“I have no value to you. I’m not a journalist. I’m not rich. Yesterday you used the words mid-level executive. We’re sitting here talking about my ex-wife. My daughter. I don’t understand why anyone would kidnap me.”
“You’re an American,” she said. “You were wandering where you shouldn’t have been. We didn’t choose you, especially. You happened by, more or less. You could have been anyone. What you were doing in Lyari I can’t imagine.”
“I was— I wanted to see how other Pakistanis live.”
“Don’t do that,” she said. Her tone was suddenly cold.
“Do what?”
“Don’t look for the suffering of others as a salve to your own wounds. It’s arrogant. You see where that gets you.”
“It wasn’t a salve. I was trying to—I don’t know. Put things in perspective.”
“Well, did you?”
He didn’t answer her, and she was silent for a while. Then she said, “Marc, you might be here for a long time for the simple reason that we hope to get something of value for you. I can’t promise that I—” She stopped herself for a moment and then cleared her throat before continuing. “When I heard that your daughter had been killed. And that you didn’t go home when you heard. I admit that interested me in ways that have nothing to do with your ransom.”
“You’re interested in a murder of someone you don’t know? In this country where innocents are killed almost daily?”
“Unlike your country? No one is ever shot dead in your own country? Where your own daughter died?”
He flinched at these questions. He would be unable or unwilling to muster a political argument even if it weren’t for his circumstances.
“Perhaps she wasn’t an innocent, but I’m sorry your daughter was killed,” she said eventually. “And you’re right to think, for me, she’s as faceless as any other daughter who lost her life senselessly. But I’m more interested in the story of a man who didn’t even return home when he heard she’d been murdered.”
“Why?”
“Why? Because I’ve seen many men grieve. Say what you want, but men here are not afraid to show their grief. Or rage. Or how one feeds the other.”
“You think I’m not sad or angry?”
“What I think,” she said, and he heard her bring her hands down with a light slap on the top of her thighs. “What I think,” she said again, “is that you will have many long days here. At least you should be hoping for that. Here, with me. Or with Saabir or Azhar. You’ve noticed that their company doesn’t involve much conversation. And so you will mostly only have me to talk to. And I am—compensated for talking to you, for getting information from you that might lead to more money. But I am not in charge of your fate, and I’m not at liberty to jump into an SUV and travel across the border or take a plane to London. I’m trapped here, in many ways, just as you are. More or less alone with my first language. So almost every day, we’ll talk. If you want to talk about the weather, we can do that. Or stock prices at PepsiCo, and whether a bullish year for your company might loosen the purse strings of your ransom. Or we can talk about something else.”
“Like my daughter.”
“I assume you loved her?”
He felt the question like a low-voltage shock.
“What color were her eyes? I’ve never seen your eyes. Were they the same as yours?”
It was a strangely intimate question. He had not thought of his daughter’s eyes, specifically, in years, but they had been a kind of green-gray, like neither his nor her mother’s.
“Her name was Claire,” she said. “A French name, of course. Claire Laurent. France, home of your ancestors.”
“Another imperialist nation,” he said, still resisting memory.
“I’ve been to Paris. Parts of it are beautiful. The way the sun lights those buildings on the first warm days of April. But to the extent that all that architecture arrives on the backs of the poor—well, many parts of Karachi are beautiful, too. You must have made it down to the ocean to watch the sunrise.”
“So I’m still in Karachi. On the outskirts.”
She shifted in her seat again and coughed once. She’d lowered her guard.
“You may be,” she said. “You may not be. But it’s no real comfort either way. Would you feel any closer to home?”
But he felt he’d gained some slight advantage, whatever that may have meant.
“Who were you traveling with in Paris?”
“Well, it wasn’t your daughter,” she said. “My guess is Claire Laurent never made it back to her ancestors’ homeland.”
He was stricken again at the mention of her full name.
“She wasn’t the kind of girl to go to the senior prom, was she? But an attractive young woman. Her hair cut close to her head. That tattoo on her left shoulder. A tree with no leaves and one bird. Pretty in a lonely sort of way.”
“So you must have seen—” But his voice caught. “You must have seen her eyes.”
“She drank too much,” the woman continued. “There’s a picture of her drinking straight from a bottle of whiskey. And she liked to read. One photo has her lying on a bed with Jack Kerouac. His book, I mean.”