Guy Novel

by Michael Ryan

  “Honestly, I am not.” She held up her hand like a Girl Scout. “You can’t imagine how hard it was to have your Arab facial hair delivered to the Abu Dhabi naval base where we refueled.”

  “Well, you might get away with wearing your hijab, but who’s going to believe I’m a Saudi? I sweat in deserts. What if this little muffin thing under my lip falls off?”

  “There so much glue on it you’ll be lucky if it doesn’t rip off your face when you try to remove it. But maybe you’ll like it so much, you’ll wear it from now on. It’s the Prince Abdullah autograph model. If I have my way, no Turkmen soldiers will get close enough to see it’s fake. That’s the thing about former Soviet Republics. The people are still in the habit of seeing what they’re told they see. So we’ll be Saudis to them even if your mouche falls off. Plus I want you to wear it the next time we have sex.”

  “You mean there will be a next time?”

  “If you’re a good boy and wear your nice costume.”

  I fingered the mustache, goatee, and mouche. They felt like Brillo. There was clear tape on the backs of each of them, under which I could see a thick adhesive gel.

  “Scratchy,” I said, holding up the mouche. “This is really crazy.”

  “Welcome to my world,” Angela said.

  “I mean really crazy.”

  “Yes, well, Niyazov is clinically insane.” She offered me a brioche. “Would you like a nice warm piece of Gurbansoltanenedzhe?”

  “Say what?”

  “Gurbansoltanenedzhe. In Turkmenistan it’s illegal to use the Turkmen word for bread. The word for bread is now the name of Niyazov’s mother: Gurbansoltanenedzhe.”

  I took a bite of the brioche. “Mom is delicious,” I said.

  “Want to hear some more of my favorites? No makeup on TV, no lip-synching to recorded music, no gold teeth—because Niyazov believes if the people chew bones like he does they’ll have healthy teeth like he does. He closed all the libraries and declared that the people should read only two books: the Koran and Ruhnama. You never heard of Ruhnama? Guess who wrote it? Guess whose autobiography it is? And all Turkmen must pass a test on it to get a driver’s license. Niyazov proclaimed that any youth who reads it three times will go to heaven. Criticism of it is high treason punishable by imprisonment. He’s erected hundreds of gold statues of himself, in every city. There’s one that’s 250 feet high that automatically rotates to face the sun and plays recordings from the Ruhnama at dawn and dusk. Niyazov’s official title is not president but His Excellency Saparmurat Niyazov Turkmenbashi, ‘Leader of all ethnic Turkmen.’ He makes Stalin look like Mr. Rogers. He won the election last year with a majority of 99.9 percent. Of course he was the only candidate and anybody who doesn’t vote gets a phone call from the secret police. But my most favorite decree is his renaming the days of the week and months of the year after himself and his family. September is called Ruhnama, after his book. What’s today, Wednesday? When we land in Turkmenistan it won’t be Wednesday, it will be Hosgun, ‘The Good Day.’ Aren’t you glad? It could have been tomorrow, ‘Justice Day,’ which is also the first day of Ruhnama. Then we might have been arrested.”

  “How did you learn all this in twelve hours?”

  “That’s nothing. You should try learning to speak Turkmen with a Saudi accent. Fortunately I know a little Arabic.”

  “Is there anything you can’t do?” I asked.

  “Yeah, I can’t be happy,” she said.

  She was dead serious. I was so surprised I was speechless.

  “You want to do something about it?” she asked, as if challenging me to a bar fight.

  “I might,” I said.

  “Well, you can’t,” she said. I had obviously said the wrong thing.

  “Why are you pissed? I’d like to make you happy. I think.”

  “You think,” she said. “It was a stupid thing for me to say. Just forget it. Let’s see how you look in your thobe.” She literally threw the robe over my head. I stood up and she slapped the mouche onto my face, hard. I grabbed her and kissed her, also hard, rubbing her face with the bristles.

  “You’re such an ath-hole,” she said, wiping her mouth.

  “Good one,” I said.

  “Put on the rest of your outfit. No more talk.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’m sorry I said the wrong thing. About wanting to make you happy.”

  “You didn’t. That was the right thing.” She kissed me again, voluntarily this time. “I’ll tell you, I could get to like that little muffin.”

  “It already likes you,” I said.

  The pilot came on the intercom. “Angela, we’ll be on the ground in fifteen minutes.”

  “We’ll be ready,” she said, not to the pilot but to me.

  18.

  I never had more fun with a woman, in bed or out of bed, than with Angela. Not even close. I tried not to think about what it “meant,” although as soon as the plane touched down I wished it would lift off again to Paris or somewhere we could spend the $20,000 I would not earn being Bill Clinton’s bagman or shot full of remanufactured Soviet bullets or blown into a bazillion Islamic pieces. But Angela was definitely running this show, and clearly she intended to “do her job,” as she put it. It mattered to her, which was fine with me (or sort of fine), yet wasn’t there anything that mattered more? Me, for instance? Maybe even “us”? Of course I didn’t say this to her. I couldn’t think of “us” without quotation marks, since we actually hardly had an “us,” and even the term “us” made me feel girly. It did seem to me a gender-neutral preference to prefer not to die in Turkmenistan disguised as an Arab, but for Angela it was all just another day at the office.

  She strapped on her machine pistol over the Kevlar vest she dug out of the big brown box, which turned out to be not filled with money but martial equipment of various alarming sorts. I was sitting at the dining table in my thobe and Prince Abdullah, the latter slanted at the jaunty angle Angela had stuck it onto my face. She looked like a one-woman SWAT team and I looked ridiculous. I had no idea what was in her mind but she knew what was in mine as I watched her adjust her vest.

  “Just a precaution, Robert. There won’t be any trouble. We’re going to be fine.” She dug into the box again and tossed another Kevlar vest to me. “His ’n’ her outfits,” she said. This one had a crotch protector that pulled under from the back and snapped in the front, which she merrily snapped for me before slipping into her hijab. Between the crotch protector and the Arab underpants, Private Wanky felt a bit put upon.

  “What am I supposed to do with my dick?” I asked after she snapped me up.

  “Keep him snug for later,” she said, giving it a gentle pat.

  I thought this was a thought I should hold onto until we were safely in the air out of Toonloonistan. It was all beginning to seem like an incredibly elaborate hazing ritual, after which I might aspire to be inducted into Angela’s fraternity-of-one.

  “Are you sure we need to go through with this?” I asked her. “I can be a lot more fun if I’m alive.”

  She kissed me on the cheek. “My Proud Lion,” she said and walked up to the opening exit door, through which blasted brutally bright sunlight and summer desert heat. The Turkmenistan military escort was waiting for us: four open trucks packed with soldiers in sand-colored combat gear and an olive green 4x4 with opaque windows and a cannon mounted on its roof. An officer stood at its rear door, which he opened chivalrously as we descended the boarding stairs, me in a pair of stiff pinching sandals no doubt designed for self-mortification on the pilgrimage to Mecca, plus the thobe whose hem I kept stepping on and the headgear that kept blowing into my eyes. At the foot of the stairs we had to pass under the crossed swords of an honor guard in full-dress uniform and two-foot black Turkmen hats that looked like enormous Afros. I held up the hem of my thobe like a matron stepping over a puddle, lest I stumble into the swords and lose a valued appendage. The officer looked more Russian than Asian. He was short, stocky, and strong, a nos
eguard, one of those little guys who could pick up a Volkswagen. His chest was plastered with medals, and he wore epaulettes signifying his lofty rank.

  I bowed to him and said, “Asalaam Alaykum,” in my best Muslim Brotherhood Arabic (as Angela had taught me), expecting him to return my greeting with “Alaykum Asalaam” (as she also taught me). But instead he just laughed, apparently truly amused, and gestured for me to get into the 4x4 with a large friendly grin. It scared the bejesus out of me, but what other choice was there but to start running the 7,000 miles or so to Los Angeles? Angela was already sitting next to a console and cup-holders with little bottles of chilled sparkling water in them, and I thought, well if they were going to shoot us why bother to chill the sparkling water? The officer took a seat facing us and pulled the door shut.

  “My husband wishes to thank you for your generous hospitality, Allah be praised,” Angela said to him in her best Arabic-accented Turkmen.

  “No need for the masquerade, Miss Chase. I know who you are. And as you see we can speak English,” the officer responded. “I am Major General Tirkish Trymyev, Commander of the Turkmenistan Border Guard, at your service. Turkmenbashi personally commissioned me to accommodate your every comfort during your all too brief visit to our happy country.”

  “Yes, thank you, General,” Angela responded politely, as if unfazed by the general’s unmasking us (in English no less).

  “You may remove your head scarf if you wish,” Trymyev said, rapping the tinted window with his knuckles. “No one can see us, including the driver.”

  “Thank you, I’d rather wear it,” she said.

  “How about you, Mr. Wilder?” Trymyev asked me. “Not that you’re not the spitting image of Prince Abdullah himself, on a day he awoke to find his mustache and beard somewhat askew.”

  “I’m fine,” I answered, following Angela’s lead, although I would have liked to rip off the whole costume and burn it.

  The rap on the window may have been the command for the convoy to start. In any case, it did—two trucks ahead of us and two behind us. Before long we were barreling along at one hundred kilometers an hour down a highway bordered by oil rigs, pumpjacks, concrete block houses, and lots of dirt—which I realized was actually a kind of dingy oil-tinged sand. It looked like West Texas only worse. But unlike West Texas this highway was only two narrow lanes and we took up both of them, causing the profuse Russian minicars to swerve onto the shoulders on both sides until we passed. No one shook their fists at us, nor yelled curses about our mothers sleeping with pigs, nor did they appear in the least surprised by the sudden military convoy. In this place the state was supreme.

  “We’ll be at your destination in about forty minutes,” Trymyev said. “So let us use the time pleasantly in conversation.”

  “Where did you learn to speak English?” I asked him amiably, as if we had just met at an exchange student cocktail party. I could see Angela roll her eyes as the words came out of my mouth, all the more emphatically because everything but her eyes was covered by her hijab.

  “Yootee,” Trymyev said.

  “Yootee?” I asked pensively. “Is that in Australia?”

  “Yootee, yootee,” he repeated.

  “UT,” Angela said dryly. “The University of Texas.”

  “Hook ’em Horns,” Trymyev said, forming the Longhorn hand signal with his pinky and index finger. “Happy Hour half-price Lonestar Longnecks killer nachos Waylon and Willie. Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering Class of ’84.”

  I smiled and nodded. Obviously my job was to keep my mouth shut.

  “Has the money for Ahmad Jalalzada been transferred from our plane to this car?” Angela asked Trymyev, without so much as a word of transition from chitchat to business.

  “It has all been arranged, Miss Chase,” he answered.

  “We have it with us, in this car?”

  “It’s all taken care of,” Trymyev said again, with exaggerated patience.

  “It’s in this car,” Angela said again, this time gesturing “this car” with her finger pointing to the floor.

  Trymyev paused a moment, to consider what and who he was dealing with.

  “It is,” he said.

  “All right,” Angela said. “When we arrive at our destination, I want the trucks halted one hundred meters from the yurt. Our car will then drive to the yurt’s doorway. None of us will get out of the car including you until your driver has transferred the money into the yurt. When he returns to his position in the driver’s seat and has fastened his seat belt, Mr. Wilder and I will get out of the car and go into the yurt. The car will then join the trucks one hundred meters away and your soldiers will establish a perimeter of a one-hundred-meter radius on all sides surrounding the yurt as the center of the circle. No soldier or vehicle will venture within the circumference of that circle for the duration of our meeting with Ahmad Jalalzada, and he will be delivered before the meeting and picked up after the meeting in the same fashion, and so will we. We will then be transported directly to our plane, which will be cleared for takeoff five minutes before we arrive at the airport.”

  Trymyev bristled noticeably at the first sentence of Angela’s instructions, and continued bristling. By the time she finished speaking he looked like a porcupine. He obviously was accustomed to giving orders and not taking them, except from Turkmenbashi himself. Especially from a woman. No doubt due to an extremely well-developed habit of self-preservation, he thought as long as he needed to before he spoke.

  Then he said, “Such was my plan exactly, Miss Chase.” (That is the best joke I’ve heard this year, I thought—delivered with wonderfully unctuous sincerity.) “It will all be done precisely as you say. But please let me assure you that we have no suicide bombers in Turkmenistan. There are no terrorists in Turkmenistan.”

  “I’m glad to hear that, General,” Angela said.

  “If I may, I’d like to tell you some features of our happy country which will make your all too brief visit more pleasant . . .” And Trymyev did just that for the remaining thirty minutes or so left in our journey, during which I could feel Angela go into the open-eyed sleep mode she went into when we first boarded Sheed’s plane in Santa Monica and sat down to dinner. I recalled that she had not slept as I had for twelve hours from Washington through refueling in Abu Dhabi, not to mention her copiloting the flight and expending considerable energy with me in the bedroom suite and not napping afterward. I wondered again how she could do what she does. It was certainly beyond my capacity. But maybe I could do things she couldn’t, maybe we could make a great team. And there I went again. Even in this dangerous situation, I start musing about our “relationship.” Girlyman, I said to myself silently, but apparently formed the word with my lips.

  “Gurbansoltanenedzhe?” Trymyev asked. “Yes, it’s true Turkmenbashi changed the word for bread to the name of his mother, much to the amusement of the American media.”

  I looked over at Angela. Her eyes were now closed and she wasn’t even pretending to pay attention. Trymyev realized he had me alone.

  “Allow me to ask you a question, Mr. Wilder. Man to man. Do you love your mother?”

  “I was an orphan,” I said.

  “That’s wonderful!”

  “It is?” I asked.

  “What a happy coincidence. Turkmenbashi was also an orphan. He changed the word for bread to his mother’s name not at all for personal glorification, but to emphasize the importance of native Turkmenistan culture to national solidarity and order.”

  I smiled and wished mightily that I had Angela’s talent for sleeping.

  “Do you realize what a remarkable event we are embarking upon even as I speak?” Trymyev asked. “Turkmenbashi arranged for you and Miss Chase to do President Clinton’s business on our native soil. He has never done this for any other nation. Can you comprehend what an exception to Turkmenistan foreign relations he has made to grant the United States this favor?”

  “Which is why we’re disguised as Saudis,” I sai
d.

  “A modest request, and you couldn’t even paste your mustache on straight,” he chuckled. “I hope you’ll tell your superiors what Turkmenbashi has done to cultivate American goodwill.”

  My superiors? I thought. That must be Robin Williams and Billy Crystal. If Trymyev knew he was talking not to an elite foreign-service operative but a soon-to-be unemployed stand-up comic he would probably defenestrate me like in the old days of the KGB.

  The convoy pulled off the road and was zipping around sand dunes, astonishing forty-foot wind sculptures, toward what appeared to be a small oasis with a large yurt. The trucks stopped abruptly, as Angela had dictated, one hundred meters from the yurt, and our car drove up to its doorway. Angela was fully awake now. The driver popped the hatchback behind my seat, then appeared carrying a big canvas Santa Claus bag over each shoulder, and entered the yurt. He did this four more times as we watched: ten big duffel bags of money. When he got into the car and fastened his seat belt, Angela said, “Thank you, General. Please pick us up in exactly thirty minutes.”

  Pretty terse, I thought. Angela Chase, man of few words. She made Clint Eastwood’s cowboys seem like gabby Dallas socialites. Just right for here in the Wild West. Except for the yurt, we could have been in the Mojave. The yurt was a big one, thirty feet high at its peak and thirty feet in diameter, covered with a dull dun fabric the color of old goats. Angela strode ahead of me fearlessly, and pulled aside the heavy rug hanging over the doorway. Inside it was so dark after the bright sunlight that she seemed to disappear. I stood there alone in the dark in a yurt in Turkmenistan. Lordy me, how strange life is. I couldn’t see Angela in her black hijab or anything else, until a man seated at the far periphery turned up a kerosene lantern.

  “Angela?” he said.

  “Ahmad,” she answered.

  It was an odd moment. There was more emotion contained in those single words than in the Norton Anthology of World Literature. I felt like I was intruding on their privacy.

  Jalalzada stood up and now I could see him clearly. Funny I hadn’t thought much about his personal relationship to Angela and not at all about what he might look like. I guess I expected a ratty little guy in a scraggly beard and turban, the stereotype of the Afghan mujahideen. But he looked like a major league outfielder, big and graceful, rising to his feet in one effortless motion, tall, dark, and handsome. And dressed in khakis and a polo shirt. His shoulder muscles rippled when he moved his arms. Even with a round Pashtun hat and camouflage jacket, he could have stepped out of a J. Crew catalogue.