The Good Son

by Michael Gruber

  “Obviously, I want to find out where they’re holding my mother.”

  “Do you think you can do that?”

  “I don’t know, Uncle, but I have to try. It’s not entirely hopeless, I think. I have contacts in the jihad, and something of a reputation.”

  “You’ll go north?”

  “Yes. I know people in Peshawar.”

  “From the jihad? How do you know they’re still alive?”

  “They were the kind of people that are hard to kill.”

  He chuckled at that and said, “Look, I don’t want to tell you your business, but this is a difficult time for Pakistan. The general is out for now, which is a good thing in a way, but when the lion leaves, the hyenas fight over the carcass, you know? Ordinarily, I could ease your efforts in various ways; I too know a lot of people in the north. But nowadays it’s difficult to know whom to trust. And I feel responsible, letting your dear mother and all of them go to Leepa… insane, really, but you know it’s quite difficult to say no to your mother and my sister all in one go.” He laughed sharply and then grew serious again. “It’s also not a good thing that Seyd did not come tonight. You understand why?”

  “Rukhsana suggested that ISI might have had something to do with the kidnapping.”

  “Oh, it’s more than a mere suggestion, I can tell you. My God, this organization, this so-called al-Faran, was invented, bought, and paid for by ISI. Whether they are still following orders or have set up on their own, who can say?”

  “What do you hear about ransom negotiations? I mean for Craig.”

  “I hear five crore-dollars, not rupees-is the asking price.”

  “That’s a lot of money,” I said. “It’ll be hard to move fifty million dollars in Pakistan.”

  “Yes. I have interests in the largest bank in Pakistan, and now I am hearing discreet inquiries from people connected to ISI: how can they conceal an influx, an unusual influx, source unspecified? This country! Do you know, Theo, that my bribery bill is an insanely large percentage of my payroll? How can one run a nation this way? Look, I am not pure like my father. I do business, and to do business in Pakistan one must play along, but I am also my father’s son and I say there is a limit. There is still decency.”

  He went on about the agony of Pakistan for a while before I brought him back to my immediate problem. “Can you get me in to see Seyd?”

  “Not a good idea, Theo; he is a peculiar fellow, my dear brother. He is very proud and quite incompetent, which is a dangerous combination. He might even have you arrested or expelled. He owes me a great deal, but he would die before acknowledging how much of my influence has gone into supporting his position in the military. As for him knowing anything that could help you-well, let us just say that Seyd is not privy to the inner secrets of his organization.”

  “Yes, there are people like that in every army.”

  “And ours has more than most. Half our national budget goes to arms, and I ask you, have we ever won a war? The country is tearing itself apart, and these imbeciles spend and spend on nuclear weapons. Do you know the nuclear establishment employs over twenty thousand people?”

  “Including Jafar. He seems to have done well out of it anyway.”

  “Yes, of course, but we have brownouts in Lahore every day. How can you run businesses this way, I ask you? And these nuclear bombs, what use are they? To frighten India? Don’t make me laugh! Meanwhile, this war in the north-it could be the end of Pakistan, you know? And no one knows what the hell to do about it.”

  I couldn’t help him there.

  Then he asked, “Suppose you find out this location. What will you do? Because if you are thinking that the Pakistani authorities will help, I cannot encourage you. And this plan of yours-I can’t say I have much confidence in it.”

  “I don’t either, but it was all we could think of. As you say, we can’t expect much help from the authorities here.”

  “Yes, but I wish you had come up with something that did not involve yet another violation of our sovereignty. Poor Pakistan: caught between monsters, and yet we persist in twisting all their tails.”

  He reached into a jacket pocket, removed a business card case, and wrote on the back of one of the cards with a gold ballpoint. Handing it to me he said, “This is a cell-phone number reserved for the family. If you need my help, do call, any hour. I have a very wide reach throughout Pakistan, and most problems can be solved with a proper infusion of money. It is, unfortunately, a national trait.” He laughed and patted my shoulder. “Or fortunately, I should say, in the present case.”

  And then we drifted back over to the other group and the rest of the evening was devoted to talk about sports and stuff, and Nisar said he could offer me a car and a driver, if I wanted to travel north-it was safer, after all-which I gratefully declined. After a while the ladies came out and we chatted amiably under the stars. It was nice enough but it was not like an evening at Laghari Sahib’s.

  The next morning I woke up early, the sky still bright pink, with little flags of the palest blue attached. I’d had a dream that the family party I’d just been at was my regular life, that the bomb had not gone off, that Laghari Sahib was still there at the head of the table and that I’d been raised and educated in Pakistan, and never been a mujahid or an American soldier, and that I was telling everyone at the table a dream I’d had, a nightmare, which was my real life and everyone thought it was awful, and for a few seconds when I woke up I didn’t know which life was real.

  I dressed in my American traveling clothes and went downstairs. I found Hassan and Iqbal having tea and parathas for breakfast, and I joined them. There’s something intimate about breakfast; more than the other meals it reminds you of home and how your mother used to make your eggs and toast just right-if you had that kind of mother, which I didn’t. These parathas and this tea tasted exactly like what I used to eat every morning when I was a kid in my grandfather’s house, and waves of aching memory overcame me and I fell back into my dream a little until I realized that Iqbal was talking to me. Did I still follow cricket in the U.S.? So I snapped out of it and we talked about cricket and baseball, differences, similarities, and so on, a nice easy conversation. I said I needed a vehicle and Hassan asked if I could ride a motorcycle and I said I could, and just like that he handed me the keys to his and said I could use it as long as I wanted.

  Iqbal said he had to go check his e-mail, to eye-rolling and jibes from his brother, and when he came back he had a piece of paper in his hand and a troubled expression on his face.

  He handed me the paper and said, “It’s from your father. It was encrypted so I decrypted it and printed it out for you. I hope you don’t mind.”

  I read the note. Hassan asked, “Bad news?”

  “Sort of. My father says someone in NSA seems to have almost sniffed out what we’re doing. A woman, apparently, a translator named Cynthia Lam.”

  “How did she find out?” asked Iqbal.

  “He doesn’t say.”

  “And how did he find out she suspects us?” asked Hassan. “I thought NSA was the topmost of top secrets.”

  “It is,” I said. “But everything has leaks. My dad says he got the tip from a man named Afridi, and Afridi got it from sources he won’t reveal, as my father says discreetly. Afridi was some kind of CIA asset in the Russian jihad, and apparently he still has contacts with the spooks. But all that doesn’t matter. The question is, what do we do about it?”

  Iqbal was looking at the paper over my shoulder. “I noticed he has obtained her home e-mail and IP address. And her taxpayer ID number and bank information.”

  “Yeah, I’d sort of like to know where that came from. But obviously someone in Washington is supplying this information about her in the hopes that we’ll figure out some way to distract her or discredit her long enough to pull this thing off. I’m open to suggestions, gentlemen. This is definitely not my department.”

  They had a number of suggestions, and I left the doing of them i
n their capable, devious hands. They seemed to regard it as some kind of game, which I guess it was for them, and I got myself together to do my part. It would not be nearly as gamelike.

  I went out to the garage and found Hassan’s bike, a six-year-old Ducati ST in decent shape, and rode it back into the old city and the Urdu Bazaar in Anarkali. Lahore traffic was as I recalled it, maybe a little worse-more motorcycles, bigger trucks-but the same sense of riding in a circus parade operated by crazy people. Again I had the sense of dipping into an alternate existence, and also the feeling that I was comfortable in a way I was never comfortable when driving my rental through the streets of Washington-and even more at ease when I bought a Chinese fatigue jacket, a couple of shalwar kameez outfits, bull-hide sandals, and a scarf and kufi hat at a shop and changed my clothes in the back of it, wrapping my head with the scarf Pashtun style, my hands moving without thought.

  Out on the street again, I swaggered around like a hill man in the big city and bought a couple of prepaid cell phones, a carton of Marlboros, and a tin hand mirror, so I could admire my beauty or kohl my eyes, and also a nylon duffel bag to put all that and my other clothes in. That done, I wandered through the bazaar and had tea and Afghan bread in a stall that Gul Muhammed used to like. The man there looked me over and addressed me in Pashto, we had the usual polite conversation, and once again memories rolled over me like heavy surf and I had to struggle not to drown in them.

  After that I took the bike up Circular Road, around the old city walls to the M2, and took that north to the M1 at Pindi and on to Peshawar. Oh, the highways of my native land! Imagine an L.A. freeway’s worth of traffic on a busted two-lane blacktop, and every truck is overloaded and painted like the calliope in a carousel, and the traffic laws are a legend no one believes in anymore, and instead of safety equipment they have inscriptions from the Qur’an painted all over the vehicles. I made good time, though, on Hassan’s hot bike, not almost dying more than thrice, and reached Peshawar in the late afternoon.

  To understand Peshawar you have to imagine that the crack wars they had in New York a few years ago never ended but got worse, and then the crack lords took over the whole city, and the main industries became dope, guns, and smuggling. They still get tourists, although it’s one of the few places in the world where armed guards are a major sector of the hospitality industry. Again, I felt right at home.

  I stuck to the Kohat Road, avoiding the tangle of the old city, and headed straight for the Cantonment, which is where the old Raj used to hang out and which is now occupied by the new ruling classes. My clan cousin Bacha Khan had bought a huge white bungalow behind a high white wall. When I told the guards who I was they showed me right in, with peculiar expressions on their faces. It’s hard to impress a Pashtun, and I was glad to see what looked like awe on their faces, and that the name Kakay Ghazan was still remembered.

  Bacha himself, I saw, remained in contention for the title of Fattest Pashtun. He bear-hugged me and sat me down on his right hand and plied me with mint tea and sweetmeats. After we had paid each other the usual compliments, asked about each other’s sons, and him expressing shock and sorrow when I said I had none, he said, “I swear before God this is like a visit from a ghost. One day you are here and the next you are gone. We thought you were dead. And now, almost twenty years later, you appear at my door. It is like a story, with djinni. Tell me now, where have you been?”

  I told him what had happened to me back then and how my life had progressed since. When I was done he said, “So now you fight for the Americans instead of God. Forgive me if I don’t say that is a step in the right direction.”

  I said I was leaving the army, maybe leaving America as well.

  He grinned widely, and I noticed he’d had a lot of expensive dental work done.

  “Are you seeking work, then?” he asked. “Because if you are, I could find an honored place for you in my business. As you see, I am prospering in a modest way.”

  He gestured to the room, which was full of the kind of junk-ugly massive gilt furniture, enormous TVs and stereos-that you see across the world in the houses of very poor people who have come overnight into large sums of cash.

  “What would that business be, cousin?”

  “Oh, you know, import-export, various forms of trading.”

  That meant he was a drug dealer, an arms dealer, or both.

  “I’m flattered that you should think to include an ordinary soldier such as myself in your business. Gul Muhammed my father would be very pleased, and honored too.”

  He nodded and asked, “And your father, he is well?”

  “That is a question I hoped you could answer, cousin. It is a source of great shame to me that I have not seen or heard from Gul Muhammed all these many years. And unfortunately, in the times I have been in Afghanistan, my business was such that I could not make inquiries. But from what you say, he is alive?”

  “I have not heard of his death, which is not the same thing,” said Bacha Khan.

  “Where is he? Do you know?”

  Bacha Khan seemed to consider this question for a long time. He slurped tea. He put his cup down and said, “The last I heard he was in a safe place, or as safe as a man with as many enemies as Gul Muhammed can ever be.”

  “And can the son of Gul Muhammed know this place?”

  I got a genial smile here. “Of course you can, although, you know, I would not like to misinform you. If God still preserves him, Gul Muhammed moves about a good deal. But I can get a message to him saying his son Kakay Ghazan has returned, and he will reply to me saying where and when you will meet. I am sure he will have great joy in hearing this news.”

  “I hope so,” I said reverently, and asked, “And what of his son, my brother, Wazir? Is he still among the living?”

  He shook his head sadly. “I think not. I think the war ate him-I mean the war after the Russian war. In any case he vanished, who knows how? It was a great blow to your father.”

  “Yes, and to me as well. Please, can you tell me where his grave lies? I would like to honor it with a visit.”

  He shrugged. “Who can tell? All of Afghanistan is a grave.”

  I understood the situation now. Of course he was not going to tell me where Wazir’s grave was because that would be where Gul Muhammed was as well. Bacha Khan was a businessman; information has value, it’s a kind of virtual heroin. He had to decide how best to turn the news of my arrival to his advantage. He was Gul Muhammed’s kinsman, yes, but I had no idea what their relationship was at this point. Cousins kill one another all the time among the Pashtuns, and Pashtunistan has always been a place of infinitely tangled and conflicting loyalties. A man like Bacha Khan had to balance the government, which he bribed, against the Taliban, who more or less controlled the region, and whose various chiefs had to be bribed as well; and then there were the criminal bands, whose alliances and interests had to be considered, and he also had to take into account the various clan and personal vendettas that had been going on since forever. The thought of my American comrades trying to operate among these people made me smile.

  My host took this as a good sign, and he smiled too and patted my knee. “I will send the message this very hour, God willing. Now, you will stay with me, of course. I have plenty of room.”

  “That’s very generous, cousin, but I regret that urgent business calls me away.”

  “What! Not even for two days? Come, reconsider! I will kill a sheep for you; we’ll have a feast, as in the old days of the Russian jihad.”

  “Perhaps another time, when my business is done,” I said. “Nothing would give me greater pleasure.”

  He stopped smiling now. “What sort of business?”

  “Personal business,” I said. “An affair of the heart.”

  A smile bloomed again. “Oh, well, then, of course.”

  “Yes, and I will need some equipment, cousin. Tell me, does Masoud still keep his shop in Karkhani?”

  “You require weapons? I can give
you anything you need.”

  “Again, you’re most generous, but I have special needs, and besides I would like to see Masoud again and remember our old times. And I would also like to go by Kachagari to see if I have any friends left there.” This reminded him that I was a considerable person and might have connections in the refugee camps outside of his control.

  “Well, then, do as you think best,” he said lightly. “But, cousin, you will find things much changed in this part of the world. It is hard to know who to trust nowadays.”

  “As opposed to the past, when the Pashtuns were famous for their fidelity?”

  A brief confusion on his face, then he laughed, and for somewhat longer than the remark was worth.

  After that I had to refuse an armed escort to Karkhani, and we parted good pals. I left him my new cell number and he agreed to call me about Gul Muhammed. Bacha Khan could not actually kill me himself, because he was bound by pashtunwali as my host, but he could certainly sell me to someone else, in the most indirect way possible. Or perhaps he was as he seemed, a kinsman who wished me and my father well. That I could not determine which of these two possibilities was true merely meant that I had entered once more into the chronic insecurity of Pashtun tribal culture. You just live with it; it can even get to be enjoyable in a funny way, especially to an adrenaline junkie like me. As Ghalib says:

  The steed of life gallops on

  Out of control.

  My hand no longer holds the reins,

  The stirrups are torn away.

  Who know where it will stop?

  Who cares?

  Karkhani is the famous smuggler’s bazaar of the Khyber Pass. It’s run by Afridi Pashtuns and has been since the Raj, the deal here being that the Afridis undertake to keep the pass open and the government undertakes not to interfere with the sale of smuggled goods. It has two sections, one full of fairly ordinary shops selling appliances, electronics, and other homely products to tourists and Pakistanis (what we have instead of Costco, in other words), and a restricted section, closed to foreigners, where they sell guns, opium, heroin, and hashish. I walked right into the restricted section through the checkpoint, the guards didn’t give me a second look, and directly over to Masoud’s shop. I hadn’t seen him in twenty years, but we recognized each other all right; we embraced, and he took me to the little terrace behind the shop where he entertained honored guests or special customers and suppliers. He had about a dozen sons by now and all of them gathered on the terrace and stared at us boldly while we drank tea, and the word spread through the neighborhood, and soon the mud walls around the terrace were lined with faces, all there to gawk at legendary me.