The Apartment A Novel(39)

Schmetterling was going to end his lecture there, but he could see, I suppose, that I did not understand his last statement, so he continued. It is extremely powerful, he said. Fill a room with fifty different instruments, and have them all play a single melody. The only instrument you will hear, or at least the one you hear first, and loudest, if it is played correctly, is the violin. By the time Schmetterling said that, the room was completely empty. He gave me the sheet music and said I could keep it. Then he said, Tell me, really, what you are doing here. I said, I have told you. No, he said, tell me the truth. I felt some psychic wall crack under the weight of Schmetterling’s strange, calm generosity, and I confessed: that I had assigned death from a distance, co-ordinated land and air attacks, missile strikes, and that I had, for a reason that is still beyond explanation but was, until then, the most necessary thing I ever did in my life, returned to Iraq alone. Had I intended to make restitution? Had I gone merely for money? Had I gone to get myself killed? Or was Iraq the only place in the world where I could find some equilibrium – where the world hated me as much as I hated it and myself, where I could live in the safety of never-ending hatred? It did not matter, I told Schmetterling, because I had only done harm. I left, finally, after a long stint of work with the Iraqi police. I was helping solve a string of kidnappings and murders of policemen and translators working with the US Army. For this, I had essentially reprised my role as a Naval officer in Baghdad, except I was a one-man team. I did most of the work in my hotel room. I woke, made some coffee, went online, checked email, checked the intel I was getting – the Army was providing a lot of it – checked surveillance activity, and prepared reports for the Army and police. These were long days. They were so long I had to phase out all the other work I was doing, all the reconstruction and development consulting. There was no more rescuing priceless artefacts looted from museums. From time to time, I left the Green Zone to meet with police officials in places where abductions were heavy, and on occasion I went out to Forward Operating Posts to give briefings about progress on our cases. The insurgents were abducting these men and torturing them to death. We knew this because we found the bodies. The interrogations, based on the conditions of the bodies found, often took a very long time. They squeezed the men’s heads in vice grips until their skulls broke. They broke men’s backs. They sliced off limbs and genitals. They poured acid all over faces. They – and this was true – tied them down, made small lacerations all over their naked bodies, and had housecats chew on them. So the men I worked with – the forces I helped co-ordinate – were eager to reduce the abductions for the sake of getting new recruits. The US Army was keen to identify and halt the leaks that were leading to the security lapses that allowed these men to be abducted – the identities of translators, for instance, were supposed to be kept secret. The Iraqi police said the same thing – that they wanted to reduce abductions, identify leaks, and boost the morale of recruits – and perhaps they meant it, but in reality the only deterrence measure they could carry out with any efficiency was to retaliate with torture nearly as extreme as the insurgents’. One morning, at a police station in south-eastern Baghdad, I was briefing a chief inspector and a US Army lieutenant colonel when there was suddenly a bit of panic. A man came in and spoke to the chief inspector, and the chief inspector immediately excused himself, put all of his papers into a case, and hurried out the door. The lieutenant colonel, now freed of his obligation to be respectful to everyone in front of the Iraqi chief inspector, responded with a fuck off when I asked what he thought that was all about. And then I was all alone in the blank little room, except for a little table with some orange soda cans on it, and a platter of chocolate bars. I got my things and left, and went out to the main room where all the desks were, and where small oscillating fans blew air around slowly, and sat down across from the only man still there – there were, because of rampant attacks on police stations, often very few men inside them – an inspector who was leaning back in his chair and smoking. Rather than rearrange my lift back to the Green Zone at great expense to myself, I just sat down near him, lit a cigarette, and asked how things were going. Fine, he said. What was all that about? I said. He leaned forward, and I leaned forward too. He said they’d got a high-value target and were taking him for questioning. I asked why the questioning didn’t take place here. I knew the answer. Perhaps I asked the question because I wanted to pretend to him or to myself that I did not know the answer. The inspector smiled and leaned back again. He said, cryptically, and in an English so broken and so mispronounced that I had to rephrase his words in my mind as he spoke, or rather speak for him: The way to win a war is to convince your enemy you have the right to kill him. The enemy will fight forever, to the very last man, if he believes his enemy has no right to kill him. When our men, he said, are abducted and tortured, what are they asked? Nothing. It’s punishment for working with collaborators. If they want secret information about the Iraqi police, he said, they can walk up to the first policeman they see, give him a little bit of money, and ask him a question. If they want an Iraqi policeman to assassinate somebody, or let them drive a bomb into a crowded square, easy, they just have to pay him. That was the inspector’s answer to the question of why the man was not being questioned in the station. Of course I knew that nobody of any importance was ever questioned in a police station. I checked the time. I had a while still. I leaned forward again and, out of real curiosity, not in an attempt to make a moral accusation, asked, What’s it like, getting someone to recognize that right? The man leaned forward and said something like, I suspect you know far better than I. Perhaps he said another sentence entirely. Perhaps he said it was rewarding. The man leaned back and said nothing more, and I decided it was worth the expense to get my lift back to the Green Zone rearranged.