Where was aisle five? Had he come from aisle five? He did not want to go to aisle five. He was confused, his blood thwacking inside him, when the guard was on him. Standing right in front him.

“Sir, you dropped this.” The guard gave him the piece of paper with the address of the guy from Montreal. “Take it easy,” he added. “I’m needed at the front. Catch you later.”

Chapter 23

23

One of them had found the basket of potatoes. There was no moon that night, so it took the rest of them a while to reach where the scout had located it. As they got close, it was plain the colonel had a dog; it had slept through one man nosing around outside his wall but barked like one scalded at the approach of thirty. The sound was ten horns in each of their ears.

“It barks at beetles, this dog. They will not wake for this,” Antar counseled, in a whisper loud enough to be heard. But no one seemed to hear him. Several were already retreating into passageways between houses. The men’s movements brought more barking dogs from other houses. These nearby dogs barked back at the barkers until, slowly at first, kerosene lamps got lit, and then the entire neighborhood in that moon-gone night was twilight.

They heard the first gunshot, from someone—the colonel’s targeted son, another son, perhaps the colonel himself—perched on the wall. One of their own fell. Then another gun, this from another wall, aimed. Aziz and Antar, the only two of their own with guns, began shooting at the two on the walls, but the gunmen jumped down behind the wall, and all Aziz and Antar had done was lose ten precious bullets. Aziz looked for Antar’s eye, and in a glance saw Antar was afraid.

Men with knives and hoes and shovels and flashlights were coming into the alley. Their sons were coming too. Uncles and grandfathers and son-in-laws and nephews joined. Unseeing, Aziz collided into one of Antar’s men. The man ran. Behind him, Aziz saw Sellami slice through a man’s throat, and then another man came for Sellami. That man, too, was cut down and fell. In a dim blur, Sellami seemed to pirouette toward a rake. Up ahead, Riad was better at killing than these sleepy good men; Aziz saw him take one man’s hoe and crush another man’s head.