The Good Lieutenant (6 page)

Her actions and her words felt thick and meat-headed—as bad as Masterson's riff on Watts—and yet Faisal overopened his eyes and licked his lips to simulate eagerness to please. Then, as he focused on the text, his features shut down, as if a plastic sheet had covered them. No need to translate that. “It is nobody,” he said. “This man.”

“What I'm curious about,” she said, “is when you're going to realize that you might want to start telling the truth. If you think I'm here to save you”—when Faisal made a move to protest, she grabbed his face where Anderson had bruised it—“I'd ask myself, why aren't I being processed? I offered to take you back to Camp Tolerance, but these guys, the one who hit you—”

“Anderson.”

“Anderson told me that there wasn't any paperwork on you.”

She backed off, waited. Faisal limped to the threshold of his cell and nodded at the door, which she opened. “Three letters,” he said. He held up three fingers, his zip-cuffed hands paired beneath his chin, then jumped over the threshold with an odd sideways hop, as if skipping rope. “Three letters, personal testimony from real Iraqis, yes? We take, we fax to Washington, get okay, the bad guys go in here. Hard to get, this testimony. This guy is bad, he did this to me. People know but don't want to say. So I write them—”

“Yeah, I know, you translate Masterson's arrest affidavits,” Fowler said, though Faisal's tone caused her to shiver, to notice the sweat cooling beneath her undershirt.

“No, I
make them up
,” Faisal said. There was a strangely mechanical element to his speech. “Whoever he wants to shoot, whoever he wants to detain, I make up a story of how they are bad. Like in a movie. So if the captain arrests
me
”—he tapped the socket of his eye, then pointed out across the dusty expanse of the patrol base and made a whooshing sound, fanning out his fingers, as if a flood had covered everything in sight—“everybody, every people he send to jail the past six months, they go free. And these people will come to find him personally. He knows this, so he does not charge me.”

“You faked the affidavits,” Fowler said.

“What the fuck?” Faisal said. “How else does he catch so many this way?”

*   *   *

Twenty minutes later, Fowler pushed into the last of eight long brown tents that occupied the southern end of the patrol base. Masterson's staff had warned her not to disturb the captain at this time of day, and the farther she wandered down the stifling rows of empty bunks, draped with gear, Kevlars, and sweaty fatigues, the less certain she was that ignoring their warning was a sound tactic. The tent's far end had been sectioned off by a wall of egg crates and she found him there, laid out like a pharaoh, an iPod glowing on his chest, his bare, callused feet atop a plain white sheet. A thick line of black crew cut scalloped low across his forehead, and his skin was acne-pitted, which, when he was awake, gave his features a roughened look but now resembled a putty covering for some other, younger face. “Sir, could I talk to you for a minute?” she asked.

Masterson raised his eyebrows, rubbing the back of his head against his wrists. He'd been a club rugby player at Oklahoma State and, at Fort Riley, a serious lifter, but he'd dropped at least twenty pounds, and now sat up gingerly, as if his skeleton had been riddled with some incurable disease—not a good sign, especially if what Faisal had told her was true. “You'll have to excuse me,” he said. He made an effort to lift his head, but this failed, and he belched and quickly aimed his gaze at the floor again. “This is not really my best time of day. We're running these patrols all night. It's a twenty-four-hour operation. I like to be there. So this is really my time to sleep.”

There was, for the first time, a hint of apology in his voice—though it was factual, not self-pitying—and by way of answer, since she wasn't leaving, Fowler reached under his makeshift desk, grabbed a wheeled stool, and rolled it between her knees.

“Why'd you have Faisal detained?” she said.

Masterson chuckled as if she'd made a joke, then spat dryly into a wastebasket. “There's a killing field out here along Route Trap. An old field where Faisal used to play soccer as a kid. Yesterday, Anderson finds a body out there with a communiqué pinned to its chest, saying Faisal organized the bombing at the Muthanna intersection.”

A large floor fan thrummed in the center of the tent and music tinkled out of Masterson's earbuds as he curled them up. No other accompaniment to tell her whether this story should be believed. “Why, he give you something?” he asked.

“I showed Faisal this,” she said, producing the same note Masterson had read that morning. “He wouldn't admit it, but I think he recognized the drawings and the writing. He also had some comments about how he was detained.”

If he heard this last remark, Masterson ignored it. Instead, he perched on the edge of his cot, his bare feet flat on the gravel and his head bent, examining the pen-and-ink sketches, their startling facility. “So Pulowski interviews some hadji at the schoolhouse,” he said. “The guy draws a couple of weird pictures and then leaves. So what?”

It was a decent question, except that it seemed designed to avoid the subject of Faisal's detention, as if Pulowski's story, up on the surface, were a distraction for some worse and troubling shadow in the depths. “An unidentified Iraqi gave Lieutenant Pulowski this when we linked up with you at the schoolhouse after the kidnapping,” she said, reviewing the facts. “He said the guy was … friendly. Trying to communicate. So he went to get Faisal, and the minute Faisal walks in, the guy just freaks.”

“Why didn't he report this to you at the time?”

Now
her
secrets glided up, black and quiet, beneath the conversation. Pulowski's confession back in her trailer. Her own responsibility for Beale. “I'm just saying, sir, look at the drawing.” She pointed to the sketch of the dark angel, engaging in some equal-opportunity misdirection. “That's a person, isn't it? A white guy, not an Iraqi. I'm not saying that
has
to be Sergeant Beale, but given what you've told me about Faisal—”

Masterson glanced up quickly, wolfishly, with a glint of amusement in his eye. “Wasn't Pulowski
with
your missing soldier when he got taken? So, this guy loses a soldier. Then he comes up with a story about how some Iraqi
might
be responsible, but doesn't detain the guy? And you trust this information?”

By then she was no longer sure who was misdirecting whom. No one had entered the tent since she'd come in, the empty bunks still looming awkwardly at her back, as if Masterson's soldiers felt the same way. She folded her hands and put her boots together, scanning the small space where Masterson lived. There were piles of underwear and brown T-shirts at the end of the bed. Stray Styrofoam containers from the cook shack. She recognized the mess, recognized its similarity to her own trailer, as well as what it meant. Flying off the handle wasn't going to help her here. Not if there weren't any handles left. “Sir,” she said, “when I was talking to Faisal, he had a couple of things to say about how he was detained. Could I ask you about them, please?”

“Like what?”

“Like what's going on with your arrest affidavits?”

For a moment Masterson's old arrogance seemed to rise up, and he glowered at Fowler from between his flattened hands, as if she'd failed to consider how dangerous that comment could be. Then he said:

“You've got a lot of balls, Fowler. That's fucking good. You and Beale. You guys ran well together. You were a good team. It's the best thing about you, loyalty. That and balls. I can understand how you'd get all broken up about this thing—”

She and Beale had never run well together as a team.

“I'm not arguing your detainee policy, sir,” she lied in return.
Everything
about Masterson's detainee policy was arguable, but she wanted to focus on the worst part, the key. As Faisal had indicated, his company had by far the highest kill and detention rates in the battalion—over 350 Iraqis total. They were
all
supposed to have signed affidavits and approval from a judge advocate general before anybody targeted them. If Masterson was forging his paperwork, however, he could kill or detain innocents. Strangers. Whomever he liked. “But faking arrest affidavits is a totally different thing.”

“Who said anything about that?”

“Faisal. According to him, that's why he's on your staff.”

If Masterson had blustered at her, if he'd yelled at her as he had back at Fort Riley, she might have left right then. But instead, he tottered to his desk for a bottle of water, rinsed his mouth, and spat, as if the sickness had risen up inside him again.

“You think that's the solution here? Better paperwork?” Masterson had dropped into a squat, his bare feet spread, showing her his back. “Or do you think maybe it's arresting guys who I think are going to kill my men? With or without the paperwork.”

There was some minor shred of truth in that. In the long string of choices that had led to Beale's disappearance, filing honest paperwork had turned out to be a hindrance, if not a mistake. “Why don't we talk about your objectives here instead?” Masterson asked. “You're in the Army. We're having a war. You lose a soldier, that's just what happens. That's the game. So I got to figure there's something else at stake.”

“I wasn't there to help him,” Fowler said.

“Why do you have to take responsibility for that? Isn't it true that you requested backup from the battalion and that backup didn't arrive?”

“Yes,” she said.

“You don't think that absolves you?”

“No,” she said.

“So we're on the same page, Lieutenant. I sent men to
that same intersection
three months ago. I knew it was poorly defended. I clearly registered my protest but was ordered to do it anyway. I followed orders. The Muthanna intersection was attacked, my men died. I know who did it. To me, that doesn't feel right.”

I know who did it.
That was the shadow beneath their conversation. Any interpreter had access to sensitive intel. They were always the first and most dangerous candidates for a leak. The problem was that Masterson had hired Faisal
because
he was dishonest, because he could be taught to falsely detain or kill who knew how many hundreds of his countrymen. He'd trained his own traitor. Now he wanted to cover his mistake. “Come on, Fowler. Give yourself a break,” he said. “You've done the hard part. You found your target. You're not responsible for me. Leave the rule-book shit to Seacourt and Hartz. I don't see either of them out here fixing anything.”

Fowler snorted. The things that they were discussing—murder, torture, her own complicity in the same—were things that she had never imagined considering. Choices she'd always believed she'd know not to make. But the language seemed personable, normal, and when she tipped her head and gazed up at the tent's ceiling, the sun glowed golden through the fabric, as it always did. It was jail if she went along with Masterson and got found out. She did wrong here or she abandoned her only lead on finding Beale. The variable was Pulowski, who might very well turn
her
in if he found out. On the other hand, if he wasn't responsible for what had happened to Beale, he deserved to know he was clean. She trundled over atop the stool and plucked the note from his hand. The two drawings—one of the anonymous Iraqi, the other, she believed, of Beale—were underlined by slanting scratches of Arabic. The one clear thing she'd felt all day had been the guilt of the beaten interpreter, Faisal, when she'd seen him in the shed. It was still there, the feeling of it twining up around her skin, black-rooted, the vines of it—though of course she could not see any such thing in reality—seeming to whisper against her, as if growing out of her own skin. “Whoever wrote this note,” she said, “leads us to Beale.”

“And Faisal?”

“If Faisal is leaking your intel, he has to have somebody to leak it to, right? Why wouldn't it be this guy? Maybe he got nervous. Maybe he wanted to confess. Maybe that would explain why the guy freaked out when Faisal came in.”

Masterson looked at the note, glanced up. “Shit,” he said.

“My feeling is, we get this translated, see if it matches what Faisal told Pulowski. If it doesn't, I go get these cameras and stake out this guy's place. And you lean on Faisal to tell us where it is. Which you appear to be doing anyway.”

“I knew there was a good reason I let you stay,” Masterson said, smiling.

“I am not good,” Fowler said. She had not consciously moved the rolling stool that she'd been perched on, so when their knees touched, she was surprised and quickly flinched away. “I'm just improvising.”

“Yeah, well,” Masterson said, “welcome to the team.”

*   *   *

Fowler stood for a time in the sunlight, staring out over the barren infield of the patrol base, the surrounding blast walls and sniper towers, trying to shake off the crawling darkness that she'd felt in Masterson's tent. Then she went to check on her platoon. The tent they'd been assigned had a single hole in its roof, which Masterson had told her had come from a mortar attack, and when she pushed through the front flap, Crawford was crouched in a column of daylight, examining an unplugged air-conditioning unit that looked as if it had been smashed by a giant fist.

“You got a little project there?” she asked.

Crawford peered up at her with his child's unlined skin. “My grandma has one like this. York. Shame to ruin a good AC unit like this.”

“You think your grandma can send us hers?”

“I doubt it. She's real attached to it.” He was still examining the top of the boxy AC unit, the hole that had been punched in its lid. “They say the shell came through and landed right here. Didn't go off. They all just sat there real quiet, looking at it.”