Body of Lies (10 page)

"The refugees have no hope, Roger," she whispered, as if that were a secret. "What keeps them going is rage. They listen to the sheiks from Hamas and Islamic Jihad. They buy those bin Laden cassettes. When they go to sleep at night, I think they must dream about killing Israelis, and Americans. And now Italians, for heaven's sake."

"But not you," said Ferris. "They don't want to kill you." She was being so serious, but all he could do was look at her. The light of the gas lamp was giving her hair a reddish glow. He leaned over the table toward her, as if to listen. When she talked, he could see her breasts rise and fall through the opening of her dress.

"No, not me. They respect me...because I listen to them. Do you listen to them, Roger? Does the American government listen to them? Or do we just want to shoot them?" Ferris had told her that he worked in the political section at the embassy, which was his cover job.

"Of course I listen to them. The ambassador listens to them. We all listen to them. I even talk to them." He rattled off a few sentences in fluent Arabic, telling her that she was very beautiful in the moonlight and that he hoped she would come back to his apartment that night.

To his surprise, she answered in decent Arabic. She told him that he was handsome, but that his fate depended on the will of God. Then she added in English: "And don't try to sweet-talk me, Ali Baba. More people have tried to hit on me than..." She thought a moment. "Than Curt Schilling. And it won't work."

"Red Sox fan?"

"Of course."

"I won't sweet-talk you. I just have this problem that I am irresistibly attracted to blondes who speak Arabic."

Alice rolled her eyes and looked at the Arab men seated around the restaurant. "Welcome to the club. But seriously, Roger, I want to know what the embassy tells people. Do you tell them you're sorry that America is killing Muslims? Do you tell them you're sorry their houses have been bulldozed and their children have been killed? Do you tell them it only
looks
as if we've allied with these right-wing kooks in Israel? Do you tell them we made a mistake invading Iraq and busting it into a million pieces? What do you tell them, anyway? I'd like to know."

Ferris groaned. He wasn't a diplomat; he was an intelligence officer. "Do we have to talk about this?"

"No. You can tell me it's none of my business. Then I'll go home."

Ferris was startled at the thought that she would leave him. "Okay. Let me think. When people complain, I tell them I appreciate their point of view. I tell them I don't make U.S. government policy. Sometimes I say that I'll put their views in a cable. How's that? I'll put your views in a cable." He was trying to make a joke, but it didn't work.

"You really don't get it! You sit in the embassy all day and I'm out on the firing line. I mean it, Roger. I have to listen to these people screaming at me every day. Do you know they cheered in the camps this week when they heard the news about the car bombing in Milan? Cheered. Friends had to come over and protect me. They want to kill us. Don't you see that?"

The argument had colored her cheeks, so they, too, had the reddish glow of the gas fire. He knew he should be giving her better answers, but one of Ferris's problems was that he was bad at policy debates. They reminded him of what he had hated about journalism. Policy debates were for real State Department officers, or op-ed columnists, or people like this mysterious Alice who worked in refugee camps and wore a sundress to dinner. But he had to say something, or she would give up on him.

"I do see it, Alice. More than you might think. I'm on the firing line, too. We all are. That's what life is now."

She looked into his eyes, as if she were searching for something. Did she know what he really did? Had she guessed it? The thought made him uneasy. He excused himself to go to the toilet. As he walked there and back, he tried to disguise his limp, but his leg was bothering him in the evening cold, and she noticed it.

"What's wrong with your leg?" she asked when he returned to the table. "Are you hurt?"

"I was. Not anymore. I'm fine now."

"What happened? If you don't mind my asking."

Ferris thought a moment. He did mind her asking, but if this relationship was going to go anywhere, he was going to have to tell her more about who he really was.

"I got shot in Iraq. That was my last assignment before here. I was riding in a car, and a grenade went off, and I got a lot of shrapnel in my leg. I'm fine now. I just have this limp sometimes. It's made me much better in bed."

She didn't laugh at his joke. She was still studying him.

"What were you doing in Iraq?"

"I was in our embassy. I was supposed to be there for a year, but when I got wounded, they sent me here instead. Then I met you. See? I'm lucky."

"You weren't in the embassy when you got shot."

"No. I was outside the Green Zone. On a road north of Baghdad."

She took his hand, held it in the half-light and then let it go. "You don't work for the CIA, do you?"

"Of course not. Don't be ridiculous. I used to work for
Time
magazine, before I joined the foreign service. Look it up on Nexis. They'd never let an ex-journalist work for the CIA."

"That's good," she said. "Because then we'd have a problem."

Ferris felt a tingle in his arms, the little hairs bristling. He normally didn't mind lying about working for the agency; it was part of his job. But this was different.

"I admire you for being so brave, Roger. I just wish you could be brave for something else. I feel as if this war is destroying our country. People want to love America, but they see us doing these terrible things, and they wonder if we've become monsters. I'm frightened what's going to happen."

"I'm worried, too." Ferris rose from the table and took her hand. "It's a bad time." He pulled her gently toward him. She stayed in his arms for a long moment, and then moved away.

Ferris drove her down Prince Mohammed Street toward her building in the old downtown quarter. She was quiet in the car, staring out the window. Ferris was worried that she was angry with him when she suddenly said, "Turn left. I want to show you a place you've never been." She rattled a quick string of directions, back and forth in narrow streets of the old city, and in a few minutes they were several miles from the center of town, in a district that had none of the international patina foreigners usually saw. The streets were dank and ill-lit; donkeys carts trundled along the edge of the road. Walls were decorated with Palestinian flags and ancient, peeling posters of Yasser Arafat and crudely drawn anti-American graffiti.

"Stop," she said when they reached the crest of a hill and a small road, not much bigger than an alleyway, which was the entrance to a warren of stucco and cinder-block houses. Ferris scanned the area warily. It was a Palestinian refugee camp, one of the old ones where people had first arrived after the wars of 1948 and 1967. Ferris recognized it from a security briefing. This was one of the places where an embassy official absolutely should not go, the security officer had advised.

"I work here," said Alice, opening the car door. "I mean, it's one of the places where I work. I wanted you to see it. I thought maybe you would understand me better. Intimacy, you know?" Was she mocking him?

Alice strode toward the entrance to the camp. Ferris peered down the dusty roadway. Strings of twinkling lights were hung along the scattered light poles like Christmas decorations; a cafe was open just inside the wall, along with a few stores down the way. A few men were sitting in the cafe sharing a nargileh, sucking on the stem and blowing out smoke. They had been talking, but when they saw Ferris and his big SUV, they stopped. Ferris was edgy. Common sense told him they shouldn't be here this late at night.

"Come on," said Alice, walking toward the cafe. "Maybe some of my friends are here." Still Ferris lingered. It was like being in college, when someone who'd been drinking wanted to drive and you had to decide whether to be a spoilsport and say no, or go along.

"Come
on
, silly. I'll protect you." She grabbed Ferris's hand and pulled him toward the cafe. They sat in two plastic chairs on the concrete terrace, under a wooden arbor that kept off the sun during the day. The other men looked at Ferris guardedly and then began talking again. Ferris saw one of them gesture in his direction and heard him say in Arabic, "Who's the Jew?"

After a minute, the owner came out. Alice greeted him and he responded warmly. She asked in Arabic if Hamid was around that evening and the owner answered no, he was visiting his mother in Ramallah, thanks be to God.

"That's too bad," said Alice, turning to Ferris. "I wanted you to meet Hamid. He's one of my main contacts in this camp. He's one of the smartest people I know. You'd like him."

"You think so?" asked Ferris. "How come?"

"Because he's like you. He knows things, and he's tough. People here respect him. I thought maybe he would say some things better than I could."

"You know, Alice, I'm not sure your friend Hamid would want to meet someone from the American Embassy. We're not very popular around here."

"That's okay. You're with me. And I'm popular. I'll protect you." The look in her eyes said she meant it. This was her place.

"Yes, but he might get the wrong idea. Or other people might get the wrong idea."

"What idea is that?" asked Alice. He had trouble seeing her face in the dark. Did she know what he really did? Was that what she was saying?

"Never mind." Ferris was still tense. He scanned the perimeter, looking for signs of trouble, but it was quiet. Maybe Alice's nonchalance--her obliviousness to the possibility that it might be dangerous to be sitting in a Palestinian refugee camp late at night--was her protection. Or perhaps it was something else. Maybe she really did belong here, and in a lot of other places that were closed to Ferris.

The cafe owner returned with Turkish coffee, bittersweet like a bar of dark chocolate. They drank it down slowly. Ferris let himself relax a bit.

"How come you don't have a boyfriend?" he asked. "A girl as pretty as you must get asked out all the time."

She didn't answer at first. She took a last sip of her coffee and then turned over the cup and let the grounds dry for a moment on the side of the porcelain. She held the cup up to the light as if she were a fortune-teller.

"Good luck?" asked Ferris.

"Maybe. If you believe luck is written in coffee grounds. My old boyfriend believed that. And a lot of other crazy things."

"So you did have a boyfriend."

She looked away from Ferris, down the little alleyway and into the dark shadows. It was ten long seconds before she turned back to him.

"I loved him," she said. "He was a Palestinian. Very proud, very angry. I loved him, but he mistreated me."

Ferris reached out his hand for her, but she was too far away. "How did he mistreat you?"

"All the ways you can think of, and other ways, too."

"My God. I cannot imagine anyone hurting you."

"He couldn't help it. He was so angry. It wasn't me. It was everything. That's what I've been trying to tell you. These people are really angry with us. We think we can lie to them and steal their land and treat them like dirt and they'll just forget about it. But they don't."

"Why didn't you leave Jordan after that? I mean, how could you stay here, after he had treated you that way?"

"I'm stubborn, Roger. That's probably something we have in common. And the more I thought about him and his anger, I thought, No! Don't run away. That's what he would expect, and all the other Arabs, too. That we pretend to care about them and then, when real life bruises us a little, we run away. So I stayed. That's how I got over it. I kept loving the people who had hurt me. I wouldn't leave. I won't leave."

Ferris felt the unfamiliar sting of tears. He wiped his eyes, trying to disguise the gesture, but she took his hand and smiled in a way she never had before. He kissed her on the cheek, his own still slightly wet.

Neither of them wanted to leave. Ferris asked about her work in the camps, and Alice tried to explain. Helping these people was a matter of logistics: She purchased schoolbooks and medical supplies; she funded water projects and dental clinics; she arranged scholarships at American colleges. It was a job; she was good at it. But the animation in her voice made clear that she was doing the one and only thing in the world that mattered to her.

Ferris looked down the ruined street, to the darkened houses and the hidden places an outsider could never enter. He wished he could share Alice's belief that decent people could prevail, with enough schoolbooks and dental clinics. But he knew too much. This was a world seething with hatred. Its smiles were false ones; its true hunger was for revenge. The people had been damaged: by Americans, Israelis and the Arabs themselves. They were rats in a cage. Alice, brave as she might be, could not know the horror that was germinating in places like this. She didn't understand that these people wanted to kill her. Yes,
her.
It wasn't a misunderstanding that would be made right with more love. This was hatred. And it was the job of people like Ferris, who knew, to destroy the cells and networks and hiding places of the killers, so that people like Alice could survive.

"Don't look so serious," said Alice. "You'll spoil the party."

Ferris tried to smile. "Be careful, sweetie. That's all. Just be careful. The world isn't as nice as you are."

"I know what I'm doing, Roger. You underestimate me. I know where the lines are. It's you who has the problems. You're the one who practically got his leg shot off, not me. You're the one who needs to be careful."

Ferris took her hand again and whispered in her ear, "I want to hold you, but I can't here. Let's go back to your place." She smiled and rose from the little table. Something had changed.

T
HEY DROVE
back past the old Roman ruins and the gold souk, and up the hill a few blocks to Alice's building. Something told Ferris not to press his luck that night, but he didn't want to let her go. As he walked her to the door, he asked if he could come up.