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“Really?” he asked.

“Yeah. It was a tiger car.”

He paused. “What did you think of the tiger car, Kim? Did you like the tiger car?”

Weird question. I gave an appropriate answer.

“Who doesn’t like a tiger car?”

CHAPTER 17

LUCKY STAR

Buried by the bombs and political wrangling of Pakistan, I had not been to Afghanistan for months. Stepping on the plane in Islamabad felt like freedom. Walking off the plane in Kabul felt like going home, even if I was allergic to that home. Outside the airport, Farouq smiled widely when he saw me. I sneezed. If we were alone, we would have hugged—it was March, and we hadn’t seen each other in six months. But in public, where all the taxi drivers and assorted men crowded around like paper clips near a magnet, we could only muster a vigorous shaking of hands. Farouq threw my bags into the back of his car. He was doing predictably well. Ever the businessman, Farouq had opened an Internet café and was clearing $1,500 a month, despite the fact that he had banned anyone from looking at pornography. As one of the country’s senior fixers, Farouq commanded up to $300 a day, primarily from visiting TV journalists, who blindly paid whatever was asked. But Farouq only earned money when journalists were in town, and he needed everything he could get. His wife was pregnant again.

“Oh man,” I said. “She’s going to kill you.”

Farouq laughed. His wife had wanted to have a small family, and she had wanted to work. But less than four years into their marriage, she was pregnant with her third child.

Regardless, whenever I was in the country, Farouq still charged me only $125 a day to drive and translate, even though it was difficult to drive and organize stories at the same time. He sometimes complained, but halfheartedly, almost like he felt he should complain. Many friends who had watched Farouq and me described us like an old married couple. We had worked together for almost five years. We knew each other’s quirks and bickered in shorthand. Farouq raised his voice whenever we disagreed. We always had the same exchange.

“Farouq, why are you upset?” I would ask. “Why are you raising your voice?”

“Kim. I’ve told you a million times,” he would reply, loudly. “I’m not upset. It’s just the way I talk.”

But now, after I had been gone for so long, we were excited to catch up and report good stories. I had only a week here—I wanted to make it count, even while juggling work and Dave, who had flown into Kabul after a grueling six-week embed that involved hiking all night through the snow.

So Farouq and I drove around the city, something we always did when I had been gone for a while. Kabul was slightly tense. Armed men patrolled the neighborhood of Shir Pur, that den of corruption and various crimes against architecture. Predictably, this was all because of Sabit, my estranged Afghan grandpa and the country’s wayward attorney general. Abdul Rashid Dostum, the Uzbek warlord famous for his love of booze and horses, had sent men to beat up a rival and his family members. In a bold attempt at law enforcement, Sabit had ordered police to surround Dostum’s mirrored and pillared monstrosity in Shir Pur. Dostum, in turn, ran up to the roof of his house and beat his chest, an Afghan King Kong. The standoff lasted for hours, until finally Sabit was called off. Dostum’s armed henchman now lurked on street corners. Sabit hid in his office. This passed for rule of law in Afghanistan—warlords trumped all. Sabit, the great white-bearded hope for the Afghan judicial system, had become the symbol of its failure.

I didn’t write about it, didn’t feel like kicking Sabit when he was down. No, I wanted something joyful, a happy story, a small good thing in all the gloom.

So Farouq and I made plans to see Afghan Star, a reality show modeled on American Idol and the most popular show in Afghanistan. This show, like other programming on the country’s most popular station, Tolo TV, started by savvy Afghan-Australian siblings, had angered conservative mullahs and established some kind