Reggie shared a large room at the end of the corridor with two other managers. The project director, Tariq, worked alone in his long, bare office. A thin man, who held his elegant frame like a pole, he was anti-regime, or so Reggie had said in the car, but his professional acumen was apparently such that the government needed him for this job—supervising the design and construction of state-of-the-art bus stations; his rigidity suggested that he, as much as his masters, had accepted the appointment with bad grace.
Within half an hour of arriving at her desk, Thea was craving coffee, tea, even another breakfast—anything to warm her up. The office boy, one of the women told her, could fetch her tea, so he was dispatched and returned with a glass of milkless tea so strong and sweet she couldn’t drink it. That was the first shock to the system: no ready supply of coffee, no standing around a communal kitchen waiting for the kettle to boil while catching up with friends; no opportunity to stop, stretch, breathe a little. The second shock was that there was no lunch break. In Saddam’s Iraq, nobody, it seemed, dared to stop working. They had to go right through until three o’clock—and Thea had brought no food. Their Iraqi colleagues produced their own lunches and ate at their desks, bread stuffed with beef and salad, the tantalizing aroma of unfamiliar spices wafting around the room.
“You’ll get used to it,” Kim said. “We’ll eat something back at the hotel.”
“What time will that be?”
“Only another three hours.”
The first day was long. Thea’s fingers were so frozen they could barely bang the sticky keys, and she knew that if she caught a cold, she would still have to show up to work in this icebox, because her contract allowed so few sick days per year. In search of warmth, she stood in the sunlight by the window, but the effect was minimal, so she retreated to her dark corner and Reggie’s letters. Kim, along the corridor, worked mostly for Geoffrey.
When three o’clock came, they escaped into the brisk afternoon and their warm jeep, and Geoffrey delivered them back to the hotel, where they tumbled gratefully into the sunny lobby, which buzzed with businessmen. At one end there was a cozy alcove, with silky red cushions and bolsters, urns and copper lights, and a low table, so Thea and Kim spread out across the couches, and ordered tea and cakes. From where she sat, Thea could see, through the curved opening, the reception desk at the far end of the lobby, and the receptionist who had greeted her the night before.
“Who are you looking at?” Kim leaned to the side. “Oh, that’s Sachiv. He’s one of the managers.”
“He seemed nice, when I was checking in.”
“He’s great. Really helpful—goes out of his way for us since we’re gonna be here long-term. Cool guy. And married. I thought I’d just throw that in. Married with three small kids.”
“Pity.”
“Uh-huh.”
His hands had been the first thing she had noticed, when she had arrived the night before. He was writing up the register, taking her details, wearing a black jacket and starched white shirt. His fingers were long and slender, his nails neat. A good start, she had thought mischievously, catching a flicker of those dark eyes, as she leaned wearily into the desk. It had been a long day, and a disconcerting one, not least when the jet had come in to land and all the aircraft’s lights had been turned off—inside and out—so that they couldn’t be fired at. It was reassuring that such a calm, attractive man should receive her on the other side of the bridge.
After tea with Kim, Thea went back to her room to unpack, and every time she took an item from her suitcase to place it on the shelves, her trajectory took her to the window. Baghdad. It was hard to grasp. Her mother had already decreed that it was her unattractive inclination to be impetu-ously reckless that had driven her there; her friends said she was like Amelia Earhart, always needing to reach higher altitudes; but she thought of herself more as a grasshopper. There didn’t seem to be much she could do about it, this tendency to make snap decisions and leap above the tall grasses to see what lay beyond. For months on end, it seemed, she could live unobtrusively, happy with her lot, until, feeling suddenly crushed by normalcy and expectation, she would do something wild, even dangerous. In such a mood she had climbed the “In Pin”—the Inaccessible Pinnacle—on the Isle of Skye with her brother when she was nineteen, though she had only hill-walking experience. At such moments she was fearless, but the payoff was considerable. Reaching the top of the In Pin was like stepping onto Heaven’s doorstep, where all she had to do was ring the bell for God to open the clouds and say, with a glance at His mountains, “Yes, I did rather well that day, didn’t I?” At twenty-two, she had learned to surf in the
