The Company We Keep (28 page)

He runs into his bedroom, looks under the bed, then dashes into our room and gently coaxes the rabbit out from under our bed. As he puts it in the cage, I go to find my folder.

Out on Second Avenue, Robert asks, “The bus or walk?”

“Let’s walk. It’s your birthday.”

“It’s tomorrow.”

He likes to walk, especially when I accompany him all the way to school.

“So what’s for tomorrow?” he asks.

“Oh, I don’t know, I was sorta thinking of the opera—or we could stay home and read.”

“Come on.”

“First we’ll go up the Empire State building.”

“And then dinner?”

“Wait until you see what Dayna has for you for your birthday.”

“I already know.”

By 42nd Street we’re behind schedule and I pick up the pace.

“What is it again that you’re doing today?” Robert asks, hurrying to keep up.

“A big, important business deal,” I say, teasing him.

“Dressed like that?” I’m in jeans and an old slicker with a ripped pocket.

“They’re friends.”

After I drop off Robert at school, I cut over to Fifth Avenue to kill time window-shopping and browsing in Barnes & Noble. I’m looking at new fiction when my cell phone rings. I push through the doors and am back out on to Fifth Avenue.

“How’s your schedule?” It’s Chuck, the investment banker I’m meeting.

“Pretty clear.”

“Look, I’m jammed up. Mind if we meet at eleven thirty?”

“That’s good.”

“And better yet, let’s do it in front of McCormick and Schmick’s, find a place to get a cup of coffee. I got a lunch date there later.”

I get to McCormick & Schmick’s early. At eleven thirty I stick my head in to make sure Chuck didn’t somehow slip by me. He’s not there. Everybody’s late in New York, I think. I wait outside, checking my folder again to make sure I didn’t forget any papers.

At five to twelve I pick out Chuck, a big man, borderline fat, his shoulder curved forward, negotiating the noontime crowd on Sixth Avenue. When he’s up to me, he pulls a handkerchief from his coat pocket to wipe the sweat off of his face. “Jesus, I’m sorry.” He takes a couple of deep breaths. “I had to batter my way out of a meeting.”

Chuck looks up and down Sixth Avenue, obviously for his lunch date. “Lunch is at noon.”

“I got everything here,” I say, tapping the mauve folder.

Chuck looks at it, but doesn’t say anything.

“Chuck, very quick. This is an offer for Angola’s deepwater
Block 32. I mean ten percent of it. No middlemen—other than me, that is.”

“I don’t know what Block 32 is.”

“A megafield, a new one. It’s carried interest. Total puts down the capital and lifts it. I don’t know, maybe a 120 thousand barrels a day.”

I know that I’m out of my depth, trying to sell one of the biggest oil properties in the world. But, as much as I understand it, it seems pretty straightforward: the French major oil company Total drills the oil, pumps it, and markets it. Whoever buys the 10 percent I’m selling gets a percentage of the money flying through the door. It’s just a matter of determining what 10 percent of the block is worth, which is why I called Chuck.

Chuck motions for me to give him the folder. He opens it and glances at the first fax.

“I know this sounds weird,” I say, “but I have an exclusive on it for the next three months. It’s a friend-of-a-friend sort of deal. You know the strange people I know.”

Chuck closes the folder and puts it under his arm. “I’ll see what I can do.”

Chuck spots three men in suits coming toward us. “That’s them. I’ll call you.” Chuck turns and walks away to meet his three lunch partners at the entrance of the restaurant.

I never do hear back from Chuck on Block 32, although it did seem to me like an interesting offer. But I have to admit I’m not all that surprised Chuck passed; I’m not much good at selling things.

Washington, D.C.:
DAYNA

T
he day I finish taking the bar exam I come home to find a message for Bob from ABC News on our answering machine. “Your contract’s ready.” It’s a woman’s voice I’ve never heard. “Can you leave for Iraq next week?”

Iraq?
Going to Iraq isn’t exactly a detail that someone you’re living with should keep to himself. Especially when the United States is about to invade the country. I’m both pissed and hurt that he didn’t tell me. I call him on his cell phone. It’s off, so I leave a message: “Have a great time in Baghdad.” Period.

It’s just like Bob to make travel or work arrangements and then fill me in at the last minute. He didn’t tell me until years later that he’d promised the crazy Argentine oil guy Carlos we’d go to Afghanistan, and even then he dropped it into a conversation purely for color: “Well, we
almost
went to work with the Taliban in Kabul.”
We
almost did
what
? Now the same thing is happening. It especially hurts because we’re just starting to put down roots.

We moved down from New York to Washington for me to go
to law school. We bought a tiny carriage house on Capitol Hill that we filled with two Labradors. Bob was trying to learn an entirely new profession, turning himself into a writer.

There was a setback to our little family when Robert’s State Department–employed mother was assigned to Pakistan, and, given a choice, Robert went to live with her. We missed Robert a lot when he left. He and I both liked to bake, and we made elaborate frosted cakes together. Bob and Robert had boy-chats on the way to school. But I knew the decision was right for him, and frankly I was a little jealous that he was off on a grand adventure of his own. And now Bob is going on one too.

It’s not that I blame Bob for wanting to see the war, to be there for Saddam’s end. He was always fascinated by the man. But I need to make him pay for not checking with me first, so when he comes home that night, I pick a fight. Well, not a fight, more like an accounting.

“How could you make plans without even telling me?” I say.

“Well, I didn’t think it was serious.”

“But there’s a contract.”

“Well, I know … but these things rarely work out … and you know one thing leads to another.”

He tells me that ABC’s plan is to send him and a cameraman across the border to help film a documentary on the last days of Saddam. They’ll stay with Bob’s Iraqi friends at their compound near Ramadi, to capture their reaction to Saddam’s fall.

Somewhat mollified, we go to Las Placitas around the corner on Eighth Street, where the margaritas put the day’s problems far behind you. On the walk there, I admit to him that I’m not so much mad because he didn’t tell me about the ABC deal as envious that he has this offer to film a war and I don’t.

“I’d be envious too,” he says.

But things have a way of working out. The next day ABC calls and tells Bob they can’t find a single cameraman willing to go
to Ramadi with him. He immediately volunteers me for the job, convincing ABC that in the CIA I’d become a whiz with small cameras—and it’s only a small step to TV cameras. Buying it, ABC sets a date to train me in New York to operate the miniature camera that the reality television shows are using now.

Dropping into the middle of a war in the Middle East is not exactly the real world I thought I’d enter when I went to law school, but it does make me believe that maybe I did leave the CIA with a few transferable skills, after all.

Washington, D.C.:
BOB

I
’ll tell Dayna later, but the truth is that getting into Iraq before our troops arrive comes down to the strength of my friendship with Marwan, the man I drove with Robert through a Washington blizzard to see. That night, after Dayna and I first talk about the Iraq trip, I try to fall asleep, but wind up lying awake, making an accounting of my own.

Marwan and I first met in Paris in September 1990, a month after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. He was staying at the Meurice, an elegant old-world hotel facing the Tuileries Gardens and the Seine River. Marwan had the penthouse suite, the only room on the seventh floor.

Marwan called down for a bottle of wine, and we went outside
on the room’s private terrace to enjoy the sunset and watch the tour boats and barges ply the Seine. Not five minutes later a waiter let himself out onto the terrace with the bottle of wine and two glasses, followed by a boy with two chairs and a table. As we watched them set the table with a white linen tablecloth, Marwan started to tell me about himself.

He first came to Paris in the sixties to work for a Texas oilman. He’d just graduated from Stanford with a degree in petroleum engineering. Marwan would stay with the boss at the Meurice. When the boss went out at night—he kept a mistress in Paris, a ballerina—and Marwan was on his own, he’d wonder where life would take him. Until then he’d never understood the wealth and power that comes with oil.

Since then, Marwan had spent his life in oil and construction, almost all of it in the Middle East, first in Saudi Arabia and later in Iraq, where he worked for a Sunni tribal chief from Iraq’s Anbar Province. The chief, whose tribe belonged to the Dulaym confederation, was extremely influential in Iraqi politics. The chief was a member of the ruling Ba’ath Party.

Through Iraq’s modern history, the Dulaym had been a mainstay of every ruling Sunni regime, providing about 25 percent of the noncommissioned officers and soldiers in the Iraqi army. Saddam Hussein, a Sunni like the tribal chief, looked at the Dulaym as a critical source of support. Saddam would push work in the tribal chief’s direction, calculating that the chief’s construction company would come to depend on government contracts.

After Marwan worked on several projects for the tribal chief, a close friendship developed between the two. Marwan soon was treated like a member of the chief’s family, eventually taking over management of the family’s money. “I’m closer with them than with my own family,” Marwan said.

That first night in Paris, Marwan gave me a tutorial on Iraq
that paralleled the one Ali gave me on Syria. As Marwan told me, Iraq’s tribes, held together by tradition and blood loyalty, are a permanent fixture in Iraq. Their unbroken allegiances and ties go back thousands of years, before even Islam. While they’ve always stuck together, even during the worst times in Iraq, men like Saddam seize power for the moment, but they inevitably fall and are eventually forgotten. The tribes are what endure. “They’re of the land and aren’t going anywhere,” Marwan said.

In marked contrast, without genuine tribal roots, Saddam and his family lack any sort of traditional social standing in Iraq, or respect. In fact, most Iraqis look at Saddam’s family as little more than common criminals who stole power and held on to it through sheer brutality and cunning. Saddam pretended to have tribal roots and solicited the support of the tribes as a way of firming up his political base.