The man seems fascinated by his missing fingers.
He visits the river four times and when he is finished the American is drenched, the chains and the corrugated bed of the pickup glistening. The air undulates with heat, a killing flood. He sits at the tailgate with the leopard in his lap, as motionless as a toy, feeling his clothes dry by the minute, feeling the American’s eyes on him. There are clay nests of swallows high on the tilting face of the cliff. Now and then the American makes a move and there is a clink of chains and Mikal looks towards him. The white man’s eyes are a doorway to another world, to a mind shaped by different rules, a different way of life. What kind of a man is he? Is he well spoken, a union of strength and delicacy? Is he in love with someone or is he oblivious? Does he, like Mikal, have a brother?
He opens a tin of food for the cub and places it in front of it and then feeds the American. Afterwards he takes a chapatti and a piece of mutton from the napkin and eats his lunch. The clothes cool his skin as they dry, the shade beginning to feel as good as a rainfall. Now and then the man looks out past Mikal into the heat as though he has heard someone or something. Or he stares fixedly at one spot on the tarpaulin as though someone is standing just on the other side. Sitting wrapped in the chains in the crosslegged position, the good arm bound to the side of him. He seems to doze and after a while so does Mikal. He rouses occasionally and looks at the tide of the cliff’s shadow as it revises itself with the sun’s movement. Telling himself he’ll continue when the jagline reaches that scrubby bush, that striped rock, that cleft in the earth.
Eventually he gets up and removes a hubcap and fills it from the river and puts it on the passenger seat and places the leopard cub in it.
He sets off across the valley, the sun standing perfectly motionless in the sky. There is grass here and there and it is golden in the sun and in a distant clump of it he sees a black jackal and for a second he mistakes it for the missing Airedale.
An hour later he drives out of the barren valley and begins to climb through the hills. Thin grass and sparse acacias. He lowers his speed when, ahead of him, beside boulders the colour of raw sugar striated with blue, he sees an emaciated man and woman sitting in the dust, with a thin black goat wearing the sole of a rubber slipper around its neck to ward off the evil eye. They tell him they are refugees from the fighting in Afghanistan. Their daughter has died in a bombing raid. ‘They are still fighting,’ the woman says. ‘Her death didn’t shame any of them.’ And then she asks Mikal if he has any jasmine perfume. ‘The goat won’t let us milk it unless we wear the perfume our daughter used to wear when she milked it.’ Mikal shares some of his food with them.
‘Why have you stopped here?’ he asks.
‘They charge money to let the refugees pass.’
‘Who?’
The man waves his hand in the direction Mikal is going. ‘The tribal lords of this area. They have set up a toll on the road. Do you have money to pay them, to pass through?’
There were no tolls on the road when he left Megiddo yesterday.
They entrust him to Allah’s protecting power and he leaves.
After journeying through the high rolling desert for half an hour he gets out and climbs to a ridge — going up an incline of thick gravel that lies like wheat escaping from a torn sack — and looks out onto the other side. A quarter-mile ahead of him is the road that he should have taken, and on it he sees a toll booth. A crudely made wooden shed. He immediately drops to the ground. Raising his head thirty seconds later he sees a vehicle coming in his direction, a trail of dust connecting it to the toll booth. Change of any kind is obvious in spare terrain and they have seen him.
‘Whatever you’re going to do, do it fast,’ he tells himself.
He turns and is off the ridge in five leaps. Getting back behind the wheel he realises there is nowhere for him to hide and with the vehicle in reverse he crashes into the bushes as fast as he can go, now looking at the wing mirror, now in front, the water sloshing out of the leopard’s hubcap. He takes the pistol out of his waistband and holds it in his left hand and continues until the low-lying stand of mesquite he had seen earlier comes into view. He backs into it, the branches thrashing hectically against the side. The other vehicle comes into view and two men get out a few yards from where he was, looking up at the ridge, one of them with binoculars. After five minutes they get back in and drive off towards the toll booth.
An hour from sunset and he is in a small south-facing valley, sitting among the rocks beside a pool that has small blue flowers growing at its edges. The pickup is on a ridge ten feet directly above him, the door on the driver’s side open. He has driven in several directions and met culs de sac again and again. He is very hungry and he sits with the leopard in his arms, the creature testing the air with its nose. He walks up to the bush five yards away, the branches full of yellow berries as though hundreds of dots have been made with a thick piece of coloured chalk. Letting their thin blood run from the corners of his mouth he begins to pick and eat them, and as he stands chewing he looks towards the pickup. In the palm of his hand he collects berries for the American and climbs up to the pickup and lifts the tarpaulin flap.
The first thing he sees is that the man is standing up. His left leg is free of the chain. Then he sees that the uninjured right arm is free as well. He sees the hand gripping the knife owned by Fatima’s nephew. All that holds the man captive is the chain attached to the right leg and the one attached to the neck ring.
He stands square to Mikal, a cold reptile calculation in his eyes. The skin is raw on the ankle of the freed foot where he has pulled it out of the ring.
Mikal takes in air with great movements of his lungs, his eyes on the man. There is a notch at the bottom of the knife’s blade, near the hilt, and he knows it is called the Quetta Notch, meant for stripping sinew, repairing rope nets. He raises his hand to his mouth and begins to eat the berries without taking his eyes off the American. The leopard is in his other hand and madly he wonders why the animal’s heartbeat has remained steady unlike his own. He backs away from the tailgate, letting go of the flap, and sprints to the front. He can feel the American turning on the other side of the tarpaulin to keep pace with him, feeling the green and brown gaze through the cloth. He arrives at the open door a second after he hears the sound of breaking glass: the American has broken the long window behind the driver’s seat, and is now looking at Mikal through it. The 9 mm is in the hollow between the two seats and Mikal is not sure if the man knows it’s there, not sure if he can see it through the broken opening. Is his arm long enough to reach in and grab it?