It was an answer she trusted more than any assurance that there wouldn’t be nuclear war. She patted his arm and turned away from Luis Rivera, though Kim who had come up to stand next to her remained staring at him.
As she entered the higgledy-piggledy streets of Chinatown, pushy and cantankerous in a way that made the ‘attitude’ of the rest of Manhattan appear amateurish, Hiroko recalled the thrill of coming here for the first time and discovering so many vegetables she hadn’t seen since Nagasaki. She still remembered some of the Chinese names for produce her mother used to buy in the Chinese quarter – and recalled, also, Konrad Weiss’s invented names for the vegetables he didn’t know: pak choi was ‘windswept cabbage’, a lotus root sliced down the centre was ‘fossilised flower’. And ginger, which Sajjad used to eat copiously, dipping sticks of it into achaar as a snack, was ‘knots of earth’.
Harry stopped beside a squatting man moving three dead fish around on the sidewalk while other men around him gesticulated and called out. Some magic trick, some betting game – he was determined to work it out. It gave Hiroko the opportunity to look at the cardboard boxes filled with fruit and vegetables in front of a cramped store. She pointed at the green-yellow spheres in a box and found herself saying, ‘Hong xao,’ – a word she hadn’t uttered since Nagasaki. In Urdu it was ‘bair’. She had no idea what the English name was.
Nagasaki. She touched her back.
‘Is that bair?’ Harry said, making her smile at this nephew of Konrad’s.
He had disappeared from her life for years after Sajjad’s death before arriving at her home in Abbottabad in the early nineties to say he had quit his previous job (even then he didn’t utter the name of his former employers), now he was in private security – a glorified bodyguard, really – but the business needed translators, so he was wondering how Raza might feel about coming to work with him. It didn’t occur to her whether she should forgive him or not for lying to her and Sajjad – he was a Weiss and he was offering Raza a chance to escape the soulless pit that was Dubai. And of course, he said, of course Raza wouldn’t be in the path of bullets.
A few minutes later, Kim, Hiroko and Harry were settled on a bench in Columbus Park, Kim uncertainly twirling between her fingers the fruit with unappealing scent which her father and Hiroko were eating with the relish of nostalgia.
‘If you’re moving to New York you should live around here,’ Harry said.
‘Here? Why?’ She looked around, trying to imagine what about this neighbourhood made her father picture her in it: was it the wrinkled twins in baseball caps playing Chinese chess on the bench opposite? The women pulling coats closer to their bodies as they bent over mah-jong pieces? The blind man caressing in long-slow strokes the air between him and the woman who was looking straight at him as she sang, high-pitched and mournful, accom panied by men with weeping stringed instruments?
‘Just,’ Harry said. If he told her that anyone wanting to strike America again was unlikely to do so in Chinatown she’d just say his line of work made him paranoid. But she turned to look at him, and confusion left her expression, replaced by understanding. There was a tiny smile – acknowledging his concern – and then, a nod.
It bothered him, the nod. She shouldn’t understand fear sufficiently to know what he was thinking. He recalled how she had stiffened, earlier on their walk, at the sight of a dark-haired man doing something with his shoes. He had laughed then, said, ‘He’s tying his laces, Kim, not detonating a bomb,’ but now he couldn’t see it as amusing. In the valleys of Afghanistan, fear was necessary; he’d been trained how to use it. But what did Kim know of moving through the world with fear at your back? Weapons in the hands of the uninitiated, he thought, understanding now what it was about this new New York that made him so uneasy.
‘I told Hiroko we’ll stay together in Gran’s apartment until I decide where I want to live,’ Kim said. She bit into the green-yellow fruit and tried to pretend she enjoyed its bitter taste.
‘We both think the other one needs looking after,’ Hiroko explained. She looked at the half-eaten fruit in Kim’s hand. ‘That’s not ripe,’ she said. ‘It must taste horrible. Why are you eating it?’
Kim spat the fruit out into the tissue Hiroko handed her.
‘I didn’t want to offend you by saying it’s disgusting,’ she said.
‘Oh dear,’ Hiroko sighed. ‘You’re going to be a nightmare to live with if you insist on cultural sensitivity.’
‘It’s a smelly little fruit, and you’ve got to be crazy to like it,’ Kim said.
‘Excellent.’ Hiroko smiled. ‘Thank you. And you need to vary your wardrobe. How many black T-shirts do you own?’
Harry watched with satisfaction. Whatever might be happening in the wider world, at least the Weiss-Burtons and the Tanaka-Ashrafs had finally found spaces to cohabit in, complicated shared history giving nothing but depth to the reservoir of their friendships.
31
In the green world, Harry Burton stepped on a dark clod and watched it break open, revealing an interior of phosphorescence. He took off his night-vision goggles and pointed at the glowing ember while his eyes adjusted to the dimness of the cave.
‘Someone was here, not so long ago.’ He ran his fingers along the cave wall and encountered a groove beneath the soot, which his fingers followed to reveal a carving of a falcon.
‘Arabs?’ asked his ex-colleague Steve, who had long since moved to the CIA paramilitary. He meant ‘al-Qaeda’.
Harry shrugged.
‘Portraiture doesn’t fit with their brand of Islam.’
‘Yeah. But mass murder, that’s OK.’ Steve gestured wearily at the contractor who walked in from the connecting cave. ‘Tell the guys we’re heading back. Nothing here. Again.’
‘It’s like they know we’re coming,’ the contractor said before returning to the adjoining cave.
Harry doubted there had ever been anyone here worth coming for. If he were an Afghan he’d light and extinguish fires in every cave of these mountains before running to claim an informant’s reward from the Americans, who were acting as though they owned a rainforest of money-growing trees. He spat on his sleeve and wiped around the falcon. It was a creature of exquisite artistry – one talon raised in imperious command. He wondered how long ago it had been perched in the mustiness of the cave, listening to battles roar and recede outside. Perhaps an Arab mujahideen of the eighties had placed it here.
He had always been uneasy about the introduction of ‘foreign fighters’ into the Afghans’ war against the Soviets. It wasn’t, he’d be the first to concede, because he had any inkling of how history would unravel over the next two decades – it was simply that some lingering idealism in him had found a nobility in the struggle of a people to win back their land from a superpower, and he could find no corresponding nobility in the men who arrived to fight infidels who had overtaken a Muslim land. It seemed so medieval.
He stepped out of the cave on to a mountain ledge, pulling binoculars out of his pack to see the land beyond the dried riverbed and barren gullies. In the plains of the Gomal district the sky and ground were in different centuries – one cut open by the blades of a Huey chopper, the other smothered by a collapsed fort and the remnants of mud houses. After two decades of war, barely anything lived here other than juniper bushes and small groups of villagers.
‘We make a desolation and call it peace,’ he said, not for the first time, placing his M4 rifle on the ground and sitting down heavily next to it, the mountain sharp against his back. The rest of his team – all younger and fitter than him – were already scrambling down, singing some song they’d made up which rhymed ‘Arkwright and Glenn’ with ‘dark fighting men’, while the Afghans who had come with them followed more quietly.
‘You want to get shot?’ Steve said, picking up the M4 and holding it out to Harry. ‘Come on, move.’
‘If they shoot me, we’ll know where they are. I’m not such a prize.’
‘When did you become such a moaner?’ Steve said, tossing the rifle into Harry’s lap and lighting a cigarette. ‘People keep asking me what the hell happened to Harry.’
‘People around me got stupid. It made me cranky.’
‘The Great Seer, Lala Buksh, speaks.’ Steve bowed from the waist.
Harry didn’t bother to respond. He had long suspected that it was Steve who had tipped off the CIA at the start of the nineties about the identity of the ‘insider’ who wrote a blistering article in an influential defence journal about the CIA’s decision to turn its back on Afghanistan after the Soviet withdrawal. Steve was one of the few people to know that ‘Lala Buksh’ – the pseudonym of the writer – was also Harry’s Pathan alias. Harry had never taken it personally; he’d been planning to quit the CIA in any case and being forced to move up the date by a few months really made little difference to his life.
‘So I guess you must feel pretty smug now. You were right. Everyone else was wrong. Jihadi blowback, that was your phrase, wasn’t it?’ Steve made a whistling noise between his teeth, which Harry recalled as the sound of disgust he made at the end of every meeting with the ISI.
‘I didn’t say “blowback” – and I never thought we’d be back here. Violent revolution in Saudi Arabia, that was my forecast. Being here . . . there’s no smugness. Just failure.’
‘We shredded the Iron Curtain. That’s a failure I can live with.’ Steve took the binoculars from Harry before a reflection off its lenses drew unnecessary attention to their location. Harry resisted telling him that his obviously dyed blond hair was just as likely to provide a target.
‘But I do owe you an apology,’ Steve said. In the twenty or so years Harry had known Steve it was the first time the other man had truly surprised him. ‘Not for unmasking you. No regrets there. But I remember saying there was no future in private military corporations. I was wrong. PMCs are the future of warfare – fighting and reconstruction both. And you, Harry Burton, are a pioneer.’
‘I see the compliment – now where’s the backhand?’ There was something to be said for knowing someone as well as he knew Steve. Even when you didn’t like each other your awareness of the other’s temperament brought a familiarity to interactions that almost made the relationship seem intimate.
‘You’re an idiot to hire all these Third Country Nationals. Economically, sure, I see the sense. But stop recruiting them from Pakistan and Bangladesh. You’re acting like this is a territorial war and they’re neutral parties. Go with guys from Sri Lanka, Nepal, the Philippines. Indians are OK, so long as they’re not Muslim.’
‘I’ve worked with these men for years,’ Harry said, standing up and pulling his binoculars out of Steve’s hand. It wasn’t restraint, simply a lack of energy that kept him from reminding Steve that fifteen years ago he loved to joke that the difference between Vietnam and Afghanistan was ‘there we just had GI – here we have jee-had’.
‘Harry, Harry, Harry. Wake up and smell the burning buildings. You think I don’t know you well enough after all that time in Islamabad? There’s too much nostalgia in you. You look at those men and you see your childhood. The cook, the gardener, the driver. The Urdu teacher.’
‘If this speech is about Raza you need to seriously reconsider continuing it,’ he said, looking casually from Steve to the drop off the ledge.
‘No need to start performing Quietly Menacing Man,’ Steve said, stepping away from the edge. ‘It really doesn’t bother you – in this time, in this place – that he’s found religion?’ In response to Harry’s look of bafflement he added, ‘I saw him prostrating himself in front of a mosque the first time I flew in. He thought there was no one around to see him.’
‘Maybe he had his nose to the ground for the scent of a woman. God knows you’re not going to find one here using your eyes.’
‘You know his skill at deception. Come on, Harry. A seventeen-year-old boy from Karachi convinces the Afghans he’s one of them to the point that they take him to a muj camp. Better than that! They take a Hazara to a Pashtun camp. Unbelievable! And even now, no one except us knows, do they? Surrounded by Paks and no one knows he’s one of them.’
Steve was right – Raza Konrad had dinner every night with the Third Country Nationals, translating between them from Urdu to Bengali to Tamil, but never revealing that one of those languages contained in it the memory of his father and all his childhood friends. The men had privately decided his name was an alias – Raza Konrad. It made no sense.
In the pass beneath there grew a single tree, shaped by the wind that raced between the mountains – trunk bent, leafy branches streamlined in a flamelike formation, it was curiously frozen in the act of animation. Hiroko, Sajjad, Konrad, Ilse, Harry: history had blown all of them off course, no one ending – or even middling – where they had begun, but it was only in Raza that Harry saw reshaping as a reflexive act rather than an adaptive response.
‘What gives you the arrogance to think you alone see his true face? This is the guy who held you responsible for his father’s death twenty years ago. Hell, Harry, I hated my dad but if I thought anyone . . .’