‘That’s no problem. Ms Burton, my brother works at A and G – Mr Burton got him a job there. He said your dad died in Afghanistan, looking for Osama. You should be proud.’
Was pride supposed to temper grief? She wanted him alive. Why was this man standing here, talking as though there were ways of dying that rendered death bearable.
‘If your brother works at A and G maybe he could get one of the suits there to return my call.’ In the five days since Harry’s death there had been no further word from Raza – he got like this after Sajjad died, Hiroko had said. Running. It’s what he’s always done. He learnt it from me. But ever since Kim had walked into her father’s Miami flat she’d felt a powerful compulsion to talk to Raza. He was the only one who could tell her about the last few minutes of Harry’s life. Perhaps he was the only one who could tell her about Harry’s life, period. She had called on his satphone all day yesterday, all day today, and the lack of response was making her uneasy. Who was Steve and why had he answered Raza’s phone? She wasn’t about to say anything to Hiroko, but she’d called A and G repeatedly and left three messages about Raza for the men who’d pressed her hand and spoken with such feeling about Harry at his funeral.
Tom looked as if she’d slapped him.
‘He’s just a driver. He doesn’t have that kind of pull.’
‘I’m sorry. Really, Tom. I’m just . . . you know? Angry.’
‘We’re all angry, Ms Burton.’
While the movers removed Harry’s presence from the apartment, Kim stood out on the balcony from where it was possible to see the offices of A and G, just a few blocks away. Harry had once told her he hated this location. ‘Millionaires’ Row’ – the snobbery of James Burton’s son recoiled at the ostentation. But the CEO had urged him to live as near the office as possible, explaining that when you only had an hour or two between work days you didn’t want any kind of commute. And then Raza had moved in to the second-floor apartment and loved everything about the location – after that it was clear Harry never even considered moving.
Kim had used the key marked ‘R’ in Harry’s cutlery drawer to enter Raza’s apartment. She didn’t ask herself why, she just did it. There she found the atmosphere she had expected of her father’s penthouse – lots of technology, no personality – though when she thought of Hiroko’s room with nothing adorning it except a faded painting of two foxes she wondered if Raza was just displaying a Japanese aesthetic. She didn’t know if that thought was racist and was too drained to work it out. She slid open his wardrobe door and the first thing she saw hanging from its railings was a beautiful cashmere jacket. She ran her fingers along its softness, and slipped it on to her own frame. It fitted almost perfectly – the sleeves only a little too long. When she slid her fingers inside the pockets the texture of desiccation made her jerk them out immediately. Gingerly, she reached in again and scooped out a handful of dried rose petals. She imagined Raza filling his pockets with the petals weeks or months earlier when roses were in bloom, enjoying the sensuous, velvety feeling each time his hands entered his pockets. Suddenly aware of how strange her behaviour was, she returned the jacket to its hanger and hurried out.
Now she looked out towards the water and Miami Beach beyond, linked to downtown by the slab-and-girder MacArthur Causeway. Its foundations: eighty-four-inch drilled shafts in the water, forty-eight inches on land. And if a plane were to nose-dive into it? If men with dynamite on their chests overlaying the madness in their hearts . . . ? If one Afghan man with an AK-47 were to climb on to it and spray bullets? No, he could do no harm. Surely, he couldn’t send the world crumbling.
One of the movers came out on to the balcony to say they were done.
‘You drink whisky? There’s a couple of bottles under the sink. I don’t want them.’
The mover took two steps back and waved his hands in the air.
‘No, no. No.’
She looked closer at him. She’d assumed he was Mediterranean, but now she saw he might be Arab.
‘You Muslim?’ She said it in a tone that wanted to convey it was OK, she wouldn’t hold that against him, she was sorry if anyone had these last crazy months.
The man laughed, a short bark.
‘No, don’t say that. Don’t say that. We’re not allowed to take anything from the homes we’re working, not even when we’re offered. That’s why we can’t. Do I look Arab? I’m Italian.’
‘My mistake,’ she said.
‘No one else had better make that mistake.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with most Arabs,’ she found herself saying, and then wondered how that ‘most’ had slipped into the sentence.
‘Hey, I’m not being racist. It’s crazy enough being mistaken for a Cuban, but Arab! God help me. And Gitmo just across the water.’
That thought hadn’t even crossed her mind all the while she’d been in Miami.
What she needed, she decided on the flight back to New York, was to retreat. And she knew just where to do it – her mother’s cabin in the Adirondacks, a place without memories of Harry, where disputes over ownership of a moose carcass could push almost everything else off the front page of the newspaper. She had spent some part of every summer of her youth there, could point to the spot where she danced with a boy for the first time, saw the world from the top of a mountain for the first time, smoked a joint for the first time, ran a half-marathon for the first time, thought she’d lost her virginity for the first time. Her mother wasn’t there now – it was only during the summers or the height of fall that she thought to leave Paris for upstate New York’s mountains – but that only added to the appeal. To live alone, in the mountains, watching the snow fall on silent valleys while the fireplace roared, the local news channel filled with familiar faces . . . Her mother used to tell her she’d find such a life comforting by the time she was sixty and she’d always laughed; now here she was at thirty-five, desperate to sink into that world and be lost in it like a tear in a lake.
Hiroko could come to visit, she thought, when she was in the elevator headed up to the Mercer Street apartment. Hiroko was about the one person in the world whose presence there wouldn’t be an intrusion.
Her mood was almost cheerful when she opened the door to the apartment to announce her new plan to Hiroko.
A man – hazel-eyed and broad-shouldered – sprang up from the sofa when Kim walked in.
‘It’s all right,’ Hiroko said. ‘It’s just Kim. Kim, this is Abdullah.’
Kim looked from the man to Hiroko and back again. Through the haze of shock, habit took over and extended her hand to the Afghan man. He looked at it, and hesitated just long enough in responding to make Kim snatch it back.
‘Why is he here?’ she said to Hiroko.
‘I’m very sorry about your father,’ the Afghan man said. ‘But he is with Allah now.’
‘Does Allah accept unbelievers?’ she said, and the man lowered his eyes.
‘I wasn’t expecting you back yet,’ Hiroko said quietly. She added something in Urdu, and the Afghan nodded, said something in return, and let himself out of the apartment without looking at Kim again.
‘What?’ Kim said. ‘What are you doing? What did you say to him?’
‘There’s no need for you to get involved,’ Hiroko replied, picking up the book she’d been reading.
‘You’ve found someone to drive him to Canada, haven’t you?’
Hiroko didn’t look up from her book. Kim threw her hands up in the air. If one of Hiroko’s friends was willing to get involved with such lunacy it was none of her business. She needed a long bath, and a glass of wine.
Seconds later, she was pulling the book out of Hiroko’s grasp, standing in front of her with a car key dangling from her fingers.
‘What’s this?’
‘I have no idea.’
Kim held up the other hand which was grasping the paperwork from the car-rental company.
‘Your signature is on here. Who rents out a car to a seventy-seven-year-old woman with a Pakistani driver’s licence?’
‘This is New York,’ Hiroko answered with great satisfaction. ‘Everything’s available for a price.’
‘Oh Christ, Hiroko. You can’t be thinking of taking him yourself.’
‘Stay out of this, Kim.’
‘You have a Pakistani passport. They’re not going to just wave you over the border.’ She could hear the rising panic in her voice. ‘You’ve never driven on the right-hand side of the road and you’ve no experience with highway driving. Exactly how much craziness are you capable of?’
‘You Americans have very timorous notions of craziness.’
‘Timorous!’ Kim stuffed the keys into the pocket of her jacket. ‘If you were anyone but you I’d suspect you of manipulation.’
‘What manipulation? Give me those keys, Kim Burton.’
‘No. I’ll drive him across. You stay here. And don’t – do not, Hiroko Ashraf, start arguing with me. Raza was right. They won’t search a car driven by anyone who looks like me.’
Hiroko looked at Kim with an expression which pulled together all her life’s experience at conveying scepticism.
‘You think he should be smuggled across the border?’ Kim was the first person Hiroko had ever known with an unshakeable faith that she lived in a world that allowed all protests, all acts of discontentment, to take place within a legal framework. Moving out of that framework was simply grandstanding.
‘If I promise you I’ll take him, that means I’ll take him. Why should anything else matter?’
‘I won’t be the reason for you to go against things you believe in.’ She felt about people who believed in the morality of their nations exactly as she felt about those who believed in religion: it was baffling, it seemed to defy all reason, and yet she would never be the one to attempt to wrestle the comfort of illusory order away from someone else.
‘You’re not,’ Kim lied. ‘Now, do you want him to have the best chance of being safe or not?’ Though the argument continued on for a while that was the moment she knew she’d won – though, of course, she had no way of knowing Hiroko would wake up the next morning, too late, remembering with a sense of unease that James Burton used almost exactly the same words to convince Sajjad Ali Ashraf to leave Delhi for Istanbul.
38
By the time he was in Muscat, Raza decided the man with blood in his eye had been right: he didn’t have the mental strength for this journey; his mind had broken apart
‘Like this,’ the man with blood in his eye said, smashing a pomegranate against a table-top. He delicately plucked out one ruby-encased seed from the fractured fruit and held it out to Raza, winking as he did so – the red tear in his cornea disappearing from Raza’s vision just as the ruby seed entered it.
‘He’s going to help Abdullah get into Canada,’ Ismail said. He had clearly been uneasy since bringing Raza to this spartan room near the central bazaar in Kandahar.
The ruby-eyed man waved his hand dismissively.
‘I’m not interested in that. Abdullah made the journey once; if he’s lucky he’ll make it again. This one, this one is a different matter. Leave me alone with him.’
When Ismail was gone, Ruby Eye motioned for Raza to sit down.
‘The way you’re clutching that bag of yours it either contains love letters or money. For your sake, I hope it’s the second. You’re not nearly desperate enough to survive the journey of the destitute.’
Raza relaxed. Now he was in a world he understood – where anything was possible for the right price.
‘From Iran to Muscat, though, you have to travel as they do—’
Many cups of tea later Ruby Eye waved his hand in the direction of the man who was traversing the room on his haunches, picking up, one by one, the pomegranate seeds which Ruby Eye had been flicking off the walls while he and Raza haggled over price. ‘You just missed the first-class trip out of Iran. Though if you wait a few weeks—’
‘No,’ Raza said, standing up, his knapsack considerably lighter than it had been when he entered, though he could see Ruby Eye’s look of amazement at the extent to which it was still weighed down. ‘I’ll leave now. It’s not so far from Iran to Muscat.’
Ruby Eye smiled.
‘The sea crossing alone will seem the furthest distance any man has ever been asked to travel.’
Raza left Kandahar at sunrise in a pickup truck, squeezed between the driver and an armed guard. His own jeep he left with Ismail, along with a promise – only partially believed by both him and Ismail – that he’d find a way to bring Abdullah into Canada. Ismail had offered him hospitality for the night, but he’d stayed with the two Pathan men instead; Ruby Eye had laughingly warned him that Ismail had not even a blanket to spare after he’d sold everything to raise the money for Abdullah’s voyage back to Afghanistan. In the glove compartment of the jeep Raza placed a thousand dollars. It felt generous, but it made no discernible difference to the weight of his knapsack.