The Taliban Shuffle_ Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan - Kim Barker [95]
“You’re not in the system,” the guard said, staring at a computer screen of employees.
I leaned over the counter and looked at the screen. “Not Baker. Barker.”
He still looked at me suspiciously.
“You need to call someone.”
No one answered on the foreign desk, but luckily a secretary remembered me so I was allowed to walk inside, past the display cases that in the past blandly advertised the Tribune Company’s various services. Now the four cases blasted a different message—change. One window even featured a picture of Bob Dylan, and the lyrics from “The Times They Are a-Changin’.”
They were. Advertising and circulation were down, panic was up. I walked a few feet forward and glanced in front of me, toward the elevators that led to the newsroom. And there I saw something horrific, something that would give me nightmares, something that told me life would never, ever be the same again. The quotes on the walls were the same, from writers such as Flannery O’Connor and Albert Camus. But right in front of the elevators sat a statue. A giant hideous multicolored statue of a fat businessman in a red-and-black-striped tie with six legs entitled Bureaucratic Shuffle. I gave it a wide berth, but I couldn’t help but stare.
“What the hell?” I asked myself, out loud.
I pushed the button for the fourth floor. Walking into the newsroom now felt like walking into the newsroom during Christmas—it was depressing, and most of the desks were empty. Only it was June, and many desks were empty because of layoffs and buyouts. Friends told me to keep my head down. For years, like everyone else, I had suffered through cost-cutting measures, grounded for a month or two at a time, forced to stay put in New Delhi or Islamabad and keep my spending small. I would stay with friends or in the cheapest hotels I could find. I had refused to give Farouq a raise—something that had started to grate on him. Even moving to Pakistan had saved the company money compared to the cost of India. My expenses the month before in Afghanistan had run about $125 a day, as I charged the newspaper only for Farouq and paid for everything else myself. During the Afghan presidential election in 2004, I had spent an average of $285 a day.
My scrimping was nothing compared with the devastation here. A photographer told me she wasn’t allowed to travel to Cairo for a great story. She meant the Cairo in Illinois. A top editor—the first man who sent me overseas, who had written my name on the back of the used envelope—asked me to lunch.
“Do I need a backup plan?” I asked him.
“It never hurts to have a plan B,” he said, carefully.
The editor of the paper had time to meet with me, and not the usual fifteen minutes. Instead, she had an hour, and seemed unusually calm for a woman who had spent the past months fending off requests that she cut more money. I was suspicious about why. The rumors stacked up—that the foreign desks of the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune would be combined, or that we would all be fired and the Tribune would buy foreign coverage elsewhere. I begged another top editor to let me meet Sam Zell. But I was told no—no one could meet with Sam, even though his e-mail address started out “talktosam.”
The foreign desk tried to prove its relevance. Because our new owner and top management did not fully understand that a dateline of “Kabul, Afghanistan” meant the reporter actually was in Kabul, company newspapers had started being much more explicit about their datelines and correspondents. As part of our new self-promoting mission, all Tribune foreign correspondents were asked to give travel tips to readers—our best of the world, the hidden delights that tourists should enjoy. Other correspondents wrote about cities and regions people might actually visit. I sat in Chicago and wrote about Islamabad, a town with practically no social life except for what we invented. This was the newspaper equivalent of a burlesque performance. “Plus, most of the other places I once took guests have closed because of security fears or nearby