To Be a Friend Is Fatal (22 page)

When the bank called to inform Hayder that the wire had arrived, he woke up Dina with excitement. “This will get us started in America!” he said. All that remained was the visa.

A
s soon as my arms were cut loose from their casts, I left West Chicago and drove to Boston with the hare-brained idea that I could work for Samantha Power, the Pulitzer-winning author of
A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide
and the director of Harvard's Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. A year earlier, when I was still in Iraq, a student of hers had emailed me to see if I was interested in providing research assistance for a book she was writing that examined America's foreign policy “amnesia,” since I had once edited a blog called
American Amnesia
on the same topic. Now that I was unemployed and sufficiently healed, I wrote to Power to offer my services, and found a cheap apartment on Massachusetts Avenue in the South End of Boston.

It was a flimsy lead, but it served as sufficient justification to leave home. My parents had put up with enough of my mania, and I needed to be alone, in a place of my own. Power never replied to my email. In my haste to head east, I didn't realize that she was on leave as Senator Barack Obama's chief foreign policy advisor. I sent my résumé to Obama's DC office, and that was the end of that.

I had buried Iraq from sight and avoided the news. Whenever someone new asked what I did, I said I was getting ready for law school. The nightmare of being abandoned in Fallujah visited only once a week now. Apart from visits to the orthodontist, my life was free of hospitals and clinics. When a reference to or memory from the war fluttered past my ramparts, I shooed it away and reset the drill clock to take another LSAT
practice test. I tore a photo of Alfred Hitchcock out of an old issue of the
New Yorker
and taped it over the only mirror in the apartment so that the scars on my face wouldn't remind me of the fall. I sealed away whatever triggers I found, repressing a tumorous sense of failure.

Dennis Hastert has a large frame and tiny, Luxembourgish eyes. When I walked into the Speaker's chambers, he ambled over and shook my hand as though we were close friends. I thought of my father as my hand disappeared into the large grip of the man who had sealed my dad's political fate.

“Sit down, Kirk!” he said jovially, gesturing at a small conference table.

I didn't really know what I was doing there. Hastert had run into my mom at a Fourth of July parade in West Chicago a few weeks earlier and told her that he wanted me to come in for a visit. I received an invitation from his office a week later and rode the Chinatown bus down to Washington.

“So. You're back. Tell me about your time there.”

I had done my best to lock them away over the past seven months, but a herd of emotions and experiences and opinions still brayed and clambered inside. Sitting across the table from the Speaker, a man from whom I wanted nothing, I flung open the gates and gave an unvarnished critique of everything wrong I'd witnessed back in Iraq. Hastert nodded throughout, as his foreign policy advisor took notes.

After forty-five minutes, I felt embarrassed for the time I had spent talking, so I stood up and thanked him for inviting me in. We posed for a picture between flags of America and Illinois, next to a display of his collection of model trains, model cars, and model tractors. I smirked, trying not to reveal the shiny braces in my mouth. I caught the next bus up to Boston.

Forty-eight hours later, I received an email marked “Time Sensitive” from a staffer in his office, requesting that I return to Washington.

Hastert was sitting at his desk when I returned a few days later. A muted television broadcast footage of marines evacuating US citizens
from Beirut, due to the war that had broken out between Israel and Hezbollah. I hadn't been able to iron the only suit I owned, and felt sheepish. Hastert smiled slightly as he got up to greet me. He put his arm on my shoulder and got in close: “Listen, I want you to sit behind me and just listen. If anything seems really off to you, just lean forward and whisper in my ear. 'Kay?”

“Okay, Mr. Speaker.” I had no idea what he was talking about.

He guided me to a door in the corner of the office, which was opened by an aide as we approached. The camera flashes were momentarily blinding, so it took a moment for my eyes to make out the dour face of Nouri al-Maliki, who had just become the prime minister of Iraq.

A dining table was set in the middle of the small room. As we walked in, Senators Ted Stevens, Dick Durbin, and Harry Reid and Congressman John Boehner were chatting in a corner with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. I felt like Forrest Gump as I took my seat behind the Speaker, directly across from the prime minister. The media were dismissed from the room as a light breakfast of smoked salmon and fruit was brought in.

Hastert initiated the breakfast with an affirmation of the US-Iraqi relationship and introduced each of the senior leaders in the room. Al-Maliki's interpreter translated the bromides into the prime minister's ear in a quiet, unobtrusive tone. The conversation then turned to each member's pet issues. Stevens spoke bluntly about the difficulty he would have in appropriating significant funds for any new initiatives. Durbin wanted Al-Maliki to condemn Hezbollah as a terrorist organization. The congressmen spoke more to each other than to the Iraqi prime minister.

Nobody mentioned the reconstruction. Nobody talked about the civil war. Nobody brought up the growing problem of refugees fleeing Iraq. I took notes but didn't lean forward to whisper anything in Hastert's ear. What could I say?

After an hour, the Speaker stood, prompting everyone else in the room to rise and then clear out. He came over to me: “Stick around. I'd like you to hear his address, and I want to introduce you to some friends.”

An aide walked me down to an ornate Victorian room and told me to sit there until someone came for me. I walked around the small room,
taking in the pale green walls and elaborate inlaid marble, and sat on a couch. I had no idea where, exactly, I was and what in the world was happening.

I was staring at my notes from the breakfast when the door opened and Nouri al-Maliki wandered in. An aide trailing him quickly sized me up. I shot to my feet and said, “
as-salaamu ‘alaykum ya ra'is
,” as I backed away and yielded the couch with a gesture. His eyes were forlorn, always fixed on the ground a few feet in front of him. They finally lifted up and fixed on mine. “
W'alaikum as-salaam . . .
” he mumbled, his voice trailing off with uncertainty as to who I was.

We stared at each other for a few seconds. I smiled, flashing my braces at him, and didn't know what to say. It felt as though he were looking through my eyes into the back of my skull.

The room filled with American and Iraqi aides, who prepped him for his imminent speech to Congress. A foreign-policy aide to Hastert came over and whispered, “What are they saying?” She nodded as I translated mundane snippets of their conversation about last-second changes to the speech.

In the scrum, Hastert put his hand on my shoulder. “Come over with me, Kirk.” We walked out of the small room. I looked to my right and saw Dick Cheney walking up the hallway toward us. The members of the House and Senate rose as Hastert and the vice president walked in, followed by al-Maliki. Applause. Once in the chamber, Hastert pointed to the left of the dais and said, “Just find a place and stay there. I'll come for you afterward.”

As al-Maliki worked through his speech, a large black fly harassed his face and forehead. He brushed it away with his hand with an unchanging face, but the fly persisted. I stopped listening to his boilerplate speech and followed the insect, which flew away from the prime minister in drunken curlicues over Senators John McCain and Barack Obama, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. Up it flew, and my eyes scanned the dozens of relief portraits of famous lawmakers throughout history hanging near the ceiling, settling on a profile of Hammurabi, lawgiver of ancient Mesopotamia. I remembered an
Iraq Daily Update
I'd written about a USAID and State Department initiative to train Iraqis in the rule of law. As the
civil war spread, sectarian militias were now implementing extrajudicial court systems, imposing their own rule of law across huge swaths of the country, and judges were fleeing.

Someone in the gallery began to scream.

Protester: Iraqis want the troops to leave! Bring them home now! Iraqis want the troops to leave! Bring them home now!

Hastert: If our honored guest will suspend for the moment, the chair notes disturbance in the gallery. The sergeant at arms will secure order by removing those engaging in disruption.

[
Applause.
]

Protester: Bring them home now!

Hastert: The gentleman may resume.

Al-Maliki [
through translator
]: Hope over fear, liberty over oppression, dignity over submission, democracy over dictatorship, federalism over a centralist state.

[
Applause.
]

Al-Maliki enjoyed a standing ovation. Hastert waved me over to introduce me to Representative Peter Hoekstra from Michigan, the Republican chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. “Talk to him about Iraq like you talked to me.” Overloaded with input, I blankly shook his hand and followed Hoekstra into a conference room at the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

My thoughts flitted barn swallow–like as I listened to Hoekstra detail a recent three-day trip to Baghdad. He and Senator Rick Santorum had eagerly summoned a press conference a month earlier to announce to the world that weapons of mass destruction had finally been found in Iraq, suggesting that the controversial decision to invade had been decisively vindicated. They minimized the fact that the sarin and mustard gas canisters were relics of the Iran-Iraq war, rusted-out carcasses decaying for decades in the desert. They peddled this scrap metal for all it was worth until the Pentagon stepped in to repudiate the significance of the find. I smiled at Hoekstra but just wanted to get out of the Capitol and onto a train.

I was about twenty minutes north of DC on the Amtrak when my
phone rang. “Mr. Johnson, we have the Speaker on the line for you.” A baby was crying a few rows behind me, so I got up and made my way to the snack car. I sat on a stool while a small line of Amtrakkers ordered Heinekens and White Castle–grade cheeseburgers. Hastert's voice cut through the din: “Didja talk with Pete?”

“I did.”

“Yeah. Good. Well, listen, I'm not gonna twist your arm. You're gonna do your own thing, but you know, the intel committee's a great job. Think you should come and work for us. That committee's a real sweet position; you could keep your eyes on Iraq, y'know?”

“Boy, I—”

“And y'know, Pete's a sharp guy.”

“Okay, well, thank you for that, Mr. Speaker. I'm trying to figure out what I'm doing next, but I really appreciate the chance to talk with you guys. I need to mull it over for a bit.”

“Yeah, like I said, you gotta do what you gotta do. I'm not gonna twist your arm, but think it over. This could be a real nice opportunity for you. And you know, I could always use you, too.”

The train was hurtling north through Delaware when I hung up, bracing myself on the seat backs as I worked my way back to my row. I was in some strange bubble of opportunity and couldn't understand why. Even though I would soon be broke, I didn't want to work for Hastert or Hoekstra. I couldn't work for the Speaker without feeling as though I was betraying my father, and I couldn't work for Hoekstra without betraying my sense of integrity.

Besides, I was done with Iraq. I was taking the LSAT in another month and needed to submit all my law school applications by the fall. I decided to wait a couple days before politely declining the offers.

A storm rained over Baghdad. Yaghdan couldn't sleep. Just two days earlier, on October 13, a man from his neighborhood had spotted him walking out of the Green Zone. He didn't know the man or his name, just that he lived down the street near the bakery.

He crawled out of bed for
fajr
, the dawn prayer. As he prayed, he heard something rustle the bushes in his garden.
Probably a cat
. He
managed a few hours' sleep before the generator sputtered out and the small fan by the bed fell quiet.

Haifa was still sleeping. Yaghdan thought he'd go out and get some bread for breakfast. As he opened the front door, he noticed a sheet of paper on the threshold.

“We will cut off your heads, and throw them in the trash.”

He remembered the rustling sound from the previous night and crept out toward the garden, where he found the severed head of a dog.

He woke Haifa, who read the note and began to tremble. “Maybe the storm blew it into our yard!” she said, hopefully, but he shook his head, telling her it had been slipped under their door. He told her about the dog.

He didn't want to believe it was finally happening. Maybe the letter and the dog head were unrelated, arriving on his front step by coincidence, but his mind would no longer be swayed by wishful thoughts. They needed to go.

He wiped his hard drive, removing all traces of his work from his computer. He gathered the papers he'd collected over the years—commendation letters from Creative Associates and USAID and the contracts he had signed with the Americans—and fed them a few pages at a time into the flame of the
mankhalaf
that they used for grilling kebabs outside.

He was angry. He had taken every precaution. His own family didn't even know about his employer. He took a bucket of water and washed away the ashes and the blood from the dog's head. Haifa silently packed her most prized possessions into two large red-and-white-checked canvas bags. There was nothing to say.