“Who the fuck is Mustafa?” Members Only demanded.
Nick whirled so fast that one of the two goons nearly pulled his gun out from beneath his jacket, but Nick just stared at Members Only. Then slowly he smiled. “What’s your name?” he asked kindly.
“Carl,” Members Only said.
Nick nodded, as if he had expected nothing less. “Carl,” he said, “we work for Mustafa Khan.” He paused, waiting for a response.
“Who?” Carl said.
Nick stared. “Mustafa Khan,” he said. “He moves half the heroin in California. And he does not stand for people who do stupid shit like this.” Carl frowned slightly, and Nick shook his head. “No, no, no, no,” he said. “Not you, Carl. This one”—nodding at Jay—“for trying to steal from you without permission from Mustafa. What did this olagh take from you? Fifty cartons? A hundred?”
“Two hundred,” Carl said.
Nick looked at Jay and hissed, “You stole two hundred cartons from this man?” Then in Dari he said, “Tell me you have money here to pay him. Nod or shake your head.”
Jay nodded.
Nick rolled his eyes. To Carl, he said, “This koskesh will pay you for the cigarettes, now. Just don’t kill him.” He leaned up against a wall and glanced at his watch, clearly bored by the whole ordeal. Jay, meanwhile, looked increasingly uncomfortable, even panicked.
Carl stared at Nick, then Jay, then at his own thugs, who looked like they were watching a movie. When Carl glanced at Nick again, Nick gave him a little shrug as if to say, What? Go ahead. Carl cleared his throat self-consciously and turned back to Jay, a snarl pasted over his features. “You don’t fuck with me, Bashir,” he said, and he slapped Jay across the face, first with his right hand, then with his left. The second slap caused Jay to stumble slightly, a fiery crimson blush on his cheeks. Carl spat on the floor at Jay’s feet, then looked at Nick as if seeking approval. Nick gave none, just said to Jay, in a tired voice, “Pay the man.”
Jay paid Carl with cash from a floor safe behind the desk, and Nick shook hands with Carl, then escorted him and his men out through the waiting room. As soon as they had closed the front door behind them, Nick slumped against a chair. He felt relieved and exhausted and strangely alert, his chest and head humming as if conducting current.
“Holy shit,” Jay said. He stood in the center of the waiting room, staring at his brother in astonishment. “What was that story? That was amazing.” He laughed. “Shit. And Mustafa Khan? Who the fuck is that?”
“He was the janitor on my dorm freshman year,” Nick said. He took the glass paperweight out of his pocket. Jay glanced at it.
“Were you planning to hit him over the head with that if he didn’t go along with your bullshit?” Jay asked. He shook his head, a man pulled back from the brink of a nasty fall, and gave another nervous laugh. “This calls for a drink,” he said. He stepped forward, arm raised as if preparing to give Nick a high five. “Seriously, man, you saved—”
The paperweight in his hand, Nick drove his fist forward, right into Jay’s stomach. Jay folded in half and fell to the floor, gasping for air. Nick looked down at his brother, then tossed the paperweight with a thud onto the mahogany-veneer desk. “I did you a favor,” he said, walking to the door. “Now you take care of Mom.”
WHEN NICK WALKED out of Lettie’s office, he found her in the front room refolding a stack of linen napkins on a display table. “All done?” she asked.
Nick glanced around to make sure there weren’t any other customers in the store. “I need some clothes,” he said. “Women’s clothes.”
Lettie arched an eyebrow. “I didn’t take you for that kind of man, but to each his own.”
“They aren’t for me.”
“Say no more,” Lettie said. “No judgment here. You’d be, what, a size eighteen?”
“They’re for my niece. She’s a teenager.”
“A gift, then. You want them wrapped?”
“She’s visiting. It’s … complicated. A running-away kind of thing.” He hesitated. “Lettie, can you keep this just between us? She’s in trouble and I’m trying to help.”
“Well,” she said, “if you’re helping her, she’s in good hands. Mum’s the word.” She nodded once, as if they had shaken on a deal. “Now, what does she need?”
With Lettie’s help, Nick bought some T-shirts, socks, cotton panties, a pair of jeans, and a pair of capri pants. He refused to even consider looking at brassieres and said he had no idea what her cup size would be, so Lettie added three different sizes of bras and told him to see which one fit best. Nick didn’t like involving Lettie, or deceiving her, but Annalise needed clothes, and the less Lettie knew, the better. Even as he told himself this, he knew he could simply have driven down to Brevard and gone to the Walmart there, where he would be anonymous and could buy anything he needed without anyone giving him a second glance.
As if reading his thoughts, Lettie said, while ringing him up, “It’s good to see you in here, Nick. It’s been too long. You should come over for dinner sometime.”
“Been busy,” Nick said. “Always something to fix on a house.”
Lettie nailed him with the same look she’d given the red-faced customer earlier. “When a lady invites a man to dinner, the man should say yes and offer to bring wine.”
“Are you asking me on a date?”
Lettie rolled her eyes. “Men,” she said. “Always convinced women are just falling all over themselves to attract one. No, you ignoramus, I’m asking you to dinner. A home-cooked meal from a neighbor. You understand neighbor? Or friend?”
Nick stood with his bag of clothing in his hands, feeling like a boy called on the carpet and trying to decide how to respond. Exasperated, Lettie saved him the trouble by shoving him out the door. “Just goes to show that you can go to school and even write books and still be an imbecile,” she said.
Nick took one step toward his car, then turned around, looking up the short flight of steps to the door. “You know I wrote books?” he said.
Lettie closed the door in his face.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
After her uncle left to get her clothes, Annalise sat in the great room and paged through a dusty coffee table book of Ansel Adams photographs that had been abandoned on the bottom shelf of a side table. Through the back windows of the great room, she saw the sun trying to break through the puffy white clouds overhead. Across the lake she could see the cliff face of Whiteside, stark and striking against the fringe of trees around it, like the moon had landed on Earth and was trying to disguise itself as a mountain. After a while she closed the Ansel Adams book and wandered through the great room, looking around and occasionally picking up items, then putting them back down—a wooden clock on a side table, a red ballpoint pen with the text CASHIERS FIRE DEPT on the barrel, a little statue of a knight on a horse that sat on the fireplace mantel. The statue of the knight was lightweight, made out of tin or maybe aluminum, and aside from the books stacked everywhere it was the only item she saw in the great room that seemed unique, belonging to a specific person.
The books eventually drew her full attention, not only because she had always liked reading but also because you could tell a lot about a person by the kinds of books they read. And she was definitely curious about her uncle. After a few minutes of looking through the stacks of books, it was clear that Uncle Nick was maybe a little obsessed with the Middle Ages—almost all the books were about medieval history or works of medieval lit. Made sense for a history professor, she guessed. But he’d said he was retired. She tried to imagine being a widow, holing up in a mountain cabin with her grief and the remnants of her career as a professor. It seemed sad and almost perverse, like her uncle was playing at being a hermit, inviting people to ask him if he was okay just so he could tell them to get lost.
She realized she was still hungry and went to raid the kitchen for food. She made herself some more toast even though her uncle didn’t have any jam or jelly—seriously, why have br
ead for toast without any kind of jelly?—and scarfed it down, along with a full glass of water, and then sat at the kitchen table for a minute, tracing the wood grain of the table with her finger. She got up and rinsed her dish off in the sink and put it and her glass in the dishwasher, because her mother hated it when she left a mess in the kitchen, and that brought a wave of quiet sobs that seemed like they would never recede. She stood in the kitchen, hands braced on the counter—unknowingly in the same position her uncle had been in two days earlier—and rode out the sobs like she was a tiny raft bobbing on an ocean of grief. I’m going to get really sick of crying, she thought.
She wiped her face and blew her nose on some paper towels, and after she threw the towels away, she looked up from the trash can and saw, through the office entryway, a framed photograph on a desk. It was of a woman. Annalise walked into the office, a small wood-paneled room with more bookshelves and a window, under which sat the desk with the photograph. Annalise picked the photograph up. The woman in the picture was standing in a field. She had long blond hair and was looking back over her shoulder at the photographer and laughing. Her skin was fair, and she looked like an elf or a sprite caught dancing in the wilderness.
That was my aunt, Annalise thought, and she felt an empty ache in her chest. How strange to miss someone she had never met. The woman in the picture was beautiful. And now she was dead. Suddenly Annalise felt cold, and she put the photograph back down on the desk.
The shelves held more books, most of them with academic-sounding titles. One of them snagged her attention, a slim volume with a rich red spine and the title in gold print: The Lion and the Prince. The author’s name was Nicholas Anthony. She pulled the book off the shelf. The front cover showed a medieval illustration of two knights on horseback, jousting. The back cover described the book as offering new insight into the relationship between English king Richard I, the “Lionheart,” and the great Muslim sultan and general Saladin. Annalise looked at the inside flap and saw a picture of a younger Uncle Nick, a slight smile on his lips. The book had been published a decade earlier. The dedication page read simply, “To Ellie, as always.” Annalise looked back at the photograph on the desk. Aunt Ellie.
She put the book back on the shelf and trailed her hand over other volumes—A World Lit Only by Fire, How the Irish Saved Civilization, Eleanor of Aquitaine: A Life. She had heard of Eleanor of Aquitaine. Kind of a badass queen, if she remembered correctly. She pulled the book off the shelf, and as she did, an envelope fell to the floor. When she picked up the envelope, she lifted the flap and saw a few photographs that were beginning to yellow with age.
The book forgotten for the moment, Annalise sat at the desk with the photographs. The first was of a split-level house, the walls a light green and the front walk made of stepping stones. The second picture stopped her heart. It was a photo of a man and two boys standing at the front door of the same split-level house. The man, tall with a dark moustache, was stiff with formality in his white button-down shirt and dark slacks. Next to him was one of the boys, maybe ten or twelve, hair thick and black as oil and his mouth open in a happy shriek. Then there was the second boy, a few years older and taller, arm slung over the younger boy’s shoulders. He smiled easily at the camera, his hair dark and over his ears, eyes the color of honey in a brown face. It was her uncle. Which meant that the boy he had under his arm was most likely his brother—her father. Even as she thought it, she saw her father’s features in the boy’s face, the nose and lips and even the cast of the eyes, the mischievous glint. Through her tears she smiled at the picture. “Hi, Daddy,” she said.
Reluctantly she put the picture down on the desk and looked at the others. There was a woman in a red hijab or head scarf that framed a tired but smiling face, Annalise’s father hanging from her arm, while the moustached man in the white shirt and dark pants stood unfocused in the background, a watchful phantom. Another picture of the boys showed them both standing in the driveway of the split-level and striking muscle poses. And then there was one of the man and the woman, clearly the boys’ parents, Annalise’s grandparents, sitting on a yellowish-green sofa, the woman raising one hand to her hijab as if tucking it more securely around her face, the man looking at her with a smile. That was the last of the photographs. Annalise looked inside the empty envelope, then turned over each picture to see if anything was written on the backs, but found nothing.
Annalise knew her father’s family had left Afghanistan before the Russians invaded, emigrating to the United States. She guessed the photos showed when they had first moved to the US—the split-level house, the clothing, the age of the pictures all suggested as much. She looked at her grandparents, her grandfather’s grin, her grandmother’s weary smile. Her grandfather had been American, some sort of government employee, and had met her grandmother in Afghanistan. Annalise thought it must have been a truly romantic love story. And then they had moved halfway around the world to a country that must have seemed almost alien to her grandmother. She wondered if her grandmother had been welcomed, if her grandfather had helped her adapt. She knew very little about her father’s family. He had usually changed the subject whenever it was brought up. Maybe her uncle could tell her about them, lift the veil on that part of her family’s history.
Maybe there were some more photographs in the desk. She pulled open the top drawer. She stared. In the drawer was a gun.
She looked at the gun as if it would coil and strike at the first hint of motion. It was the color of graphite, an ugly chunk of metal lying in a drawer. Lots of people owned guns, she knew. Up here in the mountains, she guessed several people shot deer and rabbits and who knew what else for food. But she was pretty certain her uncle wasn’t hunting deer with a pistol. Maybe he had it for home protection. He lived pretty much in the middle of nowhere, far from any immediate help from the police or sheriff.
She closed the drawer. She could hear the gun shift in the drawer when she closed it. She told herself it was fine, it was just a gun in a desk. But if that were true, then why did her skin feel prickly, like she was standing outside just before a summer thunderstorm struck?
She opened the lower desk drawer and found a box of magazines she assumed were for the pistol. Behind the box, at the back of the drawer, was a Ziploc bag with some sort of booklets in them. She picked up the Ziploc bad and opened it, then dumped the booklets out onto the desk. Even as she did it, she realized they weren’t booklets. They were passports, half a dozen of them. She picked up one and opened it to see her uncle’s photo staring back at her, a pleasantly neutral look on his face. But the passport cover read REPUBLIC OF LEBANON, and it identified her uncle as Amir Haddad. She stared at the passport, then picked up another one with a bright-green cover. On the outside was KINGDOM OF SAUDI ARABIA printed in gold. Inside was another picture of her uncle, this time staring seriously at the camera. According to that passport, her uncle’s name was Mohammed Al-Salhi.
The rain started again, a sudden downpour that beat against the roof, lashing at the windows like waves battering a ship. She ignored it and looked through the other passports. A French one in the name of Jean Dubois. Another identifying her uncle as an Afghan named Farman Ghosh, and yet another saying he was Sanjay Reddy from India. The sixth and last one, a Mexican passport in the name of Pablo Jesús Rodríguez Zapatero, made her snort with laughter, as if the name were too much, the final entry in an absurd parade of identities. All too soon, she choked off her laughter, tears pricking her eyes. What the hell was this? Why did her uncle have six different passports, all from different countries and in different names? And why did he have a gun—a gun, she noted as if tabulating evidence in her mind, that was in a desk drawer rather than locked in a safe or a gun box?
He didn’t tell the cop you were here, she thought.
Of course he wouldn’t tell the cop. He had a gun and a bunch of fake passports. Who knew what other shady shit he might have going on?
He saved you from the rattlesnake, she thought.
And he took care of you when you had a fever. And he said he would help you.
Help her. How could he help her? He was a retired history professor. Or maybe not, she thought, looking at the passports on the desk. Maybe he was some sort of undercover cop, or a criminal. And he had a gun.
So do the other guys, she thought.
With the sense of finding herself at the bottom of a deep, dark well, Annalise was struck by how alone she truly was. Her parents were dead, and she was in a cabin in the North Carolina mountains waiting for her uncle, a man she didn’t truly know, a man with a gun and multiple passports whom her father had ignored all of Annalise’s life until a few days ago. A man who might not be safe.
In the kitchen, the door to the carport opened, the rain outside suddenly louder. The sound struck Annalise like a bolt of lightning, and she froze. “Hey,” someone called—a man, maybe her uncle, maybe not. The door closed. He was inside the house. Annalise’s heart was in her throat. Then, her hand shaking, she yanked open the top drawer.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Nick turned off Whiteside Cove onto the dirt road that led to his house. He needed to order another load of gravel to spread on the road before it got completely washed out. As it was, he jounced and swayed along the hillside and past the lake. Even now he saw a line of dark clouds through a break in the green wall of trees. People were always struck by how leafy and green Cashiers was. While it had its share of beautiful sunny days, Cashiers also got over seven inches of rain a month, making it one of the rainiest places in the eastern US. No wonder the woods were almost primordial.
And then another flash of memory: a canteen lying in the dirt, water spilling out. A bloody hand next to it.
Nick hit the brakes, jerking to a stop, and squeezed his eyes shut. When he opened them, the memory had faded. He continued down the road, the sky growing darker.
A Fire in the Night Page 11