Chapter thirty-seven

If you stare into its cold dead eye, the camera always mocks you with the truth. The black-and-white photograph showed almost all the men of Khader's mujaheddin unit assembled for the kind of formal portrait that makes the people of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India seem more stiff and gloweringly self-conscious than they really are. It was impossible to tell from that photo how much those men had loved to laugh, and how readily they'd smiled.

But none of them were looking directly into the lens of the camera. All the eyes but mine were a little above or below, a little to the left or the right. Only my own eyes stared back at me as I held the picture in my bandaged hands, and remembered the names of the men leaning together in the ragged lines.

Mazdur Gul, the stonemason, whose name means labourer, and whose hands were permanently grey-white from decades of work with granite... Daoud, who liked to be called by the English version of his name, David, and whose dream it was to visit the great city of New York and eat a meal in a fine restaurant...

Zamaanat, whose name means trust, and whose brave smile concealed the agony of shame he'd felt that his whole family lived in hungry squalor at Jalozai, a huge refugee camp near Peshawar...

Hajji Akbar, who'd been appointed as the doctor in the unit for no other reason than that he'd once spent two months as a patient in a Kabul hospital, and who'd greeted my acceptance of the doctor's job, when I arrived at the mountain camp, with prayers and a little Dervish dance of joy... Alef, the mischievously satirical Pashtun trader, who died crawling in the snow with his back torn open and his clothes on fire... Juma and Hanif, the two wild boys who were killed by the madman Habib... Jalalaad, their fearless young friend, who died in the last charge... Ala ud-Din, whose name in English is shortened to Aladdin, and who escaped unscathed... Suleiman Shahbadi, of the furrowed brow and sorrowing eyes, who died leading us into the guns.

And in the centre of the assembly there was a smaller, tighter group around Abdel Khader Khan: Ahmed Zadeh, the Algerian, who died with one hand clenched in the frozen earth and the other knotted into mine... Khaled Ansari, who murdered the madman Habib and then walked into the lost world of the smothering snow... Mahmoud Melbaaf, who survived the last charge like Ala-ud Din, unwounded and unmarked... Nazeer, who ignored his own wounds to drag my unconscious body to safety... and me. Standing behind and a little to the left of Khaderbhai, my expression in the photograph was confident, resolute, and self-possessed. And the camera, they say, doesn't lie.

It was Nazeer who'd saved me. The mortar shell that had exploded so close to us, as we ran into the guns, ripped and ruptured the air. The shock wave burst my left eardrum. In the same deafened moment, pieces of the exploded shell passed us in a hot metal blizzard. None of the larger chunks of metal hit me, but eight small pieces of the shrapnel smashed into my legs below the knees - five in one leg, and three in the other. Two smaller pieces hit my body-one in the stomach, and one in the chest. They tore through the heavy layers of my clothing, and even pierced my thick money belt and the solid leather straps of my medic's bag, burning their way into my skin. Another chunk hit my forehead, high above the left eye.

They were tiny fragments, the largest of them about the size of Abe Lincoln's face on an American penny coin. Still, they were travelling at such a speed that they took my legs out from under me. Earth, thrown up by the explosion, peppered my face, blinding and choking me. I hit the ground hard, just managing to turn my face aside before the impact. Unfortunately, I turned the burst eardrum to the ground, and the violence of the blow rived the wound even further. I blacked out.

Nazeer, who was wounded in the legs and the arm, pulled my unconscious body into the shelter of a shallow, trench-like depression. He collapsed himself, then, covering my body with his own until the bombardment stopped. Lying there with his arms around my neck, he took a hit in the back of his right shoulder.

It was a piece of metal that would've hit me, and might've killed me, had Khader's man not protected me with his love. When all was quiet, he dragged me to safety.

"It was Sayeed, yes?" Mahmoud Melbaaf asked. "Sorry?"

"It was Sayeed who took the picture, was it not?"

"Yes. Yes. It was Sayeed. They called him Kishmishi..."

The word swept us into remembrances of the shy, young Pashtun fighter. He'd seen Khaderbhai as the embodiment of all his warrior heroes, and he'd followed him everywhere, adoringly, with eyes he quickly cast down when the Khan looked his way. He'd survived smallpox as a child, and his face was severely pockmarked with dozens of small, brown, dish-like spots. His nickname, Kishmishi, used with great affection by the older fighters, meant Raisins. He'd been too shy to pose with us in the photograph, so he'd volunteered to operate the camera.

"He was with Khader," I muttered.

"Yes, at the end. Nazeer saw his body, at the side of Khader, very close to him. I think he would ask to be with Abdel Khader even if he knew, before the attack, that they would get an attack, and get killed. I think he would ask to die like that.

And he was not the only one."

"Where did you get this?"

"Khaled had the roll of film. Remember? He had the only camera that Khader give his permission. The film was with other things he let fall down to the ground from his pockets when he went from us. I take it with me. I put it in the photo studio last week.

They return the photos this morning. I thought you would like it to see them, before we leave."

"Leave? Where are we going?"

"We have to get out of here. How are you feeling?"

"I'm fine," I lied. "I'm okay."

I sat up on the cot bed and swung my legs over the side. When my feet hit the floor there was a pain so excruciating in my shins that I moaned aloud. Another fierce pain throbbed at my forehead.

I probed with my blunt, bandaged fingers at a wad of dressing beneath a bandage that wound round my head like a turban. A third pain in my left ear nagged for my attention. My hands were aching, and my feet, swaddled in three or more layers of socks, felt as if they were burning. There was a painful ache in my left hip, where the horse had kicked me when the jets had torn up the sky above us, months before. The wound had never properly healed, and I suspected that a bone was chipped beneath the tender flesh.

My forearm felt numb near the elbow, where my own horse had bitten me in its panic. That wound was also months old, and it too had never really healed. Doubled over, resting on my thighs, I could feel the tightness of my stomach and the leaner flesh of my legs. I was thin, after starving on the mountain. Too thin. All in all, it was a mess. I was in a bad way. Then my mind came back to the bandages on my hands, and a sensation close to panic rose like a spear in my spine.

"What are you doing?"

"I've gotta get these bandages off," I snapped, tearing at them with my teeth.

"Wait! Wait!" Mahmoud cried. "I will do it for you."

He unwound the bulky bandages slowly, and I felt the sweat run from my eyebrows onto my cheeks. When both lots of bindings were removed, I stared at the disfigured claws that my hands had become, and I moved them, flexing the fingers. Frostbite had split my hands open at all the knuckle joints, and the bruise black wounds were hideous, but all the fingers and all the fingertips were there.

"You can thank Nazeer," Mahmoud muttered softly as he examined my cracked and peeling hands. "They were thinking to cut off your fingers, but he would not let them. And he would not let them leave you until they treated all your injuries. He did force them to help the frostbite injuries on your face, also. He had the Kalashnikov and your automatic pistol. Here-he asked me to give it to you, when you wake up."

He produced the Stechkin, wrapped in a coil of cheesecloth. I tried to take it, but my hands couldn't hold the bundle.

"I will keep it for you," Mahmoud offered with a stiff little smile.

"Where is he?" I asked, still dazed and drilled by the pain, but feeling better and stronger by the minute.

"Over there," Mahmoud indicated, nodding his head. I turned to see Nazeer, sleeping on his side on a cot similar to my own. "He is resting, but he is ready to move. We must leave here soon. Our friends will come for us at any time now, and we must be ready to move."

I looked around me. We were in a large, sand-coloured tent with pallet floors and about fifteen folding cot-beds. Several men wearing Afghan clothing-loose pants, tunic shirts, and long, sleeveless vests in the same shades of pale green-moved among the beds. They were fanning the wounded men with straw fans, washing them with buckets of soapy water, or carrying away wastes through a narrow slit in the canvas door. Some of the wounded were moaning or speaking out their pain in languages I couldn't understand. The air in that Pakistani plain, after months in the snowy peaks of Afghanistan, was thick and hot and heavy. There were so many strong smells, one upon another, that my senses rejected them and concentrated on one particularly pungent aroma: the unmistakable smell of perfumed Indian basmati rice, cooking somewhere close to the tent.

"I'm fuckin' hungry, man, I gotta tell ya."

"We will eat good food soon," Mahmoud assured me, allowing himself a laugh.

"Are we...? This is Pakistan?"

"Yes," he laughed again. "What can you remember?"

"Not much. Running. They were shooting at us... from a long way off. Mortars everywhere. I remember... I was hit..."

I felt along the padded bandages that swathed my shins, from knees to ankles.

"And I hit the ground. Then... I remember... was it a jeep? Or a truck? Did that happen?"

"Yes. They took us. Massoud's men."

"Massoud?"

"Ahmed Shah. The Lion himself. His men made the attack on the dam and the two main roads-to Kabul and to Quetta. They put a siege on Kandahar. They are still there, outside the city, and they will not leave, I think so, until the war is over. We ran into the middle of it, my friend."

"They rescued us..."

"It was, how to say, the less they do for us."

"The least they could do for us?"

"Yes. Because it was them who killed us."

"What?"

"Yes. When we made our escaping out of the mountain, running down, the Afghan army shoot at us. Massoud's men see us, and think we are some of the enemy. They are a long way from us. They start to shoot at us with mortars."

"Our own people shot at us?"

"Everybody was shooting-I mean, everyone shooting in the same time. Afghan army, they were shooting at us also, but the mortars that did hit us, I think they were our own side. And that made Afghan army and Russian soldiers run away. I killed two of them myself when they run away. The men of Ahmed Shah Massoud, they had Stingers. The Americans give them the Stingers, in April, and since that time, the Russians having no helicopters. Now the mujaheddin fight back in every place. Now the war is over, in two years, or maybe three, Inshallah."

"April... what month is this?"

"Now is May."

"How long have I been here?"

"Four days, Lin," he answered softly.

"Four days..." I'd thought it was one night, one long sleep. I looked over my shoulder again at the sleeping form of Nazeer.

"Are you sure he's okay?"

"He is injured-here... and here-but he is strong, and he can move himself. He will be well, Inshallah. He is like a shotor!" he laughed, using the Farsi word for camel. "He makes his mind, and nobody can change him."

I laughed with him for the first time since I'd woken. The laugh sent my hands to my head in an effort to contain the throbbing pain it caused.

"I wouldn't like to be the one who tried to change Nazeer's mind about anything, once it was made up."

"Me too not." Mahmoud agreed. "The soldiers of Massoud, they carried you and Nazeer, with me, to a car, a good Russian car.

After the car, we moved you and Nazeer to a truck, for the road to Chaman. At Chaman, the Pakistanis, border guards, they want to take Nazeer's guns. He give them money-some of your money, from your money belt-and he keep his guns. We hide you in the blankets, with two dead men. We put them on top of you, and we show them to border guards, and tell that we want to give good Muslim burial for these men. Then we come into Quetta, to this hospital, and again they want to take Nazeer's guns. Again he give them money. They want to cut your fingers, because of the smell..."

I put my hands to my nose, and sniffed at them. There was a rotten, death-foetid smell to them still. It was faint, but clear enough to remind me of the rotting goat's feet we'd eaten as our last supper on the mountain. My stomach churned, arching like a fighting cat. Mahmoud quickly reached for a metal dish and thrust it under my face. I vomited, spitting black-green bile into the bowl, and fell forward helplessly onto my knees.

When the nausea attack passed, I sat back on the cot and snatched gratefully at the cigarette Mahmoud lit for me. "Go on." I stuttered.

"What?"

"You were saying... about Nazeer..."

"Oh yes, yes, he pull his Kalashnikov out from under his pattu and point it at them. He tell them he will kill them all, if they cut you. They want to call the guards, the camp police, but Nazeer, he is in the door of the tent, with his gun. They cannot go past him. And I am on his other side, looking for his back. So they fix you."

"That's a hell of a health plan-an Afghan with a Kalashnikov pointed at your doctor."

"Yes," he agreed without irony. "And after, they fix Nazeer. And then, after two days with no sleep, and many wounds, Nazeer sleep."

"They didn't call the guards, when he went to sleep?"

"No. They are all Afghans here. Doctors, wounded men, guards, everybody is Afghan. But not the camp police. They are Pakistani.

The Afghans, they don't like the Pakistan police. They have big trouble with Pakistan police. Everybody has trouble with Pakistan police. So they give a permission to me, and I take Nazeer's guns when he sleep. And I look after him. And I look after you. Wait- I think our friends are here!"

The long flaps of the tent's doorway opened all the way back, stunning us with the yellow light of a warm day. Four men entered. They were Afghans, veteran fighters; hard men, with eyes that stared at me as if they were looking along the decorated barrel of a jezail rifle. Mahmoud rose to greet them, and whispered a few words. Two of the men woke Nazeer. He'd been in a deep sleep, and spun round at the first touch, grasping at the men and ready to fight. Reassured by their gentle expressions, he then turned his head to check on me. Seeing me awake and sitting up, he grinned so broadly that it was a little alarming in a face so seldom struck with a smile.

The two men helped him to his feet. There was a wad of bandage strapped to his right thigh. Supporting himself on their shoulders, he limped out into the sunlight. The other men helped me to my feet. I tried to walk, but my wounded shins refused to obey me, and the best I could manage was a tottering shuffle.

After a few seconds of that embarrassingly feeble scuffling, the men formed a chair with their arms and swept me up effortlessly between them.

For the next six weeks, that was the pattern of our recovery: a few days, perhaps as long as a week, in one location before an abrupt shift to a new tent or slum hut or hidden room. The Pakistan secret service, the ISI, had a malign interest in every foreigner who entered Afghanistan without their sanction during the war.

The problem for Mahmoud Melbaaf, who was our guardian in those vulnerable weeks, was the fascination our story held for the refugees and exiles who harboured us. I'd darkened my blonde hair, and I wore sunglasses almost all the time. But, no matter how careful and secretive we were in the slums and camps where we stayed, there was always someone who knew who I was. The temptation to talk about the American gunrunner who was wounded in battle, fighting with the mujaheddin, was irresistible. Talk like that would've been enough to pique the curiosity of any intelligence agent from any agency. And had the secret police found me, they would've discovered that the American was in fact an escaped convict from Australia. That would've meant promotions for some, and a special thrill for the torturers who would get to work on me before they handed me over to the Australian authorities. So we moved often and we moved quickly, and we spoke to none but the few we trusted with our wounded lives.

Little by little, the details emerged: the more complete story of the battle we'd run into, and our rescue after it. The Russian and Afghan soldiers who'd surrounded our mountain comprised the best part of a company and, as such, were probably led by a captain. Their sole purpose in operating among the Shar-i-Safa Mountains was to catch and kill Habib Abdur Rahman. A huge reward had been posted for his arrest, but the terror and the horror that his atrocities had forced into their minds made the hunt for him a much more personal operation for the searchers. So mesmerised were they by his savage hatred, and so obsessed were they with his capture, that they failed to detect the stealthy advance of Ahmed Shah Massoud's forces. When we made our break for freedom, acting on Habib's information that most of the Russians and the Afghans were busy laying mines and other traps on the far side of the mountain, the startled sentries in the deserted enemy camp had opened fire. They'd thought, perhaps, that Habib himself was coming for them, because their fire was wild and undisciplined. That action had precipitated the attack that was being planned by Massoud's mujaheddin, who must've seen the firing as a pre-emptive strike by the Russians. The explosions I'd seen and heard as I ran toward the enemy-they blew up their own mortar shells, the idiots- were actually direct hits on the Russian positions by Massoud's mortars. The wider mortar strikes that tore into our line were mere accidents: friendly fire, as they say.

And that was the elated moment I'd called glorious, in my mind, as I ran into the guns: that stupid waste of lives, that friendly fire. There wasn't any glory in it. There never is. There's only courage and fear and love. And war kills them all, one by one.

Glory belongs to God, of course; that's what the word really means. And you can't serve God with a gun.

When we fell, Massoud's men pursued the fleeing enemy all the way around the mountain and into the returning company of minelayers.

The battle that followed was a massacre. Not one man of the force sent to catch and kill Habib Abdur Rahman survived. He would've liked that, the madman, had he been alive to hear it. I know exactly how he would've grinned, with his wide mouth gaping soundless and his grief-crazed eyes bulging on swollen hatreds.

All that cold day, and into the sudden evening, Nazeer and I had remained on the battleground. As we shivered in the swiftly falling shadows of sunset, the mujaheddin and the survivors from our own unit returned from the fighting to find us. Mahmoud and Ala-ud-Din brought the dead-Suleiman and Jalalaad-from the barren mountain.

Massoud's men had combined with independent Achakzai fighters to claim the Chaman highway from the Pass all the way to the Russian defensive perimeter of besieged Kandahar, less than fifty kilometres from the city. The evacuation to Chaman, and through the Pass to Pakistan, was rapid and without incident. We rode in a truck, carrying our dead friends with us, and reached the checkpoint in hours-the journey that had taken us a month of mountains on Khader's horses.

Nazeer healed rapidly and began to regain weight. The wounds in his arm and the back of his shoulder closed over well, and gave him little trouble. But the larger and deeper wound to his right thigh seemed to have damaged the ligamentary relationship between muscle, bone, and tendons, from his hip to his knee. The upper leg was stiff, and he still walked with a limp as he swung his right step around the hip, instead of through it.

His spirits were relatively high, however, and he was anxious to return to Bombay-so anxious, in fact, that his fretting attention to my slower recovery became irritating. I snapped at him a couple of times when his solicitous urging-You better? You come now? We go now?-became unendurably annoying. I didn't know then that he had a mission, Khader's last mission, waiting for him in Bombay. The mission was all that held his grief and his shame at surviving Abdel Khader in check. And every day, as our health improved, the obligations of Khader's last command to him grew more suffocating; and his dereliction, as he saw it, more profane.

I had preoccupations of my own. The wounds on my legs were healing readily enough, and the skin on my forehead closed safely over a small, lumpy ridge of bone, but my ruptured eardrum became infected, and it was the source of a constant and almost unbearable pain. Every mouthful of food, every sip of water, every word I spoke, and every loud noise that I heard sent piercing little scorpion stings along the nerves of my face and throat, and deep into my fevered brain. Every movement of my body, or turn of the head, stabbed into that sweating excruciation. Every inward breath, and sneeze or cough, magnified the torment. Shifting accidentally in my sleep and bumping the damaged ear sent me starting up from the cot with a shout that woke every man for fifty metres around.

And then, after three weeks of that maddening, torturous pain and massive, self-medicated doses of penicillin and hot antibiotic washes, the wound healed and the pain receded from me just as memories do, like landmarks on a distant, foggy shore.

My hands healed around the deadened tissue on the knuckle joints.

Truly frozen tissue never really heals, of course, and the injury was one of many that settled in my flesh in those exile years. I took the suffering from Khader's mountain into my hands, and every cold day sends me back there with my hands aching, just as they did when I clutched at the gun before the battle.

Nevertheless, in the warmer air of Pakistan my fingers flexed and moved and obeyed me. My hands were ready for the work I had waiting; the little matter of revenge in Bombay. Although my body was thinner after the ordeal, it was harder and tougher than it had been all those plump months before, when we'd first set out for Khader's war.

Nazeer and Mahmoud organised our return trip by a series of connecting trains. They'd acquired a small arsenal of weapons in Pakistan, and were intent on smuggling them into Bombay. They concealed the guns in bales of fabric, and shipped them in the care of three Afghans who were fluent in Hindi. We rode in different carriages, and never acknowledged the men, but the illicit cargo was always on our minds. The irony of it-we'd set off to smuggle guns into Afghanistan, and we were returning to smuggle guns into Bombay- made me laugh, when it occurred to me, as I sat in my first-class carriage. But the laughter was bitter, and the expression it left on my face turned the eyes of my fellow passengers away.

It took us a little over two days to get back to Bombay. I was travelling on my false British book, the one I'd used to enter Pakistan. According to the entries in the book, I'd overstayed on my visa. Using the little smiling charm I could muster and the last of the money Khader had paid me, the last American dollars, I bribed the officials on both the Pakistani and Indian sides of the border without raising so much as the flicker of an eye. And an hour after dawn, eight months after we left her, we walked into the deep heat and frantic, toiling fervency of my beloved Bombay.

From a discreet distance, Nazeer and Mahmoud Melbaaf supervised the unloading and transport of their military cargo. Promising Nazeer that I would meet up with him that night at Leopold's, I left them at the station.

I took a cab. I felt drunk on the sound and colour and gorgeous flowing kinesis of the island city. But I had to concentrate. I was almost out of money. I directed the driver to the black market currency-collection centre in the Fort area. With the taxi waiting below, I ran up the three narrow wooden flights to the counting room. A memory of Khaled wrung out my heart-I used to run up these stairs with Khaled, with Khaled, with Khaled-and I clenched my jaw against it, just as I bit down on the pain in my wounded shins. The two big men, loitering with intent on the landing outside the room, recognised me. We shook hands, all of us smiling widely.

"What's the news of Khaderbhai?" one of the men asked.

I looked into his tough young face. His name was Amir. I knew him to be brave and reliable and devoted to the Khan. For the blink of an eye it seemed, incredibly, that he was making a joke about Khader's death, and I felt a quick, angry impulse to stiffen him.

Then I realised that he simply didn't know. How is that possible?

Why don't they know! Instinct told me not to answer his question.

I held my eyes and my mouth in a hard, impassive little smile, and brushed past him to knock at the door. A short, fat, balding man in a white singlet and dhoti opened the door and thrust out his hands at once in a double handshake. It was Rajubhai, controller of the currency collections for Abdel Khader Khan's mafia council. He pulled me into the room, and closed the door. The counting room was the core of his personal and business universe, and he spent twenty out of every twenty four hours there. The thin, faded, pink-white cord across his shoulder, under his singlet, declared that he was a devout Hindu, one of many who worked within Abdel Khader's largely Muslim empire.

"Linbaba! So good to see you!" he said with a happy grin.

"Khaderbhai kahan hain?" Where is Khaderbhai?

I struggled to keep the surprise from my face. Rajubhai was a senior man. He held a seat at the council meetings. If he didn't know that Khader was dead, then nobody in the city would know.

And if Khader's death was still a secret, then Mahmoud and Nazeer must've insisted on the suppression of the news. They hadn't said anything to me about it. I couldn't understand it. Whatever their reasons, I decided to support them and to keep my silence on the matter.

"Hum akela hain," I replied, returning his smile. I'm alone.

It wasn't an answer to his question, and his eyes narrowed on the word.

"Akela..." he repeated. Alone...

"Yes, Rajubhai, and I need some money, fast. I've got a taxi waiting."

"You need dollars, Lin?"

"Dollars nahin. Sirf rupia." Not dollars. Only rupees.

"How much you need?"

"Do-do-teen hazaar," I answered, using the slang phrase two-two three thousand, which always means three.

"Teen hazaar!" he huffed, more from habit than any real concern.

Three thousand rupees was a considerable sum to the street runners, or in the slums, but it was a trifling amount in the context of the black-market currency trade. Rajubhai's office collected a hundred times that much and more every day, and he'd often paid me sixty thousand rupees at a time as my wage and my share of commissions.

"Abi, bhai-ya, abi!" Now, brother, now!

Rajubhai turned his head and gestured, with a twitch of his eyebrows, to one of his clerks. The man handed over three thousand rupees in used but clean hundred-rupee notes. Riffling the small bundle first, from habit, as a double check, Rajubhai handed the notes across. I peeled off two notes to put in my shirt pocket, and pushed the rest inside a deeper pocket in my long vest.

"Shukria, chacha," I smiled. "Main jata hu." Thanks, uncle. I'm going.

"Lin!" he cried, stopping me by grasping at my sleeve. "Hamara beta Khaled, kaisa hain?" How is our son, Khaled?

"Khaled is not with us," I said, struggling to keep my voice and my expression neutral. "He went on a journey, a yatra, and I don't know when we'll see him."

I took the steps two at a time on the way down to the cab, feeling the shock of each jump shudder into my shins. The driver swung out into the traffic at once, and I directed him to a clothing shop that I knew on the Colaba Causeway. One of the sybaritic splendours of Bombay is the limitless variety of relatively inexpensive, well-made clothes constantly changing to reflect the newest Indian and foreign trends. In the refugee camp, Mahmoud Melbaaf had given me a long, blue-serge vest, a white shirt, and coarse brown trousers. The clothes had served for the trip from Quetta, but in Bombay they were too hot and too strange: they drew curious attention to me when I needed the camouflage of current fashion. I chose a pair of black jeans with strong, deep pockets, a new pair of joggers to replace my ruined boots, and a loose, white silk shirt to wear over the jeans. I changed in the dressing room, sliding my knife in its scabbard under the belt of my jeans and concealing it with the shirt.

While waiting at the cashier's desk, I caught sight of myself unexpectedly in an angled mirror that showed my face in three quarter profile. It was a face so hard and unfamiliar that it startled me to recognise it as my own. I remembered the photograph taken by shy Kishmishi, and looked again into the mirror. There was a cold impassiveness in my face-and a determination, perhaps-which hadn't even begun to gleam in the eyes that had stared so confidently into the lens of Khaled's camera. I snatched up my sunglasses and put them on. Have I changed so much? I hoped that a hot shower, and shaving off my thick beard, would soften some of the hard edges. But the real hardness was inside me, and I wasn't sure if it was simply tough and tenacious or if it was something much more cruel.

The cab driver followed my instructions and pulled up near the entrance to Leopold's. I paid him, and stood on the busy Causeway for a minute, staring at the wide doorway of the restaurant where my fated connection to Karla and Khaderbhai had really begun. Every door is a portal leading through time as well as space. The same doorway that leads us into and out of a room also leads us into the past of the room and its ceaselessly unfolding future. People knew that once, deep within the ur-mind, the ur-imagination. You can still find those who decorate doorways, and reverently salute them, in every culture, from Ireland to Japan. I stepped up one, two steps, and reached out with my right hand to touch the doorjamb and then touch my chest, over the heart, in a salaam to fate and a homage to the dead friends and enemies who entered with me.

Didier Levy was sitting in his usual chair, commanding a view of the patrons and of the busy street beyond. He was talking to Kavita Singh. Her eyes were averted, but he looked up and saw me as I approached the table. Our eyes met and held for a second, each of us reading the other's shifting expressions like diviners finding meanings in the magic of scattered bones.

"Lin!" he shouted, hurling himself forward, flinging his arms around me, and kissing me on both cheeks.

"It's good to see you, Didier."

"Bah!" he spat, wiping his lips with the back of his hand. "If this beard is the fashion for holy warriors, I thank whatever powers protect me that I am an atheist, and a coward!"

There was a little more grey, I thought, in the mop of dark curls that brushed the collar of his jacket. The pale blue eyes were a little more tired, a little more bloodshot. Yet the wicked, leering mischief still arched his eyebrow, and the playful sneer I knew so well, and loved, was still there, curling his upper lip. He was the same man, in the same city, and it was good to be home.

"Hello, Lin," Kavita greeted me, pushing Didier aside to give me a hug.

She was beautiful. Her thick, dark brown hair was tousled and awry. Her back was straight. Her eyes were clear. And, as she held me, the casual, friendly touch of her fingers on my neck seemed like such a tender ravishment-after the blood and snow of Afghanistan-that I can still feel it, through all the years since.

"Sit down, sit down!" Didier shouted, waving to the waiters for more drinks. "Merde, I heard that you were dead, but I didn't believe it! It is so good to see you! We shall be famously drunk tonight, non?"

"No," I replied, resisting the pressure he placed on my shoulder.

The disappointment in his eyes moderated my tone, if not my mood.

"It's a little early in the day, and I have to get going. I've got... something to do."

"Very well," he yielded with a sigh. "But you must have one drink with me. It would be too uncivilised for you to leave my company without allowing me at least this little corruption of your holy warring self. After all, what is the point of a man returning from the dead, if it is not to drink strong spirits with his friends?"

"Okay," I relented, smiling at him but still standing. "One drink. I'll have a whisky. Make it a double. Is that corrupt enough for you?"

"Ah, Lin," he grinned, "Is there anyone, in this sickly sweet world of ours, who is corrupt enough for me?"

"Where there's a weak will, there's a way, Didier. We live in hope."

"But of course," he said, and we both laughed.

"I'll leave you to it," Kavita announced, leaning over to kiss my cheek. "I've got to get back to the office. Let's get together, Lin. You look... you look pretty wild. You look like a story, yaar, if ever I saw one."

"Sure," I smiled. "There's a story or two. Off the record, of course. Probably keep us going over dinner."

"I look forward to it," she said, holding my eye long enough to make sure I felt it in several places at once. She broke the contact to flash a smile at Didier. "Be nasty to someone for me, Didier. I don't want to hear that you've got all sentimental, yaar, just because Lin is back."

She walked out with my eyes on her, and when the drinks arrived Didier insisted that I sit down with him at last.

"My dear friend, you can stand to eat a meal-if you must-and you can stand to make love-if you are able-but it is impossible to stand and drink whisky. It is the act of a barbarian. A man who stands up to drink a noble alcohol like whisky, in all but a toast to some noble thing or purpose, is a beast-a man who will stop at nothing."

So we sat, and he raised his glass immediately to toast with mine.

"To the living!" he offered.

"And the dead?" I asked, my glass still on the table.

"And the dead!" he replied, his smile wide and warm.

I raised my glass in turn, clinked it against his, and threw back the double.

"Now," he said firmly, the smile discarded as swiftly as it had risen to his eyes. "What is the trouble?" "Where do you want me to start?" I scoffed.

"No, my friend. I am not talking just about the war. There is something else, something very determined in your face, and I want to know the heart of it."

I stared back at him in silence, secretly delighted to be back in the company of someone who knew me well enough to read between the frown lines.

"Come on, Lin. There is too much trouble in your eyes. What is the problem? If you want, if it is easier, you can begin by telling me what happened in Afghanistan."

"Khader's dead," I said flatly, staring at the empty glass in my hand.

"No!" he gasped, fearful and resentful, somehow, in the same quick response.

"Yes."

"No, no, no. I would hear something... The whole city would know it."

"I saw his body. I helped to drag it up the mountain to our camp.

I helped them bury him. He's dead. They're all dead. We're the only ones left from here-Nazeer, Mahmoud, and me."

"Abdel Khader... It can't be..."

Didier was ashen-faced, and the grey seemed to move even into his eyes. Stricken by the news-he looked as though someone had struck him hard on the face-he slumped in his chair and his jaw fell open. He began to slip sideways in the chair, and I was afraid that he would fall to the floor or even suffer a stroke.

"Take it easy," I said softly. "Don't go to fuckin' pieces on me, Didier. You look like shit, man. Snap out of it!"

His weary eyes drifted up to meet mine.

"There are some things, Lin, that simply cannot be. I am twelve, thirteen years in Bombay, and always there is Abdel Khader Khan..."

He dropped his gaze again, and lapsed into a reverie so rich in thought and feeling that his head twitched and his lower lip trembled in the turbulence of it. I was worried. I'd seen men go under before. In prison, I'd watched men succumb, fragmented by fear and shame, and then slaughtered by solitude. But that was a process: it took weeks, months, or years. Didier's collapse was the work of seconds, and I was watching him crumple and fade from one heartbeat to the next.

I moved around the table and sat beside him, pulling him close to me with an arm around his shoulder.

"Didier!" I hissed in a harsh whisper. "I've got to go. Do you hear me? I came in to find out about my stuff-the stuff I left with you while I was at Nazeer's, getting off the dope. Remember?

I left my bike, my Enfield, with you. I left my passports and my money and some other stuff. Do you remember? It's very important.

I need that stuff, Didier. Do you remember?"

"Yes, but of course," he replied, coming to himself with a grumpy little shake of his jaw. "Your things are all safe. Have no fear of that. I have all your things."

"Do you still have the apartment in Merriweather Road?"

"Yes."

"Is that where my things are? Do you have my things there?"

"What?"

"For God's sake, Didier! Snap out of it! Come on. We're going to get up together and walk to your apartment. I need to shave and shower and get organised. I've got something... something important to do. I need you, man. Don't fuck up on me now!"

He blinked, and turned his head to look at me, his upper lip curling in the familiar sneer.

"What is the meaning of such a remark?" he demanded indignantly.

"Didier Levy does not fuck up on anyone! Unless, of course, it is very, very early in the morning. You know, Lin, how I hate morning people, almost as much as I hate the police. Alors, let's go!"

At Didier's apartment I shaved, showered, and changed into the new clothes. Didier insisted that I eat something. He cooked an omelette while I went through the two boxes of my belongings to find my stash of money-about nine thousand American dollars-the keys to my bike, and my best false passport. It was a Canadian book, with my photo and details inserted in it. The false tourist visa had expired. I had to renew it quickly. If anything went wrong in what I planned to do, I would need plenty of money and a good, clean book.

"Where are you going now?" Didier asked as I pushed the last forkful of food into my mouth, and stood to rinse the dishes in the sink.

"First, I have to fix up my passport," I answered him, still chewing. "Then I'm going to see Madame Zhou."

"You what?" "I'm going to deal with Madame Zhou. I'm going to clear the slate. Khaled gave..." I broke off, the words failing, and the thought of Khaled Ansari momentarily bleaching my mind with the mention of his name. It was a white blizzard of emotion storming from the last memory, the last image of him, walking away into the night and the snow. I pushed past it with an effort of will.

"Khaled gave me your note in Pakistan. Thanks for letting me know, by the way. I still don't really get it. I still don't know how she got so mad that she had to put me in jail. There was never anything personal in it, from my side. But it's personal now. Four months in Arthur Road made it personal. That's why I need the bike. I don't want to use cabs. And that's why I've got to get my passport tidied up. If the cops get in on it, I'll need a clean book to hand over."

"But you don't know? Madame Zhou was attacked last week-no, ten days ago. The mob, a mob of Sena people, they attacked her Palace and destroyed it. There was a great fire. They ran inside the building and they destroyed everything, then they put the place on fire. The building still stands. The staircases and the upstairs rooms still exist. But the place is ruined, and it will never again open. They will pull it down at some time soon. The building is finished, Lin, and so is she, La Madame."

"Is she dead?" I asked through clenched teeth.

"No. She is alive. And she is still there, so they say. But her power is destroyed. She has nothing. She is nothing. She is a beggar. Her servants are searching the streets for scraps of food to bring to her while she waits for the building to come down.

She is finished, Lin."

"Not quite. Not yet."

I moved to the door of his apartment, and he ran to join me. It was the fastest I'd ever seen him move, and I smiled at the strangeness of it.

"Please, Lin, will you not reconsider this action? We can sit here, together, and drink a bottle or two, non? You will calm down."

"I'm calm enough now," I replied, smiling at his concern for me.

"I don't know... what I'm going to do. But I have to close the door on this, Didier. I can't just... let it go. I wish I could.

But there's too much that's-I don't know-tied up in it, I guess."

I couldn't explain it to him. It was more than just revenge-I knew that-but the web of connections between Zhou, Khaderbhai, Karla, and me was so sticky with shame and secrets and betrayals that I couldn't bring myself to face it clearly or talk about it to my friend. "Bien," he sighed, reading the determination in my face. "If you must go to her, then I will come with you."

"No way-" I began, but he cut me off with a furious gesture of his hand.

"Lin! I am the one who told you of this... this horrible thing she did to you. Now I must go with you, or I will be responsible for all that happens. And you know, my friend, that I hate responsibility almost as much as I hate the police."

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Дата добавления: 2015-10-26