The Girl in Green

by Derek B. Miller

  ‘This trip of yours,’ Märta asks, ‘it’s going to be quick, right? Because — and I’m sorry to say it like this — but this quixotic adventure is not a high priority for me. I’m very happy to see you both and help, but I don’t want Jamal out on an unnecessary run for too long. He’s my only dedicated driver, and I can’t allocate resources because the Times wants a story and Arwood Hobbes needs to satisfy his curiosity. This is a favour for old times’ sake.’

  ‘It’s a milk run,’ Arwood says, standing up, brushing down his jeans, and slurping the last of the whiskey from his cup. ‘I’m going back to my tent,’ he says. ‘It’s been nice seeing ya, doll face.’

  ‘No one talks like that anymore, Arwood,’ she replies.

  ‘No one does a lot of great stuff anymore.’

  The door closes behind him, and Märta and Benton are alone.

  It becomes blessedly quiet. For a long moment, they sit and enjoy it.

  It is the first time they have been near each other since 1991.

  ‘You look reasonably well, considering,’ Märta says, sipping her whiskey from a plastic cup.

  ‘Considering how nervous you make me?’

  ‘I was going to say, “considering you’re over sixty now.”’

  ‘Gentle.’

  ‘Would it make you feel any better to know I’m glad to see you?’

  ‘I suspect it would.’

  ‘I am glad to see you, Thomas Benton.’

  ‘You’re looking—’

  ‘No need to say. You’ve heard about my day, and I haven’t showered yet.’

  Benton takes the cue. ‘Right,’ he says, uncrossing his legs and making ready to go. ‘I have some packing to do, and Arwood has quite a day planned for us. For some reason, he has us on a strict timeline, and I’m still behind on the details. If I didn’t say so already, thank you for letting us use the office and providing so much help. It is kind of you. You obviously don’t owe us a thing. I’d invite you for dinner when we get back if there were any place to go.’ Benton stands and brushes his jacket.

  ‘Are you still married?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Married. You still have the ring. Women usually take it off afterward, but not always men. Are you still married?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I know a good place to eat. Right now. If you’re hungry and have no other plans. And there’s a shower there.’

  ‘Oh,’ Benton says, sitting down again.

  ‘You’re shocked.’

  ‘No, no. I’m just … a little less Swedish than you are.’

  ‘Or more British, anyway.’

  ‘That, too.’

  ‘What’s her name? Your wife?’

  ‘Vanessa. As it so happens, we’re separated.’

  ‘She’s there and you’re here, that sort of thing?’

  ‘No. More officially than that.’

  ‘Here’s the thing, Thomas. I’m fifty-six years old. Erik and I split long ago. I very rarely take on new lovers, but I seldom say no to old ones. Surely that’s one of the reasons you’re here, right?’

  ‘Um—’

  Märta, for the first time, looks perplexed, which was not on Arwood’s list of facial expressions.

  ‘Or … isn’t it?’

  ‘Can I answer that later?’

  ‘Why are you separated?’

  ‘I found her sleeping with another man. Which, in a roundabout way, was probably my fault.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I think it has something to do with my personality.’

  ‘When was the last time you cheated on your wife?’

  ‘Well … as it happens, it was with you. So, twenty-two years ago.’

  ‘You haven’t been with another woman in twenty-two years, and that woman was me?’

  ‘I like to space out my infidelities.’

  ‘Thomas?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Get in the car.’

  12

  There is a private security guard posted outside the seven foot-high wall surrounding Märta’s house in Dohuk. The yellow headlights wake the guard, who had been dozing. In an effort to prove he’s been alert the whole time, he springs from his plastic chair and unlocks the padlock on the sheet-metal gate with elaborate Moorish designs across the top. Smiling, he waves them inside.

  Märta parks the Land Cruiser on a short and well-paved driveway, and they enter a two-storey house with a flat roof and barred windows that looks the same as every other such house extending from Algeria to Tehran.

  Inside, the floors are tiled and the furniture simple, aside from a bright-red Victorian wingback in the living room.

  Benton holds his duffel bag and briefcase. He feels like a schoolboy about to be seduced by a friend’s mother. He would stockpile this feeling if he could.

  ‘This isn’t so bad,’ Benton says, his voice echoing off the walls.

  ‘We’re paying three thousand dollars a month for it in a country where the average annual income is six thousand, but that’s the industry these days.’

  ‘Is it always like this?’ he asks, not knowing what else to say.

  ‘The insane prices? Yeah, pretty much.’

  ‘I meant your accommodations.’

  ‘No. It varies. In Iran, during the Bam earthquake of 2003 — you remember that? I had to stay with Médecins Sans Frontières until we were able to set up a temporary base camp of our own. That was tent and cots. Thirty thousand dead. IRSG was doing family reunification. That was especially grisly.’

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘In Dohuk? You didn’t even check the website?’

  ‘This has all come out of nowhere for me. I was watching television when Arwood called. I haven’t heard from him this whole time.’

  ‘We’re working on child protection and health. We do a little crossover work on community services. It’s a good portfolio for us, and I’m glad to be in a stable place. Except when I head to the field and visit the mobile units, like today. Then it’s worse. In Iran, everyone was dead. So much grief. Sometimes, though, you bring a child back to its family and the world glows. Without those moments, it can be too harsh. Our turnover rate is high. That’s the life, though. You following things in the region?’

  ‘I still cover international. Less fieldwork than before.’

  ‘What’s your take on what’s happening now?’

  ‘No one ever asks me.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘I think the state system is being rejected like a bad transplant. They haven’t developed an independent political philosophy to support it, and they can’t go around quoting Rousseau and Locke as convincing authorities against the Koran. So now it’s a choice between secular authoritarianism and Islam. And not the nice kind. I’m not hopeful.’

  ‘The bedroom’s upstairs on the right. The bathroom’s on the left, if you want to shower. I think I left the hot-water heater on. If the red light is glowing, you’ll have plenty. If not, you might want to use a cloth instead. It’s frigid. I’ll shower down here.’

  The red light, happily, is on, and Benton takes off his clothes carefully to avoid looking in the mirror. The hot water splays down into the peach-coloured bathtub with a water pressure that would be the envy of Kensington. A thin layer of dust forms a perimeter around the spreading water until Benton steps inside and disrupts the flow. As the water pulses down on his face and chest, Benton closes his eyes and imagines he is standing right there.

  Downstairs, Märta showers quickly and wraps herself in a terrycloth robe as though she were stepping from a Swedish or Finnish sauna. She plugs in her laptop, then her iPhone in the kitchen, and takes a long drink of water from a plastic bottle with a blue top. She runs her fingers over the countertop and sees the dust that’s collected there. She has discussed
this before with the girl. Yes, dust storms produce dust — no denying it. But the point of the young lady’s job is to come by afterward and clean it away. Even where jobs are in poor supply, there always seems to be a reason not to do them.

  Down the road, the Lebanese have set up a rather impressive supermarket, with many products flown in from the UK, the US, and Egypt. What she can’t buy there comes from the souk, which has a far better selection of fresh fruit and vegetables than Stockholm.

  The fridge is well stocked. She has a chilled Montrose rosé from Provence. It’s better than the screwtop suggests. She brings two glasses upstairs.

  Benton hasn’t yet finished with the shower as she turns down the bed and places the glasses and bottle on the nightstand. Like a college girl, she has draped a thin purple scarf over the lamp to create a warmer mood. Wiser than in her youth, she uses a low-wattage bulb to reduce the fire hazard.

  The master bedroom has glass doors that open onto the roof of the first level. Dohuk is surrounded by the Zagros Mountains. From the roof, she has an unobstructed view of the chiselled edges of the jagged hills, and can watch the snow line descend as the nights shorten.

  Like everyone else who has a rooftop in Dohuk, she has a plastic dining set so she can benefit from the breezes in summer and the warm tiles and clay on cool nights. She waits there for Benton. She imagines him drying off and sprucing himself up in her poorly lit bathroom, trying to look like James Bond. It makes her smile.

  She opens her robe to feel the breeze. No one can see her from here. She wants to feel the day slip off. She can still feel that monster’s hand in hers as they shook. He looked her in the eye. He tried smiling. It is not only the fresh air that cleanses her. If this were Sweden, if she were on a rooftop in Stockholm, she would not feel so self-conscious about being undressed. In being herself she can rebel against the noose that is slowly drawing around her.

  It’s a shame that much of what once made her Swedish is gone now. But one characteristic she has unapologetically retained is her absolute faith in the fundamental pleasure of a good drink. If she were empress of the Northern Vales, she’d instruct the sages to rewrite the calendars so that time would be measured in liquid — by ‘half a bottle ago,’ or ‘when the vintage has matured’. Poetry would soar again, and music would fill the halls. It might subvert punctuality. But what really matters — birth, love, death — doesn’t abide by the clock anyway.

  Märta pours herself a glass, and lets the wind blow her robe.

  ‘Am I intruding?’ asks Benton, stepping onto the rooftop, too, wearing flip-flops too small for his British size-9 feet. She has a few extras for guests, but the Asians don’t stock shoe sizes big enough for Western men.

  His clothes are ridiculous. His sweatshirt is from the 1980s. The stitching on the shoulders droops off the shoulders, making him look like a giant tea cozy. It is also short. The elastic waistband is comically high. It is the pallid grey of an ancient university sweatshirt abandoned for years in a drawer; it looks as though it has internalised the very darkness.

  It says, in big block letters, PREPARE TO BE FALSIFIED.

  His dark-blue sweatpants are baggy. They are cottonesque and cleanish.

  His hair, such as it is, is tussled and wavy. He may have tried using a hair dryer. Perhaps for the first time. As an act of triage, he has brushed his hair back in the hope it will make a difference. In its own way, it has.

  ‘No, not intruding,’ she says, closing her robe. ‘I was expecting you. Or something like you.’

  ‘I’m older,’ Benton says.

  ‘Your clothes, however, are timeless.’

  ‘My daughter got the jumper for me. She’s a palaeontologist now, if you can believe it. She specialises in a 300 million-year-old shell called a brachiopod. She rattles on about the wonders of phylogenetic systematics and the pleasures of cladistics. She belongs to the Willie Henning fan club.’

  ‘I don’t know what any of that means.’

  ‘It’s a method of classifying organisms in the natural sciences on the basis of shared characteristics called synapomorphies. It’s quite a new approach to the science of classification, and it’s the most accepted now, as it’s explicit in its hypothesising, and it’s empirical in its methods. Which, given the state of knowledge today, you’d think would disqualify it. Charlotte was studying earth sciences at uni, and was attracted to this as if it were a church.’

  ‘It sounds complicated.’

  ‘The science is, but the logic is admirably simple. Charlotte says that one of the most satisfying parts of her job is knowing for a fact that she is building and contributing to the fundamental wealth of human knowledge. I, on the other hand, am absolutely confident that I am not.’

  ‘You’re envious.’

  ‘Envious, yes. Jealous, no. She’s earned her peace of mind.’

  ‘It’s a cute jumper, all the same,’ Märta says.

  ‘I’m told,’ Benton says, looking down to his top, ‘that it is very funny if you’re a scientist.’

  ‘You mean on account of what it says?’

  ‘Ouch.’

  ‘There’s a glass and bottle just inside near the bed. Bring them out, will you?’

  Benton does as he’s told. There is a small box on the rooftop, and Märta opens it and then hands Benton a pristine terrycloth and motions that he should clean off the lawn chair before sitting on it. He does this and then takes a seat, folding the cloth and placing it beside himself on the next chair. Märta does the same. He pours himself a glass and tops up hers.

  ‘Skål,’ she says.

  ‘Skål,’ he replies.

  After a sip, he stretches out his legs and takes a deep breath.

  ‘Dohuk isn’t a bad duty station,’ she says. ‘The shopping is adequate, they’re tolerant of foreigners. Violent crime is low. It’s more of a wrong-place, wrong-time problem. Unless, of course, you’ve come here looking for trouble. Have you?’

  She leaves the notion hanging for a moment. Benton’s countenance is hard to read.

  ‘I found you,’ he says, spinning the glass by its stem.

  ‘What are you doing here, honestly? Did you even know I was here? I was sure you did until I saw those clothes.’

  ‘I didn’t, if you can believe it. Arwood knew you were here, but he didn’t tell me. I really am here about that girl in the video and because of how strongly Arwood feels about it. Which doesn’t mean I’m not very happy to see you. It’s comforting to know that people from your past are still out there. Still here on the planet with you. Part of getting older, I guess. We’re only missing Herb Reston now, and that Frenchman. I forget what everyone called him — something from Winnie-the-Pooh.’

  ‘Tigger.’

  ‘That was it.’

  ‘They’re here, too.’

  ‘Of course they are.’

  ‘No, really, they are.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘It’s not as though they were wandering down the street and I bumped into them. I hired them and brought them here. I hired Tigger first — ages ago. I was at UNHCR when we all met. I worked next for the Red Cross. I asked Tigger to come with me to the IRSG when I took a management position. The support group said I could pick my senior team. Tigger was in French intelligence, got out, did some political analysis as a policy wonk for a while, then wanted to get back into fieldwork. Like me, he found the development people too ideological, and so came over to humanitarian field operations, which is more pragmatic. Tigger and Herb eventually became good friends. I think of them heckling the world stage like those Muppets in the box seats. What were they called?’

  ‘Statler and Waldorf. How are they?’ Benton asks.

  ‘Grown up. Both are married. Both have children. Now we’re back in Iraq, after the Americans and everyone else has left. They’re four weeks on, two weeks off, for six mo
nths, and then they return home with a healthy pay packet.’

  ‘How long have you been here?’ Benton asks.

  ‘Thomas,’ Märta says, ignoring his question, ‘if you’re wearing those clothes, then you really didn’t fly here to see me. In which case, what are you doing? You really need to tell me. It can’t be for this story you’re talking about. This mortar attack. It’s a fly in the ointment around here. There’s no way the Times would follow up one crime in ten thousand.’

  ‘Do you remember,’ he says, ‘when we met in that tent in the mountains—’

  ‘Wonderland.’

  ‘Yes. I told you that something happened in the south before we met, but I didn’t want to go into it. What happened was that a girl died in Arwood’s arms. It was a girl in a green dress, one who bore a striking resemblance to the girl in the mortar video he’s hoping to find. The first girl’s death was pointless and cruel. It was also invisible. No one saw it. The girl in the video, though — her death, which was also pointless and cruel, was nevertheless seen by the entire world. The first one happened in front of us. The second one happened in front of us all. We didn’t go back for the girl in ’91. We left her body behind. We had no choice, but this time we do. I think Arwood is here for the girl in the video because he’s fixated, and he’s broken, and he needs to either bury this girl or return her body to her family, if that’s even possible. That may seem a mad reason for coming to this part of the world. Personally, I don’t think it is. I’ve seen people do a lot more to achieve a lot less. As for me, I’m here for Arwood, because he saved my life, and I ruined his.’

  ‘So you’re here out of loyalty?’

  ‘As I said,’ Benton says, ‘I’m old-fashioned.’

  ‘Do you trust Arwood?’

  ‘I believe he wants to solve this for reasons I understand. So … yes. We’ll drive to the spot, confirm her death, see if there’s some way to learn her identity — papers, brand of clothing, anything — return her to her family, if we can, and write a story so people know that the images they saw on television didn’t end in a dramatic puff of smoke like all the CNN coverage did back in ’91 and now all the drone attacks do, too. I want to clear the smoke — maybe for the first time in my pathetic career. As for the details, I won’t know until tomorrow, when he briefs me on the mission.’