The Wreckage: A Thriller (12 page)

Out the window he can see the Tai Chi class on a patch of ground in the park. People in tracksuits, moving like puppets in slow motion. Stopping. Moving again. Ignorant people.

Fearful people. People who wake up every morning of their lives scared about something.

Chewing on a hangnail, he removes a piece of skin and spits it on to the floor. Then he looks into the mirror and fingers the bruise on the side of his head. The girl left it there. He thinks of her again, her dark hair and the pinkness of her lips.

His mobile rings. He listens rather than talks, letting his fingers slide over the tautness of his stomach. He closes the phone and goes to the bathroom, where he wets a towel and washes the smel of sex from his genitals, before splashing water over his face and neck. He wil pray before he eats. He wil eat before he kil s.

17

BAGHDAD

Luca Terracini orders a beer and a whisky chaser. He downs the shot-glass in a swalow, feeling the alcohol holow out his cheeks and scour his throat. He orders another whisky.

The TV is on above the bar. CNN. Footage of a US Senate hearing; Carl Levin, the committee chair, has wire-framed glasses perched on the end of his nose. He stabs his finger at an executive from Goldman Sachs, saying the firm’s own documents show the bank was promoting investment products it knew would fail while at the same time betting against them.

Luca orders another drink and takes it outside. Most of the journalists are upstairs on their satel ite phones, filing the story of the day: the US Ambassador in Baghdad, Christopher Hil , has final y commented on the fact that Iraq doesn’t have a government five months after the elections. He cal ed it the “growing pains of a nascent democracy,” making Iraq sound like a pimply teenager whose voice would break soon.

Luca’s hands have stopped shaking, but he can feel the gun oil between his thumb and forefinger when he rubs them together. Men died in the burning pickup; men who had wanted to see him dead; men with no reason to hate him, yet who did so completely and irrational y. Men with families; men who woke this morning and ate breakfast and washed and prayed and did al the normal things… yet before the day had ended their lungs were ful of fire instead of air. What a waste.

Right now Luca’s life doesn’t seem worth very much. At some point in the evening he decides to go home, but changes his mind. He doesn’t remember getting upstairs. He must have asked reception for her room number.

Now she is standing in front of him, wearing a bathrobe cinched tightly at her waist.

“Wel ?”

“Do you want a drink?”

“I think you’ve had enough already.”

She doesn’t shut the door. She doesn’t open it any wider.

“Can I come in?”

“No.”

“Do you want to go for a walk?”

“We’re in Baghdad. I don’t think it’s very wise to go walking.”

“No, you’re right.” He sways slightly. “We could walk around the pool.”

“That’s a very short walk.”

“We could do it more than once.”

Daniela hasn’t taken her eyes off him. Her head tilts to one side, her face smooth as porcelain. He wonders how warm it would be to touch.

“What happened today?” she asks.

He doesn’t want to lie. He’s told too many lies to women. Instead he changes the subject and asks about that drink again. She should tel him to get lost. Sober up. Cal her next time.

“Let me get changed. I won’t be a minute.”

He waits in the hal way, leaning on a wal , watching the lights on the ceiling blur and separate into pairs.

When she appears she’s wearing a fitted blouse and jeans. They take the stairs. Luca uses the handrail.

It’s a clear night, quiet except for the diesel generators. They walk in silence for a time, gravel crunching underfoot, along a path lit by garden lights hidden within the foliage. Each time they circle the garden they reach a point where the path narrows and Luca steps back to let Daniela go first. She knows he’s checking out her figure.

“So you’re an accountant.”

“You make it sound like a disease.”

She tel s him the story of her father, a bril iant mathematician, David Garner, famous for his work on probability and risk.

“I always thought that was quite ironic because he’s never taken a risk in his life.”

“He doesn’t gamble?”

“Never. Anybody who knows the slightest bit about probability would never gamble.”

She describes him as a big, shambolic man, dressed in tweed or gabardine, with a New York Yankees cap that he wears everywhere. Constantly lost in thought. Living with numbers.

“He forgets appointments, anniversaries, shopping lists…Sometimes he interrupts dinner and begins jotting down notes on the tablecloth. One day he gave me a lovely china tea set for my birthday before realizing it wasn’t my birthday at al , but my brother’s.”

“How does your mother cope?”

“She accepts his foibles. That’s what she cal ed them. She can’t understand his work, but consoles herself with the knowledge that few people can, perhaps only a handful in history.”

“Where is he now?”

“In a home. Once or twice a year the children get summoned and he changes his instructions about his wil and his funeral and threatens to leave us nothing. He has only debts, of course. For a math genius he was always lousy with money.”

Without being asked, Daniela mentions a husband, estranged, living in Detroit.

“How long were you married?”

“Eight years.”

“Another woman?”

“That’s normal y how it happens.”

Beyond the perimeter wal s, between the strands of razor wire, Luca can see a half moon hanging in the night sky.

“How long are you here for?” he asks.

“I don’t know. A month. Maybe two. The incoming government—when they choose one—needs to know the state of Iraq’s finances.” Daniela’s arm brushes against his. “We’re using fairly standard software. Accounting with a few extras. It col ates payments, expenses, insurance, that sort of thing.” She hesitates. “I real y shouldn’t talk about it…” She changes the subject. “Do you think about leaving?”

“Al the time.”

“Why?”

“People aren’t interested any more. They’re bored with hearing about Iraq and Afghanistan, just as they got bored with hearing about Vietnam, Watergate, the Iran–contra scandal, the global financial crisis and the oil spil in the Gulf.”

Daniela tilts her head, studying him. “Did something happen today?”

“I took a drive to Mosul—fol owing up on a story. It didn’t go to plan.”

“Meaning?”

“Two men died.”

“Journalists?”

“Haji.”

She shivers. Not from cold. They find a quiet corner of the lounge with armchairs and a sofa. Daniela wants a hot chocolate.

“I don’t know if that’s a house specialty.”

“Maybe I’l be surprised.”

He sits opposite her, his head clearer now.

“You won a Pulitzer Prize.”

“You Googled me.”

“I was curious. Nosey. I shouldn’t have told you that. Are you sobering up?”

“Yes.”

“Do you always drink so much?”

“No.”

Tucking her legs under her, she leans on the side of the sofa, resting her chin on her hands.

“What made you come to Iraq?”

“I’m a war correspondent. This is a war.”

The answer is too flippant. She lets him know it and he tries again, his voice a hoarse whisper.

“I guess I needed to understand why this mess was necessary in the first place. And why it’s necessary now. Growing up, I heard so many stories about Iraq from my mother that I felt I might belong here.”

“Is that because you don’t belong anywhere else?”

The prescience of the observation rattles something inside him. He blinks twice, moving his mouth, but no words come out. A waiter arrives and delivers their drinks.

Daniela is holding her mug in both hands. Her pink tongue appears, wetting her bottom lip, and disappears again. For the next hour they talk about Iraq, Afghanistan and other war zones in his career. As he tel s her stories, Luca can feel himself being drawn into the scene like an actor who forgets that he’s acting and the drama becomes his life—the journeys to sad, violent places; reporting on the best and worst of human beings.

“So much for me,” he says, not liking the way she’s looking at him, her neutrality, her silence, the way her eyes seem to be probing him for weaknesses—not to hurt him but to see where he’s broken.

“Were you scared today?”

“Yes.”

“You’re not like any journalist I’ve ever met.”

“How so?”

“You don’t seem very excited about what you do or driven to make your mark.”

“That’s because I wonder if I make things worse by being here. I distort the outcome. The observation of an event alters the event itself.”

“Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle?”

“You know your physics?”

“My father was a mathematician, remember?”

“If people like me weren’t here reporting the bombings and sniper attacks and sectarian kil ings, would they stil be happening?”

“Yes.”

“What makes you so sure?”

She shrugs. “We can’t just look the other way.”

“Why not?”

“Because the innocents are the first to suffer—the women and children.”

Daniela has finished her drink. She runs her finger through the pale froth left on the rim of the mug.

Luca glances through the doors. “I should go home.”

“It’s dangerous out there.”

“I know the back streets.”

She opens her mouth, changes her mind. Tries again.

“You can get a room here.”

“They’re booked out.”

“You could stay in my room.”

He looks at her a moment too long.

“There are twin beds. You can use the shower.”

The practiced womanizer in Luca wants to celebrate his success. The sexual historian within him reminds him of past mistakes. He’s not a player, remember? She’s too young, too earnest, she’s been hurt before; he should go now, leave her be, wish her a long and happy life.

Sitting in silence he looks into her eyes, down to her breasts and then at his own hands, stil covered in gun oil.

Daniela uses the bathroom first. She has cleared her papers and books from the spare bed. There are pages of handwritten notes in a neat, slanting hand. Luca sits in the cone of lamplight and stares at his reflection in the window, exhausted, half sober.

After he showers he borrows a robe and carries his clothes into the bedroom. Daniela is already in bed. Her eyes open. She notices the holster and weapon on his folded clothes.

“I didn’t think journalists carried guns.”

“I live outside the wire.”

“Is that a reason or an excuse?”

He picks up the pistol and pushes a catch. The ammunition clip drops into his hand. He shows her the single bul et lodged in the spring mechanism.

She looks at him, expecting an explanation, fearing for a moment she might not get one.

“There are some groups who value me as a trophy or a hostage or a commodity that can be traded for money or weapons: Shiite death squads, Sunni insurgents, criminal gangs…”

“One bul et won’t be enough.”

“It only takes one.”

A pulse seems to shiver in her eyes.

“I don’t want anyone risking his or her life to save me,” Luca explains. “And I don’t want my mother watching my execution on the internet.” Daniela turns away from him, facing the wal , pul ing the covers tight around her. She hardly seems to breathe at al .

Luca turns off the light and lies on his bed. Listening. Desiring. Wondering why every woman he touches seems to bloom and then wither like a cut flower. Sleep comes unexpectedly. It doesn’t stay. He wakes in fright, fighting a pil ow, the top sheet twisted around him. A hand on his chest… hers.

“You were having a nightmare.”

She is sitting on the edge of his bed.

“I’m sorry I woke you.”

“You don’t have to apologize.”

He knows the dream. It’s the same loop he watches on the wrong side of every night—the unbroken litany of destruction and misery. And it always ends the same way, with Nicola’s broken body almost buried beneath rubble. Only her head is exposed, her brown eyes open, blood on her lips.

Nicola once told Luca that he tried to distinguish between pain observed and pain shared. Pain observed is a journalist’s pain. His role was to watch and report without getting emotional y involved. Nicola said those who watch brutality and do nothing are no better than those who inflict it. “They are the bad Samaritans,” she said. It was a term that Luca had never forgotten. He was the bad Samaritan.

Daniela stil has her hand on his chest. She looks into his eyes and leans forward, brushing her lips against his. Opening and closing her mouth, letting her lips move wider, her teeth nibble at his tongue and lower lip and her hands slide down his chest.

Pul ing her down next to him, he presses himself against her, listening to her heart fluttering with the urgency of a damaged watch. Impatiently, she rol s him on top of her and he pauses with his penis resting at the entrance to her sex. He looks into her eyes, asking the question silently,
Is this what you want?