by David Rich
Dan said, “It’s the fog at the beginning that makes you wonder. Just point yourself in the right direction.”
He was right. Finding Dan, killing McColl and his men, tying them to General Remington, finding the money—all that was a personal mission. It was a compulsion. Nothing could stop me carrying it on to the end. It didn’t matter if I was good enough. This time I was not sure what I was getting into. I was not compelled. I was ordered. I was not sure I was good enough.
I checked with Major Hensel about the Kurdish rebels, the PKK, sometimes called Kongra-Gel. “They’re led by a man named Diyar, we think. He might be real. He might be mythical. No one around here knows. Officially, we wouldn’t be having any contact with them.”
“If I worked for the government, you mean.”
______
Dan used a lawyer named Jaman when we lived in Phoenix. I think his first name was John, and now I wonder if his real name might have been John J. Mann and my ears just turned it into Jaman, but either way, he was a dirty guy who was always exploring his nose or his ears or his crotch and I had to be careful not to sit across from him because he would load up on food before he started talking and some of it was always flying out. Dan said he was unpolished but smart and good-natured. He stared at Dan, followed his every gesture, would move his hands the way Dan did, hold his head the way Dan did, but he could not hold the pose; soon his hand would sneak, like some uncontrollable pet, down to his crotch and nudge it affectionately in one direction or another.
Jaman wrote contracts for Dan, and letters demanding payment and promising payment. Sometimes Dan would let him negotiate for a few minutes, then interrupt and appear to give in to the other party over Jaman’s objections. Jaman always had his legal secretary, Betsy, by his side; she brought the laptop and typed everything. Betsy was pretty, though she, too, was unpolished. The heart tattoo on her smooth, milky thigh was seared into my eyeballs from intense hours of staring. Jaman would catch me longing and smile and point to his chest with pride and say something like “Someday you’ll get your own. This one is mine.” Then the same finger would be drawn, as if by invisible magnets, to his nose or ear.
Betsy was Dan’s, too, of course. I could hear them from almost anywhere in the small house where we were living. I could never understand how Jaman did not know about Dan and Betsy. How could he think she would not prefer Dan? How could he think Dan would not seduce her? How could Jaman read my thoughts so easily and not have a clue about Dan’s? More than once I heard Betsy ask Dan when he thought Jaman would “pull the trigger” or “pull up his pants.” Once she said she was sure he had bought a ring. And Dan always reassured her that Jaman was on the verge of proposing.
One day, Dan handed me an envelope and told me to deliver it to Jaman’s office, which was not far away. It was number 303, with no name on the door. I went into the waiting room and I could hear the argument going on in the inner office.
Jaman said, “No, I don’t blame him. I blame you.”
Betsy yelled, “You said you were gonna marry me. You promised.”
“I’ll never marry you. You’re a slut. Put that away.”
“I let you paw me for years for what? You pig . . .”
That went on for a little while. I could not move, could not bear the thought of missing one mean comment, one insult. And just as Jaman said, “Oh, get out of here,” and “How do I open this damn computer?” the shot was fired. He groaned. I was still standing there when the door opened. Jaman was slumped at his desk with one hand on the laptop. Betsy held the gun.
“Tell him he’ll have to find someone else to service him,” she said, so calmly that it made me think she knew I was out there all along.
I ran. I was about one flight down the stairs when I heard another shot. At home, I reported to Dan. He shook his head, then came close and gently took the envelope from me. “You brought those back. Good boy.” Then he drove me to the apartment where one of his girlfriends lived and I did not see him for over six months.
I never found out who received that second shot and that was the only time I had ever been in an attorney’s office until I walked into the law offices of Kelekian and White of Houston, Texas. They did have their names on the door. The air was cold in the office and so was the atmosphere. Outside, through the tinted windows, the sun struggled to shine and the city looked dimmed and dusty like an alien, harsh, and desolate colony on a nasty planet, a place of danger and disease to be avoided.
It was no surprise that Darrell White was in the final stages of a really big case, his firm’s biggest in years, which he really could not talk about, so he could only give me a few minutes. He was a big man in his fifties, developing a gut but still handsome, with a lot of brown hair carefully shaped into a point resembling the prow of a ship. His jacket hung on a valet stand in the corner. A holster, empty, hung next to the jacket. I guessed the gun was in a desk drawer. The sleeves of his white shirt were rolled up, but his tie was firmly in place. The office was roomy and neat and the view expansive. Pictures of Darrell White with tennis players, golfers, ballerinas, and hockey players decorated the walls. Maybe one of the pictures was of the King of Kurdistan; Darrell White specialized in immigration and had helped the King’s entourage get visas.
“Recognize anyone?” he said.
“You’re the big guy, right?”
“Some of those ballerinas were tiny as matchsticks. But I love watching them dance. Love it. Now you said oil business, the financial side, yes? Usually, we have a lot of success helping financial people get work visas because no one understands what they do, so they must be essential. The only problem comes when it’s a really attractive woman, then no one believes she could be essential for her brains. You’re not importing a girlfriend, are you? You don’t look the type.” He had the gift of being able to seem to give his full attention, which was probably a valuable skill when dealing with all his stars and artists.
“Not a girlfriend. Business associates. From Iraq. They’re not financial types. They’re representing my new partners. You’ve handled visas for Iraqis?”
“Of course. I’ve helped bring an Iraqi soccer team over here for training and a series of games. A cricket team, too. Actors. Not a lot of financial people, but I don’t see why that would be a problem. Who are your guys? Why are they essential to your business?”
“Well, y’see, we negotiated some oil rights and these men represent, as I said, our partners and they have to . . . the people we’re going to do business with here in the States are going to want to meet them. That’s why they’re essential.” I hemmed and hawed enough for a deaf man to tell I was avoiding the truth.
“They don’t need work visas to do a meet-and-greet. I can get them two-week tourist visas for that,” he said with a forced friendliness, as if it were going to be a favor.
“That’d be great. That’d do just fine.”
“But first, before I can do that, you have to stop bullshitting around and tell me who they are.” He smiled with his lips closed and his eyes narrowed. It was his “I’m on to you” look.
I waited a few moments, as if I were getting up the nerve to tell the truth. “We secured oil rights—”
“You already told me that.”
“We’re working on securing oil rights from the regional Kurdish government in the case of independence and we already have them from the PKK, also known as the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, also known as Kongra-Gel. Unfortunately, they are also known as terrorists in some places.”
He did not show surprise or any acknowledgment that he had ever heard of Kurdistan. I pulled out my checkbook and a pen.
“I can give you a retainer right now.” I wrote a check and tore it off and slid it across the desk. The check was for ten thousand dollars. If he accepted it, I had wasted my time because it would mean he did not give a damn about Kurdish oil rights and did not know anyone who did care
. I wanted to know if he was going to alert the King to my presence and my claims. “I don’t know if you have many oil business contacts, but if you do, I might like to get to know some of them. We’re going to be lining up drilling operations, have our ducks in a row for when the time comes.”
“What time is that?” He said it like he was inquiring about a dinner invitation.
“We feel we have a good chance that either the Regional Government or the PKK will be able to move forward as the definitive authority in the area soon. In the next couple of years. Do you know anything about Kurdistan? Fascinating place. Energetic people, great environment to do business.”
The check remained on the desk between us. He took his eyes off me to look at it and again he smiled. He shook his head. “Politics always makes the world difficult, doesn’t it? That means this is going to require some delicate maneuvering. Quite time consuming. If it can be accomplished at all. I can’t make any guarantees,” he said.
“What would it take?”
“This is a tough one, and you want introductions as well. About ten times that.”
That sounded high to me, but it made me happy. It meant he wanted to see if I was for real before he started alerting the King. I tore up the first check and wrote one for one hundred thousand dollars and stood up and told him I was staying at the St. Regis. He stood up and shook my hand and said he knew some “folks” at the State Department and would get on it as soon as I got him the names and copies of the passports. “And, if it’s okay with you, I’ll ask around about who might like to get some of your business.”
“That would be just fine,” I said.
______
Will Panos said he wished he was in Houston with me, but I did not believe him because when I asked how he was doing with the widow, he said, “Kristen is her name. We’re having dinner tonight. At her house.”
“Bring flowers.”
“Flowers. Okay. Something for her daughter?”
“Too soon. You’ll make the kid suspicious, if she’s worth anything,” I said. “How are you doing on identifying the body in the grave?”
“No progress. We can’t exactly put him on exhibit. DNA will come back, but what do we compare it with? The FBI has been around. They want to talk about you.”
“See if you can get anything out of them about the shooter. Where the bullets came from, anything on the car. Anything. Try to keep the focus on that and off the grave and what we were looking for.”
“And off you.” He waited for me to make a comment. I waited. “Are you there?” he said.
“Hint that you know where I am. Maybe they’ll offer you information in exchange. In any case, let them know I’m in Houston. You think I’m on leave.”
“You want them?”
“And don’t tell the Major, please.” It was Will’s turn to be silent. I said, “Flowers, Will.”
9
With the windows open and the air-conditioning off, the hotel suite began to feel muggy and comfortable. I slowly shaped the moist blanket of air, lifting it, pressing it back into place, angling through, disturbing the dense air less and less until the knotty tension that had been thickening for days flowed out and was absorbed into the soupy mix. Finished with the tai chi, I sat in full lotus.
When I began yoga and meditation, the instructor told me to find a peaceful spot. Lately I had tried envisioning a desert mountaintop, sitting like a guru in a cartoon on the edge of a cloud alone before the striped sky, the quiet of a cave, the murmuring of a stream, an ever-changing woman morphing slyly before my closed eyes, and more. But the farmhouse, my original peaceful place, the place I thought was a fantasy but turned out to be a memory, the place where I learned my real name and found Dan’s money, kept pushing the other spots aside and they did not have the muscle to push back. I knew this was all wrong, but meditation is not about fighting and so the vision I would bring up each time was no longer a refuge of peaceful contemplation. Instead, it was a constantly developing puzzle that could never be solved, a set of clues to a mystery that remained hidden. I found rooms that never existed. People popped in and out. Some I knew. It was neither a dream nor a nightmare. It was an immersion in a maze, a ride through a riddle.
First I glided into the basement and the doors shut behind me. Slowly my eyes adjusted to the light just enough to make me think I saw dim shapes huddled in the far reaches, near rooms I had forgotten to visit or explore for too long; they lurked like sea creatures in nooks and crannies, but as I pushed forward toward them, they receded and I only faced deeper darkness at each turn, along with the suspicion, dripping and cold, that something nasty was filling the space behind me. I did not have the guts to turn around. The doorbell rang. I shifted to a spot where I could peek through a crack to see black shoes on the porch. I held still while listening for more. The bell rang again. I could not find a way to see more. My vision was stuck. Then a knock and someone calling, “Mr. Hewitt.”
I opened my eyes and hopped up. Room service had arrived. When I finished with that, I called downstairs and asked the concierge to arrange a Maserati for me. She called back a few minutes later and said the Maserati would not be available until the next day, but I could have a Ferrari right away. She hesitated, then said, “It’s red. Is that okay?”
All I wanted was something that would attract attention and be easy to follow. I left the room but had to go back before I reached the elevator. I grabbed a sugar packet from the room-service tray and left.
I drove out toward Texas City, where the tankers came in past Galveston Island. I could smell it before I saw it: oil, exhaust, and dead fish, a combination I had rarely experienced. Soon the tanks and smokestacks of the refineries lurked like bullies guarding their home turf. Cranes, dozens of them, hung out to the right, a rival gang, cool, lanky, heads hung, like transformers waiting to be called to action. I parked as close to the port as I could get and put up the top, but left the car unlocked. I stashed the rental paperwork in the glove box, then sprinkled a little sugar on top of the corners. If anyone checked, I’d know.
Along the dock road, I found a low wall to sit on, where I could watch the slow routine of the bay. Two cargo ships stacked with sealed containers were docked. A crane unloaded one of them gracefully and easily. Farther out, an oil tanker hooked up with a smaller ship, a lighter. I snapped a photo with my phone. A helicopter came out of the north, banked, and turned east over the bay. I decided I wanted to do that, too.
The pilot was a former Marine and the proud owner of an MD 520 series helicopter, not too new but very clean, which he chartered, mostly to oil people like I was pretending to be. He had been a Flying Tiger, HMH-361, and he flew the big Super Stallion choppers during the Iraq invasion. Marine was not in my bio, so I told him my father had been a Marine chopper pilot who then flew a traffic copter in Arizona, and I used to go up with him all the time.
When we got up I asked to circle the harbor first. The dark sedan was parked behind the helicopter shed. Two men in suits had gotten out. One was trying to use his phone, though the noise must have made it difficult. The rest of the ride would serve to solidify my identity as an oilman and make the followers worry that I might be going somewhere significant or meeting someone important. Maybe that would make them move faster. I asked to fly over some offshore platforms. The pilot said that was his most requested trip. He stopped talking and I did, too, and before long, the orange and gray dots grew into misshapen ships, forever moored. They grew in clusters that reminded me of the apartment complexes outside Phoenix that would erupt beyond the previous limits of urban life. At first they were brave outposts, but the seeds blew and others grew nearby, and soon after that no one could tell the area had been unpopulated just the other day. The platforms were multiplying in the same way.
During my first tour in Afghanistan, Tom Rickun was wounded in the foot and shoulder and I carried him behind cover, where the medics cou
ld help him out. Tom was near the end of his tour, but after he got home, he always wrote to me, mostly about how he wanted to be a writer and tell everybody what he had seen in Afghanistan. He got a job writing marketing brochures for a real estate development company, and because they liked him so much and thought of him as a man of imagination and cleverness, they assigned him the task of compiling potential names for the various new developments. At first it was a pleasant distraction. He kept a digital voice recorder and would riff in the car, spouting out combinations that sounded good. He would edit those and hand over the lists. The boss called him into the office and praised him. It was the most attention and praise he had ever received for anything. They used about a dozen of the names he submitted: Normandy Hill, Avalon Heights, Sagebrush Terrace, Cornwall Crest, Canterbury Ridge are some I remember. The praise brought on something like writer’s block; he could do no work on his stories. All his time went into concocting pleasant sounding communities.
Everything began to sound wrong to him, names like Anglesey Acres and Catalpa Circle, yet the company still liked his work and used the names. Next came contempt, which introduced book and movie names like Manderley, Tara, Twelve Oaks, and Brideshead: each one praised, accepted, used. He would get drunk and become obsessed with moving away from English and French references. The company had to break new ground he insisted: Bremen Sands, Brno Mews, and Stuttgart Court were rejected. He could do no writing other than letters to me, he said, and he feared the direction he was heading. He wanted to name a development near Las Vegas Korengal Valley, another, near Orlando, Peshawar Place.
I wrote a long letter to him detailing a failed rescue mission my unit had undertaken and asked him to write it up as a short story. Instead, he wrote back saying that he would refrain from war locations, but he hated the bosses and was determined to embarrass them with French and German words and phrases like Fernsehapparat Vistas and Malypense Meadows, the job be damned. He asked me how to say “If you lived here you would be home now” in Pashto and in Dari. The real estate collapse drove the company into bankruptcy before they could fire him. I have not heard from him since I’ve been back, but I think oil platforms might have snagged his talents. They had names like Mad Dog, Cajun Express, and Pride of About Every Place I’ve ever heard of.