Samir leaned in toward the table. “A pilot for who-the airlines? The CIA? The cartels?”
Bergen chortled, it was all grand fun. “We’ll talk about me when the time comes. How did you wind up in the army?”
“When will come the time to talk about you? Why not now?”
“I’m not the one looking for a favor.”
Outside, Father Luis’s ancient Volkswagen puttered up the gravel drive from the coastal road. Somewhere, a dog started barking.
“So that’s how it is,” Samir said. “We’re in need, at your mercy. You know all the promises we have had. And what we paid to get them. Until you show me you have something real to offer, not just more promises, I have nothing to say.”
A faint scent of gasoline wafted in through the open window as the door to Father Luis’s Volkswagen slammed shut and his footsteps crunched the gravel. Nodding that direction, Bergen said, “The padre vouches for me. Who vouches for you?”
“And what do I know of this priest?”
As though on cue, Father Luis appeared in the doorway, nodding toward his company, oblivious to what they were saying. Dusting off his glasses with a handkerchief, he looked in need of a nap and a shave. Roque wondered if Samir might not be on to something: What did they know of this man? Returning his glasses to his face, the priest blinked and smiled, then shuffled off to join Dolor in the sacristy.
“Oh what the hell, let’s move the ball down the field.” Bergen made one last attack on the basket of chapulines, tipping it toward him, looking for the last few tidbits. “No, I did not fly for the airlines. I was trained in the air force, served my first tour at Ramstein which, as you may or may not know, has airlift and supply responsibilities for the Middle East. I got transferred to Davis-Monthan in Tucson just in time for the invasion of Panama, Operation Just Cause-or as we called it, Operation Just Because. I bagged out of the service after my second tour and found work in Phoenix, flying businessmen around, them and whoever they wanted to impress or bribe or screw. Flew all over the Southwest, plus Cancún, Belize, Baja, down here. You meet a lot of colorful people in the air, especially in a Gulfstream. I met a few who had some seriously out-of-the-way projects, so far out in the middle of bumfuck nowhere the roads were a rumor. I got work hauling in gasoline, food, clothes-and no, I didn’t fly back with a hold full of dope. Never. It was a pretty decent living for a while, until the men I transacted with left for a meeting one afternoon in Colima and never came back. That happens down here, as I’m sure you can guess. I didn’t care much for the men who took their place. Since then, I’ve been improvising.”
A boy attending a small herd of goats along a path through the cornfield started tooting a recorder. Beyond him, the sky seemed triumphantly blue, streaked with bright cloud.
Samir said, “Why settle here?”
“I’d been to the area off and on, carting clients down here to the beaches or up to Oaxaca de Juárez for the art. I bought myself some property through a presta nombre, a name lender. Foreigners can’t own property within fifty clicks of the coast and I didn’t want to go through a fideicomiso, a bank trust. Had plans to build myself the beach house of my dreams. It’s a charming place. People think goats are the devil, black dogs are good luck, mescal cures diarrhea and skunk meat clears up acne.
“Anyhoo, prices started going through the roof the past few years and greed never sleeps. My presta nombre got himself in serious need of a kidney that never materialized-don’t think I didn’t try to find him one-and under Mexican law his heirs inherit the property, not me. His widow and kids knew a bargain when it fell out of the sky. But I like it here, didn’t feel like letting them run me off. They want to cheat me, they can look me in the eye. Not that that’s a problem, mind you. The Mexican conscience knows how to adapt. Thousands of years of getting screwed will do that.”
Outside, the boy with the recorder had mercifully wandered out of earshot with his goats, which may or may not have been devils.
“Now that’s my story, or the part that’s relevant. Let’s get back to how you wound up in the Iraqi military.”
Samir made a token snort of protest, fluttered his hands. Then he settled deeper into his chair. “I didn’t want to, believe me. Saddam was just throwing bodies at the front, same as the Persians.”
“All wars are lousy,” Bergen offered, “but that one-”
“It was butchery. Obscene. But I came to realize there was no choice, it was enlist or else. I was studying English and Spanish at university, was beginning some classes in Portuguese, Italian. I wanted to work in radio, maybe TV. But the Mukhabarat, they had other ideas. They came to where I was living-my first apartment, overlooking the Tigris, I had just turned twenty-and they drove me to their ministry near the Al-Wasati hospital.
I was put in an interview room on the top floor, at the end of a long hallway of cells, and they made me wait for hours, the door locked.
“Finally a captain came in and sat down. A guard stood behind him at the door. The captain had a folder and he very politely apologized for any inconvenience. He was plump and bald and wore reading glasses and I thought to myself how much he looked like one of my professors. And just as I was thinking this he asked how I enjoyed my classes, like he could read my mind. I told him I liked them very much, I hoped to perhaps work for the foreign ministry. You know, make it look like we were on the same team.
“He asked if any foreigners had approached me, any reason at all. I said no, none. He seemed disappointed. I was afraid he didn’t believe me. Then he asked that I contact him should I receive any job or research offers by noncitizens, even visiting professors. Even Arabs. I of course agreed, even though I knew what this meant. If I didn’t report some contact, I would be the one under suspicion. But there was no one to report. I’d have to hand up someone innocent.”
Lupe yawned-so much talk, none she could understand-then formed a cradle with her arms and laid down her head.
“I went home, tried to think of what to do. You have to understand what it was like, living under Saddam. Once you were a target there was no place to hide. At some point it came to me: Why not join the army? The war had been dragging on for eight years, Iraq fighting for a stalemate, the Persians fighting to win. Without the Americans we would have been done for. But the Kurds were mounting skirmishes in the north, the Shia in the south-this, I realized, was why the Mukhabarat had come for me. They were becoming suspicious of all outsiders in the country. If I enlisted, it’s not like they’d turn me away. They were executing ordinary Iraqis who refused to serve, then making the families pay for the bullet. I realized my friend the captain might think I only joined to be a spy but I could not afford to do nothing. I had to prove my loyalty. This was the only way I could see to do that without harming someone else.”
“Except in battle,” Bergen noted.
“The Persians are dogs. I was at the front, I saw with my own eyes what they did. Don’t lecture me.”
Bergen’s smile froze. “So you enlisted-”
“I was put into the infantry just before the offensive in Shalamcheh. I was lucky, my sergeant was a good soldier. The irony? He had been a cop in America. I’m serious. Dearborn, Michigan. He knew how to shoot, something none of the other recruits ever learned. It was criminal how badly trained the army was. Lucky for us, the Iranians were no better. We fought them hand to hand, sometimes just hacking and beating each other with our weapons because we’d run out of ammunition. There is no word in any language for what that is like. I became an animal, the men around me became animals.