Do They Know I'm Running? (45 page)

They were gathered around the dining-room table, Bergen and Lupe and Roque and Samir. Father Luis had gone off to bless a local fisherman’s
lancha;
Dolor was mending altar linens in the sacristy. The basket of
chapulines
sat at the center of the table, back for an encore. Everyone but Bergen ignored them, though his enthusiasm was almost infectious.

“I relied on my cousin to arrange that side of things,” Roque managed to say. He still felt only half there, the other half still on the phone, waiting for Tía Lucha to come back on the line.

“Your cousin misunderstood the playing field,” Bergen said.

The man dressed, Roque thought, as though hoping to be invisible: simple sport shirt, tan linen slacks, no jewelry beyond a weatherproof watch. He could have vanished in any crowd of expats. When asked what it was he did, he’d replied simply that he “tried to help out here and there.” At one point he let slip that he was a pilot, or had been.

Roque stared at the tiny basket of fried grasshoppers as though the things might come alive. “My cousin paid the same people to come across just a few months ago.” He heard his voice as though he were sitting in a different room. “It worked out okay then.”

Bergen snagged a fistful
of chapulines
from the basket, tumbled them like dice in his palm, popped a few in his mouth. “Your cousin got lucky.”

Across the table, Lupe had drifted off into her own world, unable to follow the English. When she glanced up, Roque ventured an absent smile. Pregnant, he thought as she timidly smiled back. I won’t punk out like my old man, end up nothing but a question.

Samir slouched in his seat, one arm hooked across his chair back, eyeing Bergen like he was poisonous. “Okay. We are unlucky. Are you here to help or call us names?”

Bergen chafed his hands to rid them of lingering bits of insect. “I’d say that depends. I need to know a little more about who I’m dealing with. You in particular.” His eyes shuttered with vaguely hostile mirth. “And don’t lie to me. I’ve spent some time in your part of the world, not just this one. I don’t fool easy.”

Samir, thin-skinned as always, rose to the bait. “Let me tell you something, I have not lied to you. What have I had time to lie about? You have been blah-blah-de-blah ever since you walked in the door.”

That seemed only to amuse Bergen further. “From what I hear, you proved yourself better than average with a weapon out there the other night. You held off an ambush almost single-handed.”

“Not true.” Samir nodded toward Roque. “I had help.”

Bergen’s smile lamped down a notch. “You’ve got a military background. You’re an Iraqi Arab. You told that much to Father Luis. You either come clean with me or you can find your own fucking way to America.”

Even Lupe, lost behind the language barrier, detected the change in temperature. She glanced back and forth between the two men, who were locking eyes, then turned to Roque for reassurance. He offered a shrug, still feeling strangely disembodied, as though floating over the table, watching himself.

“I was in the war with Persia,” Samir said finally with a flutter of his hand, as though nothing could be more matter-of-fact.

“Excuse me but I find that puzzling,” Bergen said. “Palestinians normally didn’t serve in the Iraqi military, even in the war with Iran.”

“How do you know these things?”

“Like I said, I’m no stranger to that part of the world. Besides which, I’m a pilot. You spend a lot of time hanging around airfields, waiting for people and things—or money—to show up. Plenty of time to catch up on your reading.”

Samir leaned in toward the table. “A pilot for who—the airlines? The CIA? The cartels?”

Bergen chortled, it was all grand fun. “We’ll talk about me when the time comes. How did you wind up in the army?”

“When will come the time to talk about you? Why not now?”

“I’m not the one looking for a favor.”

Outside, Father Luis’s ancient Volkswagen puttered up the gravel drive from the coastal road. Somewhere, a dog started barking.

“So that’s how it is,” Samir said. “We’re in need, at your mercy. You know all the promises we have had. And what we paid to get them. Until you show me you have something real to offer, not just more promises, I have nothing to say.”

A faint scent of gasoline wafted in through the open window as the door to Father Luis’s Volkswagen slammed shut and his footsteps crunched the gravel. Nodding that direction, Bergen said, “The padre vouches for me. Who vouches for you?”

“And what do I know of this priest?”

As though on cue, Father Luis appeared in the doorway, nodding
toward his company, oblivious to what they were saying. Dusting off his glasses with a handkerchief, he looked in need of a nap and a shave. Roque wondered if Samir might not be on to something: What did they know of this man? Returning his glasses to his face, the priest blinked and smiled, then shuffled off to join Dolor in the sacristy.

“Oh what the hell, let’s move the ball down the field.” Bergen made one last attack on the basket of
chapulines
, tipping it toward him, looking for the last few tidbits. “No, I did not fly for the airlines. I was trained in the air force, served my first tour at Ramstein which, as you may or may not know, has airlift and supply responsibilities for the Middle East. I got transferred to Davis-Monthan in Tucson just in time for the invasion of Panama, Operation Just Cause—or as we called it, Operation Just Because. I bagged out of the service after my second tour and found work in Phoenix, flying businessmen around, them and whoever they wanted to impress or bribe or screw. Flew all over the Southwest, plus Cancún, Belize, Baja, down here. You meet a lot of colorful people in the air, especially in a Gulfstream. I met a few who had some seriously out-of-the-way projects, so far out in the middle of bumfuck nowhere the roads were a rumor. I got work hauling in gasoline, food, clothes—and no, I didn’t fly back with a hold full of dope. Never. It was a pretty decent living for a while, until the men I transacted with left for a meeting one afternoon in Colima and never came back. That happens down here, as I’m sure you can guess. I didn’t care much for the men who took their place. Since then, I’ve been improvising.”

A boy attending a small herd of goats along a path through the cornfield started tooting a recorder. Beyond him, the sky seemed triumphantly blue, streaked with bright cloud.

Samir said, “Why settle here?”

“I’d been to the area off and on, carting clients down here to the beaches or up to Oaxaca de Juárez for the art. I bought myself
some property through a
presta nombre
, a name lender. Foreigners can’t own property within fifty clicks of the coast and I didn’t want to go through a
fideicomiso
, a bank trust. Had plans to build myself the beach house of my dreams. It’s a charming place. People think goats are the devil, black dogs are good luck, mescal cures diarrhea and skunk meat clears up acne.

“Anyhoo, prices started going through the roof the past few years and greed never sleeps. My
presta nombre
got himself in serious need of a kidney that never materialized—don’t think I didn’t try to find him one—and under Mexican law his heirs inherit the property, not me. His widow and kids knew a bargain when it fell out of the sky. But I like it here, didn’t feel like letting them run me off. They want to cheat me, they can look me in the eye. Not that that’s a problem, mind you. The Mexican conscience knows how to adapt. Thousands of years of getting screwed will do that.”

Outside, the boy with the recorder had mercifully wandered out of earshot with his goats, which may or may not have been devils.

“Now that’s my story, or the part that’s relevant. Let’s get back to how you wound up in the Iraqi military.”

Samir made a token snort of protest, fluttered his hands. Then he settled deeper into his chair. “I didn’t want to, believe me. Saddam was just throwing bodies at the front, same as the Persians.”

“All wars are lousy,” Bergen offered, “but that one—”

“It was butchery. Obscene. But I came to realize there was no choice, it was enlist or else. I was studying English and Spanish at university, was beginning some classes in Portuguese, Italian. I wanted to work in radio, maybe TV. But the Mukhabarat, they had other ideas. They came to where I was living—my first apartment, overlooking the Tigris, I had just turned twenty—and they drove me to their ministry near the Al-Wasati hospital.

I was put in an interview room on the top floor, at the end of a long hallway of cells, and they made me wait for hours, the door locked.

“Finally a captain came in and sat down. A guard stood behind him at the door. The captain had a folder and he very politely apologized for any inconvenience. He was plump and bald and wore reading glasses and I thought to myself how much he looked like one of my professors. And just as I was thinking this he asked how I enjoyed my classes, like he could read my mind. I told him I liked them very much, I hoped to perhaps work for the foreign ministry. You know, make it look like we were on the same team.

“He asked if any foreigners had approached me, any reason at all. I said no, none. He seemed disappointed. I was afraid he didn’t believe me. Then he asked that I contact him should I receive any job or research offers by noncitizens, even visiting professors. Even Arabs. I of course agreed, even though I knew what this meant. If I didn’t report some contact, I would be the one under suspicion. But there was no one to report. I’d have to hand up someone innocent.”

Lupe yawned—so much talk, none she could understand—then formed a cradle with her arms and laid down her head.

“I went home, tried to think of what to do. You have to understand what it was like, living under Saddam. Once you were a target there was no place to hide. At some point it came to me: Why not join the army? The war had been dragging on for eight years, Iraq fighting for a stalemate, the Persians fighting to win. Without the Americans we would have been done for. But the Kurds were mounting skirmishes in the north, the Shia in the south—this, I realized, was why the Mukhabarat had come for me. They were becoming suspicious of all outsiders in the country. If I enlisted, it’s not like they’d turn me away. They were executing ordinary Iraqis who refused to serve, then making the families pay for the bullet. I realized my friend the captain might
think I only joined to be a spy but I could not afford to do nothing. I had to prove my loyalty. This was the only way I could see to do that without harming someone else.”

“Except in battle,” Bergen noted.

“The Persians are dogs. I was at the front, I saw with my own eyes what they did. Don’t lecture me.”

Bergen’s smile froze. “So you enlisted—”

“I was put into the infantry just before the offensive in Shalamcheh. I was lucky, my sergeant was a good soldier. The irony? He had been a cop in America. I’m serious. Dearborn, Michigan. He knew how to shoot, something none of the other recruits ever learned. It was criminal how badly trained the army was. Lucky for us, the Iranians were no better. We fought them hand to hand, sometimes just hacking and beating each other with our weapons because we’d run out of ammunition. There is no word in any language for what that is like. I became an animal, the men around me became animals.

“The offensive was our first victory in years. Then the Iranians struck back with incredible ferocity, we lost tens of thousands of men. I was fortunate, my position was not gassed. But I knew men who were. The Iranians of course said we were the ones who used gas—and who knows, maybe they were right. I would not put it past Saddam to gas his own troops. But we managed to hold out, regroup, and within the week we went on the attack again, recaptured the Majnoon oil fields, then Halabja. Soon the war was over, Iran agreed to peace. I came home a hero. People were so proud we’d actually, at long last, pushed back, regained some of the country’s pride.”

“But that didn’t satisfy the Mukhabarat,” Bergen guessed.

“I was back in school maybe two months when they came around again. There were incredible purges going on in the country, people disappearing right and left, not just Shia and Kurds. I was taken to the ministry again, a different room, this one on the second floor, but the same captain came in, sat down.

My file was much larger at this point. They must have been watching me in the army. Just like before, he asked me how my classes were going. Honey would have melted on his tongue. I was more scared in that room than I had been at the front.

“Finally I asked, ‘What do I have to do to convince you I am no enemy of the regime?’ He seemed offended but that lasted only an instant. He said I had to know someone in the Palestinian community who had spoken out against the war, against Saddam. And there it was. My way out. All I had to do was give them a name. I had joined the army for nothing. They wanted to terrorize the whole Palestinian community, remind us that our safety under Saddam was a gift, not a right.

“So I went home, thought about who I would betray. Given what I saw in the war, I was no longer quite so squeamish about doing what I had to do to survive—do you understand? There was a man named Salah Hassan, he had a little business repairing radios and televisions and vacuum sweepers. I knew, when the war was going badly, he had demanded that some of his customers pay him in Saudi riyals—better yet, pounds or dollars if they had them. This was considered a crime in Saddam’s Iraq, a kind of money laundering. Worse, subversion. So I told my friend the captain about it. A few nights later, while I lay awake in my bed, I heard the cars pull up outside the repairman’s house, I heard them pound on his door. I heard him speak very respectfully, very cordially to the men who took him away. And after that night, my problems with the Mukhabarat ended.”

Lupe, head still lolling on her arms, uttered a drowsy, uncomprehending sigh. Samir fussed absently with his hands. Bergen said, “I don’t mean to be contrary, but from what I know of intelligence agencies, they don’t tend to let go. They keep coming back—”

“You misunderstand.” Samir seemed strangely uncoiled, even relaxed. “The Palestinian community in Baghdad had caused no
problems during the war. The Mukhabarat just wanted to make a point. We were not beyond their reach.”