War of the Encyclopaedists (32 page)

“Yes, it is,” Yasmin said. She laughed and gave Tricia a quick tight hug. A weight lifted from Tricia's forehead. She was fine. She had been quietly imagining crawling back to Luc, apologizing, saying how right
he'd been. But she was fine. He wasn't right. She had taken a risk, and she'd witnessed something important. That was the whole point of being here.

They reached the checkpoint and were waved into the Pedestrian Search lane. Tricia wrapped her hijab
back around her face.

Then she heard his voice. With all the exhilaration, she had nearly forgotten why she'd insisted on Checkpoint 11.

She wasn't sure what she would say to him or even how she would feel around him. Their night together, apart from the bloody nose, had fit the standard hookup routine. It began with the man circling, testing the waters, her hunger for sexual attention, which itself was almost sexual. Then the climactic act in which she left her mind and inhabited her body, giving herself to unadulterated pleasure, like licking a sugar cube. Then there was the afterglow, pleasing for a brief moment, until she began to reenter her mind, to analyze her performance, his performance, the quality of their intimacy—would he want to do it again, would she want to? And then to crush these anxieties: abrupt separation. Time to leave. Nice knowing you. Where are my socks? Let's hope we don't run into each other on campus. Hal's blimp-pilot friend had been a good hookup because he was from out of town, a one-night stand from the get-go, and no lack of phone calls or contact could be attributed to his interest or lack thereof. She had been able to enjoy the afterglow without falling into anxious analysis. They were airships passing in the night. Seeing him now, a stranger who had seen her naked, she expected the usual anxieties to well up—but instead of falling into the nerve-racking and involuntary mental review of the entire history of their contact, she found herself fixated on a still frame: the two of them laughing, blood dripping off her chin onto his chest.

“Mickey!” she said.

Montauk cocked his head like a threatened animal. Tricia revealed her face and he blinked several times, unable to recognize her out of context.

“Tricia, remember me?” she said, giving a little wave.

“Holy shit, Tricia! What? How are you . . .”

“I'm on a grant from the Investigative Fund with— Well, I'm
reporting for the Inter Press Service and
Truthout,
which— Hal told me Second Platoon, so . . .”

“Crazy.” Montauk became self-conscious of the fat plug of dip in his lower lip. And of the fact that their conversation had caught the attention of Sodium Joh and Sergeant Jackson, who were looking on with interest.

“You weren't . . .” He noticed that the Iraqi woman with Tricia had a purple index finger, and that Tricia herself had purple ink smudged on her clothing. “Did you go to the polls?”

“Yasmin voted. I went with her to watch the election process.”

“Americans are barred from getting even close to the polls today.”

“You mean American military are. I'm not military.”

At once, Montauk's rage almost boiled over. It was that attitude of civilian privilege, her careless violation of, if not the letter, at least the spirit of a very sensible prohibition. But he liked Tricia. He admired her audacity. Which meant he couldn't be unequivocally angry, though he wanted to be. He wanted to break something. The desert had taken hold of him and he knew it. In the past weeks, he had witnessed this tendency toward anger taking residence in his skull like some kind of deadbeat relative he couldn't turn away. He bit his lip, thrummed his fingers against Molly Millions, and stared upward for a moment, trying to rein it in. You like this girl. Be nice to her.

“Let's see your badges,” Montauk said.

Tricia stepped forward and pulled out the plastic access badge from a lanyard around her neck. Montauk took it in his gloved hand. It was probably warm, the same temperature as her breasts. He regretted wearing his gloves.

40

“Heard you got chewed out by the CO, sir,” Thomas said.

“Sorry, sir,” Joh said.

Montauk held a stoic face, basking in their apprehension. Dinner was almost over as the three of them entered the DFAC. “Vote for Pedro . . . I took it in the ass for that,” he said. “And I would have ­recommended you two for an Article Fifteen.” His face broke into a smile. “If it wasn't so goddamn funny.”

They laughed, relieved.

“Why did the brass freak out so much?” Joh asked as they stepped into the chow line.

“Yeah, it's not like the Iraqis would even know enough to be offended,” Thomas said.

“You know how everything bad that happens in Iraq is our fault?” Montauk said. “No matter how fair the elections are, people will say the US rigged it.” He could feel her eyes on him. She was seated at a table right there in the DFAC. A part of his other life, the college-kid one, the one he shared with Corderoy. “They'll point to any evidence,” he continued, “no matter how stupid.” Right there across the dining hall. He met her eyes. “That's why the brass is pissed at the Pedro banner. That's my take, anyway.”

Montauk took a tray and went to the entrée section. The Paki servers were dishing up “tacos,” which turned out to be burritos, the same ones you would find at an upscale buffet in the outskirts of
Atlanta. Get ahold of yourself. You banged this chick. Montauk stood a little straighter and looked back at her table. She was still looking. He gave her a small smile, then turned to the server to accept his tongful of
carne asada
.
After several ingredients, Montauk realized that the tortilla would not be large enough to wrap it all into a clean bundle. He considered skipping the
crema
to avoid messiness while eating next to Tricia and whatever dude was next to her. Calm the fuck down. Sit over there like you own the place and eat a giant messy burrito.

“Tricia Burnham, I presume.”

“Lieutenant. Montauk.”

“Hi there,” he said to Luc. “Mickey. Nice to meet you.”

The guy nodded curtly, chewing slowly as if that were a sufficient placeholder for his name. Montauk set his tray down and went to the drink machine.

“You know this guy?” Luc asked Tricia as soon as Montauk was out of earshot.

“Kind of. He was my roommate's best friend in Boston. Only met him once.”

“Strange.”

“Yep. Small world.”

Montauk returned, slurping an icy soda.

“So we visited this local family the other day,” Tricia said. “There was an unexploded mortar in their backyard. I wrote up an article about it for
Truthout
. We contacted the Aussies but haven't heard back . . . think your platoon can get rid of it?”

Luc glared at her. “Maybe they put it there,” he said with a hint of self-satisfaction.

This particular brand of bullshit was almost too stupid for Montauk to take offense at. Almost. “Unlikely,” Montauk said. “We haven't fired a mortar into central Baghdad since 2003. Plus, if it was American ordnance, it would have exploded. Also, if my guys are aiming for a civilian house, we hit the house, not the backyard. But anything's possible. Give me the address and I'll contact EOD.” Montauk took a huge, sloppy bite of his burrito,
carne asada
falling back onto the plate, an oozing thread of cheddar cheese hanging
from his lip. He chewed slowly with his mouth slightly ajar while looking at Luc, letting the sounds of mastication slursh out in an alpha-male display of territorial dominance. Montauk felt powerful as Luc glanced down at his own plate, until he noticed that Tricia, unlike Luc, looked disgusted. Montauk swallowed and wiped his mouth.

He half participated in small talk for the rest of the meal, trying to eat through his mild embarrassment at his own aggro behavior. When they'd all finished, he stood first and reached for their plates, saying, “Let me get those for you.” This offer of generosity surprised him as much as it did Luc and Tricia. Montauk knew he was acting weird, but in seeing Luc's bewildered expression, he quickly came to accept his own confusing behavior. Kill them with kindness. As he carried their plates to the dish bin, he imagined both of them thinking: Lieutenant Mickey Montauk . . . who the fuck is this guy? He was under the impression that this sort of exasperating mystery made dudes angry and got chicks wet.

Montauk found Tricia's e-mail address on the Truthout.org website. Her article wasn't half-bad—more balanced than a lot of the lefty swill on the Internet. Even the accompanying photo by Luc Dubois, he had to admit, was well composed. The article began as a human-interest piece about a family with a mortar in their backyard, but expanded to address the violence surrounding the elections. A suicide bomber had detonated himself in a queue of voters in Sadr City, killing four. At least twenty-five more people had been killed in attacks on other polling stations—that number seemed to have made an impression on Tricia, though it didn't seem terribly high to Montauk for a day's worth of violence in Baghdad. He wanted to write to her immediately, but he held back for several days. “Hey, nice article, let's fuck again” didn't seem like the appropriate thing to say. “Want to grab dinner” seemed too transparent. What he needed was a plausible work-related excuse to spend enough time with her to make a further sexual encounter all but inevitable. It was hard to plan this out, though, with the headache Ali Gorma was giving him.

For weeks, Gorma had been showing up late to his shifts. And just recently, he'd no-call/no-showed. That alone might have been reason enough to fire him. But Montauk had also repeatedly found himself in situations where Gorma's translations didn't match the facial expressions of the distraught Iraqis whom Montauk was attempting to communicate with. This suspicion—that Gorma was leaving out information, due to either apathy or a misdirected sense of propriety—had been gnawing at him for weeks. He had even begun to worry that Gorma was actively sabotaging day-to-day operations. The most infuriating part was that when Montauk got up the courage to send Gorma packing, he stood there looking bored as ever. “Do you get what I'm saying?” Montauk had said. “You're fired. Don't come back.” Gorma had said, “Okay,” shrugging with the least amount of exertion possible to convey his indifference.

But with Gorma gone and Olaf looking for a replacement, Montauk could focus on the more important question of how to get Tricia alone in a dark room. He'd begun the e-mail by complimenting her article and telling her that EOD had gone out to remove that mortar. This put him in a good light. But Tricia didn't seem like the kind of girl who would come running to him because he was big and strong and could solve all her problems. She had a very developed sense of her own agency. He'd grinned at his cleverness when the idea came to him. Just a little afterthought at the end of the e-mail:
P.S. Maybe we can trade information. Let's talk.
How could she resist that? He'd offer her some leads about civilian casualties from the daily INTSUM—stuff that would make great human-interest material for lefty publications. And in exchange, maybe she could . . . keep an ear to the street—that was a good phrase—for rumors of insurgent activity. It wasn't entirely bullshit. Maybe Tricia and her journalist cronies could turn up information that Montauk, as a US soldier, would never get from the locals. And though sharing bits of intel with an unembedded journalist wouldn't endanger anyone, he could get in serious shit if Captain Byrd found out. There was real risk, which made the elaborate attempt at a liaison even more erotic.

They had arranged to meet at the internal checkpoint to the DFAC. Montauk was there now, shooting the bull with the guard force, which
today meant Fields and Kyriacou and a few Gurkhas. The Gurkhas were former British colonial troops from Nepal who were now basically mercenaries.

• • •

Tricia arrived alone. Khakis and a button-up. The hijab she wore outdoors lay around her shoulders.

“Lieutenant,” she said. Her ID hung from a lanyard around her neck, government-worker style. She held it out expectantly toward Montauk.

He took it, flipped it around, and gave it the once-over. “You're good.”

“Are you working right now?” she asked.

He raised an eyebrow. Fields raised one, too. “Technically, no.”

“Technically, dinner?”

“The LT would be glad to keep you company, ma'am,” Kyrie said. “Sir, me and the Gurkhas got it locked down, you're good to go.” He flashed a grin and gave a double thumbs-up.

Tricia smiled and stepped through the gap in the sandbags, beckoning Montauk to follow.

“Sir!”

“Right . . .” Montauk hadn't cleared his weapon. SOP when entering US military buildings was to pop out your magazine, yank back the bolt to show the empty chamber, and then aim your rifle into the sand-filled clearing barrel and pull the trigger. Montauk pointed Molly Millions into the clearing barrel, but he yanked back the bolt
before
ejecting the magazine, which racked a round into the chamber.

“Oooh,” said Kyrie.

“Shit.” Montauk jacked the bolt back again, ejecting the rifle round, which he caught and popped back into the magazine. He pulled the bolt back a third time, then fired the empty weapon into the barrel.

“Good to go, sir!” chimed Kyrie.

“Thanks,” Montauk muttered.

“Everything okay?” Tricia asked as they walked across the mosaic of Bush I's face.

“Everyone's already watching me because I'm an officer, and now I'm walking around with a hot American chick.”

Tricia blushed. “Like it's fifth grade and you don't want to be the first guy with a girlfriend.”

“Exactly.”

“I see why you get along with Hal.”

“I heard about a staff sergeant who got busted down like three ranks for getting blown by an interpreter.”

“What? Why?”

“There's no sex in the Army.”

“C'mon.”

“No permissible sex.”

“And what does that have to do with us getting dinner?”

They walked down the hall past the barbershop and one of the many stalls selling paintings and cheap watches and pocketknives. Montauk chuckled at himself.

“What?”

“It's just that my game's been sucking it through a glory hole.”

“When did you become a frat guy?”

“I'm pretty sure I was dipping Kodiak and swigging High Life when we first met.”

“That was when you were a blimp pilot.”

“I still am, this is just a yearlong deployment.”

She smiled at that. “Right.”

“I'm serious—they have to hold my job for me at UAI. It's federal law.”

“Let's just forget that, okay? You're not who I thought you were.”

The track-lit buffet at the Al Rasheed spread out before them. Tonight was chicken Kiev, which here was basically a breaded fist-sized chunk of boneless chicken with a cream-cheese sauce injected inside. Montauk had no idea what chicken Kiev was supposed to be, but he'd wager money that it was totally different from what they served in the Al Rasheed.

They picked an empty table at the far end of the room.

“So how are you liking Baghdad?” he said.

“Let's get down to business,” Tricia said. “You can get me leads on civilian casualties?”

“I get an intelligence brief on Karada every morning. It's like a police-blotter thing, except with stuff that's of interest to us. Mostly
attacks and threats on their side, raids and other ops on our side, and tidbits of intel, like reports that we're going to get hit with a car bomb, which we seriously get every day.”

“Car bombs?”

“Reports of car bombs. We haven't actually been blown up. Not my platoon, anyway.”

“It'll have reports of civilian casualties, then?”

“No, it's just a bunch of incident reports, but it generally reports if one of our units has done an operation anywhere in the area, if they've done a raid or taken contact or whatever.”

“And it has addresses?”

“More like grid squares. But they're accurate to about ten meters, if you have a GPS. Sometimes the reports mention which apartment building, plus maybe a street or an intersection. Mostly grid squares, though.” The cheese sauce came oozing out of the chicken Kiev when he pushed on it with his fork. “Usually they won't mention if they hurt someone or trashed the place—it's an intelligence report. But if you know where an operation recently happened, you could roll over there and talk to people, see what they say.”

“That's helpful. I think.”

“I'm only giving it to you, not that other dude. Understood?”

“Okay . . .”

“And I'm not going to give you the whole thing. I'm going to write down the stuff that's relevant to you. I could get in serious shit for this. As in jail time, maybe.”

“It's classified?”

“Tell people you got it from your translator friend.”

“Okay. And what do you need from me?”

“You know,” Montauk said, taking a bite of his entrée. “Just keep your ear to the street for rumors of insurgent activity. We get so many reports, and we can't pay attention to all of them. Even a hint about which ones to focus on, even if it's not hard intel, could be useful. Try your chicken Kiev. Not bad.”

Tricia took an indifferent bite.

“So, really, how are you liking the city?” Montauk said.

“It's overwhelming. And incredible. Just . . .”

“Just your boyfriend's got his panties in a twist.”

“He's not my boyfriend.”

“Girls tend to say that around me.”

“Stop it.” She playfully slapped his arm. His frat-guy act was just thin enough to be funny. “But yeah, he's been kind of uptight. He chewed me out for going to observe the elections.”