“Our history,” said Nouri, “has been mortgaged many, many times. I am surprised, to tell the truth, that we have any left.”
“Ha.” Carl handed him a cigarette. “You’re kind of selling off the family silver here, aren’t you?”
“Silver. Oil. We give it you, perhaps you fuck off, leave us alone, hey? No offence there.”
“Aw, none taken.”
“And you, Mr. Englishman.” Nouri turned on me gleefully. “Already, you have half Iraq, locked away in your Museum. I have been in London, I have seen this! Half our heritage! I tell you, one day—” He leaned towards me, squinting through his glasses, pointing with his cigarette, “one day, I am coming to London again. And I will take it back!”
It was the first time they’d involved me in their banter, and I took it for a good sign. Maybe they’d trust me. More than I could trust myself just now, at any rate.
So we finished off our break. I told them what I wanted: where to put the generator, where I’d start to lay the cables.
“I’ve worked with Registry before,” said Carl. “This isn’t how they did it last time.”
“No.”
“This like, some special method, then?”
“Not really. But I can’t get a proper fix on the thing, the way it is. I’m going to try . . . kind of a trick. I’d like to get it done before the sun goes down. Then we’ll camp, finish off by sunrise, yeah?”
They looked at me. I said, “You might want to keep back once I get started. You know. Just in case.”
Nouri took his glasses off, polishing them on his shirt. “What is your plan, my friend? What will happen here?”
“I’m not going to go for the catch. Not right away. I’m just going to . . . nudge it a bit, see?”
“Nudge.”
This didn’t fill them with delight.
“Yeah,” I said. “Just try and . . . kick it into shape. You know. See if it’ll start behaving.”
Nouri put his glasses back on, frowning through the lenses, looking like an anxious gnome.
“My friend. It sounds like you plan to wake it up.”
“Just a bit,” I said. “Only a little bit . . .”