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Page 49.

He noticed that Nasr Tandileh appeared to be a man of habit. As near as Tim understood, Nasr Tandileh owned a carpet factory and some other industries in Néma. Natural sunlight poured in through high windows during the day. There were no windows on the south side, and these houses were efficiently built of thick thermal bricks and mud, so that it stayed relatively cool inside. Much of the day, Tim rested on his carpets in semidarkness; and then there were the long, black nights during which his eyes grew sensitive to see in the dark.

Most of all, Tim began to rely on his senses of smell and hearing. He knew what time of day meals were, and what was being served, by the smells of vegetables, cabbage, couscous, peppers, onions, and garlic being fried in the kitchen. The routine of the house was easy to learn and was based on the comings and goings of Nasr Tandileh first, and secondly on the living patterns of his four wives. Apparently his first wife was the kind, soft-spoken gray haired woman who came twice a day to care for Tim’s feet and to feed him. Then there were two younger ones with loud voices, who argued a lot. Those two had teenage children who also carried on. Finally there was another loud wife who sounded as though she might be Senegalese, from south of the border. That one sang when she worked alone in the kitchen, but yelled when the other wives were with her. Tim began to really appreciate the virtues of monogamy, of marrying a sweet girl next door and having a quiet home where a lamp glowed in the window, and the children were safe and asleep in their beds upstairs. Sometimes he felt God was punishing him for leaving Sally Levesque. He could close his eyes and run imaginary fingers over the soft skin of her pale, freckled legs, and smell lilac soap in her golden glowing red hair. I am such a fool, he thought, more than once.

Within Néma’s sounds and smells, Tim triangulated the layout of the house. In a way, it was like Huff Duff all over again—so that he knew there was a wall about a foot thick separating him from the garage where Nasr Tandileh kept the powerful French limousine with which he left early in the morning and returned late in the evenings. There was a chauffeur who puttered in the garage for another hour, apparently cleaning the car and sometimes having assignations with a giggling young woman (Tim suspected it might be the young Senegalese, but he couldn’t be sure; it was just another scrap of information he stored up for the future). Most importantly, he noticed that airplanes flew overhead, and he learned to triangulate their flight paths. He would walk around the room, at least the part where his chain would allow him, and he’d look up, rapt, with his arms spread and his fingers splayed like antennas, and he’d listen. He would follow, by body language, as a plane flew in or out. At times he was so light-headed that he almost felt like a plane himself, or a bird, flying in the darkness under the larger machine’s prop wash. Once, while doing this, he fell down and banged his head, but the earthen floor there was forgiving, and he awakened sometime later when the old lady came to bring food.

A few times, while the old woman was in the room and the door was open, Tim could see into the house. He saw the gloomy corridors of packed earth, the rounded ceilings, the distant kitchen with its black oven doors and hanging pots. Once, he saw two men in the hallway on prayer rug while the muezzin’s call still echoed in the air, and the direction of their obeisances told him roughly which way was east, since they always prayed facing toward Mecca. From that he put together a mental map of the city. He sensed that it was a wide-open desert space with wide roads and sparsely placed mud and brick buildings. He stood under each window at various times of day, listening to the varying gradients and types of sound, and surmised that the main sooq was about two or three blocks east. From there, he heard the braying of camels, the shouting of hawkers, and the constant hammering of metal smiths.

One day, after the woman had come to rub his ankles in soothing balm, and after she’d left, he discovered that he had lost so much weight, and the shackles were so slippery, that he was able to slide first one foot and then the other out of his shackles. Worse, he couldn’t get them back in because of the pain and swelling that followed the acrobatics of twisting his feet around.

He had no choice. He must escape that very day, his seventh or eighth, or face having a hand or foot chopped off, if not worse. Already, his captivity was making him stir crazy. He was feeling stronger, more rested, from the feeding and the inactivity. He had a fairly decent roadmap of the town in his head—and his only plan was to reach the airport. He knew that was about a mile away through twisting alleys and streets. From there, he had to hope that he could bluff his way onto a European plane, be it Allied or Axis, and make his way back to the world he had grown up in, not this primitive and alien desert existence of centuries ago. Damn you all to your slimy, hypocritical, savage mud-brick hell! Suddenly, he was tired of getting screwed with, and he determined to escape or die.

His evening meal, of couscous with rolled up flatbread and mint tea with honey and milk, came at the usual time, when the house grew still as the family ate. They were becoming more generous about feeding him, probably to have a nice fatted slave to hand over to some Western embassy in exchange for a suitcase of cash. Tim pictured how it would work. The Arabs would accept the highest bid, probably from the U.S. Consulate. They would leave a suitcase of dollars, cash, on some distant stretch of highway, where Tandileh’s gangsters could watch from the hills above to make sure there was no stakeout. Having paid, the local police would find Tim drugged and sleeping in a local hotel. There would be no paper trail. And the gangsters would be sure to follow through without cheating, because Tandileh had more gangsters, smarter and better armed, to torture them to a slow, hideous death if they tried to run off with the suitcase. Sweet plan, and Tim determined they would not have him as a person on whom to practice their plan.

The old man was home, and from a quiet niche he presided over a roomful of women and children seated at their cushions elsewhere in the house. A servant usually brought Tim’s food and tea in two tin dishes, left them near the door, and retreated locking the door behind her. She also changed the slop bucket, which sat in a corner with a battered wooden lid on it.

Tonight, Tim ate and drank like a camel storing up for a long journey. He must be full, and yet stay light on his feet. No swollen belly to make him sluggish. He must make every second count, and he had a desperate plan. The chauffeur finished cleaning the car, the giggling came and went, and the garage door rolled up and then down again as the man and woman left for parts unknown.

For days, Tim had been examining a crack in the wall. Using his spoon, he now gouged at it, loosening plaster and underlying sand. Every few minutes, he froze and listened to noises in the house. He had a carpet ready to put against the wall in case anyone came to check on him, but nobody did. So far, so good.

Within a few hours, he had managed to loosen a few bricks. There was no turning back now. Feverishly, with bloodied hands, he gouged and dug into the wall. Slowly, one by one, he dug out the long flat bricks embedded in the mortar. To his dismay, he discovered another layer of wall beyond this one, but he kept digging. He was going on blind faith, hoping his ears had told him truly what lay beyond. Sweat ran down his face, dribbling into the piled debris around his ankles. He took off his clothes so they would not become soiled with a mix of sweat and dust. He dug nude in near-total darkness. His ankles were swollen and achy, weeping blood, pus, and yellow plasma.

A moment of truth came when he had a hole about two feet in diameter. The brick second wall looked solid. He edged close on his buttocks, steadying himself by pressing work-raw hands on the floor by his sides. Slowly, with his heel, he began to push and tap at the wall. Every few minutes he’d stop and listen. His heart pounded in his ears. He pictured getting a foot or hand cut off in punishment.

There! He worked a section of brick loose.

Abruptly, a chunk of masonry and brick fell out and landed with a clatter in the dark room beyond.

Tim lay back, sobbing for breath, fighting his slamming heart while trying to listen for sounds of running feet, but nobody came.