Baghdad Fixer (60 page)

“You’re a liar!” Ali leans in close to her face. “I know you have more than that.”

Sam pulls in her lips and holds them there.

“Subhi? Check her bag.”

Subhi doesn’t look at either of us. He walks over to Sam and picks up the bag on the floor next to her chair.

“Go ahead. Let’s see what’s inside.”

Subhi crouches and begins to pick things out, putting them down on the floor between Ali and me. One notebook. One folder. One Nikon digital camera. Two tubes of lipgloss. Four pens, none of them the same. The hotel keychain with a small torch with a miniature pocketknife connected to it. Business cards in her holder. A tattered pack of Trident chewing gum. Her wallet and passport.

Ali motions to hand the last two things to him. He opens the small blue book. “Very nice,” he says when he sees the picture, switching back to English. He nods and holds it up to show me. “Beautiful photo,” he adds. “Let’s see. Born Philadelphia, April 5, 1970. You doesn’t look thirty-three. And not married? Or this your husband?” He has a hold of a plastic folder of pictures in her wallet.

“It’s my fiancé.”

“Fiancé?
Yaani, aris
?
Ya Nabil, haram.”
Sorry, she’s taken.

I can feel blood rushing up the side of my neck, that pounding in my temples just before I pass out. Try to be like Sam. Focus on the horizon.

“And this? This your parents?”

“Yes.” Sam’s voice is small and far away. I wonder why she never showed me these pictures. I wonder what Mustapha is doing now, and Brutus. It was all a set-up, and we walked right into it. How could Saleh have sent me to him?

“Let’s see what we have in here.” He opens up the wallet and plucks out what’s inside.
“Wahad, tneen, talata, arba, khamis...
there’s only five hundred dollars in here.”

“The rest is by my knee.”

“What?”

“I am wearing the rest on my knee,” she says. She uses her chin to point towards her left knee, and raises her leg a bit to make the point. “To protect from theft.”

Ali looks amused. “Which knee?”

Sam exhales, closes her eyes for a moment. “The left knee. Inside the kneesock.”

Ali looks at her and then looks longer at me. He points right, left and right again, clearly unsure of what he heard in English. Subhi says
is-shmaal.
Ali bends down and takes a hold of the left hem of Sam’s trousers. I can feel her recoil and stiffen. Ali carefully lifts the trouser leg, never touching her skin. Beneath it, her knee is wrapped in what looks like a sports-sock for an athlete who’s had an injury.

“Empty it out,” Ali orders.

Sam doesn’t react.

“Empty it out!”

“With my hands tied?”

“You can. You try.”

Sam moves her tied wrists out of her lap and towards her knees. She twists them to the left and begins to pick at the inside lining, revealing a pocket. Her hands are shaking more than they were before. I blink, and a rivulet of sweat that had been held up on my forehead is set loose, stinging on my cheeks and putting a saltiness in my mouth.

Sam’s back curves into a C, the way it sometimes does when she is doing her stretches. She finally gets her fingers into the sock, making her shoulder push her right hand deeper. After some pinching, stopping, and then pinching around again, her tied hands finally come out, holding a small fold of money between two fingers. Ali bends forwards and grabs it. The bills whisk through his hands like a counting machine.

“It’s only $300!”

“I told you I had $800.”

“What about the rest? No foreigner comes to Iraq with just $800.”

“It’s back at the Ha-...hotel. I keep it in a safe there.” Sam lowers her eyes again.

“Don’t worry. We know exactly where you stay. And if not, so we are finding you at the Sheraton or the Palestine anyway. For the foreigner, Baghdad is not big city.” Ali ducks his neck so he can force Sam to look him in the eye. “I don’t think my friends are going to be happy with $800, Miss Samara Katchens. Why don’t you think about whether you have some more for us, right here with you, so we won’t have to search in places where maybe you put the rest of your money.” He gets up and stands in front of us.

“Anyway,” Ali backs away, “you can just wait here for a while until we decide what to do with you.” He picks up Sam’s bag and hands it to Subhi, and then, approaching me from behind touches my backside, making me jump in my seat. “Just looking for your wallet, Nabil,” he says calmly. He yanks at it a few times, until it pops out of my pocket with the slight sound of a rip. “You won’t be needing this for the time being, will you?” He begins to walk out, and gives the guard instructions that we may speak but not move, not even to scratch.

“Wait, Ali?”

Sam looks at me like one of us has already gone mad.

“Could I just go to the bathroom, please?”

“After all the trouble we took to sit you down? No, unfortunately, you may not.”

~ * ~

I listen to the sound of her breathing, and although it still sounds somewhat laboured, there is something about Sam’s rhythm that calms me.

And what if I’m deluding myself? What if they plan to take Sam’s money and then kill us anyway?

Ali comes back into the room. He is carrying two bottles of Coca-Cola, already opened. “Drinks for our guests,” he announces, and puts them on the chair where his gun had been. “
Tfaddali
,” he says, holding one out to Sam, and then laughing to himself. “Oh, here, let me,” he says, holding it up to her lips.

She turns her head to the side. “No, thank you,” she says.

Ali straightens his back. “Well, at least no one can accuse us of having bad manners. Nabil?” He holds out the bottle in my direction. Although I am terribly thirsty, drinking something, especially Coca-Cola, will only make it harder to hold myself. I shake my head to indicate I’ll pass as well.

“What? Would you go without food or water in your last hours?” He laughs and keels forwards. “Ah, just for laughs. It’s good to have laughing in times like these, no?”

He takes his gun out again, sits down and rests the pistol on his thigh. “Of course, we could always kill you later, if you don’t go the right way. The right way, I mean, is you pay us for the trouble you made for us. So maybe we can give you chance to do that. How much in the hotel?”

Ali picks up his gun and points it at Sam. “I’m asking you question.”

Sam looks dazed, and simply stares.

“How much?!”

“About two thousand dollars,” Sam says. Her voice is lifeless, almost another woman’s.

“Just this? Not more? I don’t believe you.
So
much more. The journalists have so much more than that. Your colleague, Mr Axelrod, he spend at least this amount for our documents.”

“Really?” Sam is half-alive again.

“Really,” he responds.

“Well,” she says, watching Ali, “I wasn’t looking to buy documents right now. I was planning on leaving soon, so it didn’t matter that I was almost out of money.”

“Well, that’s nice. I’m sorry you leave Iraq so soon. Maybe you stay longer.”

Sam does not answer, and stares again at the Tigris beyond the windows.

“Or maybe we can make arrangement for you to give us the money before you leave Baghdad, so we can make sure you get out safely.
Very
safely. And you know it is hard to leave Baghdad safely. How will you go? To Kuwait or to Jordan?”

Sam’s lips stay shut for several blinks. “Jordan.”

“Yes. But be careful. The road there is dangerous.”

Sam swallows, and the dryness of the roll in her throat makes me want the Coke all the more, so much that I cannot resist it any longer.

“Could I drink some, please?”

“Ya Nabil, of course!” He puts his gun back on the chair and leans in towards me, quickly lifting the bottle to my mouth, banging it against my front teeth. “Oh, sorry. There you are,” he says, yanking my head back slightly by my hair. It’s sweet and cool and fast, so fast that it’s soon running out of the sides of my mouth when I can’t swallow it all, foaming over my face, and when he pulls the bottle away I’m grateful that he didn’t just force me to choke and drown in it altogether. “Ah, special from America.” He stands over me, smiling. “So much easier to get Coca-Cola now, isn’t it? Think of the benefits. Right, Subhi?”

Subhi gives off a guttural noise that means yes.

He turns towards Sam. “For you?” She shakes her head no.

“As you like. You can be thirsty,” he says. He shoves the gun back into his trousers. Does he have the safety lock on or off? “In fact,” he says, his voice behind us and towards the door, out of sight, “you just might have to go thirsty all night. You think about it.”

Ali orders Abu Ihab to make sure we don’t move from our chairs.

All night?
It cannot be later than three in the afternoon. Do they not plan to release us? Will they actually hold us here overnight? My mind rushes with images of American soldiers breaking in to rescue Sam, then thanking me for helping to see her through. Or maybe they would blame me for it all, painting me as the bad fixer who led her into the hands of the worst possible people.

~ * ~

48

Painting

It is like waiting for an injection, a discomfort that you know you have no choice but to tolerate. When I look over at Sam, I am frightened by the sight of her. Her eyes are closed and she is doing that same deep breathing, but I see from the rate of her stomach rising and falling that she isn’t really so calm at all. Inside the tape her fingers are twitching.

“Sam?”

No answer.

“Sam?”

Abu Ihad arranges himself in his chair by the door, sneers at me, and says nothing.

“Sam, I’m sorry I brought you here. It’s my fault.”

Sam’s eyes open again, and I watch her eyelashes flutter against each other.

“I made a horrible mistake.”

“It’s not your fault,” she says, her voice a monotone. “Either it’s my fault, or it’s no one’s fault.”

“Sam, what do you want to do? Is that all the money you have?”

She is quiet for a moment, hesitant to answer. “Yeah.”

“Could you get the newspaper to pay them more?”

She shakes her head. “I don’t know.”

“Maybe you can offer to pay them more.”

She turns towards me for the first time in nearly an hour. Her eyes look dull, almost veiled by something cloudy. “I just want to get out of here.”

“That’s what I’m trying to do — to get us out of here. We have to have a plan. If we promise them more money, then maybe they will release us.”

Sam focuses her eyes again on the water and says nothing. I feel I am losing her, as if she may as well be as distant as the river.

“Promise them you won’t write the story. And then for certain they will let us go safely. Sam?”

Nothing. Only the ebb and flow of her breath, the occasional shivering of her hands.

“What do you want to do?” I whisper. But an angry voice in my head is stirring. Where is my Sam with a plan? Sam who always has directions for me about how to approach everything we do? Sam with her philosophy of journalism and her ethical guidelines to every problem that might arise?

“Sam!”

Abu Ihad sniggers, then rolls his eyes back as if bored by my nervous natterings in a language he doesn’t understand.

“I don’t know,” she finally says. “Just wait, I guess.”

~ * ~

The minutes become eternities, each one a desert of dunes that undulate as far as the eye can see, so that if you are walking through it, you cannot tell if you’ve walked for ten kilometres or ten days.
Dog days.
In this wilderness, my thirst is my desperation for a sign from Sam, some indication that she knows how to get us out of this. Or is she really just leaving it all to chance? Or worse, to me?

Lunch and Mustapha never arrived, though I should have given up hope in him long ago. Was that even really his office? Ali and Subhi have only been back to check on us once, letting us sip some orange soda, when Sam finally relented and drank. It must be close to 6:30 p.m. now because the sky is no longer blanched to a washed-out blue, but has begun to welcome the emergence of pink and grey. I can occasionally hear voices in the other room, the sounds of Abu Ihad and other guards shifting in their seats or handling their weapons.

Sam and I have not spoken for hours and I think if we remain in silence any longer I will break down and cry. It isn’t only the silence, I need a distraction. I might have to finally go in my trousers, and then I will cry, from humiliation.

~ * ~

“Sam, are you okay?”

“Yes,” she says. “I’m all right.”

“When they come back I’ll promise them we won’t write the story.”

“Most of it’s probably written. I don’t know if we can—”

“But I can tell them that anyway.”

Sam sighs a shallow breath. Shrugs in a small shudder. “Okay.”