Slim To None

Zaynab pushed the robes aside. “Good.” She withdrew a long gray skirt and flowered blouse from the armoire, then headed back to her bed to get ready.

Hannah busied herself folding the clothing on the bureau—a few pairs of thin socks and underthings, a child’s sweater and T-shirt. Yasmin came over and shyly added her folded nightgown to the pile. Hannah gave her a smile.

The girl had on a white cotton blouse and dark pleated skirt that had seen better days. The blouse was clean, but worn and patched, and a little small for her. The skirt had obviously been let down at least a couple of times, by the look of the fold lines at the hem. Even so, it ended an inch or two above her knee, shorter than girls in this part of the world normally wore. Hannah doubted it was a fashion statement. Yasmin’s outfit looked like a school uniform that had been worn long past its serviceable time, after being subjected to all the abuse that children everywhere put their clothes through.

She thought of Gabriel, her son, and the many knees he had taken out of pants, crawling around with his cars when he was little, and later, tumbling off bikes. These days, it was his skateboard that put rips in his clothing and beat down the treads in his sneakers. But Gabe never had to wear pants that had been patched or rehemmed. At eight years old, in fact, his wardrobe cost more than Hannah’s, outfitted as he always was in trendy fashions from the upscale children’s boutiques of L.A.’s Westside and the Beverly Center. Gabe couldn’t care less about style, of course, but it was important to Cal that his son be as much a credit to him as his trophy wife, so Gabe’s stepmother kept him turned out in relentlessly preppy fashion.

“Can I take my pictures?” Yasmin asked, pulling a small, leather-bound album from the bureau’s top drawer. From the way she clutched it in her thin arms, Hannah could only guess at the memories it contained.

“Absolutely,” she said. The girl looked relieved.

Zaynab finished buttoning the cuffs of her long-sleeved blouse. Then, she picked up a brush off the bureau and pulled it gently through her granddaughter’s wavy black hair. “We are lucky that Mumtaz sent for us,” she said quietly. “Yasmin hasn’t been able to go to school this past while.”

“You lost your teachers?”

“No, but when Salahuddin took charge, he banned school for girls.” She grimaced. “I’ve known him since he was a boy, you know. I knew his parents. His mother died in childbirth. The father was a brute, and Salahuddin turned out to be a lout just like the old man, drunk and stupid. Then he went to prison and found Allah, they say. Nonsense, I say. Holy warrior—feh! Then he comes back here, calls himself ‘sheikh’ and starts issuing fatwas. I’m surprised he didn’t close the school altogether, because even the littlest boys are smarter than he is.”

“Ouch, Grandmother!” Yasmin protested. “Too hard!”

“Oh, sorry, little one,” Zaynab said, setting aside the brush she’d been wielding like a rake. She kissed the top of the girl’s head. Then, she glanced back at Hannah. “Even before he outlawed school for girls, it wasn’t safe for Yasmin. People! It wasn’t enough that she’d lost her mother and father. At school, the children, even the teachers, some of them…” The old woman shook her head bitterly. “The things they said. The things they did. That’s what thirty years of Saddam has turned my countrymen into—cowering pack dogs who tremble before the leaders, then turn around and bare their fangs at the weak and defenseless. We have become a nation of cowards.”

“Are we ever coming back here?” Yasmin asked Hannah.

Hannah shrugged. “I don’t know. That will depend, I guess. I think everyone hopes things will get better here one day.”

The grandmother looked around, as if the finality of what they were about to do had suddenly hit her. “This used to be a beautiful country, you know.”

“I know,” Hannah said.

“I don’t want to die in a foreign land. I want to be here, in my home. I want to be buried near my husband and my son.” She sat down on the edge of the mattress. She looked as though she might be changing her mind.

“The future is for the children,” Hannah said quietly. “For Yasmin here, and for those two grandsons in London you’ve never seen. All we can do is what’s best for them. What’s best for Yasmin now is to get her to a place where she’ll be safe, have enough to eat, go to school and become the young woman her parents would have wanted her to be. That’s the gift you can give her. And Mumtaz, too. Your daughter must be frantic to have you and Yasmin safe with her.”

The old woman’s eyes teared up, but she nodded.

“Do you have a small bag we can put your things in?” Hannah asked.

The old woman’s forehead creased in thought, and then she turned to her granddaughter. “Your old school satchel will hold everything, I think. It’s in the other bedroom. Run and fetch it. It’s under the bed, I think. Or…no, on top of the wardrobe.”

“I’ll help you get it down, Yasmin,” Hannah said, grabbing her rifle and flashlight.

“Ready?” Ladwell asked as they emerged from the bedroom.

“Yup,” Hannah said. “Just getting a bag to put their stuff in and then we can hit the road.”

She followed Yasmin into the bedroom on the other side of the sitting area and reached up to retrieve a blue nylon backpack that was sitting on top of the armoire. The wardrobe stood opposite a double bed covered in a pink chenille bedspread. A ruffled white lampshade topped a pink-striped ginger jar lamp, while a woven jute rug just next to the bed was designed to protect bare feet from the cool, decoratively tiled floor. As in the rest of the house, the impression here was of a middle-class family fallen on hard times. And yet oddly, Hannah thought, this room looked more decorated than the one Yasmin and her grandmother had been using.

By the odd, crumpled look on the child’s face, Hannah guessed that this must have been her parents’ room. She put a hand on the girl’s shoulder. “All set?”

Yasmin pressed her lips together and nodded, starting for the other room. Hannah was right behind her, but stopped short as the beam of her flashlight fell on something behind the door. “Hold up a second, Yasmin.”

On a chair hidden by the open door sat an expensive-looking hiker’s pack with a North Face embroidered patch on the flap. A bright blue Nalgene hiker’s water bottle hung from a carabiner hooked on one of the pack’s carrying loops, and a tan, multi-pocketed jacket hung on the back of the chair. When Hannah shone her flashlight on it, she spotted an L. L. Bean label inside the collar.

She frowned. “Where did these things come from?”

The girl’s shoulders gave a hesitant shrug. “They’re not ours. We’re just…I don’t know how it got there,” she said, suddenly fearful. “We should go now?”

“Hang on.” Hannah tucked the flashlight under her left arm and patted down the jacket pockets. Encountering resistance, she fumbled until she found a hidden inside pocket which she unzipped, withdrawing the object she’d felt through the fabric. It was a blue passport with a gold eagle and the words United States of America embossed on the cover. She opened it by the light of her flashlight. The young woman’s smiling face on the inside photograph seemed vaguely familiar. When Hannah read the name of the passport holder, she understood why.

“Holy smoke.”

She hung onto the jacket and passport as she bounded out of the room.

“What the hell…?” Ladwell muttered behind her as she flew across the sitting room and into the bedroom on the other side.

“Zaynab,” Hannah said, holding up her discoveries, “how did these get here? And that pack in the other room?”

“I don’t…” The old woman hesitated, as if trying to guess what the right answer might be. It was a common response among people who lived in countries where the wrong answer could mean torture or death.

Hannah amped down her excitement. “You know Amy Fitzgerald,” she said gently, telegraphing the message that there was no wrong answer here.

The old woman nodded. “She was renting the room of my son and his wife. I didn’t like to take money, because really, she is a guest and it was good that she had come here to help the people. But Amy insisted, and it allowed me to buy better food for Yasmin and other things she needed, so in the end, I let her pay me.”

“What the hell is going on?” Ladwell asked coming in behind Hannah. “We need to go, Nicks. This is no time for a bloody gabfest.”

“I found this in the other room,” Hannah said, switching to English. She held up the L.L. Bean jacket and the passport. “You’ll never guess who they belong to. Amy Fitzgerald.”

“And who’s that when she’s at home?”

“Daughter of Patrick Fitzgerald, whose family owns half of Boston or something? Amy Fitzgerald’s a doctor. She was working in-country for the Red Cross/Red Crescent when she was kidnapped a week or two ago. I read about it on the flight over here.”

“And that is significant to me why?”

“Because she’s a hostage, and we’re here, and there’s a million-dollar reward for her return.” Before Ladwell could reply, Hannah turned back to Zaynab and asked in Arabic, “Do you know who took her?”

“Salahuddin’s men. People said there were wounded men in his compound.”

“And they’re holding her at this compound?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“Aha.” Hannah turned back to Ladwell and translated. “She says there’s a chance Amy’s at the compound of Sheikh Salahuddin, here in town.”

“I don’t give a toss if she is. It’s not my concern. We’re being paid to get this woman and her granddaughter out safely. Now, get them ready and let’s get the hell on the road.”

“We can’t just walk away and leave, now that we’ve discovered where she is.”

“Allegedly is. She could also be in Syria or upcountry or dead by now.” Ladwell passed a finger across his throat. “Beheaded like those other poor sods.”