“Using fixers,” she continues. “Now that’s a sort of paying for information, right? Information on how to get to the people who matter so we can interview them.”
“Right. So you’re saying if he’s considered another fixer, like on a short assignment, then it’s okay to pay him?”
“I’m not sure. I mean, is this man a fixer, a lawyer...or a forger?” Sam shakes her head. “Paying him and paying you, that’s a whole different ball of wax.”
“Is that like a kettle of fish?”
“What?”
“The other day you said something was ‘a whole other kettle of fish’. Is a ball of wax the same thing?”
Sam looks to the ceiling with scrunched up eyes, as if to check the big reference book in her mind. Or maybe to ask God for patience. “Yeah, I guess so, it’s the same idea.”
“But why ’ball of wax’? What does it mean? And why a ‘kettle of fish’?”
She shrugs. “It’s just one of those things people say. I’ll look it up for you if you want.” Sam’s eyes search mine. “You’re always working, aren’t you?”
“No. What do you mean?”
“On your English. You’re constantly trying to learn new words and phrases, so you can do your job better.”
“It’s not that.” My job? And what happens to my job if Sam leaves? The
Tribune
will replace her with another correspondent who will want to work with someone else — some other person to fix things.
“I’m just curious,” I explain. “I like to know where sayings come from. I’ve learned a lot with you, especially the slang.”
Sam smiles.
Learned. As if she is already a thing of the past.
“I think I might someday write something in English. If I really worked hard on it.”
“What, like a book?”
“Maybe. Or some poems.”
“I think you’d be terrific at that Nabil. I’ve never seen anything you’ve written, but from the way you speak, from the way you use language, I think it would be really beautiful.”
I don’t know what to say, but my body feels like it knows what it wants to do — to move over to Sam’s sofa, to kiss her and touch her until she begs for me to love the rest of her.
“Excuse me,” I stand, pointing to the hallway. “The bathroom’s there, right?”
“Uh-huh. Feel free.”
I shut the door slowly, trying hard not to seem rushed. Sam Katchens, the only woman to have truly appreciated my love affair with language.
~ * ~
When I come out, she has moved the dishes to the counter near the front door, and is staring down at the Jackson papers laid out on the table.
“Such a big deal over five little pages,” she says. “Just words. Looks real to me. Would you have known?”
I look closer. “I don’t really know what government documents look like. Except maybe the draft notice from the army.”
“You were drafted?”
“I only had to serve for two months,” I say. “A lot of the boys from better families, their parents pay bribes so they don’t have to serve.”
“Oh,” she says, and I wonder if it is an oh of understanding or of judgement. Sam puts the pages back into the file.
“This whole thing is becoming just a little too sketchy, Nabil. Harris might be coming back. Suleiman and Akram are looking for me. Some sick person made up this letter to try to scare us. My editors have no clue what I’m going through here.”
“You are a brave woman, Sam. I have never known you to be afraid, ever.”
“Maybe I just hide it well.”
Knocking. First a soft one, and then, two louder ones. “Who is it?” Sam calls. There is no reply, and she jumps up. “Maybe it’s the fried rice they forgot to bring up. They always leave something out and then—”
Sam stands at the open door and shifts her weight impatiently. There is no one there, and in the empty space I can feel a kind of nervous energy in the air, left behind by someone who didn’t want to wait for an answer.
“Huh!” She moves to close the door. “Oh, hang on,” she says, bending to a squat. When she comes up, she’s holding an envelope in her hand. She opens it — either the person who wrote it hadn’t bothered to seal it, or the person who delivered it decided to have a read for himself.
She unfolds the contents, a letter in Arabic on yellow writing paper. “Special delivery. Apparently it’s for you.”
Even before I can begin to read, I feel in my bones who it will be from: Mustapha. The beautiful and somewhat bombastic handwriting makes it seem like the kind of letter a lawyer would write. I skim through it and then translate for Sam.
“It’s from this lawyer I saw today, Mustapha.”
“Yeah? I thought you told him I was staying at the Sumerland.”
“I did,” I say. “He says, ‘Dear Nabil. I am certain I can provide you with the information you require. Come to my office tomorrow morning with the American lady in a regular taxi. I strongly suggest you avoid coming with your usual car and driver. Certain people may be watching and they already know your vehicle. Tell the journalist to come in
hejab
so she won’t easily be noticed. I trust that you will use the utmost discretion in this matter. Other news organizations are requesting similar information, and I want to ensure that you have access to it first. With sincere trust. Your friend and classmate, Mustapha.”
“Jee-sus,” she whispers. “Seriously?”
“That’s what it says.” I wonder why, if Sam is Jewish, even only half-Jewish like I’m half-Shi’ite, she says “Jesus” all the time.
“Do you trust this guy?”
My stomach is beginning to hurt, probably from these strange sauces made by someone who is no doubt from Al-Ummal and has no idea how to make Chinese food. Something inside contracts, then relaxes. “I don’t know. I didn’t know him well at school. But I don’t think my cousin Saleh would send me to someone he doesn’t trust.”
Sam picks up a chopstick from the counter and puts it into her mouth at the same angle she would a cigarette. Unsatisfied with her almost subconscious drag, she eyes the biscuit jar.
I look over the note again. Mustapha did say he’d have a messenger drop off a note.
“Rizgar’s not going to like that,” she says. “He doesn’t like when I do things without him.” She chews the chopstick a bit between her molars. “He’s very protective of me.”
“I know.”
“Not that you’re not—”
I hold up my hand, trying to make her stop explaining. “I understand what you meant. I’ll talk to him.”
“Rizgar? Yeah, but I’m not sure he trusts
you.”
“Really? I think we work together well.”
“Maybe it’s a Kurdish thing. Your guys did kill about a few hundred thousand of theirs, easy.”
“My guys? No one in my family worked for—”
“I mean, the half of your guys who are Sunni.”
I wonder if Sam even knows about some of the things that Kurds would do to Arabs, given the chance. About the fact that they want to break up Iraq so they can make their own country and take all our oil wealth with them. About the Arabs in the north who have been chased out of their homes at gunpoint in the past few weeks, decades after Saddam moved them there. I’ve been reading about it in the newspapers.
“Sorry, I’m not being fair,” says Sam. “I’m just trying to see it through his eyes.” I wonder if, when I’m not there, she tries to see it through mine. “My God,” she says. “This place is too complicated. I don’t know if we should do this. My editors are happy to just run the story as is, so what am I doing putting my ass on the line? Mine and yours!”
“You don’t have to worry about me. I’m ready to do whatever it takes to get the story.”
Including getting a gun. I’ll go back to Zayouna first thing, pick one out, pay for it, and keep it under my shirt, like everyone else. Protective, like Rizgar.
“We have to finish this, Sam. If we give up on getting to the truth, what was the point of any of the work we’ve done together? What
are
you doing here?”
She looks at me with a mix of sweetness and pity, like she’s sorry she ever gave me all those talks about the truth, about ethics, about what good journalists do and don’t do.
A baretta. Or maybe a Smith and Wesson. Louis said that was one of the best.
“He also wanted you to bring the photocopies.”
“Maybe Baylor’s right. Maybe we hold off a day and see.”
“But you need to finish the story as soon as possible, right? I mean, your editors don’t want to wait another few days, do they.”
“No.” Her mouth twitches. “It’s now or never.”
I come towards her in the kitchen. I have an urge to cover her mouth with mine, to turn that twitch into a kiss. Instead I lean against the wall by the door, on the back of which is a newly placed page of emergency instructions, signed by the Hamra Management.
In case of an attack on the hotel, such as by mortars or shelling, hide under furniture such as desks for protection.
In case of an attack outside the hotel, I’ll be Sam’s furniture.
“You’re a guest in Iraq. Let me do the worrying. Everything will work out the way it’s supposed to.” I hardly know if I believe that, but when Amal says it, I always like the way it sounds.
Sam puts her fingers on her eyelids and makes slow circles. “You know what, I
am
worried. And I’m feeling awful about Joon. I’ve known her for three years and we’ve never spoken to each other like that.”
“Maybe you’ll sort things out with her.”
“Maybe.” She opens her eyes again. “So you’ll talk to Rizgar?”
“Yes. I’ll explain.”
She smiles with crooked lips, not looking up.
~ * ~
43
Looking
Every so often my mind will work in a very organized way. The plan of action comes out short and clear, like my poems once did. On my way across the lobby, I find my fingers air-typing a list of what I need to do. See Munzer, then Rizgar, prepare for Mustapha. Talk to Saleh once more to check that he doesn’t have any doubts about Mustapha. Take money out of my bottom drawer, waiting in an envelope behind my old notebooks, and decide what kind of gun to buy.
I catch Munzer just as he is leaving his shift for the day, on the steps outside the hotel.
“You got the note?” he asks.
“Yes,” I say. “I would have come over to get it. I thought you were going to leave it here for me.”
“I was leaving soon and I wanted to make sure it got to you. It seemed important.”
“You read it?” I didn’t mean to sound so accusatory.
“No. You just seemed anxious about it, so I thought whatever you were waiting for must be very important.”
“The people who were dropping it off were supposed to believe that Miss Samara lives here, at the Sumerland.”
“Okay, so no problem.”
“Well, what if they saw you or one of your guys run across the street right afterwards to deliver it to the Hamra?”
He looks at me with eyes that don’t seem to have blinked even once. “I don’t think so, Mr Nabil. I don’t think so at all.” He gazes at his watch and takes a step down, away from me. “You don’t have to worry. I’ll keep our secret. But you must excuse me. I need to pick up my wife from work. She works at the Babel Hotel. Let me know if you need anything else,” he says, taking the next three steps towards the street, a car key already in his hand.
~ * ~
Rizgar is asleep behind the wheel, the windows down. I shake the car a little bit until he awakens.
“I’m glad Baghdad is now safe enough that you can have a nap out on the street,” I say, teasing. He unlocks the door languidly, letting me in.
“Just closed my eyes for five minutes, that’s all. It’s so hot, and it’s bad for the car to run in the heat all day just so I can sit in the air-conditioning.”
“True. Also expensive,” I say, as he takes off into Karada. “But you could sit inside the lobby, where it’s air-conditioned.”
“The lobby is for the translators,” he says. “The drivers sit and wait by their cars.”
That’s right, I think. But not all of them. Some translators go to their journalists’ rooms and eat dinner.
I ask Rizgar to take me to my cousin Saleh’s house again. It’s short, I promise. It’s really important.
“I’m her chauffeur,” he says. “Not yours.”
“Five minutes. Just five.”
“Fine,” he says, and we drive in silence, me holding back the information that I now have, wanting to wait until I’m ready to jump out of the car to tell him, so I won’t have to face him lecture me for too long, or to feel him brooding the whole way.
Instead, I find myself pushing Rizgar towards small talk, asking him questions about his family that I had never asked before. His wife and three children are in Irbil, but he has relatives in Kirkuk and Suleimaniye. His wife’s family is from Halapca. He asks me if I know what happened there. I say that I’ve heard some stories, but I don’t know what part of them is true. It’s all true, he says, and it’s worse than you would think. He says he has a lot of young cousins who keep having children with strange birth defects like bad fingers and missing body parts, or other things in the wrong place, or diseases that kill them before they’re old enough to run.