AHLAH USED GREAT CARE TO SET OUT THE TOOLS of her craft. She lifted the transparent plastic trays from their green metal workbox and lined them up neatly. She took the narrow-nosed pliers, the drill, and the wire cutter from their protective sheaths and she laid them on either side of the row of cords, cables, and lengths of gold chain that she used to assemble the intricate necklaces and earrings which Rachel and her mother had kindly undertaken to sell among the jewellery in their shop. “This's every bit as good as anything we got at Racon,” Rachel had declared loyally. “Mum'll want to show it, Sahlah. You'll see. Anyway, what c'n it hurt to try? If it sells, you got some money for yourself. If it doesn't, you got some new jewellery, right?”
There was a degree of truth to Rachel's words. But beyond the money—three-quarters of which she turned over to her parents once she'd earned enough to pay off Theo's bracelet—it had been the idea of doing something on her own and something that was purely an expression of herself that had motivated Sahlah to design and create for eyes and purses outside of her family's.
Had this been the first step? she wondered as she reached for the tray of African beads and trickled them slowly into her palm like winter raindrops, cool and smooth. Was it when she decided to engage in this solitary creative act that she'd first awakened to the possibilities offered by a world beyond the realm of her family? And had this act of creating something as simple as jewellery in the isolation of her bedroom produced the first fissure in her contentment?
No, she realised. Nothing was ever as simple as that. There was no primary cause-and-effect that she could point a finger at, explaining not only the restlessness of her spirit but also the soreness of an insular heart. What there was instead was the entire duality of a life lived with her feet attempting to march in two conflicting worlds.
“You're my English girl,” her father had said to her nearly every day as she scooped up her schoolbooks in the morning. And she'd heard the pride in his voice. She was born in England; she went to the junior school right there in town with English children; she spoke the language by virtue of both birth and exposure and not from having had to learn it as an adult. Therefore, in her father's mind she was English, and as verifiably English as any child with porcelain cheeks that flushed like peach skin after play. She was, in fact, as English as Akram secretly longed to be.
Muhannad was right in this, Sahlah realised. Although their father attempted to wear two different suits of cultural clothing, his true love was with the three-piece suits and brollies of his adopted country despite his duty's entanglement with the shalwār-gamīs of his heritage. And from the moment of his children's births, he'd expected them to share and understand this perplexing dichotomy. At home they were to be dutiful: Sahlah subdued and obedient, honing skills in homemaking to please a future husband; Muhannad respectful and industrious, preparing himself to shoulder the burdens of the family business and eventually producing sons who would shoulder that burden in their turn. Beyond the home, though, the two Malik children were to be quintessentially English. Counselled by their father to mix with their schoolmates, they were supposed to establish friendships in order to garner respect and affection for the family name and consequently for the family business. And to this latter end, Akram monitored their schooldays, looking for signs of social progress where he could not possibly hope to find them.
Sahlah had tried to humour him. Unable to face being the cause of her father's disappointment, she'd made valentines and birthday cards addressed to herself, and she'd brought them home, signed in the names of fellow pupils. She'd written herself chatty, gossipy notes ostensibly passed her way during science and maths. She'd found discarded pictures of classmates and autographed them to herself, with love. And when her father got wind of birthday parties, off she went in mock attendance to a celebration in which she was never included, jubilating instead in a tree at the bottom of the orchard, where she was hidden from the house and from the prospect of her father's disillusion.
But Muhannad made no similar attempt to fulfill their father's fantasies. He had no conflicts about being dark-skinned in a white-faced world, and he didn't seek to mitigate any consternation he encountered, consternation aroused at the sight of a foreigner living among a populace who were largely unused to dark faces. Born in England like herself, he no more considered himself an Englishman than he considered cows capable of flight. Indeed, the last thing on earth Muhannad would have wanted to be was an Englishman. He scorned what went for the English culture. He had only contempt for the ceremonies and traditions that formed the foundation of English life. He ridiculed the stiff upper lips that propriety required of men who dubbed themselves gentlemen. And the masks that Westerners wore to hide their biases and prejudices he eschewed entirely. He displayed his own biases, prejudices, and animosities like the family escutcheon. And the demons that haunted him were not and had never been the demons of race, no matter how he tried to convince himself and others that this was the case.
But she wouldn't think of Muhannad now, Sahlah decided. And she took up her long-nosed pliers as if making a pretence of work would somehow assist her in driving from her mind any consideration of her brother. She pulled paper towards her to sketch a necklace design, hoping that putting pencil to paper and carved beads in position would obliterate from memory that glitter in her brother's eye when he was determined to have his way, that streak of cruelty which he always managed to keep diligently hidden from both of their parents, and most of all that anger of his and how it whipped through his arms and burst from the tips of his fingers when she least expected.
Somewhere in the house below her, Sahlah heard Yumn calling to one of her boys. “Baby, precious baby,” she was cooing. “Lovely boy. Come to your Ammī-gee, little man.”
Sahlah's throat closed, her head grew light, and the African beads melded one into the other on the table before her. She released her grip on the long-nosed pliers, crossed her arms on the tabletop, and sank her head into their cradle. How could she think of her brother's sins, Sahlah wondered, when her own were as grievous and just as capable of rending the family irreparably?
“I've seen you with him,” Muhannad had hissed in her ear. “You slut. I've seen you with him. Do you hear me? I've seen. And you're going to pay. Because all whores pay. Especially white men's filthy slags.”
But she hadn't intended anything harmful. Least of all had she intended love.
She'd been allowed to work with Theo Shaw because her father knew him from the Gentlemen's Cooperative and because accepting Theo Shaw's offer of his computer expertise was yet another way that Akram Malik could demonstrate solidarity with the English community. The mustard factory had recently moved to its new location in the industrial estate on Old Hall Lane, and this expansion had necessitated an updating of business procedures.
“It's time we entered the twentieth century,” Akram had told his family. “Business is good. Sales are increasing. Orders are up by eighteen percent. I've spoken to the good gentlemen of the Cooperative about this, and among them is a decent young man willing to assist us in computerising each of our departments.”
The fact that Akram had perceived Theo as decent was what made his interaction with Sahlah acceptable. Despite his own affection for them, Akram would have preferred that his daughter had no contact with Western men. Everything about a daughter of Asia was to be safeguarded and kept in trust for a future husband: from the moulding of her mind to the protection of her chastity. Indeed, her chastity was nearly as important as her dowry, and no step was too great to take if it could ensure that a woman went to her husband a virgin. Since Western men did not hold these same values, it was from them that Akram had to guard his daughter from the onset of puberty. But he put aside any and all worries when it had come to Theo Shaw.
“He's from a good family, an old town family,” Akram had explained, as if this fact made a difference in his level of acceptability. “He'll work with us to set up a system that will modernise every aspect of the company. We'll have computerised word processing for correspondence, spread sheets for accounting, programs for marketing, and desktop design for advertising and labelling. He's done this already for the pier, he tells me, and he says that within six months we'll see the results in accumulated man hours as well as in increased sales.”
No one had argued against the wisdom of accepting Theo Shaw's help, not even Muhannad, who was least likely to welcome an Englishman into their midst if that Englishman were to be in any position of superiority, even one as arcane as computer expertise. So Theo Shaw had come to Malik's Mustards, setting up the computer programs that would revolutionise the manner in which the factory did business. He'd trained the staff to operate these same programs. And among the staff had been Sahlah herself.
She hadn't intended to love him. She knew what was expected of her as an Asian daughter, despite her English birth. She would marry a man carefully chosen by her parents because, having her interests at heart and knowing her better than she knew herself, her parents would be able to identify the qualities in a prospective husband most complementary to her own.
“Marriage,” Wardah Malik had often told her, “is like the joining of two hands. Palms meet”—she demonstrated by holding her own hands up in an attitude of prayer—”and fingers intertwine. Similarity of size, shape, and texture make this joining both smooth and lasting.”
Sahlah couldn't have this joining with Theo Shaw. Asian parents did not choose Western men for their daughters to marry. Such a choice would only serve to adulterate the mother culture from which the daughter sprang. And that was unthinkable.
So she hadn't considered Theo anything other than the young man—affable, attractive, and casual in a way that only Western men were casual with a woman—who was doing a friendly service for Malik's Mustards. She hadn't really thought of him at all until he placed the stone on her desk.
He'd earlier admired her jewellery, the necklaces and earrings fabricated from antique coins and Victorian buttons, from African and Tibetan beads intricately carved by hand, even from feathers and copperas that she and Rachel collected on the Nez. He'd said, “That's nice, that necklace you're wearing. It's quite different, isn't it?” And when she'd told him she made it, he'd been openly impressed.
Had she been trained in jewellery making? he'd wanted to know.
Hardly, she'd thought. She'd have had to go off somewhere to school to be educated in her craft, perhaps to Colchester or regions beyond. That would have taken her away from her family, away from the business where she was needed. It's not allowed was what she wanted to say. But she'd told him instead a version of the truth. I like to teach myself things, she'd informed him. It's more fun that way.
The next day when she'd come into work, the stone had been on her desk. But it wasn't a stone, Theo explained to her. It was a fossil, the fin of a holostean fish from the Upper Triassic period. “I like its shape, the way the edges look feathered.” He coloured slightly. “I thought you might be able to use it for a necklace. As a centerpiece or something …? I mean, whatever you call it.”
“It would make a fine pendant.” Sahlah turned the stone in her hand. “But I'd have to drill a hole through it. You wouldn't mind that?”
Oh, the jewellery wasn't for him, he told her hastily. He meant her to use the fossil in a necklace for herself. He collected fossils out on the Nez, where the cliffs were collapsing, you see. He'd been looking through his display trays last night. He'd realised this particular fossil had a look and a shape that might lend it to being used artistically. So if she thought she could make something of it and with it, well … she was quite welcome to keep it.
Sahlah had known that to accept the stone—no matter how innocently it had been offered—would be to cross an invisible line with Theo Shaw. And she saw the part of herself that was Asian lowering her head and quietly sliding the serrated bit of prehistoric fish across the desk in polite refusal of the gift. But the part of herself that was English took action first, fingers closing round the fossil and voice saying, “Thank you. I know I can use it. I'll show you the necklace when I've finished it, if you'd like.”
“I'd like that very much indeed,” he said. Then he'd smiled and an unspoken bargain had been struck between them. Her jewellery making would be their excuse for conversation. His fossil collecting would justify their continuing to meet.
But one did not fall in love because a single stone or a thousand stones passed from a man's hand into a woman's. And Sahlah Malik hadn't fallen in love with Theo Shaw because of a stone. Indeed, until she was in the midst of loving him, she hadn't even realised that there was a simple word of four letters that explained the softness she felt round her heart, the yearning she experienced in the palms of her hands, the warmth that rose from her throat, and the lightness of body as if she had no real body when Theo was present or when she heard his voice.
“White man's slag,” Muhannad had cursed her, and she'd heard the hiss—like a snake's—in his words. “You're going to pay. The way all whores pay.”
But she wouldn't think of it, she wouldn't, she wouldn't.
Sahlah raised her head from her arms and looked down at the paper, the pencil, the beads, the beginning of a sketch that was no sketch because nothing within her could create a design or put objects together in a pattern that was balanced and pleasing to the eye. She was lost, now. She was paying the price. She'd been awakened to a longing that couldn't be met within the narrow definition of the life she was expected to lead, and she'd begun to pay the price for this longing months before Haytham's advent among them.
Haytham would have saved her. He possessed an earnest concern for others that set the self aside, and because he was capable of acts of generosity beyond her ken, he greeted the news of her pregnancy with a question that swept aside both her guilt and her fear. “And have you carried this dreadful burden these two months all alone, my Sahlah?”
She hadn't wept until that moment. They'd been sitting in the orchard, side by side on the wooden bench whose back legs slid too far into the soil. Their shoulders had been touching but nothing else touching, until she confided in him. She hadn't been able to look at him as she spoke, knowing how much depended upon the next few minutes of conversation. She couldn't believe he would take her as his wife once he knew that she carried another man's child. But by the same token, she couldn't bring herself to marry him and then to attempt to pass off the birth of a healthy baby as the birth of an infant that would have to be taken as at least two months premature. Besides, he'd been in no immediate hurry to marry, and her parents had seen in his suggestion that they wait not a reluctance to fulfill his part of the marital agreement but a wise man's decision to learn to know the woman who would be his wife. … before she became his wife. But Sahlah had no leisure to pursue an acquaintance with Haytham Querashi.
So she'd had to speak. And then she'd had to wait, her future and her family's honour held in the palm of a man she'd known less than one week. “And have you carried this dreadful burden these two months all alone, my Sahlah?” And when his arm went round her shoulders, Sahlah realised that she'd been saved.
She'd wanted to ask him how he could take her as she was: defiled by another, pregnant with that other's child, tainted by the touch of a man who could never be her husband. I've sinned and I've paid the price of sinning, she wanted to say. But she said nothing, merely weeping in near silence and waiting for him to decide her fate.
“So we'll marry sooner than I had expected,” he'd said meditatively. “Unless … Sahlah, you don't wish to marry your child's father?”
She'd clenched her hands together between her thighs. Her words were fierce. “I don't. I can't.”
“Because your parents …?”
“I can't. If they knew, it would destroy them. I'd be cast out. …” She could say nothing else as the grief and fear within her—so long held in check—were finally given release.
And Haytham required no other explanation from her. He'd repeated his initial question: Had she carried the burden alone? Once he understood that she had, he sought only to share it and to comfort her.
Or so she had concluded, Sahlah thought now. But Haytham was a Muslim. Traditional and religious at heart, he would have been deeply offended at the notion that some other man had touched the woman meant to be his wife. He would have sought a confrontation with that man, and once Rachel had alerted him to the existence of a gold bracelet, a very special gold bracelet, a gift of love …
All too clearly, Sahlah could picture the meeting between them: Haytham asking for it and Theo eager to comply. “Give me time,” he'd begged her when she'd told him she would marry a man from Pakistan chosen by her parents. “For God's sake, Sahlah. Give me more time.” And he would have struck out to buy himself that time, eliminating the man who stood between them in order to prevent what he saw he couldn't stop: her marriage.
Now she had a surfeit of time and no time at all. A surfeit of time because there was no man waiting in the wings to rescue her from disgrace in such a way that she would not lose her family as a result. No time at all because a new life grew in her body and promised the destruction of all that she knew, held dear, and depended upon. If she did not act decisively and as soon as possible.
Behind her, the bedroom door opened. Sahlah turned as her mother entered the room. Wardah's head was covered modestly. Despite the unabating heat of the day, her entire body was clothed so that only her hands and her face were bare. Her choice of dress was dark, as was her custom, as if she were permanently in mourning over a death that she never acknowledged in words.
She came across the room and touched her daughter's shoulder. Silently, she removed Sahlah's dupattā, and loosened her hair from its single plait. She took a hairbrush from the chest of drawers. She began to brush her daughter's hair. Sahlah couldn't see her mother's face, but she could feel the love in her fingers, and she could sense the tenderness in every stroke of the brush.
“You didn't come into the kitchen,” Wardah said. “I missed you. I thought at first that you weren't home yet. But Yumn heard you come in.”
And Yumn would have reported, Sahlah thought. She'd be maliciously eager for her mother-in-law to know Sahlah's every lapse in duty. “I wanted a few minutes,” Sahlah said. “I'm sorry, Ammī Have you started dinner?”
“The lentils only.”
“Then shall I—”
Wardah pressed her daughter's shoulders gently when Sahlah would have risen. “I can cook the dinner with my eyes closed, Sahlah. I missed your company. That's all.” She curled a long lock of Sahlah's hair round her hand as she brushed it. She laid the lock against Sahlah's back and chose another, saying, “Shall we speak to each other?”
Sahlah felt the pain of her mother's question like a fist that was gripping her heart. How many times since her childhood had Wardah said those same six words to her daughter? A thousand times? A hundred thousand? They were an invitation to share confidences: secrets, dreams, puzzling questions, ruffled feelings, private hopes. And the invitation was always extended with the implicit promise that what was said between mother and daughter was to be held in trust.
Tell me what happens with a man and a woman. And Sahlah had listened—both frightened and awestruck—as Wardah explained what occurred when a man and a woman bound themselves to each other in marriage.
But how do parents know what person is good for a marriage to one of their children? And Wardah quietly delineated all the ways in which fathers and mothers are fully capable of knowing their children's hearts and minds.
And you,Ammī? Were you ever frightened to marry someone you didn't know? More frightened to come to England, Wardah told her. But she'd trusted Akram to do what was best for her, just as she'd trusted her father to choose a man who would care for her throughout life.
But weren't you ever afraid in your life? Even to meet Abhy-jahn? Naturally, her mother said. But she'd known her duty, and when Akram Malik had been presented to her, she'd thought him a good man, a man with whom she could make a life.
This is what we aspire to as women, Wardah told her in those quiet moments when she and her daughter lay side by side on Sahlah's bed in the darkness before Sahlah fell asleep. We achieve fulfillment as women by meeting the needs of our husbands and our children, and by sending our children into marriages of their own with suitable mates.
True contentment grows from tradition, Sahlah. And tradition binds us together as a people.
In these nighttime conversations with her mother, the room's shadows hid their faces from each other and freed them to speak their hearts. But now … Sahlah wondered how she could possibly speak to her mother. She wanted to do so. She yearned to open her heart to Wardah, to receive the comfort and to feel the safety that her mother's quiet presence had always provided her. Yet to seek that comfort and safety now meant to speak a truth that would destroy the very possibility of comfort and safety forever.
So she said in a low voice the only thing she could say, “The police were at the factory today, Ammī”
“Your father phoned me,” Wardah replied.
“They've sent two detective constables. The constables are talking to everyone, and they're recording the interviews. They're in the conference room and one by one they call in someone to question. From the kitchen, from shipping, from storage, from production.”
“And you, Sahlah? Have these constables spoken to you as well?”
“No. Not yet. But they will. Soon.”
Wardah seemed to hear something in her voice, because for a moment she stopped brushing Sahlah's hair. “You fear an interview with the detective constables? Do you know something about Haytham's death? Something you haven't spoken of yet?”
“No.” Sahlah told herself it wasn't a lie. She didn't know anything. She merely suspected. She waited to see if her mother would hear a hesitation in her words that gave her away or an uncharacteristic inflection that revealed the roiling of a soul in which guilt, sorrow, fear, and anxiety all warred. “But I'm frightened,” she said. And this, at least, was a truth she could part with.
Wardah put the hairbrush on the chest of drawers. She returned to her daughter and placed her fingers beneath Sahlah's chin. She tilted her face and gazed into it. Sahlah felt her heart beating rapidly, and she knew the birthmark on her cheek had suffused with colour.
“You have no reason to fear,” Wardah told her. “Your father and your brother will protect you, Sahlah. As will I. No harm can possibly come to you from the harm that came to Haytham. Before that ever could happen, your father would lay down his own life. As would Muhannad. You know this, don't you?”
“Harm has already come to us all,” Sahlah whispered.
“What happened to Haytham touches all of our lives,” Wardah agreed. “But it needn't contaminate us if we choose not to let it. And we make that choice by speaking the truth. Only lies and denials have the power to taint us.”
These words were nothing that Wardah had not said in the past. But now their power to wound astonished her daughter. She couldn't blink the tears away before her mother saw them.
Wardah's face softened and she drew her close, holding Sahlah's head against her breast. “You're quite safe, dearest,” her mother said. “I promise you that.”
But Sahlah knew that the safety of which her mother spoke was as insubstantial as a piece of gauze.
BARBARA SUFFERED THROUGH Emily's ministrations to her face a second time that day. Before allowing her to meet the Pakistanis in her first official appearance as police liaison officer, Emily took her to the locker room and stood her in front of the basin and mirror for another go with the foundation, powder, mascara, and blusher. She even dotted Barbara's mouth with lipstick, saying, “Stuff it, Sergeant,” when Barbara protested. “I want you looking fresh for the fray,” she instructed. “Don't underestimate the power of personal appearance, especially in our line of work. You'd be a fool to think it doesn't count.”
As she repaired what the heat had damaged, she gave her directions for the upcoming meeting. She listed what details Barbara was to share with the Asians, and she reiterated the dangers of the minefield they were walking through.
She concluded by saying, “The last thing I want is for Muhannad Malik to use anything from this meeting to fire up his people, all right? And watch them both while you're at it. Watch them like a hawk. Watch everyone like a hawk. I'll be meeting the rest of the team in the conference room, if you need me.”
Barbara was determined not to need her, as well as to do justice to the DCI's faith in her. And as she faced Muhannad Malik and Taymullah Azhar across the table in what had once been the Victorian house's dining room, she recommitted herself to those ends.
The two men had been kept waiting a quarter of an hour. During that time, someone had provided them with a jug of water, four glasses, and a blue paper plate of Oreos. But they appeared to have touched nothing. When Barbara entered, both men were sitting. Azhar rose. Muhannad did not.
“Sorry to keep you waiting,” she told them. “Some last-minute details we had to clear up.”
Muhannad didn't look as if he believed that remark. Obviously, he was experienced enough and clever enough to know when power-jockeying was being attempted by an adversary. For his part, Azhar made a study of Barbara as if trying to gaze beneath her skin for the truth of the matter. When she returned his scrutiny, he lowered his eyes.
“Details we wait to hear,” Muhannad said. Barbara had to credit him with opening the meeting with an attempt to sound polite.
“Yes. Well.” Onto the table she slapped the folders she was carrying. There were three of them, and she'd brought them along more for effect than for any other reason. She topped them with the yellow-bound book she'd taken from Querashi's hotel room. Then she drew out a chair, sat, and gestured Azhar to do likewise. She'd brought along her cigarettes, and she took a moment to light up.
The room was only a degree or two less stifling than Emily Barlow's office had been, but unlike Emily's office, there was no fan circulating the tepid air. Muhannad's forehead glistened. Azhar, as usual, could have stepped from an icy shower a moment prior to Barbara's entrance.
Barbara indicated the yellow-bound book with her cigarette. “I'd like to begin with this. Can you tell me what it is?”
Azhar reached across the table. He turned the book with the back cover face up and read what Barbara would have thought to be the final page. He said, “This is the Holy Qur'aan, Sergeant. Where did you get it?”
“In Querashi's room.”
“As he was a Muslim, that can't come as a surprise.” Muhannad said pointedly.
Barbara extended her hand for the book, and Azhar complied. She opened it to the page she'd noted on the previous night, marked with a satin ribbon. She directed Azhar's attention to the passage on the page, where brackets had been drawn in blue ink. “As you obviously read Arabic,” she said, “would you translate this for me? We've sent a fax of it to a bloke at the University of London for deciphering, but we'll be that much ahead of the game if you're willing to do the honours right now.”
Barbara saw a small flicker of irritation cross Azhar's face. In revealing that he read Arabic, he'd inadvertently given her an advantage over him that she'd otherwise not have had. In telling him that she'd already sent the page to London, she'd made it impossible for him to manufacture a translation that might meet ends other than the truth. Love-one, she thought with no little pleasure. It was important, after all, that Taymullah Azhar understand their acquaintance wasn't going to stand in the way of Sergeant Havers's getting her job done. It was equally important that both men knew they weren't dealing with a fool.
Azhar read the passage. He was silent for a minute, during which time Barbara could hear voices coming from the first floor conference room as the door opened and shut upon Emily's afternoon meeting with her team. She shot a glance at Muhannad but couldn't decide whether he looked bored, eager, hostile, overheated, or tense. His eyes were on his cousin. His fingers held a pencil and tapped its rubber end against the top of the table.
Finally, Azhar said, “A direct translation isn't always possible. English terms aren't always adequate or comparable to those in Arabic.”
“Right,” Barbara said. “The point's duly noted. Just do your best.”
“The passage refers to one's duty to go to the aid of those who are in need of help,” Azhar said. “Roughly, it reads, ‘How should you not fight for the cause of Allah and of the feeble among men and of the women and the children who are crying: Our Lord! Bring us forth from out this town of which the people are oppressors! Oh, give us from thy Presence some protecting friend!’ “
“Ah,” Barbara said wryly. “Roughly, as you say. Is there more?”
“Naturally,” Azhar said with delicate irony. “But only this passage is marked in pencil.”
“I think it's clear enough why Haytham marked it,” Muhannad noted.
“Is it?” Barbara drew in on her cigarette and examined him. He'd pushed his chair back as his cousin was reading. His face wore the look of a person who'd had his suspicions confirmed.
“Sergeant, if you'd ever sat on this side of the table, you'd know that it is,” Muhannad said. “‘Bring us forth from out this town of which the people are oppressors!’ There you have it.”
“I did hear the translation.”
Muhannad bristled. “Did you? Then let me ask you this: What more do you need? A message written in Haytham's blood?” He dropped his pencil on the table. He got to his feet and went to the window. When he next spoke, he gestured to the street and—metaphorically, it seemed—to the town beyond it. “Haytham had been here long enough to experience what he'd never had to experience before: the smart of racism. How d'you think he felt?”
“We haven't the slightest indication that Mr. Querashi—”