Saul's Game by Andrew Kaplan

Author:Andrew Kaplan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

CHAPTER 19

Khafat, Baghdad

23 April 2009

De Bruin’s house was a fortified villa in the Khafat district of west Baghdad, south of the Abu Ghraib Expressway. The villa was contemporary in design, white with cantilevered levels. It was surrounded by twelve-foot blast walls, zigzag car-bomb barriers, a steel gate, and had at least twenty or more heavily armed Peruvians on round-the-clock shifts.

Inside, the grounds were exquisite. A glass opening to an indoor-outdoor pool, flowers everywhere in the landscaped garden, and, painted on the interior walls, a mural of nineteenth-century Baghdad, the Ottoman Baghdad of horses and carriages and palm trees by the Tigris River.

What was unexpected were the guests: famous Iraqis, a painter, a poet, a glamorous television star, among others, and the food: a spread of mezzes, along with the best masgouf and kofta Carrie had ever tasted. In the background, a trio of musicians on the oud, piano, and violin played traditional Iraqi maqams.

“And when the war ends . . .” Eric Sanderson, deputy chief of mission at the U.S. embassy, eyeing Carrie when she walked in with de Bruin and Dasha, was saying.

“You keep saying that, but it is your war that will end,” Shaima Yassin, the television star, said, tossing her long wavy hair. “America will go home to its baseball games and its endless self-contemplation. You’d think Americans were Buddhists instead of Christians the way they study their own navels as though the rest of the world doesn’t exist, but the war you left us will go on for a hundred years.”

“Now you set her off, Mr. Sanderson. Suffering is the new Iraqi art form. It infects every conversation,” Abdul-Jabbar, an archaeologist noted for his deciphering of Sumero-Akkadian tablets, said.

“And despair. And ugliness,” the painter, Msayyiri, said.

“Ya Allah. And what was under Saddam?” Shaima said.

“Grandiosity. Stupidity. And banality. The triteness alone made you want to shoot yourself,” Msayyiri said.

“And fear,” Carrie said.

“And fear,” Msayyiri, looking at her, agreed.

“And now?” Sanderson asked.

“Sewage, Mr. Sanderson. And dead children. I hope it was worth it,” Msayyiri said, getting up and pouring himself some champagne from a bottle chilling in a silver bucket.

“You’re the artist?” Carrie asked.

He nodded.

“It’s odd, sometimes there’s beauty too. You see rockets exploding or red tracer bullets arcing across the sky at night; it can be beautiful,” Carrie said.

“Like Yeats,” al-Tariq, the poet said. “A terrible beauty.”

Later, in the bedroom with Marius de Bruin and Dasha, overlooking the garden and an outdoor pool so still it reflected the stars, and flying on ecstasy, Carrie had some of the best sex of her life; the three of them intertwined, no way to tell where one ended and another began.

And in the morning, first light, floating naked in the pool. Alone, with only the flowers and the birds and there was no war anymore and nothing except the sense that she had done it.

Because she had gotten up in the middle of the night and used the thumb drive sewn on the inside of her clutch—and a good thing

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