Body Work

22 The Road to Kufah

I stopped at my apartment just long enough to leave the dogs with Mr. Contreras. At my office, I found a little pot of tulips heavily wrapped in newspaper on the doorstep and a note from the client.

We got Chad moved to Beth Israel, and now Mona’s sitting with him. I like your doc. She said to bring along some of his music to play when we can’t be there, so Mona’s got his iPod running and I’ll play my clarinet for him tonight. I guess you know what you’re doing.

J.V.

The candy-cane-striped tulips made a bright circle of color on my desk. Heartened by the flowers, and the client’s goodwill, I wrote up my notes for the day. I synced my handheld with my machine so that the names I’d seen in Widermayer’s assistant’s spreadsheet got uploaded into my case file software. Ludwig Nastase, Michael Durante, Konstantin Feder. There’d been a woman as well, a Bettina Lyzhneska. A truly diverse, international crew, rounded out by Rodney Treffer.

I went back to Rodney’s cryptic jottings, wondering if any of the letters he’d written on the Body Artist corresponded to his teammates’ names. There’d been several I’s and O’s, along with C, L, and S. Except for Lyzhneska and Ludwig, I couldn’t see a match.

I wrestled with the numbers. I’ve never been a fan of codes and ciphers, and these looked so random that you probably needed a key to uncode them. Maybe they were page numbers, where you counted lines and letters, but you’d have to know the book first.

Still, I’d had a bit of a break today, getting Rodney’s last name. I did a little rooting around on him, and on Owen Widermayer as well. Rodney had been a cop with the Milwaukee PD. Now LifeStory claimed he was an independent security contractor. I remembered Olympia’s brittle laugh, her referring to him as her “insecurity.” He’d been divorced-twice-and both his ex-wives had entered orders of protection against him. Big surprise there.

Widermayer’s profile was blander. He lived in Winnetka, he was on the board of his temple, serving as their accountant. Other than that, I couldn’t get a client list out of my databases, but that didn’t really surprise me. I kind of thought Kystarnik might be Widermayer’s only client; looking after a mob thug could be a full-time job.

At six-thirty, I left for my meeting with Tim Radke. Plotzky’s, the bar he’d chosen, was on the western end of Division Street where Nelson Algren used to hang out. Algren probably wouldn’t recognize the street anymore. West of Ashland, the newest Yuppie invasion had turned the cold-water flats and honky-tonk joints into expensive lofts and restaurants with names like Suivi and Arrêt. Instead of a shot and a beer, you got martinis with funny names and weird ingredients.

Plotzky’s was one of the last surviving blue-collar joints. With an upscale sushi place on one side and a wine bar on the other, I didn’t give them much chance.

It was a few minutes before seven when I got there. A handful of men in their forties or fifties were sitting at the bar, their parkas unzipped to reveal dirty work clothes. Unlike my federal friends in Roehampton this afternoon, these men had earned their hard hats.

The Black Hawks pregame show was on the TV over the bar. No one was watching it. They were rehashing their own lives with each other and with the bartender, a middle-aged woman with bleached hair and thick pancake makeup. Like Sal at the Golden Glow, she kept an eye on the whole room while nodding empathically at the men talking to her.

I looked around but didn’t see anyone who seemed to be waiting for me. I perched on a stool near the street door. The bartender put her hand on the arm of one of the men.

“Be right back, Phil. What’ll yours be, honey? Scotch? We got Dewar’s, White Horse, Johnnie Red.”

I chose Dewar’s. The regulars eyed me with a frank, impersonal curiosity, then went back to their own conversations. After twenty minutes, when I was beginning to wonder if Radke had gotten cold feet, a guy in a worn Army parka came in. I recognized his pitted, craggy face. He was the man who’d run after Chad when he’d confronted Nadia in the parking lot.

I got to my feet and sketched a wave. Radke came over to me at once, but nodded along the way at the other men at the bar, who called out greetings when they saw him.

“Gerri, don’t go bringing him no beer without seeing his ID first. Kid’s too young to drink in public, even if he’s trying to impress his date.”

“Don’t pay them any mind, honey. They’re just jealous that they have to drink alone,” Gerri said to Tim. “Bud?” She slapped down a bottle on the bar in front of him.

“You were at the club, weren’t you?” Radke said to me once the men stopped razzing him.

“Yes-you and I almost ran over each other backstage when Chad was chasing after Nadia Guaman that time. I told you on the phone that Chad’s father hired me to find out what was going on, how Chad got involved with Nadia Guaman.”

Radke nodded cautiously over the neck of the bottle.

“I’m having trouble getting any information about either Chad or Nadia,” I said, “so anything you can tell me would be a help.”

“I didn’t know him that well,” Radke warned me.

“I thought you were in Iraq together.”

“Iraq’s a big country, and we were in a big Army. Chad, he was in a rifle company. Me? I was in Network Support.”

“Network Support? Computers in the field, you mean?”

“The whole Army runs on computers these days. I came to be pretty good, but I don’t have a college degree or anything, so when I got out I could only get me a job installing electronics. Maybe something better’ll come along when the economy picks up, if I haven’t forgotten everything the Army taught me.”

He gave a tired smile. “Anyway, Chad, him and me, we never met until we got home. We were part of the same post-deployment group at the VA. How is he? On the news, they said he tried to commit suicide and was unconscious, but when I tried to go see him, they had him in prison, not in a hospital.”

He smacked his bottle down on the countertop. “I couldn’t get permission to go see him. Him and me, we fought for our country, and some two-bit county employee gets to tell me whether I can see my own buddy or not. If it was even a cop, I wouldn’t take it so hard-they’re like every soldier I ever met, putting their lives on the line every damned day of the week. But these county assholes, getting jobs just because they raised so much money for some politician, and then lording it over…”

Gerri moved within range in case I needed to be thrown out for annoying one of her regulars. Radke subsided but twisted his beer bottle so ferociously, I thought the glass might break in his hands.

“I got the police to let us move Chad from the prison hospital to Beth Israel,” I told him. “I haven’t been able to speak to the doctor in charge, so I can’t tell you how he’s doing, but I’m sure his folks would let you go see him now that he’s in a regular hospital.”

Radke asked me to write down the address, and the name of the doctor, and promised he’d stop by as soon as he had time. “It’d be better if he was at the VA on account of the insurance, but I know you went out of your way getting him out of that hellhole. Well, you didn’t ask me here to rant and rave. What did you want to know?”

“When Chad and Nadia were arguing, it sounded like a couple in the middle of an angry divorce. But John Vishneski says Chad didn’t know Nadia.”

“I don’t think he did.”

Radke drained his bottle and signaled to Gerri for a second. She had it on the counter almost before his hand went down.

“So what were they fighting about?”

“Her drawings. He told Marty and me they gave him flashbacks.” Radke drank most of the second bottle in one big gulp. “It was something to do with what went wrong when his unit was on the road to Kufah.”

“What was that?” I prompted when he fell silent.

“You ever been in a war? It’s nothing like what they show on TV or video games. You’re tired all the time. You’re scared, you don’t know who’s a friend, who’s an enemy. If fighting starts, it’s not organized. You don’t always know where the shots are coming from and, if you shoot back, will you hit your own guys? Maybe it was different in World War Two, but in Iraq-even me, I was in Support, but I still got caught in a couple of gun battles because there aren’t any lines, yours or the enemy’s.”

He shredded his napkin and started laying pieces out on the counter as if he were trying to establish some real battle lines. I shook my head at Gerri as she started toward us.

“Is that what happened on the road to Kufah?” I asked.

“Chad couldn’t say, even at the VA when we were with one of those counselors. We got five sessions! Five sessions to undo five years of war!” Radke snorted in derision. “Chad lost his whole squad. That’s all he ever said, not any details about how it happened. You know what that’s like? Guys you been eating and sleeping with, suddenly they’re lying dead all around you. They sent him home after that for four months, then he had to redeploy. And he was fine, he said, as long as he was over there. But once he got discharged, once he got home, he couldn’t take being around civilians. No one here gives a rat’s ass about what we went through. It’s hell to be there, to be going through it. But it’s a hundred-no, a million-times worse to be here where no one cares.

“‘I lost my whole squad on the road to Kufah,’” he mimicked in a savage voice. “‘Bummer, man. But what about American Idol?’ And the women are worse!”

“How’d you end up at Club Gouge?”

He gave me a sidelong look, checking me for signs of shockability or maybe prudery. “We heard this gal sits naked on a stage. And the drawings… It was something to do.”

I’d printed out a copy of Alexandra Guaman’s yearbook photo. I pulled it out and showed it to Radke.

“She was Nadia Guaman’s sister and she was killed in Iraq. She wasn’t with the Army, though-she worked for one of the private security firms. Hers is the face that Nadia kept painting on the Body Artist. I wondered if Chad knew Alexandra Guaman in Iraq.”

Radke shook his head. “He never said. It’s like I told you, it’s a big country. And it’s not just we’re a big Army, but the contractors… You know they have more contractors than Uncle Sam’s soldiers over there? Some guy, he said, ‘Iraq isn’t the war of the willing, it’s the war of the billing.’ And until you’ve seen it, you don’t get it! The contractors, they’re everywhere, building crappy housing for us, good shit for themselves. They’re hustling a buck at the PX; they’re taking convoys around. We’re busting our asses for base pay, and we have to protect the contractors, who are drawing double overtime doing less work than we are!”

His voice was starting to rise again so I broke in. “What would Chad say after you left Club Gouge if he never said whether he knew Alexandra or Nadia Guaman?”

“We’d come here-here to Plotzky’s, I mean-a lot of times. Like, the night that gal got shot, we were here, right on these stools, watching the Hawks. Marty, one of our crowd who we met at the VA, you know, he’d say to Chad, ‘Why are you letting that broad get under your skin? Did she ditch you or something?’ But Chad, he’d just say, ‘She’s rubbing my face in it.’”

“Rubbing his face in what happened on the road to Kufah or in a busted relationship?”

Tim started peeling the label from one of his empties. “If I had to guess, I’d guess the road to Kufah just because-if some girl is riding you, she can make you madder than hell but she’s not what’s giving you flashbacks. Maybe Chad wrote about her on his blog. He kept one-a lot of guys did… do-where they write pretty much everything. It’s not just that it passes the time, but it makes you think that somewhere someone cares if you live or die.”

Chad’s blog, of course, I should have been reading that already. Maybe John Vishneski had been right to suggest I was incompetent. Despite my brave words, I was being a slow-footed, clumsy seeker, something like a two-toed sloth crashing through a jungle. I was making it easy for a skilled hider to stay twenty steps ahead of me.

“The night before Nadia died, when Chad confronted her in the parking lot, you came out and brought him back to the club. He had some kind of dark object, looked like a cloth about yea big.” I sketched the shape in the air. “Did he show you that? Do you have any idea what it could be?”

Tim shook his head. “A dark cloth about eight or ten inches wide? Could it have been, like, a scarf folded into a square? Maybe he thought she’d knitted it for him.”

That hadn’t occurred to me. Don’t pretend you don’t know what this is, Chad had yelled. Maybe it had been something some woman mailed him. Maybe he thought Nadia had been a secret correspondent sending him presents while he was in the desert. Yet another unprovable idea. It seemed impossible to get real information about anything or anyone connected with Nadia and Chad.

I tried not to let the weight of impossibility drag me down. I thanked Tim and signaled Gerri for the check. Tim gave me the names and numbers of the three other guys in his and Chad’s band of post-Iraq brothers, as well as the name of their counselor at the VA. Chad might have told her something privately that he hadn’t felt able to say in front of the group.