LITMIR.BIZ

       2

       Acco

      It was after midnight when Rashid emerged from the tunnels under Acco. He left by way of new digs into the crusader city; they were unguarded and had opened new routes to the surface for him. One came up just outside the north walls, close enough to the sea that he had to wade the last few yards through water filthy with refuse in his wavering flashlight. He washed as soon as the water looked clean. Then he picked his way along the stone shoring intended to keep ancient Acco from washing into the Mediterranean until he passed the walls and entered the industrial zone to the north. There he climbed up into the over-lit modern night and squelched his way to a bus stop. By the time a bus came, he was nearly dry. Neither of the two passengers gave him a glance.

      He was going to the apartment of Salem’s girlfriend. He didn’t like her, but he had nowhere else to go. She would tell him what had happened. She would know where to find Salem.

      Even his feet were almost dry by the time the bus dropped him a few meters from her apartment, a heavy building with too much concrete and too little glass. From the street, he could see a paid security guard in the lobby. He had been here before, many times. Salem had virtually lived in her apartment after he met her.

      He walked around the building, hungry, thirsty, and every time he slipped his side gave a pulse of pain like a knife-jab. Yesterday, or perhaps two days ago, he had had everything a man his age could want—a job, a place to live, a wonderful friend—

      Before he could start crying again, Rashid pushed himself up the steps and into the lobby. The guard did not raise his head from his Koran, and Rashid went by. The building had elevators that actually worked. Rashid hit the up button and waited. When the doors opened, he entered, panicked briefly when he saw a man coming up from the garage with him, and then made himself press the button for sixteen. The man smiled at him and then frowned at his shoes, good American basketball shoes now caked with filth and still damp.

      “I got lost,” Rashid said.

      The words hung in the air between them. Rashid knew immediately that talking had been a mistake. The other man looked away. The elevator came to a stop on twelve and the man got out, looking at Rashid as he left and then at the digital floor display as if to check where Rashid was going.

      Rashid felt his hands begin to shake. He clenched them.

      The doors shut.

      Rashid was sure that the man intended to call the desk when he reached his apartment. If Saida refused to see him, he would be taken, perhaps handed over to the police.

      The doors opened on an empty corridor. Rashid stumbled forward, rattled and apprehensive. Saida was a hard woman, but she wasn’t bad.

      A slut, his mother said.

      He got to her door, still confused about what to say when she answered, and knocked. He should have called before he came, but he had little money, and in movies, people could be traced by their cell phones. He knocked again, put his ear to the door and knocked as loud as he dared.

      The elevator departed behind him with a loud hum and whir of hydraulics and pulleys. He listened to it as it ran all the way down to the lobby without stopping.

      He knocked again.

       She wasn’t home.

      The stairwell was locked on the ground floor, he knew. He didn’t want to face the security in the lobby by going down the stairs.

      The elevator was coming back up.

      He tried to turn the handle of her door. Locked, of course.

      He tried again, as if strength could break a lock. Suddenly, his apprehension turned to panic at the approach of the elevator and he put both hands on the knob and wrenched at it, throwing his weight against the door.

      The knob suddenly turned freely, and he stumbled through and the door slammed shut behind him. He tripped and fell sprawling with a crash as loud as the slam of the door. His flailing hands found paper, clothes, pans—

      The balcony light shone through the sliding doors at the end of a short hall. The floor of the entire apartment, bigger than the place he shared with his mother, was covered in papers and trash. Every item in every drawer, every sheet of paper, had been rifled and tossed on the linoleum.

       The lock had been forced. That’s why he had got in so easily.

      Two thoughts seemed to occur to him simultaneously: that whoever had done this might still be there, and that the lobby security might be coming up in the elevator, might enter and assume he had robbed her. The association of the two thoughts froze him on the floor.

      The elevator ran and ran, a pulse-like vibration allowing him to count the floors.

      It stopped. The doors opened. It was this floor; someone got out and walked swiftly up the hall, and then back down it. Rashid held his breath, sure, sure that it was the guard. Unable to move. With nothing between him and arrest but an unlocked door. The man moved and stopped.

      And moved.

      And stopped.

      Rashid saw the guard’s feet under the door against the light of the outside hall. In his mind, he prayed. Inshallah, Inshallah, Inshallah.

      Allah’s will was that the guard should walk on. He moved down the corridor a few more doors, stopped, and came back.

      The elevator doors opened and closed again and the car began to move.

      Rashid breathed.

      What if she was here, dead? That was a foolish thought, born of fatigue and the alien landscape in which he suddenly found himself. It was like finding himself on the set of an American horror movie.

      He couldn’t push it out of his mind. In movies, the dead person was always in the bathroom. The bathroom was the next room on the hall.

      He wished he had a weapon. He forced himself to crawl to the light-switch and threw it. All the lights came on, revealing the destruction of Saida’s effects more cruelly than the hallway lighting had done. He peered into the bathroom and saw no body. Emboldened, he moved into the kitchen, found a clean glass on a paper on the floor, and drank her expensive bottled water from the refrigerator. He drank three bottles before he was done; then he ate a sandwich that was days old but tasted wonderful.

      Saida’s absence left him with no options. No money, no place to go, no one to beg for help. But his brain began to run again, and the panic drew back to the edge of his consciousness.

      He had to get out of this building.

      He had to get money.

      He had to find Salem, although it was increasingly clear to him

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