Burnt Shadows Part 19

'It's unlikely. The ISI doesn't give out information to anyone unless it's necessary. Certainly not to the Afghans. But I wouldn't get too hopeful about this man in Kabul. Even if he remembers your friend Abdullah Raza bhai, what are the chances he's alive?'

And even if he is, then what? Raza thought as he drove back to base. What if he's become one of them the black-turbanned men who banned everything of joy, blasted ancient prophets out of mountain-faces. Abdullah, he couldn't help remember, had talked of the carvings along the road to Peshawar as the work of infidels. And women Abdullah at fourteen knew exactly what a woman's place in the world was, and it was nothing that Hiroko's son could understand. Then it hadn't really mattered, to be honest but now, just two weeks in this country and the sight of women shrouded as though they were the walking dead made him want to scream. In Miami as in Dubai it was women who kept his life from becoming that of a drone s.e.x the habitat in which he was most at home, its balance of intimacy and transience perfectly suited to his temperament. He fell in love, briefly but intensely, with all the women who invited him into their beds, never seeing that what he truly loved was the version of himself which manifested itself in their company a version comprised of his father's lightness and his mother's boldness.

At sunset, he was driving past a mosque, and the sky-blue beauty of its dome made him get out of his Humvee and prostrate himself on the ground as the muezzin's call wheeled across the plain. The sound was drowned out by the whup-whup of a chopper, which swooped closer to the ground to investigate the stationary Humvee. Raza jumped up, waved at the pilot, and stepped back into the vehicle just as a group of elderly men came out of the mosque to see what was happening.

'Sorry for the interruption,' Raza said in Pashto, leaning out of the window, but the men only looked accusingly from the American vehicle to the man whose features suggested tribes unfriendly to the Pashtuns. One of the men unslung a Kalashnikov from his shoulder Raza remembered Abdullah lifting a piece of cloth like a magician to reveal the gleaming gun beneath and another said, 'Go away from here.'

Last time I'm travelling in this beast, Raza thought as he drew up to the compound, waving away the warnings of the Sri Lankan guard who had witnessed Harry's fury when he discovered the Humvee was missing.

'Who came in the chopper?' he asked.

'American.' The man shrugged, as if to say anyone else would have travelled by road.

29.

'Did I ever tell you I was so determined when I arrived in New York to cast off the shackles and constraints of life as Mrs Burton that I swore to myself I wouldn't be shocked by anything in my cousin Willie's life even though he kept sending me letters before my arrival warning me that his social circle was not what I was used to?' Ilse burrowed down into the sofa cus.h.i.+ons, arms wrapped around a cus.h.i.+on resting on her stomach.

So many late nights in Delhi had unfolded just like this: Ilse in this very position on the living-room sofa, Hiroko sitting in an armchair beside her sipping a cup of jasmine tea, chatter going back and forth between them. Then, as now, Hiroko always pretended the stories she'd already heard were new to her because she enjoyed the animation with which Ilse retold her favourite anecdotes.

'So my very second day in New York I walked into the kitchen in Willie's flat in the middle of the night to get some water, and there he was with this beautiful young man naked! doing something I had never seen done before, not even in a photograph. And I had so steeled myself to take everything in my stride that I said, "Don't mind me," and walked right past them to the fridge. Poor Willie almost fainted with embarra.s.sment, and the young man caught a bus back home to Iowa the next morning and never returned!'

'Well, no wonder I stopped getting your letters in Karachi all those years ago,' Hiroko laughed. 'If you were writing things like that the censors must have been framing them on their office walls!'

'Oh I was so desperately in need of all that liberation,' Ilse said, kicking her foot up in the air. 'New York after the war. It was the most wonderful madness. I kept wis.h.i.+ng you were here with me.'

'I was where I wanted to be,' Hiroko said quietly.

Ilse reached out her arm and caught Hiroko's wrist.

'I do know that. I used to wish it for my sake, not yours.' She paused for a moment. 'Well, all right. Maybe a little for yours. I place much too high a premium on material comforts, always have. I don't have your stoical j.a.panese spirit.'

'You talk such incredible nonsense,' Hiroko said, with as much affection as asperity.

The flung-open front door, the sound of Kim's voice shouting out Ilse's name, sucked all tranquillity from the room.

'Dad, have you heard from Dad? I can't get hold of him.'

'Kim, what's the matter?' Ilse tried to sit up, but her body was too ensconced in the sofa cus.h.i.+ons and she only managed to raise her head a little before it, too, fell back, to her sharp cry of impatience.

'Haven't you heard the news? A man tried to light a bomb inside his shoe on a flight. To Miami. And I can't get hold of Dad.' She pulled Ilse upright as she spoke, and thought senility might have finally caught up with her grandmother when Ilse's only response was to pat her cheek as if she was a child who had just lost her favourite toy.

'There are hundreds of flights to Miami every day, and your father is almost never on any of them,' she said.

'And everyone on the plane is fine,' Hiroko added. 'Other than that stupid man. Was he still wearing the shoe while trying to set it on fire? The news report didn't make that clear.'

Kim looked from Ilse to Hiroko, not believing how unconcerned they were.

'It was a plane,' she said. 'Another suicide attack on a plane.'

'Come here.' Ilse pulled her down on to the sofa, and put her arm around her. 'Stop doing what you're doing. Stop trying to imagine precisely what would happen to a plane mid-air if a bomb went off inside it.'

Kim closed her eyes.

'I'm not trying to imagine it, Gran. I can't help imagining it.' She had trained to be a structural engineer because she'd always wanted to know how to keep things from falling, from breaking apart. Only these last months had she seen how much she'd had to learn about falling, about breaking, in order to do it.

'Let's try getting hold of your father,' Ilse said, dialling Harry's satphone number. He answered almost immediately.

'Have you been in the vicinity of any flammable loafers today?' Ilse asked.

'What?' Harry shouted over the roar of something that sounded like helicopters. 'You mean that shoe guy on the flight? No, of course not. Is that why Kim called? I've just got to my phone and seen three missed calls from her.'

Ilse pa.s.sed the phone to Kim, who shouted into it, 'When you see three missed calls, you might want to try calling right back.'

'I was about to!'

And there they went, Ilse thought, exchanging an exasperated glance with Hiroko who just said, 'Love to him and Raza,' before slipping away to the kitchen.

'I hate this,' Kim said, after hanging up the phone. She rested her head on Ilse's shoulder, but lightly, aware how frail the old woman's bones were. 'I hate that it felt familiar, trying to get hold of him. Those hours I couldn't get through to you on 9/11 . . .'

'It was minutes, not hours,' Ilse said. 'Look, your skin is so young compared to mine we could be creatures from different species.' She rested her hand on Kim's, gently patting it.

'I just want the world to be as it was.' Ilse said nothing, just carried on patting her hand. Only with Gran was it possible to be this way, to feel herself sinking into peace. Her father would have responded with some CIA-style political a.n.a.lysis about s.h.i.+fting geopolitical trends. And worse her mother with her cod psychology would be saying, 'Now, Kim, darling, you know this is bringing up those suppressed feelings of loss and vulnerability around your father and my divorce. I know you chose this profession of yours because in some way you're trying to atone for what you see as your own inability to hold our marriage together. So when anything threatens to collapse or crumble it brings back that sense of personal failure you felt when the marriage broke up.' And she always emphasised the words 'broke up' as though they conclusively proved her point that Kim's pa.s.sion for engineering was really all about her.

'I've lived through Hitler, Stalin, the Cold War, the British Empire, segregation, apartheid, G.o.d knows what. The world will survive this, and with just a tiny bit of luck so will everyone you love. But it is entirely possible you'll need some kind of holiday before that happens.' Ilse rapped Kim's hand firmly at the final sentence. Kim had said she was only coming to New York for a meeting about ironing out details of her relocation and would be on vacation after that until the Christmas holidays ended, but somehow she'd ended up working on a project out of the New York office instead.

Kim made a non-committal noise deep in her throat.

'I don't know how I managed to never worry about Dad all those years he was with the CIA. But now-' She stopped as Ilse pinched her and gestured her head towards the kitchen where their voices might easily travel. They had never spoken of it, but silently both had agreed on a pact to allow Hiroko to continue believing Raza and Harry's euphemisms about administrative work in security. Lowering her voice she said, 'Everything in the world is so scary, nothing more than the thought of where he might be, what he's doing. I'm frightened all the time, all the time. And I hate it. It must make me so amazingly tedious to be around.'

'Your conversation has been somewhat limited of late,' Ilse said. 'Sometimes I wish I had been in London during the war simply so I could pull you up with stories of the spirit of the Blitz.'

'Oh, don't beat yourself up over it. It wouldn't have worked.' She gave her grandmother a resounding kiss on the cheek.

'I mean what I said about the holiday.' Ilse spoke with that voice of gravity which she only brought out when she was very seriously concerned about Kim.

'I know you mean it. But right now, I need some place to go at least five days a week where I feel a sense of control.'

Ilse, who knew her granddaughter far better than either of Kim's parents did, had long ago recognised it was the need for control rather than atonement for her inability to hold together a marriage at the age of four which had drawn her into the profession she'd chosen. She still remembered the expression of fierce accomplishment almost defiance on Kim's face the day she came home from university for her winter holidays and said, 'I know how to make a building earthquake-proof.' Earthquake-proof! As if there was anything to be done in defence if the world opened up beneath you.

Poor Gary! Ilse found herself thinking in unexpectedly sympathetic terms about the man who she'd never thought good enough for her granddaughter. Kim had only chosen him to begin with because she knew he'd never make her feel uncontrolled. She had enough of that around her father had always wanted to summon up indifference to both his absences and his presence, and grew so enraged when everything but indifference was what she felt. And, of course, she'd always ultimately break up with the Garys of the world simply because her basic nature was too pa.s.sionate to settle for someone towards whom she could feel so completely lukewarm. One day, Ilse thought, one day someone will come along and knock her sideways. It will either be the best or the worst thing of her life.

'What were you and Hiroko talking about before I whirled in like a banshee?' Kim had kicked off her boots and curled up on the sofa, her body pliant with relief now that Harry was OK.

'The "Willie in the kitchen" story.' Ilse laughed.

'If there is a heaven, Uncle Willie will be glaring down at you from it,' Kim said, shaking her head as if disapproving, though Ilse knew Kim loved this bawdy side to her, and would often encourage her to say the most outrageous things with a single smile or glimmer of the eye.

'Nonsense. If there is a heaven, Willie is doing exactly what he was doing in the kitchen. Otherwise it's not heaven. Not for Willie.' Suddenly she cackled. 'Imagine if those suicide bombers end up in Willie's heaven. Imagine the looks on their faces.'

'Gran, that isn't funny.'

'It's hilarious! Hiroko, isn't it hilarious?'

Hiroko, re-entering the room, handed Kim a cup of something steaming-hot.

'When I knew her first, she was very well behaved. I promise you, she was.'

Ilse's laughter was clear and unconstrained the laugh of a woman who knew how fortunate she had been to get a second life.

It was this laughter that Hiroko thought of some days later, when Kim was back in Seattle packing up her life to move it to New York, and Ilse didn't respond when Hiroko rapped sharply on her bedroom door and asked her how long she was going to go on sleeping. She thought of the laughter even before she opened the door to receive confirmation of what she already knew to be true.

Pus.h.i.+ng the hair away from her old friend's tranquil face, she thought, It can happen like this, too. Not just scales and shadows and bullet wounds, but peace is also possible at the end.

She picked up the phone from Ilse's bedside and called Raza's satphone. When he answered, his voice distracted at first but instantly snapping into concern as he heard the tone of her voice, she said, 'Raza-chan, you need to be Harry's support today. Ilse has died in her sleep.' When he was finally a.s.sured that she was not about to fall apart and didn't need him to phone anyone in New York to come over and hold her hand she hung up and sat with Ilse for a few minutes more, crying with sorrow but not despair.

Then she drew a deep breath, asked any part of Ilse's spirit still lingering in the room to give her strength to do the unbearable, and called Kim to say her grandmother was dead.

30.

Harry Burton walked through the bright winter morning, jet lag and sorrow colliding to make everything in New York seem a little off-kilter. He had expected to come back and find the city as he'd last seen it near the end of September with a great pall downtown, survivor's unease uptown, but instead he found an ongoing collision between the city's forward-strutting nature and the demands of tragedy which insisted grief must be held on to like a dying lover.

He wanted to be done with it, his own grief. It was unbearable, seeping into everything. Her ghost everywhere along these SoHo streets. Did Kim feel it too? He glanced sideways at his daughter, easily keeping pace with his long strides, everything about her appearance a warning: combat pants, steel-toed boots and a bomber jacket half unzipped to reveal the black T-s.h.i.+rt beneath, freshly shorn copper hair sleeked against her cheetah-skull, tipped with the black dye which still hadn't entirely grown out.

'Penny for your thoughts, panther,' he said, wincing at his own inability to exit cliche.

'Gran was half the reason I'm moving to New York.' She glanced up at him. 'You didn't know I'm moving to New York, did you?'

'No. But that's great. I mean, I always picture you here. I know you've been in Seattle a while but . . . the hills, the grunge, the self-conscious coffee drinking! No, no, not my daughter. It's always seemed like one of those short-term flings, you know?'

'I know short-term flings, Dad. Just not as well as you do.' She grinned, and put her arm through his.

Surprised, but far from displeased, he squeezed her arm and tried to think what a father should say in such a moment, his daughter's eyes still red with weeping as they had been ever since he arrived yesterday just in time to bury Ilse.

'Sweetheart, she died as she would have wanted to. In her sleep, at peace, after what Hiroko tells me was a raucous dinner with her closest friend. We should all be so lucky.'

'Doesn't make me miss her less,' Kim said, resting her head against her father's shoulder.

They walked that way for a while, though the posture was slightly awkward. The SoHo crowds were thinned in the post-Christmas doldrums, for which Harry was grateful. Too much time in narrow mountain pa.s.ses these past weeks, and his body was still primed for danger. The fire escapes running in zigzags along the length of cast-iron buildings looked like misshapen spines, deliberately twisted out of shape, and on either side of the street buildings loomed, their windows reflecting sunlight as the barrel of a gun might do.

'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 Ca.s.sandras 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 Ca.s.sandras! 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, a.s.sumed 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 att.i.tude 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 Pathetic, Kim thought, even as she allowed Harry to take her arm and loop it through his own again.