Brotherhood and Others Read online

  Robin shut the door, slumped to his side on the carpet, and wondered if he had a thieving heart after all. But that doubt lasted less than ten seconds. He heard a car honk and sat up. He was in an anteroom that opened into a softly lit master bedroom, a large, airy space dominated by a four-poster king-size bed.

  Claudio said the diamond bracelet was in a box in a drawer in the woman’s dressing room. It was an odd place for it to be kept, but the maid had told Claudio the woman wore it so often she rarely put it in the safe, which was supposedly behind a painting somewhere in the master bedroom.

  Robin heard the car honk again. He crossed to a window. Below him, a red sports car idled in the circular driveway. Beyond, he could see a steel gate closing. A boy several years older than he, but dressed in much the same way as Robin—white shirt, dark pants—was holding the car door open and saying something to the fat silver-haired man trying to extricate himself from the bucket seat.

  Robin left the window and found the dressing room between one of two walk-in closets and a luxurious master bath. An ornate dressing table with a lighted oval mirror was pushed against the wall beside a hamper and clothes butler. He started going through the drawers, looking for the bracelet.

  The top center drawer held brushes, combs, pins, barrettes, and, in a corner, a small, plain key on a sterling silver chain. But no bracelet. The side drawers contained makeup, nail polish, scissors, and the like. The bottom right drawer featured hair rollers and a bag of cotton. The bottom left a hair dryer.

  But no bracelet.

  He double-checked to be sure. The woman was either wearing it or she’d returned it to the safe. In any case, Robin couldn’t be faulted for not coming out with the bracelet. He couldn’t steal what he couldn’t find, now could he?

  That left the painting. Where would they put something like that, a painting that had been in a book? He imagined it was valuable, and his mother had taught him that rich people like to show off their expensive things.

  “They’re like birds,” Francesca had once told him. “They like flashy things, and they like to show off in gaudy colors.”

  So where do you show off a painting from a book?

  He figured downstairs, probably as the centerpiece of a large room, probably fitted with an elaborate alarm system. How could Claudio expect him to get at something like that? A fourteen-year-old boy might get away with walking through the house in an official uniform, but he’d never get the chance to disarm a security system.

  Robin endured a moment of confusion and then decided the heck with it. It was enough that he’d gotten in, reached the dressing room, and searched for the bracelet where the maid had said it would be. If he could get out now, clean, it would be enough. Wouldn’t it?

  Yes, he decided. It would be enough to earn the tattoo. How many of the other Brothers had made a jump from a tree like that? None. He was sure of that. And Claudio had witnessed the leap. He was sure of that as well.

  Now all he had to do was get out of the house and the grounds without being stopped, or better, noticed. He left the dressing room thinking that his best chance was not to sneak out, but to just walk straight out the front door, act as if he did work there, convince the kid parking the cars to open the front gate, and he would be gone.

  Robin returned to the master bedroom, gave it all a quick glance before stopping short. Hanging on the wall directly facing the bed was the painting Claudio had told him to steal.

  * * *

  “Where are you, Kitty Vicious?” the man called in a hoarse slur. “Come out! Come get your lamby!”

  The lion turned its head toward the voice, panting, drooling.

  Then Monarch heard a squeal of fright, followed by a thump. The lamb began screeching in pain. The lion leapt away, became a bounding shadow until the trembling light found it biting into the lamb at back of its neck and shaking the poor beast until it hung limp and bleeding from his mouth.

  “Good Kitty Vicious,” the man purred. “Daddy’s best Kitty Vicious.”

  Monarch leaned slightly away from the wall and peered back up and along the fence until he found the source of the beam and saw the man holding the torch. Uday Hussein was weaving on his feet, light in one hand, a fresh bottle of whiskey in the other, a leer smeared across his face as he watched the lion tear into the lamb.

  Monarch pressed back into the shadows, hearing Saddam’s eldest son’s voice change, become almost melancholy. “Kitty will stay with Daddy, won’t she?” he asked before his tone turned bewildered. “Or will you be like all the other pussies? Bitches … cunts … that’s all they…”

  The light fell with a clatter and bounced off the bottom of the pit, but did not die. The beam cut away from Monarch, away from the lion, shone tight on the wall. Not far away, the antiaircraft guns opened up again, and bombs began to explode once more. The sky flashed with reddish light and Monarch plastered himself against the wall for fear that Uday would spot him.

  But then he heard wood—a cane? a staff?—strike above him followed by that shuffle, strike, shuffle, and then the sound of a man choking against tears.

  Twenty seconds later, he heard a gate clang shut, and the dictator’s son scream, “Why?”

  In the glow of the flashlight Uday had dropped, Monarch saw the lion still busily feeding. He went straight across the pit and found the door in the wall. Maglite in his teeth, he quickly picked the lock, levered the door open, and exited into a short tunnel that climbed and exited behind the pit and the fence.

  He checked his watch. Thirty-four minutes until the bombs came to lay waste to the palace. He scanned the compound, seeing a second, smaller residence by the main one. The windows were dark. He was about to circle toward the big palace when a light went on in a window on the first floor of the smaller residence. He thought he saw Uday walking around inside.

  Better yet, Monarch thought, and began to jog in a loop around the lion pit, alert for any movement. But there was none, and it was becoming apparent to him that the dictator’s son had been abandoned by his guards.

  Uday Hussein was alone here, drunk out of his mind, clinging to the last vestiges of his power and grandeur.

  Better yet, Monarch thought again.

  * * *

  Robin’s heart began to pound. That had to be the painting there locked inside a glass case hanging on the wall. He walked closer and saw, exactly as Claudio had said, that it was signed in the lower left-hand corner, “Xul Solar.” The painting depicted in gaudy watercolors the shapes of a distorted city, with orange and red buildings that curved and bulged as if seen reflected in a curved mirror.

  The teen got close and studied the glass box that held the painting from several angles, could see the clear material was thicker than glass, stronger too, probably bulletproof, and it seemed connected to a steel frame of some kind set in the wall. But Robin couldn’t see any wires. Then again, maybe the wires were behind the painting where he couldn’t see them. He fretted a moment, then reached out, touched the box. He tried to move it left, right, up and down, but it didn’t budge. It was locked to that frame in a way he couldn’t figure out.

  Robin tugged on the box. He felt resistance, and then to his surprise the entire box and painting swung out toward him on two thick extending steel hydraulic arms a full eighteen inches from the wall. He looked behind it and saw a safe sitting inside the steel frame.

  He didn’t know how to crack a safe, and was about to shut it back up, when he thought to look at the rear of the bulletproof box. Ducking under one of the arms, he saw that there was a door and a lock. The lock was embedded deep inside three layers of bulletproof glass. No dial like the safe. It took a key to open the box.

  Robin blinked, thinking of that key back in the top center drawer of the dressing table. He raced back to the dressing room, found the key, and raced even faster back.

  Fitting the key in the lock, he heard muffled voices somewhere, and then the piano music starting up again. He turned the key. An audible click. His heart
jumped with joy. He glanced at his inner right forearm and let the door slide down dovetailed grooves into his hand.

  Heart still pounding wildly, he stared at the rear of the painting and the frame that held it. Bolts, screws. He’d never get the back off, and he couldn’t carry it anyway.

  Scissors. He’d cut it out. For the second time, he sprinted back to the dressing table, found the scissors, and dashed back. He lifted free the painting, turned it to face him, pressed the bottom of the frame against his hip, and stabbed the narrow blade of the scissors in the lower right corner. It punctured easily.

  He started cutting, surprised that the painting was not on canvas, but paper glued to a piece of cardboard. And this ended up in a book?

  It took Robin less than a minute to cut it free of the frame, and less than ten seconds to roll it up. He ran back to the dressing table a fourth time, got hair bands and barrettes, and made the rolled painting into a tight tubular package.

  He put the painting under his shirt and tried to pin it beneath his arm. He looked stiff, but it could work. Before he could talk himself out of it, Robin went straight to the glass box and pushed it back to hide the safe, then crossed to the suite door and twisted the knob. He peeked out, saw no one at the bottom of the stairs, and stepped out, closing the door behind him.

  Down and out, he thought, and took a step toward the stairs.

  Then he saw a woman appear below, her back to him, looking the other way. He saw what she was wearing and panicked.

  It was one of the hired help—someone who would know who was working the party. Robin no sooner had that thought than she started to turn toward him.

  * * *

  Monarch had the pistol leading when he slipped into the smaller of Uday Hussein’s palaces through the front door, finding himself in a brilliantly lit foyer with a rose marble floor, elevator, and lurid red wallpaper. The nearest door, the one on the left, the one that led toward the room where Monarch figured he’d seen the dictator’s son, was open. It too glowed with light. He took a step in that direction, then heard something smash somewhere in the palace above him, followed by screaming and ranting.

  Uday was losing it big time.

  Monarch ran across the foyer past the elevator and a white grand piano that looked as if it were on loan from Liberace and started up the curving staircase. Everything about the place was garish: the chandeliers, the shag rugs at the top of the stairs, the gold-flake fixtures, as if it had been designed and decorated in homage to a whorehouse, or some demented caricature of one.

  When he reached the landing, Monarch heard another item smash, large, like a lamp or a vase, down the hallway, past several closed doors.

  “I have the power to destroy you!” Uday shrieked. “The power!”

  A girl began to weep and beg for mercy.

  Monarch went straight at him then. He eased around the corner and found himself in the bedroom of a decadent sultan. There was a tufted green-and-gold silk ceiling. Matching drapes framed huge gilt mirrors. There were snapshots pinned all over the drapes, every one of them a picture of a naked woman, many of them shot with a Polaroid.

  Wearing pajamas and a robe, surrounded by the pornography of his life and the shards of a drunken tantrum, Uday had a large ceramic vase raised overhead and looked poised to hurl it not at the naked young girl cringing and weeping on one of the couches, but at the last of the intact mirrors.

  “I have it,” Uday drunkenly promised his mirror image. Then he raged, “The power over life and death!”

  Then his head jerked and Monarch realized the dictator’s son had spotted him in the mirror. Uday dropped the vase, shattering it, and pivoted, wild-eyed, homicidal. Until he saw the gun, and the uniform Monarch was wearing.

  “Did you come to protect me?” Uday asked, the rage fleeing before fear. He stopped in his tracks and began to weave. He turned away, went to a bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue Label, and chugged on it, one eye on Monarch, who stepped closer, trying to figure out how best to handle the situation.

  He had a good idea why Saddam’s oldest son had just asked if he’d come to protect him. Monarch was wearing a uniform that identified him not only as a member of the Republican Guard, Iraq’s elite fighting force, but also a member of Uday’s father’s palace guard, the most loyal of his troops.

  When the dictator’s son lowered the bottle, Monarch half lowered his gun.

  “Your father sent me,” he said in flawless Arabic. “He needs you to give me something.”

  Uday’s eyes screwed up in anger. “My father?” he asked. “That fucking cocksucker? Disowning bastard fuck of his crippled son.”

  Monarch understood some of that as well. Eight years before, when Uday was primed to be his father’s successor, there was an unsuccessful assassination attempt on him. Uday took multiple rounds and lived. But the attack caused brain damage and left him with a deformed right leg. Soon after the shooting, Saddam began favoring Uday’s younger brother, Qusay, as his political heir.

  Uday sneered at Monarch. “Why doesn’t my father come see me himself?”

  The dictator’s son stumbled and weaved again, looking at the girl now. Uday began to fumble with the drawstrings of the pajama bottoms he wore, as if Monarch were not even there.

  “Your excellency!” Monarch shouted. “Your life depends on getting me what your father wants. Now.”

  The dictator’s son frowned, looked back at Monarch, and asked caustically, “What does my dear disowning bastard fuck father want for my life?”

  Monarch said, “The three other copies have been destroyed in the bombing. He needs your copy. Now.”

  For a beat, Monarch thought Uday was going to argue further, but then he appeared won over. “It’s in my computer in the other house.” He glanced at the girl, looked back at Monarch, and added, “Shoot the bitch. Then we go.”

  * * *

  Robin vaulted away down the hall, back toward that narrower staircase that led to the third floor of the mansion.

  “Alejandro?” the maid hissed after him. “What are you doing? You crazy?”

  He heard the woman pounding up the stairs just as he ducked into the narrow staircase and sprinted toward the top. He reached the landing, heard her calling in that hiss, “Alejandro!”

  She was coming all the way. There were only two bedrooms, the bathroom, and the closet. He couldn’t jump from the window. It was thirty feet. She was going to find him. And the police would be summoned. And the police would question him and then talk. And soon the men who’d killed his parents would come for him and …

  The dormer.

  Robin raced to the closet. The maid stormed up the narrow stairs behind him, hissing, “Alejandro?”

  He dropped the painting out the window, heard it slap the grass below as he climbed out backward, reached up, and grabbed at the drip edge of the dormer at the same time he heard the maid call, “Alejandro, she will fire you!”

  * * *

  “Shoot the cunt,” Uday ordered, looking excited at the prospect of watching the poor naked wretch of a girl endure further suffering, as if she were nothing more than meat for the lion’s bottomless appetite.

  Monarch couldn’t take it anymore. Though he might have been able to carry on the charade of being a palace guard on a mission from Saddam, he just couldn’t stomach the dictator’s son any longer.

  He swung the pistol, took a step forward, jammed the muzzle of it between Uday’s eyes, and said in English, “I’d rather blow your head off, you depraved excuse for a lunatic.”

  Uday’s suddenly terrified eyes looked at Monarch right down the gun barrel. “I have the pow—” he began in Arabic.

  “No, Uday,” Monarch replied. “You don’t.”

  Monarch grabbed the dictator’s son and slammed him up against one of the drapes, grinding Uday’s nose against the snapshots of the naked women he had defiled in the room. “You don’t have anything anymore,” Monarch growled in his ear in Arabic, the gun against the back of his head now. �
��You have nothing but me. I am your lord and master, the only thing separating you from death. Do you understand?”

  Bombs fell so close to the compound, the place shook and dust fell.

  “Do you?” Monarch shouted as he slipped zip ties around the wrists of Saddam’s eldest son.

  Uday whimpered, nodded, and said, “Allah, have mercy on a true believer.”

  “A true believer?” Monarch snorted. “If I were you, I wouldn’t be counting on virgins waiting for you at the gates of paradise. More like guys with knives, fired up for a castration.”

  “Let me go,” Uday pleaded. “I’ll pay you. Anything you want. A fortune is yours for the asking, my friend.”

  Monarch thought about that, then said, “Deal. Your life for the battle plan.”

  “The battle … of course,” the dictator’s son said. “Yes. That’s all?”

  “We’ll see,” Monarch said.

  Then he looked at the girl. “Get dressed. Get out of here. Now.”

  The traumatized girl went for a robe. Monarch hauled Uday out into the hall. “My leg,” he complained. “I must have my cane.”

  Monarch wanted to hurl him down the marble staircase, but held him by the collar of his robe and dragged him to the bottom and out through the front door into the night. The bombs fell stunningly close—just outside the greater palace compound now, no more than seven, eight hundred yards away.

  Uday was crying, “We’ve got to get out of here.”

  “Not without that final battle plan,” Monarch said. “Where is it?”

  “In my office upstairs,” Uday said, pointing at the big palace. “The computer, it is—”

  The bomb went off just outside Uday’s compound with a flash that blinded Monarch, threw him off balance, and made him release his hold. He ducked, arm raised overhead to ward off debris, then realized that Uday was trying to flee. Monarch sprinted after him, hit him across the center of his back, forced him to his knees, and then jerked the now sniveling dictator’s son to his feet.

  “I told you I am your lord and master, Uday,” Monarch yelled, stuffing the barrel of the pistol into the man’s mouth. “Get me that plan or you will die and face the cosmic castrators right now.”