Burnt Shadows

by Kamila Shamsie

  ‘Say he’s sorry?’ He mimicked her tone and accent with disconcerting accuracy. ‘Did you really just say that? Have you read the Patriot Act? Of course they care if he’s legal or not. They can indefinitely detain someone with just minor visa violations if they have even the vaguest suspicions about them.’ In the pause that followed he said quietly, ‘OK, you haven’t read the Patriot Act.’

  ‘Why are we even having this conversation?’

  ‘He can’t stay in America now. And there is a way for him to get back to Afghanistan from Canada. So you need to get him across the border. They’ll never search a car driven by someone who looks like you. None of his friends in New York look like you.’

  ‘This is where I hang up.’ She ended the call, and then switched off the phone to prevent further conversational insanity before hurrying back to work. She was made uneasy about the idea of an Afghan who ran from the FBI, and made more uneasy to know she found such a thing suspicious. Damn Raza Ashraf. What right did he have to call her up and make her feel . . . caught out. Yes, he was just like Harry. Passing the buck and making you feel guilty for noticing it was counterfeit.

  Part-way across the world, Raza was disappointed but unsurprised. Plan B then, he thought, as he watched the lazy shuffle that was Harry’s bowling run-up. He knew exactly what would happen when he told Harry he had to leave for New York – right away – to get Abdullah out. Harry would say he was being sentimental and idiotic. He’d also curse the ineffectiveness of the FBI, the ineptitude of politicians, the stupidity of stupid laws – but follow up by pointing out that Abdullah’s innocence would do nothing to help Raza’s case if he was found attempting to help a suspected terrorist. And then, when Raza refused to back down, he would say fine, he was going along, too – Raza didn’t look nearly all-American enough to cross the border without being stopped. Raza smiled, and stretched contentedly. It would be good to be back in America, no matter how briefly. He thought longingly of a high-pressure shower, and wondered if he owed Kim Burton some kind of apology.

  Harry bowled an off-break, short of a length, followed by an exaggerated cry of pain when the batsman hit him for a four. Steve stepped out of his room to see what the noise was about. The ball landed near Raza, who held up a hand to the fielders to signal he’d retrieve it.

  He was bending down to pick up the ball when he saw the movement up in the guard tower.

  Harry was turned towards Raza, holding his hands out for the ball with a smile that anyone who had been loved by Konrad Weiss would have recognised, when the stranger in the guard tower swept his Kalashnikov from right to left as though it was his partner in a dance, and Harry fell in synchronised response, his shirt incarnadine in the bright lights of the Humvee.

  34

  Raza watched the mud lift off the ground in concentric circles, earth flattening around it. He was huddled in a crouch, arms raised against the rush of air, refusing to look any higher than the walls of mud rising an inch or so before collapsing back down as the chopper pulled itself away from earth, carrying two wounded contractors and the body of Harry Burton.

  As the noise of the chopper muted in the distance, Raza heard the sound of a revving engine. The jeep carrying the bodies of three Pakistani Third Country Nationals was about to leave the compound, unescorted, headed for the border; the other jeep, with the unwashed corpse of the Afghan gunman tied to its bumper by his feet, would wait until sunrise before departing to drive around the surrounding terrain as a warning. The corpses of the two Bangladeshi TCNs were in a storage room, awaiting a decision on what was to be done with them in the absence of an embassy in Kabul to which they could be sent. And somewhere out of sight two men were digging a grave – Raza could hear the flump! of earth being turned over by shovels – for the Sri Lankan man without identity papers.

  Raza stood, his clothes so stiff with dried blood they were resistant to the unfurling of his body. He made his way slowly to the jeep which had the Afghan tied to it, and raised his foot to feel the satisfaction of bone snapping beneath his heavy boots. But instead, he pirouetted to retch on the ground.

  No one recalled seeing the Afghan before. In all likelihood he was part of the group of men who had come to pledge their allegiance to the Americans. He must have slipped away from the group and made his way to the watchtower where he garrotted the Sri Lankan guard. The tribal chief who had led the group of men into the compound insisted he had never seen the man – but he would say that, wouldn’t he, Steve had pointed out.

  Raza unzipped his bloodied jacket and let it fall to the ground as he made his way to the room he shared with Harry. Had shared with Harry. The gunman seemed most intent on killing Americans – the TCNs who died were simply in the way as the bullets sprayed an arc from Harry to the other two contractors in the yard. But the other two had survived because of their body armour. Harry should have been wearing it, too – A and G’s policy specifically stated that all its employees who were provided with body armour should keep it on at all times. But it wasn’t cost-effective to provide body armour for the TCNs, so they had none – and Raza said he felt ridiculous sitting down with them for dinner around their firelit campsite if he was the only one bent over under the weight of protection, so he refused to wear it. And Harry said if Raza wasn’t wearing it, he wasn’t wearing it either.

  Indoors, Raza sat on Harry’s camp bed, and picked up the book Harry had been reading. Mother Goose’s Nursery Rhymes. He’d said it was the only thing that could keep a man sane. Raza closed his eyes and leaned back into the scent of Harry Burton. He wanted to be home. Not in Miami – but in a Karachi of twenty years ago, which had long since disappeared as civic violence turned Nazim­ abad into a battleground and all Raza’s closest friends moved to other parts of the city or away to the Gulf or Canada or America. The house which Sajjad and Hiroko had bought with Ilse Weiss’s necklace had been torn down to make room for a more ‘modern’ construction.

  ‘You should change out of those clothes. They reek.’

  Raza looked up at Steve, who had stepped inside, flinging Raza’s jacket on to the bed.

  ‘What’s the quickest way for me to get to New York?’ Raza asked. ‘Kim said they’d delay the funeral until I get there.’ Kim hadn’t said it – he had phoned his mother instead and told her what happened.

  – But why are you in Afghanistan? – Ma, I’m sorry. I’ll tell you everything when I get there. – Raza, are you involved with this war? – I’m sorry, I’m sorry. – Shh, stop crying. No, cry. Cry all you need to. And come quickly. We’ll wait for you, of course. It’s what Harry would want. Oh Raza, how can he be dead? How will I tell Kim?

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous. You’re not going anywhere. We’re going to interrogate every Afghan who entered this compound in the last twenty-four hours to find out who helped Harry Burton’s killer – and you’re going to sit there and translate every word that comes out of their diseased mouths.’

  ‘I’m an employee of A and G,’ Raza said, carefully placing Mother Goose on the bedside, next to Harry’s reading glasses. ‘You can’t tell me what to do. Come to think of it, I may be in charge of operations here now. I’m the seniormost employee.’

  ‘You may want to reconsider your attitude.’ Steve sat down on Raza’s bed. ‘I employ your employers. I’ve just been on the phone with them, in fact. They’ve given me operational control until they fly in a replacement. It’s really a dry run for them and me – if things work out well I’ll be taking over Harry Burton’s office soon. Next door to yours, I understand?’

  ‘I’ll draft my letter of resignation right away.’

  ‘That’s nice. But don’t forget the ninety-day waiting period before it comes into effect. If Kim Burton is putting Harry on ice until you get to New York, check she has enough ice to make it through to April.’

  Raza closed his eyes and leaned back against the wall.

  ‘Please. You have other people here who can translate. Just let me go for the funeral. Harry was . . .’ His
voice refused to continue.

  Steve stretched himself out on Raza’s bed, adjusting the flame on the lantern in the space between them so that shadows flung themselves across the walls and on to the ceiling.

  ‘Harry was the man I admired above all men,’ he said. ‘He never knew that. A visionary. And now what is he? A piece of rotting meat.’

  ‘Please let me go for Harry’s funeral.’

  ‘But the one thing he wasn’t a visionary about was the TCNs. I tried telling him. Sure, they’re cheap. And no one in their own countries cares what’s being done with them. But what do you do about the question of allegiance?’ He played with the flame control, shadows alternating between lurking and leaping. Raza could feel the sweat spread under his armpits, wetting the blood on his shirt into pungency. Steve turned to look at Raza. ‘That’s not a rhetorical question. I’m asking your opinion.’

  ‘They’re desperate for money,’ Raza said, pulling his legs up against his chest. What was Steve trying to suggest? That one of the TCNs had smuggled in an Afghan? ‘Their allegiance comes from their need to keep getting the pay-cheque. And their sense of brotherhood to each other.’ He closed his eyes. He could see himself behind the till of one of Hussein and Altamash’s supermarkets – scanning the barcode on a packet of milk, opening the cash register, answering customers’ queries about where to find the flour. It was an image of peace. He knew then he wasn’t just going to quit A and G; he was going to walk away from this whole life. It was nothing without Harry.

  ‘But you don’t need the pay-cheque, Raza Ashraf of Karachi and Hazara. You’re not one of the grunts who know their positions can be filled by a million other desperate rats if they mis-step even slightly. You’re the ageing boy wonder – the translation genius. You can name your salary in corporations around the world. And you certainly have no sense of brotherhood with anyone.’

  ‘My allegiance was to Harry. His family and mine—’ Again his voice cut out. When he had told Hiroko she had to break the news of Harry’s death to his daughter he thought of the American woman he had never met as his family, closer in some ways than Hussein and Altamash of Ashraf Stores, Dubai.

  ‘I was there, Raza. In Pakistan, nearly twenty years ago. When you sent Harry Burton from your house accusing him of being the cause of your father’s death.’

  ‘I loved Harry.’ He said it quietly, simply, the stark truth of it never evident to him until that moment.

  ‘Is that why you signalled the gunman to fire?’

  ‘I . . . what?’

  Steve reached into the pocket of his jacket and pulled out Raza’s satphone.

  ‘And is that why you made a call a few days ago to a known supporter of the Taliban in Kabul?’

  Blood and shadows everywhere. The Commander?

  ‘I didn’t know . . .’

  ‘And am I really going to have to track down whoever called you from that PCO in Kandahar – Taliban HQ – just a few minutes before Harry died, or are you going to spare us some time and just tell me, Raza Hazara?’

  ‘I haven’t used that name in twenty years. I was a boy then.’

  ‘I was standing next to you, you lying filth. Just a few hours ago when the call came. I could hear the man on the other end of the phone. Raza Hazara. That’s what he said.’ Steve stood up, picking up the copy of Mother Goose as he did so, along with Harry’s satphone and the handgun from the bedside-table drawer. ‘Humpty Dumpty,’ he said conversationally and walked towards the door, book in hand. Opening the door, he pointed to the two contractors standing guard outside – they were the ones Raza had dismissed as ‘hired help’ just a few days earlier.

  ‘Could you give me my phone,’ Raza said, holding out a hand and then quickly withdrawing it as he noticed its tremble. ‘I need to call A and G – their lawyers should probably know you seem to be accusing me of something.’

  Steve shut the door and walked back to Raza, vastly amused.

  ‘Do you really think A and G is going to get into a legal tussle with the CIA just when they’ve finally got what they’ve wanted for the last decade – a slice of government action? And over you?’

  ‘You have no evidence. I can explain the phone calls.’

  ‘Oh, you can explain anything, I’m sure. But here’s the bad news for you: I saw you signal the gunman and I saw you duck just before he opened fire. That’s sufficient evidence in my world.’ He put a hand on Raza’s shoulder. ‘I know what you’re all about. And I’m counting on your cowardice – tell me who else was involved before this gets unpleasant.’ He stepped back. ‘I’ll give you time to think it over. You’ll see sense.’

  He left, quietly closing the door behind him.

  There was a place in Raza’s mind where nothing existed but the practical application of selected facts – it was the part of his brain he used when reading reports or sitting in on A and G meetings in which it was manifest that his company was in business with murderers and thugs. That part of his brain had once allowed him to sit through a meeting in which a new client of A and G’s extolled the effectiveness of rape as a tool of war. Raza impassively translated every word he said. Afterwards, Harry had found him in the A and G Olympic-sized pool, swimming furious laps, and said, ‘I’ve made it clear I’m not getting involved with this contract.’ Raza replied, ‘Even so, I’m really quitting this time. Don’t think a raise will change my mind.’ Harry crouched by the side of the pool and placed his hand on Raza’s slicked-down hair. ‘I don’t know what I’d do without you, son,’ he said, and Raza stayed.

  As Raza changed into a shalwar kameez, first wiping blood methodically off his body with a wash cloth and the water from Harry’s bedside flask, he retreated to that purely practical section of his mind. Harry had chosen this structure for himself and Raza rather than any of the more spacious ones for a very particular reason – Raza moved his camp bed away from the wall and tapped on the floor until he heard the hollow sound which had confirmed to Harry the theory he’d constructed around the locals’ tales of the vanishing family who had lived here. (‘What about the dead boy?’ Raza had asked. ‘He was just a dead boy,’ Harry replied.)

  Raza made his way around the room, picking up whichever items would be of use – a large knapsack, a bottle of mineral water, a torch, granola bars, a key, his Pakistani passport and US green card. What considerable space was left in the knapsack he filled with the vast sums of money Harry kept on hand to buy Afghan loyalty. He hesitated a moment over the photograph of Hiroko, Ilse and Kim in New York, and then decided against it. He wanted nothing on him which would tie him to anyone else. But he took Harry’s bomber jacket – his own was too stained, and the smell might attract wild animals.

  The tunnel was narrow and musty, its roof too low for upright walking. Raza thought of Harry in here just weeks earlier, hunched over with his body angled sideways to ease his progress. ‘I feel like Alice in Wonderland stuck in that house,’ he’d groaned and Raza, slight enough to walk through with minimal discomfort, had laughed and said that if ever they really needed to use this tunnel as an escape route he’d go first because there was every likelihood that Harry would get stuck. ‘What then? You’d leave me?’ Harry said, turning to smile at Raza and tripping on a stone – here, here, the torch-light shining on the tunnel wall showed Raza the smear of dried blood from Harry’s temple. Raza wiped tears off his face and pressed them against Harry’s blood. Then, awkwardly – it required him to crane his neck uncomfortably – he pressed his mouth against the moist blood. But it still didn’t seem quite real to him.

  It was almost an hour later that he finally emerged on the other side of the tunnel into a roofless structure which smelt faintly of livestock, no sign of habitation around. The scent came from the dun-coloured tarpaulin which Harry had found in a barn filled with goat droppings. Beneath it was a jeep.

  Raza pulled off the tarpaulin, unlocked the jeep with the key from Harry’s bedside, and drove out of the derelict barn. Through the darkness he made out the faint o
utlines of mountains – the border, and Pakistan. He stopped the jeep, consulted his GPS. Pakistan was the obvious destination. Obvious to him, and to Steve. He might just be able to convince the Army guards at the border to phone Captain Sajjad Ashraf and receive assurances that Raza was just another Pakistani who the Americans had turned against after extracting all that was useful from him, but the bigger problem was the bounty hunters who prowled the border area, on the lookout for ‘enemy combatants’.

  Raza stepped out of the jeep and unbuttoned the soft top. The stars glittered malevolently. One phone call from Steve – perhaps that call had already been made – and he would enter data banks the world over as a suspected terrorist. His bank accounts frozen. His mother’s phone tapped. His emails and phone logs, his Internet traffic, his credit-card receipts: no longer the markers of his daily life allowing him to wind a path back through a thicket of lovers to the specificity of the 3.13 a.m. call with Margo, the poem forwarded to Aliya, the box of Miami sand couriered to Natalie, but a different kind of evidence entirely. That nothing in the world could possibly show him to be Harry Burton’s murderer seemed barely to matter in the face of all that could be done to his life before that conclusion. If anyone even bothered with a conclusion. He had never felt so sharply the powerlessness of being merely Pakistani.

  Perhaps he should go back, back through the tunnel to Steve. Back where he could explain about the cricket ball and Abdullah’s brother, and the Commander – and Kim Burton could verify he had called her to discuss Abdullah. And what would that prove? Only that he wanted to help a man he hadn’t seen in twenty years who ran from the FBI. If Steve was looking for confirmation that Raza’s allegiance belonged to some brotherhood of jihadis he would find it right there, right from Kim Burton’s mouth. He leaned his head against the doorframe with a small pathetic cry.

  No, there could be no going back – not to the compound, not to his life. He unzipped the knapsack, tossed out his passport and green card and watched the wind sift fine particles of sand on to the documents that made him legal. For an instant longer he breathed in deeply the desert air, everything around him vast and indifferent, and felt the terror of unbecoming.