‘
On the way up to her room, I begin to ask Sam a question, but from behind I see her shaking her head, telling me to wait. She opens the door and her body jerks as if a little current just went through it. There’s a strange man standing at her desk, in front of her computer.
It dawns on me that he must be one of the hotel cleaning staff. He has a rag in one hand and a spraybottle in the other.
“Sorry, madam. Clean your room.” He seems startled as well.
Sam lets out a sigh and unloads her bag. “Thanks, that’s enough,” she says, looking around. “It looks very clean already. Maybe come back tomorrow?”
I start to translate this for him but he seems to get the point before I finish my sentence and moves to leave. I try to explain that she just has a lot of work to do, but he says
maku mushkile, maku mushkile.
No problem. And walks out, closing the door quietly behind him.
Her eyes grow twice their normal size. “I’m starting to suspect everyone,” she says. “Not a good sign.”
Sam paces a few times, goes to her computer, and taps it awake. She takes the file that’s been sitting under her laptop and opens it, and counts the five pages of photocopies of the Jackson documents.
“I think I’m keeping this with me from now on,” she says, tucking the folder into her day bag. “Some of these hotel guys give me the creeps.”
I take a seat on the sofa. “But don’t you trust your own friends?”
Sam closes her laptop gently. “What? You mean Joon?” Her nostrils flair. “It’s not that I don’t trust her. It’s just that you can’t share every story you’re working on with everybody else. Some things you have to keep quiet. And Jesus, I don’t know what to make of Baylor.”
I shrug. “He seemed to hold up the electricity expert routine.”
“Or not. Maybe he’s fooling both of us. Who knows what he’s up to.” She stands. “Nabil, I’m starving. The Chinese food here is not that bad. Let’s order something now, because by the time it gets here, it’ll probably be dark.”
~ * ~
The knock on the door comes sooner than I would have expected and Sam is up quicker than I am, heading for the door. “That was fast,” she says. “Room service is really improving around here.”
Sam opens the door to find Joon, who doesn’t look happy. But then, I’ve hardly seen her smile.
“Oh, hey,” Sam says. “What’s up?”
“Can I come in?” Joon asks as if it’s awkward to have to ask.
“Of course,” Sam replies. “But I’m kind of on deadline so I can only talk for a few minutes. You want a quick coffee?”
“No,” says Joon, who continues to stand despite Sam heading towards the sofa. “Look, Sam, I have to be honest with you. I didn’t appreciate the way you acted downstairs.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You know exactly what I’m talking about. Frank Baylor? Your, um, electricity source?”
Sam shoots her a blank look.
“Look, you want to be all secret and clandestine about your sources, you go ahead. But don’t start acting all pissy and territorial if some of your sources also speak to some of your colleagues. The rest of us have jobs to do, too.”
Sam gets up and goes to the kitchen, taking down the coffee jar from the cabinet. “Joon, I’m going to make myself a coffee. You can have a cup with me, or maybe you want to just have a make-believe cup to save yourself the caffeine. Because you seem to have quite an overactive imagination at the moment.”
“Don’t be ridiculous! I know you’re on that Jackson story, everyone in this hotel knows it. So Baylor’s a source. So what? Maybe he’s a source for me on something else. For your information, I met him before you did. He was in Suleimaniye before Baghdad fell, just before you arrived. And suddenly you’re looking at me like you own the guy.”
Sam slaps a mug on the counter, almost hard enough to break it. “I don’t own anyone. And I don’t owe you anything. Look, if you’re pissed off because I’ve been too busy to hang around in the evenings—”
“I’m pissed off because you’re acting like I’m moving in on your sources.”
“Well maybe you are,” Sam shoots back.
“Yeah? Just like you moved in on my boyfriend.”
“What?”
“Sam, don’t pretend you didn’t know I was with Jonah last year when you guys hooked up in Kabul. And then after all that you dump the guy.”
Sam’s mouth drops wide open. “Dump? Jonah? You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Well, after he was released from Abu Ghraib with his head inside out, you were pretty damn quick to send him back home to England to let someone else deal with him.”
“Just because I wasn’t going home with him, doesn’t mean I dumped him,” Sam says. “The man’s been wanting to get out of journalism for years and this was the final straw. If you guys were so tight you should know that.”
Joon’s eyes are suddenly brimming with tears.
“What do you want me to do,” Sam scowls. “Jump on his funeral pyre?”
Joon’s face is a wall of outrage. “You make me sick. I can’t believe we’re having this conversation in front of your
fucking
fixer! What are you two, attached at the hip?”
They both glare at me as if I should say something in my defence, or out of offence. I wish I’d excused myself and left the minute Joon walked in. Sam looks as if she might pick up the mug and ram it into Joon’s pale, pretty face.
“I could have asked him to leave if you wanted,” Sam says in quiet, forced calm.
“Yeah, I’m sure you have him trained really well.”
“Get out, Joon. I have nothing else to say to you.”
Joon turns with the grace of an alley cat and grabs the door, slamming it behind her.
~ * ~
42
Slaming
“I think I’m going up to the roof to have a scream.”
I stare at Sam, wordless.
“But that will probably make the neighbours think someone just got shot. I think I’ll have a smoke instead.” She opens what looks like a biscuit jar on the kitchen counter and takes out a packet that says Marlboro Lights on it, shaking a cigarette into her hand. In one brisk movement, she lights the gas on the stove and makes the tip of the cigarette in her mouth glow orange.
“Nabil,” she exhales. “I’m sure you want to talk about everything that just happened, but you know, at this moment, I really don’t want to get into it. Because I’ve got too much on my plate at the moment to worry about Joon Park’s little intrigues. And her jealousy, which is really her downfall.”
“I…em...I probably should have left.”
She blows out a line of smoke like an exclamation point. “Why? Look, let’s leave it for now. Come, sit,” she says, and I do.
She is inhaling the cigarette so deeply, it’s already half gone. “Smoke bothering you?”
“No,” I lie.
“Good. So give me a quiet moment,” she says. “The smoke helps me think.” Sam closes her eyes and lets the ash grow long. The hum of the air conditioner fills the void.
“You know, Nabil, I think I’m going to have to leave Iraq as soon as this story is done.”
Sam had said nothing about leaving. Not until now, not until we got into this crazy story. I think I imagined that she would soon start giving out a card like the one she gave me on the first day we met.
Samara B. Katchens. Baghdad Bureau Chief.
“I mean, I was supposed to be leaving soon anyway,” Sam says with shoulders jutting uncomfortably high. “I’ve been in Iraq since March 10th. It’s now May 1st? That’s nearly two months in Iraq. I need to go home and take a break.”
She stubs out the cigarette and stares into the ashtray. Then she reaches for the camera in her bag.
“I can’t stay here forever, Nabil. But I’ll probably come back, maybe in the fall.” Sam takes off the lens cap. “What? Why aren’t you saying anything?”
“I think that’s the right thing to do. You should leave. I don’t want you to leave, of course, but you have to do what is right for you.”
“It’s not just what’s right for—”
“And also for your safety. You’re right to be a little bit worried now. I don’t know about some of these people. Did I tell you I saw someone shot on a local expressway yesterday, on the way to work in the morning?”
“No. What happened?”
“I saw three men pull another man out of his car and just shoot him. They then got into his car and drove off, along with the rest of the traffic moving at about, I don’t know, forty miles an hour. No rush, because there’s no one to catch them. No one did anything. What should people do, go and find an American tank and ask the soldiers who don’t speak Arabic to come and catch the criminals? This is what’s happening, Sam, this is what I can’t control. What if Akram’s men come over here and try to shoot you in the car park and just drive off?”
“Hold on. Let’s not get carried away.”
“I’m just trying to tell you that anything could happen. No one’s in control here.”
“So you think it’s good that I’m leaving.”
Just like that, moving seamlessly from “I think I’m going to leave” to “I’m leaving”.
“Of course. You know you are always welcome in Iraq and I’m happy when you’re here, but you have to take care of yourself.”
Sam reaches for the camera again and holds it up to her face. “I don’t know why I want to take a picture of you here when we could do it out in a pretty place, along the waterfront. Okay, smile,” she says.
I do, and she frowns. “Looks artificial. Okay, don’t smile,” she says, wrapping her hand around the black body of the camera and pressing down on the silver button, releasing the sound of a fake shutter opening and closing.
~ * ~
The plates of Chinese food don’t look particularly appetizing to me, but Sam is exactly right: they’re not too bad. They have a sweet and spicy taste, and all the sauces have strange colours, like a red that I don’t think occurs in nature, and another dish has a sort of electric yellow glow. Everything seems heavily fried and then stewed or soaked in something, and somehow, it’s vaguely satisfying. Sam ordered broccoli and beef for me, which she refused to touch, plus several plates of vegetable dishes: eggplant and garlic sauce, chow mein with snowpeas, peanut and peppers. She had been asking over the phone if they could make her a Buddha Delight, which is steamed vegetables, but the guy on the phone didn’t get it, and Sam hung up the phone, laughing. I think he thought I was saying “put out the light”, she mused.
“Do you eat this a lot at home?”
“It depends on what you mean by home.”
“In Paris.”
“In Paris there are even more exciting things to eat. In Washington, though, there are a whole bunch of good ethnic restaurants not far from where I live, in this area called Adam’s Morgan.”
“But which one is home, Sam?”
“I don’t know.” She picks up a chunk of dripping broccoli with her chopsticks. “Right now, home is room 323 of the Hamra Hotel. That is, when my doppelganger is not staying at the Sumerland Hotel.”
“I never heard it pronounced until now, but I actually know that word.”
“See, that’s what I like about working with you, Nabil. I wouldn’t have used it with just anyone.”
I feel full already, despite not having eaten very much. I will keep eating, though, so Sam doesn’t feel like she’s eating alone. “What kind of food is ethnic food?”
“Oh, you know. In Adam’s Morgan there’s Korean, Mexican, Japanese. There’s even a good Lebanese restaurant. I bet you’d like that. Oh, and there are these fantastic little Ethiopian places—”
“So ethnic is everything but American?”
Sam has one of those laughs that just stays in her throat. “Yeah, basically.”
I push the syrupy noodles around my plate with a fork while Sam snaps things up with her skinny chopsticks. I find myself wondering how she learned to eat with them, and where the Hamra Hotel gets such things.
“So we have a name,” she says. “Ali something.”
“Ali al-Yaqubi al-Sadr.”
“Name ring a bell?”
“No. Except that if he’s related to Moqtada al-Sadr, well, that might be logical. They also hate the people who tried to stop this war. Even if now their main thing is to complain that the Americans are occupying Iraq illegally and should get out.”
“And what about this guy you saw this morning?”
“Mustapha,” I say, taking another mouthful of noodles. “My cousin Saleh says he’s the right person to be talking to. But he wants to be paid,” I say. “Mustapha I mean.”
“How much?”
“He didn’t say how much. He asked how much we’d be willing to pay.”
Sam digs around a little more, fills up her plate again, but then sits back, putting her hands on her slightly distended stomach. “I think I’ve had enough. So where did you leave things with this Mustapha.”
“He wanted to know what we’d be willing to pay.”
“You know the paper’s policy.”
“Sure.”
“But we pay other people who provide services. Fixers, for example,” Sam says, gesturing in my direction, but looking towards the map of Baghdad she recently taped up on the wall. The place names look funny written out in English, and many neighbourhoods I would consider important are not even on it. Zayouna, for example, where I was yesterday, is nowhere to be found.