“Yeah, a lifetime ago. Remember there were air strikes that year, before graduation? We got stuck with all that, even after the war with Iran, and then the war with Kuwait and the Americans,” he laughs. “I mean, the Americans the first time around.”
His eyes search me for a minute, and I wait for him to ask what I’ve been doing. I want to ask him how he got here, but something in his gaze tells me to wait. “Well it’s good to see you, again.”
“And you,” I say. The truth is, we weren’t friends, though also not enemies. Nor did Mustapha strike me as very bright. I had the sense that he was one of the many university students who got through school the easy way — paying off professors for a passing grade. It was one of the many reasons I didn’t feel like continuing in school for my PhD — the thought of working with all of those professors accepting bribes.
“Wouldn’t you like something cold to drink? Here we are giving you tea but it’s quite hot already. You’d think it were August.”
I swipe at the sweat that sits like drizzled rain on my forehead. “That would be great.”
“Nadim,” Mustapha says, turning to Brutus, who has said nothing since his monosyllabic recognition of my entry. “Would you mind running out and buying a cold drink for our guest?”
Brutus gets up, and lifts the strap of the weapon on to his shoulder.
“I don’t think you need that,” says Mustapha, looking up at Brutus, which is a more fitting name for him than a gentle one like Nadim, meaning friend. “We just want a couple of 7-Ups,” Mustapha says. Brutus puts the gun back down, his fat lips curling a bit as he does. He leaves, the fabric on his big body swishing as he goes.
“He’s good to have around,” says Mustapha, cracking a smile once the door is safely shut.
“I’ll bet.”
“You need a bit of security in this business.”
I nod as if to say of course, and then turn over in my mind the events of the past twenty-four hours. Sam being Jewish, not denying it at all. Why don’t I get a gun? Can I trust Mustapha, given that Saleh sent me here? Saleh has a law degree, and that makes him an attorney, right? So he must have some respect for the concept of the law, some understanding of it.
“So you’re a lawyer now?”
“Indeed,” he says. “And you?”
“I had been teaching. Now I’m working with a foreign journalist.”
“An American.”
Did I not tell Saleh not to tell?
“Don’t worry, it’s fine. Just tell me what you’re trying to do.”
Sam would say
—
“We’re old classmates,” he says. “Aren’t you from Yarmouk?”
—go with your gut.
“Yeah.”
Don’t hesitate too much, or it will make you look weak. That’s what Ziad told me when he was trying to teach me to fight.
“We need to find out where a certain set of documents came from,” I start.
“Sure. Go on.”
“Like you said, some of them are almost artwork. These might even be masterpieces. But they’re fake.”
“And? What do these documents show?”
“Well, I don’t know if I can tell you that part just now. But what we want to know is, who made up the documents, and why.”
Mustapha runs his hand over the short, grizzled goatee beard he is either growing in or cutting somewhat carelessly. “Well, you have to show me the documents for me to figure out who made them and why. Obviously.”
“I think I can do that. But I don’t have them with me now.”
Mustapha lets out a long breath through his nose, and looks at his watch. “Can you at least tell me how you got hold of these documents? I need something to go on if I’m going to help you at all.”
We’re running out of time, Sam said. The editors think they have all they need to run the story. Why does it have to involve running? Hasn’t there been enough rushing into things around here? Now or never.
“A former military official gave them to another reporter for the same newspaper.”
“General Akram, then?”
I watch his eyes, that strange green glow, and I can see that he knows he has me. He’s proved he knows who he’s dealing with, that he knows all the important players, and he knows I need him. But does that mean I should trust him?
“Look, he’s not the only big-name seller,” Mustapha says, “he’s just the only guy who used to be in the military. How much are you prepared to pay if we can help you?”
A lawyer who bribed his way through school. What does a lawyer do in this country anyway? Everything is fixed. Nothing gets solved inside the courtroom.
“I don’t know. I didn’t really come prepared to answer that question,” I say, offering something that is more honest than what I would have said if I had thought it out in advance. “But the truth is, the newspaper this woman works for, well, her editors were angry about the other reporter paying for the documents. So I don’t think it would be a simple thing for her to pay again, because that was part of the problem the first time around.”
Mustapha takes a writing pad off his desk, and jots some notes into it. “Nothing is simple these days, Nabil,” he says, without looking up. “You must know that.”
Ya mistarkhis al-lahm, ind al-maraq tindam.
A proverb my Grandma Zahra used to use when she cooked. If you buy cheap meat, you will be sorry when you get to the gravy. I think there is a near equivalent in English: you get what you pay for.
“I’m sure things are negotiable,” I explain. “I’ll have to discuss it with her.”
“Oh, so it’s a lady journalist. Or is ‘she’ still this group you’re talking about?”
“Well, she, yes, she works for a large group of editors, you know, at a newspaper, so that’s why I said that. I’m sorry if I was being a bit cagey.”
“I understand completely,” he shakes his head earnestly. “You have to be discreet in these things. What hotel does she stay in?”
Fast, Nabil. “The Sumerland Hotel.” It’s just down the alley from Hamra, after all. Near it, but not it.
“Right. I see. Well, I’ll see what I can find out today. When I have information, I’ll have a messenger drop off a note at the reception desk there. Room number?” he asks, pen hovering.
“They know her. You don’t need a room number. Just ask to leave a note for Miss Samara.”
“A very pretty name,” he says, writing it down in English capitals. Damn, should have lied about that, too. Since I’ll now have to pay a bribe to the receptionist at the Sumerland to pretend that Sam is staying there, rather than having an occasional meal with friends, I could just as easily have made up a fake name and paid the guys to pretend they recognize it. But then, what if Mustapha already knows more than he’s admitting?
“So,” he says, looking at me. “You know where to find me. If you can get me a copy of the documents you want to have traced, and get it to me right away, all the better.”
“Good. That’s great,” I say, standing up, hoping I don’t appear to be rushing off. “It’s great to see you after such a long time. It looks like life is treating you well,” I say, patting my stomach in reference to his.
“Al-Hamdulilah.
We have one little boy already, and another one on the way. I added this to make my wife feel better,” he says, running a hand over his girth. “How about you?”
“I’m not married yet.”
“No? Well, don’t lose hope. You’ll find the right one,” he says, walking me towards the door. “And if not, by the time the Americans leave, this country will have so many widows that there will be a lot of young women in need of husbands. You can get one going around a second time!” He laughs and so I laugh, too.
I pull open the door and find Brutus holding the other side of the knob, two cold cans wrapped in his enormous hand, prompting Mustapha to laugh harder.
~ * ~
40
Prompting
I hurry into the Hamra’s second-tower lobby on my way to get Sam, and smile at Rafik. His face, however, is like a graveyard.
“Miss Samara asked me to give you this,” he says, pushing a folded page written on her notebook paper across the counter.
I thank him and pick it up quickly, as if it might be read by the wrong person in the interim. I know her handwriting, loping and large, from watching her fill her notebooks.
Nabil, Had to go over to the Sheraton to do an interview with MSNBC. Meet me there, 14
th
floor.
“Thanks very much,” I say, turning to go.
“Not at all,” he answers, looking me over disapprovingly. “You haven’t heard about your colleague, Taher?”
“Who?”
“The young fellow. One of you fixers, but with the British, I think,” he says. “The Americans opened fire on a taxi trying to pass through a checkpoint in Yarmouk this morning. The car didn’t slow down, so the soldiers thought it was an attack. They opened fire and killed all five people inside. Taher was one of them.” He shakes his head. “So young.”
“That
Taher? The handsome fellow working with Sky News? The young guy who sits there in the main lobby sometimes, waiting?”
“That’s right. The Americans are saying it’s an accident, a misunderstanding. But people are very upset. A lot of the employees from the first tower went to the funeral. I didn’t know him, so I didn’t go. Very sad.”
“That can’t be,” I say. “He was just - I just saw him yesterday!”
“Rahimahu Allah,”
Rafik says. God take mercy on his soul.
“Do you know where he lives? Or, I mean, where his family lives?”
“I heard Hayy Riyadh,” he says. “But what do I know?”
~ * ~
Taher, dead. I barely knew him. Just awful luck. What was the driver thinking, not stopping at the checkpoint? Or what if that’s just a story the soldiers fabricated? I should try to pay a condolence call. Or maybe contact his family in England. I reach Rizgar’s car out of breath. “Go. To the Sheraton.”
“Where is Miss Samara?”
“She went there for some kind of interview.”
He shakes his head. “
Majnouna
.” Crazy woman.
“Mu majnouna, mashghule”
I protest. “Not crazy, just busy.”
“She shouldn’t be getting into other people’s cars like that,” he says, peeling out to Omar bin Yasir Street. “It’s dangerous. She should only travel with me.”
“I’m sure she wouldn’t go over there if she didn’t have a safe way to go.”
Rizgar shrugs, reaching for his cigarettes. I see he is now smoking Marlboros, a testament to his improving financial situation. When I first met him, he smoked Sumer, our cheap national brand in the blue packet. Now, it’s either Marlboro or Pall Mall, which seemed a strange name to me at first. According to the dictionary, the most common meanings of pall are something dark and gloomy, and secondly a coffin or a casket. A mall is a place where they sell things. So Pall Mall could be the place where they sell darkness and death. In that case, they would be appropriately named cigarettes.
However, when I shared this amusing fact with Baba, he shot down my theory: Pall Mall is a street in London, he said, named after a ball game no one plays anymore.
“You shouldn’t smoke so much,” I tell Rizgar as he lets out another column of smoke, much of it hovering over my face.
“You shouldn’t separate from Miss Samara,” he says. “You should stay with her.”
“Miss Samara is smoking again like you. You’re being a bad influence on her.”
Rizgar takes two deep drags, lowers his window and blows most of it out, saving me from the rest of the exhale. “Miss Samara is a big girl. And you should worry more about keeping her alive in Baghdad when she’s thirty than about what will happen to her health when she’s sixty.”
Thirty-three. You don’t even know how old she is, and I do. You don’t know half of what I know.
He inhales deeply once more, cups the cigarette in his left hand, and releases the smoke into the whipping wind.
~ * ~
The security around the Sheraton is much more elaborate than at the Hamra, with many layers of guards and a quasi-checkpoint, and most frustrating for Rizgar, a prohibition against parking in front of the building. We look for a space along Abu Nuwas, but the riverfront near the hotel is full, and we end up having to circle back towards Kahramana Square, my favourite in Baghdad, in order to locate a spot. As we drive, I find myself wondering how I keep neglecting to tell Sam Kahramana’s story, which comes from
One Thousand and One Nights.
It is the brilliant Kahramana, just a slave-girl, who saves the city from Ali Baba and the forty thieves who were terrorizing people with their crimes. She convinces them to hide from the authorities in a series of jars, and then pours boiling oil on their heads.
The bronze sculpture in the square is a water-fountain that has Kahramana pouring her “oil”, in this case water, though lately the fountain hasn’t been running at all. Maybe Sam will be like Kahramana, a woman who stops the work of unjust men, a struggler who has to do the difficult job of holding the crooked accountable for their deeds.
The Sheraton lobby is nothing like the Hamra’s. It is large, multi-levelled, and bustling with people. Men sit in groups on sofas and armchairs while others stand alone, looking around, hiding between the greenery provided by person-sized plants. I make my way through them and notice the glass lift, saving me from the need to ask anyone how to get up to the fourteenth floor.