The Taliban Shuffle_ Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan - Kim Barker [93]
“This is really, really embarrassing,” Farouq said, popping a porn DVD out of my computer. “People are really sick.”
“I am aware,” I said, popping one that involved a watermelon into my DVD player.
Tom became more and more cryptic. Then, finally, he called.
“I wanted you to hear this from me,” he said. “But Sean has been kidnapped.”
I felt ill. As far as Tom had been able to figure out, Sean and Sami had been taken hostage in late March, immediately after crossing into Pakistan to meet their contact. Brilliant, as Sean would say.
Dave flew to Kabul on his way to another embed with NATO troops. He was unsympathetic to my fears about Sean, blaming him for being an idiot. As usual, Dave and I fought late at night, him yelling at me for some perceived slight. I curled up, facing the wall. He apologized, saying that he was under stress. But I stared at the paint. It was nothing I wanted to deal with at that moment, but I knew I would eventually have to face the truth. This would never be that fairy tale I thought I wanted, the dream of the overseas life, the family, the full-meal deal. I just couldn’t face it now. I didn’t want to be alone in Pakistan. With everything happening, I didn’t want to be alone at all.
I flew back to Islamabad for a few days before leaving on a trip to the States, where I planned to have minor surgery that would hopefully fix all my sinus and allergy problems. Sean was kidnapped, Dave was a war junkie, and, on nowhere the same level, I was facing a deviated-septum repair and the removal of a blueberry-sized polyp from my right nostril. I was in no mood for any more stress. I walked upstairs to the freezer, where I kept the booze. Procuring alcohol in Islamabad involved a bootlegger, a friend, or cumbersome red tape that meant you basically had to declare yourself a Christian alcoholic. I chose the friend option—one had earlier sold me about a dozen bottles, including syrupy concoctions like banana liqueur and Midori, a sweet, green, disgusting melon-flavored drink made from Japanese honeydews. Only fifteen-year-old girls would drink it. But in an Islamic country, I took whatever was offered, under the theory that at some point, at some time, life might become as desperate as me sitting beneath the pool table, swigging banana liqueur, bombs falling outside.
When I looked in my freezer, I noticed the gooey liquor bottles were missing. Dave would never drink those. The next morning, I asked the housekeeper. He immediately blamed Samad—almost predictable, as the two hated each other. Samad was a Punjabi, and as the driver, should have been relegated to the outside. The housekeeper was an Afghan-born Pashtun.
“Samad’s been sleeping in the main house,” the housekeeper volunteered.
“What?”
“Yes,” he said. His eyes grew large. “Inside, on the floor, I found him one day.”
I grabbed my office manager, hired three months before.
“Has Samad been sleeping here?”
“Well … I don’t know about every night, but I know one morning when you were gone, I came inside and he was sleeping on the floor of the office,” she said.
“He brings girls here,” the housekeeper said. “He has parties. He plays with the balls upstairs.”
He must have meant the pool table.
“Is that true?” I asked the office manager. “He’s playing with the balls upstairs?”
I envisioned Samad having sex on the pool table. The office manager shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve seen him with a girl out near his room in the back.”
“What? Who? Why didn’t anyone tell me? Girls?”
The housekeeper shrugged. He appeared to be settling into his story. “You don’t want to hear anything bad about Samad. He was also having girls in your house. Maybe in your bed.”
I called Samad. “Where are you?”
“Five minutes, boss.”
He showed up in twenty. I practically dragged him inside. He denied everything—the booze, the girls. He said