I considered that objectively. With his coloring and beard, Dave did resemble a Pashtun. A beefy Afghan who had clearly been pumping iron in one of the many bodybuilding gyms of Kabul then walked up to him.
“I’m sorry again, sir.”
Dave started yelling at him. “You can’t treat people like that. I’m a journalist.”
Farouq looked at me, his eyebrows raised. Dave had a point. But the security guard had apologized, several times. Now Dave was shaming him in public, which contradicted any Afghan code imaginable. His anger was spilling over from me to the world. What had he seen on his embeds? I didn’t know, because he didn’t want to worry me, but I imagined bombs, gunfights, the kind of violence that I had somehow avoided. Dave had started to change. Always passionate and intense, he now seemed just angry.
Finally he sat down, still upset, barely speaking to me because of the ticket fiasco. This was not a fun date. Poor Farouq was stuck in the middle.
But we were all soon distracted. White lights flashed, and the loudspeakers pumped music. The host ran onstage, announced “In the name of God—hello,” and called out the four singers. They walked out and stood nervously, waiting to hear who lost in the previous week’s voting. Lima Sahar was the only woman and the only Pashtun.
“Who is the person who should stay with us?” the host asked the audience, who booed Lima. Some of the three hundred or so audience members felt that Lima had made it this far in the competition not because of her talent but because of a massive Pashtun voting bloc. And they were upset for another reason.
“Why are they booing her?” I asked Farouq.
“She’s a woman,” he whispered. “They aren’t used to it.”
I felt bad for her. Lima was kept home during the Taliban years, and although she was eighteen, she was only in the eighth grade. She could speak little Dari, the main language in Afghanistan. When Lima was in Kandahar, she wore a blue burqa whenever she left the house. But onstage she wore blue glitter in her hair, a matching headscarf, a long electric-blue tunic with gold-sequin flowers, matching pants, fake eyelashes, and the makeup of a televangelist’s wife. She gripped her elbows in front of her chest like a life preserver and stared straight ahead, looking past the boos of the audience.
The host paused, dramatically delaying the judges’ decision. “I can tell you this time, something strange has happened.”
Something strange had indeed happened—the most popular singer had been knocked off. And Lima had made it to the final round of three.
When Lima sang, I could see why some people questioned her ability. She seemed more like a karaoke performer, perhaps even a not-so-good karaoke performer. She danced almost as an afterthought, with the rhythm of Whitney Houston and the enthusiasm of lumber. Her voice was sometimes off-key. Yet she was also slightly flirty, a bit subversive. She sang one song with almost a sneer, changing the words of a traditional Pashto song from a male perspective to a female one. In Afghanistan, that passed for rebellion.
“If I blacken my eyes with eyeliner, it will kill you,” she sang, with a slight hip sway. “Especially if I wear these bangles from Kandahar.”
My story was scheduled for the front page the next Thursday, the same day that Lima happened to be voted off the show. But Dave’s ran first, days earlier, meaning that I had helped him scoop me. That was hardly the only problem. Unknown to anyone at the Tribune, a reporter at our sister newspaper, the Los Angeles Times, also owned by the Tribune Company, had written a story weeks earlier about Afghan Star that had not yet run in the newspaper. It was a very different story, and didn’t even mention Sahar, but it was about the same TV show. Then, in a decision that would haunt me for months, the Los Angeles Times decided to run its story about Afghan Star on the same day as mine.
Our newspaper company had just been bought by the eccentric billionaire Sam Zell, an alleged maverick who liked wearing jeans and swearing. The deal was complicated and somehow involved cashing in all the stock owned by employees, but since it had gone through in the weeks between the emergency and Bhutto’s death, I paid little attention. Zell, who resembled a cross between a Keebler elf and a garden gnome, was not a newspaperman. He was a compulsive bargain hunter, the self-proclaimed “grave dancer,” making billions largely by buying troubled companies, somehow fixing them, and then selling them. So far he had tried to ingratiate himself with employees by removing the barriers to porn on the Internet, under the theory, I guess, that newspapers shouldn’t have any censorship and because everyone loves porn, even at work. After appearing at a Los Angeles Times plant in Orange County in February, he was quoted on his philosophy: “Everyone likes pussy. It’s un-American not to like pussy.”
In theory, he should have loved my story about Afghan Star. But soon after the competing stories appeared on March 13, they came to Zell’s attention. He allegedly got angry and used some four-letter words. I could understand his point—two of his newspapers had expended resources on the same feature story in Afghanistan, hardly a smart investment. So as Zell toured around his newspapers in the coming weeks, he would complain about Afghan Star. And by inference, me.
But I wouldn’t know about the fallout for months. Oblivious and trapped in a hotel room with a man who felt neglected, I wrote other stories. I tried to spend time with Dave, but I also ate dinners with various sources, a time commitment that annoyed Dave more than my ticket stunt. Then my friend Sean, the British adrenaline junkie, called. I hadn’t seen him since the barbecue the previous summer at the Fun House, where the Afghan Elvis had peddled cocaine smuggled in toothpaste tubes.
“Meet me for dinner,” he said. “I need to talk to you about something. It’s very sensitive.”
I wanted to say yes. I knew I couldn’t.
“I can’t,” I said. “Lunch?”
I didn’t tell Sean I had a man in my hotel room because I didn’t want to mix the two men. Sean would be fine, but Dave would be jealous. Sean invited me to the Gandamack. As soon as the waiter took our order of chicken salads, Sean looked from side to side and leaned in closer.
“So, I have to ask you about something,” he started, vaguely.
“Yes?”
“I have an opportunity. An invitation to go meet someone. Someone important. But it could be difficult. I’m wondering if you think I should go.”
“Tango?” I said. By now, I slipped easily into his conspiracy lingo.
“Not Tango. Someone senior. I can’t tell you.”
“Hekmatyar?” I said, naming the renegade leader of Hezb-i-Islami, the militant group in the east.
“No. Let me finish. I have been invited to meet a senior commander who’s very important. But the meeting would be over the border, in the tribal areas of Pakistan. What do you think?”
I didn’t have to think long. “I think you’re a fucking idiot and you’re going to get kidnapped.”
“They promised me security,” Sean said.
“I think you’re a fucking idiot and you’re going to get kidnapped,” I repeated.
“Keep your voice down,” he said. “You know, I’m a little worried. I was supposed to meet the contact a few days ago, but Sami didn’t have everything together and it felt weird, so we canceled. And our contact said, ‘No problem, we can reschedule.’ That seemed strange. Normally you have to push and push to get these guys to talk to you.”
I sighed. Sean knew everything I was telling him. His translator, Sami, knew everything. They knew this was a bad idea, but Sean still wanted his fix.