The Company We Keep (25 page)

“Do you like it?” he asks.

I think he is asking about Beirut, and I don’t know what to say.

“The apartment,” he says.

“It’s great. I’ll take it.”

“And Beirut?”

He doesn’t say anything when I don’t answer. I’m glad he doesn’t press me, or ask why we came here. I’m no longer quite sure myself.

I never do get through to Bob while he’s in Paris to tell him about the apartment. I wonder if my phone is broken. But I know he’ll love it, and I call Hajj to confirm. The same day I walk up to
Hamra’s main street to buy some move-in items, everything from sheets and pillows to dishes. On the way back I walk past Abu Khudur’s, so I can tell Ahmed we’re neighbors.

I leave the packages at the hotel and go back out to look for a portable washing machine, the kind you attach to the sink faucet. I find one in a small shop off Hamra, put down a deposit, and tell the shopkeeper that my
zowj
will be back in a taxi to pick it up.

With time on my hands, I stop at a general store with racks of brooms, mops, and cleaning brushes. On a shelf outside, a black and white baby rabbit sits in a small cage. The shopkeeper notices me playing with it through the mesh wire and comes outside.

“Is it a pet?” I ask. He nods, but I’m not sure he understands.

“Yes, you buy.” He says something in Arabic, but I only catch
hayawan
. Animal.

“Where did you get her?” I ask. I can picture the rabbit running around the terrace of our new apartment.

“In field,” he says, stroking the side of the cage. “If you want, you say.”

“I’d love to have a rabbit, but right now I’m living in a hotel,” I say as slowly as I can. “And I have to ask my
zowj.
”

“Ask
zowj.
”

I promise myself that I’ll bring Bob back to buy it as soon as he’s home. The rabbit can be his present to me—Christmas is only a week away.

Paris, France:
BOB

I
don’t pay attention to where the short Argentine oilman with a silver mane of hair is taking me until we’re inside the restaurant, a hamburger place packed with tourists and the odd French businessmen slumming it. I wait while Carlos walks up and down,
searching the booths for the man we’re having lunch with. Carlos finds him, and summons me to join them.

Sitting in a dark booth is a man dressed in a pair of khaki slacks and a checkered wool shirt. “Howyudoin,” he says, standing up to shake my hand. His American accent is nearly flawless. “My name’s Ahmed Badeeb.”

I don’t know why Carlos didn’t tell me we were having lunch with Badeeb—he’s a legend in my old circles. During the Soviet Union’s war in Afghanistan, he was the bagman for the Mujahidin. He would show up in Peshawar with suitcases filled with tens of millions of dollars, all in neat, cellophane-wrapped bricks of hundred-dollar bills, and hand them out to the Afghans like candy. The Mujahidin used the money to buy the arms that brought down the Soviet Union and ended the Cold War—not a bad item to have on your résumé. Badeeb is now chief of staff of Saudi intelligence.

He asks me something I can’t hear because of a little girl shouting and crawling under the table next to ours. I lean in closer.

“How’s your Dari?” he repeats.

“So-so,” I say.

“You’ll learn it fast.”

I’ll wait to figure out what he means by that.

Badeeb stops a passing waiter and looks at Carlos and me. “Cheeseburgers?”

He doesn’t wait for our answer. “Your very best meat, sir,” he tells the waiter, “and medium rare.”

While we wait for our lunch, Badeeb and Carlos talk about a meeting next week in Riyadh. It’s to discuss raising money for Carlos’s Turkmenistan-to-Pakistan gas pipeline.

I stay out of it, but I’m curious to see how this unfolds, and I’m fascinated by the venue. I always imagined power lunches like this taking place in a cloud of cigar smoke in some baroque drawing room, over a port, and not a cheeseburger.

The burgers come. Badeeb pours ketchup and mustard on his, carefully holding the lettuce and tomato in place, and we eat in silence for a few minutes.

“When will you be able to leave for Afghanistan?” Badeeb asks, looking up from his hamburger.

Carlos looks at me with an expression that says there is only one answer to this question, and I’d better know what it is.

“Oh, almost anytime,” I say.

For the last two months I’ve been consulting on the Middle East for Carlos. He runs his company, Bridas, like his personal fiefdom, hopping around the world in his private jet. He likes it that I’ve set up in Beirut because it’s a convenient hub for the places he does business. Kabul is a new twist, but I can’t say I’m not interested. I’ll run it by Dayna if and when it gets serious.

“What about the Russians?” I ask. “They couldn’t be happy about it.”

It’s pretty much a given that the Russians want all Central Asian pipelines to go through Russia rather than Afghanistan. They want an economic stranglehold on these countries.

Badeeb waves his hand in the air as if he’s swatting away a fly. “The Russians are bluffing. They wouldn’t dare try to stop this pipeline.”

Badeeb and Carlos go back to talking about financing, calculating that construction will start next year.

After lunch Carlos walks out with me onto the Champs-Élysées. It’s starting to rain. Carlos doesn’t have an umbrella, and I offer him mine. He looks at it for moment, but doesn’t take it. Instead, he asks me to spend another night in Paris so I can meet one of his bankers tomorrow for lunch.

“I have a flight in three hours,” I say.

“But this is a very important lunch.”

I start to tell him that Dayna is in Beirut, expecting me home, but then decide Carlos won’t care. I know enough about his world
to realize that while there’s nothing more important than family, family never gets in the way of business.

“I’ll be there,” I say. “But I absolutely must go back to Beirut tomorrow afternoon.”

I walk up the Champs-Élysées to call Dayna from a phone booth. Her cell rings once and then turns off. I feel panic setting in. It’s two days before Christmas, and I was only supposed to be gone for two nights.

I should have told Carlos no and just gone back to Beirut. And the more I think about it, the crazier the idea of our moving to Kabul to work with the Taliban seems. Why would the Taliban ever accept me, an ex-CIA operative? But I can’t turn down the proposal out of hand. Garth introduced me to Carlos, and I can’t embarrass him.

The next day, when I show up to the Plaza Athénée, one of Paris’s great Beaux Arts hotels, Carlos and the banker are already in the restaurant, two Kir Royales on the table in front of them. Carlos sees me, and signals to the waiter that I need one too.

After Carlos introduces me to the banker, they ignore me and talk about interest-rate spreads. Every time the banker makes a point, he shoots his sleeve, exposing his dime-thin, gold Patek Philippe watch, and gives his neck a quarter turn as if his collar were too tight.

I look at my own watch. I have exactly three hours and twenty minutes until my plane takes off for Beirut. I pick up a menu, catching Carlos’s eye. I ask him if he’s ever had the sole here. He looks over at me, doesn’t answer, and goes back to talking to the banker.

“What kind of wine do you like?” I interrupt again, pushing the wine list in his direction.

Irritated, Carlos picks it up. He doesn’t like the choices, and
catches the steward’s attention. He orders a bottle each of white and red, wines I’ve never heard of. But from their names they sound expensive.

As Carlos and the banker leave off interest rates to discuss a Swiss investor they don’t like, I continue worrying about my flight. I can’t disappoint Dayna and miss it. I push my chair back and say I have to make a call. Carlos waves me away in the direction of the door.

All the phone booths around the Place de l’Alma are occupied, but after maybe fifteen minutes of waiting, one frees up and I try our cell that Dayna has. It’s busy. Who could she be talking to? I try a second time, but it’s still busy. On the third try, a canned voice tells me in Arabic that the phone number is no longer in service. It feels like feral cats are eating the inside of my stomach.

Carlos doesn’t even look my way when I sit back down. The waiter pours me a glass of white wine. I don’t touch it, and instead glance at my watch. I now have two hours and twenty minutes before the plane takes off. I try to remember what Paris traffic is like on Thursday afternoons, another wasted thought. The only thing predictable about Paris traffic is that there’s always a snarl on the way to the airport. The
premier plat
hasn’t even arrived.

When the banker starts to talk about his summer house in Provence, my frayed nerves turn white-hot with fury. I consider ripping his Patek Philippe off his wrist and dropping it in the flower vase. Carlos glances over at me, probably wondering if I’ve lost my mind.

There was a time not long ago when I would have moved heaven and earth to sit at a meeting like this, listening to two players in the Great Game redraw the map of Central Asia. But right now I can only think about getting home for Christmas with Dayna. In the chaos that is my life, she’s the only certainty I have. There’s no way I’m going to let this relationship become a throwaway like so many before.

I push my chair back again. “I have to leave.”

“Is something wrong?” Carlos asks.

“A family emergency.”

Carlos looks at me in disbelief. I turn and walk out, and then half run across the lobby.

I make the plane, and the next morning Dayna takes me to see a little rabbit she’s found. She can’t locate the shop right away, and we walk the neighborhood in a grid. The store’s closed, but she sees the cage just inside the front door. We peer into the window. The cage is empty. Too bad, she says. He must have sold it.

Just to make sure, she looks in another window. I hear a little startled sob. I follow her gaze, and there, hanging from a pole, is a small black and white rabbit skin. Dayna turns and begins running, fast enough that I have trouble catching up to console her.

I half knew that working for Carlos wasn’t going to work, and Paris fully convinced me. If I’d stayed through lunch, there would have been dinner, and then another meeting the next day. And then, likely as not, Carlos would have invited me on his jet to Riyadh, and, who knows, from there to Kabul. This is exactly what I promised Dayna we wouldn’t do, live separate lives.

And, as it turned out, Carlos’s Afghan pipeline never was to be anyway. On August 7, 1998, al Qaeda bombed the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The attacks were orchestrated by Osama bin Laden from Afghanistan, under the umbrella of the Taliban. An embargo on Afghanistan followed, putting an end to Carlos’s business there.