Free Ahmed's Revenge by Richard Wiley Page A

floor of our bedroom cupboard. Once inside I couldn’t see at all, but I could tell that things had been disrupted there too. I opened the door leading to our bedroom and quietly entered. Everything was completely black. Sometimes the evening sky lit this room pretty well, through the bigger window that was now on my left, but in the hours just after sunset, a time when Jules and I often went to bed, the room was usually dark. I opened the door to the main part of the house as quietly as I could, and then I waited a full minute, counting the actual seconds, before walking into the hall.
    I could see at a glance that I wasn’t alone. A man stood in the pale moonlight that pushed itself through the open front door. He was so intently watching the landscape before him that he hadn’t heard me at all. I knew where Jules kept his guns, but everything was turned over in the living room too, and, frankly, I had been so sure that I’d find the house empty, so sure that the voice we’d heard had been a recorded one, that I hadn’t thought what I would do if the opposite turned out to be true.
    I could see our kitchen and the hallway leading to our office and the small guest bedroom that we had. I could also see a soapstone vase turned over on the coffee table between the man and me. If you know soapstone, then you know that though it’s heavy, it’s more fragile than glass, and I was surprised that this one hadn’t broken when it fell over. It was a tall vase, meant for a single flower or two, and was shaped like a policeman’s billy club. I picked it up, silently inching toward the man.
    Clouds had reduced the moonlight by the time I got to him, but there was still enough of it, thank God, to save me from making a big mistake. The intruder was Detective Mubia. I recognized his posture and the altered hue of his suit even as I raised my weapon, but it took me a moment to change the course of the soapstone vase so that it came rushing past his ear rather than crashing down on the top of his head.
    â€œHoly Mother in heaven! Jesus save me now!” said the detective. He had his police revolver in his hand but he used it only to shield himself, its barrel pointing up at the ceiling. Though I had clearly frightened him, he spoke softly and was quickly calm again. “I didn’t hear you come,” he said.
    â€œWho did this?” I asked him. “Who wrecked my house?”
    The detective pointed the tip of his pistol at Jules’s tape recorder, out on the porch and facing the grounds. “It is a voice I think I know,” he said. “If we could listen to it one more time perhaps I could be sure.”
    When I told him where I’d left my dad, the detective volunteered to bring him inside. He stepped off the front porch in an unstealthy way and walked toward the workers’ dormitory. His pace was unhurried but I kept my eyes on him until he’d walked into the darkness behind the building. And just as I turned to survey the damage again, he threw the generator switch and the lights came back on. I went around quickly turning most of them off, to make me less visible and to lower the generator’s load, and while I was doing so the detective returned alone.
    â€œWould your father have walked away?” he asked. “Does he know the area well? Is there someplace else he would have gone?”
    The detective tried to speak lightly, but he wasn’t a naturally casual man. He had lifted me out of the dust and helped to give me strength with his words before, but he couldn’t do it a second time, so instead he brought my husband’s stereo speakers back inside the living room and rewound the tape. When he turned it on again, this is what we heard: “Mr Minister of Wildlife, Retired. We have been steadfast, we have kept our part of the bargain without fail. Now you must keep yours. We demand that you meet with us privately in order to give us the