Burnt Shadows Part 27

'I know things are bad, but perhaps there wasn't any need to run. Even now, it might not be too late. Kim and my mother will help. They'll find you a lawyer. These things still matter, they must.'

'You're living in another world. My friend Kemal he was picked up ten days ago. No one has heard from him since. New York now is nets cast to the wind, seeking for any Muslim to ensnare.'

His words made Raza turn reflexively to look out of the window. No nets, but there was a police car in the parking lot which hadn't been there a few seconds ago, and two policemen talking to a redhead whose hair reached her jawline. The woman turned towards the window, her finger pointing- Raza grabbed Abdullah's s.h.i.+rt and yanked hard, ducking at the same time so neither of them could be seen from outside. He pressed his keys into Abdullah's palm.

'Go from the back door. The silver Mazda. Take it. Run. Trust me.' He pushed Abdullah from his chair.

'Raza, what-?'

'For your son's sake. Go quickly. Please.' He picked up the baseball cap that had been resting next to his elbow and put it firmly on Abdullah's head, handing him his jacket Harry's jacket at the same time, and reached across to take the coat Abdullah had slung over his chair.

'Allah protect you,' Abdullah said, squeezing his hand, before walking very rapidly to the back door.

But not rapidly enough. The policemen had entered; one pointed towards Abdullah, the other shrugged and called out, 'Sir?' in his direction.

Raza stood up, wearing Abdullah's grey coat, said 'Allah-o-Akbar' loudly enough to be heard. The diners seated next to him shrank into their seats; a man standing by the utensils picked up his child and held her protectively in his arms; someone called out to the policemen.

Kim Burton crouched beside a car in the parking lot, the side-view mirror allowing her to see the door to the restaurant without being seen. She didn't want him caught, she didn't want him to escape, she didn't want to be responsible either way. When the policemen exited, Abdullah in his grey winter coat handcuffed between them, she felt both sickened and relieved.

And then she saw his shoulders, far too slight for the great bulk of the winter coat.

41.

The policemen had identical grips. Each had hold of his upper arm with a pressure that was merely professional. One was left-handed, one right-handed, and Raza wondered if this had been a consideration in pairing them up. Did policemen, like opening batsmen, work well with a left-right combination?

Pellets of ice were falling out of the grey sky. Raza was glad to be outside, away from the atmosphere of terror replaced by thrill the diners had witnessed something, it would be on the evening news, they would tell all their friends to watch.

A car in the parking lot was covered in snow; it would have been here since the previous night. He wondered if its owner had spent the night in the restaurant, hiding in the bathroom stalls until the closing-up s.h.i.+ft departed, scavenging through the kitchens in the dregs of night, finding everything locked up save for condiments. Or perhaps someone was in that car had been there for days, would stay there until the first spring thaw revealed the corpse of a man so defined by absence that no one noticed he was missing.

His head was down so she wouldn't see his face. He wasn't actually looking at the car, was only recalling he had seen it as he entered the restaurant and had paid it no attention then. All he was looking at now was ice melting at every moment of impact with paving, with shoes, with the soil in the otherwise empty flowerbeds near the restaurant door. Annihilated by contact, any contact.

'Wait!' he heard her shout. The policemen stopped, angled their bodies towards her.

There was the spider, and there was its shadow. Two families, two versions of the spider dance. The Ashraf-Tanakas, the Weiss-Burtons their story together the story of a bomb, the story of a lost homeland, the story of a man shot dead by the docks, the story of body armour ignored, of running alone from the world's greatest power.

Still he didn't look up, but the s.p.a.ce between one footfall and the next told him she was walking towards him in large strides. No other sound in the parking lot; the zip of cars on the highway was backdrop and hope. Abdullah should have left through the exit around the back, he would be on the highway now, using his phone to call John and set up another meeting place. But it wasn't enough to be out of the parking lot, he needed time to get away, time in which no one would know they should be looking out for a broad-shouldered, hazel-eyed Afghan.

'I need to make sure that's him,' he heard Kim say.

Raza raised his head and bellowed, 'Chup!', the end of the word half-strangled with pain as the policemen's hands pressed down on his head, forced him to his knees.

He saw Kim Burton's eyes refuse to believe what they were seeing. Blood rushed to her face and for a moment she looked angry, furious Harry's quick temper manifest in her as though the world was attempting to play a trick on her which she didn't find even remotely entertaining. Then she was reaching a hand out to him, and Raza's body jerked away from her touch.

'Stand back,' he heard one of the policemen say.

Raza wasn't sure she'd heard. She was staring at him as a child might stare at a unicorn or some other creature of legend whose existence she'd always believed in yet never expected to receive proof of.

In any other circ.u.mstance he'd be reflecting her expression back at her. In the twenty years since Harry had handed him marshmallows on the beach and said Kim was asking if he had a girlfriend he'd been imagining and re-imagining their first meeting. Now his mouth twisted at how far his imagination had fallen short.

His grimace brought her back to the moment. He saw her looking up towards the restaurant window, then at the winter coat . . . she took a step back. She would be wondering, he guessed correctly, if he had set her up from the beginning, from that first phone call from Afghanistan. Why had he recoiled from her touch and why had he said, 'Chup!' It was one of the Urdu words with which Harry most liberally seasoned his language Raza would be aware she knew it meant 'Be quiet.' What did he think she was going to say? He saw Harry's careful intelligence in her looking at the pieces, trying to understand the picture.

The ice was falling into her auburn hair, splinters winking as they dissolved. For a moment, he wavered. All he needed to do was allow her to say what she had been about to say when he stopped her. She had only to say, 'That's not him,' and they would let him go. And then a bead of melted ice trailed down her face, following the route a tear might take he and Kim Burton would finally sit down face to face, to talk about Harry, to talk about Hiroko, to talk about everything.

But he would not do that to Abdullah. Not this Raza Konrad Ashraf not the one who had lain in the hold of a s.h.i.+p bearing the weight of an Afghan boy, not the one who had floated in the dagger-cold sea looking up at Orion, promising himself he would not be as he was before. Every chance, every second, he could give Abdullah he would.

He looked once more at the snow-covered car, the desolation of it, and wryly considered this new heroic persona he was trying to take on. Truth was, he didn't have the temperament for this kind of running anyway; they'd catch him soon enough. Perhaps arrest Bilal, or his mother, or anyone else who might be termed accomplice. Kim Burton, too, if she walked with him out of this parking lot. What a gift, then, what a surprising gift, to be able to say the moment when freedom ended had counted for something. Finally, he counted for something.

'Is it him?' one of the policemen said.

He looked straight at Kim.

'Hanh,' he said very softly. Hanh. Yes. Say yes.

He saw her decision, though he didn't know how or why she had come to it.

'Yes,' she said.

The men nodded and lifted Raza to his feet. Her expression became frantic as she heard the jangle of his handcuffs.

'I don't know that he's done anything wrong. He just looked suspicious. My father died in Afghanistan a few days ago. I'm not coping very well. There's nothing he's done wrong. Please let him go.'

'Don't worry,' the policeman said in the tone of voice men reserve for women they decide are hysterical. 'We're just going to ask him a few questions. And I'm sorry about your father.'

They walked Raza past Kim as they headed to the car. The look on her face was one he knew he'd never forget. No matter what happened to him, what anyone did now, what they said, how they tried to break him, he would remember as if it were a promise of the world that awaited if he survived Kim Burton's expression, which said, clearer than the words of any language, 'Forgive me.'

He would have. If it were in his power he would have taken her mistake from her and flung all the points of its gleaming sharpness into the heavens. But he knew it didn't work that way. He could only try to convey, in that final instant before they dragged him away in the dip of his head, the sorrow of his smile that he still saw the spider as well as its shadow.

42.

By the time she was speeding down the West Side Highway every traffic light turning green at her approach, the river lit up with Manhattan's liquid reflection, the sky that glowing orange which pa.s.sed for darkness on cloudy nights Kim Burton was no closer than she had been six hours earlier in the parking lot to understanding what had transpired that afternoon, both in the restaurant and in her own mind.

In one moment she saw Abdullah as the innocent. What had he said after all to warrant sending the law after an illegal Afghan? That he had sat in a car which might have driven over teddy bears? That Hiroko was to be honoured for a.s.suring her son a place in heaven? That those who defended their nation against attack were heroes? In the next moment he was a threat, seeing virtue only through the narrow prism of his religious belief, conferring martyrdom on those who attacked Americans. It was necessary to allow the experts those involved with threat a.s.sessment of a kind that was not part of her experience to speak to him, to make the decision she wasn't competent to make.

In that first moment, she was grateful beyond measure to Raza, that deus ex machina, long waiting in the wings of her life for the moment when he could enter with a flourish and interpose himself between her misguided intentions and their fulfilment. He would be fine, of course. She had concluded this before she even reached the border, once she was able to brush away the awful tension of the parking lot and consider the plain facts. Of course he would be fine. There wasn't any question of that. However bizarre his behaviour, there was nothing illegal about it, or about his presence in Canada. The policemen need never know he had helped Abdullah escape; they'd merely conclude that the American woman was paranoid, seeing a threat in every Muslim.

But in the next moment she was so angry she had to pull over more than once to collect herself. He had allowed Abdullah to escape. And now there was nothing she could do without exposing Raza as an accomplice. And how had that become the line she couldn't cross? This was the part that confounded her the most, made her want to rip the windpipe from Raza's throat. There had been such a surprising gravitas to him, such an urgency and knowing in his eyes, that she had done what she never otherwise did suspended her own judgement, and complied.

She missed Harry. She missed Ilse. She missed the world as it had been. Abdullah's voice in her head said it had never been.

When she entered the Mercer Street apartment the total darkness within told her Hiroko was asleep already. Kim had driven all the way back to the city instead of stopping in the Adirondacks as had been her original plan purely so she could tell Hiroko what had happened, but now it felt like a reprieve to be spared that tonight.

She switched on the floor lamp, and Hiroko was sitting upright on the sofa, looking at her.

'Where's my son, Kim?'

'G.o.d, Hiroko. You scared me.'

'I called you. Many times.'

'My battery died.' For some reason it seemed necessary to extract her phone from her pocket and hold it out as proof.

'Such a strange thing happened this afternoon.' Hiroko stood up and walked over to the window. 'Omar called and asked me to come downstairs.'

'Who's Omar?'

'Omar!' Hiroko snapped, turning to glare at Kim. 'You've been in his cab at least a dozen times.'

'Sorry. Of course.'

Hiroko continued to look at her for a moment, and then resumed staring down at the lights strung across the Williamsburg Bridge like stars too curious about the life of New York to keep their distance, her voice returning to its tone of neutrality.

'When I went downstairs he handed me his phone and said it was Abdullah. I thought he must have lost my number. Why else would he call Omar? But it was because he thought my phone might be tapped. By the CIA. As part of their investigations into your father's death.'

'What does Abdullah know about my father's death?' Her mouth had some trouble forming the words.

'Only what Raza told him.' She opened the side window, breathed in the slicing wind. 'He is running, Kim. Just as I said he was. He's been running since Harry's death. But not for the reason I thought. He's running from the CIA. They think he was involved, that he planned it.'

'Planned what?'

'Harry's death.' The wind rattled the pane, blew in a light scattering of snow.

'Is that supposed to be a joke?' When Hiroko didn't respond, Kim raised her voice. 'Does your friend Abdullah think my father's death is something to joke about?'

'He was calling to ask if it would help Raza or hurt him if he turned himself in. He said he saw you talking to the policemen before they took Raza away. Why was that, Kim Burton?' She closed the window, sealing the two of them into a dimly lit room. 'Could you explain?'

Kim had thought the world was strange and wrong a few hours earlier. Now she understood she had only been approaching the precipice.

'I didn't know Raza was there. I called the police yes, I did that; I had reasons I called them because of Abdullah.'

'What reasons?' She still had her back to Kim, but both women could see each other captured, inches apart, in the window.

The van he was in drove over a pile of teddy bears. There was no way to explain the terror in the silence of the Afghan which conveyed that image to her. Kim waved a hand imploringly and it pa.s.sed through Hiroko's reflection.

'I trusted my training. Don't you understand? If you suspect a threat you can't just ignore it because you wish and I really really wish this you lived in a world where all suspicion of Muslims is just prejudice, nothing more.'

'And there it is,' said Hiroko, finally turning to look at her.

'No, there it is not. How can you? Over three years we've been constant in each other's lives, and you think I'm a bigot? I'm sorry, but it wasn't Buddhists flying those planes, there is no video footage of Jews celebrating the deaths of three thousand Americans, it wasn't a Catholic who shot my father. You think it makes me a bigot to recognise this?'

'I think you're too scared and too angry to be allowed to make a judgement. What did you talk to him about? The orchards of Kandahar? The exaltation of being part of a successful cab strike and knowing this is how fights can be won, this is how they should be won? The fear of being a disappointment to his wife and son?'

Kim sat down where she was, all the way across the room, back pressed to the wall. The only light in the room was directed at Hiroko, standing up against an empty orange sky.

'I've seen you angry, but never like this,' she said in a small voice.

'I don't remember ever being like this. I don't like it. I don't like it at all.' She clenched her fists and shook them in front of her a strange gesture that only stopped short of being foolish by its surprising venom. 'Ilse once accused Sajjad of being a rapist. For all of two minutes she thought he was a rapist. She told me afterwards, those were two minutes in which she was lost. And look at you now, Ilse's granddaughter. You don't even know you're lost.'

'You can't possibly compare! She'd known him for years.'

'You'd known him for five minutes. That's how long he said you spoke to each other for. Was he lying about that? No, he wasn't, was he? You condemn a man based on five minutes of conversation. In its own way, that's as much of a crime as what Ilse did. Five minutes! I spent one evening and almost all the next day talking to him. Do you think I would have let you get into a car with him if I thought . . .' She pulled short, her voice strange to her in its rage.

Kim stood up, and walked a few steps towards Hiroko.

'If I did look at him and see the man who killed my father, isn't that understandable? I'm not saying it's OK, but you have to say you understand.'

'Should I look at you and see Harry Truman?'

Kim's eyes first widened, then narrowed. Was that supposed to be a trump card? Ridiculous, and insulting. Her own family had lost one of its own in Nagasaki; Konrad's death was the most vivid story of terror she had grown up with.

'Raza will be fine,' she said, turning her back on Hiroko. 'He's got A and G's lawyers on his side; there's nothing he can't get away with.'

'Not even Harry's murder?'

'Hiroko, I'm too tired for this,' she threw over her shoulder as she poured herself a gla.s.s of Scotch. Bath, drink, bed. Exactly what she'd wanted twenty-four hours ago before Hiroko had drawn her into this mad plan. Bath, drink, bed and tomorrow she'd call the estate agents and find if there was any way to bring forward the start of her tenancy. 'No one could think Raza is involved with Harry's murder. Your Afghan is a liar, and I don't know what besides.'

'Come back here and sit down.'

'I'm not one of your ten-year-old students, Mrs Ashraf.'

She was almost all the way to her bedroom when Hiroko spoke again.

'When Konrad first heard of the concentration camps he said you have to deny people their humanity in order to decimate them. You don't.'

Walk on, Kim told herself. Get into your bedroom and close the door. But she stayed where she was, cradling the gla.s.s of Scotch that put Harry in the room with her.

'You just have to put them in a little corner of the big picture. In the big picture of the Second World War, what was seventy-five thousand more j.a.panese dead? Acceptable, that's what it was. In the big picture of threats to America, what is one Afghan? Expendable. Maybe he's guilty, maybe not. Why risk it? Kim, you are the kindest, most generous woman I know. But right now, because of you, I understand for the first time how nations can applaud when their governments drop a second nuclear bomb.'

The silence that followed was the silence of intimates who find themselves strangers. The dark birds were between them, their burnt feathers everywhere.

Kim was the first to speak. Not to Hiroko, though. She picked up the phone and dialled Canada. She spoke to someone, then someone else, insisted, pleaded, held on a very long time. Finally she was asked to leave her number and wait by the phone.

She and Hiroko sat on a sofa, side by side, unspeaking.

Within a few seconds one of the policemen from the parking lot called. Kim put the call on speaker phone.

'I'm glad you called,' he said. 'I wanted you to know you did absolutely the right thing today.'