“I am very curious about one thing that you didn’t mention in your statement,” he says. “Why did he try to use your call sign?”
When someone dies, you are free to make up any old story about them. You can’t betray the dead. If they come back from the dead and catch you betraying them, then you are trapped.
It suddenly seems as if Obaid has cheated on me by being alive. I signed the fucking statement because you were dead. I cut a bloody deal because you were supposed to have been blown to bits because of your own stupidity. Now you are standing there asking for explanations. Couldn’t you have stayed dead?
Suddenly, I want to strangle Baby O with my own hands.
I pat Major Kiyani’s shoulder. I look into his eyes. I try to harness the tea-party camaraderie that we have both been fostering.
“Major Kiyani, only a professional like you can appreciate this,” I say, trying to keep my voice from choking, covering up the surprise that you get when you see someone who you thought had taken a hit from a surface-to-air missile. Also the bigger surprise: your own desire to see them dead. “It could only have been a case of professional jealousy.”
Baby O opens his eyes and puts his hand above his missing eyebrows to block the sun that must be piercing his eyes. His hand is covered in a bloodstained bandage.
“Which one of you is Colonel Shigri’s son?”
If it hadn’t been Secretary General’s voice, I would have ignored it. If it hadn’t been his handcuffed hands raised in air, as if he were trying to raise a point of order in his central committee meeting, I wouldn’t have recognised him. I always imagined him to be old and shrivelled and bald, with thick reading glasses. He is much younger than his distinguished career would suggest. A tiny but milk-white shock in his short hair, a village tattooist’s idea of an arrow piercing an apple of a heart adorning the left side of his hairless chest. He has the physique of a peasant and a bright open face as if the years of living in dark dungeons have given it a strange glow. His eyes are flitting between me and Major Kiyani. Trust Secretary General to confuse me with Major Kiyani. His eyes scan the table brimming with food and then our faces. It seems he is trying to decide which one is the teapot and which one the cup. A cloud’s shadow travels across the lawn. My eyes squint. Major Kiyani reaches for his pistol. Before the shot rings out, I hear Major Kiyani’s booming voice.
“I am, comrade. I am Colonel Shigri’s son.”
TWENTY-FOUR
The three-member team of marines stationed at the gate of the ambassador’s residence was having a hard time matching their guests with the guest list. They were expecting the usual tuxedos from the diplomatic corps and gold-braided khakis from the Pakistan Army, but instead they were ushering in a steady stream of flowing turbans, tribal gowns and embroidered shalwar qameez suits. If this was a fancy-dress party, the ambassador had forgotten to tell the men guarding his main gate. The invitation did say something about a Kabul — Texas themed barbecue, but it seemed the guests had decided to ignore the Texas part and gone all native for the evening.
The floodlight that hung on the tree above the marines’ guardhouse — a wooden cottage decked in red, white and blue bunting for the evening — was so powerful that the usually noisy house sparrows who occupied the surrounding trees in the evenings had either shut up or flown away. The monsoon had decided to bypass Islamabad this year and the light breeze carried only dust and dead pollen.
The marines, commanded by twenty-two-year-old Corporal Bob Lessard and helped by a steady supply of beer and hot dogs sneaked out by their colleague on catering duty, managed to remain cheerful in the face of an endless stream of guests who didn’t look anything like their names on the guest list.
The local CIA chief, Chuck Coogan, one of the first guests to arrive, sported a karakul cap and an embroidered leather holster hung from his left shoulder. The US Cultural Attache came wearing an Afghan burqa, one of those flowing shuttlecocks that she had tucked halfway over her head to reveal the plunging neckline of her shimmering turquoise dress.
The marines had started their celebrations early. They took turns going into the guardhouse to take swigs from bottles of Coors that were chilling in the cooler as Corporal Lessard crossed off another name on his clipboard and greeted the ambassador’s guests with a forced smile. He welcomed a hippie couple draped in identical Afghan kilims which smelled as if they had been used to pack raw hashish.
“Freedom Medicine?” he asked.
“Basic health for Afghan refugees,” said the blonde girl with neon-coloured beads in her hair. “For the muj injured in the guerrilla war,” said the blond goateed boy in a low voice, as if sharing a closely guarded secret with Corporal Lessard. He let them in, covering his nose with his clipboard. He welcomed Texan nurses wearing glass bangles up to their elbows and a military accountant from Ohio showing otf his Red Army medal, most probably taken off the uniform of a dead Soviet soldier by the muj and sold to a junk shop.
Corporal Lessard’s patience ran out when a University of Nebraska professor turned up wearing a marine uniform. “Where do you think you are going, buddy?” Corporal Lessard demanded. The professor told him in hushed tones that his Adult Literacy Consultancy was actually a programme to train the Afghan mujahideen to shoot and edit video footage of their guerrilla attacks. “Some of these guys have real talent.”
“And this?” Corporal Lessard fingered the shoulder epaulette on the professor’s crisp camouflage uniform.
“Well, we are at war. Ain’t we?” The professor shrugged and tucked both his thumbs into his belt.
Corporal Lessard had little patience for soldiers behaving like civilians and none whatsoever for civilians pretending to be soldiers, but he found himself powerless in this situation. This evening he was nothing but a glorified usher. He’d had no say in deciding the guest list, let alone the dress code, but he wasn’t going to let this joker get away with this.
“Welcome to the front line,” he said, handing his clipboard to the professor. “Here you go. Consider yourself on active duty now.” Corporal Lessard retreated into the guardhouse, positioned himself on a stool from where he could keep an eye on the professor and joined the beer pot contest with his staff.
Beyond the guardhouse, the guests could choose between two huge catering tents. In the first one the central spread was a salad the size of a small farm, red cabbage and blueberries, giant ham sandwiches with blueberry chutney, all arranged in the shape of an American flag. Before a row of gas-powered grills, marines stood in their shorts and baseball caps, barbecuing hot dogs, quarter-pounders and piles of corn on the cob. Pakistani waiters in bolo ties and cowboy hats roamed with jugs of punch and paper glasses, dodging children who had already started hot-dog fights, and offering drinks to the few people who had bothered to venture into this tent. A long queue was forming outside the adjacent tent, where eight whole lambs skewered on long iron bars were roasting on an open fire. An Afghan chef was at hand to reassure everyone that he had slaughtered the lambs himself and that everything in the tent was halal.
The ambassador’s wife had been feeling sick to her stomach ever since seeing the Afghan chef put an inch-thick iron rod through the first of eight baby lambs that morning. It was Nancy Raphel herself who had come up with the Kabul — Texas theme, but she was already regretting the idea because most of the guests were turning up in all kinds of variations on traditional Afghani clothes and suddenly her own understated mustard silk shalwar qameez seemed ridiculous. The sight of so many Americans decked out like Afghan warlords repulsed her. She was glad that her own husband had stuck to his standard evening wear, a double-breasted blue blazer and tan trousers.