Death in the Green Zone

Monday, November 14

2007-05-28T10:23:00.000-07:00

My skin felt the ghoulish caress of the cold clammy air before my eyes were able to focus on the gray lack of clarity. Unease had built up in my gut and was swelling as it passed my throat on its way to my brain. Something formless and evil was out there waiting for me. Maybe I could see it better if I cleared the fog from my glasses--but I wasn’t wearing my glasses. My hands flailed out in the gray wilderness to try to find the glasses. The back of my left hand found the edge of my night-stand, hard. I cursed monosyllabically, sat up on my bed, and wondered why I was so damned cold. Oh. Last night I hadn’t turned off the air conditioning, even though the fall nights in Iraq were coolish now, with temperatures in the 50s, and then I must have kicked off my blankets, which I now retrieved and wrapped around my torso. A terror dream was not the best way to wake up, but I supposed it was better than an angry call from an ex-wife.

I saw the phone flashing on the nightstand. The time was 7:13, and Émilie had called twice from her cell, at 11:53 and again at 12:01. Damn. I checked and found I had somehow switched the ringer off. I dialled her back, figuring eleven-something at night back home wasn’t too late for a college girl, but got no answer. I tried again, same lack of response. Great. She had reached out to me, I wasn’t there--again--and now she was no doubt back to screening out my calls and hating me. There was no point in calling Marguérite, since all I could expect was expert opinion on my inadequacies as a father.

Lingering memories of the cold twilight landscape where my dream had taken me, reinforced by recriminations at having missed Émilie’s call, left me unable to go back to sleep. I got up, dressed, grabbed a coffee and some toast at the mess hall, and went out to face the day. I checked my work-station at the Cabana and saw no e-mails, no overnight cable traffic of interest. So, I went out to the Ministry of Defense to see if there was anything new on Herb’s death--maybe Aliya had uncovered new information on Latif’s crooked dealings, maybe Jaburi had an update on the al-Maghribiya project from his contacts at the Prime Minister’s office.

On arrival at the Ministry--after a perfectly, mercifully uneventful trip--I was waylaid by a politely fawning young man in an immaculate white shirt, a small gold cross on a chain, and perfectly pressed khakis. “Please, Mr. William, good morning, sir.”

“Good morning, ah, Butrus,” I said, retrieving the name by a small miracle. I also remembered that he was one of the rare Iraqi Christians still around and the office manager for General al-Stambuli, the deputy minister. “I hope you and the general are well this morning.”

“Yes, thank you, it is very kind to ask. Please, Mr. William, the General would like to see you if he may.”

So I followed Butrus into a remarkably modest office, with just a desk and a half-dozen overstuffed chairs--but none of the Farouk Quatroze gilding that smothered the furnishings of most high-ranking Iraqis. This was in keeping the General’s character. He was a short, trim man, with an erect bearing that belied his 70 years and 3,000 parachute jumps, and never with a single wrinkle on anything he wore. The General had two main jobs, as far as I could tell: providing a reassuring, avuncular presence for the Ministry’s career military personnel left over from the Saddam regime, and staying out of the way of the Minister and the other returned exiles who actually ran things. The General excelled at both.

“Mr. William, please come in, sit down,” he said, leaning across the desk to shake my hand. “My most important duty today is a sad duty, to express to you and all your colleagues how sad I was to learn of Mr. Herbert’s death. It is a great loss, especially because he was so young. Brigadier Jaburi tells me it was an accident. That would not happen for an Iraqi, we don’t have accidents here any more.”

“Yes, sir, an accident, that’s what the investigator at our Embassy seems to be concluding,” I answered. “It’s very kind of you to be so concerned. Your concern is another reminder of how lucky we are to have you from the Defense IAS Service as our friends and family.”

“Friendship and family are normal feelings. Your friend Brigadier Jaburi is preparing a memorial service for Mr. Herbert that the Brigadier will want to discuss with you later. But for now, I hope you will indulge an old man. I have found the photographs we talked about and would like to show them to you.”

A few weeks earlier, during a long bout of polite chit-chat over coffee, and after the General had told his fourth war story of the morning, I had suggested he pull his experiences together into a memoir of all the changes in Iraqs he had lived through. He said then that he had at home photographs that showed all the history of modern Iraq, and I of course expressed my deathless desire to see them.

The photographs that he pulled out began with a sepia-toned photo of a man he identified his father, wearing an odd uniform that started at the bottom with knee-high boots and ended on top with a fez over a fierce mustache. “In the first war, my father here fought for the Sultan, in the battles against the English and the Indians when they landed at Basrah. You remember of course that my family were real Turks, from Stambul or Istanbul as you call it, but they were also real Iraqis who married Arab girls, and we stayed here even when most of the other Turks left. But we are also real Turks of Turkey, unlike these Turkomans in the north.”

The general’s photos moved us forward through Iraq’s 20th century. At first the images were almost familiar: Stambouli père in a frock coat posing stiffly next to his wife in a modest Western dress in a park, images changing as fashions evolved and as children joined the group and grew. The images veered in a different direction by the late 1950s as the General became a young man. There was a poignant shot of young Stambuli in a singlet shaking hands with a young man wearing a dark double-breasted suit and delicately stretching a smile across an unlined face. “That,” the General said, “That is the young king, the second Faisal, awarding me the trophy for best wrestler at the Royal Military Academy. This was June 1958, just one month before General Qasim had his coup and the mob killed the king, even though he was still a boy, just twenty-three. We all thought that was progress back then, because kings were backwards and becoming a republic meant being modern and scientific.” He shook his head sadly.

Then the theme of the photos changed, and all the images were military. Stambuli and other young Iraqis grinning with Russian jump instructors, on some Central Asian steppe in the 1960s. Posed on the lip of a cliff with endless mountains behind, during operations against Kurdish guerrillas in the early 1970s. Holding a Star of David flag. Huh? “Yes, that was in the Golan in 1973, the Ramadan war. There were 75,000 of us Iraqis fighting alongside our Syrian brothers, and we fought the Jews to a standstill then. Of course, that was before Saddam destroyed our army.” More snapshots against the backdrop of Kurdistan, then an older officer posing with Russians, other Arabs, Africans--and is that large black man . . .? “Yes, Mr. William, that is Idi Amin Dada, when he was president of Uganda. We were sent to train his troops how to jump, but there were bad problems with their planes, and we lied that the weather was not right for the exercises we had planned. We ate dinner at Idi Amin’s palace with him and his offices, but I had heard the stories so even though he said he was a Muslim like us I decided I could not eat the meat.”

Now a middle-aged officer beamed at the camera from the ruins of a city. The same face beamed back at the photograph and then at me. “Abadan, at the beginning of our war with the Persians. That is when I became a general, when we drove into Iran at the beginning of Saddam’s war.” And the general launched for at least the tenth time in my hearing into the haircut story: how, under intense enemy shelling, he ordered his orderly to give him a haircut. “I never had a worse haircut in my life. Mustafa’s hands were shaking so badly I’m lucky he didn’t cut my ears off. But my men saw the haircut, and maybe they thought I was very brave, maybe they thought I was just crazy, but they held the line that day no matter how many shells the Persians fired.”

The next photo showed the general standing ramrod straight, right hand out shaking the hand of him, the man with the thick black moustache and the toothy, self-satisfied grin. “That, Mr. William, was January 1981--or was it February, I’m not sure any more--when Saddam himself awarded me the Wissam ar-Rafidain, the Order of the Rivers, the highest award he could give, because even he could recognize what we had accomplished on the southern front when we fought the Persians in Abadan. I was called from the front, but at first they didn’t tell me why. When I got to the airport in Basrah they took my pistol and put me in a plane with the windows covered up, and I started to worry, because you could always get arrested for no reason. For 90 minutes in the air I wondered which captain or corporal had a grudge against me and might have turned me in to the Istikhbarat, the military intelligence. When we landed the plane went into a hangar, and they put me into a van with no windows. I was really sweating by this time, even though the weather was cold, and they probably could have got me to confess to anything if they had wanted. We drove into another covered structure, and then the guards--who never gave names and wore no markings on their uniforms--led me down hallways that looked too comfortable to be a prison, but you could never tell in those days. So you can imagine my surprise when I was brought into a room with a clean uniform, exactly my size, laid out on a bed, and polished shoes, and told to take a shower and shave. Then an orderly came for me, and we went to another waiting room, but this one with security men who patted me down, and then another orderly brought me into a throne room, and there he was, President Saddam Hussein, surrounded by other officers I barely knew and a photographer and a cameraman from the television news. I must say the President was nice to me, telling me to stand at ease and praising me and my men for all the Persians we had killed. I felt very good and proud--and maybe my relief at not being arrested had something to do with this--and I was happy to be praised by the President and to know that my wife and sons would see my picture with him in the newspaper. I can’t say how long the ceremony lasted, but when it was over I remembered what the President didn’t say. He didn’t ask about my troops, whether they had enough to eat or enough bullets to hold their positions or how their morale was. So when I was given a furlough for a few days before returning to the front, I thought it was my duty to write a letter to the President letting him know what my boys at the front needed to do their duty and how they were short on bread and petrol and certain types of ammunition. I never got an answer, but about one week after I returned to the front, I got new orders to become head of physical fitness for the Army and maybe one year later was told that I was able to retire on full pension. I guess that Saddam did not want to hear what I had to say after all.” The general smiled wanly, maybe thinking of the dangerously foolish optimism of his youth.

The remaining photos lacked the drama of the others. There were various shots of the General and his wife and his children. Each year they looked a little more threadbare and worn. “Mr. William, when I first retired, my pension was adequate, but things became very hard. After the war that your first President Bush had with Saddam because of Kuwait, our money became worthless. An honest man like me, and I praise Allah for steering me clear of temptation, who only owned property in Iraq, could not get by on his pension and his savings. I used to calculate the value of my pension every month in U.S. dollars and British pounds, but when my 10,000-dinar pension became worth less than three dollars--and that used to be the rate for just one Iraqi dinar, mind you--I couldn’t do it any more. If we wanted something more than the rice and tea and sugar the government gave us every month every month, we had to sell some furniture or a piece of my wife’s jewelry. I tell you, Mr. William, when the regime fell two years ago, we were down to nothing; all we had left was our bed, our wedding bands, and a 15-year-old car.” Stambuli straightened the pile of photos and stared at them wistfully.

“General, your life has been Iraq’s, and after seeing your photos I think more than ever you should write it down so the young people won’t forget,” I said, looking for a tactful way to disengage. “If Iraqis lose touch with this past, they will have much less of a future.”

“Thank you, Mr. William, for your kind words,” Stambuli responded. “The future, ah yes, that reminds me. We have been asked to help with a project that will be very good for Iraq’s future, and I hear you have discussed it with Brigadier Jaburi. This is the al-Maghribiya project to buy the seeds and everything else so the poor farmers out in the west will stop being terrorists. It is so positive that the Shia members of the Prime Minister’s party have found a way to help the Sunni people out in al-Maghribiya, and especially because your American Ambassador and all his advisers are committed to help. And with my colleagues here in the Intelligence and Analysis Service at the Defense Ministry, we will of course do everything we can to make this happen; we will focus resources on finding and defeating the terrorists who want to rob the Maghribiya farmers of their chance to grow food and get rich. It is very good for us to work with the government like this.”

So Stambuli, too, had been sipping from the al-Maghribiya Kool-aid. I shouldn’t have been surprised.

“General, I don’t know nearly as much about this project as I would like,” I said, weighing my words carefully. “It is great, though, to see our colleagues here in the intelligence bureau have such a direct role in something so important to the Prime Minister.”

I judged it was an appropriate time to bolt. “Sir, again thank you for being so generous with your time and showing the pictures. But I must excuse myself. Mr. James back at the Embassy has asked me to take care of some business with Mrs. Aliya and Brigadier Jaburi, and I of course cannot let him down. And again, we all appreciate your condolences for Herb and his death.”

“So sad, so sad that a young man who was our good friend had to die. Please, Mr. William, go, and thank you for your company and advice this morning.”

I decided to head next to Aliya’s office, largely because there was one fewer flight of stairs than going up to Jaburi’s. The climb itself and finding clean, secure footing free of catshit and other obstacles took all my attention. A more observant person might have found it odd that I was the only one on this staircase late on a weekday morning, and probably would have heard sounds from the ongoing construction on the third floor. Such a person would have been a lot less startled than I was when suddenly a hammer hurtled no more than a half-inch from my face and bounced off the railing by my right hand before landing somewhere in the basement. Someone yelled out “Afwan--sorry" and by a miracle of self control the contents of my bladder remained in situ. This had to have been a random near-miss, but I couldn’t help but reflect that another conversation about al-Maghribiya--no matter how bland and uncontroversial--had been followed by another apparent accident seemingly aimed at me. When I got to the top of the flight of stairs and turned toward Aliya’s office, I stopped to collect myself until my hands stopped shaking, but couldn’t will any strength back into my legs.

When I stepped into Aliya’s office, things appeared normal at first glance. Three employees in her section were standing in front of her desk, heads down, clasped hands clutching folders while she held forth in rapid-fire, high-pitched Arabic. A closer look gave a different picture, though. Aliya’s face was drawn and colorless, with bags drooping under her eyes. Her makeup was haphazard and smudged. Aliya saw me in the doorway, nodded, gave a last burst of irritated-sounding Arabic, gestured for her three staffers to leave, and then waved me in. She smiled at me and gave my hands a warm squeeze, but her eyes were dull and no gold flecks glimmered from her pupils.

“Mr. William, I am always so glad to see you,” she said, motioning for me to sit. “Especially when I have to deal with people like those three who say they are lawyers but cannot take the first step in our profession. I asked them to work on the simplest thing, to check the leases on some houses we are renting, but they are incapable of the smallest amount of common sense. They thought it was perfectly normal for us to pay a security deposit on the lease equal to a full year of the rent, and then to pay monthly rent. I cannot make up my mind if they are stupid or maybe taking payments from the landlords.

“And then I must deal with these idiots after two very bad nights with Haydar.” She got up and shut the door to her office. “I do not care what they think we are doing in here”--it was risqué for an unrelated man and woman to be alone together behind closed doors--"but I do not want them to know of my troubles at home. Haydar is worse than ever. He stopped touching me as a man touches his wife months ago, but now he does not even shake my hand and will not eat food that I prepare. He says I am impure and polluted by the way I dress and the way I spend time with men. He knows I meet with Americans like you and Mr. Herbert, and says he would kill them if he could for dishonoring me and him and our country and religion. I think he would beat me if he could stand touching me. Now he says he will take another wife, some 16-year-old girl who is the daughter or sister of the imam from the Sadr party husseiniya (Shia mosque), and he says I cannot stop him. If he wants to do that, he is right, I cannot prevent it. But I do not have to accept it, so I am going to get a divorce. I will have to leave our apartment and move in with my cousin and her husband, but at least he is a nice and modern man like you, Mr. William, a professor of mathematics at the University of Baghdad. Now my whole family will know all the troubles I have had with Haydar, and I know my sisters will say it is my fault.”

Aliya’s eyes filled with tears, which provided the refraction the gold flecks needed to shine again, and her jaw trembled with the effort of holding them back. I felt the stirring of a strange, strong cocktail of pity and desire. I took her right hand and gently patted it--while trying desperately to conjure up images of cold showers to douse my combustible feelings.

“I am so sorry, Mrs. Aliya, so sorry that your husband can’t appreciate what a beautiful, smart, strong woman he married. You’re living something very hard right now, but I think things will get better. You don’t deserve to be stuck with some man who lets an imam do all his thinking for him, and once you are free of Haydar, you’ll be able to find the good, decent man you deserve.”

Now the tears poured out, but she also smiled, and it was like a seeing a rainbow through a storm. She lightly stroked my face with her left hand.

“Thank you, Mr. William, for being my good friend." She paused as in mid-thought, touched my face again but this time clinically, and folded her hands in her lap. “You are pale and do not look well. Now that I think about it, you maybe were trembling when you came in. Are you sick? Is it something about Mr. Herbert’s death?”

“It’s not Herb’s death,” I said. “The investigator from our Embassy has made a pretty good case that Herb died because of an accident. What you see with me right now is the after-effects of a stupid almost-accident,” I said. “One of the workers on the renovation of the third floor dropped his hammer, and it fell very close to me. You know I’m no hero, and any sort of fright like that is hard on me.”

Aliya looked doubtful. “Accidents do not happen in Iraq, not now, Mr. William. As I told you on Saturday, when a young, healthy man like Mr. Herbert dies here, it is because somebody makes it happen. And I do not think that hammer fell near you by accident. I think you are asking questions about Muhammad Latif and his Maghribiya project, and somebody is warning you to stay away. I think there might be other so-called accidents that are happening to you, and you are not telling me. And maybe you are so worried it is giving you bad dreams. Mr. William, you are my friend and I cannot lose you.”

She almost whispered the last few sentences as the tears welled up around the gold flecks again. She reached into her blouse and pulled out a chain on which several pendants hung. She unhooked the chain, took one of the pendants off, put it in my palm and folded my hand over it.

“This is for you to borrow,” she said. “It is a charm that my grandmother gave me when I was in school. It is an eye that will look for evil and keep it away from you. I did not have it with me the day Saddam’s police arrested me, but I have worn it ever since I left prison. I think you need it more than I do now. Please be careful, Mr. William.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Aliya.” I was able to put the pendant--an open, almond-shaped eye, maybe a half-inch long, surrounded by lashes like sun rays--on my key ring. “I will keep it for a few days, to make you feel better. When we really know what happened to Herb, then I’ll return it to you.”

I stood and excused myself because I needed to speak to Brigadier Jaburi. Aliya lingered over my farewell handshake, eyes shining with tears and jaw slightly trembling. She said nothing as I left.

The near-miss from the hammer and Aliya’s concern left me too preoccupied to pay my usual attention to the cat-shit and carpet barriers between her office and Brigadier Jaburi’s analysis department on the next floor up. Once I reached the third floor, the employees of Jaburi’s analysis department--most of whom I was seeing for the first time that work week--sidled out of their offices and quickly and quietly offered their condolences on Herb’s death. I shook dozens of hands and mouthed refrains of “Thank you, it’s very kind of you” as I worked my way down 50 yards of hallway. At the corridor’s end, Jaburi was alone in his office, engrossed in a pile of documents containing what liked like schematic diagrams.

He looked up and waved me in. “Please, Mr. William, have a seat. You see, we are very busy here. The Minister, Dr. Salah F. Brahim, has asked us to prepare a memorial service for our friend Mr. Herbert, to take place tomorrow, so we are of course complying. This is important to show our respect for all of our foreign friends, from America as well as England and Australia, and also because we were so fond of Mr. Herbert.”

The tea-boy come in. I asked for qahwa ma sukar, sweet strong Turkish coffee, and thanked Jaburi for the concern he and the other Iraqis were showing for Herb.

“This is only normal, Mr. William. Mr. Herbert was very special to us, very special. He was so young and so full of life, and he always was so generous in sharing his advice with us. We will miss him so much.”

Jaburi’s comments could have been interpreted as an unfavorable comparison between the ambitious dead guy--so young, so willing to tell the Iraqis how to go pound sand--and the living, breathing burned-out case in front of him, but I didn’t think this was the time to ask. Instead, I sighed, “Yes, Herb was one of a kind. He’ll be hard to replace.”

“But I think Mr. Herbert had a good death, even for a young man,” Jaburi continued. “He was helping us Iraqis fight against terrorism and building the friendship between the Iraqi and American people. When he died, he was in a place surrounded by friends who valued so much what he was doing. Maybe, if he had to die, Mr. Herbert was lucky in what happened. But it is because he was so impotant to us ...” I lost track of Jaburi’s exact words because the cadences of his encomiums on Herb and his good death evoked something strangely familiar. Yes, I thought, that’s it: Jaburi is channeling Arthur Miller, talking about young Herb the same way that Willy Loman described the old guy who died the death of a salesman in his green velvet slippers in the smoking car of the New York, New Haven & Hartford.

When I returned from my excursion back to 11th-grade English, Jaburi was continuing on his plans for commemorating Herb. “That is why planning a ceremony for Mr. Herbert is so important for us. We will have the ceremony down in our conference room on the entrance floor. We will conduct it in a non-sectarian way, of course, honoring the new Iraq and recognizing that all of us--Sunni and Shia and Christian and even others, you know even some of the fire-worshippers from the hills in the north work here in the Ministry--are children of God. The Minister, Dr. Salah himself, will make some remarks, and some of us others who have benefitted so much from Mr. Herbert and you and the other friends, and we will invite you and Mr. James and even the English and Australian friends we work with. There is so much to do in so little time!”

Jaburi got up from behind his desk and started pacing around the office, punctuating his steps with stabs of his right index finger. “Look, Mr. William, at the charts of everything we must do: enlarging a photo of Mr. Herbert that we can display; deciding who will sit where in the most dignity, ordering refreshemnts--and don’t you agree that simple cakes with coffee and tea would be best; finding an expression of our sympathy that we can ask you to send to his family back home; and even thinking about music. Here, you see, we have got the Iraq and American flags that we will honor along with Mr. Herbert in the ceremony. So much, so much to do.”
He circled around behind his desk again, grabbed a pile of envelopes, and handed them to me. The paper was heavy but with a smooth texture and a fine cream color--the highest quality stationery I had seen in Iraq. Jaburi continued, “And,before I forget, here are the invitations for you and Mr. James and your colleagues. With your kind permission, we would like for the ceremony to start at eleven tomorrow morning.”

I made a show of pulling the frayed little calendar from the credit union out of my pocket and consulting it. “Brigadier, I think that will work for us, but I’ll have to check with the boss and let you know if there’s any conflict. I can speak for us all in expressing how moved and grateful we are with the effort the whole Ministry is showing for my dead colleague.

“Before I leave you to carry on with all the preparations for tomorrow,” I continued, “I’d like to see if you’ve got any additional information about the al-Maghribiya project. It seems to be on everybody’s mind. When I paid my respects to General Stambuli first thing this morning, he mentioned it and said the Minister has pledged to support it in any way possible.”

“I am glad to be able to tell you that the news on this front remains good,” Jaburi said. “Yesterday I spoke with Dr. Jibril, our friend who works on the Prime Minister’s staff. Dr. Jibril told me that he and Mr. Muhammad al-Latif had a very positive meeting on Saturday with the experts from the American USAID mission and even with a member of the American Embassy political section. And he said this was a very good meeting, and they think Muhammad al-Latif will have the funds he needs from Washington by the end of this week. And also on Saturday, when the Prime Minister took tea with your Ambassador and your commanding General, he explained the importance of the Maghribiya project and they promised to do everything to help. This is all very good. For just a few million dollars, by Spring we will have more farmers and fewer insurgents out in Maghribiya Province. It is all very good.

“And our service will play its role, of course,” Jaburi continued. “Dr. Jibril and I will speak in the next few days about the types of information, on terrorists and the tribes and so on, that we can provide. It will be a big boost for us to be involved in something so important.”

“Well,” I said, “It sounds like some real progress is being made there, and it’s great you’ll have a key role. I know you’re very busy, what with planning for the ceremony and getting ready to help the Prime Minister’s office with the al-Maghribiya project, so I”ll excuse myself and go now.”

“Mr. William, I cannot do that,” Jaburi protested, loking at his watch. “It is one-thirty and time for lunch, and we have a special Iraqi treat today that you must share with some of my colleagues and me.”

The tea-boy cracked the door and said something in Arabic. “The timing is very good, Mr. William. Our lunch is here on the table out in the hall and waiting for us. Please, let me show you.”

I felt too worn out by the portents that had followed Herb’s death to protest Jaburi’s cheerful, energetic invitation to lunch. I let him usher me out to the hall, where his three section chiefs--Kamal, Dulaimi, and Hamid—stood expectantly around a pungent platter of fish, salad, and bread.

“Mr. William, welcome,” said Kamal. “Today you will get to know mazhguf, the famous fish of Iraq.”

“I have heard that in the old days, Baghdad was well known for restaurants that grilled fish along the river. Is that what mazhguf is?”

“The very best food you can get in Baghdad, or maybe anywhere in the world” Kamal said. “Mazhguf is the best, the noblest fish in our Tigris river. It is the fish that stays on the bottom, so he can eat all the food that is there and get fat without fighting for his food. And the very best mazhguf, like this one we will eat, is from the river right here in Baghdad and prepared by the fish cooks of Abu Nawas street along the Tigris. That way, you know it is absolutely fresh. You see, Mr. William, the trick in preparing mazhguf is to smoke the fish over a fire, but not too long or too close, and you must use the wood from a pomegranate tree. That way it will stay tender and juicy, just the way it should be.”

As I put all this information together, I wanted to gag. The Iraqis had worked themselves into a gastronomic frenzy over a close approximation to a carp from the Cuyahoga or the East River: a bottom-feeder that had been fattened on all the shit--literal shit--and corpses and other pollution that accumulated every day in the fetid open sewer that passed for a river in Baghdad. But I had to suppress the reflex and surrender my digestive well-being to the needs of God and country. I responded to Kamal, “I am uniquely lucky to be able to taste this remarkable dish.”

Jaburi grabbed a plate and with his right hand ripped off a large, dripping piece of the fish. After adding a piece of bread and a bit of salad, he handed it to me with a flourish. “Please, Mr. William, start, do not wait for us. Mazhguf waits for no one.”

The fish was juicy and with a pleasant woody taste, but all I could think of was the turds and water-logged bits of human flesh that had entered its mouth and been transmogrified into the glistening white lumps that kept reappearing on my plate. I manfully polished off each serving that Dulaimi and Kamal and Hamid and then Jaburi again politely insisted I must have. I felt I was on the receiving end of a gastro-intestinal gang-bang. My stomach gurgled and my head spun, but like a true professional diplomat I kept eating and smiling.

After 30 minutes or so we had made enough of a dent in this undercooked bottom-feeder to leave the remnants to the tea-boys and floor-sweepers who had been jealously eyeing the feast. Dulaimi fetched an atomizer from his office and doused us all with cheap, strong eau de cologne. Now I reeked of counterfeit perfume as well as coprophagic fish. Watering eyes joined throbbing head and flip-flopping gut. We retreated to Jaburi’s office for the obligatory cups of sweet tea and chit-chat about the glories of Iraqi cuisine and the wondrous products of agriculture in the Land of Two Rivers. Digestive twinges steadily crept ever lower down my gut. Around 3:00 I was able to excuse myself without hurting the Iraqis’ feelings. Mercifully, my walk to the car in the Rashid Hotel parking lot featured no sudden, spasmodic cramping below the belt.

What I saw as I strolled into the parking lot was not merciful. Another slashed tire, this time the rear left. I remembered the statistics class required for my economics major. You need three points to draw a trend line--and now there were three points of cut-up tire going counter-clockwise from the front right one. It didn’t take much to guess that the line would next hit the right rear tire, and that maybe my person would be the ultimate target of the line of slashing. My left hand slid in my pocket and felt for Aliya’s eye charm on my key ring. I felt I needed all the help I could get. I took a couple of deep breaths and got in behind the wheel. As I put the key in the ignition, I remembered: I was so distracted by the slashed tire that I hadn’t checked for stray wires or grease stains that might indicate a car bomb. I turned the key any way. Insh’allah, I thought--God willing--I just wanted to get out of there and back to our compound as fast as I could. The motor started smoothly, and for the third day in a row I limped into the garage for a new tire.

Grease Man the mechanic was having a smoke in front of the garage when I limped in and parked. His eyes turned down to check at the tires, and when they reached the rear left the cigarette dropped out of his oily fingers. He kept his eyes fixed as he walked over, squatted by the mutilated tire, and ran his fingers along the wound.

"Mo-ther-fuck-er," he said, almost reverentially. "Looks just like what happened to your tires yesterday and Saturday. You're a spaceman, Purdue, and you drive like an asshole, but I don't think even you could manage to fuck up three tires in a row like this. Gotta be somebody who really hates you that's doing this."

"I wish I knew, Grease, I wish I knew," I said. "You figure that there's 25 million Iraqis out there and an awful lot of them wish us all types of hurt. But somebody thinks I'm real special. Jesus, if I knew who it was, believe me, I'd stay the hell away. The good news for you is that I don't think I'll need this til tomorrow."

"Mo-ther-fuck-er," Greaseman intoned again. "Yeah, looks like this would be a good night for you and my car to stay in. I'll have a new tire on for you for the morning, but for fuck's sake, be careful man."

I went over to the Cabana to check my e-mails. O’Dwyer was on the front porch as I entered. He nodded a greeting, sniffed, stared at me, and sniffed again.
“Jesus-fucking-Christ, Will,” he said. “You smell like you just swam across the Anacostia River after visiting a cheap French whorehouse. What the hell happened to you?”

“Muzhguf,” I answered. “I was over at IAS today and had the bad fortune to be in Jaburi’s office at lunch time when they brought one of those goddam fish in. It’s just carp pulled off the bottom of the Tigris, where it’s gotten fat from all the shit and bodies, and then they undercook it. Jaburi and his guys were pushing it down my gullet like I was a French goose. I can feel the damned stuff working its way down my gut, and I think something nasty is gonna happen real soon.”

“Yeah, I know all about muzhguf,” Jim said. “It’s one of the reasons you’ll never see me over there at meal time. Of course, if you used your brain as much as you worry about your dick, you’d have been able to tell them something about why Presbyterians can’t eat freshwater fish. I’ve got ‘em convinced that it’s against my proud bog-hopping Irish heritage and mackerel-snapping religion to eat fish unless it’s Friday and they can serve boiled potatoes alongside. If you get sick, it’s your own fucking fault for not thinking on your feet. Just try not to puke around me.

“While you were over there, Will," he continued. "Did you learn anything of interest, besides the earth-shattering fact that bottom-feeding fish eat a lot of turds?”

“Well, the only thing on Herb’s death was invitations to a memorial service they are holding for him tomorrow--here they are. Jaburi was obscenely ecstatic about getting all the details down. The Minister’s gonna preside over this zesty session. I told Jaburi there shouldn’t be any problem in us showing up at eleven.”

Jim nodded his head and said, “Yeah, it’d be pretty bad form for us not to show up. Luckily, it’s not too early because we just set up our own ceremony for Herb at nine tomorrow morning. Herb was one of ours, after all. I’ll clear my calendar for late morning and lunch time and have Neidermeyer”--that was O’Dwyer’s deputy--"clear his as well.” He sniffed again and crinkled his mouth and nose in disgust. “Did you just fart? That stank even worse than the damned fish on your breath and your clothes. For God’s sake get out of here before you kill somebody.”

He had taken the words right out of my mouth. “Sorry, Jim. You’re right, I’d better run. My gut’s starting to cramp bad.”

I managed a fast, cheek-clenched walk back to my room with as much dignity as possible. I at least had the solace of company since gastro-intestinal distress was even more common than dust in Baghdad. Whether it was airborne bacteria, food that had traveled too far on its way to our messhalls, or some remnant of Saddam's biological warfare programs, just about every Westerner in Baghdad seemed to catch the Mesopotamian two-step.

Once safely home I spent the rest of the afternoon and most of the evening pouring pepto-bismol down my digestive tract to try to compensate for the ravages wrought by the muzhguf. The exorcism of my intestinal flora raged past 10, when the last traces of the filthy, carp-processed sediments of the Tigris spewed out of me. I took a shower and a last dose of pepto and flopped down to bed.

Sunday, November 13

2007-05-19T14:09:00.000-07:00

Once again I was unable to float on the soothing waters of the Lethe as far into the morning as I had hoped. The cell phone’s display showed it was 6:38 a.m. and that I was getting a call from Jane’s landline.

I picked the phone up and turned on the sarcasm. “You’re really deadset against letting a man sleep, aren’t you?”

There was a pause, and then a young, tentative voice said, “Sorry, Dad. I’ll call later.”

“No, Mathias, no, don’t hang up,” I answered. “No need to apologize. I’m always glad to hear from you. It’s, well, I thought it was your mother, and you know how things are between us. But you must have called for a reason. What is it?”

“Okay. Dad, you won’t tell Mom I called, will you? I want this to be just between you and me. Mom’s even madder at you and more worried than usual.”

“No, Mathias, I’d only tell her if it was something dangerous or bad for your health. Please tell me you’ve not done something like that.”

“I feel like a baby, Dad, but I’ve got these bad feelings about you. Mom told told me that somebody you work with got killed, and I see all the bad news about the war and the fighting in Iraq on television. There’s other stuff too. I keep hearing Mom and Barry talk about having Mr. Green, the lawyer, make it harder for you to visit and call and stuff. Mom says you’ve already checked out of my life any way, that you’re happy as a pig in shit living in your little bubble there in Baghdad--that's exactly what she said--but at least Barry’s telling her to chill out. Dad, I just don’t want anything to happen to you.”

Handling my teenage son’s unexpected expession of worries about and love for me was harder than responding to my ex-wives’ anger and unhappiness. Jane and Margot were right about my failings as a father. I didn’t deserve Mathias’s concern but I didn’t want to lose him either. I had to stay engaged, put aside my own concerns, and lose the sarcasm and victimhood with which I usually responded to stress and emotions.

“Mathias,” I said. “It’s tough for all of us--you, your sister back in Virginia, even your Mom even though she and I split up long ago--to have me here in Baghdad. The danger and distance and everything else make this a lot harder than when I was back in Washington or on my other jobs in Africa. But Mathias, there’s good stuff, too. I’m getting more time off that I can spend with you. I’ll be home at Christmas time, and of course I’ll visit you in Costa Mesa. Start thinking about whether you want to go skiing or to Baja. We’ll work it out with your Mom, don’t worry. And don’t worry about me keeping safe. There is a war here, sure, but I’m not a soldier, and I’m not looking to prove what a hero I am.

“Listen,” I continued. “I need to apologize to you. I’ve not been as good about keeping in touch with you as a father should. Some of it is the time difference--the 11 hours between Iraq and California is a bear--and some of it is just everything that’s happening out here. A lot of it is that things just slip my mind. But whether you hear from me every day or not, I want you to know that you’re always on my mind and in my heart. If I ever completely, irrevocably dropped out of your life, it would break my heart. I love you son.”

“I love you, Dad.”

The line went silent for a few seconds. I stepped into the breach. “By the way, Mathias, you turn 16 next month. My shopping options here are kind of limited, so why don’t you tell me what you’d like.”

“I’d really like a car,” the kid said without missing a beat. “But I probably won’t get my license til the end of the school year, so that wouldn’t work. How about a Retro 550 Vespa Scooter? It’s got automatic transmission and can’t go faster than 30, that makes it safer and easy to use; and it uses hardly any gas so it’s good for the environment; and Mom wouldn’t have to drive me around; and it looks really cool. What do you think, Dad?”

“What I think, Mathias, is that you’ve already done a lot of thinking about this,” I answered, carefully weighing my words. “I would also bet that you’ve not talked about this with your mother, and that this is something she and I would agree on. A scooter can be real dangerous--and it’s not because you’d be a bad driver, but you’d have to trust all the old farts and idiots on the road to see you. I’m not saying definitely no, but I will have to talk about this with your mother. Listen, Mathias, tell me how are things with you. Is school going okay? Are you still working on stage crew?”

A door chime sounded in the receiver. “I think that’s Evan and Laura and Andrea. They’re coming over to watch a DVD. I’ve gotta go.” The chime range again. “I love you, Dad.”

“I love you, too, Mathias,” I said to a connection already gone dead with all the rush of youth.

This was certainly a more auspicious way to start the day than had been the case on Friday and Saturday. Somebody back home who was intimately connected to me was worried about maintaining the bond. Feeling lucky, I punched in the land-line number for Marguérite and Émilie in Virginia; no answer. I tried Émilie’s cell; no answer again. They were still screening out my calls. Getting my daughter back into my life was going to take some time and thought--both of which were also required, I remembered, to try to figure out why and how Herb had died.

Much as I wanted to, I just couldn’t rule out the possibility of a link between Herb’s death and the Al-Maghribiya Project. Aliya, Jaburi, and the other smart, well-educated Iraqis I worked with all believed in a kind of conspiracist astrology. They saw their lives as governed by hidden networks and plots that were engaged in an occult struggle to dominate their lives, their country, the region, even the whole world. To survive, the Iraqis felt they had to be able to read the indirect signs of where the networks were and how they were moving, and then find a way to sidestep or placate these forces. Where Jaburi saw a Persian planet moving malignantly through the house of Iraq, Aliya perceived a dangerous constellation forming around Al-Maghribiya and Muhammad Latif and Jibril at the Prime Minister’s office, and she was convinced that this alignment had somehow exerted the force that pushed Herb to his death. Logically, I should have dismissed this theory out of hand, but long years in Africa left me disposed to believe in the reality, efficacy, and malevolence of occult forces. I had known too many happy customers of Chadian marabouts and Liberian jujumen--Westerners as well as locals, all pleased to have achieved the love or revenge they had contracted for--to dismiss this type of magical thinking out of hand. And understanding magic was like understanding science or police-work; magic followed its own rules of causation and if used in a crime would leave some type of forensic evidence just as surely as a gun or vial of poison. I needed to flesh out what I knew about Al-Maghbribiya, its principals, and their contacts. Lieutenant-Colonel David Ferguson, military liaison with USAID, might be the guy to fill in the facts.

My only commitment this Sunday was a follow-up meeting with the Embassy investigator at around 12:30, so I thought I could usefully fill in the morning by chatting with David over at USAID. When I called--talking around the main issue--he agreed to see me at ten.

David was the guy you always wanted to know in a war-zone. With his engineering officer’s determination to overcome all obstacles to get things done and the type of straightforward charm that could sell sand in the desert, he was tied in to the supply sergeants who were linked to all the fixers and short-cuts in the Southwest Asia Theater of Operations. David’s biggest coup in my book was the way he worked his network to get the Italian, Canadian, and Australian compounds in the Green Zone hooked up to the U.S. military’s generator-powered electric grid. This ensured light, music, and cold drinks at the Zone’s A-list social events, as well as invitations for David and his friends. He used the same wasta--connections--to escape the assembly line of staff work at the Multi-National Corps, where hundreds of captains and majors and colonels ground out thousands of daily Powerpoint slides detailing the coalition’s triumphal march toward victory and to get assignged instead as the U.S. Army liaison to the USAID economic assistance mission. If the Army wouldn’t approve his repeated requests to lead a combat engineering unit in Mahmudiyya or Mosul, then he might as well get him billeted in the the Green Zone’s cushiest digs--USAID pampered its employees with permanent houses that had real kitchens and separate bed-rooms instead of half a trailer, as well as a dining hall run to the exacting standards of its resident French chef. In these posh surroundings, David was able to serve as a de facto cross-cultural adviser to the USAID Director, explaining the intricacies of the military environment where the Misison’s projects were to take place.

The USAID compound was about halfway to the Rashid Hotel and the IAS building. To save the time and aggravation of having a complete security sweep of my vehicle, I parked across the street from USAID in the lot reserved for the Liberty Pool recreation complex. When I found David in his cubicle in the USAID office space, he looked up from his computer screen--which was filled with an intricate Powerpoint slide laying out steps for deconfliction of USAID and military projects--with a bemused look.

“Said William Perdue, kif halik? Marhaba, marhaba,” he said. “To what do I owe the honor of this visit? You were all mysterious and spooky on the phone, saying you thought I might have some information on a sensitive issue. I guess being mysterious like that is what your people call tradecraft. But I thought you were the people who knew everything.”

“Because I’m such a nice guy, I’ll take that as a compliment,” I responded. “A more cynical person would think you were snidely referring to the whereabouts of Bin Laden or the danger from Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction. But you know the drill. If we at RAG know anything, it’s due in large part to the cooperation of honest, patriotic Americans like yourself.”

“Just doing my duty,” said David. “Listen, before we get any further, what’s the news on what happened to Herb? I know you thought he was a real pain in the ass, but jeez, dying in Iraq like that, in a stupid accident at a party, that’s harsh. I mean, if you’re gonna get killed here, it ought to be for some better or more heroic reason, or at least something that will look better on Fox News. Didn’t he have a wife or fiancée? It’s gotta be hard on her, not to mention his parents.”

“Well, Herb’s death is, in fact, the reason I wanted to talk to you today, and it’s why I was kinda squirrelly on the phone.” I gave him a sanitized version of what I had heard from Aliya the day before: Herb had stumbled across information about the dubious Al-Maghribiya project that was being promoted by some well-connected dirtbags, in particular Muhammad al-Latif and Dr. Jibril in the Prime Minister’s office; this project seemed to be getting an undue amount of Iraqi and American high-level attention; one of my Iraqis whom I implicitly trusted feared the movers behind Al-Maghribiya were capable of murder to protect their illicit profits; I knew linking this to Herb’s death was far-fetched, but things happened for different reasons and in different ways in Iraq than elsewhere. “And so,” I concluded. “Since you’re spending more time now in the development biz, building things rather than blowing ‘em up, I was hoping that you might have some additional info or insight on Al-Maghribiya.”

“Seeds,” said David. “Seeds. You think there’s a conspiracy to commit murder because of seeds.”

“Huh?”

“The heart of the Al-Maghribiya project is the procurement of a literal shitload of seeds for the Spring planting season out there. Let’s see.” David turned to his computer and opened up a new Powerpoint file. “Alfalfa, green beans, watermelons, cowpeas, cucumbers, carrots, and lots more. Twenty million dollars to ship in seeds via the port of Beirut by mid-February, so the farmers in Al-Maghribiya can plant in time for the Spring harvest. Another eighty million or so for odds and ends--fertilizer, pesticides, spraying machines, tractors, the full Monty. And we’ve got two high-rollers pushing for this. On our side, the Marine general commanding MEF-3--that's the Marine Expeditionary Force for you, in English--out in Al-Maghribiya is convinced that bringing in the seeds and everything else will convince the good, honest local citizens to stop shooting at us and start farming again. That would mean the Marines could stop kinetic operations--you know, what we used to call shooting and bombing--and that the Marine General could tell the CG, our commander in theater here General Casey, that we have a victory out in Al-Maghribiya, and General Casey could tell Rumsfeld, and Rumsfeld could tell the President, and we could all go home to a victory parade that much sooner.

“And then, we’ve got the governor of Al-Maghribiya, Sheikh Abd ar-Rahman ar-Rashid, who’s talking to our general and pleading with the Prime Minister and other bigwigs here folks in Baghdad to make this happen. You’ve heard of Rashid, right? He’s a notable in one of the Sunni Arab tribes who made a nice living in the good old days of Saddam by smuggling across the border from Syria. His tribe, the Rashidis, they’ve got a long history of playing both ends against the middle, and now Governor Rashid has upped the ante in this game by becoming just about the only Sunni of any consequence to join up with the Prime Minister’s party, which as you of course know, is all about getting a better deal for the Shias. And this means, of course, that the Prime Minister wants to make things happen for Rashid and his people, to let all the Sunnis know that if they love the al-Da’wa party, then the al-Da’wa party can show some love for them. This is clear as mud, right?”

“Let me check that I’ve got this right,” I said. “The U.S. military wants to send seeds to Al-Maghribiya to try to convince the locals to stop shooting at us. The Prime Minister and his party want to do it so they can reward one of their few Sunni allies, this Governor Rashid. But what’s in it for Rashid?”

“That, Will, is kind of murky, and I would guess it’s related to the problems in the project. See, the technical aggie people here at USAID worked up the numbers in the project proposal, and they’re real funny. The amount of seed they want to buy for Al-Maghribiya, which is just one of Iraq’s 18 provinces, would equate, let’s see, yeah, it’s on this slide, here--to a yield of 2.7 million tons of vegetables. But the UN Food and Agriculture Organization estimates--okay, there it is, on this next slide--that in a normal year Iraqis consume only 2.4 million tons of vegetables. There’s no way Iraq could absorb that much additional vegetable production. The marketing and distribution system just doesn’t have the capacity, and even if it did, the increased supply of vegetables would probably cause prices to collapse, with all sorts of unpleasant implications for rural incomes across Iraq. And, according to the USAID experts, there’s just not enough land in Al-Maghribiya to plant all these seeds. Let’s see, where’s that slide, here it is--they say total crop area in the province, which is mostly used for wheat and rice now, is about 120,000 hectares, but the quantity of seeds purchased would require 90,000 hectares. Where’s that extra land supposed to come from? Either nobody’s really thought this through, or somebody has and just doesn’t give a shit about it.

“And here’s where the Al-Saba’ah Company, run by that guy Muhammad Latif, comes in. Governor Rashid said only Al-Saba’ah had the capacity, the knowledge of markets in Iraq and of port facilities in Lebanon and trans-shipment through Syria, to make this happen. And he’s got the Marines and our Ambassador and the political people at the Embassy convinced of this, so they’re all leaning on my friends at USAID here to find the $100 million to make this happen. I just have a bad feeling that this is the worst and most transparent sort of scam you can imagine.”

David looked at the computer screen again. “That’s what I thought. Think you can spare an hour or so of your precious time? The Iraqis are putting the full-court press on this Al-Maghribiya project, and the two guys you’re fixated on, Muhammad Latif and Dr. Jibril from the PM’s office, are supposed to meet with our new Director, I don’t think you’ve met him, John Wald, and also with some of us technical staff in about 30 minutes. I can get you in by saying you do, ah, political liaison at the Embassy; that’s not too big a lie, is it? You ought to take it easy for now, because what you’re about to see might not be very pretty. Wald has told us that the way for USAID to make a difference is to be, um, helpful in whatever way the Ambassador and the Iraqi bigwigs want. With all the political interest in Al-Maghribiya, I doubt that Wald is going to let us waste a lot of time discussing inconvenient facts.”

So, 30 minutes later--time that David used to fine-tune his Powerpoint slides and that I spent completing the word jumble in the previous day’s Stars and Stripes--we rolled over to the USAID Director’s office. David introduced me to Wald, a little man with a big case of self-serving logorrhea. Wald burbled his pleasure that a political type from the Embassy was joining this important meeting and would be able to let the Ambassador know about USAID’s critical role in supporting broad policy and military initiatives. He wanted to be sure I’d spread the word that USAID was no longer a bunch of thumb-sucking nuts-and-granola types--at this point two USAID agricultural experts came into the office, with names as indistinguishable as their Dockers khakis and Lands End polo shirts--and said all we had to do was look at his record running the USAID Mission in Zimbabwe. Nobody had every moved humanitarian aid as fast as he had, and his focus in Harare wasn’t process but results, and those spoke for themselves; I was too polite to ask about famine, repression, and hyper-inflation in Zimbabwe. Wald’s breathless syllables were eliding into something about lowest damned operating budget per employee of any USAID Mission in the world and unique technical assistance with land reform programs, when, mercifully, the Iraqi principals for Al-Maghribiya shimmered in.

A round of introductions followed, and I was too busy taking in Latif and Jibril to be bothered catching the agricultural experts’ names the second time I heard them. Latif looked like a character from a late-night comedy skit about a nouveau riche Arab with lots of dollars but no moral sense. He had the self-assured bulk of Sydney Greenstreet: a prominent hooked nose, fleshy sensual lips accentuated by a goatee, multiple chins, all topped by a badly dyed perm that put a wave in what remained of his hair. A large gut and fleshy man-breasts were swaddled in a lemon yellow Ralph Lauren Polo shirt--and over this was the pièce de résistance, a lightweight gray cashmere sport coat from Brioni, identical to one with a $3,000-price tag that I’d ogled at the Neiman Marcus at Tysons Corner back home. Jet-black eyes flashed shrewd intelligence, and his smile oozed oleaginous charm. Dr. Jibril Ali Muhammad al-Basri--to give his full name--appeared set to play Stan Laurel against Latif’s Oliver Hardy. Looking 30ish and some 10 years younger than his colleague and dressed in a non-descript dark suit, Jibril was tall and rather slender for an Iraqi official; the black in his hair was all natural. A long, oval face framed dull dark eyes and an expressionless mouth. I couldn’t tell whether the deadpan expression reflected extreme boredom, terminal stupidity, or chronic constipation.

Wald escorted Latif and Jibril to places flanking his chair at the head of the table. From the beginning Wald left no ambiguity as to what he expected from the meeting.

“Mr. Muhammad al-Latif, Dr. Jibril,” Wald intoned. “I’d like to thank you for coming to see us here in the Green Zone to discuss this exciting initiative for Al-Maghribiya province. What I hope to accomplish today is to hear from you as to what we we need to do to make this happen, and to make it happen fast. I think this is a great project. It pulls together everything that our American Administration is aiming to do in Iraq: increase incomes in a poor rural area, create jobs, move healthy food to local markets, make it possible to put a peaceful end to the fighting in Al-Maghribiya, support the Iraqi private sector, and show that Iraqis from all religions and all ethnic groups can work together. And this isn’t important just for USAID. As you can see from looking around the table, the presence of Lt. Col. Ferguson the U.S. Army who works with us here at USAID and Mr. Perdue, a political officer from the Embassy shows how the whole U.S. Mission in Iraq is behind this project.”

“Shukran, that is to say thank you, Mr. John Wald,” said Latif. He eased into his chair, slowly scanned the five American faces in the room, and then settled his dark, liquid eyes on me. “Mr. Burdoo, you are a political officer? Well, Dr. Jibril and I met one of your colleagues at the Prime Minister’s office last week, Mr. Herbert. He was there just three or four days ago to discuss some kind of special project with the American military officer there, but Mr. Herbert was kind enough to call on Dr. Jibril, too, and I was there, and we told him about the seed project for al-Maghribiya because it is so important.”

“This project is very important because the Prime Minister wants it,” Jibril chimed in.

“Quite so,” Latif continued. “But Mr. Herbet did not seem to understand the issues. He asked too many questions and did not see that this project is so necessary. But he is a nice young man, and Mr. Burdoo, I hope you will convey my best wishes to him.”

“I wish I could do so, Mr. Latif,” I said, “But sadly it isn’t possible. I’m afraid Herb died Thursday night, apparently because of an accident.”

“That young man is dead? Oh, that is too sad.” As he said this, Latif’s eyes zeroed in on me. “Too many bad things happen here in Iraq. Even for you Americans in the Green Zone, you must be very careful. People go to the wrong place or sometimes just ask the wrong question, and the awful happens to them. Yes, it is so sad that everybody must watch out here.” Was this a hint that Herb’s poking around into the al-Maghribiya project had somehow led to his death and that I should mind my own business? My stomach started slam-dancing my diaphragm in nervousness, but by a miracle of self-control I kept my face impassive.

Latif smiled at me, shook his head, paused briefly, cleared his throat, and launched a pitch worthy of Willy Loman or Professor Harold Hill. “Yes, especially after the death of our young friend Mr. Herbert, it is more important than ever that we move forward with this criticial project. It is an honor for Dr. Jibril and myself to discuss it with you important and well-informed gentlemen. You know, of course, that it is not because of us that this project matters. No, no. This project is what the people of Al-Maghribiya want. The people of Al-Maghribiya want peace, they want to farm, they want to eat, they want to sell their vegetables and so on and so forth to the people in Baghdad. They told this to their representative, their governor, the Honorable Mr. Shaykh Rashid. And so, if we get them the seeds and equipment they need so they can plant for the Spring, we will make all the good things happen that the people of Iraq and the people of America want, especially your President who liberated us.”

“And the Prime Minister, he says he wants this too,” chimed in Jibril.

“What we need from you, Mr. John, more than anything else, is speed,” continued Latif. “We are now only two months from the planting time. To reach Al-Maghribiya by February 15, we must place our orders by the end of this month. To make these important benefits happen and to bring peace to that sad province, we humbly ask to approve the project now and to move the money to us as fast as possible.”

“We must do this now. The Prime Minister says he wants it, so it is very important.” As Jibril repeated these points, his head nodded up and down like the little plastic dog my sister once glued to the dashboard of the family’s 1969 Oldsmobile F-85 station-wagon.

“Gentlemen, you have identified exactly what we need to do,” Wald enthused. “We can’t afford to waste time, not when your Prime Minister and our President are so involved, and not when peace is at stake. I have already asked my financial management people and lawyers to crash on how to get Washington to move the $100 million you need for this project as fast as possible. When we finish here, I’ll have them put everything in final form and send it back home for the final chop. I’ll let our Ambassador know what we’re doing, and he can use his pull in the White House to make sure the bureaucrats back home don’t stifle this. Now, because Washington doesn’t work on Sunday and we’re eight hours ahead here, I’m afraid I won’t have the final good news for you probably until Tuesday morning our time.”

Jibril jumped in, head continuing its bobs as he spoke. “That’s good. The Prime Minister says this project is important, and we must do it for him and for Iraq.”

“Exactly right, Dr. Jibril,” said Latif. “This project is the key to peace and prosperity in the west, and the sooner it gets going, well, the sooner we will get that peace and prosperity we all so badly want. Mr. John, I admire the efficiency and speed in your operation here, so typical of America and Americans, and I do not want to waste your time. I think some details are important here, like bank data for making the payment so we can buy the seeds and other farm supplies, but your money people will of course know how to take care of that.”

David and the agriculture twins had been shifting restlessly in their seats during the love-fest between Wald and the Iraqis. Before Wald could echo the platitudes that had been pouring out of Latif, David spoke up, hesitantly at first. “Well, John, we all agree it’s great that Mr. Latif and Dr. Jibril were able to join us here. You know that Ron and Rob”--now at least I had their names, even if I didn’t know which was attached to Tweedledee and which to Tweedledum--"and I have been working on some of the technical questions regarding the project, and we, well, we think it would be useful to take advantage of these gentlemen’s presence here to dialog about that. I know I’ve forwarded you these Powerpoint slides on the most important aspects. We were particularly concerned about quantities, because this project seems ready to produce some 2.7 million tons of vegetables, while all of Iraq, according to the UN agriculture people . . .”

Wald cut him off. “David, and Ron and Rob, those are implementation questions, and I think they need to be worked out at your technical level. Today, with Mr. Latif and Dr. Jibril, we’re talking about the broad, strategic questions, about war and peace in Iraq and not about how many cucumbers Farmer Ahmad might be able to sell in Mosul. I invited you here so you’d be able to understand something of these higher-level issues when it comes time--and I think this will be soon--to get these technical, implementation issues worked out. Your contribution here is important, but everything in its place, guys, everything in its place. Mr. Latif, Dr. Jibril--am I correct about this?”

“Mr. John, we are of course open to any questions your colleagues might have,” said Latif. “But as we have been lucky enough to learn from our American friends these past two years, time is money. Today we just don’t have the time to worry about the details, not when getting the money ready is the important thing. We will have to leave in two mintues for our next meeting, at the Council of Ministers, and we cannot make them wait. Otherwise, we would love to be able to learn from you. Mr. John and Colonel Ferguson, please, call our office, and you and your experts can help my staff make this right. I apologize for the errors that must be in our humble program. We in Iraq have been democratic for such a short time, and we have so much to learn from you. But first things first. We need to get the money moving so we can help the farmers.”

“And, please, Colonel, Mr. John, this project is very important for the Prime Minister,” added Jibril. His head was bobbing faster and deeper now, with his chin almost reaching the knot of his ties every third syllable. “We must do this project because it is so high priority for the Prime Minister.”

“Gentlemen, thank you so much once again for sharing with us your time and insights.” Wald got up and walked the Iraqis to the door. Meeting over. “This was so useful for us. We all now know who we are dealing with, and we’re all committed to going forward here. It will be very exciting to make such a direct contribution to peace in Al-Maghribiya Province.” The agriculture twins, David and I filed silently out behind Wald and the visitors.

Back at David’s cubicle, he gave his assessment. “Well, that meeting was interesting if not particularly useful. I don’t know what type of Kool-Aid they’ve been handing out to the people who are making decisions on this project, but it looks like John’s been drinking it by the gallon. Your friends there, Latif and Jibril, it looks like they’ve got a nice racket going, and they’ve snowed a lot of people here and apparently back in Washington. Once they get their $100 million, they won’t change a damned thing about the quantities of seeds and tractors or anything else. There’s a lot of room for fiddling on this contract; I just hope that some part of what they’re stealing ends up with the poor farmers in Al-Maghribiya. But I know you don’t care about who’s ripping off the government or the poor farmers, not in general and certainly not here. To answer the question I know you want to ask--my answer is no. These guys are dirtbags and slime, but they sure don’t look like murderers to me. Latif wouldn’t want to risk getting stains on that nice piece of cashmere he was wearing, and Jibril’s head would be bobbing too fast for him to ever get a good bead on somebody he was told to shoot. Yeah, these guys are all about dirty money, but that’s a very different kettle of fish than killing.”

“I don’t know, David,” I answered. “What did you make of Latif’s comments about talking about the project with Herb and about Herb’s death? He didn’t exactly say anything, but he sure shot me a look that was full of meaning. God damn Herb. This is just like him. He had this meeting over at the Prime Minister’s office and didn’t say 'Boo!' to me about it. Another one of his fucking did-you-know-that bombs, and this one could take me out. David, there’s just too much bad stuff happens here for me to rule anything out. Take Aliya, for example, that lady lawyer I’ve told you about, the one who’s smarter than just about anybody, she’s says Latif and his people are bad guys who worked with Uday Hussein and who are capable of anything. Aliya was telling me . . .”

David interrupted me. “That’s why you’re so worked up. You’re thinking about Herb’s death with the little head dangling between your legs rather than the big empty one between your shoulders. I should have seen this a while ago. You’ve got a crush on what’s her name, yeah, Aliya. That’s clearer now than ever. Yeah, she got you with her story of being in prison and how she got out, so now you see yourself as the knight in shining armor who’s going to rescue the damsel in distress.”

“C’mon, David, give me more credit than that. Any way she’s married and a Muslim, and can you imagine the administrative and security shit I’d have to go through if I got involved with an Iraqi woman?”

“I didn’t say you were doing anything,” David said “Just that you’ve got a Jones for this girl. And I wanted to give you a helpful warning against letting it cloud your judgment.”

“Hell, David, you know me,” I pleaded. “What with the ex-wives, kids who hate me, 25 years on the federal payroll--I've got so many things clouding my judgment that letting Aliya bat her pretty brown eyes at me every now and then won’t make a damn bit of difference. Yeah, logically, or logically by American standards, it just doesn’t stand to reason that Herb would have been killed because of a dirty deal for seeds. But then again, there are just too many little threads that somebody seems to be knitting together. I’m not quite at the Agent Mulder point, where I’m believing that the truth about the little green men is out there somewhere, but I just can’t reject a link either. You know as well as I do that nothing here in Iraq is as it seems, and the record of U.S. Government functionaries like us in understanding anything about this place has been pretty abysmal. And what’s the harm if there is no link?”

I glanced at my watch. “Shit. I’ve got to be at the Embassy at 12:30, in 10 minutes, to talk to that FBI investigator about his investigation. Should be tons of fun. Do you know her, Eleanor Kelly? I think she needs something that you’d be able to give her a lot better than I could. I mean, what with your training in weapons and the physical standards the Army wants you to meet, I think you’d be a lot better able to handle a cocktail of guns and handcuffs and Jack Daniels than a weenie civilian like me. Well, thanks for the info and the chance to sit in on that meeting, David. We’ll talk later.”

“Okay, Will, glad to be of help. Just stay sane, bro, alright? Baghdad is not a normal place, and people start getting weird ideas here. See you later, man.”

When I got to my vehicle in the Liberty Pool lot, this time I didn’t begrudge the security sweep. The previous day’s tire-slashing and all the additional information about Latif, Al-Sabaah Company, and the Al-Maghbriya Project had made me jumpy. My mood didn’t improve when I found that the front left tire was flat, and appeared to have been slashed--just like what had happened to the front right tire the day before. This couldn’t be a coincidence, it had to be an unambiguous message from somebody. But could Latif or Jibril or one of their hirelings have worked so fast? I had stayed in the USAID compound at most 10 minutes longer than they had, which didn’t leave much time for giving the order to slash the tire and then for the deed to be done. Although Latif had issued his barely veiled warning about Herb’s “snooping around,” I had kept my mouth shut and my profile low in the meeting. What would make Latif and Jibril think I was anything other than a friendly, supportive Political Officer from the Embassy, as John Wald had identified me?

The three Gurkha guards at the gate told me that, between my arrival at ten and the current time, 12:15, nobody unusual had entered or left the lot: several dozen American soldiers going to the pool, a carload of Italian carabinieri, and a few civilian females. They had seen no Iraqis going in or out of the lot, and the Gurkhas bristled when I suggested that somebody may have somehow scaled the 10-foot walls, slid over the razor wire on top, dropped into the parking lot and taken a knife to my tire without their knowing it.

“Sah, maybe you no drive no good,” one of them said. “We see you always in hurry, you nevah miss holes in road. Maybe that put hole in tire.”

It tends to be hard to argue against the truth, and the Gurkhas’ accurate observation of my driving habits reinforced the likelihood that they would have noticed anomalous comings and goings in the parking lot. I was already running late for my meeting with Eleanor, the FBI investigator at the Embassy, so I gave my head what I hoped was a wise and mysterious shake, got behind the wheel, and limped back to the garage for yet another tire change and repair.

Greaseman the mechanic didn’t exactly greet me like a long-lost brother.

“You fucked over another one of my tires, man,” he observed. “You go out of your way to park on top of the same fucking piece of razor wire over at the Rashid?”

“No, Grease, I was over at USAID, and that’s what’s weird,” I said. “I can’t believe this is something I did. Look at it, the same sort of slash as yesterday but on the opposite side. It’s almost enough to make you think somebody’s trying to get me.”

“Probably just some son of a bitch pissed off at the way you drive or park, Will. I can get this fixed for you by tomorrow morning, but if you keep fucking up my tires like this, I don’t know if I can keep helping you.”

I promised to take better care of his tires and hurried up towards the Embassy. Dropping off the car took 20 minutes that I hadn’t budgeted, and my half-jog up to the Embassy reminded me that, even in mid-November, the Baghdad sun was hot. When I finally stepped into Eleanor’s office--late, sweating, and puffing from my exertion--she shot me an angry look. I was relieved to see that the holster against her left breast--the first place my eyes went--was empty. She looked back down to her desk, where her Glock was field stripped, with the parts laid out on a towel for cleaning.

“I didn’t know if you’d remember our appointment,” she said, “So I thought I’d get something useful done. Have a seat while I finish up here.” With her left hand she picked up the barrel up to her eye, squinted at me through it, then grabbed a metal bristle brush with her right hand and silently twisted it several times through the barrel.

“Sorry, Eleanor,” I said, my breath coming a little more regularly. “I was at a meeting over at USAID, then had a real bad flat on my car, the second day in a row. Weird and a real pain in the neck.”

She put the gun barrel down and turned her eyes on me. She gave me an appraising once-over, colder and more guarded than the one early Friday morning. If nothing else, it suggested that she was sober now.

She grunted unsympathetically. “You’ve just got to watch where you’re going and what you’re doing, and you’ve got to be better at planning your movements. This is a war zone, even here in the Green Zone. It’s not like driving through the parking lot at Tysons Corner mall.

“Any way, we’ve wasted enough of both of our time here, and I suppose we should get to the business at hand, the death of your friend Herbert Bennett,” Eleanor continued.

She shuffled through some papes on the left side of her desk and handed me a folder. “Here’s a copy of my draft report, laying out what I’ve found so far, and frankly I don’t know if I’ll find out much more. According to the autopsy conducted by the docs at Ibn Sina, Bennett died at approximately twenty-three-thirty-five hours on Thursday, 10 November, from cranial trauma incurred by a fall of approximately 45 feet onto a concrete surface. His other injuries, fractures of two cervical vertebrae and the right humerus, as well as various contusions, are consistent with a fall. The docs say they found no signs of struggle or a fight on his body that would suggest he had been pushed.

“And that pretty much tracks with what that Aussie security guy, McNabb, and I found when we looked at the roof. No blood, no torn bits of clothing, nothing like that. We did find a cigar that was still smoldering, which corroborated your statement that Bennett had gone up there for a smoke, and some empty beer cans that could have been there for a few days. So everything is pointing to an accidental fall, except for one thing. We just can’t figure out how a guy who by all accounts wasn’t inebriated could have fallen over the wall at the edge of the rof, which is three-foot tall and by all signs perfectly sound structurally. You might think suicide, except there’d be no guarantee of actually killing yourself from 45 feet, and with all the weapons around here, there are much surer ways of taking yourself out. And nobody has reported that Bennett expressed or showed any suicidal intentions since his arrival here. I think we’d only know what happened and why he fell if there was an eyewitness who had been on the roof with him, and there doesn’t seem to be one.

“That’s all I’ve got, Will. I’ve shown you mine, now it’s time for you to show me yours.” It must have been my imagination that, as she sat back while saying this, her blouse settled down her torso and gave the day’s first hint of her cleavage. Her face relaxed from professional glower to something approaching a smile.

“Thanks, Eleanor,” I said. “I’m afraid I don’t have much to say here. Nothing that Jim and I have found in Herb’s effects or his papers or his on-line files down at RAG seems to shed any light here. No hint of suicidal thinking, no suggestions of enemies who hated him enough to kill him. From what we have there, it just looks like one of those stupid, tragic things.” I wasn’t lying here, but I didn’t see any reason to raise the issue of the Al-Maghribiya seed project and Muhammad al-Latif. Eleanor’s report on Herb’s death was tidy and tangible, and it appeared as if it would wrap things up neatly and acceptably for Herb’s family, the Embassy, and my own group. The possible link to Al-Maghribiya was murky and multi-layered, and unraveling it, I thought, would be beyond the sophisitication of an FBI agent or any cop.

“Nothing else?” Eleanor face returned from near smile to cop dead-pan. “Don’t you work pretty close with Iraqis from the Ministry of Defense office over by the Rashid Hotel? I can’t believe you haven’t discussed what happened to Bennett with your Iraqi friends. It is their country, after all, and maybe they know something.”

This line of questioning was a surprise. I didn’t remember having told her what my advisory role was or where I did it. After a bit of reflection, though, I guessed it wasn’t too surprising that she was able to piece this together from talking to people who knew Herb and me.

“Well,” I said. “I was over there yesterday morning and of course talked about Herb’s death with our Iraqi friends. The senior guy I work with on a regular basis, Brigadier Jaburi, said we Americans were lucky to be able to die in accidents instead of having terrorists always trying to murder us. We talked in pretty general terms, of course, because, as you can understand, we try not to air our dirty American laundry in front of the Iraqis. If something tangible comes from them, of course I’ll share it with you. In fact, I’ll be seeing them again tomorrow, probably mid-morning or so.”

“Okay.” Eleanor had put her deadpan cop face back on. “We’ll stay in touch on this, but I think most of what’s left to do is formalities. We’ll probably have the paperwork wrapped up so Bennett’s remains can get shipped home in 72 hours or so, let’s say Wednesday.” Her eyes--still cold--shifted from me to the disassembled Glock on her desk. “I think that’s it for now. I’ve got to get this back together and then make certain that all that paperwork’s good to go back to Washinton tonight.”

“Thanks for the time and info,” I said, tucking the envelope with her draft report under my arm and ducking out the door. I decided, so long as I was up at the Embassy, to see if Maria-Theresa could spare a few minutes for me.

Despite my preoccupation with thoughts of Herb’s death and a possible murderous conspiracy to embezzle millions of dollars by importing unwanted seeds, I was caught gape-mouthed and wordless by what I saw in Maria-Theresa’s office. Every available square inch of desktop and bookshelf, as well as most of the floor, was piled high with sports clothes--t-shirts, polos, windbreakers, fleeces, and baseball caps. The colors ran the full Lands End palette, from muted Beachwood khakis and deep ebonies to pastel Bermuda blues. On closer inspection I saw that every item was embroidered with the eagle-and-shield logo of the Department of State and the legend “American Embassy Baghdad Iraq.”

Maria-Theresa glanced up from her computer and waved me in. “Always a pleasure to see you, Will. And you’re in luck, I’ve got a few minutes for you, once I finish this message.” She looked back at the computer and delivered a quick flurry of keystrokes, ending with a flourish on the “enter” key. “Good, done. Come in, sit down.”

“Well, Maria-Theresa, are you getting out of the law biz,” I asked as I settled into the one chair that was not covered with t-shirts. “I mean, it looks as if you’ve got your full Winter collection on display here.”

“Oh, that. The Embassy front office decided that baseball caps and polo shirts were a delicate legal matter that only I could ajudicate. Do you know Ralph, one of the engineers working with the advisory team for the Ministry of Electricity, down in the south end of the Palace? He’s a good Republican, got a solid entrepreneurial bent, and he figured there was a deep, unsatisfied market among all the Americans and Brits and other foreigners stuck here in the Green Zone for high-quality logo clothing items that people could buy as souvenirs for the folks back home. He hooked up with some factory in Ohio that must have cloned whole villages of little Pakistani children with delicate hard-working fingers, because it seems they do the best and cheapest embroidery work in North America. Open up one of those packages and feel the quality, the number of threads they use for the work. Very impressive. Any way, Ralph ordered hundreds each of t-shirts, ball caps, polos, and this other stuff, and started selling them out of his office. Word got around that he had the best stuff in town, and there was a constant flow of people going to the Electricity Office, demanding to buy the logo clothing. The stuff was flying out of the box, with Ralph making five, ten dollars on each item.

“And that was the problem, leading to me getting called in. The other eight people in Electricity couldn’t get any work done, with all the visitors and their vocal agonizing over color and fit and quantity, and they were looking for a way to put an end to it. One of Ralph’s colleagues got the idea that there was something illegal because he was making a profit by selling items with the official logo and emblem of the Department of State and the U.S. Embassy, a sort of copyright infringement. So, this woman filed a complaint with the Embassy Administrative Officer, who thought it probably had merit but didn’t want to take final responsibility. Since we’re one of the rare Embassies in the world with a resident lawyer, the Admin guy thought I was just the person to make the decision and spare him a headache. They decided to temporarily seize the evidence of potential wrong-doing and entrust it to my safe-keeping while I worry my poor blonde head about it. I actually kind of like having it here; it adds a bit of color and makes me feel like I’m 19 again and reliving my brief career in the active-wear department of Marshall Field.”

“So how are you going to rule on this weighty matter?”

“I really don’t know,” Maria-Theresa said. “This isn’t exactly the most pressing issue facing us here in Iraq. At some point Ralph is going to start squawking about all the working capital tied up in my office, and I’ll have to make something up just to keep my peace of mind.

“But Will,” she continued. “You didn’t come here for this clothing conundrum, did you? This must be about what happened to poor dead Herb.”

“Yeah, I’d like to run what I’ve learned and heard by you,” I said. I outlined for her Eleanor’s report, in which all signs pointed to an accident. Logically, I should accept this. But then there were Aliya’s worries about a link between Herb’s death and the business with Al-Maghribiya and Muhammad al-Latif. I trusted Aliya implicitly, I told Maria-Theresa, and if she said these were evil people capable of murder to protect ill-gotten profit, then I believed her. Aliyah was smart and had suffered prison and maybe worse in the old days because of dirtbags like Latif. And my fortuitous meeting with Latif and Jibril earlier that day at USAID only fed my suspicions. Latif knew Herb--the stupid little shit was out playing boy-spy and getting in over his head without anybody else back at the office knowing about it--and there was a menacing edge to the pleasantries that had oozed out of Latif for my benefit. And there was the slashing of my tires, which had happened only after Herb’s death and my own nosing around in this. Aliya, I said, Aliya is right that there’s something deeply wrong here.

“Aliya,” Maria-Theresa repeated. “Aliya is, I think, the answer to all this. I’ve heard you talk about her before, and now it’s becoming clear. You’ve got a thing for her. This is one of your romantic nerd things, isn’t it? Poor Will: you see yourself as Han Solo and Aliya as Princess Leia, and Darth Vader and Jabba the Hutt are lurking out there trying to do nasty things to your princess. I’m certain Aliya’s as smart and strong and impressive as you say, but it’s not just your brain that’s at work here, it’s something limbic. You want to believe that Herb was murdered, Will, because that would give your life meaning and adventure, and you can build a whole romance of joining hands with the endangered lady lawyer and unmasking a vast nefarious plot.

“Will, don’t you see how that’s part of a pattern in your life? From what I’ve seen of you in 25 years, you’ve never just been able to be. You’re always running to or away from something. You married two good women and with each of them had a good kid, and you couldn’t leave it be. Things were good, but you wanted them to be perfect. And where did looking for this perfection get you? In a hot, dusty war zone, where you devote your spare time to drinking too much and looking for that true, unworldy romance. Will, what do we always say, that Baghdad is the island of broken toys? You’re not a broken toy, not yet, but you’ve got to slow down, breathe, just be. And Will, on Herb’s death, I think even Eleanor was right on this. It was just an accident. Sometimes bad stuff just happens, especially in a place like this.” She paused. I reflected and said nothing. “Talk to me,” Maria-Theresa said.

I sighed. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe something that looks like an accident really is just an accident; Herb’s last cigar was just a cigar. Aliya can tell a compelling story, and Muhammad Latif virtually has Hollywood Bad Guy tattooed across his forehead--but yeah, I’ll grant there are a few steps required before we can go from that to murdering Herb at the Aussie House. And, yeah, I do feel something for Aliya. She’s smart and brave and, as an Iraqi woman and married, she’s unavailable--which of course just makes her irresistible to a confused clown like me. Good Lord Almighty, Maria-Theresa, how do you put up with listening to me and my interminable woes and whack-o conspiracy theories? I’ve now got another problem, though, because the blonde has just shown how much smarter than me she is, and God only knows how stupid that makes me. I better go now before I look any dumber.”

Maria-Theresa smiled, got up to hug me farewell, and said, “Remember, Will. Be. Just be. Rest. Sleep. Exercise. Please. I can’t be your mother and protect you from yourself all the time."

As I left the Embassy and walked back to the Cabana, I felt less agitated than I had since Thursday night. My venting to Maria-Theresa and her advice to me had had a calming effect, putting the situation in context. As I reached the 200-yard-stretch of dirt road channeled between blast walls, I drew up a mental balance sheet of what I knew or suspected about Herb’s death, with the suppositions on the debit side and the hard facts on the credit ...

WHAM! A loud dull explosion filled my ears; a blast wave staggered me. I looked around and saw a plume of dust and smoke rising maybe 20 yards away, behind the blast wall to my left. Loudspeakers came to life spitting static. “Attention in the Embassy, attention in the Embassy. Indirect fire has been reported in the International Zone. Take cover immediately. Repeat, take cover immediately. Attention in the Embassy ...” I looked again at the billowing dust. There wasn’t much smoke. The charge in the incoming round--and I couldn’t tell the difference between a rocket and mortar--must have been inert, and it looked as if the round hadn’t hit anything major. Praise the Lord, I whispered in my best lapsed Presbyterian manner, for the lack of a storage and maintenance ethic in the artillery units of Saddam’s army. Still, there was a good chance another round or two could be headed my way. I decided for form’s sake to jog the rest of the way to the Cabana and take shelter in the office.

Once inside I ducked into the bathroom to splash the sweat off my face and cool the redness away. As long as I was back in the office, I might as well check in with O’Dwyer, and I figured there would be room for just one red face in the room. As I made my way to Jim’s office, I heard another, somewhat fainter explosion--meaning the bad guys were able to get off a second round--and a repeat of the “Attention in the Embassy, take cover” warning. The people in the Cabana looked up for a second or two, cocked their ears to the muffled sounds, then carried on with whatever they had been doing.

The sporadic shelling did not seem to have made any impact on Jim. As I did my mood appraisal from the door to his office, I saw the face was as red as ever and heard the usual steady hammering of his meaty fingers on the keyboard. He looked up and caught me in the act of assessment.

“Stop gaping at me like I’m some type of one-legged monkey in a high-wire act,” Jim said. “Come on, Perdue, come in and sit down.”

As I settled in a chair, he kept talking. “Well, it looks like you’re not the only person around here with a hard-on for that fucking al-Maghribiya project and that dipshit con artist, what’s his name, right, Latif. I just got back from the Ambassador’s senior staff meeting, and you know how I hate those fucking wastes of time even on a good day. That guy is such a self-serving idiot, even compared to the other morons I’ve seen working as Ambassadors. I think he wouldn’t even be able to find his asshole except for those two blonde girls and the fat boy working as staff assistants, which is the fancy State Department way of talking about the person who wipes your crack whenever you even think about farting. Jesus, what was I saying? Oh yeah, Maghribiya. Well at the senior staff meeting, the Ambassador droned on for a good 45 minutes about the importance of getting seeds to the farmers there in time for their Spring crops so they’ll drop their Kalashnikovs and pick up their hoes, and about how this guy Muhammad Latif is the big swinging dick among the ‘emerging entrepreneurs’ of the new Iraq--he even kept a straight face when he spewed that out, the dumb bastard probably believes his own bullshit. And then, at the end of this crap-a-thon, the Ambassador pulled me aside for 10 more minutes of preaching about the importance and creative vision of this Maghribiya project--I swear, the man was preaching about the link between seeds and farmers and terrorists like he was goddam Pat Robertson on the teevee--and then asked me for whatever type of intelligence support we can give him about it. So I just sent a message back home, asking for whatever research and analysis we can find on Muhammad Latif. What a fucking waste of time. Latif’s a shit. The project’s a scam. Nobody in Maghribiya is shooting at Marines because he’s unhappy about not being able to grow cucumbers; it’s because they’re a bunch of mean, ignorant bastards who’ve been marrying their cousins since before Adam. Well, Will, I hope you found something out about what happened to whats-is-name, Herb.”

I handed Jim the envelope that Eleanor had given me with the draft summary of her findings. “Eleanor from the Bureau says all physical evidence is consistent with an accidental fall. I’d like to believe this, I really should believe this, but I just keep thinking there’s something really off here and really evil about Latif.” I outlined for Jim my meeting with Latif and Jibril at USAID. I focused on Latif’s comments about having met Herb. “I can only interpret what he said as a threat, a reminder that Herb somehow fucked with him, and look what happened to him. And I also get back to Aliya. I just don’t think she’d get this worked up over nothing.”

“You’re not screwing her, are you Will,” Jim asked with his usual delicacy. “Because if you are, you’ve got a lot of paperwork and interviews you owe the security guys. I think this girl has really got under your skin. Jesus. Try to use the big head from time to time, the one you hang your eyeglasses on. Latif is a fucking piece of scum, and it sounds like he enjoys talking tough, but you know you’ve got nothing but hunches and suppositions to pin on him. And the say-so from your girlfriend. Will, why don’t you take a break, go to the gym, and then take a nice long cold shower? Maybe that will calm you down for an hour or two. Any way, the report from that bimbo Eleanor looks like good news. If the Bureau and Embassy report an accident instead of a murder, we’ll have a lot less shit to worry about. After that cold shower, keep your eyes and ears open, but don’t obsess on this crap, and let me know if you find anything new.”

I left Jim’s office and determined I had been given an order. I went to the gym, flexed various muscles for a while, sweated, took a shower (albeit warm), and then interpreted the spirit of his order as including a decent, leisurely dinner gorging myself on pasta with marinara sauce followed by a plate of gooey chocolate truffles, and the early to bed. No reading, no television, just unconsciousness.

A Brief Pause for a Shout-Out

2007-05-12T17:44:00.000-07:00

This has nothing directly to do with "Death in the Green Zone." But, since this is my blog, I feel I can give an occasional shout-out as warranted--in this case to an oldie but goldie poem from W.H. Auden:

Epitaph on a Tyrant

Perfection of a kind was what he was after
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand.

He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the street.

Saturday, November 12

2007-05-12T12:34:00.000-07:00

I think I was having a very pleasant dream, something to do with Spring in central Virginia. Soft, warm, humid air was caressing me as I sank into an emerald meadow dotted with tiny, delicate violets. Then a cell phone rang, yanking me into semi-consciousness and the sensation that I was trying to climb up from the bottom of a deep, dark well. Somehow I managed to jerk my head up, fumbled for the phone on my nightstand, and deciphered two unpleasant facts from the display: it was 6:22 a.m., and my second ex-wife, Jane, was calling from her home in Costa Mesa, California. Christ.

I met Jane in the mid-80s in Chad, where she was serving as a Peace Corps Volunteer. Marriage was her idea. Jane told me later that her heart melted when she saw me playing with a little Anglo-African girl who reminded me of Émilie, and she thought I’d make a great father for her own future children. I didn’t put up much of a fight. I was feeling lonely and on the rebound from the split with Marguérite, and I actually thought that a relationship with a middle-class suburban white girl, raised on the same jokes and t.v. shows and movies as myself, would work better than my marriage to an African had. What it really meant was that Jane wasted little time in seeing through my pretensions of being a sensitive, different sort of guy--saw the intellectual arrogance, the diffidence, and the fundamental selfishness--and that she was the one who initiated divorce proceedings after only three years. Jane did get a little boy out of me, Mathias, now a tall, skinny, shy teenager, but not much help from me in raising the kid.

“Whaddya want, Jane?” There was no point in even pretending to be polite.

“I just spoke to your mother, and even she’s losing patience with you. You forgot Émilie’s 21st birthday? I knew this was important to her and that she’d been planning her party for months. Don’t feed me some bullshit line about war zone and duty and all that other crap. I know you. It’s just pure self-absorption. If you don’t have your nose in some damned books, it’s because you’re out drinking and chasing women. It’s all about you and your needs, all the time.”

“Yeah. Okay. I’m a piece of shit. I appreciate your taking the time to remind me of that at six in the fucking morning. Is there something in particular you want me to do about it or something you need from me? I’ll do what I can, but I just had a guy I was working with die, so things at work really are kind of busy.”

“Will, cut the sarcasm and the self-pity. You’re in a fucking war zone, so of course people you know are likely to die. You’d think that fact would have sunk in through your self-absorption a few months ago. No, I just called to warn you not to pull the same stunt you did on Émilie with Mathias when he turns 16. We’ve got a new lawyer who says under California law, forgetting birthdays can be construed as proof that a parent is disengaged from a kid’s life and can be used to terminate any sort of custodial relationship. Legally writing you out of your son’s life would make things a whole lot easier for all of us, but I thought I’d give you fair warning.”

This was bad. I liked both my kids, when I thought about them and could arrange to be around, and I didn’t think Jane was bluffing about cutting me off from my son. Barry, Jane’s current husband and former high school sweetheart, had made a killing in real estate in Orange County and I was sure he knew every crookedly creative lawyer in greater Los Angeles.

“Listen, Jane,” I pleaded. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves here. I messed up with Émilie’s birthday, but there really is a lot of shit happening here now, and trust me, I’m going to make it up to her. You know I’ll do the right thing by Mathias in the end.”

“I didn’t say cutting you out of Mathias’s life would be the right thing, Will, just that it would make life easier for us. But I’m warning you, the kid needs you in his life, and if you let him down on the birthday, well, we’ve got options. Oh. That’s Barry coming up the driveway. He just got the new Lexus and I want to see it. Gotta go. Do be safe out there, your son loves and needs his father.” She hung up, and the display on my phone went dark.

So long as the phone was in my hand, I figured I should try to make amends to my family on the other coast. I tried Marguérite at the house in Falls Church, and then Émilie’s cell phone; neither answered; both were probably screening out calls from the ex-husband and nearly estranged dad--and who could blame them?

Another day was off to another great start. I tried as hard as I could to go back to sleep but of course failed. My brain was racing, first with the unfairness of not being able to hide in a war zone from my failed family life, then with plans for a ski vacation or trip to Key West with Émilie to try to make things right, and finally with Herb’s death and how it had happened and why.

By nine I reached the conclusion that I could neither hide from sleeplessness nor run from dealing with Herb’s death. I dressed and decided to head over to the Information and Analysis Service--IAS--at the Iraqi Ministry of Defense. I couldn’t imagine that Herb had done anything there that was even remotely related to his death, and figured it would be easier to eliminate this possibility before looking into anything else.

Our job with the IAS was to help the senior Iraqi officers at the Service evaluate what type of information and analytic reports they were capable of producing, then figure out what were the intelligence needs of the Defense Minister and the Prime Minister, and finally match up the capabilities and the needs. This was no more than the application of common sense and simple social skills. We were to be a subtle presence that, after observing and listening to the Iraqis, would be able to nudge them away from the old, brutal, inefficient way of running an intelligence agency and toward a kinder, gentler, and hopefully more productive American model. (Our Iraqis were always too polite to ask for lessons learned from our experiences in assessing their former President’s possession of weapons of mass destruction or the information extraction tactics being used at Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib.) Like nearly all their countrymen, our IAS colleagues had been deformed by the lies, paranoia, mistrust, and brutality that had been Iraq’s daily bread in 50 years of dictatorship, civil unrest, foreign war, and invasion. Their needs were basic, and it was the simplest advice that yielded the best results. Family therapy--getting the IAS officers from different offices and different backgrounds to sit and talk with each other--often produced near-miracles. Yes, Mr. Hamid, I know you aren’t getting the support you’d like from the people in the Terrorism Section and you think it’s because so many of them worked for the Intelligence Service--the Mukhabarat--under Saddam. But they are your colleagues and from what I’ve seen they’re patriotic Iraqis too. Why don’t you and I go upstairs and visit them, and then you can chat about the issues?

Herb, though, wasn’t satisfied with being a gray eminence who whispered a few well-chosen words behind closed doors. He had made his career in Washington by making important people notice him as the guy who got wheels spinning--although these high rollers rarely checked whether Herb’s efforts actually produced forward motion. The wheels he revved up were attached to bureaucratic forms and procedures, and it was immaterial for his career whether there was any gearing that linked them to substance or external reality, in either Washington or Baghdad. Herb thus sought complication and involvement and a directing role in every detail of how the IAS operated. His complete lack of prior experience dealing with foreigners or the Middle East or anything to do with Iraq was an advantage for his style, since he had no idea just what type of mess he was getting himself into. He weighed in with suggestions on type font, even though he couldn’t read a word of Arabic, and pushed on his second day in country to have the customary opening Bismallah (in the name of God) removed from IAS documents because of church-state separation concerns. (Mercifully, I was able to over-ride this disastrous suggestion quietly and in my usual passive-aggressive manner but forgetting to follow up with the translators.) The Iraqis’ deep-seated cultural acceptance of aggressively stupid micromanagement aggravated Herb’s petty grandiosity; they accepted this type of foolishness as the most natural thing in the world. After all, for 5,000 years, from the rise of Sargon the Great to the fall of Saddam Hussein, this was exactly the type of dictatorship that had always lorded it over the people of Mesopotamia. Worst of all, from my narrow bureaucratic perspective, Herb compounded this pointless hyperactivity by the practice of withholding information. He hoarded nuggets until the appropriate time to drop a “Did you know that” bomb on the Iraqis or his colleagues at RAG. With his dangerous combination of ignorance and ambition, it was just possible that Herb had stuck his nose in some sensitive, dangerous place where it didn’t belong, and that somehow this had gotten him killed.

So I resolved at mid-morning to see if I could learn anything at the IAS. From the slice of weather that filtered into the narrow alleys between the residential trailers at the RAG compound, it appeared that the day was off to a gorgeous start--dry, dust-free, and just a touch cool under a cerulean sky, as good as it got in Iraq. Hoping that the skies were a better portent of the hours ahead of me than the ungentle wake-up call from Jane, I headed off to the parking lot. Unlike many mornings, I remembered where I had parked the vehicle early Friday. Once I got in behind the wheel, my interior auto-pilot kicked in, and the armored Mercedes snaked along the rows of HMMVs festooned with smoking and sleeping soldiers on their hoods and headed right out of the lot. The road dog-legged right and then left along the edges of the Embassy compound. A chain-link fence on my right blurred drearily into concrete blast walls; the ring of security around the Embassy oozed grays and browns, smothering the faint greens of the sparse, scraggly bushes and dulling the blue above. On my left there were still no signs of repairs to the bombed-out façade of the Believers’ Palace, built by Saddam to mask the entrance to a warren of tunnels that in the end provided him neither escape nor shelter. There was no speeding past these unlovely sights because the U.S. Air Force Military Police in their infinite wisdom had installed speed bumps--eight-inch wide bands of steel with joints at painfully acute angles--that kept all traffic to a crawl close to the Embassy. After some 500 yards of crawling, bumping, and rocking along, I passed the last official American building and turned left up the broad, empty boulevard that took me past the Kurdish party headquarters and the British compound, a smaller and less lugubrious version of the fortress housing the U.S. Embassy. I was in luck--no convoys of soldiers or VIPs clogging the road with guns, armor, and attitude on this morning.

After a mile or so, I took the usual right at the intersection by the monumental parade ground that Saddam had ordered to celebrate his famous victory over Iran in the 1980s. As I passed I indulged in the guilty pleasure of admiring the splendid awfulness of the place’s art and architecture, which suggested the esthetics that the love-child that Albert Speer and Elvis Presley might have had. Monumental replicas of Saddam’s hands brandished colossal scimitars that were as helpless warding off dust as they had been in defending the regime. A nearby small rise was topped by the harlequin colors of an indescribable roundish structure--extraterrestrial wedding cake? Sunday go-to-meeting hat for a superannuated acid head?--that Saddam had had built as a tomb for the myriad unknown soldiers killed for his glory in his war with Iran. As I always did when driving past this monument alone, I mouthed the obvious lines from Shelley:
My name is Ozymandias, king of kings
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!

I quickly approached the next set of checkpoints. At the first, I got a desultory stare and wave-through from three bored, homesick soldiers from Georgia (ex-USSR, not ex-CSA). Fifty yards ahead, my best white-man-in-a-suit mien could not keep the Gurkhas posted at the Rashid Hotel from applying all the rules. Although smiling and bowing, they still insisted on carefully scrutinizing my identity card and on scanning the underside of the car before waving me into the Rashid lot. There, I went to my usual shady spot in the far corner to park. I grabbed my briefcase and strolled through the last obstacle of HESCO barriers around the five-storey pale gray slab occupied by the IAS, calling out a cheerful “As-salaam alaykum” to the IAS guards--the first Iraqis I had seen in two days.

Closer to the building I joined the trickle of IAS employees heading to work from their parking lot on the Red Zone side--our euphemism for Iraq--of the compound. As always, it was a sight that both inspired and baffled me. From the stories the Iraqis had told me, all of them were putting their lives at risk every day they came to work at the IAS. Terrorists, ethnic militiamen, religious extremists, and common criminals were on the hunt for Iraqis suspected of cooperating with us. My IAS friends said their neighborhoods were under constant surveillance by unknown gunmen and that somewhere in Baghdad, just about every night, men wearing masks and bristling with weapons would cordon off an apartment building or street, invade homes and scrutinize their residents’ faces and ID cards, and execute or kidnap the unlucky, who were chosen because they were secular or religious, Sunni or Shi’a, holdovers from the old regime or anti-Saddam activists. Then, if they were able to wring any sleep from the restless night, the Iraqis faced the commute from hell. The main arteries of Baghdad were clogged with shifting clots of security roadblocks, some manned by the US Army, some by the Iraqi army, still others by the local police or party militias or outright gangsters. The only constant in the rules for getting through these checkpoints was change, with no prior notice or predictability. After hundreds of detonations of vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices--VBIEDs to use the unlovely military jargon--any Iraqi in a car was presumed guilty until proven innocent, and there was no appealing the arbitrary decision of an angry corporal. On a good day, driving the 10 kilometers from a residential neighborhood, in Mansur in west-central Baghdad or al-Adhamiya on the left bank of the Tigris, could take an hour, but good days were rare, and on the really bad days, when car bombs exploded or the Iraqi Prime Minister or U.S. Ambassador was moving in the city, all movement froze. Despite all this, the Iraqis arrived at work as punctually as any group of civil servants, in at least passably good spirits, and with dedication. Why, I would ask the Iraqis, why do you accept this risk to work here? Mr. William, I will not hide the fact that jobs are scarce and the IAS pays us well. But this is my country, and my family’s home, Mr. William. Will America give me a visa so my children and I can live in your house? I don’t think so. We cannot let things get worse, and that means I have to do my job. It is not much, I am afraid, Mr. William, but insh’Allah, God willing, it is all I can do.

At the IAS, my first stop that Saturday morning was in the office of the head of the legal section, Mrs. Aliya. I always thought it was a peculiarly American conceit that one of our first steps in trying to set up a working intelligence service in Iraq was to get lawyers involved. Damn the substance, we seemed to be saying, let’s get the procedures and paperwork in order. My initial meeting with Aliya, several months earlier, had appeared to bear out my skepticism. A petite 30-something woman with what I appraised to be a thousand bucks worth of gold bangles on her wrists, she greeted me with a small, piping voice. Her desk was so cluttered with every type of official and personal paperwork--legal files, a week’s backlog of the garish headlines and hyper-colored photos that passed in Baghdad for newspapers, medical prescriptions, phone message pads, copies of the Official Gazette of the Laws of the Republic of Iraq--that there was hardly any space to set the inevitable cups of sweet strong tea. As I outlined what I hoped to work on with her--regulations to keep the IAS from spying too overtly on Iraqi political parties and a framework for helping the new National Assembly come up with appropriate legislation governing intelligence activities--she smiled, nodded, and batted her dark eyes at me from behind blonde-highlighted bangs. I took in a pretty face--long and narrow with smallish features--and a trim, attractive figure. The Weekly Standard-reading part of me sighed inwardly at having to work around the Iraqis’ pretense of gender affirmative action, and I started plotting tactics for getting results out of this soft, disorganized female.

My second meeting with her, two or three days after the first, left a different impression. From the hall outside Aliya’s office I heard a sharp soprano voice explode in a stream of a consonant-rich Arabic that communicated displeasure and command the way a nuclear explosion radiates light and heat, and I then saw two of her male staffers slink out, heads down and arms full of legal-looking folders. When I stepped in, she flashed the same girlish smile as before, but her voice had taken on a complex and decisive timbre. “Sabaah al-khayr, good morning, Mr. William. Tafaadhl, please, sit down. How are you today? Good. The boy will bring us some tea in a minute. Now, about what we discussed the other day …” And Aliya riffled through one of the stacks of paper on her desk, pulled a few sheets of paper out of a folder, and in 20 minutes gave a masterful, logical, and concise briefing of proposed regulations for keeping the IAS out of Iraqi politics, as well as her suggested strategy for the organization’s relationship with the new parliament. She left me speechless, an adviser with no advice to give.

“Saïdati, my dear lady Mrs. Aliya,” I said. “I really don’t have much to add to your very thorough presentation on these issues. It’s impressive. You must have been spent most of the past couple of nights working on this.”

“Well, you see, Mr. William, this is not exactly new for me. I had a lot of time to think about these issues, about how we should make democracy work in Iraq and the type of institutions we need, when I was in prison.”

“Prison? During Saddam’s time? Why? What were the charges? Were you involved with the opposition? Good Lord, it must have been awful.”

“Yes, Mr. William, it was under the regime, but they did not put me in jail for anything courageous like trying to overthrow him, only for trying to do my job. In 1995 I had just completed my law degree at al-Mustansiriyah University here in Baghdad. My parents down in Basrah were so proud. Do you know that my mother cannot read and that my father only finished primary school? Well, I had opened my office and was eager to use my degree, to take any case where I could apply justice. And one of the first people who came by was an older gentleman with a big house in Mansur, you know, the rich neighborhood just to the west of here. Mr. Hussein, that was his name, he had rented his house to one of the judges who worked for Saddam’s special court for crimes against the state. The house was well-built and spacious, and the judge’s wife loved it and decided she wanted it to be hers. So she had title papers forged, claiming that she and the judge were the house’s rightful owners. And that was so typical of these people, the Baathists, especially the ones from Saddam’s town Tikrit; they acted as if the laws applied only to us Shi’a and to the Kurds. Because the judge was so important and close to Saddam, no experienced lawyer would take Mr. Hussein’s case, but you see, Mr. William, I became a lawyer because I believed I could help find justice, even in a country as unjust as Iraq. So I took the case, and I used everything I had learned at school to prepare it, and I argued it as well as I could, and when I won I surprised everybody--except for me, of course, because I always expect to win.

“But Mr. William, I think you know that every good thing has a price, and that was true when I won Mr. Hussein’s case. The judge and his wife were unhappy at losing, and they blamed me for keeping them from having that beautiful house in Mansur, and so they brought a charge against me for cursing Saddam’s name. And, you know, there was no defense against that in those days. Especially not for somebody like me, because one look at my name and where my family was from, Basrah, would tell them that I was Shi’a, not one of the Sunni people who got nearly all the good jobs and money and everything else under the regime. Well, any way, I was called back to the court, where they said I needed to finish some paperwork, but instead they read charges against me of defaming the president, and they found me guilty, and they sent me right to prison, and they said I would probably be executed because showing disrespect for the president and his name was a capital crime. Mr. William, for anybody who was raised right, the way my parents raised me, you will never be ready for prison. My first night I was in a common holding cell, and I could not believe what I saw: girls kissing other girls in front of everybody; girls lifting their skirts in front of the guards to get some more eggplant and tomatoes in their stew and an extra blanket to lie on; there was even a man who thought he was a girl and who was wearing the prettiest floral-print jumper and who the guards just didn’t know what to do with.

“It got worse, Mr. William. After a day they put a bag over my head and tied my hands and took me to a jail for political prisoners, I never knew where or what its name was. Physically, they didn’t hurt me too much. A few times they put electrodes on my ears and shocked me, and it made my nose bleed, and I tell you I never cried like that, and I still don’t like to wear ear-rings any more; but that was just a few times, and it was over soon. What was strange about when they shocked me is that they didn’t interrogate me or ask any questions. I guess it was just what they did to a new prisoner, like copying the identification card and taking fingerprints. No, Mr. William, the worst was that they put me in a cell by myself, with no light and no company and no books and nothing to do, and always the threat that they would come for me and kill me. The only contact with other people was when they brought my food, twice a day, and when I would hear other prisoners scream as they were tortured. I thought I would lose my mind, and at first I rocked and beat the back of my head against the wall just so I could feel something. But after some days, maybe a few weeks, something gave me strength, Mr. William. Maybe it was God, maybe it was the good training I got from my parents. I told myself: if I let Saddam and that evil judge and his awful wife beat me down, if I let them grind my soul into dust, then I would be dishonoring all the love and kindness and decency I had been lucky enough to receive during my life. So I resolved I would think--I would think about a new Iraq, one without Saddam or his sons or any Ba’athists. And I wrote a book in my head, with all the laws to make a democratic Iraq, and that included the way the Mukhabarat should work. And that’s where my ideas came from.”

Aliya’s story had left me more than speechless. The brain-freeze induced by her logic and intelligence was now deepened by the enormous lump that had risen from my gut and lodged in my throat. I could not square the calm, articulate young lawyer in front of me, dressed--schoolmarmishly for an American woman, daringly for an Iraqi--in a long black skirt that hinted at lively, shapely legs and an almost demure gray sweater, with this story of greed, injustice, torture, and dark, dank, solitary confinement. I had known intellectually, of course, that Saddam based his rule on cruelty and brutality, but now for the first time the facts I had absorbed from intelligence reports and newspaper articles had taken on flesh and a face and a soul. With my education at the University of Virginia--still steeped during my time there in the 1970s in the mythos of gentlemanly behavior and Southern chivalry--I was especially discomfited at hearing a young, vulnerable-looking woman recount having suffered such torments.

Swallowing hard and struggling to maintain manly control over my voice, I said, “Mrs. Aliya, I have been lucky enough in my life that I just cannot imagine what you went through. I don’t think my sanity would survive an experience like yours. But how did you get out? Didn’t you say that you had been found guilty of a capital crime?”

Aliya smiled and batted her eyes at me again. “Mr. William,” she said. “I told you that I always expect to win, and if I hadn’t survived in that prison I would have lost, and I would not be here now working to make sure that Saddam and his followers and other evil people are never able to kidnap and torture Iraq again. Surviving was nothing special.

“But how I left prison is a more interesting story. Did I tell you that I spent almost two years--23 months, one week, and four days--in prison? Every now and then the guards would tell me that my file was being reviewed and that when the process was finished, I would be led away and killed. I knew that I was already dead, but I continued to write the book on democracy in Iraq in my head, because I thought it would be interesting to talk about this in Paradise with my father and with Imam Ali and Imam Hussein.

“Then one day it seemed that the end had really come. The door to my cell opened, and two guards that I had never seen before came in. They put a bag over my head and bound my hands and led me out, and I thought they were taking me to the prison basement, where I had heard the executions took place. Instead, I was surprised to be taken outside and then into a car. After all the time in my cell, and even with my head completely hidden, the sun was blinding, and even with my head lowered and my eyes shut, I could feel the sun burn my eyes, and I had never felt tears run down my face like that before. Nobody said anything to me, and I said nothing because I had learned to keep quiet unless spoken to. I don’t know how long we were in the car. I know we finally stopped in deep shade and we then walked into a building with marble floors and walls that echoed with every step and scuff of our feet. I heard a heavy door open in front of us and close behind us and then felt carpet under my prison slippers. Then the bag was taken off my head and I saw him in a big chair behind an empty desk. Saddam Hussein. When you see him up close, Mr. William, he really looks like any other middle-aged Iraqi man, with the thick moustache and the big jaw and the black dye in his hair. His real evil is in his voice, because it is calm and reasonable, like a favorite uncle telling a naughty little boy to be good, and it goes gently up and down for hours until you agree with the most evil or stupid things--that we must kill the traitors among us or that war with Iran or Kuwait or America is a good thing.

“And that voice spoke to me. He said, ‘Young lady, you know you are in a lot of trouble. Your file says you cursed my name. Under our law, the usual punishment for that is death. Your case is unusual; because you are a woman and so young and so well-educated, none of the cowards and imbeciles who work for our courts would approve your execution, so they sent the decision to me. And as you and all Iraqis know, I am an honest and fair-minded man, so I wanted to interview you myself before deciding for life or death. I have one question for you, young lady: did you curse my name as the court says you did?’ I said, ‘No, Mr. President, I did not do that.’ Saddam looked down at some papers on the desk and then he stared at me again. ‘Young lady,’ he said. ‘This is very important. Your life depends on it. Tell me the truth. Are you guilty or not?’

"And, Mr. William, I looked him in the face. At first I was scared, because everybody said that Saddam had the eyes of a devil or an angel and could look into other people’s souls and find the truth or falsehood of what they were saying, but I did not blink, and I looked into Saddam’s eyes, and I saw that his eyes were no darker or deeper or wiser or more penetrating than any other man’s, and I thought, since I was already dead, the truth was the important thing, much more so than pleading for my life. So I said, ‘With all due respect, Mr. President, I would like to address you as a lawyer. Under Iraqi law, if I curse God’s name, I can go to jail for one year, but if I curse your name, I can get executed. What is the reason for this difference?’ Saddam held my gaze for a few seconds, broke it off, and finally without a word signaled the guards to take me away. They returned me to my cell, and I was certain they would kill me that day. But a week later, with no explanation other than the usual court document noting my crime and the time I had served in prison, I was released. And now I have no fear as I work for my country and try to work for justice, Mr. William, because every day I walk under the sun and breathe free air is a gift to me. Nobody can kill me again.”

The lump in my throat had melted into an alloy of shock and awe, purified of any Rumsfeldian dross that might have attached to these words. I had left my safe, predictable bureaucratic world for a parallel universe of myth and legend. The smart young lawyer with the bangs over her eyes and bangles on her wrists was Sheherazade keeping the sultan and death at bay for the 1,002nd night; she was Daniel deciphering “Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin” on the walls of King Belshazzaar’s banquet hall; she was Esther out-witting Haman; she had stared a basilisk in the eye and walked away without turning into stone. More prosaically, I realized that Aliya possessed a rare combination of smarts and steel, and that I had found an invaluable if unlikely ally in my new job.

Aliya's amazing personal history remained fresh in my mind as I approached her office. Because it was a Saturday morning--the second day of the Iraqi weekend--Aliya was the only member of the legal section in their second-floor office when I walked in. There was a somber cast to her features, which seemed to deepen in the quiet calm of the empty office.

“Mr. William,” Aliya greeted me. “Good morning. I hope you are well. Please, I heard yesterday about Mr. Herbert’s death, and I am so sorry. Please, tell Mr. James and the other friends you work with at your Embassy that we will miss Mr. Herbert, and please, let his family know how sorry his Iraqi friends are.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Aliya,” I said. “That’s very kind of you. I will certainly share your condolences with the other friends in our office and with Mr. Herbert’s parents. His death will be sad for all the people who will miss him.” This was a nice performance on my part. I managed to mouth the common courtesies concerning Herb’s death but without giving the lie that I was among those who would miss him.

“I heard that Mr. Herbert died in a fall,” Aliya continued. “You Americans will of course say it was an accident. But you know us Iraqis by now, Mr. William; you know that for us there are no accidents. Do you think somebody murdered him?”

I smiled in spite of myself. “Mrs. Aliya, will I have to lecture again you about the smartest William who ever lived?” This elicited a wan smile from her. In many of my meetings with Aliya and her IAS colleagues I would mount a hobby-horse called William of Occam and from the saddle preach the 14th-century Franciscan’s gospel of logic and parsimony in reasoning about the world. Numquam ponenda est pluritas sine necessitate. Entities are not to be multiplied without necessity. The simplest answer is usually the correct answer.

“Mr. William, you always want us to believe that nobody is smarter than somebody named William, even if he died 700 years ago. But as I always tell you, this William of Occam was English, and that is almost like being American, and so he could not of course understand the way the world works in Iraq. Nothing just happens here. Nothing is simple. Everthing that takes place here is because somebody wants something.”

I didn’t think either of us wanted to renew our long-standing debate on epistemological matters, so I returned to the facts at hand. “Well, I was there when Herb died, Mrs. Aliya. He fell from the roof at the Australian house, and there were no signs that he had been pushed. It sure looked to me like an accident.”

“You know what you saw, Mr. William,” Aliya said. “But I worry because of what I discussed with Mr. Herbert on Wednesday, the last time I saw him. Of course he told you about it.” Damn. Here was a new twist in how Herb was haunting me from beyond the grave. At least, I thought, this should be the last of his “did you know that” bombs.

“No, I’m afraid that this time he wasn’t able to,” I said, trying to keep irritation with Herb out of my voice. “I’m certain he was planning to tell me about it. What was this about?”

“This was something that came up in the inter-agency security contracting committee, where I sometimes represent IAS and the Ministry of Defense. They meet every Tuesday, and this week there was only one item on the agenda, a $100 million contract to buy seeds, tractors, fertilizers, and other agricultural goods on an emergency basis for al-Maghribiya Province, out west along the border with Syria. The provincial government said they needed money for the project from the Americans. It was presented by the Prime Minister’s aide, Dr. Jibril, who said this was very important. Dr. Jibril told the committee that the project had come from governor of al-Maghribiya, who had worked on it with the general of the U.S. Marines there and with the political representative of the American Embassy. The governor and the American general and the others all think that if they can make it easier for the people in al-Maghribiya to be farmers, to grow cucumbers and wheat, then they will not want to be terrorists and they will stop trying to kill American and Iraqi soldiers. Dr. Jibril said this was so important and we had to approve the money and the contracts right then.”

“It sounds to me like just about every other civil-military operation that’s ever been dreamed up,” I said. “It’s got a somewhat bigger price tag, but that seems to be what’s most different about it.”

“Mr. William, what was that expression you taught me last week? ‘Smell test?’ I do not think this project passes a smell test. Something is wrong. First, the papers we got did not look Iraqi. Everything was written in English, and that is against Iraqi law because our language is Arabic of course, and all contract papers must be in Arabic. Then, why is there so much hurry? As you said, one hundred million dollars is a lot of money, and this should be looked at carefully. It would be normal to give more time to make a decision about it.

“But there is an even bigger problem,” Aliya continued. “The whole contract, for buying all the seeds and fertilizer and tractors and other products for the farmers, is supposed to be given to the Al-Saba’a Company, which is owned by a man named Muhammad al-Latif. This man is smart and rich, but he is also evil, Mr. William. He was at the law faculty at Mustansiriyah University, two years ahead of me. He was a Ba’athist--of course we all went to party meetings, we had to or we could not study law--but everybody said he also worked with the secret police. He reported on who made jokes about Saddam, who went to mosque too much, who drank alcohol, who didn’t drink, everything we did. When he finished his law studies, Muhammad kept himself useful to the regime, and he also made the regime useful for him. They let him set up a company, the Al-Saba’a Company, and he went into business with people in Lebanon and Jordan to import food for Iraq under the United Nations program. He bought rice in Thailand and wheat in Australia; he paid bribes and took bribes; he made a lot of money. And Mr. William, Muhammad al-Latif also was very lucky. Some time in 2002 he had an argument with one of Saddam’s boys, I can’t remember if it was Uday or Qusay, and he had to leave the country. Of course most of Latif's money had left Iraq before him. So Muhammad al-Latif made his way to London, where he told stories that he had to leave because he was working against Saddam and where he paid enough money to be believed. And after the fall of the regime in April 2003, Muhammad had friends who told him to come back, and he set up his Al-Saba’a company again, to get a share of all the money the Americans were going to spend. And I think that the $100 million for agriculture in Al-Maghribiya is one of these big contracts he wants to get with the new government and with the Americans.”

“Well, this does sound fishy, and maybe it smells that way, too,” I said. “But what could this possibly have to do with Herb’s death?”

“When I spoke of this to Mr. Herbert, he took very careful notes and he asked me many questions,” Aliya responded. “He told me he would ask at the Embassy and elsewhere about the Al-Maghribiya project. And that included the Prime Minister’s office, he said, because that day, Wednesday, he was going there to meet with the American military working with the Prime Minister’s staff. I told Mr. Herbert to be careful about what he said and who he said it to, because Muhammad al-Latif is an evil man who knows many bad people and who can make bad things happen. Maybe Mr. Herbert was not so careful and asked questions of the wrong people, and they are the ones who had him killed. Please remember, Mr. William, this is Iraq, and bad things happen here all the time.”

“Maybe there is some sort of connection to Herb’s death,” I said after a little reflection. If the forging of a possible link between this hare-brained agricultural scheme out west and Herb’s demise had come from anybody other than Aliya--especially from any other Iraqi--I would have dismissed it out of hand. Paranoia and conspiracy theories were even more common in Iraq than acts of violence, but I respected Aliya’s smarts and judgment. “Mrs. Aliya, I will see what I can find out about the Al-Maghbribiya project and this guy Muhammad al-Latif. Maybe Herb left some information in his files or on his computer; maybe my friends at the Embassy know something about it. And even if his death really was just a stupid accident, getting to the bottom of all this corruption and influence-peddling might be worth doing for its own sake.”

I stood up to leave. Aliya got out of her chair, edged around her desk and its ziggurats of paper, clutched my outstretched right hand with both of hers--had they become softer and warmer since the last time we had shaken hands?--and fixed her eyes--did her deep brown pupils always have those gold flecks in them?--on mine with a worried look on her face. I felt a strange loss of words, an aphasia rooted in my gut rather than my head. Aliya’s hands kept lightly pressing mine; something--I hoped it was tears from an allergy--was making her eyes shine. An urge welled up in me to fold her in my arms and kiss her. The voice of reason was fading, and I was losing consciousness of its warnings about getting involved with a married Muslim woman and an official of a foreign intelligence organization to boot. Somehow, reason found enough voice to shout a last warning over the cacophony of emotion and lust. I eased Aliya’s hands out of mine, dropped my gaze, took a small step back, and cleared my throat.

“Mrs. Aliya, you must forgive me,” I said. “In all this talking about Herb’s death, I haven’t asked how you are. I hope things are better with your family.”

Her eyes were still shining and fixed on me. “Mr. William, you are always too nice to me, and I wish I could tell you something happy. But nothing changes. Haydar”--Aliya's husband of five years--"is getting worse. He goes to the same meetings at the husseiniya, that is our Shi'a mosque, two or three times a week with the other engineers from the Ministry of Transportation, and his head gets fuller and fuller of the foolishness preached by Muqtada al-Sadr and those other angry idiots who call themselves imans and who hate you Americans and everything you stand for. For six months Haydar hasn’t been the man I married. He hardly comes home to our apartment any more, he sleeps at his office or the husseiniya. And now he says he’ll divorce me if I don’t wear a veil and take off my make-up and keep quiet unless spoken to. Worst of all, he tells me that we haven’t had a baby because God is punishing me for talking to men, especially American men, and for dressing the way I want. I don’t care any more if he divorces me and I don’t care how sad and angry it makes my mother. What is important to me now is this job at the Ministry, where I can contribute to Iraq, and where I can meet with my friends and Iraq’s friends, like you, Mr. William.”

Damn her eyes, I thought. They were glistening now, probably from tears that my thoughtless attempt at politeness had brought on. I managed to stammer, “It-it-it, ah, it's so sad that Haydar can’t see how lucky he is to be married to you, Mrs. Aliya. You deserve nothing but happiness.”

“Thank you, Mr. William, thank you,” she said. “In my whole life in Iraq, I never met a man like you. You listen to me, you treat me the way you want to be treated yourself. And look at you: tall, almost two meters I think, and with no belly hanging over your belt”--I unconsciously sucked in my gut--"and no cigarette smoke on your breath. Where, Mr. William, where in Iraq will I meet a man like you?”

“You’ll meet someone,” I tried to reassure her. “I know that it is only in Iraq have I found a woman with your strength and courage that is bundled in such a pretty package. I don’t think I’d meet a woman like you in America, and that’s America’s loss. But you wouldn’t really want someone like me, any way. It's not just that I'm old and tired. You know I’ve tried marriage twice, and failed at it twice. My ex-wives would be only too happy to tell you what to avoid in a man like me. No, Mrs. Aliya, you’ll find the man and the happiness you deseve, and you’ll do better than an old loser like me, I know it.”

I glanced at my watch and started fiddling with my bag. “I really must excuse myself now. You’ve got a lot of work to do, like always, or you wouldn’t be here today. And I’ve got to help sort out Herb’s things for his family. Thank you for your help.”

We repeated the farewell gesture. Aliya took my right hand with both of hers, still soft and warm, and again fixed me with her glistening, gold-flecked eyes. This time she spoke first.

“Please, Mr. William. Please be more careful than Mr. Herbert,” Aliya said. “Money and influence are everything in Iraq now. People’s lives mean nothing to the evil people here, but you are my good friend, and I could not stand to lose you.” Her hands gently pressed mine to punctuate the advice.

“Of course I’ll be careful,” I answered. “You know I’m a man of words and ideas, not action. I’m no hero and I am not about to start doing stupid things now.” I patted her hands, set them down and left her office.

As I walked down the second-floor hallway and then up the stairs to the third-floor, thoughts of gold-flecked eyes and soft hands and of a web of corruption and murder linking Herb’s death to the Al-Maghribiya project gave way to the more prosaic consideration of where to place my feet. RAG had paid for a complete renovation of the IAS building in late 2003, but two years later, the entropy and chaos of Iraq had infiltrated the clean and orderly facility that Americans had envisioned. The indoor-outdoor hallway carpet had come untacked on most floors, leaving ridges and depressions that shifted like the windswept dunes of the Syrian desert; although the Iraqis navigated these hazards with no difficulty, the iregularities had already claimed two sprained ankles and one badly twisted knee among the American advisers. Trash cans overflowed with food--carried in because the Iraqis didn’t want to risk lingering in the kabob shops and sandwich stands in the Red Zone--which fed the building’s thriving colony of rats. Because of the rats, the Iraqis welcomed a rapidly multiplying clowder of cats as a counter-measure. In the absence of kitty-litter boxes, the felines emptied their bladders and intestines on the stairway landings between floors. Nobody had slipped yet on a cat turd in the building, and I had so far had the good fortune of not even soiling my shoes on the feline feces. My lucky streak continued this morning, and I celebrated by stopping at the head of the stairs on the third floor and liberally dousing my hands in disinfectant lotion.

The third floor housed the office of my other principal client at the IAS, Brigadier ‘Umar al-Jaburi, who headed the Service’s Analysis Section. The Brigadier was smart, lucky, and slick. He had prospered in a 25-year military career under Saddam, wangling a spacious house near the river, accumulating enough cash to be able to buy a new Mercedes for his family, and earning the trust to travel abroad, to Europe as well as Arab countries, nearly every year. A fighter pilot trained on both Soviet MiG-21s and British Hunter Hawkers, he had survived decades of rough weather: Saddam’s purge of Air Force officers held responsible for allowing the 1981 Israeli air strike on the al-Tuwaitha nuclear research facility, eight years of sorties during the 1980s war against Iran, and the American-led annihilation of the Iraqi Air Force during the 1991 war. Jaburi had been an enthusiastic and vocal member of the Ba’athist Party, but after April 2003 the scales fell from his eyes and he became an impassioned advocate of democracy and human rights. He favored dark suits with a trim military cut and kept his hair cropped and free of undyed gray; he limned his upper lip with a pencil moustache. Jaburi was vain about his appearance--undoubtedly motivated by the mistresses he was said to keep in various flats around Baghdad--but it was a healthy vanity that led him, unusally for an Iraqi man, to watch his weight and routinely engage in physical exercise. The Brigadier sytled himself an intellecutal and filled our meetings with disquisitions on the nature of organizational behavior and the history of intelligence. Jaburi's smarts, acute political barometer, and strong survival instincts made him uniquely useful.

When I walked into Jaburi’s office this morning, I at first thought I had somehow stumbled into a heroin shooting gallery on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Three members of his staff were sitting in front of his desk with bloody needles in their hands and embarassed expressions on their faces as the Brigadier lectured them in Arabic. Jaburi smilingly broke off when he saw me enter, and he waved me to a chair.

“Please, Mr. William, have a seat,” he said. “You see I am taking advantage of this Saturday to help my colleagues with their health. Mr. Hamid, Mr. Kamal, and Mr. Dulaimi will not listen to me when I say they need more exercise and not so many cakes, so I thought that testing their blood for glucose and for diabetes would help them understand. Mr. Hamid and Mr. Dulaimi had glucose levels of almost 200--and a fasting glucose level of 126 milligrams per decaliter of course means you have diabetes--so maybe now they will think more about exercise and less about kabobs and sweets.”

By the look of things, Jaburi was right to worry about his staffers’ health. Hamid was a chain-smoking ex-cop shaped like Humpty-Dumpty. He couldn’t walk from his office to the elevator without working up a wheeze worthy of a public service announcement on black lung disease. Dulaimi wasn’t overweight, at least not by Iraqi standards, but I could discern no muscle tone under his skin, and his face had the sallow skin and sunken eyes of a man who made up for lack of sleep with a surfeit of cigarettes. Although Kamal carried a healthy gut over his belt, his pancreas probably wasn’t his organ at greatest risk of failure; the web of burst capillaries on his nose bore witness to multiple postings to Moscow during his career as an intelligence operative for the old regime, a fondness for Russian culture, and an affliction with the Russian disease--alcoholism--that probably had already scarred his liver. But typically for Iraqis, the three paragons of ill health were more worried about public, open discussion of their woes than any effort to turn it around, and my arrival in their boss’s office gave them a way out of Jaburi’s shaming session. Their faces beaming with relief, Hamid, Kamal, and Dulaimi eased out of their chairs, shook my hand in greeting, and waddled back to their own offices.

“They do not want to listen to me,” Jaburi said after their departure, shaking his head with paternalistic concern. “They will get fatter and fatter and unhealthier and unhealthier, and they will die before their time, and we will have to pay pensions to their widows and orphans. We all of couse die when God wants us to, but I do think that He wants even us Iraqis to do a little sport and exercise and to be careful about what we eat. Our Muslim imams and mullahs tell us that Paradise is full of virgins for us believers, but I have not yet heard that it has diabetes test kits or insulin.

“But Mr. William, I am being rude here and forgetting about the terrible news,” Jaburi continued. “I heard that Mr. Herbert died on Thursday night, and we are all so sorry, because he was our good friend. It is very sad, but you know that my colleagues, Mr. Hamid and Mr. Kamal and Mr. Dulaimi, will say that being skinny and taking sport did not save him because it was God’s will. I understand he died in an accident?”

“Yeah,” I said. “A fall from the roof while we were visting the Australian house, on Thursday. It looks like he just slipped and fell. The security people at our Embassy are investigating and we should get the official word in a few days.”

“All very sad, very sad. But we cannot stay here on this Earth any longer than God wants us to. At least you Americans have the luxury of accidents. Even here in Baghdad, where so many terrorists and criminals want to kill you, you are protected. It would be very difficult for al-Qaida to get past the checkpoints and plant a car bomb by your house, and those murderers from the Jaysh al-Mahdi, the Mahdi Army militia that that angry young fool Muqtada al-Sadr is leading and that those bastards in Iran are funding, even they would have trouble finding you and shooting you. But as for us ... Well, Mr. William, you know this is a different story.” I resigned myself to hearing the umpteenth iteration of the persecutions suffered by Jaburi and the other officers and officials of the former regime.

“We former pilots, for example, are at great risk. And for me it is even worse because, as I always tell you, I am from a tribe that everybody knows to be Sunni. Never in Iraq, never was this business of Sunni or Shi’a or Kurdish important. We were all friends and neighbors and we married each other. Saddam and his regime were terrible, but back then we were all Iraqis first and member of our tribes or factions second. But after the regime fell, those Iranians or Persians were able to come here during all the confusion, and they are the ones that are setting us all to hating each other. And this is our problem, Mr. William, too many of the Shi’a people here in Iraq are really Persians. Of course, many good Iraqis are Shi’a, that has always been the case, and these ones are victims of the Persian plan, just like we Sunnis are. But too many of the others, they are Persians, not Iraqis, not Arabs, not even Kurds. Listen to their names--Sistani, Sharistani, istani-this, istani-that, they don’t even try to hide where they come from. But, as I always tell you, the Persians think long-term. The mullahs in Tehran and Qom have a 50-year plan to take control of Iraq, and I am afraid it is working. They know we Iraqi men like the ladies too much. So, if a bus brings 100 Iranian pilgrims to the holy imams’ tombs in Karbala, maybe five or 10 will be beautiful girls. And they will stay, and marry Iraqi men, who have such a weakness for pretty ladies, and they will have many children. And of course the women will raise the children to be Persians and not Arabs or even Kurds, and that is just one of the ways that the Persians will overwhelm us. I tell you, they are the ones who invented chess, and they are always thinking ahead.

“And again, as I always say, it was so much worse for us pilots and other military men who simply did our duty in the 1980s. And this, I tell you, Mr. William, this is because the Iranians are Persians, and the Persians never forget anything done to them. After the end of Yugoslavia, they say the Iranians would not deal with the new republic of Macedonia. And why was that? It was because they did not forget that it was Alexander the Great, from Macedonia, who destroyed their Persian Empire. And if they are still angry about that after 2,500 years, then how do they feel about their war with us from 20 years ago? Like I have told you too many times, Mr. William, the Iranians remember that it was our Air Force that bombed their cities and killed their soldiers and stopped their invasion. And they want revenge. One of the first things they did in that confusion after Saddam and the regime fell was to buy our names and files that were looted out of the Defense Ministry--and I am sad and almost angry with your American Army, that they did not control the building and the files back then--and now the Iranians are hunting us down like rats. I told you about my friend, Major General Daud al-Halaby, who trained on the MiG-21 in Russia with me, and how he was shot like a dog in his garden, while drinking tea with his neighbors and his daughter was serving cakes. And there are at least a dozen others who have been killed just like that. And that, Mr. William, that is why I am almost jealous that your friend Mr. Herbert was able to die in an accident. But I am still sorry for him and for his family and even for us, because now we no longer have his advice."

“Brigadier,” I said. “Thank you for your kind statements about Herb’s loss. He will be missed.” As with Aliya, I managed to be polite without stating an untruth. “And you know Herb, like me, tremendously respected all the sacrifice and courage that you and all your colleagues display every day. I will admit that you are right that we are lucky to have the luxury of dying in accidents. Whatever the cause, it’s a sad business.

“Brigadier,” I continued. “If I may be direct in an American kind of way, may I ask what the last issues were that you worked on with Herb? I need of course to follow up and make certain that nothing gets loss in the wake of this tragedy.”

“You know the answer to that, Mr. William,” said Jaburi. “I last met with Mr. Herbert and you together on Tuesday this week. We were discussing the latest letter from the the Prime Minister’s office, with the suggestions for the issues they want us to cover in our weekly reports. We agreed that we would write a letter to the Prime Minister’s assistant, Dr. Jibril, saying that we will first focus on the threat from the Al-Qaida terrorists in Al-Maghribiya Province, because that is where there is the biggest threat, and then we will deal with Baghdad and Ninewa and the other provinces.”

“Yeah, that’s pretty much what I remember,” I said, flipping through my notebook and hoping that I had jotted down something legible during that Tuesday meeting. Then something stopped me short. Dr. Jibril--wasn't he the guy Aliya had identified as the big advocate of the Al-Maghribiya project? I figured there’d be no harm in fishing for more information.

“What I can’t remember, Brigadier, is whether we talked much about Dr. Jibril. Since he’s the gentleman who’ll see your reports before passing them on to the Prime Minister, his style and his interests are at least as important as his boss’s.”

“Well, Mr. William, I don’t think I have said very much to you about Dr. Jibril. I meet him several times a month, at meetings of the National Security Committee. Dr. Jibril is of course a member of the Prime Minister’s party, the al-Da’wa, and like the Prime Minister he is a Shi’a and was born in Karbala. But what makes Dr. Jibril different from many of these Shi’a politicians is that he spent most of his life here in Iraq, living under the old regime. Dr. Jibril did his doctorate in law at Mustansiriyah University, I think in the early 90s, and did not leave the country until 2000. They say he got in trouble somehow with Uday Hussein, and that Dr. Jibril left Iraq with just the shirt on his back. Dr. Jibril then spent some time in London, where he joined with the opposition. He is a very well-connected man, and he knows everybody. What is very good is that he is becoming a good friend for us here at the IAS.”

“That is very interesting. I agree with you, Brigadier. Dr. Jibril does sound like a good friend for the IAS.” I hoped I was able to show something close to a poker face as I tried to match Jaburi’s information with what Aliya had told me earlier. This guy Jibril was a key figure in the Prime Minister’s office; he had contact with my friends at the IAS; and his career timeline--graduation from law school in Baghdad in the early 90s and the feud with one of Saddam’s boys and flight to exile in 2000--dovetailed with the life of Muhammad al-Latif, the dubious businessman that Aliya had linked to the al-Maghribiya project.

“Oh, and there’s one more element about Dr. Jibril that is very good, very good indeed,” Jaburi said. “He is a true Iraqi nationalist. Unlike many of members of the Prime Minister’s party, who care only about the Shi’a and the people in the south and who have sold their souls to the Iranians, Dr. Jibril has a vision for the entire country. He told me after the National Security Committee meeting last Monday that he and the Prime Minister are now advocating for an important agriculture project for Al-Maghribiya Province out west, worth $100 million, even though the people there are Sunnis and do not support the Prime Minister or his party. Dr. Jibril sees that if these people can grow crops and sell them, they will be too busy and too rich to support the terrorists. And you as an American, Mr. William, will be happy to know that Dr. Jibril wants to use this project to develop private sector companies here in Iraq, too. The purchase of all the seeds, tractors, and other things that the farmers need, this will be done by a private Iraqi company called Al-Saba’ah, and that means ‘morning’ of course. The owner of this company is a very clever man named Muhammad al-Latif. He used to have the contracts to buy wheat and vegetables and meat for the Air Force when I was serving under the old regime, and I always thought he was very efficient and very honest, one of the best. I think this project for the farmers in Al-Maghribiya is a good one that has good people working on it, and I hope that your American Embassy will support it one-hundred percent.”

“That is interesting,” I replied. “It’s good to hear that there are people in the government worrying about all Iraqis, and not just their own tribe or family. I’m sure this important project in Al-Maghribiya will get all the support it deserves from your governnment as well as from the American Embassy. Brigadier, I must ask you to excuse me now. I have to return to our office to deal with Herb’s papers and help get his effects ready to send to his family.”

“Mr. William, please excuse me. I get so involved in the work we have that I forget my manners. Please, do what you must. This accident that happened to Mr. Herbert is so sad, and I know it must be weighing on you like it does with all of his friends. Let me know if we can help. I hope I will see you again soon.”

With that, Jiburi got up and walked me out of his office and down the hallway to the stairs. On the way down I managed once again to avoid the cat shit on the carpet, and my trip out the building, through the security checkpoints and into the parking lot was equally, mercifully uneventful.

An unpleasant surprise was waiting for me in the lot. Because it was daylight and because somebody else from the RAG office might see me, I decided to perform the vehicle sweep that our security people required and that I avoided as much as possible out of a combination of laziness and fatalism. I was unsurprised to find no telltale wires sticking out of the engine or grease stains on the pavement, since I didn’t flatter myself that I merited a car-bomb, but I was irritated to see that the front right tire had gone flat while I was at the IAS. After closer examination, irritation became unease. The tire didn’t look like it had suffered a slow leak; rather, there was a six-inch slash mark in the sidewall, strongly suggesting deliberate intent. Who? Why?

My nerves joined forces with the right side of my brain and rushed forward with explanation: this was the work of the same people who had killed Herb; these people are somehow tied to the $100 million Al-Maghribiya project and its well-connected backers; I’ve just been warned to keep my nose out of this. Slower on the draw, the left, rational side of my brain insisted that there was no plausible link among all these events: Herb’s death gave every appearance of being no more than an accidental fall; I didn’t know everything that Herb may have learned about Al-Maghribiya or what he planned to do with this information; and the Al-Maghribiya principals' history of corruption didn’t necessarily mean that they were plotting murder. I was rooting for my left brain’s logical, analytical approach to win the debate, but the right brain wouldn’t budge from its position. So, unsure of what exactly was happening and what it meant, I got into the Mercedes, pulled out of the parking lot, headed back to the RAG compound, and gratefully noted that the drive-flat tire was performing as advertised.

After the five-minute drive to our compound, I left the vehicle at the contract garage to have the tire changed. Greaseman, the chief mechanic, shot me a sour look after inspecting the damage.

“What the fuck did you do here, man? I know you always bring the vehicles back with little dings and scratches, but I never seen anything like this. It looks like that Freddy Kruger guy from the movies ripped it up with one of his claws.”

Although suspicions of foul play were still haunting my thought process I decided to downplay them with the mechanic. “Grease, if I knew what it was, I’d’ve avoided it. You know all the shit on the roads and the parking lots here. Maybe I was dragging razor wire or something.”

“Razor wire wouldn’t cut so deep or so long or along the sidewall,” Greaseman observed. “Lots of strange shit here. Well, I oughta get this fixed in a coupla hours. And then, to make my life and yours easier, I hope you’ll pay more attention to where you drive this son-of-a-bitch.”

“I’ll do what I can,” I promised.

After this exchange and a quick lunch, it was nearly three when I got to the RAG office and updated O’Dwyer on what I had learned from Aliya and Jaburi. He listened quietly, and his face stayed at a constant mid-point between red and pink, making it hard to read. He didn’t react until I described the slashed tire and the unease this had caused me.

“Jesus fucking Christ, Will,” Jim said. “How long have you been here? Four months maybe? It sounds like you’re getting even more paranoid than the Iraqis, and they at least really do have people trying to kill them every damned day. Do you know for a fact that the tire was slashed? You don’t think there’s the least little chance that you caught a curb or the edge of a pothole somewhere? I’ve seen you in that Mercedes--you drive exactly like the four-eyed fucking analyst that you are.

“And as for the Al-Maghribiya project. I know you like that lady lawyer, Aliya, and you respect her brains and her cojones, but don’t you think it’s kinda far-fetched to think that some dipshit scheme to sell over-priced seeds to dirt farmers has evolved into a shadowy conspiracy capable of murder inside the Green Zone? Not to mention the question of whether poor dumb dead Herb would have been worth killing to begin with. Do you really think he found out anything more than what your girlfriend told him? Herb was a fucking whiz kid back at Headquarters. But c’mon, you know that his taste for French-kissing bigshots’ assholes and the way he really cared for the sort of idiot detail that gives big hard-ons to all those pricks at the White House--those are the skills that produce zero results here. Herb wouldn’t’ve recognized real intelligence information if it was rubbing him between the legs, and there’s no way he’d’ve been able to elicit anything from anybody. No, if he was murdered--and I’ll bet you your next paycheck he wasn’t--it's because of some dumb-ass thing he did at that party, like spitting in somebody’s beer or pinching the ass of some other guy’s girlfriend.”

“I hope you’re right, Jim,” I said. “It would make things a lot easier if you were. But I do trust Aliya, and I’ve not seen her so worried before. And there was also something weird in Jaburi’s smarmy enthusiasm for the Al-Maghribiya project. He only gets that worked up for somebody with a lot of wasta, with the juice and connections to make good things happen for him.”

“Will, Will, Will. Didn’t you tell you you’ve read The Lord of the Rings something like two dozen times? I bring this up because you seem lost in some realm of heroic fucking fantasy. At least you’re not not saying it was the man on the grassy knoll who shot Herb as he passed through Dealy Plaza--not yet any way. At any rate I’m glad you got this info from the Iraqis which suggests to me, at least, that that poor son of a bitch wasn’t doing anything worth getting killed for. Now have you seen anything in his paperwork or on his computer files? Don’t even open your mouth. Your face says you haven’t done a fucking thing on this, so get off your ass and at least pretend to do what I’m asking.”

Jim’s words were harsher than his tone or demeanor. His face had had lightened by a shade or two in the direction of pink by the time he dismissed me, suggesting that I was getting the details surrounding Herb’s death sorted out to his satisfaction. I was less sanguine. Evil Iraqis with checkered pasts were maneuvering to profit from a fraudulent contact; Herb had been killed; somebody had slashed my tire. I was sure there was some kind of connection.

I spent most of the afternoon stuck in a loop between Jim’s office and the communications vault. In order to have a look at Herb’s computer files, I needed the commo people to give me access to his password and account. Commo cited regulations showing why and how they couldn’t do this until I had approval in writing from the chief, namely Jim, to access a specific list of files. However, I couldn’t know which files I needed to get into until I could browse through Herb’s account. I finally had to take Jim’s secretary, Marcia, by the hand into the commo vault and engage in direct negotiations with the commo technicians on the bureuacratic niceties involved in this delicate case. It was early evening by the time this shuttle diplomacy yielded tangible results.

After all that, I found nothing in Herb’s soft folders on our Intranet that seemed to have anything to do with the Saba’ah Company, Muhammad Al-Latif, Dr. Jibril, or the Al-Maghribiya Project. His e-mails did provide some interesting reading of a more personal and prurient nature, though. First, I saw that the sneaky bastard had been sending weekly updates to his former boss, who ran our Director’s personal office back in Washington. It was nauseating enough to read his onanistic odes to how “I straightened out that mess at IAS” or why “Brigadier Jaburi really appreciated my suggestion”, much less the periodic encomiums to the “visionary leadership” and “imaginative reforms” being enacted by our highest leadership back home. It was unsurprising that he lavished praise on the “outstanding operational judgment” that Jim used to run our RAG office in Baghdad, since there was always the chance that his messages might get forwarded to local management. No, what most disturbed me was the evidence of just how good Herb had been at bureuacratic infighting. He never directly slammed me or my judgment, preferring to damn with faint praise. His best shot was to comment on how helpful I’d been in putting out one of the monthly updates because “Will Purdew is the best proof-reader I’ve seen in my 15 years of U.S. government service.” He took other subtle shots at my appearance and style. “Perdu’s got a great sense of humor, especially about himself. Yesterday he pointed out the weird set of clothes he was wearing--button-down dress shirt, cargo pants, and sandals--and said his nick-name should be ‘Grape Nuts’ . . . Will has done so well getting to know the small number of women here that he says he sometimes forgets he’s just another overweight balding middle-aged white guy with a bad attitude.” These toxic-keyboard notes painted a vivid portrait of me as a female-obsessed space cadet who could be relied on in a pinch to back up the spell-check function in MS-Word. Wonderful.

I took some solace from personal issues revealed in another e-mail thread. Herb had given full power of attorney to his fiancée--whom he wince-inducingly referred to as CINCHOUSE, Commander-in-Chief-House, aping a term widely used by uniformed military--but was apparently having second thoughts. He noted to the recipient of this thread, who from the context appeared to have been Herb’s best friend back at headquarters, that “CINCHOUSE” was running through his savings “like Patton’s Third Army through France.” Herb asked his buddy to have a look at his house and see whether “CINCHOUSE” was really making the improvements she had claimed--and whether “some other dude’s truck is parked in the driveway.” I knew it was none of my business, but I couldn’t stop reading it, and the more worry and insecurity I saw, the better I liked it. An inquiring mind like mine always wants to know.

It was nearly ten by the time I had a look at Herb’s paper files. All of us were supposed to keep no more than one inch of paper holdings, to minimize the time needed to burn or shred them if the bad guys ever came over the wall. Reflecting his inflated sense of self-importance, Herb’s paper files were two inches thick. Printed copies of his e-mail correspondence with headquarters and of his earnings-and-leave slips made up most of the file. There were some hand-written notes from the past week, including one sheet dated November 9. It contained just a few names: Alliyah-Muhammad Lateef--al Magreb project--Saba company. Attached to it was an article printed from the web-site of an Australian newspaper.

Perth Commercial Appeal
Company in Iraq Payments Scandal Keeps Going Strong
By Katie Llewellyn
October 12, 2005

Local suppliers linked to kickbacks for Saddam

A Lebanese-Iraqi company that covertly funneled hundreds of millions of US dollars to Saddam Hussein’s government from the Western Australia Wheat Association (WAWA), the principal grain marketer and exporter in our state, is looking for new business despite its role in helping the ousted Iraqi regime evade UN sanctions.

According to a UN report, the Saba’ah Company--incorporated in Lebanon but effectively owned and controlled by Iraqi nationals--extorted kickbacks from international companies seeking lucrative contracts with Iraq under the now-defunct humanitarian Oil-for-Food programme (OFF). Australian farmers sold more than US$1 billion worth of wheat to Iraq between 2000 and 2002 as part of this UN-monitored operation.

OFF was designed to ease the impact of broad economic sanctions on Iraq’s civilian population by letting the Iraqi government sell oil and use the proceeds to buy food and other humanitarian goods. Revenue from oil sales was paid into overseas accounts supervised by UN officials in order to keep the funds out of the hands of the Saddam regime. Companies seeking to do business under OFF therefore negotiated deals directly with the regime while billing for payment from the UN-controlled account.

The Saba’ah Company was at the center of the Saddam regime’s scheme to subvert international controls over the proceeds of oil sales. Like all companies selected as commercial intermediaries by the Baghdad government, Saba’ah told WAWA and its other overseas suppliers that they had to cover the cost of transporting goods not only to Iraq’s borders or ports but also--purportedly unknown to the UN and its employees--to points of distribution within the country.

The foreign companies were then told by regime representatives that they had to give onward transport contracts and costly “post-commercial relations” contracts to selected companies. These firms, later found to be shell companies owned by the Iraqi regime and by members of Saddam’s inner circle, added surcharges to the OFF-approved contracts that boosted the cost of these procurement contracts at times by as much as 50 percent.

Saba’ah was one of the principal middleman firms involved in these transactions. Because it was registered and legally domiciled in Lebanon rather than Iraq, it was exempt from the UN sanctions against the former Iraqi regime.

Saba’ah served as the main purchaser of Australian wheat in the 2000-2002 period covered by the UN report. It is estimated that of the US$1.2 billion worth of wheat sold by WAWA and other Australian suppliers, more than US$200 million were paid for the bogus transport costs and similar apparent kickbacks.

Unlikely company for Saddam

Although Saddam Hussein and most of his inner circle were members of Iraq’s Sunni Muslim minority, they turned to a company run by a man from the country’s traditionally downtrodden Shiite majority to handle many of the kickbacks under the OFF programme.
Muhammad Wasim Isa al-Latif al-Trabelsi, 41, is an Iraqi-educated lawyer described by business contacts in Beirut and Amman as “brilliant” and a “ruthless deal-maker.” He was born in the Shiite holy city of Karbala, about 100 kms southwest of Baghdad, into a family that was descended from a 19th-century Shiite religious scholar from southern Lebanon and that still maintains ties to Lebanon.

Taking advantage of his dual Lebanese-Iraqi nationality, Latif registered Saba’ah for Trading with Lebanon’s Ministry of Commerce in 1993. He gave a 49.9-percent share in Saba’ah and its profits to an Iraqi company known to have been used as a cut-out by the Iraqi dictator’s brutal older son, Uday.

“Muhammad knew he was doing business with very bad people,” says a Latif associate based in the Jordanian capital of Amman. “The money was just too good, and he justified it by saying he was able to buy wheat and rice to feed the poor people in Iraq. For a number of years he just didn’t care.”

Falling out

Latif and his company lost their access to the former regime’s golden goose in 2002. The reasons are unclear.

In a late 2004 interview with the Lebanese newspaper les Actualités de l’Orient, Latif claimed that Saddam’s secret police had uncovered his long-standing provision of financial support and information to opposition parties abroad and that he “fled Iraq just a minute ahead of the death squad and wearing only the clothes on my back.”

Some of Latif’s business associates recount a different story. Banking circles in Beirut told us that Latif was forced to end his relationship with the regime after Uday Hussein discovered that Latif had cheated the Iraqi government of its full 50-percent share of the profits, worth hundreds of millions of American dollars.

Whatever the reason, in September 2002 Latif arrived in London, where he began cultivating personal and political ties with opposition groups, including the Al-Da’wa Party of Iraq’s current Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jafari.

Rehabilitating a country and a company

Since mid-2005 Latif has been actively trying to re-energize his company. In response to written questions from this newspaper, he said “Al-Saba’ah has unmatched business expertise and international contacts that can work for the benefit of all citizens of the new Iraq.”

He added, “Agriculture and rural development are the real future of Iraq. Oil makes money for the government, but farming creates jobs and grows food for the people.

“It was because of their ability to use water from the two rivers and the rich soil of our Iraqi homeland that our Mesopotamian ancestors invented agriculture and civilization. I look forward to using my business skills to help rehabilitate this critical sector for the development of the new, democratic Iraq.”

When asked for specifics, Latif told us that Al-Saba’ah was particularly well positioned to furnish the seeds, fertilizer, and farm implements that are in short supply in Iraq. He added that Australian farm input companies have high quality products and interesting prices.

No helpful pattern had emerged here. I didn’t know whether that was because of fatigue or because I had just poked around through the dirty socks and soiled undershirts of another man’s psychic laundry basket. I hadn’t learned anything important that I didn’t know before. Herb was a self-serving shit--albeit wielding the stiletto of character assassination with more finesse than I had been willing to give him credit for--and Aliya had spoken to him on Wednesday about the odd deals surrounding the Al-Maghribiya project. The article from the Australian paper corroborated Aliya’s concerns about the shady past connections of Muhammad al-Latif and his Saba’ah Company, but it didn’t establish either a capability or a desire to murder an American in the Green Zone in order to protect a few million dollars. I needed more information--and also a full night’s sleep uninterrupted by either a dead colleague or an unhappy ex-wife.

I went back to my room, poured a couple of fingers of Jim Beam into a glass, settled back on my bed, switched on the television in time for the kickoff of the Virginia-Georgia Tech game, snorted myself awake in the middle of the third quarter to find my pillowcase half-soaked in drool, and remembered to switch off the tube before returning to the pleasures of oblivion.

Friday, November 11

2007-05-05T12:20:00.000-07:00

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.

Chapter 1: Thursday, November 10, 2005--11:34 p.m.

2007-04-26T17:06:00.000-07:00

“Let smiles cease,” Converse said. “Let laughter flee. This is the place where everybody finds out who they are.”

Hicks shook his head.

“What a bummer for the gooks.”
Dog Soldiers, by Robert Stone

I read too much and watch too many movies. I never experience anything directly. I measure everything that happens to me against what I’ve read or watched. Without the filter of somebody else’s imagination, I understand nothing. During my first years as a professional expatriate, I viewed the strange new countries where I was posted through the lens of The Wizard of Oz--an odd choice for a heterosexual man. The locals were either cute and helpful like the Munchkins, or terrifying and mindless like the Wicked Witch’s winged monkeys. I staged departures as dramatically as Dorothy’s from the Emerald City, with tearful pledges of lasting friendships and undying memories, although I never managed to accumulate much in the way of brains or heart or courage along the way.

When I volunteered for the job with RAG, the U.S. Embassy’s Research and Analysis Group, in the wake of Operation Iraqi Freedom, purportedly to advise the Iraqi Ministry of Defense on intelligence analysis, it occurred to me that I may finally have left Wizard of Oz metaphors behind, despite surface similarities between the Emerald City and Baghdad’s Green Zone. I had racked up a quarter-century’s worth of postings to such garden spots as Zaire and Chad and Angola, becoming one of the U.S. Government’s leading experts in watching--and sometimes helping--Third-World countries swirl down the plumbing fixtures of history. I had also gone through two marriages and estranged a couple of kids. I could no longer convince myself that there was any link between my life and the story of a young innocent swept into fantasyland. I needed a new myth and a new set of images to explain my life. So, when I arrived in Baghdad in mid-2005, I was hoping I could use The Year of Living Dangerously. I was of course thinner in the scalp and thicker in the middle than a young Mel Gibson, and would probably have trouble befriending a mystically-minded dwarf in Iraq. Still, I didn’t think it unreasonable to hope to find a strong, striking woman in the Sigourney Weaver mold and to spark a torrid romance while playing a role in the great events of the day.

Several months later--at 11:34 p.m., on Thursday, November 10, 2005, to be precise--I was chagrined to find that the script for my life in Baghdad appeared instead to have been written by Dashiell Hammett. That was when the body of Herb Bennett, my partner on the RAG advisory team, fell from the three-storey-tall roof of the new Australian house in the Green Zone and landed with a sickening mix of crunch and squish, half-in and half-out of the pool. Being who I was, my first thoughts were of Sam Spade and Miles Archer in The Maltese Falcon. When a man's partner is killed, he's supposed to do something about it. It doesn't make any difference what you thought of him, he was your partner, and you're supposed to do something about it. ... And when one of your organization gets killed, it's - it's bad business to let the killer get away with it. Bad all around.

The Maltese Falcon came to mind because the advisory team of Herb Bennett and Will Perdue (that’s me, by the way) was as unhappy an outfit as the Spade & Archer detective agency. Herb and I had radically different agendas and objectives for our gig in Iraq; to put it less politely, we hated each others’ guts. My own reasons for being in Baghdad were straightforward. I was trying to hide from a longstanding fear that I somehow bore a mark of Cain that made me stand out as different, potentially dangerous, and ultimately unlovable. This had driven me since childhood to seek refuge in books and movies and to erect a wall of intellectual arrogance to protect me from unknown persecutors lurking somewhere out in the world. As an adult employed by the U.S. Government the same impulse drove me to volunteer for duty at Embassies in the far suburbs of the world. The quirks arising from this behavior had been compounded by my failed efforts as a husband and father. I liked the abstract idea of marital commitment, parenthood, and being a real adult, but like Groucho Marx I lost interest in any club--or marriage or family--that would have me as a member. Maybe I was just in love with falling in love, whether with a new girlfriend or wife or child. Even as my fortieth birthday became a distant memory and I neared the half-century mark, I kept looking for relationships that were intense sprints rather than plodding marathons. No matter where I went--Africa, Washington, Paris--I couldn’t or wouldn’t change this outlook. So, when Iraq became a chronic crisis offering numerous “unique career-enhancing opportunities” for the people in my organization, I jumped at the first one that came my way. I judged that head-chopping insurgents, indiscriminate mortar rounds, and the Embassy’s security paranoia would make my various troubles think twice before trying to catch up with me on the banks of the Tigris. I latched on to the job as an escape and as a fatter paycheck that would leave a somewhat less paltry pittance for me after taking care of the alimony and child support I owed the families I had left behind in the States. I expected little else from the job and hoped I would receive the grace of benign neglect from the Embassy’s top management and from Washington. I figured that, if I and my colleagues managed to avoid creating the sort of embarrassment that would make titillating front-page reading in the Washington Post, the job would be a roaring success. As for my Iraqi advisees, I arrived in Baghdad expecting nothing of them.

Herb had come out to Baghdad for less noble motives: duty and ambition. Only 36 years old, he had been fast-tracked to GS-15, and he expected to reach the Senior Executive Service by his 40th birthday. Back home he had been the first staffer in our Director’s office to recognize that 12-point Courier New font was much better suited for a Republican administration than the 11.5-point Times New Roman that had been the favorite of the Clinton White House, and he was the master of making PowerPoint slides appear as if they were grounded in reality. Herb believed in Progress and Democracy and the Global War on Terror, both intrinsically and because he had been sent out to the front lines of the great and noble crusade. Unburdened by adult experience beyond the Beltway, he knew Iraq was the place where he could make his mark. Drawing strength from his ignorance of anything to do with Iraq or the Middle East at large, Herb was certain that the Iraqis shared the Mission and that our local friends were all as innocent as any Congressman or Assistant Secretary back home of pecuniary corruption, ego aggrandizement, or the other sins, misdemeanors, felonies, and character deformations found in war and politics. Moreover, living and working in Iraq was for Herb a sort of Boy Scout Summer camp. Every day was a chance for him to dress his short, chubby frame and oddly oval head in his Halloween costume of a mercenary security consultant: shaved cranium, Oakley sunglasses, scraggly goatee, cargo pants, steel-toed boots, shooter’s vest, and Under-Armour tee-shirt. Now, though, Herb’s grandiose plans and annoying peculiarities were moot because he was dead.

After my brain had quickly screened the first reel of The Maltese Falcon, my second thought that Thursday night was that, damn it, Herb had gone and ruined a perfectly good party. Marina Seeley, the Aussie liaison who helped us with our work with the Iraqis at the intelligence section of the Ministry of Defense, had invited us to their celebration of having finally moved out of the British compound and set up their own digs in a villa that once belonged to Uday Hussein. Marina was radiant with happiness at having escaped the British housing area--a covered parking garage packed well past the point of claustrophobia with shipping containers and ironically called "Ocean Cliffs"--when she greeted Herb and me on our arrival. A toothy smile and gin-flushed cheeks showed off shoulder-length blonde hair and world-class cleavage to great advantage.

"It's so great you guys could make it. Let me give you the grand tour," she said, linking her arms through Herb's and mine. I tried hard to banish the hope that the alcohol in her bloodstream and unaccustomed high heels on her feet would send those delectable breasts tumbling my way.

"This place is of couse overdone in the full Sargon Quartorze style, but that's Uday for you," Marina said. "I've never seen so many gold-plated bidets in my life. But I think we'll be very comfy here, thank you. I mean, Uday may have been a brutal psychopath, but take a look around and you'll see he knew how to pick a setting for parties. Look at how nicely he set off the pool, with two sides of sheer wall for the house and that lovely sunken bar down there to your left, and then we've go this great lawn here. Maybe you might fancy some croquet later on?"

I for one was impressed. "Marina," I said, "You did real well here. Why, if Jay Gatsby had been in Baghdad, staging swank soirées to lure Daisy Buchanan from the east bank of the Tigris to the west, from Rusafa to al-Karkh, this is the house he would have built."

"Well, Will, I'll just have to hang out a green light and see what happens," Marina answered. Not bad, I thought, for a girl from the wrong side of the world. "You guys will have to excuse me for now, I've gotta help with the Dutch Ambassador--looks like he's already tanked."

As we watched Marina totter off excitingly in her heels, Herb scrunched his brow and asked, "Gatsby's the new chief of Congressional liaison back home, right? I don't think I know Daisy."

"No, man, you're thinking of somebody else," I answered with as much tact as I could fake. "C'mon, let's go see what they're doing with this place."

The Aussies were putting it to good use. The bar was fully stocked. In a nice touch of sophistication, the Aussies had set out cases of decent wine--that is, wine that hadn’t turned to vinegar during the long, hot haul across the desert from Jordan and Lebanon--in addition to the beer, whiskey, vodka, and gin laid on for meat-and-potatoes drinkers like me. The music was mostly Wham! and other forgettable 80s pop, but it was loud and danceable. Maybe a third of the guests were women--a great ratio by Green Zone standards--and these were drawn from the Zone’s A-list of females: junior political officers at the US Embassy, UN election monitors, aid workers from the UK and Danish missions. My favorite touch, especially after my third or fourth Jim Beam, was the disco ball and laser light mounted in the middle of the garden for the pleasure of dancers and drunks. The laser was aimed at the spinning ball, which in turn flashed light in all directions. The light that went upwards registered on sensors in the US Army helicopters carrying the young men maimed in the day’s combat in Ramadi and Tall Afar to the Combat Support Hospital at Ibn Sina in the Green Zone. The helos’ packages of electronic counter-measures read the laser pulses refracted by the disco ball as efforts by a hostile surface-to-air missile battery to acquire a target, and they fired off flares to confound the suspected attack, spraying the sky and illuminating our festivities with hot reds, luminescent greens, and phosphorous-tinged yellows. Even with the fireworks, though, Herb started whining almost from the moment we arrived. The music was too loud, there weren’t enough women and the party was nothing but a dude ranch, the girls that were there were too nuts-and-granola for his tastes, on and on. After a while he realized that I was paying a lot more attention to Jim Beam and Mireille Duclos, the Canadian human rights monitor with the slender figure and crooked smile, than to him, and he announced--largely to the air--that he was looking for a quiet place to smoke a cigar. Those were the last words I ever heard Herb say.

Only my third thought after Herb’s fall included doing anything even remotely responsible. I stepped away from the bar where I had gone for refills for Mireille and myself (she was going that evening for the Australian Black Swan Cabernet Sauvignon), and made my way to Herb’s body, which had conveniently landed at the end of the pool closest to the bar. I pushed my way through a speechless, shocked knot of partygoers, and found that a rare sober Aussie had pulled Herb out of the pool, placed him on his back, and was squatting by his head.

“He your friend,” the Aussie asked without shifting his glance from Herb’s head and neck.

“Yeah, he’s Herb Bennett. We work together at the U.S. Embassy. We're friends of Marina. Seeley. Jesus.” Blood was streaming from Herb’s ears and nose, the back of his skull had gone flat and pink and red, and his head had flopped an unnatural 90 degrees to the right.

“I don’t think it’s even worth trying CPR on him,” the Aussie said. “Your mate caught the edge of the pool with his back, here, breaking pretty cleanly, and then the back of his skull smashed into the concrete, you can see the mark, there. I think it killed him immediately.”

“Jesus.” I was full of helpful theological observations but otherwise numb. Marina appeared, the glow gone from her face, and said something to me. I think she's the one who covered Herb’s face with a beach towel but then I lost her. I sat down on the cement apron along the pool, wrapping my arms around my knees. Most of the other partygoers staggered out; Mireille brushed me on the shoulder, whispered “Courage, chéri--call me” in my ear, and joined the exodus. I thought, damn, dealing with this dead asshole is going to take a lot of time and explanation.

The Aussie who had been first to the body seemed to be taking charge. He told me his name was Devon McNabb, and he was in charge of Australian Embassy security. I let him know I was Will Perdue, from the U.S. Embassy.

“You see, I’m new here, and I’m not certain what the drill is if a foreign civilian drops dead on our premises,” McNabb explained. “I’d be in better shape, procedures-wise, if there’d been a mortar round dropping in. Now, since you’re the mate of, what did you say his name was? Herb? Well, I’d like to ask you to stay here until we get stuff sorted out with your Embassy and your security people come. You might be able to help. Since he’s dead, I don’t want to move the body until your security people--and I don’t know whether they’ll be military or civilians--get a look at the scene. At some point I suppose they’ll take him over to Ibn Sina for an autopsy and a forensic look. I’ve got to make some phone calls, but Tony and some of the other lads here will be able to take care of you. Oy! Tony! If you’ve got the coffee ready, get a cup over here for Will!”

McNabb wandered off with a cell phone clapped to his ear. Tony and the other lads--revealed as members of the Australian Embassy’s security detail by the muscled bulk, tight t-shirts, shaved heads and aggressive facial hair they shared with all the well-paid DynCorp, Black Hawk, and other mercenaries protecting us--led me to a table on the lawn. Coffee was put in front of me as promised, and I was left alone. The security guys assembled briefly around McNabb, then dispersed across the compound, looking, I guessed, for evidence. McNabb lifted the blanket covering Herb to peek at something and then improvised a cordon around the body with some plastic pool chairs. He disappeared inside. I saw a light, or maybe lights, up on the roof; somebody must have been having a look at the starting point of Herb’s plunge.
After taking this in I remembered that I wasn’t the only person with a stake in Herb’s death. I took the cell phone from my pocket and called Jim O’Dwyer, my boss and the chief of the Research and Analysis Group in Baghdad. I braced for his likely eruption at being woken up at midnight to learn of the death of one of his officers.

“Hello?” Jim’s voice rasped sleepily out of my phone.

“Jim, this is Will, Will Perdue. I’m sorry to call so late, but I’ve got some bad news that I didn’t think would wait.” I paused to be certain that he would be awake for the story.

“I’m listening. What the hell’s wrong, Will?”

“Well, I’m at the Australian Embassy house, in Little Venice, and something bad happened to Herb Bennett at the party here. He went up to the roof, fell, and died. It looks pretty certain like it’s an accident, but the Aussies are doing some investigating.”

“Dead. Herb’s dead. Christ, that’s just what we need. Do you know what that means, Will?”

“Um, there’s going to be a lot of work for you and for all of us, what with telling the home office what happened, and pulling his effects together, and then we’ll have to deal with the Iraqis of course.”

“You’ve gotta understand,” O’Dwyer said. “We don’t control the investigation. I think it’ll be done by that fuckhead legal attaché from the FBI, maybe you’ve not met her, Eleanor Kelley, and she’s brainless even by the Bureau’s standards. Shit. You and me, we’ll have to spend a lot of time with that worthless woman. She’s probably on her way over to the Aussie place now, and you’ll get to deal with her. Of course she’ll start bugging me later. Nothing I can do about that now. Shit. Right now, I need to be certain I know what you know, so I can tell Washington. Let’s see if I got your story straight here. Herb died at the Australian Embassy, a social event, and it looks like an accident, a fall. We’ll get more details later. Is that right?” I grunted assent. “Good. Okay, Will, stay there and work with Eleanor Kelley or whoever the Embassy sends to start the investigation. Tell them pretty much whatever they want to know, but if they ask too many questions about the details of Herb’s job, send them my way; you’ve been around long enough to know the drill. And first thing in the morning, come see me so we can get this squared away. I’ve got to get into the office now. Son of a motherfucking bitch.” Jim hung up.

The call over, I sat at the table where the Aussies had parked me, wondering whether anybody would notice if I quietly slipped out. I wasn’t able to test my bugging-out skills because McNabb emerged from the semi-dark with a woman swaying slightly as she tried to keep up with him. She looked to be closing in on the half-century mark, like me, and to have put on a bit more weight over the years than she was willing to admit, also like me. As she passed through a pool of light, I saw that her face was fair and flushed, with lipstick and mascara applied liberally, almost operatically. A partially-buttoned blouse displayed a healthy expanse of cleavage. She was wearing tight jeans, maybe a size too small--unless it was her butt and hips that were now a size too big--and she appeared to have been poured into the denim. Her feet were jammed into a pair of spikey heels that clacked along the poolside cement. Yielding as always to primal male instinct, I let my eyes wander to the cleavage, and then saw that the woman was wearing a shoulder holster with a Glock 9-mm pistol nestled next to her left breast.

McNabb brought the woman up to my table. “Will,” he said. “Thanks for waiting while we tried to sort everything out. This is Eleanor Kelley, the FBI lady at your Embassy. She’s gonna take over whatever needs doing in the way of investigation and reporting on what happened to your mate.”

Eleanor and I shook hands. I manfully kept my eyes fixed on her face and away from that tantalizing juxtaposition of weapon and cleavage. McNabb excused himself. Eleanor sat down, looked me over, and leaned forward in a way that brought the holster and left breast even closer together. I caught a strong hint of eau de Tennessee--Jack Daniels--on her breath. Her eyes slipped down from my face along my torso, halted somewhere around my belt-buckle--I couldn’t say whether north or south--and returned to my face. In the uncertain light the eyes looked hazel and a bit bloodshot. “I know, the pool,” she said, only slightly slurring her syllables. “I’ve seen you in the pool, swimming a bit and sunbathing a lot, just about every Friday and Saturday morning since the Summer. You’re the guy with the nice deep even tan, on the back and chest and legs. It would just about be perfect if you could take care of that gut. Will. Perdue. It’s nice to have a name to place on the tan.”

I’m not certain how I expected the official investigation into Herb’s death would begin, but I know my preconceptions didn’t include a flirtatiously tipsy FBI agent whose breasts were competing with her sidearm for my attention.

“Ah, thanks, Eleanor,” I replied. “Yeah, I do try to get in some laps and some sun on the weekend.” I would normally have been flirting right back after her comment on my tan, but that seemed inappropriate even to me in the context.

“I guess you’re looking for information on Herb and what might have happened to him here,” I continued, hoping to remind her why she had been called to the Aussie residence. “Just tell me what you want to know, and I’ll try to help however I can. I spoke about what happened to my boss, Jim O’Dwyer, I think you know him, and of course he said I should cooperate fully with your investigation.”

The mention of Jim O’Dwyer seemed to sober Eleanor up and cool her ardor. Her face went from flirtatious smile to the subtle grimace of someone reminded of the day in fourth grade when her mother loudly delivered her diarrhea medicine in front of the whole class. She sat back a bit, which eased the strain in her blouse, folding silk over a good bit of the exposed cleavage, and reached for a small notebook that had been wedged in the waistband of her jeans. She proceeded to question me crisply and professionally about Herb and what had happened that night.

I told her I had known Herb for about three months, since we both arrived to work at RAG. No, he didn’t have any enemies, certainly nobody who’d want to kill him. His health seemed pretty good, other than some of the usual gastro-intestinal bouts with Saddam’s Revenge, and I didn’t think he was taking any sort of medication. I wasn’t aware of anything unusual with his life back home. He lived in the far end of Loudon County, almost in West Virginia, with his fiancée and talked about getting married when he returned home, in July or August ’06. No, I’d never heard him say anything suicidal or behave in any way that might reflect a desire to do himself in. Tonight Herb and I came to the party together; we’d both been invited by Australians we worked with. I thought he’d had one, maybe two beers, and he didn’t look or sound intoxicated. The last time I saw him and spoke to him was maybe eleven, eleven-fifteen, when he told he was going off to smoke a cigar somewhere quiet.

Eleanor signaled the interview’s end by shutting the notepad and returning it to her waistband. I gave her my card, with the phone number and e-mail on it, and said of course I’d be available to answer any further questions she might have. She leaned forward again, silk slid away to expose full cleavage, but my attention was riveted once again by the Glock nuzzling her left breast through the holster.

“Thank you, Will, you’ve been real helpful,” she said. “Herb’s death must have been hard for you, and you’re holding up so well. You don’t have to see me just as the FBI investigator here. I can also be your friend, and if you want to talk, or, well, anything, well, I can be there for you.”
As she finished, her right hand came to rest halfway up my left thigh, with her index finger lightly stroking the inside. The signal was unsubtle and unwelcome. I generally don’t play hard to get, but there are times when I say no. An advance from a drunk law enforcement officer wearing a sidearm had trouble written all over it, especially since I’d never understood the way handcuffs and nightsticks turn some guys on.

“Well, thank you, Eleanor, for your kindness,” I said, hoping to disabuse her gently of any possibility of amorous interest on my part. I pushed my chair back, stood up, took her right hand in mine for a chaste shake, and then gently disengaged. “I’ll give you a call in a day or two to see how I can help you. I’m sorry we had to meet in these circumstances.”

Eleanor remained in her chair. A light behind her was in my eyes, and I couldn’t see her face. “Yes, again, thanks for your help, Will. I’m sorry we had to wait for your friend’s death to meet.”
I headed for the parking lot outside the wall around the Aussie house. On the way out I passed the pool. Herb’s body was gone, presumably to the hospital morgue. Ghoulishly, as I took note of the dark blotches on the cement where he had landed and bled, I wondered how the stain could be removed. McNabb was in the poolside bar, perched on a stool and smoking a cigar. I thanked him for the help with Herb’s death. He nodded, silently shook my hand, and waved me off on my way. At the main gate to the house Marina stepped silently out of a shadow, gave me a quick hug, said she was so sorry, and told me to get home safely.

Going home seemed to take forever. The Green Zone is only about four square miles, and it usually takes just a few minutes to get anywhere. That Thursday night, or rather early that Friday morning, time and distance expanded. I felt as if I was taking in every detail of the scenery and the road between the Aussie house and the RAG end of the U.S. Embassy compound. I don’t know whether this was due to my unusual sobriety or the impact of Herb’s death. As I walked out of the house to my car, I was struck by how different the Aussies’ neighborhood was from the rest of the Green Zone. The expatriates called the area Little Venice, because of its water channels and decorative ponds. Little Venice luxuriated in the cool, humid green of relative forests of trees and bushes, a welcome change from the 12-foot-tall concrete blast walls, HESCO barriers, and odd piles of sandbags in the compound around the hideously ornate Republican Palace that served as the US Embassy. In the parking lot I dispensed with the mandatory security check under the carriage, in the exhaust pipe, and on the roof of my vehicle--was a myopic, distracted, sleep-starved middle-age man really going to find a bomb in the dark?--and tugged open the door of the up-armored Mercedes SUV. The road through Little Venice took me by Uday’s Porn Palace, where a decrepit generator was coughing out juice for two or three spot-lights that shed pale, yellowish pools of illumination on random spots of grubby masonry and weed-choked water. People said that Saddam’s son had this garish, pond-front pile of concrete built especially for al fresco screenings from his world-class collection of dirty movies. Uday and his cronies would sit on a platform above the projection room and in the warm Mesopotamian night smoke cigars, drink Scotch, chat, laugh, and admire images of unnatural and violent couplings that inspired their own sessions of whoring and rape. The jagged shadows cast by the play of dim lights on grimy architecture for a moment seemed to summon ghosts seeking vengeance for painful, humiliating deaths. I gave my head a quick shake, which only jarred loose the fact that I’d spent the past couple of hours in the company of Herb’s broken body. I promised myself I’d get more sleep and drink less--and quickly took the turn that got the Porn Palace out of my rearview mirror and then took me out of Little Venice.

I got on the street going past Ibn Sina Hospital--which mercifully appeared to have suspended airborne intake for the night--and headed for the Embassy compound. This street was even deader and more inhuman at three in the morning than in daylight. Ibn Sina and the adjacent buildings that housed reconstruction and support contractors loomed dully behind the ubiquitous blast walls, whose gray soaked up the desultory light emitted by decrepit security lamps that looked like surplus from the British Mesopotamia Protectorate of the 1920s. Knee-high Jersey barriers served to channel traffic through identity controls and security inspections into the various offices. Every 50 yards signs reminded me, in English and Arabic, that parking and stopping were strictly prohibited and that deadly force was authorized. At the Marine checkpoint on the edge of the Embassy perimeter, I went through the usual ritual: stop 25 yards away, dim the exterior lights, switch on the dome light, finger the ID card on the lanyard around my neck to double-check it was visible, wait for the double flash from the sentry’s flashlight. Late night for you, sir. Not as late for me as for you, Corporal, but at least it’s not too hot right now. That’s right, sir; you’re okay, go on in. Thank you, Corporal, good night.

I parked in the lot by the PX, in a latecomer’s space at the back end of beyond, and threaded my way through the rows of armored vehicles, the military’s HMMVs and APCs dwarfing the civilian contractors’ over-sized Land Rovers and Mercedes and Hummers. I crossed the road by the Green Zone’s heli-port, Landing Zone Washington, and entered the last Controlled Access Checkpoint, calling a cheery “Namaste” and steepling my hands in greeting to the bored Nepalese Gurkha guards as I flashed my ID. My Himalayan salutation had the desired effect of getting the Gurkhas to remove their right hands from the trigger guards of their M-4s so they could reciprocate: “Namaste, sah. Good night.” Down the dirt road leading from the CAC to the RAG compound, the blast walls seemed closer and higher than ever. As I passed the Embassy’s bank of generators, behind the walls to my left, I was certain they had gone from humming to roaring since Herb and I had walked past them a few hours earlier, going the other way. I opened my mouth to comment on this to Herb, and then remembered that he was dead and that was why I was so late and so sober. I’m starting to scare myself here, I thought; I need a good night’s sleep and then maybe it’ll make sense. I turned the corner into the compound, ducked between a row of modular housing pods and a wall of Hesco sand barriers, and walked the 50 yards to my own room. I opened the door and kicked off my sandals in a well-practiced move. As my head dropped to the pillow, the luminous hands on my watch showed it was three-oh-something.