“Samara, I would appreciate it if this were totally off the record.”
“No problem,” she says, though I can see the petulance in her face.
“You know,” Aloomi says, “I served as an advisor to the Iraq office at the Pentagon. I know what government documents look like and I helped the Americans with them for years, while I was doing my PhD in Virginia.” He signals to see the folder, and Sam pulls it out of her bag and presents it to him. He leafs through the copies of the documents Harris sent Miles via e-mail when the story first ran. The other day, Miles e-mailed them to Sam, and she printed them out at the Hamra’s business centre, which actually has a working printer.
Aloomi looks up. “It’s obvious these documents are copies of the real thing.”
“They are?” Sam hesitates, draws in a breath. “How can you tell?”
“The insignia. Do you see?” He points to the calligraphy at the top. The letters fold in on each other in a way that makes it a little difficult to read, like the old signature of the Ottoman Empire. “I don’t know if you’d know the difference, but...you, Nabil.” He shifts the page towards me. “Do you see the way the ‘qaf’ here becomes the ‘rah’ here?” He points to a dip in the Arabic “q” at the end of Iraq to the “r” in jumhuriyye, or republic. “It’s obvious right here. And here,” he says, pointing to ties in between other letters, where the same stroke for ending one is used to start another. “This insignia is difficult to imitate. Impossible.”
None of what he’s saying makes a solid argument, but I nod anyway and say I see.
“If your editors think that these documents are fakes,” he says, pushing the folder back towards Sam, “you should tell them, what was that saying you have in America? They are barking at the wrong tree.”
“Up,” says Sam.
“Pardon?”
“Barking up the wrong tree.”
Aloomi suddenly stands, pushes his tie again over his middle. “I wish I could help you but I really don’t think there’s any point in expending any more energy here.”
Sam stands up slowly, and I follow.
“Are you sure you can’t try to find some other documents for us with Uday’s signature? That couldn’t be too difficult, with all the boxes of documents you have here. I’m sure everyone back in Washington would really appreciate your help with this.” Sam smiles, seeming sweet — and yet threatening.
He looks through her, not at her. “I’ll have to check with some other people at our headquarters to see if there’s any way we can help you.” He walks to his door and holds the knob. “But honestly?”
Sam and I walk towards the door. I have a feeling of being dismissed. Sam looks at him, indicates she’s waiting for him to finish.
“With all due respect, I wouldn’t bother wasting time on this, if I were you,” he says. “You should just be glad that the Tribune was first to report the story of Mr Jackson’s corruption. Unfortunately, that’s the way the world works. Corrupt politicians in the free world and brutal dictators in the Third: they make great friends.” He smiles broadly. “You must know that.”
Sam places a hand on her hip. “How will we know if you do have something for us?”
“If I have something that can help,” he says, pacing the three steps back to his desk and then picking up her card, “I’ll call you. Or drop something off for you.” He studies the card. “Did you write your Thuraya number on this?” He flips it over, where Sam has written a long line of numbers. “Ah, so you did.” He looks at me and back to her. “Well, anyway, I can always find you at the Hamra Hotel, I presume?”
Sam glares.
“I have been hearing that all of the top journalists are staying at the Hamra now because it’s considered the popular place to be,” he says. “And you have that lovely swimming pool, too.”
“Yes, it is something. I go there sometimes to see some of my colleagues. But I don’t stay there. I’m at the Sheraton.”
“I see. Also a good choice.” Once again he makes for the door and opens it as if welcoming us in, though he’s showing us out. He holds out his hand to Sam and she takes it stiffly, as if she’s unsure whether she wants her skin to meet his. And then his hand reaches mine, squeezing the bones a little too hard.
~ * ~
30
Squeezing
Sam is dipping chunks of bread into the hummus, but she hasn’t touched the kebab. I ask her why, and she says she doesn’t like red meat. I consider telling her that it’s quite brown now, but it would sound too cheeky. She insists she is not a vegetarian because she occasionally eats chicken. But if you don’t eat meat, as far as I can see, you’re not really eating a normal diet.
“You should come back in the winter and have my mother’s kubbeh soup.”
“Oh yeah?” She is eating the vegetables and the pickles, and occasionally a french fry. It’s a treat to be eating again at Lathakiya, but she’s missing the best part. “What’s that?”
“Kubbeh? It’s a very famous Iraqi dish. It’s like a, what do you call that? A dumping? Sorry, a dumpling! A dumpling with meat inside it, except that the outside is better than a dumpling.”
She gulps her Coke, draining the glass. I’m amazed how she could stay away from red meat but is happy to fill up on this. “But I don’t eat meat.”
“It’s just little bits of meat. Not really like a big piece of meat. Mincemeat, that’s what they call it. It’s very delicious — it’s the best thing on a cold winter day. You have to come to my house and try it. Mum makes the best.”
Sam shapes her lips in a way that suggests she doesn’t fancy the sound of it at all. “Maybe she’ll make me a veggie one? As I said, I don’t eat meat. Only chicken.”
Realizing she isn’t going to budge, I reach for the last kebab, although I’ve probably had one too many already, as my stomach is pressing against my belt. I consider loosening it a notch, then decide against it.
“Sam, that thing that Aloomi was going on about, the yellowcake issue, about how Saddam tried to buy it from Niger?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Well, my cousin Saleh says that report was totally fake. And he says Chalabi, or someone at the INC, made it all up. A total fake.”
Sam wipes her mouth, leaving a lipgloss afterglow on her napkin. “Really? Saleh who wants a job? How would he know?”
I shrug. “He knows. I guess from working at the UN liaison office here. I’ve been meaning to tell you more about it. I mean, I wasn’t totally sure I believed him. Though now that I saw Aloomi act the way he did, it’s starting to make more sense.”
“Start over. Tell me again about Saleh.”
I stab into the last kebab on the table and push it into my mouth, glad for the need to chew, and therefore to think. “He works for the UN, but as I mentioned to you before he wants to get out, and he hopes we can get him a job somewhere.”
“Tell him he should check out CARE. I think they’re hiring translators.”
“Oh, yes? Good.” I hand her my small notebook. “Can you write down the names? I mean, of anyone you know there? It would help.”
Sam jots down two names as I talk. “And?”
“The night before last, I told him about our story. And then, early this morning, he stopped by and gave me a lift to the Hamra, and in the car, he gave me a lot of information about forgers.”
Her eyes narrow. “Wait. What did you tell him?”
“Not the whole thing, of course, just that we were looking for some information — that we are investigating the issue of fake documents, of where they come from.”
“The issue?” Sam wipes at the dust on the napkin holder. “Nothing specific? I have a hard time believing anyone would be satisfied with that explanation.”
“It wasn’t really an explanation, Sam. It was just a short visit. I had told him that we could use some help, he said that he wanted to do anything he could.”
“Well?” Sam suddenly looks anx
ious.
“He thinks a lot of the information Chalabi and the INC people gave to the Americans before the war was fake. This morning, he gave me a description of how to find several forgery operations in Sadr City, and he thinks these are the places where such documents were made.”
Sam stops picking at the radishes on the table and looks over to the waiters, in case they might be listening. “Really? Can we go?”
I nod. “Maybe I should go first, to check out if it’s okay for you.”
Sam’s mouth twitches, her nostrils widen. “We might not need to go more than once. I think I should just go with you. I’ll wear an abaya.”
“It isn’t just about wearing an abaya. You look too American. And even if you were Iraqi, an Iraqi woman wouldn’t be involved in going to these places.”
Sam grabs a wad of napkins, more than she needs, and wipes her hands on them. Then she takes a tiny plastic bottle from her bag and spills a gooey clear liquid on her hands, rubbing them together.
“What’s that?”
“Oh this?” She turns the bottle around to look at the label. “It’s Purell.” She reads on. “Instant hand sanitizer. Disinfectant.” She turns the logo towards me and smiles. “Makes life a little cleaner.”
“Do Americans use this all the time? After every meal?”
“Of course not!” she laughs. “I mean, some people — when you’re in a place where it’s...where you’re travelling.” She rubs her hands together, giving off an odour that is a mix of ammonia and menthol. “Want some?”
I shake my head, and mouth to the waiter that we would like tea. Thinking again about how my refusal could be insulting, I hold out my hands.
Sam spills a drop into each palm. It feels like cold glue, but after rubbing it into my hands for a moment, it disappears.
“Actually, you’re supposed to use it before you eat so that you’re eating with clean hands,” she says. “But whatever. Sometimes I do things backwards.” She dips her head closer to me. “How does your cousin know about these places? Is he involved in this sort of thing?”
“No!” I probably sound too forceful, but the question is a little off-putting. “No, absolutely not. But he was some kind of management official at the UN liaison office in Baghdad, and of course anyone in those jobs had to be approved first by Saddam. He’s a smart guy, my cousin Saleh, and basically innocent — he was doing what he had to do to survive. I don’t think he ever really liked Saddam. He’s definitely not a Ba’athist, though his father probably was.”
Sam nods. “Okay.”
“Okay, so, during the oil-for-food programme, and you know, during the years of the embargo against Iraq—”
“The sanctions?”
“Yes, the sanctions. He was one of the people who had to give the UN the reports about the number of children dying from lack of medicine and malnutrition. They had to make the number look very high — to make America look bad. So these experts in documents, I mean, these men who have an expertise in creating documents that look very real, well, Saleh and another guy in his office sometimes had to go to Saddam City, you know, now it’s Sadr City, to pick them up. He said that’s where the best forgers were. Saleh knows a few names.”
“Where?” she asks. “I mean, do you know where exactly? Sadr City is huge.”
“One place is Souq Mureidi,” I say, my voice so low it is almost a whisper. Across the screen in my mind, I see myself whispering that way right in her ear, her eyes closing, her mouth opening.
Sam stares at me. Her face is still but her sealed lips grow full, pleased with themselves. The tea has arrived, hers first. As the waiter puts mine down a hot splash lands on the back of my hand, making me flinch enough to knock over my water glass. Sam manages to catch it before much can spill.
“So sorry. So sorry.” The waiter, a spotty-faced fellow with bushy hair who cannot be more than sixteen or seventeen, keeps apologizing while I dip my napkin in the rescued glass and dab it on my hand. I tell him it’s fine, but he still looks concerned and, looking a bit helplessly at me, runs off.
Sam makes the kind of sympathetic face you might for a small child. “Let me see.”
I peel the wet napkin away to reveal the red spot across my hand. “It’s fine. It hurt for a second, that’s all.”
Sam turns her head to watch the young waiter rushing back towards us, a plate in hand. “Well, sometimes it pays to exaggerate a little, huh?”
He puts the plate down in front of us. “Sambusi, special for you, on the house,” he says in English, which I find a bit worrying, because it just proves how obvious it is to everyone around us that Sam is American. “So sorry,” he says again.
“That’s not necessary,” I say.
“Please. Please. On us,” he says, and makes for the other side of the restaurant where the other waiters, who are not as young, are smirking at him.
“Have you tried this?”
“No-o,” says Sam, interested. “Looks decadent. Bet it’s really sweet, yeah?”
“Sweet, but with warm cheese inside. Try it.”
She shudders, which tells me this doesn’t sound appealing, but places her fork into the triangular pastry none the less and tries to break it in half. I want to tell her she would be better putting the whole thing in her mouth, but I suppose that’s not the way a woman, Arab or otherwise, likes to approach the eating of a dessert.
“Mmm,” she says, or moans, really. “It’s so rich.” She closes her eyes as she chews. Something in her shut lids suggests a deep satisfaction, a side of herself she has never shown me.
She opens her eyes again, breathes out through her nostrils.
“Sam, are you happy?”
She smiles wryly and takes the half she left behind, more interested in the sambusi than my question. She puts the fork down and stops chewing, her eyes rolling across mine like one of those scanning lights in the middle of the night looking for invading ships.
“Oof,” she lets out a breath, as if she’d been holding it all this time. “That’s crazy sweet. But amazing,” she says, nodding, as if to make sure I know she likes it.
“You should taste the ones my mother makes.”
Sam smiles, pushes around the second piece of pastry on the plate, and glances at her watch. With Sam, there is rarely a full attention, an awareness that it isn’t polite to talk to someone about food while looking at your watch. Everything that I hate in these moments, when her courtesies fail, I can love a minute later, when I remember that it’s only about her dedication to the story. My grandmother, Zahra, once told me you could be a mujahid your whole life, she said, just in struggling for the truth.
“Am I happy? What kind of question is that?” She stares at the second pastry, pondering, I presume, whether or not she will eat it.
“Oh, I mean, do you like this job you have, being in Iraq, travelling all over the world all the time? Don’t you want, well... I guess you must think my life is boring. I have only been to England and Dubai, though that’s more than most Iraqis.”
“You’re not boring,” she says. Her eyes leave the plate a second to meet mine, and then go back to the second sambusi.
“Why don’t you eat it?” she asks.
“I don’t want any sweets now,” I say. I almost forgot. The truth is, since Noor was killed, I decided that I would give up eating anything sweet for a year, which is an appropriate period of mourning for a loved one, even if that’s not how I see Noor. I want to show that I’m not indulging in sweetness after what happened. But to whom? As if God cares whether I eat sweets. But there aren’t many other luxurious things in my life to give up.
“Why not?” Sam says, spreading out the sweet honey sauce that surrounds the pastry. “You sure?”
“Yes. And you can’t let good sambusi go to waste.”
She pushes it across the table, towards me. “You eat it, then.”
“What I meant is, maybe you’re the happiest woman in the world.
All your dreams come true. But in your country, is it not important for a woman to have children? To get married and be a wife?”
She stares at me, and there’s something of a hurt look across her face, flaring in her nose. “Sure it’s important. But it’s not the only thing. I’m not just a body with a womb.”
“I-I know. I didn’t mean that—” I feel my hands stuttering to defend me.
“No, it’s fine.” She taps her fork into the sambusi she had pushed away. She looks at me to make sure I haven’t changed my mind, and when I shake my head, she presses her fork down into the pastry, and watches the cheese ooze out from the sides. She continues to press on what was round and full until it is flat.
Baghdad Fixer Page 29