“They kill,” he said. “You live? They kill.” Then something in Urdu. He turned Marc around again, and walked him the rest of the way around the perimeter. By the time they reached the window, the man in it was gone and the light turned out.
When they went back into the room, he saw that Saabir had laid out Marc’s bedroll, and he used his gun to indicate to Marc that he should lie down. At the gesture, Azhar turned and left, though Saabir uttered a few words in his direction before he closed the door. Marc lay with his back to Saabir, as he’d been instructed each night for reasons he never understood, since once the light was out he was free to roll over.
He tried to imagine Azhar walking through the dark streets along the outskirts of Karachi, and what his wife must have thought when he came home shaken, the gun slung over his shoulder. Marc was beginning to understand how his own life was putting innocents at risk.
Unlike most nights, Saabir wasn’t going to sleep at the same time Marc was. He heard him sit down in his chair.
“Saabir,” Marc said. “Did something happen to one of Azhar’s children?”
He didn’t answer right away, and Marc had no idea if he’d understood the question.
“Hmmmm,” Saabir said. “Children.” He did his best to pronounce the word. “No.”
Saabir shifted his feet, tapped them once, and then stood up and picked up the broom, and Marc listened to his sweeping, in a slow and deliberate rhythm that allowed Marc to close his eyes. He remembered the feel of the gun at his head, how his body had gone cold, but how indifferent he’d felt to Azhar possibly pulling the trigger. He wondered if Josephine had instructed him to make the threat. He could still feel the spot where the barrel had rested, and he dreamed lightly there was an insect crawling along his hairline. When someone knocked on the door, he reached back to push it away.
He knew it was the woman even though she didn’t speak to Saabir. She’d pulled the chair over almost to the edge of Marc’s bedroll. Saabir picked up his broom and began sweeping again.
“Josephine, did something happen to Azhar’s children?”
“His children are fine,” she said. “Azhar’s gone home.”
“When we were out walking, he—” But he stopped himself.
“He what?”
“He seemed afraid of something.”
“I know. He has a family. He is afraid. I don’t have to tell you not to turn around, do I?”
“No.”
Saabir’s strokes with the broom grew longer, slower. Marc couldn’t imagine there was anything left to sweep. He heard Josephine take a long breath, and then release it.
9
In the time that she and Jack had owned the battered little truck, Claire had never slept in its bed. Jack had done so several times, when he’d traveled some distance to pick up supplies for the motel. “Not too bad,” he’d said after the first time he’d tried it. “Back was a little sore in the morning. It’d be awfully snug for two people.” And now she was lying on her own back, shoulder to shoulder with Genevieve, the ridges in the truck’s bottom pushing into the mattress along her rib cage. The bed smelled vaguely of rust, dirt, and mildew.
“Sorry about the accommodations,” Claire said.
They had driven to the outskirts of the city, near the Great Salt Lake itself, and in the last light of the day found a primitive campground that was mostly abandoned. A small camper was parked in one spot, and someone had managed to pitch a tent in the dry, hard ground, but no car was near it.
“Are you kidding?” Genevieve said. “Without you, I might be sleeping in a truck stop a few hundred miles farther from Chicago. I’ve slept in worse places.”
“It’s funny,” Claire said. “Did I tell you that Jack and I run a motel back in California?”
“No, you didn’t.”
“Well, we do. It’s a pretty run-down little place. We’ve fixed it up some. Lucy knows every nook and cranny of every room. But one of those motel rooms would look pretty good right now.”
“This is fine,” Genevieve said. “I’m used to sleeping under the stars.”
Both of them were looking at the sky.
“Look,” Genevieve said. “You can kind of see the Milky Way.”
Before they’d climbed into the truck bed, the air was so cool that Claire had put on a sweater, but now she was hot under the blanket, and she sat up and pulled the sweater over her head, and as she did her pajama top came up off her shoulder. She flung the sweater at her feet and pulled the pajama top back down. Before she lay back, she felt Genevieve touch a spot on her left shoulder, and she jumped.
“Sorry,” Genevieve said. “But what’s that?”
“A scar,” Claire said.
“I know it’s a scar. But I could see it even in the starlight. It doesn’t look like—well, it doesn’t look like it was made by a scalpel.”
“It wasn’t. It’s a long story, Genevieve.”