The Girl in Green

by Derek B. Miller

  The Leopard Room, beneath the Hotel d’Angleterre in Geneva, is a short stroll eastward from the Mandarin on Quai du Mont-Blanc, past the spot where Lake Geneva draws to its south-western tip and the Rhône River is born under the Pont de la Machine — as though it were named for making the river rather than for pumping its water into the public fountains. Like the Thames or the Seine, the Rhône is trimmed by concrete as it runs through the city, but, like Geneva itself, the river has less drama and less majesty. It performs its functions and lives its life as quietly as possible. With its understated and dour birth between the Alps to the south and the hamlet-rich Jura Mountains to the north, one would never suspect that the freshwater river eventually bursts into the spirit-filled Catholic world of the Riviera, swells the grapes on the Côtes du Rhône, dances down to the estuaries near Marseille, and then — as quickly as it came — vanishes from Europe altogether, leaving only the taste of its sweet water to lap the wide shores of North Africa.

  Geneva was undeniably beautiful. The problem was the Calvinist mood. It was serene here to the point of sterility. In Arwood’s view, the collective goal of Swiss life was to get from birth to death without incident. If that wasn’t your own philosophy, the city would never be more than a distraction from the life you actually wanted to live.

  Arwood liked the Leopard Room for business, because it looked colonial and felt smarmy. It was three steps underground, and despite its being only a stone’s throw from the lake, you’d never know it was there. It was dark, filled with earth tones and woods. It was as good a place as any to draw green and purple lines on maps, soiled only gently from gin and tonics and the rank egoism of a self-serving philosophy. It really was a top-quality place to sell weapons.

  Arwood had been drinking a bourbon on the rocks, wearing a black T-shirt and Levi’s. He was leafing through a blue-cloth book by Norman Angell written in 1910 that explained how future war in Europe would be futile because it would be economically irrational.

  Arwood laughed so hard, he spilled his Maker’s Mark. He was wiping it off his leather jacket when his associate entered and took a seat beside him to the right of the piano.

  Jindar Zafar wore an exquisite blue Super 140 suit from Corneliani and a yellow tie by Lanvin. His shoes were J.M. Weston. His watch was IWC. Zafar was in his early fifties, and looked to Arwood as though he knew exactly how much longer his prime would last. He joined Arwood at a table near the back, filled with books used as furniture, topped now by Norman Angell.

  ‘So, Mr Jindar Zafar. Still lookin’ like dat.’

  ‘Mr Hobbes.’

  ‘Want a drink?’

  ‘I don’t think I’ll be here that long.’

  ‘You could have had two already if you’d applied yourself.’

  ‘I’m a Muslim, Mr Hobbes. We don’t drink. You wouldn’t understand.’

  ‘Really,’ Arwood said, tossing the soiled napkin onto the table and calling a waiter to remove it. ‘I was sitting in Manama waiting for this arms dealer I know, and while there I learned about how the Saudis drive across that new fancy bridge of theirs and get thousand-dollar hotel rooms at the Meridian, where they have bottles of the finest booze in the world brought up to them by the youngest of Russian hookers. I’m talking fourteen years old. You find them in business class on Emirates — maybe you’ve seen them. After the Saudis and their guests are done, they drive back across the bridge and tell the West we’re corrupt and morally adrift. So what else do you plan to teach me about how you mystical and wise Orientals live your lives that I can’t possibly understand?’

  ‘I choose not to drink to honour my religion.’

  ‘Well, that’s entirely different, isn’t it? Meanwhile, without a beverage, you look like a gangster waiting to get shot. So settle into the chair. You’re embarrassing me.’

  ‘Do you have what I want?’ Zafar asked.

  A young man with the physique of a distance runner sat himself down at the piano in the corner of the room. His jacket probably fitted the last guy who wore it, but there was no telling. He started playing ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’. No one in the room seemed pleased to hear it.

  Arwood had to lean in to be heard. ‘Do I have what you want? The interesting part is whether you have what I want. People selling information don’t always have the information. So let’s start with you. Where’s the fucking colonel, and when’s he gonna be there?’

  Jindar Zafar straightened his jacket, sat back, and crossed his legs. ‘Up north. In a village on the road to Zakho. He has a cousin. After Saddam was killed, he took to hiding there. It’s in Kurdistan.’

  ‘Why was he killing people in the south, if he’s from the north?’

  ‘He is Sunni. They are Shiite. He is well connected to the network from Tikrit. It is usually easier to kill people farther from home.’

  ‘Uh-huh. I need GPS coordinates and a time window. There’s a lot to coordinate.’

  ‘Are you really this driven to kill a man because of a grudge over twenty years old? You’ll take that risk, pay this cost, for something so distant?’

  Arwood removed a photograph from his bag and slid it across the table. It was a picture of himself in Iraq in 1991, taken during the long quiet of the air war and before he was stationed at Checkpoint Zulu. He looked young and handsome. He was in the middle of a hearty laugh beside another young man who looked the same. They were both laughing, because a third man in the middle — his face obscured from view, his black fingers in relief against the white fabric — was holding up a T-shirt that read, I HATE SAND.

  ‘You see this?’ Arwood said. ‘That’s Alan Vicars on the right, and John Griffiths behind the shirt. We were friends once. This is a special picture that I carry around, because it is the last time I remember laughing at something that was meant to be funny.

  ‘The colonel killed a little girl the next day, and she died in my arms. I don’t even know who else he slaughtered, but I know about her, and that’s all that needs to matter. Since then, in my life—’ Arwood put the picture back into his jacket pocket and stopped explaining himself.

  ‘Without a real cause, without something urgent and visible, you risk being seen as a madman.’

  ‘You don’t know what happened down there in 1991.’

  ‘I do know what happened,’ said Jindar Zafar. ‘It happened up north, too. Among my people. You know this. You went there next. Saddam did it to everyone. But if people act on old grudges every day, the world will be bathed in blood. There must be a way to move on. Forgetting, or letting go, or forgiving, is sometimes necessary.’

  ‘Maybe next time.’

  ‘My advice?’ Zafar said. ‘If there is a sign, if there is a cause that others can understand, then go. If not, take that as a sign, too. The people you are asking to help you in Dohuk and Mosel — they are your friends. You have been good to these people. They will help you. But there is no reason to ask for favours and put people at risk without some greater purpose.’

  Arwood was unmoved.

  ‘Here is the information you want,’ Jindar finally said, pushing a plain envelope across the table. ‘It is all here. The time and place are very clear. The village has a café. There are yellow chairs. His is the fourth door on the left. There is a blue tile to the left of the door, with the Arabic number for five on it. Can you read Arabic?’

  ‘I know the numbers.’

  ‘If you are late—’

  Arwood finished off the bourbon, which by now had lost its bite and only tasted sweet. He could drink it all night.

  ‘If the intelligence is bad, I’ll find you.’

  ‘How would you do that, Mr Hobbes?’

  Arwood laughed. ‘You fancy dressers always miss the obvious. How would I find you? I’d wait for you at your fuckin’ tailor’s, that’s how.’

  23

  ‘Who makes these?’Arwood asks, regarding the black hood on
the floor. He’s sitting on the mattress and playing with it on the end of his foot.

  ‘What?’ Benton replies.

  ‘Who makes them?’ he repeats. ‘I’ve never seen one for sale in London, New York, Milan, or Cape Town. I’ve never looked in a shop window and seen one over the head of a mannequin. No Christmas sales at Bloomingdale’s. No pop-up ads on the Internet.’

  ‘I don’t know, Arwood.’

  ‘These are not repurposed items. They’re useless for anything other than covering or carrying heads. How do supply and demand find each other? And for real … how much do they cost?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Has anyone considered that if we simply raided the factories that make these and grabbed hold of their mailing lists, we’d probably have the entire global terrorist network by the balls? Even knowing where the orders have been placed, and for how many, would wrap up the entire intelligence game. Am I the only one who has this figured out?’

  Adar starts to cry again. Benton looks at the fourteen-year-old child who is traumatised, isolated, and under continued stress. If she even survives this, he knows, she’ll never be the same, or whatever she might have otherwise been.

  ‘Is something wrong?’ Benton asks Jamal, in the hope it is something specific.

  ‘She knows one of them,’ says Jamal, who is still standing in the corner as though he’s ready to go at any time.

  ‘One of them was in the convoy attack?’ Arwood asks.

  ‘No. One of them is from Shaddad. South of al-Hasakah. West of here and near her village. It is Sunni. She says the village has a dark history. They have been treated very badly by the Shiites. Very bad. She does not know his name, but she knows his family. She says she has heard that the father was murdered by the Shabiha. This is Assad’s secret militia. His death squads. They are Alawite tribe. They are Shiite. They hate the Sunni. Adar is Sunni. So she runs away to Iraq to hide.’

  Arwood pulls up his knees and leans back against the wall. ‘If he’s all disgruntled, he should be off killing government troops with the rebels. Not blowing up civilians in traffic or murdering cops. This doesn’t help us.’

  ‘No, no,’ Jamal says. ‘That’s not what happened. She said he came from a good family. Everyone knows their family. Mother is very nice. Boys are nice. But he became very angry. And then he met someone who explained that these people are heretics. They are infidels, and they are the reason the Muslim people are weak. She says that the boy is like all the others. No one wants to be weak anymore. They are tired of being weak. They want to return to a time when they were strong and united. They cannot stand the humiliation anymore. The West does not understand our humiliation.’

  ‘The fourteen-year-old said all this?’

  ‘No, I say all this.’

  ‘You’re not much of a translator,’ Arwood says.

  ‘I am a driver.’

  ‘And you think,’ Arwood says, ‘that if these people felt proud and respected, they’d stop packing ice-cream trucks with explosives to kill as many children as possible? They need jobs and a hug?’

  ‘I’m saying there are reasons.’

  ‘There are always reasons, Jamal, but not justifications. Listen, I’ve been watching these douchebags for years. These guys aren’t choosing between a job in auto mechanics and beheading infidels. Yeah, they’re discontented, and maybe they’ve got a good reason, too. Fair enough. The thing is, there are a lot of hard-luck cases in the world, and a lot of places on the losing side of history. But not all those places celebrate mass murder because they’re angry. See, little Johnny Hardluck might feel bad one day and say to his mummy, “Mummy, I feel so bad I’m going to cut somebody’s head off.” That could happen in Pittsburgh. We have psychos, too. But how Mummy responds is kind of what makes one place different from another. So if his mummy says, “That’s a good idea, Johnny, you slice them up real good, and if you die, we’ll be extra proud of you,” then we know what kind of people we’re dealing with. Around here, you kill a hundred children with an exploding ice-cream truck, and your family gets a pension and its own website. That doesn’t happen in Pittsburgh. That is not a minor distinction. When we act badly, we at least feel really bad about it, and try to find ways to avoid it later. These people do exactly the opposite. That’s why we’re better than them. Got it?’

  ‘They are being manipulated by the elites,’ Jamal says.

  Arwood gently bangs the back of his head against the concrete cell. This is not the first time he’s had this conversation. But usually, when he does have these conversations, he’s trying to get laid. At least this time he can speak his mind.

  ‘Jamal, you can only manipulate ideas that make sense to people already. If an imam gets on his soapbox and tells all the Sunnis to go out and kill all the New York Yankee fans, they wouldn’t make much headway. Because it wouldn’t make any kind of sense. Go kill the Shiites? That makes sense. Unfortunately, everything happening down the mountain, and even up here, makes sense to people, whether they like it or not. And these Stooges? In there? They aren’t gonna stop. You see, it’s all explained by Loggins’s Law. You know Loggins and Messina? No? Doesn’t matter. It’s like this, Jamal: we will never get along with anyone — not now, not later, not ever — if their mamas don’t dance, and their daddies don’t rock and roll. Because it’s mind over matter, my friend. And you cannot change people’s minds about what matters.’

  Jamal does not translate any of this for Adar.

  ‘You should both rest,’ Benton says, taking a position on the mattress similar to Arwood’s. ‘You’ll need your strength. And if they offer you food and water, don’t be proud or stubborn. Take it. You, too,’ he says, looking at Arwood.

  ‘Yeah, yeah.’

  Jamal and Adar don’t move.

  ‘What’s the name of his family?’ Arwood asks.

  Jamal asks Adar, but she bows her head and says nothing.

  Benton leans his head back against the wall, and the paint flakes behind him, dropping little pieces down his trousers. The air is dry. It is tinged with a scent of cooking oil and a familiar spice he can’t name. Benton cannot hear, but still feels, some manner of village life outside. Over some hills. Gently, as on a breeze, he closes his eyes, and he drifts over the mountain they climbed, turn upon turn upon turn.

  Charlotte once explained to her father how everything in life was connected. She could tell him which aspects of an organism were connected by evolution to others — either closely or distantly, but unified from common origins. It didn’t really matter to her how far apart they had become over time; the shared evolutionary characteristics remained. ‘We’re not on a ladder of evolution with missing rungs,’ she’d explain. ‘It’s more like a big bush.’ When she came home from university and stayed with them in Fowey, she’d try to share her enthusiasm for her studies. She’d read essays aloud from Stephen J. Gould with wonderful names like ‘Bully for Brontosaurus’ and ‘George Canning’s Left Buttock and the Origin of Species’ and ‘A Darwinian Gentleman at Marx’s Funeral.’ She said the twigs on the branch were expanding and splitting and growing. Some twigs stopped, while others pressed ever outward. In the end, the bush of life is populated by what lives farthest out. ‘We are not at the top of the ladder,’ she explained. ‘We are only the farthest from the centre, on our own fragile and particular twig.’

  ‘Which,’ said Benton, trying to get his head around it, ‘means that everything still alive after all this time is also a successful twig.’

  ‘Right. Isn’t that wonderful? It means we’re all connected, and always will be.’

  He had said ‘Yes,’ because she obviously thought it was, which was nice.

  ‘We really are out here on our own,’ Benton says, aloud.

  ‘We’d better not be, because if we are, we’re royally—’

  Then the Stooges come in.

  Curly is the
first through the door. He speaks English, but his accent is thick and he slurs his speech.

  ‘Where you from?’ he says, looking at Benton.

  ‘England,’ he says.

  ‘America?’

  ‘No. England. Perhaps you’ve heard of it.’

  ‘What is your name?’ he says.

  Arwood jumps right in and answers for all of them. He is even helpful enough to spell them out. Benton hopes the man doesn’t have the inclination or skills to type them into Google.

  ‘What are you doing in Ninawa?’ he asks Arwood.

  ‘I’m here for my health. The climate is good for my allergies. He’s a journalist. He’s covering the film festival.’

  Curly ignores Arwood, and takes hold of Jamal and Adar. He pushes them through the rusty green door into the adjacent room as Shemp follows them out, walking backwards, training his rifle on Arwood and Benton, whose hands are still bound.

  ‘Don’t you fucking hurt them!’ Arwood yells.

  Shemp is expressionless as he closes the door. The bolt slides into place from the other side, and a padlock is reinstalled.

  Despite his hands being tied behind him, Arwood hops up like a karate instructor and rushes to the door. He places his ear against it and listens.

  ‘Curly and Shemp locked it,’ Benton says, sitting down again, this time with his hands behind him. ‘We’re locked in.’

  ‘That’s what you’ve named them?’ Arwood asks as he wanders around the room, looking closely at it.

  ‘I don’t know their real names. I have to call them something to keep them straight in my mind. It’s important to remain sorted in these circumstances.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s true,’ Arwood says, scanning every aspect of the room. ‘Stooges, though. That’s pretty good. I didn’t think of that.

  ‘So, listen,’ Arwood says as he walks slowly along the wall, looking for … something. ‘Did you get laid last night?’