2
Washington’s first winter snow has melted to dirty gray slush heaped up on the sidewalks. An early morning wind blows new flakes hard and cold against Kat Polinski’s face. Soon the city will be white with fresh snow covering car roofs and the windowsills of the apartment block just up from Dupont Circle where Kat’s heading.
A large flake falls on her phone and melts. Kat presses the dial for Jennifer. She lets it ring to voice mail, “Hi, it’s Dr Jennifer Fox here. I’m in Iraq until December 21st but picking up messages.”
All up beat, as if being in Iraq’s like working anywhere else, as if Jennifer could be round the corner.
“It’s me,” says Kat lightly. “About to see how things are going with the apartment, then to the Russell Building for the hearing. Hope to catch you before that.”
She drops the phone into her pocket, slows her pace and stops across the street from the block where she and Jennifer have just bought an apartment. Jennifer’s Kat’s best friend but not an old one. They’ve only known each other a few years. Jennifer’s clever and groundbreaking in her work. She pushes boundaries in trauma surgery and is already acclaimed by her peers. She’s also funny and sexy and people love her. Part of Kat wonders if setting up home with Jennifer is a form of avoidance because she should be finding the right guy, seeing if she can purge her restless demons and settle and if it fails, that’s fine, at least she’ll know and can move on. Jennifer’s wondered the same about herself too, being in a similar situation or maybe a step ahead of Kat because she’s ended a relationship and needs decompression space. They’ve done it anyway and they’ve found a place with a great terrace, a huge living room, four bedrooms, two, which will be their studies, and two bathrooms to die for. The owner needed to sell, so the price was good and they calculate that even just renovation and selling will pay the mortgage so it’ll be win-win.
But renovation means dealing with contractors, and today it’s an electrician named Phil O’Connor, commissioned by Jennifer. He’s been paid half his money up front with a deadline to finish.
O’Connor isn’t returning Kat’s calls, and, worse, when Kat visited the new home yesterday he wasn’t there. It was littered with cigarette butts, beer cans, and sleeping bags rolled up in a corner.
This morning, she finds O’Connor’s truck in the parking lot.
Home
Electrical
–
Fast
,
Reliable
Service
is painted on the side, with a phone number underneath. She switches her phone to video, notches it up to the highest resolution and makes a call to Bill Cage.
“Light OK?” She asks.
“It’s fine,” says Cage.
Kat holds the phone’s camera lens six inches from the driver side door handle.
“Keep it steady,” says Cage. “Three, two, one….OK….hold it there….It’s accepting…we have an image.”
Cage is relaying the image into the fingerprint identification unit database shared throughout the federal intelligence community. It will show vehicle fingerprints, match them to O’Connor and run a full check on him.
Kat gets her answer in less than two minutes.
She quietly lets herself into the apartment. It’s warm like a sauna with the heating on full and smells of whisky and stale marijuana smoke. Plaster is stripped out down the walls and dug out from around the electrical sockets. A bare light bulb hangs precariously from the ceiling.
In a corner of a huge bedroom, O’Connor sleeps, tangled in bed sheets, on a pile of sleeping bags. His right arm drapes over the breast of a woman, who’s also asleep. His left is on the thigh of another. She lies; awake, on her side, eyes open, looking straight up at Kat.
Kat puts her finger to her lips for her to stay quiet. But she doesn’t. She jolts upright and screams. O’Connor sits up, eyes screwed against the light. His hand reaches down under the blankets as if for a weapon.
Kat side steps. “Phil, stop. It’s OK. It’s Kat Polinski. The owner.”
“Polinski.” O’Connor’s face looks pale, uncertain. He coughs phlegm into a handkerchief.
“Both hands out, Phil.”
O’Connor pulls his right hand from under the bundle of clothes that made up a pillow. “Shit, girl, you scared me,” says O’Connor.
“You got a gun down there?”
O’Connor shakes his head. “No, no way. It’s instinct, OK. It’s nothing, just what I do when disturbed.” He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand.
“You’re not going to meet the deadline,” says Kat.
“You never know what shit’s behind the walls.” The edge of his lips is turned down, sneering to keep some control. “Some problems delaying things.”
“Hold up.” O’Connor sits straighter and jerks his head at the two women. “They speak English. Not good. But they understand.”
Kat nods.
“Party’s over, girls,” says O’Connor. He stands up holding a sheet to cover himself, and kicks away the corner of a sleeping bag to reveal the women’s clothes. The women stand up, both naked, their expressions flat. They’ve seen better clients; seen worse, too. One is Caucasian. The other looks Hispanic.
“I need them to speak English, see,” says O’Connor. “I need to talk to them. They understand me see. It’s not just, you know….It’s not what it looks like.”
Kat walks to the terrace door and opens it. Cold air streams in.
“Quickly, ladies,” says O’Connor. The women step into their jeans, and pull thick sweatshirts over their heads. O’Connor presses banknotes into their hands, then closes the door behind them as they leave. He’s in his thirties, dark, tousled hair, face tired, wary, curious. He starts dressing. “Different name. So fucking what? Dennis, Phil…What’s it matter? You a fucking cop or something?”
“You used to be a good army electrician,” says Kat. “In Fallujah 2004, you kept a field hospital powered up while under attack. You went outside under fire to fix a generator. Your buddy got shot next to you. You had the choice to bring him in and save him or get the power going again and save the twenty lives inside the hospital. You saved the twenty, dragged your friend back dead. All the time you were working, he cried out for your help, but you ignored him and kept going. Not many people face choices like that.”
O’Connor’s stares at her, eyes red, knuckles white, gripping his shirt. “Who the hell are you?” he whispers.
“Back here, who understands how things like that change a person,” continues Kat. “Where war makes a man go in his mind. Least of all Marie, right?”
O’Connor flinches. “So I left my wife. Who doesn’t?—”
“Failed businesses in California, Nebraska. Debts all over the place.”
“So wire the fucking place yourself because I quit.” O’Connor’s standing his ground, but he’s forgotten about the shirt, which dangles from his hand like a rag.
Kat takes a slip of paper from her pocket, steps across to a windowsill, brushes off the dust. “You made the right decision that night in Fallujah,” she says.
She writes on the paper and hands it to O’Connor. “I want you to call up this guy. He’s a friend of mine, a professor of psychology at the Veteran Affairs Medical Center in Boston. He’ll make you well again. You have a daughter in Boston, too. Catherine. Get well. Get to know your daughter.”
Kat points at the shirt. O’Connor puts it on, but keeps his eyes on her.
“Rewire my apartment like you said you would; clean it up. The day it’s done, I’ll pay you the rest, and a bonus. Then, go to Boston.”
O’Connor nods. On the way out, Kat e-mails the Boston psychologist, then, walking carefully across freshly fallen snow and calls Cage. “Thanks,” he says. “I think it worked.”
“You still with him?”
“Just leaving.” A cab’s turning into the road and Kat hails it. “See you in ten minutes.”
Kat tries Jennifer again. She’s still on voice mail. She calls her unit at the hospital. No one’s knows that she’s checked in. It’s 7.56 in Washington, making it 17.56 in Baghdad. Sunset begins around 16.45, meaning it started getting dark more than an hour ago.
Jennifer should be back in the compound, but she’s not or she would have called to say she’s safe.
3
“You work for Trauma International,” says Abdul. It’s a statement. But it needs a response.
“Yes,” says Jennifer.
“That is an American aid agency.”
“I’m a doctor from George Washington University Hospital in Washington D.C. Call them. Three months a year, I go overseas with Trauma International to places like Iraq.”
“You have been here before?”
“Yes. A year ago.”
“Today. What were you told?”
“Told?”
Jennifer’s stomach turns. She tightens her right hand into a fist but keeps her line of sight steady on him.
“We were just doing our jobs,” says Dexter. It’s the first time he’s said anything and he speaks as if he has male stuff to prove and that worries Jennifer. She glances across, indicating him to stay quiet.
Abdul ignores Dexter. “Yes. What were you told?” he repeats.
“About what?” Her fingernails cut into the skin.
“It is better you say it.”
“I was told nothing,” she says. “I was treating people. Soldiers took us away. Now we’re here.”
The room is on the second floor of a six-story building set back in a compound. She saw the high metal compound gate close when they drove in. She counted the floors from the outside, counted the stairs as they walked up.
She’s wearing a white medical smock with a red cross on it, a sign of neutrality, and she plans to keep it like that.
Jennifer has a striking face, a strong jaw line and high cheekbones. Her blond hair’s tied back, showing her forehead. She’s 29, with more life in her features than many.
Windows, streaked with dirt, stretch across the length of the room. Sand has gathered on the sills outside. One pane is cracked, and a corner of glass missing. Newspapers are stacked on
bookshelves across one wall. Hooks and holes pockmark the other wall, where pictures once hung, but are now blank.
Ringed with chairs, the conference table takes up most of the room. Her medical bag is on the chair next to her.
Suddenly Dexter speaks. “You can’t keep us here like this.”
Jennifer says nothing.
Abdul says nothing.
Jennifer sits forward, chin in cupped hands, elbows on the table. Abdul refuses to look at her, his eyes always somewhere else, but that’s customary in this part of the world. It doesn’t tell her anything.
“I need to ask you again,” he says. “Did you learn anything unusual?”
The uniform of the men who took her away was of the Iraqi army. The men downstairs in the foyer are dressed like the police. But uniforms can be bought at market stalls. She doesn’t know who’s holding them and why they’ve been taken.
Each question, each flicker that changes his expression makes her more scared. His English is adequate but not fluent, so she answers clearly. “Nothing,” she says. “Nobody told me anything.”
Abdul brushes his hand over his shoulder holster, then walks out of the room, leaving the door open.
4
Kat flips through the Iraq news on her phone, two car bombs in Mosul, one in Nasirya, one in Hilla; a double mosque bombing in Baghdad; three more car bombs in the city; a mass grave found in Basra, a government minister shot dead.
Kat was a kid when America declared Mission Accomplished, and the blood keeps running.
She calls again: “Hi, Jen. I just checked on our new home. It’s all fine and got a meeting now.”
Kat’s not had success with stability and the thought of a new apartment with a close friend is important to her. The cab pulls up on C Street, outside the Russell Building.
Kat’s distracted. She stares at snow melting on the windscreen.
However much care you take, places that aren’t safe aren’t safe. Iraq’s one of them. Adrenalin runs round inside her. Her hands are unsteady as she pays the fare.
Often, it’s worse for the ones who aren’t there.