‘What’s the other half,’ he said, ‘of the reason why you’re moving to New York?’
‘This.’ Kim waved her hands in the direction of the flags flying from every edifice, then gestured to the emptied skyline. ‘The thing about structural engineers, Dad, is that we knew right away. Switched on the television, saw the flames, and knew the building would fall. The rest of the country had a few minutes’ grace but we were the Cassandras standing in front of the first images, saying it’s coming down, all of it. And then the second one. From that moment, I haven’t wanted to be anywhere except back here.’ She looked around fiercely. ‘We’ll keep building.’
The Cassandras! Harry thought. Because you predicted total disaster an hour before it happened? Just one hour.
‘If you slow down construction the terrorists have won,’ Harry said, and felt her arm slip out of his.
‘I suppose this is all very mundane to you,’ she said. ‘Death and destruction. Good for business and entirely unsurprising.’ She knelt down by a lamp post and buried her hands in the thick fur of the collie leashed to it, furious at how much she had wanted his understanding. The cold seeped from the sidewalk through her combat pants.
Harry held his hand out and the collie, who had accepted Kim’s attention with the air of an aristocrat receiving nothing more than what’s due, nuzzled at his palm.
Traitor, Kim thought.
‘Unsurprising, yes,’ Harry said. It’s true, he was entirely unsurprised by 9/11 – had, in fact, assumed a jihadi connection to the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 – but he was also stunned by his reaction to it, the depth of his fury, the wish for all the world to stop and weep with him for the city which had adopted him when he was eleven. He was in the Democratic Republic of the Congo at the time, overseeing the setting up of Arkwright and Glenn’s operation to provide security for a Belgian diamond-export company, and was well aware of how disproportionate his attitude must seem in a country which had lost more than two and a half million people in a war which seemed to have pauses rather than an end. He sat down with a calculator on 12 September, and worked it out to more than two thousand deaths a day, each day, for over three years – but he couldn’t find any way to connect those numbers to his emotions. ‘And good for business, very definitely.’
‘Well, that’s honest,’ Kim said, standing up and swatting at her combat pants with far greater vigour than was necessary to brush off the dust.
‘It’s only part of the story. We only ever hear part of each other’s story, panther.’
‘We?’ She stared at him and shook her head. ‘You’re the one who keeps leaving.’
‘I’m here now.’
‘How long?’
He looked away.
‘Thought so.’ Despite the disappointment there was a satisfaction about being right.
‘Kim, you and I – we’re going to spend a lot of time together soon. More than you want. Take that as a threat or a promise.’
‘Sure,’ she said, her voice tight with disbelief. ‘When the abstract noun is defeated . . . or will you be going after horror and misery next?’
He couldn’t help laughing.
‘Your father’s an old man. I’ll be sixty-five in June. Retirement time, sweetheart.’
Kim snorted.
‘You’ll never retire.’
‘Well, OK,’ he admitted. ‘But I’ll take a holiday. How about we go to Delhi together? I’ll show you my childhood.’
It was an old promise, but she couldn’t help being drawn in by it. That was the thing about Harry Burton which made his smiles so impossible to resist – when he said a thing, he meant it. For that moment.
As they walked down the street there was a strangled sound behind them – Kim turned to see the collie straining at his leash, eyes fixed on Harry. Pathetic, Kim thought, even as she allowed Harry to take her arm and loop it through his own again.
‘Mom sends her condolences,’ she said. ‘She offered to fly across, but I’m not sure I can handle dealing with both of you at the same time.’
Harry’s laugh was an acknowledgement of the truth behind that lightly uttered comment.
‘How is she? Still masterfully hiding the heart I broke behind a veneer of total happiness with what’s-his-name?’
‘Yes, Dad, she’s still very happily married. Desperately worried about me, though. She thinks the fact that I’ve been single for over three months is some kind of curse. Last time we spoke she said when I meet men I shouldn’t tell them what I do for a living. Apparently, engineering is too macho. It scares off the boys. I think she’s trying to tell me I come across as a lesbian.’
‘You come across as you,’ Harry said. ‘And if the boys think that puts you out of their league, they’re probably right!’
She knew he wasn’t just trying to win her over with cheap compliments. Whatever else could be said about Harry as a father, he left no doubt about his belief that his daughter was the best thing his life had ever produced. She took his hand in hers, as she used to when she was still young enough to pretend she needed his help crossing the road.
Further down the street, a woman – elegantly dressed in camel-coloured winter coat with a beret jauntily angled on her head – was staring intently at a store window.
‘What is she looking at?’ Harry whispered, horrified, and Kim laughed and let go of his arm to rush forward to Hiroko.
The window was dominated by a male mannequin dressed in skintight leather, an improbable bulge below his waist. Kim put her arms around Hiroko’s shoulders and they stood there – half laughter, half tears – recalling Ilse stopping in front of the mannequin on her ninetieth birthday, saying, ‘I wonder what this decade will be like? My eighties were not what I anticipated – Viagra, you know. All those old lovers crawled out of the woodwork.’
Harry cleared his throat uncertainly behind the two women and Kim winked at Hiroko.
‘He’s so not ready to hear it,’ she said.
Hiroko stood on tiptoes, as tall as her sensible old-lady shoes would allow, and kissed Harry’s cheek, watching the blush spread across it to reveal just how rare such gestures of affection were in his life.
‘Come to China with me,’ she said, taking his arm.
Kim watched Harry carefully modulate his gait to keep time with Hiroko’s without making it evident that she was slowing him down and suddenly she knew that they would go to Delhi. Harry, Hiroko and she – and Raza.
Kim had never met Raza Konrad Ashraf – his blink-and-you’ll-miss-it trips to see Hiroko never coincided with her more frequent sojourns in New York – but he was framed on the mantel of the Mercer Street apartment and in every third sentence out of both Hiroko and Harry’s mouths, so perhaps it wasn’t so surprising that he sometimes made his way into her dreams. He would appear in the strangest situations, his presence never a surprise.
They’d probably drive each other crazy when they met, she thought. It was clear that Raza was just another version of Harry himself. Their two personalities a collision waiting to happen. She found herself smiling at the prospect, lagging behind Harry and Kim as they neared Chinatown, her mind in Delhi already.
Harry was glad for the distance between his daughter and him, so he didn’t have to feel her bristling disapproval as he said firmly, in response to Hiroko’s question, ‘Of course Raza’s not in India or Pakistan. I promised you I’d keep him out of danger, didn’t I?’ Harry made many promises but that one to Hiroko was among the few he had tried his utmost to keep. As far as possible he ensured Raza stayed in the sterile world of Arkwright and Glenn’s Miami head office, translating his way through client meetings and contracts and emails and wire-tapped conversations. But Afghanistan was different – the first time A and G had been contracted by the US military, an opportunity that had the shareholders giddy with prospects both short-term and long. And Raza Konrad Ashraf, the translating genius who had once passed himself off as an Afghan, was an asset too great to be left behind.
Hirok
o was unsure how to raise her next question. It concerned a matter they’d never discussed since the day they stood together over Sajjad’s corpse. To allow herself a moment to decide how best to broach the subject she slowed and looked at the faded poster pasted on to the heavily graffitied wall of a loft building. It consisted of a picture of a young man and the words: MISSING SINCE 9/11. IF YOU HAVE ANY INFORMATION ABOUT LUIS RIVERA PLEASE CALL . . .
Hiroko thought of the train station at Nagasaki, the day Yoshi had taken her to Tokyo. The walls plastered with signs asking for news of missing people. She stepped closer to take in the smile of Luis Rivera, its unfettered optimism. In moments such as these it seemed entirely wrong to feel oneself living in a different history to the people of this city.
‘You must still have friends in the CIA.’ The question tumbled out of her mouth.
‘Everyone’s doing their best to make sure both sides back down, Hiroko,’ he said, understanding precisely why she had asked the question.
It was an answer she trusted more than any assurance that there wouldn’t be nuclear war. She patted his arm and turned away from Luis Rivera, though Kim who had come up to stand next to her remained staring at him.
As she entered the higgledy-piggledy streets of Chinatown, pushy and cantankerous in a way that made the ‘attitude’ of the rest of Manhattan appear amateurish, Hiroko recalled the thrill of coming here for the first time and discovering so many vegetables she hadn’t seen since Nagasaki. She still remembered some of the Chinese names for produce her mother used to buy in the Chinese quarter – and recalled, also, Konrad Weiss’s invented names for the vegetables he didn’t know: pak choi was ‘windswept cabbage’, a lotus root sliced down the centre was ‘fossilised flower’. And ginger, which Sajjad used to eat copiously, dipping sticks of it into achaar as a snack, was ‘knots of earth’.
Harry stopped beside a squatting man moving three dead fish around on the sidewalk while other men around him gesticulated and called out. Some magic trick, some betting game – he was determined to work it out. It gave Hiroko the opportunity to look at the cardboard boxes filled with fruit and vegetables in front of a cramped store. She pointed at the green-yellow spheres in a box and found herself saying, ‘Hong xao,’ – a word she hadn’t uttered since Nagasaki. In Urdu it was ‘bair’. She had no idea what the English name was.
Nagasaki. She touched her back.
‘Is that bair?’ Harry said, making her smile at this nephew of Konrad’s.
He had disappeared from her life for years after Sajjad’s death before arriving at her home in Abbottabad in the early nineties to say he had quit his previous job (even then he didn’t utter the name of his former employers), now he was in private security – a glorified bodyguard, really – but the business needed translators, so he was wondering how Raza might feel about coming to work with him. It didn’t occur to her whether she should forgive him or not for lying to her and Sajjad – he was a Weiss and he was offering Raza a chance to escape the soulless pit that was Dubai. And of course, he said, of course Raza wouldn’t be in the path of bullets.
A few minutes later, Kim, Hiroko and Harry were settled on a bench in Columbus Park, Kim uncertainly twirling between her fingers the fruit with unappealing scent which her father and Hiroko were eating with the relish of nostalgia.
‘If you’re moving to New York you should live around here,’ Harry said.
‘Here? Why?’ She looked around, trying to imagine what about this neighbourhood made her father picture her in it: was it the wrinkled twins in baseball caps playing Chinese chess on the bench opposite? The women pulling coats closer to their bodies as they bent over mah-jong pieces? The blind man caressing in long-slow strokes the air between him and the woman who was looking straight at him as she sang, high-pitched and mournful, accom panied by men with weeping stringed instruments?
‘Just,’ Harry said. If he told her that anyone wanting to strike America again was unlikely to do so in Chinatown she’d just say his line of work made him paranoid. But she turned to look at him, and confusion left her expression, replaced by understanding. There was a tiny smile – acknowledging his concern – and then, a nod.
It bothered him, the nod. She shouldn’t understand fear sufficiently to know what he was thinking. He recalled how she had stiffened, earlier on their walk, at the sight of a dark-haired man doing something with his shoes. He had laughed then, said, ‘He’s tying his laces, Kim, not detonating a bomb,’ but now he couldn’t see it as amusing. In the valleys of Afghanistan, fear was necessary; he’d been trained how to use it. But what did Kim know of moving through the world with fear at your back? Weapons in the hands of the uninitiated, he thought, understanding now what it was about this new New York that made him so uneasy.
‘I told Hiroko we’ll stay together in Gran’s apartment until I decide where I want to live,’ Kim said. She bit into the green-yellow fruit and tried to pretend she enjoyed its bitter taste.
‘We both think the other one needs looking after,’ Hiroko explained. She looked at the half-eaten fruit in Kim’s hand. ‘That’s not ripe,’ she said. ‘It must taste horrible. Why are you eating it?’
Kim spat the fruit out into the tissue Hiroko handed her.
‘I didn’t want to offend you by saying it’s disgusting,’ she said.
‘Oh dear,’ Hiroko sighed. ‘You’re going to be a nightmare to live with if you insist on cultural sensitivity.’
‘It’s a smelly little fruit, and you’ve got to be crazy to like it,’ Kim said.
‘Excellent.’ Hiroko smiled. ‘Thank you. And you need to vary your wardrobe. How many black T-shirts do you own?’
Harry watched with satisfaction. Whatever might be happening in the wider world, at least the Weiss-Burtons and the Tanaka-Ashrafs had finally found spaces to cohabit in, complicated shared history giving nothing but depth to the reservoir of their friendships.
31
In the green world, Harry Burton stepped on a dark clod and watched it break open, revealing an interior of phosphorescence. He took off his night-vision goggles and pointed at the glowing ember while his eyes adjusted to the dimness of the cave.
‘Someone was here, not so long ago.’ He ran his fingers along the cave wall and encountered a groove beneath the soot, which his fingers followed to reveal a carving of a falcon.
‘Arabs?’ asked his ex-colleague Steve, who had long since moved to the CIA paramilitary. He meant ‘al-Qaeda’.
Harry shrugged.
‘Portraiture doesn’t fit with their brand of Islam.’
‘Yeah. But mass murder, that’s OK.’ Steve gestured wearily at the contractor who walked in from the connecting cave. ‘Tell the guys we’re heading back. Nothing here. Again.’
‘It’s like they know we’re coming,’ the contractor said before returning to the adjoining cave.
Harry doubted there had ever been anyone here worth coming for. If he were an Afghan he’d light and extinguish fires in every cave of these mountains before running to claim an informant’s reward from the Americans, who were acting as though they owned a rainforest of money-growing trees. He spat on his sleeve and wiped around the falcon. It was a creature of exquisite artistry – one talon raised in imperious command. He wondered how long ago it had been perched in the mustiness of the cave, listening to battles roar and recede outside. Perhaps an Arab mujahideen of the eighties had placed it here.
He had always been uneasy about the introduction of ‘foreign fighters’ into the Afghans’ war against the Soviets. It wasn’t, he’d be the first to concede, because he had any inkling of how history would unravel over the next two decades – it was simply that some lingering idealism in him had found a nobility in the struggle of a people to win back their land from a superpower, and he could find no corresponding nobility in the men who arrived to fight infidels who had overtaken a Muslim land. It seemed so medieval.
He stepped out of the cave on to a mountain ledge, pulling binoculars out of his p
ack to see the land beyond the dried riverbed and barren gullies. In the plains of the Gomal district the sky and ground were in different centuries – one cut open by the blades of a Huey chopper, the other smothered by a collapsed fort and the remnants of mud houses. After two decades of war, barely anything lived here other than juniper bushes and small groups of villagers.
‘We make a desolation and call it peace,’ he said, not for the first time, placing his M4 rifle on the ground and sitting down heavily next to it, the mountain sharp against his back. The rest of his team – all younger and fitter than him – were already scrambling down, singing some song they’d made up which rhymed ‘Arkwright and Glenn’ with ‘dark fighting men’, while the Afghans who had come with them followed more quietly.
‘You want to get shot?’ Steve said, picking up the M4 and holding it out to Harry. ‘Come on, move.’
‘If they shoot me, we’ll know where they are. I’m not such a prize.’
‘When did you become such a moaner?’ Steve said, tossing the rifle into Harry’s lap and lighting a cigarette. ‘People keep asking me what the hell happened to Harry.’
‘People around me got stupid. It made me cranky.’
‘The Great Seer, Lala Buksh, speaks.’ Steve bowed from the waist.
Harry didn’t bother to respond. He had long suspected that it was Steve who had tipped off the CIA at the start of the nineties about the identity of the ‘insider’ who wrote a blistering article in an influential defence journal about the CIA’s decision to turn its back on Afghanistan after the Soviet withdrawal. Steve was one of the few people to know that ‘Lala Buksh’ – the pseudonym of the writer – was also Harry’s Pathan alias. Harry had never taken it personally; he’d been planning to quit the CIA in any case and being forced to move up the date by a few months really made little difference to his life.
‘So I guess you must feel pretty smug now. You were right. Everyone else was wrong. Jihadi blowback, that was your phrase, wasn’t it?’ Steve made a whistling noise between his teeth, which Harry recalled as the sound of disgust he made at the end of every meeting with the ISI.
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