“Women and men can’t mourn together,” he said. “They go into the house to drink coffee and tell stories of the dead sheik. And make the food, yo.”
The atmosphere was solemn, and I quickly ran out of ways to say, “He was a good man.” As servants brought out the first platters of food, Saif found me and explained that fried eggplant served cold on pita bread was a traditional dish. It was a wild garden of dough and oils, and we ate with our hands, sharing the platters. Following Saif’s lead, I dipped the bread into a side of hummus. We washed the food down with spiced chai, which somehow cooled me in the heat.
“Did you hear?” Saif asked through mouthfuls. “The police released Ismail this morning. Saw him leave his cell. Sullen young man. Didn’t look too beaten, likely because you intervened. That was a good thing you did.”
I was surprised they’d released the Barbie Kid already, but the brigade JAG officer had determined an attempted sai poking didn’t qualify as a murder attempt. I decided to let Chambers hear about the teen’s release from someone else; he’d just rage about how much the army and Iraq had changed for the worse.
The second group of platters consisted of dried apricots and some sort of chopped salad I had no interest in. Fat Mukhtar arrived, too, his three wives and many children hustling inside with bowed heads, armed guards and the toucan Sinbad staying outside with us. One of the guards held the bird on his forearm, though it nibbled from Fat Mukhtar’s hand with its keel bill as he fed it bread from the communal platter. Saif grunted at the scene, but said nothing. Neither did anyone else.
“There’s a strange feeling in the air now,” Snoop whispered in my ear.
The bird regurgitated into his feeder’s hand, a yellow and deficient slop. Fat Mukhtar rolled his eyes and wiped his hand clean on his guard’s black muscle shirt. He shouted something in Arabic, which brought laughs from throughout the tarp.
“He say the Reconciliation means he must square with Shi’as,” Snoop translated. “But he doesn’t have to square with toucans.”
I smiled at the mukhtar. His greeting under the tarp proved far more tepid than the hug I’d received on the Sunni Strip, just a limp peace sign under glazed eyes. Around the collection of frail old men, he seemed even larger than usual. His goatee was freshly trimmed, as usual, but his thatch of curls had been slicked back with grease for the occasion. As we made our way through the third course, a mix of goat meat and brown rice, he walked to our side of the circle, speaking low to Snoop.
“He say it is wrong to talk business today, but wishes to know if you’ve learned Haitham is the Cleric. This true, LT? It doesn’t make sense to me.”
“Yeah.” Through his mask, I could sense Snoop’s skepticism. “Battalion told me yesterday. Crazy, but true.”
“Surf’s up,” Fat Mukhtar said.
Then he asked for us to turn off the machine in the Strykers that made cell phones stop working, as the sheik’s sons were expecting calls from loved ones.
“No idea what you’re talking about. We don’t have that kind of technology,” I said, plain-faced. “Excuse me, I have a completely unrelated matter to attend to.”
I walked past the cypress tree to our vehicles and gave Dominguez the “kill the jammer” hand-and-arm signal; remote-detonated IEDs weren’t a concern at the moment. Returning to the tarp, I noticed something odd on the shoulder of one of Fat Mukhtar’s guards, standing off by himself and holding a silver AK-47. I called over Snoop.
“The fuck?” I pointed to the Ranger scroll he’d sewn onto his khaki Sahwa top. “Where’d you get that?”
From a Ranger, of course. It was a gift. They’d worked together on a recent mission he couldn’t tell us about; it was “top secret.” I thought about how battalion had learned of the Cleric’s identity — the still-alive one — and looked past the guard to the waddling mukhtar. He held his toucan in front of a sad, wizened old man, laughing while the bird croaked.
So many secrets here, I thought, trapped in a glint of the afternoon sun. So many veils, too.
After I rejoined the mourners, a group of old women in black abayas were exiting the house, moving with slow steps to the tarp. They chanted dirges, low and ominous. The old men passed around a collection plate, which Saif quietly explained was for the women, professional mourners hired to sing of the dead’s accomplishments and the world’s loss. They’d go for hours, if necessary, and would return each afternoon of the three-day ceremony. I tossed in a ten-dollar bill.
I hadn’t seen Snoop sneak away, but as the lamenters performed, he waved me to the back of the tarp. He held his phone tight in his hand.
“Haitham,” he said. “He asked if we were at the wake for Abu Mohammed.”
“Shit.”
“I didn’t tell him. But he say if we were here, we should dig near the cypress tree. He say — he say we will find the body of Shaba there. Then he hung up.”
I turned around to look out into the desert. Nothing but yellow badlands until Baghdad, I thought. Who knew how many bodies lay in the barren earth beneath us.
“I am just a terp, but we should dig at that tree,” Snoop said. “I believe him.”
I strode to the cypress, all gnarled branches and leaves like asparagus. The dirt around its trunk was cracked and sun-scorched. None of it looked disturbed. Then I looked up and saw the Iraqis looking over their shoulders at me, pretending to listen to the dirge.
“Get Saif over here,” I said to Snoop. “We need to be delicate about this.”
The Iraqi lieutenant’s eyes flashed like pinwheels when we told him, and he stroked his pistol holster. I argued we should wait to dig until after the mourning ceremony, but Saif pointed out they knew that we knew now. Unless we wanted to post guards for three days, we needed to dig right away.
“It’ll be better if my men do it,” Saif said. “And your Muslim soldier.”
I sent Snoop to the sons to explain that we weren’t trying to be disrespectful, just following a tip. The laments ended as Ibrahim and the jundis put shovels into dirt. Two and three at a time, the mourners fell away to their cars and homes, Fat Mukhtar leaving with his guards in a Mercedes. Only the dead sheik’s family remained for the excavation.
It took ten minutes for one of the jundis to find a piece of plastic. It stuck out of the ground like a candlewick, crusted in dirt and barely discernible. Thirty minutes after that, we stood around a shallow hole with a bag of human remains in it. The body had been stripped and burned, giving the carcass a smoky, charcoal shine. Maggots had long ago chewed through the clear plastic to feast on the insides. The skull wasn’t attached to the body but had remained intact, falling to the bottom of the bag. I stepped into the hole to look it in the eye. A chipped bottom tooth was fixed prominently in its mouth, death reckoning life with the stupidest of grins.
“Not right,” Saif said, looking up at the branches of the rigid cypress. “Even to an enemy. Such things are against Allah’s will.”
I heard the joes whispering from above, around the tree. “Think it still has the Green Beret tat on it?” one asked. The others told him to stop being stupid.
“Who is it, sir?” Ibrahim asked, his face and words drained of color. “Or was it, I mean.”
“Not sure.” I set the skull and bag back in its hole. “But he may have been one of us, once upon a time.”
Then I got on the radio with Captain Vrettos, apologizing for waking him, telling him he wouldn’t believe what we’d found.