The Good Lieutenant

by Whitney Terrell

  Pulowski considered this. He hadn’t spoken to McKutcheon since returning from the Muthanna intersection where the attack had taken place. So there was no reason the major would know that he’d had a front-row seat for Beale’s abduction. “No,” he said.

  “You didn’t see anything?”

  “We got hit. There was a shooter in one of the buildings beside the intersection. The word I got was that Beale got picked off going in.” He was walking fairly briskly between the white ranks of trailers that housed the battalion—taking care to avoid Fowler’s and, especially, Beale’s. As he’d expected, he felt less guilty now that he’d allowed McKutcheon to make the case for doing nothing, rather than making it himself.

  “I’m just saying,” he continued, “if we’d had a camera at the exact same intersection two months ago, we would’ve stopped that truck bomb, don’t you think? No truck bomb, no dead soldiers. And if there aren’t any dead soldiers—and we already have a camera set up—then nobody’s out at the Muthanna intersection yesterday.”

  “Maybe,” McKutcheon said. “Except that truck was stopped two months ago. Fredrickson and Arthur checked the driver’s papers before the bomb went off.”

  A small electrified charge lit Pulowski’s stomach, a feeling that resembled the spark of despair when he found bad code early in a command—from this fork branched a thousand possible mistakes. “Why would they do that?”

  “They let the truck through,” McKutcheon said, “because, apparently, we were paying an Iraqi contractor to haul gravel to a construction site inside Muthanna. Spreading a little U.S. taxpayer money around. Somebody must have slipped the driver the right papers. Not to mention filled him in on our entire routine.”

  “We were paying the bomber?”

  “Or at least his boss. Look, you got off of this detail easy, Pulowski. Everything about the Muthanna intersection has been a clusterfuck from start to finish. Setting the cameras up yesterday was strictly a cover-your-ass project for the colonel. It didn’t work. He’s got a bigger problem on his hands now. If I were you, I’d leave it that way.”

  He smiled at the comforting Homer Simpson nihilism of McKutcheon’s advice. He’d been called in to work intel when Alpha Company lost a tank back in January. The ambush outside Al-Shula. During all these disasters McKutcheon had talked this way.

  By then he’d slipped into the battalion’s “Cyber Café,” which occupied a ramshackle wood shed, and a private showed him to an ancient, clicking Acer computer, set on a long plastic folding table, bookended by a pair of palm trees. It was in the base’s smaller public spaces—the toilets, phone banks, and computer clusters—that McKutcheon’s philosophy made the most sense. A half dozen soldiers hunkered around him, heads bowed, boots spread wide, postures submissive—already defeated—before happy onscreen cornucopias of bank ads, Web graphics, and interactive news feeds. One had begun to cry, hands clutching the back of his head. All of them were or would soon be involved in the hunt for Beale, and every inch of their unhappiness could be explained and even possibly prevented by his own personal cartoon slogan: Safety Comes in Can’t.

  He’d invented it in this very room, on similar nights when shit had gone bad and he had sat here trying to email his mother, staring up at a plastic banner mounted by the same geniuses who’d named the cafeteria Camp Chillin’:

  SAFETY COMES IN CANS

  I CAN

  WE CAN

  YOU CAN

  What if somebody, somewhere, had simply argued that the safest thing was can’t? Even Senator Kerry hadn’t quite had the guts. He’d stood there, grim and hatchet-faced at the convention, watching can-do photos of his Vietnam days, and then the swift boats came and took him out. Why? Because ’Nam had been a great big pile of can’t. As a signal officer, can’t was one principle Pulowski never sold short. The other came from a book he’d read for English class at Pitt, whose touchy-feely motto he’d also Homerized: Do not connect. Both self-evident truths, nowhere more obvious than in the pleasures of the Cyber Café when shit was truly going bad. The fact that he’d never managed to convince Fowler to see any of that wasn’t his responsibility.

  At the same time, none of this accounted for how he’d felt when he’d watched Carl Beale disappear into that alley doorway. That was the tidal wave of stupid that he’d been counting on McKutcheon to talk him out of, its oncoming boil cold and gray, carrying with it death and rot, wreck and stink. “So what you’re telling me,” he said, “is that we have a device that might very well … no, no, no … would be demonstrably helpful to our soldiers in the field. Americans. People who you and I know personally. And yet you’re lying about its readiness because … why? Because we’re afraid to go outside the wire and set up the thing?”

  The phone was dead by then. When he hung up, Pulowski stared for some time at the email on his screen, reading first the text, and then allowing his eyes to swim across the Kelly-green banner flashing at the top of the screen:

  E*TRADE—DISCOVER THE POWER OF YOU

  Also deeply stupid. Also clearly not a message designed for geeks. It would’ve been much better if he hadn’t worn the shirt. He’d figured out by then why it didn’t fit. Every time he stretched the fabric down around his belly button, he could smell Fowler’s scent drifting up out of it. Then he cut-and-pasted Colonel Seacourt’s email into the top line, CC’d everybody except McKutcheon, and typed:

  Sir,

  I am the project coordinator for the mobile camera network. There has been a miscommunication between myself and Major McKutcheon. The camera system has been fully tested and is ready for deployment. I will have it outside the offices of the 16th Engineer Brigade at 0800 hours tomorrow morning, ready for pickup.

  Sincerely,

  LT Dixon Pulowski

  Then he hit send.

  * * *

  Patrol Base Fortitude was no larger than a high school football stadium, set out in a bean field forty miles north of Camp Tolerance, surrounded by blast walls, domed by empty sky. Fowler handed the note to Captain Masterson on the doorstep of the farmhouse that served as his TOC. Her convoy had arrived the night before and she could feel her soldiers watching from the barren infield as she explained how Pulowski had gotten the note, and why it might be a clue to Beale’s abduction. It could be nothing, she admitted, but she’d like to talk to his interpreter just to be sure. Masterson listened, forefinger rubbing his tallow cheeks, and then abruptly headed toward the base’s motor pool—followed by Fowler, who didn’t know what else to do. Once they were out of sight, Masterson veered right toward a concrete hut with sandbagged windows. Out front, his first lieutenant, Anderson, stood quickly from a plastic chair.

  “All right.” Masterson stopped short of the building’s door, which had been fitted with a shiny brass lock. “Trust me, Lieutenant. This is not something you’re going to be excited about. The advice I’m giving you is to go home and forget it.”

  “Yessir,” Fowler said. “I just—”

  “Do you know where we are, Lieutenant?”

  “We’re at the intersection of Route Tender and Route Trap.”

  “Actually, this base is on the border between the Al-Tamimi tribe, which is Shi’ite, and the Al-Dulaymi tribe, which is Sunni. It’s like having an apartment in Watts between the Bloods and the Crips. All those guys at the schoolhouse? Sunni. Except for Faisal, no Shi’ites came. So trust me when I say you have no idea where you are.”

  Fowler returned this stare bluntly for a few moments, asserting—what, exactly, she wasn’t sure. That she was as capable of being overconfident and condescending as Masterson? That she hoped he knew more about the local population than he did about South Central L.A.? Then she said: “Sir, I already requested backup. They’re coming out. All I want to do is talk to your interpreter. Is there some problem with that?” As she spoke, she felt a pinch on the insides of her wrists so strong that she rubbed them.

  Masterson wrinkled his forehead as if still uncertain what to do with her. He glanced back
at Anderson, who was unlocking the building.

  “You’re free out here, sir,” she said, scrambling to register some argument that he might take seriously. “You’re free to operate.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Masterson said grimly. “Freedom—that’s what we’re all about, Lieutenant. The problem is we got too much of it around here.”

  If this was a joke, or even an unexpectedly intelligent comment, Fowler couldn’t tell it from his face. Instead, as Anderson’s bald head disappeared into the dark shed, Fowler noticed Masterson fiddling with a roll of black electrical tape that he’d earlier removed from his pocket. He fitted a strip over the stitched FOWLER on her fatigues, tearing it with his teeth, then tossed the roll to his lieutenant as he reemerged. This made the cuffed figure who shuffled along beside Anderson, accompanied by the searing, eye-watering reek of unwashed human flesh, all the more surprising. It was Faisal Amar, the smart-ass interpreter who worked for Delta Company, the young man with the mole and the dusty gray suit. The man she’d come to see. “Faisal has begun working with us in a more advisory capacity,” Masterson said. “Maybe you’d like to advise him to share his knowledge of what happened to Sergeant Beale yesterday.”

  * * *

  Faisal Amar’s condition, his dangling arm and tufts of missing hair, embarrassed her more than she’d expected—worse, somehow, than when Beale had hit him three weeks earlier, because the injuries seemed almost meditative. Deliberate rather than passionate. She also disliked the clothes that Masterson’s lieutenants had dressed him in, once they’d taken him into custody: scrawny, shifty arms sticking out of a Lakers jersey like a drag queen’s, a pair of oversize shower slippers on his crusty feet. But his hostility was clear enough. You saw guys like that at gas stations in Kansas City: pompous, sallow-eyed, acting like they had a secret answer to everything. Real sweeties to women, they were supposed to be. Wondered why their countries looked like shit when they kept trying to blow up everything. After Lieutenant Anderson left, he studied her face, then shrugged at her covered name tag. “I know you,” he said.

  “Yes, you do,” Fowler said, peeling off the tape.

  “Three weeks ago you beat me up. Now you lose a soldier. Man, you are on some kind of streak.” She got a genuine leer out of his thin face, salt whitening the corners of his mouth: they had bad luck in common. A nice thought. Unless it wasn’t bad luck at all that Faisal appeared to be connected to both of these events.

  “You remember a lieutenant named Pulowski?”

  Here was some bad acting in her opinion: squinting, ceiling examined, eye movements to suggest the ruffle of memory. “Which time is this?”

  “He brought you to this man.” She showed him the note that Pulowski had given her and pointed to the drawing of the anonymous Iraqi’s face. “We think he has information about my missing soldier, Sergeant Beale. We also think you know him and you pretended not to. Why would you do that, Faisal? Why would you lie to us in such an important case?”

  “We do hundreds of these, lady,” Faisal said, “a million, whatever. Come on. I do not know this person.” He craned his neck so he could shout around her, toward the door. “Hey, boss. You got somebody more interesting for me?”

  She felt a trigger flipping in her head, lower than her brain—down in the spinal cord, the center of the neck—and she jerked his slim, champagne-flute wrist down and leaned in, her elbows on his knees. “Just read the goddamn paper!” she said. “Read it and tell me the truth about what it says.”

  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.
<
br />   “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?”