Baghdad Fixer (64 page)

“About you and Noor, I mean. I’m glad you told me that. I understand so much more now.”

“About what?” I say, and lean forward to point out the next few turns to the driver. “The antiquated ways of the Arab peoples?”

“No, Nabil.” She sounds hurt. “About you.”

Without allowing them to, my lips insist on rounding into a slight smile of appreciation. We are only a few blocks from my house, and I don’t want everything to feel tense when we go inside.

Sam turns her left wrist over in her right hand, inspecting the marks. “Remember the accident that I told you about? How Jack died?”

“Yes.”

“Well.” She puts her hands down and stares out of the window again. “I never told you that I was in the car. Somehow I got away with nothing more than a broken pelvis and a few scratches. That’s why I’m always stretching out my back. It still aches sometimes.”

I try to meet Sam’s eyes to offer something of my sympathy, which at this point I don’t think needs to be put into words. But for that I need her face. And she won’t look at me.

“Who was driving?”

“He was.” She blows hot air on the window and then lifts her finger to draw on it: a quick “o” for a face, two dots for the eyes, and a long, flat dash for the mouth.

My family does not ask all the questions they want to, at least not right away. They can sense, I know, from the minute we walk in the door together, that something has gone terribly wrong. Mum sends Amal back to her room, and with a whimper she goes, eased by the fact that it’s not yet 7 a.m. Given that she has nowhere to be and no school to attend, she’s become used to sleeping late every day.

Mum is very hospitable, and very uncomfortable. Her English is too rusty to make conversation with Sam. But she slips into a welcoming mode straight away, rushing to make up Ziad’s room for Sam, who looks more shattered than she did last night. Sam offers her thanks, using the wall to hold her up, and Mum keeps saying things like, “You please home here.” Baba, who has been standing around, not quite knowing what to do, goes back to the table, where his breakfast is half-eaten, and tells me that he’ll leave for the hospital a little late today so we can talk. “Assuming,” he says, dipping his bread into his tea, an odd ritual he maintains, “you want to tell me what’s going on.”

~ * ~

I’ve had to wait a long time for Sam to wake up. I poked my head in and checked on her several times, but she was still asleep. It’s funny, cracking open Ziad’s door like that, the way I did when I was fourteen, to see if he had come home. He was often out late with friends, of which he had many more than I.

This time, I find her wide awake, sitting at Ziad’s desk, writing. When I come in, she closes the cover of the book. It’s one I haven’t seen before — not a notebook, but a hardcover with a maroon fabric binding.

“Am I bothering you, Sam? Do you still want to have some rest?”

“No, it’s fine,” she says, dropping the book into her bag on the floor. “It’s already afternoon, isn’t it?”

“Yes. It’s after two. My mother is worried that you haven’t eaten. Do you want to have some lunch?”

She shrugs. “In a while, maybe. I’m not so hungry now.” She picks up a pink plastic bottle on the desk, about half-full of liquid, and shakes it back and forth. “Your sister gave me this.”

“I’m sorry. Has she been pestering you?” I take the edge of the bed.

Sam smiles and closes her eyes, then re-opens them slowly. “No, not at all. She’s lovely. She’s just so curious. I always wanted a little sister like her.”

I notice that things have grown a coat of dust in Ziad’s old room: a small, golden trophy he won in high school, when he played centre-forward, and a football signed by the French player Zidane. Ziad took the air out and had it shipped home to us. We were shocked that it arrived, when far less valuable packages never did. I bet the primary thing troubling Mum at this moment is that she didn’t get to give Ziad’s room a good cleaning before I showed up with Sam.

“We need to make a plan, Sam.”

“I know,” she says. “I just talked to Miles as he was waking up, in fact I think I woke him up. I told him what happened. He agreed that I should leave, if that’s my instinct.”

“That’s what he said? And what about the money Ali’s demanding?”

“Well, he said I could lie to management and say it was stolen from me. But I can’t just hand it over to them like some kind of gift and expect the newspaper to cover it.”

“And the story?”

“I tried to convince him. But he claims he’s powerless, it’s not up to him,” she says. The look in her eyes says she doubts it. “The story with an apology to Jackson is running tomorrow, after the lawyers vet it this afternoon. All Miles can promise me is that they’ll send me a copy overnight to read. But at that point, we’ll probably be on the road anyway.” Sam is shaking her head no, no, no. “First they took the story away from Harris, and now they’re taking it away from me. I mean, my byline is going to be on it, along with some bigshot investigative reporter in the Washington bureau, but I won’t have written a word of it myself, and I’m not sure I’ll get to read it before it goes to print. Can you believe that?”

I see the Thuraya sitting on the windowsill, the reception-bars flashing in the upper-right-hand corner. “You got a satellite signal here?”

“Not a good one. Just enough for a staticky call before it cut off. The best part is that when I tried to tell him to take my byline off the story, for my own safety, he said he’d ‘run that up the flagpole’ but wasn’t sure the higher-ups would go for it!”

“Did you tell Miles
everything
that happened?”

Sam wavers. “Most of it. Not the rough parts. He says if I want to do a profile exposing ‘the man called Technical Ali’ after I leave, if I have enough to go on, I can do that and they’ll run it afterwards.”

“You didn’t tell him that he tied us up and threatened to kill us? Wouldn’t your editor want to know that?”

“Look, if I can do the story about him later, after I’m out, that’s probably the best I can get at this point. I don’t want to make it sound like a personal vendetta.”

“So it’s still about the story and not about your life. Or my life.”

Sam glares at me. She picks up the bottle, which I now realize is nail-varnish remover. In the middle of all of this, she is planning to paint her toes?

“Sam, listen. Everything I know now makes me think that it was a setting from the start.”

“You mean a set-up.”

“I said that.”

“You said setting.”

“I meant set-up. Just listen, okay?”

She shakes the bottle back and forth.

“Sam, I think it was all arranged and co-ordinated, from the moment we stepped into Subhi’s apartment until the moment Ali dropped us off by the Hamra. Ali was always in charge, working for Chalabi, working for Moqtada al-Sadr, who’s probably his cousin, working for anyone who will hire him - other than the Americans. Ali runs this big forgery ring and makes a lot of money off of it, and he doesn’t really care from whom or for what. In fact, maybe he has no politics at all, and that way, he can sell to everyone! Mustapha is nothing but a big fat fascist, just some middleman, despite my cousin Saleh telling me all this time that he was a good guy. What did he know? Maybe Saleh was fooled. Maybe
he
was set-up. Or maybe no one he knows in that world could possibly be honest, because to get mixed up in that, you’ve got to be a crooked kind of bloke from the start.”

“Nabil?”

“I think even Adeeb was part of it. Subhi sent us to him to stall for time, so they could get ready for our visit to Akram, and Adeeb is so scared of all of them he does whatever they say. He’s just a lackey for them and—”

“No, Nabil.” Sam is shaking her head.

“—and Khalil, that forger guy, probably is corrupt too and warned Mustapha we were coming. And of course, General Akram was just a salesman! Ali and his friends made him the front man because he looks good and has a name and a title, and thought they could use him and that story of his, his brave little revenge brigade as the alibi for how they captured these documents. Akram would send word back to Ali of what was in demand and what would sell, and Ali would produce it, and who cares if it was about hijackers or yellowcake or some congressman from New Jersey! Who cared if even one word of it was true?”

“Listen. Calm down. There’s no way we can be sure they’re all connected,” Sam says, waving her hand at me. I notice it is shaking, though it isn’t at all cold in here. “What if we got shunted from one slimeball to the next and just got unlucky? Or lucky, because we’re still here. Don’t jump to conclusions.”

“I’m not jumping. I’m saying it’s obvious!”

“What’s obvious?” She purses her lips together and unscrews the little bottle, then tips it over into a wad of tissues, shaking it several times. Everything is clear to me now, and Sam doesn’t see it. She thinks you need to prove things with facts in order to know. I could talk about it with God Almighty until
Yawm id-Din
, Judgement Day. But I don’t need to. I just know.

“Don’t you see, Sam?”

“See what? What I see is a trail of events that led us from one corrupt fixer or thug or forger to another. I don’t know if they connect. It could all be random.”

“How can you not see it? Really, how?” Afraid my family will hear, my voice falls into a whisper. I feel myself on the brink of exasperation. If she pushes me more, I will shout. Or maybe break. “Believe me, Sam.”

“No. I don’t always believe you. Not every little Middle East conspiracy theory you come up with holds water. You guys just love to think the forces of evil are aligning in perfect formation to rule the world. Like it all fits together so easily. Not every crazy event happens for a—”

“What do you mean, ‘you guys’?”

“Nothing. Forget it.”

“No, what is ‘you guys’? All Iraqis? Maybe all Arabs?”

“No!”

“All Muslims, maybe?”

“Nabil, stop it!” She looks close to tears. “I said I didn’t mean it that way. Sometimes I say stupid things, okay? I’m not always as eloquent as you.”

The smell of the nail-varnish remover fills the air between us, accosting my nose. How I hate the odour of acetone, which reminds me of that horrible cleaning fluid at the hospital. Did scientists invent this putrid substance solely for the purpose of removing ladies’ nail colour? But this is not, I see, why Sam asked for it. She ignores her toenails and begins to work at the tape-marks on her wrists.

A shock wave through my head: the terror of that first moment of Ali pulling out the gun, the shouting, the lack of control, the room spinning. I find my own hands in fists. Next time someone tries something to hurt me or Sam, I will hurt them first. I will be prepared.

“I just mean that I don’t always think there’s a perfect order to everything,” Sam says, rubbing at the gummy grey ring around her wrists. “Sometimes things just don’t make sense. People die here every day for no reason.”

Maybe I’ll be one of them. Maybe there isn’t anything at all I can do to prepare. But I don’t believe things happen for no reason at all. Right now, maybe I shouldn’t be reasoning anyway. I’m so exhausted my eyes are starting to burn.

The fight was fixed, is what I should have said. That’s something she might understand. In England, the boys at school were always talking about fights — and footie and cricket matches and tennis tournaments — being fixed. Fixed as unfair, without a fighting chance. Like the comments that some of the boys said years later about my fight with Hamed al-Alami. It was “fixed”, they said, because my older brother Ziad was much stronger than his older brother, and it would become a blood feud if Hamed didn’t let me win. There was no truth to that rumour, but that didn’t stop people from believing it.

“...and just because we got to Z, we can’t assume we know what X and Y are.”

“Sam, you said forget it. So let’s just forget it.”

“Let’s. Let’s forget everything,” she says. Her eyes twitch, and then she closes them. She shakes her head gently, as if in disagreement with herself. “I’m sorry, Nabil. I’m really sorry.”

I should tell her there’s no reason to be sorry, but finally, I’m out of words. Sam takes a fresh wad of tissues from the box on Ziad’s desk and tips more acetone on to them. She’s almost scrubbing now, working to wipe away the evidence of yesterday. But the gluey residue still marks both of us, a cuff at the end of each forearm that I’m keen to erase, like Adeeb did to his tattoo. How much did he know, about Subhi, about Ali? He seemed so honest.

I think I’ll leave my marks right where they are, wide grey stains around the rim of each hand, until they start fading away all on their own.

~ * ~

52

Fading

Amal dashes out to open the front gate. It is one of her only chances to get out of the house, this business of occasionally answering the door, and she rushes to the job at every opportunity.

But when she sees it’s someone we don’t know, she asks him for his name, and scurries back to the front door where Baba is standing, with me next to him, peering out of the window. From his face, the familiar shape of the jaw, the cut of his moustache and a certain sadness around his eyes, I already know exactly who it is, and I give Amal the okay to let him inside. When she opens the gate, I see the car parked outside: Rizgar’s Cherokee jeep, which I haven’t seen since the day of Noor’s funeral.