Body Work (40 page)

Father Vicente reminded me of the priests and nuns who wrestle with celibacy every day, sometimes every hour! Know you are not alone in your struggle. And find yourself a nice boy. You will meet plenty of young men in the middle of a war. Marry one of them, make a family. A family will cure you of your sinful desires.

I read on through the night. More trips into Baghdad with Amani. The two women went to art galleries or to outdoor markets, but never to see Amani’s family—she couldn’t let the neighbors know she worked for Americans or they might murder her little brothers for being related to a collaborator.

On Thanksgiving, during the boisterous celebrations inside the Green Zone, Alexandra got drunk and spent the night with someone named Jerry, one of the programmers in Tintrey’s communications division.

November 26

I’ve been sick all day. Throwing up gin, and throwing up Jerry. I don’t know which has made me sicker.

December 1

Have avoided Jerry all week. I think he told some of the other men—they look at me like a cat licking its lips over a wounded mouse. I pray I’m not pregnant.

December 9

Thanks to the Mother of God, my period arrived today. My coworkers are all treating me as if I were a leper, I thought because of Jerry. But Mr. Mossbach, the head of my unit, took me aside today. “People are talking about you. You spend too much time with that Arab gal, and that means your teammates aren’t sure they can trust you to be on Uncle Sam’s side. Trust, Allie! We’re a Team!”

So! Amani’s neighbors may attack her family if they know she works with Americans. And my neighbors attack me because I drink coffee with Amani.

She calls me A’lia, an Arabic name. It means “exalted” or “noble.” And Amani means “wishes” or “dreams,” so I call her Desideria.

How can it be a sin to find more pleasure in her society than in that of silly girls or drunken boys? Of course, I have no sinful thoughts for her, only gratitude that I have found a friend in this strange country.

In January, Alexandra was transferred to another unit, to Achilles. My pulse beat faster: was this where her life intersected with Chad’s? I didn’t see any mention of his name. Her family, calls to her mother, e-mails to Nadia, Allie’s own private wrestling over her friendship with Amani.
My desire is for my Desideria,
she wrote more than once, and then crossed out and recrossed out the sentence.

The men in Tintrey’s operation outnumbered women by about ten to one, so there was constant pressure on Alexandra to date. After her Thanksgiving date with Jerry, she avoided, or tried to avoid, being alone with any of the men after work hours.

Perhaps Father Vicente is right, that all sex outside marriage is sinful and therefore without pleasure. But my roommates both have male lovers and seem to have no unhappiness. They tease me and call me the Ice Queen. As long as I do my job well and give no cause for complaint at work, surely all will be well.

February 2

Amani came to find me this afternoon. She was waiting in the shadows of the building until she found me alone in the supply room.

“A’lia, how have I offended you?” she asked, her beautiful dark eyes full of tears.

“Desideria,
mi corazón,
how could you ever offend me?” I said. “It is only because of my boss. He ordered me to stay away from you.”

Then she asked what my words meant, not “boss,” my Spanish.

“My heart,” I said. “We call our sisters that. It’s a pet name.”

I was terrified she would think I was making an improper gesture to her.

“My heart?” She smiled and told me the words in Arabic.

And then, somehow, we were holding each other. And my own heart felt at peace.

And then began their trysts, the secret meetings in a bombed-out flat near the art-gallery district.

I took a picture through the broken window to send to Nadia. A date palm, which somehow survived bombs and lack of water. Its crown is level with the roof of the building, and in the summer, Amani tells me, boys climb to the roof and jump to the tree to harvest what fruit the tree still produces. I asked Nadia to make a painting of it, and when she did, I was able to present it to my corazón.

Allie wrote of the pleasure they had in each other’s bodies, the delight in hiding from the bosses, from the soldiers, the drunkenness, the violence of the war itself. But she was always tormenting herself over her sin and wondering if she should confess it to the base priest.

But he is such a soldier, such a military man. How could he counsel me except with more military advice, to find a soldier and have the children I want to share only with my heart’s desire.

And then the inevitable happened: someone started spying on them. Allie found a crude drawing on her desk, heard snickers from her coworkers. Her roommates asked her to move out: they didn’t want to live with a traitor. Mr. Mossbach, the boss, told her no one trusted her because she wasn’t a team player.

“My work is always properly done, perfectly done. Even now when someone on the team sabotages it, I stay late and get it all together. How can you make this accusation?”

He laughed, suggested they have a drink after work, he’d help make it all right for her. A drink led to attempted sex; she fought him off, and then her life became hell indeed.

May 2

The weather here is as hot and difficult as my own poor life. I go, when I can find a way to leave unwatched, to the little room Amani found for us. But it has been many weeks now since I saw her.

May 14

Today, I finally saw my Desideria. She also has had to stay away—too many people are watching her. Someone, maybe even the Americans, warned her cousins that she is keeping “undesirable company.” It is easy for her family to keep her almost as a prisoner after work hours. She says she may have to quit her job, that someone in our office has suggested to her cousins and her mother that she is secretly seeing an American. Only the poverty of her family, their need for the money Tintrey pays her, lets her keep the job for now. “But my noble one, my exalted A’lia, we must be so careful. No one must see us together in the office. Do you understand?”

My joy with her is great. And yet my sorrow is great, too. Why is it wrong for us to meet? Because we are of different religions? Or because we are two women? Jesus, if you are the God of Love, then why is my love to be punished with so much sorrow?

That was the last entry. I flipped through the remaining pages, which were blank. And then I came upon a letter printed in black ink on a thin piece of onionskin. The ink had bled through, making it hard to read.

Dear Nadia,

I hope I may address you by your name without offense. You are the beloved sister of my beloved friend, now dead. When I heard of her death, I made my way to our room. Perhaps she told you of our room, with the date tree outside the window that told us life was still possible.

Someone had been in there. Not a drifting person, rather someone who came with the evil intent. My hands shook as I walked through the destruction of our small sanctuary. Our earthen pitcher broken, our mirror shattered, the linen cloth embroidered by my grandmother ripped in two. They had poured blood on our bed. Much destruction have I seen in this war, but this destruction was so personal, against me personally, and against your sister, that I almost fainted from the hatred that had been in a room where only love existed before.

I knew my beloved A’lia wrote in this book and kept it in a secret place we made behind the bed. Too many eyes were spying on her, in her living place and in her working place. She could not leave her writings where unfriendly eyes would see them. Thanks be to God that the evil ones did not find our hiding place.

I wish I could keep my A’lia’s book, but too many eyes look upon me also: Iraqi eyes, American eyes, mullah spies. So I send this book of her writings to you. Keep them safe as a sacred memory of your sister’s most noble and beautiful soul. She adored you, and little Clara, and worried constantly over your fates. But God will keep you safe. You are in the country of safety.

I enclose no address, for no letter can come to me that will not be read by many eyes before mine ever see it.

Amani, known to your sister as Desideria

43

Othello Misfires

I
’d been so absorbed in Alexandra’s journal that I hadn’t noticed time passing. It was almost three a.m. when I finally finished reading.

What a sorrowful document. At a time in life when Alexandra should have been glorying in the chance to explore the world and her own place in it, she’d been pursued instead by demons. The fierce teachings of her religion, the taunting by her coworkers and boss—perhaps all those things pushed her to a breaking point. Perhaps that’s why she volunteered to drive a truck along the road that led to her death.

Some of the writing showed glimpses of happiness, especially the passages where she described her siblings—Nadia painting a cartoon of Tintrey for Allie, Ernest laughing with her. It was hard to think of them now, Nadia and Allie, both dead, Ernest so damaged he couldn’t speak clearly about his sisters.

You live in the country of safety,
Amani had written to Nadia. In the country of safety, Nadia had been murdered, Ernest severely injured.

But nothing showed a connection between Chad Vishneski and Alexandra, except for the fact that both had been in Iraq. Alexandra had worked for Tintrey’s Achilles division. Chad had one of the Achilles shields in his duffel bag. Tintrey had nine thousand employees in Iraq and the U.S. had over a hundred thousand troops there. It wasn’t beyond belief that Chad and Alexandra had met, but she hadn’t mentioned any Chad in the journal.

If I went to Iraq and somehow found Amani, and Jerry the programmer, and Mr. Mossbach and persuaded them, by unimagined means, to tell me everything they knew about Alexandra’s eight months in Iraq and her last day on earth, I still might not find out how she died. If I was going to untangle the story, I would have to do so from the evidence I could find here at home. Clara said her mother and Nadia had fought over the insurance payments the Guamans received after Alexandra’s death. The parents wanted to sue Tintrey, but the lawyer, Rainier Cowles, showed up and persuaded them to accept a settlement.

There was nothing strange about that, or even unsavory, but it so angered Nadia that she walked out of her parents’ home, and was still estranged from her mother when she died. And Clara believed no one was allowed to talk about Alexandra’s death.

I wandered restlessly to the window, carrying my glass. The journal had absorbed me to the point where I’d forgotten to drink the whisky. I parted the blinds, half expecting to see a date tree, but of course there was nothing but snow and ice and a few late-night cars bumping through the ruts.

Rainier Cowles had come to Club Gouge with the owner of Tintrey and the head of the company’s Iraq division to watch the Body Artist’s homage to Nadia. The men’s locker-room jokes gave lie to any notion that they were there out of respect for the dead.

Besides, when I went up to the Tintrey offices, Gilbert Scalia knew exactly who Alexandra Guaman was and how she died. Maybe Tintrey kept track of the Guamans because they feared a wrongful-death suit.

I let the curtain fall. Tomorrow—or, rather, later today—I would visit the Guamans. There had to be a way to get them to talk to me. And then I would buy a very large crystal ball and divine where the Body Artist had gone to ground.

On that helpful thought, I stumbled into bed. This time I fell asleep. In my dreams, Alexandra and Amani were painting a picture of a date palm across my body. In the background, Karen Buckley, her transparent eyes half shut, was crying, “My sister died, too.”

It was a relief when the phone pulled me out of sleep a little before eleven, even though the caller turned out to be John Vishneski.

“Warshawski, someone came after Chad, just like you thought they might. My buddy Cleon was here, and a good thing, too.”

“Attacked right in the ICU? How did they get past the nurses?”

“Dressed up like a nurse. Some blond gal, looked like that actress in
Chicago
, Cleon said—all brassy hair and whatnot but in a uniform. Cleon looked through the glass and saw her holding a towel over Chad’s nose, and you better believe that he busted in there fast enough to set a record, but she skittered out the other end of the ward and disappeared. What the
hell
is going on here? What did Chad get himself into?”