“Hi, Dad. Thought you’d be up.” Eamonn’s voice was calm, affectionate, nothing like that of the crazed thing who’d had to be physically restrained from returning to the arms of that manipulative whore. Well, “arms” wasn’t really the bit of her he wanted to return to, was it? Though Karamat probably shouldn’t have said so at the time.
“You okay?” He hadn’t spoken to Eamonn since Terry had arranged for Max and Alice to take him away to one of Alice’s family estates after he’d moved from hysteria to a listless resignation—the press assumed the estate was the one in Norfolk, though it could just as well be Normandy. Karamat hadn’t asked Terry not to tell him where their son was, but she knew well enough that it was information better kept from him in case someone asked him a direct question, which he’d have to answer honestly. His wife had always had a perfectly judged sense of who he was, who he had to be, as a public figure, which made it all the more mystifying when she packed up a segment of his wardrobe and moved it down to the basement bedroom in response to his office’s breaking the story of Eamonn’s involvement with the girl. You could have protected him, she’d said, as if her husband were the kind of man either stupid or unethical enough to try to organize a cover-up. She hadn’t relented when most of the newspapers correctly portrayed Eamonn as a dupe, and some even managed to suggest he’d turned on the girl as soon as he’d realized what she wanted.
“Yes. I’m sorry how I behaved the other day.”
Karamat crossed a foot over his knee, considered the open-mouthed sturgeons with bulging eyes and entwined tails at the base of the nearby lamppost. Usually grotesque, they now appeared winningly comical to his benevolent gaze. “I’m sorry you’re going to have a rough ride for a bit. Perhaps that move to New York your sister suggested might not be the worst idea.”
“I worry about you more than me.”
Karamat stood up and walked to the lamppost, leaned against it, and turned away from his security detail. “That’s nice to hear, but unnecessary.”
“It’s just that from where you’re sitting it may not be clear how this looks. A government that sends its citizens to some other country when they act in ways we don’t like. Doesn’t that say we can’t deal with our own problems? And stopping a family from burying its own—that never looks good. That’s what people are beginning to say around me. If your advisers won’t tell you this, your son will.”
“My son, schooling me in politics from his vantage point among the landed gentry,” he said, pressing his knuckles into the bulging eyes of the fish.
“I’m saying this because your reputation matters to me. More than you know.”
“She told you to say all this, didn’t she?”
“I haven’t heard from her. You know that. I’ve done what you asked. I haven’t called or texted. You said if I agreed, you would help her. How have you helped her?”
“She’s had police protection stationed outside her house. I haven’t let the world see the kinds of videos her beloved brother worked on. She hasn’t been locked up in an interrogation room for fourteen days without charge, not even after admitting that she seduced my son in order to help a terrorist. You saw that transcript, didn’t you? She admitted it.”
“Of course she said that once she thought I’d abandoned her.”
“Do you hear yourself?”
“Do you hear yourself? You think you’re doing someone a favor by not locking them up for fourteen days without reason?”
“Please don’t try to develop a spine. You weren’t built for it. Did she give you your first really great blow job, Eamonn? Is that what this is about? Because trust me, there are better ones out there.”
A pause, and then his son’s voice at its most cuttingly posh: “I think we’re done here, Father.”
The call went dead and Karamat turned around, crumpling the empty paper cup in his fist. Suarez stepped forward and extended his palm to take the cup, teeth marks visible on his thumb. He saw Karamat’s eyes on the indentations and folded his thumb over his palm to hide the visual reminder of Eamonn kicking wildly at the air, teeth clamped on Suarez’s gag-hand.
Pivoting away from Suarez, he sent the paper cup flying in the direction of the garbage can. It hit the rim, bounced up, plummeted into the receptacle.
Take out the trash. Keep Britain clean.
||||||||||||||||||
Mid-morning in London, mid-afternoon Karachi, someone called @CricketBoyzzzz uploaded pictures of a woman in the white of mourning, sitting cross-legged on a white sheet covered in rose petals. The sun-singed grass and the patches of damp on her kameez conveyed an extraordinary heat despite the banyan tree under whose spreading branches and beardlike aerial roots she’d arranged herself. #Knickers #FoundHer
All the press assigned to the Pasha story, scattered among upscale hotels and graveyards and family homes and airport terminals, descended on the park, only to be met by the blank stare and silence of a girl whom Karamat was beginning to suspect of being as unhinged as she was manipulative.
“Find out where the body is,” Karamat instructed his assistant, James, eyes moving between the two TV screens in his Marsham Street office, one tuned to a Pakistani news channel, the other to an international one.
The Pakistani channel had a split screen. One side showed scenes from the park, as increasing numbers of onlookers arrived to cluster around the girl, as if she were the site of an accident; the other showed a studio in which the urbane host of a religious discussion program explained what Shariah law had to say about the Pasha case. The man had slicked-back hair and a black mark on his forehead—the latter a sign of piety, helped along by banging one’s head against a stone or rough surface during the daily prostration of prayer. Karamat picked up a lion-and-unicorn paperweight, pressed it to his forehead. First, said the man, the boy had joined those modern-day Khajarites who were a greater enemy of Islam than even America or Israel, and so he should never be described as a “jihadi.” Second, he should have been buried before sunset on the day he died, no matter how far from home he was, and anything else was un-Islamic. Third, by her own admission to the UK police, the girl was a sinner, a fornicator, and should be flogged.
Karamat made a note of the man’s name and turned his attention to the international channel, where the anchor had pulled up a digital 3-D map of the area surrounding the park and was describing the location as “significant” as red circles appeared on the map identifying the gas station next to the park, the convent school and Italian consulate across the street, and the busy roundabout a stone’s throw away. The 3-D models of buildings and trees collapsed into the ground as if from a powerful detonation, and what remained was the figure of a girl facing the British Deputy High Commission.