“You, too? Sam is trying to get an interview with him. We haven’t succeeded yet.”
“What am I? An errand boy? The illiterate man around the office who makes the coffee? I am expected to translate these interviews, but also to pick up food and fuel and other supplies? And when I come back, if I’ve spent too much, I have to explain why I didn’t get a better price!”
He spits into the standing ashtray, about as high as his waist, to his right. A puff of grey particles go flying. “They treat us like they own us. That’s what a fixer is to them. Someone you own. Someone who will do anything you say. And we do it, because we have no choice. Just like the old days. Still living with a dictator, just a different kind.”
As he gives vent to his anger, I notice the sad lines running from the bottom rim of his eyelashes towards the arms of his bookish spectacles. He is lean and extraordinarily muscular, as I could be if I had some way to get exercise. I wonder if Sam could get me permission to swim laps in the pool.
“Sorry,” I clear my throat. “I don’t think I caught your name.”
He holds out his hand. “Taher al-Zubeidy.”
“Nabil al-Amari.”
“I know.”
“Sorry?”
“I just mean that I know your name because I’m often sitting here in the lobby waiting for my bloody journalist, and so I made friends with one of the guys behind the desk. He mentioned your name.”
I glance over to the desk and notice that the man from the first day, the one who gave me nasty looks, is not around. I glance at my watch; the face is more scratched than I’d noticed before. She said just a few minutes.
“What did you do before?” I ask Taher.
“Me?” he points to himself, as if I had struck up a conversation with him out of the blue.
I nod. He takes off his glasses and rubs the inner corners of his eyes. “I was living in London,” he says.
“Oh? I lived in Birmingham for a year and a half.”
He raises his eyebrows and looks away, seeming less than impressed, and already bored with me. “Yeah, well, we’ve been there for ten years. My parents convinced me to come back to witness the supposed liberation and to test whether it was safe for them to return. In truth, they wanted me to check on our house and our relatives. Well, our house has long since been taken over by people I don’t know, with more guns than I have ever seen in my life. My relatives are destitute, and they think my parents should have sent over more money with me to give them. I didn’t have a job in London anyway, but I had just been accepted on a post-graduate course.”
“Doing what?”
“Architecture and urban planning.”
“Wallahi, that’s very impressive.” I search for things to say. Should I ask him what kind of structures he hopes to build? He seems so miserable. I wonder what I would be like if we had stayed in Britain. “We’ll need good architects when the war is over,” I offer. “You can be the new Harun al-Rashid, directing the great reconstruction like in the Abbasid Dynasty.”
He gives a sceptical frown. “The war’s not ending anytime soon. And this itself is going to be the big business for the foreseeable future. Not building — destroying. And just because I speak English, I can sit here and take part in capturing the destruction, so people back in England can say, ‘Oh my, oh dear, dreadful, isn’t it?’ And then go back to their tea and crumpets and wish Mohammed at the chip shop well and go on with their nice, middle-class lives.”
I wish Sam would come. “So why did you stay?”
“What choice did I have? I was here and I went into the Sheraton Hotel to see if I could make an international phone call, and I met a journalist from Sky News. When they found out I was a native Iraqi with perfect English, they offered me a job. Starting at $150 a day, and they give me work every single day. I don’t take any days off and they’re very happy with that. Do you think I could make $4,500 a month in Britain right now, without anything more than a university degree? And do you know how hard it is to get a job when you have an Arab name? England sucks. It sucks here, and it sucks there, too. So may as well stay here.”
I glance at my watch again with a slight tilt of my wrist. In five more minutes I will use the internal hotel phone to check on Sam. Tell her that Rizgar says that if we’re going to Tikrit, we’d better get going.
“How old are you?” I ask flatly, hoping it will sound neutral.
“Twenty-one.” I had already begun to suspect he was young, but not that young. His body is fit, but the lines around his cheekbones make him look like he could be almost ten years older. “You?”
“I’m twenty-eight. Almost 29.” I imagine that sounds old to him. When I entered my twenties, people who were leaving them were, unlike me, actual adults.
“Married, then?”
“No.” I can picture Noor, and then Noor falling to the floor, and so I stand up quickly. “Really? Handsome bloke like you? Isn’t everybody here usually married by the time they’re twenty-five?”
“Not everybody. You know, not all of the foreigners lack respect. Some do, but the woman I work with is really an excellent journalist.”
“Yeah?” He laughs with a glaze in his eyes. “I’m sure she thinks you’re an excellent fixer!”
I offer him my hand, and he rises quickly and shakes it in both of his. “Oh, I’m sorry. I hope I haven’t said anything to offend.”
“Of course not. It’s just that I need to go back to confer with her now.”
“Aah. I see. She wants you in on the decision-making, does she?” He waves out a hand in an effeminate way. “Off you go!” His voice is raised an octave, making him sound like one of the schoolteachers in England, sending us out to play at breaktime. “Come back in an hour!” He looks around, as if speaking to someone just beyond me. “‘Would someone send the fixer out and tell him to come back in an hour?”‘
I wait for him to stop, hoping that no one is listening.
“Hey, Nabil. Sorry. Just taking the piss. Passing the time.”
“That’s all right. But I do need to go. You take care now.”
At the desk, I ask the man to dial Sam’s room. She picks up immediately, and before I even say a word, she knows it’s me. “Ten seconds!” she says, almost shouting. “I’ll be down in ten seconds.”
~ * ~
26
Shouting
Faisal Hamdani. As we drive, my fingers repeat his name on my invisible typewriter. Sam’s editors say that’s the man whose relatives we want to find today. Faisal Hamdani. Or, according to some places where his full name is written out, Faisal Mohammed Hamdani al-Tikriti. His name is on each of the Jackson documents. He’s a distant cousin of Saddam’s, but judging from the description, looks nothing like him. He’s slighter, fairer, and rather nice-looking, to the point of appearing more Italian than Arab. His eyes are greenish-brown and he’s a good dresser. Same big moustache, though.
This according to a source, “a friend of a friend”, but Sam won’t tell me who, who’s said he’s seen Hamdani on several occasions. Hamdani, the source says, may or may not be in Tikrit, and if he is, he’s probably in hiding. Several of his family members, however, would certainly be there. Perhaps one of them could verify the signature. I try to press her for more, working to convince her that at this point, it might be better if I know everything she knows. She says she got the info on Hamdani from a well-informed American source. “More than that, it’s better you don’t know,” she says, and I don’t know how I’m supposed to interpret that.
On our way to Tikrit, we pass the detritus of the old regime: buildings that have wilted like flowers past their season, burned-out Iraqi military equipment left like crushed aluminium cans on the roadside. Even the fertile green areas seem to be yielding a crop of rubbish and ripped plastic bags. There’s something about the landscape that I don’t recognize.
Faisal Hamdani. Should I have known this name? I don’t, but Sam does. She says if you
read any of the books written about Iraq in recent years, you can find mention of him. As we drive north, she begins to fill me in on what she’s read and heard. Faisal Hamdani is considered deeply loyal, not particularly political, and financially astute. Most importantly, he was one of the only three people entrusted with keeping tabs on Saddam’s cash.
Cousin Faisal. A blood relative, a member of the clan, probably a player in Saddam’s inner circle. Most likely, a man of substantial wealth and the means to maintain a small militia to protect himself. If any of these things are accurate, we should probably turn the car around and head back to Baghdad. The more I think about it, I cannot believe Sam’s editors have compelled her to go into Tikrit searching for such people. Even more unbelievable is that I haven’t really tried to stop her. We are barrelling up the highway at 130 kilometres an hour, the villages beside the road a haze of muddy brown and palm green. Rizgar makes an emergency stop and the abruptness of it throws us forwards, a feeling that our bodies and the car are at cross-purposes.
“Shit!” Sam is pushing, involuntarily, on the back of my seat; she had agreed to let me sit in the front in the interest of safety in the countryside. Neither of us had noticed the line of cars up ahead, which we might easily have crashed into at that speed. At the end of the queue are two tanks, various military vehicles, and soldiers in clothes the same colour as the desert.
Rizgar turns around. “Sorry, Miss Samara.”
“Okay, okay,” Sam says. “But I don’t want to get stuck waiting at some checkpoint. Just drive up to the front of the line.”
“Do you think we should?” I ask. “There are a lot of people waiting. If we skip the line it will be very obvious and then people will know that we are foreigners.”
Sam stares out of the window to her right and I follow her gaze. A framed and encased photograph of Saddam, perhaps twenty feet tall, emerges from the grassy garden just to the side of the road. In it, he wears his full military regalia and a smile that is almost that of a roguish youth. In the picture, he looks trim and almost dashing — it must have been taken twenty-five years ago.
“They haven’t touched it,” Sam says with wonderment. “Not even a dot of graffiti.”
Rizgar chuckles quietly; from the corner of my eye, I can see his belly shake. “Tadhkar!” he says. Souvenirs. “Tell her! It’s a good souvenir. Maybe we can get one for her to bring home.”
I translate this for Sam and she grins and doesn’t answer, but has already slipped her camera out of her bag and is holding it to the window. She winds down her window and I hear her camera devour a few images. And then there is someone in my face, in front of the windscreen, and another guy knocking on my window near the front passenger seat.
His knuckles rap the glass louder, and I look at Rizgar and then roll the window down.
“Salaam Aleikum,” I say to the young man, whose eyes glitter with agitation.
“No photographs. You tell her not to photograph here or we will make sure you don’t leave Tikrit. No more American pictures for laughing at!”
“Sam, put the camera away,” I say, trying not to stare at the pistol on the other guy’s waist.
Sam takes the lens away from her face and squints. “Is that what this guy’s on about?”
“Just put the camera away and don’t make eye contact with him.”
She complies and looks in the other direction. The line moves up by a centimetre and the man who threatened us, accompanied by two friends, disappears down a sidestreet.
“Well,” says Sam. “So much for trying not to make it obvious that we’re here.”
My head screeches with a thousand retorts for everything Sam has said and done in the past week. I don’t know how I will contain them any longer. She doesn’t consult me enough.
“Maybe you shouldn’t take pictures when we come to a place like this.”
Sam sighs. “That’s fine. Just tell me ahead of time. I can’t read your mind.”
I tell Rizgar we should make for the front of the line after all.
“What?” Sam grabs on to the handle on the ceiling. “I thought you said you didn’t want to go making a scene by getting in as foreigners!”
“Yes, but it’s too late now. Those men already saw you taking pictures. Do you think there are many Iraqi women holding thousand-dollar digital cameras out of the window when they are entering Tikrit?”
Sam puts up her hand like a stop sign. “Fine, I get the point. Just tell me when you want me not to do something I would normally do, like taking pictures. That’s part of what I do, remember?”
Rizgar lurches to the front of the line so that we’re only two cars from the inspection point. Some of the drivers behind us are honking their horns, though no one gets out of his car. A soldier, fattened by his gear, his hands positioned to shoot the M16 hanging around his chest, rushes to Rizgar’s side and kicks his bumper. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” He shouts, glaring at Rizgar. The soldier’s face is red and his pupils are as tiny as nuktateen, two little dots that hover above certain letters in our alphabet.
Rizgar’s face flushes. He moves to open the car door.
“Don’t, Rizgar!” Sam is lowering her window on the other side. “Let me.” She leans her arm and head out of the window. “Sir? Officer? I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make problems for him. He’s my driver and I asked him to skip to the front of the line. We’re journalists. I’m with the Tribune?” She smiles widely at him, and although I know her well enough by now to see something around the edges of her lips that is entirely artificial, she is, none the less, suddenly all the more comely for it. “Sam Katchens from the Tribune.” She holds a business card out of the window, and with the other hand a plastic badge that says “PRESS” on it.
“Yeah? I see,” he says, taking the card in the hand that is not on the trigger. His lips move as he reads the name. “Ma’am, I’m sorry, but there’s no more preferential access for media.”
“What? Really?” Sam is speaking a little more sweetly than she normally would, and more slowly. “I was here twice since Tikrit was captured, and they always let us go through.”
“Well, orders have changed. You’ll have to wait in line.”
“Really? But...oh sorry, what’s your name, sir?”
“Specialist Gavin Johnston.”
“Specialist Johnston, please, do you think you could just let us through this time?” She smiles and lowers her head a little, so that she’s looking up at him with a wide-eyed, flirtatious face. “It’s just that it’s not very safe around here and I’m kind of scared. Two guys just threatened us while we were in line.”
“Well, if that’s your feeling, maybe you shouldn’t come to Tikrit.”
“But we have to. We just need to get in and get out. We’re only looking to find one guy for a report that I absolutely have to do. Please?”
He lingers, looking at her with his mouth half-open. “All right, then. But you better tell your driver he should never do that again. We have orders to shoot anyone who refuses to stop at a checkpoint.” He waves to a soldier next to the crossing bar and yells something to him, but the car in front of us has yet to move. Specialist Johnston — and what kind of title is that? — repositions his rifle to his side. He leans back in towards Sam, resting an arm over the window where she sits.
“How’s things in Baghdad?” he asks. His pupils seem fuller now and less agitated, and the irises around them more blue.
“A mess,” she answers. “But otherwise, quite a kick.”
“Must be more interesting than here. We’re bored out of our skulls. When we’re not gettin’ shot at.” He looks around to see if the other soldiers are listening. “I hear that you guys got like, parties and stuff down at the big hotels. Is’sat true?”
“Sometimes,” Sam emits a silent laugh, and her eyes flutter suggestively. “You’ll have to try to get sent out on a visit and see.” The car in front of us begins rolling.
> “Which place d’ya stay at?”
Sam winks at him and begins raising her window. “Top secret. But thanks, Specialist Johnston.”
I feel angry at Sam, but the truth is, I know I have no right to be. For what could I blame her? Talking our way through the checkpoint? Pacifying a volatile soldier?
Baghdad Fixer Page 25
