Baghdad Fixer (30 page)

“Yes, but bigger than that. Yellowcake is a mixture of uranium oxides and other uranium compounds, and if Saddam were trying to buy it from Niger, it would prove that he was trying to build a bomb of the worst kind. But you see, I know from people who know that this uranium report was a fabrication. When Saddam was around, we only suspected that it was a hoax. Now we know for sure. So that means someone dreamed it up, and then came up with a bunch of documents to prove it. Someone paid a lot of money to have that done, and have it done well enough to be convincing to the Americans.” He shrugs. “Which is probably not so difficult to do.”

I feel I should be writing this down, the way Sam does when the conversation gets interesting. Because now he’s beginning to make references I don’t catch, to dates and deals and different inspectors, and I see that there are so many things that I just don’t know. Before you were what, a teacher?
Qabil,
before. In that other life, before the fall. Saleh continues to talk and wheeze and cough, filling the air between us with chemicals and dates and people, with motives and counter-motives, with his medicine-scented breath. After much rambling on, he asks whether this was what I wanted to know.

“Well,” I start. “We’re investigating a story about an American politician who is suing her newspaper, the
Tribune.
But I can only tell you this in absolute confidence, just as you have spoken to me.”

“Nabil.” He reaches to touch my shoulder and shakes it, making my tea swirl in its cup. “We’re family! I wouldn’t have told you all of this if I wasn’t sure I could trust you.”

I finish the tea to give myself a moment to think. “It’s like this,” I say. “The
Tribune
published a story about a week ago which accused an American politician, someone who visited Iraq several times, of taking millions of dollars from Saddam Hussein in order to defend him in the West.”

“Jackson.”

“You know him?”

“Nabil, I know the name of every politician who came to visit Iraq in the past ten years. Doesn’t mean he was taking money from Saddam. Who else would they accuse? He’s black and he opposed the war. Perfect target.”

Saleh coughs into a tissue, and I can sense a glob of something thick having landed in it before he crumples it and sticks it on the table.

“You think that Chalabi could be part of this as well? Would he have been trying to retaliate against influential people who were too friendly towards Saddam? Or who opposed the Americans coming?”

Saleh runs his hand over his small beard. “You know, that’s a very interesting theory. But the truth is, I would imagine it’s just that. Interesting. I think Mr Chalabi has more important concerns to attend to. He is dealing with the Bush administration and the CIA, and MI5, and probably the Mossad, too.” He laughs again, leaving his mouth hanging open in a smile that is both boyish and hungry. “Then again...let me think about it. I can ask around.”

“But you can’t tell anyone,” I say.
“Yaani,
off the record.” Funny that those words would come out of my mouth — I only learned the expression the other day, when Sam told me about how it works when someone talks to you “off the record”. As she spoke I daydreamed of the turntable Grandma Zahra used to have in the living room, where she’d play the records of Salima Pasha and spin her wrists to the languid melodies. Now I know “the record” means something else, some kind of holy boundary between what you are free to write about and what you are not, and that if you violate this unwritten rule of journalism, it’s as good as committing blasphemy.

“I can’t find anything out for you if I can’t give away some details.” His voice has an authoritative tone. “I won’t tell anyone I don’t really trust.”

“Well, then you should be very, very vague. Don’t mention Sam, Samara that is, or her newspaper or the lawsuit.”

He pretends to zip his lip. “I never even heard her name. And Akram?”

“Well, other journalists seem to know about him, so I guess that’s fine.”

Saleh looks at his watch. “Curfew starts in twenty minutes. So unless you have a special military pass from your American friend—”

“I don’t.”

“Then you’d better get going. But look, I need you to help me, too.” His throat clicks a few times, as if trying to swallow an insistent wad of phlegm. “I really need a new job. My family name is associated with the Ba’athists, mostly because of my father. I’m not going to be able to keep my job with the UN now that the Americans are demanding they fire all Ba’athists, and it’s going to happen soon. I need a job like yours, in the news with foreigners. Or even with a foreign aid organization. I don’t care where, just not the army. I avoided the damn Iraqi military, I’m not going to work for the Americans. You know my English is excellent. Maybe not like yours,
ustaz,
but more than decent.”

I smile at his compliment, calling me something akin to professor. It’s a way of saying you really respect someone who is a teacher of any sort. But this is the second time he’s asking me, and given Sam’s reaction, the conversation makes me uncomfortable.

“Not even a job, Nabil, just introductions. You know how it works. Foreigners are afraid of us and they don’t know who they can trust. But a recommendation from people they know, that’s what gets a man a job.” He looks into my eyes, hard but intimate. “You know that, don’t you?”

“Sure.”

“So just try. Try for me and I’ll try for you. If you can’t, if the woman you’re working for says no, then it’s not a problem. I have other contacts. But the truth is, I need the money. We are looking into going to a private doctor in Europe to see about our problem, you know,” and he falls into a whisper, his head so low it’s as if he’s talking to his belt buckle, “about why we haven’t had a baby yet. These doctors cost a lot of money. Can you believe, in the middle of a war, the country being invaded, people stealing and kidnapping and killing each other in the street.”

He looks towards the door, then back at me. “All that,” he mouths almost soundlessly, “and all my wife can talk about is wanting to have a baby! That, and this bloody dream about the UN being blown up with me in it!”

He dismisses his tea cup towards its saucer, but it slips from his hand and fails to regain its composure, spilling its speckled brown contents on to the table.

~ * ~

24

Spilling

It’s close to the 9 p.m. curfew when Rizgar drops me off, grumbling about how he’ll hardly make it home in time, how he should have let me take a taxi. A few days ago, I began to ask him to drop me at least two blocks from my house, because after all, there’s no need for everyone to see me getting dropped off each evening in a chauffeur-driven car. People will wonder why I never came home in this fashion before. Baba warned me not to tell anyone who doesn’t already know that I’m working with Sam.

The neighbourhood is dark and silent. It used to be that everyone would have their televisions on at this hour, but there is no electricity tonight, like the night before. I guess people are cooking on gas stoves or talking quietly near their propane lamps or making love by candlelight or telling stories to their children. We are doing many things at home in the evening these days, but watching television is not one of them.

I walk towards our house, open the front gate and close it quietly behind me. I hope that Baba bought a small generator like he said he would so we can watch television again and hook up the new satellite dish I bought with my first week’s salary and do something else at night, something other than just sitting by the dim candles and listening to the radio.

And just as I’m passing the car park, I have a feeling that something isn’t right but now it’s too late because I hit a pole, except there’s no pole here, and I haven’t hit anything but something has hit me. And then I realize that it’s a man’s hand that’s slammed across my mouth and his other arm is across my chest and I start to squirm but then I feel the cold metal pressing into my temple and am conscious that there’s another man with him and the sound of the safety lock being released is like a deafening rush in my head that smothers my ability to breathe, to think, to do anything at all.

“Don’t move,” the man with the gun against my head says, and he could never know that my real fear is that I will faint and he’ll think that I moved and that will be the end of it. “If you say a word we’re going to distribute your brains all over your baba’s nice big Mercedes over there.” The gun is cool against my head, like ice on hot skin on a sweaty day, and I feel oddly thankful for the low resting temperature of metal because it may be the only thing saving me from melting.

“Listen, Amari.” It is another man now, and though I cannot see him I can suddenly picture him: one of the thug-boys from middle school, grown fatter and thicker. “We suggest you stop working with all foreigners. Particularly the Americans.”

I’m coming to hate this label — the Americans. As if Sam represents the Americans as a whole, as if she is the same as the soldiers who dropped bombs on our homes and rode into our cities on their tanks. I think I could bite the man’s clammy hand and hurt him, but I realize the futility of this, as the gun presses even harder against my temple.

“Do you understand?” The man with the gun hisses in my ear. Then the other man lifts his hand from my mouth and pushes me up against the car park wall. Unlike the gun, the concrete is surprisingly warm against my face, as though exhaling all the heat it has reluctantly accepted throughout the day. “If you turn around in the next sixty seconds, we’ll shoot you in the head and you’ll be gone so quickly, even doctor-baba won’t be able to help you.”

I hear clicks again and I wish I knew something about guns, to at least know for sure whether he is switching the safety lock on or off, or maybe rotating the revolver a few times just to scare me.

I hear the man who is holding my hands mutter something in the other’s man’s ear. “Yes, and your friend,” the man with the gun says, poking the barrel hard against my temple before pulling it back a bit. “We’ll get her, too. She’ll go back to America in a pretty coffin with a red, white and blue flag draped on it. Would you like that?”

I feel a quiver in my neck but
stop it,
I will stop it from swelling into a flinch, a palpable shudder. The thought of something happening to Sam feels worse than something happening to me. And then, the second man rearranges his grip to hold me at my elbows, which sends a bolt of pain through my shoulders, and then he pins my hands in the small of my back and finally lets go. I can now feel the gun against the back of my head.

“They are just innocent journalists,” I say. “They don’t agree with their government.” Sam told me this is true, that most of the American journalists here don’t even agree with their government’s policy, and that most of them didn’t vote for Mr Bush. But neither did we vote for Saddam, and did that make the Americans think we were innocent? I have been fighting the urge to struggle against the clamp of their arms holding my arms, their hands stronger than my hands. But once they let go, I have to fight my instinct to twist and run. But to where? To my father, inside the house? I am practically inside my house. They know where I live.

“No! Not just journalists.” It is the man who slammed his hand into my mouth, the one without the gun. Between my tongue and my lips I taste blood, sweet and salty, and I draw my mouth in on itself and hope the bleeding will stop before the thought of it starts to make me nauseous. “They’re Americans. We in the neighbourhood resistance committee have ruled that no one here should work with Americans. Do you understand, Amari?”

I wonder if they even know my first name and if they know Sam’s name or whether they just heard something about me or about her, a picture not quite complete, and as I’m thinking this, the man with the gun puts the barrel into the hollow of my right cheek and pushes harder.

“The infidels are only here to occupy our country and exploit it. They’re here to steal our oil and defile our women. No collaborators will be tolerated.”

It is pointless for me to say another word. The one without the gun has a sandpaper voice, and he leans in towards me, hangs an elbow on my shoulder and puts his mouth up to my ear. “Do you understand?”

“Yes,” I murmur.

“You know, you might think of joining the resistance, too,” he says. “We could use English-speakers like you. Think about it.”

I can feel the heavier one, the one who first jumped on me and clamped my mouth, moving away and heading for our gate, whispering for his friend to hurry up. I can sense the gun being tucked into the front of the man’s trousers, and the sound of a half-laugh, as though amused by my compliance, waiting there for the next order.

“Sixty seconds,” says the man at the gate, the gunman. “Start counting.” I hear a small explosion somewhere to the south and it makes me feel insignificant. Somewhere in Baghdad, someone else’s house or car or store or Bradley Fighting Vehicle is getting blown up. Why would anybody care if there’s a man holding a gun to my head just outside my doorstep?

“Count!”

And I do, and I can hear them run for the gate, leap over it without using the door. When I get to twenty-five and can’t hear them anymore, I stop counting and rush to the gate, where I can see the soles of their trainers rising and falling, growing faint somewhere at the end of my street.

~ * ~

25

Growing