Streams of Babel (20 page)

He seethed in air through clenched teeth. "I'm so sorry. How are you doing?"

I could only nod before Alan went on. "And I've just been informed ... his brother, Rain's good friend, has come down with a flu also..."

James Imperial's Adam's apple bobbed into his necktie so hard that I thought it would stick there. That almost blew me backward. It looked like ... guilt or remorse or responsibility ... but I didn't have much chance to wonder about it. The guy at the dining room table stood up, held both phones out from his ears, and said something to Imperial in Swiss/Swedish/ Whatever.

Imperial turned to me. "He would like to say hello to you and express his condolences, if you can just wait a minute."

He...
Mr. Switzerland looked like the center of attention around here. When Alan said he would get Rain's antibiotics from her bathroom, I didn't follow. I watched the man continue to talk on the second phone, though after a few more foreign phrases, he handed that phone to Imperial. Then, he dashed through the kitchen without saying anything to me.

Imperial kept the foreign conversation going through the cell, so I figured I ought to just wait by the door. I'd kept myself focused enough to be somewhat sane this afternoon, but the past three days had taught me that nightfall could turn it all around, and it was already dark. I'd heard this about grief: that it comes and goes without rhyme or reason but you can count on a train wreck at sundown. My train wrecks had lasted well into the mornings.

The blond-haired man appeared from the kitchen and came right toward me. I'd heard him speak every language under the sun but my own. So I was stunned to hear him say in perfect English with a trace of Boston slang, "Potty break. Sorry. I've accepted every bit of ease that comes with modern electronics, but I still can't use the facilities while I'm on a cell phone."

I figured potty humor might cut my tension. "I can't zip up without dropping the damn thing into the toilet. Been there, done that."

"A man after my own heart." He grinned at the woman who had come up to us along with Imperial. The blond man's eyes grew serious above his smile. "How are you doing? Alan told all of us, of course."

"Good. For the moment." I can rarely say how it is that I know what I know, but I sensed it would be seriously in my best interests to appear on top of my stress. I forced a grin. "How many languages did you just speak on the phone?"

"Uh ... three," he said. "French, Punjabi, and Arabic. The French was my wife. She knows English, but you know the French ... She has to pretend she doesn't."

He laughed easily,
so blasé about his French wife and multilingualness.

"So, how many languages do you speak altogether?"

While the others laughed, he groaned, like they had some private joke going, and he said, "Not enough, believe me. Did you know that there are over a hundred languages spoken in the Middle East alone?"

I hadn't known that, but before I could ask more, Alan returned with the prescription and dropped it into the bag.

"Scott, this is the USIC director of operations in Pakistan, who's visiting the states this week. His name is Roger O'Hare."

I knew Alan and I had talked about Pakistan recently, but with my memory falling down, I only remembered one interesting thing.

"Pakistan ... that's where the online informant is who's younger than my brother?" I asked.

"He's talking about the Kid," Alan prompted him. "I told him about that recent
Newsweek
article that mentioned him."

"Ah, yes. The Kid keeps my life colorful." Roger chuckled, but something seemed amiss. Like his pupils were having a hard time staying on me, and maybe he was going through this small talk as an exercise in discipline or something. I'd say his phone calls were making him nervous.

"So, he's real?" I persisted. "He's really a teenager?"

"He's real, and sixteen. Going on forty-five," he said, maybe too casually. "He loves Drake's, Gatorade, and Bazooka Bubble Gum. And while he's sitting in his uncle's Internet café, busting a gut on Drake's Apple Pies, he'll capture the screen of some bloody, dangerous guys sitting two terminals away from him, and he'll script them for us."

I didn't know what scripting was, but I figured it was some serious part of spying. "Sounds dangerous," I said. "I mean, sixteen and all..." I couldn't help but imagine Owen being in that much of harm's way.

His smile faded. "As Americans, we can't force citizens of other countries to behave in certain ways if they don't want to. If they want to sell us intelligence, all we can usually do is watch their backs as best as we can. But the Kid is being relocated. He's
not happy with us, but if he didn't wind up with his head sliced off, his health was about to get him. He's got asthma from hell."

"Asthma?" Why the details of legendary people intrigue us normal folk, I can't say, but sometimes even I am a sucker for it. It was sort of like hearing a locker-room story told by a friend of Shaquille O'Neal's. And I could feel the paramedic in me rising up, too. It makes me twitch to hear about people in third world countries with health problems.

"So ... can he come over here? There's a thousand hospitals in this country that could clear up the worst case of asthma. In fact, we've got a specialist right here in Trinity Falls, Doug Godfrey, who was with a team in Rome that operated on the pope. Why don't you send the Kid to us? He could stay at our house. Doug would take care of him..."

I trailed off, as a polite grin came over his face. "Thanks, Scott. He's still working, so we're keeping his whereabouts under wraps. But I'll be sure and tell him of your generous offer next time I see him. He'll be touched by that" O'Hare stuck his hand out and gave me an exit line. "Listen, you're in our thoughts and prayers, Scott. We'll be sure to keep up with you via Alan."

As for leaving, I felt like I was passing up a smorgasbord of info. Yet, I'd lived across the street from Steckerman for years, and I knew how tight-lipped the FBI was about case information. These USIC guys would be ten times worse.

But the concept of give-and-take was right there for me. I figured I'd play my only card. Surely I wouldn't end up in the slammer before my mom's service and with my brother feeling sick.

I pulled the pieces of paper out of my pocket, and let my eyes fall onto the hieroglyphics and the only discernible English words I could make out. "You guys aren't looking for someone named ... Uri Gulav, are you?"

I could feel the temperature drop about fifty degrees:
Paramedic student thinks he can help out USIC. Oh Christ, how do we be polite?
A couple of people turned their backs and moved awkwardly to the couch, and Imperial turned and raised his eyebrows in this condescending way.

"No, we're not."

I ignored him, focused on this piece of paper. "You're not looking for an Omar, are you?"

I would have felt utterly stupid, except for one thing: This Roger O'Hare actually stopped dead in his tracks on his way back to the table. His neck did this thing that looked like a one-inch whiplash. He turned around and looked at me.

"Omar..." I looked on the sheet, thinking maybe I ought to shut up, but I couldn't. "...Hokiem. And some phone number. The last three digits are 0324, but I couldn't make out the first three. Must be local, though, because—"

I stopped as O'Hare took the paper from my hand and stared at it. He didn't laugh at the pencil lines running across it or try to call me Dick Tracy. I pointed to the goblet thing with the eight lines running down. They looked almost like an upside-down sunrise from a kid's drawing. And one of the lines was crossed over by a thicker line. I mentioned I thought it looked like a water tower. A few of the agents got interested and came up behind O'Hare and Imperial to look at the thing.

O'Hare finally said something, but it wasn't in English.
Though just from the tone, I'd swear it was "Jesus Christ Almighty."

Fifty-five questions later, I'd told them about Dobbins and the celebration he'd seen at the discount shoe store while ordering the New Year's keg. I'd told them about the soaped-over windows the day after New Year's. I'd told them about me and Dobbins going down there, though I called it "to see what we could see" instead of "breaking and entering."

I was trying for a give-and-take thing that wasn't really going my way. They thanked me with necktie politeness, and Imperial finally gave me "The Speech" on please don't break and enter. I ignored it.

I said, "Right now, I'm watching over three kids who have a very strange flu. If there's anything I should know to keep them out of harm's way, I'm sure you'll tell me."

The room was quiet and even more awkward. "I'm
sure
you'll tell me," I fought on as I grabbed the doorknob.

I figured if there was nothing wrong, one of them—Imperial or O'Hare or my neighbor of fifteen years—would have said something like "Not to worry; we promise there is nothing to tell."

But I left under the same weight of silence that I'd first walked into.

OWEN EBERMAN
MONDAY, MARCH 4, 2002
6:42
P.M.

SOMETIMES I THINK I don't want to see people, but I can be wrong. A smile crossed my face on seeing Moran and Dempsey and Tannis come through that door. I could have done without Dempsey's stupid remark, "What are you guys doing
here?
"

But Cora still looked absorbed in her mother's tape. I don't think she even heard Dempsey.

I countered his rudeness with "What're
you
guys doing here?"

"We spied," Dempsey confessed, looking more proud than ashamed. "Or, I should say Tannis spied."

Tannis bowed. "Dobbins was just having a convo in the kitchen with Dr. O'Dell. And he was leaving a message for some other doctor to come over here because you three are here with some ... flu thing. What do you have? The Ebola virus?"

"Hopefully, all we have is my brother being his usual cautious self. Hopefully...," I repeated, and pushed the smile across my face again. "Rain's had the thing for five days, and it's now down to a stuffed-up nose."

"Well, I ain't gonna French-kiss you." Moran shrugged. "If it's so contagious, how come more people don't have it?"

"No clue," I told him honestly. "Put it this way: If it was highly contagious, I don't see how you guys wouldn't catch it from me before Cora and her mom would."

"We don't care what you have," Tannis said. "You're stuck with us. Food?"

I realized he'd brought in a couple of grocery bags and laid them on Cora's dining room table. I didn't need the smells wafting out to tell me that it was something chicken.

"If it's bland," I said.

"I'm starved!" Rain added, and Cora just kept staring at the TV, engrossed with the foul-language speech her mother was giving this Jeremy person again. I didn't call her out of her daze.

Moran stood behind them, watching the footage. "That your mom, Cora?"

After a couple seconds, she said, "Yes."

"Guess what? Cora's mom sneaked into Iraq," I added, wondering why she didn't brag away. "She wanted to get more Kurds into America, so she filmed the Kurdish massacre to let people know."

"You're shitting me." Moran sat down cross-legged beside Cora and watched as her mom gave the little speech to this Georgie about the effects of cyanogen. Cora ignored him but looked different somehow. Her posture was always so good, but right now, it wasn't the first thing you'd notice about her. I don't know what you'd notice about her except that she was pretty.
Her cheeks glowed, which was probably her sickness, but despite her dropping one tear after another, her eyes didn't swell. She just gazed in that blank way of hers.

"All those dead people, that's the Kurdish massacre?" Moran asked. "Wasn't she scared of inhaling poison gas herself?"

Cora didn't move at first but finally answered. "I can't say there was too much she was afraid of. She also was in Mogadishu, where the
Black Hawk Down
story took place. Did you see that movie?"

Moran nodded. "Totally scary. Who's Georgie?"

"I'm not sure ... but I think it was George Bush Sr."

A former president.
Her dainty dimples showed up, but more from politeness than bragging. Moran just stared at her. There really wasn't too much else to do—Cora Holman was good at getting you to stare. I wished sometimes I could see into her head, because I'd never seen anyone act like her before. I didn't know what it was like to sit as unmoving as a statue at your mom's funeral, or to announce your mom's presence at the Kurdish massacre. In a sense, I admired her and wished I could have that much ... is
control
the word I'm looking for?

Another tear rolled down one cheek as she watched her mom again. But even when she cried, it was weird and very different. For one thing, she didn't make any noise.

SCOTT EBERMAN
MONDAY, MARCH 4, 2002
6:42
P.M.

I WENT BACK to my house to get out of my button-down shirt, now drenched in breaking-and-entering sweat, and find my jeans. I realized I hadn't ironed a second shirt for tomorrow. Here's how whacked my train of logic was: I had a brief thought I could ask Mom to iron it for me.

I sat on the edge of my bed and had my first train wreck of the night. My uncle Davis came into the bedroom, Mom's oldest brother, and he sat there rubbing on my back, blathering on about how he and my uncle Greg would help us out financially. I hadn't even thought about finances yet.

"Please don't be offering us money," I sniffed. "My financial aid should be pretty good from here on in if you don't mess it up."

He cracked up. For a moment. "And I can stay down here as long as you want. Greg can't, but I'm self-employed and flexible."

Uncle Davis was a stockbroker and could have retired at age thirty if he'd wanted to. I almost said, "Aw, great, stay another week," but my head went over to Cora's where my brother was holed up. My paramedic training decided otherwise. "Thanks, but go on home tomorrow like you planned. We have to, um, get back to normal. If I need anything, I'll call, and you're only three hours from here."