The Bone Clocks

THE NOISE OF the explosion died away, but half a dozen car alarms blasted out various pitches and patterns. I remembered being told that running outside wasn’t clever in case gunmen were watching the site to pick off survivors and rescue workers. I just lay there shaking for a bit, I didn’t know how long, until I got up and went back down to the lobby, my boots crunching on glass. Mr. Khufaji was crouched over the body of Tariq, the armed doorman, trying to curse him back to life. Probably I was the last person Tariq ever spoke to. Big Mac and some journalists were venturing out of the bar, nervous about a follow-up raid—often Bomber Number One clears the obstacles, while Bomber Number Two goes in and finishes off the tenderized targets.

The Safir was spared a double attack, however, and time lurched by until midnight. A paramilitary unit with an English-speaking “Detective Zerjawi” arrived sooner than usual because of the foreigners involved, and a torchlit survey of the hotel forecourt was carried out, with a shell-shocked Mr. Khufaji. I didn’t go. Big Mac said several cars out front had been blown to smithereens and he’d seen a few body parts. Detective Zerjawi theorized that one of the security guys had killed the other—there was only one body—and let the car bomber through. The bomber had planned on driving through the glass porch and into the lobby to detonate the explosives there, hoping to bring down the building. This plan had been frustrated by an obstacle in the car park—“Who knows?”—causing the bomb to go off outside. God had been good to us, Detective Zerjawi explained in the bar, so now he, too, would be good to us: For only eight hundred dollars, he would spare three of his very best officers to stand guard in the shot-out lobby. Otherwise, it would be very difficult to guarantee our safety until the morning. Terrorists would know how vulnerable we were.

After organizing a whip-round, some of us headed to our laptops to write up the story, others helped Mr. Khufaji with the clean-up, and a few went to bed and slept the sleep of the lucky-to-be-alive. I was too wired for any of the above, and went up onto the roof, and put a call through to Olive in New York. Her PA took the message: The Safir in Baghdad had been hit by a car bomb, but no journalists had been killed. I also asked the PA to get the message to Holly in London. Then I just sat there, listening to the bursts of gunfire, the drone of engines and generators, shouts, barks, brakes, music, and more gunfire: a Baghdad symphony. The stars were feeble for a browned-out city and the moon looked like it had liver disease. Big Mac and Vincent Agrippa joined me to make their satphone calls. Vincent’s wasn’t working, so I lent him mine. Big Mac gave us a cigar to celebrate not being dead and Vincent produced a bottle of fine wine from God knew where. Under the influence of Cuban leaf and Loire Valley grapes, I confided how I’d have been dead if it hadn’t been for a cat. Vincent, still a good Catholic, told me the cat was an agent of God. “Dunno what the cat was,” Big Mac remarked, “but you, Brubeck, are one lucky sonofa.”

Then I texted Nasser to say I was okay.

The message failed to arrive.

I texted Aziz to tell Nasser I was okay.

That message failed to arrive, too.

I texted Big Mac to check the network was working.

It was. Then a terrible possibility hit me.

PROBABLY THE WORST hour of Holly’s and my joint parenthood is already morphing into a multiuser anecdote, sprouting apocrypha and even one or two comic interludes. I told the jubilant crowd in the lobby I’d just had the thought that maybe Aoife had gone up twoflights of stairs instead of one in search of her grandparents’ room so I’d gone to check, and found a chambermaid who’d let me into all the rooms. The third one along, my shot in the dark had hit its mark. Luckily everyone was too relieved to examine my story closely, though Austin Webber huffed and puffed about Health and Safety and how doors that locked children in were a liability. Pauline Webber declared, “Wasn’t it luckyyou thought of that? Poor Aoife could’ve been trapped for days! You don’t want to think about it!” and I agreed. Dead lucky. I didn’t say what room number I’d found Aoife in: It all sounded too X-Files, and would’ve eclipsed Sharon and Peter’s wedding. Until, that is, twenty minutes ago, when, on the balcony of the Maritime Hotel, looking down on the nighttime pier, I told Holly the full version. As usual, I couldn’t tell what she was thinking.

“I’ll take a quick shower,” she said.

Aoife is tucked up in bed with Snowy, the Arctic fox.

A fleet of well-tuned motorbikes passes below.