“Allies or partners?” he asked. “Big difference.”
“Insha’Allah?” I was growing fond of the many meanings this one Arabic phrase provided.
The sweat underneath his pits had gathered into pools, and he plucked small hairs from his mustache, hiding the freed hairs in his palm. Dark, puffy circles hung under his eyes like speed bags. Everyone touched by war seemed aged or corroded in some way. Saif wasn’t even thirty yet, but he had the calloused look of a man nearly twice as old.
“You hear anything about a new insurgent named the Cleric?” I asked. “Got a tip he was involved in the attack on my soldier last month.”
“The Cleric?” he said. Seconds passed in warm, heavy silence. I realized belatedly there was no fan in the room. “A bad joke. The Cleric is dead.”
Saif stood again and took four long steps to the chai. He placed two cubes of sugar in white teacups, pouring the tea from the pot over the sugar. He then stuck a small spoon in each cup and set a biscuit on each of the saucers.
“It’s hot,” he said. The chai was golden-brown, like wheat husk. I took a sip and bit my lip while my tongue simmered.
I was about to explain the tip, but Saif spoke first. “The Cleric was a powerful sheik in Ashuriyah some years ago, after the Collapse and al-Qaeda wars. He was a tribal leader, not a real cleric, but the townspeople called him that out of respect.”
“The guy on the arch?” I asked. “With the beard?”
Saif nodded. “Yes. Sheik Ahmed.”
“Ahmed.” I closed my eyes and bowed my head, remembering the name from a First Cav statement. Though our relationship with Karim the Prince’s father, Sheik Ahmed, and the Sunni Coalition of Ashuriyah have been negatively affected… “I’ve heard of him.”
“He died of tuberculosis before I came to town as a police cadet. We did security for the funeral procession because his family wouldn’t allow the Americans to come. He’d worked with them for many years, but it was his dying wish.”
“Because they killed his son.” The words tumbled out of my mouth like dominoes, and I took another sip of chai to mask my enthusiasm. Now cool enough to taste, it reminded me of warm Kool-Aid. “That’s what I heard,” I added. “An American kill team. Supposedly.”
Saif waved off the rumors of past civilian murders, claiming every Iraqi town and village had them. “Propaganda from the militias,” he called them. He said he’d heard of the sheik’s al-Qaeda son, though he didn’t recognize Karim’s name. Nor did he seem to recognize Chambers, laughing off the notion that he was the same man who’d frightened locals in 2006.
“Just as all Iraqis look the same to your eyes,” he said, “all Americans look the same to ours.”
“You never heard anything about a kill team?” I asked again. I hadn’t revealed that Chambers had admitted to being in Ashuriyah before, but something about Saif’s dismissive laughs made me think he knew more than he was letting on. “What about a guy called Shaba?”
Saif raised a bushy eyebrow. “Shaba.”
He set down his saucer and pushed himself up once more, his knees cracking. He went to the trunk in the corner, looking over his shoulder as he unlocked it, as if to ensure that I wasn’t memorizing the combination.
Everyone’s so goddamn paranoid around here, I thought.
He sifted through his trunk, stacking folders of passports and driver’s licenses in the corner. Confiscated from detainees, he said. He pulled out an envelope of photographs, flipping through them before raising one into the air.
He handed the photo over. An American soldier’s plate carrier, a thinner, lighter version of our body armor, was covered in blood and dirt and set against a house wall. Much of the photo was a void of black, and the time stamp read, APRIL 5, 2006, 4:25 A.M. The nametape was missing, but the rank was not: the barbed chevrons of a staff sergeant pierced through the dark.
“My police mentor gave me that, when the army assigned me back here,” Saif said. “Said I needed to remember what Ashuriyah really was.”
“The hell?” I asked, shaking the photograph as if an answer would fall out of it.
“Let me remember.” He sighed, returning the piles of evidence to his trunk. “The older I get, the more my mind turns into that of a Marsh Arab.”
Yes, of course he’d heard the legend of Shaba. Shaba was the man who could travel by shadows at night to kill terrorists but handed out money in the day to the townspeople. His mentor had been on duty the night Shaba disappeared and had taken the photograph I now held. After a long firefight near the stone arch, they’d rushed to the scene, finding only the bloody plate carrier and shell casings. Hundreds and hundreds of shell casings, Saif said, his mentor had always stressed that. They looked for Shaba for many months but never found him.
He’d first learned of Shaba at the sheik’s funeral. The townspeople couldn’t shut up about him. No one knew what had happened, not exactly, but there were theories.
“Like what?” I asked.
“Just crazy gossip,” Saif said. “Some said Jaish al-Mahdi killed him because he’d joined al-Qaeda. Others said the opposite. He was out there by himself that night, that’s certain. No one knew why, not even the Americans. So strange.”
As for the sheik, he’d had many relatives, but his wife had been dead for years, and there was only one living child, a daughter. And no one had seen her for some time. Not until the funeral.
A jewel, Saif said. Even from afar, even covered in her mourning burqa. She’d caused a minor scandal by refusing to wear a face cover, opting instead for a translucent veil. But she didn’t seem bothered by the reactions it provoked. She walked, Saif said, like royalty, snubbing everyone she passed on the street, looking down on everyone else even when they were on level ground. She’d come to Ashuriyah with her husband and two little boys. The townspeople said the youngest looked so much like his father, but the eldest had a different appearance, Iraqi coloring with no Iraqi features.
Some of the townspeople said an American soldier had raped the shiek’s daughter during the sectarian wars. Others said the dead sheik had promised her to an Anbar doctor. Still others said she’d been taken as a wife by al-Qaeda, and when her husband was killed by the Americans, she’d gone to prison and given birth there.
But most people, Saif said, simply didn’t want to talk about it. They hushed the others and told them to respect the memory of the sheik. It was funny, he said, even though he’d returned to Ashuriyah many months before, he hadn’t thought about these names and people for years.
“They are the past,” Saif said. “It is the future I’m interested in.”
“The daughter?” I asked, trying to contain my interest behind a swig of chai. “She alive?”
He shrugged. “Ask the cleaning woman. She used to be one of Sheik Ahmed’s servants.”
My mind reeled. Had Alia meant to mislead me? Had I asked the wrong questions? Had she been conspiring with Chambers this entire time? She’d said that Shaba had “died like anyone else in Iraq. By the gun.” What exactly had that meant? It seemed like the more I learned, the less I understood.
“What troubles you, Loo-tenant Porter?” Saif asked.
There was no more chai in my glass to drink, so I sucked on what remained of the sugar cube. I wanted to tell him everything, how everything was troubling me, the past, the present, and the future. But I kept down my half-drawn story of love, war, and consequence. I looked back at Saif. He’d resumed sitting on his knees. He was a thick, sweaty, balding man with brown skin from here. I was a thin, sweaty baby face with white skin from there. He was still a them. I was still an us. No amount of chai could change that.