My first thought is, Result! Having excellent grounds for assuming that Spyglass’s communications are being intercepted by several government agencies, Olive Sun texts in code: Dufresne is our nom de texte taken from The Shawshank Redemption for the Palestinian tunneler-in-chief under the Gaza-Egyptian border; “Cairns” is Cairo; “dole fruits” is Hezbollah; and an aunty is a handler. It’s exactly the sort of Bondesque stuff that kids like Seymour suppose we do routinely, but there’s nothing remotely glamorous about being detained by the Egyptian security forces for seventy-two hours in a downtown Cairo bunker, waiting for a bored interrogator to come and ask you why you’re there.
I pitched the story to Olive last autumn and she’s pulled God knows how many strings to set this up. Dufresne, if he’s one man and not ten, has a mythical status in Egypt, the Gaza Strip, and Jordan. An interview would be a major coup and enhance our magazine’s reputation in Arab-speaking countries by a factor of ten. Blockades and sanctions have no news legs; there’s little to say and nothing to see. Who cares if Israelis ban imports of powdered milk into Gaza? Stories about tunnels under walls, however, that’s different. That’s Escape from Colditz stuff, that’s The Count of Monte Cristo, and people eat that shit with a spoon. I’m about to reply with a yes when I remember one catch: At seven P.M. next Wednesday, Miss Aoife Brubeck is appearing for one night only as the Cowardly Lion in St. Jude’s C of E Primary School’s performance of The Wizard of Oz, and her daddy is expected.
What kind of self-centered bastard would miss his own daughter’s star turn? Why care about other people’s six-year-olds who’ll never perform anything because they died when Israeli bulldozers or Hezbollah rockets destroyed their homes? They’re not our kids. We’re clever enough to be born where such things don’t happen.
See the problem, Seymour?
THE SECURITY GUYS on duty at the Safir Hotel checkpoint recognized Nasser’s car, raised the barrier, and waved us through. Crunching to a halt, Nasser told me, “Okay, Ed, so Aziz and me, we come at ten tomorrow morning. You, me, we transcribe tapes. Aziz bring photographs. Amazing story. Olive is very happy.”
“See you at ten.” Still in the car, I handed Nasser an envelope of Spyglass dollars for the day’s fee. We all shook hands, Aziz let me out of his side, and the Corolla pulled away. It stopped after only a few yards. I thought it was mechanical trouble, but Nasser wound down his window and waved something at me. “Ed, take this.”
I walked over and he put his little tape recorder into my hand. “Why? You’re coming tomorrow.”
Nasser made a face. “If here with you, is safer. Many good words on the tape.” With that he drove around the roundabout and back to the checkpoint. I walked up the hotel steps. Every window was a dark rectangle. Even if the electricity is working, guests are warned to keep lamps off at night because of the risk of snipers. Meeting me in the metal-plated porch was Tariq, a security guard with a Dragunov. “How they hanging, Mr. Ed?” Tariq likes to practice his slang.
“Can’t complain, Tariq. Quiet day?”
“Today quiet. Thanks to God.”
“Is Big Mac back home already?”
“Yes, yes. The dude is in the bar.”
I tip Tariq and his three colleagues generously to tell me if outsiders are asking questions about me, and to be vague with their replies. Not that I can ever be sure Tariq isn’t pocketing fees from both sides, but the principle of the Golden Goose has held so far. From the porch I passed through the glass doors to the circular reception area, where a low-wattage lamp gleamed on the concierge’s desk. A mighty chandelier hangs overhead, but I’ve never seen it illuminated, and now it’s mightily cobwebbed. I never looked at it without imagining it crashing down. Mr. Khufaji, the manager, was helping a lad load used car batteries onto a luggage trolley. Dead batteries are exchanged for live ones every morning, like milk bottles when I was a kid. Guests use them to power laptops and sat-phones.
“Good evening, Mr. Brubeck,” said the manager, dabbing his forehead with a handkerchief. “You’ll be needing your key.”
“Good evening, Mr. Khufaji.” I waited while he fetched it from the drawer. “Could I have one of those batteries, please?”
“Certainly. I’ll send the boy up when he returns.”
“Most kind.” We retain old-school manners, even if Baghdad has gone to hell and the Safir was less a five-star hotel and more of a serviced campsite inside a dead hotel.
“I thought I heard your dulcet tones.” Honduran cigar in hand, Big Mac appeared from the dingy bar that served as common room, rumor mill, and favor exchange. “What time do you call this?”
“Later than you, which means you’re buying the beers.”
“No no no, the deal was the last one back buys the beers.”
“That’s a shameless lie, Mr. MacKenzie, and you know it.”
“Hey. Shameless lies precipitate wars and make work for hungry hacks. Get any street action in Fallujah?”
“The cordon’s too tight. What about you day-trippers?”
“Waste of time.” Big Mac filled his lungs with cigar smoke. “Got to Camp Victory to be told the fighting had intensified, meaning the Marine Corps were too busy to keep our fat asses alive. We munched bullshit with press officers before being squeezed into a supply convoy heading back to Baghdad. Not the one that got IEDed into flying mince, obviously. You?”
“Better. We found a makeshift clinic for refugees from Fallujah, plus a shot-down Kiowa. Aziz took a few shots before a uniformed countryman of yours kindly suggested we leave.”
“Not bad, but”—Big Mac crossed the floor and lowered his voice, even though Mr. Khufaji had exited—“one of Vincent Agrippa’s ‘well-placed sources’ texted him twenty minutes ago about a ‘unilateral cease-fire’ coming into play tomorrow.”
I doubted that. “Mac, the Fallujah militia won’t roll over now. Perhaps as a regrouping exercise—”
“No, not the insurgents. The marines are standing down.”
“Bloody hell. Where is this source? General Sanchez’s office?”
“Nope. The army’ll be spitting cold shit over this. They’ll be, ‘If you’re going to take Vienna, take fucking Vienna.’ ”
“Do you think Bremer cooked this one up?”
“My friend: The Great Envoy couldn’t cook his own testes in a Jacuzzi of lava.”
“You’ll have to give me a clue, then, won’t you?”
“Since you’re buying the beers, here’s three.” Big Mac took a five-second cigar break. “C, I, and A. It’s a direct order from Dick Cheney’s office.”
“Vincent Agrippa has a source in the CIA? But he’s French! He’s a cheese-eating surrender monkey.”
“Vincent Agrippa has a source in God’s panic room, and it pans out. Cheney’s afraid that Fallujah’ll split the Coalition of the Willing—not that they’re a coalition, or willing, but hey. Join us for dinner after you’ve freshened up—guess what’s on the menu.”
“Could it be chicken and rice?” There were fifty dishes on the Safir’s official menu, but only chicken and rice was ever served.
“Holy shit, the man’s telepathic.”
“I’ll be down after slipping into something more comfortable.”
“Promises, promises, you tart.” Big Mac returned to the bar while I climbed up to the first landing—the elevators haven’t worked since 2001—the second, and the third. Through the window I looked across the oil-black Tigris at the Green Zone, lit up like Disneyland in Dystopia. I thought about J. G. Ballard’s novel High Rise, where a state-of-the-art London tower block is the vertical stage for civilization to unpeel itself until nothing but primal violence remains. A helicopter landed behind the Republican Palace, where this morning Mark Klimt had told us about the positive progress in Fallujah and elsewhere. What do Iraqis think about when they see this shining Enclave of Plenty in the heart of their city? I know, because Nasser, Mr. Khufaji, and others have told me: They think a well-lit, well-powered, well-guarded Green Zone is proof that the Americans do own a magic wand capable of restoring order to Iraq’s cities, but that anarchy makes a dense smokescreen behind which they can pipe away the nation’s oil. They’re wrong, but is their belief any more absurd than that of the 81 percent of Americans who believe in angels? I heard a miaow nearby and looked down to see a moon-gray cat melting out of the shadows. I bent down to say hello, which was the one and only reason why I wasn’t scalped like a boiled egg when the explosion outside blew in the glass windows on the western face of the Safir Hotel, filling its unlit corridors with blast waves, filling our ear canals with solid roar, filling the spaces between atoms with the atonal chords of destruction.
I TAKE ANOTHER ibuprofen and sigh at my laptop screen. I wrote an account of the explosion on yesterday’s flight from Istanbul with dodgy guts and not enough sleep, and I’m afraid it shows: Nonfiction that smells like fiction is neither. A statement from Rumsfeld about Iraq is due at eleven A.M. East Coast time, but that’s fifty minutes away. I click on the telly to CNN World with the sound down, but it’s only a White House reporter discussing what “a well-placed source close to the secretary of defense” thinks Rumsfeld might say when he comes on. On her bed, Aoife yawns and puts down her Animal Rescue Ranger Annual 2004. “Daddy, can you put Dora the Explorer on?”
“No, poppet. I was just checking something for work.”
“Is that big white building in Bad Dad?”
“No, it’s the White House. In Washington.”
“Why’s it white? Do only white people live in it?”
“Er … Yes.” I switch the TV off. “Naptime, Aoife.”
“Are we right under Granddad Dave and Grandma Kath’s room?”
I should be reading to her, really—Holly does—but I have to get my article done. “They’re on the floor above us, but not directly overhead.”
We hear seagulls. The net curtain sways. Aoife’s quiet.
“Daddy, can we visit Dwight Silverwind after my nap?”
“Let’s not start that again. You need a bit of shut-eye.”
“You told Mummy you were going to take a nap too.”
“I will, but you go first. I have to finish this article and email it to New York by tonight.” And then tell Holly and Aoife that I won’t be at The Wizard of Oz on Thursday, I think.
“Why?”
“Where d’you think money comes from to buy food, clothes, and Animal Rescue Ranger books?”
“Your pocket. And Mummy’s.”
“And how does it get in there?”
“The Money Fairy.” Aoife’s just being cute.
“Yeah. Well, I’m the Money Fairy.”
“But Mummy earns money at her job, too.”
“True, but London’s very expensive, so I need to earn as well.”
I think of a pithy substitute for the florid “spaces between atoms” line, but my inbox pings. It’s only from Air France, but when I get back to my article I’ve forgotten my pithy substitute.
“Why is London expensive, Daddy?”
“Aoife, please. I’ve got to work. Close your eyes.”
“Okay.” She lies down in a mock huff and pretends to snore like a Teletubby. It’s really annoying, but I can’t think of anything to say that’s sharp enough to shut Aoife up but not so sharp that she won’t burst into tears. Better wait this one out.
My first thought was, I type, I’m alive. My second—
“Daddy, why can’t I go to see Dwight Silverwind on my own?”
Don’t snap. “Because you’re only six years old, Aoife.”
“But I know the way to Dwight Silverwind’s! Out of the hotel, over the zebra crossing, down the pier, and you’re there.”
Look at mini-Holly. “Your fortune’s what you make it. Not what a stranger with a made-up name says. Now, please. Let me work.”
She snuggles up with her Arctic fox. Back to my article: My first thought was, I’m alive. My second thought was, Stay down; if it was a rocket-propelled grenade attack, there could be more. My—
“Daddy, don’t you want to know what’ll happen in your future?”
I let a displeased few seconds pass. “No.”
“Why not?”
“Because …” I think of Great-aunt Eilísh’s mystic Script, and Nasser’s family, and Major Hackensack, and cycling along the Thames estuary footpath on a hot day in 1984 and recognizing a girl lying on the shingly beach, in her Quadrophenia T-shirt, her jeans as black as her cropped hair, and asleep, with a duffel bag as a pillow, and thinking, Cycle on, cycle on … And turning around. I shut my laptop, walk over to her bed, kick off my shoes, and lie down next to her. “Because what if I found out something bad was going to happen to me—or, worse, Mum, or you—but couldn’t change it? I’d be happier not knowing so I could just … enjoy the last sunny afternoon.”
Aoife’s eyes are big and serious. “What if you could change it?”
I squeeze her hair at her crown so it makes a sort of samurai topknot. “What if I couldn’t, Little Miss Pineapple Head?”
“Hey, I’m not”—she yawns—“Pineapple Head.” I yawn too, and she says, “Ha! You caught my yawn.”
“Okay, I’ll take a snoozette with you.” This isn’t such a bad idea. Aoife’ll be out for an hour, at least, while I’ll wake up refreshed after a twenty-minute power nap, catch Rumsfeld’s latest denial, finish my article, and figure out how to tell Holly and the Cowardly Lion that I have to be in Cairo on Wednesday. “Sleep tight,” I tell Aoife, like Holly tells her. “Don’t let the bedbugs bite.”