Ali hands the tape to Subhi, pushing it towards his stomach.
Subhi steps back. “Are we going to tie their feet?”
“I don’t think it’s necessary. I think they are well-behaved. You will behave here, won’t you, Nabil? You will tell your American ladyfriend to behave, won’t you? Maybe just their waists, Subhi. Just tie their waists to the back of the chair. We don’t want them dancing around the room, do we? You, too, tie them,” he says, and one of the guards comes over, looking uncertain. “Ah, I’ll do it myself. Lift your arms,” Ali says to me, and I do, because what else should I do? Ali and three armed men plus Subhi against Sam and me.
Ali winds the heavy tape around my stomach and the back of the chair, which doesn’t hurt, but when I feel the sticky black stripes going around, it makes me think of the pain of a lashing, one strap at a time. I remember once reading an article about someone being given lashes like that in Saudi Arabia or Iran. “You see,” Baba always said. “That’s another good reason not to let the religious people run the country.”
“I think we leave you just as you are, Miss Katchens, don’t you think? You won’t try anything funny, will you? Not with Abu Ihab in the room.” He gestures to the larger guard, the one with the AK-47, standing by the door with his gun across his chest.
Sam says nothing. I hear Ali and Subhi walk behind us and leave the room.
“Sam, you okay?”
The guard with the AK-47 starts, rattling his rifle across his chest. Abu Ihab, I want to say. You seem like a decent man. How did you get caught up working for these people?
No answer from Sam.
“Sam?”
“Uskut!”
The guard lifts his rifle in my direction. “No talking.”
And so we sit, listening to nothing but breathing and the dull buzzing of traffic along Abu Nuwas, named for one of the most famous poets of Baghdad. He was infamously creative, hedonistic, and gay. Most of his poems are irreverent and joyful. If he saw the city now, I think he would write endless, angry lines until his hand hurt. And then, in disgust, I can imagine him tearing them to shreds when he’s done.
~ * ~
47
Tearing
His footsteps unnerve me. I can feel them as though he were walking up my own spine. Ali drags over a chair and sits opposite Sam and me. In my neck I can feel Subhi standing in the doorway, out of view.
“Okay, Samara Katchens. This is your name, right?”
“Yes.” Sam’s voice sounds robotic and flat.
“Samara. Very nice. Almost sounds Arabic. Are you sure that’s your real name?”
“Yes.”
“Who are you working for?”
“The
Tribune.
An American newspaper.”
“Not a spy for the CIA?”
“No.”
“Or the Mossad?”
“No.”
“Maybe you are MI6.”
No answer. The sound of her vocal chords stripping up each other. “You can check my passport,” she says. “Look at all the press visas. I’m an American journalist.”
“But you also tell people you are a French lady.”
“I never told anyone I was French.”
I should die, right now. It’s my fault. If someone is going to die here, it should be me.
I hear Subhi’s voice in the corner. “They saw her with a CIA man. It was a CIA car.”
I feel a slicing in the bottom of my stomach, like someone at work on cutting open my lower intestines. I need to go to the loo.
“She’s definitely CIA.” Subhi. On second thoughts, perhaps I could kill
him. “Akid
”, Subhi says. For sure.
“She’s not CIA,” I say. “He was just a source for her story. She was only interviewing him. She’s not CIA.”
I can feel Sam’s eyes stretching in my direction, but she then stares down at her hands. The initials she told me never to mention.
“You can check,” I say. “Check on the Internet for her. Do you have an Internet connection yet?”
Ali pushes the pistol up against my head and moves metal between his fingers.
A gasp rocks Sam’s body like an electric shock.
“Don’t!”
The room is still. Ali begins to laugh. I can feel the rancid wave of his breath. The others push themselves to laugh with him.
He squeezes my cheeks with one hand, shakes my face a bit, then lets it go. “This girl really likes you,” he says. “She’s a pretty one, too. Lucky man.”
I keep thinking that Sam will start to cry soon, and that maybe this would be good, because then they will take pity on us. But after her outburst, she is silent again. And yet, from the corner of my eye, I can see that her hands are shaking.
Ali laughs again. He puts his pistol back into the waist of his trousers, and leans his forearms on the chair he had been sitting in. “We could do this all day. Or many days. It’s not bad for you. You have nice view, right? Saddam built nice houses for the Republicans.” He laughs again, motioning with a kind of exaggeration, as if he knows he misspoke. “Oh, sorry, I mean Republican Guards. Special glass, you know.” He gestures to the windows behind him. “You can see everything, but no one can see you. Isn’t that a great invention? The Americans invented that. They invent many good things. Like this.” He whips out the gun again, inspects it, then holds it out towards Sam. “Look at that. Smith and Wesson 520. A .357 Magnum. Lightweight. Shoots seven rounds. And see the beautiful handle. Finger
groove
wood,” he says it slowly and clearly, as if he’s practised trying to pronounce the word. “And, what it says here? ‘Springfield, Massachusetts.’” He stumbles over the words, so that his -field sounds like filed, and Massach-, like massacre. “Is that where you’re from, Miss Katchens? Do they make these there?”
Sam shakes her head. “Pennsylvania.”
“What?”
“I’m from Phoenixville, Pennsylvania. We used to make steel.”
“So, the same. The steel to make the guns and tanks and helicopters. It’s nice, all these things your America exports to all the world, all your weapons. We’re very grateful. Most beautiful gun I’ve ever had,” he says, bringing it closer to his face and inspecting it with feigned affection. “Thank you.”
Sam sniffs.
“I think America likes this very much, to see Arabs killing other Arabs, Muslims fighting Muslims. And you give us the weapons, and we kill each other for you. Right?”
Sam stares straight ahead.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I don’t understand. Please tell us why we are being held. We haven’t done anything wrong.”
“Neither have we,” says Ali. “We just wanted to talk to you but your ladyfriend was in such a rush to leave that you force us to give you some benefit to stay.”
“Incentive,” says Subhi, whom I cannot see, probably because he is avoiding showing his face.
“In-centeev?
Yes, incentive,” Ali repeats.
Ali continues to play with the revolver; he rubs his finger over the wood, as if to dust it off. He drags over another wooden chair and puts the gun down on it, facing Sam. Then he collects his swivel chair and rolls it over with a somewhat violent swing before bringing it to rest in front of us, next to the chair with his gun on it.
“We want to know exactly what you’ve been doing. Everything. Why have you been asking people about our work?” For the first time since we arrived, Ali is addressing me in Arabic.
I wish Sam had discussed all of the potential scenarios with me in advance. What would she have wanted me to say? “He says he wants to know what we are doing.”
“La-a. Biddun targime
.” Without translation, he says. “You tell me.”
“We are just doing research for a story.”
“A story? I’ll get my son to tell you a story. It’s amazing, isn’t it? You went hunting around Sadr City and Baghdad Al-Jadida and Showja and Zayouna, looking for people who know how to make good documents. You went to the amateurs when you didn’t have to. You should have come straight to the first-class operation.” He smiles, gazes dreamily out of the window towards the river. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”
In fact, it used to be more beautiful. Lately, it seems almost still, hardly flowing anywhere. Beyond Ali’s right ear I can see a small dinghy with two men in it, pushing themselves away from the bank with their fishing poles. In my mind I can imagine the sound of the oars against the water, that day on the river with Baba and Ziad, when we were visiting our relatives in Basra. I didn’t want to wait any longer for the fish. Patience, Baba said, patience. If you wait long enough, they will bite. There is an old Arabic maxim: Haste is the sister of regret.
“Very beautiful,” I agree.
“We all have very beautiful things,” he says, glancing at Sam. “It’s a shame when we don’t take care of them. Isn’t it a shame the Americans aren’t taking better care of Baghdad?”
“Yes. That’s true.”
“Tell him the truth, Nabil.” From the side Sam’s eyes look still and clear, like two pieces of amber.
I turn my head towards hers, and then, thinking I might get whacked for it, forwards again.
“Just tell him the truth.”
Which truth? The one that may put him out of business? Or is she putting on an act hoping I’ll come up with a good cover story. I said I used to like writing poetry. I never said I was a good storyteller. The walls and floor shake, and then I hear it, like a rush moving inside my head. Another bombing, somewhere to the west.
I watch Ali’s face. “It is terrible, all this chaos,” I say. “Isn’t it?”
He crosses one leg over the other and leans on an armrest. “Yes. It is. And you have your American friends to blame.”
“They were supposed to free us of Saddam and then leave,” I say. “But now they can’t leave.”
“What do you mean?”
“George Bush promised people that we had dangerous weapons. So now they need to find them. And until they do, they can’t leave. So that’s what we were trying to do.” A lie a minute, Nabil. Just keep it spinning. “We wanted to look into the documents about weapons, the ones Saddam’s enemies gave to Bush, and then we could show they were fake, and then the Americans would have to leave because they didn’t find any weapons.”
Ali looks mildly surprised. “Is that the truth? You think they would?”
“It is. I’m sure,” I say, as confidently as is possible for a person taped to a chair.
“But you were working on a story about the documents we did for General Akram. This American man. Jackson.”
“That’s true. But we were only looking at that as an example of how it all works.”
“How
what
works?”
“The document-making business. We wanted to, to understand the market. Maybe it’s a legitimate business.”
“Of course it’s legitimate,” he scoffs. “What do you think happens in a place where there’s no government? Or when the government is so corrupt is doesn’t really govern, it terrorizes. People have to make up their own government. So, for the time being, we act instead of the government.”
“I see.” I am terribly thirsty. I need the loo. “We also just wanted to find out what these documents cost. We wanted to know what you were paid to do the Jackson documents.”
Ali’s eyes shift back and forth, like an accountant checking the details of his balance sheet. “Why is it so important to you?”
“It’s just how these journalists work, in the West. She just wanted the facts. I don’t know, a precise number. We didn’t mean to disturb anyone.”
Ali crosses his arms, vacillating in the chair’s orbit. “Isn’t it fair that we should be paid for producing what people need?”
“Of course.”
“What do you call that in economics? Supply and demand?” He pushes at the chair leg next to him with his foot. “No?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“I also have a family to feed. No one else in my family has a job. No one has been able to take money from the bank in more than a month!” Ali gets up and pushes his swivel chair out of the way.
“We have the same problem,” I say.
“Which is why you’re working for her.”
Sam’s eyes look like they are in a dream. Maybe she is in the midst of imagining herself elsewhere. She isn’t here, but out there somewhere, on the river.
“It’s a good job for you,” says Ali. He walks over to Sam and raises his hand. I feel my jaws clench. He could grab her, hurt her, anything, and it would be on my head. Instead, he lays his hand on her hair, running his fingers through the orange-red curls, fascinated. Sam closes her eyes, and I can see her face close down like a drawbridge. Suddenly he withdraws his hand, looking embarrassed — or disgusted. “So maybe you would like to pay for something you want. Such as your freedom. Her safety. Give us five thousand dollars and we will set you free.”
“Five thousand? I’m sure we don’t have that kind of money with us.”
“Oh? What kind do you have?”
“Sam. Sam? He wants to know how much money you have.”
I can see Sam’s eyelashes flutter, but she says nothing.
“Sam, he wants us to pay him $5,000 to let us go.”
Sam swallows. “I have about $800 with me.” Her voice sounds like she has just woken up.