The Good Lieutenant

by Whitney Terrell

  “Like what?”

  “Like what’s going on with your arrest affidavits?”

  For a moment Masterson’s old arrogance seemed to rise up, and he glowered at Fowler from between his flattened hands, as if she’d failed to consider how dangerous that comment could be. Then he said:

  “You’ve got a lot of balls, Fowler. That’s fucking good. You and Beale. You guys ran well together. You were a good team. It’s the best thing about you, loyalty. That and balls. I can understand how you’d get all broken up about this thing—”

  She and Beale had never run well together as a team.

  “I’m not arguing your detainee policy, sir,” she lied in return. Everything about Masterson’s detainee policy was arguable, but she wanted to focus on the worst part, the key. As Faisal had indicated, his company had by far the highest kill and detention rates in the battalion—over 350 Iraqis total. They were all supposed to have signed affidavits and approval from a judge advocate general before anybody targeted them. If Masterson was forging his paperwork, however, he could kill or detain innocents. Strangers. Whomever he liked. “But faking arrest affidavits is a totally different thing.”

  “Who said anything about that?”

  “Faisal. According to him, that’s why he’s on your staff.”

  If Masterson had blustered at her, if he’d yelled at her as he had back at Fort Riley, she might have left right then. But instead, he tottered to his desk for a bottle of water, rinsed his mouth, and spat, as if the sickness had risen up inside him again.

  “You think that’s the solution here? Better paperwork?” Masterson had dropped into a squat, his bare feet spread, showing her his back. “Or do you think maybe it’s arresting guys who I think are going to kill my men? With or without the paperwork.”

  There was some minor shred of truth in that. In the long string of choices that had led to Beale’s disappearance, filing honest paperwork had turned out to be a hindrance, if not a mistake. “Why don’t we talk about your objectives here instead?” Masterson asked. “You’re in the Army. We’re having a war. You lose a soldier, that’s just what happens. That’s the game. So I got to figure there’s something else at stake.”

  “I wasn’t there to help him,” Fowler said.

  “Why do you have to take responsibility for that? Isn’t it true that you requested backup from the battalion and that backup didn’t arrive?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “You don’t think that absolves you?”

  “No,” she said.

  “So we’re on the same page, Lieutenant. I sent men to that same intersection three months ago. I knew it was poorly defended. I clearly registered my protest but was ordered to do it anyway. I followed orders. The Muthanna intersection was attacked, my men died. I know who did it. To me, that doesn’t feel right.”

  I know who did it. That was the shadow beneath their conversation. Any interpreter had access to sensitive intel. They were always the first and most dangerous candidates for a leak. The problem was that Masterson had hired Faisal because he was dishonest, because he could be taught to falsely detain or kill who knew how many hundreds of his countrymen. He’d trained his own traitor. Now he wanted to cover his mistake. “Come on, Fowler. Give yourself a break,” he said. “You’ve done the hard part. You found your target. You’re not responsible for me. Leave the rule-book shit to Seacourt and Hartz. I don’t see either of them out here fixing anything.”

  Fowler snorted. The things that they were discussing—murder, torture, her own complicity in the same—were things that she had never imagined considering. Choices she’d always believed she’d know not to make. But the language seemed personable, normal, and when she tipped her head and gazed up at the tent’s ceiling, the sun glowed golden through the fabric, as it always did. It was jail if she went along with Masterson and got found out. She did wrong here or she abandoned her only lead on finding Beale. The variable was Pulowski, who might very well turn her in if he found out. On the other hand, if he wasn’t responsible for what had happened to Beale, he deserved to know he was clean. She trundled over atop the stool and plucked the note from his hand. The two drawings—one of the anonymous Iraqi, the other, she believed, of Beale—were underlined by slanting scratches of Arabic. The one clear thing she’d felt all day had been the guilt of the beaten interpreter, Faisal, when she’d seen him in the shed. It was still there, the feeling of it twining up around her skin, black-rooted, the vines of it—though of course she could not see any such thing in reality—seeming to whisper against her, as if growing out of her own skin. “Whoever wrote this note,” she said, “leads us to Beale.”

  “And Faisal?”

  “If Faisal is leaking your intel, he has to have somebody to leak it to, right? Why wouldn’t it be this guy? Maybe he got nervous. Maybe he wanted to confess. Maybe that would explain why the guy freaked out when Faisal came in.”

  Masterson looked at the note, glanced up. “Shit,” he said.

  “My feeling is, we get this translated, see if it matches what Faisal told Pulowski. If it doesn’t, I go get these cameras and stake out this guy’s place. And you lean on Faisal to tell us where it is. Which you appear to be doing anyway.”

  “I knew there was a good reason I let you stay,” Masterson said, smiling.

  “I am not good,” Fowler said. She had not consciously moved the rolling stool that she’d been perched on, so when their knees touched, she was surprised and quickly flinched away. “I’m just improvising.”

  “Yeah, well,” Masterson said, “welcome to the team.”

  * * *

  Fowler stood for a time in the sunlight, staring out over the barren infield of the patrol base, the surrounding blast walls and sniper towers, trying to shake off the crawling darkness that she’d felt in Masterson’s tent. Then she went to check on her platoon. The tent they’d been assigned had a single hole in its roof, which Masterson had told her had come from a mortar attack, and when she pushed through the front flap, Crawford was crouched in a column of daylight, examining an unplugged air-conditioning unit that looked as if it had been smashed by a giant fist.

  “You got a little project there?” she asked.

  Crawford peered up at her with his child’s unlined skin. “My grandma has one like this. York. Shame to ruin a good AC unit like this.”

  “You think your grandma can send us hers?”

  “I doubt it. She’s real attached to it.” He was still examining the top of the boxy AC unit, the hole that had been punched in its lid. “They say the shell came through and landed right here. Didn’t go off. They all just sat there real quiet, looking at it.”

  She would’ve liked to hold or hug Crawford, touch his body gently, the opposite of how she’d handled Faisal, whose smell was still on her fingertips. Instead, she hiked her pants, eased down next to him, and ran her finger around the damaged area, so that their hands touched. He glanced up. She grabbed his forearm, squeezed, as if that were the end of their conversation, as if she understood what he was doing by not asking where she’d been. “Where are your glasses?” she said in a brighter tone.

  “Fuck,” Crawford said. “They around.”

  “You had them coming in, didn’t you?”

  Crawford glanced up, sheepish, pleased.

  “Now we’re getting somewhere,” she said appraisingly. It was well known that Crawford wore his glasses at all times, even in bed. “This is not a situation where you are having philosophical thoughts about an AC unit. This is a situation where you lost your glasses and because you lost your glasses, you’re afraid to go to sleep.”

  “I looked around,” Crawford said.

  “Did you look under things?”

  “Nothing to look under, ma’am.”

  “Is that right?” She was on her hands and knees, peering under one of fifty bunks.

  “I ain’t been here long enough to get under them.”

  “You check the guys?” She was already up then, lookin
g. They were all asleep, but the search gave her an excuse to touch them, check them over, which she wanted to do anyway: Dykstra’s hammy double chin, Waldorf with his blast goggles strapped around a bicep, Jimenez, Halt, Eggleston, McWilliams with the burned-out butt of a Camel still clutched between his knuckles. She lifted the Camel from McWilliams’s fingers and folded his arm back against his chest, and when she did, Crawford’s gold glasses tumbled out from beneath his armpit. She carried them over and fit them silently onto Crawford’s upturned face, and he immediately curled up on an empty rack, knees against his chest. Then she sat on another. They were a good platoon. It was a sentimental thought, since the main thing she was thankful for was that no one had asked where she’d been, or why she’d spent the morning in a shed in the back corner of the patrol base.

  There wasn’t any way she could ask their advice, though, and so, after she’d writhed around on her bunk for some twenty minutes, she crossed the gravel infield, entered the farmhouse that served as the patrol base’s TOC, and followed Masterson’s directions down an airless, stuffy hall to find Faisal Amar’s replacement. She drew back a shower curtain that had been hung across an alcove and found a fat, middle-aged man lying there, reading. “I am sorry, can I help you?” he said.

  The room was no more than a closet, squalid, hot, and the man lay on his side atop a black foam sleeping pad, a small stack of Arabic paperbacks and an electric light beside his head. She wondered if these had been Faisal’s things.

  “It’s all right, it’s okay,” Fowler said, reading the embarrassment on the man’s face. She averted her eyes until he’d buttoned his shirt. “I was just wondering if you could give something a quick look-see for me?”

  “At your service,” the fat man said brightly. But when he donned his glasses, he clicked his tongue in disapproval. “Hello, yes, you are the lady who lost the soldier. I’m sorry to hear about you. You are here to kill my friend today?”

  “Faisal?” she said. “Is he still your friend?”

  The man’s face fell at her tone. “No, not anymore.”

  “Good,” she said. “Then translate this.”

  She left the ’terp with the note and walked back down the hall and logged into the base’s single public access computer to check her email, see if her camera request had gone through. Her SOS to Pulowski. The room was hot and stuffy, filled with the scent of food and tobacco spit. She sat for a moment before the computer’s shifting screen, her forehead furrowed. She didn’t have to tell Pulowski what she was doing, so why worry about it? By then the green bar at the bottom of her browser had loaded, and she opened up her in-box, found an email from Pulowski’s CO, Major McKutcheon, saying the camera system wasn’t ready yet. Then, a few lines down, she found one from Pulowski himself, with his contradictory response to McKutchon’s email attached.

  Hey LT, Pulowski’s email said. The cameras are ready (see below). You were right about these assholes. Or I was right and you were wrong, then you were right and I was wrong. So at least we covered all the bases. Cheers. I’ll be waiting.

  She stood and walked into the back room. The translator had disappeared, leaving behind the note and his translation, written in pencil on a legal pad.

  I am Ayad al-Tayyib from Bini Ziad. I am 23. I have a friend who is a translator with the 27th Infantry. His name is Faisal Amar. If I help you, can you guarantee his safety?

  The note proved that Faisal had lied about knowing the Iraqi. But it didn’t prove he knew anything about Beale. It wouldn’t be enough to detain him if she followed protocol and took him back to Camp Tolerance. So she had a choice. Either she allowed Faisal to be questioned by Masterson, which was probably the same as killing him. Or she reported Masterson and risked letting Faisal walk free. Which might mean never finding Beale. She crouched in the alcove where Faisal Amar had slept, her boots waffling patterns in the sleeping pad. The worst part about listening to Masterson evade responsibility for Faisal Amar was that she’d been reminded of the conversation she and Pulowski had had back in her trailer, when she’d blamed him for what had happened to Beale. Blame was what she needed. Stories of blame. Reams of affidavits supporting it. What was the proper gesture when you condemned a man? She touched the books, but couldn’t read them. Only a fool would lie down where he’d lain. Then she returned to her computer and typed in: 0800 hours tomorrow. 16th Engineer Brigade HQ. See you then. Then, after a moment’s hesitation, she added, We got the bastard, then pressed send.

  4

  “Can you draw?” Pulowski asked. He opened the notepad Fowler had given him, flopped it onto the table, and drew a stick figure of himself. “Dixon,” he said. Then, remembering that the Iraqi across from him couldn’t hear—the man’s hand flittered up to his ear again as Pulowski spoke—he wrote his name on the pad in English. DIXON. He pointed at himself. Then he turned the pad so the man might do the same.

  The room that they occupied was in a small rural schoolhouse in the northern sector of their territory, near a town named Bini Ziad. When Fowler’s platoon had shown up, a line of civilians, detained by Captain Masterson, whose territory this remained, stretched clear through the school’s courtyard and into the road. All of them had to be questioned about Beale and the attack at the intersection. It was a mime show, in Pulowski’s opinion, a necessary but pointless routine, and so it felt somehow proper to be interviewing a man in his mid-twenties who, rather than answering his questions, fired off a picture, quickly sketched but done in the proper proportions, a hint of perspective, cross-hatched shading, the way a genuine cartoonist might work. It was a self-portrait, no blemish left out, his defects if anything exaggerated, the chin melting away into his neck, the teeth overlarge, possibly the most honest testimony he’d seen all day.

  “Very cute,” Pulowski said. He held the drawing up beside the man’s head as if to judge its likeness. Then he frowned, as if he couldn’t see the resemblance.

  The man widened his eyes insistently. Yes, I am that ugly, he seemed to be saying, if it was possible to derive actual words from the folds and positioning of a face. Seriously, I’ll show you! He stuck his rabbit teeth out and jabbed at them, then jabbed back at the picture—See?—and gave a quick offhand shrug—Who, me?—as if he did not intend to let his achievement of this ugliness go to his head.

  Pulowski laughed. Okay, okay—he nodded—you win. Then he pointed to the name Dixon on his sketch and tapped the blank space beneath the artist’s.

  The man shook his head gravely. He flipped the stationery and the sketch over, revealing what appeared to be a formal note, written in Arabic.

  “You want me to read this?” Pulowski asked.

  The man nodded, though of course there was no way he could have understood. Then he grabbed the note and drew on it again, this time right beneath the text, the small lines scratching and fanning out magically, creating out of the nothing that had been there a face, a body, a pair of wings. Was it … what? A male angel. Did they have angels in Islam? Or just virgins? The man pointed eagerly toward the door, as if he wanted someone to read the note, so Pulowski nodded politely and carried it into the hallway.

  The main problem Pulowski was experiencing just then was the awareness of his own secret. The fact that he’d abandoned Beale and then lied about it was probably more important than anything the Iraqi had to say. On the other hand, he’d decided that telling the truth about it wouldn’t help anybody, least of all Beale. He had reasoned very carefully through all of this during the twenty-four hours that had passed since Beale had charged into the abandoned building in the Muthanna intersection, and Pulowski, rather than follow him, had stood and sprinted away, back into the intersection, unhooked the mic from Waldorf’s dashboard, and said, We got separated from Beale. I have no idea where he might be. Pulowski’s father had been a liar too—as well as a resident surgeon at the Blanchfield Army Community Hospital outside Clarksville. Or at least that was how Pulowski had thought about him when his father had filed for divorce and, two months later,
retired from the Army and moved to Naples, Florida. One of the most curious things about that divorce—one that had grown more curious once Pulowski, who’d been sixteen at the time, had gone off to college and developed a better sense of how a divorce might work, not to mention how a man like his father, who was extremely organized, would tend to plan things—was the fact that his father must have known and been planning to move to Naples for some time. It was impossible to imagine it differently. This had become the focal point of his anger with his father for years, especially once he got to college. He’d finally asked his father about this directly at the graduation banquet held for his ROTC cadre. The colonel, as far as Pulowski knew, had not put on a uniform since his retirement, which was one of the reasons that Pulowski, dressed up in his ROTC greens, had felt powerful enough to ask the question on that particular day. They’d been in a hotel ballroom near the University of Pittsburgh, the cadets in white gloves, the tables covered in fancy tablecloths, napkins frilled in cups, and when Pulowski’s mother had gotten up to go to the bathroom, he’d leaned over to his father and said, You knew you were leaving us, didn’t you? You knew it and you never said anything. Isn’t that true? His father, a fastidious man, gray-haired, not far from his own death (though, of course, Pulowski hadn’t known that then), had rearranged his utensils around his plate and then said, And what use would that information be to anybody?

  At the time, Pulowski had considered his father’s response to be, at best, cowardly. But now, as he pushed through the crowded hallways, looking for an interpreter to read the detainee’s note, all he hoped for was his father’s equanimity. He could still see Beale’s splotchy, glistening face peeking out from behind a metal dumpster once they’d started taking fire in the alley off the Muthana intersection. “You think it’s such a stupid idea to check these buildings out now?” Beale had said, hands shaking as he tried to aim his weapon. “Fuck that, man. Fuck you and your bullshit.”