Baghdad Fixer Read Free Page A

realize that I am surprised. She turns to me. “Look, we’re here covering this war and our friend’s been missing for three days and we heard he might have been brought here.” She says those words, “covering this war” as if we started it.
     
    The red-haired one, I guess she’s called Sam, though that sounds like a name for a man, dabs at her face. All that’s left is an afterglow on her cheeks and some runaway smudges of mascara under her eyes. She turns to me. “Please,” she says, lowering her voice from the tone she had taken a minute earlier. “Can you help us?”
     
    “Yes, of course, please. I would be more than happy to help you,” I say. I hate my choice of words. Awkward, formal. Maybe I’m out of practice. Happy? “Are you all right?” I ask her. “Can I get you something to drink?”
     
    Her eyes roll over me with suspicion. They are eyes of a strange colour that I’ve never seen before, sort of a golden sand or straw instead of a regular brown or blue or green.
     
    “No, thanks,” she says. “I’m fine. We just want to find my friend. He’s about five-foot-eleven and we know he was near the Rashid Hotel and he was wearing...” And I don’t entirely hear everything she is saying because I wonder why a woman like this is not somewhere in America, safe at home with her family, why she’s standing in a corridor in my father’s hospital, talking at me with those strange eyes, almost the colour of the marmalade I loved when we lived in England. It had a kind of sweetness and a bitterness at the same time.
     
    “Jonah Bonn,” I repeat to the nurse on the admissions desk. “Please, these people are guests in our country and it’s really important that we find their friend.”
     
    “What nationality?”
     
    “American.”
     
    The nurse raises her chin and her eyes narrow a little bit and I know she’s saying she doesn’t really care if there’s a dead American in the hospital.
     
    “Listen, I’m Dr al-Amari’s son and I, we, would really appreciate it if you would check.” I want to sound like she should listen to me, like she should feel she has no choice, but I still sound like I’m asking.
     
    “Here,” she says, handing me a stack of paper attached to a clipboard. “See if he’s there.” The only foreign names I can find are of two Frenchmen.
     
    ~ * ~
     
    “Come with me,” I say, and the three of them follow me towards the lift at the end of the corridor.
     
    “Pretty modern hospital. Not bad,” says the freckled man, and I realize I do not even know their names.
     
    “Sorry,” I turn to them when we reach the elevator, pressing the button more times than necessary. “I’ve forgotten my manners. My name is Nabil al-Amari.”
     
    “June Park,” says the Asian woman. She’s small and lithe and, some men would argue, just as pretty as the other one, but terribly thin for my liking.
     
    “Samara Katchens,” says the woman with the fiery hair. She offers her hand. It feels warm and soft in my palm, so much softer than I would have expected from a woman with such strong bones in her face, and such a loud voice. “You can call me Sam,” she says. Her teeth are bright white and I realize now that maybe it’s true what they say about the Americans, how you can spot them from their perfect smiles, because when people smiled in Birmingham they never looked like this.
     
    The freckled man holds out his hand for more of a slap than a shake, then presents me his closed fist of knuckles, which I belatedly realize I’m meant to meet with mine. “Raphael,” he says. I smile and press the button a few more times.
     
    The doors part, presenting Dr Hamza, one of Baba’s colleagues. He walks out and, on recognizing me, his eyebrows form an arc of pity, a well-traced shape I am sure he’s honed over the years of working here.
     
    He grabs hold of me to kiss me on both cheeks and behind him, as I tilt my head from this side to that, I see that we are