A Nasty Piece of Work (13 page)

Ornella walked across the narrow room to the window that gave onto the railroad tracks and, beyond that, the Mojave Desert and pulled down the shade. She turned to face me. “How old
are
you, Lemuel?”

“Forty-eight.”

“I’m thirty-three. You were smack on when you figured there were fifteen years between us.”

She settled cross-legged onto the bed, her spine against the footboard. “There’s a Corsican saying my grandfather passed on to me—something about a woman needing to be half her lover’s age plus seven if the relationship had a hope in hell of working out. I think the Corsicans got it from the Arabs. So by my Corsican grandfather’s rule of thumb, Lemuel, dear, you’re much too young for me.”

She smiled that patented smile of hers, only this time I thought I detected the faintest suggestion of joy in it. Maybe I was coloring her smile with my own crayons. Maybe I was wishful thinking. Maybe I needed to stop thinking. Her nipples were erect. My luck, both of them were pointing straight at me. This wasn’t the moment to play the killjoy.

Without going into details, I can honestly say that I rose to the occasion. At one point I became convinced she was running a fever—until it hit me that the heat coming off her body had another explanation. Her skin was the temperature of the earth I once touched above Dacht-i-Navar, a still active volcano southwest of Kabul in Afghanistan. When I said this out loud, I was rewarded with a ripple of musical laughter, something I couldn’t remember hearing from her before. Fact is I could feel myself falling for Friday in a big way—I could feel myself trying to hold myself back and not succeeding. I could see she’d been hurt and hurt badly. The pain was in the smile. The pain was in the back of her eyes. The pain was in the alert, guarded way she had of accepting a lover into her arms. A nasty little voice in the lobe of my brain that houses my early warning system told me hurt people sometimes became addicted to pain—in themselves, in others.

I tuned out the nasty little voice.

In the early hours of the morning one of those endless Union Pacific freight trains rumbled past the hotel. The rattling of the windows, the quaking of the floorboards must have startled Friday because she melted back into my arms as if she were seeking sanctuary. After a long while she whispered in my ear, “You make me hope there is hope.”

“Hope is what’s left when you pan for gold and come up with pebbles washed smooth in the riverbed.”

“Are you always such a wet blanket?”

“I try to keep things in perspective. We can begin to talk about hope when we spend the night in the same bed without making love.”

When the freight train’s caboose had gone past, the deafening soundlessness of the desert engulfed us. “So I didn’t think you’d be a good lover,” she said suddenly, her breath warm and moist on my ear. “You took me by surprise.”

I pushed her away gently and sat up. “Listen up, Friday. There’s no such thing as a good lover or a bad lover. We’re different lovers with different people. It’s one of the mysteries of life—how one female can turn you into an eager and ardent lover and another can barely get a rise out of you. Go figure.”

She sat up alongside me. “Question of chemistry,” she said.

“Question of alchemy,” I said.

“Panning pebbles in a riverbed and turning them into gold?”

I had to laugh. “That’s as good a definition of alchemy as any.”

She padded over to the window and raised the shade and came back to the bed. The Clara Bow room was turning shades of gray. The seashells on the small mirror glistened with first light. “Our first sunrise,” Friday said. She kissed the shrapnel scar on my right shoulder, then, startled, looked at me. “Where’d you get this?” she whispered.

“Roadside bomb filled with ammonium nitrate—what you call fertilizer—exploded under our Humvee during my first tour in Afghanistan back in 2001. The driver was killed instantly. He was a nineteen-year-old hillbilly who drove me nuts blasting ‘Grown Men Don’t Cry’ on a jury-rigged Blaupunkt. The Afghan officer riding shotgun had both his legs blown off and died of gangrene two days later. I was catnapping in the back so I lucked out—only caught a splinter of shrapnel in the shoulder. Never did find out if the bomb was set by Pashtuns trying to kill Tajiks or Tajiks trying to kill Pashtuns or either, or trying to kill Americans.”

Friday pressed her lips to the wound inflicted in the hospital immediately after I was born. And I heard a murmur drift up to me. “We’ve been lovers for only a third of a day, Lemuel, dear. I’m already sharing your pain.”

We made love again. It was one of those drowsily slow, exquisitely sumptuous couplings that only happen in the morning when you’re still not a hundred percent awake, when you mistake reality for a dream.

With sunlight flooding the room, I could make out the spume white swell of her breasts and purple welts on one or two of her very spare ribs. She noticed me noticing. “Car accident,” she explained. “I was driving my uncle’s old Chevy—skidded off the road into a drainage ditch. Seat belt probably saved my hide but left its mark on my rib cage.” She smiled sheepishly. “Last thing I expected was to sleep with you so I didn’t think you’d ever set eyes on my rib cage.”

“I’m tickled pink to wake up to your rib cage,” I said. “I’m eager to share
your
pain.”

Later on, stuffing ourselves with home-baked raisin muffins in the general store—amazing the appetite you can work up at what Vesustiana called “sexual copulation”—we returned to the business at hand. I retrieved the Sony Walkman from my gear and hit
PLAY
so we could listen again to the anonymous phone call that sent Detective Awlson off to the Blue Grass to arrest Gava.
“Awright, I have not got all night. What do you say we put this show on the road, huh?”
We sat there staring at the cassette as if it could provide an image of the speaker if you listened hard enough.

“What can you tell about him from his voice?” she asked.

“He’s cocksure of himself, for starters. He knows where the conversation is going because he’s steering it. He’s shrewd smart as opposed to educated smart. He’s probably a poker player who memorized the odds against drawing to an inside straight. He’s not someone I’d invite into my Once in a Blue Moon to drink a cold Mexican Modelo. He’s not someone I’d tangle with if I could avoid it.”

“All that just from his voice?”

“All that and more. I’ve come across mugs who buy cocaine before.”

“I’ll bet you have.”

Back in the Clara Bow room, Friday suddenly came up with the idea of exchanging tokens to mark the beginning of the beginning. “I told you I was superstitious, remember?” she said. “Here’s the thing: We’re starting out on a journey together. I need to have something personal of yours, you need to have something personal of mine to make sure we get where we’re going in one piece.”

I studied her eyes. She was dead serious. I didn’t know if the journey in question was the search for her bail jumper or had something to do with what happened in Clara Bow’s double bed the night before. Shrugging, figuring I had nothing to lose, I gave her the small piece of shrapnel the Afghan male nurse had pried from my shoulder and I’d used as a fob on my Once in a Blue Moon key chain. She gave me the silver St. Christopher medallion she wore around her neck whenever she was on the road. Turns out her grandfather had given it to her at the airport after her first summer in Corsica. I attached the medal to my key chain. St. Christopher, of course, is the patron saint of voyagers. I wasn’t one to put much store in saints but what the heck, it didn’t hurt to bet on several horses in any given race.

Seventeen

I’ll do Afghanistan now.

I’d been posted to the Company’s compound in Kabul, which was Langley’s bright idea of R and R after two months in the Pakistani-Afghan badlands. I’d been named acting deputy station chief, which sounds real important until you discover there were eight deputy station chiefs, each one with a bailiwick to preside over. As the station was thick with desk wallahs and thin on officers who’d spent serious time outside the Green Zone, I presided over field operations, which consisted, during my tour in Kabul, of forays into the maze of various medinas in search of Taliban and Hezb-e Islami operatives. Sometimes I’d tag along with the raiders to interrogate suspects myself—I understood enough pidgin Pashto to know when the government translator was leaving out juicy details. Other times I camped in the compound’s command bunker to coordinate operations from a distance. I’d sit on a wooden swivel chair, nursing a cold beer, my eyes on the bank of plasma screens showing, among other things, a Wall Street ticker tape, an old episode of
Seinfeld,
and the live feed from minicameras attached to the helmets of soldiers breaking down doors in a medina. I was presiding over one such foray that had reached the operational stage when my station chief—I’ll refer to him as Jack for the purposes of this narrative, since the real names of Company employees, mine included, are considered a state secret—suggested I ought to tailgate the Delta-Foxtrot team setting off at midnight to raid a remote village in the rugged ridges of the Hindu Kush in the hope of capturing the especially tall mujahid who’d taught English to Osama bin Laden. (We had the mujahid’s photograph on file, it’d been taken from a drone, we calculated his height from the time of day and the length of his shadow.) “If you’re on scene, you can begin interrogatin’ him from the get-go while he’s still disoriented,” Jack said. “If you elicit real-time information on the whereabouts of our friend Osama, radio it on in. I’ll have another team geared up and airborne in minutes.”

The Delta-Foxtrot people had a reputation for being pit bulls—the standing joke held that they could traverse more terrain on foot in a day than run-of-the-mill soldiers could cover in a jeep. Like most exaggerations, it contained a kernel of truth. I wasn’t sure I could keep up with them and told Jack as much. “You’re goin’ to seed sittin’ ’round these television screens,” he said. “God damn, Lemuel, put on your seven-league hiking boots if you need to but I want your ass out there.”

If you’ve never used night-vision goggles, don’t. The feeling of being trapped underwater is so intense you find yourself gasping for air when you first put them on. Two helicopters, flying without lights, deposited us on a flat two ridges downwind from the target, so we had a bit of a slog between us and the village. We scrambled up and down gullies, point gunmen out ahead, followed by the main team, followed by me and my minder, a medical corpsman just back from three weeks of R and R in Japan and sweating bullets under the weight of the rucksack filled with first responder gear. On the downslope of the first ridge I stepped gingerly over the corpse of a young herdsman outside his igloo-shaped stone hut. I could see the hilt of one of those curved Afghan pulwars sticking out of his chest. The goats he’d been guarding, tethered to a long cord stretched taut between the hut and a dead tree, had all had their throats cut. For purposes of the obligatory battle report, I supposed they’d be listed as enemy combatants KIA. We made our way up the second ridge, past a field filled with vines. The grapes hanging from them appeared bluish green through my goggles. I wondered what kind of wine they could make with grapes like that. At the top of the last ridge, the Delta-Foxtrot leader, a baby-faced lieutenant, his face streaked with charcoal, only his eyes clearly visible, dropped to one knee next to me. I thought for a moment he was going to ask me to join him in prayer. “You and Meredith here wait till I radio for you to come on in, hear?” he whispered.

“Hear,” I said.

Lying flat on my stomach, my chin on the small radio pack strapped to the folding stock of my M-16, I could make out ghostlike figures, bluish green in their camouflage khakis and flak jackets, swimming downhill toward the drowned village, dark and silent as a sunken ship in a seabed. Somewhere at the edge of the seabed a dog barked, the bark turned into a yelp, the yelp trailed off into a soft whine of pain. I could make out hunched figures running through the alleyways, converging on the mud-walled compound around the whitewashed mosque. Then the first shots echoed through the village—bloated blasts from the old smooth-bored rifles the mujahideen had used in their ten-year jihad against the Russians, falsetto bursts from the automatic weapons of our raiders. A grenade—one of those fragmentation thingamabobs with a fifteen-meter kill radius—exploded next to the massive wooden door of the mosque compound, blowing it off its hinges. A geyser of smoke and dust rose from the seabed.

“So much for surprising them,” I whispered to Meredith.

Inside the mosque compound, a woman screamed in Pashto—I understood that she wanted a girl or several girls to run to the mosque. An especially tall man in a bluish green djellaba materialized in a doorway and fired his rifle into the head of a raider at point-blank range. Spinning, he tried to shoot again. The rifle must have jammed, because he took hold of the barrel and began to use it as a club, swinging wildly at the bluish green figures in camouflage khaki swarming around him. The terrified shrieks of young girls pierced the night.

“I’m going in,” I told Meredith.

“Lieutenant said we was to wait till he radioed up to us,” he said.

“Lieutenant may be otherwise occupied,” I said. I pushed myself to my feet, flicked off the safety on my M-16, and started downhill through ankle-high underbrush that undulated like seaweed as I waded through it. I could hear Meredith, out of breath from an overdose of adrenaline, sliding, slipping, scampering downslope behind me. At the edge of the village I came across the first corpses, two Afghans, one a boy, one a grandfather judging from his long bluish green beard, sprawled on the ground next to a dead dog. All three were bleeding bright orange blood from slit throats. There were other corpses, maybe a dozen, maybe more, I stopped counting at eight. In the mosque compound, the corpse of the dead American who’d been shot at point-blank range was being zipped into a black canvas body bag, his dog tags wired to one of the plastic grips. Two raiders had literally pinned the especially tall man to the mud wall with bayonets thrust through the cloth of his bluish green djellaba. The left side of his face was vivid purple, bright orange blood oozed from an open wound under his left eye. Unintelligible words rose from his throat. If this was bin Laden’s English teacher, he would need an extended sick leave before he taught anyone anything again.