Baghdad Fixer

by Prusher, Ilene

  I don’t want Sam to feel I don’t understand things first time round, so I nod occasionally, and try to look alert.

  “I mean, no paper in America wants to have the African-American community looking at them like they went and smeared one of their most esteemed, promising politicians, and in some ways, an important one, even if he’s really not someone with a hell of a lot of power in Washington.”

  “But...I’m not sure I understand. Is he important or not?”

  “Well, he’s important to his constituents in New Jersey. He’s important to a lot of people in the black community, and he’s often the first one to make noise when there’s a whiff of racism, even when there isn’t. He knows how to make news. Actually, I think he genuinely tries to represent his voters’ needs in Congress. But look, he’s a Democrat who opposed the war, which means he’s out of fashion on two fronts. He was one of very few people in Congress who voted against the use of force in Iraq. What does that tell you? He’s obviously persona non grata with most of the establishment in Washington.” Sam searches my face. “Didn’t the papers here cover his visits? I think he came to Baghdad twice, maybe three times in the past year or so.”

  “Perhaps.” I consider trying to hide the truth from Sam, and then realize there’s no point. She’ll probably wring it out of me eventually, and I’ll be ashamed for having tried to pretend. “I don’t really know because I didn’t read the papers very much in the last few years,” I admit. “I read them when I was in high school and university, but the quality of the writing was so poor that I thought it was actually very bad for me.”

  Sam looks amused. “Bad for you? What, like drugs? Like drinking too much coffee and not getting enough sleep?”

  “Are you asking about my health or yours?”

  She laughs into her cup and sips her coffee. “This could be huge,” she finally says. “Or, it could be a total wild goose chase.”

  “I don’t,” I start again. “I don’t think I understand what you’re supposed to do. What’s your assignment?”

  “Miles, my editor? He wants me to track down the person who gave Harris the documents. And meanwhile, this reporter, Harris? He wants to do it himself.”

  “So why doesn’t he?”

  “Well, that’s exactly what I said. Apparently he’s down in Basra on an assignment for some magazine. He wants to come back to Baghdad to clear this up, but the paper wants him off the story at this point, and won’t let him come anywhere near it. They’re pulling him off the story, which is like getting dumped in public. Miles says they’re not sure they trust the guy at this point.”

  I feather my fingers through my hair, wondering how anyone in journalism trusts anyone. Why do Sam’s editors trust her? Should I? The access to my scalp seems much more immediate than it did a few months ago, with loose, baby-hair tufts that seem to float rather than stay combed in place.

  Sam is now seated in front of her computer and is tapping on the long space bar. “Let me look at my notes from last night.”

  She types in a word. “All right, here it is.” She reads through the page quickly, mumbling a litany of words that I cannot distinguish, like the murmurings of men at prayer.

  “All right. Our story said Billy Jackson took at least $25 million dollars since the Gulf War. The story ran on April 10th. Harris said he got the documents from a former Iraqi general. Akram. That’s his name. Miles says, ‘We also want to know if Harris paid for the documents. We asked him flat-out and he says that he didn’t, but we’re starting to wonder,”‘ Sam says. “Hah! Starting to.”

  Sam mumbles again, reading but not really pronouncing her words, which I guess is her way of skim-reading out loud.

  “So,” she looks at me. “That’s the crazy part of it. They want me to track down the source of these documents that implicate Jackson, and they want to know if Harris paid for them. Essentially, they’re asking me to play policeman on Harris. It’s just a little — ick. Not very collegial,” she says with a grimace that drains some of the prettiness from her face.

  She gets up, strides into the kitchen, opens the refrigerator door, and shuts it. On a wooden rack above the stove, next to salt and pepper cruets and a box of matches, is a packet of cigarettes — a brand I haven’t seen before — with a blue emblem on it. Sam picks it up and shakes it, stares at it a second longer, and puts it back in its place. “That’s just what I need now, Carlos, for you to leave your cigarettes around.”

  “Who’s Carlos?”

  “Oh, he’s my roommate. Sort of. The suites here have two bedrooms. So this guy who’s a photographer for the Tribune, I’m sharing with him.”

  “A bloke with rather long hair?”

  “Yeah. Why, do you know him?”

  “I think I saw him leaving here yesterday.”

  “Probably. But he’s not around much, so as a roommate he’ll do.”

  She returns to the screen and reads, ‘“Harris is not being so co-operative, but he did give the name of one fixer he worked with on the story. Subhi el-Jasra, a student at Mustansiriyah University.’ That’s it. Can you believe it? A story like that, and all Harris is giving up is the friggin’ fixer’s name?” I stand behind her. She is still scrolling down to the bottom of the document file, and on her screen, I can see she is on page three.

  “You wrote all of that, just from having a phone call with your editor?”

  She shrugs. “It’s just I think better when I’m moving my fingers.”

  Me too. So why did I stop writing?

  “And it helps to keep a record of things. As a journalist you need to back things up. If you don’t, you wind up like Harris Axelrod, who after an illustrious career, finally appears to be up Shit’s Creek.” She glances at me with the eyes of an apologetic child. “I’m sorry. I’m not always this crude.”

  “You don’t have to—”

  “You know, part of me is pissed off because I’m also under the gun. I’m being taken off news, and therefore off the front page, and all anyone in Washington will notice, if anything, is that my byline has disappeared. It doesn’t look good for me. If this produces a great story and we get to hitch a ride on it, great. But if not, it’ll be for nothing and my byline count will suffer.” She stares at me. “You probably have no idea what I’m talking about.”

  I open my mouth, but she continues before I can answer.

  “They count up our bylines at the end of the year to judge our performance. The number of articles we write. If I end up spending weeks on this, I’m not going to be doing other stories, and I’ll have fewer bylines at the end of the year. That’s going to kill me in my year-end review.”

  She snaps her laptop shut hard, almost as if, were it a door, she’d be a hair shy of slamming it. Noor’s face flashes in my mind. That’s going to kill me. How Americans exaggerate.

  “Maybe it’s a test,” she says, packing up her bag. “Or they dumped it on me because I’m the youngest Tribune reporter here.”

  It’s as good a moment as any to ask. “How old are you, if I can—”

  “Thirty-three.” There’s nothing between us but an imperceptible sprinkle of dust in the air. I thought she looked thirty at most, except when she looks either annoyed or happy, and then the lines she’s growing around her eyes and mouth become visible. Five years between us.

  She sets her bag diagonally, across her chest, the strap drawing a division between her breasts. “So Mustansiriyah, and then Abu Ghraib.”

  “Abu Ghraib? The prison?”

  “Well, that was my plan for the day, and I’d like to stick with it. Perhaps we can have our cake and eat it too. On the way there, we’ll go and see if we can find this fixer Harris worked with.”

  She gestures for me to head for the door, and she follows after me. I have to grip the knob two or three times before I manage to turn it. To my surprise, my hands are soaking wet with sweat.

  ~ * ~

  13

  Soaking

/>   In the car downstairs I explain things to Rizgar as briefly as possible. We are going to Abu Ghraib, the prison whose name Baghdadis usually say in a fearful whisper. But first we’ll head for Mustansiriyah University to find a young man named Subhi.

  Rizgar frowns at me. “But all the universities are closed,” he says in his funny-accented Arabic. His meaty hands grip the wheel to pull out of the Hamra Hotel parking lot.

  “Oh, right...the universities are closed,” Sam says, turning to me. “Why didn’t you say so?” I wonder how she gets this when she doesn’t, apparently, speak Arabic. “Well, whatever. Rizgar, we go anyway. There’ll be someone around.”

  During the drive, I ask Sam more questions, but she only gives me vague three-word answers: “I don’t know.” “We’ll find out.” “Not sure yet.”

  And so I stop asking.

  The campus is a collection of angular, plain buildings, lacking the distinguishing features of the University of Baghdad. Most of the windows are broken, and the glass on the ground sparkles in the sun. Sam stays in the car with Rizgar and I walk up towards the main entrance alone. Drawing closer, I see that the painting of Saddam’s face on the wide pathway has been vandalized. Someone, perhaps a group of students, must have dipped their feet in red paint and then danced on his face. His eyes have been blacked out, making him look as evil as I have ever seen him.

  A bearded guard with a Kalashnikov slung over his right shoulder moves the weapon in front of him as I approach. I hold up my hands and tell him I’m just hoping to see one of their students. He says there is no one here, the students aren’t around. But I plead with him, explain that I’m trying to find someone very important. When he asks who, I blank for a minute and then say Subhi, Subhi el-Jasra. He asks, Subhi el-Jasra, is he a friend of mine? And in that split second I can only think to pretend, and I say yes, Subhi is my friend. The guard tells me that he doesn’t know him personally, but indicates that Subhi is one of the five young men in charge of the Hawza Committee. And I say, yes, my friend is on the Hawza Committee. He then announces that they are working on the security arrangements to open up the university again in a week, and I say of course, I know that, and he asks whether I want to see the head of the Hawza Committee so he can put me in touch with Subhi, and I say it would be very helpful. He makes tiny circles with his finger to ask if I have a pen, and I give him the one in my pocket and my notepad, and he writes: Mahmoud al-Tarabi, near the Showja Market. And then he says that Mahmoud’s father, Iyad al-Tarabi, is the head of security for the market there. And I say thank you, he has been such a help to me, and he says I am welcome, and I look him in the eye and then down at his right hand, to see if it is discreetly held out, motioning to receive something from me. But his hand is only holding the pen and depressing the plunger in it a few times, and he nods towards it to indicate it’s a nice one. I ask him if he could use it and he nods that he can, and I tell him to keep it, I’ve got another one in the car, which isn’t true. His beard is a young beard, full and yet not fully grown, and there is something about its unkempt edges that tells me that he is a religious man, and that he would not appreciate being offered money in this particular circumstance. But a nice pen is a tiny gift, not a bribe. And so I thank him again and he says God be with you, and I say, And with you, and I am back in the car so quickly I almost feel as if I have flown.

  “We’re in luck,” I tell Sam. “Apparently he’s a well-known student here, or maybe more than that. The guard knew him.”

  Sam looks up from the magazine she was skimming. “What do you mean, more than a student?”

  “Well, he says Subhi is on some security committee. Hawza security, he said.”

  “House security?”

  “No, HAW-za,” I say, pronouncing it so she can hear the word clearly. “Hawza is the religious establishment in Najaf. I mean, not the establishment, but where the establishment get their—” I search for a word, but have a hard time finding the right one. “Their intellectual ideas.”

  Sam’s eyebrows form a sceptical arch. “Intellectual ideas? Really? I thought the purpose of being a fundamentalist was to shun all things intellectual. It’s all about the man upstairs, right?” She points her finger upwards. “Nothing too complicated about that.”

  Sam must notice something in my face that betrays my discomfort with her generalization. It occurs to me that she and my father would get on well. Her eyes narrow. “I’m being facetious, Nabil.”

  “Well, there is some truth in what you say. But maybe not the full truth. But the men in the Hawza study holy Islamic books all the time, and they try to come up with decisions on all of the social questions of the day.”

  “Like issuing fatwas?”

  “Yes, like fatawa” I say. “This is the plural of fatwa.” I can’t help but feel that it sounds strange when English speakers take an Arabic noun and simply add an “s” to it. In fact, this is one of my translation peeves.

  Sam takes a black clip and snaps most of her hair into it. It’s so thick that it doesn’t all fit. “Do you take those seriously?”

  “What? The fatawa? It depends.” It’s beginning to irritate me, the way Sam uses words like facetious. And all sorts of slang. What if I were just a regular Iraqi with decent English? Most people wouldn’t know words like that.

  She turns in her seat, with the bottom of one foot, free of a sandal, against the inside of her thigh. “Whadd’he say?”

  “He said we could go to see this man in Aadhamiye who’s the head of the Hawza’s security committee, and that maybe he would tell us how we can find Subhi.”

  “Cool. Shall we go now?”

  I look towards Rizgar, hoping he will chime in with some advice about driving to Aadhamiye. But he says nothing, flicking his cigarette into the hot wind through a crack in his window. I keep expecting direction from him, as if simply by virtue of being older and wiser, he must have a better idea of what to do. And then I remember that he only knows about twenty-five words of English, and so he often isn’t listening. I’m the Baghdadi, not him.

  But that does not mean he isn’t thinking.

  ~ * ~

  It didn’t take long to track down Mahmoud al-Tarabi. I went to the Showja Market and said I was looking for Iyad al-Tarabi. The smell of the spice-stalls there infused me with energy, and I asked a few merchants and one thing led to another and I was pointed towards a line of homes facing the market, ones that didn’t look run down compared to others nearby. Mahmoud came to the door right away, a young man with a light-brown beard that was destined to become bigger and eyes that made me suspect that I had woken him from a nap. When I said I was looking for Subhi, he asked who I was. Right there I decided that Sam’s story was too long and complicated and so I told him I was from the University of Baghdad and we wanted to talk to Subhi to coordinate setting up a similar student-run security committee there. He nodded and said he’d have helped me but he was busy now although if he could help some other time he would. But he gave me the address I was after. As I walked back to the car I bought some fresh cardamom, always my favourite spice because it gives coffee — real coffee — just the right flavour, and I wondered if this was Saddam’s legacy to us: the sense that if you just cooperate a little and tell people what they want to hear, you make your life easier.

  ~ * ~

  We stand in Subhi el-Jasra’s doorway. He doesn’t look happy that his friend Mahmoud was so co-operative. He smiles only the most feeble of smiles, as if a ventriloquist from above has yanked the corners of his mouth into the most perfunctory crescent a mouth can make. And then his smile collapses, but he turns away from me so fast I hardly see it.

  It could be the heat. Today feels less like late spring and more like midsummer, when no one goes out in the middle of the day if they can avoid it.

  “Do you want to sit?” He points to a shabby blue sofa. A film of cigarette ash covers its fabric like a grey, carcinogenic dew. As we move into the room, I notice another young
man, about the same age, engrossed in a newspaper. He looks up to acknowledge us, but doesn’t say hello.

  We sit but Subhi remains standing, clearing newspapers off the other sofa. With better light here than we had in the doorway, I can see that he has traces of a black eye, a dark arc that throws his face off balance. Perhaps I didn’t introduce ourselves properly, because Subhi doesn’t seem impressed.

  “So, I am Nabil and I’m finishing my doctorate at Baghdad University, and this is Samara Katchens, from the Tribune newspaper.” I clear my throat, waiting for the “Ah, yes.” It does not come. It is true, I have been saying for several years that I’m going to do my doctorate, though I’ve done nothing to forward this goal, save some graduate courses.

  Subhi sniffs at the air as if trying to sniff us out. Or maybe all the smoke hanging around him has clogged his sinuses.