Chapter Twenty-Three · Adam's Robe Book 3

Udvada, Gujarat, India — Day 32, night

Nassiri gave up on sleep a little after eleven, and went down the stairs in his socks with his shoes in his hand.

The guesthouse was dark. The widow's radio had been turned off an hour before, and the corridor smelled of cold rice and camphor. At the foot of the stairs a single bulb burned over the register, and under it, on a folding cot, the widow's grandson lay asleep with one arm flung over his face. Nassiri stepped round him. He put his shoes on in the doorway, and went out, and closed the door so softly that the latch made no sound at all.

It was warm outside, and still. The street lay under a thin gray light that came from nowhere, from the stars and the whitewash and the long dry shine of the road. Nothing moved. The dogs of the town, which usually quarreled at this hour, had gone to ground. He walked east, away from the sanctuary and the square, toward the end of the town where the lanes thinned out into salt flats and the smell of the sea began.

He had stood in this town for fourteen days, and he had not yet been to the water.

It lay a short way beyond the last house, behind a low sea wall of piled stone. He climbed it and sat. A long, flat, black expanse ran out to a horizon that could not be seen. Along its edge a faint pale line broke and drew back, broke and drew back, with a sound like a hand drawn slowly across cloth. There were no ships. For fourteen days, he realized, he had not seen a ship, and it was the first quiet he had known since the dhow.

Tomorrow.

He said it to himself without feeling. It was a fact, like the hour or the tide. In some twelve hours he would walk through a green door into a room he had been told about and not yet seen. An old man in a white coat would put in front of him what the household called a trial. He had not asked what a trial was. He had been told that he would be seen. He had gone over the sentence so many times that it had worn smooth, and no longer meant anything.

He thought, instead, of a pencil box.

It had been tin. It was the first thing he saw when he let himself, and it came up from some depth he had stopped sounding, exact in every particular. A flat tin box with a picture of a rocket on the lid, the paint chipped at the corners where a child's thumbs had worked it open. Inside, ranked by color from red through violet, with care, as if it mattered, eleven pencils. Amir had been eleven. He had done everything in order. He lined up his shoes at the door, and his books by height. On the evening before the last time Nassiri saw him he had stood in the doorway of the flat in Karaj and shown his father the pencil box. He had asked, with grave pleasure, whether his father noticed anything different.

You have sharpened them, Nassiri had said.

All of them, said Amir. I did it with a knife. Aunt Parvin said I was not allowed. I did it anyway.

It is a good edge.

It had been the whole of the conversation. He had a train to Tehran in the morning. He had put his hand on the boy's head, which was the correct gesture, as he had been taught, and he had not yet learned another. Then he had gone.

He had been a father as he had been a colonel, by arrangement and in absence. The boy lived with his mother's sister, because Nassiri's work did not allow a household, and because the boy's mother had left long before and had left nothing behind her but a name that neither of them spoke. He sent money on the first of the month. He telephoned when he could. He had believed, in those years, that this was a form of devotion, one of the quieter ones. A man arranged the world so that a child could be safe within it without ever knowing the cost.

The strikes had come on a morning of light rain.

He had been on a road outside the capital, in a car, with a driver and a radio, and the radio had been tuned to an operations channel that was never meant to carry anything but coordinates. A flat voice had given a sector. Another had given a list. He had been listening for a vehicle. He had listened, in that bored, deliberate way a man listens who is hunting a number among numbers, and the number had come, and it had been a street. Karaj. A residential block. The voice had said the street's name, and the building's, and then, as an afterthought, in a different tone, possible secondary, meaning the thing that had been hit had not been the thing that had been meant.

He had told the driver to stop. He had sat for a quarter of an hour in the back of the car with the engine ticking, not moving. Then he had told the driver to go on.

That was the whole of it. He had gone on. He had completed the day's work, a meeting in a basement, a handover of papers, a drive back in the dusk with the rain stopped. He had arrived at the flat in Karaj at midnight. He had stood in the street among men with lamps, in front of a wall that was no longer a wall. A woman had put a tin box into his hands, dented, with a rocket on the lid, found by someone in the rubble. He thought it was Parvin. He could not afterward have sworn to it.

He still had it. He had carried it for three and a half years. It was in the bag in his room, wrapped in a sock. He had not opened it since the night he was given it, because he knew exactly how the pencils would look.

Eight months after that night he had put on the cloth on a mountain.

The sea drew back and broke. A wind had got up, off the water, warm and damp, and it stirred his sleeves.

Three years. That was what he had said to the old man. I carried it for nearly three years. And what had he done with it? He asked himself the question plainly, in the flat, disciplined voice he trusted, and then, because the voice would not hold, in another that he did not know. He had waved a conscript's hand aside at a checkpoint. He had been handed a slip of paper by a trader who had never given anything away. He had asked a young man in a gray suit for a name, and received it, and the young man had a daughter. Small, self-directed things. Deniable. Each had a reasonable explanation, and he had accepted each. Not once in thirty-four months had he walked into a room that mattered and used what he carried for the single purpose he had told himself it was kept for.

He had told himself he was waiting. He had said it so long that the sentence had calcified into belief. The second garment changes everything. He heard it now, in the dark, and heard what was wrong with it. It had the sound of a door held shut by someone leaning on the other side.

A voice spoke behind him, in English, quite softly.

"It is a good place to think. I have thought here myself."

He never started. He had trained himself out of it long ago. He turned his head slowly, as one does who has been expecting an interruption and has merely been waiting to learn its shape.

The young man in the blue shirt stood at the foot of the sea wall with his hands in view. He was perhaps twenty-six, with a lean, pleasant, anxious face. He held a paper bag. In the light off the water he looked like a clerk who has been told to deliver a parcel and has just realized that the recipient is dangerous.

"I am sorry to disturb you, Colonel," he said. "I have been trying to speak to you for a week. It is difficult. You are a cautious person."

"You are the man on the scooter."

"I am the man on the scooter." He gave a small, rueful bow. "My name does not matter. I work for an agent in Mumbai, who works for a friend of a friend. It is a long chain. I do not know the end of it, and I would prefer not to." He lifted the bag. "I have brought you tea. It is not drugged. I would drink it myself, but you will not believe me, so I will put it here."

He set it on the wall at some distance. A flask and two paper cups. Nassiri did not touch it.

"You have a message."

"I have an offer." The young man cleared his throat. "My employer wishes it said first that you are not being threatened. Nobody is going to hurt you. Nobody is going to harm the house, or the old man, or the foreigners. I was told to say that three times." He took a breath. "There is a car on the east lane tomorrow night, a green Ambassador, with a driver. There is a passage by sea from a fishing harbor an hour up the coast. There are papers in the glove compartment, in a name that belongs to no one, with a visa for a country that will not ask you any questions. There is money. It is all arranged. You need only go out of the house, when it is over, by the lane on the east, and get in."

"It is not a trap," said Nassiri.

"I was told you would say that. I was told to say that it is not."

"That is the first sentence of every trap."

"Yes, sir," said the young man, with a flicker of unexpected humor. "It is also the first sentence of every kindness. I have found it hard to tell them apart from this side."

Nassiri looked at him for some time. There was a fisherman's lamp far out on the water, and it rose and fell.

"When it is over," he said.

"Yes."

"You say it as if you know what will be over."

"I do not, sir. I am not told." The young man's anxious face did not change. "I am told that after tomorrow afternoon there will be some people in this town who are not the people who are here now. That it will not be a good place to be. My employer does not wish you to be in it. That is all."

Some people. The words went into him like cold water. He put the arithmetic together like a sentence heard in fragments all week. A service in Tel Aviv with a team to send. A colonel in Islamabad with a channel. A foreigner with a folding stool at the end of the east lane. After tomorrow afternoon.

They were not coming for the old man's house. They were coming for the hour after it.

"Who is your employer's employer?" he said.

"I do not know."

"You do. You have a guess."

"I have a guess." The young man looked at his hands. "I would not like to say it. It might be wrong, and the people it is about do not forgive that."

"I will not forgive it if it is right."

There was a long pause. The sea broke on the stones below them with a sound like a sigh.

"Sir," said the young man, quietly, "I have been watching you for eleven days. I was sent to find a colonel who had done terrible things. I have found someone who sits on a wall at night and does not look at his phone. I do not know what is in that house. I do not wish to. But I have a sister. If she were in your position I would want someone to say to her, take the car." He bowed again, small. "That is all. I am sorry. The tea will get cold."

"Tell your employer that I am grateful," said Nassiri. "Tell him that I will leave the way I came. By the front door."

"He thought you might say that." The young man seemed almost relieved. "He told me to add one thing. The offer does not expire. If you change your mind, the car will be there until it is not. He said you would understand that."

"I do."

"Good night, Colonel."

He went away along the foot of the wall, without hurry, with his hands loose at his sides. At the corner, where the lane began, he paused, and looked back once, as people do who wish to remember a face. Then he was gone into the dark between the houses. The sound of a scooter started up somewhere behind them, and faded.

The tea sat on the wall, a gray shape in the dark, giving off a thin line of steam.

Nassiri sat for a long time without moving.

He left the tea alone. There was no need. He was thinking of what the old man had said at the gate, in the long light, with his hand on the frame. I will not send men to follow you. He had not. The old man had never once sent anyone. Somebody else had sent the young man in the blue shirt. Somebody else had a car on the east lane. Somebody else, in a room a long way off, had already decided what would happen to a house that had asked its neighbors to a prayer meeting.

He could warn them. The thought came with perfect clarity. He could walk back up the lane now, in the dark, and strike the green door with his fist, and say, there are people coming. He could say it to the old man's face. He could be the one who, on the last night, did the clear thing.

He could also say nothing, and let the afternoon come, and let it be a hearing and not a flight. If he warned them, the house would bolt its door. The witnesses would go home and what had been offered would be withdrawn. He would be, once again, alone in a rented room with the cloth under his shirt and an argument he could not finish. It would be safer for everyone. It would be a lie. It would be exactly the kind of restraint he had despised in a man on a mountainside.

He made no decision. He was surprised, a little, to find that he did not need to. Some part of him had already settled it, quietly, in the hour since the young man spoke, as a stone settles in a riverbed.

They are coming for the hour after.

Then let them find me standing nearest the gate.

It was a thought one could have in the dark, by the sea, without examining it. He did not examine it. He put it with the rest, where the plain truths went, and sat looking at the water until the lamp far out had turned into a boat, and the boat had turned to a smudge.

He took the notebook from his pocket. He turned to the back. Soltani. Ghorbani. Two lines beneath them, ruled and blank. He looked at the blank lines. After a time he wrote, in the small block hand he used for things he did not intend to lose, a single line.

Amir. Eleven. All of them sharpened.

He read it. He closed the book.

Then he stood, stiffly; he had sat a long while on stone. He left the tea where it was and walked back up the dark road toward the town and the room and the hours that remained. The wind had dropped. In the lane behind the guesthouse a dog barked once, and fell silent. Above him, high up, there was a plane going over, small and slow and blinking, toward some city where nobody had yet been told.