The Exile Kiss (5 page)

The fat cop handed him the desk phone, and Papa spoke a long series of numbers into it. "Now," said Papa to the sergeant, "how much do you want?"
"A good, stiff bribe," he said. "Enough so I
feel
bribed. Not enough, you go to the cell. You could stay there forever. Who's gonna know you're here? Who's gonna pay for your freedom? Now's your best chance, my brother."
Friedlander Bey regarded the man with unconcealed disgust. "Five thousand kiam," he said.
"Lemme think, what's that in real money?" A few sec-onds passed in silence. "No, better make it ten thousand." I'm sure Papa would have paid a hundred thousand, but the cop didn't have the imagination to ask for it.
Papa waited a moment, then nodded. "Yes, ten thou-sand." He spoke into the phone again, then handed it to the sergeant.
"What?" asked al-Bishah.
"Tell the computer your account number," said Papa.
"Oh. Right." When the transaction was completed, the fat fool made another call. I couldn't hear what it was all about, but when he hung up, he said, "Fixed up some transportation for you. I don't want you here, don't want you in Najran. Can't let you go back where you come from, either, not from this shuttle field."
"All right," I said. "Where we going, then?"
Al-Bishah gave me a clear view of his stumpy, rotted teeth. "Let it be a surprise."
We had no choice. We waited in his reeking office until a call came that our transportation had arrived. The sergeant stood up from behind his desk, grabbed his rifle and slung it under his arm, and signaled us that we were to lead the way back out to the airfield. I was just glad to get out of that narrow room with him.
Outside under the clear, moonless night sky, I saw that Haj jar's suborbital shuttle had taken off. In its place was a
small supersonic chopper with military markings. The air was filled with the shriek of its jet engines, and a strong
breeze brought me the acrid fumes of fuel spilled on the concrete apron. I glanced at Papa, who gave me only the
slightest shrug. There was nothing we could do but go where the man with the rifle wanted us to go.
We had to cross about thirty yards of empty airfield to the chopper, and we weren't making any kind of resis-tance. Still, al-Bishah came up behind me and clubbed me in the back of the head with the butt of his rifle. I fell to my knees, and bright points of color swam before my eyes. My head throbbed with pain. I felt for a moment as if I were about to vomit.
I heard a drawn-out groan nearby, and when I turned my head I saw that Friedlander Bey sprawled helplessly on the ground beside me. That the fat cop had beaten Papa angered me more than that he'd slugged me. I got unsteadily to my feet and helped Papa up. His face had gone gray, and his eyes weren't focused. I hoped he hadn't suffered a concussion. Slowly I led the old man to the open hatch of the chopper.
Al-Bishah watched us climb into the transport. I didn't turn around and look at him, but over the roar of the aircraft's motors I heard him call to us. "Ever come to Najran again, you're dead."
I pointed down at him. "Enjoy it while it lasts, motherfucker," I shouted, "because it won't last long." He just grinned up at me. Then the chopper's co-pilot slammed the hatch, and I tried to make myself comfort-able beside Friedlander Bey on the hard plastic bench.
I put my hand under the
keffiya
and gingerly touched the back of my head. My fingers came away bloody. I turned to Papa and was glad to see that the color had come back into his face. "Are you all right, O Shaykh?" I asked. "I thank Allah," he said, wincing a little. We couldn't say anything more because our words were drowned out
as the chopper prepared for takeoff. I sat back and waited for whatever would happen next. I entertained myself
by entering Sergeant al-Bishah on my list, right after Lieu-tenant Hajjar.
The chopper circled around the airfield and then shot off toward its mysterious destination. We flew for a long
time without changing course in the slightest. I sat with my head in my hands, keeping time by the excruciating, rhythmic stabs in the back of my skull. Then I remem-bered that I had my rack of neural software. I joyfully pulled it out, removed my
keffiya,
and chipped in the daddy that blocked pain. Instantly, I felt a hundred per-cent better, and without the adverse effects of chemical painkillers. I couldn't leave it in for very long, though. If I did, sooner or later there'd be a heavy debt to repay to my central nervous system.
There was nothing I could do to make Papa feel bet-ter. I could only let him suffer in silence, while I pressed my face to the plastic port in the hatch. For a long time I hadn't seen any lights down there, not a city, not a village, not even a single lonely house stuck far away from civiliza-tion. I assumed we were flying over water. I found out how wrong I was when the sun began to 1 come up, ahead of us and a little to starboard. We'd been flying northeast the entire time. According to my inaccu-rate mental map, that meant that we'd been heading out over the heart of Arabia. I hadn't realized how unpopu-lated that part of the world was.
I decided to remove the pain daddy about half an hour after I chipped it in. I popped it, expecting to feel a wave of renewed agony wash over me, but I was pleasantly surprised. The throbbing had settled down to a normal, manageable headache. I replaced my
keffiya.
Then I got up from the plastic bench and made my way forward to the cockpit.
"Morning," I said to the pilot and co-pilot.
The co-pilot turned around and looked at me. He took a long look at my princely outfit, but he stifled his curios-ity. "You got to go back and sit down," he said. "Can't be bothering us while we're trying to fly this thing." I shrugged. "Seems like we could've been on autopilot the whole way. How much actual flying are you guys do-ing?"
The co-pilot didn't like that. "Go back and sit down," he said, "or I'll take you back and cuff you to the bench." "I don't mean any trouble," I said. "Nobody's told us a thing. Don't we have a right to know where we're going?" The co-pilot turned his back on me. "Look," he said, "you and the old guy murdered some poor son of a bitch. You ain't got any rights anymore."
"Terrific," I muttered. I went back to the bench. Papa looked at me, and I just shook my head. He was dishev-eled and streaked with grime, and he'd lost his
tarboosh
when al-Bishah bashed him in the back of the head. He'd regained a lot of his composure during the flight, how-ever, and he seemed to be pretty much his old self again. I had the feeling that soon we'd both need all our wits about us.
Fifteen minutes later, I felt the chopper slowing down. I looked out through the port and saw that we'd stopped moving forward, hovering now over reddish-brown sand dunes that stretched to the horizon in all di-rections. There was a long buzzing note, and then a green light went on over the hatch. Papa touched my arm and I turned to him, but I couldn't tell him what was going on.
The co-pilot unbuckled himself and eased out of his seat in the cockpit. He stepped carefully through the cargo area to our bench. "We're here," he said.
"What do you mean, 'we're here'? Nothing down there but sand. Not so much as a tree or a bush." The co-pilot wasn't concerned. "Look, all I know is we're supposed to turn you over to the Bayt Tahiti here." "What's the Bayt Tabiti?"
The co-pilot gave me a sly grin. "Tribe of Badawi," he said. "The other tribes call 'em the leopards of the des-ert." Yeah, you right, I thought. "What are these Bayt Tabiti going to do with us?"
"Well, don't expect 'em to greet you like long-lost brothers. My advice is, try to get on their good side real fast." I didn't like any of this, but what could I do about it? "So you're just going to set this chopper down and kick us out into the desert?"
The co-pilot shook his head. "Naw," he said, "we ain't gonna set it down. Chopper ain't got desert sand filters." He pulled up on a release lever and slid the hatch aside.
I looked down at the ground. "We're twenty feet in the air!" I cried.
"Not for long," said the co-pilot. He raised his foot and shoved me out. I fell to the warm sand, trying to roll as I hit. I was fortunate that I didn't break my legs. The chopper was kicking up a heavy wind, which blew the stinging sand into my face. I could barely breathe. I thought about using my
keffiya
the way it was meant to be used, to protect my nose and mouth from the artificial sandstorm. Before I could adjust it, I saw the co-pilot push Friedlander Bey from the hatch opening. I did my best to break Papa's fall, and he wasn't too badly hurt, either.

"This is murder!" I shouted up at the chopper. "We can't survive out here!"

The co-pilot spread his hands. "The Bayt Tahiti are coming. Here, this'll last you till they get here." He tossed out a pair of large canteens. Then, his duty to us at an end, he slammed the hatch shut. A moment later, the jet chopper swung up and around and headed back the way it had come.

Papa and I were alone and lost in the middle of the Arabian Desert. I picked up both canteens and shook them. They gurgled reassuringly. I wondered how many days of life they held. Then I went to Friedlander Bey. He sat in the hot morning sunlight and rubbed his shoulder. "I can walk, my nephew," he said, anticipating my con-cern.

"Guess we'll have to, O Shaykh," I said. I didn't have the faintest idea what to do next. I didn't know where we were or in which direction to start traveling.
"Let us first pray to Allah for guidance," he said. I didn't see any reason not to. Papa decided that this was definitely an emergency, so we didn't have to use our precious water to cleanse ourselves before worship. In such a situation, it's permissible to use clean sand. We had plenty of that. He removed his shoes and I took off my sandals, and we prepared ourselves for seeking the near-ness of God as prescribed by the noble Qur'an.
He took his direction from the rising sun and turned to face Mecca. I stood beside him, and we repeated the familiar poetry of prayer. When we finished, Papa recited an additional portion of the Qur'an, a verse from the sec-ond surah that includes the line "And one who attacketh you, attack him in like manner as he attacked you."
"Praise be to Allah, Lord of the Worlds," I murmured.
"God is Most Great," said Papa.
And then it was time to see if we could save our lives. "I suppose we should reason this out," I said.
"Reason does not apply in the wilderness," said Papa. "We cannot reason ourselves food or water or protection."
"We have water," I said. I handed him one of the canteens.
He opened it and swallowed a mouthful, then closed the canteen and slung it across his shoulder. "We have
some
water. It remains to be seen if we have
enough
wa-ter."
"I've heard there's water underground in even the dri-est deserts." I think I was just talking to keep his spirits up —or my own.
Papa laughed. "You remember your mother's fairy tales about the brave prince lost among the dunes, and the spring of sweet water that gushed forth from the base of the mountain of sand. It doesn't happen that way in life, my darling, and your innocent faith will not lead us from this place."
I knew he was right. I wondered if he'd had any expe-rience in desert survival as a younger man. There were entire decades of his early life that he never discussed. I decided it would be best to defer to his wisdom, in any case. I figured that if I shut up for a while, I might not die. I also might learn something. That was okay, too.
"What must we do, then, O Shaykh?" I asked.
He wiped the sweat from his forehead with his sleeve and looked around himself. "We're lost in the very southeastern portion of the Arabian Desert," he said. "The Rub al-Khali."
The Empty Quarter. That didn't sound promising at all.
"What is the nearest town?" I asked.
Papa gave me a brief smile. "There are no towns in the Rub al-Khali, not in a quarter million square miles of sand and waste. There are certainly small groups of no-mads crossing the dunes, but they travel only from well to well, searching for grazing for their camels and goats. If we hope to find a well, our luck must lead us to one of these Bedu clans."
"And if we don't?"
Papa sloshed his canteen. "There's a gallon of water for each of us. If we do no walking at all in the daylight hours, manage our drinking carefully, and cover the great-est possible distance in the cool of the night, we may live four days."
That was worse than even my most pessimistic esti-mate. I sat down heavily on the sand. I'd read about this place years ago, when I was a boy in Algiers. I thought the description must have been pure exaggeration. For one thing, it made the Rub al-Khali sound harsher than the Sahara, which was our local desert, and I couldn't believe that anyplace on Earth could be more desolate than the Sahara. Apparently, I was wrong. I also remembered what a Western traveler had once called the Rub al-Khali in his memoirs:
The Great Wrong Place.

4

According to some geographers, the Arabian Desert is an extension of the Sahara. Most of the Arabian peninsula is uninhabited waste, with the popu-lated areas situated near the Mediterranean, Red, and Arabian seas, beside the Arabian Gulf—which is our name for what others call the Persian Gulf—and in the fertile crescent of old Mesopotamia.

The Sahara is greater in area, but there is more sand in the Arabian Desert. As a boy, I carried in my mind the image of the Sahara as a burning, endless, empty sand-scape; but that is not very accurate. Most of the Sahara is made up of rocky plateaus, dry gravel plains, and ranges of windswept mountains. Expanses of sand account for only 10 percent of the desert's area. The portion of the Arabian Desert called the Rub al-Khali tops that with 30 percent. It might as well have been nothing but sand from one end to the other, as far as I was concerned. What the hell difference did it make?

I squinted my eyes nearly shut and looked up into the painfully bright sky. One of the minor advantages of being stranded in such a deadly place was that it was too deadly even for vultures. I was spared the unnerving sight of carrion birds circling patiently, waiting for me to have the courtesy to die.

I was pretty determined
not
to die. I hadn't talked it over with Friedlander Bey, but I was confident he felt the same way. We were sitting on the leeward side of a high, wind-shaped dune. I guessed that the temperature was already a hundred degrees Fahrenheit or more. The sun had climbed up the sky, but it was not yet noon—the day would get even hotter.