Kamila Shamsie - Home Fire

“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.

Karamat pressed the mute button and watched the doe-eyed girl in white, head covered, surrounded by bloodred rose petals, the park railings looking like a backdrop of prison bars in close-up shots of her. Nothing accidental in any of it, but what was all the iconography of suffering meant to achieve?

James returned to say the Turkish embassy could confirm only that the body had arrived in Islamabad, but had no details of how or when it would be transported to Karachi, and the Pakistan High Commission had made it clear they expected an apology from the home secretary before they would reveal any information about their citizens to him. Karamat handed him the piece of paper with the urbane host’s name and said, “If he has a UK visa, find a reason to cancel it.”

“There are some people who think you’re wanting a reason to strip her of her citizenship too,” James said, indicating the girl on the screen, his accent turning more pronouncedly Scottish and working-class, as it always did when he thought he might be about to enter into a disagreement with Karamat. It was a tic James was almost certainly unaware of, but Karamat had always found it winning that the young man’s unconscious played his outsider status up rather than down when he challenged the home secretary.

“And what do you think of that?”

“I think it’s a terrible idea. Everyone will think it’s because of Eamonn.”

“Everyone should know better,” Karamat said. He stood up and approached the split screen. “Damned if I know what she’s planning next. Would you be standing as near her as all those people in the park?”

“You think she’s wearing a suicide vest under those clothes?”

“No, I think she turns everything around her toxic. Look, it’s all gone a bit yellow around her, hasn’t it?”

“Must be something wrong with the camera lens. I’m sorry, sir, about the suicide vest comment.”

“Don’t be silly, James. These are the times we live in.”

The girl stood up fluidly from her cross-legged posture and stepped off the sheet. A single rose petal adhered to the top of her slim, bare foot. He imagined his son’s mouth pressed where the petal was, made a flicking-away motion with his hand. Both TV channels were showing the same scene, from slightly different angles, the air clearly yellow with an impending dust storm. The park — no more than twice the size of the Lone family garden — was bound in by railings and banyan trees, with an open gate toward which she was walking. A van had pulled up outside — an ambulance.