Baghdad Fixer (41 page)

Sam slams down the receiver. “Jesus H. Christ,” she says with a voice that would convey rage if the disbelief hadn’t sucked the air out of it. She looks at me and her eyes grow big for a moment, so that I can see all the whites around the edges, and then they fall back to their natural state. She turns away from me then, slides open the glass door to the balcony and walks out. She bends over and looks down at the pool below, where I can hear people splashing in the water.

She turns her neck when she notices me standing there, watching her. “You heard all that, right?” It’s as if she didn’t pay any attention to which part of the conversation was on speakerphone, and at what point she had picked up the phone, turning their exchange into a monologue.

“Part of it.”

“Can you believe that? They didn’t even bother to tell me and they’ve got us chasing after Saddam’s best friends. I’m sorry to say this in front of you, Nabil, but that’s fucking ridiculous. This is patently, objectively insane.” She takes another cigarette out of the packet in her hand and brushes past me, stomping towards the kitchen. She clicks on the gas flame at the stove, lowers her face sideways towards the fire, and turns the cigarette tip bright orange. The smoke curls she lets escape from the sides of her mouth wind up inside her hair and hover there a moment. She seems half-angel, half-Medusa. “I’ll be back in a bit,” she says, not waiting for a response, and walks out.

I want to chase after Sam straight away, but that seems like something stupid men do in those trite Egyptian tearjerkers. Run after the woman, tell her that everything’s going to be fine, then grab her and kiss her when she’s most vulnerable. When she
needs
you.

Somehow, I don’t think that following Sam the moment she storms out of the room is something she will appreciate.

I wait and pace for several minutes, which pass like hours. I peer over at her computer screen, though I know I shouldn’t, and read the subject lines of the messages lined up in a column. There is a message from Miles.
Please call ASAP.
One is, judging from the name, from Sam’s mother.
Stay safe!
And one from Jonah:
“Re: Where are you?”
I watch my fingers finding their way to her unfamiliar keys, and somehow, managing to open and read
because the risks you’re taking aren’t worth it, Sam, and I learned that the hard way. And if you really cared about us, about yourself, you’d consider dropping that story before something
and then I force myself to stop and exit because Sam could walk in at any moment and would be furious.

But she doesn’t. And so I scroll down the page with the arrow key, past a dozen or so news headlines that the paper apparently sends Sam every day, to find more messages from Jonah. There are six messages whose subject lines read,
Re: I love you,
and a last one, stating simply,
I love you.
I have never told a woman that I love her, but when I do, I certainly don’t want to tell her through a computer.

I have to fight the urge to read more. I recall The Unjust, a sura from the Koran. It tells us that the records of righteousness and sin are not meant for us to know in this world. “It is a sealed book, seen only by the favoured. (83:20)” My mother once taught me that this sura means we should not read other people’s mail or pry into their private affairs, even if we suspect them of wrongdoing.

Instead, I grab the cigarettes off the table. I can hardly believe myself. I have hated cigarettes since my father let me see pictures of diseased lungs from the hospital morgue when I was twelve. But it gives me a good excuse to go looking for Sam. I have something to bring her.

I am not surprised to find her on the rooftop. I know Sam likes it up here, because from this height she can watch the two worlds below. Inside the Hamra walls, her colleagues saunter half-naked in their bathing suits, swimming or drinking alcohol. Outside the walls, a claque of women in full-length abayas float past like black spirits, sending bad omens to the foreigners inside. Once inside for the night, the foreigners try to forget the Iraqis outside. The Iraqis never forget.

“I brought you these,” I say, and place the box on the ledge in front of her. I smile a little bit, and try to stop myself from imagining a lung going black in Sam’s body.

“Thanks.” She points to the chairs in the hallway, where we left them. We drag them out to the space she likes, in the front corner where you get a bit of crossbreeze.

I feel we’re being accompanied by a quiet orchestra of satellite dishes. Millions of people around the world get their news from this very rooftop. I catch myself fantasizing again about throwing it all over the edge into the pool below, drowning the communications equipment in a watery, chlorinated tomb.

“I never saw you smoke before,” I offer.

“That’s because I don’t,” she says, pulling out another cigarette and lighting it with the burning butt of the last one. “I quit five years ago.” She drops the remains of the old cigarette on to the white floor, turning it into a black blur with her sandal. I hate that fresh cigarette, and the thought of Sam ruining her health with it, but there is something sensuous about the way her mouth wraps itself around the tip and pulls it in. Her lips seem a little puffy, but perfectly sculpted and pinkish, as though they belong on one of those plastic baby dolls that seem to multiply like mad before the holidays, when people are expected to bring gifts to all the children in their family. There is something about the lines in her lips that is attractive, even if I know that someday, they will be an old lady’s lines. Even as a grandmother, she will still be beautiful.

“Five years ago is a long time.” I don’t know what to say. I don’t want to be in a place of giving Sam grief.

“Yeah, well,” she says, inhaling deeply, as if she expects half the cigarette to be pulled inside her all at once. “That was when I met Jonah. He got me to quit.”

I can feel my chest fall as Sam exhales. “He required you to quit? In order for him to be your boyfriend?”

“Well, something like that. He convinced me. No one
requires
me to do anything.” She laughs a little. I watch the smoke make ringlets above her hand, floating up towards her neck before being caught by a hot breeze and carried off somewhere north, towards Sadr City.

“You’re disappointed in your editors, yes?”

Nabil al-Amari, master of subtle questions. She doesn’t answer and so we don’t say anything for a while, and I don’t mind that. It is good to just sit here and know that she must be comfortable enough around me not to say anything. I think only people who really trust each other are able to do that.

On her third cigarette, Sam begins to talk again.

“Disappointed isn’t the word, Nabil.” She takes two drags, one after the other, and then exhales the smoke through her nostrils. It reminds me of a bull in the cartoons, just before it charges. “I’m fucking furious.”

I think of the conversation we’d had about cursing, how I had used “fuck” during an interview — as part of my translation, to convey someone’s anger — and she scolded me for it afterwards. She said it was too impolite to use, even in an informal interview, around anyone who knows any English at all, because you never know how much they really know.

But now doesn’t seem the right time for pinning Sam down on the finer points of when vulgarities are or are not acceptable.

“It’s fine,” she says, as if trying to convince herself.

“Is it?”

“What’s the difference?” Sam takes off one of her sandals and throws it on to an adjacent roof across the slim alley. “After all I’ve done for them, they go ahead and do this without even telling me! I’m endangering my life in this hellhole and they’re playing around with some friggin’ Get Smart, Inspector Gadget nerd in Washington. Jesus! The fucking nerve of them!” She annunciates the words in a staccato, as if spitting each one into hot air. She gets up and paces for a moment, limping because of her missing shoe, and then she stops and looks at me.

“You know what?”

“Yes, Sam?”

“The floor’s too hot to be walking on barefoot, even at night!” She plonks herself back down into the chair, dropping her bare foot over the sandalled one. “This is pathetic,” she hisses at her feet, as if talking to herself. “Why am I here if they want to figure it out from their end? Why
am
I here? What am I
doing
here?”

Quiet. And then the sound of the
izzan
to answer her, called out by a nearby
muezzin,
who is soon joined by a chorus of many more, none quite in sync with the other, sending their melodic dissonance wafting over the rooftops. There is now a sweet quorum in the air, and I want to pray with them, to pray for Sam and for all of us, but I am not about to say prayers with Sam around.

“Why is it so bad, Sam? The information they have, doesn’t it back us up? The story is still correct. I mean, it doesn’t contradict what we’ve found.”

“Yeah, but they think it’s all we need, as if it’s the end of the story. They want to run it in the next day or two. Tomorrow if they could. They’re impatient. Just like they were when they ran Harris’s original story that got the paper into this mess. Just like every damn newspaper in America. And across the free world.”

“Does that include Iraq? President Bush says we’re free now.”

Sam sputters a mouthful of smoke. “Very funny.”

“Can’t you get them to wait?” I ask. “You’re good with negotiating.”

“How? Well, I could scream and pout and insist until I’m blue in the face and threaten to quit...”

“Would you?”

“No, I can’t go giving them an ultimatum. It’s...bad form.”

I turn to her and say in my poshest English accent, “Oh! Terribly tawdry!”

She laughs. “You’re a trip, Nabil. You crack me up sometimes. Do you know how ridiculous it sounds when that accent comes out of a mouth like yours?”

Even if I’m glad to see her laughing, I’m a little bit insulted. What does it mean, a mouth like yours? Is my mouth so different from an Englishman’s? I do not even wear a moustache anymore. But I can see that no matter how good my English is, Sam will always view me as an Arab who, by speaking so well, is a source of amusement.

~ * ~

34

Speaking

Taking the steps two at a time, I fly up the stairs and tap on the door of Sam’s room. There is no answer. I try buzzing and knocking, but still no reply. Nearly 9 a.m. She had said to come between 8:45 and 9.

Next door, a young woman in shorts that only cover the start of her thighs shows herself in the doorway. I have noticed her around the pool, usually in a bikini and dark glasses, as if the latter might let her disappear among the other foreigners. I have noticed her because she has a skinny Western figure but a delicate Arab face, almost like a Yemenite, I think.

“You’re Sam’s fixer, right?”

The fixer: the person who makes it all happen. Will I ever live up to the title? And then Taher, who made it sound sort of insulting, someone’s errand-boy.

“I’m her interpreter. Uh, translator.”

“She asked me to tell you that she decided to stay overnight at the Sheraton. There was some big party there for all the journos last night, and she didn’t want to rush back before the curfew. So you should just wait for her.”

When I left at 8:30 p.m., Sam left afterwards and went to a party? From being so angry, she went out to socialize?

“I see.” I can feel my Adam’s Apple move up and down, a lever gauging my nervousness. I try to avoid letting my eyes fall towards her bare legs. She closes the opening a bit, moving her body further from the door.

“Excuse me,” she says, “I just woke up. Had a late deadline.”

“Yes, oh, I’m sorry if I disturbed you. I’m Nabil.” I consider giving her my hand, but as the opening in the door is so narrow now, I hold it up instead, a frozen, mid-air wave.

“I know. I’m Leila,” she smiles, without looking directly at me. “See you soon, then,” she says, and shuts the door, leaving me between their two doors in the hallway.

I wander downstairs to the bakery that I must have passed a hundred times since I started working for Sam, but never bothered to enter. I’m surprised by the wide selection of biscuits and cakes, and I feel that the two women working the counters are equally surprised to see me. Perhaps only foreigners staying at the hotel shop here, and very few Iraqis, despite the beautiful delicacies. Can they possibly get enough traffic here to keep such a well-stocked bakery in business?

Caught in the coffee-eyed gaze of a young woman waiting for me to buy something, I order two boxes: Arabic ones for Sam, European-looking puff pastries with coloured icing for my family. Each will be more impressed with something from the other. I will use the opportunity to teach Sam about the different kinds of
baklawa.
It would be a shame if she left Iraq someday and didn’t know that much.

Walking out, I realize there are only a few choices. The first is to sit here with Rafik. The second is to go back to the first tower, where I might have to sit with the nasty receptionist, or Taher, or some other translators I don’t feel like talking to just now. I’m afraid I’ll open my mouth and say something I shouldn’t.

A third option is to wait for her in the café with the ugly orange decor and those guys who watch and eavesdrop. Or to wait by the pool, though it’s already hot like a
firin
out there. So I may as well wait here in the second tower lobby, with Rafik at his desk.