War of the Encyclopaedists

by Christopher Robinson

  The figured moved, as if alive somehow. Should he call a medic? No, that was stupid. The guy was ash. His hand, his certainly dead hand, had just slipped from the wheel. Gravity.

  A burst of rounds. Every soldier in the platoon turned toward Nguyen’s truck. PFC Lo had just fired the fifty from his turret at the roofline of a building across the street. The bullets impacted with the wall, sending bits of plaster and brick down like confetti.

  Pedestrians began fleeing the site, worried an attack was imminent. The other gunners were scanning the roofline, and even Jackson and Urritia had dropped their concertina wire and whipped out their rifles. Montauk swore he could smell the collective adrenaline. Everyone focused intently on the roofline. After thirty seconds of dead quiet, Montauk ran over to Nguyen’s truck. “Lo, what did you see?”

  “There was something, sir. Something up there.”

  “A person, someone with a gun?”

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  “Goddammit, Lo. What did you see?”

  “There was a glint. Sir.”

  “A glint? You fired the fifty at a fucking glint?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You think there might be civilians in that building, Lo? You think the fucking fifty-caliber M2 machine gun might shoot right through those shitty walls? Positive identification before you pull that trigger!”

  “Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.”

  Montauk sighed. “Staff Sergeant Nguyen. Take Lo off the fifty. Put someone up there who understands the rules of engagement.”

  A bullet ricocheted off Nguyen’s Humvee. Everyone took cover as a few more hit the dirt near the tires.

  “Tall building five blocks south,” Jackson yelled. He leaned out and fired a few rounds at it, shattering a window.

  They waited. And waited.

  No return fire.

  Was Montauk supposed to send someone to go check in that building? His job was to secure the intersection. He looked at Olaf. “Think we hit him?”

  “I doubt it, sir. Probably scared him off. He’ll be long gone by the time we get there.”

  They waited another few minutes, scanning the rooftops, the windows, the alleys. Montauk could hear Aladdin on the ground next to him, chewing gum.

  Eventually, tensions dropped and bystanders began trickling back toward the bomb site. The engineer platoon pulled into the intersection. Montauk went to confer with the engineer captain, who appeared nervous and distracted.

  “Everything secure?” the captain said. “We heard gunfire.”

  “Someone took a plink at us a few minutes ago, sir,” Montauk said. “No further contact.”

  “All right,” the captain said, “we’re going to start cleaning up the debris and haul what we need to haul. See if you can give us an outer perimeter so we can concentrate on doing what we can to make the intersection drivable again, and make sure the buildings aren’t— Holy shit.” He craned his neck to look up at the BMW on the department store roof. “How’d that get up there?”

  “How indeed,” Montauk said. The physical explanation for such a thing was within his grasp. Blast velocity. Inertia. Projectile motion. But the psychological explanation was beyond him.

  “Who do you think that guy was?” he asked Aladdin as the captain left.

  “I know this man, sih. He’s a Sunni, from Baquba. His name is Fayed, or Amr. Maybe Amr is his friend. He works in his father’s print office. He and Amr, they are both losers. Until Amr become a hero of Islam. Fighting the infidel. Now everyone is best friends with Amr. Who is dead. And Fayed become jealous. He thinks about watching at his own funeral, how sad everyone is, hearing them say they don’t know him really, until now, until his glory. Hearing the pretty girls say that. And so Fayed parks his car on the roof. He wasn’t even that serious, before. About Islam.”

  “Shit,” Montauk said. “Was he your friend?”

  “No,” Aladdin said. “I do not know him. But I know many people like him. The story is always the same.”

  “Crazy,” Montauk said.

  “Yes, you think it’s crazy. Because you are a good man, LT. But it is not so crazy. Next year, maybe, it is normal.” Aladdin spit his gum into the dust. “Every day.”

  23

  * * *

  Opening the door to the port-o-john was like checking on how a piece of rancid pork was doing in the broiler. Montauk tore apart the Velcro flap of his armor and let it slide down to rest on the floor of the john as the door closed behind him. He propped Molly Millions in the corner and hastily began to loosen his rigger’s belt. For a painful minute, he stood still, his hands frozen on the steel loops of the belt. Then, when a delicate equilibrium had been reached, he dropped his pants, opened the lid of the blue cauldron, and deflated as if someone had popped a water grenade stuffed up his ass—one that had been filled with a liquid that had the color, temperature, and consistency of Burger King coffee. Montauk made a weak hoooaaahhhh noise. He hadn’t had a regular shit since the car bomb they’d responded to last week. The plastic latrine shook as a few armored vehicles rolled past it and out the exit lane. His entire body felt covered in a sheen of sweat and shit particulate. A kindred soul had written in Sharpie above the paper dispenser: “Saddam’s Revenge says Fuck You.”

  Two-Six, this is Priority Search.

  The plastic seat creaked as Montauk leaned over to reach the hand mike on his vest. “Priority Search, Two-Six,” he responded.

  Two-Six, we’ve got a body in the river.

  • • •

  The Priority Search lane was temporarily closed, and midlevel Iraqi contractors sat in their cars, annoyed, while Kyriacou, the Greek kid, stood behind the fifty. He looked overly alert, almost jumpy. The rest of the Priority Search crew, which today meant 3rd Squad, gathered twenty yards north of the road, at the edge of a gentle slope that ended in the muddy southern bank of the Tigris. Montauk could smell the corpse as soon as he left the road. Unless that was Bessie the Cow. She’d been there for months, apparently, stuck in the mud near one of the bridge’s piers.

  As he approached the riverbank, he saw Sergeant Fields struggling to drag the corpse ashore by the cuffs of its jeans; its hands were behind its back, digging into the mud. The body had swollen from the hot river water, and its clothes had shrunk until what had been a stylishly fitted look had become comical. Ant was standing a few paces away, staring at the ground near the corpse. Montauk propped Molly Millions against a rock and walked into the river. “Let’s go, let’s grab him,” he said. “Ant. That means you.” He bent down to grab a handful of soaked T-shirt, and the full evil of the reek made itself known to him. “Jesus, fuck.” He paused to keep from retching on the corpse’s bloated but strangely . . . familiar face. “Christ, it’s Aladdin.”

  Ant took hold of the other shoulder, trying not to breathe as he waited for Montauk.

  “Okay,” Montauk said, looking back to Fields, who now had both knees tucked in his armpits. “One, two, three, up.”

  Aladdin was heavy, and the wet cotton threatened to slip from their hands as they stumbled up the muddy bank. They set him down among the reeds, then walked away from the body and bent over, trying to breathe. Montauk closed his eyes, tight-lipped. The death smell made him want to kill. Ant stood there shaking his head minutely back and forth, caught in a loop. Fields rolled Aladdin over onto his shoulder. His backside was covered in mud, but Montauk could see a strand of packing twine dangling wetly from his bound wrists. He took a breath and pulled out his Leatherman. It took a minute of careful sawing to avoid slashing Aladdin’s wrists as he worked. There was an uneven line of small burns running up his swollen arm, maybe from a cigarette.

  “Looks like he gained some weight since we last saw him,” offered Fields.

  “I was teaching him how to pack a can of dip,” Montauk said. Aladdin’s eyelids were cracked, as if he were half asleep. Montauk attem
pted to close them, but they wouldn’t quite go down.

  • • •

  He breathed heavily on the walk back up to the CP, both to get the death out of his nostrils and to fuel the anger inside him that, if left untended, would subside into panic. The checkpoint felt quiet and focused. He saw Monkey standing at the base of the east gun tower like a kid lost at the mall. “What are you doing?” he yelled. The kid looked up to the tower.

  “Just getting some shawarmas, sir!” yelled a voice from the tower. Urritia.

  “You’re gonna be pissing out your ass!” Montauk yelled.

  “Speaking from experience, sir?” Urritia yelled back.

  Montauk ignored him and turned to continue on to the CP, then stopped and called Monkey over. “You hear about Aladdin?”

  “Yeah,” Monkey said. “They kill him, man.”

  Montauk spat into the dust as an idea took shape in his head. Why the fuck not. “Listen,” he said. “I’ll give a reward to whoever can tell me who killed Aladdin. You understand?”

  “Reward?” Monkey nodded doubtfully.

  “Reward. Money. I want to know who killed Aladdin. You get it? Someone tells me who killed Aladdin, I’ll give them—” He was going to say a thousand dollars. But that sounded absurdly high for Baghdad. “Five hundred dollars,” he said. Monkey stared back and nodded. He didn’t get it.

  “Look, see this?” Montauk said, tearing open the Velcro pocket at his sleeve where he kept a few bills and a notepad. “Here’s a dollar. I want to know who killed Aladdin. Whoever tells me who killed Aladdin, I’ll give him five hundred dollars. That’s this much,” he said, writing and underlining “500” on the notepad. Monkey’s eyes widened.

  “It’s got to be real. No lies, okay? Only real, true information. Who killed Aladdin.”

  “You gonna shoot him, LT?”

  “That’s right. And anybody who tells me who it was, they get five hundred dollars. My own money. Tell everyone you know.”

  “Yeah, man.”

  Urritia had descended the ladder from the machine-gun nest. “Damn, sir, you’re putting a contract out on these fuckers?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Well, I got five on it. Hey, Monkey, I got five on that contract.”

  “You’re gonna confuse him.”

  “Right, sorry, sir.” Urritia handed a bill to Monkey. “Just the shawarmas, then.”

  “Yeah, man,” Monkey said.

  “All right, scram,” Montauk said to the kid. He turned to Urritia as Monkey ran off. “Keep it in the platoon, all right. Don’t spread it around the company.”

  “Roger, sir.”

  Montauk walked back up to the CP to start filling out the report. Urritia went back to the tower. He was only a few rungs up when he heard Jackson, his squad leader, calling him from behind. “What’s going on?” Jackson asked.

  Urritia hopped down. “LT’s offering a cash reward for the Al-Qaeda fuckheads who whacked the translator.”

  Jackson blinked willfully. “Serious?”

  “Roger, Staff Sergeant.”

  “All he’s gonna get is a line of stinky ragheads tellin’ lies.”

  Urritia fished a tin of Copenhagen out of his cargo pocket.

  “How much is he putting up?” Jackson asked.

  “Five hundred bucks.”

  “Five hundred bucks?”

  “Roger, Staff Sergeant. He said not to spread it around the company.”

  Jackson snorted and lit up a Gauloise. The sun had started on its way down, and traffic on Karada Dahil was picking back up after the midday siesta. “What a retard,” he said.

  “Yeah,” said Urritia. “What a retard.”

  24

  * * *

  The pedestrian lane went up a concrete stairway and ended at the Ped Search bunker, which spat out the foot traffic onto the sidewalk on 14 July Bridge. PFC Lo had been taken off gun duty. He was scrutinizing an ID card at the bunker’s entrance as Montauk arrived. It was a fibrous paper deal with a small photo affixed at the corner, laminated with sticky paper. It seemed to have been hidden alternately in the gearbox of some grinding machine and up the bearer’s ass for the last few decades. The picture, scarcely visible behind the smudging and creasing of the plastic, looked to Lo like it had been taken in high school. It depicted a smooth-faced, olive-skinned youngster. Lo looked up at the face of the laborer—tough and creased, with a huge bushy mustache; his eyes seemed to express either confusion or docility. Lo returned the card and waved the guy inside to be patted down.

  Montauk gave Lo an encouraging nod. At least he was trying. And hopefully on Ped Search, he wouldn’t get anyone killed.

  The bunker was a rectangular room with a doorway on either end, about twelve-by-thirty, and built of HESCO bastions, large wire-mesh, cloth-lined boxes filled with gravel. It had a plywood roof. Aside from Sodium Joh, who was doing the pat-downs, Olaf was in the bunker, standing next to a stodgy, plainly dressed Iraqi sitting on a plastic chair. “Afternoon, sir,” Olaf grunted.

  “Who’s this guy?” Montauk asked, nodding toward the Iraqi.

  “This is Ali Gorma. Our new translator. Hey, Gorma, come meet the LT.”

  Montauk got caught on the word new. Not new like a new car, undriven, but new to you, like a used car you bought to replace the one you’d totaled. A new girlfriend to replace the one you’d dumped. Montauk’s litany of tasks and unexpected urgencies had been enough to keep him from obsessing about Aladdin for the last few days. But in confronting this “new” translator, he needed a concerted effort of will not to picture the waterlogged corpse like an overstuffed and rancid sausage, not to smell the rot, which was thick enough to taste in the back of his throat.

  Ali Gorma stood up like it was a chore. He slouched under Montauk’s blank gaze.

  “Hey,” Montauk said, extending his fist. “I’m Lieutenant Montauk. Good to have you on board.”

  Ali Gorma stared at Montauk’s fist. It took Montauk an awkward half-second to realize that Gorma, unlike Aladdin, wasn’t hip to contemporary American hand greetings. Aladdin had probably been the outlier. Gorma shook Montauk’s hand the way you might shake hands with your friend’s ugly sister at a party.

  “I am Ali Gorma,” he said, then he slouched back down onto the chair. Another pedestrian passed through the bunker.

  “So, Ali G,” Montauk said. “You a football fan?”

  “Okay,” Gorma said.

  “I know everyone says Al-Shorta’s the best team,” Montauk said, “but I prefer Al-Zawra’a SC. They’re leading Division B right now, aren’t they?” The Iraqi Premier Football League had been suspended when the invasion began, and it had just resumed last week.

  Ali Gorma shrugged, unimpressed.

  “Well, let me know if you have any questions,” Montauk said, hoping to create the impression that their lack of a conversation had come to an organic end. He fished out his tin of Kodiak and put in a plug of dip while looking out past the stairwell toward the pedestrians snaking up along the traffic circle. There was Monkey, rushing past the line and heading toward the stairs.

  “He must have found someone,” Montauk said. “That was fast.”

  “What was fast?” said Olaf.

  “I told Monkey to ask around about Aladdin.”

  “What?”

  He’d said it in a moment of emotional extremity. But now it was really happening. There was no choice but to own the decision. “I had him put the word out that if anyone had intel on it, I’d have a reward.”

  “How much?”

  “Five hundred bucks.”

  “Your own money?”

  Montauk nodded.

  Olaf stepped closer and spoke quietly: “Sir, you sure that’s a good idea? That kid could end up in the river.”

  “I don’t know about that. He seems to get how thin
gs work around here. I don’t think they’d go after the kid.” Montauk felt stupid as soon as his mouth started moving with that last one.

  Monkey tried leaping into the bunker, but Lo jumped in front of him, grabbed him by the shirt, and demanded ID.

  “Hey, LT,” Monkey said, out of breath. “C’mon, man.”

  “It’s okay, Lo. Let him in,” Montauk said.

  Monkey shook off Lo’s hands and strutted inside. “I got somebody who want to talk to you, man.”

  “Good work,” Montauk said. He thought about telling Monkey to keep spreading the word, but he decided against it with Olaf standing behind him. “Here.” He handed Monkey a five-dollar bill. “Finder’s fee.”

  Monkey unfolded it, held it up to the light, and scrutinized it. Montauk felt a brief twinge of the kind of envy he and his other suburbanite friends had felt for black kids growing up in Compton after The Chronic came out. If only they’d had the fortune to be born into poverty, to have no choice but to hustle. If you succeeded in the world of the ghetto enough to leave it, you had undeniable respect. No one gave a shit if you made it out of the suburbs.

  Monkey’s whole body slumped, and he lolled his head to the side as if utterly disappointed. It was a good trick.

  “What?” Montauk said. “You think you deserve more?”

  “Yeah, man. I want a hundred.”

  Montauk laughed, looking around the bunker. Joh was smiling, but Olaf looked like he was moderating the GRE test. “One hundred dollars? What would you even do with it?” Montauk said, forcing amusement into his voice. “You’d have to, I don’t know, get me the head of Osama bin Laden if you want a hundred dollars.” Monkey screwed up his mouth, as if contemplating how he might actually find bin Laden’s head. “Okay, doesn’t have to be bin Laden,” Montauk said. “You want a hundred dollars? Get me a human skull, any skull. You know what a skull is?”