The Terrorist (12 page)

What would it be like to spend your life inside a black robe?

What would it be like to know that people were serious about the word “obey”—that yes, you were going to obey your husband every day of your life in every word he said?

Once she had asked Samira if she went to that mosque.

“I’ve never gone to a mosque,” Samira had said.

Laura knew you could be Christian and not pay attention to church, but she had not known you could be Islamic and not pay attention to the mosque.

There, on the sidewalk, stood Mr. Evans, smoking a cigarette in the rain. “Laura,” he said. It was a lecture in one word. “You’re soaked. Here. I’ll take you to tea. We’ll go to Louis’ Patisserie—it isn’t far—you’ll dry out and they do quite a nice tea there.”

Afternoon tea was the best thing about London.

Basically, tea meant a really good after-school snack. They brought you a pot of tea, milk in little pitchers, and sugar in fat brown lumps that were lumpy, not the square squares of American sugar lumps.

Then you ordered your pastry. London was pastry heaven. “Sweets,” they were called, or hideously, “pudds.” This was short for pudding, which sounded thick and blobby, but nobody meant pudding; they meant dessert.

How disgusted Billy had been to learn that British children had mostly lost interest in tea. “Where do your kids go for after-school snacks?” he had asked his father’s British colleagues.

“McDonald’s,” they told him.

Billy was absolutely totally disgusted with British children. “How are you supposed to get to know other people’s cultures,” he said darkly, “when they keep trading them in?”

Laura was better now at handling Billy memories. She said to Mr. Evans, “I’m having tea with you only if you skip the lecture.”

“Mmmm,” said Mr. Evans. “I’m afraid I cannot skip it, Laura. There’s a bit to discuss.” He popped her into a car driven by a policeman whose expression indicated that he had better stuff to do than drive Laura around. Or else he had appendicitis.

The tables at Louis’ were very tiny. Laura and Mr. Evans were jammed in among strangers. Laura chose a Hungarian pastry, with lots of layers, and cinnamon, and raisins and butter. The sweet hot milky taste of her tea was like childhood: like the warmth of home before bad things happened.

Mr. Evans was very serious about his pastry choice. Laura liked a person to whom food mattered. Billy, of course, had been extremely serious about his desserts. He usually ordered something with clotted cream, which tasted like whipped cream, but more so.

Mr. Evans got butter on the sleeve of his too-large wool jacket and Laura knew she could tell him Jehran’s problem. He would help solve it, and that way she wouldn’t have to—

“Laura,” said Mr. Evans, “you and your family need to go back to the States. It’s hard on you to be here, and it’s especially hard on your mother. Christmas is coming, and you should be home. You could pressure your family to return to Boston.”

“We have a right to stay, Mr. Evans,” said Laura, who had no idea whether they had any such right. Perhaps the British would deport the Williamses. She almost grinned. Billy would be awfully sorry to miss getting deported.

If we go home, she thought, how can I help Jehran?

She had forgotten the fat pack of money. Her eyes flew open and her hand flew to her purse, to be sure she hadn’t lost it. She wet her lips.

Suddenly, queerly, she was afraid of Mr. Evans. Of what he could do to her, and to Jehran. All this money. Was it Jehran’s? Was it stolen? Would Mr. Evans arrest Laura if he found it? And the passport—if Laura told, Mr. Evans could confiscate the precious passport that had been Billy’s.

“But is it best for your family?” said Mr. Evans. “Laura, I have the sense that your parents are staying so your school year isn’t disrupted. But it has been disrupted. And you’d be better off at home.”

“You just don’t want me talking to people,” said Laura. Who had complained. Jimmy? Mohammed? Samira? Con?

“What do you think you will accomplish?” said Mr. Evans nicely, as if he really wanted to know.

Laura wasn’t accomplishing a thing. She might as well have been playing football by sitting in a chair. She couldn’t score because she didn’t even know who the enemy team was. “I have to try, Mr. Evans.”

“No,” said Mr. Evans. “There are plenty of people trying, Laura. They are experts. They know what they’re doing.”

“If they knew what they were doing, they’d have done it.”

Mr. Evans gave Laura the well-known
American teens are so rude
look. “You are losing friends, Laura. Treading on toes.”

“It isn’t a question of
toes
,” said Laura, shotgun angry. “It’s a question of
bombs.
Bombs that splatter you so you don’t have a heart or arms or legs, never mind toes.”

Her voice had skyrocketed.

People were staring.

The pianist, who had been taking a break, went quickly back to the keyboard.

She had no use for Mr. Evans, none at all. Toes! As if her brother’s murder were no more than a day that hadn’t gone well.

Mr. Evans gave Laura her instructions for future behavior.

The usual rules, thought Laura, for those of us whose brothers get blown up.
Don’t get into a car without checking the backseat for crouching murderers. Don’t leave your suitcase unattended. Don’t accept packages from strangers.

In her purse lay a package she had accepted from a stranger.

L
AURA WAS CAREFUL
.

When school ended, she waited until her friends had left by car, or bus, or Underground, and then she took a bus as if to go shopping at Selfridges. After a block or so, she got off and took a different bus, walked the wrong way down a one-way street, and entered the Underground at a station she never normally used.

She took a train to an area not for tourists: city-grim and city-sad. It reminded Laura of shimmy corners of Boston, though the architecture, and certainly the speech, was different. Trash in the streets, abandoned cars where grass should have grown, sullen children smoking in doorways.

I wouldn’t set foot in this neighborhood at home! she thought. Why am I doing this in London?

Again she felt eyes on her back, but these were not the eyes of friends; they were the eyes of strangers, deciding what kind of victim she would make.

A stupid one, thought Laura Williams, walking swiftly past betting shops, pubs, and abandoned stores.

Within a block she found a cut-rate travel agency, as she had known she would. London was full of tourists and immigrants and aliens and strangers, and all of them came from somewhere and would want to go back one day.

Travel posters inside the windows of the shop had faded, and the tape holding them down was brown and split. Brochures curled at the corners. When she entered, the floor was filthy with squashed-out cigarettes and the air was gray. The travel agent was Indian, overweight and irritated, talking through a cigarette that bounced between his thin lips.

What was she doing? Why had she not chosen a nice travel agency in a nice neighborhood? This was London! Millions of people! Nobody was going to recognize her, nobody knew her to start with.

“Two round-trip tickets to New York City, please,” she said. “American Airlines. Departing December twenty-eighth.” She used her most London accent, and he looked at her oddly, and she realized she had used her Jehran
-Masterpiece Theatre
voice, which nobody in this neighborhood possessed.

But she did not interest him. Only ticket sales interested him, and he went into his computer.

Laura forced herself to concentrate on the plan.

The London Walk Club was taking a morning train to Edinburgh on December twenty-eighth. Laura and Jehran would fly out that morning, too, get to New York, Laura would escort Jehran to the taxi stand, and Jehran—brave, brave Jehran—would be on her own in a new world. Laura would turn around and fly back. Jehran would disappear without a trace.

If an official asked, Laura would say she and her little brother were visiting Grandma over vacation. But that meant Laura, who had to fly back the same day, could not display a return ticket for that day. Customs officials would want to know why a visit to Grandma was not at least for one night.

It wouldn’t matter to Jehran, who would just toss her return ticket in the trash and vanish.

But Laura would have to have a second ticket to come home on. She had decided to buy this at another agency on another day.

The ticket agent had difficulty finding seats. Laura had forgotten how busy Christmas season was. Seats were sold. Oh no! she thought, it’s not going to work!

“No seats on American,” said the man. “Would you travel British Air?”

If she had not lived in London for months, she would not have understood a single word. The accent combination of immigrant from India and slum London was another whole language. “Well, okay,” said Laura, forgetting to sound Brit.

He paid no attention, but typed. At last came the welcome sound of the printer spitting out tickets.

She handed him pound notes, the equivalent of hundreds and hundreds of dollars. The man’s expression sharpened, and he tried to see how much more cash she was carrying. She read the tickets carefully to see that they were the right times and dates. Williams, L. seemed acceptable, printed out on the tickets, but Williams, W. looked wrong and terrible. She stuffed the tickets into her purse, tried to thank the man, but couldn’t, tried to walk calmly out, but bumped into a man even fatter and more angry than the clerk, a man ready to yell at anybody, and Laura was there, and she bolted.

Up the scary street to the Underground she ran. She showed her commutation ticket and got on the next train without caring if it went where she needed to go.

The noisy rhythm of the train calmed her down.

She was not a brilliant strategist. She was a fool.

Jimmy Hopkins loved television detective shows where they followed the guy, but he had always wondered if it really worked.

It worked.

Following Laura was easy.

He hadn’t planned to do it. But he couldn’t help noticing that Laura did not leave school when everybody else did. He didn’t go back inside to look for her. He just waited.

Twenty minutes after everybody else was gone, out came Laura, wearing an old raincoat and a navy scarf that were an excellent disguise; they made her old and boring, and he knew who it was only because he was looking for her.

Not only did she get on a bus that would not take her home, but she got off that bus at the very next stop—Jimmy could still see her way down the road. He raced after her, book bag whapping against his back, and caught up just as she was disappearing into an Underground station. At first he thought she didn’t want to use the station where Billy got killed. But then she got on a train that wouldn’t take her home either.

She’s going shopping, he said to himself, or to Con’s house, or running errands, or something.

But the raincoat made him curious.

And he’d wanted to follow somebody all his life.

So he followed.

Laura was a bundle of jitters, thinking of all she had to do and pretend to do. She had borrowed Con’s tour guide and, as the train took her home, she read up on Edinburgh. How do I fake Scotland? Mom and Dad will ask about it. And they’ll meet the train; what do I do about the train? Do I show up at St. Pancras Station when the class returns from Edinburgh and pretend I was with them? Mr. Hollober won’t let me get away with that. Besides, they’ll be away two nights, and I’ll be away one night. What do I do that other night? Pretend I took an earlier train from Edinburgh? Stay at a hotel?

Laura patted her tickets and her extra money. This had such a familiar feel that she realized she had been patting her purse constantly; she was one of those creepy people you kept your eye on in subways, wondering if they were about to go nuts and get violent.

She looked up.

She kept forgetting: this was London; nobody paid any attention to anybody here. People slept, read their papers, or stared at their feet.

She did not want to keep secrets from her parents. And when they did go home to Boston, and did need passports, and Billy’s was not there … she’d have to tell them everything in the end, anyhow. Should she just tell them in the beginning?

After Jehran is safely in New York, Laura said to herself, I’ll tell. Of course, they’ll be mad at me, what parent wouldn’t be? Flying back and forth across the Atlantic Ocean and lying that I was on a school trip?

Seriously mad.

But that won’t be the problem.

The problem is: will they keep Jehran’s secret?

Jimmy stared at sun-wrecked posters in a nasty little slum travel agency.

If Laura were going someplace with her family, first of all her parents would make the arrangements, and second of all they’d never ever use this shop. What was she up to? Jimmy wanted to know what she’d gone in the agency for.

He hesitated. He had never offered anybody a bribe.

Billy wouldn’t have hesitated. Jimmy drew a deep breath, pretended he was Billy Williams, walked up to the travel agent, and set two ten-pound notes on the counter. “I need a printout of her travel plans,” he said, pointing at the disappearing Laura.

There was silence. The man dangled his cigarette between his lips, and the smoke curled offensively.

Was Jimmy being laughed at? About to be arrested? Had he offered too little?

The printer clattered.

The Asian behind the counter neither smiled nor frowned, just sucked in smoke, handed him the printout, and took the twenty pounds.

Jimmy was a little chilled at how easy that was.

He walked out. He, too, went swiftly up the hill toward the Underground entrance. Too late to catch Laura, but plenty of time to get caught by some mugger.

He unfolded the printout.

Laura had purchased two round-trip tickets to Kennedy Airport in New York City: one for herself … and one for Billy.

The next day in the cafeteria, Mohammed managed to get in line behind Samira.

Jehran and Laura were already seated, heads together over macaroni and cheese. Samira shot a glance of loathing at the American girl.