Honor Among Thieves Read online

  “Let me remind you, sir,” said Dollar Bill, “that Ireland is the land of Yeats, Shaw, Wilde, O’Casey and Joyce.” He raised his glass in their memory.

  “I’ve never heard of any of them. Drinking partners of yours, I suppose?” This time the young barman put his cloth down and began to pay closer attention.

  “I never had that honor,” replied Dollar Bill, “but, my friend, the fact that you have not heard of them, let alone read their works, is your loss, not mine.”

  “Are you accusing me of being ignorant?” said the intruder, placing a rough hand on Dollar Bill’s shoulder.

  Dollar Bill turned to face him, but even at that close range he couldn’t focus clearly through the haze of alcohol he had consumed during the past two weeks. He did, however, observe that, although he appeared to be part of the same alcoholic haze, the intruder was somewhat larger than he. Such a consideration had never worried Dollar Bill in the past.

  “No, sir, it was not necessary to accuse you of ignorance. For you have been condemned by your own utterances.”

  “I won’t take that from anyone, you Irish drunk,” said the intruder. Keeping his hand on Dollar Bill’s shoulder, he swung at him and landed a blow on the side of his jaw. Dollar Bill staggered back off his high stool, falling to the floor in a heap.

  The intruder waited some time for Bill to rise to his feet before he aimed a second blow to the stomach. Once again, Dollar Bill ended up on the floor.

  The young man behind the bar had already begun dialing the number his boss had instructed he should call if ever such a situation arose. He only hoped they would come quickly as he watched the Irishman somehow get back on his feet. This time it was his turn to aim a punch at the intruder’s nose, a punch which ended up flying through the air over his assailant’s right shoulder. A further blow landed on the side of Dollar Bill’s throat. Down he went a third time, which in his days as an amateur boxer would have been considered a technical knockout; but as there seemed to be no referee present to officiate, he rose once again.

  The young barman was relieved to hear a siren in the distance, and was praying they weren’t on their way to another call when suddenly four policemen came bursting through the swing doors.

  The first one caught Dollar Bill just before he hit the ground for a fourth time, while two of the others grabbed the intruder, thrust his arms behind his back and forced a pair of handcuffs on him. Both men were bundled out of the bar and thrown into the back of a waiting police van. The siren continued its piercing sound as the two drunks were driven away.

  The barman was grateful for the speed with which the San Francisco Police Department had come to his aid. It was only later that night that he remembered he hadn’t given them an address.

  As Hannah sat alone at the back of the plane bound for Amman, she began to consider the task she had set herself.

  Once the Ambassador’s party had left Paris, she had returned to the traditional role of an Arab woman. She was dressed from head to toe in a black yashmak, and apart from her eyes, her face was covered by a small mask. She spoke only when asked a question directly, and never posed a question herself. She felt her Jewish mother would not have survived such a regime for more than a few hours.

  Hannah’s one break had come when the Ambassador’s wife had inquired where she intended to stay once they had returned to Baghdad. Hannah explained that she had made no immediate plans as her mother and aunt were living in Karbala, and she could not stay with them if she hoped to keep her job with the Ambassador.

  Hannah had hardly finished the second sentence before the Ambassador’s wife insisted that she come and live with them. “Our house is far too large,” she explained, “even with a dozen servants.”

  When the plane touched down at Queen Alia Airport, Hannah looked out of the tiny window to watch a large black limousine that would have looked more in place in New York than Amman driving towards them. It drew up by the side of the aircraft and a driver in a smart blue suit and dark glasses jumped out.

  Hannah joined the Ambassador and his wife in the back of the car and they sped away from the airport in the direction of the border with Iraq.

  When the car reached the customs barrier, they were waved straight through with bows and salutes, as if the border didn’t exist. They traveled a further mile and passed a second customs post on the Iraqi side, where they were treated in much the same manner as the first, before joining the six-lane highway to Baghdad.

  On the long journey to the capital, the speedometer rarely fell below seventy miles per hour. Hannah soon became bored with the beating sun and the sight of miles and miles of flat sand that stretched to the horizon and beyond, with only the occasional cluster of palm trees to break the monotony. Her thoughts returned to Simon and what might have been…

  Hannah dozed off as the air-conditioned limousine sped quietly along the highway. Her mind drifted from Simon to her mother, to Saddam, and then back to Simon.

  She woke with a start to find they were entering the outskirts of Baghdad.

  It had been many years since Dollar Bill had seen the inside of a jail, but not so long that he had forgotten how much he detested having to associate with drug peddlers, pimps and muggers.

  Still, the last time he had been foolish enough to get himself involved in a barroom brawl, he had started it. But even then he only ended up with a fifty-dollar fine. Dollar Bill felt confident that the jails were far too overcrowded for any judge to consider the maximum thirty-day sentence for such cases.

  In fact he had tried to slip one of the policemen in the van fifty dollars. They normally happily accepted the money, opened the back door of the van and kicked you out. He couldn’t imagine what the San Francisco police were coming to. Surely with all the muggers and drug addicts around they had more important things to deal with than mid-afternoon middle-aged barroom drunks.

  As Dollar Bill began to sober up, the stench got to him, and he hoped that he’d be among the first to be put up in front of the night court. But as the hours passed, and he became more sober and the stench became greater, he began to wonder if they might end up keeping him overnight.

  “William O’Reilly,” shouted the Police Sergeant as he looked down the list of names on his clipboard.

  “That’s me,” said Bill, raising his hand.

  “Follow me, O’Reilly,” the policeman barked as the cell door clanked open and the Irishman was gripped firmly by the elbow.

  He was marched along a corridor that led into the back of a courtroom. He watched the little line of derelicts and petty criminals who were waiting for their moment in front of the judge. He didn’t notice a woman a few paces away from him, tightly gripping the rope handle of a bag.

  “Guilty. Fifty dollars.”

  “Can’t pay.”

  “Three days in jail. Next.”

  After three or four cases were dispensed with in this cursory manner within as many minutes, Dollar Bill watched the man who had shown no respect for the canon of Irish literature take his place in front of the judge.

  “Drunk and disorderly, disturbing the peace. How do you plead?”

  “Guilty, Your Honor.”

  “Any previous known record?”

  “None,” said the Sergeant.

  “Fifty dollars,” said the judge.

  It interested Dollar Bill that his adversary had no previous convictions, and also was able to pay his fine immediately.

  When it came to Dollar Bill’s own turn to plead, he couldn’t help thinking, when he looked up at the judge, that he appeared to be awfully young for the job. Perhaps he really was now an “old-timer.”

  “William O’Reilly, Your Honor,” said the Sergeant, looking down at the list of charges. “Drunk and disorderly, disturbing the peace.”

  “How do you plead?”

  “Guilty, Your Honor,” said Dollar Bill, fingering a small wad of bills in his pocket as he tried to remember the location of the nearest bar that served Guinness.