“We need to get you out of the Hamra, and then we need to discuss how to get you out of Iraq altogether. I mean, I presume that’s what you want.”
Sam leans on the desk space where the computer was. “I have seven thousand dollars.”
“And?”
“I’m just telling you.”
“Are you saying you want to pay them? Maybe you think you can bargain with them, like in the market?”
Sam shrugs. “No. I don’t know what I’m saying. I’m just telling you so you know. I just want you to know the truth about everything.”
“You want me to go back to these schmucks who held us hostage and offer them two-thirds and see if they’ll be satisfied? Buy them off, just like Harris buying the documents?”
“What?” Sam’s face falls with disbelief. “That’s not what I’m saying at all. I’m just telling you facts so that you know what our options are. I thought you might like to know, okay? Because I’m not a walking bank. I only have seven grand. That’s what I have left, anyway, not that I couldn’t get more if I borrowed from someone, like Joon or Marcus.
I can see she’s not thinking clearly. She can’t be. Can she really be thinking of paying our own ransom, after we’ve been set free, and after all her lessons to me about the ethics of paying for things? Then again, it would be the only way for Sam to keep working in Baghdad. Maybe she can send in an invoice to her editors, along with the handwritten receipts she’s been making each time she pays me or Rizgar. Mark it $10,000: This week’s price of doing business in Baghdad.
“Get this: the paper is running the story tomorrow. It’s going through final edits now. They’ll send me a draft before it runs.”
“What?”
She looks at me and nods, demonstrating a mix of incredulity and matter-of-factness. “I just saw it in my e-mail now. They said they’re ready to run the story tomorrow. They think they have everything they need, now that there’s no doubt Harris’s story was based on fake documents. They said they’ll send me a copy of the story later today.”
“But, I thought—” I stop and swallow, wondering if my surprise will only make her feel worse. Sam, my boss, in charge of me perhaps, but not her own story. “You mean, you’re not even going to get to write it?”
Sam has a resigned expression on her face that reminds me of certain students of mine, those who barely passed but to whom I kept giving second, third and fourth chances. “Apparently not,” she says. “They’re just taking whatever information I can give them, and then writing it in Washington.”
“Oh,” I say. “Did you know they would do that?”
“Nope.”
I go to the counter to get the coffees, which aren’t giving off the steam they were only minutes ago. I stretch my hand across the coffee table, holding a cup towards Sam. “What about the people who decided to have the fake documents made? What about the people who just created these things to, to blame this guy, this Congressman Jackson, and to make money? Didn’t your editors also want to know who did that?”
She takes the small cup, holds it under her nose, shuts her eyes while she breathes in deeply. She sips, then rolls her eyes at me. “They did last week. They don’t seem to want it now. They think the story’s done.”
“But what if the newspaper runs the story and Ali finds out? And you’re still in Iraq?” She’s a pretty one, too. Lucky man.
“That’s possible. Then again, maybe he wouldn’t find out for a few days. I mean, how would the average Iraqi know what’s written in the Tribune?”
“Maybe Ali is not the average Iraqi,” I say. “We have to leave in three minutes. Drink your coffee.”
She lifts the cup to her lips, sighing with exhaustion into the small black sea.
~ * ~
51
Sighing
The early morning is a nervous blur of packing bags and paying bills, of negotiating for a new taxi driver who, I suspect, is an informant for someone, of simple tasks constantly disrupted by a feeling in my blood that we are not safe. That Ali will jump out and recapture us at any moment, that he will drive our taxi off the road and shoot the driver and stuff us in the boot. The screen in my mind keeps replaying the moment when he held the gun to Sam’s head, the others also pointing theirs. As the taxi makes its way over the Jadriya Bridge, I make up a new rule. When I catch myself re-living episodes like this, as if it’s all before me, I will turn my watch upside down, which will be the equivalent of shutting down the screen in my mind, simply lowering the curtain and closing the theatre doors. When I need to know the time, I’ll take the watch off and check to see if I’ve succeeded, even for a few minutes, in putting it out of my mind.
I join Sam in looking at the view of the water and the early fishing boats floating serenely, as if this morning were the same as any a thousand years ago, when the fishermen, I imagine, were equally oblivious to the political upheaval of the day, the overthrow of the Muslim caliphate in Baghdad. I wonder if Sam knows anything about that time when we were the very heart and mind of the Islamic world. I wonder if the Americans know that they didn’t invent regime change for us, because we’ve already had it for aeons.
Traffic is only now beginning to thicken, and we drive through Mansour, not far from the school where I once taught. Qabil. Before. Before the whole city became my classroom, in which I am no longer a teacher but a new student.
Sam, who had seemed deeply uninterested in conversation, turns to me.
“I’m glad you told me what you told me last night.”
I look at her and wait. My teeth catch a sliver of the inside of my cheek.
“About you and Noor, I mean. I’m glad you told me that. I understand so much more now.”
“About what?” I say, and lean forward to point out the next few turns to the driver. “The antiquated ways of the Arab peoples?”
“No, Nabil.” She sounds hurt. “About you.”
Without allowing them to, my lips insist on rounding into a slight smile of appreciation. We are only a few blocks from my house, and I don’t want everything to feel tense when we go inside.
Sam turns her left wrist over in her right hand, inspecting the marks. “Remember the accident that I told you about? How Jack died?”
“Yes.”
“Well.” She puts her hands down and stares out of the window again. “I never told you that I was in the car. Somehow I got away with nothing more than a broken pelvis and a few scratches. That’s why I’m always stretching out my back. It still aches sometimes.”
I try to meet Sam’s eyes to offer something of my sympathy, which at this point I don’t think needs to be put into words. But for that I need her face. And she won’t look at me.
“Who was driving?”
“He was.” She blows hot air on the window and then lifts her finger to draw on it: a quick “o” for a face, two dots for the eyes, and a long, flat dash for the mouth.
My family does not ask all the questions they want to, at least not right away. They can sense, I know, from the minute we walk in the door together, that something has gone terribly wrong. Mum sends Amal back to her room, and with a whimper she goes, eased by the fact that it’s not yet 7 a.m. Given that she has nowhere to be and no school to attend, she’s become used to sleeping late every day.
Mum is very hospitable, and very uncomfortable. Her English is too rusty to make conversation with Sam. But she slips into a welcoming mode straight away, rushing to make up Ziad’s room for Sam, who looks more shattered than she did last night. Sam offers her thanks, using the wall to hold her up, and Mum keeps saying things like, “You please home here.” Baba, who has been standing around, not quite knowing what to do, goes back to the table, where his breakfast is half-eaten, and tells me that he’ll leave for the hospital a little late today so we can talk. “Assuming,” he says, dipping his bread into his tea, an odd ritual he maintains, “you want to tell me what’s going on.”
~ * ~
This time, I find her wide awake, sitting at Ziad’s desk, writing. When I come in, she closes the cover of the book. It’s one I haven’t seen before — not a notebook, but a hardcover with a maroon fabric binding.
“Am I bothering you, Sam? Do you still want to have some rest?”
“No, it’s fine,” she says, dropping the book into her bag on the floor. “It’s already afternoon, isn’t it?”
“Yes. It’s after two. My mother is worried that you haven’t eaten. Do you want to have some lunch?”
She shrugs. “In a while, maybe. I’m not so hungry now.” She picks up a pink plastic bottle on the desk, about half-full of liquid, and shakes it back and forth. “Your sister gave me this.”
“I’m sorry. Has she been pestering you?” I take the edge of the bed.
Sam smiles and closes her eyes, then re-opens them slowly. “No, not at all. She’s lovely. She’s just so curious. I always wanted a little sister like her.”
I notice that things have grown a coat of dust in Ziad’s old room: a small, golden trophy he won in high school, when he played centre-forward, and a football signed by the French player Zidane. Ziad took the air out and had it shipped home to us. We were shocked that it arrived, when far less valuable packages never did. I bet the primary thing troubling Mum at this moment is that she didn’t get to give Ziad’s room a good cleaning before I showed up with Sam.
“We need to make a plan, Sam.”
“I know,” she says. “I just talked to Miles as he was waking up, in fact I think I woke him up. I told him what happened. He agreed that I should leave, if that’s my instinct.”
“That’s what he said? And what about the money Ali’s demanding?”
“Well, he said I could lie to management and say it was stolen from me. But I can’t just hand it over to them like some kind of gift and expect the newspaper to cover it.”
“And the story?”
“I tried to convince him. But he claims he’s powerless, it’s not up to him,” she says. The look in her eyes says she doubts it. “The story with an apology to Jackson is running tomorrow, after the lawyers vet it this afternoon. All Miles can promise me is that they’ll send me a copy overnight to read. But at that point, we’ll probably be on the road anyway.” Sam is shaking her head no, no, no. “First they took the story away from Harris, and now they’re taking it away from me. I mean, my byline is going to be on it, along with some bigshot investigative reporter in the Washington bureau, but I won’t have written a word of it myself, and I’m not sure I’ll get to read it before it goes to print. Can you believe that?”
I see the Thuraya sitting on the windowsill, the reception-bars flashing in the upper-right-hand corner. “You got a satellite signal here?”
“Not a good one. Just enough for a staticky call before it cut off. The best part is that when I tried to tell him to take my byline off the story, for my own safety, he said he’d ‘run that up the flagpole’ but wasn’t sure the higher-ups would go for it!”
“Did you tell Miles everything that happened?”
Sam wavers. “Most of it. Not the rough parts. He says if I want to do a profile exposing ‘the man called Technical Ali’ after I leave, if I have enough to go on, I can do that and they’ll run it afterwards.”
“You didn’t tell him that he tied us up and threatened to kill us? Wouldn’t your editor want to know that?”
“Look, if I can do the story about him later, after I’m out, that’s probably the best I can get at this point. I don’t want to make it sound like a personal vendetta.”
“So it’s still about the story and not about your life. Or my life.”
Sam glares at me. She picks up the bottle, which I now realize is nail-varnish remover. In the middle of all of this, she is planning to paint her toes?
“Sam, listen. Everything I know now makes me think that it was a setting from the start.”
“You mean a set-up.”
“I said that.”
“You said setting.”
“I meant set-up. Just listen, okay?”
She shakes the bottle back and forth.
“Sam, I think it was all arranged and co-ordinated, from the moment we stepped into Subhi’s apartment until the moment Ali dropped us off by the Hamra. Ali was always in charge, working for Chalabi, working for Moqtada al-Sadr, who’s probably his cousin, working for anyone who will hire him - other than the Americans. Ali runs this big forgery ring and makes a lot of money off of it, and he doesn’t really care from whom or for what. In fact, maybe he has no politics at all, and that way, he can sell to everyone! Mustapha is nothing but a big fat fascist, just some middleman, despite my cousin Saleh telling me all this time that he was a good guy. What did he know? Maybe Saleh was fooled. Maybe he was set-up. Or maybe no one he knows in that world could possibly be honest, because to get mixed up in that, you’ve got to be a crooked kind of bloke from the start.”
“Nabil?”
“I think even Adeeb was part of it. Subhi sent us to him to stall for time, so they could get ready for our visit to Akram, and Adeeb is so scared of all of them he does whatever they say. He’s just a lackey for them and—”
“No, Nabil.” Sam is shaking her head.
“—and Khalil, that forger guy, probably is corrupt too and warned Mustapha we were coming. And of course, General Akram was just a salesman! Ali and his friends made him the front man because he looks good and has a name and a title, and thought they could use him and that story of his, his brave little revenge brigade as the alibi for how they captured these documents. Akram would send word back to Ali of what was in demand and what would sell, and Ali would produce it, and who cares if it was about hijackers or yellowcake or some congressman from New Jersey! Who cared if even one word of it was true?”
“Listen. Calm down. There’s no way we can be sure they’re all connected,” Sam says, waving her hand at me. I notice it is shaking, though it isn’t at all cold in here. “What if we got shunted from one slimeball to the next and just got unlucky? Or lucky, because we’re still here. Don’t jump to conclusions.”
“I’m not jumping. I’m saying it’s obvious!”
“What’s obvious?” She purses her lips together and unscrews the little bottle, then tips it over into a wad of tissues, shaking it several times. Everything is clear to me now, and Sam doesn’t see it. She thinks you need to prove things with facts in order to know. I could talk about it with God Almighty until Yawm id-Din, Judgement Day. But I don’t need to. I just know.
“Don’t you see, Sam?”
“See what? What I see is a trail of events that led us from one corrupt fixer or thug or forger to another. I don’t know if they connect. It could all be random.”
“How can you not see it? Really, how?” Afraid my family will hear, my voice falls into a whisper. I feel myself on the brink of exasperation. If she pushes me more, I will shout. Or maybe break. “Believe me, Sam.”
“No. I don’t always believe you. Not every little Middle East conspiracy theory you come up with holds water. You guys just love to think the forces of evil are aligning in perfect formation to rule the world. Like it all fits together so easily. Not every crazy event happens for a—”
“What do you mean, ‘you guys’?”
“Nothing. Forget it.”
“No, what is ‘you guys’? All Iraqis? Maybe all Arabs?”
“No!”
“All Muslims, maybe?”
“Nabil, stop it!” She looks close to tears. “I said I didn’t mean it that way. Sometimes I say stupid things, okay? I’m not always as eloquent as you.”
The smell of the
nail-varnish remover fills the air between us, accosting my nose. How I hate the odour of acetone, which reminds me of that horrible cleaning fluid at the hospital. Did scientists invent this putrid substance solely for the purpose of removing ladies’ nail colour? But this is not, I see, why Sam asked for it. She ignores her toenails and begins to work at the tape-marks on her wrists.
A shock wave through my head: the terror of that first moment of Ali pulling out the gun, the shouting, the lack of control, the room spinning. I find my own hands in fists. Next time someone tries something to hurt me or Sam, I will hurt them first. I will be prepared.
“I just mean that I don’t always think there’s a perfect order to everything,” Sam says, rubbing at the gummy grey ring around her wrists. “Sometimes things just don’t make sense. People die here every day for no reason.”
Baghdad Fixer Page 51