Precast concrete arches leaned against the side of the neighboring commercial building, but the stones of the square pillars were being fitted on-site from the pile of rough limestone ashlars delivered from the quarry. Two stonecutters and the half dozen short-haired boys kibitzing sat in a waste of rock-chips and yellow dust from the stone.
The older of the stonecutters stood straddling the column which he was forming into a hexagonal pilaster. His partner wore a cloth cap like Kelly’s, a tan sweater pulled over a dark blue shirt, and baggy black trousers almost hidden by rock dust and the one-by-one-by-two-foot stone prism behind which he squatted with an adze. He was in his late thirties, clearly the elder Ayyubi brother, for his broad, dark face was a near double of that Kelly had last seen videotaped on a rainswept street in Diyarbakir.
Ahmed Ayyubi glanced up at the man approaching and struck the stone again with a blow deceptively light. Rock exploded, and the adze stopped half an inch beyond the point of impact.
“You,” said Ahmed Ayyubi as he rose. The arm holding the adze fell to his side, but the tendons of the hand on the haft stood out with the fierceness of the Kurd’s grip.
“We need to talk, Ahmed,” Kelly said as he walked closer. He was trying to appear calm, but he stumbled on the rock chips – some of them the size of a clenched fist – covering the ground. Danger had made a tunnel of his viewpoint, and the peripheral vision that guides the feet had vanished under stress. The boys continued to chatter for a moment, but the other stonecutter paused with his own tool resting on the work face.
“Get out of here,” Ayyubi said in Kurdish, and in a voice so guttural that Kelly could not have understood the words had they not been the ones he expected.
One more step put the American agent as close to the workpiece as Ayyubi was, well within reach of the adze. “We need to talk,” Kelly said. Tiny bits of stone floated in the sweat that sprang out suddenly from Ayyubi’s brow. “Otherwise Mohammed’s killing will be unavenged.”
“You’re responsible for his death, you know,” the Kurd snarled.
Kelly reached out and touched the back of the stonecutter’s right hand while he held eye contact. “Whatever responsibility I have for Mohammed’s death, I will wash away in the blood of his killers. But you must help me find them.”
And only when he felt Ayyubi’s hand relax on the adze helve did Kelly realize that he had succeeded.
The stonecutter grimaced and set his tool on the work-piece. “Come,” he said, gesturing beyond a pile of finished blocks toward the street. A couple of the boys jumped up to follow. “You go away!” Ayyubi said. “This is man’s business.” Though there was love in his gruffness, the hand he batted at the nearest lad would have flung the boy across the rubble if the blow had landed.
Traffic noise on Maskular and the adjoining streets was a white ambiance that may have been what Ayyubi was seeking. More probably the Kurd had needed time and the movement to clear his thoughts of limestone and his sudden fury at seeing Kelly again.
“I don’t know what Mohammed was doing,” Ayyubi said abruptly. Standing, he was three inches shorter than Kelly, but his neck and shoulders made even the stocky American look slight by contrast. “I wanted him to get into decent work, come in with me and Gulersoy” – his calloused thumb indicated the older stonecutter – “but he’d gotten the taste for being a hero, for getting rich without working. You did that to him.”
“Yes, easy money,” Kelly murmured. His right hand caressed the jacket over his left elbow. There was a four-inch scar there, where the skin had been laid open by the same bomb blast which had knocked him silly. Mohammed Ayyubi had carried him to safety a hundred and fifty feet up the sides of a ravine that a goat would have thought was sheer.
But soldier ants probably can’t explain what they do to the workers in the colony, either. It was that sort of world, is all.