“Meddlesome fanatics,” Najeeb muttered on his way into the streets. “They’ll be the death of us all.”
CHAPTER TWO
AS THE SECOND Molotov cocktail exploded into flame a mere twenty feet to his left, it occurred to Skelly that he was paying the price for having forgotten an old but important lesson: Choosing the wrong fixer can get you killed.
It was not supposed to have been a problem, this demo—five hundred hotheads with a scratchy bullhorn mounting an hour-long rant against America and Musharraf, Pakistan’s latest president for life, followed by the roughing up of a straw-filled effigy. The effigy, a sort of all-purpose Ugly American painted red, white and blue, was to have been set alight for the cameras. Then everyone was supposed to break for lunch and call it a day.
But halfway through the festivities the policemen waded in, and when the crowd shoved back they began swatting at skulls and rib cages with long wooden batons, flailing like enraged schoolmasters. Things got ugly in a hurry. Had Skelly stationed himself a hundred yards farther down the block everything would have been fine. He would have had a nice seat, in fact, a vantage point with easy escape and a cozy teahouse at hand, somewhere to relax afterward and put his notes in order while the smoke cleared. Mopping up would have required nothing more than a few interviews with shopkeepers—a spice merchant, perhaps, they were always good for a little sensory detail. Though God knows you wouldn’t want to convey the smell of this place, with its open-air toilets and slicks of donkey shit.
It would have been an easy first byline on this, Skelly’s first full day in Pakistan, leaving him the afternoon to shower, get his stomach under control, crank up the airco and slide under the hotel sheets for a real night’s rest. Then he would get going in earnest tomorrow, having held jet lag and microbes at bay.
Instead he found himself at the epicenter of an angry mob, backed against a filthy stone wall while the firebombs exploded. And it was all the fault of his idiot fixer, Babar, same name as the elephant. Just look at him, Skelly thought. The man’s wide eyes and strangled look of panic bespoke his lack of qualifications far more eloquently than his broken English.
Skelly had known Babar for all of thirty-seven minutes, having chosen him hastily from a crowd in the hotel lobby. Picking an interpreter that way was breaking a rule right off the bat, but Skelly had been in a hurry. There had been a dozen or more to choose from, lingering by some couches near the front desk. Each had been dressed in a
shalwar
kameez
—a loose-fitting shirt drooping to the knees, with matching baggy pants cinched by a drawstring. Skelly was already accustomed to seeing this traditional costume in the streets, but it looked incongruous in the lobby of the Pearl Continental, what with the smartly clad desk clerks, the handsome wood paneling, the wall-mounted televisions blaring CNN and the well-appointed breakfast buffet, complete with a man in a white chef’s hat who fried omelets to order. Or maybe it was lack of sleep that made them seem such a spectral bunch—dark faces hovering above billowy pastels, like a gospel choir waiting to sing at a funeral. It was an appropriate enough image, Skelly supposed, because these men were definitely hoping to perform, and it was death that had put them in business. Journalists were besieged by such characters at the fringes of every war and insurrection, and their eager come-ons were virtually the same from country to country: “How are
you,
sir? You need a translator?” They were the lounge lizards of the trade, and usually only one in ten knew what he was doing, so you hired instead from the staffs of local newspapers or on the recommendations of colleagues.
But three years in the suburbs of the Midwest had left Skelly forgetful of past lessons. He’d grown used to being spoon-fed quotes by publicists and spokespersons, heading back to the newsroom with a press release, a few handouts and a Styrofoam cup of overbaked coffee.
In Pakistan he felt as if he were starting over, and he clumsily tried to pick a winner from among the lobby long shots. Babar had stood out as the friskiest in the paddock, aggressive yet well organized, reeling off a patter that made his English seem passable. Spoke Pashto as well, Babar said, along with Urdu, the standard tongue of Pakistan. In fact, Babar had claimed to speak all the languages of the Afghan exile community, a population that in Peshawar numbered in the hundreds of thousands. Fluent in Dari, middling in Balti. Even knew a touch of Baluch in case Skelly was interested in heading south into the desert. And he had a driver. His cousin, of course.
Everything that you need, sir.
A sweeping gesture.
The car is waiting.
But did Babar know the borderland tribal areas, and how one acquired the proper passes and permissions to visit them? Skelly had felt he ought to ask
something,
and this question had struck him as suitably difficult.
Oh, yes, Mr. Skelly.
A dismissive wave.
It is not a problem.
No problem.
Aucun problème. Nema problema.
From West Africa to the Balkans, it was the litany of can-do fixers the world over, and somehow Babar’s words had reassured him.
But it was all a sham, of course—the sales patter rehearsed, every boast empty. Skelly had suspected as much when he saw the cousin’s car, a rusting ’83 Toyota with cracked windows and holes in the floorboard, the rushing pavement visible below.
His fears were confirmed by Babar’s performance during their first interview, just before the demo began. They’d flagged down a weathered old man in a turban who had gone off on a lengthy tirade in Pashto in response to Skelly’s first question, jabbing his finger and bobbing his head.
“He says he is angry,” Babar offered in translation. “Angry at America.”
“Yes?” Skelly prompted, waiting for the rest.
“Because of the planes bombing Afghanistan. He is angry. Angry at . . .”
“America. I know. But what else did he say? He went on for five minutes.”
“You want with him five more minutes?” Furrowed brow. Utter in-comprehension.
“No. I just want . . .” It was hopeless. Why bother? “Never mind.”
“You mind him?”
“No.”
“You want that we should . . . ?”
“
No.
Just forget it.”
“Okay, Mr. Skelly. We forget him. It is not a problem.”
Babar had then led them straight to their present precarious location, the only block of the bazaar where the level of risk now extended above and beyond the call of duty. Skelly had sensed the miscalculation as soon as he saw that the only other Westerner within sight was a young French photographer, a lean T-shirted daredevil in an Afghan scarf and a six-pocket vest, hair in a ponytail. His type was like the needle of a compass in these situations, pointing straight toward the places you least wanted to be. Twenty-five years ago—could it really have been that long?—an old foreign editor had advised Skelly to “stay away from the bang-bang and don’t get yourself killed. That’s for young French photographers.”
Yet here was Skelly, shoulder to shoulder with Agence France-Presse, the man’s motor drive whirring, Domke bag slung like an ammunition belt as he crouched for a low-angle shot of a fallen policeman, not even flinching as half a cinder block landed beside him with an alarming
thunk.
Skelly felt tired just watching, if only because it reminded him of every other capital of world misery he’d visited—Managua, Baghdad, and the deserts of Kuwait. Sarajevo and Pristina. Mogadishu and Goma. Port-au-Prince and Panama City. Hebron and Gaza. Khartoum and, then, there at the last, Monrovia, deep in the anarchy of Liberia—the very capital of random death. Malice and cunning had grinned from thin faces and deep-socketed eyes, every gun barrel following him like a stare. But the worst of it had been the armed tyranny of twelve-year-olds, vacant-eyed boys who had lost all sense of fear, order and limits. He wasn’t sure what it was about them that scared him most—the bored way in which they shot holes in people or their eerie resemblance to his own sons, like some foreign X-Games version equipped with a Kalashnikov, ruled by hormones, every parent’s worst nightmare. Those horrors, plus the gastrointestinal bile that left him writhing on a dirty cot for two weeks, out of touch and out of money, had convinced Skelly that he would never again see home. Thus had his eventual escape seemed like divine deliverance, a stay of execution, some last-minute pardon from the Creator. Skelly took it as a sign that it was time to get out of the game, even if it meant the newspaper might put him out to pasture.
Which is exactly what happened, of course. Because what could be more worthless to an aspiring young editor than a weary scribbler home from the wars, trailing a third wife, a fifth child and the correspondent’s de rigueur collection of Oriental rugs and international folk art. Any fool could have seen that Skelly was a burnout, saddle sore from too many long rides with each of the Four Horsemen.
So he became the chattel of the suburban editor, a chirping young product of good schooling and a sheltered upbringing, thoroughly workshopped in people skills and every sort of ethnic and gender sensitivity. The man knew everything, in fact, except how to cover breaking news on a deadline, or the difference between Appalachia and Asia Minor, and he exhibited no desire whatsoever to approach Skelly, much less prod for signs of life. Instead he chose the easy way out, dispatching Skelly to the local version of Siberia, forty miles up Route 19 to Warren County, with its Wal-Marts, belt roads and Assemblies of God. Skelly wound up covering store openings, school openings, park openings and weather stories, filling in for whichever twenty-three-year-old had just pulled up stakes for the metro desk, that faraway place downtown that everyone but he aspired to.
After so many years abroad, he found himself struggling to make sense of his homeland. America, it seemed, had turned into a land of big-box stores and hundred-channel cable. On half the channels, grown men in suits argued with each other. On the other half, shapely blondes offered the latest numbers from Wall Street. The heavy, uncomfortable vehicles he’d once rented to cross deserts and minefields had become the transportation of choice for commuters and soccer moms, and nearly everyone over the age of thirty seemed to have either just scored big in the stock market or become the host of a new talk show. Skelly had never beheld so much prosperity, yet to a man his neighbors complained about money, and their lack of it, or of the faceless bureaucrats who were supposedly “on their backs,” trying to take it all away.
Then, on a sunny September morning, the dirtier, hungrier world that Skelly knew better shouldered its way back into the public’s view. He was at the Warren Mall doing man-in-the-street interviews about shark phobia when the first jet crashed, and then the second. He watched the twin towers crumble on a TV screen at Radio Shack, staring in rapt disbelief while young clerks from the food court sobbed on either side, his sense of dislocation growing by the minute. An hour later he returned to the office to find that his skills were suddenly back in demand.
“Help us understand them,” his editors pleaded. “Why do they hate us?”
So he got a visa, went to a doctor for a few shots, and hopped on a plane. And, barely a month later, here he was—Stanford J. Kelly, if you’re wondering about bylines, a.k.a. Stan Kelly, a.k.a. Skelly to just about everyone in the business except the new foreign editor, who insisted on calling him Stan. He was back in the game in yet another location, parachuted from the heavens after scarcely as much preparation as you might make for a weekend at the beach.
Still blinking against the glare, he felt rusty and uncertain. And he was downright ashamed of having made a blunder as egregious as hiring the wrong fixer. Because if war journalism in a foreign land is a sort of glorified tourism—overland adventure holiday, as the Brits might say, combined with geopolitical peep show—then the fixer is both travel agent and tout, one part hustler and another part sage. They are the first line of defense against cheaters and ne’er-do-wells, and the best-known weapon (apart from Marlboros and American dollars) against obstructive officials and checkpoint trolls. The best ones know who to talk to and where to find them, and can decipher the Sanskrit of local politics and all its petty grudges. But mostly what a fixer does is keep you alive and functioning, right down to knowing where to buy phone adapter plugs, the cheapest rugs and the cleanest food.
Skelly had already made up his mind to undo the damage of his current choice as quickly as possible. He would pay off Babar and head back to the hotel, and at four he’d keep the tentative appointment that a colleague had made for him with a fixer who came highly recommended. Najeeb something or other. Perfect English, supposedly, and his Pashto was as good as his Urdu. He even had a dash of Western sophistication in the bargain, it was said. He was pricey—Babar, at least, came cheap at sixty dollars per day—but a good fixer was worth every penny. Let the bean counters worry about the money. This was no place to cut corners.
For the moment, his more pressing worry was getting out of the demonstration alive. He grabbed hold of Babar, who, God help him, was following in the wake of the photographer, angling deeper into the maelstrom.
“Not there!” Skelly shouted. “This way.”
Babar turned, following mutely, stunned livestock on a tether, and Skelly shoved him toward an alley that looked reasonably safe, the noise of the crowd ringing in his ears, a buzz of anger and panic that seemed to ionize the dust. Other bodies jostled his, warm and damp against his shirtfront. People always smelled different in other countries, and their scent now was close and unmistakable. Not unpleasant, just different, a bouquet of sweat, spice and sandalwood that from now on would always remind him of this moment, this street. The wooden stock of a policeman’s carbine bumped his hip bone. Babar’s pale clothing loomed just ahead, flowing like something out of the
Arabian
Nights.
“Come on,” he shouted, as Babar again threatened to veer astray.
“But my cousin’s car, it is this way.” Wild-eyed now, in need of a jolt.