The Ambassador's Wife (45 page)

Miranda takes another few steps backward, feels with her left foot for the gun on the ground. How had he heard about Vícenta? Who in their right mind would have told him? True, much of the diplomatic community knew, but they would never share that kind of information with Mazrooqis. They knew the consequences.

“And this is how you treat him? You arrange to have his wife kidnapped?”

“You ruined him. You did some kind of magic on him. He let you be too free.”

Too
free
?
Here?

It is too dark for her to read the expression on Mukhtar's face.

“You took me to protect Finn?”

“We took you to send a message to your country.”

She can feel her heartbeat shuddering in her neck. He hasn't yet lifted the gun. How long does she have? There's something odd about his posture; his left leg is bent almost balletically behind him. She squints in the darkness. His foot is caught on something. He cannot run.

“How many wives has your country killed, how many children? How else can we get their attention, how can we stop the drones?”

The drones. Those fucking drones. Her own country was killing her.

“Has it worked? Have you got their attention?” Her left foot nudges the gun, making sure of it.

“Of course not. They still think you are alive.”

Miranda falls silent.

“The child is the only reason you have stayed alive this long. But I think now she no longer needs you.”

Fear nearly paralyzes her. But she sees a sudden movement as his hands slide along the gun. There is no time for thought. There is no time for her to try to remember how to shoot a fucking AK-47. Crouching, she swiftly grabs the gun on the ground with both hands and sprints toward her former bodyguard. His arm is rising, metal glinting in the starlight, but his trapped foot throws him off balance. Miranda never shone at the range, but she was a pretty decent softball player. Raising the AK-47, she swings it like a bat, taking Mukhtar by surprise and knocking his gun to the ground. When Mukhtar reaches for it, she swings again, catching his rib cage. He lies on the dirt now, panting, making no effort to rise. “Why didn't you just shoot me?” he says.

“Mukhtar, you know I can't shoot straight.” And she swings the gun once more, this time at his head.

FEBRUARY 14, 2011

Tazkia

In the car, Tazkia turns to Madina. “Did you call Finn?”

“No.”

“Shouldn't we tell him?”

“I don't want to get his hopes up. Chances are, we won't find her. And if we do, we might not have good news.”

Tazkia absorbs this. “You don't think he could help us? Not him, but the embassy?”

“What do you think the chances are that a foreigner would make it up there? Slim to none, kiddo. Slim to none. It has to be us. Two out of three of us are Mazrooqi, and I can pass for Mazrooqi. Besides, we're women. No one will take us seriously.”

Tazkia can't argue with that. She and Nadia watch with admiration as Madina talks her way through checkpoint after checkpoint, explaining about the spiritual retreat and how they hadn't had time to apply for the travel permission slips. Whenever a man demonstrates any reluctance to let them pass, Madina pulls out a thousand-dinar note. “For cigarettes,” she says, folding it and slipping it into his palm. And the men wave them through.

They haven't stopped since leaving the city, making do with the provisions each has stuffed into her handbag. Tazkia feels queasy after two bottles of Coke and her packet of cookies. Perhaps she should have brought a banana. Something healthy. Miranda was always going on about the amount of sugar in everything here.

At one of the last checkpoints before the northern territories, a policeman tells Madina the pass is partially blocked. They had forgotten about the pass. Madina hadn't known about it of course, being a foreigner. But the other women should have remembered. The floods of the rainy season often dislodge massive chunks of earth from the mountains on either side of the pass. It could be weeks before the heaps of sludge are cleared from the road.

But the word
partially
gives them hope. “Do you think we can get through?” asks Madina. The man looks skeptically at their rusted sedan. “It's not impossible,” he finally says. “But you'll need help. If I were you I would wait.”

Thanking him, Madina guns the car forward.

Tazkia closes her eyes. If they are meant to get to the North, they will get there. She thinks of Adan. It won't be long now. She imagines what it will feel like to run her hands over the smooth caramel of his skin. To wind her fingers in his thick, dark hair and inhale his scent. But there her heart stutters to a stop. Can she marry him now, with the paintings out there like a time bomb? Finn has promised to keep looking, but even if he finds them, there will always be someone else who has seen them. Has
seen
her. Has seen the part of her that only
her husband should know. If she were honorable, she would break off with him now, before he is forced to leave her. But she cannot bear the thought of losing the kindest man she has ever known. The man who brings her tiny treasures each time he comes to see her: a miniature vase with a tiny violet, a painted porcelain thimble, a teddy bear the size of her thumb. Things she can carry with her. The man who wrote her poems, sheets and sheets and sheets of poems. If she cannot have him, whom can she have? Has she doomed herself to a lifetime of solitude? To a life without children? Sickened by this line of thought, she opens her eyes. She isn't the only one at risk, she reminds herself. Along with Miranda's paintings of Tazkia had been Tazkia's paintings of Miranda. She hadn't been able to bring herself to tell Finn. He had enough to worry about. And then, it might not even matter now.

Nadia, huddled against the back window, hasn't said a word the whole journey. Tazkia is surprised she could get away; her parents are strict, maybe even stricter than Tazkia's. But Nadia is the only one who knows the North, who knows this territory and these tribes. She and Madina had to have Nadia. Tazkia wonders how Nadia feels about Sheikh Zajnoon. Are her tribal loyalties to him stronger than her loyalty to Miranda? Maybe she and Madina should have talked about this, about what to do if Nadia turned on them, before they started out. Because surely Nadia should have remembered the pass?

The air cools as the car labors sluggishly up the several thousand feet of hairpin turns to the crossing. Falling silent, Madina focuses on coaxing the reluctant engine onward, over increasingly broken asphalt. Serrated peaks of blue rock rise on either side of them, obscuring their view of anything but the road ahead. It occurs to Tazkia that she has never been so far from home. Gripping the door handle with sweaty hands, she prays.

“Here we are,” announces Madina. “Hang on tight.” She presses her slippered foot to the floor. The car jumps forward, allowing Tazkia and Nadia a view of the wedge of mud and rock slumped across the two-lane road. The left side isn't too bad, buried in just a few inches, but the right is impassable, a wall of debris. On either side are vertical cliffs. “Good thing I learned to drive in Africa,” yells Madina. “Time to pray!”

But the car lurches only about a third of the way through before its wheels begin to spin in the mire. Madina shuts off the engine and turns to her two friends. “So,” she says. “Who brought extra shoes?” Only Tazkia is wearing sneakers; Madina and Nadia are wearing the slippers or heels they wear every day. “Everybody out,” orders Madina. “If you don't want to lose your shoes take them off.”

Uncertainly, Nadia tugs off her shoes while Tazkia laces her well-worn Reeboks more tightly. When they climb out of the car, their feet instantly disappear in the bone-chilling muck. “Quickly,” says Madina. “Before we freeze.” Yanking up the skirts of their
abayas
and tucking them into the waistbands of their jeans, then flipping back their veils, the women pick their way to the rear of the car. “Wait,” says Madina. “We need something for the front wheels, for traction. Can you find small stones? Sticks? Anything not mud?”

Twenty minutes later the women have wedged a mosaic of rubble under the front wheels and gathered again at the back of the car. With Madina at the wheel, Tazkia and Nadia dig their numb toes into the ground and push. At first, the wheels flail in the mud, flinging up useless sprays of filth. “PUSH,” calls Madina. “Harder!” adds Tazkia, her voice panicky. “Someone is coming!” Looking over their shoulders, the women can see a green truck a few turns below, making its steady way toward them. Terror of discovery in states of semi-undress has an invigorating effect, and seconds later the front wheels grip the stones. Stumbling as the car lurches from their shoulders, the women fight their way forward, heaving their whole weight into the car until finally it breaks free onto dry road. Madina pulls several meters forward as the women run to jump inside. Just as the truck commences its own struggle in the morass behind them, Madina presses her foot to the floor.

“I hate to say it,” says Tazkia as the women untuck their
abayas
and use their socks to wipe their feet, “but with any luck we'll be coming back the same way.”

“We'll make it,” answers Madina, “if the rains hold off.”

As they descend from the pass, the air thickens with heat. Tazkia sweats, wishing she could remove her
abaya
entirely. (She's almost grateful for her soaking feet, but not quite.) In between checkpoints
she flips up her
niqab
and fans her face with a notebook. Madina rolls down the windows, but still the heat is oppressive. Suddenly, Nadia straightens from her slouch against the door. “Turn here,” she says, pointing to a dirt road branching off to the left.

“Really? Here? But it's—”

“It's the best way,” says Nadia firmly. “A back road to the city. We won't be so conspicuous.”

As Madina steers off the tarmac and begins to bump the car along the dusty, serpentine road, Tazkia glances idly at her phone. Missed call. How could that be? She checks her ringer; it was switched off. The stupid ringer is always turning itself off in her purse. She picks it up to look at the number but doesn't recognize it. Good, then it wasn't her family or Adan. Probably a wrong number. She won't bother calling back, she has hardly any minutes left on her phone anyway. But she switches on the ringer and keeps the phone on her lap.

“How long now?” she asks Nadia, who is looking more confident as they near her hometown.

“Half an hour? Less? Depending.”

Before they get too close to the city, Madina pulls the car over so that they can all pee behind the piles of rocks strewn across the flat countryside. It's easier than trying to find a bathroom in town. As she squats, Tazkia can see streams of people moving in the distance. Families, walking away from their bombed homes, she imagines. Could Miranda be among them? Or was her prison spared? Or have they gotten her location completely wrong?

“Taz! Phone!” Madina calls from the car. Tugging up her jeans, Tazkia sprints to the car and lunges for her phone.

“Tazzy, is it really you? Don't hang up.” The voice cracks and begins to sob. Tazkia holds the phone away from her ear and looks at it in amazement. “Mira?” she finally says.
“Mira?”

FEBRUARY 14, 2011

Miranda

Miranda stands looking down at Mukhtar's limp form, unsure whether he is dead or merely unconscious. She doesn't want to know. And she has no time to examine him. Quickly, avoiding looking at his chest or mouth for signs of breath, she goes through his pockets until she finds his phone. She takes this and a five-hundred-dinar bill and glances around her to make sure she is not observed. But everyone seems to be moving away, away from the blasted buildings, away from the city. She wonders if all of her other guards are dead. Luloah has grown quiet in her hiding place, having become fascinated with arranging pebbles in a straight line. Miranda limps back to her and scoops her up. Luloah protests, and Miranda retraces her steps to get her a handful of the pebbles before starting again toward the lights of the city. It is the dark places she fears, the emptiness with its invisible arms reaching to grab her. She and Luloah will be safer in town.

As they make their slow way down the mostly abandoned streets, they hug the walls, staying in the shadows. She has got to find something to make a sling for Luloah; the child is too heavy to carry for long, and Miranda's ankle yelps with every step. At each corner, she has to set the girl on the pavement for a few minutes before she can move on. It's already getting lighter, the desert sun burning away the shadows. People move past her, men on their way home from mosque, women carrying pink plastic bags of bread, parentless children chasing a cat. They stare at her curiously but say nothing. Miranda wonders what she looks like. It has been months since she has seen a mirror. Her hair is growing out, and stands out from her head in stunted, greasy ringlets. Her left hand is wrapped in a strip of cloth and soaked with blood. She wears a long black skirt and loose, ragged polyester blouse, both coated in dust. Of course many of the people she passes are also dusted with plaster, victims of the same attack. Wide-eyed and stunned, often bleeding, they pass without seeing her.

As soon as she feels far enough from her prison to stop for a few minutes, she dials Finn, heart skipping, amazed she remembers his
number. Yet it doesn't even ring; a message in Arabic informs her that the line has been disconnected. Nausea threatens to overwhelm her. Could he also be in trouble? Perhaps he has left the country, taken Cressida to safety. Desperately, she tries to dial the embassy and the Residence but gets an error message both times. Damn it. Has she forgotten the numbers?

At a tiny storefront she stops to buy a bottle of water for her and a packet of crackers for Luloah, who turns them around in her hands marveling at them before running her tongue around an edge. The shopkeeper smiles at her and reaches over to pinch Luloah's cheeks with thick, grubby fingers. Squatting out of his sight, Miranda unwraps her hand and pours water over the wound. The pain is so acute she leans in to the wall and vomits onto the pavement. Luloah crawls toward her, pulls at her skirt. The blood is still coming from her palm, but slowly. She rewraps it in the bloody cloth, trying to keep the cleanest part over her wound.