He parks in front of the Mustapha Hotel across the street. “I know too many people who work at the Hamra, and if they see me, I’ll have to go in and say hello. After all, the UN delegations used to stay here.”
He turns to look at me. “Wait, I thought you were a schoolteacher.”
“I was. I mean, I am. But this is more interesting.”
“How much does it pay?”
How much to tell him? Not just about my salary, but about Sam, about Akram, about the documents. “It depends.”
“Look, Nabil, why don’t you come by this evening so we can continue,” he says.
“That would be wonderful. Thanks for the lift.”
“Anytime, brother, you’re my flesh and blood.” He gives me a pattering of small kisses on the cheek, and as I kiss back, I feel the edge of his beard against my shaven face and realize how fortunate I am to come from a good family, and wonder why I was reluctant to visit Saleh in the first place.
~ * ~
At the reception desk, Rafik rings Sam and she says to come right up. But it’s a shirtless Carlos, not Sam, who opens the door. Sam appears a moment later, looking more striking than usual. A flowing white scarf is wrapped around her neck, one end hanging delicately in front of her, the other crossed over her shoulder and draped behind. She looks like a 1920s baroness in a photograph I once saw. I have a hard time imagining the scarf being transformed into something modest and Islamic.
Sam notices my disconcerted look.
“This okay? Don’t you think there’s a chance that Akram could be religious, and that I’ll want to put it on?” She demonstrates, draping it over her head.
Carlos picks up one of his cameras sitting on the sofa and says, “Let me photograph that and send it to National Geographic.”
Sam makes a playful frown at him.
“Seriously, that’d be about the sexiest
hejab
in Baghdad. Nabil, is that kosher?”
She grabs my elbow and pulls me towards the door. “Don’t listen to him, Nabil. My friends will only corrupt you.”
On the way down to the car, she turns serious again, giving me a rundown of her latest conversation with Miles, on how they want her to dedicate herself entirely to this Jackson story, on what we should ask Akram. She does so in an undertone that’s almost a whisper, eliciting a stare or two from the hotel staff.
~ * ~
It maybe a bit of a ride to get to the Jihad neighbourhood, where Akram lives, and so Rizgar slips a Kurdish tape into the player. He glances at me and smiles and then turns the volume low. I’ve already told him I’m getting tired of his music — it sounds like one long nationalist lament.
Ismaa, ismaa,
he pleads, listen. Murad Kaveh. The best Kurdish music ever made.
“Sam?”
“Hmm?” She underlines something in her notebook, draws a hasty star next to it, and turns the page.
“Sam, I have a favour to ask.”
“Yeah?” Now she looks at me, but only for a brief moment before returning to her notes.
“Do you think you could get my cousin Saleh a job?”
“Do I know your cousin Saleh?”
“No, you don’t, but he’s very smart and his English is also good. He worked for the UN and now his wife doesn’t want him to go back there. She says she’s sure they’re going to get bombed soon.”
Sam shakes her head, then juts out her chin — her questioning posture. “Uh, so why would he want to work with the foreign press?”
“It’s different. It’s not like sitting around all day in a building that’s going to be a target.”
“Nabil, I’m not an employment agency.”
I look out of the window. The flatness of the Jazeera plains to our left is filled by the intermittent green blur of the date palms.
“I know,” I say. “Of course not. He’ll find something.” I crack my knuckles without realizing how loud it will sound, an aggressive snap across the quiet car. Murad Kaveh croons from the speakers, singing the same lyrics again and again, none of it making any sense to me.
“I didn’t mean it that way,” Sam says. “It’s just that I don’t have the power to hire a whole bunch of people. We have a budget for one translator and one driver per correspondent.”
“I understand.”
I think she’s sorry she was so hasty in her reply. It’s something Sam does often. She is quick to spout out some reaction, something clever, and then regrets it.
“I guess I could ask around for you at the Hamra,” she says. “Maybe someone there needs a translator.”
“Also, Sam, it’s more than that. Saleh could be very helpful to us. He has a lot of contacts.”
“Yeah?”
“Of course. That’s how he got to be working for the UN in Baghdad. The regime allowed him to have that job. Uday had to approve everyone who worked with foreigners, especially the UN. Saleh knows people.”
“So why does he need a job with some journalist?” Sam’s mind seems to be in a constant cycle of dissection. I feel she is constantly trying to figure out if people are lying to her
—
including me.
“Sam, do you trust me?”
She turns around, her eyes compressed, concerned. “What, about your cousin?”
“No, I mean in general. Do you trust me?”
“Nabil, of course I trust you. I asked because you have to wonder about a person’s motives. That’s what I do. I ask questions. Doesn’t mean I don’t trust you.”
“Do you always trust the people you work with?”
She closes her notebook, and reaches into her bag to retrieve a Turkish chocolate bar labelled Metro. “Have some, Nabil. It’s a Turkish knock-off of a Mars,” she says. She offers each of us a piece, but we both refuse. The idea of chocolate first thing in the morning disgusts me.
“Do I trust people I work with? That’s the question? Absolutely,” she says while she chews. “Otherwise I wouldn’t work with them.”
“How did you know to trust me?”
“You? Oh, you’re easy,” she smirks, “you have an honest face.”
I peer into the rearview mirror, notice my eyebrows a bit askew, the beads of sweat on my forehead. “Do I?”
“I saw it that first night in the emergency room. Those big puppy-dog eyes. Sometimes you just have a feeling about someone.”
Sam puts the chocolate wrapper in the ashtray. Rizgar removes it and throws it out of the window.
“Rizgar! Don’t do that!” She rolls her eyes at me. “Tell him not to do that.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I shrug. “It’s fine.”
“Don’t just litter like that. You could be fined $500 in my country for doing things like that.”
“Five hundred dollars!” I say. “That’s bollocks.”
“Bollocks?”
“Bollocks. Bullshit. Do you not say bollocks?”
Sam grinds out a guffaw that never quite leaves her throat. “Well, we don’t say that in America, but Jonah grew up in England. I’ve heard him say it.”
The car goes quiet. Jonah’s name has a way of shutting me up. I’m starting to hate the sound of it. Why didn’t he stay here with her? If he loved her, he’d have asked her to marry him by now.
“It’s good you trust me, Sam. In our culture, it’s very important. It’s everything.”
“Uh-huh. You think it’s not important for us in the West?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it is. Not in the same way. I’ve heard that in America, people break their promises a lot and then they sue each other to get things sorted out. Just like Mr Jackson, suing your newspaper.”
“Right,” says Sam. “Because if it had been Iraq, all he would have had to do is put a bullet in the editor’s head.”
I cover my mouth with my hand, pretending to ponder this, when it’s really to stop my urge to say something more.
~ * ~
21
Pretending
Jihad always seemed a nice enough West Baghdad address to me, with sprawling houses and mostly Sunni families. I knew some boys from school who lived here. But as we drive down the streets, following the path that Adeeb explained to me and I have explained to Rizgar, I feel a sense of cold dread. It must be the air-conditioning; Rizgar has been keeping it turned up to full freeze.
“Sam?”
“Hmm?”
“I think this could be dangerous,” I say, trying to sound more authoritative than scared. “What if General Akram knows we are trying to catch him?”
“We’re not trying to catch anybody, Nabil. Except maybe Harris Axelrod in a big bloody lie. If Akram’s documents are real, then he’ll want to sell something to us. And if his documents are fake, then he’ll
still
want to sell them to us because he thinks he can make a good profit from it. It’s win-win.”
“What if he knows what we’re doing?” I feel embarrassed that I’m the one who seems so nervous. I’m only the fixer, right? But I have the sense that Sam doesn’t appreciate how dodgy this could be. That’s a word I haven’t heard since I was at Alston Primary School in Birmingham.
Hey, Amari! What kind of dodgy lunch you got there today?
“Why should he know what we’re doing? A friend told me that CBC was just here two days ago and that Fox is in the market to buy something, too. So obviously a lot of people are shopping around for documents. He has no reason to suspect us in particular.” Sam exhales a tight chestful of air. She’s not as relaxed as she claims to be. She opens the visor in front of her and, after only a flash of light from the mirror, snaps it closed again. She pulls open the glove compartment, pushes some paperwork aside and comes out with two black devices that are like her Thuraya satellite phones, but smaller, and without any number pads. She turns each one on, and moves a small dial to No. 5. It emits a static buzz, a little like the scrambled radio stations.
“Keep this on at all times,” she tells Rizgar as she hands it to him. “Just stay in front of the house and don’t leave.” She reaches into the big styrofoam container in the seat next to me. “There are drinks in here so there’s no need to go anywhere.”
A few days ago, Rizgar wasn’t waiting for us when we came out of an interview. He said he was hot and had gone to get a drink. As it happened, some insurgents hit a passing American convoy with a mortar and the area turned into a shooting gallery in a matter of seconds. Sam and I had to crouch in an alleyway while the gunfire whistled and ricocheted in the air above our heads. Rizgar agreed later that it was a bad idea to leave, and that he wouldn’t do it again. Since then, Sam has kept what she calls a cooler, filled with water and Coca-Cola, in the car at all times.
“I have this one with me in case we need you,” she says, holding up the other antennaed gadget. She laughs with a rawness that sounds like it is caught deep in her throat. Rizgar looks confused by her swing from gravity to levity But this seems to be her way — pretending she’s amused when she’s actually scared.
“Do you know why it’s funny?”
Our silence answers.
“Because I had a set of these when I was about nine years old,” she says. “We used to use them at night in the summer on treasure hunts. And now I’m thirty-three and I’m still on some crazy treasure hunt. Except now I’m depending on a piece-of-shit walkie-talkie to save my life!”
“This safe, Miss Samara,” Rizgar says, standing the device on the arm rest, right next to his cigarettes. “No problem. Problem? Call. Say, ‘Rizgar, problem!’ No problem.”
Sam flashes a wide smile at him and pulls back the door handle.
“Y’alla.
Let’s go.”
We are both standing on the driveway and for a moment, we are too close to each other. The guard directs Rizgar to reverse out of the driveway and wait on the other side of the street.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” I hope she knows I am only concerned for her safety.
“Definitely,” she says, as the door to the house opens, and a young man waves us inside.
“No appointment?” he asks. “Usually you must take an appointment, but I’ll check to see if the general can see you now.”
The man appears to be in his mid-twenties, with a belly that protrudes a bit too much for someone of his age and physique. Otherwise, he looks like a body-builder, with large shoulders and a fat, muscular neck. His heft seems to warp the way he walks. He holds out an arm, a heavy, hairy block emerging from a short sleeve, and points us into the salon.
Everything around us is blue and gold, everything matching, everything looking like it should be in a palace or a museum. In fact, it fits what Adeeb told me about the looting Akram has done, whether personally or through his proxies. The room is full of too-fancy furniture, which looks out of place in his otherwise middle-class home. The sofas and armchairs are padded with a plush blue velvet, and the ornately carved ridges of the furniture are painted with gold trim. It must have come from some palace or Saddam-family home somewhere, and that knowledge makes me wonder if the furniture trim might have real gold in it, for it shines as bright as a set of dowry bracelets. The room is also well-lit — I can hear the hum of Akram’s generator, presumably tucked into the garden, powering the house.
“Have a seat,” the brawny man says, and disappears.
But Sam doesn’t, and neither do I, because we are both too fascinated by the room and its incongruent objects. Sam is studying a massive Chinese vase as if appraising it.