And you know what the Iraqis really loved, their number one smash hit recipe? They called it Khantooqi Fried. It was funny: back home, people complained about the imposition of American values on an ancient civilization.
Well, there was one delicacy that every Iraqi short-order chef could produce, and that was the brown-grey salty batter in which they caked the corpses of their poor, scraggy, underfed roosters. Long before General Tommy Franks, there was one American military figure who had conquered Iraq, and that was Colonel Sanders.
After a while McDonald’s did arrive in the barracks. They installed Coke machines. The troops’ skin began to suffer. All the guys were getting seriously homesick, and they were only allowed five minutes per week on the phone.
All of it might have been tolerable, however, had it not been for the streets. He hated the streets, walking among these skinny and malnourished people as though you were from an alien planet. You felt like Judge Dredd, with your big padded helmet, your flak jacket, your chest a kind of mobile drugstore: watch, radio, aspirin, scissors.
Always there was the heart-thud of anxiety when the cars cruised towards your station. Everyone was afraid of the guys with the mad eyes, who ran in from the crowds and pop pop pop they fired or ka-boom they blew their killer waistcoats. No damn good a flak jacket was going to do you, not against a man who really wanted to whack you.
Pickel had been standing on the mound outside the Al-Mansouria Palace, watering his geraniums. Actually, he wasn’t watering them, he was Diet Coke-ing them, since some clerk’s error in the Pentagon meant they were supplied with more Diet Coke than bottled water. The geraniums liked Diet Coke, even if it was bad for people, and Jason just loved the way they grew, the way they responded to him. He loved their geranium smell when he broke their stalks, to make them grow better. He stroked their pinks and reds and whites that mimicked his sunburnt Germanic skin. He marvelled at their long woody stalks, and thought how much bigger they were than the geraniums at home.
Thing was, he was worried about how things were at home. He hadn’t talked to his wife for more than twenty minutes in the last month, and he missed her.
Anyhow, he was Diet Coke-ing the blooms, when the Humvee with Jerry Kuchma rolled up. They were already yelling for help as soon as they came in sight, and when they braked poor Jerry Kuchma’s helmet rolled out into the yellow dust of the street. There was a big nametape stitched to the brim, as if he were at school, saying that it belonged to Kuchma, blood type A neg. But Jerry wasn’t going to be needing a transfusion now. You only had to look at the exit wound in his back, when they rolled him over, to see that the blood wouldn’t stay inside him.
Pickel was so horrified that he just stood there, and the only thing he managed to say was ‘Hey’. He said ‘hey’ because at one point he was worried that the stretcher guys were going to damage his blooms.
But the worst bit was when the English journalist came.
Why the hell he had been picked to come to London he did not know. He’d told his superiors.
He’d explained how it left him with a rancorous feeling of resentment towards anyone with one of those smooth-talking freaking British accents. If Jason Pickel had been asked to do a word association test, and you had said the word ‘British’, he would have said ‘rat’ or ‘fink’ or ‘shithead’.
So he was on geranium patrol, a week after Jerry Kuchma died, and it was meant to be extra-tight security because of some pow-wow or shindig inside. A lot sheikhs and mullahs and fat Iraqi businessmen were trying to sort out some blindingly obvious problem, that should have occurred to the Administration before it invaded the country, such as who was going to be Governor of the Reserve Bank of Iraq, and who was going to set monetary policy, and who was going to be in charge of the Iraqi army, now that it had been routed, and who was going to be Foreign Minister, now that Tariq Aziz was being held out at the airport, or how they were going to get the air con back, that kind of thing.
Then this guy walks down the street towards him, a white guy, wearing one of those special Giraldo Rivera war-zone waistcoats, with the pouches. Except that he had nothing in the pouches, and he was wearing stained chinos and trainers.
Thing Jason really noticed about him was his hair. His hair was like an Old Testament prophet, all silvery and swept back. But the detail that mattered, the thing Jason fixed his eye on with almost romantic excitement, was what was clamped to his ear.
‘Yuh, yuh,’ the man was saying, ‘OK, I’ll file 400 words about the scene of the American torture orgies. OK I understand. Listen, if you’re tight for space, I’ll just do 300.’
The reporter hung up, and then directed a look at Jason that was grave and charming. Jason knew he was going to be corrupted.
‘I am so sorry to trouble you,’ began the reporter.
‘No trouble at all,’ said Jason.
‘My name is Barry White, and I am a reporter for the Daily Mirror of London, and I wonder if you would be so kind as to help me.’
‘I’ll surely do what I can,’ said Jason.
‘I’m trying to track down General Axelrod – hang on,’ – he pretended to consult his notes – ‘I’m sorry, Lieutenant Axelrod Zimmerman.’
‘I am afraid I don’t know Lieutenant Zimmerman,’ said Pickel. ‘You’ll have to consult with the media department if you want to arrange an interview. You need to go back to the football stadium.’
‘No, it’s all right,’ said the Moses-like reporter. ‘I’ve just come from the media department and they said that Lieutenant Zimmerman would be expecting me here.’
‘Sir, I am afraid I can’t let anyone in here.’
‘This is Uday’s palace, isn’t it, the one they call the love-nest?’
‘It surely is, Mr White sir, but like I say, if you want to see that stuff, you’ve got to get clearance. Haven’t you all done that torture story, anyhow?’
‘Well, there’s just a detail I’d like to check, and I was told that Lieutenant Zimmerman … Tell you what, I’ll ring them up now, and you can talk to them …’
Jason Pickel felt his mouth go dry. He knew he was in the presence of a pusher. It was six days since he had talked to Wanda. Anyway, he needed to know about the soccer matches his kid was playing in, that kind of thing.
The Brit was dialling the number, and then he was offering the phone to him. Jason could see the screen lit up, the plump rectangles indicating a full battery, a clear signal. It was a Thuraya, a satphone. Jesus, he ached for a quick conversation.
‘I’m really sorry,’ he said, ‘but my regulations state that I may not talk in public on a civilian telephone. One of our guys was killed doing that.’
‘But that’s absurd,’ said Barry White, with the look of a headmaster uncovering a case of fourth form bullying. ‘Why don’t we just nip in there and you can use the phone in private?’
That was when the disaster happened, said Jason to Indira, as they sat on the duckboards, on the roof of the House of Commons, surrounded by pigeonshit.
What disaster? asked Indira. But Jason looked brooding, and in her imagination she supplied the answer.
It was the usual thing.
