“So I spend years overseas, dealing with assholes like the Taliban, risking my life, then I come home and an asshole like you steals my identity. How did you get my credit cards?”
She looked at me, mumbled that she didn’t know anything.
“Oh, you know. You know, bitch.”
Here, I was channeling a multitude of TV cop shows.
“Tell me. I can go easy on you, or I can go hard. It’s up to me how this case is prosecuted. If you cooperate, I’ll go easy. If you don’t, you’ll wish you never were born.”
“Yeah,” interjected one of the officers, who had adopted the role of good cop. “Help yourself.”
Eventually, I was able to get the name of the man who had allegedly given her my stolen cards, and the time of day she had allegedly got them. Not much, and no idea if it was true, but the experience was good training for a new career.
I walked out of the room with the two cops. We all started laughing. The lead detective was congratulatory.
“Man, you’re good,” he said. “You got more out of her in fifteen minutes than we did in six hours.”
I had still not dropped my fake-cop persona.
“Well, you know—I kind of do this for a living. We’re all on the same side.”
Where was I getting this? I left the cop station in time to see the Cubs lose. My thief would eventually be sentenced in a plea bargain, to about thirty minutes in jail.
But no matter. I soon heard my best news in months, the news I had been waiting for. Sean and Sami had been released after three months in captivity. Sean was spirited out of Pakistan to London, and Sami had crossed back to Afghanistan. After a flurry of e-mails with friends, I managed to get Sean’s new phone number in London—he was trying to lay low. While driving to Springfield to meet people from the Illinois National Guard, about to deploy to Afghanistan, I called Sean and left a message. He called back almost immediately. He sounded manic, jumping from subject to subject like a fly in a roomful of candy, tasting each one briefly before moving to the next.
“Hey, do you remember the last conversation we had?” he asked.
“You mean the one when I told you that you were a fucking idiot and were gonna get kidnapped?” I asked. “Yeah, I remember.”
“I kept thinking about that.”
But most of our conversation was one-sided, just a monologue from Sean, a run-on sentence.
“I lost some teeth,” he said.
“Uh-huh,” I said.
“At one point, I was inside one safe house. I heard BBC on a radio outside, and they were doing a story on Taliban training camps in Pakistan, and Pakistani officials were denying any training camps, but I couldn’t hear the story that well because of all the gunfire from the Taliban training camp outside my door.”
“Uh-huh,” I said.
“Sami almost lost it, at one point he was convinced we were going to be killed, and he just didn’t want to translate anymore, and without him, I had no way to communicate, so I had to tell him to pull it together.”
“Uh-huh,” I said.
Altogether, between driving to Springfield and back to Chicago, through various phone calls, I talked to Sean for almost four hours. Or I listened to Sean. Sami and Sean had been kidnapped almost as soon as they met their crucial contact, although they didn’t realize it at first. They had been moved several times—their captors would torture them, by doing things like brandishing guns, even pretending to shoot them in the head with an unloaded weapon. Sean didn’t know if he would ever be released. What got him through, he said, was thinking about his two sons, about what that would do to them, and about getting home. He felt guilt so heavy it threatened to smother him. He rarely felt hope.
It was unclear who originally took Sean—possibly criminals—but he was eventually traded up to members of the Haqqani network, the worst bad guys in Pakistan. Press accounts said his TV station had paid a total of $300,000 to free Sean and Sami. Sean didn’t want to talk about money. That also made him feel guilty—any money would go to nothing good and would make all of us targets. I said I’d see him soon in London.
My nose felt brand new, and it was time to leave. After the long break, I knew that I wanted to keep my job, wanted to stay overseas. Four years into this gig, my whole identity was wrapped up in it. If I wasn’t a foreign correspondent, then who was I? But after almost two weeks in Chicago, hearing the various plans to save the newspaper, I had become a pessimist. Something had to give. With few ads, dropping subscriptions, and no other business model, the newspaper seemed like it was imploding. I worried that I would have to move back to Chicago, find a new job, or make Dave get an actual job, if we could even make us work. Nothing else seemed likely. I calculated the odds. Chicago or Dave getting a job seemed like the most realistic bets. I talked to Dave. He really didn’t want to get an actual job yet.
“But I’m pretty sure they’re going to get rid of the foreign staff,” I said. “We can’t both freelance. So I may have to move back to Chicago. We may have to move.”
“I really hope that doesn’t happen,” he said. “I’d miss you.”
“Wouldn’t you come with me? You can work there.”
“I don’t want to live in Chicago. I don’t want to run into all your ex-boyfriends all the time.”
“All my ex-boyfriends? There’s maybe one.”
“I don’t want to just be a trophy on your arm there, Kim.”
“A trophy? You’re hardly a trophy.”
I thought about what he was saying.
“What about a compromise, D.C. or New York?”
“I don’t want to live in the U.S. I have no interest.”
All my doubts clicked into place. Freedom Fries and all, this was still my country. I didn’t want to move back to the States yet, but I didn’t want to rule out the possibility of ever living here again. I had reverted to my fantasy of normalcy, children, the things I was supposed to want, rather than facing the fact that this relationship was doomed. The fights had just gotten worse; objects had been thrown. I would much rather be alone than ever yell again, even if it meant being alone in Pakistan.
I walked into the Tribune Tower to say goodbye to my bosses and churn through some paperwork before flying home to Islamabad. Within three months, most of the glass offices would be filled with different people. Most of the top editors would quit, including the man who had written my name on an envelope, the editor in chief, and the editor who wouldn’t let me talk to Sam. The motto of the Tribune would change from the hopeful “World’s Greatest Newspaper” to the realistic “The Midwest’s largest reporting team.” That evening, I stepped off the elevator and walked past the inexplicable six-legged statue on my way out the door. I glanced at the nearby quote from Flannery O’Connor. It seemed apt: “The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.” My limbo was becoming my life.
CHAPTER 20
WHY CAN’T WE BE FRIENDS?
I flew back to Pakistan to pick up the pieces. As I trudged out of the Islamabad airport into the summer swelter, Samad spotted me and grabbed my purple suitcase, big enough for him to fit inside. “Hello, boss,” he said, looking down at the pavement. This was a test run, to see if he could handle working for me again. He had disappeared for more than a month after I left for the States, unavailable whenever my office manager called. But he had finally surfaced to explain why he had been acting so strange. He was not an ISI spy. He had been seeing a girl—his fiancée.
Although he was engaged, Samad was not supposed to talk to his fiancée. This was an arranged marriage. Samad and his fiancée would not be allowed to marry for years, not until his older brother had married, and not until Samad and the girl were considered old enough. This decision had the force of law because the father of the bride, who didn’t trust Samad, was also Samad’s oldest brother. Samad and his future bride were related in a second way—her mother was his cousin. So Samad was his fiancée’s uncle and second cousin. This was hardly unusual in certain circles in Pakistan, Afghanistan, or even India. Such marriages consolidated family ties and family belongings. Only the middle class and the elite picked their own spouses, and not always.