Way too early, the phone rang. I cursed myself for not turning it off when I has collapsed into bed a few hours earlier. The Sony’s screen flashed that the call was from Marguérite, my first ex-wife whom I met when I was posted to Rwanda in the early eighties; it also informed me that it was 7:45 a.m.
Even though it had been more than 15 years since we split up, Margot and I shared a long, intricate, intimate history that suffused every phone call, every e-mail, every exchange with emotional heat. I married Margot not just because of her regal, long-legged, Tutsi beauty, but because she was smart in a beguilingly innocent, unschooled way. She found it amusing when I put on my act of being a sadly misunderstood intellecutal in exile. I found her irresistible when she would smile knowingly at me, softly shake her head, and chide me with "Oh, William, you are just too proud."
The romance began to fade after the birth of our daughter Émilie. Margot’s decency and charm had quickly reversed the the shock at this miscegnation from my family--with proud Southern roots in Selma, Alabama, and Maryland’s Eastern Shore--into acceptance of a daughter-in-law with lustrous red-brown skin and an Eastern African lilt and French inflections in her English. When I saw my parents pulling together the genealogical material that would qualify their new café-au-lait granddaughter to join the United Daughters of the Confederacy on her 16th birthday, I realized that Margot’s mere existence no longer gave any offense to my family, and much of her attractiveness to me began to fade. The marriage ended when I left on an unaccompanied assignment to Chad on the southern edge of the Sahara. The divorce was finalized by Émilie’s second birthday. Margot and the girl stayed in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, where Margot proved to be infinitely more loving, supportive, and filial towards my parents than I had ever been. In her mid-40s she was still a striking beauty, and would-be suitors continued to nose around, but she never considered remarrying--reflecting her Catholic respect for the sacrament of marriage, even a failed one, rather than any yearning for me.
“Good morning, Margot,” I said, hoping to score points by subtly calling her attention to the eight-hour time difference between Baghdad and Falls Church, Virginia. “What can I do for you?”
“T’as aucune idée du jour qu’il est aujourd’hui?” She sounded angrier than usual. This seemed to involve something even more serious than money.
“Yes, I do know what day it is. Um, ah, here, eight hours ahead of you”--I couldn’t resist the temptation to score again on this point--“it’s Friday, November 11, 2005, Veteran’s Day in fact. Back in Falls Church, it’s still Thursday, November 10, 2005, and that means it’s the 230th anniversary of the U.S. Marine Corps to boot.” I was able to put on this impressive cognitive display so early on a Friday morning because Herb’s death had curtailed my drinking, and this morning I was suffering only from sleep deprivation, not my usual hangover.
“Incroyable, Will. T’es pire que jamais. You remember the Marines anniversary, mais tu oublies carrément l’anniversaire de ta proper fille. You are completely forgetting your own daughter’s birthday.” I was right. Marguérite’s anger this time had nothing to do with money.
“Oh, c’mon, Margot. Émilie’s a big girl now. She’s gotta be too busy with boyfriends and studying down at Tech to worry about silly shit like that. She’s too old to be expecting a gift-wrapped Barbie from her daddy, isn’t she?”
“Imbécile! Salaud égoïste! Émilie today is making her 21st year. You remember the mail she sent you on the computer just at the beginning of this week? Non, of course not. She came home for a big party here, with her friends, and family, and even your mother. And of course there was nothing from her papa--no flowers, no gift, no card, not even a phone call. Bien. I know you have so many important things to do, more important than your own daughter. Good. Bye.” Silence from the phone’s earpiece, followed by darkness on the display.
Damn. Another complication from Herb’s death. With all the time that would be eaten up by reporting on his death, dealing with the Embassy investigation, explaining what had happened to the Iraqis, and everything else, when would I be able make things right by Émilie? I brooded on this for a few minutes, then failed to will myself back to sleep. As a slave to my stomach and a creature of habit, I realized I wouldn’t be able to function at all without breakfast or my usual Friday morning routine of dusting, vacuuming, and otherwise straightening up my 300 square feet of living space.
After those small treats, I went over to The Cabana, as we called RAG’s office space. Although most of the Embassy and many military command elements worked out of the Mussolini-esque Republican Palace, RAG had set up shop in an enormous pool house a half-mile away. The pool itself was drained and boarded up. The adjacent expanse of empty concrete had a sad, almost apocalyptic feel--like the set of one of the low-budget Planet of the Apes sequels--especially on summer days when the temperature soared past one hundred thirty. The usual blast walls and sand bags heightened the sense of desolation. Inside, computer work-stations had been squeezed into the odd angles left by the eccentric architecture. Hastily improvised bundles of electric wires and IT cabling snaked across the floor and down from the ceilings. The windows were covered with plastic film designed to keep glass shards from flying in, should there be some type of explosion, and the electronic impulses of our computers and phones from flitting out. The only real office was in the former ladies’ changing room, and it was reserved for RAG’s Chief.
Normally, I made it a point of pride to avoid going into the office on Fridays. Most people at the Embassy and RAG made no distinction between weekend and other days, but I thought that this bad habit just proved Parkinson’s Law: the work of the U.S. Mission to Iraq was expanding to fill the time allotted to it, which was every waking hour for colleagues more driven by self-importance and a liberal overtime policy than I was. I always liked to think I had something better to do with my time, such as clipping my toe-nails or browsing E-Bay for slightly used cowboy boots --not to mention fine-tuning my tan up at the Palace pool (as Eleanor had commented on the previous night). On this Friday, though, after Marguérite’s bilingual reminder of my many flaws as an ex-husband and sometime father, going into The Cabana looked like a nice break, even if it was mainly to deal with the consequences of a colleague’s death.
I walked up to the door of the office of the RAG Chief, Jim O’Dwyer, and before knocking on the open door had a look to gauge the boss’s mood. This never required much study. Jim was a Boston Irishman whose face flashed the full palette of shades available to the whitest of white people--flushing redder as he got mad and softening into pink on those much rarer occasions that something made him happy. He had the craggy, jowly face and shock of white hair of Tip O’Neill, and nobody could ever prove to my satisfaction that Jim was not the late Speaker’s love child.
My glance into Jim’s office yielded unfavorable signs. Not only was his face redder than a meeting of the Clube de los Amigos de Fidel Castro, but he was pounding something so hard on his computer keyboard that his desk was quivering almost as much as the rolls of fat under his polo shirt. Sigh. There was nothing to be done for it. I really couldn’t put off discussing Herb’s death. I knocked on the open door.
Jim’s sausage-like fingers hammered a few more strokes, his face turned even redder, and then he looked up at me.
“Well, goddammit, come in Will, shut the door behind you. You might as well sit down because we’ve got a lot of talking to do. Do you know how much of a fucking pain in the ass it is to have one of your officers die in a shithole like Iraq? It’s an unbelievable fucking pain in the ass, that’s what it is. The dickheads at the home office in Washington think I can keep idiots like you and whats-iz-name, Herb, from doing stupid shit here. It will be bad enough, Perdue, when you get the clap from one of those international girls you’re always chasing after--don’t even try to look innocent, I hear the same gossip as everybody else--but when you take a dipshit like Herb to a party at a foreign diplomatic mission and let him get killed, well, this particular pile of shit is going to be hitting the fan for the next six months. I’m just now putting out the initial death report cable. Next somebody’s got to inventory Herb’s crap, both personal and work-related, then we have to arrange to ship his remains, and the shit just goes on.
“Now that’s just the crap I’ve got to put up with from our own people. Dealing with the Embassy will be even worse. The investigation into Herb’s death is in the hands of the fuckheads from the FBI. You met that bimbo Eleanor Kelly last night, so you know exactly what I’m talking about. What a great fucking combination--an Irish broad, a badge, a gun, cheap booze, and this idiot war zone. The Bureau’s people are a bunch of knuckle-dragging idiots in the best of circumstances, and you can be sure that their best people--you know, the ones that can holster their weapons without putting another hole in their own dicks--managed to get out of being sent here. Jesus-fucking-Christ. We’ve got to let that stupid fucking airhead Kelly interview us, spend time with us, pretend that she fucking knows what she is doing. And back home at the head office, all they want is to keep this off of Fox News and the Washington Post. The only reaction I got from the desk when I called them last night was whether any journalists knew about this yet. Jeezuz-H-Christ on a cross of gold. And while we’re wasting our time with this crap, we’re still supposed to do our job, to get the information that will protect the Marines and soldiers out in Ramadi and Tall Afar, and then help the goddam Iraqis build institutions that will defeat the fucking terrorists.
“Now, Will, I’ve got a request to make of you, and since you created the situation by not keeping Herb from getting himself killed, I don’t think you can say no. I’m pretty sure he died from some stupid accident; you know how it is, with just about all our people here who get hurt, it’s because they slip in the shower or trip over their own goddam feet leaving the bar, but this is a war zone, so you’ve got to check and double-check just in case. Eleanor Kelly and those other fucking morons the Embassy has investigating this case almost certainly won’t find anything unless it bites them in the ass a coupla times, and even then they’ll just think it’s their goddam hemorrhoids. You knew Herb--it’s not the same as liking him, I know you couldn’t stand each other--and you knew as much as anybody what he was doing and working on. Who knows; maybe he uncovered some deep dark secret that our friends at the Ministry of Defense were trying to hide, and they had him whacked for it. More likely he was just leaning over the roof at the Aussies’ place, trying to piss in the pool or look down some girl’s shirt. Try to find out what really happened. It might not make a difference, but it’s always good to know.”
With that Jim took what I thought was his first breath in 10 minutes. His face was pinker and not quite as red as it had been when I came in. I just nodded my head and said, “Yeah, that sounds reasonable. I’ll check around with our Iraqis and look into Herb’s papers.”
“Good man,” Jim said. “Let me know what you find.” He motioned me to the door, turned back to his keyboard, and resumed pounding. His face was already darkening from pink back to red.
Herb’s death, Margot’s call, and Jim’s call to arms had left me feeling wrung out but with a clear sense of purpose. I knew what I had to do. I went back to my room and took a long nap.
A little after five, I woke into a pleasant bubble of amnesia. For a minute, maybe longer, I didn’t know who or where I was. I was aware only of the comfort of oblivion. The comfort faded as consciousness trickled in, all too quickly building up to a stream of unpleasant facts. I was Will Perdue, in Baghdad. My daughter hated me even more than my ex-wives. My annoying colleague Herb was dead, and this was going to demand some time and energy from me. The FBI, in the buxom boozy shape of Eleanor Kelly, wanted to talk with me about it, and my boss wanted me to do a little digging and rule out the possibility that the death wasn’t just a stupid accident. Now that I was fully, uncomfortably awake, I needed to talk with somebody a lot smarter and saner than myself. I grabbed my phone and called my friend Maria-Theresa Liegen, the Embassy lawyer.
It was an undeserved stroke of luck for me that Maria-Theresa and I had both arrived in Baghdad in mid-2005. She was the sister of John Peter Liegen, one of my best buddies at the University of Virginia. I first met her at a graduation party in the late 70s. Our paths crossed over the years at marriages and baptisms and other highlights of John Peter’s life. Maria-Theresa was smart, outspoken, and pretty in a wholesomely blonde way that suggested clean, vigorous summers spent at Lutheran church camps in the German Black Forest. When we met we would talk books, swap gossip, maybe flirt a little, but our relationship remained that of friendly acquaintance.
As I attained modest mediocrity in my career with the Regional Analysis Group and attended to the confusion in my personal life, Maria-Theresa scaled the cursus honorum of international commercial law, earning a partnership, high honors, and of course boatloads of money. My mid-life crisis had driven me to Baghdad to hide; hers had propelled her there (helped by useful Republican connections) to seek adventure and serve her country. I was pleasantly surprised to bump into her during my first week in Baghdad, and quickly claimed a quasi-familial status. I found Maria-Theresa to be the pretty, blonde, smart, take-no-shit sister I had always wanted to have. She actually listened when I unloaded about my self-inflicted personal woes. From her perch as the Embassy’s chief lawyer, she was an invaluable source of gossip and tidbits about goings-on that I could recycle to O’Dwyer and use every now and then to look smarter and better informed than I really was. Who would be better to talk to about issues involving a dead colleague and a disturbing, possibly disturbed female FBI agent?
This Friday afternoon, when I called, I was in luck. Maria-Theresa not only answered the phone but was free for dinner. We arranged to meet at 5:30 at the Palace’s dining facility, the DFAC--dee-fack.
For most of the 10-minute walk from RAG to the DFAC, I was able to will conscious thought away and attain something close to the state of “mindfulness” that I had heard various yoga instructors soothe into existence over the years. (And always unsuccessfully in my case, as I lay flat on the mat painfully aware of that my briefs had bunched up.) The trance broke when I tripped on a crack in the sidewalk running parallel to the Palace’s southern end. Pain from my right big toe brought my mind back to a here-and-now full of ghosts: the garden of fallen icons. Three gigantic bronze busts of Saddam Hussein in full Saracen fig, claiming Saladin’s mantle as the defender of Muslims against latter-day Crusaders, kissed the dust. Next to them, oversized likenesses of Michel Aflaq--the founder of the Baath party--and other heroes of the ousted dictatorshipreclined amid a few scraggly weeds. I cursed the broken sidewalk and the statues--briefly wondering if some lingering malignancy from these images of murder and hatred had willed me to trip and then smiling at my foolish credulity--and gingerly resumed my way.
As I slightly limped up to the DfAC at 5:30, Maria-Theresa met me with Teutonic punctuality. She gave me a hug and then a quizzical look.
“Will,” she said. “I know you haven’t come up here because they’re having chicken again for dinner or because you want to give a girl the thrill of your über-macho company. Like everybody else, I’ve heard about what happened at the Australians’ last night, and I’d guess that’s what you’d like to talk about.”
“Maria-Theresa, sehr liebe Kaiserin, wie immer, du hast recht,” I said. “As always, you are of course right. I came here not just for your beauty--and I’ll swear you’ve lost another coupla pounds this week--but for your brains, which aren’t too shabby for a blonde. I would be eternally even more in your debt if you’d be able to answer a question or two and maybe give me some advice.”
“Of course, liebe Schatz. But let’s first see if they’ve got any chicken left inside.”
Because it was Friday, the most common down day for all the civilians and military personnel in the Palace, we were able to find an empty table where we could talk privately. Maria-Theresa picked at plate approximating salad--a pile of iceberg lettuce, spotted with the same peas and corn and beans that apparently were recycled at every meal--while I started sawing away at a purportedly spicy Mexican piece of chicken breast.
“I’m lucky tonight,” I said. “Whatever I say has got to be a lot more interesting than that salad you’ve got in front of you. Okay. My boss, Jim O’Dwyer--you've met him, right, florid-faced Irishman?--asked me to look into what happened to Herb and to keep track of what the Embassy’s doing about it. Jim thinks it was just a stupid accident, and nothing I saw last night or have heard since would suggest otherwise, but Jim says we can’t rule out the possibility that somebody for some reason killed that poor idiot Herb. This is a war-zone, and a lot of people are dying here. And with that FBI woman, Eleanor Kelley, as the lead Embassy investigator--well, you know our institutional bias about the Bureau. So, with you as the smartest and prettiest American lawyer in Baghdad, I was hoping you’d be able to give me some free legal advice and maybe a hint or two on what I can expect to happen here.”
Maria-Theresa smiled; I was pretty sure I was right about being more interesting than the salad. “Alright, Will. I’ll give you credit for knowing that flattering a girl is always a good way to start when you ask a favor. And yeah, I got a call way too early this morning to come in and check on the legalities of investigating the death of an American in the Green Zone. And since I had to suffer through the research on all these details, I think it’s only fair that I get to show off how smart I’ve become about them. You know how we blondes get when we actually know something.
“Basically, back in June ’04, at the end of the Coalition Provisional Authority, when we were getting ready to start returning sovereignty to the Iraqis, we issued CPA Order No. 17, concerning the status of coalition civilian and military personnel in Iraq. To put it bluntly, this order said we don’t trust the Iraqis enough to let them have any sort of say in the legal implications of what our people--Americans, Brits, other coalition or international types--might do over here. Section Two of the order explicitly says that all coalition personnel are immune from the Iraqi legal process, that we’re all subject to the laws of the governments that sent us here, and that our governments have the right to exercise any criminal or legal jurisdiction they choose here as it concerns their nationals. Like all the CPA orders, this is going to remain the law of the land until the Iraqi parliament explicitly changes things. And given the insurgency, security problems, the bad economy, and everything else on the Iraqis’ plate, I don’t think Order 17 will change any time soon.”
I had taken ungentlemanly advantage of her explanation to dispatch most of my chicken, as well as the fiesta rice and fried peppers. After Indian-wrestling a last bite down my gullet, I said, “Let me see if I get this. If an official American person here, whether a soldier or diplomat or other civilian, does something or has something done to him, then the Iraqis have no role in the investigation, and in fact we apply American procedures and law.”
“Such a smart boy, you got it right. I’m glad the obvious flattery you’ve been pouring on--and which you can keep pouring on, by the way--hasn’t detracted from your frontal-lobe activity. If it were a soldier or Marine, it would be the military criminal investigation people handling everything. For a direct civilian employee of Uncle Sam--like you or poor weird-looking little Herb--Embassy management decided to have the local FBI people do the work, because they seem to have the best expertise in forensics. And that’s where your new girlfriend, Eleanor Kelly, comes in.”
“Eleanor. Christ, that woman is some piece of work,” I said. I recounted Eleanor’s behavior at the Australians’ and her none-too-subtle pass at me. “If I were a bit younger, I might have been turned on in a disturbing sort of way by a drunk woman with a big gun, bigger breasts, and a badge. But I just don’t have the energy for that sort of thing any more.”
“Oh Will, you disappoint me. You’re too quick to judge. That poor girl just wants a little fun, and there you are pooping the party she’d like to throw for you.” Maria-Theresa smiled as she teased me, then seriousness returned to her voice. “But your boss is right to have you work on this yourself. I don’t think Eleanor was sent out here because she’s the best beloved of the Bureau’s big shots back in Washington. I hear she screwed up some type of big-time corruption investigation at her last job, in Kansas City I think, and her management thought Baghdad was about as far away as they could send her. I have seen her sober at the Embassy a few times, but those incidents were the exception, not the rule. Eleanor’s quirks probably won’t do any harm if Herb’s death really was just an accident, but I’d hate to think of her handling anything requiring any sort of judgment or sensitivity, without adult supervision or at least some type of second-guessing.”
“Well,” I said, “I guess the most good I can do here is damage-control. I don’t think that’ll be too hard. I mean, it sure looks like Herb just fell, so maybe the toughest thing here will be making sure there’s no Jack Daniels stains on Eleanor’s final report.”
Maria-Theresa nodded her head. “You’re right, that should be straightforward. Now, I’ve got to run off and make a phone call, but first I need you to do something important for me.” Her gaze shifted to the far wall of the room, to a counter where a half-dozen Baskin-Robbins flavors were served. “It’s an established fact that, if you get somebody else to get ice cream for you, it has only half the calories, so I’ll be your best friend forever if you get me a scoop of pralines-and-cream with a touch of fudge on top.”
I couldn’t argue with this unassailable logic and got myself two scoops of chocolate-chip-cookie-dough--in the bargain. As we consumed the frozen, high-calorie soma in worshipful silence as we left the DFAC, waves of calm and well-being washed over me from the melting pools of butter fat and sugar. Maria-Theresa returned to her office, and I headed back to the Cabana compound. Psychically fortified by the ice cream, I made it past the garden of fallen icons without tripping or seeing ghosts and safely into my room for an early night.
