Sam’s door flies open with such a rush that it fans my face and forces my eyes shut.
“Gooood
morning!” she says to my closed lids. She sounds artificially cheery, like one of the radio anchors back in Birmingham. She looks surprised to see me. “You’re early. It’s not yet 9.”
“I couldn’t sleep last night, and got up early. But I can wait downstairs.”
“Wait, before you do,” she says, and indicates for me to come inside. Once the door is closed, she talks quickly, and in a lowered voice. “Can we go to Tikrit today?”
“Tikrit? Well, I guess so. Why?”
“Miles asked me to. He wants me to verify the signatures on the documents. Even one man who knows Uday or the other signers and can vouch for a signature.”
“Who, you mean, Uday’s signature? That’s...we can’t do that.”
“Nabil, you never know what you can or can’t do until you try.” She takes some milk from the refrigerator and stirs it into the coffee she was making. “Do you want a cup?”
I ponder the container of instant coffee on the counter, deciding to say yes, but not quickly enough.
“Oh, right, you hate my coffee. Picky, picky,” she says. “So yeah, why don’t you go wait downstairs in the lobby and I’ll be down in ten minutes. I’m not quite ready to go. Oh, wait in the main lobby, not in the one downstairs. Lately that Rafik gives me the creeps. I don’t want him picking your brain while you wait for me. And don’t tell him what we’re working on.”
I make for the door, but pause before I open it. “Sam, you do know it could be dangerous, going to Tikrit now? And to get someone to look at a signature and say it’s real or not real? And how can we trust
that
person? What difference would it make?”
“All the difference in the world,” she says. “In Miles’s mind anyway.” She puts her hand on the wall and leans into it.
“Isn’t it already clear from what we saw yesterday that Akram’s documents are fake?”
Sam shakes her head. “No, Nabil. It’s not enough that something looks clear. It has to
be
clear. That’s why people like Harris Axelrod get into trouble. You can’t run a story on a hunch. We need concrete proof,” she says.
I nod and she looks at me with a little bit of embarrassment in her eyes. “Nabil, I’m sorry about last night. I think I overreacted to your questions.”
“No, I should—”
“No, it’s me. It’s your country and I want to understand your culture. I’m learning a lot from you.” She drops her hand from the wall and clasps it in the other one. “I told you I like people who ask a lot of questions. That’s why I hired you. I guess I’m just not as good a sport when the subject of the questions is me.”
Is I,
I think. The subject is I. Though I can’t be sure, because certainly her English must be better than mine. Or maybe in America it’s different? I think about the strangeness not just of the American language, but of the American mind. Concrete proof. As if truth were so hard in that way, like rocks and cement. In Iraq it is rarely so.
“Sam, I—” What happened last night is on the tip of my tongue, but why bother? It’ll only worry her, and what can she do? Either I want to keep working with her, or I don’t. “I’ll just wait for you downstairs.”
~ * ~
I take a chair next to the youngest man in the lobby. He is well-dressed and has what I think of as a stylish haircut which makes me think he’s not from here, though otherwise he certainly looks Arab. His legs are crossed, the top one playfully kicking in the air.
When I check my watch, I notice that a full two minutes have gone by.
What is it about sitting in a hotel lobby that is so awkward? Even, dare I say it, humiliating? Everyone knowing that you’re waiting for someone, and that they have kept you waiting. For ten minutes, or for an hour? No one around you knows exactly. And yet, we’re all waiting here, for one of them,
il aganib,
the foreigners. Our bosses. Our big salaries. I can see it in their faces.
The young man turns to me and to my surprise opens in perfectly clear British English, almost like mine, but with a regional accent I cannot place.
“Are you enjoying it?”
“Enjoying what?”
“Being her fixer.”
“I’m her interpreter,” I say. “
Mutargim
.”
“You don’t need to translate for me, mate,” he says, and switches to Arabic.
“Mutargim
sounds nice, when you say it in Arabic. But when you’re not around, she’ll say you’re her fixer, just like the rest of them.”
I shrug, wishing I had a newspaper with me. “What’s the difference?”
“Well, an interpreter, out in the real world, is someone who gets paid by senior government or business people and is expected to do the work of interpreting their conversations. For example, I know someone who worked for the United Nations, and there he was treated with dignity. Here, with the journalists, they pay you more, but they don’t treat you with respect.”
I can think of many moments where Sam and I have had difficult conversations, where we have disagreed, and where she has been perhaps a little too direct. Even too demanding or lacking in patience. But I wouldn’t say she ever treated me with disrespect.
“A fixer is a fixer because they want us to fix everything for them, from start to finish. They don’t want us to just interpret what’s said in the interviews. They want us to arrange their meetings, get their money changed, go and fetch food and supplies for them, go ahead of them to check on the situation to see if it’s safe enough for them to go. My fellow sat down to send his story yesterday after I’d been chasing about with him all day, and while he sat there in his comfortable, air-conditioned office, he asked me to go out and buy him a case of bottled water to drink, and some chocolates. Hands a little stack of dinars to me, doesn’t even look me in the eye when he does it. Doesn’t say please or thank you. Then looks at me while I’m standing there and says, “Do you think you need more?” And then as I’m leaving he asks me to stop by the INC headquarters and see if we can get an interview with Chalabi.”
“You, too? Sam is trying to get an interview with him. We haven’t succeeded yet.”
“What am I? An errand boy? The illiterate man around the office who makes the coffee? I am expected to translate these interviews, but also to pick up food and fuel and other supplies? And when I come back, if I’ve spent too much, I have to explain why I didn’t get a better price!”
He spits into the standing ashtray, about as high as his waist, to his right. A puff of grey particles go flying. “They treat us like they own us. That’s what a fixer is to them. Someone you own. Someone who will do anything you say. And we do it, because we have no choice. Just like the old days. Still living with a dictator, just a different kind.”
As he gives vent to his anger, I notice the sad lines running from the bottom rim of his eyelashes towards the arms of his bookish spectacles. He is lean and extraordinarily muscular, as I could be if I had some way to get exercise. I wonder if Sam could get me permission to swim laps in the pool.
“Sorry,” I clear my throat. “I don’t think I caught your name.”
He holds out his hand. “Taher al-Zubeidy.”
“Nabil al-Amari.”
“I know.”
“Sorry?”
“I just mean that I know your name because I’m often sitting here in the lobby waiting for my bloody journalist, and so I made friends with one of the guys behind the desk. He mentioned your name.”
I glance over to the desk and notice that the man from the first day, the one who gave me nasty looks, is not around. I glance at my watch; the face is more scratched than I’d noticed before. She said just a few minutes.
“What did you do before?” I ask Taher.
“Me?” he points to himself, as if I had struck up a conversation with
him
out of the blue.
I nod. He takes off his glasses and rubs the inner corners of his eyes. “I was living in London,” he says.
“Oh? I lived in Birmingham for a year and a half.”
He raises his eyebrows and looks away, seeming less than impressed, and already bored with me. “Yeah, well, we’ve been there for ten years. My parents convinced me to come back to witness the supposed liberation and to test whether it was safe for them to return. In truth, they wanted me to check on our house and our relatives. Well, our house has long since been taken over by people I don’t know, with more guns than I have ever seen in my life. My relatives are destitute, and they think my parents should have sent over more money with me to give
them.
I didn’t have a job in London anyway, but I had just been accepted on a post-graduate course.”
“Doing what?”
“Architecture and urban planning.”
“
Wallahi
, that’s very impressive.” I search for things to say. Should I ask him what kind of structures he hopes to build? He seems so miserable. I wonder what I would be like if we had stayed in Britain. “We’ll need good architects when the war is over,” I offer. “You can be the new Harun al-Rashid, directing the great reconstruction like in the Abbasid Dynasty.”
He gives a sceptical frown. “The war’s not ending anytime soon. And this itself is going to be the big business for the foreseeable future. Not building — destroying. And just because I speak English, I can sit here and take part in capturing the destruction, so people back in England can say, ‘Oh my, oh dear, dreadful, isn’t it?’ And then go back to their tea and crumpets and wish Mohammed at the chip shop well and go on with their nice, middle-class lives.”
I wish Sam would come. “So why did you stay?”
“What choice did I have? I was here and I went into the Sheraton Hotel to see if I could make an international phone call, and I met a journalist from Sky News. When they found out I was a native Iraqi with perfect English, they offered me a job. Starting at $150 a day, and they give me work every single day. I don’t take any days off and they’re very happy with that. Do you think I could make $4,500 a month in Britain right now, without anything more than a university degree? And do you know how hard it is to get a job when you have an Arab name? England sucks. It sucks here, and it sucks there, too. So may as well stay here.”
I glance at my watch again with a slight tilt of my wrist. In five more minutes I will use the internal hotel phone to check on Sam. Tell her that Rizgar says that if we’re going to Tikrit, we’d better get going.
“How old are you?” I ask flatly, hoping it will sound neutral.
“Twenty-one.” I had already begun to suspect he was young, but not that young. His body is fit, but the lines around his cheekbones make him look like he could be almost ten years older. “You?”
“I’m twenty-eight. Almost 29.” I imagine that sounds old to him. When I entered my twenties, people who were leaving them were, unlike me, actual adults.
“Married, then?”
“No.” I can picture Noor, and then Noor falling to the floor, and so I stand up quickly. “Really? Handsome bloke like you? Isn’t everybody here usually married by the time they’re twenty-five?”
“Not everybody. You know, not all of the foreigners lack respect. Some do, but the woman I work with is really an excellent journalist.”
“Yeah?” He laughs with a glaze in his eyes. “I’m sure she thinks you’re an excellent fixer!”
I offer him my hand, and he rises quickly and shakes it in both of his. “Oh, I’m sorry. I hope I haven’t said anything to offend.”
“Of course not. It’s just that I need to go back to confer with her now.”
“Aah. I see. She wants you in on the decision-making, does she?” He waves out a hand in an effeminate way. “Off you go!” His voice is raised an octave, making him sound like one of the schoolteachers in England, sending us out to play at breaktime. “Come back in an hour!” He looks around, as if speaking to someone just beyond me. “‘Would someone send the fixer out and tell him to come back in an hour?”‘
I wait for him to stop, hoping that no one is listening.
“Hey, Nabil. Sorry. Just taking the piss. Passing the time.”
“That’s all right. But I do need to go. You take care now.”
At the desk, I ask the man to dial Sam’s room. She picks up immediately, and before I even say a word, she knows it’s me. “Ten seconds!” she says, almost shouting. “I’ll be down in ten seconds.”
~ * ~
26
Shouting
Faisal Hamdani. As we drive, my fingers repeat his name on my invisible typewriter. Sam’s editors say that’s the man whose relatives we want to find today. Faisal Hamdani. Or, according to some places where his full name is written out, Faisal Mohammed Hamdani al-Tikriti. His name is on each of the Jackson documents. He’s a distant cousin of Saddam’s, but judging from the description, looks nothing like him. He’s slighter, fairer, and rather nice-looking, to the point of appearing more Italian than Arab. His eyes are greenish-brown and he’s a good dresser. Same big moustache, though.
This according to a source, “a friend of a friend”, but Sam won’t tell me who, who’s said he’s seen Hamdani on several occasions. Hamdani, the source says, may or may not be in Tikrit, and if he is, he’s probably in hiding. Several of his family members, however, would certainly be there. Perhaps one of them could verify the signature. I try to press her for more, working to convince her that at this point, it might be better if I know everything she knows. She says she got the info on Hamdani from a well-informed American source. “More than that, it’s better you don’t know,” she says, and I don’t know how I’m supposed to interpret that.