The Good Lieutenant Read Online Free PDF Page A

traffic on this familiar path seemed to have increased, the grass worn back in furrows, but the culvert was unfamiliar, and as he crossed it, he began to sweat—cold sweat, high up on his neck—and his insteps curved uneasily over the patterned metal and the guide wire burned his hand. He entered town through a field whose current tenants included a donkey who’d been chained to a steel drum and a long, low-rising esker of slurried trash that curved into a copse of thorn trees. A sign had been propped up against a mud wall that read Haircuts, kitchen utensils, sinks . It had hung over the awning of a shop in town for as long as Ayad could remember; its owner, he had heard, was now dead.
    Raheem al-Najafi was in his repair shop as usual, talking on his cell phone in the back room, his body hidden by the door frame and one of his scrawny chicken legs stretched out across the opening, the calf bare beneath his tan house shirt.
    Ayad slid the paper past the bulky parts books: Nissan, Toyota, Opel. Still talking, Raheem grabbed it, read, and nodded gravely, the solemnity that entered his brown eyes completely at odds with the salesman’s grin—tongue poked out in anticipation of a hissing laugh—which he aimed at the speaker of the cell phone, as if the person on the other end could see. Then he disappeared into the back.
    There had been a time in Ayad’s early teens when he had considered becoming an auto mechanic, going into something like an apprenticeship. This had been before his father died and before his family had frozen up around that death, a situation only worsened by the news that his mother had been awarded a pension by the state, thus eliminating any immediate need to earn money. Back in the old days, then, when his greatest concern had been himself: What would he do? How would he earn money? How would he learn a trade if he could not even go to school? At that time, his father had been in Baghdad frequently at the flat that he kept there (abandoned now, since the outbreak of the war) and his mother would drive in to see him, made up, happy to be going into the city, and Ayad—his brother away in the army, his older sisters married—had stayed for weeks at the house alone, too frightened by the city, by its traffic, by the way it emphasized his disability. So he had started walking into town and squatting at Raheem’s shop—the mechanic knew him, had fixed his father’s SLE many times before—not speaking, just watching. An undeclared apprenticeship.
    It had been both a provocation and a debasement: What was he worth? Or rather, a way of saying to his father: Without you, I have no worth.
    Or maybe it had just been an attempt at truth.
    But he was not a nothing now; after his brother had valiantly failed to survive the American invasion, Ayad had become his family’s oldest living male, and thus the steward of his mother’s land, and Raheem was something other than the man who fixed his father’s SLE. If not a criminal, then, as a Shi’ite, a man known to have connections, the possessor of a new and undefined authority. The blue sedan that the intruders had been driving when they’d arrived at Ayad’s house—it had taken him some time to place it, but Ayad was fairly sure he’d seen it before, parked in Raheem’s lot out back.
    When he thought that Raheem had been on the phone long enough, he pounded on the bell that the garage owner kept hidden, out of reach, atop his desk. Raheem deliberately—Ayad was familiar with his habit—refused to even budge the sallow curve of his shin as it stuck out across the rear doorway.
    Where is this problem with the dog? Raheem’s note read when it came back.
    This dog wants your friends’ gift , he wrote. This night, every night . He drew a picture of a dog digging a hole under the moon, surrounded by stalks of wheat.
    *   *   *
    He slept in the living room of