Florence of Arabia

by Christopher Buckley

  "Not particularly. Is this where we slash the North Korean defectors? So they'll feel at home?"

  Florence explained, insofar as it could be explained, about Uncle Sam. the PDB, the $1.0 million in gold, the operation, the carte blanche, the fact that he had been able to pull the strings that got George himself reassigned. George listened with deepening gloom, uttering dismissive grunts: "U'm-um. Um-um."

  "George," she said, "do you remember the conversation we had about what if we were in charge for just ten minutes?"

  "Vividly. You recall my saying that I didn't want to be in charge for ten minutes? I want to be left alone, Firenze."

  "Thank you, Greta Garbo. Is that why you joined the State Department?"

  "You know perfectly well why I joined the State Department."

  "Because of one remark by your mother at a Thanksgiving dinner?"

  George's great-great-uncle was Adler Fillington Phish, the American diplomat, then ambassador to Bogota, to whom President Theodore Roosevelt famously cabled in 1902: SECURE ISTHMUS BY CHRISTMAS. This led to the "secession" of Panama from Colombia, the building of the canal and the further enrichment beyond wild dreams of Cleveland industrialist Mark Manna, New York financier J. P. Morgan and William Cromwell, founding partner of the law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell. The gilded trio later expressed their gratitude to Ambassador Phish by retaining him as counsel in numerous transactions, inaugurating the Phish family fortune.

  By the time George arrived, four generations later, the family fortune had dwindled to Phish House, a once handsome redbrick federal in Georgetown, now in dire need of maintenance. George's mother. Philippa Phish Tibbitts, had never gotten over the disappointment of not being richer, or the departure of her husband. Jameson "Bucky" Phish, for an Argentine polo player named Esteban, a close friend of the Kennedys, which only made it worse. She had been nursing these grievances for many years with increasing dosages of vodka (now mixed with buttermilk). One particularly gruesome Thanksgiving dinner, she announced in front of all the guests that George, seated at the table and as usual staring glumly into his mushroom soup—trying not to lunge across the table and concuss his mother with the silver tureen (a gift from the newly installed governor of Panama, and the last item of any real value remaining in Phish House)—that her son would never have "the gumption" to join the Foreign Service: moreover, that he would probably end up "arranging flowers for a living." George signed up for the foreign Service exam the following Monday. Here he was, sixteen years later. It remained unclear who had won.

  "George," Florence said, "you're one of the most brilliant men I know. You're wasted behind that desk. Look at this chance we've been handed. It'll never come this way again."

  "You don't know the first thing about this Uncle Sam."

  "Now you sound like my mother. It's a chance to make history. Never mind actually helping eight hundred million Muslim women."

  "A lot of those women are perfectly content, you know. I'll bet half of them like wearing the veil and being put on a pedestal." "Some pedestal. I low would you like it?"

  "Living in a society that considered me a second-class citizen and restricted my rights? Let me get back to you on that."

  " 'All that is required for evil to succeed is for good men to do nothing.' Edmund Burke."

  " 'If you run away, you live to run away another day.' Mel Brooks."

  "1 can't do this without you. George. It's going to be fun."

  "No. It's going to be a nightmare. And I'm going to be in it."

  HANDS ON HER HIPS. Florence studied her dinner table. Uncle Sam had proposed the Alexandria safe house for the first group meeting, but she'd decided instead to cook them a good Italian meal at her little house in Foggy Bottom. She wasn't sure what the chemistry would be among them, but she did know there are few occasions in life that can't be improved by a delicious dinner of bresaola, risotto—crawfish and fava beans, her own recipe— chocolate-raspberry tiramisu. espresso and bottle after bottle of Barolo. She wore a black cashmere turtleneck. pearl stud earrings, toreador pants, heels and a flouncy apron that made her look even sexier, in a 1950s way.

  The first one to arrive was Bobby Thibodeaux. the CIA guv. He rang the bell live minutes before eight. CIA people always show up early. They like to be in control of the situation. George arrived punctually at eight. Rick Renard arrived twenty minutes late, complaining of having been made so by a congressman "who wouldn't shut up."

  Florence served flutes of iced Prosecco. The three men faced one another awkwardly. She found herself watching Bobby Thibodeaux's face as he took in his two new colleagues.

  Bobby was in his late thirties, powerfully built, with short blond hair and hooded eves that gave him a skeptical expression just shy of cool hostility. He moved economically, as if conserving his energy. His first word to her was "ma'am." She greeted him in Arabic and suppressed a smile when he returned her "Salaam" with an Alabama accent. I le caught her look. He was not the sort of person on whom anything was lost. Florence found herself blushing.

  "Well." she said, holding out her glass of Prosecco and clinking it against theirs in turn. "To Aqaba."

  "Aqaba?" Renard said.

  George and Bobby looked at him. Bobby said. "You'd be the PR guy?" "Strategic communications," Rick said.

  A mirthless grin crossed Bobby's face. He turned to George. "So, would you be with the State Department?" CIA people overseas tended to refer to State Department personnel as "embassy pukes."

  Florence thought she'd better jump in. "I've been to Aqaba. It's quite Lovely and cool. The king of Jordan maintains a small palace there."

  "Where you been posted?" Bobby asked George.

  "I've been here, actually."

  Bobby's eyes drooped. "How long you been with State?" "Sixteen years."

  "You been in Washington for sixteen years?" "Sixteen and a half."

  Bobby turned to Renard. "How long you been strategically communicatin'?"

  "I've had my own firm for four years." Rick said. "You spent much time in the Middle Fast?" "I get to Dubai pretty regularly." "What d'ya think of the new airport?" George tried to catch Rick's eye. "its... nice. Fine." Bobby grinned. "What's so funny?"

  "There is no new airport in Dubai." George said. "Shall we eat?" Florence said.

  The Barolo and risotto with crawfish and lava beans look some of the edge off. George helped Florence clear the main course and, in the kitchen, whispered to her. "Where did you find him? Killers R Us? His knuckles touch the floor."

  "We need him."

  "You know he's the one who called in that cruise missile strike in Dar?" "It was a good target."

  "I'm all for bombing foreign ambassadors, but just because some redneck thinks he smells paint thinner.. ."

  "George, it was a Qaeda chem-weap factory."

  "Whatever. I think we'd better have another bottle of wine."

  "Gel back in there and protect Renard."

  "He walked right into that one. A hit man from Dogpatch, a PR hack and a queer foreign Service officer. Quite the A-Team you've assembled, Firenze. They'll be writing ballads about us, and thank God I'll be dead."

  Florence came in with another bottle of Barolo.

  Bobby was telling Rick. "In Vietnam. Navy SEALs. when they'd killed a VC cadre, they'd cut out the liver, take a bite out of it and throw it down by the body. According to Buddhist theology, you can't enter heaven unless you're whole. Put a major freak on em."

  Rick paled and put down his knife and fork.

  "You gonna finish that?" Bobby said.

  ‘Uh. no."

  "Mind?" Bobby took Rick's plate. He said to Florence, "This is quite excellent, ma'am. I never had bugs with risotto before." "Bugs?"

  "Crawfish, where I come from." "Why don't you call me Florence?" "Florence. Okay. Florence of Arabia."

  "Just Florence will do." She raised her glass. "So, to Aqaba. then?" Bobby raised his glass. "What the hell. To Aqaba."

  "It's a metaphor," George said
to Rick. "It means we're going to die before we get there."

  '"If the camels die. we die.'" Bobby quoted. "And the camels will start to die in twenty days."

  CHAPTER SIX

  he emirate of Matar (pronounced, for reasons unclear, "Mutter") consists of a ten-mile-wide, 350-mile-long strip of sand that runs along the western coast of the Gulf of Darius. Its northern boundary begins in the mosquito marshes of the Um-katush. From there it runs on a generally south-eastern course for several hundred miles, to the Straits of Xerxes, where it curves gently westward until it terminates at Alfatoosh, on the sparkling shore of the Indian Ocean.

  Viewed on a large-scale map, Matar seems an illogical political entity, like so many American congressional districts, whose contorted outlines are the result of successive attempts to maximize incumbencies and to inconvenience challengers. One might suspect, contemplating Matar's bizarre physical configuration, that its borders had been drawn so as to deprive its much larger neighbor to the west, the Royal Kingdom of Wasabia of access to the sea. One would be correct.

  The account of Matar's creation is described in David Vremkin's magisterial history of the creation of the modern Middle East, Let's Put Iraq Here, and Lebanon Over Here: The Making of the Modern Middle East:

  Churchill was furious With the French, in this case with reason, as they had been carrying on separate negotiations with (Wasabi king) Tallulah over the matter of saltwater ports. By the lime the conference convened.

  he was in no mood lo dither with the French foreign minister. Delavall-Poolriere. He had stayed up until five in the morning with Colonel Lawrence. Glandsbury and Tuff-Blidgel. as well as Jeremy Pitt, miserable from the heat and another attack of gout. The next morning, as everyone filed in. Bosquet and Gaston Tazie both noticed that Tuff-Blidget's lingers were green, blue, yellow and magenta and signaled frantically to the French delegates. Too late. By the lime the fifty participants had taken their places around the green felt table in the Great Hall of Sala-al-din at Majma Palace, the British had their maps drawn and ready. The ink. Chomondelev observed, was "quite dry."

  Siggot, Sykes's majordomo (who. two years later, would be killed during a freak tea-pouring accident at Kensington Palace with Queen Alexandra), described the sound of "Winnie unrolling his map over the conference table" as "like a suddenly unfurled topgallant sail snapping in a twenty-knot freshet off Cowes." Vivid indeed. Realizing what was happening. Delavall-Pootriere tried to object on procedural grounds, but Churchill, pointing his cigar at the Frenchman "like a half eaten breakfast banger" threatened to extend the Balfour Declaration, which provided for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, into Lebanon and Syria—that is, well into the French sphere of influence.

  The last thing the French wanted. Meg-Wright noted in his cable that morning to Arthur Glenwoodie, was "wave after wave of irrendendist kibbutzim mucking about the Levant." Such a move would also have the effect of pitting the British branch of the Rothschild family against the French branch, which for some time had been eyeing the western slopes of the Bekaa and Xoosh valleys as potential vineyards for experimental sauvignon noir grapes. Delavall-Pootriere could do nothing. He had been outmaneuvered.

  King Tallulah, livid over seeing his promised coastline vanish with several strokes of the British cartographical pen, denounced the conference as a "gathering of jackals and toads" ("jamaa min etheeah weddqfadeah"), stormed out of the hall and left Damascus with his bodyguard of two hundred Bedou and Hejazi. Picot observed to Gastin-Piquet, "Sa majeste est bien fromagee ("The king is well cheesed").

  For his part. Gazir Bin Haz, the plump, pleasure-loving minor sharif of the Wazi-had—trailers and Fishermen along the Daiian littoral since the time of Alexander—now found himself emir of a territory that effectively blocked Wasabia from getting its oil to the sea. This had, of course, been Churchill's plan all along. What better way to repay King Tallulah for his obduracy over the proposed tariff on unpitted dates, to say nothing of the endless arguments over who should enter Damascus first, and wearing what?

  That night over brandy and cigars in the billiard room at the British Legation, Churchill told Glandsbury that he could not decide which had given him more pleasure, thwarting Delavall-Pootriere or "forcing that royal ass Tallulah to drink his own oil."

  KING TALLULAH WAS LEFT with no choice but to cut a deal with the emir of Matar. Wasabia built its first pipeline through Matar to the Gulf shortly after the signing of the treaty. Over the wars, a dozen more pipelines followed. Wasabia simply had no other means of getting its oil to market.

  The Emirate of Matar prospered magnificently from this steady black income stream through its territory. The emirs never released official figures, but annual revenues from the so-called courtesy fees paid by Wasabia into successive Bin Haz exchequers were, by the end of the century, estimated to run annually to the tens of billions of dollars. The Bin Haz dvnastv continued to maintain the official face-saving fiction that the country's extraordinary wealth derived from fig oil, dates, fishing and tourism.

  This last assertion was in some ways the boldest, given Matar's fierce sandstorms and average summer temperature of 115 degrees Fahrenheit. Matar could, however, legitimately boast that part of its abundant gross domestic product came from gambling. The present emir had developed Infidel Land, a complex of hotels, casinos and theme parks on an offshore archipelago accessible by a ten-mile-long causeway. Matari residents were (officially) not allowed to cross the causeway and take part in the gaming—and collateral activities— but this law was rarely observed and never enforced. The emir had decreed it as a bit of window dressing for the local mullahs.

  His handling of Matar's religious authorities had been, by unanimous consent, masterful. Matari mullahs were the best fed in the Muslim world. Indeed, they were so prosperous that they had acquired the local nickname of "moolahs." They received a generous salary from the stale, luxury apartments, a new Mercedes-Benz every three years and an annual six-week paid sabbatical, which most of them chose to take in the South of France, one of Islam's holiest sites.

  As a result of the emir's attentions in this area, Matar was a veritable oasis of tolerance. Its mullahs were among the most contented and laissez-faire of their faith. As one scholar put it, "Here, truly, is Islam with a happy face." Clerical careers were avidly sought in Matar, and strictly regulated.

  This approach to matters religious stood in starkest contrast with that across the border in Wasabia. After Sheik Abdulabdullah "The Wise" came into power in 1740 (or 1742), he struck a deal with Mustafa Q’um, imam of the Nejaz, to consolidate his power throughout the territory. Mustafa preached an extremely austere version of Islam called mukfellah. Abdulabdullah agreed to make mukfellah the official religion of all Wasabia. if Mustafa would pledge his allegiance to the Hamooj dynasty". Thus Wasabia united under one rule.

  Alas, this doomed Wasabia to becoming—as one historian put it—the Middle East's preeminent "no-fun zone." Unless, as he dryly noted, "one's idea of fun includes beheading, amputation, flogging, blinding and having your tongue cut out for offenses that in other religions would earn you a lecture from the rabbi, five Hail Marys from a priest and, for Episcopalians, a plastic pink flamingo on your front lawn." A Google search using the key phrases "Wasabia" and "La Dolce Vita" results in no matches.

  This disparity in religious temperament, added to the matter of the national border, made relations between the two countries predictably strained. King Tallulah's successors chafed over having to pay Matari emirs the so-called Churchill tax.

  In 1957. King Talubadullah. Tallulah's grandson, threatened to seize a twenty-mile-long strip of Matar on the almost ostentatiously flimsy grounds that Caliph Ibn Izzir (1034-1078 c.e.). a very remote Hamooj ancestor, had established a summer fishing camp there. He went so far as to move a tank division up to the Wasabi-Matar border, and to dispatch Royal Wasabi Air Force

  Mirage lighter jets (supplied by Wasabia's great friend France) to fly "maneuvers" along the
disputed area. This caused a few days of anxious hand-wringing at the United Nations, until the U.S. ambassador in Kaffa quietly told the Wasabi foreign minister to "cut it out."

  The United States maintained good relations with Wasabia—the unthinkable alternative being to use less oil—but it had always supported Matar's sovereignty as a means of containing Wasabian power in the region. The old lion Churchill might have been drunk, but he was shrewd. The U.S. tilt toward Matar also had the advantage, as Henry Kissinger noted in Years of Genius. Volume XXI of his memoirs, "of driving the Wasabis nuts."

  Wasabia periodically rattled its scimitar at Matar and threatened to push through to the sea, but these episodes were not taken seriously by the emirati. Protected by America, its economy guaranteed by Wasabi oil, the local religious fat, happy and uncensorious, Matar was the Switzerland of the Gulf. The only things it lacked were a Matterhorn and a chocolate-bar industry.

  All in all, it was the ideal platform for Florence and her team. And there was this advantage: You could even order a drink at the bar.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Florence had given a great deal of thought to the emir's present. It had to be expensive enough to get his attention, but she wanted it to be distinctive and conversation-starting, not just another gaudy bauble of gold to keep a drowsy emperor awake.

  The emir was fond of hunting gazelle while sitting in a special seal mounted on the front of his Hummer. Bobby proposed a matched pair of gold-plated, engraved 30-06 rifles from Holland and Holland. George, who found the slaughter of gazelles grotesque, noted that the emir's gun collection already consisted of more than two hundred rifles. He counterproposed a twelfth-century edition of the Holy Koran that had been owned by the last sultan of Moorish Spain, bound in ivory and inlaid with Arabian sea pearls and Ceylonese emeralds—a steal at $3.4 million. Rick, ever with his eye on the PR aspect, said the fact that it had belonged to the last sultan of Spain could only prove awkward. Why not, he said, a private submarine that he had seen in the Sharper Image catalog? "Arabs like water, right? Bet they'd love the idea of being completely submerged in it." George complained that at $750,000, the sub wasn't nearly expensive enough for a man whose wealth ran to the tens of billions. There was some discussion about equipping the submarine with U.S. Navy torpedoes and missiles, to make it more exciting. Uncle Sam nixed that on the grounds that there were U.S. warships operating in the Gulf of Darius, and it wouldn't help matters if one of them accidentally identified the emir's sub as an enemy and destroyed it.