I fold my hands over my stomach, which still seems to be mulling over my breakfast. I am relieved to see Sam at the door, her body swaying backwards as she pulls it open. “I am simply a believer,” I say. “I don’t believe in making these distinctions. All a Muslim needs is faith in God.” I stand, watch Sam stride towards us, her hair still heavy from a shower, her hands swinging.
Beyond the shampoo scent emanating from her hair, as I follow her up the stairs I can smell last night’s party on her clothes: drinks and cigarettes. She pushes open the door, and shuts it behind her immediately. “Nabil, I met someone really interesting at this party last night who I think is going to help us get some answers. And you’re going to be pretty interested to see who he is.”
“So,” I say, “I know him?”
“Hang on. Take a seat for a few minutes. Or better yet,” she says, eyeing Rafik’s paper, which I forgot to hand back to him when I followed Sam up, “translate some headlines for me while I change. I’m curious to know what these new papers are saying.”
“How did you know it was new?” I ask, but she is already in her room, the door only slightly ajar, rummaging, I presume, for something else to wear. Something much more conservative than the snug black pants and very-short-sleeved black blouse she wore to last night’s party. I wonder why she never mentioned she would be going there when I left yesterday. I feel it is my job now to know about the major things going on in Sam’s life, at least her life in Iraq. How can I fix things for her if I don’t even know where she is?
She appears in a light-blue blouse and those loose khaki trousers she wears often, striking that serious-but-sporty look the women reporters around the Hamra all seem to have. At first it seemed uniquely Sam, but now that I’ve seen it on others, it looks like an American uniform.
“How did you get back this morning?”
Sam stops her rearranging of things in her bag and looks at me, watching without blinking, as if she is gauging what to say based on how capable I am of handling the information. “A friend from the BBC drove me home,” she says. And then raises her eyebrows. “Anything else, Mom?” She laughs a bit and I make a show of laughing with her. “Hey,” she says, eyeing her watch. “We’ve got to head over to the Green Zone.”
“I thought you said your editors didn’t want you to do any more daily stories for now.”
“They don’t. This isn’t a press conference,” she says. “Um, what’s in here?”
I forgot to present her with the box of Arabic sweets; I carried them up in a bag and then set them on the kitchen counter when we walked in. Now she is lifting open the top and discovering them before I had the chance to present them to her. This is Sam; taking what you want to give her anyway. If only she’d be more patient.
“I got them for you to—”
“Wow!” She takes the first box out of the bag and opens the second. “And these, too?”
“I got, well, I bought a box of the Arabic ones for you and the European pastries for my family, because I’d have thought you’d have had enough of that sort of—”
“Oh, Nabil, that’s so sweet of you!” She purses her lips like she might, for just a moment, want to kiss me. “Thanks, Nabil. These look great.”
“Well, they’re just from downstairs. Someday I will take you to Abu Afif. That is the best sweet shop in all of Baghdad. I’m not sure these will be as good.”
Sam lifts up a small one, prying it from its tight alignment. It disappears into her mouth, and she closes her eyes, circling her head and pretending to swoon. “Oh my God. That’s like a direct injection to the veins.”
“Try this.” I point to the round ones in the centre. “It’s called the bird’s nest. See why? The nuts are supposed to be the eggs.”
“I see,” says Sam, but reaches for an Oum Ali instead, which is much too heavy for this time of day. “So at this party,” she continues, holding the pastry up to her mouth and using her teeth to break it in two, depositing the rest on a plate in the sink. “Mm. So good. I’ll tell you about it on the way.” She licks two fingers, then holds her hand under the tap, rinsing the stickiness away.
~ * ~
35
Rinsing
By the time we reach Damascus Street, Sam has filled me in on why were heading to the Green Zone. Last night at the party, she got invited to a smaller party in someone’s suite. She walked in, and among the ten or so people there was that rude American man who had forced us to leave the meeting in Fallujah. Except that he wasn’t rude now. He was suddenly very nice to her, and apologetic about how he had acted that day. He took her aside and said he’d love to make it up to her by helping her out, and that she should come to his office today. He’s working in an ORHA office for reconstruction projects, ORHA being the name the Americans have given for the office of all the things they’re supposed to be doing in Iraq, other than just occupying our country with tanks and soldiers. His name is Franklin Baylor, but we can call him Frank.
Rizgar rolls over the Jumhuriya Bridge, inching behind the other cars which gingerly pass the tanks and Bradleys with men posted behind their guns. To our left, the Ministry of Construction stands like a rotting dinosaur, parts of it bombed out by the Americans in the first days of the war, each window shattered, every part of the frame warped and frayed. I wonder if Frank is going to reconstruct that.
“So he’s really not a spook?” I ask.
Sam shrugs. “I’m not so sure about that. I think he could be a spook whose cover is that he works on reconstruction.”
What really amazes me is that she has forgiven him so quickly for his treatment towards us that day. Or maybe she just thinks he has something she wants.
We wait for the soldiers to check our boot, and then they tell us to get out of the car so they can search the inside. We stand and wait, and I notice that her hair still looks wet, perhaps because she tied it up and didn’t give it a chance to dry. The thought of her showering somewhere else, but not being clear where, filters through the part of my mind that feels like shaking her. Anything else, Mom? Sam sees me as worrying about her like a mother — not even like a father! — not as being defensive of how staying out all night could affect her reputation. Not as being curious about whose bed she slept in.
The inside of the presidential palace is spacious and confusing, Arabic in style but American in function, bustling with soldiers male and female, and civilian people dressed like they do in the American films about California, many of them in jeans or shorts and colourful, short-sleeved polo shirts. Most spectacular are the elaborate ceilings, high as the grandest mosque, and the intricately tiled floors, beautiful as a Persian carpet. I want to take it all in, but Sam hurries me along. Apparently she knows the way from her previous visits here.
“Nabil!” she whispers, catching me gazing upwards. “Come on! I don’t want anyone noticing we came in here without an escort.”
Sam doesn’t realize how new this is. How we have grown up learning to be afraid. How it is baked into our samoun, rolled into our kubbeh, stuffed into our dolma, filling up the very fibre of who we are. Unless, of course, you are one of the people who makes others afraid.
“In here,” Sam beckons, her hand cupping me towards a corridor of offices with paper signs on the doors. Written on them are all our country’s problems in need of fixing: sewage, water distribution, health services, road repair, electricity.
The tall, muscular bulk of him rises to shake my hand. He has the same arrogant face that made Sam so angry that day, only now he seems a shred softer. He welcomes me with a laugh in his voice, as if to acknowledge that circumstances were quite different last time we met.
“Nabil al-Amari.”
“Franklin Baylor. Pleased to meet you,” he smiles, pointing to a chair for me to sit in, and something about the way he smiles makes me realize that he probably was not expecting to see me. Perhaps he thought Sam would come alone.
Baylor sits and folds his hands o
n the edge of his desk. “So, another reporter who wants to know what the hell’s going on with the electricity.”
Sam is slow to respond, her eyes sweeping from one side of his face to another. She smiles gently. “Well, yes. I mean, why is it that no one is getting more than a few hours a day? I mean, it’s more than a month since the US forces took control of Baghdad and there are parts of the city that have no power at all.”
“There are a lot of reasons,” he says, rolling his eyes back at her. “I can explain most of them and show you what we’re doing to fix it. The administration really wants this problem solved. But I think the best way to explain it to you is when we’re looking at a chart of all the grids, for the whole city of Baghdad.”
Baylor looks out of the window, then pushes back one of the huge maroon curtains, pendulous with dust. “Come with me down to the utility logistics room and I’ll show you what I mean.”
“Oh,” Sam says, “you don’t mind if Nabil comes with us, do you?”
“Well,” Baylor sounds hesitant. “We have certain policies on access for Iraqis who haven’t been through a security clearance.” He scans my face and stares at me for a moment, “But I think we can get around it. You look like an honest one. You can vouch for this guy, right?” Baylor grins, and at one end of his mouth is a tooth that seems sharp enough to open a can of vegetables.
He’s off down the hall. And because he’s tall and his stride is long, it’s an effort keep up with him, especially as I keep getting distracted. Above us there is a soaring ceiling with intricate Syrian wood carvings fitted into it, and a sparkling chandelier more elaborate than anything I have seen in any mosque. Baylor leads us into a grand reception room with windows that look out on to a tropical garden. There are gargantuan columns lining the room and an ocean of rich marble flooring so shiny I feel we could skate our way across it. The sun from the windows bounces off it and glares into my eyes, so that I feel compelled to shield them with my hand.
I try to keep in step with their brisk but breezy-looking pace through the chambers as they change from vast to vascular, leading from one place to another, past offices with computers, men in military uniform and others in shorts and trainers, women dressed like the men or wearing sleeveless tops. Each has a collection of plastic-coated tags hanging around his or her neck, and they trade cheery words as they pass without stopping. “Heya. How’ya doin’? How’s it goin’?” Most of them are young, with the exception of a few middle-aged men with grey hair and wider middles, tugging at their collars in the heat. And the heat is stifling. My shirt is almost soaked. “How could a palace like this not have air conditioning?” I ask Sam.
“No, no,” Baylor says. “Apparently, there was always air conditioning here but when our boys bombed the electrical centre during the invasion, we destroyed it and now they can’t get it to work again.” He smirks at me. “But the official line is that it’s the looters fault for stealing all the wiring.”
Baylor continues to lead us through the maze of the palace. We descend three flights of stairs from where we started, and as we go the air gets staler, but also, pleasantly cooler.
“See now, Iraqis will tell you that there was full-time electricity under Saddam, but that’s a blatant lie,” he says. “And in fact, the deal was, Saddam was sending all the juice to his buddies in Baghdad and the Sunni triangle and places like Tikrit, while poor Shi’ites and people in the south weren’t getting much of anything at all. See? Let me show you the damage that was done to some of the circuit-breakers,” he says. He holds open the door to what I imagine is some kind of control room, but as we step in, it looks little more than a small storage room with a dirty window that gives on to a concrete wall.
He shuts the door behind us. “All right, it’s a bit hot and shitty, but it’s safe to talk.” He offers Sam the only seat, a beaten-up wooden chair against a narrow counter, and leans on the wall. “Sorry,” he says to me. “I know it’s not the swankiest of places.”
“Might we open the door a bit?” I ask. It is already hot in the room; with three of us shut in here, I can imagine the temperature soaring, the air being sucked out, me hitting the floor. But Sam seems fine; she has her window. It’s only now that I realize we have something in common: unpredictable syndromes liable to get the better of us.
“Sorry,” Baylor says. “But that would defeat the purpose.” He goes to the window, undoes the catch and yanks the window up a few inches, releasing a mouldy puff of dust. “That should do it.”
“So,” Baylor crosses his bulky arms, facing Sam. “You want to know where your problematic story on Congressman Jackson came from, the one that he’s suing y’all for in court.”
“Right,” she says. “Well, actually, at this point it’s more than problematic. We can say, pretty much with certainty, that they’re fake.”
“Yes, and so you’d like to know who cooked them up. Well, I think I can help you with that, and then maybe you’ll help me out with something.”
“Okay…” Sam says tentatively.
“I don’t think you have to look any further than the office of Ahmad Chalabi. I mean, I’m liable to get fired if it comes out that I told you that,” Baylor says, looking over at me and then back to Sam, “but I’m sure that’s never going to come out, is it?”
Sam nods her slow nod. “So this is just a theory you have. Don’t get me wrong. I realize someone went out of his way to stir this thing up. But Ahmad Chalabi? Why would he need to be messing around with domestic American politicians like Jackson? I mean, why should he be dabbling in smear stories when he’s got a recently liberated country to run? Chalabi’s got the whole Pentagon behind him, the White House, and the CIA. This guy’s going to be the next president of Iraq, right?”
Baylor bows his head to one side. “If some people have their way, sure. At least, that was the plan. But I would trim your list of supporters a bit. In fact, I’d lop off the last third.”
Sam crosses her legs, pulling the right so far over the left that it’s like she’s only sitting on one side of her body. “Yeah?”
Baylor squints as if to say of course, that same kind of squint that Sam gives me when I’ve said something dumb. “Sure. Agency’s been warning for a long time not to trust him. In fact, State department folks don’t like him either. The guy’s wanted in Jordan for bank fraud, for God’s sake. But DIA loved him. They and the Pentagon told the White House everything the big chiefs wanted to hear. No one cared if it was true or not. No one went out and said, hey, you think we should do some reference checks on this guy before we hand’im the keys to the castle?”
Sam turns to me. “DIA is Defense Intelligence Agency. You get the difference, right?”
I nod.
Baylor points to me and to Sam and back at me. “So both of you guys are in on all of this?”
“Totally,” Sam says, sounding emphatic, even defensive. “I couldn’t have done any of this without Nabil.”
“Okay, so then Nabil needs to be in on the confidentiality agreement, too. You can’t tell anyone we had this conversation, and my name can never be mentioned, nor the agency.”
“I know,” I say. “Off the record.” I’m surprised by the way it rolls off my tongue.
“This isn’t even off the record,” he says with eyes narrowing in my direction. “This is such deep background, it may as well be at the bottom of a mass grave in East-fucking-Baquba. You get my drift?”
“Sure.” I still dislike his arrogant tone. But I like that I am getting most of his slang, and that he sees that my English is good enough for him to use it.
“Listen, Ahmad Chalabi is a character and-a-half,” Baylor says. “He’s now one of the wealthiest, most powerful men in Iraq, and he’s done that primarily with taxpayer money. It’s amazing this guy was in our good graces as long as he was.”
“Was?” Sam interrupts.
“Well, look, there’s a lot bubbling now that I can’t talk about yet, even on backgrou
nd. But let me tell you this much. Ahmad Chalabi—”
“Do you mind if I take notes?”
“Go ahead. But you’re not recording are you?”
“No,” Sam says, putting her notebook on the counter. “I hardly ever record.”
“Fine. Don’t even put my name at the top of your notes there,” he says, stretching his neck to see what she just scribbled. It reads: On Chalabi.
Baylor clears his throat. He quickly opens the door a crack and sticks his head out to see if there’s someone in the hallway. “Just bear in mind, if you burn me by sourcing any of this back to me or anyone who even smells like me, I will make sure that no one in any agency that matters will ever talk to you again.”
Sam holds up two fingers. “Scout’s honour.”
“Nice, but I think that’s a peace sign.”
Sam smiles with a hint of embarrassment, drawing the two fingers together.
Baghdad Fixer Page 34
