The man nods. ‘How many are there? Tell them to come out.’
‘They’re asleep.’
The man swears under his breath and walks to the tailgate and kicks it several times. ‘Wake up.’ The noise certainly wakes his companions in the room, one of whom utters a curse, another a threat, a third an insult. One stumbles to the door, loosely carrying a Kalashnikov, and after looking around with eyes screwed up, and assessing that there is nothing untoward about the situation, he calls his companion a ‘dirty infidel’ and goes back inside. The man with the rose returns to Mikal.
Mikal reaches into his pocket. ‘I am very sorry for having troubled you. How much do I owe you?’
‘Give me a hundred and go,’ the man says, holding out the palm of the hand that has the blossom pinched between the tip of the thumb and first finger. He raises himself on his toes and casts a casual glance through the driver’s window.
Mikal decides he’ll give him 110; but the man is now leaning into the window for a closer look at something. Mikal knows it’s the leopard, and the man confirms it by opening the door and picking up the cub — he turns and stands facing Mikal.
‘Is this yours?’
‘Yes. Here’s one hundred and ten. I am very sorry to have troubled you.’
‘How much do you want for it?’
‘I can’t sell it.’
‘Why not?’
He studies the man, the cub quivering in his hands. ‘It’s not mine to sell. It’s my sister’s.’
‘The sister in the back?’ the man says. ‘Wake her up.’ He turns his head at an angle and spits on the ground without taking his eyes off Mikal.
‘Actually it belongs to my father.’ Mikal reaches out but the man makes no move to relinquish the cub. There are sleepy murmurs from the booth, muffled protests that the transaction is taking too long, the sound of this conversation interfering with rest.
‘Where is your father?’ There is a note of menace in the voice now. ‘Why did you say it was your sister’s?’
‘It belongs to my whole family. I said what I said because I am tired. It’s been a long day.’
‘They are sound sleepers,’ the man points to the back of the pickup. Mikal proffers the money again, giving a quick glance to the automatic at the man’s hip. ‘Here is what I owe.’
The man looks deeply at him. ‘Is the necklace around your neck your sister’s too?’
Mikal wasn’t aware that it had revealed itself. A small section of it is lying over his collar and he covers it up, sending it below the neckline just as the man reaches into the pickup and takes out the ignition key. His eyes are full of mystery and black silence. It seems that all human relations are to be weighed anew at this site. ‘Wait here,’ he says, handing the leopard cub to Mikal. ‘And I want them out of the back and lined up here in thirty seconds.’ He turns and walks towards the room, switching on the light in there, shouting at the others to get up.
It takes Mikal five seconds to reach the door of the room and another five to pull it shut with a bang and secure the bolt. The men shout and rattle the door but he is already in the pickup, taking the spare key from the glove compartment and starting the engine. By the twentieth second there are several yards between him and the toll booth, the tyres speeding up, but he knows it won’t take much to break down the door.
Ahead on the road he already sees the original toll booth he had been trying to avoid, the pile of wood burning across the road, a Pajero parked outside it. Without slowing down he tears through the flames, brilliant cinders spraying into the night. He hears a gunshot or perhaps it is something in the fire, a knot exploding in a log. Not knowing when he took it out of the waistband, he is holding his gun in his hand. The leopard is clamped between his thighs and the jangle and clatter of chains comes from the back of the pickup and the road winds through the night and it isn’t long before he sees a trail of dust raised by the vehicle that is following him, perhaps a mile and a half behind him, the dust glowing faintly in the moonlight the way mist marks the path of a river, and he sees the funnels of two headlights and cannot believe the speed at which they are gaining. He hears the flat reports that long-barrelled guns give over open ground, one bullet shattering the mirror on the passenger’s side. And in his own mirror he sees another set of headlights moving across the open desert floor in a pale hovering of raw dust, coming at him at a diagonal. Somewhere ahead is the Wolf River. After crossing the bridge he would be only twenty minutes away from Megiddo.
Sweat is soaking through his clothes. Rounding the corner of the second-to-last hill, he brings the pickup to a sideways halt in the middle of the road. Ahead of him the bridge over the river is burning with flames as tall as electricity poles. He gets out and stands looking at it, pieces of wood falling into the water twenty feet below. The ground seems to shake with the force of the fire, as though the dead are making room for him down there — a vision of Allah’s left side on the Day of Judgement.
He takes the tarpaulin off the frame, undoing the straps that fasten it to the metal. The American, exposed, looks at the fire in astonishment. Mikal drags the tarpaulin towards where the ground slopes towards a gravel bar at the edge of the river, and walks into the river with the heavy cloth until he is up to his waist in the moving water, pushing the folds of the tarpaulin under with both his hands. He looks up towards the bridge — calculating how many of its wooden planks are gone. The burning pieces fall and hiss as they meet the red-lit water. By sitting down and dipping his head below the surface he drenches himself completely, and then walks out of the river dragging the soaked tarpaulin behind him, twice as heavy as before.
He comes up the slope and the American begins to struggle wildly against the chains when he sees him appear with the waterlogged cloth, fully comprehending what Mikal has in mind. The man twists with his teeth gritted and then screams the English word Mikal does understand, ‘No! No! No! No! No!’ feet scrabbling against the metal bed, running sideways. Mikal hurls the tarpaulin onto him like a fisherman’s net, dripping golden drops, losing his balance from the swing for a moment, and then climbing up after it, making sure that the man is entirely covered. He leaps off the bed and gets in behind the steering wheel, putting the cub under his wet shirt. Working the steering wheel as fast as he can he aims the pickup into the mouth of the fire. I thought of your beauty and this arrow made of a wild thought is in my marrow. The words Naheed had quoted.
He enters the blind lethal power of a hundred suns and the American hasn’t stopped shouting or struggling under the tarpaulin and the tyres judder as they go over the burning planks, the thickets of flame pressed against the vehicle, twisting in their own hot wind and the fire has a sound too, the roar of a primordial beast, the sound of the river fading within it, but as he progresses across the bridge it returns, the flame suddenly silent, and the phenomenon repeats itself as he moves forward, the blunt needles of the cub’s paws digging into his skin, the heat becoming unbearable and soon he realises that he is saying Naheed’s name, calling out to her in desperation, because he has to get across, because the bridge is the bridge between the innermost part of him and the American’s, something that can’t be consumed or rendered meaningless even by fire, a bridge to his parents and Basie, to a world where Jeo is still alive and where Tara never went to prison, to the white-hot core of the fire, the flash that took away Rohan’s sight. He won’t let them catch the American soldier, and at that moment he loves the American soldier, and he loves the two he killed, and he loves the dead girl who wore jasmine, so much so that he feels his heart will not bear the weight of it and will kill him before the fire kills him. The pickup lurches from side to side as the planks break under it. The flames reach in when the windshield blackens before his eyes and then cracks with a shear of light, and he no longer knows if he is moving in a horizontal line or falling through the air vertically with the vehicle covered in flames. But then suddenly he is on the other side. He stops and opens the door and, dropping the cub onto the ground, struggles back onto the bed of the pickup, feeling as though he is doing it with extreme slowness. He coughs the smoke out of his lungs. Catches a glimpse of the burning tyres as he goes, the blistered paintwork.