Honour Among Thieves

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 abayah, 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 enquired where she intended to stay once they had returned to Baghdad. Hannah explained that she had made no immediate plans as her mother and sister were living in Karbala, and she could not stay with them if she hoped to hold on to 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 travelled 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 bar-room 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 thirty-day mandatory 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 bar-room 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 holdall. '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?'