Read Online The Good Lieutenant by Whitney Terrell - Free Book Online Page A

she’d been reminded of the conversation she and Pulowski had had back in her trailer, when she’d blamed him for what had happened to Beale. Blame was what she needed. Stories of blame. Reams of affidavits supporting it. What was the proper gesture when you condemned a man? She touched the books, but couldn’t read them. Only a fool would lie down where he’d lain. Then she returned to her computer and typed in: 0800 hours tomorrow. 16th Engineer Brigade HQ. See you then. Then, after a moment’s hesitation, she added, We got the bastard , then pressed send.

 
    4
    â€œCan you draw?” Pulowski asked. He opened the notepad Fowler had given him, flopped it onto the table, and drew a stick figure of himself. “Dixon,” he said. Then, remembering that the Iraqi across from him couldn’t hear—the man’s hand flittered up to his ear again as Pulowski spoke—he wrote his name on the pad in English. DIXON . He pointed at himself. Then he turned the pad so the man might do the same.
    The room that they occupied was in a small rural schoolhouse in the northern sector of their territory, near a town named Bini Ziad. When Fowler’s platoon had shown up, a line of civilians, detained by Captain Masterson, whose territory this remained, stretched clear through the school’s courtyard and into the road. All of them had to be questioned about Beale and the attack at the intersection. It was a mime show, in Pulowski’s opinion, a necessary but pointless routine, and so it felt somehow proper to be interviewing a man in his mid-twenties who, rather than answering his questions, fired off a picture, quickly sketched but done in the proper proportions, a hint of perspective, cross-hatched shading, the way a genuine cartoonist might work. It was a self-portrait, no blemish left out, his defects if anything exaggerated, the chin melting away into his neck, the teeth overlarge, possibly the most honest testimony he’d seen all day.
    â€œVery cute,” Pulowski said. He held the drawing up beside the man’s head as if to judge its likeness. Then he frowned, as if he couldn’t see the resemblance.
    The man widened his eyes insistently. Yes, I am that ugly , he seemed to be saying, if it was possible to derive actual words from the folds and positioning of a face. Seriously, I’ll show you! He stuck his rabbit teeth out and jabbed at them, then jabbed back at the picture— See?— and gave a quick offhand shrug— Who, me?— as if he did not intend to let his achievement of this ugliness go to his head.
    Pulowski laughed. Okay, okay— he nodded— you win. Then he pointed to the name Dixon on his sketch and tapped the blank space beneath the artist’s.
    The man shook his head gravely. He flipped the stationery and the sketch over, revealing what appeared to be a formal note, written in Arabic.
    â€œYou want me to read this?” Pulowski asked.
    The man nodded, though of course there was no way he could have understood. Then he grabbed the note and drew on it again, this time right beneath the text, the small lines scratching and fanning out magically, creating out of the nothing that had been there a face, a body, a pair of wings. Was it … what? A male angel. Did they have angels in Islam? Or just virgins? The man pointed eagerly toward the door, as if he wanted someone to read the note, so Pulowski nodded politely and carried it into the hallway.
    The main problem Pulowski was experiencing just then was the awareness of his own secret. The fact that he’d abandoned Beale and then lied about it was probably more important than anything the Iraqi had to say. On the other hand, he’d decided that telling the truth about it wouldn’t help anybody, least of all Beale. He had reasoned very carefully through all of this during the twenty-four hours that had passed since Beale had charged into the abandoned building in the