Standing at the doors and waiting for the next lift, a man appears next to me, wraps his hand around my forearm, and says my name. My mind goes lopsided to the point of dizziness. Suleiman al-Mutanabi. Suleiman the Syrian. Akram’s guy.
“It is so good to see you, my brother. Where have you been?” He pulls me away from the lift. “I have looked for you and Miss Samara many times.”
“Oh, I’m sorry you had trouble finding us. We have been so busy with all of the news.”
He hasn’t let go of my arm yet, and now has his right hand in mine, his left hand on my elbow, pulling me just a little further away from the lift. “You haven’t let us know yet what her editors decided about the story. About the documents we showed you.” He looks happy to have taken me off guard, and I try to imagine what Sam would do now: sigh, smile, breathe calmly.
“We have been waiting for an answer! Can you believe those ridiculous editors cannot even make up their minds?” It’s the best I can do to feign frustration. “Stupid Americans.”
“We didn’t find you or her here. We looked for you.”
“Oh, that’s because she had to move to another hotel last week. This one is so expensive. The newspaper is tight on money.”
“A big American newspaper doesn’t have enough money?” He looks incredulous. “Where does she stay now?”
“The Karma Hotel.”
Stupid! Just around the block from the Hamra. Couldn’t I have picked something further away? Does he remember that I told him she worked for the
Guardian
? If so, he must know I’m lying about everything.
“How can we get in touch with you?” he asks. “We have some new information that may clear up some of the questions you have. You can come to see it.”
“I’ll let her know that as soon as I see her,” I say.
Suleiman finally lets go of me, and I step an inch away from him, back towards the lift. “You remember where General Akram’s house is, don’t you?”
“Certainly.”
“Well, then. Where is your lovely friend now? Is she in the hotel?”
“Now, no. I’m just doing an errand. But I’ll tell her I ran into you and that she needs to make a decision soon. It’s not right to be made to wait like that, is it? Foreigners. They don’t understand these things.”
The
bing
of the lift behind me, and my hand over my heart to offer a non-contact goodbye. “You will hear from us, I am sure.” I step in as the people get out, relieved that Suleiman stands there, his arms folded and with an intense expression on his face but making no effort to get in with me.
The lift soars, with only a few stops on the way. On floor fourteen, I rush up and down until I find an MSNBC sign, and am hit by a feeling of relief that there is an armed guard keeping anyone from just walking in, anyone like Suleiman al-Mutanabi. “Sam Katchens,” I say, somewhat out of breath, and the guard says he needs to check. I feel my heart racing and my head pounding. What if Suleiman changes his mind? What if he emerges through those lift doors right now and Sam walks out and we look like a couple of liars and Suleiman just shoots us, and the guard, right there? Who could stop him? Who would come after him?
A trim black man pokes his head out of the door behind the guard. His face is distinctively shaped, like I would expect for a man on American television. “You looking for Sam? Nabil, right? She told me to expect you.” He holds out his hand. “I’m Wayne. She’s up on the roof doing a Q&A live-shot. You can head up there and watch if you want. Just be quiet unless you know the shot’s over.” When I look confused, he walks me to the stairwell and holds the door open. “There you go, buddy. Up two flights to the roof.”
The sun hits me hard in the eyes, making me sneeze. Inside a tent made of poles and black fabric I can see Sam across from the camera, and she looks beautiful. For the first time since I’ve known her, she has on makeup, either eyeliner or mascara, and brown lipstick. Her hair is tied up nicely behind her, more controlled. She’s wearing a jewel-green blouse that I’ve never seen her wear before, and it sets off her hair in a way that makes her look simply striking.
Sam is talking but I can’t hear the words, the way it sometimes is in a dream. She smiles widely, her lips say thank you, and then she is still, almost frozen. She reaches down the front of her shirt takes out a small wire, presumably a microphone, and hands it back to one of the crewmen. She is chatting with the man behind the camera, and then he points at me.
“Nabil! Glad you got the note.”
She indicates that I should come and join them, presumably to introduce me to everyone, but when she sees I’m motioning towards the door, she walks over to me. “Hey, don’t you want to see how the TV side of things works?”
“Not today. We need to get out of here. Now.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Suleiman is here. Akram’s guy. Asking after you.”
“Shit.” She looks back to the tent. “Let me grab my bag.”
“Wait.” My hand takes her forearm near the wrist. Unintentional, unintentional. But once it’s there, I like the warmth of it, the narrowness. “What if he sees us on the way down? Ask those guys if there’s another way out of the building.”
Sam scuttles back, and as she talks to them, I find my nervousness mitigated by watching how glamorous she looks today. Less natural, but extraordinarily beautiful. Is that the Iraqi in me? Louis said our women wear too much makeup. Perhaps we like it that way.
Sam leads the way, back towards the stairwell. “They said we could walk down to the first floor,” she says. “The lobby is actually on three. They told me to try to go through the kitchen and use the exit there, which goes out to the employee parking lot.”
“You always prefer the stairs anyway.”
“Yeah, well, that elevator is mostly glass so it doesn’t bother me.” She whips around to face me before she starts the decline. “Are you sure he’s still here?”
“Miyye bil miyye.
Do you know that one?”
“A hundred per cent,” she answers. “To the bottom.”
She begins the rush down and I follow her, taking the stairs quickly, sometimes skipping one when she does.
“What were you doing here?”
“Got asked to do a Q&A on the situation here. No one else from the paper was available.”
“So?”
“So they called and wanted me to do an interview,” she says, taking the stairs so quickly that I fear she might fall. I want to tell her that we don’t have to go this fast, and that an extra minute won’t keep us from bumping into Suleiman again, but once the momentum is going, it isn’t easy to stop it.
“Did you know that the army today gave orders to all US soldiers to shoot looters on sight?” Sam asks. “So that’s their answer for stopping the looting.”
We both are almost running, a
pa-pum
with each two steps we take, but there’s a weightlessness to it, a lack of effort due to gravity, and it almost makes me giddy.
“Also, you know, all the political players, the Shi’ites and the Sunnis, they’re all up in arms now because it seems like the Bush administration is putting off the whole Iraqi interim-government thing, indefinitely.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, so now everyone’s thinking it’s going to look like more of a long-term occupation and less of a ‘let’s hand it over to the best Iraqi we can’ sort of thing. And now it’s seeming that they won’t just present the whole thing to Chalabi on a platter, so he’s pissed off... “
pa-pum pa-pum
“And all the Shi’ites are pissed off, because they say the Americans are reneging on all their promises…”
pa-pum pa-pum
“...and the whole thing is getting to be a mess because no one’s got control of the security situation and it’s looking bad for Washington. It’s now five weeks since they’ve been here and the place is still in freefall. I mean, my God!”
pa-pum pa-pum
“So what did you talk about?”
Sam stops, her chest heaving. “What did I talk about?”
“The interviewer in America. What answers did you give them about all the problems here?”
“Oh, you don’t actually have to give them any answers. They just prompt you with some situation-questions and you talk a bit and then wait for the next question. It’s very, you know, basic.”
“We don’t have to run this fast. Another minute won’t make a difference.”
“I know,” she sighs, taking the steps again, a little more slowly. “But I miss working out. I can’t get any exercise in this place.”
Only four more flights to go. “Sam, how did you know all these things were happening? You said your editors completely took you off news to do this investigation.”
Her eyes open with surprise. “A journalist never totally cuts off from the news, Nabil. Even when I’m not
on
news I’m on top of the news. You can’t afford to shut off from what’s happening. Not in a place like this.”
A place like this. Are there other places like it? This time next year, Sam will simply go to another country, to the seat of some other regime accused of threatening the world, and cover a war like ours, in a place like this, with a guy like me.
“Hurray!” She waves her hands in the air in what looks like a dance move I saw in a music video at my friend Alan’s. I think he said it was hip-hop. The name fits our run down the stairs. “Last floor,” she sings.
“
Al-Hamdulilah
.”
“Yeah, seriously. Thank God.” Sam reaches for the doorhandle, and stops to catch her breath. “Please, please don’t be locked.” She turns it, pulls, and the door opens, the fresh air like the sweetest I’ve felt on my face in years. “I say we just find the kitchen and pound through it. Don’t stop for anyone until we get to the exit.”
“Yeah, but we should just walk very quickly,” I say. “Not run. Running looks suspicious.”
“Fine.”
We push open the swinging doors into the kitchen, which feels hot and damp. “Go,” she whispers, poking me in the back. “I’ll follow you.”
I hurry past the ovens and the cooks, at least two of them looking at us but the rest are oblivious, past the pots and the smells and the cabinets, Sam close behind me, my suddenly shouting that we’re sorry, we need to help a friend with his car out in the car park, and despite what I told Sam about walking I’m almost running anyway, and she follows and I can’t decide if it’s fear or the fun of escaping with her that’s pulling me along, and through the storage room, past bottles and boxes and bags of rice, until I see the exit sign, and we tumble through it, and we’re out, and we’re free, and we’re safe.
“Don’t run anymore,” I order. “Then we’ll really attract attention.”
We’re both working to get enough air, to regain composure, to save ourselves from making a spectacle. But Sam can’t help herself, she’s laughing now, and so am I, and I hope not too many people are noticing us, out in the open, because there just isn’t such a thing as a couple walking around Baghdad like that, breathing hard, bending over, laughing out loud.
We have the short walk to Kahramana Square to bring ourselves under control. Sam has sweated a bit through her nice shirt, and I through mine.
I take the back seat, and Sam waves me to move over, falling in beside me. Rizgar takes one look at us and says
“Shunu, shunu?”
What? What happened?
“Maku ‘shi
,” I answer. There’s nothing, no problem. “Back to the Hamra, right?”
“Yeah,” says Sam. “Hi Rizgar. Nabil and I need to have a bit of a conference call.”
Rizgar turns to me for a translation.
“We’re trying to plan what we will do next,” I tell Rizgar. “Does it bother you if we both sit in the back?”
Rizgar looks at me and then Sam and shrugs.
“Tfaddalu.”
Please, be my guest, he says, in a way that somehow says that’s not exactly what he’s feeling.
Sam looks at me and shakes her head, smiling, slowing down her still-fast breathing. “This place is crazy.”
I nod, wanting to tell her that it wasn’t always like this, but the truth is, I realize that it was crazy before, too, just in very different ways.
“Sam, this guy was acting very suspicious of us. He says he’s been looking for you and wants an answer. He said he might have new information.”
Sam raises her eyebrows at me. “Do you believe that?”
“Not really.”
“So forget about it.” She notices the blocks-long queue outside the Rafideen Bank.
“What’s going on there?” she asks, her head turning as we leave the men, hundreds of them, behind us.
“It’s a bank. There’s a rumour they might open today. A lot of people haven’t been able to get money yet.”
“You mean since the war began?”
“Of course.” I guess I never told her that it’s been my weekly payments from working for her, rather than Baba’s hospital salary — which arrives over a month late — that makes it possible for us to live without feeling the strain of the banks being closed, looted or otherwise unable to operate.
A thought flashes through my mind: Mustapha and big Brutus, waiting with the coke cans and their Ml6. As if I’ve just had a nanosecond of a nap and met them in my dream.
“We need to get back to the Hamra,” I say. “And just so you know, Suleiman thinks you’re at the Karma Hotel, and this guy I met this morning, I told him that you’re at the Sumerland.”