The Good Lieutenant (9 page)

“And you told us specifically not to go into that building without a full team,” Pulowski said. “Didn't you do that? Wasn't that the case? Okay, so that was ugly. That was something I never want to see, and I hope I live long enough to forget about it, but I am not going to sit here and let you destroy yourself because you didn't follow Beale into doing what was obviously a stupid thing.”

“You knew that,” Fowler said. “You knew that was a stupid thing.”

“Sure as fuck turned out that way.”

She saw the flinch, the darting way his eyes shifted to the dingy trailer window, a quick grope of his armpit. “How were you so sure?” she asked.

“What difference does it make?”

“Because the shooter”—Fowler pointed at the trailer's ceiling—“was on the roof. We missed it. I missed it. But Beale saw it. Beale was trying to protect me, and my soldiers, a twenty-eight-year-old sergeant—”

“Oh, come on. You are not going to—”

“A twenty-eight-year-old sergeant,” Fowler said, rising to her feet, “who risks his life to help my team, and meanwhile I'm lying around inside my Humvee, farting around on the radio—”

To her shock and surprise, as she reached this crescendo, Pulowski laughed in her face. “Oh, man, that is some desperation, Fowler. What do you want me to do? You want me to take the blame? What do you think would've happened if I had gone in after Beale?”

She'd done the same thing with her younger brother, Harris. She could remember it perfectly, as if that moment had been permanently encoded in her memory, waiting to reflower now in this version of her worst self. Meaning she'd found out that Harris had boosted a car—it had been a Mazda, owned by the Ryersons, who'd had a daughter in her class at school. She might be a schlub lieutenant now, who was overweight, who ran a half-assed recovery team—who was fucking scared and terrified, who'd been fucking scared and terrified every second out there in that intersection—but back then she'd been tougher, lean, and she'd had plans for Harris. So she'd been terrifying in her righteousness, ambushing him in the parking lot where he'd hidden it, forcing him to admit where it had come from, rubbing his nose in it. She didn't want to use anger now—she knew better, or she ought to have known better. Not against Pulowski, especially.

“No,” she said. “Hold on, hold on—let me walk that back.”

“Fuck you, Fowler!” Pulowski said. He was crying then, which was the last thing that she'd intended, the last thing she wanted to see. “You think you're going to be able to walk this back? What are you, some kind of idiot? Don't you know what happened out there? What are you, fucking blind?”

The last words had been a howl. It had been the same way with Harris when she'd confronted him about the car: sarcasm, anger, contempt—goading, which she'd never been that good at handling. And then when she pushed back—which she did way too hard, she knew that—there was nothing there when you broke the shell. “Know?” she said. “Know? Fuck, yes, I know what happened. I was in command and I lost a soldier. Do you have some kind of different take on this, Pulowski? What the hell else happens when somebody disappears? You try to get them back.”

“Aha!” Pulowski said, jabbing a finger at her. “We're going to start in on this. Fowler's sad story of her brother.”

“Because I'll tell you what happens when you lose somebody and
don't
try to get them back. You end up lost too. That's it.”

“I am not going to sit here and discuss your family.”

“It's not my family,” Fowler said. “It's
me
. That's me, okay? If that had been you out there, wouldn't you want me to get you back? You don't think your fucking mom would expect me to make an effort?”

Something had shifted ever so slightly in the conversation. “Yeah, well, good for you,” Pulowski said, his angular face becalmed, as it usually was when he'd won an argument. “But I
was
there. I was with Beale in the alley. He wanted to go in the building and find the shooter and I wouldn't. I bailed on him and lied about it and I'm not sorry about it and I'd fucking do it again. That's it. Okay?
That's
me.”

The feeling was like stepping into an air shaft that had been gaping there in the middle of the conversation from the beginning. On the way down, in the loose, falling sensation that accompanied the drop, she did the math. Not only had Pulowski failed to help Beale. But if he
had
tried to help, she'd probably be looking for him. That was all there, present in his face—and had been, probably, from the minute they'd come into the trailer. Instead, she'd fucked it up, exactly as she had with Harris. She could never back off, never shut up. “I'm an ass,” she said. “I'm sorry, Pulowski. I didn't see.”

There was a deliberation in his movements that she recognized, as if some decision had been made whose terms she hadn't been informed of. He gave a shaky laugh. “Yeah, well, at least his mom'll know who to blame, huh? You can write that to her:
Your son Carl is dead because Lieutenant Pulowski sat on his fucking ass.
I guess they can write that on my epitaph.”

“Dixon.” She propped herself up on her elbow and gave him her best version of her father's icy glare, wanting to contradict him in some way. “No.”

Pulowski paled and began waving his hand as if to wipe out any further sentiment. He'd reached down into his pocket and produced a folded scrap of beige paper. “I get it, okay? I am
not
saying that you're wrong. You got to look for Beale. I understand. It's just that I'm out. But before I get out, you're gonna want to see this, okay? I don't know if it means anything—”

He unfolded the paper and handed it to her. There were two sketches, one of the Iraqi, another of an unknown man with wings. The one who looked like Beale.

“An Iraqi gave this to me at the schoolhouse,” he said. “I think you should go to Masterson's patrol base, find his interpreter, ask him about it. If you get a bite, if there's something there, you don't walk it back.”

 

5

It was nearly June when Faisal Amar stood on the roof of Ayad al-Tayyib's house and offered Ayad twenty dollars a week American for the use of his property and the fields surrounding it. The offer was not completely insane, not completely unexpected. Previous to that spring, it had been possible to switch on the Al-Iraqiya network, watch the jarring, bumpy footage of a bombing's aftermath, mangled bodies being carted off on stretchers, or the wailing crush around a casket, and then walk outside and feel none of the same tension in the surrounding air. Breathe in eucalyptus, watch a flock of crows dance in unison over the date palm trees. But since the bombing of the Al-Askari Shrine in Samarra that winter, Ayad had begun to feel a constriction reaching out from the city, tightening the air of the surrounding fields. There were rumors now. Mysterious flyers in the markets in Bini Ziad. Gunfire occasionally at night. He did not frequently agree with his mother's assessment of local politics, particularly when it came to the Shi'ites. (Seeing televised footage of the shrine's exploded golden dome, his mother, dressed in the brocaded jacket she had once worn for trips into the city, had texted his phone crisply from across the living room,
Now they'll have an excuse to do anything.
) And yet, recently, from this spot here on his roof—shielded by the spaceship that he and Faisal had built—he'd seen headlights out across the fields, winking, disappearing, with no practical explanation for their presence except that, following their visits, their old Sunni neighbors tended to move away. Even he might define those convoys as a
they
.

The money, which Faisal flourished now from his suit pocket, would've been useful. If it had come from Faisal himself, he would've been less concerned, since he viewed Faisal as a
we
. But instead, it came from Raheem al-Najafi, the Shi'ite mechanic who worked in town, whose identity, once fixed and stable, beneath Ayad's mother's notice, had been mutated and altered by the invasion, until nobody knew what, exactly, he should be named. Ayad's mother would've called him
takfiri
, or unbeliever (which really meant uppity Shi'ite). The word in Bini Ziad was that he was a member of the Grand Brotherhood of the Golden Dome, whose angry flyers papered the marketplace. But Ayad's main concern was with how the Americans defined Raheem. Insurgent being the worst case.
Explain this to me again
, Ayad wrote in his notebook, jabbing it back at Faisal.
Why would Raheem al-Najafi want to use my house? When did he get so rich?

Raheem's objective is not an issue. You will not be involved in it.

You're involved in it.

I know you, so Raheem has asked me to make the contact.

What does he want to use the house for?

It would be better if you did not ask.

I thought you were working with the Americans? Can't they protect you?

I am working with the Americans. But I can't be with them all the time.

Why don't you tell them that you're in danger?

I am not in danger
, Faisal wrote.
You are in danger.

I am not in danger if I do not have a side. If anything, I am in favor of the Americans. None of them have bothered me.

Are you saying that you would support a group of infidels against your own countrymen? Do you have no pride in your religion?

Ayad laughed at this last note when he read it.
You are not a religious person
, he scribbled.
You don't fool me.

Faisal considered this, stone-faced. Then responded:
You don't know what I am.

Ayad had had long arguments with his mother about what, exactly, Faisal was back in the day. A shape-shifter. A user. That was what she called him. According to her, the only reason a Shi'ite like Faisal played with him was that the other Sunni kids ignored him. That and the fact that what Faisal
really
wanted was to marry Ayad's cousin Hanan, who'd been living at Ayad's house then. Admittedly, there had been afternoons when Ayad could remember his friend sitting out at the wooden picnic table just below him, in his mother's rose garden, doing voices to make Hanan laugh. On the other hand, the other Sunni kids ignored Ayad too. So maybe there had been some using, but it had gone both ways. Normal using, if there was such a thing. So Ayad had worked out a compromise: Faisal could still play up on the roof, in the spaceship, which he'd helped build. And which Ayad considered to be the best avatar of his friend, a physical manifestation of his desire to escape who he was consigned to be.

The spaceship as a whole had always been a frivolous project. Its blueprints had been drawn up loosey-goosey—the word Faisal had preferred was
mu'wajj
, or literally “crooked”—on bits of paper; then it was constructed from scraps. And yet despite its absurdity, its impracticality, there had never been a moment during its conception and assembly, executed on this very same gravel-covered rooftop more than a decade ago, when Faisal had dropped the extraordinarily grave and deadpan seriousness that he adopted when consulting his friend over aspects of design.

Unlike you, I am on all sides
, Faisal wrote.
Especially the side that wins.

Which side is that?

I don't know yet.

As the two men crouched beside the rusting remains of their old toy, Ayad could still remember Faisal's expression, his exact method of nodding and running a thumbnail through his eyebrow, as he pored over one of Ayad's drawings, or picked up a pen and responded to one of his notes on their pad. He mentally cleared the present from the rooftop and relit the roof with the daylight of the past, revealing the palomino speckles of its pebbles interseeded with doomed eucalyptus shoots (he could summon these familiar things as casually as a photo in a book), and then—though this took a bit more concentration—he disassembled the spaceship into its constituent pieces, hoisted the great geared wheel that served as its floor back out into the open air, and balanced it atop two sawhorses.

Faisal's father had retrieved the wheel from a grain works in Ramadi and hauled it onto the roof. A quiet, sepulchral man, he'd rented a house from Ayad's family, done odd jobs for Raheem al-Najafi, for whom Ayad had worked too. But it was Faisal who'd imagined the spaceship. Faisal who'd bartered for the American comics that they'd read, secretly, inside its shadowed cockpit. Faisal who'd brought his old telescope out, charting the stars, and convinced Ayad to draw the worlds they would see. Ayad's mother had disliked the spaceship, largely because she had disliked Faisal. But in Ayad's opinion, the shape-shifting quality that allowed Faisal to recast the two of them as astronauts had been Faisal's strength, the very thing that allowed them to be friends. In that sense, it had seemed natural when Faisal applied to work with the Americans. Translating paid one hundred dollars a day—a gigantic sum. In almost no time, Faisal had a better cash flow than Ayad's family, especially after their government pension payments dropped away. And so it unnerved Ayad that Faisal was standing here on the same roof where they'd played as children, asking for help. But not exactly asking either—more like telling Ayad what he should do, as if he didn't have a choice, while at the same time pacing about so nervously that it seemed clear that maybe it was Faisal himself who didn't have a choice.

Ayad wasn't going to rent him his property. That was for sure. On the other hand, he had no power to enforce his refusal, so he was going to have to find some other appeal. Downstairs, Ayad made chai in the kitchen, offered it. They sat alone in the living room, Faisal casting his gaze about the environs, as if trying to match it up with the past.