young aide and the two exuberant BAPCO executives? Why were they still hard at it after well over an hour, with the thermometer reading in three figures and the merciless sun overhead and their idiotic balls already tapped into a dozen or more of their idiotic cups?

  And how much longer would they go on before returning to the bliss of an enclosed and air-conditioned space?

  And why, Chaudri marveled, why in the name of the Prophet must they attire themselves in those outrageous costumes? The Senator, whom he had previously only seen in sedate charcoal-gray suits and rich silk ties, now wore a pair of lime-green trousers, an open-necked canary-yellow shirt with a crocodile at the breast, a peaked mechanic’s cap and white shoes with leather tassels flapping at every step and – incredibly – nails extending downward from their soles!

  Chaudri shook his head sadly. He would never really understand these foreigners, never. They lived in another world; their values were hoplessly other than his own.

  Which of them was right? The thought disturbed him. In his heart, he knew that neither culture was right, neither wrong. Each was what it was, neither more nor less, and perhaps this golf seemed as normal to the Senator as it seemed normal to Mahboob Chaudri that he should live and work and be lonely in Bahrain while his dearest ones stayed behind in Pakistan and lived in vastly greater comfort off the money he was able to send them from his monthly pay packet than they could possibly have enjoyed had he chosen to remain with them and earn perhaps a tenth as much at home.

  Though these thoughts occupied his mind, Chaudri was still the first of them to notice the swirl of sand and the faint rumble of an engine in the distance.

  It was a dusty Land Rover with four-wheel drive, and as it approached them the Pakistani recognized its driver as a minor functionary at the American embassy, where he had accompanied the Senator to a brief and apparently purely ceremonial meeting with the ambassador two days earlier. Ostensibly, Chaudri had been assigned to provide the Senator with personal security for the length of his stay, but – given the general peacefulness of the emirate since Saddam Hussein’s forces had been pushed back out of Kuwait at the beginning of the 1990s – he considered himself more of a uniformed guide than a bodyguard.

  The Land Rover’s rear tires swung wildly and threw up a curtain of sand as the vehicle slewed to a stop. The gentlemen from BAPCO seemed scandalized by the interruption, the Senator’s aide continued to look as if he were waiting to be switched on, the Senator himself wore suit-and-tie solemnity over his ridiculous golfing garb.

  “Sorry, sir,” the boy from the embassy blurted, jumping from the hot Land Rover to fumble in his pockets before them. “The ambassador thought you’d want to know. The Suq-al-Khamis Mosque, sir, and four Americans. They’re going crazy back there!”

  The Senator stepped forward and put out a soothing hand. “Slow down, there, son,” he said, his deep voice a velvet command. “What’s this about four Americans?”

  “Hostages!” the young man gasped. “Some group of terrorists has moved into the Suq-al-Khamis Mosque, and they’re holding four Americans hostage, a doctor and three nurses from the American Mission Hospital.” He pulled at last a sheet of yellow flimsy from a pocket and unfolded it triumphantly.“They sent this message to Radio Bahrain and both of the national newspapers.”

  The Land Rover’s engine ticked its disapproval and settled into silence. For a long moment, the only sound was the whisper of the heat. Then Senator Harding snatched the slip of paper and his aide handed him a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles. He hooked them over his ears and read the note aloud in the stillness of the desert afternoon.

  “The decadent era of Western dominance is at an end,” it said. “The Great Satan will be driven far beyond Bahrain’s borders. We will re-establish a true Islamic society and return the land to its former glory as the fourteenth province of Iran. It is written in the Book of Books: “As for the unbelievers, their works are as a mirage in a spacious plain which the man athirst supposes to be water, till, when he comes to it, he finds it is nothing; there indeed he finds God, and He pays him his account in full; and God is swift at the reckoning. Saifoullah.”

  The Senator looked up. “The Great Satan,” he scowled. “That’s supposed to mean the US of A, I reckon. But who the hell’s this Saifoullah character? One of them damn ayatullahs, is that the idea?”

  “Saifoullah is a what, sir,” said Mahboob Chaudri, “not a who. I have heard of them before. They have been writing inflammatory letters to the Arabic media, but this is to my knowledge the first time they have been committing an act of political aggression. We are knowing very little about them,
but from their demands it would seem that they are Iranians, or at least that they are sponsored by Tehran. Bahrain, you see, was a part of the Persian Empire for almost two centuries previous to 1782, when the first of the al-Khalifas was driving the invaders back to Persia. Whatever else they may be, Saifoullah are Shi’ite fundamentalists, and if they—”

  “Whatever the hell else they may be,” the Senator snarled, “Saifoullah are a pack of kidnappin’ terrorist dogs, and if they think they can get away with holdin’ four Americans hostage they damn well better think again.”

  “Saifoullah.”The younger of the gentlemen from BAPCO said the word slowly, tasting it. “You know what it means, officer? I’ve only been here four months; my Arabic doesn’t go much beyond please and thank you.”

  Mahboob Chaudri nodded. His nut-brown face was drawn with lines of concern. “Saifoullah is meaning ‘the Sword of God,’ ” he said.

  The American Embassy in Manama was not sequestered behind concrete bunkers and grim Marines – not yet – but the windowless walls of Ambassador Paul Northfield’s private office were three feet thick and made of steel; his door was as strong as that of any bank vault and opened only to those few high-ranking members of his staff who were privileged to know the combination to its sophisticated electronic locking mechanism.