“We’re going to have to really boogey from here on in,” says Sam. “I’ll ask them to hold off for just another forty-eight hours. I’ll explain to them that we’re really close.”
“What happened today with Baylor?”
“Not that much,” she says, waving an invisible fly away. “He gave me some leads.”
“What sort of leads?”
“Why don’t we talk about it tomorrow? You may as well go now and then tomorrow we can go into the specifics, after I speak to Miles.”
“Sam, if you want to get this done, you need to tell me!”
“Nabil, sometimes you just need to cultivate your sources a little. Trust me. If there’s something important to tell you, I’ll tell you.” She taps on the keyboard again.
Should I ask her, or would it be embarrassing?
“Hey Sam? What’s nirvana?”
“Nirvana? It’s um, you know, a state of peacefulness. But let me get you a fuller definition,” she says, tapping a few keys on her computer. “Gotta love dictionary.com. It’s a term from Buddhism and Hinduism: a stage in which one reaches a higher state of harmony and tranquility by disassociating oneself from worldly possessions.”
That doesn’t sound like Louis. I walk closer to her desk. “Check if there’s another definition.”
“That’s it. It’s like, paradise. Why?”
“This Louis had his music on loud in the car, I asked him what it was and he said nirvana.”
“Oh! That Nirvana. It’s also a rock band. Here we are now” she sings in a sinister slur, “entertain us... “
“That’s it. That’s what he had on.”
“Jeez. That’s a bit much. I guess you got a good crash-course in American culture, though.”
Every day I work with you, Sam. “It was pretty interesting.”
“They’re depressing. The lead singer killed himself.” Sam looks at me with that look, the one that says I’m worried about you. “I’ll burn you a CD with some, you know, more chill stuff. I think that’d be more your speed.”
“Maybe,” I shrug.
“All right,” she stands, sending the signal that my invitation to leave is being sent a second time. “Come at, say, around nine tomorrow? Or, wait, you said you might go to check out that other forger in Sadr City without me, the one your cousin Saleh is going to recommend. So why don’t you do that first, and come to me around ten. Oh!” She rushes to the refrigerator. “Your desserts, for your family.” She hands them to me in a gesture that says take them. “You’re not going to leave me with these sugar bombs, are you?”
I take them in my left hand, and make for the door handle with my right.
“So see you in the morning,” she says.
“I’m down with that.”
Sam leans against the refrigerator. “Picked up some good slang today, eh?”
I point at her with my thumb pointing up, pistol-like. “Raping,” I reply. Sam shakes her head and stands, frowning at my hand, in the shape of a gun.
~ * ~
38
Frowning
Liar. Sam is a liar. Samara B. Katchens, Paris Bureau Chief who is hardly ever in Paris, has been lying to me. Who in this city is not a liar?
I have the whole walk through Yarmouk and the taxi ride to Karada to review things in my head. Last night, as I was walking out of the hotel towards Rizgar’s car, a broad-shouldered young man bumped into me. Then he pushed an envelope into my chest and murmured, “For you.”
“For me? What’s this—” and halfway through my sentence, he was gone. So I shoved the envelope into my trouser pocket, not wanting to have to read it in front of Rizgar, and got into the car. Then I remembered that I wanted to see Saleh, and decided maybe I shouldn’t open it there either, and so I may as well just wait until I get home.
I had Rizgar drop me off in Amiriya, close to Saleh’s house. I have started to do that wherever I go. What if Saleh’s neighbours don’t trust him? What if they see a fancy car they don’t recognize stopping at the house? They might suspect he’s working with the Americans. I’ve already heard too many stories of guys getting shot, and neighbours just shrugging and saying that he was working with the Americans, so he deserved it.
Saleh gave me more precise directions on how to get to the office of a guy called Mustapha al-Tamimi. Saleh said I should forget about going back to Khalil Ibn Khaldoun. He does not have the goods, but he will try to pull the same trick on us, in which he’ll play Akram and we’ll play Harris. Saleh says Khalil will just produce information demonstrating what it is he thinks we want to prove, and then expect us to pay. That’s the trouble with people in the forgery business, Saleh said. You rarely get an honest word out of any of them. The guy we really want, Saleh insisted, the guy with a direct line to our documents, that’s Mustapha, and Khalil is just one of his competitors.
They insisted I stay for dinner. Ashtar makes an incredible teman o’morga. It’s just a simple rice stew with vegetables, but I like the way she makes it, with dried mint and sweet peppers.
I started filling up on it, and her homemade leben, which is like yogurt. When she saw how good my appetite was, she heated up some baamya, a stew of lamb and tomato sauce, which was probably left over from the night before. I sat at the table, pushing it into my mouth and thinking of Louis and his foul, funny mouth, devouring his spicy sticks of gum. Ashtar said I looked tired, and that maybe I hadn’t been eating enough. She was thrilled to get the box of European sweets, which looked close to soggy by the time she opened them. My family won’t know the difference.
After dinner, Saleh and I went into their garden and smoked some sheesha. It was probably the most relaxing hour I’ve had in weeks. I hate cigarette smoke, but I don’t think smoking an occasional nargila could be bad for you. Baba said the people who got lung cancer smoked cigarettes, the best of which are exported from America. But sheesha? That never hurt anyone.
I almost smoked myself into nirvana, and then I started talking. First about Sam, then about the thugs outside my house the other night. Who else could I tell? Baba? He would worry too much. Amal? I trust her the most, but she is too young to handle any of this.
Saleh said to be careful. Maybe I should think seriously about getting a gun, he said. Or maybe I should quit my job — the same kind of job he’s trying to get. I tried to explain that it wasn’t about the money. What else could work be about, he laughed. It’s not like you’re going to do these things to help some American woman. Unless you’re in love with her! I laughed with him and said of course not. He lit another bowl of sheesha, this one with cherry-flavoured tobacco, and promised it would be the last.
By the time I got home, just in time for curfew, I felt better than I had in weeks. Citing exhaustion and Ashtar’s good cooking, I went straight to my room. And read the letter.
Liar, liar. Liaress. Is that a word?
It is exactly twelve hours later, I notice, as I knock on Sam’s door. She opens it, looking surprised. She’s still wearing something that approaches night-clothes: sweat-pants, I believe she calls them, and a crumpled tee-shirt.
“I thought you were going over to see the guy in Sadr City first thing,” she says, glancing down at her clothes. “Sorry, I didn’t expect you until at least ten.”
“I was,” I say, “but something came up overnight, and I need to discuss it with you first.”
“Come in,” she says. “Good news. It seems like maybe Miles is on our side now, but the front office guys are impatient and they’re ready to run with what they have. Miles is trying to hold them back.”
With the air-conditioning and a fan on, the smoke from Sam’s cigarette is swirling around the room. It’s hard to believe she is now smoking this early in the day.
I wait until she types out her last words. The clicking of the keys finally slows to a stop, and then, the “hmph!” that I’ve learned to recognize as a sign that whatever she was working on is done.
She turns to me and rolls her eyes. “If only they knew what we’re going through for this friggin’ story. I need coffee.”
“Sam,” I start, “I want to talk to you about some important things. Is now okay?”
Her shoulders drop, which tells me she’d rather not talk about anything other than the story, but she says sure, and suggests we go down to the pool.
“Not there,” I say.
“Let’s at least go outside, then. It’s not too hot yet.” She stands up and slides open the balcony door, and the heat and buzz from the pool rise up and enter the room with no delay, as if they had been pushing to get in all along. A warm swampiness of chlorine and exhaust goes in; round-the-clock, $75-a-night air-conditioning spills out.
Sam settles into one of the dusty plastic chairs and I take the black one, speckled with tiny white drops that must have been left behind when they last painted. She slips off her sandals and lays her bronzed feet, striped white in the places where the straps lay, up on the ledge of the balcony. The rusty-coloured polish on her toenails has flaked into small bar-graphs of colour.
“Sam, what kind of name is Katchens?”
She looks at me and the rims of her irises, today the colour of honey, seem to grow thinner. “It’s a German name.”
“What kind of a German name? Does it mean something?”
Her toes curl, and one of them cracks. “It means ‘pure’. So my ancestors must have been saintly people, or at least very clean.” She faces me for a moment with an artificial grin.
“Sam, someone gave me an envelope in the car park last night, and then just took off.”
“Hmm.” Sam plucks another cigarette from the pack on her lap and turns to me with it in her mouth, unlit. She takes it out. “I can’t believe I’m smoking like this again. Did I tell you that I quit five years ago?”
“Yes, you did.”
“So what was in the envelope?”
“Someone doesn’t want us to continue with our investigation. And I think it’s far beyond Akram.”
Sam’s face crumples into a wrinkled pout, as if someone has just tried to sell her something for ten times its rightful price. “Nabil, these guys don’t have any say-so over what stories were working or not. Don’t let them intimidate you. It’s a free country. Or it will be anyway.”
She rolls a thumb over the orange plastic lighter in hand. She holds a flame to the fresh cigarette and breathes in the glow. I watch her belly rise as she draws it in, holds it somewhere inside, and sends its amorphous grey exhaust into the morning air.
“Inside this envelope was a letter, a typed letter, saying that you’re Jewish. It said you are Jewish and your father is Jewish, and that you should avoid interfering in the internal affairs of Iraq, and that you might otherwise find yourself accused of being a Zionist spy.”
Sam’s eyes bulge. She takes her legs down off the ledge.
“If this is true, Sam, they could make a lot of problems for you. For us.”
Sam stares ahead, beyond the pool and the buildings on the horizon, where the date palms stand guard. Of all the buildings we have seen shattered during the war, our tamr are the one proud thing on our landscape which stand unscathed. She is quiet, but I see her eyes running back and forth, searching.
She puts the cigarette back into her mouth and drags on it, and then crushes the burning butt against the balcony ledge, sending a spray of embers to the floor. She turns to me, and I see lines in her forehead I don’t remember seeing before, arrows pointing towards an axis of stress between her eyes.
“Nabil? I would never lie to you, and I never have. It’s true. My father is Jewish. But I’m — I don’t know what I am. I’m really not anything. Not in terms of religion, anyway. I’m just an American. I mean, maybe I believe in God, or at least some kind of intelligent design, but that’s about the extent of my religious identity.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Tell you? There was really nothing to tell. Like I said, only my father’s Jewish. My mother’s Catholic. Neither of them think it’s important. I didn’t think there was something worth telling.”
“You could have told me anyway. You should have told me.”
Sam looks annoyed. “Did you ask me? No. You never asked me.”
“I asked you where your family name was from. You should have told me then.”
“Oh, please,” she says. Sam goes inside and comes back with her sunglasses. “This sun is killing me.” She sits back down and lights another cigarette. I wave the discharge of it out of my face.
“Sorry,” she says, though I think she’s only willing to apologize for the smoke.
I don’t answer.
“You think I should have told you.”
“Yes, I do.”
She pulls one knee up towards her chest, wrapping a hand around her shin. “Well, I didn’t think there was anything to tell. I’m telling you right now. My father is Jewish, so that is part of my heritage, but the only -ism I follow is journalism.”
“But if your father is Jewish, then you are Jewish.”
“No, actually. No, I’m not. That’s not how it works. To be Jewish your mother has to be Jewish. At least, that’s the way it works if you go by the book.”
“But the religion always comes from the father.” I can hardly believe my own words. Exactly what religion did I get from my own father?
Sam coughs out her negation, shaking her head. “Well, yes, in the Muslim world it works that way, but for Jews, it’s the other way around. Every religion has its own way of discriminating... of deciding who’s in and who’s out.”
The Muslim world. I never thought of there being a Muslim world before. Sam makes it sound like we’re on our own planet.
“But still, you are partially Jewish then, right? Like I am half Shi’ite, half Sunni.”
It never occurred to me until now that this makes us very much alike. I wonder if she realizes this. I want her to know I don’t like her any less for being Jewish, but I’m pissed off at her for lying.
“It would have been fine if you told me,” I explain. “I don’t have a problem with that. I am open-minded. But Sam...” I search for the right words, and there are none. “I feel very sad.” I want to say angry but I don’t think I should. “Sad that you would keep that from me. You’ve asked me so many questions about my life, my family, and I answered everything, everything, as honestly as I can. So why weren’t you honest with me? Why did you lie?”
Sam tilts her head to one side, looking sceptical. “I didn’t exactly lie to you. I never told you I was something I’m not. I just didn’t tell you. It didn’t come up.”
“But when you spoke about your family, about where you’re from, you kept it from me. Not saying what is true can also be a lie.”
Sam’s shoulders lose their composure. Her face shifts from right to left, arguing “no” without putting out the energy to say it.
“You know why I didn’t tell you? Because I had a feeling you’d react like this. You’d make a big deal out of it, and that’s exactly what I didn’t want to happen. I didn’t want it to be an issue. Because frankly, I don’t care about religion. I mean, I respect it in you and in other people. But it doesn’t mean anything to me.” Sam is waving her right hand in circles, like she is digging for words to show she is right. “It’s an interesting thing to study, to watch. Especially here. But I don’t want it for myself. I never did. I never really had much of it in the first place. And so I’m not going to go around wearing it on my sleeve.”
“But you believe in God?”
“Oh, Nabil. I just said I did.”
Sam walks back inside, and I follow her. She plants herself on the sofa and puts her thumbs between her eyes, while I remain standing.
“Sam, it’s not an issue with me. But of course, with many people it is.”
“No, really?”
“Look, I’m not daft,” I say. “I know there are a lot of peopl
e in my country who don’t like the Jews. But that’s not the way I am. That’s not the way I was raised.”
Sam runs her hand through her hair, twirling up a loosening curl. “So then why are you making such a big deal out of it?”
“I’m not! I’m trying to protect you!” I wish I weren’t losing my calm. Everything is going the way it wasn’t supposed to go.
“Yeah, well, that’s not the job you were hired to do. I didn’t ask you to be my bodyguard!”
At the top of the small stack of cards in my wallet is the fake press ID we had made up for me so I could have an easier time getting past American checkpoints. I slip it out of its slot, and toss it down on the table in front of her.
Baghdad Fixer Page 37