left Club Gouge if he never said whether he knew Alexandra or Nadia Guaman?”
“We’d come here—here to Plotzky’s, I mean—a lot of times. Like, the night that gal got shot, we were here, right on these stools, watching the Hawks. Marty, one of our crowd who we met at the VA, you know, he’d say to Chad, ‘Why are you letting that broad get under your skin? Did she ditch you or something?’ But Chad, he’d just say, ‘She’s rubbing my face in it.’”
“Rubbing his face in what happened on the road to Kufah or in a busted relationship?”
Tim started peeling the label from one of his empties. “If I had to guess, I’d guess the road to Kufah just because—if some girl is riding you, she can make you madder than hell but she’s not what’s giving you flashbacks. Maybe Chad wrote about her on his blog. He kept one—a lot of guys did . . . do—where they write pretty much everything. It’s not just that it passes the time, but it makes you think that somewhere someone cares if you live or die.”
Chad’s blog, of course, I should have been reading that already. Maybe John Vishneski had been right to suggest I was incompetent. Despite my brave words, I was being a slow-footed, clumsy seeker, something like a two-toed sloth crashing through a jungle. I was making it easy for a skilled hider to stay twenty steps ahead of me.
“The night before Nadia died, when Chad confronted her in the parking lot, you came out and brought him back to the club. He had some kind of dark object, looked like a cloth about yea big.” I sketched the shape in the air. “Did he show you that? Do you have any idea what it could be?”
Tim shook his head. “A dark cloth about eight or ten inches wide? Could it have been, like, a scarf folded into a square? Maybe he thought she’d knitted it for him.”
That hadn’t occurred to me. Don’t pretend you don’t know what this is, Chad had yelled. Maybe it had been something some woman mailed him. Maybe he thought Nadia had been a secret correspondent sending him presents while he was in the desert. Yet another unprovable idea. It seemed impossible to get real information about anything or anyone connected with Nadia and Chad.
I tried not to let the weight of impossibility drag me down. I thanked Tim and signaled Gerri for the check. Tim gave me the names and numbers of the three other guys in his and Chad’s band of post-Iraq brothers, as well as the name of their counselor at the VA. Chad might have told her something privately that he hadn’t felt able to say in front of the group.
23
What’s in a Blog?
Eleven American soldiers were killed Tuesday on the road to Kufah when they were trapped in an ambush and insurgents burned their Hummers with incendiary devices, the Army reported today. Convoys had been traveling that route with relative safety since May. Insurgents loyal to Amir Harith al-Hassan, a dissident Shia mullah, claimed responsibility.
That was all I could find about any incidents on the road to Kufah. Only three of the dead were mentioned by name, because they were from New York, and the story had been carried in the New York Times. I didn’t find any mention of it in the Chicago papers, which surprised me since a Chicago youth had been the sole survivor of the attack. No wonder Tim was bitter about the American response to him and his comrades.
I was curled up on my living-room couch with the dogs and my laptop. The dogs still smelled faintly of lavender, and they were still tired enough from their morning run that they’d been content to chase tennis balls in the backyard while I made a pot of spaghetti. Mr. Contreras had shared it with me, even though I only put in mushrooms and peas instead of the tomato sauce he preferred. After dinner, he’d gone out to spend an evening with some of his remaining pals from his old local.
I turned to Chad’s blog. As John Vishneski had reported when he hired me, the early entries were filled with a kind of happy zest, as if Chad were writing up a road trip with his buddies. When he reached Iraq and was reporting in the blistering heat, you still got a sense of underlying good humor and a serious commitment to his country.
A