“Here’s what you should know. Since around 1994, when our guys back home really started regretting not taking out Saddam in ‘91 when they had the chance, the United States has given over a hundred million dollars to Chalabi and the INC. Every month the INC gets about $350,000 from the Department of Defense. And that whole time, it turns out, he was double-dipping: getting funds from the Iranians and cultivating close ties with them. Meanwhile just a couple of years back, after 9/11, Chalabi starts feeding us all kinds of info about how Saddam has resumed his WMD plans and wants to build a bomb. And you know what I think? Not just me. A lot of us. A lot of us think that nearly every piece of information the guy provided to us about Saddam’s weapons capabilities was fake. But we wanted it. Oh, you can imagine how hungry Bush’s boys were for every tasty tidbit that Chalabi served up. So, let’s see, you feed us bogus information, and we pay you handsomely for the privilege of receiving it. Either we’re too blind to see you’re bullshitting us, or we’re pretending we don’t see it. Because hey, it makes such a good excuse for a war. And a great opportunity to take out a brutal asshole who no one likes anyway.”
Sam is scribbling so furiously that her script looks more like unfolding coils of Arabic than English, except for it running from left to right. Her cheeks are flushed. I wish I had a handkerchief with me to wipe the sweat from my face.
“So your guys at the Tribune bought bum documents from some guy who professes to have more, and all of these documents seem to incriminate people who were pro-Saddam, or at least anti-invasion. What does it tell us? It’s an ideologically motivated forgery ring, not just a financial one. Hey, criminals are people, too, you know — they got a right to a cause. So, if you’ve got a whole slew of documents and most of them just happen to be incriminating people who were pro-regime or even looked pro-regime and who worked their tails off to keep us from knocking out Saddam, you bet’cha bottom dollar that is no coincidence. And if I had to say who was the most likely suspect, as a person who might have the will and the wherewithal to organize such a thing, well, I’d say that that person must be Ahmad Chalabi. See what I mean?”
Sam finishes off another two lines in her notebook and stops, putting it aside. “Wow. Huh! That’s pretty incredible. But look, Frank, I can’t go on must-be. You can put two and two together, I guess, but maybe there’s more than one person who fits the profile of four. Maybe someone else who’s smart and corrupt did this. How can we know for sure it’s Chalabi?”
“Hey, well, proving that Chalabi is behind it, now that’s going to be pretty hard. That man’s one slippery individual. And clever, too. Did I mention well-connected? You’re sure you want to pursue this?”
Sam shakes her head. “It’s not a question of wanting.”
“Well, then I’ll say this. I’m positive that Chalabi is your man. But if you want to trace the whole paper trail, that’s going to require a little more work.”
“What about your sources? Could any of them help us nail down whether it’s Chalabi?”
“Now, Miss Katchens,” he says in a sermonizing tone, wagging a finger at her. “I’m happy to give you whatever information I can that will be helpful for your story, if it will help bring out the truth. But not at the expense of some other guy getting his head blown off, which keeps happening around here.”
Sam exhales, turns her pen over in her notebook. Point, plunger, point. “So, what’s the truth you’re after?”
Baylor shifts his back against the wall, blinking. His eyes search blank airspace for a moment, and he stands up straight.
“The truth is that I don’t give a shit about Billy Jackson and his political career, and I don’t have a particular axe to grind against Chalabi. But I’m going to help you with this Jackson thing, and after that, I think you’re going to help me by doing a story about the WMD farce.”
Sam squints. “Are you saying there are no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?”
“Not in useable condition. And whatever was useable has probably been carted off elsewhere,” he says, using his fingers like little feet running away. “But first things first. Sam, how about you come back to my office upstairs so we can make things look good in terms of you having talked to me about electricity. I can send out a couple of messages from there, maybe get you some leads,” he says. “And Nabil, I’m going to send you out with one of our undercover intel guys who can show you areas where a lot of the illegal activities are going on: weapons markets, chop shops, looted goods up for resale. You might find some connections to the forgery operations there, too.”
Sam views Baylor with hard eyes. “We don’t usually split up.” It isn’t entirely true, but I like the way she put it. We. “And if this guy is intel and knows all this stuff,” Sam says, “I’d like to be there, too.”
“Afraid not,” Baylor says. “Nabil will see where they’re at. He could always bring you back there later in your own car. But I don’t need you going there on my watch. It’s way too dangerous.”
“Well then it’s dangerous for Nabil.”
“Less so for an Iraqi,” he says, reaching for the door knob. He looks me over. “I want to send you out for a tour with my guy Louis. He’s not really in intel so much as security with a bit of information-gathering thrown in, but don’t tell him I said that,” he says, giving me a wink. “He can show you a few interesting things around town, and then drop you off at the Hamra.”
“Frank,” she says. “I need to get out and check these places, too. If I don’t do it in one of your bullet-proof bulldozers, when will I?”
“Look, Louis is a quarter Latino and wears a nice big moustache, so he can pass in a crowd. But people would be suspicious of a woman in these places. Am I right, Nabil?”
I look at Sam, knowing that lying might put her in danger. “Yes.”
“With that mane, if you don’t mind my saying, you’re never going to pass for anything but a good-lookin’ media chick,” says Baylor. “Oh, sorry. Was that politically incorrect?” He smiles widely, pulling the door open and holding out his hand for her to walk first.
~ * ~
36
Holding
Up close, Louis, who makes it clear that I don’t need to know anything about him other than not to call him Lou-ee, and not Lou either, doesn’t look at all like he might be mistaken for an Arab. But he does wear a thick moustache, and from afar, I suppose, I see what Baylor is talking about. He is a touch more brown than most Americans, unlike Baylor or Sam, who have skin somewhere between a peach and an apricot. He could pass for Lebanese, maybe. But not Iraqi.
After a kind but fast hello that says, don’t waste my time with your Arab niceties, Louis flies off at speeds we haven’t driven since before the war, when we weren’t worried about the possibility of being mistaken for someone trying to attack a US convoy.
He reaches into his glove compartment, cups a red glass box in his hand, and when he rolls down the window I get a better look at the ruby-coloured charm and only now do I see that it is a siren. He lifts himself out of his seat and, with his left arm out of the window, plonks the siren on top of the car.
The wailing sends a bolt of fear into my neck. It’s the knell of heart attacks, strokes, accidents. The sounds of the hospital while I waited in Baba’s office after passing out from some terrible sight or another. Akhir marra. This is the last time I’m taking you here, Nabil.
But we don’t often hear the sirens anymore, unless it is a really big bombing, the kind that shakes the ground and rattles the windows and sends a shudder through your arm-hairs, so that you know that many people, not just one, have just passed from this world, whisked out of the city through the secret doors only God knows. There are fewer sirens now because when it’s only a few people dead no one bothers to get the ambulance to come, but instead they take most of the injured to hospital on their own.
We carry our own dead and wounded, in our cars and trucks and trunks, and afterwards in our minds, which brings them
back to life just when we least expect it. Recently, I saw a blackened body, or maybe it was an almost-dead man, flung over the seat of a bicycle while his friend, crying, pushed it along from behind. For every Iraqi who has done harm to his fellow man in this war, there are a hundred others who have done good. I’ve seen them in corners, trying to help, trying to stay honest, trying to live. I’ve seen them lift torn flesh and blood and put it on human wings and spirit it to places where we try to do the work of God.
Sometimes I wish I had been stronger, like Baba and like Ziad, so that I too could heal people. But I’m doing a different kind of mending, aren’t I? Fixing. Without me, the communication between Sam and the rest of Iraq would be broken. Instead of bodies, I stitch together words.
I feel the impact more than the ache; Louis just punched me in the arm. I must have been lost in my thoughts for too long. He grins at me and laughs.
“Look, man. You gotta have some way to get around traffic in this town, because it is fucking deadly. You don’t think I’m going to sit here and wait for us to get shot at, do you? I’ve taken lots of small arms fire, that’s nothin’. Do you know what it’s like to come under a barrage of mortars and RPGs when you’re just trying to get the goddamn boss to work?”
Before I can answer, he turns up the volume on his stereo and veers on to the central reservation, and now he is higher than I am. He overtakes the other cars at speed and he is hooting like a schoolboy and I feel like we could tip over at any second, surely in my direction, and that he would crush me in an instant.
“Yee-hah! Hold on there, Nabel!”
I find myself grasping on to a hook just above the window with one hand, and with the other, the dashboard.
“Is this allowed?”
“Come on, my man. What isn’t allowed in this hellhole? There’re no rules here anymore. This here’s make-your-own!”
Off the central reservation and back into traffic, he veers to the right, down a sideroad. “Gotta know the shortcuts, Nabel.”
“It’s Nabil.”
“Nab-eel? Like an ‘eel’ at the end?”
“I guess so.” My stomach has the feeling I get just before I become nauseous, and my heart is thumping like it’s trying to escape through one of the spaces in my rib cage. It is embarrassing that I cannot stop thinking this way, that some things are allowed — masmuh — and other things are forbidden - mamnua. You should always ask. You don’t want to make trouble for yourself by breaking the rules. It is a philosophy that has kept my family out of trouble for generations.
“Don’t worry, dude!” He slaps a hand on my knee and shakes it, his left hand still vibrating at the steering wheel. His touch makes me recoil.
He smiles and slows a little. “Just having fun wit’cha. But look, you want to wind up a piece of roadkill just to avoid making cutsies?”
I glance back at the line of people we just blazed past and I remember that night of taking Noor to the hospital. On their faces, that same resentment and resignation.
“What’s this?” I ask, watching him pound his head with the music.
“Nirvana, dude.” He turns a switch next to the radio, and now the sound of the siren changes. It was long and wailing. Now it’s short and staccato.
“Pick a tune, any tune,” he says. “Anything to get these schmucks out of the way. Fucking towelheads.”
I haven’t heard that term since we lived in England. My father said it was very offensive, and that people who use it are ignorant. My father has probably never worn a ghutra on his head in his life, thought he does sometimes wear a dishdasha around the house, a long men’s dress, on his day off, because wearing one is just plain comfortable.
There is no point in me reacting. What could I say? That most of us, in fact, don’t wear towels on our heads, and that a ghutra does, in fact, provide very good protection from the combination of extreme sun and airborne dust? Or that I had expected more from someone who is working for the US government?
“Oh, by the way, I don’t mean you,” he says, speeding to the front of another line of traffic, towards a checkpoint. He rolls down his window and thrusts a pass in the face of a young soldier. “When I say towelhead, I only mean these hajjis with shit-for-brains who keep targeting our boys. That’s all. There’s a lot of folks ‘round here will shake hands with their right and shoot you with their left.”
I nod, as if to indicate that I accept his racist commentary. I wish I could take the nod back.
“No harm done, eh?”
“Of course not.”
“So who is it exactly you guys are looking for? I mean, what’s your interest in this whole, you know, underground illegal goods market thing?”
I have to think for a minute. What would Sam say if she were here? What are we looking for, exactly? Connections to Akram? Chalabi? Saddam?
“We want to find out how a certain set of documents got made, now that we’re pretty sure they were fabricated. And who made them, and why.” I guess that’s the most I could say, off the record. “It’s a bit complex.”
He smiles. “Sounds like it.”
“Well, they certainly looked quite realistic to the average person, at the start.”
“Things always look good at the start, my friend.” The car rattles with the invisible backblow of an explosion somewhere, probably to the north, maybe around the neighbourhood of Al-Khansa or even Sab’a Nisan. “Like us coming here, Nabil. Looked good from the start, didn’t it? Boy, it was downright brilliant.”
I want to tell him that none of it looked good from the start. Not that things were so good with Saddam either, because every day they discover some new mass grave where Saddam and his men dumped a few hundred bodies, and you start wondering, could America have made that up, too? I don’t think so.
A phone is ringing, and it occurs to me that we’re practically shouting at each other. Louis turns the volume on the music down and reaches for what I thought was a small weapon on his belt. He flips the black, egg-sized gadget open, and answers. A phone, on his belt! I thought Sam’s Thuraya phone was the best technology around, but you need to be outside for that to work, and hers is three times the size of Louis’s.
“Yeah. Yeah. Yeah,” Louis says. “Well, I’m busy doing a little recon work for the desk chief right now.” Louis looks at me and winks. “Okay, yeah,” he says, looking at his watch. “I’ll be back within the hour.”
He flips the phone closed and tosses it into a space just below the gearstick. “Hey, sorry about this, but this ride ain’t gonna be as long as we planned because I’m being called back to the office by forces more powerful than Mr Baylor, and there ain’t many of them, as Baghdad ops go.”
“No problem.”
“Look,” he says. “I’ll drive you over to the Souq Mureidi area in Sadr City so you’ll know where it is.”
“Well, I know where that is.”
Louis raises his eyebrows. “Oh yeah? And do you know what you’d find in Habibiyeh market versus the one in Chuhader? Or where Baghdadis are going these days for guns?”
“Well...” I could find out such things if I needed to, if I wanted to. “I haven’t had much reason to research that.”
“Well, truth is, you can get illicit stuff all over the city now.” He switches off the siren and turns east on the Dura Expressway, instead of north. “You just need to know where to find things. I wish I could bring you around town to check’em out all afternoon. So maybe instead I’ll just show you one of the markets in Zayouna.”
“Zayouna? I know Zayouna very well.”
“Is that right?” Holding on to the wheel with his left hand, he reaches into his back pocket with his right. He pulls out a packet of chewing gum that says Big Red on it. “You want?”
I take a piece and thank him. Inside my mouth, however, it burns so much I’m tempted to spit it out, and then I find myself getting used to it.
Louis frowns. “What do you know about Zayouna?” he asks, s
hoving two pieces in his mouth.
“Well, I grew up in Baghdad. I had some friends who lived there, and also some distant relatives. It’s a good neighbourhood. Very nice people.”
“Very nice people who are actively involved in trying to kill my people, who are even nicer. Ha!” He shoots a glance at me. “That was a joke, Nabil. We need a nickname for you. Or maybe a title. ‘Nerves-of-Steel Nabil.’ Haddya like that? That’s a good one to have written on your tombstone.”
Louis pulls another red-hot strip from the packet and balls it up into his mouth, working his jaw hard to keep the wad going. “So you got relatives in Zayouna? Maybe a nice cousin you want to introduce me to? Someone cute? Some of these ladies are good-looking if you get them out of their veils, you know what I mean? Except that a lot of them wear too much makeup, man.” Louis veers off the highway, taking us towards Baghdad Jadida — not necessarily the shortest route to Zayouna. How could he possibly know all these neighbourhoods, anyway? Still, for someone who hasn’t been here long he seems to be very familiar with the city.
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