Baghdad Fixer (40 page)

I look at her, and she seems sad, or maybe as if she’s seeing her grandmother now, and I feel jealous because I want to see her, too. And then Sam comes back to me.

Though I would never say so, I find the story hard to imagine. We don’t have many tall apartment buildings like that in Baghdad. I don’t know anyone who lives in a building with more than four storeys. And I can’t imagine leaving a four or five-year-old Amal somewhere to get lost, even as a joke.

“That’s awful, Sam, for such a little girl,” I finally say. “It must have been terrifying.”

“Yeah,” she laughs. She sits up straight again, shakes her head. “They were real pranksters. But I guess because of that I’ve spent my life keeping track of exactly where I’m going and what my surroundings are.” Her hands grip the edges of the chair tightly, as though bracing herself. “I explore all the options, travel everywhere, but make sure I always know my way back. And whenever possible, I stay in big, open spaces where there are other people around. I hate feeling, you know,
stuck.”

I think of Amal again, sitting at home and not going out for weeks on end.

“You know what the hardest part of doing this job is?” Sam stares at me now, her lips parted, waiting. “Learning to trust someone like you. And Rizgar. I have to. But sometimes I feel like I shouldn’t trust anyone at all, should just keep my eyes on the buttons and make sure I know exactly where I’m going. Which is a pain-in the-ass in your country, I might add,” she says with a half-moon of a smile, “because for starters, there’s hardly any street signs.”

“You can always trust us. We know the way.”

She nods a few times. “Also, there’s something else I’ll never forget after that day in the elevator.”

“What’s that?”

“My grandmother lived in 3G.”

I laugh and she elbows my arm, then withdraws it.

“What was her name?”

“Her name?”

“Your grandmother’s name.”

“Sarah.”

“Oh, right, you said that. You know this is also a Muslim name? My grandmother’s name was Zahra. It almost sounds the same, no?”

“Yeah,” she says, “is it?”

“No, Zahra means flower. And she was just like that. Like a stubborn desert flower.” I look at Sam. “What was your grandmother like? What was the smell you were looking for?”

“Oh, you know how grandmothers smell.”

“No, I mean, what did she cook?”

Sam turns away, looking back to the balcony. “I think the B-GAN’s probably ready now.”

“Wait, tell me. What do grandmothers in America cook?” I am imagining the
masghouf
that Grandma Zahra made, and also the slightly spicy
kubbeh
from my mother’s side, from the Samawa area, and I want to know what real, home-cooked food would taste like in America.

“I hardly remember,” she shrugs. “It was so long ago. All I can imagine now is the smell of that chicken tikka I ordered from room service. Remind me not to do that again.
Y’alla
,” she says, and is already halfway across the balcony. She gestures for me to come over to her B-GAN, sitting on the roof along with a dozen or so others, half-open to the sky like oysters on a great white beach. “Let me teach you how to turn this puppy on so if the day comes, you’ll know what to do with it,” she says. She runs her finger over the tiny lights on the panel, clearing a coating of dust from the machine. Two black helicopters, with propellers at either end looking like giant locusts against the darkening sky, whirl overhead. “Children,” she pronounces in an artificially deep and authoritative voice, fiddling with the tilt of the satellite receptor with both hands, “don’t try this at home.”

~ * ~

33

Fiddling

In the kitchenette, Sam opens the refrigerator and pulls out what looks like a tall, green can of soda. She holds it up. “Beer?”

“Oh. Uh, no thanks.”

“All right then. More Carlsberg for me.” She detaches the ring-pull with a
psht
and takes a double-sip. “I think you worry too much, Nabil,” she says. “You know, we’re getting really close to the bottom of all of this.”

“Sam.”
She’ll think you’re a poofter. She’ll think you re silly.
“If you want my honest opinion, I think this is all becoming...
majnoun.
You know that word? Crazy. Don’t you think your editors would understand that if you explained it to them?”

Sam sits and drops her head back over the top of the sofa. She coughs up a puff of air. “Understand what?”

“That what you’re doing is dangerous. Aren’t they worried about you?”

She busies herself with drinking the beer, which is not one of the things I picked up for her in the Al-Wahde Supermarket, which has plenty of foreign products. There are small Christian-run liquor shops in town, and I guess the journalists have found their way to them. “Sure,” she finally says. “I’m sure they are. But they need this story done. They leave us with a lot of personal autonomy. They just...leave it to us. We can decide whether to say no.”

“Did you ever say no?”

Sam looks at me sideways. “No, what?”

“As in, ‘no, I won’t do that story.’ Or, ‘no, I won’t go there because there’s a war going on.’”

She rolls her eyes, and her arms fold in on each other. She seems smaller, yet stronger. “No, I haven’t. But that’s not the point.”

“Sam, everyone in America is supposed to be free to do as he pleases. And you have all your civil rights, rights no one in this country has ever had. So if you’re free, why do you have to do things you don’t want to do?”

She stares at me for a moment, and then turns her hands out. It reminds me of one of the motions we use when we pray. “I don’t. I don’t do anything I don’t want to do. I chose to do this.”

“You mean, you chose to come to Iraq? To cover the war?”

“Well, more or less. They asked me to come, and I said yes.”

“Did you have to say yes?”

Sam reaches for the box of Parliament cigarettes sitting on the table. It’s probably the same pack that Carlos left behind - the one Sam cursed about the other day. She slides one out, runs it under her nose, inhales and closes her eyes, like the tobacco has jarred something in her memory that makes her feel good. She puts the cigarette in her mouth, sucks on it unlit, then takes it out and breaks it in her fingers over the ashtray. A snowfall of tobacco flakes quietly into the dirty silver dish below.

“You used to smoke.”

“I did,” she grins, and dismantles the remains of the cigarette without looking up. “I quit a long time ago.” I’m glad I didn’t meet Sam then. All the Iraqi women who smoke look like they’re trying hard, too hard, to look sophisticated and cosmopolitan. Instead, they just look hard.

“Sam, you didn’t answer the question.”

She laughs like there is a joke she isn’t going to let me in on. “Nope. Never said no to a story. That’s the question, right? But doesn’t mean I wouldn’t. Just that I haven’t.” I can’t tell if she is proud or embarrassed.

The satellite phone rings. It has such a strange, metallic jangle, like the sound of a device that has yet to be invented. Sam moans and looks at me. “You’re closer to the phone,” she says. “Just press the green ‘call’ button, would you? Then hit speaker phone.”

I do what Sam asks, press the buttons, and sit back down.

There’s a lot of static, but I already know it’s Miles’s voice. It’s distorted, as usual, by being sent through a satellite somewhere over the Indian Ocean. I wonder what he sounds like in real life.

“Sam?” he asks loudly. “Sam, can you hear me?”

Sam drags herself off the sofa and on to the armchair next to her desk, to get closer to the speaker. “Yeah, Miles, hi. I hear you.”

“Sam, we’ve got news.”

“Well, we’ve got news, too. I was in the middle of writing you a memo about it but I stopped to fix the sat and eat dinner. You wouldn’t believe what we’ve learned in the last twenty-four hours. I think we’ve almost got it figured out.”

“Look, we figured it out at our end. We got the tests back.”

“Wh-which tests?” Sam sounds confused.

“Oh. Didn’t I tell you? We sent the documents that Harris gave us to an Iraq expert in Washington. He compared the signatures on the documents to Uday’s real signature and it’s not even close to the real thing. No resemblance at all. Can you believe that?”

Sam blinks in astonishment.

Miles continues. “The letterhead isn’t even right. So at the same time, we talked to a private investigator, who said we should send them for ink-ageing analysis, and the guy who did that says the documents are no more than two months old. There’s no way the dates on these documents can be right.”

“Wait,” Sam says. “I thought you only had copies of the documents.”

“No, no,” Miles says. “Harris sent us the originals via another reporter who left Iraq last week.”

“Uh-huh.” Sam blinks. “Well, this is what I was about to tell you. We’re pretty close to being able to prove that the documents were fabricated here, in Sadr City. I think we’re even going to be able to pinpoint where they were made and then maybe we’ll even figure out who did it and why. So tomorrow we’re going back to find the—”

“Sam,” Miles interrupts. “You may not have to bother now. I mean, unless you’re certain you can pinpoint in the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours who made these documents and why. If so, great. Otherwise, we just won’t even address that in the story at all. We just need to come out and clear the record: they’re fake, we made a mistake and we’re sorry, that’s it. We don’t need to go breaking some additional story that increases our risk and keeps this whole thing in the spotlight for a minute more than absolutely necessary.”

“Miles. Miles? I don’t understand. Three days ago you said you needed us to figure out who made the documents, to meet Akram, to go all out to verify the signatures.” Sam’s voice is rising as she speaks, and I can see a wave of disbelief passing over her. She rushes over to the phone and picks up the receiver, so I can no longer hear what Miles is saying so well.

“I want you to know what we’ve put into this story so far. I’ve devoted the last week to this alone. I haven’t done anything else but chase after these people and these documents, and now you’re saying it’s all wrapped up?”

Miles’s voice crackles from the phone, “...still need a confirmation on the documents...we’ll get a second opinion... you know with the front office...the decision is not entirely in my hands...and with such high legal fees... “

Sam nods her head petulantly, making circles with her free hand as if to urge him to finish his point.

“But Miles, why didn’t someone tell me about taking this to an ink-ageing analyst? You said something about using contacts at your end, in Washington, and that was the last I heard of that.” More Milesmumble, Sam walking the length of her desk a few times and then sitting on the edge of it. “I am,” she says. “I am happy we’ve got that now. It’s great. It’s just that I didn’t even know that you were going that route. If I had known you were about to find that out, I wouldn’t have been chasing down some of these nasty people we’ve been chasing down.”

She nods with shut eyelids. “Mmm. Um-hmm.” She pushes herself further on to her desk and pulls one knee towards her chest. The words she’s saying to her editor sound assertive, even forceful. But to look at her, she seems like a little girl trying to protect herself. “No, it’s great, it’s just that we’re poking around in Sadr City and Tikrit and Fallujah and asking for the relatives of these nasty characters to verify these signatures, which is what you said you wanted me to do, right? And that’s a little sketchy, according to our local staff, and if we really didn’t need to do that, if you were on the verge of getting an answer some other way...uh-huh. But look, we’ve gone this far. At this point, tell them to wait a few more days. I think we’re on the cusp of finding out so much more. I mean, we wanted to know who made these documents and why, right? And finding out that they’re fake is only the tip of the iceberg. Why would someone in Iraq make up documents to embarrass Billy Jackson of Newark, New Jersey? I mean, something about this stinks, Miles, and in
such
a bizarro way. What if there’s other stuff involved? Maybe the same people who made these documents are the same folks who were drawing up fake documents on WMD! It’s possible, isn’t it?” Sam looks at me and opens her eyes with exaggeration, like she knows she might be taking this too far. She slides off the desk and leans on the glass door that leads to the balcony. There’s still a large X taped across it.

“But Miles, we still need to figure out who made these documents. I mean, there’s something fishy there.”

The tinny crunch of Miles’s voice emanates from the phone. I pretend to get up to get a glass of water, but really I do it so that, on the way back, I can seat myself in the smaller sofa next to her desk, nearer the phone.

“Miles, would you run a crime story and not let the reporter
try
to find out who the perp is? I mean, if you could figure it out...but, but I think we
can
figure it out. We’re close. Just wait, Miles. Please don’t do anything with the story yet. There are still a lot of gaps to be filled in.”

Sam listens. Her lips and nose behave as if they are perpetually in protest at food that’s gone off in the fridge. She rubs the pretty bones that her eyebrows lie upon and sighs. “I understand. Just tell them the story really isn’t done yet. If they can hold off for just a couple more days, I think we’re going to have a much, much better story Okay? Good. I gotta run, but I’ll check in later.”