‘My friend Kim.’ Raza shook his head. ‘We’ve never met. We’ve just been presences in each other’s lives for a very long time. What did you say to her? What’s she like?’
‘She has short hair. Like a boy,’ Abdullah said, his index fingers knocking against his jawline, just beneath the ear.
‘And we all know how much you Pathans like your pretty boys, walnut,’ Raza laughed.
Abdullah cuffed him lightly.
‘Still the same Raza. I don’t know what I said to her. There’s something – don’t laugh at me when I say this – there is something open in her face. Some Americans have it, that openness. You think you could say anything to them. And we were both sitting in the front seat. Ten years of driving cabs every day, twelve hours a day, and this was something new.’
‘You hit on her?’ Raza switched to English.
Abdullah drew back.
‘What kind of man do you think I am?’
‘The kind of man I am. Go on, what did you do?’
‘I spoke to her. As I have never spoken to an American woman before. I wanted her to understand something, I don’t know what, about being an Afghan here. About war. Again and again war, Raza. And then. Then, I don’t know. She started attacking Islam. They’re all, everyone, everywhere you go now – television, radio, passengers in your cab, everywhere – everyone just wants to tell you what they know about Islam, how they know so much more than you do, what do you know, you’ve just been a Muslim your whole life, how does that make you know anything?’
Raza put an arm on Abdullah’s.
‘Quiet, quiet. People are looking. Abdullah, Kim’s not like that. I know. She can’t be like that.’
‘She said heaven is an abomination because my brother is in it.’ He covered his face with his hands. ‘You hear them now all the time. Talking about how they won the Cold War, now they’ll win this war. My brother died winning their Cold War. Now they say he makes heaven an abomination.’
‘You’re tired,’ Raza said, holding Abdullah’s hands between his own. ‘Come with me. The car’s outside. You can sleep on the plane. Today, Abdullah, you make the journey home to your family.’
‘New York is home,’ he said brokenly. ‘New York is my home. The taxi drivers are my family.’
Raza felt a curious sense of envy amidst his pity.
‘I know things are bad, but perhaps there wasn’t any need to run. Even now, it might not be too late. Kim and my mother will help. They’ll find you a lawyer. These things still matter, they must.’
‘You’re living in another world. My friend Kemal – he was picked up ten days ago. No one has heard from him since. New York now is nets cast to the wind, seeking for any Muslim to ensnare.’
His words made Raza turn reflexively to look out of the window. No nets, but there was a police car in the parking lot which hadn’t been there a few seconds ago, and two policemen talking to a redhead whose hair reached her jawline. The woman turned towards the window, her finger pointing—
Raza grabbed Abdullah’s shirt and yanked hard, ducking at the same time so neither of them could be seen from outside. He pressed his keys into Abdullah’s palm.
‘Go from the back door. The silver Mazda. Take it. Run. Trust me.’ He pushed Abdullah from his chair.
‘Raza, what—?’
‘For your son’s sake. Go quickly. Please.’ He picked up the baseball cap that had been resting next to his elbow and put it firmly on Abdullah’s head, handing him his jacket – Harry’s jacket – at the same time, and reached across to take the coat Abdullah had slung over his chair.
‘Allah protect you,’ Abdullah said, squeezing his hand, before walking very rapidly to the back door.
But not rapidly enough. The policemen had entered; one pointed towards Abdullah, the other shrugged and called out, ‘Sir?’ in his direction.
Raza stood up, wearing Abdullah’s grey coat, said ‘Allah-o-Akbar’ loudly enough to be heard. The diners seated next to him shrank into their seats; a man standing by the utensils picked up his child and held her protectively in his arms; someone called out to the policemen.
Kim Burton crouched beside a car in the parking lot, the side-view mirror allowing her to see the door to the restaurant without being seen. She didn’t want him caught, she didn’t want him to escape, she didn’t want to be responsible either way. When the policemen exited, Abdullah in his grey winter coat handcuffed between them, she felt both sickened and relieved.
And then she saw his shoulders, far too slight for the great bulk of the winter coat.
41
The policemen had identical grips. Each had hold of his upper arm with a pressure that was merely professional. One was left-handed, one right-handed, and Raza wondered if this had been a consideration in pairing them up. Did policemen, like opening batsmen, work well with a left-right combination?
Pellets of ice were falling out of the grey sky. Raza was glad to be outside, away from the atmosphere of terror replaced by thrill – the diners had witnessed something, it would be on the evening news, they would tell all their friends to watch.
A car in the parking lot was covered in snow; it would have been here since the previous night. He wondered if its owner had spent the night in the restaurant, hiding in the bathroom stalls until the closing-up shift departed, scavenging through the kitchens in the dregs of night, finding everything locked up save for condiments. Or perhaps someone was in that car – had been there for days, would stay there until the first spring thaw revealed the corpse of a man so defined by absence that no one noticed he was missing.
His head was down so she wouldn’t see his face. He wasn’t actually looking at the car, was only recalling he had seen it as he entered the restaurant and had paid it no attention then. All he was looking at now was ice melting at every moment of impact – with paving, with shoes, with the soil in the otherwise empty flowerbeds near the restaurant door. Annihilated by contact, any contact.
‘Wait!’ he heard her shout. The policemen stopped, angled their bodies towards her.
There was the spider, and there was its shadow. Two families, two versions of the spider dance. The Ashraf-Tanakas, the Weiss-Burtons – their story together the story of a bomb, the story of a lost homeland, the story of a man shot dead by the docks, the story of body armour ignored, of running alone from the world’s greatest power.
Still he didn’t look up, but the space between one footfall and the next told him she was walking towards him in large strides. No other sound in the parking lot; the zip of cars on the highway was backdrop – and hope. Abdullah should have left through the exit around the back, he would be on the highway now, using his phone to call John and set up another meeting place. But it wasn’t enough to be out of the parking lot, he needed time to get away, time in which no one would know they should be looking out for a broad-shouldered, hazel-eyed Afghan.
‘I need to make sure that’s him,’ he heard Kim say.
Raza raised his head and bellowed, ‘Chup!’, the end of the word half-strangled with pain as the policemen’s hands pressed down on his head, forced him to his knees.
He saw Kim Burton’s eyes refuse to believe what they were seeing. Blood rushed to her face and for a moment she looked angry, furious – Harry’s quick temper manifest in her – as though the world was attempting to play a trick on her which she didn’t find even remotely entertaining. Then she was reaching a hand out to him, and Raza’s body jerked away from her touch.
‘Stand back,’ he heard one of the policemen say.
Raza wasn’t sure she’d heard. She was staring at him as a child might stare at a unicorn or some other creature of legend whose existence she’d always believed in yet never expected to receive proof of.
In any other circumstance he’d be reflecting her expression back at her. In the twenty years since Harry had handed him marshmallows on the beach and said Kim was asking if he had a girlfriend he’d been imagining and re-imagining their first meeting. Now his mouth twisted at how far his imagination had fallen short.
His grimace brought her back to the moment. He saw her looking up towards the restaurant window, then at the winter coat . . . she took a step back. She would be wondering, he guessed correctly, if he had set her up from the beginning, from that first phone call from Afghanistan. Why had he recoiled from her touch and why had he said, ‘Chup!’ It was one of the Urdu words with which Harry most liberally seasoned his language – Raza would be aware she knew it meant ‘Be quiet.’ What did he think she was going to say? He saw Harry’s careful intelligence in her – looking at the pieces, trying to understand the picture.
The ice was falling into her auburn hair, splinters winking as they dissolved. For a moment, he wavered. All he needed to do was allow her to say what she had been about to say when he stopped her. She had only to say, ‘That’s not him,’ and they would let him go. And then – a bead of melted ice trailed down her face, following the route a tear might take – he and Kim Burton would finally sit down face to face, to talk about Harry, to talk about Hiroko, to talk about everything.
But he would not do that to Abdullah. Not this Raza Konrad Ashraf – not the one who had lain in the hold of a ship bearing the weight of an Afghan boy, not the one who had floated in the dagger-cold sea looking up at Orion, promising himself he would not be as he was before. Every chance, every second, he could give Abdullah he would.
He looked once more at the snow-covered car, the desolation of it, and wryly considered this new heroic persona he was trying to take on. Truth was, he didn’t have the temperament for this kind of running anyway; they’d catch him soon enough. Perhaps arrest Bilal, or his mother, or anyone else who might be termed accomplice. Kim Burton, too, if she walked with him out of this parking lot. What a gift, then, what a surprising gift, to be able to say the moment when freedom ended had counted for something. Finally, he counted for something.
‘Is it him?’ one of the policemen said.
He looked straight at Kim.
‘Hanh,’ he said very softly. Hanh. Yes. Say yes.
He saw her decision, though he didn’t know how or why she had come to it.
‘Yes,’ she said.
The men nodded and lifted Raza to his feet. Her expression became frantic as she heard the jangle of his handcuffs.
‘I don’t know that he’s done anything wrong. He just looked suspicious. My father died in Afghanistan a few days ago. I’m not coping very well. There’s nothing he’s done wrong. Please let him go.’
‘Don’t worry,’ the policeman said in the tone of voice men reserve for women they decide are hysterical. ‘We’re just going to ask him a few questions. And I’m sorry about your father.’
They walked Raza past Kim as they headed to the car. The look on her face was one he knew he’d never forget. No matter what happened to him, what anyone did now, what they said, how they tried to break him, he would remember – as if it were a promise of the world that awaited if he survived – Kim Burton’s expression, which said, clearer than the words of any language, ‘Forgive me.’
He would have. If it were in his power he would have taken her mistake from her and flung all the points of its gleaming sharpness into the heavens. But he knew it didn’t work that way. He could only try to convey, in that final instant before they dragged him away – in the dip of his head, the sorrow of his smile – that he still saw the spider as well as its shadow.
42
By the time she was speeding down the West Side Highway – every traffic light turning green at her approach, the river lit up with Manhattan’s liquid reflection, the sky that glowing orange which passed for darkness on cloudy nights – Kim Burton was no closer than she had been six hours earlier in the parking lot to understanding what had transpired that afternoon, both in the restaurant and in her own mind.
In one moment she saw Abdullah as the innocent. What had he said after all to warrant sending the law after an illegal Afghan? That he had sat in a car which might have driven over teddy bears? That Hiroko was to be honoured for assuring her son a place in heaven? That those who defended their nation against attack were heroes? In the next moment he was a threat, seeing virtue only through the narrow prism of his religious belief, conferring martyrdom on those who attacked Americans. It was necessary to allow the experts – those involved with threat assessment of a kind that was not part of her experience – to speak to him, to make the decision she wasn’t competent to make.
In that first moment, she was grateful beyond measure to Raza, that deus ex machina, long waiting in the wings of her life for the moment when he could enter with a flourish and interpose himself between her misguided intentions and their fulfilment. He would be fine, of course. She had concluded this before she even reached the border, once she was able to brush away the awful tension of the parking lot and consider the plain facts. Of course he would be fine. There wasn’t any question of that. However bizarre his behaviour, there was nothing illegal about it, or about his presence in Canada. The policemen need never know he had helped Abdullah escape; they’d merely conclude that the American woman was paranoid, seeing a threat in every Muslim.