The Imperfectionists: A Novel

by Tom Rachman

  "I considered deleting that line."

  "I'm not even sure it's grammatical. And, for the record, the origins of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict do not 'hark back to an ancient spelling mistake.' Not that I've ever heard."

  "I thought that might draw the reader in."

  "But it's not true."

  "I don't know, Zeina--the undersecretary spoke so fast. And somebody went by selling ice cream. The noise. It distracted me."

  "I know--you mention the ice-cream vendor in your article."

  "A bit of local color, I thought. So I shouldn't offer it to the paper?"

  "Offer it, by all means."

  "Or

  maybe

  not."

  "Look, come back tomorrow. We'll find you another story."

  Admittedly, his first attempt flopped. But, as he heads back to the apartment, Winston is electrified--he has conducted a real interview. This was actual journalism. His mobile rings, triggering instant panic: maybe it's Menzies from the paper, demanding stories. No such luck.

  "Wassup,

  bro?"

  "Snyder,

  hi."

  "In the Nile Valley. Military commandos. Islamists."

  "I'm sorry? I'm hearing only bits of what you're saying. You're coming in telegraphically. Can you repeat that?"

  "Aid groupie satphone. Charges by minute. Talk fast. How's research?"

  "The stuff you asked me to do? To be completely honest, I haven't had tons of time to work on it. I've sort of been trying to do my own stories. Anyway, it sounds like you're in a rush, so I won't get into the details. Point is I've had difficulty doing the research. In part because you have my laptop."

  "Did Kathleen call?"

  "No," Winston responds. "Why? Was she supposed to?"

  "Halt your story. Do my research."

  "She

  said

  that?"

  "Massive project. Award candidate. In or out?"

  "Are you serious?"

  "In? Or out?"

  Winston settles into a carrel at the American University library. At first, he is irked at having to do Snyder's bidding, but is soon drawn into the material. He cannot deny a certain relief in being able to sift through academic tomes, fulfilling his journalistic duty without having to barge past security guards at the Arab League or grab man-on-the-street from women at the market. This library work is easily his favorite part of reporting so far. Indeed, he grows so engrossed that he's still at it three days later, when Snyder returns to town.

  They arrange to meet for lunch at L'Aubergine.

  Snyder arrives twenty minutes late, chattering into his cellphone. He sits and continues talking. After ten more minutes, he clicks off his phone. "Wicked to see you, bro."

  "No problem," Winston says, though Snyder hasn't apologized for anything. "I've got that research you wanted."

  Snyder digs a finger into Winston's hummus. "Awesome time down there. I ditched my military watchers on, like, day one. Met up with the Bedouins. Infiltrated the muj. Riding donkeys. Sugarcane fields. Choppers. Bunker-busting. Madrassas. Extremist training camps. You should have come."

  "I got the sense you wanted to go alone."

  "Ohmigod--are you kidding? All I want is for the news to come out."

  "Did you meet any terrorists?"

  "The real deal, bro." He pauses. "Not full-on Qaeda. But they're way up the waiting list."

  "There's an application process?"

  "Totally. OBL is whacked that way."

  "Who's

  OBL?"

  "Osama," he replies. "I don't know him that good. We only met, like, twice. Back in Tora Bora. Good times."

  "What's he like?"

  "Tall. That's what hits home most. If he hadn't taken a wrong turn, maybe a career in professional sports. That's the tragedy of this conflict--so much talent wasted.

  Whatever. The thing that pisses me off about GWOT is the ignorance. Don't get me wrong--I reject extremism in all forms. I only hope that, in a small way, people might read my work and hear the voice that cries out in every article."

  "And what is that voice saying?"

  "I'm gonna finish the hummus, 'kay?"

  Winston piles three binders on the table. "Almost everything you asked for.

  There's a table of contents and an index."

  Snyder eats without looking up.

  Winston makes another attempt. "Do you want me to leave it here?"

  "Keep it, guy. My present to you."

  "Don't you want the research?"

  "Don't you read the paper, dude? The story already came out."

  Winston absorbs this. "I got a contributor's tag for a story I didn't even read?"

  "But you said not to put your name on my story. Didn't you say that in an email or something?"

  "Never."

  "Yeah, you did. Since obviously it was, like, my story and stuff." He dive-bombs his hand into Winston's eggplant dip. "So, you gonna try freelancing now?"

  "Well, I'm still going for this stringer job."

  "Stringer for who?"

  "For the paper."

  "They didn't tell you? I feel so bad," Snyder says. "I'm pretty much the paper's guy in Cairo now." He opens and shuts his cellphone, ensuring that it's off. "Entre nous, this gig is just a time-killer for me. I'll be out of here in a year max. The New York Times will definitely want me in Baghdad. We're not in touch yet, but they'll call within the year, I guarantee. In a way, the wait is cool for me--by the time I get there, Iraq might be a failed state, which would be wicked on my resume." Their bill arrives. "Who's grabbing this one?" Snyder asks, making no move to do so.

  Sluggishly, Winston takes out his credit card.

  "That is so nice of you, guy. I would totally expense this, but since you're going to."

  "Actually, I can't expense anything. I don't have a job."

  "Ohmigod, then that is even more cool of you to pay."

  Snyder leads the way back to Winston's apartment, unlocks the door, and belly-flops onto the bed.

  "Snyder?"

  "Yeah?"

  "What happened to my laptop?"

  "What

  laptop?"

  "The one you took."

  "Where'd you have it last?"

  " You had it last."

  "Don't think so, dude."

  Winston sits up most of the night, conspiring to murder this usurping baboon. But the risk of jail time in Cairo is a powerful disincentive, so he shifts to planning all the cutting remarks he'll make the next morning.

  Yet at dawn, when Snyder is up and leaping about, Winston only watches, half-asleep, silently loathing. Snyder says an aid groupie is getting him on a restricted flight to Darfur. "I'm in a failed-state of mind," he declares. He gathers his belongings and leaves without even offering thanks.

  Winston stretches out on the still warm bed and shuts his eyes. He runs over his interactions with Snyder, condemning himself for cowardice. He flips about for a fitful hour, then rises, determined to leave this city.

  The decision is deflating, then heartening--he has longed to escape Cairo ever since he arrived. Should he inform the paper of his departure? Do they even know he's here? He hasn't heard a peep from Menzies or Kathleen or anyone else since he arrived.

  All that remains is to change his return ticket, pack, and get the keys to Zeina. He invites her for his last dinner as thanks, pledging to himself not to mention Snyder.

  Nonetheless, the baboon keeps popping into their conversation.

  "One thing I have to say about him," Winston comments, "is that he does get amazing quotes. In my minuscule experience at it, nobody said anything particularly interesting."

  "Snyder's quotes? Some people claim they are, on occasion, approximate."

  "How do you mean?"

  "Well, do Taliban fighters really say things like 'That bombing was sweet, now let's kick ass on the Northern Alliance'?"

  "I'm not sure. I've never met the Taliban."

  "To be fai
r, he reports the hell out of stories, goes to the front lines--he is fearless in his own weird way."

  "I know. I saw him talking to an interior ministry guy once at Khan el-Khalili.

  Snyder just kept badgering the guy--pretty rudely, I thought. But he ended up getting a story out of it."

  "Good reporting and good behavior are mutually exclusive," she explains. "I'm exaggerating, slightly."

  She is a decade older than Winston, and he admires her--she's so collected and competent. He wonders if, after dinner, there might be an opportunity to kiss her. He has not seen couples kissing on the street in Cairo. Where would he make his approach?

  Then again, if he were to launch himself at Zeina, what next? Already, with her clothes on, she scares him. Whatever narrow hope he has nurtured evaporates when she says, "You know that me and Snyder had a thing, right?"

  "Really?" Winston responds nonchalantly. "What kind of thing?"

  "A fling thing. Whatever."

  That's a Snyder line, Winston realizes with a chill. "I wondered how you knew so much about him."

  "Majorly bad move. But he's tempting."

  "Snyder

  is

  tempting?"

  "I told you," she says, "the man is sexy. But now tell me, young Mr. Cheung, looking back, has this journalism experience been a nightmare for you?"

  "Not

  entirely."

  "Did you enjoy any of it?"

  "I liked going to the library," he says. "I think I prefer books to people--primary sources scare me."

  "Unless they're simian."

  "Even then," he says. "Like one time, my thesis adviser was giving a tour of our lab to a bunch of undergrads. He was trying to demonstrate hierarchical dominance among macaques. On his cue, this male called Bingo started chewing on my thigh and corralled me into the corner of the enclosure. Before the entire class, Bingo showed that he, an unremarkable adolescent monkey, significantly outranked me."

  She smiles. "Is that why you quit grad school?"

  "The matters are not unrelated. The downside of studying primates, I realized, is that you grow overly conscious of rank, submissive behavior, alliance-forming. In academia, I was always going to be a low-status primate. But journalism seemed like an alpha-male profession."

  "Journalism is a bunch of dorks pretending to be alpha males," she says.

  "Speaking of which, did I mention that Snyder called me from Dar-fur?"

  "What

  for?"

  "He wanted me to interpret something from Arabic. Had some pretty interesting material, too."

  "Did you help him?"

  "Why would I? Actually, I've been in touch with Kathleen at the paper."

  For a chilling moment, he thinks Zeina has interceded to get him the stringer position after all, and that he might be compelled to stay.

  This isn't what she meant. "I'm tired of wire-service hackery," she explains. "It'd be nice to actually detach my ear from the telephone and go out and report once in a while. Even if it's just as a stringer for the paper."

  "I didn't know you wanted this job."

  "Well, I did."

  "I guess it was even more generous of you to have helped me, then," he says, wondering suddenly how much she really had helped. "Why didn't you mention this before?"

  "We

  were

  opponents."

  "I didn't realize."

  "So you're going back to your studies in Minnesota, then?"

  "I have a plan," he responds archly, but goes no further. He isn't going to reveal himself to her. And, anyway, he doesn't have a plan. "You know," he remarks, "it occurs to me that I've been wrong about something: I always assumed that age and experience weather you, make you more resilient. But that's not true. It's the opposite." He turns to her. "Don't you think?"

  But she's checking her cellphone for missed calls from Snyder and doesn't respond.

  1963. CORSO VITTORIO, ROME

  With Betty out of the picture, Leo assumed full control of the paper and declared that his first goal was to raise status. Whether he meant the paper's status or his own was a matter of debate.

  His obsession was "marquee pieces," which he defined as articles to make you fall over at the newsstand. However, he distrusted his own staff to produce anything that good, so he purchased the stories from outside writers, which endeared him to no one at the office. The atmosphere grew increasingly toxic; the old collegial days were over.

  Circulation declined marginally, but Leo claimed that the readership had merely grown more refined. When corresponding with the board in Atlanta, he pledged to cut costs, but privately he was cocky. After all, Charles had tipped his hand: he'd said the paper was untouchable.

  In 1969, Charles stepped down as chairman of the board and Ott's son, Boyd, age twenty-seven, took over. Leo sent Boyd a letter of congratulations, with a hint that more cash would be timely--the paper could do with a few new hands. Instead, Boyd got rid of an old one: Leo himself.

  The justification was that Leo had betrayed the paper and its late founder. Ott had left his family, had toiled day and night, to build a publication that served the world, Boyd said. But Leo had turned the paper into little more than a personal fiefdom. Boyd even alleged that Leo had altered the masthead to shrink "Founded by Cyrus Ott (1899-

  1960)" and enlarge "Editor-in-Chief: Leopold T. Marsh." A measuring stick seemed to prove the point.

  Leo lingered around the capitals of Europe for a while, nosing about for a route back into the international press. In the end, he returned to the United States, taking home a before-breakfast Cognac habit and scant cash. He accepted a job in Pittsburgh running a trade publication on the coal industry and was lucky to get it.

  Boyd pledged to lead the search for a replacement editor-in-chief but proved too absorbed by the rest of the Ott empire. He had grand ambitions and began by selling off many long-standing holdings, even the sugar refinerythat had started it all, in favor of speculative investments overseas. It was audacious--just the sort of thing his father would have done.

  Or so Boyd believed.

  For he had barely known Ott, who left for Europe when Boyd was eleven. He had not even been born during his father's fabled early days, when Ott had built an empire from nothing. Most of what Boyd knew about those times came from sundry courtiers nibbling at the edges of the family fortune.

  Still, these myths spurred him on. He was bold because his father had been, and proud because this, too, had been Ott's fashion. Yet Boyd's boldness lacked pleasure, and his pride lacked dignity. He styled himself a man of the people, as his father had been.

  But the people mistrusted Boyd, and he in turn despised them.

  "KOOKS WITH NUKES"

  * * *

  COPY EDITOR--RUBY ZAGA

  THE JERKS TOOK HER CHAIR AGAIN, THE CHAIR SHE FOUGHT FOR

  six months to get. It's amazing. Just amazing, these people. She hunts around the newsroom, curses bubbling inside her, bursting out now and then. "Pricks," she mutters.

  She should just quit. Hand in her resignation. Never set foot in this place again. Leave these idiots in the dirt.

  But wait, stop! Yes, there it is: the chair--over there, behind the watercooler. She hurries over and grabs it. "Get their own damn chair." She rolls it to its rightful place at the copydesk, unlocks her drawer, and lays out her tools: a cushion for her lower back, an ergonomic keyboard and mouse, RSI wrist braces, antibacterial wipes. She decontaminates the keyboard and the mouse. "Impossible to feel clean in this place."

  She adjusts the height of her chair, pats the pillow into position, and sits.

  "Disgusting." The seat is warm. Someone has been sitting in it. "Should just walk out."

  Seriously. Wouldn't that be rich. Never have to see these losers again.

  The paper is the only place Ruby Zaga has ever worked. She started here after quitting a doctorate in theology. She was twenty-seven at the time and self-conscious about taking an unpaid summer internsh
ip. At forty-six, she's still at the paper, working on the copydesk, her temper shorter and her body stouter, though she dresses just as she did on her arrival in 1987: bangles, silver hoop earrings, sweaterdress cinched with an oversize belt, black leggings, white Keds. It's not simply the same styles but the same items in many cases, dotted with fuzzballs, colors faded.