The Ambassador's Wife (32 page)

Amulets and ritual appealed to Miranda's love of the occult, of magic, of the unexplained, though she had no specific faith. The closest thing to religion Miranda was exposed to as a child was her parents' unswerving belief in the moral obligation to recycle, buy organic vegetables, and vote in every election, no matter how minor. While Miranda has more or less adopted these tenets, the only thing in which she has true, passionate belief is painting. Only when sitting at an easel, funneling her mind's images through the tip of her brush, does she feel the possibility of the divine. And now that has been taken.

A
T NIGHT, WHEN
Luloah is returned to her, she remembers the lullabies she would sing to Cressida. Cressie's favorite was “Hush,
Little Baby.” Miranda had never known all the real words, so she made up rhymes as she went along. “Hush, little baby, don't you cry, Mama's gonna sing you a lullaby. And if that lullaby won't calm, Mama's gonna buy you some Tiger Balm, and if that Tiger Balm's not divine, Mama's gonna buy you a green grape vine. And if that green grape vine won't juice, Mama's gonna buy you a friendly old moose, and if that friendly old moose runs away, Mama's gonna buy you a brand-new day…” And so on. No matter what other verses she sang, she couldn't help eventually arriving at a brand-new day. And then she would have to stop, rather than go on to say, “And if that brand-new day won't dawn…” She could not bear to think of a day refusing to dawn for her daughter. Sometimes she got through forty-seven verses before coming to the brand-new day, sometimes it popped up after only nine. At least she does not have this problem when singing in Arabic or French.

Only when she sings these songs, to herself or to Luloah, does she allow herself to dwell on the memory of her daughter. She closes her eyes and wills the words back to the city, or to wherever Cressida and Finn are now, as if she still has the power to comfort her daughter. I will come home to you, she insists in the dark. I will come home. I will come home.

JULY 4, 2010

Miranda

Miranda was dressed for the firing range an hour before Tucker was scheduled to pick her up. He was always early. He had taken her with his team several times now, teaching her to fire a series of increasingly powerful arms. She began with a pistol and an AK-47, and worked her way up to an M16 and the Heckler & Koch G3 7.62 mm, with a recoil so powerful she had to fire it lying on her belly. In spite of her pacifist nature, Miranda went to the range because Tucker had asked her and she was grateful. In the first year, few people from the embassy had asked her to do so much as have a cup of tea.

Tucker was different. True, it was his job to protect her and Finn.
But it wasn't his job to befriend and entertain her. This was something he did of his own free will, and Miranda loved him for it. She would have loved him anyway, for the simple fact that he kept Finn safe from harm. Both he and his wife, Paige, had spent their entire careers in the armed forces, managing to spend only about half of their time in the same country. At the moment, Paige was in Iraq, and Tucker worked tirelessly so as not to feel her absence so acutely. In his rare off-hours, he worked just as tirelessly boosting everyone else's morale. He hosted barbecues and costume parties and taught them all how to shoot. Always the first on the dance floor at a party, in a wig and miniskirt, he was also the last to go home. Men in the armed forces, it hadn't taken long for Miranda to discover, were the most likely to cross-dress.

Today's visit to the range was not optional. The CP team was going to try a “live extraction,” a series of maneuvers they would perform in the event of an attack on Finn or Miranda, in order to remove them from danger and get them to safety.

“You might want kneepads,” Tucker said when she opened the door. “I'm afraid we're going to rough you up a bit.”

When she climbed down from the car an hour later, she gazed around her feeling—as always—like a visitor to another planet. Planet Men. Planet Guns. Bruise-colored mountains curved around them like a theatrical backdrop. The skies were the postcard-blue of the dry season, the sun having vaporized the last of the clouds. In front of her stretched an empty expanse of sand and dirt, heat rising from it in waves. No life in sight; no plants, no trees, no animals, no humans. This was the range. “You could close your eyes here, and open them in Kabul, and it would look exactly the same,” said Tucker. It sometimes seemed to Miranda that she was the only person in the country who hadn't been to Afghanistan or Iraq. Even Finn had been posted to both places. The way the men talked about the dangers, the wild parties, and their cramped pods all in the same breath made Miranda feel she had missed out on something life-altering. She envied the bond among those who had survived.

While they waited for Finn to arrive from the embassy, the team scurried around setting up a long row of targets, black-and-white
prints of a generic enemy with dramatic five o'clock shadows and a more than passing resemblance to Richard Nixon, crouched over his gun and glaring from under his helmet. The pictures were stapled onto sheets of plywood propped up in front of a vast sandbank, which absorbed the bullets after they passed through the targets.

Tucker put his men through a pistol drill with their SIG Sauers, blowing a whistle and shouting out,
“Shimal!”
or
“Yameen!”
(Left! or Right!) or
“Khalf!”
(Behind!) In response the men cried out,
“Ado Shimal!”
(Enemy left!) or
“Ado Yameen!”
(Enemy right!) and fired.

After each drill, the men sprinted to the targets to watch Tucker count and chalk the number of bullet holes that would have killed the enemy—those that hit either the center of his body or his head. Most of the team could kill the enemy twenty-three out of twenty-six times. Mukhtar and Yusef were the best, but even tubby little Bashir was a pretty good shot. It gave Miranda confidence that they might actually be able to nail a terrorist targeting Finn—if they saw him first.

When it was her turn, Mukhtar helped fit her with a pair of noise-canceling headphones, reminded her how to load the magazine, and handed her a SIG. It felt light in her hands; a machine capable of a baker's dozen murders in the space of a few seconds should have more heft. She fired six rounds, her heartbeat swooshing in her ears, hitting the target with about every third shot. Her aim was worse with the AK-47. Her first shot not only missed the target entirely
and
the board it was stapled to but also missed the entire sandbank, sailing up into the sky behind it.

“What's behind there?” worried Miranda.

“I don't know, but whatever it was is dead.” Mukhtar grinned at her.

“Want to try it on automatic?” asked Tucker.

No
, thought Miranda.
I really don't
. But she nodded and allowed Tucker to shift the appropriate lever. It took nearly all of her strength to hold the gun steady as it sprayed bullets; it was like trying to hold a jumping rabbit. A hot, homicidal, steel rabbit. The movies make it look way too easy, she thought. The targets remained unscathed.

“Ana mish tammam!”
I'm not good!, she cried. The men rushed to
reassure her.
“Laa! Antee jayyida,”
said Mukhtar. “You could kill someone!”

“W
OULDN
'
T WANT TO
meet you in a dark alley.” Finn's car had pulled up while she was firing, and he was standing in his pin-striped suit at the back of the range. Her headphones had muffled the sound of his arrival.

“You'd be fine in a dark alley,” said Miranda, lowering her weapon. “I couldn't sight for shit in the dark.” Damn. She'd managed to swear in front of the team again. She wasn't sure how much of it they understood, but she had been trying to avoid shocking them more than she already did on a daily basis. Fortunately, the men were all busy loading their weapons or rolling old tires onto the range to create an obstacle course. Miranda handed her gun to Mukhtar and took Finn behind the car to give him a pair of his jeans and a work shirt.

The new guys and Bashir (who had arrived with Finn, looking very smart in one of the new suits and ties Tucker bought for the men; they had to blend at diplomatic events, after all) clambered up a rocky mountainside for a better view.

It worked like this: Finn began striding through the obstacle course the men had erected—his bodyguard glued to him—as if he were heading to a meeting. One man was always assigned to be immediately beside him (putting the “close” into “close protection”), while the rest positioned themselves strategically ahead and behind. The tires represented bushes, stumps, or trash cans behind which Finn could hide. Probably bushes would be too porous. But anyway. Six of the guys were spread out, three on either side, alert for threats. Their elbows jutted stiffly out at their sides as they swung their heads left and right. They reminded Miranda of a cluck of wary chickens prowling a farmyard. Bashir beckoned to her, and Miranda clambered up the rocks to the ridge overlooking the range. “Nice suit,” she said to him. He smiled, turning toward her so she could see her face reflected in his mirrored sunglasses.

A whistle blew, signifying enemy fire. Yusef, operating as Finn's
bodyguard, grabbed Finn around his waist, arresting him midstride, and shoved him down into the dirt behind one of the tires. Then, yanking Finn up by his belt, he propelled him forward, running him through the gunfire to the next hiding place. Finn's legs cycled through the air at the end of Yusef's arm as if he were a marionette pantomiming a sprint. All the while, Tucker's team was shooting live bullets at the “enemy,” covering Finn and Yusef while backing away. Their goal was to allow Finn to be safely extracted, rather than to chase the enemy. Miranda could see Yusef shouting in Finn's ear, but the gunfire made it impossible to hear anything. Even from the ridge it made her ears ring.

Miranda watched as Yusef shoved Finn into the dirt again. She worried about his glasses. Her eyesight blurred for a moment, and she realized her knees were trembling. Yusef yelled at Finn as he hauled him up again. Was it the manhandling of the person she cared most about in the world that brought up the waves of nausea? The fact that live bullets were flying around him out here in the desert? Or the reminder that this wasn't just playacting, that Finn could actually face such an attack?
I will not cry in front of the men
, she willed herself.
I will not cry in front of the men
.

“The guys have to get used to being rough with him if the situation calls for it,” Tucker said when the exercise was over. “Being too respectful in a situation like this could get him killed.”

Miranda nodded and tried to smile. Finn strolled toward her, flushed and smiling, his forehead slick with sweat and his jeans streaked with dirt. “You survived,” she said weakly.

“Sorry!” Finn squeezed her sweating hand.

“Okay, Madame Ambassador, your turn.” Tucker slipped a hand under her elbow and steered her down the slope. “Let's show the guys how to treat a woman.”

Miranda walked with him to the course, where he turned her over to Mukhtar. Her legs felt strong again, and she wasn't afraid. Only things utterly beyond her influence terrified her. Keeping Finn safe, for example. She never feared for her own safety; her own safety felt more within her control.

A wave of euphoria struck as she walked alongside Mukhtar into
the imminent ambush. She felt a temptation to laugh. “Walk faster,” said Mukhtar. “More purposefully. You're strolling.” She quickened her pace. Where might she be rushing? To a meeting of the Heads of Mission Spouses Association? The thought of any of the designer-suited ambassadors' wives waddling at speed made her want to laugh again. No one except Finn ever walked quickly and purposefully in this country.

The whistle shocked her from her reverie. Explosions erupted in every direction, the men opening fire. Miranda suddenly forgot everything she was supposed to do. “Get DOWN!” shouted Mukhtar, pushing her into the dirt behind the first tire. He held her to the ground with a hand on the middle of her back while she breathed iron-tasting dirt into her mouth. While watching Finn, she had imagined how she would do it when it was her turn, how fast she would run, how she would throw herself into the dirt. But now there was no time for her slow responses. All she could do—and all she was intended to do—was blindly submit. Not something with which she had much practice.

A few seconds later she was dragged up by the waistband of her trousers and shoved in the direction of the next tire. Mukhtar's mouth was next to her ear, shouting, “MOVE, MOVE, MOVE!” But she couldn't make her legs pedal forward fast enough to keep pace. It was like running in a dream, where her legs became heavy or diffuse, unable to propel the body forward. The next time she hit the dirt her knee struck a sharp rock. She felt the indent it made in her skin but couldn't register the pain. As they sprinted for the last tire, a muscle in the back of her right thigh gave a twang of protest. Yoga and swimming were apparently poor preparation for the rigors of dodging terrorist fire.

By the time she and Mukhtar reached the end of the course, Miranda was suffused with adrenaline. She smiled at Finn as he trotted toward her, holding his camera aloft. “I got photos!” he said. “You were fantastic.”

Miranda limped beside him to the car. “Nothing but glamour, the life of an ambassador's wife.”

An hour later, as they rode back to the Residence in their armored
car, Miranda's mood tumbled down around her like a house of cards. Discreetly squeezing Finn's hand on the seat beside her, she found herself fighting back tears again.

“You were good with that SIG Sauer,” said Finn. “I'm thinking about putting you on the team.”

Miranda smiled, not at him but out the window at the endless beige horizon, so he couldn't see her eyes. “Well, at least if you're attacked and someone drops a pistol, I know what to do with it,” she said at last.

“Let's hope I have a clumsy abductor.”

“And that he has a SIG. Otherwise, we're fucked.”

NOVEMBER 18, 2010

Finn

Finn sits at the tiny card table in his kitchen, staring at the drawing. Even Cressida seemed to have recognized its authorship, grabbing a corner in her damp fist while babbling “Mummmumummy!” Or perhaps she had somehow recognized herself, and deduced that only a mother would create such an image. For it clearly was Cressida, a version of Cressida. Miranda had always said she couldn't draw her daughter properly, and Finn understood what she meant. Their tiny girl changed too quickly to pin to paper. But though the child in this drawing wasn't a perfect resemblance—she had less hair, more fat on her thighs—she retained an essential Cressidaness. Cressidity. The shape of her eyebrows, her long, sweeping lashes, her tiny bowed lips.

How long ago had Miranda drawn this? He had no way to know. It was Nadia who had produced it from beneath her
abaya
. Her family lived in the mountains a few hours north and west of the city, she said. Just outside her cousin Imaan's village was a small training camp. Everyone knew what the men were training for, but it wasn't openly discussed. Someone at the camp might have heard something about a Western woman taken hostage, thought Nadia. Surely these kinds of men talked with each other. She and the other women had
been systematically—and cautiously—contacting relatives in their home villages, taking advantage of their vast networks.

Nadia rang Imaan, one cousin she was sure she could trust. When they were still in school, Imaan had caught her scribbling pictures in her religion notebook several times and had never told on her. She made Nadia tear up the sketches of their various relatives, but more from fear of punishment than from fanatical fervor. She didn't want to see Nadia in trouble. Imaan hadn't heard anything about an American woman but said she would pay a visit to her eldest aunt, who lived out at the camp, where her husband and son participated in the mysterious exercises. Aisha's hut was far enough from the training grounds that she wouldn't have to see any of the men. Imaan didn't know any other women who lived out there, just Aisha, who cooked for the men and looked after them.