Baghdad Central (36 page)

Rawls and Khafaji walk over to the palace. They do not talk. When they pass someone smoking, Khafaji asks for a light. His appearance terrifies the man and he surrenders the lighter anyway.

When he walks into the building, Khafaji realizes it's come down to this.
You'll go to Parodi. You will talk with him. Then you will quit. You will set it down on paper. You will write a letter spelling it out. There should be at least one record of someone telling the Americans how dangerous it is to work for them
.

When Parodi sees Khafaji walk in, he blinks. He stares in disbelief, then mutters, “I can't fucking believe this shit. Straight out of camel-jockey central casting!”

He shakes his head, then yells, “Go clean yourself up and then come back, Khafaji!” He turns to a soldier typing on a
computer. “Get him something decent to wear. Go down to the commissary if you have to.”

Rawls takes Khafaji down the hall to a private bathroom. Khafaji locks the door and strips down to his underwear. He turns on the water and waits for it to get hot. He washes the blood and dirt from his face. He sticks his head under the faucet and lets the water run over his scalp. Then he turns the cold water on, and washes his face and head all over again. By the time he has done this twice, he is wide awake.

He is drying off with paper towels when a man arrives with a pair of oversize khaki pants and a plain white undershirt. The pants are too big. Khafaji folds the waist over and then again and tucks in the undershirt. It looks odd, but he doesn't care. He puts on the sandals and looks into the mirror again.
Eyes tired. Chin covered in gray stubble. Cheeks hollow
. His fingers rub the whiskers of his new moustaches.
Everything comes back, doesn't it?

Rawls is waiting outside the door when Khafaji opens it. They walk back to the office. Parodi doesn't get up when Khafaji comes in. He doesn't even look up from the papers on his desk.

“What the hell's going on, Khafaji? You're supposed to be in Kirkuk.”

Khafaji sees that the conversation isn't going the way he imagined. “Sir, I got the message. I tried to call so many times. I thought it was an emergency. Olds told me to come fast.”

Parodi finally looks up. He squints for a moment, then asks, “Olds told you to come back here?”

“Yes, sir.”

“That's bullshit. Olds didn't say that.”

“Sir?”

Parodi shakes his head in exasperation. “That's a load of shit. You scared? A bomb goes off and you come running home?”

Khafaji decides not to correct him. He stares at his feet. Parodi continues, “You're AWOL and you're in trouble. You want to tell us what really happened?”

“Sir?”

“We're going to need you to tell us how you pulled that stunt in Kirkuk.”

“I did not pull any stunt, sir.”

“Well, you need to tell us what you did.”

Khafaji stares at the ground for a minute, then finally meets Parodi's gaze. “I was scared, sir.”

“You like desk work, huh?” He laughs and Rawls joins in. “All right then. We'll put you back to work at the desk – we've got a lot of paper to get through. And we need to get through it fast. Rawls – want to fill him in?”

Rawls turns toward Khafaji, but his eyes never leave the ceiling. “Citrone was off the reservation. You probably know that by now. Seems he kept a girl. Seems he had something going with the girl's boss too.”

“Pardon?”

“Did he ever talk to you about Zubeida Rashid?”

“Sir?”

“Woman by the name of Zubeida Rashid. Citrone was up to his neck with her. And deep in bed too. She runs a prostitution ring and some other angles as well. We visited her office, and found a treasure trove.”

Parodi interrupts. “Normally, we'd hand this stuff over to the linguists. But in this case there's a problem.”

Rawls continues, “Since you like desk work so much, you're going to go through what we found. It's all there next door.
It's a rush job. We need this stuff gone over yesterday. Get some coffee and get to work.”

“I don't drink coffee,” Khafaji objects.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

Khafaji follows Rawls into the other office. There are rows of boxes in the corner. Most are full of files in Arabic. Some in English or French. “The entire contents of her office. We got her.” Khafaji clears off a desk and begins to open the first box. Rawls sits down at the desk next to the door.

Khafaji's mind begins to wander as he opens the first files. More than once he imagines her holding the pen that touched the paper. Each file is a piece of her.

Most of the files are lecture notes. Irrelevant. At the university, she taught courses on organizational structure. That was her specialization. He looks over an old lecture on complex decision trees. Khafaji finds her dissertation and spends an hour trying to read it. The questions Zubeida asks are original. According to her, it was not ideology that shaped the Party's organization, but organizational shape that dictated its ideology.

In some old files, Khafaji finds transparencies of graphs depicting the development of networks, from simple vertical hierarchies and top-down chains of command into more horizontal ones with multiple nodes of decision-making. In the last transparencies of one lecture, Zubeida illustrates how even the most developed organizations can be undone by their own rigidity, by their own desire for control. She shows how most unexpected situations are the direct result of networks whose real linkages only become visible to planners after the fact.

In another box, he finds drafts of old conference papers
where Zubeida argued for hybrid models. Organizational structures where many actors could collaborate with one another in ways no single actor was ever conscious of. At the end of the paper, she concludes, “Organization is not structure. It is activity.”

In the margins are remarks made by a stranger's hand. Notes urging the author not to pursue this argument. In the other boxes, which contain more recent material, these claims disappear. In the manuscript for a book entitled
The Administrative Vision and Method of the Leader the
arguments are the reverse of what she wrote earlier.

The first unusual document Khafaji finds is tucked deep inside a first-year course on statistics. He nearly passed over it. He looks at a memorandum dated July 2003. He looks at the smudged emblem of the General Command and blinks. He sits up in his chair and looks over at Rawls, who is right where he was two hours ago.

The memo is a response to an inquiry regarding logistics. At the bottom, in the hand Khafaji now recognizes as Zubeida's, he sees a familiar list: 126 Salhia, 44 Sheikh Maarouf, 19 Shawaka, 77 Fatih. Those addresses again. Khafaji skims through other boxes – more lecture notes and forms and reports submitted to the university administration. There is a lot of repetition and duplication. Everything is in perfect order; no one could claim the author was disorganized. And then, in another file for another statistics course, he comes across another communication between Zubeida and Party leadership, this one even more recent.

At this point, Khafaji goes through the remaining boxes, removing the statistics files set among the other course files. Eventually, he is sitting in front of a stack of dossiers, communiqués, memoranda, private letters, and notes. It is not
clear what they all are, only that they would be damning if they landed in the Americans' hands.

Khafaji leans back in his chair. Only then does he notice that Rawls has left the room. Khafaji begins stuffing the correspondence into Manila envelopes. He puts those inside plastic binders and hides them in a desk drawer. Carefully, he puts the other materials back into the boxes they came from. He stacks the boxes and looks down the hall. He peers into Parodi's office. Empty. He walks down the hall to see the old office, but no one is there either. Only then does Khafaji look at his watch and see how late it is. Past 10 p.m. He walks back to the new office and takes the binders out of the drawer. He reconsiders the idea of leaving without saying anything, and decides to write a letter. After five minutes and five attempts at the first sentence, he gives up.
Just leave
. Khafaji sees a wool jacket hanging next to the door and borrows it.

Only when he hears the cheering downstairs does he realize that no one else is on the second floor. As he walks down the stairs, a man rushes by, shouting, “We got 'im, we got 'im!”

Khafaji walks through the cafeteria, and is surprised to see it packed to capacity. Some stare slack-jawed at the television sets. Others hug each other or slap each other's hands and dance. From the corner of the room, Jabbouri runs over to greet Khafaji. “Congratulations! It's unbelievable, isn't it?”

Khafaji stops and joins the others. At some point, he sets the binders on a chair next to him. They are watching a televised press conference. A man wearing combat fatigues reads a statement:
At approximately 8.26 p.m. local time, elements of the Fourth Infantry Division and Special Operating Forces raided a farm compound about fifteen kilometers south of Tikrit, capturing former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. At least 600 troops were
involved in the raid, which resulted in the capture of Hussein and two men, armed with AK-47s. Hussein was found hiding in a six-by-eight-foot crawl space below an outbuilding, armed with a pistol and carrying $750,000. Saddam Hussein was then transported by helicopter en route to a secure, undisclosed location without incident
.

Khafaji feels a slap on his back and turns around to see Louis Ford. They shake hands, even though Khafaji is not sure why. Everyone is congratulating each other, and Khafaji shakes dozens of hands before he is able to leave the room.

Khafaji reaches the front steps of Ibn Sina and takes out his last cigarette. Without a lighter, he puts it back. There is no one at the reception desk when he signs in. He looks down the corridor and into an empty room, then notices a crowd of nurses gathered around a television set. He is walking down the hall toward Mrouj's room when a nurse calls out, “It's after…” Then she smiles and says, “She's been moved!” She comes over and leads Khafaji down another hallway.

Mrouj is fast asleep when Khafaji walks in. He sets down the binders next to the bed, pulls up a chair, and waits. Every now and then, he strokes Mrouj's hair and touches her hand. It is quiet. Only when he looks around does he notice there's only one monitor. The only personal object is the poetry primer sitting on the nightstand. He looks for the other files he left, but they are gone.

An hour goes by. Khafaji sits there, aware that Mrouj is asleep for the night. He gets up and leaves quietly, but not before stacking the files on the nightstand. As he walks out, he asks the nurse, “Why have they moved her?”

The woman nods and smiles. “Her condition has finally started to improve. When you see the doctor, he can tell you about it. She's responding very well to the new medication.”

He shakes her hand and says, “Thank you, you are a good person.”

Khafaji pulls the borrowed jacket around him to keep the cold out. He reaches for his cigarettes, then walks as fast as he can toward the gates. Two American soldiers insist on slapping his hand and congratulating him before he can leave.

Sunday

14 December 2003

Khafaji sleeps deep and dreamlessly. He gets out of bed once in the early morning, then goes back to sleep. Each time he begins to wake up, he closes his eyes again. Eventually his stomach pushes him out from under the covers. He shuffles to the kitchen and goes to make tea. The water's off. He looks around for bottles of water, but can't find any. He finds a tin cup and holds it under the bathtub tap. A small stream spills out, enough to fill the cup. Khafaji feels the stubble on his cheeks and looks at himself in the mirror, then decides to give up and go out.

As he puts on his shoes, he notices a small stack of books sitting on the rug next to his reading chair. He looks at the titles. Nazik al-Malaika's diwan sits on top.

Khafaji smiles as he passes the guard on the second-floor landing. The young man stands and salutes as Khafaji walks by. The guards downstairs offer Khafaji tea, and for once he accepts. One man puts down his gun and puts three cubes of sugar in a small glass on the tray. He pours the tea and stirs. The clink of the spoon in the glass echoes up and down the stairwell. The man hands the tray to Khafaji. He takes the glass and sips. When he finishes that, they pour a second
glass and then a third. For the next few minutes, they drink their tea together in silence.

When Khafaji finally sets down the glass, he thanks them. On the curb, he looks down the street. It's quiet. Some pedestrians walk past, their heads bowed, their eyes on the ground as they thread through the debris. Khafaji walks over to Abu Nuwas Street. He looks up at the thick black clouds gathering to the north of the city. The air feels cold and pregnant.

When he signs in at the reception desk, a new nurse smiles at Khafaji. He walks down the old corridor and only realizes his mistake after walking into Mrouj's old room, now occupied by a frightened old man. When he gets to her new room, Mrouj isn't there. Stacks of folders are strewn all over her bed, the nightstand, the chair and the windowsill. Khafaji starts to straighten the papers when he hears a clicking sound behind him. He turns to see a frail Mrouj standing in the doorway. Her hands grip the metal walker so hard her knuckles are white.