“She looked like you a little,” Dragoslava says over the roar of the engines.
I blink at her. “Who?”
“Lila.”
I think of the photo albums, her with her boy. “I saw his picture. Her son,” I say. “Your half brother.”
“So what?”
“So nothing,” I say. “Just mentioning it.”
“Never met him.” She closes her eyes, leans her head against the seat.
“I left something for Lila, in case she comes back. So she’s provided for.”
“Lila’s not coming back.”
“Her son, then. I didn’t want—to leave them with nothing.”
Dragoslava lets out a little snort. “Why? You didn’t even know her.”
“When I opened her things…” My voice trails off as I work out how to say it. “It was so personal. Somehow, I thought—I don’t know. I wanted it to suddenly make sense.”
“Find a connection, you mean. Between you and her.” She opens her eyes suddenly and leans forward, elbows on knees. “What did you think you’d find, the missing half of a gold locket?”
“It’s stupid. Obviously.” I look out the window, the green Bosnian hills shrinking below us, being replaced by skeins of white-gray clouds. “My mother was here, you know. In Bosnia, with the peacekeeping force.”
She looks at me, eyes firm. “We’re not half sisters, if that’s what you’re wondering.”
“Of course not.”
“I mean, we might be,” she says. “My father fucked a lot of women.”
The muscles in my shoulders tense. “I was just—looking for a link. For it to come full circle. Find out the pieces fit together.”
“Family, you mean,” Dragoslava says.
“I guess.”
“That link, what you’re talking about—family, tribe, nationality—that’s what gives us minefields in forests.” She closes her eyes and leans back again. “It’s what my father built his business on.”
“I know.”
“So stop looking for it to make sense. Stop telling yourself you’re some special princess who’s just getting what’s rightfully hers.” She grimaces at whatever she’s picturing in her head. “You didn’t win because of shared DNA. You won because you’re smart and lucky. Let that be enough.”
The engines of the plane whine as we climb higher into the clouds, the earth below us gone.
Forty
The plane touches down in heat that shimmers off the tarmac, bounces a few times, then rolls to a stop. The airport buildings—two small Quonset huts and a single-story building of bare concrete blocks—are spartan and almost deserted. A snaking line of three vehicles, two white Toyota Land Cruisers and a black Mercedes limousine, appears, then pulls up beside the jet.
For a visitor of Dragoslava’s importance, Sheikh Al-Saqqaf will apparently take no chances. There are four men apiece in the Toyotas, locals in flowing robes carrying Kalashnikov assault rifles as casually as students carry backpacks. A handsome attendant in a suit waits for us at the bottom of the stairs, smiles a welcome, and ushers Dragoslava and me into the backseat of the Mercedes.
“There’s a sandstorm coming, apparently,” Dragoslava tells me. “Should end in a few hours. We’ll be wheels up after dinner with the sheikh.”
Beyond the private airport, there is only desert bisected by a black ribbon of pavement pulled taut across the surface of the earth. There are no other vehicles on the road, so the drivers speed up, racing toward whatever lies ahead. Whether it’s out of some sense of urgency or this is the way they always drive here, I have no idea.
“The Al-Saqqaf family, they’re kind people, and always good friends to the Zoric family,” she says, shifting her eyes to the driver so that I understand.
“I’m very grateful to the Al-Saqqafs,” I say, following along. “They are powerful and respected.”
Dragoslava gives me the smallest of smiles in return. It’s not lost on me that however important Dragoslava is, we are both at the mercy of our hosts.
I check the time, swallow nervously—less than an hour. I’ll see him in less than an hour. I don’t have a plan worked out and don’t even want to picture it too clearly in my head. Just a schematic of the conversation we’ll have. Naz. The money. How I’m not going to run anymore. Marike Saar will live her life, and he’s welcome to be a part of it. But as for her living where she wishes, as she wishes, that part is nonnegotiable.
We drive for fifteen minutes more, deeper into the desert, the road ahead disappearing and reappearing as waves of sand move across it. Every so often, the driver’s radio comes to life with a quick comment in a hyperlocal dialect of Arabic I can’t understand.
Another burst of something on the radio and the two SUVs behind us drop their speed. Our driver picks up the handset and says a few words back. The Mercedes slows to a stop in the middle of the road, while one of the Toyotas pulls around and stops just ahead of us.
“Find out why we’ve stopped,” Dragoslava says.
I lean forward and ask the driver, doing my best to stay polite and appear unworried. The driver just shrugs and tells me in Arabic, “We were told to wait here.”
I translate into English, then catch sight of something up ahead. A kilometer or so down the road, the spectral figure of a vehicle appears, shimmering in and out of sight like a mirage. Then I see it’s not a single vehicle, but several, a convoy like ours.
Men are climbing out of the SUVs now, shouting at one another, taking up positions on the road, assault rifles not raised, not quite, but ready.
“We’ll be safer outside,” I say quietly to Dragoslava.
The two of us exit the car, leaving only the driver inside. The sudden heat is crushing, and the wind has picked up, blasting sand-filled air that scorches my lungs with each breath. The security men are tense and uncertain, squinting at the approaching vehicles as their leader orders them to spread out.
The lead vehicle is a Land Cruiser like ours, and it’s followed by a Mercedes limo like ours. The security men start laughing and relax their guns as the convoy pulls to a stop directly in front of us. The back door of the Mercedes opens and an ample-bellied man in sunglasses and black-turning-gray beard in resplendent green-and-white robes climbs out. The guards all fall silent and step out of his path.
I recognize him now. The same man who’d straddled the lamb, gave it a reassuring rub between the ears.
The sheikh calls out a happy greeting to Dragoslava and embraces her, patting her back jovially. I reach into the car, take the duffel bags of gifts.
“Salam,” the sheikh says, taking my hands in his, a wide smile beneath the mustache. “Ahlan wa sahlan fiki fi dari.”
“Peace be upon you. It is an honor to be welcomed onto your land.” I speak in very formal Arabic, head slightly bowed, then hold the duffel bag forward. “These are gifts for you, honored sheikh, and your blessed grandchildren.”
He peeks into the bag, at the iPhones and watches and the bundle of 1 million euros, then gives me a rough pat on the shoulder. “You’ve grown,” he says in Oxford-degree English. “You visited me before, do you remember? We broke the Eid fast together.”
“I remember,” I say. “Thank you for having my father as your guest. You have no idea what this means to us.”
“An honorable man is always welcome here.” He smiles warmly at me. “Your father, he was pacing so nervously. I thought, why not meet you on the road. You can ride together if you wish. You must have much to talk about.”
“He’s here?” I say. “My father’s here?”
The sheikh turns, gestures to the limo. The rear door opens again.
The beard and hair are trim and neat, tight up against a healthy, grinning face, red from the sun. My father has filled out, too, just as he’d said, putting back on some of the weight, making his white shirt and khaki pants look almost the right size.
My legs are trembling and can’t seem to move, but that’s all right, because he’s walking
toward me—walking, not running—the gait exactly as I remembered him when he was confident and strong. He spreads his arms wide, then circles them around me, pulling me into his chest.
Back in Montevideo, I thought it would be the last time I heard his heart beating, but I was wrong. Here it is, even, steady. I look up and see his eyes are wet with tears. “Sweetheart,” he says. “Last time we do this, okay?”
He rocks me back and forth, arms so tight he’s almost crushing me. Dragoslava turns away to give us our privacy, but the sheikh and his men look on, their faces alternating between polite warmth and boredom.
Above my dad’s words and the men’s banter and the blowing of the wind and the sedate growl of the vehicles’ engines, I hear something else. A hum that starts as a tinny buzz and grows into what sounds like a sustained chord on an organ. The sheikh looks to the sky, and his men do, too, their eyes searching back and forth for the sound’s origin.
Then, a second sound to accompany the first. It lasts just a second or two. Ripping fabric that starts low but climbs the register until it’s a screeching whistle. The security men start scrambling for the open desert, while the sheikh turns his eyes to me and my father, disappointment heavy on his face. The Mercedes he arrived in disappears in white-orange flame, then the Mercedes I arrived in does the same.
My father is crumpling around me, his body wrapping mine as he pushes me to the ground beneath him. There’s a third explosion, and a fourth, and a fifth, all of which I feel rather than hear. I feel them through my father’s body and through the ground as it lifts beneath us.
* * *
I pull myself from my father’s arms slowly and climb out from under him. He is half of himself now. His face, his chest, are intact, but the reverse side has been peeled away, exposing burnt flesh and organs and bone and brain matter. I sit cross-legged on the ground, holding his head in my lap, looking at his perfect, sleeping face while my hands try their best to gently smooth and mold the back of his head to the shape it should be.
I turn and call for help, but the rest are dead, too. Sheikh Al-Saqqaf’s security men are littered about the road, some having made it as far as the edge of the desert, some lying where they stood. As for the sheikh himself, he has disappeared, replaced by a blackened shape in the resplendent green-and-white robes, the duffel bag of gifts beside him, my symbol of gratitude and trust.
Sound is starting to come back, but now it’s just the wind and the crackle of burning vehicles and flesh. The banter of the guards is gone, and so is that odd buzzing, that strange drone.
My hands flutter to my face, understanding now, understanding what’s happened. When my fingers touch my skin, I feel wetness and a peculiar, oily texture. I look at my fingertips and see blood, but also bits of flesh, bits of myself, where shrapnel tore into me. It’s that way on the back of my left arm and shoulder, too, and on my right calf. Funny, there’s no pain.
One vehicle is intact. A Land Cruiser that had accompanied us from the airfield. One vehicle intact, and one person. Dragoslava is pulling herself along the ground toward it, a dark streak on the pavement trailing along behind her from her useless legs. Panic wells up from my gut, then rage.
I stumble after her, calling her name, but she ignores me. My hands grip the back of her blouse and I flip her over. Her hands flutter to my chest and her mouth opens and closes without a sound. She’s bleeding from her abdomen, a field of red and pink, light and dark, every shade, pulsing in the air swirling with sand.
Her hands circle my head tenderly, and she pulls me close. “You did this,” she says.
I crane my head, surveying the carnage around us, the wreckage and burnt shells of at least a dozen lives, looking for an enemy who isn’t here. I can picture them, chuckling in an air-conditioned conference room, picture them in rolled-up shirtsleeves, biting their lips, watching a screen, grunting as the first missile found its target.
Dragoslava cries out in agony as I lift her by the armpits and drag her with shuffling steps toward the Toyota. I arrange her on the floor of the backseat as best I can, fish through the body of the nearest corpse for the keys, then climb behind the wheel.
The tires crunch over debris as I turn the truck around and head back the way we came. I keep one hand on the steering wheel, and the other on Dragoslava, calling out to her, telling her she’ll be all right, telling her I’m sorry.
Dark, rolling demon clouds of sand are starting to swirl over the road, and their arrival is accompanied by the first onset of pain in my face and shoulder and calf. The hurt is exquisite and strange, burning matched with gouged flesh, terrible in ways I’d never imagined. I drive blindly, unable to see anything but sand and motion, glimpses of pavement coming only every few seconds, and then disappearing just as quickly.
For a very long time, I crawl the vehicle forward, moved by faith that the road is straight and the airfield lies ahead, moved by the slowing metronome pulsing on Dragoslava’s neck beneath my fingertips. The journey ends when the front bumper of the Land Cruiser crashes into a light pole, slamming me forward into the steering wheel. Ghost figures materialize through the sand, ghost helpers who pull Dragoslava and me from the vehicle. The pilot and copilot carry her aboard the plane as I stumble up the stairs after them.
An hour into the flight, Dragoslava dies.
I lie beside her body the whole way to Sarajevo.
Prologue
Mein Ruh ist hin.
Mein Herz ist schwer.
The third time the woman sings it, Marike raises her hand to her eyes. Dark mascara on the fingertips of her cream-colored gloves now, which may or may not come out. A stupid purchase anyway—who wears gloves anymore, even to the opera?—but they’d been so pretty and did such a good job of covering the scar tissue on her left forearm.
Beautiful Johnny touches her thigh through the black beadwork dress. A loving gesture, an inquiring gesture. Johnny’s boyfriend is right next to him, after all. Marike catches Johnny’s eye, mouths the words, I’m fine.
He hands her a handkerchief, pulling it from the breast pocket of his tuxedo jacket. Linen and white as snow, which means she’ll ruin that, too. Marike wonders how much it cost, because it’s possible she’ll see a bill for it. But probably not. Janal Purohit isn’t that kind of attorney.
Let’s celebrate, beautiful Johnny had said. Mohammed and I, we have an extra ticket. Jessica Chen, tell me you’ve heard of her. No? Darling. Darling.
Marike Saar is not into opera, does not know this impresario from Beijing, and does not like crowds. And it’s not even a real opera, just songs by Schubert and Rachmaninoff. Thus Marike can’t even lose herself in the plot.
But celebrate she must. It would be rude not to. Provisional Singaporean citizenship had been granted, and all it had cost her was a 60,000-dollar application fee, whatever Johnny was billing her, and a $20 million investment in a company run by the nephew of Singapore’s foreign minister. She should have her provisional passport in a week or two.
An intermission, thank God. Ranks of tuxedos and evening gowns file out of the theater and into the lobby. Marike dashes ahead as quickly as she dares in these shoes to be one of the first at the bar. Two glasses of red wine, one of which she downs and disposes of on her way back to Johnny and Mohammed. They’ve run into someone they know, an associate at Johnny’s practice, and Marike hangs back until Mohammed motions for her to come over.
“So sad,” the associate says. “Broke my heart.”
“Mein Ruh,” Mohammad says. “Mein Herz—wish I knew German.”
“Marike does,” says Johnny.
They all turn to look at her, but the associate quickly averts his eyes. Despite her efforts to grow her hair out long enough to cover her left cheek, it still doesn’t hide the lava bed of scar tissue—bright pink, bright white—which is there for all to see.
Marike clears her throat, looks down into her wine. “My—my rest, you know, like inner peace, is gone, or ran away,” she says. “And the second part mea
ns ‘my heart is heavy.’”
“Ah,” says the associate as he forces a laugh. “Well, that’s uplifting.”
Marike smiles politely, which creases and folds the scar tissue in a way that hurts her. She is suddenly conscious of the crowd around her, the deafening chatter, the closeness of their bodies. She glances around at a thousand unscarred faces, feels her veins stretch as if being pulled taut like violin strings, feels her stomach ball up, squirting fear and want into her heart.
Lights dim and come back brightly, twice, three times. Intermission over. She pushes through a knot of people toward the restroom, approaches the sink, and does not look into the mirror. Instead, she scoops water into her mouth, opens her clutch, and finds the bottle of pills they’d prescribed after her second or third surgery and which she’s faithfully renewed with a pliant doctor every month since. Marike scoops more water into her mouth and swallows them down.
The restroom is empty now, or almost. Behind her comes a flush, and the clack of a door bolt being opened. The woman who comes out of the stall wears a burgundy cocktail dress that looks good against her brown skin. Her hair is cut short these days, or shorter than Marike remembers it, but she recognizes the fine features, the woman’s slender nose.
Wordlessly, the woman washes her hands at the sink beside Marike, dries them with a towel, and walks away.
Marike picks up the folded square of paper the woman left behind, tucks it into her clutch.
Follow us on Facebook or visit us online at mackids.com.
OUR BOOKS ARE FRIENDS FOR LIFE.
About the Author
The Greed Page 37