Damascus Station Read online

  “What happened?”

  “I lost. I remember doing the math: three years’ salary at the mill evaporated. As I’m shuffling out, the host, this guy named Max, tells me to stop. I turn around and he asks why I play. And I shrug and say: To win. I’m sure I gave him some punk attitude. I asked him why he cared. He said he didn’t. But he knew I was either lying or mistaken. He’d seen it during the game, in my eyes. Just winning won’t be enough for you, Sam. You need more.”

  “What did he mean?” Mariam asked.

  “We walk to a window. He had a place in the Bellagio, a big casino on the Strip. He said I could have it all. I could earn back the money in a couple months, drive the Aston Martin, get the place in L.A., Tahoe, wherever. He told me he’d wrestled with it. Vegas had carved him up, left him hollow. He asked if I wanted to make a contribution. I had no idea what he was talking about. But I said yes. Something resonated with me. This emptiness I’d felt in Minnesota and now in Vegas, like I was adrift from anything that really mattered.”

  “That, or the fact you had just lost over one hundred thousand dollars,” Mariam said with a smile.

  Sam laughed. “There was that, too. But in either case, this guy, it turns out, helped find people for the State Department. And here I am.”

  “Very unconventional,” she said, as if she knew some of the facts were false. Sam finished his wine. She leaned closer. “Thank you for telling me,” she said.

  She ordered another bottle and Sam said he’d just told her about the craziest thing he’d ever done. “What’s your thing?”

  “Aren’t you going to ask me about Syria, about the discussions with the opposition?” she said with a laugh. “Don’t you have reports to write for Washington?”

  “My question is more interesting,” he said.

  Her face darkened as she took a generous sip of wine. “Fine. Once, I went to a protest.”

  “I knew you were a rebel.” Sam was joking but noticed now her fingers fidgeting on the table around the base of her wineglass. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to trivialize it. We can talk about something else.”

  She considered this for a moment and took another sip of wine. “No, it’s all right. It’s just that I haven’t told anyone about it.”

  And there it was, a secret. His mind photographed the moment, as it had for every asset he’d recruited. Once a developmental offers a secret about themselves, he knew, they eventually provide one belonging to their government.

  “What happened?” Sam pressed gently.

  “I have a lovely, impetuous cousin named Razan,” Mariam said. “We are almost the same age. We are like sisters. Razan had a friend in one of the opposition’s coordinating committees, the tansiqiyas, in Damascus. They organized protests. The Haddads are a big, well-known Damascene Christian family. And Christians have largely sat on the sidelines of the uprising, hoping it will end. The protest organizers said it would be helpful if Razan attended. It would demonstrate Christian solidarity with the opposition. Razan told me about it, that’s how close we are. Even though I work in the Palace, she told me.”

  “And you followed her there?”

  Mariam nodded, calculating her words, still keeping a wall up with this American. “I did.”

  Mariam finished her wine, refilled her glass, looked him directly in the eye to deliver a message. “I went to keep her safe, not because I supported it.”

  “Okay,” he said quietly.

  Mariam reviewed his face as if confirming the message had been received. Sam examined the eyes, the body language, those hips shifting in the chair. He could intuit the tension but wanted her to offer it first. He stayed silent, creating space.

  “They gave Razan a megaphone. She made unfortunate public statements criticizing the President. I watched from outside the crowd like a spectator.”

  “What did the mukhabarat do?”

  “They stopped her, of course. Someone swung a club into her right eye. They dragged her away, beat her, arrested her. She stayed in prison for a few days. My father secured her release. She was lucky. But she still can’t see from that eye.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I did nothing.”

  Sam placed his hand on the table, fingers outstretched, inviting. She put her hand on his, warm and delicate and smooth. She gave him a weak, dimpled smile, a thank-you for letting the story end there.

  Sam tried to remind himself that this was a developmental meeting, not a date, and that certain boundaries had to be respected. One of them was to avoid physical contact, he knew, looking at the hands on the table. A case officer could use physical attraction as an influencing mechanism but under no circumstances could they indulge the asset or themselves. This, he knew, was indulgence.

  “I should probably get back to the hotel,” Mariam said, withdrawing her hand.

  “How much longer are you in Paris?”

  “A few days, until the end of the week.”

  “Can I see you again?” As soon as the words came out, he wondered why he’d said it that way, like it would be a date.

  She looked like she wanted to say yes, but instead she said: “I’m not sure it’s a good idea. I will be very busy. And you are, well, American.” She looked at his hand on the table, and her eyes darted away.

  Respect the first no, he knew. The good recruits are not coerced. Let them choose.

  “I understand,” he said. He took the pen inside the leather flap holding the bill and wrote a phone number down on a napkin. “This is my number,” he said. “I’d love to continue our conversation. To see you again. I’ll be here for the rest of the week. Personal time.” He slid the paper across the table. She looked at it, debating, then slipped it into her handbag.

  The back room had emptied, the French couples long gone.

  Mariam left an imprint of red lipstick on his right cheek before she left. She tried wiping it off and held up stained fingers, toothy mischief stretching across her face. “I didn’t get all of it.”

  He laughed and pulled her in for a hug. She leaned back and took him in before saying a quick good night and disappearing into the cloudy evening.

  9

  MARIAM AWOKE THE NEXT MORNING AND THOUGHT OF his outstretched hand inviting hers onto the table. Why had she told him those things? She still could not fathom why she’d opened herself so fully to a strange diplomat. And an American, at that. She thought of the phone number written on the napkin, now folded in her wallet behind a credit card. She shuddered. She should rip it to shreds and flush the pieces down the toilet. She knew this. Still, she had not. It did not make sense, but there it was.

  She got up and worked through the Krav motions until she could no longer move. Slick with sweat, she showered, tossed on a robe, and ordered macchiato and brioche to the room. She stared into the cup and her brain began posing the simple questions, the ones that tortured. Who are you? Why are you doing this? Why have you come to Paris to threaten Fatimah Wael?

  She didn’t answer, though. Instead, she went to the closet, put on a black pencil skirt, a flowing cream blouse, black heels, and a simple string of Mikimoto pearls, a gift from her mother. She tied her hair up and applied her red lipstick in the mirror. She appraised her look: elegant, simple, the opposite of the mukhabarat knuckle-draggers who normally threatened Fatimah. I am the young face of the new Syria, Fatimah. Come join me and renounce the rebellion. Come home. Or you will be destroyed.

  Mariam went downstairs to find Bouthaina eating breakfast in the dining room off the lobby. Her security detail lounged at the table behind like jungle cats. Bouthaina had a notebook open on the table and her phone out, her fingers sending frenzied text messages. “Mariam, my dear, I won’t be able to join you this morning with Fatimah. And in fact I may need to cut my trip short. Drama in Damascus.” She sent another text message. Mariam saw a phone call from an unknown number flash on the screen.

  “Shit,” Bouthaina mumbled. “Take the meeting and we can regroup later.” Sh
e looked at another text message. “Shit.”

  AN EMBASSY DRIVER COLLECTED MARIAM from the hotel at eight. It had rained in the early morning and the Parisian streets were now slick with oily pools so the morning dog walkers wore high boots. Waiters at the passing cafés were toweling down the chairs. They drove to the embassy to retrieve Mariam’s bureaucratic weaponry: paper, files, names.

  Outside the embassy the driver cut through a gaggle of protesters. One held a sign that said Dr. Death over Assad’s picture. Mariam took a deep breath as they entered the gates. Protesters banged on the hood and windows as the car crawled along. A young Syrian man pointed at Mariam through the window. “You are the butcher’s slave,” he said. He plastered a homemade poster against the window. On it were pictures of dead bodies: some in rubble, others lined up in kaffans, the burial shrouds. The man pointed at Mariam again. She looked past him, at a picture of a dead woman who resembled someone from a night in a long-ago Syria.

  IN THEIR THIRD YEAR AT Damascus University, Mariam and Razan drank.

  They also shopped, lunched, partied, danced, dated, groomed, smoked, gossiped, consumed, ignored. Times were heady for sons and daughters of the regime. Bashar had recently ascended to the presidency following his father’s death. The papers spoke of change: after all, the old president had ruled for thirty years. Political salons opened in the homes of several geriatric oppositionists. Western politicians came to Damascus. Bashar drove them around the Old City in his Volkswagen Golf and they took photos. Bashar was young. He knew how to use computers. He had been a doctor. He had studied in London. His wife Asma, Razan liked to say, was a babe. Vogue put her on the cover (“A Rose in the Desert”).

  But inside the regime, money and power flowed to a narrow group of individuals around the new President. Cousins, trusted friends, influential families—the insiders won fortunes in oil, telecommunications, and car dealerships.

  Razan, already impetuous and rebellious and flirting with Marxism, explained to Mariam how the system worked. She lay on their dorm room floor in a white tank top and jeans taking slugs of vodka off the bottle, a cigarette-clotted ashtray next to her head. “The money and licenses and positions are controlled by Bashar and a few people around him,” she said. “Then they carve it up and give it to a second tier, who does the same for the third, and so on.” She put down the vodka bottle and dragged on her cigarette and stretched her arms along the carpet until her shirt pulled upward and her dusky midriff was bare. She’d had her belly button pierced. Complete scandal. “It cements Assad’s control over Syria. Suriya al-Assad. Assad’s Syria.” She gave a wicked grin and handed the bottle to Mariam.

  Mariam set down her drawing pad and took a swig, arching an eyebrow at her cousin. Mariam scanned the room, imagining where the mukhabarat may have installed microphones. Razan did not care. She smiled and asked Mariam: “Do you know where it all goes?”

  “Downstream,” Mariam said as she drank the cheap vodka.

  Razan opened the door to their shared closet and dangled a pair of Louboutins, instantly recognizable from their red soles. Not that Mariam had any difficulty identifying the five-inch heels. They were hers. One of several pairs that she owned. “From Assad to our closet,” Razan slurred, the vodka’s bite now settling in. “A few detours along the way, of course. Through the military and the SSRC to our fathers, then to us.” She rifled through the jewelry drawer, holding up gold pieces as she continued her monologue. Then she cupped her breasts and feathered fingers over her forehead—recently augmented and injected, respectively—and said: “Courtesy of His Excellency Bashar al-Assad” and curtseyed and laughed with a snort like Mariam’s. She lolled into the wall from the booze.

  “Habibti, we’ve got to be there in fifteen minutes,” Mariam said, looking at her watch. Politics dropped, Mariam and Razan set out to party. They put on the shoes—“Assad’s Louboutins” said an increasingly tipsy Razan—and tight little dresses and caked-on makeup, and took a cab to the Art House Restaurant, which had been rented to celebrate a friend’s birthday. As the cab flew down the streets of Damascus, Razan leaned her head onto Mariam’s shoulder.

  “What happens to us when life catches up?” Mariam asked.

  “They’re going to breed us,” Razan said.

  “I think you’re right.”

  “The only way to avoid the breeding program is to get a good job,” Razan said. “That way we have options.” She sat up and looked out the window. Mariam did the same, the city full and lustrous through the window. Damascus, oh, Damascus. Mariam loved then how it glowed in its center, like a pulsing neon heart feeding the country’s gangrenous body.

  She could almost forget the heaviness on her chest. Almost.

  Mariam remembered more vodka and dancing and kissing one of the boys from history class, but then Razan, that evil glint in her eyes, said, “Let’s take a field trip, habibti.” And her cousin—God help me, Mariam thought—somehow snatched a friend’s car and she was driving them east on the M5 out of the city toward the suburbs. Mariam thought maybe she’d blacked out, couldn’t remember much about leaving Art House. Then Razan was smoking and the windows were down. Enrique Iglesias blared from the radio while Razan drummed the wheel with her palms and danced in her seat. The freeway lights spun as Mariam fought the slide.

  After what seemed like thirty minutes—but may have been longer, Mariam was not sure—she asked Razan where in the hell they were going. “Out, habibti,” she said. “To see the sights.” Razan had sobered up a bit. The car mostly moved in a straight line, anyway. But around a place called Harasta, Mariam saw a strip of metal in the road and Razan plowed into it and they heard a dull pop. Razan started cursing, reviewing the glowing dials, putting her fingers on them like they were talismans. Razan turned off the M5. The streets were dark and Mariam could feel eyes behind shuttered windows examining the tinted BMW. They passed several mosques, an electronics store, a restaurant abandoned to stray cats. Mariam saw a woman in a niqab—unseen in central Damascus—walking behind a man and a flock of young children. Refuse piles dotted the streets. Razan dodged a garbage bag as she passed another mosque, cursing, the tire now flapping as the road shredded it to ropes. “Don’t think they’re used to seeing Christian women driving BMWs,” Razan screamed over the noise. The stress ushered Mariam from the vodka fog.

  Then the tire gave out and the rim hit the pavement. Sparks flew. Razan cursed and sputtered the car to a stop in a nameless darkened street. They found the spare beneath the trunk but neither knew how to change a tire.

  Together they reviewed the darkness—Where are the streetlights?—and the bone-deep quiet and the sewer smell wafting into the air. Mariam said: “We’re fifteen minutes from home and I’ve never felt farther.”

  “Which suburb is this?” Razan asked.

  “You drove, idiot.”

  “So?”

  “We passed Harasta, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Douma, then. It is Douma.”

  They strolled looking for help. Two half-drunk, uncovered Christian girls dressed to party. Miraculously they found an auto body shop a few blocks north. It was now past midnight. The shop was dark, but Razan knocked anyway.

  “Razan, what are you doing? It’s the middle of the night.”

  “How much money do you have?”

  “Not much.”

  “We’ll give them what we have.”

  On the third knock a man with a thick black beard and a jagged face opened the door. Seeing two strange women on his doorstep, he immediately shut it. Razan raised her fist to knock again, but Mariam caught it midair. “No,” she said. “Enough.”

  Bickering, they’d turned to leave when the door opened again. An old woman stood in the entryway. She wore the niqab. “What do you want?” she asked.

  “We broke down a few blocks that way,” Mariam said. “Flat tire.”

  The woman waited in silence as if this were a bad answer.

  “We were hoping you could call a
taxi for us or have someone look at the car,” Mariam continued.

  “You know the time?”

  “Yes. We’re sorry. We just broke down.”

  “Where were you going?”

  “For a ride,” Razan said.

  The woman stared at Razan like this answer was ridiculous. Mariam found herself agreeing. She watched this woman, nearly completely covered, and Mariam registered cosmic embarrassment for existing in this awful moment. She wanted to throw her Louboutins—Assad’s Louboutins—in one of Douma’s trash piles. The woman may have had the same thought, because she stared at Mariam’s shoes for a beat, then looked up at her face.

  “Come inside,” she said.

  She led them through a cramped hallway into a kitchen and gestured to a grimy plastic table. She left to speak with her husband. The door to a back room was ajar. Mariam could see at least eight, maybe nine children sleeping on ratty blankets spread on the floor. When the woman returned, she saw Mariam looking at the children and said: “Six are mine, the rest are my husband’s family from the east. The drought destroyed their farms and herds. They had nowhere else to go. My husband will go look at the car. Where is it?”

  “A few blocks that way,” Razan said, pointing. The old woman nodded.

  “It’s a BMW,” Mariam said, hoping the old woman would let that go.

  Again the woman nodded. Mariam thought she could see her face crease with a smile beneath the niqab, which she now removed in the presence of the two women. She had a craggy face, gray hair, and corn-kernel teeth. It was impossible to tell how old she was, but Mariam could tell from the symmetry of her face that she’d been attractive before life intervened.

  “I’m Mariam,” Mariam said. “And this is my cousin Razan.”

  “Umm Abiha,” the old woman said.

  Her husband walked through the kitchen carrying a toolbox and avoiding eye contact with them. Umm Abiha told him about the car. Razan slid the keys toward him and he picked them up from the table. As he extended his hand, Mariam saw the knife scars and burn marks covering his left arm, recounting a history with blades and fire. Many of the burns were small and circular. Razan gave a lingering stare that did not go unnoticed by Umm Abiha. After her husband left, she stood to heat a rusted teapot. As she opened a cabinet searching for the tea, Mariam’s shame flowed again as she reviewed the sparse shelves and the skittering roaches. She thought of her own mother’s pantry, always stocked with fresh bread, vegetables, and spices.