The Ambassador's Wife (5 page)

Once Corduroy has found refuge, Miranda carries Cressida down the corridor and through the little kitchen to her room, where she lays her in her cot. Negasi has already drawn the blinds and lined up Cressie's sleuth of bears at the edge of her mattress. With a wail of protest, Cressie stands, reaching for her mother. “Tesas!” she yelps. “Tesas!” Miranda sighs. “Okay, just once though.” She heaves her daughter out of the cot and takes one chubby little hand in hers, as if they are ballroom dancing. And swaying in circles around the room, she sings:

When we dance together my world's in disguise

It's a fairyland tale that's come true

And when you look at me with those stars in your eyes

I could waltz across Texas with you

A few choruses later Cressie grows limp in her arms, her head abruptly heavy against Miranda's shoulder. Her voice fading to a hum, Miranda tiptoes over to the cot. When she lays her daughter down on her back, Cressie's eyes fly open for a moment, find her mother's, and apparently comforted by the sight, she falls instantly back to sleep.

M
IRANDA IS HALFWAY
down the front steps when she remembers the wine. Damn! She drops her backpack, fumbles with the key
again, and races back through the house. “Teru!” she calls, skidding around the corner into the kitchen. Teru looks up from a mixing bowl, placid, imperturbable, accustomed to Miranda treating the house as a running track. Miranda has never seen her flustered. You could say to Teru, “We'll be having twenty-seven people to dinner tonight, including five vegetarians, four vegans, three people with celiac disease, two with lactose intolerance, and one on the Atkins diet,” and she wouldn't even blink. Of course, she, Negasi, Desta, and the men are all Orthodox Christians who observe seven fasting periods a year, eschewing all meat and dairy, so they are perhaps unfazed by dietary restrictions.

“Wine, I forgot the wine. Remind me what we decided for dinner tonight?”

“Fish,” says Teru. “With garlic and chili. And the spinach and mashed potatoes.”

“Right! Thanks! Where's Negasi?”

“Here, Madame.” Negasi has appeared from nowhere, her hands folded against the white apron she wears over the green-checked uniform.

“Hi! Would you mind helping me with the wine? I almost forgot about it.”

Negasi follows her downstairs to the door of the wine cellar, which Miranda unlocks with the key they always leave in the door. She loves the smell of the wine cellar, its dank alcoholic air like that of a pub toward closing time. How this happens when every bottle and can is sealed is a mystery, but it does. The wine cellar is one of their greatest pleasures. Over the past few years Finn and Miranda have slowly filled it with wines from all over the world. They have been experimental, ordering things they'd never heard of, from every price range. They've even ordered the odd liqueur, like Bénédictine and Suze.

Miranda turns toward the wall of whites, running her fingertips over the dusty bottles. Something light and dry, probably something Australian. She chooses a sauvignon blanc and passes several bottles to Negasi. Together they carry them upstairs and load them into the drinks refrigerator. Plenty of time for them to cool before dinner.

“Thank you,” says Miranda, already running back toward the door. “I'll pick out the red when I get back!”

AUGUST 9, 2010

Finn

By the time Finn gets to his office 347 e-mails await him, the average number lying in wait after a weekend. Sighing, he turns away from his computer and opens his briefcase to pull out the morning's newspapers. They don't necessarily illuminate what goes on in the country, but at least reading them exercises his Arabic. No surprises today; nothing about the looming threat of civil war, the restless youth of the North, or the increasing scarcity of food. Rather, “Saudi Arabia donates dates for Ramadan,” “Minister beautifully unveils new democracy project for children,” “UNICEF holds fund-raiser at the Sheraton.” Stop the presses! What he wouldn't give to just once read a headline that tells it like it is. “President once more pays off corrupt cronies with country's oil money” perhaps. Or “Women still treated like crap in every single governorate.” Miranda would like that one. He smiles. Mira. His stomach still does a delirious flip when he remembers she lives in his house, that she will be there at the end of the day. If only there weren't the EU ambassadors' dinner this evening. It has been more than two weeks since they had the house to themselves, free from guests. At night they had to make love surreptitiously, hands over each other's mouths to keep from waking the police in the bedroom next door, often dissolving into fits of laughter that are equally hard to stifle. It would also be nice to get home early enough to read Cressie her bedtime stories one of these days, before she forgets who he is. Still. He is a lucky man; he doesn't lose sight of that for an instant. He had all but given up by the time Miranda splashed down in his staid world.

He's still glancing through the headlines, struggling to fend off the image of Miranda's tawny limbs tangled in his sheets, when his personal assistant, Lyle, pokes his head in to remind him of his first meeting. It's all-staff first, then a meeting with his defense attaché
about the pirate situation. If it weren't for the incessant meetings, he might be able to get some work done. As he heads out, he glances at his computer once more. There are now 368 e-mails, at least a couple dozen marked URGENT.

Most are probably pirate-related. He had worked all weekend on the pirate situation, much to Miranda's dismay. Friday, a British Royal Navy ship picked up a Mazrooqi dhow that had been boarded by Somali pirates and was attacking a Finnish vessel. In the confrontation with the Brits, three Somalis and two Mazrooqis were killed. But even with the pirates all either dead or in captivity, Finn's work was just beginning. It was the embassy's responsibility to figure out what to do with the boat, the crew, and the corpses. First, he wants to repatriate the Mazrooqi corpses, which requires getting diplomatic clearance to send them in a British helicopter over Mazrooqi waters. Then he needs to figure out what to do with the Somali bodies. Both Mazrooq and Somalia refuse to accept the pirates' bodies. Not a lot of countries clamoring for decomposing criminals, actually. So Finn then has to figure out how the navy could give the Somalis a proper Muslim burial at sea. Merely tossing them overboard could trigger a diplomatic crisis with unpredictable consequences.

After the dead are taken care of, Finn needs to decide what to do with the living. The surviving Mazrooqis must be brought home. He has sought assurances from the Mazrooqi Foreign Minister that the surviving Somalis would not be put to death if they were brought to trial here; the UK forbids the death penalty. The Foreign Minister has thus far refused to guarantee this, saying that to do so would undermine the independence of the justice system. So then where are the Somalis to be sent? Maybe Kenya? Finn reminds himself to put in a call to the British High Commissioner in Nairobi later this afternoon, to see if he can sort out a way to get the prisoners tried there.

The Defense Attaché is waiting in his office when Finn gets back from the staff meeting, legs crossed, reading a dog-eared copy of Hisham Matar's
Anatomy of a Disappearance
. “How did you get here so fast? Didn't we just come from the same meeting?”

“Teleported. A new stealth technology we're trying out in the navy.” Leo closes his book without marking his place. He memorizes
the page numbers, he'd told Finn. A shared love of order was one of the many things that bonded the two men.

“Glad to hear it. Might come in handy with the pirate situation.”

“Figured if that kid Harry Potter can do it, why not the world's best military?”

“I think he apparated, actually.”

“Same thing, from a technical standpoint. Good to know you're keeping up with contemporary literature though.”

“I do my best. So?”

“Well, the good news is that we have permission for the helicopters. They'll bring the Mazrooqi bodies back here later this afternoon.”

“And the living?”

“Them too.”

“I've got a call in to the president's imam to find out how to bury the Somalis at sea.” Finn flips open his pocket-size calendar. Paper. He's endlessly mocked for his old-fashioned tastes, but he's sure that if his entire schedule were on something electronic, he'd accidentally drop it in the toilet. At least paper dries out. “At three p.m. If he actually rings then, and you know how unlikely that is, I'll let you know our instructions.”

“Do we need to get ahold of a Quran?”

“Probably. But I don't know. Ever been to a Muslim funeral?”

“Seen them go by my house. With the corpse on a stretcher under a rug. Not sure where they go with it though.”

“Find out. Could be useful someday. Not with the Somalis, of course. They're off to make a whole lot of fish happy.”

“A pleasing role reversal.” Leo is the only military man Finn knows who is also a devout vegetarian. And he isn't a small man. At six foot seven, with glossy flaxen hair, a rosy complexion, and thickly muscled torso, Leo is a poster boy for the vegetarian lifestyle. Must blow the Mazrooqis' minds, a vegetarian DA. “I see enough death at work,” he'd said simply. “I don't need to see it on my dinner plate.”

When Leo heads off to organize the helicopters, Finn turns to his e-mails, now numbering 379. Lyle brings him a cup of Earl Grey and he opens the first one, an update on a water project down south.
If only he could do his job without e-mails. He is a slow, methodical thinker and he types with two fingers. E-mails that would take Mira ten minutes to write take him two hours. His talents lie elsewhere, in negotiating agreements with the president and his men, arguing politics with tribal sheikhs, and encouraging consensus among disparate groups, which is why the other European ambassadors chose him to lead mediation efforts to head off open hostilities. And while he is typically self-deprecating when speaking of his linguistic abilities, he is secretly proud of his Arabic. When the president meets with Finn, he dismisses his translator in favor of Finn's superior ear for nuance.

When Finn has cleared 170 e-mails (mostly by hitting the ever-handy Delete button), he allows himself to ring Miranda. The sound of her voice, cheery and warm, soothes him. Reassured of her continual presence on the planet, he opens his lunch bag. He never has time for lunch out unless it's official, so Negasi packs him sandwiches. He's halfway through the first one when Dax, First Secretary Political and their resident spook, sticks his head in the door.

“Got a minute? Oh, sorry, you're eating.”

“I can listen and chew at the same time. If you don't mind. Come in.” Finn waves a hand at his leather sofa.

“It's about the kidnappings up north.” Dax comes in, closing the door behind him. “We may need the police back, to do some forensics.”

“Oh, Dax, no.” Feeling suddenly queasy, Finn drops the remains of his sandwich back into the aluminum foil.

“I'm afraid so.”

“All of them?”

“All except one. The Dutch boy is still missing.”

“Jesus.”

“I know.”

The two men sit in silence for a moment.

“Anyone claim responsibility?”

“Not yet. A few hallmarks of AQ, but could be Zajnoon's people. They can be pretty brutal. But we don't know.”

“I'll ring the families,” says Finn.

“They're still here, at the InterContinental.”

“I'll go over then. Brief me.”

Dax unfolds the particulars of the horror, the search that led to the row of headless corpses found in a mass grave up north. The heads were buried several feet away.

“The Dutch and the French know? And the Germans?”

“Their guys were with us.”

When Dax leaves, Finn rings the other ambassadors to offer his condolences and vow to collaborate further on the search for the killers. And then all four of them head off to strip the frantic families of their last remaining shreds of hope.

I
N THE CAR
, a new dread leaps onto his shoulders. Miranda is out walking today. She wouldn't have heard of the killings, no one would have. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office had managed to keep the disappearances out of the papers entirely. It had surprised him when he began his career, just how much the FCO managed to withhold from the press, how many missing people. But this was critical; publicity was disastrous for hostage negotiations. Not only did it give violent men the spotlight they craved but it gave them an exaggerated idea of their victims' importance, often resulting in astronomical ransom requests. The media were also all too frequently stupid enough to disclose details about a hostage—that he was Jewish or gay or American—that put his or her life in further danger. Finn was all for freedom of the press, but not at the expense of a life.

Struggling with the seat belt, he extracts his mobile from his pocket and rings her. It goes straight to voice mail. She's probably just out of range. He rings Tucker. “They're nowhere near up north, Finn,” he says. “It's a totally safe area. Never been an incident. It's Sharaq, where the president comes from. Just a forty-five-minute drive.”

Somewhat more at ease, Finn flips his phone shut. He has got to stop being so paranoid. She'll be fine. She always is.

I
T
'
S NEARLY
5:00 p.m. by the time Finn gets back to his office, having left two disintegrating families in his wake. The father of one of the British women wouldn't even look at him, just sat on the beige leather sofa with his face in his hands, tears running through his fingers and soaking the cuffs of his shirt. His wife had sat rocking beside him. “No,” she'd said over and over. “No no no no no.” The other couple had raged at him for not throwing their daughter out of the country. “How could you have let her stay in a country like this? Why didn't you warn her?” Finn had explained that the website of the Foreign Office did, in fact, warn against nonessential travel to the region, but that people ultimately had responsibility for their own safety. Muslim Mercy isn't ordinarily targeted, he'd added, so she may have felt she was safe with them. “She was doing good work, important work.” He'd paused, searching his memory for something to ameliorate their devastation. “She saved a lot of little children from starving. Where she was, the babies under one were all dying of malnutrition before Muslim Mercy arrived.”