Baghdad Fixer

by Prusher, Ilene

  To me, it is impossible to eat a meal and work at the same time. I would rather fast as if it were Ramadan and wait for a proper dinner in the evening. But Sam eats with one hand while racing through her notes with a pen in the other, sometimes letting a drop of hummus fall on to her notebook, a few crumbs on to the keyboard. I have never seen anything like it. In Iraq, we don’t eat and work at the same time. To do so shows a lack of appreciation for the food, as well as the person who made it. After all, how many things in life do we really do that cannot wait a half-hour or an hour before being completed? A person shouldn’t be expected to take in and put out at the same time. Maybe Americans don’t see it that way.

  If eating and writing at the same time is not enough, Sam also moves to pick up the telephone when it rings. I offer to answer for her, but she holds the fork in her hand and waves it, which I take to mean “no”. Instead, she puts the call on speakerphone, grabs a tissue on the desk and spits what she was chewing into it.

  “Hello, Sam. It’s Axelrod.”

  “Harris!” Her voice bursts as one would when hearing from an old friend after many years. “How are you?”

  “Good, Sam. Never been better. Just got back from hanging out with some fishermen in Basra. How’s Baggers treatin’ ya?”

  Sam clears her throat. I can see that she is nervous from the way her eyes search the void in front of her. She quickly opens a file and begins typing. Her fingers are moving much more lightly over the keys than they usually do, like tiptoeing. I suppose she doesn’t want Harris to know she is taking the conversation down, word for word.

  “Oh, you know, the usual. A few soldiers getting picked off every morning. America is in the throes of firing the entire Iraqi military, and some of these disgruntled guys are starting up their own militia. So I’m working on a story about that.”

  “Really?” The tone in Harris’s voice sounds pushy, almost bullying. “Now, I thought you were working on a story about me.”

  “About you?” Sam laughs in a way that impresses me. It is casual, as if she’s just having a good joke. “Well, Harris, unless you’re planning to start your own militia.” She laughs again, and this time, it sounds a bit more forced. She drives her highlighter pen into her notebook, letting the bright-pink ink bleed into a wider splotch.

  “Let’s cut the bullshit, Sam. We both know what story you’re on. I know Miles asked you to check up on my story about Billy Jackson.”

  “Oh, is that what you mean? Well, yeah, of course I’m working on that as well. I wouldn’t say that’s a story about you. I’m just trying to figure out where those documents really come from.”

  “What do you mean, really come from? Okay, let me explain it to you again like I explained it to Miles. I got them from General Akram, who got them from Uday Hussein’s house. What’s so complicated about that? I mean, what are you guys trying to do here?” Something about his voice is condescending, rather like the way a bad teacher belittles a poor student.

  “Harris, look. I didn’t even want to do this story. But the fact is that we’re getting sued by Congressman Jackson, and Miles and everyone in Washington has laid it on me to help figure this out. At this point, we’re just checking facts.”

  Sometimes when I watch Sam, I am entertained by the effort I have to exert to figure out which things are half-truths, which of them white lies, and which of them pure manipulation. She did tell me she wished the paper would send Harris to clean up his own mess — but that was days ago. Lately, she acts as if the story matters as much as anything else in the world. She no longer seems unhappy that they assigned it to her.

  “Well, they’re refusing to let me work on the story anymore at this point, and they won’t even pay my expenses to send me back to Baghdad to clear things up.” Harris says. “But I might come back, on a gig with Harpers or Vanity Fair. They’re both quite interested. And with you guys taking this story away from me, it becomes a prime example of how the Tribune mishandles things and screws its own reporters. Typical.”

  “Really,” says Sam. “Well, that’d be something.” Sam looks at me and her mouth drops open.

  “Sam, I heard from Miles last night that General Akram told you I paid him $3,000 for those documents.”

  She stands up and sits again. Her top teeth bite into her lower lip.

  “Sam, it’s bullshit. Don’t believe a word of it. I didn’t pay a thin fucking dime for those documents. I just paid $1,000 to have them translated.”

  “A thousand dollars to translate documents in Baghdad? That’s like, more than a year’s salary for most people here.”

  “C’mon, Sam. You know how it is. You need something done in that town, you gotta pay for it. I was in a rush. Look, I didn’t do anything wrong — nothing different than any other reporter would have done. Everybody was shelling out cash for papers. You know it.”

  “I knew people who gave $50-dollar tips to get into guarded buildings. Not $3,000.”

  “Jesus. What did I just tell you? I didn’t pay $3,000! Shit, I guess I am going to have to come to Baghdad, because obviously you’re not getting it.”

  Sam cracks her knuckles softly, plucking each finger out with a snap that I almost feel in my own joints.

  “You know how good my reputation is. I’ve got a book deal on the way. Do you think I’d have gotten this far if I didn’t know what I was doing? If I went around buying documents in Baghdad?”

  “Harris, I’m telling you, I resisted taking on this story, but they said I had no choice. So I can’t do anything about it. I think you have to discuss this with Miles, not me.”

  “The man hardly has the time of day for me now! He says I should put all further correspondence on the matter in writing. Their fucking lawyers are vetting everything.”

  “Harris, I wish I could help you more. But I’m actually on deadline so I ought to go.”

  “Sam! Sam, don’t you hang up on me. My career is on the line. You’re besmirching my reputation. You know, I also could sue you. Especially if this is turning into character assassination.”

  “Hmm. Okay, Harris, I think I’ve had enough. I’m going to go now.”

  “Yeah, well, you tell your little translator pal there I say dir balak. You just—”

  As my finger presses the red END button, I imagine what it would be like to poke my finger in Harris Axelrod’s eye. I wonder whether Sam even knows that when someone tells you to “watch out” like that, it usually means they’re planning to hurt you. Or at least, wishing something evil happens to you. It’s a kind of curse. Sam doesn’t seem to mind that I hung up the phone on her behalf, or that I’m standing over her now, so close that I could let myself fall all over her and cover her up and be a shield to protect her. I could wrap her up in me and be her blanket and her bodyguard all in one.

  She shakes her head and says, “Smart, Nabil, very smart.” She drops her head down and lets her eyebrows rest on the hard, lower edge of her palms. “Why didn’t I think of doing that five minutes ago?”

  ~ * ~

  29

  Doing

  While we sit here waiting, I find my mind reviewing everything we did yesterday in Tikrit. That, and all Saleh told me this morning after he arrived at my house at 8 a.m., kissed my parents hello, and then offered me a lift to the Hamra. He pretended it was on his way, but I know it wasn’t. As he drove, I listened and took notes. Jotted down places where high-quality forgeries have been known to be done.

  Why we’d ever need to go to such lengths, I don’t know. There can’t be much doubt now that the Jackson documents are forgeries. What more could Miles want?

  Plenty, says Sam, starting with Fayez Aloomi from the INC. Aloomi has been a source for other Tribune reporters in Washington, and now he’s in charge, among other things, of examining and categorizing regime documents that will later be used to build the case against Saddam, if and when the Americans ever find him.

  If Aloomi’s people say he’s going to be
back soon, Sam says, we’ll gladly wait outside for him. I said that seems menacing - only mukhabarat or some other official planning to drag you off for interrogation would do something like that. She laughed and said that was the old Iraq. The new Iraq will be like America. In America, it’s normal for journalists to wait around for hours if they really want to see someone. Especially if he’s someone important. Sam said it’s called door-stepping; others would call it a stake-out. I told her I thought that was a barbeque. She chuckled again and said that was a cook-out. When she wasn’t looking, I changed the spelling in my notebook. Stake, not steak.

  We’ve been waiting in the car for almost an hour, but it feels longer.

  “Sam, I was wondering. What do you know about Harris?”

  She turns completely around in her seat, so that her back is resting on the dashboard and her legs are folded in the style of an Indian guru.

  “I mean, the Tribune is an excellent newspaper,” I say, “so they would hire only writers with an excellent reputation, isn’t that so?”

  “Yeah, that’s the way it’s supposed to work.” She coughs. “Please, Rizgar, blow that smoke out the window or you’ll get me started again.”

  Rizgar smiles, puts his half-smoked cigarette between his lips, and steps out of the car.

  “Harris was never hired. He’s a freelancer who began overseas,” Sam says, holding on to the neckrest of the seat and repositioning her own neck from left to right, eliciting a vertebral snap. “So they view him differently than they view a staff writer. But they shouldn’t. Most freelancers are great. What’s important is that every reporter in the foreign press corps thinks the guy’s a sensationalist who makes shit up and cuts major ethical corners.”

  “So, if Harris had been hired in America, it would be better, but because he has international experience, he is frowned upon?”

  “He is frowned upon, not because he has international experience, but because as far as we know, he had no local reporting experience. Never covered the cops, the school boards, the local crap every reporter is expected to cover. That’s how you learn the ropes. But Harris never did it. He’s been war-zone hopping since he graduated college, and he started to make a big name for himself out of it. So who the hell knows what his reporting habits are like. Before Iraq it was Afghanistan, Rwanda, the Balkans. I think he started to make a name for himself there, with a big piece in Harpers or The Atlantic.” She turned her head to one side. “Or maybe it was The New Yorker. Whatever. These are the most important magazines in America. Every editor is reading them.” She still seems to be struggling to find a comfortable position. “My back is killing me like this. Come sit up here.”

  Just then, Rizgar swings open the car door and sits down.

  “Oh, forget it, I’ll come sit in the back.” She steps out and shuts the door as quickly as she opens the other. Rizgar shrugs. She slides in next to me and grins with only half of her mouth. She has her left knee on the seat, bent towards me. “Riz, can you turn up the air conditioning? Please. Too hot.” She fans her face to demonstrate.

  “He doesn’t function like a regular journalist,” Sam continues. “He goes around rustling up tipsters whom he pays for information. A normal journalist comes to a country and hires one fixer. Harris might hire five or more.”

  “Like Subhi and Adeeb. But how can he afford that?”

  “Well, I don’t know. But what I heard from another reporter I really do trust is that when Harris got to Afghanistan, he had a whole gaggle of fixers and tipsters coming to his room every day. He told each one of them that if they came back with a good scoop on Osama or the Talibs at the end of the day, Harris would pay them $100. And if they don’t come back with something, they don’t get paid.” Sam lets out something of a snort.

  I consider this information for a moment. “Does he make that much on a story to cover his expenses?”

  “Probably. But forget about the money for a minute.” Sam looks at me with her head slightly lowered, so that her eyes glare up at me. “Maybe it was only $50 a day. That’s not the point. The point is that you can’t just throw money around like that to get information. You can’t tell people, ‘I’ll pay you if you produce some information for me,’ because inevitably they’ll manage to come up with exactly the information you want, even if it means completely manufacturing it.”

  “But that’s assuming everyone’s a liar.”

  “I’m not assuming everyone’s a liar. I’m just telling you it’s something you’re not supposed to do. You don’t go creating a market for information. If you go out there shouting that you have a demand for something and you’re just jumping to pay for it, you can bet your bottom dollar someone is going to come around and supply it. That’s not even journalistic ethics. It’s basic economics. And what you get in return will be tainted by the fact that it was manufactured for the buyer, which in this case, is probably going to translate into being fed a lot of absolute bogus.”

  Sam takes a ballpoint pen and picks the blue stopper from the top of the plastic shaft. Then she pulls out the tube of ink, and puts the clear shell of the pen in her mouth, inhaling deeply on her substitute cigarette. “All right, this is getting ridiculous,” she says, looking at her watch.

  “What if it’s just gossip?”

  “Come on.” Deep grooves appear where her smiling lines should be. “That much shit doesn’t follow someone around for no reason.”

  “But what if it’s just...namime. That’s what we call it. Like, in English, I guess you would say chatter. Gossip. It’s very bad. We’ve seen it happen a lot of times when the old ladies start talking about some beautiful young girl whom they think is going out with boys, maybe because they’ve seen her out with one of them. They start to make up stories about how they saw her with so-and-so, and next thing you know, she winds up dead. They usually say it’s a suicide, but everyone knows it’s really because a family member has killed her.”

  Sam suddenly seems fascinated by what I have to say. She is searching my face the way I have seen her do to people she is interviewing.

  “But despite what I said the other day, I think it’s wrong to call it an honour killing, because most of the time, it’s a gossip killing,” I say. “Gossip is usually what kills these girls. And often it’s the women who are perpetrating the entire thing.”

  Sam rubs her tired-looking eyes and exhales make-believe smoke. “Do you think we could do a story about that at some point? I think readers would find that fascinating.”

  “Sure we could.” A month ago, that would have sounded preposterous to me. But now, anything seems possible.

  “I mean, not now. Not until we figure out this documents thing.” And she stops rubbing, but leaves two fingers at the inner corners of her eyes, as if her hand could save her, if only for a moment, from seeing us for who we are.

  ~ * ~

  And then it happens, near dark. An assistant approaches the car to tell us we can come in, that Mr Aloomi will see us now. I can’t help but wonder, was he here all along, and they were just making a show of him having “arrived”? Wouldn’t we have seen a car pull up?

  Fayez Aloomi looks younger than I would have expected, a handsome and tanned mid-forties, and he is dressed in the kind of suit I would surely buy if I were to visit England now.

  “Thanks a lot for seeing us on short notice,” Sam chimes, holding her hand across a desk piled high with paperwork. “I know you must be very busy these days. I really don’t want to take up a lot of your time but I came to you because I know you’ve been really helpful with our reporters in the past. Some people in our Washington bureau are big fans of yours. Joe McClintock in particular sends regards.”

  “Oh, Joe. He’s a fine reporter. I think he did a very thorough job on all of the WMD coverage before the war. He was one of the few reporters who was able to demonstrate how dangerous Saddam really was. In fact, he was the first one to report the uranium story, when it was discovered that Saddam was abo
ut to buy yellowcake from Niger. Do you remember?”

  “Of course,” Sam says. Her eyebrows lift knowingly, almost like a barrier holding back more than she is letting on. “I spend a lot of time in Washington.”

  “Oh?” He shifts forwards and picks up the card she had put on his desk. “I didn’t realize. Your card says Paris Bureau Chief.”

  “Yes, actually, I’m ending my posting there and taking up a Pentagon posting back in Washington, so I’ve been in DC a lot in the past year to get a feel for the job.” Sam never mentioned that, and I’m wondering if it’s true. “By the way, this is Nabil al-Amari, my translator.”

  He meets my eyes and nods with a quiet, slurred salaam aleikum. “Miss Katchens — Samara,” he says, picking up her card from his desk. “What a lovely name. Very interesting. Can I call you Samara?”

  “Of course.”