Burnt Shadows Part 20

'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 antic.i.p.ated v.i.a.g.r.a, 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 pa.s.sed himself off as an Afghan, was an a.s.set too great to be left behind.

Hiroko 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 . . . MISSING SINCE 9/11. IF YOU HAVE ANY INFORMATION ABOUT LUIS RIVERA PLEASE CALL . . .

Hiroko thought of the train station at Nagasaki, the day Yos.h.i.+ 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 a.s.surance 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 'att.i.tude' 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-s.h.i.+rts 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 s.p.a.ces to cohabit in, complicated shared history giving nothing but depth to the reservoir of their friends.h.i.+ps.

31.

In the green world, Harry Burton stepped on a dark clod and watched it break open, revealing an interior of phosph.o.r.escence. 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 ma.s.s 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 n.o.bility in the struggle of a people to win back their land from a superpower, and he could find no corresponding n.o.bility 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 pack 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 h.e.l.l 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 ident.i.ty 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.

'I didn't say "blowback" and I never thought we'd be back here. Violent revolution in Saudi Arabia, that was my forecast. Being here . . . there's no smugness. Just failure.'

'We shredded the Iron Curtain. That's a failure I can live with.' Steve took the binoculars from Harry before a reflection off its lenses drew unnecessary attention to their location. Harry resisted telling him that his obviously dyed blond hair was just as likely to provide a target.

'But I do owe you an apology,' Steve said. In the twenty or so years Harry had known Steve it was the first time the other man had truly surprised him. 'Not for unmasking you. No regrets there. But I remember saying there was no future in private military corporations. I was wrong. PMCs are the future of warfare fighting and reconstruction both. And you, Harry Burton, are a pioneer.'

'I see the compliment now where's the backhand?' There was something to be said for knowing someone as well as he knew Steve. Even when you didn't like each other your awareness of the other's temperament brought a familiarity to interactions that almost made the relations.h.i.+p seem intimate.

'You're an idiot to hire all these Third Country Nationals. Economically, sure, I see the sense. But stop recruiting them from Pakistan and Bangladesh. You're acting like this is a territorial war and they're neutral parties. Go with guys from Sri Lanka, Nepal, the Philippines. Indians are OK, so long as they're not Muslim.'

'I've worked with these men for years,' Harry said, standing up and pulling his binoculars out of Steve's hand. It wasn't restraint, simply a lack of energy that kept him from reminding Steve that fifteen years ago he loved to joke that the difference between Vietnam and Afghanistan was 'there we just had GI here we have jee-had'.

'Harry, Harry, Harry. Wake up and smell the burning buildings. You think I don't know you well enough after all that time in Islamabad? There's too much nostalgia in you. You look at those men and you see your childhood. The cook, the gardener, the driver. The Urdu teacher.'

'If this speech is about Raza you need to seriously reconsider continuing it,' he said, looking casually from Steve to the drop off the ledge.

'No need to start performing Quietly Menacing Man,' Steve said, stepping away from the edge. 'It really doesn't bother you in this time, in this place that he's found religion?' In response to Harry's look of bafflement he added, 'I saw him prostrating himself in front of a mosque the first time I flew in. He thought there was no one around to see him.'

'Maybe he had his nose to the ground for the scent of a woman. G.o.d knows you're not going to find one here using your eyes.'

'You know his skill at deception. Come on, Harry. A seventeen-year-old boy from Karachi convinces the Afghans he's one of them to the point that they take him to a muj camp. Better than that! They take a Hazara to a Pashtun camp. Unbelievable! And even now, no one except us knows, do they? Surrounded by Paks and no one knows he's one of them.'

Steve was right Raza Konrad had dinner every night with the Third Country Nationals, translating between them from Urdu to Bengali to Tamil, but never revealing that one of those languages contained in it the memory of his father and all his childhood friends. The men had privately decided his name was an alias Raza Konrad. It made no sense.

In the pa.s.s beneath there grew a single tree, shaped by the wind that raced between the mountains trunk bent, leafy branches streamlined in a flamelike formation, it was curiously frozen in the act of animation. Hiroko, Sajjad, Konrad, Ilse, Harry: history had blown all of them off course, no one ending or even middling where they had begun, but it was only in Raza that Harry saw reshaping as a reflexive act rather than an adaptive response.

'What gives you the arrogance to think you alone see his true face? This is the guy who held you responsible for his father's death twenty years ago. h.e.l.l, Harry, I hated my dad but if I thought anyone . . .'

Harry raised a hand.

'Enough.'

Steve made a gesture of surrender.

'Just giving some friendly advice before I go.'

'You're leaving?'

'The United States will play no part in your private private incursions into Pakistani territory tomorrow.' He grinned, extinguis.h.i.+ng his cigarette on his arm where an old injury had left him without nerves. 'Make sure you get the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds, Burton. Uncle Sam is getting so bored of failure.' incursions into Pakistani territory tomorrow.' He grinned, extinguis.h.i.+ng his cigarette on his arm where an old injury had left him without nerves. 'Make sure you get the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds, Burton. Uncle Sam is getting so bored of failure.'

'Yes, sir,' Harry said, saluting with a sneer. 'But could you tell Uncle Sam to step up his efforts to cool temperatures in the neighbourhood. I had an uncle in Nagasaki that's one piece of family history I don't want to relive.'

'I'll pa.s.s the word along.' Steve gestured to Harry to lead the way down, hoping that when he was sixty-five he'd have enough of a life beyond work that he'd be content to retire instead of climbing mountains in war zones.

The sky was thick with stars by the time the convoy returned to the compound, and the temperature had plunged vertiginously. Raza was sitting in the doorway of the one-room structure he shared with Harry, huddled in a blanket.

'Handprints getting to you tonight?' Harry asked.

The interior walls of their room were covered in the grease-stained fingerprints of a child, level with Raza's waist. More than once Harry had woken to see Raza walking around the room in the early morning, following the trail of prints, his fingertips skimming the grease stains. The compound had been deserted when the Americans arrived, its dust disturbed only by bird claws, and the locals were quick to relate the tale of the family who used to live here before the attack on this compound by a feuding tribe the tribe had broken in to find one dead child and no one else. Some form of black magic had made the rest of the family disappear, the locals said powerful black magic, conjured up with the blood of a child.

Raza shook his head.

'Just felt claustrophobic in there, Uncle Harry.'

The last time he'd said 'Uncle Harry' was over two years ago in Kosovo, when the jeep taking them to a meeting with KLA commanders at a 'secure location' had driven past a ma.s.s grave.

Harry sat down, a hand on the younger man's shoulder. Raza unwound the blanket and offered its warmth to Harry, who moved closer, his shoulder pressed against Raza's, and pulled one half of the blanket tight around himself. It had been a long time since he had felt awkward around the Pakistani's casualness with physical intimacy. Steve, stalking across the compound ground, thought sourly that they looked like a two-headed creature examining the world from the safety of a patterned coc.o.o.n.

'One of your local stooges brought in a guy he claimed was Taliban,' Raza said. 'Two of the new A and G guys interrogated him. They wanted me to act as interpreter.'

'Which two guys?' Harry's voice iced over.

'Don't worry. I told them I don't take orders from the hired help. Anyway, they let him go. Eventually. He was just some guy with a long-standing enmity with your stooge. You ever interrogated anyone, Harry?'

'Yes. But rarely in the way you mean. It's largely ineffective.'

'Is there anything you wouldn't do if you thought it was effective?' He recalled the day Harry had come to Dubai in search of him Raza had asked if the CIA had ever even tried to find the man who shot his father. 'I found him. And then I killed him,' Harry had said, and even though Raza knew his father would have been appalled and his mother furious he couldn't help but feel grateful to Uncle Harry for doing what he wanted done but would never have been able to accomplish himself.

'What wouldn't I do if it was effective?' Harry said thoughtfully. 'Almost nothing. Children are out of bounds, rape is out of bounds, but otherwise . . . what works, works. When I'm dead, Raza, and my daughter asks you what kind of man her father really was, don't tell her I said that.'

Kim Burton. The much imagined Burton who he was now accustomed to thinking he'd seen every time a red-haired woman entered his field of vision. Somewhere, in a world very distant from this one, she was living with Hiroko. Raza crossed his arms on his knees and rested his head there. Heaven lies at the feet of the mother, his Islamiyat teacher in school once said, and Raza came home and searched between his mother's toes with a magnifying gla.s.s, laughing. 'This carpet is heaven? This ant?' until his mother hauled him up by his collar and turned the magnifying gla.s.s on him saying, No here, here she held the gla.s.s against her eye and looked at his smiling face. Here's heaven.

Harry knew Raza's silences well enough to know he was thinking of Hiroko. The adored and neglected mother. He rested his hand on Raza's wrist. Impossible to believe Ilse was dead. Even in her very old age, she had seemed more alive to him than anyone else in the world. He wanted to tell Raza that one day he'd regret spending so little time with his mother simply because he didn't want her to fully understand how devalued a being he had become, but he knew Raza would only hear Harry's own regret in the words rather than understanding any wisdom in the advice. And perhaps there wasn't any wisdom there.

'I haven't been able to find Abdullah,' Raza said abruptly.