TWO CITIES

 

A year after the events at Camp Liberty, while Rem Gunnersen was living in Europe (Halsteren, Amsterdam, and afterward Bruges), he was asked in a casual discussion to describe two bad days. They didn’t have to be the worst days he’d ever had, just two stinkers. It’s a game, the man, a Norwegian, said. If your story’s worse than mine, I’ll buy the next drink.

While the men did not know each other, they’d passed the day in a canal-side bar drinking shots and chatting with ease, and a game, whatever the premise, would add purpose to the late afternoon.

Rem had two stories in mind before he’d properly considered the idea. When he did consider it, he realized that he’d chosen these days not because they were his worst, but because they worked as parentheses either side of a year he wished to set behind him.

On the first bad day (story one), his dog, Nut, a dirty white insecure Staffordshire bull terrier, went missing.

On the second (story two), a man he’d worked with kidnapped another man, then drove halfway across the country with him in the boot of his car.

The thing is, Rem explained, he’d almost certainly kidnapped the wrong man.

*   *   *

If the Norwegian had asked for one story Rem would have chosen the first.

Nut slept in the same room as Rem and his wife. The dog suffered gas (no diet would cure it), and being timid the creature didn’t like surprises. He ignored other dogs; was never heard to bark or growl; sat between people as they talked and appeared to understand their conversations.

Rem loved the routine. The early walks, the late walks. The lake-front at Rogers Park dusted with mist. How Nut waited to be told to run. How the dog loved water. How, every year, he rediscovered ice. Nut doted on Rem and Cathy, walked jauntily in their company, shone with affection, would lean against a door if he was shut out of a room, just to be close.

Nut disappeared before Rem left for Iraq, and Rem later realized that if the dog hadn’t vanished, he would have stayed in Illinois. Nuts’ needs and routines set a perimeter they never questioned; without that perimeter, their horizons automatically broadened.

*   *   *

Rem set his morning in order. First the Robinsons, then the Rosens, the Colemans, then Matt.

He found Martin Robinson on the driveway of his home in Lake Forest. The man leaving, car pointed downhill, the weather turning from indeterminate drizzle to a harder, full-on rain. Rem ran from his car with his jacket pulled over his head and leaned through the passenger window, and Robinson pushed Rem’s head back and kept his hand out for the money.

As the car drove away Rem looked back to the house. He never envied people money, seldom felt bruised at others’ entitlement and excess, even now, handing over cash on a broad driveway curved to give a last long view of the lake, the landscaped garden, treeless until the incline, the flat-roofed house, the lap pool, the edge of a Chihuly chandelier, those slab windows reflecting a sombre two-tone view. Grey lake. Grey sky. These people didn’t need money, not in the same way Rem needed money.

The cleaners along these lake-front houses arrived in vans labelled Maintenance Technician. The trash collectors – Waste Managers. Decorators – Design Consultants.

*   *   *

Two thousand. Four thousand. Five thousand.

*   *   *

Twenty minutes later Rem met with Martin and Samantha Rosen in their house with its Tudor frontage. Said he wouldn’t come in because he was wet, and thought it kind when Samantha Rosen returned with a towel, asked if he wanted a coffee, and behaved with less embarrassment than her husband. Rem left the money on the kitchen counter, and didn’t look at the package as he sipped the coffee and calculated the cost of the appliances. Those cabinets are engineered and handcrafted, you can’t slam the doors, even if you kick them they slide home with a sigh.

It wasn’t green they’d wanted but chartreuse. Rem wasn’t a housepainter, but an interior decorator. The money he brought wasn’t anything other than satisfaction, under the circumstances.

*   *   *

At the Colemans’, Rem spoke with a housekeeper who said that Marie Coleman had just left, and Rem wondered what was going on. They have these people in their houses, coming and going, and yet they figured the problem came from some sticky decorator. Cathy had a point, he shouldn’t be so easy to ride. A Yorkshire terrier, small even for the breed, scuttled for the door, and the housekeeper held it back with her foot and called it Lucy. Andy Coleman – nicknamed ‘turd-cutter’ by either Matt or Mike for his tight mouth and pudgy cheeks – worked for the Lake View office of the Chief of Police. A portrait of the man and wife, black-and-white head shots, mounted on the wood panelling.

Rem held on to the money; while he didn’t want to return, he didn’t trust leaving an envelope containing this much cash. The Colemans held the deepest grievance. The ring was an heirloom piece. The housekeeper recognized the logo on Rem’s car and told him: You need to speak with the Stahls.

*   *   *

Before he reached Chicago, Rem received two calls from Andy Coleman. Both abusive. The first call nothing but an indignant sulk: ‘You said you’d be here. We gave you a specific time. We had an agreement.’

The second message was less constrained and the man shouted. ‘How would you feel if someone broke into your home? How would that feel, Gunnersen? Hey? You tell me? How about I come to your home and take something of yours? How will that feel?’

Rem wanted to tell him to go to his apartment, no worries, help himself to whatever he wanted. Instead he managed to sound reasonable, even made himself smile so his voice would carry some colour.

‘Sorry to miss you. There’s a misunderstanding. I came by earlier but you weren’t there. I didn’t want to leave anything as the house didn’t look secure. Let me know when you’re about. I can come back tomorrow. Mornings aren’t a problem.’

*   *   *

The last visit promised to be the most difficult, and Rem waited a long time in the car, and smoked despite his sore throat. You need to speak to the Stahls. The point of the exercise already undermined. If Rem was paying people to keep their mouths shut he wouldn’t need to speak with the Stahls, because the Stahls wouldn’t know. Just as some slack-mouthed housekeeper shouldn’t know either.

Nobody but the Robinsons and the Rosens had any business with him. These were the people named by Matt. The only two. The Colemans were included for containment.

Cissie let him in, wrong-footed him with a kiss on the cheek, said breezily that Matt was in the back and how about a coffee? Rem couldn’t calculate if this was bravado, because they’d known each other for so long – was she supposed to answer the door in sackcloth? Weep? Cower? What did he expect? She hadn’t done anything wrong. Even so, her cheeriness made him sore.

No such breeziness from Matt. Sequestered on a dark internal porch, Matt wiped his hands down his legs but didn’t offer to shake hands. His expression fixed in a gawp, a slap-red rash ran up his neck. He moved in slow counterpoise to Rem, a greasy movement, distrustful to the core.

Rem laid out the papers for the loan agreement, the book of payment slips, a separate sheet listing the names and amounts he’d paid. Payments that counted into thousands of dollars. He outlined them one at a time, but didn’t mention the Stahls.

While Rem spoke Matt hastily gathered the papers and looked to the door, and Rem guessed that Cissie knew nothing, had no idea.

When he asked, Matt drew a small in-breath that sounded like incredulity, perhaps even scorn. ‘I’ll pay every cent back. As long as I have work I can pay you.’

Rem closed his eyes, quarried for an explanation.

‘There isn’t any work. No one wants to hire us, Matt. We’re done.’ Rem let the fact sit before venturing. ‘I have to explain the situation to Mike and the others. I have to find reasons why.’ Rem stood, hands to his knees, a simple, pneumatic movement. ‘You pay in each month. That’s all you need to do. We don’t need to be in contact otherwise.’

Cissie busied herself in the kitchen as he left. No coffee being made, instead it looked like a supper of pasta and eggs and ham and sour cream. Rem had left his cigarettes on the table, had set them down when he’d taken out the papers. He didn’t want to return for them, didn’t want them at all.

*   *   *

Rem arrived home to find the lobby unlocked, the mail picked up, which meant that Cathy was home – although she never left the door open, this was his habit, and his problem when people came in and fouled in the hallway. At the top of the stairs he found the outer, heavy warehouse door, metal-sheathed, open. The second apartment door also open. No welcoming dog. No Cathy either.

*   *   *

He searched the neighbourhood with the leash wrapped about his knuckles, hopeful at every corner and block-long view that Nut would be there, shivering – because this is what he did when he was lost, he shivered, he cowered, he whimpered. This was Coleman’s doing. No doubt. Rem couldn’t imagine anything more provocative than breaking into a house and letting a dog out on the street.

*   *   *

Unlike Kuwait City, Amrah City had no central business zone, and only one building higher than four storeys, the Ministry of Oil, a honey-coloured, hive-like building of twenty-five storeys, which could be seen some distance from the city. Rem looked for similarities to other cities, but three factors – the vast plane of squat oblong houses, the pounding heat, and how disturbingly vacant the city appeared – dominated any familiar elements.

Amrah City Section Base (aka: ACSB, The Station) lay four miles from the Regional Government Office, Southern-CIPA. Pinched between Shi’a and Sunni districts, the former light-industrial complex had once housed a packing plant, a cannery, a coach station, and an ice factory. The buildings wore scars from the conflict, and there was evidence that the Palace Guard had used the complex as a garrison. The compound was barely adequate in scale and location, and housed nearly twelve hundred non-Iraqi foreign nationals, Fobbits, who bedded down in stacked container units – alongside a further fifteen hundred Americans and other allies, although this number declined by the day. The recent increase in security breaches made the post less attractive for contractors who had no military experience. Protected by a fortified outer wall, Section Base housed a cinema, a sports hall, stores, and a PX, and in the courtyard a row of cabins, referred to as ‘the ovens’. The electricity seldom ran longer than four hours, so the compound rang to the thrum of generators.

The job fell short of expectation on the first day. Rem, assigned to Unit 409, was told that he couldn’t stay inside the compound, as ACSB was classified as home territory. If he wanted the Strategic Placement Bonus he’d have to leave the compound every day.

Rem built walls to repel and redirect blasts: walls to stop cars, mortars, rockets, objects propelled with great force and speed; walls to stopper windows, doorways, shop-fronts either side of the new highways; walls to segregate Sunni from Shi’a. The project involved the fortification of the north, south, and western routes into the city – routes which cut the city into separate zones.

For the first week the crews worked a night shift (four nights on, one off), and laboured under arc-lamps in vacant neighbourhoods which reminded Rem of the Southside of Chicago. On the midday news, by satellite, he saw the ramps he’d built, the road divisions and blast walls, the routes broad enough to carry troops and convoys. Unlike Baghdad, Amrah City would have no Blue or Red Zones. If the old city didn’t work they would sweep it aside and build a new one in its place. The neighbourhoods straddling the main routes were razed in a one-block strip either side of the highway. Houses, hotels, and businesses were demolished, along with every facility, school, surgery, or market which might house any kind of crowd, and Rem became used to seeing the city through a pale haze of dust.

They worked at night, as if in a fever, to the clatter of gunshot and the glow of street fires. The cleared space beside the road buzzed with itchy expectation, and Rem wondered what had happened to the people who’d lived in these districts and how much of the dilapidation was new. He worked in a crew with a security escort of ex-soldiers and ex-marines, American in the large part, but also Australian and Danish, independent security outfits with repurposed Humvees front and back, apprehensive boys dressed in full protective gear, who wouldn’t hold any position for very long, anxiousness riven through them.

Eight nights in, a woman stumbled over the debris between the generators and spotlights. Rem rode on the back of a roller, an eye on the trash that spilled into the street, the broken stone, the dirt road. He saw the woman, dressed in a black abaya and niqab, dust rising about her, turning as if surprised, unsure of the next expected move. With shouting and a mighty clack of armament security established a perimeter about the woman and shouted instructions in English and crude Arabic. Rem saw men running, some toward, but most away, throwing themselves over the barrier they were building.

And nothing happened.

‘They use children. They use women. They use crazy people, retards, the deaf and the dumb. They make bombs in their homes and strap them to the mentally infirm then detonate them by remote. They slaughter their own people. There’s no logic.’

The man driving the roller, unit leader Luis Hernandez, from Minnesota, known as Santo, spoke as if he was an authority, as if these were established facts.

‘They hate us. They hate life. They’ll kill everyone to show it.’

Rem didn’t want to agree, but the woman was crazy, without doubt, and she’d been shoved out as a threat, even when she was not primed.

*   *   *

The next night the bombing started in earnest. A length of wall along Jalla Road taken out, along with a number of the new watchtowers, concrete perforated by EFPs. The exposed rebar, the scattered blocks and punctured walls became a kind of signature, Rem’s image of the city. Two supply trucks returning from the airport were assaulted, the drivers dragged into the street and cut to pieces; the incident posted online before the news reached ACSB. To add to the slow accumulation of deaths (highest among them the foreign nationals from Nepal, Pakistan, and India) came specific assaults against the units working on the new highways. The incidents quickly became continuous and seemed organized. Work stopped, and while they waited out the trouble Rem spent his quiet hours playing cards with Santo, and won every hand.

At the end of Rem’s second week ‘the ovens’ came under attack. Shielded by the PX the cabins had always seemed secure, but on this night the mortars made determined arcs, as if magnetically drawn to their tin sides and roofs. In the first volley two cabins were obliterated and six damaged, fragments of debris pierced the PX. In the second, one hut took a direct hit, killing two men from Unit 89, and wounding three. Rem watched the team of men clean up. They wore the same green overalls, the same protective gear, and moved with practised care bagging what they found.

*   *   *

The PX, the most secure building in the compound, became Rem’s second home. During the day he stored his sleeping roll in a locker with a bust hinge. He changed clothes every other day, started buying sweatshirts from Stores to avoid using the laundry which was sited right beside the inner blast wall. Since the attack most of Unit 409 used the showers beside the PX in any case. Rem made sure he didn’t present a problem. He slept in the commissary during the day, hunched over a table, alongside the Indian and Nepalese truckers.

Santo began to take his meals with Rem and when Rem asked why he wasn’t as familiar with the other men, Santo shrugged. ‘I’m unit manager.’ He held up a small sheaf of papers. ‘I hold grave responsibilities their young minds cannot comprehend.’

Rem asked what the papers were.

‘The rotas. I’m deputized to post the work rotas. On a noticeboard.’

‘It’s a skill.’

‘I decide the colour of the pin. Exactly where the paper goes. The hour they’re posted.’ Santo smiled. ‘You know the trouble you cause? They talk about you all the time. They want you to return to your quarters but they think you’re a little crazy.’

‘How so?’

‘Look at you. Nobody wants to mess with a big guy. Everybody’s afraid of you.’

Rem asked how much of this mattered.

‘I’m just saying. Nobody wants to fuck with you. That’s all.’

Santo liked to run his hand back over his head, the palm flat and one or two fingers bent to scratch his scalp, which he generally kept shaved, so the noise, for such a small gesture sounded loud. Rem thought of this gesture as something urban, partly because he knew that Santo came from Minneapolis, and partly because the Latino boys, with their shoulders burned with tattoos and their various styles of goatee, appeared more urban than rural. He couldn’t picture Santo outside of a city.

‘I’m short. People fuck with me all the time. Like Fatboy, they hit on me like Fatboy there. Difference is, they do this only one time.’ Santo pointed to Fatboy, a weedy nineteen-year-old, a mouse. Stunted in pre-pubescence, the man/boy ate burgers, fried meat, drank power drinks, never slept, suffered from bad skin, and remained rake-thin. Fatboy liked to smile, a smile which showed small and weak teeth. He never disagreed or bad-mouthed anyone, no matter how unpleasant the exchange. Rem hadn’t seen him angry, despite the abuse he had to tolerate, and because of this he admired the boy. Fatboy managed supplies for the PX. He lived to supply and delivered on every request (Cheetos, Oreos, Chipotle dip, Mega-Moca-Latte-Mix, Vegemite, DVDs, Blu-Rays even, CDs, and, according to rumour, porn of any variety). Fatboy navigated with ease around HOSCO’s complex systems. And best of all, he let Rem sleep wherever he wanted.

As a consequence, Rem drew Fatboy into their breaks and lunchtimes, invited the boy to sit with them when he played cards with Santo before their night shift. And while Santo rarely spoke to the boy he didn’t appear to mind his company, especially when Fatboy brought chips and Cheetos, dips and sometimes fries.

Santo smiled every time he spoke about the money he was making. ‘In thirty days the pay becomes unreal. Now I’m in extra-overtime. I’m printing money. Soon it will have my face on it.’

Santo liked to smoke home-grown smuggled by the convoy security. He liked the day to slip from him, he liked to feel easy, so if anything happened he’d be in the best shape to take it, because bad news shouldn’t be taken straight. ‘I have this idea.’ He leaned toward Rem, his breath sweet and grassy. ‘You know. Something you should do, because you’re a big white man and they won’t say no to a big white man. The idea? We work on the teams that go in after the attacks. We volunteer.’

‘We volunteer? This is your idea?’

‘It’s a good idea. You’ve no idea how much they pay. By the time they go in everything’s over. It’s meat, it’s not even people, what’s left over.’

Rem didn’t like it, but Santo persisted. ‘You put together a team. They want people just like you. Big white people who do things.’

Rem wouldn’t consider it. He’d seen enough devastation from a distance, and had trouble forgetting the cabins obliterated by the attack, the stink of scorched blood and fat, his fear over what had happened to the men inside.

*   *   *

The shifts altered once the buildings had been cleared either side of the new routes: so they began to work during the day. Every night, after Santo returned to the cabins, Rem spread out his mat and lay under a table in the cafeteria and knew he would not sleep. Santo’s idea stuck under his skin. Them and us. They blew up markets, employment queues, clinics, schools, colleges, funerals, any protest or procession. They bombed exit routes, corridors, roadways, targeted surgeries, emergency vehicles, so that there could be no escape. And when this was done they went to the hospitals and blew up the arriving ambulances, the waiting rooms, targeting relatives, the doctors and nurses. How many times did Rem, Santo, and the crew of Unit 409 listen to the attacks then wait for the follow-up blasts? Rem had no language for this, but understood that he was part of the dynamic. However separate Santo and the others might regard themselves, Rem at least admitted that he was, in some way, connected.

*   *   *

Three in the morning Rem woke to see Fatboy stacking candy bars into the vending machines. A slight nervous energy ran through the boy, his feet jiggered as he unloaded the boxes.

Rem watched him walk away, arms full of snacks and cardboard flats, and told himself he wanted company. He followed Fatboy through the complex, a small channel of light marked a corridor to an exit, a set of folding doors. He found his cigarettes in his pocket, caught up, and offered the boy a smoke.

‘Can’t sleep?’

‘Don’t seem to need it.’ Fatboy looked at the sky, at a yellow horizon edged by shadowy palms and the distant square hulks of buildings. He pointed at the cabins with boards secured behind the windows to prevent blast damage. ‘Like a face,’ he said. ‘See? Eyes? Mouth?’

Rem looked back to the PX, worried about the light from the corridor.

Fatboy’s thoughts were often disconnected and Rem became used to the chaotic switches: ‘What’s the most people you ever saw?’

Rem said he didn’t know.

‘The most people – in one moment. Right in front of you? Face to face?’

Rem wasn’t sure, and Fatboy led him back through the PX, past the Stores, the commissary, the humming fridges; the canteen seeming longer in the half-darkness, its recesses deeper. The boy leaned against the door before he pushed. ‘Tell me how many you think there are.’

The door opened to a series of interlinked spaces – a loading dock, a parking lot, the remnants of a boulevard – one large area bordered on two sides by blast walls, and along the far side, by low-rise prefab buildings. Lamps mounted on the buildings cast an acid wash over the compound. To Rem’s amazement the ground was covered with sleeping bodies.

Fatboy leaned against the door to keep it open. ‘Wild, right? TCNs. Third-country nationals. They run the facilities. Everything.’

From their feet to the far perimeter slept the drivers, shelf-stackers, cleaners, sales clerks, barbers – he couldn’t account for the numbers.

‘They don’t have anywhere to sleep?’

‘Most do. There’s an area behind with shipping containers. They’re modified for sleeping, each container holds around nine men. They’re mounted one on top of the other. Not everyone’s working. Some are going home, others are being shipped out, or transferred. If you aren’t working, you aren’t assigned quarters. You ever seen anything so wild?’

‘I don’t see how this is any safer?’

‘The containers get hot. A while back some of them were burned out. After that most people started sleeping like this. It’s better to be outside, especially when there’s trouble.’

From what Rem could see the bodies were male, men sleeping side by side, fitted together, on and under vehicles, lodged crazily, puzzlelike, head to toe, with little space between them. Most slept in thin T-shirts, trousers, with rags or paper or newspaper over their heads and faces. Rem couldn’t absorb the detail, so that group immediately at his feet stood in for the many laid out before him.

*   *   *

Rem and Fatboy began to spend their nights together.

Fatboy’s habit would be to smoke, pause, then ask a question, as if there was something on his mind.

‘You ever pray?’

Rem answered no.

‘Your parents alive?’

Rem shook his head but didn’t answer. He finished one cigarette, lit another.

‘My mom lives in Michigan. Doesn’t do much but eat.’

There were times when Rem thought the boy wasn’t right, that somewhere along the spectrum of normal and crazy Fatboy pulled up short. When he noticed how poorly the boy looked after himself he took on duty of care and presented him with food, fruit, nuts, things he thought would be good, and sat with him as he ate. Fatboy, for his part, began to open up.

‘There’re these marsh Arabs. They live east of here between the Tigris and the Euphrates, and they build these huts out of reeds on these stilts. Real small. And there’s one big hut, this place where everyone meets. You just go in and you ask anything you want to ask, like, where are all the fish, and someone will tell you. Or you go there because you’re troubled, or you want an answer to something, and someone always has an answer. Someone always knows what you’re supposed to do.’

Rem thought the boy was homesick, but not for home. ‘You’ve seen these people?’

‘I will do. Some day.’ Suddenly the boy choked up, and Rem wondered, if he ever made it to this place, this raised hut set above the marsh, what question he would ask.

‘You have someone at home?’ the boy asked.

Rem said yes, he had someone. ‘My wife comes from Texas,’ he explained. ‘A place called Seeley.’

‘Same as the mattress?’

‘Same as the mattress. I think she’s happy to be out of there, but I think she misses Texas.’

‘You think you did the right thing coming here?’

Rem shrugged. ‘My mother had these ideas. She’d say something like: everything you do puts you one step forward. Some things are better not known.’

‘You wish you hadn’t come?’

Rem looked up and took in the sky, blank because of the light-spill from the compound. Fatboy came from a small town himself. He never could have imagined these things or such a place. This wasn’t their home.

*   *   *

The idea that Rem Gunnersen should take employment away from home came from his wife, Cathy, because, she said, she needed a vacation.

Cathy Gunnersen’s realization came to her after her sister’s wedding. This being no special night and no special occasion, except Rem had started drinking at midday as a party of one and left a full beer in the utility room right on top of the washer, so when the spin-cycle kicked on, the can tipped over and the beer saturated the laundered clothes. She found him splayed across the couch, feet on the armrest, heels digging a groove, with another beer gripped between finger and thumb, jiggling to some rhythm or some other agitation. Cathy wanted to know was wrong with the first beer. Hey? And the second? What was wrong with that? Come on? An open can on the kitchen counter, another in the fridge, another beside the couch – she could map his afternoon. Did he have any clue how much he was drinking? Seriously, was anyone keeping track? It wasn’t the drinking that bothered her, no, what angered her was the idea of him drinking while she worked. And why, could he please explain, was the dog out in the hall?

‘Listen to me,’ she said. ‘Listen. I need a vacation. OK? I – need – a – break.’

Rem understood the distinction: her disagreement wasn’t about the event, per se, it was about the timing. And hadn’t he felt wrong-headed all day? Besides, it wasn’t about the beer, it wasn’t about getting drunk, but some continuing aggravation set against him: a bad curve to the day of nothing being in place, of everything beginning to prickle. Another Gunnersen self-detonation

‘You – Rem Gunnersen – need – to – work.’

Cathy Gunnersen could wrastle a problem until it became unbearable. Formerly these situations were managed with sex. Rem would just unbuckle and they’d have at each other. These days, right now, that possibility was spoiled by her habit of closing conversations with a monumental sulk, which demonstrated nothing but disappointment. Most times she walked off in less and less of an act.

‘Get over this,’ she said. ‘Start over.’

Rem held his tongue. It’s always the people who don’t have to start over who speak like this.

*   *   *

The wedding party had ended badly. It wasn’t that Rem disliked his sister-in-law’s partner – a fashion buyer for a high street chain Rem could never remember – he just couldn’t stop needling the man (Don’t worry, you’ll always be her first husband). In return the groom preened at the news from Cathy about Rem’s business not doing so well. Everything was headshakingly ‘too bad’. But times were tough for everyone, right? At least Rem still had a business, right? However diminished. And he could always go back – where was it now – to I-raq, Afghanistan, Kuwait, wherever it was he’d gone that first time, and earn some more? Right?

Cathy wouldn’t hear of it.

Rem’s speech, volunteered without request, included a joke about men who design women’s clothes and another about sodomy. A couple, newly-wed, come into the doctor’s office, and after a thorough examination the doctor finds the woman to be a virgin, despite her husband’s claim that he ‘puts it to her’ every night …

Cathy repeated Rem’s jokes to Maggie at work. She specified the targets, punch by punch, the blows levelled at the groom’s faith, his occupation, his sexual prowess (about which, she had to admit, her sister never expressed enthusiasm). It wasn’t embarrassment or humiliation she’d felt as Rem slowly pumped his hips in demonstration: this crudity, these dim thrusts meant nothing. Cathy drew a picture of Rem looming acute over a long table loaded with plates and glasses and lit candles, a table dressed with flowers and napkins, with creams and fleshy pinks – and this she found inexcusable. Rem, top heavy, ox-like, boxy, overburdened, ready to topple, slake off and hammer down like some great hunk of glacial ice. It was this: his pure force, his size against the delicacy of the table which she found humiliating, and how the entire room remained silent for the duration of his speech, listening to his Continental English, aching for him to hit the deck and take out the cake.

As it happened, Cathy was the one to fall over. Not one drop of drink in her, she flopped to the floor. Couldn’t remember catching a heel in the carpet, but one moment upright, the next, prone, knees spread, and a feeling afterward of indigestion, a low-grade bellyache stuck to the gut that lasted too long.

*   *   *

Rem slept with his head on one arm, the other tucked under the pillow. Cathy spoke to the back of his head. The vacation became a simple matter. She didn’t want to go anywhere, she wanted to stay home, in any case she couldn’t leave, not with her work. They could spare her, sure, but her last break had resulted in Maggie receiving the promotion to shift-supervisor – and wasn’t that the start of everything going wrong? No, this vacation would come under a different arrangement. Rem, who wasn’t doing much except a whole lot of moping around, would have to find a real job that paid real money, and send the money back. He could use this time to consider his drinking, his attitude, his habit of grinding people down, of riding someone’s back until they were just plain tired of carrying him. Better than sun beds, a Mexican beach, an ocean of mojitos, this vacation would cost her no effort and no expense. Which is exactly what made it perfect.

Rem sat up and turned on the light – which improved nothing.

Cathy drew herself to her elbows. Looked about ready to say something she’d been saving.

‘This isn’t a discussion.’ As Rem left the room he felt it drag after him. Nut followed in a sympathetic sulk.

Maybe going someplace else was a good idea. He looked out the window at Clark. A subterranean night, yellow and dim. The changing stoplights. The lack of traffic. The taqueria, open and empty.

Nut settled half-on, half-off the rug, raised his head and huffed. A heaviness to the sound that Rem could appreciate.

*   *   *

Cathy’s stubborn disconnection outlasted any other bad mood, and through the weekend it became obvious that things weren’t going to settle in their usual way. Rem knew when to stay clear, and Cathy took on double shifts at the Happy Shopper, took anything extra that Maggie could offer.

Cathy blamed Rem for the dog. He never locked the doors. Never checked they were locked. Despite Rem’s claims, she didn’t find it strange, just sad, and didn’t blame a third party for the dog’s disappearance. Once again, this all came down to Rem.

‘The doors, Rem. See for yourself. They aren’t forced.’

Rem kept the payment to the Colemans to himself, along with his certainty that Nut’s disappearance was related. He took a two-day job refurbishing a dentist’s office at 5 North Wabash, and for two days lost himself to the sticky swipe of a roller, to the soft spray of white emulsion, the thrum of the El as the trains scudded the corners on the raised tracks. While he painted he boiled with plans of revenge. He spoke with Mike, who said he’d be up for anything, if Rem could devise a workable plan. Rem realized that neither of them were graced with SEAL-like stealth or had any kind of smarts for housebreaking. He couldn’t see them storming the Coleman compound, then roving SWAT-like through the apartment to find the dog, expose the Colemans, then fuck them up. Mike’s ideas involved juvenile desecrations, urinating on beds, crapping on dinner plates, and they agreed that in all likelihood Coleman had driven the dog someplace and just let him loose.

He abandoned himself to the dream of being elsewhere. Cathy’s idea of a vacation wasn’t so extreme. With the business on hold he could return to Holland, spend time with his brothers, maybe even go back to his family’s roots and see his sister in Norway. While he was away he could canvass for work, reimagine the business, and return with energy. His enthusiasm soon failed him. Could he even call Halsteren home after so many years away? And did he really want to go back now that his mother was dead? And would this really be the best time to set the business aside? Aren’t you supposed to work through the tough periods? Persist?

At the end of the second day Rem found himself disinclined to return home: hours festering over stale possibilities had fed a bad mood. He understood Cathy’s proposal for what it was – a failure on multiple fronts. Home. Business. Wife. Work.

Unwilling to drink at the Wabash Inn where he might meet people he knew, he chose the cubby-hole bar at the Palmer House Hotel.

Rem sat with his back to the counter and looked over an area divided into zones by arrangements of furniture and potted palms. He lost an hour to watching men in suits amble from the elevators to the lobby to the bar with unengaged distraction – then realized, just as he was watching the businessmen, that one man, seated in an armchair close to the bar, was watching him.

The man – smart, trim, black hair, white skin as if he never spent time outdoors – watched Rem, unabashed. Dressed in a smarter suit, with smarter shoes, a trimmer haircut, the man appeared separate from the other businessmen gathered in the lobby. You come to a town, any town, you stay in a hotel, you do business. This could be any week of the year.

Rem decided to go, toasted the businessman and drank down the beer. The man turned his head to the side, glanced at leisure along the bar, then back at Rem, and Rem wondered if he was missing something. He couldn’t suppose what the other man was thinking, and thought the exchange so blank that it bore a hint of hostility.

The man stood and came up to the bar, and while he didn’t face Rem, it was clear, by the way he spoke and the turn of his shoulder that he was being addressed.

‘One of my favourite novels opens on a street in New York. The main character thinks he’s being followed, so he slips into a bar to lose him, and this man follows right after. Another?’

The businessman watched the last foam spitline slide down Rem’s empty glass. Did he want another drink? Hooded eyes. Dark lashes. A man so carefully presented that he might be playing himself. His accent, Southern, not a drawl so much as an affectation, pronounced and aware.

‘Another?’

Rem said he would, though he shouldn’t. The businessman nodded. ‘Same. I’m supposed to meet with people.’ He signalled to the waiter for two more beers. ‘Business. They talk figures. Statistics. Money.’ He took a twenty from his wallet and folded it around his forefinger.

‘You were talking about a book?’

The man drew a quick breath. ‘He thinks he’s being followed. It’s a great moment, because he’s right, he is being followed, although he’s wrong about the reason.’ The businessman leaned against the bar, all smooth friendliness, a light turned on. ‘It’s just. Well, it’s just very strong, how he thinks he’s being followed because he’s done something, and he thinks he’s been found out – and, you know, you never find out what that trouble was, the reason for him being so anxious. You never learn. Instead this man offers him a job. He wants him to go someplace and find someone because he’s mistaken this man for someone else. So both men are mistaken. It’s a really nice place to start.’

Rem looked to the elevator. The doors opened to an empty cab. ‘I never read.’

The man smiled at Rem’s accent. ‘You sound British,’ he said, ‘but I’m guessing you’re not. I’m hearing something else?’

‘Scandinavian. Raised in the Netherlands. Norwegian father. Dutch mother.’ Rem spoke as if giving evidence. Nearly four years in his early twenties working ad-hoc jobs in London had fixed his accent, and once in a while it struck him, came to his ears at a wrong angle, and he’d wonder at the foreignness of his speech, of the assumptions people made, the unintended deceit of belonging to one place but sounding like another.

‘Family?’

‘Wife.’ Rem raised his glass. ‘From Texas. You?’

‘Pittsburgh, then North Carolina, then Virginia, now Europe. You don’t look like you’re here for the expo?’

Rem said no and set his glass on the counter. No he was not.

‘You look preoccupied.’

‘I do?’

‘You do. So tell me, what do you do for work?’

‘I have my own business, house painting, decorating, but…’ Rem opened his hands, showed them to be empty.

‘It’s like that?’

‘Most definitely.’ Rem sucked in air, slow and deliberate. ‘I’m thinking of letting everyone go. Putting it aside and waiting out whatever we’re going through.’ He looked at the man. ‘To be honest, I don’t know.’

‘How many people do you have?’

‘Three full time. Seven part – or casual – depending on the job.’

‘Small. I don’t know if that makes it easier or harder. And this means what? You’ll go self-employed?’

‘Natural step.’

‘Self-employed, you’d be looking at, annual?’

Rem shrugged, stretched his back against the bar; he had no idea. ‘Twenty-seven?’

The man gave a laugh as if this was a good joke. Twenty-seven, now that was funny.

‘I meant twenty-seven is what I owe.’

The businessman hesitated, absorbed the statement, then offered, ‘Twenty-seven isn’t so bad. If it’s fixed.’

‘If you have work.’ Rem explained himself in a low voice, keen not to be overheard. ‘Twenty-seven. That’s what I owe in wages and loans, debt I’ve taken on.’

The man drew a wallet then a business card out of his pocket. His suit, tailored, black, a little feminine with a sharp-blue lining, behind or ahead of the times, Rem couldn’t tell. Paul Geezler, Advisor to the Division Chief, Europe, HOSCO International. Rem shook the man’s hand and repeated his name. Geezler. German?

‘Pennsylvania Dutch. If you’re serious about looking for work,’ Paul Geezler took back the card and wrote a booth number on the back, ‘take a look at the expo. If this doesn’t interest you there are others recruiting, and they’ll be looking for people with skills.’ He pointed to Rem’s paint-specked hands. ‘They’re looking for anyone who’ll take on a challenge. People who don’t mind a little hardship as long as the money is good. And the money is good.’

Rem couldn’t help but smile. ‘Where’s the work?’

‘Dubai, less and less. Now it’s Kuwait. Kuwait and Iraq.’

‘I can’t do that.’

‘You’ll clear your debt.’

‘That’s how I raised the start-up money: Kuwait, worked on the hotels.’

‘Construction?’

‘Six weeks. Fitting, finishing, painting. They kept building. You could watch them go up. Fourteen new builds in six weeks.’ Rem raised his hand and tower blocks grew around them. ‘Every one a hotel.’

The businessman nodded. Rem referred to the card, the memory of those six weeks caught with him.

And when was Kuwait? Before the surge or after? He couldn’t remember. He could hardly say he’d seen Kuwait, just views from hotel rooms in which buildings grew faster than flowers. It wasn’t even six full weeks on site, closer really to five. Five short weeks with a team of men, one from St Louis, one from Cedar Rapids, and two Brits from Dev-un, that’s how they pronounced it, Dev-uhn, all particular and resentful, not Dev-on, the way it’s spelled. For five or six weeks the men barely spoke and worked in high-rise high-class hotels, progressing floor by floor, and paid in cash by the completed unit. Money rained down. Tax-free. Divine.

Paul Geezler nodded, brisk and dismissive. ‘There’s a good number of possibilities.’ He became distracted as four men, all suited, came out from the elevator and drifted across their line of view. Paul Geezler fixed on them the same attention he’d fastened earlier on Rem.

‘You know them?’

‘I know him.’ Geezler gave a nod to the man in the middle of the group. ‘In six months his company won’t exist.’

‘You know this?’

‘Intimately. It’s a volatile world.’

‘And you?’ Rem asked.

‘It would take something to shake us. Something newsworthy. Monumental. Can I ask about your business? Can I ask what the problem was?’

‘Sorry?’

‘The problem. With your business.’

Rem straightened his back. ‘There isn’t any problem, except there isn’t any business. People stopped calling.’

‘I ask, because people ordinarily tell you why things haven’t worked out. You gave no explanation.’

‘It’s a small business. People stopped calling.’ He changed the subject. ‘You’re serious about having work?’

Paul Geezler turned to face Rem, to make sure he had his attention. ‘If you have a moment I’ll tell you what we do.’

Both men looked at the full beer glasses set beside the taps, and Rem, imagining Cathy’s complaint, had the notion he should return home. Paul Geezler, of HOSCO International, pushed the beer toward him.

‘I’m giving a presentation tomorrow.’ Geezler looked at his beer. ‘An overview. Sixty-eight per cent of our business is now based in the Middle East. Last year it was forty-two. Even for us that’s exceptional growth.’ The man paused as if this fact might impress Rem. ‘We oversee large-scale development projects. The majority are military contracts, although that’s not exclusive. We handle contracts for building, and we provide maintenance and operational support, but the bulk of our work comes from supply. Eastern Europe, Indonesia, West Africa, Central America. Now it’s the Middle East.’ Geezler cleared his throat. ‘We supply transport, drivers, security, accommodation, food, clothing, entertainment. In the past nine years we’ve built everything from schools to refineries, banks, police stations, prisons, sewers. We have a lot of experience, Mr Gunnersen. There isn’t an aspect we don’t manage. If you take a shower it will be in one of our booths, with water and soap we supply and deliver. You’ll dry yourself with one of our towels.’ Geezler drew in breath. ‘I’ve been looking forward to steak tonight. If you’ll join me, I’d like to make you a business proposal.’

Rem deliberately made no gesture.

‘You have plenty of time to finish your beer.’

*   *   *

They sat at a table in the dining room. A recessed glass ceiling high above reminded Rem of a cruise ship, a room so creamy and vast their voices sounded thin. Along one wall ran a mural of a woodland, a steamy forest clearing with near-naked Indians and deer, strafing sunlight, a kind of overreaching nobility to the scale, everything pitched at the same grand status, animal and man.

‘I was recently in New Hampshire.’ Geezler looked to the mural. ‘Have you been to New Hampshire, Mr Gunnersen?’

Rem said that he hadn’t.

‘They have woods in New Hampshire, old forests. You think of these as wild places, these habitats, as something unique. After a while everything looks the same and you come to realize that it’s all managed. Very little is what you’d call natural. They plant and cut and replant, redirect streams, build dams, lakes, fire ponds. What appears old isn’t old at all. Everywhere you go looks the same. Even the animals. Everything is controlled. Anything excessive is eliminated.’

Geezler waited as the meal was delivered.

‘Our problem is we’re too big. The only way to manage diversity on this scale is to treat everything the same. We don’t think we do, but we do. The way we handle meat is essentially the way we handle electricity, oil, transport, information, manpower. Source. Deliver. Maintain. Resource. If we have a demand for hamburger in Balad, then we buy land and we raise cattle in Wyoming, because, long-term, it’s cost-effective. We go deep, Mr Gunnersen. New-growth forests in New Hampshire will provide lumber for construction, for paper, pallets, crates, and packaging. If we need water, we filtrate it ourselves. If we need to clear mines in Kuwait or Kosovo, we buy into the manufacturer of the sweepers, and hire and train the labour force ourselves. We’ll own an interest in the company that fabricates the body armour, and an interest in the company that produces the fibre for the armour. We bring the same approach to everything we do. It’s how we work. First it was about supply, about making connections, but now we have interests everywhere you can imagine. And there are issues with this, of course. At some point it becomes difficult to distinguish between what’s ours and what’s someone else’s. Does that make sense?

‘Do you have children?’

Rem shook his head.

‘For the first four months they can’t tell the difference between their own mouths and their mother’s teat. That’s how it is with us. We don’t know our limits. We started in minerals a long time ago. Then oil. And we just grew, we kept saying yes. Eighty-five years on and there’s probably only four people in the entire company who properly understand the scope of what we do. We live in departments where we make our work appear mysterious. The problem is structural.’

Paul Geezler lifted coverings from the platters and satisfied himself with what he saw.

‘I like how they do this. Speaks of another time.’ He smiled. ‘Think about that wood, Mr Gunnersen.’ Geezler leaned forward. ‘The reason everything works in forestry is because they knew what they were doing when they started. They understood the job. They set up a business knowing their parameters, and they created the world in which they operate. You know what they did with the existing woods? They cut them down. They started from scratch. We didn’t. We started out doing one thing and we’ve ended up doing everything. I’m not saying we’re greedy. I’m saying we’re promiscuous. The Middle East is raising lots of questions for us. People like what we provide, maybe they even like what we represent – more than they’d admit. But they don’t like us. That’s the issue. It’s animal, Mr Gunnersen. Instinctive. We make ourselves too available. That’s the scope of our problem. This is what it comes down to. We operate in other people’s territories. Territories we do not control.’

Geezler moved his steak to the centre of his plate. He gripped his knife, pen-like, held the meat in place with his fork, then cut the meat into equal sections. Done, he laid down the knife.

‘I’m not sure what we do about this. It might be something that can’t be addressed. I don’t know if it’s too global. For everything to work properly you need good foundations, which means building the territory from scratch. Cut down the old wood. Plant a new forest. Start over. But, like I said, we live in departments.

‘I can do something about more local issues. And for that I need people who can be my ears and eyes. I can’t do this myself.’ He stuck a piece of meat with his fork, lifted it to check that it was cooked to his liking. ‘I want to look at how we do things – I want to know our day-to-day workings in specific, intimate detail. I want to see how our services work, and at what temperature. Understand what’s lacking. What we’re getting wrong.’ He looked square across the table. ‘I need to know how we do business. Does this interest you?’

Rem cut into the steak Geezler had ordered for him. Rarer than he liked, salted and seared, the meat had a good rich taste, but as he chewed he felt a vague wave of disgust at the texture, at how the meat gave, uncooked, easily to his bite.

‘It doesn’t matter that you don’t know our procedures. It’s probably better not to know. All I need is someone to interact with our operations and report back. How does this sound, Mr Gunnersen?’

Rem said he wasn’t sure what he was being asked, and for a moment Geezler appeared disappointed, as if Rem had missed the point of the discussion, just hadn’t appreciated the general thrust.

‘I’m not asking you to do anything other than observe. That’s all I’m asking.’ Geezler set his fork beside his knife.

*   *   *

Rem stood at the front of the carriage and watched the train lights skid along the rails. A friendly comfort to the bump and jostle of the first carriage on the last train. Two calls on his mobile, one from Jay, the other from Mike, both asking for news on Matt as neither had heard from him in over a week, but really asking after money. As he looked out at the city he thought of Nut, lost or stolen.

He considered Geezler’s proposal and found no argument against it. Go to a trade fair on Navy Pier, wander about, speak with the handlers and exhibitors, then report back in the evening on how it went. Just return with his impressions. Five hundred dollars.

He rehearsed the conversation with Cathy, played through how he would introduce Geezler, and how he would ridicule the man’s dull concerns and intensities, that entire ramble about his work, that fuzz and fuss about woods and forests. Even as he rehearsed this he winced, slightly superstitious about laughing at the man.

*   *   *

The story as Santo tells it goes something like this: He’s a unit manager, in Amrah, four nights on, one night off, which is how and where he first met Gunnersen. He’s used to the heat, but this was something else. Insanely fierce. And the wind, when it picked up, carried a dry scent of desert, burnt land, a thousand-plus miles of waterless Arabian plains and rock. He started as part of a team that cleared the roadside trash, which is burned on the spot or bundled into skips to be taken to one of the burn pits, and worked his way up. Work isn’t anything he has to like exactly, but endure. Even now the work bothers him in ways he can’t describe. Too much junk, too much dust, broken concrete, stuffed shopping bags, too much crap to properly know what’s being hidden. These buildings, he shakes his head. They clear them out, knock them down, and then build these superhighways right through them. A superhighway crashing right through some medieval sun-scorched slum. He splays his hands to describe the scene. Broken furniture, mattresses, you name it, TVs you’d sort of expect, but fax machines (who uses those?), PCs, game consoles, office furniture, beds even, you name it, all out on the roadside, doorways opening to unpaved roads. There’s no need to mention the water bottles. Always, everywhere, those ribbed plastic bottles.

He says things that aren’t entirely true: You smell what’s there. You get a nose for trouble. You learn the difference between someone running because they’re frightened and someone running because they’re the root cause of trouble. You get a nose for these things. You get to know the people you work with. You get close.

Fatboy wants to buy DVDs. He’s wearing one of the armoured vests supplied by HOSCO. He’s ready and he begs, literally begs, to be brought along. As soon as he’s in the vehicle he’s asking these stupid questions, the way he does. The boy can nag. He wants to know about the vests, how good they are, how effective. Like if you were shot in the chest would the vest protect you? How about the stomach? At what range? All of these questions none of them can answer. Then it becomes obvious that Fatboy has a gun with him. Something no one’s happy about, because the regulations are clear about contractors carrying guns, or rather not carrying guns, even though they can buy them easily enough, or sell or trade them on when they leave, because contractors are dying daily out here and the law is against them when it explicitly states that they Can’t Legitimately Protect Themselves. Guns aren’t allowed for non-combatants. No, no, no. On account of the gun and the questions, they change their minds about taking Fatboy with them and leave him in the vehicle, mulling, and tell him they’ll bring the DVDs right back, whatever’s new, whatever they don’t think he has, and plan to speak with him later about the handgun and about how he needs to behave if he wants more of these trips. Behave and Shut the Fuck Up. The point is made and the men walk off, and leave another guy, Samuels, for company, no one thinking that the weapon might be loaded or what kind of damage one bullet might make in the confines of a metal bucket like a Humvee. Barely into the market, Santo and his accompanying guard hear a contained report. A shot. Unmistakable. Back in the Humvee Samuels has blood specking his face, arms, shirt, and he’s freaking out, he’s screaming like he’s the one who’s hurt. And Fatboy has shot himself in the gut, although this isn’t so easy to work out at this particular moment. It’s an unbelievable thing, the interior of the truck is a canning-factory mess, sticky, black and red, just nasty, and Fatboy is crumpled like some strings have been cut; hands are sopped to his elbows and worst of all his face, his expression, like he doesn’t believe it, like this can’t be happening.

*   *   *

Santo will tell this story to the men at Camp Liberty who are curious about Rem, because they want to know who they’re working for and why he keeps so much to himself, and Santo seems to have an idea.

Rem won’t go to visit the boy before he’s shipped out, there’s a two-hour opportunity in which he makes himself scarce. Fatboy wants to see him, but Rem won’t visit and won’t say his goodbyes. He doesn’t do much other than look like he’s going to cry every time Fatboy’s name comes up, this ox of a man, brought low over this wounded skinny boy.

It’s like this thing comes at you, and you don’t even know it, and you’ve no idea what it’s going to do to you. Santo can’t explain himself. He wants to find meaning in this, but knows there’s a limit to what can be taken from such an event. The story is simple and not so rare, and he doesn’t do much at the end of telling it but shake his head. Fatboy. Stupid Fatboy. No harm to anyone but himself.

*   *   *

Wednesday. Up before Cathy, Rem took an early walk to the lake, a habit now in case Nut might be at the shoreline, then returned only to skulk out the house again and head downtown with a half-planned notion, two birds, one stone. He left without explanation. No tall tales about Paul Geezler or shared jokes about the man’s manner or his work. No hint on what he would be doing today. Just a plan to attend the expo, report back as requested (although he still wasn’t sure what the man wanted) and earn in one day what had taken three weeks in the previous month. Plus, if he returned with brochures and information it might be enough to quieten Cathy. Two birds. Prospects for the early summer weren’t looking good. At some point he’d need to speak more formally with Mike and Jay and the others about putting the business on hold. He might have to explain about Matt.

Riding the train, Rem made a decision about Coleman.

*   *   *

Posters along Grand advertised tickets for the expo at twenty-five dollars. A crisp wind blew from the shore, cold and without aroma. Wagons and trailers for a film production blocked the sheltered roadway under Lake Shore Drive, and Rem picked a route between the idling vehicles, the gathered onlookers, expecting to be challenged. The city stopped at the pier, an abrupt wall of glass towers behind him, ahead a clean rolling blue that stopped the running argument in his head.

His phone trilled in his pocket: Coleman – 1 voice.

Rem found the entrance to the expo through a fixed fairground, a hotdog and souvenir stand right beside the stairway. As soon as he’d mounted the steps he realized that he was out of place. Dressed in jeans and trainers and a hooded top, he cut a scruffy figure, a slouch among men in pressed suits, military uniforms, and military fatigues. Men with heads shorn to express discipline.

The exhibition space, a long glass-topped gallery sectioned by two parallel aisles of open booths, stretched the length of the pier. In each booth the company names and logos were stencilled large across the walls, every one of the small kiosks dressed with carpets, counters, and tables, little sets busy with leaflets and brochures. And why hadn’t he worn his suit?

Rem had a list from Geezler of the HOSCO partners, the subdivisions, and the subsidiaries. The companies he needed to check out.

He took the job seriously, and strolled through the booths as if to satisfy a particular interest. The booths close to the entrance were wonderlands of massed hardware, of all imaginable kinds of armament: machined, bright, mysterious. In the first booth, and the first business on his list, Proteck Inc., he found a display of jackets and helmets, whole body suits opened layer by layer, some with ceramic plates, others reinforced with micro chainmail padded with a webbed lining and a fine downy insulation. The more expensive jackets fitted with sweat-wicking undershirts and optional protection flaps for the neck and crotch (like necks and crotches weren’t essential), easy-release binds and fasteners, and a guarantee that a personalized suit could be fabricated and shipped to any unit, worldwide, within twenty-one days. These suits, wall-mounted dissections, all impressively clean. Grey and black and busy with pockets.

Rem’s phone trilled again and again, another message from Coleman. He deleted both messages then turned the phone to silent.

The more serious equipment came further up the central aisle – handguns and rifles, semi-automatic and fully automatic, hardware monitored by security guards. The guns, presented on Perspex mounts, pointed to a hoarding-sized poster of a desert populated by sneaky blacked-out turbaned figures with targets marked over their chests and heads. Rem knew next to nothing about guns, they simply didn’t figure in his imagination; but being the kind of man who prefers the engine and not the car, the machined parts held a certain fascination. New, clean, oiled. Untouched. He examined the barrels, the sights, the disassembled trigger mechanisms, the hollowed-out carbon stocks, as if he understood the language.

His phone vibrated against his thigh.

Coleman – 1 message, 2 voice.

At Parkway CI Technologies (third on Geezler’s list of subsidiaries) he found a display of landmines and devices – ETPs, IEDs. On the wall ran a client list of diplomats and businesses, recognizable global brands, sports teams, with a small under-scored by-line as suppliers of expertise to entertainment and production companies. As in the first booth, the combinations of hard technology and recognizable detritus (spent shells and casings, gas canisters, detergent boxes, computer monitors packed with dummy explosives) were opened out for display and marked ‘genuine’.

Mike SMS: I’m getting calls from Coleman.

As Rem bent down a rep approached, talking, and Rem slowly straightened up. He hadn’t bargained on talking.

Mike SMS: He’s saying you won’t answer his calls?

Rem held up his hand to stop any discussion, and continued looking. The man stepped back and asked which service Rem was with, and as Rem didn’t understand the question the man flatly added that there was nothing for him here.

Mike SMS: What do you want me to tell him?

Rem headed back to the aisle.

A sign, ‘Employment Services’, hung in the centre of the walkway, and the booths separated out to a border area marked ‘Food Court’.

In this area the reps dipped anxiously into the aisles, a stickiness to their movements, an anxiety that someone might slip by. As he passed a group of men, each with a coffee, he overheard advice: ‘Set an exit strategy.’ ‘They don’t own you.’

Rem checked his phone. Three further voice messages from Cathy. He’d wait till later to explain himself. He could imagine the confusion if he told her he was looking at guns.

When he checked the messages from Mike he had to sit down.

‘I’m getting questions from Coleman about where you are and why you aren’t answering his calls. He’s threatening all kinds of things.’ Mike spoke quickly. ‘He’s called two or three times an hour. If he comes round … I don’t know. I just don’t want any trouble.’

Rem looked up the aisle at the guns and displays of weaponry. Grenades. Rifles. Semi-automatics. A three-quarter model of a heat-seeking missile.

*   *   *

Rem returned to the Palmer House Hotel to find Paul Geezler waiting. They sat in the main reception, both in high-backed armchairs. For the second time that day he had the notion that he was on stage, that behind the vast lobby walls were banks of seating, an audience eager to witness a humiliation.

Geezler, smooth and smart in a different suit, his hair neatly parted, comb-tracked. A newspaper across his lap with an image Rem couldn’t quite see – was it a hunter on one knee, or something more benign, a man by a road, a farmer? Geezler sat with his elbows on the armrests, hands clasped, ready to listen. He asked Rem about his visit to the fair.

Rem decided to be honest.

‘I’m the wrong man. I don’t know anything about these things – to be honest – it isn’t that I’m not interested, I just don’t have the knowledge. This isn’t what I do. I’m not the man for what you want.’

Geezler gave small considered nods, and appeared to agree. ‘You’re right. I’m using you in the wrong way.’

‘Don’t get me wrong. I appreciate what you’re doing, but I’m not the person you need.’ Rem was beginning to rise, when Geezler held up his hand.

‘I’m serious about wanting to know how we work. I have a better idea of how to use you. We work with employment agencies. Why don’t you go to one of the recruitment drives and report back to me?’

‘Again, it’s a “thank you”, but I don’t have the expertise.’

‘You don’t need expertise. Submit an application, show up at the recruitment event, attend the presentations and processing, and we have a discussion afterward about how it all went. That’s all it is. You only have to look like someone who’s looking for work.’

This was something Rem could manage. The phone rang again in his pocket, he stood up, offered his hand to Geezler, and apologized.

‘Maybe some other time.’

Geezler reached into his pocket and drew out his wallet. Rem said he couldn’t accept the money. Not in good conscience.

‘Think it over. If you’re interested, call me.’ Geezler insisted on a final drink, looked alone simply because he’d asked, so Rem agreed. After he’d placed the order, he asked Rem if there was anything wrong.

‘You look different from yesterday. I’d say you look a little harassed.’

Rem said he probably needed to go.

Geezler rose with him. ‘Out of interest, was I right about there being some kind of trouble?’ Geezler’s interest appeared genuine. ‘I’m curious, that’s all this is.’ He settled back into his seat and looked to the bar, to the deeper lounge, as if placing people, calculating proximities. ‘Sit down. Talk to me. Let me know what the problem is, make it hypothetical if you need. I might be able to help.’

Rem thought for a moment, it would be good to lay out the situation, hear it from his own mouth. Rem zippered his thumb across his mouth. ‘We had some issues.’

‘Issues?’

‘Trouble.’

Geezler shifted in his seat. ‘Related to hiring or performance?’

‘Hiring.’

Geezler gave a broad smile. Satisfied. As if he knew it.

‘One of the men stole from the houses we were painting.’

‘Recently?’

‘Recent enough.’

‘Houses?’

‘Two. That I know.’

Geezler nodded in encouragement.

‘You paid them?’

‘Two I knew about, a third I had to go with. I didn’t want the rumour spreading. I wanted to keep my business.’ Did he need to explain this?

‘How did you find out?’

‘We weren’t getting referrals. People stopped calling. So I knew something was wrong.’

‘Why did you pay?’

‘Everything depends on reputation. If it ever went to court we’d be finished. As it is we’re almost finished. I have loans I can’t service, and wages.’

‘And no one called the police?’

‘Nobody wanted to involve their insurers.’

Geezler took in the information for a moment, then looked directly at Rem and said he appreciated what Rem had just told him. It took spine to be that direct. People around him barely spoke so plainly. He remembered the debt and said he could help. That is, if Rem wanted his help.

*   *   *

Rem returned with the money. Cash. He set it on the table to see how it would look. Four fifties – what he was comfortable accepting, given his poor performance. Geezler had wanted to press more on him, had offered it as security for the next occasion, which Rem decided not to take up.

Cathy wasn’t home, and probably wouldn’t return for another couple of hours. Rem looked at the notes on the table and understood that it wouldn’t have made much difference to Geezler how much he’d paid. The only person it made any difference to was Rem, and right now the qualms he’d had about accepting money for a shoddy piece of work seemed beside the point. Two hundred dollars was better than nothing, but in reality, given their need, two hundred dollars wouldn’t make much difference.

Three new messages on the home phone, seven stored. John first then Jay. Mike said you might have something coming up? Let me know.

Rem scooped the cash off the table.

His phone vibrated in his pocket.

Maggie – 1 new message. Coleman – 3 new messages. Mike – 2 new messages.

*   *   *

Cathy had collapsed at work, mid-aisle at the Happy Shopper. Looked like a spell had been cast and she was felled, instantly asleep.

‘She’ll have bruises.’ Maggie spoke in a droll voice as if there was a punchline. They hadn’t called an ambulance because Cathy had come to, clear-headed, and said something about not eating, about stress, about how she wasn’t sleeping well.

‘We gave her tea, tea with sugar.’ Maggie called Rem ‘the Brit’, and enjoyed how the reference irritated him. The story had a coda. She wasn’t done. ‘It happened again, at four o’clock.’

The second time could have been serious. Cathy keeled over on the kerb. Outside, smoking, taking a quick five-minute break, and she’d done the darnedest thing, lurched forward like she’d been shot and launched herself into the road. Out before she hit the ground. Lordy. She didn’t even raise a hand to protect herself. Not a mark on her. Nothing broken either.

This time they’d called an ambulance but Cathy had refused to go.

‘We called you. I called. Cathy called.’

‘I was downtown, working.’

‘At least you’re here this time. I’ll drive her back.’

‘Take Ashland. Clark and Western will be busy.’

In the background, Cathy complained. ‘I can drive.’

‘You want a word?’

‘Look.’ Cathy’s voice came extra-loud. ‘They said it was low blood pressure. I didn’t eat this morning. That’s all it was.’

‘Maggie said it happened twice?’

‘Low blood pressure.’

Maggie, now in the background, added, ‘I didn’t eat last night, but I’m not passing out.’ Her voice obscured by Cathy’s shushing.

Cathy had fallen at the wedding and this sounded like the same thing. She’d picked herself up immediately. Or was it immediate? Hadn’t he noticed a pause? Hadn’t the thought occurred to him that she was embarrassed, ashamed to have fallen, and just wanted to lie there, let everything get along without her? Add to this the fact that she clearly wasn’t herself lately.

*   *   *

Through the door and home Cathy hurried directly to the bathroom, leaving Rem with Maggie. Maggie winced when she saw him, winced again while he clumsily said thanks, with the expectation that she would leave.

‘I’ve been with her all day, and you want me to leave before the good part?’ Maggie drew hard on her cigarette and squinted through the smoke. ‘She needs a friend. Someone on her side.’

Rem dug his hands into his pockets and found Geezler’s business card and cash.

‘You really want me to go?’

‘No. Stay. Tell me what happened.’ Rem minded that he didn’t sound sincere. He could never pitch himself right for Maggie.

‘She won’t shut up about money.’ Maggie took out another cigarette and counted through the remaining pack before looking at Rem. ‘At least you’re here.’ She held the cigarette just free from her mouth.

Cathy stood at the bathroom door, arms folded, ‘Maggie, don’t start.’

‘I’m just saying.’ Maggie shrugged. ‘That’s all. The last time Rem was in Kuwait, or something. What do I know?’

‘This isn’t—’ Cathy tightened her arms. ‘It’s not the same thing. I didn’t have any breakfast. I’ve not eaten.’

‘She wouldn’t go. They wanted to take her to Cook County.’

‘It’s not the same thing,’ Cathy protested. ‘Fainting isn’t a sign.’

Maggie narrowed her eyes. ‘Isn’t a good sign either.’

‘What did the medic say? You saw a medic?’

‘I said. There were two medics. One of them took my blood pressure. I’ve explained this already.’

‘But what did they say about the blood pressure?’

‘That it was low. High or low, that’s all anyone ever says about blood pressure.’

Maggie rolled her eyes, folded her arms to mimic Cathy. ‘How do you know this isn’t the same thing?’

Cathy turned back, defiant, walked to the kitchen. ‘Because that was my thyroid. It’s not the same thing.’

‘Tell her,’ Maggie nudged Rem. ‘She has to get this checked out.’

Cathy answered so quietly she had to repeat herself. ‘Enough. All right? Enough.’

Maggie began to ask more questions, and Cathy returned to the bathroom and locked the door.

*   *   *

Once Maggie was gone, Cathy came out of the bathroom and told Rem to sit down.

‘I checked the messages from work. Seven messages from Andrew Coleman. What’s going on? Have you heard them?’

Rem automatically answered no.

‘Is he asking for money? Why is he calling, Rem? He doesn’t even make sense. Listen to it.’

‘No.’

‘Are you paying the Colemans?’

Rem wouldn’t answer.

‘Jesus Christ, Rem. Why? They’ll all want money. Who won’t you pay?’

‘There won’t be any more.’

‘Rem, you haven’t done anything for the Colemans in, what, two years? At least? Why?’

‘They’re missing a ring.’

‘Since when?’ She rubbed her forehead to tease out an idea. ‘He works for the police.’

‘He’s not in the police. He works for the office for the Chief of Police.’

Cathy found herself a seat.

‘I haven’t given them the money yet.’

‘But you’ve arranged it. You’ve agreed it. Why is he calling?’

‘I was late paying him. I still have the money. I’ll call him. I’ll settle this.’

Before she walked to the bedroom he thought she paused, something too small to properly register as a pause, but a tiny measurement of doubt, and he realized that she hadn’t asked how much he was paying Coleman.

*   *   *

Flush with Geezler’s money, Rem took Cathy to the movies. This being their habit, at least once a month, to agree on a movie, Cathy’s preference being the Music Box, or at a push the Art Institute or MCA. For Rem, any Cineplex would do, with comfortable seats, surround sound, and a responsive crowd.

The film was Cathy’s choice, but more to Rem’s taste. She sat stiff throughout, resistant to the violence, didn’t see how it was possible, the entire plot.

The movie was fact, Rem pointed out, based in an honest actual event, a piece of uncontested history.

‘It’s not the facts, Rem. It’s the whole flavour of the thing. OK, so it happened. But how did it happen?’ It wasn’t the event she doubted, but how the event was demonstrated. They – the screenwriters, the actors, the director, whoever – had taken something real and made it implausible.

‘People don’t disappear like that.’ Cathy wouldn’t let this go. How could a young American, worldly, white, male, be abducted from a train station in broad daylight? This was Italy, supposedly, where everyone makes it their business to know everyone else’s business. How could this be possible? Come on, not without one single person noticing. At the very least? The whole thing struck her as highly improbable. It wasn’t the film, so much, as the idea that people could disappear. It didn’t matter how loved they were, how vital, how dynamic. They could just vanish.

‘And why? Was that ever explained?’

‘The book.’

‘I don’t buy it. Imagine, you’re given a job stapling plastic to a wall in a basement room, and you never ask yourself why? What might this room be used for? Come on? You never ask? It just wouldn’t happen like that. And the names? Please. Mr Wolf.’

Rem only knew things in retrospect. Only in hindsight when motives and meanings became apparent. In this regard film was the perfect media: with the answer laid out at the end.

*   *   *

Rem took it as his responsibility to clear out Fatboy’s room. Following Rem’s example Fatboy had moved from his assigned quarters and taken residence in a store closet in the corridor between the commissary and the PX. Rem didn’t like the idea of anyone messing with Fatboy’s possessions, and decided it was his duty to box everything up, ready to ship back to his family. The boy had mentioned a mother in Michigan, but no one else, although Rem had fashioned the idea that Fatboy came from a large family and couldn’t shake the notion. He saw Fatboy as the runt among many brothers and sisters and imagined that there were other versions, none of them quite so skinny or fragile.

The clean-out started one evening when other options were exhausted: he couldn’t face another game of poker with Santo, and didn’t want to watch another DVD, where the disc more likely than not would be corrupted. To avoid the other men in his unit he quietly roamed the PX, did the rounds of the food stalls, the vending machines, but couldn’t occupy himself. As he came out of the commissary and headed toward the showers he had to pass Fatboy’s closet.

The room: windowless and strewn with trash, the heat compacted the stench (Fatboy’s stink of sweat and sweet nutmeg). Shelving units on three of the four walls were stacked with boxes, TV monitors, radios, wholesale packages of candy, out-of-date chips, jars of chip-dip in flats of twenty-four. Fatboy lived like a shut-in; everything within reach of a makeshift bed, a modest single black mat laid across the floor with barely enough room to stretch out, a radio kept inches from his ear. How could he stand the heat? Under the bottom shelf Rem found clothes, laundry, stiff and stuffed away with things he didn’t want to see, some magazines and balled-up socks. The boy’s taste ran scattershot: small Asian girls, breasty hipster blondes in cowgirl outfits. Rem couldn’t imagine Fatboy with a woman, partly because he was so young, but mostly because Fatboy appeared innocent. He could be coy when the other men spoke of sex.

He worked with the door closed. Head throbbing when he stood up. He drank a warm Red Bull, the fizz hurt his throat, leaked through him, and he immediately began to sweat. He recognized this sweetness as the cause of the stink in the room: what he’d assumed to be the smell of the boy was only the smell of the drink.

On the bottom shelf Rem found a black folder with a notebook and a collection of loose paper. At first he thought that Fatboy had kept a diary and determined to burn this, because it was hard enough thinking about him, wondering if he had or had not ever loved anyone – and knowing, if he survived, that these injuries would blight his life.

Rem settled with his back to the door and began to leaf through the notebook. It looked like junk, just lists and scribbles, many of the pages swollen as if once wet. Fatboy had scrawled crosses on page after page; some plain, some three-dimensional with ornamentation as if wrought from iron. The notebook reminded Rem of a book of tattoo designs, demonstrating different varieties of the same thing. Loose rows and columns of crosses. On other sheets he found lists of names, possibly three to four hundred with a good number of repetitions, some from the military, but most of them contractors listed by their units. While he recognized some of the names, he couldn’t figure out what linked them. He found Santo, alongside Clark and Samuels, two other men working with Unit 409. Next to these names were the same simple crosses. Others – Watts, Pakosta, Chimeno – were annotated with a cross in a circle, others with an ornate cross with spiral arms. One, drawn in negative, in a black circle, appeared against names which had been crossed out: Forester, Marks, Bell.

For no good reason he’d thought of Fatboy as a Quaker. Rem liked to think of him equal to his peers, dressed in plain clothes, humble, sat alongside his brethren, waiting until the spirit singled him out. Instead the boy appeared a more common-or-garden evangelical Christian, born again, though that didn’t tally with what he knew. Didn’t those born-agains proselytize? Didn’t they hunt people, hound after their souls? Didn’t they pester God into every corner, bend every conversation? If Fatboy was a born-again he’d kept his counsel: Rem couldn’t see God in any kind of detail here, not the faintest trace, and thought the idea laughable. So what kind of God-fearer was Fatboy? Some youth holed up in a storage room who saved souls by writing names and scrawling crosses? Fatboy collected names not souls.

*   *   *

Rem took over the room. He packed Fatboy’s belongings and made sure they were returned to his mother. Night after night when he could not sleep he read repeatedly through Fatboy’s lists, but knew that he would never understand why the boy had collected them.

His missed Fatboy’s banter.

‘If you had a special power,’ Fatboy had asked, ‘what would it be?’ The power of flight, or X-ray vision, the ability to transform into a wolf, to swim like a dolphin?

Santo huffed. He already had a special power. ‘Invisible.’ He looked for a place to spit. ‘True. I’m invisible. The only time people see me is when they want something. Blame. I exist to shoulder other people’s shit.’

Rem said he wouldn’t want anything special. No. According to his wife, he needed the simple gift of instant hindsight, so it wouldn’t be hindsight at all. There probably wasn’t even a word for what he needed, but he knew there wasn’t one single day he didn’t need to go back and fix something.

‘I’m off-pitch,’ he said, ‘that’s what she calls it.’

‘Not a problem, bro.’ Santo leaned forward, let out a fine stream of spit. ‘I blow my nose, I get blood. The air. It’s dry.’

Fatboy wanted everything. Let’s face it. What’s the point of just one thing? You’d need super-strength, super-speed, heightened senses, the whole bag of superpowers – and flight. One lone power wouldn’t cut it.

‘And what would you do with all that?’ The idea vexed Santo. He looked up, took in the hot white sky. ‘I mean, what’s the point? You get to do all this shit, but what for? There’s always stuff you can’t do. My sister, she sees angels. All over the place. Angels with wings. Everywhere. Her cat died and she still sees it. Follows her around. Why? She thinks she’s gifted. What use is this to her?’ He shook his head. ‘Nothing. She still works minimum wage. Still married to a creep. Still unhappy.’

Fatboy said he’d been reading, and found some differences. ‘We have people who do things. Fly, climb buildings, all that. Here they have things that do stuff. Carpets. Lamps. Bottles. Magic stuff.’

‘The Arab is superstitious.’ Santo shook his head. ‘They ever cut my head off, they even try, I’m telling them they’re cursed. Their family, their neighbours, everything they touch. Fucked up for ten thousand years. Their sperm will have no tails, their children will be retards, their women frigid. Their water poisoned. The wheat will die in the field. Locusts. Fat-assed locusts in their millions. That’s my superpower. Fear and doubt. They even touch my head I’ll curse them, and everything that happens, everything bad, big and small, is down to me. I’m giving them doubt. That’s my superpower. Doubt.’

Fatboy liked the idea. In all those stories, the ones where you get three wishes, they never work out. Not even once. There’s always some trick. Better to do it like Santo, and live for ever because they can’t fix you, can’t get you straight. Even when you’re gone they don’t know who you are so they have to keep rolling the idea over and over. He liked it. Santo was on to something.

‘Just claim something you haven’t done. Famine. War. Disease. Say it’s yours and they’ll make you a saint.’ Santo pointed at the ovens, he’d promised them rum, proper Cuban rum. No joke. Security from Anaconda could bring you anything. Only if they even got caught thinking about alcohol they’d lose their jobs and entitlements. Better to drink it in his hut.

*   *   *

The package from Geezler arrived on a Friday. Rem hid it from Cathy and took it with him to the library. He sat at the back by the magazine stacks with a view of the door and the computers beside him.

Geezler had filled in much of the form, and with it came a simple note asking Rem to complete the sections he’d marked and make sure he signed in three places, and to call once it was in the mail. As far as Rem could see it wasn’t much of anything. Geezler had him marked down for manual work in Region 3: Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman, Saudi, Syria, Turkey, UAE, Yemen. He did exactly as he was asked, dropped the package in the mail on his way home, and called Geezler.

‘So you’ll do this?’

‘It’s on its way.’

‘I need one favour. I need what we’re doing to remain between us. Just us. No one else. If other people find out it won’t work.’

Rem couldn’t see any problem with this.

‘So, we’re agreed. Complete deniability. No one else knows. Not anyone you meet in the interview, none of the candidates, no relatives, no family, not even your wife.’

‘I have to tell my wife.’

‘You can’t. As part of the clearance procedure they’ll want to confirm details, they’ll call you at home – what if she answers?’

‘I’ll tell her.’

‘It’s a risk.’

‘She’ll understand.’

Geezler paused. ‘It’s too much of a risk. If they have any idea we’re sending people to check on them it isn’t going to work. To be honest, you’re no use to me otherwise.’

Rem considered hanging up. He could tell Cathy and not tell Geezler that she knew. ‘OK.’

‘OK?’

‘OK.’

‘Don’t tell her and think it will work out. She can’t know. Are we agreed?’

Rem hesitated and then agreed.

He wanted to know when he would hear, and Geezler assured him that they turned these things around quickly.

After the call, Rem began to wonder what he’d agreed to, and what difference it would make if Cathy did or didn’t know.

Rem walked up Clark and was struck by how solid the street appeared, how this was, he couldn’t think of any other word, except, natural. As if today was how the neighbourhood should always be seen, that every other season the street would be out of perspective. For example: walking now, the budding afternoon, the late-spring air, the buses, the fried meat scent from the taquerias, the split cartons and crates beside the supermercado. All of this seemed right, in place. Ordinary. He couldn’t imagine the same street three months earlier, grey with old snow, rutted with ice, cars shifting forward and sideways, the sidewalk limited to one narrow path, figures disguised under jackets and coats, and hunched under the assault of a brutal wind, the windows at the eateries greased with condensation. He couldn’t imagine himself either with his dog, because this was the route they took from the lake, each morning, each night. He couldn’t picture the dog, and had to work hard to resurrect him. Rem looked about as if to fix the street, the corner, Clark and Lunt, in memory. One day I won’t live here. This will all be lost.

*   *   *

Just over a week after submitting his application Rem received a package from Headspring Training offering an interview at a choice of venues: the Welcome Inn outside Knoxville, Tennessee, or the Best Western close by O’Hare.

Curious about the pack, Cathy asked what was going on. Was this some agency? Had he registered for work? Did this have anything to do with their loans? Rem shuffled through the papers, which asked for insurance details, health, and next of kin.

‘Is this a job? Induction. That sounds a lot like work?’ Cathy took the papers out of his hands. Sat down as she read, assumed a slow bending stoop, her expression becoming tighter. ‘What is this?’ she asked, serious, confused. ‘I don’t understand. Why do they want details about your health? These are questions about your family, about diseases? I don’t understand. She read on. ‘What’s Headspring? Who are these people?’

Rem said he didn’t know, he’d sent an application to Manpower Recruitment who managed civil-engineering contracts, so he had no idea about these Headspring people.

‘Engineering? So this is work?’ She sounded surprised. Rem didn’t like this reaction. ‘You found work? Where?’

‘It’s a recruitment agency.’

‘I don’t know that I like the idea of you working on construction sites.’ Cathy turned the papers over. ‘It says region three. What does that mean?’

‘Region three means places like Saudi.’

‘Saudi?’

‘Like Saudi.’

‘Like Saudi? Where else is like Saudi?’ She gave a short laugh. ‘I don’t know what that means.’

‘Like the Middle East. Like Jordan. Syria. Dubai. Like Iraq.’

It took a while to penetrate. Iraq. He could have counted the seconds.

‘Iraq?’ She spoke as if absorbing some mighty concept. ‘Iraq?’ And then she appeared to disassemble, her hands descending to her lap, her shoulders, her face even, taking on weight. When she did speak, her voice came considered and final. ‘I’m not doing this again.’

‘It isn’t the same. I’m not going anywhere.’

‘Rem, when I said somewhere else, I meant Iowa or Indiana, or maybe, I don’t know, someplace like California, but Iraq?’ A small pry cut through her voice. ‘Iraq? Rem? You paint rooms. In houses. In hotels.’ She held the papers to her chest and shook her head, and her expression became so sorrowful, so lost. This wasn’t going to happen again. Kuwait had been bad enough. Iraq was out of the question.

After some moments she softly asked if he had signed anything. ‘You have to call. You have to tell them there’s been a mistake.’

Rem leaned forward, set his hands on her knees to reassure her. ‘It’s information,’ he said, ‘that’s all. Something I found. I sent off an application and they sent this back. It’s nothing.’

‘This isn’t nothing.’ Cathy held up the papers. ‘This doesn’t just happen. You’ve already applied. I don’t understand why we’re talking about this.’ She twisted free of his grasp then set the papers carefully on the table. ‘You’ve done this deliberately.’

Cathy left the room and Rem considered how to clarify his arrangement with Geezler without breaking his word. Cathy returned from the bedroom with more papers.

‘You see these. This is on top of what we owe. You understand? You need a job, Rem. Something that has healthcare. Insurance. A job. A stable job. Here.’ She shook the papers at him before dropping them on the table. Bills for scans, blood tests, X-rays. ‘That’s what we owe, and they haven’t even got started. We don’t qualify for anything, Rem, we don’t get assistance. No one else is going to look after these. Do you understand the problem? How is this going to work if you go to Iraq?’

Rem separated his papers from the pile on the table. ‘It isn’t what you think. I’m not going to work in Iraq. It isn’t what you think.’

‘When is it ever about what I think, Rem? It has to be something more complicated, doesn’t it? It’s always something else with you. That is an application for a job. It’s in your name.’

Rem straightened the papers on his knee. Let her do this, leave her alone. Explain some other time.

*   *   *

When Cathy returned from work that evening she took a cup of hot water with her to bed, and complained of a migraine, her mood too dangerous to confront.

Rem called Geezler and explained about Cathy. He wanted to tell her, he said. This past month hasn’t been easy. She needs to know. She hasn’t been well. This isn’t helping.

‘You’re not going anywhere except O’Hare,’ Geezler soothed. ‘You go to the induction. You call me. We speak, and then you explain everything to her.’

‘She made a point about the application being real, being in my name.’

Geezler appeared to give this some thought. ‘You’re right. We should have used another name. You’re still going?’

‘I’m still going.’

‘I’d like to send you to the training camp in Austin. I could use you out in the field.’

The idea had its own logic.

‘You know I can’t do that.’

‘I know. I’d pay a bonus. A straight fifty, no questions. However you wanted it. Fifty thousand on top of anything you earn. No tax. No questions.’

‘You’re talking Austin?’

‘Two for Austin but fifty for both Austin and Iraq.’

‘Nice numbers, but not possible.’

‘I wish it was. She already thinks you’re going.’

‘I can’t.’

‘Think about Austin then. Will you do that?’

‘I know I can’t do it.’

‘One week at the training camp.’ Geezler backed off. ‘It’s just a thought,’ he said, ‘it would be useful.’

*   *   *

They agreed to speak after the induction.

*   *   *

On the last day in May, Unit 409 were sent to Jalla Road to lay the final section of blacktop. On this night, the people who had lived in the neighbourhood gathered at a squatter camp in an archaeological park bordering the highway. It wasn’t that their tents and campfires hadn’t been noticed, but everyone assumed that these people were part of the influx of refugees from Basrah, Nasiriyah, even Baghdad. A mistake with serious consequences. The highway, nearly complete, with its steep walls, was little more than a deep concrete trench. As the long convoy of vehicles approached, none of the crew of Unit 409 noticed the refugees beginning to congregate on the walls above them. By the time they did notice, and stop, the angry former residents, raised above the convoy, were able to pelt them with stones and bottles loaded with gasoline.

The crews, expecting back-up, withstood the first barrage. A second wave brought a hail of bottles which burst into fire on impact. They watched the front vehicles burn, their companions scuttle from one vehicle to the next seeking refuge. When security did not show the convoy steadily reversed down the unpaved highway and abandoned the stricken vehicles. As they retreated, the bolder citizens came down the concrete banks as a wave. Rem watched the mob fill the roadway. As the contractors made their way back to ACSB they passed the security forces, a pack of armoured trucks with helicopters riding overhead. The zone behind them strafed with streams of tear gas.

The next morning the highway was blasted to pieces. IEDs planted every twenty metres uprooted hanks of concrete, pitched holes, spoiled a road which had never been used.

*   *   *

Rem arrived an hour early for the sessions at the Premier Suite, and sat in the parking lot facing the white front of the motel. A few cars on either side. Cathy’s ‘don’t commit’ hung with him, and he regretted not explaining the situation to her. ‘Why are you even going? What are you trying to prove?’

In a beige VW parked beside him sat a man who appeared to be speaking to his fist, a white wire ran from his ear.

Rem gathered his papers, locked his car and paused for a final smoke. The man in the VW wound down his window and asked Rem if he was here for the Headspring event. The induction.

‘Which company are you with? Manpower?’

Rem nodded.

‘Manpower. Roads, right? Highways and byways.’ The man gave a thoughtful nod. ‘That makes sense. Civil work? You’re not security, then?’

Rem shook his head. The man stepped out of his car and still appeared small.

‘Pendleton, Manpower, RamCo, ReServe, Outcome. Headspring recruits for them all. They’re all the same, in any case. You’ve heard of HOSCO?’ This wasn’t a question so much as an assumption, the opening of a conversation.

The man looked up as Rem shook his head.

‘HOSCO. Look them up. They run everything. Most of these companies are subsidiaries, but HOSCO run the show. They’re the people you’ll work for. You’re serious?’

‘Serious?’

‘About going?’ The man answered his own question as he locked his car. ‘Serious enough to come, I guess. Serious enough to find out.’

*   *   *

In the first session they were given nametags, offered coffee and an over-large platter of mini-Danish. Rem counted thirty people, exclusively men, the majority Black and Hispanic, and they sat facing a roll-down screen, silent while an introductory video titled ‘Amrah City – New City’ played and replayed. Rem watched as a decrepit city of low-rise buildings of dead whites and tawny browns, with blank dusty skies, was digitally transformed with new roads and highways, a river, then, rising from the ground, office buildings, libraries, schools, a museum, an entirely new administrative centre surrounded by flags and trees under a slick blue sky. No people, he noticed, not one placed in there. This, he guessed, was the project the man in the VW had described. Regeneration For The Next Generation. The title faded out. Re-build. Re-generate.

After the video a man of about Rem’s age delivered a short introduction. He clasped his hands as he spoke, thanked everyone for coming and said that this was the final round of the post-application, pre-selection process, then introduced himself as Steve.

‘Today, we go through our final screening procedures – nothing to worry about.’ He pointed at the screen. ‘We want you to have an idea of the scale of the project. Forget what you’ve heard, or read, or anything you’ve been told. This is a whole new situation. You’ll be involved in rebuilding. Helping to finish what we’ve started out there. Amrah City is the hub. Government. Business. Communications. Industry.’ While he spoke he looked slowly through the seated rows, man to man, and when he stopped he gave a little hesitation as if expecting applause.

Steve asked if there were questions, and one man struck up his hand and said he didn’t get it. ‘Are we working for the military or the government?’

Steve nodded through the question, then said he understood and that this raised a good point. ‘When you are out in the field you are a contractor. A private individual. You’re working for yourself. Except, we provide the opportunity for you to work. We’ll go more into this later.’

After the introduction they formed four queues in the foyer, A–F, G–L, M–S, T–Z, where they showed their papers and documents to a couple at a desk, after which, with everything satisfied, they returned to the seminar room. Rem noticed fewer people returning, and was joined by the man he’d spoken with in the parking lot. A sticker, hello, my name is – Rob, on his shirt pocket. They shook hands.

‘Did you show references?’

‘Do we need to?’

‘You’d think? This is an employment agency, right, and they don’t ask for references? You think they don’t have enough people to build their own roads out there?’ Rob kept his eye on the door. ‘Have you spoken with any of these guys?’

Rem said no.

‘Security is usually ex-military. Who knows who these people are?’ His voice low, he asked Rem questions while men were called out for their medical evaluations.

Rem wondered if the man was part of the recruitment process, a spy to vet the candidates they were unsure about, and with this doubt he became less confident about answering his questions. Was he working for the company, or for a rival? You have to consider these possibilities.

When the assistants called the candidates for interview, Rem noticed that Rob became quiet.

*   *   *

Rem took off his shirt, wondered how far he should go with this, gave blood anyway, breathed in and out when he was asked, answered questions about his general health which made him laugh, and then, behind a screen, produced a urine sample and made sure he filled the container to the top although he had been asked not to. He signed a form certifying that he’d never been convicted of a felony and faced no ongoing charges. When he returned to the seminar room he noticed that Rob was gone, along with half of the applicants. Eight men remaining. After a small wait he was asked back to another seminar room where a formal offer was made. On the wall hung a row of prints, scenes of windmills, fields, and waterways.

Rem allowed the man to talk. If he signed the contract he’d be working with HOSCO: the Hospitality and Operational Support Company of Hampton Roads, Virginia – just as Rob had said. Steve explained that HOSCO managed civil contracts in Europe, Africa, and across the Middle East, but they were hiring now for southern Iraq in a last bid to complete contracts within Amrah City. Rem also needed to understand that while these projects were nominally classified as civil, they were, in fact outsourced military projects: meaning that they were open to private business, and that those private businesses enjoyed military protection.

Rem fought against the urge to explain himself, the pure fun of stating that he was already working for HOSCO.

In Amrah City, Steve promised, you won’t see one local. Not one. It couldn’t be safer. Plus (not that you’ll need it), you have the entire US Marine Corps looking out for you. Posters behind Steve showed men beside diggers, smiling, shaking hands with men in desert MARPAT, a ziggurat in the background, a long low-lying adobe village; or men seated during a work-break at some stumpy oasis surrounded by skinny dogs, handsome strays with dark almond-shaped eyes; or (Rem’s favourite), an employee in a flak jacket playing soccer on wasteland with a scattered group of boys. ‘HOSCO: Building Communities One Project at a Time,’ the sky a clear wondrous blue, suggesting worthy effort and reward. Naive? Sure, but so what, at least they appeared sincere.

And how did the money sound to him? The first figure presented didn’t look impressive, but the advisor added up overtime, what he called ‘strategic placement bonus’ and a ‘completion of work bonus’, then explained the allowance for meals and reimbursement for any work-related accommodation. ‘This is covered while you’re at Amrah. We have a complex close by the government compound, with housing, stores, a PX, a commissary, a fully-equipped gym. And remember, there’s no tax. They can’t take a dime.’

As an idea Rem could see its appeal. The man continued. There were two kinds of insurance, one for life, one for catastrophic trauma.

‘You won’t need it, but it’s there. And supposing, and I mean supposing, something were to go wrong, we’d ship you to Germany and bring you back home. No questions. No trouble. You get the same cutting-edge medical attention as the military. It covers your family back here if you or they have to be provided for. Tell me,’ he asked, ‘where you could make this kind of money, every month. No tax. Not one cent.’

The man asked how good it sounded now, and Rem, understanding that the figure represented his potential monthly earning, not his yearly gross, admitted that it was starting to sound very, very good. Kuwait had paid well, except the agency had subtracted a sizeable monthly fee. This guaranteed considerably more.

When Rem said he’d like to think about it, the man sucked in his breath and placed his hand flat on the papers.

‘Sure,’ he cleared his throat, ‘of course you do. You can’t take a decision like this lightly. You need to consider it, think it through. I understand. I can hold this offer for a week. Think about it, talk it over, do whatever you need to do. If it takes more than a week I won’t be able to offer the same package. We have quotas, and once those are full we won’t be hiring any more. This is our final drive, there aren’t so many places. I’m offering the last of what we have. It’s a favourable package. If you need a week, take a week. I’ll hold it for you. I can’t promise any longer.’

Rem took up the pen, but said that he could not sign without speaking first with his wife.

The man pushed the papers forward.

‘It’s four months,’ he said, ‘you’ll be back before anyone knows you’re gone.’

*   *   *

Rem folded the contract into his back pocket as he came out of the building, the shift in temperature, from crisp air-conditioning to the humid outdoors, made him hold his breath. As he unlocked his car door he noticed Rob sat on the barrier across the parking lot, an attitude about him, a deliberate wait. A man smoking with intent, thin legs stretched out, looking like the slightest gust would push him over.

‘You didn’t sign anything, did you?’

Rem again wanted to explain what he was doing – just the once.

‘I didn’t sign.’

‘No? Not yet, but you will. You’ll go home and think it over. You’ll think about the money until it sounds so good you can’t see the harm in it. Be careful, though. Take a good look at these people before you agree to anything.’

Rem didn’t have the heart to explain how he’d done this before, as good as. What could be the difference? A complex in Amrah City? A hotel in Kuwait City? Two contained environments.

Three security guards came out of the building and waited under the awning, arms folded. ‘This is public property,’ Rob shouted across the road. ‘I have every right to be here.’

The men watched but kept their place.

‘They think they know me. I’m not a journalist,’ he said, ‘I’m an interested citizen.’

*   *   *

The two men sat outside the Intercontinental bar on a balcony overlooking the highway. Rem watched the cars and cabs turn off for the terminals, the hive-like hum of the highway, the hotels, the concrete spill of the parking lot and the approach to the airport, he felt part of a larger vista – the wind carried breadth and distance, a scope of land running right the way to Nebraska, Wyoming, the idea of a prairie holding a sense of potential, of unknowing. He let his eye hop over the billboards running alongside the airport approach – hotels, airlines, credit bureaus – as Rob paid for the drinks.

Six weeks with a fifty-thousand-dollar bonus from Geezler.

No tax.

‘I’m not saying the money isn’t good. They get kids direct from high school, promise them three, four times as much as the military, then whisk them out, and what for? You know how many contractors have been killed this year?’ Rob stabbed out his cigarette. ‘You don’t want to know. The equipment is substandard, nothing can cope with the heat or the sand. They say they’ll provide protection; the military won’t touch the gear they use. And the place you’ll be staying – they can’t protect you, whatever they say. Security is a joke. I tell you this for free. If you go, stay clear of the military. Have nothing to do with them, they’re leaving, they don’t care what happens next. It’s only HOSCO that won’t admit it’s over. Avoid Iraqis whenever possible. Don’t go there to make friends. Get in. Get out. Better still, get a job managing food services, or something so remote no one knows you’re there. Have nothing to do with guns or any kind of munitions. At the moment Amrah City’s nice and quiet, but it won’t last long. All this talk of rebuilding? They’ve poured millions into reconstruction, to satisfy agreements that no longer stand. It’s about taking one more bite out of that apple before they dump the barrel. Nothing is being done right. The whole thing’s failed. The idea that they can rebuild a dying city right at the edge of the desert is a dumb idea cooked up in Washington where they don’t know anything about Amrah or the Arab mentality. Fact is, no one can control the districts, they think they have one place settled, and then the next day they’re right back where they started.’ He lit another cigarette. ‘You signed, didn’t you. I know it. You haven’t said a word.’

In the air, still, that sense of space. Rem held up his glass and closed his eyes.

Fifty thousand dollars, in hand, plus wages, no tax, every cent he earned. Money for his business. Money for their debt. Money for Cathy’s medical. Plenty of money.

*   *   *

He called Geezler. Read from his notes, and broke the day down, hour by hour. He repeated Rob’s concerns verbatim. Allowed himself a little joke when speaking about Steve, but had to admit, in the final analysis, that the man didn’t seem to know his subject.

‘There was pressure,’ he said, ‘and it was confusing. I’ve had an easier time buying a car. They come across as desperate.’

Geezler became most interested when Rem began to talk about the contracts. ‘They follow a script,’ he admitted, ‘how did it sound?’

‘Unclear. They could stick to the information. Give a few hard facts. Even with the contract it just was hard to follow.’

‘You’ve done a good job. I’d like to use you more. I really would.’

‘Would you offer more than fifty?’

‘You’re considering this?’

‘More than fifty?’

‘Fifty is my discretionary limit. But you’re considering this?’

‘I can’t say I’m not tempted.’

‘I’m guessing that you’ve already decided.’

*   *   *

The men from Unit 409 were called to a meeting. One of HOSCO’s division directors, a man from Hampton Roads, Virginia, intended to visit Amrah and wanted to meet one of the teams in situ. He’d spend an hour at the compound, inspect the site, and most likely be accompanied by a photographer. Rem sat next to Santo and wondered what, actually, was the reason for the visit.

‘This isn’t to honour us,’ Santo shook his head, ‘this is PR. You’ve seen the news? The protection. The vehicles. The body armour. It’s all sub-substandard. Might as well be wearing targets. He’s here because of Fatboy getting shot through one of their shitty vests. Some lawyer smelling trouble has made them do this.’

Rem sat back, Fatboy’s notebook in his hand.

‘What are you doing with that?’

‘You’ve seen this before?’

Santo looked Rem in the eye. ‘Depends.’

‘On what?’ Rem scoffed, this was absurd. He’d either seen it or he hadn’t.

‘I’ve seen it.’

‘The names?’

Santo gave a shrug as a yes.

‘You’ve seen the names?’ Rem opened the notebook on his lap. ‘Then you know what all these crosses are about?’

Santo took the book. ‘Fatboy was keeping a slate.’

‘Betting? I don’t follow. On what?’

‘On who was going to get hit. Fifty per contractor. One hundred if they worked internal with military or security. Two hundred if they worked over the line. Hit. Maim. Kill. There’s hit, which is just hit, nothing more, maybe something superficial, anything that heals or is non-essential. Accident or deliberate, doesn’t matter. Loss of anything smaller than a hand, fingers as such, ear, nose, anything they can reconstruct classifies as a hit. Then maim, pretty obvious, no? Non-replaceable damage, loss of limb, use of limbs, sight, dick, you name it. Then there’s kill. Kill speaks for itself. See, he marked the odds with crosses.’ Santo flicked through the book. ‘It’s a shame about what happened, because it was just getting started. I mean it’s been going for a while, but it was just getting properly started. These guys,’ he pointed out the names on the first page, ‘they’re small. They never go out. Waste of time. This place would have to take a direct hit to get money on them. The big money is on these guys. You pay two hundred to start, because they’re more exposed. Anyone working over the line is more vulnerable, so naturally you pay more. See here: Pakosta, Watts, Chimeno, these are the prime candidates. They work in transport, security, and comms. They go out every day.’

‘You knew about this?’

‘Sure. I knew about it.’

‘So these crosses?’

‘That means the first bid was two hundred. Every bet after that would have gone up by fifty.’

Disappointed in Fatboy, Rem didn’t want to push. ‘How do you know about this?’

‘It was mostly the military. Was. They were the people who started it. The MODS were betting on which contractor would go first. It worked in two ways, if someone was killed, you’d get the whole pot. Half if they were medevaced out. The slate was wiped clean with every hit. Fatboy took the basic idea and turned it into an art. He had this notion that if you bet on a string of kills, four or five in a sequence, you’d be solid.’

‘Meaning?’

‘We’re talking a lot of money here.’

‘How much?’

‘Pick a number. That book isn’t even old. This was Fatboy’s scholarship fund.’

‘Did anyone get hit?’

‘Plenty.’ Santo scanned through the pages, then opened the book at a page where the names had been scratched out, then another, then another. ‘See. And here.’

‘And how did you know about this?’

‘Rem,’ Santo hit his chest in mock grief, ‘man, everybody knows about this. I knew about it, and I’m on the list. I worked at one of the FOBs before this, and I knew about it then. Hernandez, right there, that’s me.’

‘Why aren’t I included? We do the same work?’

Santo folded his arms. ‘He wouldn’t accept a bet on you. Wouldn’t hear of it.’

Rem looked to the book: Hernandez, Samuels, Clark, Watts, Pakosta, Chimeno.

*   *   *

Cathy didn’t understand, and had a look about her like she wasn’t ready to make the effort. What was this? The whole thing? Geezler? What kind of a name was that anyway? What kind of scheme? Was this a hoax?

Rem tried his best to explain. It was good money. That’s what it was. Money for those medical bills for a start. Money to help pay their debts. Money they couldn’t hope to make otherwise.

Cathy looked at him, astounded. ‘My God. You’ve made up your mind haven’t you? You’re going?’

Rem struggled to stay calm. ‘It’s a training camp. It’s where everyone goes before they’re shipped out.’

‘You’ll die.’

‘He wants to know how it works.’

‘And who is this man?’ Cathy summoned anger from the air.

‘He’s the head of the parent company.’ Rem knew this not to be true, but the fact that Geezler could be undertaking this kind of enquiry meant that he was placed high in the company.

‘You don’t know what you’re doing. You don’t know what they’re asking. This isn’t a solution.’

‘Yes, it is. You just don’t want it.’ Rem’s answer came with a nasty calm.

‘Call him,’ she answered. ‘Go. See if I care.’

Rem picked up the phone, walked to the bedroom to find Geezler’s business card in his jeans. When he returned to the kitchen Cathy half-stood, half-leaned against the kitchen table. Eyes small and black.

‘Do it.’

‘It’s six weeks.’ Rem drew a chair back from the table, sat down, made his actions certain, definitive. ‘In six weeks we can have everything paid for. I don’t see much of a choice. I don’t see a lot of options.’

Cathy narrowed her eyes and hung her head. Call him. She said. Call him. Get it over with.

*   *   *

Santo wouldn’t answer Rem’s questions about Fatboy’s book. He didn’t outright refuse, just became weary, rolled his eyes, his patience with this almost out. If it was running, Rem reasoned, up until he was shot, then what had happened with the money?

Santo had no idea. ‘How should I know? You knew him. He wasn’t normal. He didn’t do things like everyone else.’

‘You said people paid in hundreds of dollars each a week. So there had to be money?’

‘It wasn’t all cash. Not hard cash. There aren’t exactly many banks round here. He kept a tab. That’s – the – reason – for – the – book.’ Santo dropped his head, exhausted. ‘That book.’ Santo tried to explain. ‘It’s like everything else here. It doesn’t work how you think. Let’s say I won, all right. Let’s say I bet two hundred on a top kill, and I won. Then I might get some money upfront from Fatboy, a little money, but the rest would be owed to me from the other people who’d laid bets. So other people who had unsuccessful bets would have to pay. Understand? Far as I know no one ever paid out. It was like a rolling debt. If I won, then anyone who’d placed a bet owed me, and it was carried on like that, week after week. Likewise.’

‘But there was still money. Five dollars. Ten dollars. A million dollars. I’m telling you there wasn’t a cent in his room. He left with nothing. I packed everything up for him.’

Santo finally appeared to understand. ‘Well, there had to be some.’

*   *   *

Rem found Samuels in the commissary. Since Fatboy’s accident Samuels had refused to go over the line and was in forfeit of his Strategic Placement Bonus. Samuels haunted the commissary, sat at tables with coffee nested between his hands, his skin growing whiter under the stark overheads, the lack of natural light.

Rem bought them both coffees and slid into the booth. Samuels, as insubstantial as Fatboy himself, cringed at the memory, and never spoke of the incident.

‘Did he have anything with him?’

Samuels pinched his mouth and shook his head. Rem thought his eyes looked glassy, not like a drinker, but fearful, rabbit-like.

‘He didn’t have a bag, a hold-all? He wasn’t carrying anything?’

‘He had the gun. That’s about all I remember.’

Rem looked up the hall. They could be in a school. The linoleum floor, the tiled ceiling, the sameshit double-glass fire doors. Cream-coloured walls. This could be Idaho, Iowa, Illinois, not Iraq.

‘He had nothing. He had a gun. He didn’t know how to hold it. I’m lucky it didn’t go off in my face. He shouldn’t have had that gun. He had no business being there.’

Rem thanked Samuels, and when Samuels asked him why he was asking, Rem shrugged. He didn’t rightly know, not really. Just had this notion that Fatboy had a bag of some kind, something he might have carried with him.

Samuels shut his eyes and softly shook his head. ‘Everyone wants to know where the money is.’

‘The money?’

Samuels gave Rem a long come on, be serious look. ‘Everyone wants to know about the money from the club.’

Just as Rem walked off, Samuels called him back. ‘On the seat. You’re right. A sportsbag. Singapore Airlines. That logo. Singapore. That’s what he had. I don’t think there was ever any money. I’m sure there never was any cash.’ Samuels talked and moved as a man disturbed from slumber. ‘It was all promises. Credit notes. IOUs. That’s all it was about. Winning. You promised money, and kept going, hoping for a perfect run.’

Rem couldn’t see what Fatboy would get out of it.

‘When people left they owed him. Fatboy was building a future. People who owed him favours. People who could help him out one day. It wasn’t about money, never was.’

Rem thanked Samuels again, and Samuels asked if Rem knew Fatboy’s name. ‘William. At home he went by Billy.’

Rem returned to Fatboy’s room, settled on the mat, and found himself sweating before he’d opened the notebook. Knowing someone’s name took away their mystery. He wondered who Billy was, back home with his family and his mother. Another timid boy. One among others, undistinguished. Plain William, borrowed from uncles and grandfathers.

He slept through much of the afternoon and woke to find email from Cathy on his cell: Call me. It’s about Matt.

*   *   *

For all but his last night Cathy slept separately and avoided talking with him, until, in a final capitulation she slipped, silently, under the covers beside him.

*   *   *

He’d taken a flight from the Netherlands via Austin the year before they married, spent time at immigration being questioned about his visa, about how many trips he’d made by officials for the Department of Homeland Security who didn’t quite understand that Schiphol Airport served the whole of the Netherlands. Rem insisted that his family came from a small village swallowed by Bergen op Zoom where people strived to live undistinguished lives, hold moderate values, the kind of people who knew their neighbours, rarely visited the city, and feared God with a powerful superstition, and he wondered, while he insisted on this distinction, why he had to attach himself to a place he hadn’t lived in for over twenty years, to people he’d worked hard to leave. He didn’t understand Halsteren when he was a child, and he held no attachment to it as an adult. His family simply lived there, and year by year, there were less of them. Nevertheless, Halsteren remained in his passport as his place of birth. For immigration these distinctions meant nothing. As a big man with a casual lope, they took him as a type. They detained Rem for four hours in an eight-by-nine space defined by six rolling screens he could have pushed aside. They left him alone, in this temporary space, not even a room, and he expected the man to return, passport in hand, to escort him to departure. He wasn’t sure how it would work, but he couldn’t see himself reaching Chicago. He missed his connecting flight and had to sleep in the terminal with the threat that these men could return, pick him out and pack him off, just as they pleased. The whole experience was so unpleasant it resolved him to marriage, although neither of them wanted to marry. The visas gave limited security. He understood that he might have chosen Chicago as his home, but Chicago had not chosen him.

On his return to Austin the same dread set upon him. He couldn’t imagine the next step and half-hoped for a call from Cathy telling him to come home, this was ridiculous, just come right back.

At the carousel a different certainty struck him. He watched bags tumble down the baggage claim and realized he’d gone too far.

*   *   *

On the first night Cathy went early to bed, took a mug of hot water with her, her glasses, a book, a thriller she’d bought for this specific night, switched the TV on, quiet and low, as if this was normal, or better: as if this was something long anticipated, a treat she was determined to enjoy. She settled naturally on her side of the bed, rested her glasses and the book on her stomach and wondered what she should do next. She wasn’t exactly sure what she wanted, and looked about the room and wondered how it had come to be furnished in this way, not through any one decision, but through a gradual accumulation: a dresser from her mother, the built-in wardrobe Rem had salvaged and fronted with mirror. The TV, large, flat-screen, paid on credit they hadn’t yet settled. She watched her reflection. The light from the TV picked out the rounded shapes of her feet, her knees, her stomach and breasts, all softened by the quilt, her face shone a little greasy, and she was alarmed at how surprised she looked, as if it wasn’t Rem that was missing, but part of her body.

He wouldn’t call, she guessed, so she sent an SMS, typed a hug and a kiss at the end of the message, and thought this hypocritical but necessary, then turned to her side so she wouldn’t have to watch herself. He’d come back, she didn’t doubt, he didn’t like Austin in any case. He’d be back in two days, four, tops.

She decided to sound perky. Practical. She’d call, if he didn’t answer she’d leave a message.

When the home phone rang she looked at it in surprise.

‘Hello? Rem?’

‘My cell’s flat. I’m calling from the dormitory, plugged-in. They’ve given us rooms. You know those movies where the parents take their daughter to college? It looks nothing like that. What are you doing?’

‘I’m in bed.’

‘I woke you?’

‘No. It’s early. I thought I might read.’

‘The people I’m with…’

‘I was going to ask.’

‘… are from the Philippines. No one speaks English too well. We haven’t been fed. They brought us from the airport, told us we couldn’t leave. They’ll pick us up at seven tomorrow. I’m not sure what they’re going to do with us. There’s one row of showers, two toilets – don’t ask – and a snack machine. There’s a rumour that we don’t get paid until we’re actually in Iraq.’

She thought to tell him not to do this, to walk out, face whatever trouble came their way because of it, but to come right back. They could pay the company back for the flight, somehow make everything right with Geezler, move on and forget this. She didn’t know how, but they would figure this out.

‘What are you reading?’

‘I don’t know. I haven’t started.’

‘I’ll leave you to it.’

Cathy kept the phone to her ear long after Rem had hung up. The only decision she wanted to make was whether she would take Western or Lake Shore Drive to work the next morning.

She read the last chapter of her book because she didn’t want to start something that would end badly.

*   *   *

Immediately after speaking with Cathy, Rem called Geezler, to let him know about the arrival, the chaos of the place, and sound off a little about the squalid lodgings.

Mid-ring he changed his mind. Intuition told him that this wouldn’t be the worst of it. Geezler didn’t need to hear every detail. He should concentrate on what mattered, essentials, not make reports day by day, but digest the experience first.

His phone rang before he could pocket it. Geezler on an unlisted number.

‘You wanted to speak?’

‘I thought better of it.’ In truth Rem had lost the mood.

Geezler said he’d take anything Rem had to offer. ‘The whole point is to hear your take. You understand? That’s why you’re going. I want your perspective.’

Rem started again on his day. ‘I’m in a room with nine men from Fiji and the Philippines, who think they’re heading to Dubai. Their contracts say Balad. They don’t know where they’re going. They don’t have their passports. This can’t be legal.’

Once again Geezler listened and was ready with questions, and on occasion, an explanation.

‘These people are in transit. Technically, they aren’t in the country. We’ve had trouble before. If they have their passports they disappear.’

Rem wouldn’t drop the subject. ‘Benigno. Beni. He’s thirty-seven, he looks like he’s fifty. He has a fourteen-page contract busy with small print. Only four out of nine in my room can read English, and everyone is going to Iraq and they don’t know it. How can they not know?’

Geezler promised to look into Beni’s case, and asked Rem to find the names of the other men. Although, he said, his arena was Europe, which limited him in certain regards. It wasn’t if he could do anything, but when.

‘I don’t want to play my hand too early. I’m operating in someone else’s territory. There might be a more apposite time for me to be involved.’ To be honest, he said, he hadn’t anticipated so many issues, certainly none as serious as this. He asked Rem to keep an eye on Beni. ‘Let me know when he receives his deployment date. I can intervene at that point without making undue trouble. Make sure you have his full name.’

Rem accepted the situation. Geezler at least was listening, he paid attention. Rem understood the constraint under which he worked. Geezler had set up the whole operation, had sent Rem into the field to discover these problems. While Geezler hadn’t said as much, he guessed that he’d put his job on the line. If discovered Rem would lose nothing. Geezler stood to lose plenty.

He took another quick look at the facilities before turning in, and what he saw depressed him. It wasn’t so much the lack of cleanliness as the smell and disarray of too many men in too small a space. Everyone was to be woken at five, a schedule laid out the order for showers and breakfast.

Unused to sharing a room with men, Rem slept uneasily.

*   *   *

The first four days in Austin passed quickly, on each day the information changed, the briefings became longer, repetitive. First they were heading to Iraq via Dubai, then Bahrain, possibly Düsseldorf, then definitely Bahrain. Once in Bahrain they would be held in a hotel close to the airport while they were processed, which could take anything up to a week because the parent company, HOSCO, needed to figure out exactly where they were needed.

Geezler called on the sixth day to notify Rem that a placement had been confirmed and transit was organized for the next morning. Geezler wished him luck, and Rem said that he was ready. Rem called Cathy with the news.

‘You don’t have to do this. If you don’t go you won’t be letting anyone down.’

‘It’s six weeks.’

‘You don’t have to go.’

‘Six weeks. We’ll owe nothing. Tell me what you want.’

‘And what difference would it make, Rem?’

The fact, unspoken, lay clear before them, if she asked him not to go, he would not go.

*   *   *

On his last afternoon in Chicago, Rem visited Mike in his house on Ravenswood.

Mike’s wife opened the door, looked less than pleased to see him. ‘When are you taking that dog back?’

Rem said it wouldn’t be with them much longer.

‘It’s cruel,’ she said, blame in her voice, ‘it’s not right keeping something in a cage like that. And I don’t like lying to Cathy.’

‘I’ll deal with it.’

As she walked away she muttered, Make sure you do, then told him that Mike was waiting in the back.

The houses on Ravenswood lay close to the tracks. Trees sheltered the yards and darkened the stoops and porches, and while he used to enjoy this – shade in the summer for beer and end-of-day business – it struck him now as oppressive.

He found Mike sat at a table. Geezler had settled an advance of three thousand, enough to pay the most urgent outstanding medical bill and give Mike a little of what he owed.

Mike stood up, squeezed past the table and asked Rem if he wanted a beer.

Rem spoke while Mike was out of the room. Easier to talk without facing him, to speak with a little pep and verve, to make the news sound inconsequential.

‘I found work. It’s a short job, but it means I’ll be able to settle everything.’

‘Short?’

‘Six weeks, guaranteed bonus. No tax, so I can settle with you when I get back.’

Mike stopped at the door, a beer in each hand.

‘No tax, so that’s abroad, right?’

Rem nodded. Mike’s head made a slight jolt. ‘Is this what I think it is? Because you don’t have to do that.’

‘It’s a lot of money. In six weeks I can clear everything I owe.’

Mike set both beers on the table. ‘Rem, if this is Iraq, I mean, we can all wait. What’s done is done. You don’t have to do this. Don’t go on my behalf.’ He scratched the back of his head. ‘You should have just cut us loose. That’s what you should have done. You have this whole thing mixed up. Other businesses fail. It’s not your fault. As soon as you didn’t have the jobs you should have let us go.’

Mike popped the cans open, slid one across to Rem.

‘And then there’s Matt. I don’t see why you helped him out. I don’t see it. You go to Iraq and what does he do? You haven’t saved anything. The end result – I really hate to say – is what? What does Cathy say?’

‘She doesn’t like it.’

Rem took out the money and set it beside Mike’s beer. Mike looked at it and repeated, ‘This just makes me feel bad. I don’t want to hold you to anything.’

‘I promised I’d pay you.’

Mike picked up the money, note by note. ‘I can’t refuse this. You know that. But I don’t like being in this position, Rem. I think I should take this and we should call it quits. You’ve done what you can.’

‘I said I’d pay. And I’ll pay.’

‘You just have to give it up. Sometimes you just have to say enough.’ Mike shook his head.

‘It isn’t as bad as it sounds. Won’t be much different than Kuwait.’

‘It isn’t just about going, Rem, you know that. It’s leaving here. Leaving Cathy. You two always mess up when you’re apart. You know that.’

‘It’s not the same.’

‘She was sick, and you were away. You think she doesn’t remember that?’

As the light failed, the house became unfamiliar, through all the years Rem had visited it had never seemed so drab.

They spoke in conditional terms about events that were already decided.

‘We might move.’ Mike looked to the kitchen, to indicate the choice wasn’t his. ‘Be closer to her sister in Cicero. It isn’t just the money. The neighbourhood’s changing. On one side the rents are going up, on the other, it’s turning into a place you don’t want to be.’

‘When might this happen?’

Mike pointed to flats of cardboard stacked alongside the wall, boxes, ready to be made up.

‘That soon?’

‘Soon.’

Rem looked hard at the table’s edge. He cleared his throat. ‘About the dog.’

*   *   *

On the porch, in a cage – nothing more than a rabbit hutch – set on a workbench, a small Yorkshire terrier curled on a folded blanket. Rem bent forward, cooed, Lucy, Lucy, and the dog came up, licked his fingertips through the mesh.

‘It has to go back.’

‘She’s fond of it now.’

‘It’s not right, though.’

‘Eye for an eye.’

‘I can’t be certain.’ The thing is, he explained, you can take all of the facts, mix them around, give them to five people, and you’d have five different versions about what’s going on. Things get so mixed up, you just can’t tell the truth any more.

*   *   *

Rem wouldn’t hear the news until the next morning. Not until Cathy returned from the hospital.

‘How do I get hold of you?’ she asked. ‘Calling your cell is going to cost a fortune.’

Rem suggested they keep the mobile strictly for emergencies. They could record messages, video or sound, on their phones and upload them. Cathy asked how.

‘Use the library. It’s free. They have a stack of computers. Send emails, use the Yahoo account.’

‘Are you serious?’

‘It’s only six weeks. It’s not that much hassle.’

And here they were, spending money talking about talking.

‘Keep the phone for emergencies. I can pick up messages just as long as there’s a signal. But keep it to emergencies, OK?’

‘That’s the thing.’ Cathy’s voice became hesitant. ‘I’ve news and it’s bad.’

*   *   *

A call had come from Mike, and at first she couldn’t understand what he was saying, but he wanted her to check out Channel 5 or Fox, it was on both right now, then get in contact with Rem, because Matt had done something so unbelievable he couldn’t credit it, couldn’t begin to express how profoundly disturbing it was: he just couldn’t comprehend what he was seeing.

This is the kind of stunt people used to do on LSD.

Matt had been caught in action by a news team, who just happened to be coming up Lake Shore Drive right at the moment he appeared. The newscaster advised viewer discretion, because, despite the hazy picture quality, you could see a good amount of unpleasant detail. Matt had opened his wrists with a box-cutter, walked with a woozy stride across six lanes of rush-hour traffic in what looked like wet red jeans, then tipped himself off the flyway to land on his back on the grass, one unholy mess. Unlucky in everything.

‘Can’t even kill himself.’ Mike’s voice stopped down to an incredulous whisper.

Cathy watched, stood up, sat down, hands to mouth, as Matt tipped over the balustrade, a full head-over-heels dummy-drop, slam on his back.

She wanted a drink. Needed something in her hands. Ducked toward the TV to make sure that she was seeing this right. Matt. That was Matt? Right? Their Matt? Former neighbour/friend/Rem’s employee, Matty, the man who threw the party when they came back from New Orleans? She watched him amble – what else could you call it – across the expressway, through the fierce downdraught of a police helicopter, just outright saunter across Lake Shore Drive, off his box, to topple ragdoll over the far parapet.

The grass rippled about him, the ground velvet, soft as an undulating sea.

Two helicopters now. Three. One to medevac him to Northwestern, two to monitor. The traffic backed up from Fullerton to Loyola. People were sending images from their cellphones to the network. Matt seen from a passenger seat. Matt taken from the back of a bus. Matt, definitely Matt, curving by a driver, blank-eyed, to disappear, head first, arms at his side, with a heavy inevitability, the man in the car shouting, not even using language, just a bellyful of awe and shock.

Cathy went to the bedroom, dreamy-voiced, like this could be normal, talked out loud, as if the dog was there, or Rem. ‘I’m calling Cissy.’ You watch a former friend (your husband’s one-time best friend, for what, fifteen years?), a deeply compromised person who has caused you unending trouble, someone you hope you might forgive (one day), perform a sloppy unsuccessful exit on prime time and you decide to call his wife, as if for a chat.

Matt’s wife and Cathy had history, and while Matt’s thievery unspooled in a long and ugly fall, Cathy had insisted, at least to Rem, on their friendship.

Cathy couldn’t make the call but sat at the edge of the bed, head in her hands. She couldn’t sit, couldn’t stand, found it impossible not to move, spoke briefly with Mike a second time then paced the hall with the phone saying, Jesus, oh Jesus Christ, as Mike’s voice began to break.

Then: a touch of relief as Cathy understood that there wasn’t honestly any other narrative Matt Cavanaugh would decide for himself.

*   *   *

Cathy sat beside the bed, simply because being low, close to the ground was a comfort. She called Cissie because she wanted to do something, and learned that Matt was at Northwestern, downtown.

Once on the El, Cathy began to seethe. Why did she have to be so reliable?

She called Maggie to tease out her anger. ‘I tried calling Rem. They’re nine hours ahead so it’s, what, three in the morning already? He never answers. It’s pointless calling.’ She stared hard at the tracks, and focused her aggression on the apartments beside Wilson. ‘I don’t know what to do. This whole thing has been chaos.’ She couldn’t answer questions about Matt and looked at the apartments, the ornate cornices and balconies, and wondered if they were supposed to look Spanish or Italian, like haciendas or palazzos. Who knows how anyone is going to react? There’s never any telling. She could barely anticipate her own reaction to any situation at any given moment. Cathy rolled her eyes, tipped back her head. ‘You know what I resent? I resent being on my own with all of this.’

She loved the curve before Sheridan, how the track veered left after the cemetery into a tight corner. The design of it pleased her as did the effect, the loveliness of your bodyweight tipping because you just can’t help it. Even now, in this circumstance, she couldn’t ignore the curve and how her shoulders pressed against the side of the carriage, how the standing passengers jostled to stay upright.

*   *   *

Only family. A regulation Cathy felt thankful for, a mercy not to face the man. No police, no journalists. A shiny corridor slick with light. A smell she could barely stomach. Cissie beside a noticeboard, hands squeezing out grief.

Cissie couldn’t look her in the eye as she explained that Matt was essentially stapled to a board to hold his spine in position. We’re through the worst, she said, the two halves of her face in disagreement: pure haggard shock in her eyes and a fleetingly sociable smile she could just about keep steady. ‘It’s very kind of you.’

Cathy wanted to ask why, but couldn’t find the heart.

Cissie pecked randomly at facts, and it was clear that she didn’t understand the full picture either. She asked after Rem, asked if they had spoken, and Cathy answered no, not yet. Hadn’t Rem told Matt he didn’t want to see him again? I don’t care if you’re on fire, you don’t call me. You stay away.

Cathy asked if anyone else had come and immediately regretted the question. Cissie froze, clenched, terrified at the idea. Then, steadily, the tension dropped, her hands and shoulders relaxed, because, what else could happen, really – what else could now go wrong? She didn’t know what to hope for, she said. She didn’t know what to think, and Cathy replied that no one blamed Matt. Not now. What had happened was all in the past, and they needed to think about the future.

Cissie’s expression laid open her heart. Everything rested on the word blame. She didn’t understand.

‘What he did,’ and now Cathy had to spell it out.

It seemed, at least to Cathy, that this blunder – at the very least – illuminated with a terrible clarity what must otherwise have been an intolerable situation. Cissie had no idea.

*   *   *

Cathy came out of the hospital in a hurried half-run, as if heading for a train or a ride. She slowed at the kerb and walked toward Michigan Avenue, relieved to be outside, the image of Cissie’s slow realization stuck with her. She stopped by a group of smokers close by the stock doors to Neiman Marcus, checked her pockets for keys as an excuse to pause. One of the smokers asked if she’d come from the hospital and Cathy nodded.

‘That bad?’

She couldn’t think how it could be any worse, couldn’t bear to see her reflection in the store windows, thought that she was inhuman.

*   *   *

When she did speak with Rem she managed to keep her patience while he told her what to do. His voice in any case was filtered, unreal, so she might be talking via a third party, or a stranger, some abstracted Rem-like idea. She didn’t like telling him news that she had already processed, and found he didn’t absorb the basic facts quickly enough.

‘It didn’t have to go this far.’ She didn’t mean to say this, especially now when anything she could say would sing with too much purpose.

He wasn’t responsible, he said. It wasn’t his fault.

Rem wasn’t prepared. He took it in for a moment, she could hear this in his pause. He never could keep up in any kind of confrontation. Coming back from the movies that last time they’d argued, and Rem, unwilling to stick with it, had changed seats, moved along the carriage, and left her to feel the solidity of the houses speeding away from them, the flat roads, the weight and volume of the city.

She understood that the discussion wasn’t going to go further. A second piece of news, she decided, she’d save for another call. This was about Nut, and Rem would need a little more time to process this.

According to Cissie, Matt had come to see Rem the day that Rem came over to see him – if that made any sense. Rem had made some plan, but Matt wasn’t sure if they were supposed to meet at Clark Street, or if Rem was going to come over to theirs. Around ten o’clock Matt had walked up Lunt to Clark, and found the doors unlocked. At first he thought Rem had just slipped out, was probably in the store downstairs or something. Anyway, Rem hadn’t come back, so he must have left in a hurry without locking the doors. He must have been preoccupied. What happened – somehow, Cissie didn’t know how – but Matt had let the dog out. It was his fault. It wasn’t deliberate.

‘He didn’t tell me at first. Waited a couple of days. I think he thought you’d find him. But he felt bad about it. I’m really, really sorry.’

*   *   *

On the day Rem heard the news about Matt Cavanaugh, Fatboy’s replacement, Stefan Kiprowski, arrived at the section base. Seconded from Food Services at Southern-CIPA, the regional government agency, the post was intended to be temporary. Geezler hadn’t lied: HOSCO ran everything, food, water, sleep, employment. Kiprowski reminded him of someone. Not because of his height, and not because he was thin. He couldn’t place the reference.

Rem loved the complexities. Each morning when they returned to ACSB he sat with Santo in the commissary. They drank coffee while they watched the TCNs gather and prepare for their drives.

‘You can always tell where they’re going.’ Santo nodded at the drivers. ‘The smilers are southbound, Kuwait. The shitters are heading north,’ he deepened his voice, ‘to a land of desolation,’ then more sweetly, ‘bye, boys. Say bye-bye.’

Santo offered to refill the coffees so he could hum ‘One Headlight’ as he passed by the drivers. When he returned he told Rem he looked happy. ‘Happier, I should say. Don’t get me wrong.’

‘I might stay here.’

‘Here? Iraq?’

‘Safer. I just heard news.’

‘Home?’

Rem nodded.

‘Thing is. You aren’t there. You’re here. Can’t do one thing about it. It’s win–win.’

Rem began to explain about Matt’s walk across Lake Shore Drive: how cars hadn’t hit him and how he’d survived a tumble over a parapet, and something like a fifteen-foot drop. ‘Didn’t even hold out his hands to save himself.’

‘I saw that,’ Santo cooed. ‘The jumper. You know him?’ He sat back, hands on his thighs, impressed.

Rem gave a slow nod.

‘I heard they opened him up and found everything pushed up.’ Santo heaved his hand from his chest to his throat. ‘They had to take it all out and put it back in the right place. He had shit coming out of his ears you wouldn’t want coming out of your ass. Can you believe that? Some people die falling off a chair. Man, you know him?’ Santo shook his head in disbelief. ‘Why would a person do that?’

Rem said he couldn’t believe it himself. Some things are beyond imagining.

Santo, seeing the conversation heading in a bad direction, pointed out the new manager. ‘Speaking of Chicago. He’s from your town.’

Rem looked across the commissary at the tall thin boy, still couldn’t place him, but doubted that they knew each other from Chicago. More robust than Fatboy: corn-fed and wholesome. ‘Looks lost.’

‘Talking of dumb-assed, you hear what KCP did to him yesterday?’

‘KCP?’

‘Transport. They hear this new guy is coming in from Southern-CIPA, which is right on the other side of Amrah. He’s here three hours and he has to go back for one last duty. This is a journey you can’t make without security, without armoured cars, guns, SWAT teams, nuclear devices. So he goes to Transport, places his request, says he has to get to CIPA, as soon as. They take a dislike to this guy, because, well, I don’t know, they just don’t like him. So they give him the brush-off and tell him to come back in an hour. So, he’s back in an hour, and the office is closed, and there’s a sign saying come back in another hour. These guys are just messing with him.’ Santo took in a deep breath. ‘An hour later he’s at the counter, and there’s a new sign saying “back in five”, only they aren’t back in five. So he calls them, tells them he has to be back at Southern-CIPA in two hours for a function. He’s supposed to be laying on the food for this function. Cutting sandwiches. Making coffee. He goes away. He comes back a third time. Still nobody there, this time the sign says, “vehicle in loading dock”. He goes to the loading dock and there’s nothing there except a fat-assed BFV. A tank. And just for good measure they’ve leant a bicycle against it with a dishwalla and one of those headscarf turbans. You know what he does?’

‘This already didn’t happen.’

‘You know what he does? He dresses up. He puts that shit on, he dresses like a fratboy heading to a hazing. He takes the bike, and he cycles all the way to Southern-CIPA.’

‘It’s not true.’

‘It’s true. Fact! Jalla Road. Ask him. Ask him how he got to the tea-party at Southern-CIPA yesterday. Ask him.’ Santo shook his head. ‘What is it with Chicago these days? Is there some kind of crazy in the water? I’m putting money on him for a kill.’

Rem looked across the room. The boy checked items on a clipboard. Something about the turn of his head, not directly down, but tilted, gave Rem the reference he couldn’t place. Nut. The boy looked like his dog.

*   *   *

Matt survived two strokes in his first week in hospital, and suffered a blood infection in the second, which temporarily turned his skin yellow, but responded immediately to treatment. He held on. This is what they told themselves: Cathy, Cissie, the attending medics. Matt was holding on with superhuman determination. The doctors ordered scans and tests, amazed that he demonstrated any brain function at all given the damage caused by his fall. They depended a good deal on the word instinct.

Cathy came to the hospital when she could, and kept in touch with Cissie by phone on the days she could not visit.

Cissie’s quiet unnerved her. She ran her day to a bare routine of arriving and departing, picked the same seat, sat in the same attentive poise, wrung her hands and waited. On the phone Cissie had nothing to say, and in her stillness Cathy saw a kind of madness.

The news that Matt had been transferred to Kansas City came as a relief.

*   *   *

The arrival of the Division Chief signalled another change in HOSCO: a potential reshuffle of directors and deputies assigned to the regions. No one could put a name or a face to the Division Chief for the Middle East, or could find such a man on the company website – that the position might be vacant meant little to the men of Unit 409 who were bothered only by the disruption that accompanied any such visit or site inspection. Since the assault on Jalla Road resentment had begun to grow and the Iraqi Ministry for Infrastructure and Sanitation had become more diligent. Permits for clearances and demolitions were stalled. Rem guessed that the delay depended on the right amount of money hitting the right person or the right clan before they would be able to continue with their work. This, he thought, would be the real motivation behind the visit. He doubted it had anything to do with Fatboy and substandard equipment.

Still, curious enough to show up, Rem accompanied Santo to the meeting.

*   *   *

The commissary was sectioned off with small rope barriers to mark out a rough rectangle. Men from the unit sat on either side of the tables interested in the boxes stacked alongside the vending machines. Two of the tables were marked with a ‘reserved’ sign.

The Division Chief arrived with a posse of bureaucrats: uniformly dressed in white shirts, chinos, buckskin boots.

‘Jesus Christ,’ Santo whispered, ‘would you look at that. The Banana Republic hive mind. They sleep in one big bed, swap clothes. Have interchangeable limbs. They have no genitals.’

Rem watched the group approach, the Division Chief concealed by the huddle, then, as the deputies spread out, revealed. Large in every sense, he wore a white linen suit and carried a light-blue handkerchief with which he mopped his forehead. Disproportionate, tall, and so overweight that walking appeared cumbersome. The man swung his arms, breathed through his mouth, had a sprightly edge, and seemed, at least to Rem, uncommonly alert.

Santo swore under his breath. A chuckle stirred through the unit, then the men fell unusually silent.

The Division Chief was introduced by the section head, Mark Summers, who appeared decorous beside the chief.

Santo complained that he hadn’t heard the Division Chief’s name, and the answer came back, whispered down the row: Mann, David Mann. Division Chief for Europe.

‘What happened to the last guy? The one for the Middle East?’ Santo asked in a voice that was not so quiet. ‘You think he ate him?’ The men looked back and considered the possibility.

Summers stood beside the boxes and began to speak. His shirt was wet at the armpits, his hair matted. The boxes contained new protective jackets.

‘These,’ he said, struggling out one of the black flak vests, ‘are what we’re offering all ground personnel. Gratis. You can take these now.’ He opened the vest, spoke about the new neck guards, the crotch-bib.

‘What did I tell you?’ Santo nudged Rem. ‘I must be psychic. They’ll take pictures now, and this goes in the company magazine. Gets sent to the newspapers.’

To Summers’ embarrassment the men stopped in their seats. Rem kept his eye on Mann and was surprised that he did not intervene, but appeared, instead, to study the men.

Summers, quieter, squeakier, said that the men could sign for the jackets at the PX. ‘One each,’ he said. ‘One.’

*   *   *

Rem hung around the visiting party as Summers and Mann were shown ‘the ovens’. He overheard Summers ask if he could see the men’s quarters, and the mistake stuck with Rem, not because of its irony, but for the lack of understanding. Neither Summers nor Mann had visited a live compound before. They couldn’t have. The accommodation was no different from HOSCO’s usual provision: inadequate for a combat zone. As European Division Chief, David Mann could be forgiven. Summers had just never left his office.

Rem followed with his arms folded.

*   *   *

That evening Rem found Paul Geezler in the commissary. Paul Geezler. In Iraq. Amrah City.

Rem picked a soda from self-service and stood at a distance. Geezler wore a blue shirt with HOSCO sewn in white along the right breast pocket, a plate of pasta-bake in front of him.

Aware that he was being watched, Geezler looked up. ‘Gunnersen.’

‘What are you doing here?’

‘I’m with the Division Chief. One day. In. Out.’ Geezler indicated the seat opposite him. ‘Join me. I was hoping to speak with you.’

Geezler shifted his tray to make room, asked Rem if he was eating. ‘I haven’t heard much from you lately?’

The air-conditioner focused a fine stream between Rem’s shoulders.

Geezler spoke of his business, a tour to Singapore then Indonesia. ‘Denpasar. They insist, even now, on a face.’ He gave a resigned shrug. ‘You like it here? It’s a sincere question. Do you like your work?’

‘It’s complicated.’

‘Have you thought about staying?’

Rem couldn’t help but laugh.

‘You’ve been useful.’

‘There hasn’t been much happening.’

‘I have what I asked for.’

‘I want to get through this without trouble. I had a friend—’

‘The boy who shot himself.’ Geezler nodded as if considering a personal sorrow. He paused, set down his fork. ‘I don’t think we’re using you to your full advantage. I’m thinking you’re in the wrong place.’

‘I have two weeks.’

‘Hear me out. What if I could offer you something uncomplicated? How would that sound?’ Geezler’s eyes were a perfect blue, disarming in a man. ‘People are frightened of you. Did you know that?’

Rem shrugged. ‘I want to go home. There are things happening, I should be home.’

‘Maybe you want something safer?’

‘Safer is good. Home is better.’

‘How is that business of yours? Can you go home and start that up again? Will the money be enough?’

Rem looked at the man and focused on not giving a response.

‘I need a manager. Have you heard of Al-Muthanna?’

‘It’s the desert. In the south.’

‘Remind me what you earn?’

Rem held up his fingers.

Geezler nodded again. ‘What if you earned that in one month?’

‘Total?’

‘Total. No tax, as per.’ Geezler held up his hands and looked at them. ‘You’ll need to decide quickly.’ He asked for a napkin. ‘I see you as a manager. What do you know about the burn pits?’

Rem pushed a pack of towelettes across the table.

‘Tell me. What have you heard?’

Rem shook his head.

‘Everything we’ve brought here needs to be taken away. What can’t be taken away needs to be burned. We have four sites. Camp Bravo, up north. SB Alpha and Camp Victor, both central. And Camp Liberty, south-west. Every one except Camp Liberty is manned. I need a manager to assemble a team. No more than seven men. You’ll be your own man. It’s secure, remote, and absolutely safe. HOSCO have set up the pits, the systems, the deliveries and sites are independent.’

‘How long?’

‘Two months. It’s hard to tell. Until we close them down.’

Rem reflected for a moment. Kiprowski in a paper hat, a white bib, tall and lanky, waited behind a counter, head forward, arms behind his back, bored.

‘You can pick whoever you want.’

‘You need an answer now?’

‘I leave in three hours,’ Geezler checked his watch, ‘but let me know by the end of play tomorrow. I won’t ask anything else of you.’

*   *   *

It took Rem an hour to find Santo down in Transport watching the TCNs being dispatched. ‘Makes me feel bad watching them go like that. You ever seen those convoys?’

Rem said he hadn’t and followed Santo across the central quad.

‘I have a proposal. There’s a man here from HOSCO and he’s asked me to put together a team. Seven men to go down to Al-Muthanna. They need a team. He’s asked me, but I think I could persuade him to take you if it’s something you’re interested in?’

‘Why would I want to go? Things are working fine here.’

‘It’s double the money.’

‘Where is this again?’

They waited by the entrance to the transport dock. Three rows of vehicles, the noise shuddering through the garage, the fumes rising. Santo pointed out a mechanic who stood among the security and drivers as they decided on a running order. Santo waved the man over. ‘This is Pakosta, he’s been here longer than me.’ Pakosta wiped his hands on a rag as he came to them. Confident and fresh, he shook Rem’s hand as they were introduced.

‘Should have stayed here,’ he said to Santo. ‘Had a fight. No one wants to ride in the first set.’

‘It’s that bad?’

Pakosta shrugged. ‘The problem is how they drive. People fall asleep. Lose the road. They won’t slow down or stop. I’m sick of picking dogs out of fenders. Last week one ran through a herd of goats. Refused to stop. They think if they stop then they’re dead. Most are high on chaw anyway.’ Pakosta pinched the bridge of his nose. ‘They wear adult diapers. Honest to god. Like monkeys. Don’t even stop to shit. You don’t want to go inside those cabins after a long haul.’

Santo asked Pakosta when he was done, and Pakosta said he was looking for an extension. ‘You mean here, right? You’re asking when am I done here?’

‘You heard of Camp Liberty?’

Pakosta looked up in the air in thought. ‘Which one?’

‘South-east. Al-Muthanna. On the way to Kuwait.’

Pakosta nodded, he knew it. ‘Camp Crapper? Off Highway 80 someways? I’ve been there on a recovery. It’s not occupied. Why?’

‘He’s putting a team together.’

‘For?’

‘A short job, managing the burn pits.’

‘They need people for that?’

‘The pay is good.’

‘They dump stuff and set fire to it. Why do they need people?’

Rem said he didn’t know, and Santo asked if it mattered. Pakosta said he guessed it didn’t. Santo asked a second time if he was interested, and Pakosta answered that he’d sooner just wait in Amrah and see what came up.

Ready to leave, Rem began to make his excuses. Pakosta rolled up his sleeve.

‘You see this. Here.’ He held up his arm to show a fresh scratch, a short thick line, as thick as a finger. ‘Nearly died last night.’ Santo and Rem looked at the scar.

‘What is that?’

‘We were recovering a vehicle on North Jalla. We just got it hitched and someone took a shot.’

‘Is that a graze? You saying it just missed you?’ Santo leaned in to look closer.

‘They shot out the bulb from the headlight. Burned right through.’ He turned his arms so he could look.

Santo disagreed. ‘Doesn’t count. No one’s getting rich off a miss.’

As they walked away Rem and Santo were silent.

*   *   *

Imagine you could do something undeniably, unquestionably good. That dropped into your hands was the opportunity to achieve One Good Thing.

Imagine a man stumbling across a motorway, blind, out of his mind, and you beside him, guiding, making those split-second choices.

Let’s say it’s only temporary. Let’s say it’s in your power to grant someone a reprieve. You can snatch them away, and offer a short respite. And maybe what’s coming might become less of a certainty?

Rem slept, woke, slept again, revived the same dream of scooping people from highways, buildings, cars – elemental dreams with floods and fires. Dreams of stress not salvation. The last hours of the night he slept heavily and decided on a plan. These men in Fatboy’s book were lined up, dead certainties while they remained at ACSB.