The Wreckage

17

Luca finds Edge at a bar in the International Zone holding a shot glass of bourbon up to the light as if looking at a rare jewel. His right hand is wrapped in a discolored bandage and a Filipino woman is sitting on the stool next to him. Dressed in a halter top and denim shorts, she’s wearing spiked heels that don’t reach the floor.

“You look like you slept in the restroom,” says Luca.

“Not true. I slept with this little lady,” says Edge, almost inhaling the shot, before sipping a beer more slowly. “Say hello to Marcella. She’s a hooker.”

Marcella doesn’t appreciate the description. She swings her handbag at Edge’s head and calls him an ape before tottering away on her heels, which make her legs look longer and her head smaller.

“Can I join you?”

“It’s a free country. Operation Iraqi Freedom-name says it all.”

The barman has left the bottle of bourbon so Edge can free pour. That’s one of the things the contractor hates about foreign countries-the measuring cups and penny-pinching.

Flexing his damaged hand, Edge picks up a cigarette. He has six of them lined up on the bar. Lighting up, he sucks on it like oxygen.

Luca narrows his eyes against the smoke. “What are you doing?”

“I’m getting drunk and then I’m gonna pick a fight.”

“In that order?”

“Yep. Which bit are you here for?”

Luca points at Edge’s bandaged hand. “Is that from your last fight?”

“I hit a wall.”

“Who won?”

“We both suffered superficial damage.”

Edge sips his beer.

“I heard about Shaun,” says Luca. “You want to talk about it?”

“Nope.”

“Might help.”

“That’s what the counselor said. I told him I wanted to turn this shithole country to rubble.”

“What did he say?”

“He suggested I take anti-depressants. I said I wasn’t fucking depressed. Depressed is when you can’t get out of bed and you can’t taste your food and you can’t laugh or cry. Depressed is when you feel nothing at all. Right now I’d love to feel nothing.”

“You shouldn’t blame yourself.”

“I should have been there.”

“Then you’d be dead too.”

“Yeah, well, I could have lived with that.”

Luca orders a beer. They sit in silence for a while. The bar is empty, except for a young man reading a newspaper near the window. Every so often he turns a page and glances at them. Taller than average, with a short haircut and an expensive leather jacket, he looks American. It’s the teeth. An orthodontist winters in Florida thanks to those teeth.

Luca motions to Edge’s hand. “Is it broken?”

“Maybe.”

Edge gingerly unwraps the bandage as though expecting to see something green and gangrenous. Instead it’s bruised and swollen.

“Can you still drive?”

“Yeah.”

“Can you hold a gun?”

His eyes brighten.

“Sure.”

“I need security.”

“Will I get to shoot anyone?”

“I’d prefer it if you didn’t.”

Edge seems to teeter on the edge of a direct response, his eyes charged with a strange energy.

“What’s the job?”

“I’m trying to find out why Shaun and the others died.”

“How you gonna do that?”

“You remember Watergate?”

“Nixon and stuff.”

“An informant was feeding information to Woodward and Bernstein-they were the journalists who linked the break-in to the White House.”

“Deep Throat. Right? The guy in the underground car park.”

“You saw the movie-that’s good. Deep Throat kept telling them one thing, over and over.”

“What was that?”

“Follow the money.”

“That’s my sort of message.”

“I thought it might be.”

“When do we leave?”

“First light.”

The trucking camp is a makeshift township of tents, shipping containers and clapboard buildings five miles south-west of Baghdad on the main highway to Jordan. It’s a strange atavistic and tribal world, set amid a wasteland of stony desert, sand dunes, rocky islands and dried up riverbeds.

More than fifty trucks are parked in bays, some with canvas awnings strung from the cabs and pegged to the ground. Other rigs are jacked up on cinder blocks undergoing repairs. Most of the vehicles are stained with rust or scarred by bullets and shrapnel.

The gatekeeper is small and brown with a frayed coat and woolen hat the same color as his beard. Pressing his palms together, Luca talks in Arabic, wishing him good morning.

Springsteen is playing on a beatbox from within a nearby tent.

“That’s what I’ll never understand about this place,” mutters Edge to Daniela. “These bastards hate us, but they watch our movies and listen to our music.”

“Maybe music doesn’t belong to anyone,” replies Daniela.

“Yeah, well Springsteen doesn’t belong to these fuckers.”

Luca comes back to the Land Cruiser.

“Two hundred yards straight ahead, building on the right.”

The drivers are waking, emerging from their tents, stiffness in their bodies, shirts unbuttoned and belts undone, scratching navels or testicles. Most of them are foreigners, uneducated and poor, hapless and a long way from home. One of them urinates loudly on the side of an empty drum.

Edge parks near the largest of the buildings and watches Luca and Daniela walk across the dusty street and push through a doorway slung with a hessian curtain. Inside the air smells of pea soup, eggs, rice and noodles. Large metal pots are propped on cinder blocks above glowing charcoal.

Four cooks turn in unison. Only one keeps his back to them, continuing to stir a pot. Luca bows and asks for Hamada al-Hayak.

Al-Hayak turns and wipes his left hand on a dirty cloth tucked in the rope that serves him as a belt. Instead of a right arm he has an empty sleeve, knotted above the elbow.

The cooks and dishwashers are focused on Daniela, whose headscarf has slipped back from her forehead. Self-consciously, she tugs it back in place. One of them is huge, in a checked shirt and overalls that are two sizes too small and ride up over his ankles.

“Can we talk?” asks Luca.

Al-Hayak motions to the rear door. Stepping past a makeshift pyramid of gas cylinders, he leads them into a small courtyard and storage area fenced in by shipping containers. A diesel generator chugs noisily, producing power for the fridges and the lights. Goats are tethered to wooden stakes, their eyes luminous and curious.

The cook turns on Luca.

“What sort of dumb shit are you? Coming here. Bringing a woman like that.” He motions to Daniela without making eye contact with her. “Some of these men will look at you and see nothing but a reward.” He pinches one nostril and blows out the other. “Who gave you my name?”

“Jimmy Dessai.”

“You’re lying.”

Luca takes a fifty-dollar bill from his pocket. “I need some information.”

Al-Hayak ignores the request and puts a cigarette between his lips, hunting in his shirt pocket for a match. Finding a light, he holds the smoke deep in his lungs like he’s trying to digest it. “So now you’re going to bribe me. How much is my life worth? What about my arm? What will you pay me for my good arm?”

“What happened to your arm?” asks Daniela.

“What do you care? You will go home one day soon and you’ll call this a victory and say you did your best.”

“You used to be a truck driver,” says Luca.

“When I had two of these.” He holds up his hand.

“What happened?”

“I lost my truck. They blew up the lead vehicle in the convoy, blocking the road and opened fire on the rest of us.”

“What were you hauling?”

“Diesel.”

“Ever take anything else?”

He shrugs. “Cigarettes, paraffin, wheat, cooking oil…”

“What about cash?”

Al-Hayak shakes his head, his mouth a tight line. The odor of cooking fat and wet nicotine rises from his clothes.

“I earn two dollars a day serving food. With two arms I could earn five times that much. I’m a cook, not a criminal.”

Luca pulls out another banknote, holding it between his index and forefinger. The gesture seems to reveal something in the cook’s eyes, a small dull yellow light burning in the corners like a parasite feeding. Taking the money quickly, he pushes it deep into the front pocket of his apron.

“I have no stake in this.”

“I understand.”

“I delivered a container. I didn’t know what was inside.”

Al-Hayak stares at the burning end of his cigarette. “Seven months ago a man came to my brother-in-law and asked him about doing a run into Syria. He wanted two trucks, so my brother-in-law called me. He told me we were hauling oil, but I could tell by the weight it was something else.”

“You didn’t see the trailer being loaded?” asks Daniela.

“No.”

“What about a manifest?”

“The paperwork says what they want it to say.”

“What did you think you were carrying?”

Al-Hayak scratches his face. His fingernails are edged with dirt. “Drugs. People. I didn’t ask. We had an escort. Guards. Usually only the military convoys get protection, but we had two Land Cruisers with us all the way to the border.”

“Where did you cross?”

“Husaiba.”

“Into Syria.”

“Yes. The Land Cruisers didn’t cross with us. I was given a number to call once we had cleared immigration and Customs. I had to ask for a man who would give me orders. The man was angry because we had come a day earlier than he expected. He told us to wait and he would send an escort.

“Mazen, my brother-in-law, wanted to find shade, but I told him we couldn’t move. We waited all day in the heat. I thought if there were people inside they would be dying of heatstroke and dehydration. I put my head against the side, listening, but I couldn’t hear anything.”

The cook’s cheeks are dented as he sucks the saliva out of his mouth and spits.

“The man didn’t come until past midnight. There were two more vehicles. He ordered us to drive, but I said it wasn’t safe at night. He laughed at me and waved a gun. That stretch of road from Ash Sholah to Palmyra is treacherous even during the daylight. The edges are soft and the escarpment has switchbacks and blind corners.

“My brother-in-law was ahead. He missed a turn. Maybe he fell asleep. Maybe his brakes failed. I saw the truck go over the edge and roll down the mountain. It opened like a giant tin of peaches. I expected to see bodies being flung into the air, but there weren’t any people inside.”

Al-Hayak motions for Luca to give him another banknote. “This is what I saw,” he says, holding the note in front of Luca and Daniela’s eyes. “Fluttering like butterflies in the moonlight, caught in the updraft. I knew Mazen was dead. The truck had fallen two hundred feet. A guard pointed a gun at my head and told me to keep driving. He asked me if I saw anything. I said no. They would have killed me then. No question.”

“What happened to the money?”

“The mountainside was covered in shale and loose rocks. It was too dangerous to climb down. They made me drive to a warehouse on the outskirts of Damascus, near the airport.”

“Can you remember the address?”

“There was a sign on the gate: Alain al Jaria.”

“Ever-flowing spring,” says Daniela.

“You speak Arabic?”

She shakes her head. Luca looks at her, puzzled, and al-Hayak grows nervous at how much he’s said. More drivers are waking and wandering past, peering at the strangers, eyes hooded, shoulders hunched.

“Did you hear any names?” asks Luca.

Al-Hayak scratches his chin. “I was told to forget.”

Luca gives him another twenty.

“The man who came to the border to meet us-I heard one of the guards use his name. Mohammed Ibrahim.”

Daniela’s eyes widen. She tries to recover, but the cook has seen her reaction.

“Enough! No more questions!”

He turns away, pushing through the flapping hessian curtain.

Daniela follows him. “Did you ever see this man? What did he look like? Was he a big man? Overweight?”

The cook lifts the lid from a dirty steel pot, dropping it loudly. Steam billows into his face.

“Did he have another name?” says Daniela. “What did they call him?”

Al-Hayak spins like an animal trapped in a box. This time he has a heavy steel lid in his fist.

The rest of the kitchen is suddenly silent. The big cook dressed in overalls is beside him, the muscles swelling across his shoulders like cords of wood on a woodpile.

Luca steps in front of Daniela. He avoids the first blow, but someone punches him from behind, finding his kidneys. He goes down, mouthing the air like a fish feeding on the surface of a lake. Strong hands pick him up and carry him outside on to the street where drivers are queuing for breakfast. Al-Hayak is breathing hard. White flecks cling to the corners of his mouth.

Edge is running, the semi-automatic in his damaged hand. All hell is going to break loose. His good fist snaps out three professional punches, sending the big cook to the ground. He swings the gun in a wide arc, almost daring the others to give him an excuse.

Lifting Luca to his feet, he pushes him into Daniela’s arms.

“We’re leaving.”

Backing away from the crowd, swinging the semi-automatic from side to side, he waits for them to reach the car. Then he slides behind the wheel, the engine running, finding reverse where it should be, accelerating backwards down the narrow street, spinning the wheel, sending the Land Cruiser into a 180-degree turn. First gear. Stamping on the accelerator. Gravel spitting from the tires and rattling against a pyramid of fuel drums.

Edge doesn’t look back until they reach the smooth tarmac of the highway. Tossing his weapon on to the passenger seat he lights a cigarette and opens the windows. Pushed back by the rushing wind, nobody speaks for a dozen miles.

“Who is Mohammed Ibrahim?” asks Luca.

Daniela brushes hair from her eyes. “Remember I told you how I used to work for Paul Volcker?”

“The former head of the Fed Reserve.”

“We were investigating the Oil for Food program. Saddam skimmed nineteen billion dollars in bribes and kickbacks. That’s how he built his palaces and paid rewards to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers.”

“And Ibrahim?”

“One of the mysteries we had to solve was how Saddam got this illegal revenue into Iraq. It took a while but eventually we found dozens of bank accounts set up in the name of front companies in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. The bribes and pay-offs were channeled through these into accounts in Iraq’s state-owned banks. One name kept coming up: Mohammed Ibrahim Omar al-Muslit. The Iraqis called him the Fat Man, but we had another name for him.”

“What was that?”

“Saddam’s banker.”