Ransom (15 page)

“You got it.”

“Well, the joke's on you. I haven't seen Marilyn in two weeks.”

Ransom decided to leave it at that.

They were returning on the afternoon of the third day. That morning, Ransom told Miles that he was going to Hotaka alone, but Ryder insisted on coming. The innkeeper drove them in his van. The serpentine valley eventually spilled into a broad cirque, where, on a rise, the Alpine Lodge was situated above a huge parking lot. Behind the lodge, the long ridge of Hotaka extended across the sky like a rusted saw blade.

Ransom bought two bottles of sake in the lodge. Ryder bought one for himself. “You want me to wait here?” he asked.

“You can come if you want.”

They went out through the parking lot, past families snapping pictures of the peaks, and followed a footpath into the woods. Ryder asked if he remembered the way, and Ransom nodded his head. After ten minutes they came to the clearing. It looked just the same: some forty stones huddled together in a small meadow, each one engraved with a name, memorial gifts of sake and flowers placed beside many. An informal shrine commemorating climbers who had died in the mountains, it was started and maintained by their families and friends. The bodies were
elsewhere; some had never been found. At the edge of the clearing were two newer stones. One said
Ian
, the other
Annette
. A local artisan had done the engraving.

Ransom placed a bottle of sake beside each stone. He ran his eyes across the letters, trying to separate each chiselled character from the others in the vague hope that the familiar names would yield some new meaning, finally looking up at the face of the mountain, and at the pale sky. “Okay,” he said to Ryder, who was standing back in the trees, and started back up the path.

That afternoon they took the train back to Kyoto.

“And where is your beautiful wife this fine day?” the Pathan said, when Ransom found him at his stall in the bazaar. The woman in question was not Ransom's wife, and by his lights it was not much of a day: no wind, the sun a degree higher in the sky and hotter than it had been the day before, and still no sign of Ian. The Pathan's question had an ironic spin, as if the man understood all of this and found it slightly amusing. But then he always sounded that way to Ransom. He replied that Annette was back at the fort where she was relatively safe from lecherous Pathans. He meant this as a joke, but the anxiety of waiting two weeks in a place where he didn't want to be put a sharper edge on the words than he'd intended.

The Pathan's thin smile faded.

Something bumped Ransom's thigh. He looked down and found a sheep nosing at his jeans. The sheep turned and waddled off down the bazaar, poking into the stalls as if shopping.

Ransom had insulted the Pathan, a stupid thing to do. Pathan tribesmen with Enfield rifles strapped over their shoulders and bandoliers of ammunition around their
baggy shirts strutted past the stall. The man Ransom was talking to had a revolver holstered on his hip.

“You have heard from your friend?” he said after a minute.

Ransom shook his head, relieved that his indiscretion had been passed over.

“He was not Australian?”

“American.”

“Ah.” The Pathan nodded. “There is an Australian passport for sale.”

It took Ransom a minute to sort this out, and to construe the warning. He thought he knew where the passport had come from. A few days earlier, in the bazaar, he had met an Australian who had mined opals in the Outback for two years. He had dry, brick-red skin against which his green eyes and the gaudy opal pendant on his chest glistened. A man who had lived alone in a trailer in the desert, seventy miles from the nearest settlement, he showed the tentative volubility of the rescued castaway who is not quite certain if language still works. Over kebabs in the bazaar he told Ransom, who hadn't asked, about his plan. He was in Landi Kotal to score hash oil. He was going to swallow it, in condoms, when he flew out of Karachi, and shit out a small fortune when he got back to Sydney. That was it. When he had finished talking, he beamed as if he were the first person to have penetrated the mystery of supply and demand. Ransom felt obliged to tell him that it was an old trick, and people had died that way; any residual alcohol that hadn't been boiled off in the processing of the oil would eat through the condoms, and once that happened it was permanent deep-space. But the
Australian smiled and rubbed the opal to his chest. “My lucky amulet,” he said. Ransom left the Australian licking chili sauce from his cracked lips and that was the last he saw of him. Yesterday he'd seen the opal pendant for sale at a stall not five yards from where he stood. He felt awful then, thinking of what might have happened, thinking he might have been more sympathetic, or at least more persistent.

It was an object lesson, Ransom thought. The Pathan was reminding him of what could happen.

“Excuse me,” he said to the Pathan. “My humor was crude.”

The Pathan nodded. “Your wife. She is still sick?”

Ransom nodded. A convention of their transactions was that Annette was sick and that the junk was a temporary analgesic. This was, in fact, the way Annette viewed her habit.

“There is anything else I can do for you?” the Pathan asked, after they'd made the usual exchange.

“How about a fifth of scotch?”

“I am sorry. You know I am a devout man.”

Ransom nodded. He thought it was a funny kind of devotion that traded in smack and balked at booze, but he didn't say anything.

“I hope your wife will be well soon,” the Pathan said. “A good woman is a pearl of great price.”

They'd met the Pathan two weeks earlier, the day after they arrived in Landi Kotal. Ian was planning to leave for Kabul later that afternoon. The three of them spent the morning in the bazaar. This was Annette's first time in
Landi Kotal and she wanted to look at everything. The close-packed stalls displayed bolts of Scottish tweed, Swiss watches, Indian ivories, sundries with the initials of French and Italian designers, Levi's, Japanese cameras and radios, Buddhas in bronze and clay, vintage British cavalry swords and U.S. Army-issue Colt 45s. They found a handtowel embroidered with the legend
Grand Hotel, Mackinac Island, Michigan
laid out beside a stack of Tibetan prayer rugs, and in the next stall a Peugeot ten-speed bicycle. Smuggling was the main industry of the region. Some of the contraband was what it appeared to be, but the smart buyer began with the assumption that the Western goods were Asian counterfeits, the handcrafts and antiques mass-produced. You never took the first price quoted.

At one of the stalls, Ian and Ransom examined some pale, crumbly hash. Ian shook his head. Water-pressed, he said, the dregs of the last season's pressing. He was confirmed in his decision to cross the border and get the pick of the crop in the mountain villages outside of Kabul.

A small boy with a large knife sheathed in his belt stepped into their path waving his arms. “I got stone, man,” he announced. “I got stone. Very hot stuff. Brand new. Crazy tunes.” He reached into a pocket and drew out a cassette which he pressed into Ransom's hand. The blocky, Roman letters on the inner lining read, “Excite on Main St. by Rolling Stone.” The boy wiggled his shoulders and hips vigorously. He took Annette's arm and coaxed them over to his rock-and-roll emporium, a stall with boxes of bootleg cassettes and several Japanese
cassette players. A Fender Stratocaster was mounted in a gun rack at the back of the stall.

Annette wanted to buy a cassette player. Ian told her that if it wasn't confiscated at the border when they went back to India they'd end up paying more duty than it was worth. Ransom reminded her that their money was tight. Annette slammed down a tape she'd been looking at. “Always you and Ian gang up on me,” she said, stalking off into the bazaar. Ian went after her while Ransom bargained for the cassette player. Annette had been clean for three weeks and Ransom wanted to keep her happy.

Finding Ian and Annette was easy because they'd gathered a crowd. Annette's red chamois shirt was on the ground and she was trying to tug her T-shirt up over her head. Ian was trying to restrain her. Men and boys in turbans were closing around them.

Earlier in the morning they had counseled Annette on keeping herself covered no matter how warm it was. Annette didn't like being told what to do. And she didn't like clothes. In Goa they'd spent the days nude on the beach. But Goa was not Moslem.

Ransom pushed through the onlookers. Ian had her arms pinned. Annette had a mouthful of her own sleeve and was trying to rip the fabric with her teeth. When Ransom grabbed her shoulder she kicked him in the shin.

“Bastards! Beat up on me!”

They each took an arm and pushed her through the crowd. Annette was laughing now.

“Fook these dirty people,” Annette said. “They have never seen teets before?” Ransom was hoping that no one
could make out the English behind Annette's French accent. The eyes of the crowd were already hostile.

The crowd followed them. Annette tried to wrench herself away from Ransom. He dropped the new cassette player, which had been pinned under his arm. The turbans hissed and muttered behind them. Ransom looked back and saw a man pick up a stone from the side of the road. Some of the men carried rifles. A young man darted forward from the crowd and grabbed at the neck of Annette's shirt. Ransom turned and kicked him in the knee, provoking angry shouts from the mob.

“Don't look back,” Ian said.

Annette was no longer resisting. Her face was pale.

In front of them a man emerged from one of the stalls. Ransom raised his fist.

“Please follow me,” the man said. “This way.” He took them through a narrow passage between two stalls. “Here,” he said, holding back the flap of the tent.

“They will not come here,” the man said, closing the flaps. He lit an oil lamp and beckoned them to sit.

The first thing Ransom noticed about the man was that his eyes were blue. The sharply hooked nose seemed to be placed a little too high on his face. He wore a pale-blue turban and had a long, wispy beard, which he stroked with his left hand. Ransom saw that the ring finger on his right hand was missing, nubbed below the first joint.

“An accident,” the man said, catching Ransom's eyes on his finger. He introduced himself. Ransom missed the name. He said he was of the Afridi tribe of Pathans and that it was the code of his people to offer shelter and protection to strangers.

Ransom was stroking Annette's hand, watching her.

“She is your woman?” the man asked Ransom.

Ransom didn't say anything.

Annette said, “I am nobody's woman. Nobody cares about me.” She was pale and her hands trembled.

“She is very beautiful,” the Pathan said.

Ransom put his arm around Annette and began to knead the muscles in her neck. He stopped suddenly when he saw the way the Pathan was looking at Annette. It was a look he had seen in the faces of the crowd in the bazaar.

Ian said, “I think we should be pushing on.”

They thanked the man. He assured them that he was always at their service. He was a merchant, a broker of commodities, and if they should require anything, anything at all, during their stay in Landi Kotal . . .

To Ransom he offered the advice that you did not display a jewel in the bazaar unless you intended to sell it. Then he looked again at Annette.

Ransom and Annette saw Ian off a few hours later. The taxi stand at the edge of the bazaar had a fleet of pre-'60 Chevies. When a sufficient number of passengers had presented themselves, the cabs rattled off over the Khyber Pass. A taxi was nearly ready to leave when they arrived. The driver had seven fares in the cab itself and intended to put four more in the trunk. Four of the passengers were Caucasian. A woman with matted blond hair and dirt in the creases of her face was leaning out the back window of the cab moaning. The man beside her was holding her hair back behind her neck. While Ian dickered with the driver, she vomited. “That's the way,” the man said, “that's the
way.” Inside the cab someone with a heavy southern accent was telling a story about a guy from Ohio who had his balls cut off at the border when the guards found a ball of hash taped underneath his scrotum. A Pathan with an automatic rifle on his shoulder was securing a canvas bag to the pile of luggage on the roof.

“Well, that's it,” Ian said, after he'd paid the driver. “I've got a seat on the observation deck,” he said, indicating the trunk. He turned to Annette and opened his arms. “How about a kiss for the soldier going off to the wars?”

Annette allowed herself to be embraced, then kissed him on the cheek.

Ian hugged Ransom and said, “You take care of her. That's your job.”

Ransom nodded and tried to smile. He was suddenly very nervous. He felt there was something they were forgetting. They'd been planning this for weeks, but now that the time had come he didn't like the idea of splitting up. The blond girl leaning out of the cab heaved again, and Ranson felt his own stomach shrink in on itself. “You'll be back in a few days?”

“A few days, maybe a week. Just as soon as I can.”

Ian had done this before. He liked to buy direct from the tribes in Afghanistan because it was cheaper and the hash was better than anything that came into Landi Kotal. He had a third of the money in his boot heel. Ransom, who had never done anything like this in his life, was holding the rest. Ian would catch a bus from the border to Kabul, hire a guide into the hills, arrange the buy and make a down payment. He would come back through customs clean, and they would wait for the Afghanis, who did not
believe in borders, to bring the stuff over the mountains. That was the plan.

The taxi driver told Ian they were ready to go. Ian climbed into the trunk of the cab and settled himself among three old men in pink turbans. A cloud of smoke engulfed the rear of the car as the driver gunned the engine. When he popped the clutch the car lurched violently and died.