LITTLE BOOTS OF BAGHDAD

Sample from Bengal Actual

It was a hot day that day, even for Baghdad. There were no clouds to muffle the sun’s blinding intensity. The only clouds at all were the black columns of smoke bleeding into the sky, dozens of them all throughout the city. The Army convoy was Humvees escorting two 5-ton trucks and two car carrier trailers liberated from a dealership. The smells of sweat and exhaust were in their noses. They drove on a dusty road out of the dense senseless geometry of the city and into the open road where they could see the great size of the tan earth. TK’s car was pretty quiet, save for the occasional radio chatter and PFC Nyquist on the mk19 sharing his preferences on which famous women he’d most like to fuck. Nyquist finally shut up when they made visual contact with the palace owned by the Ace of Hearts himself.

The company drove down the private road, kicking up dust between two perfectly manicured lines of palm trees and security walls, then under an arch and onto the palace’s front lawn. It was already packed with vehicles like the parking lawn at a music festival. Humvees hillbilly-armored with ballistic vests, several 5-ton trucks, an Abrams tank decorated with desert flowers picked from the palace garden, and a candy apple red Lamborghini Countach. Somewhere a stereo was playing In Da Club, by 50 Cent. Four men sat in a truck, zip-tied, heads black-bagged. They had nothing to say, just waiting to be taken somewhere with soundproof walls and asked a lot of questions. A captain from the 3rd Infantry was giving an interview to some journalists.

TK killed the engine. The men dismounted their vehicles and stretched their legs. Captain Echols spoke with a lieutenant colonel. 1st Lieutenant Wright told them that the MP’s were here to search the building and take a detailed inventory of all supplies. He emphasized the words “detailed” and “all” so his men understood: if they stole anything, they’d get caught.

TK took off his helmet, wiped his forehead with his sleeve, and walked in through the open, enormous double front door. The thick walls kept the heat out, even with the A/C off. The palace was in pretty good condition save for a few holes in the ceiling and debris on the floor. A few soldiers sat at a dining table long enough to accommodate fifty, playing Uno and smoking Uday’s Cuban cigars.

The palace’s aesthetic was like a screaming argument between Salah ad-Din and Tony Montana. An ideology of sacrifice and submission and law and tradition, Spartan and survivalist in character, practical, blood-soaked in cosmic moral certainty, a rejection of the material and now for the promised and forever, at all times pointing an accusing finger at its whorish roommate: vice and luxury and decadence, the fleshy and material and right now, things of the body and senses, all vanity and shamelessness, every bit garish and braggadocious, smothered in gold and chrome and diamond, like a Miami nightclub in the ’80s, a Satanic neon cocaine haze.

The paintings on the wall were all in lavish gaudy frames more impressive than the art they surrounded. Portraits of the former tenant transforming into a tiger. Art of naked women too sleazy to call a nude but not sleazy enough to call porn. A portrait of Saddam taller than you are, with all the quality, craftsmanship, and subtlety you might see on a velvet Elvis painting sold out of the back of a van in a rural Pennsylvanian pebble-paved flea market.

The attached garage was big enough that your voice echoed, and it was filled with luxury cars, mostly in mint condition. Some cars had been stolen, others stripped for parts, others crushed. A museum of a century of engineering. ‘55 Belair crushed, Rolls Royce, Lamborghini. Some of them were priceless historical artifacts of engineering. Others were ridiculous and impractical European and Japanese gas-powered spectacles. All of them had to be loaded up by 1600 hours.

The palace basement had an armory. Gold and nickel-plated firearms of Russian and Belgian design. Cases of ammo stacked chest high. The armory had more guns than they could remove with three trucks, piled up carelessly like stacked kindling twigs. The collection was a museum with items as common and ubiquitous as AK47s, as clownish as Tec-9s, and as historically obscure as a Type 58. A stack of shiny, black retro-future kabuto helmets. TK picked one up and looked at it.

“Looks like a Darth Vader helmet, right?” said an MP with a clipboard.

“Yeah.”

“It is. The Fedayeen Saddam wear those.” He tapped the helmet with his pencil.

“Why?” TK half laughed in embarrassment for them.

The MP shrugged. “Maybe Uday thought it would look scary. It’s weird. Everyone thinks they’re the good guys. But it’s like he knew he was the bad guy, and he liked it.”

There were several living rooms. Two of them had bars. They were stocked with liquors, mostly whiskeys, and mostly American, and all with respected names: the kind with nice paper labels hand-signed by the distiller. There were wines from covetous vintages. The palace was furnished and decorated with items so rare and valuable that people like you and I wouldn’t even know that they’re worth stealing. Lladro porcelain sculptures, as tacky as anything your great grandmother might love and expensive enough to pay a Manhattan rent for a year. Czech crystal. Oriental rugs.

Most of the TK’s unit were interested in the kitchen with a pantry bigger than most restaurants and stocked with enough food to last a year. Two men at a kitchen island counter gorged themselves on Oreos, going shot for shot. They were into their second bag. TK heard a haram sizzle and smelled the smokey scent when a man tossed more of Uday’s bacon onto a frying pan.

There was a private theater with an extensive library of American gangster films, home videos, and pornography. In the dark room, the light beams from the rear projector flickered under the cigarette smoke of some men watching a homemade video shot in the courtyard of the palace. The movie was filmed with a handheld. Splashed on the projector screen were five men, stripped naked, on their knees, shivering, hands tied behind their backs, with their heads hidden underneath rubber Barbara Bush Halloween masks. The movie had a gruesome story but we’ll never know what that story was.

TK walked up the wide, curved staircase to the second floor, past two PFCs struggling to haul down a 52” television set.

The master bathroom was bigger than a double-wide trailer and two men were taking a shower, unembarrassed by the people coming and going. A sargeant shaved his face in a sink while two feet away a specialist took a noisy shit into a toilet that cost more than his year’s wages.

There was a cracked floor safe in the office, just in front of the thick mahogany desk. The blast marks on it were an obvious tell. Someone popped it with a kit designed for destroying unexploded ordnance. No one took credit, no one claimed to have whatever was inside that safe, and no one snitched.

The walk-in closet was a room unto itself, with every piece of wardrobe for any occasion imaginable, with several wall-mounted mirrors so you could see yourself from every direction. The names on the tags were mostly Italian, expensive without exception. The closet held more than just clothes. On the other side of a sliding door was a row of long, human hair, tied with bows, hanging like neckties. That closet didn’t seem to serve any other purpose.

From the third-floor balcony, with its breakfast table and chrome ashtray, TK could see a few klicks away to the crushing poverty–deep and inescapable–where people’s bodies, lives, and work are the property of someone they never met. A prison without walls where everyone is a prisoner and everyone is a jailer.

The palace had a lot of strange rooms. But the strangest of all was the zoo.