The Company We Keep (31 page)

Dayna calls her father on the satellite phone to tell him we made it here safely.

“We’re fine, Dad,” she says. “We’re in a big hotel. There’s lots of U.S. troops around us.”

She listens for a while and tells him again not to worry. “The fighting is far away. We’ll be careful.” She hangs up.

“You didn’t tell him about the house,” I say.

“It would have been too much for him.”

The next morning our driver takes us to Malik’s compound near Ramadi, or Kilo-18 as it’s called. I haven’t called ahead, and I have no idea how we’ll be received.

For thirteen years now, I’ve imagined Malik living in a desert encampment, with tethered camels, dun tents, and children chasing goats. But the compound we drive into is a sprawling truck depot, and heavy equipment is everywhere—front loaders, dump trucks, cranes. There are a dozen pits where trucks pull over to be repaired. No one is at the entry gate, and the driver keeps going until we come to a one-story cinderblock house. The sun is up in the middle of the sky, and the temperature is over a hundred degrees, a haze sitting over the Euphrates.

A man comes out of the house to see what we want. The driver asks where the main house is. The man looks in the car at Dayna and me, and asks who we want to see. I tell him we’re friends of the family. He points at a cluster of trees. We can’t see anything there, but drive across a rough open space until we come to the trees and behind them a large mound of rubble, about three feet high and the size of a tennis court. Although not a wall remains,
you can tell it was a house. The rubble’s charred, pieces still smoking. There’s a pungent, burnt smell. We get out of the car.

“We’ve recovered the bodies,” someone says in Arabic behind us.

It’s Hamid, Malik’s uncle who came to Rome with Malik the first time I met him. I hug Hamid. “
Allah yarhamuh,
” I say. May God protect them. He’s crying. He shakes Dayna’s hand, and she starts to cry too.

We walk in silence to a guesthouse that sits next to the Euphrates. The place is spare—no pictures, cheap terrazzo floors, and roughhewn wood furniture. Hamid shows us onto a narrow terrace, which sits over the water. A young boy brings a tray of cookies and sugared tea. Hamid tells us he was in another house when the missiles hit. Malik and his wife and children were gathered for the evening, as was their custom. They were all killed. Hamid helped pull out the bodies.

I have no idea what to say. I ask if there’s anything we can do. Hamid thanks us and says, “May God preserve you.”

After tea, Hamid drives us to Ramadi, where condolences by tribal leaders are being offered. We sit for three hours in a
diwan
, a large room with hard wooden benches pushed against the wall. A seemingly endless line of tribal elders files through, Hamid presiding, sitting in an overstuffed chair. We are the only foreigners, but no one seems to notice us.

The press would report that Barzan al-Tikriti, Saddam’s half brother, was the target of the strike that hit Malik’s house. Marwan would admit that it was Barzan who wanted to meet me. He said Barzan was desperate and thought that somehow an ex-CIA operative could save him from capture and execution. Barzan would have been killed along with Malik, but earlier that evening
he’d left for Habbaniyah, a nearby air force base. Many more years later, Marwan would tell me that Saddam himself was in a guesthouse on the compound. After the rockets hit, Saddam stood outside and watched as they pulled burning bodies from the rubble. Marwan said that the sight of it had a deep effect on Saddam, and he wrote about it in his diary.

Al ‘Awjah, Iraq:
BOB

B
efore we leave Iraq, I close my last Iraqi chapter, a visit to Al ‘Awjah, the small village on the Tigris where Saddam Hussein was born—the lion’s lair. It was here in March 1995 that my Iraqi generals prepared to corner him and either arrest or kill him.

I’m the first one to see the small Al ‘Awjah sign along the Samarra-Tikrit road. I tell the driver to turn. He looks over at me and says he thought we were going to Tikrit. He’s shaking. As it is with every other Iraqi, Al ‘Awjah is the seat of his worst nightmares.

Fifty yards down the narrow, paved road, before we get to the first houses, the driver slows down, hoping I’ve seen enough and don’t mind if he turns around and goes back the way we came. “
Yallah,
” I say. Let’s go.

He inches the Toyota along the narrow road, his head turning from side to side. Saddam’s secret police don’t exist anymore, but the dread of them does.

Just as we reach the first houses on Al ‘Awjah’s edge, we spot a knot of men standing at the side of the road. A couple hold two-by-fours; one has a shotgun. The driver stops when he comes up alongside of them. One in a tribal robe steps to the window and says something to the driver I can’t hear. I lean across him and ask where the American troops are. He ignores me.

“Drive through them,” I tell the driver, but before we can move, another man steps in front of the Toyota, swinging his two-by-four. The man at the driver’s door shouts, “What do you want here?” He tries to open the car door, but it’s locked. The driver looks at me, the blood drained from his face.

I lean across the driver again and, through the half-open window, tell the man in Arabic, “We’re French. This is not our war.” He’s surprised to hear his own language. He pauses for a moment and then turns to the others. “It’s OK. Let them pass.”

Another half mile down the road, we come to a walled compound with a large house on top of a hill. I recognize it from satellite photography I’d seen when I was still in the CIA. It was here that the generals intended to corner Saddam, their tanks crashing through the gates. By the front gate you can see where there’d recently been some sort of tracked armored vehicle, probably a tank. But it’s gone now, and the gate into the grounds is wide open.

We drive through it and up to the front of the house. The double door’s opened a crack. None of us moves, though, half expecting someone to come out to see what we want. Finally we all get out, but still hesitate to go in. The driver looks at us nervously; I’m sure he’s hoping we’ll decide not to.

You can see why Saddam picked this site to build his palace, the way it sits on a bluff over the Tigris with a boundless view of the river and the palm plantations beyond. There’s a steady breeze that makes the weather almost tolerable. Saddam must have climbed up this hill as a child, dreaming about one day building a house here.

We finally get up the nerve and let ourselves in. There’s plaster, broken masonry, and brick everywhere. In the ceiling there’s an enormous hole where a missile came through. Pigeons sit around the inside of the Palladian rotunda watching us. We walk through the darkened rooms silently, our hands behind our backs, not touching anything, as if it were a museum.

The house looks as if it hasn’t been occupied in a while. Closets and drawers are empty—or maybe just looted. There’s a layer of dust on everything. I imagine Saddam coming here only for a night or two, his entourage hurriedly packing up his things after he left.

In the library I pull a couple of books off the shelves, expecting to find rare ones, maybe even old manuscripts. But they’re all cheap editions, some with broken spines. There are a lot of paper-backs. I open one book and find the traced hand of a small child in pencil on the flyleaf. Underneath is written “Qusay,” no doubt Saddam’s eldest son. Was it Saddam who traced Qusay’s hand in a moment of tenderness?

We walk around Saddam’s indoor pool. The water is clean, but it could be a community pool anywhere. In a room off to the side stands a treadmill and a Stairmaster. Stiff, white ordinary towels are stacked on a bench. I’m surprised there’s no speaker system or television on the wall.

We walk around back to the servants’ quarters and find a mammoth, rolled-up rug on the lawn. It looks as if someone dragged it out of the house to steal it, but then changed his mind. I bend over to take a closer look. It’s synthetic, inexpensive, made in Belgium—cheap like everything else in the house. Saddam either had vulgar tastes or didn’t care how he lived.

I watch Dayna as she picks through things on the burnt lawn in the back, stopping at a rusted swing set, sun-faded plastic toys scattered around it. She stops to listen to the F-16s passing overhead.

I used to joke with Dayna that I’d take her to the ends of the earth, but always tacking on, “What if there’s only a red plush sofa there?” I was wrong about the details, but I think I had the sense of it.

Silverton, Colorado:
DAYNA

I
t’s not long after Bob and I come back from Iraq that we marry, and then drive out west to explore the Rocky Mountains. On our drive back to Washington, we stop in Silverton, Colorado, an old mining town deep in the San Juan Mountains.

On our last morning I happen to walk by a house for sale. Actually it’s more of a spruced-up cabin. But Bob loves it, and, on a whim, we buy it—our little getaway from Washington’s awful summer heat. We spend the next summer there fixing up the place and hiking. We promise each other we’ll go back to Washington at the end of September. But when the aspens lose their leaves and the tourists decamp, the solitude takes hold of us, and we decide to stay on.

In the off-season, there are fewer than four hundred full-time residents in Silverton, including a stray wolf the locals call Wolfie. No one can tell us where Wolfie came from; he was just there one day and never went away. In the summer no one sees him because he retreats up into the mountains. He’s waiting for the tourists to leave so he can go back to sunning himself in the middle of Silverton’s streets.

There are no traffic lights, and only one paved road through town, Greene Street. Silverton has no pharmacy, no bakery, no doctor or dentist or vet or even mail delivery. You have to haul your trash to the dump. The ambulance and fire department are all volunteer.

Silverton is the capital of San Juan County, the highest administrative unit in North America. It sits at the lowest point in the county, and it’s still at a nose-bleeding 9,318 feet. The county holds the American record for most snow in twenty-four hours: seven feet. The only way into the county is across a couple of 11,000-foot passes and a highway described as the most dangerous in America, or up the narrow-gauge Durango & Silverton Railroad, which only operates May through October. The locals like to impress tourists by telling them they have to drive downhill to ski.

Silverton makes up for remoteness with small-town friendliness. It’s the kind of place where if you need something from the hardware store and it’s not open, you call the owner, go over to his house, and get the keys. We discovered this the first week we moved here. Bob was standing in front of the house, trying to figure out how to haul away a pile of dead brush, when a local we know walked by and told Bob to borrow George’s truck. The man pointed at an old navy blue Ford F-150 parked down the street. “The keys are in it,” he said, adding that George wouldn’t mind. Not long after, a tire went flat on our pickup and we left it for the next morning to fix. We woke up to find that someone had already changed it for us.

The phone rings one Thursday morning. It’s rained for the last two days, but it’s a washed, cloudless blue sky today. I listen as Bob talks, his voice getting louder.

“No, you can’t land here.” Bob looks over at me, frowning.