Broinowski - The Director is the Commander

It all started with a birthday present. In 2009, my partner threw a fondue party for my fortieth, in the film school where he worked. The loveable renegades, jokesters and other unflushables Id collected over the years snuck in at midnight and stood around steaming cauldrons, forks in hand, dripping strings of Jarlsberg on the pristine carpet.

Vodka was drunk and lascivious toasts exchanged. The event descended rapidly, as it should, into a retro-punk free-for-all involving pogo dancing to The Sex Pistols and scrums on the marshmallow-smeared floor. By the time the cauldrons were licked clean and filled with brandied chocolate, my mates were paddle-whipping anyone who dropped their strawberry in the sauce, and condemning repeat offenders to sing AC/DC, naked, on the film-school roof.

Thats what I heard, anyway. I wasnt there. I was back home under my duvet, nursing the Battlestar Galactica of flus. My immune system was shot by six months hard labour in an edit suite, making a film about a Chicago con artist called Norma Khouri. Had I known Normas twisted tale would lead me to Kim Jong Il, I might have thought twice about getting involved with her. She was a dark and doe-eyed beauty, and a truly dangerous dame.

When I started tracking Norma, she was on the lam from the FBI for a reported $1 million worth of fraud. One Chicago gumshoe had spent fifteen years trying to nail her for a string of scams, including an old woman whose signature Norma had allegedly forged to steal her lifes savings; a businessman whod given Norma a building, believing she was an Arab princess who wanted to house the poor; and a sorry legion of love-struck putzes whom Norma had seduced into proposing marriage, then smoothly milked of their assets.

There were also dubious insurance claims involving Normas mother-in-law, and her husband, John a sushi-loving playboy with ties to the Greek mafia and a penchant for white leather shoes. But what had really frightened me was the meeting Id had with a detective from the Department of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, who told me, over key-lime pie on an Illinois beltway, that Norma was potentially implicated in the shooting of Johns tennis partner at a gas station in broad daylight. That bit I left out of the film. Normas tendency to mention guns in every interview we shot together had me spooked.

Normas got more brains than John and his mother put together. Shes the best con artist operating today, the gumshoe told me bitterly. True to form, Norma had given the FBI the slip hopping into a taxi to OHare Airport with no one but the gumshoe in hot pursuit, and flying to Athens, where she lived with John and their two kids until the American Statute of Limitations under which she could be arrested expired. With bills to pay and no Greek, Norma used her Mensa-level IQ to switch careers from bilking to books. She sat in an internet cafe, surrounded by teenagers blasting Arabs to smithereens on Conflict: Desert Storm II, and tapped out a fake first-person memoir.

In potboiler prose, Norma reinvented herself as a Jordanian hairdresser, racked with guilt for her part in the secret affair that led to the brutal murder of her best friend, Dalia. She described the unisex hair salon in Amman where she and Dalia had worked; the secret trysts shed arranged between Dalia, a Muslim, and her handsome Christian lover, Michael; the Gauloises theyd nervously smoked in Dalias bedroom the night they realised her brothers were onto them; the agonising sprint Norma had made to Dalias house on Nablus Street the day she disappeared only to discover her friends bloody corpse being dumped in the back of an ambulance.

Dalia had been stabbed twenty-seven times by her father and brothers in bed while she slept, for having dishonoured them by falling in love with an infidel. She was still a virgin when she died. The book ended with Normas outrage that her chaste and innocent friend could be slaughtered by her own family, yet they could be let off by an archaic section of Jordans penal code, which allows men to commit crimes of honour against female relatives with impunity.