Burnt Shadows (38 page)

       
It was this laughter that Hiroko thought of some days later, when Kim was back in Seattle packing up her life to move it to New York, and Ilse didn’t respond when Hiroko rapped sharply on her bedroom door and asked her how long she was going to go on sleeping. She thought of the laughter even before she opened the door to receive confirmation of what she already knew to be true.

       
Pushing the hair away from her old friend’s tranquil face, she thought, It can happen like this, too. Not just scales and shadows and bullet wounds, but peace is also possible at the end.

       
She picked up the phone from Ilse’s bedside and called Raza’s satphone. When he answered, his voice distracted at first but instantly snapping into concern as he heard the tone of her voice, she said, ‘Raza-chan, you need to be Harry’s support today. Ilse has died in her sleep.’ When he was finally assured that she was not about to fall apart and didn’t need him to phone anyone in New York to come over and hold her hand she hung up and sat with Ilse for a few minutes more, crying with sorrow but not despair.

       
Then she drew a deep breath, asked any part of Ilse’s spirit still lingering in the room to give her strength to do the unbearable, and called Kim to say her grandmother was dead.

30

Harry Burton walked through the bright winter morning, jet lag and sorrow colliding to make everything in New York seem a little off-kilter. He had expected to come back and find the city as he’d last seen it near the end of September with a great pall downtown, survivor’s unease uptown, but instead he found an ongoing collision between the city’s forward-strutting nature and the demands of tragedy which insisted grief must be held on to like a dying lover.

       
He wanted to be done with it, his own grief. It was unbearable, seeping into everything. Her ghost everywhere along these SoHo streets. Did Kim feel it too? He glanced sideways at his daughter, easily keeping pace with his long strides, everything about her appearance a warning: combat pants, steel-toed boots and a bomber jacket half unzipped to reveal the black T-shirt beneath, freshly shorn copper hair sleeked against her cheetah-skull, tipped with the black dye which still hadn’t entirely grown out.

       
‘Penny for your thoughts, panther,’ he said, wincing at his own inability to exit cliché.

       
‘Gran was half the reason I’m moving to New York.’ She glanced up at him. ‘You didn’t know I’m moving to New York, did you?’

       
‘No. But that’s great. I mean, I always picture you here. I know you’ve been in Seattle a while but . . . the hills, the grunge, the self-conscious coffee drinking! No, no, not my daughter. It’s always seemed like one of those short-term flings, you know?’

       
‘I know short-term flings, Dad. Just not as well as you do.’ She grinned, and put her arm through his.

       
Surprised, but far from displeased, he squeezed her arm and tried to think what a father should say in such a moment, his daughter’s eyes still red with weeping as they had been ever since he arrived yesterday just in time to bury Ilse.

       
‘Sweetheart, she died as she would have wanted to. In her sleep, at peace, after what Hiroko tells me was a raucous dinner with her closest friend. We should all be so lucky.’

       
‘Doesn’t make me miss her less,’ Kim said, resting her head against her father’s shoulder.

       
They walked that way for a while, though the posture was slightly awkward. The SoHo crowds were thinned in the post-Christmas doldrums, for which Harry was grateful. Too much time in narrow mountain passes these past weeks, and his body was still primed for danger. The fire escapes running in zigzags along the length of cast-iron buildings looked like misshapen spines, deliberately twisted out of shape, and on either side of the street buildings loomed, their windows reflecting sunlight as the barrel of a gun might do.

       
‘What’s the other half,’ he said, ‘of the reason why you’re moving to New York?’

       
‘This.’ Kim waved her hands in the direction of the flags flying from every edifice, then gestured to the emptied skyline. ‘The thing about structural engineers, Dad, is that we knew right away. Switched on the television, saw the flames, and knew the building would fall. The rest of the country had a few minutes’ grace but we were the Cassandras standing in front of the first images, saying it’s coming down, all of it. And then the second one. From that moment, I haven’t wanted to be anywhere except back here.’ She looked around fiercely. ‘We’ll keep building.’

       
The Cassandras! Harry thought. Because you predicted total disaster an hour before it happened? Just one hour.

       
‘If you slow down construction the terrorists have won,’ Harry said, and felt her arm slip out of his.

       
‘I suppose this is all very mundane to you,’ she said. ‘Death and destruction. Good for business and entirely unsurprising.’ She knelt down by a lamp post and buried her hands in the thick fur of the collie leashed to it, furious at how much she had wanted his understanding. The cold seeped from the sidewalk through her combat pants.

       
Harry held his hand out and the collie, who had accepted Kim’s attention with the air of an aristocrat receiving nothing more than what’s due, nuzzled at his palm.

       
Traitor
, Kim thought.

       
‘Unsurprising, yes,’ Harry said. It’s true, he was entirely unsurprised by 9/11 – had, in fact, assumed a jihadi connection to the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 – but he was also stunned by his reaction to it, the depth of his fury, the wish for all the world to stop and weep with him for the city which had adopted him when he was eleven. He was in the Democratic Republic of the Congo at the time, overseeing the setting up of Arkwright and Glenn’s operation to provide security for a Belgian diamond-export company, and was well aware of how disproportionate his attitude must seem in a country which had lost more than two and a half million people in a war which seemed to have pauses rather than an end. He sat down with a calculator on 12 September, and worked it out to more than two thousand deaths a day, each day, for over three years – but he couldn’t find any way to connect those numbers to his emotions. ‘And good for business, very definitely.’

       
‘Well, that’s honest,’ Kim said, standing up and swatting at her combat pants with far greater vigour than was necessary to brush off the dust.

       
‘It’s only part of the story. We only ever hear part of each other’s story, panther.’

       
‘We?’ She stared at him and shook her head. ‘You’re the one who keeps leaving.’

       
‘I’m here now.’

       
‘How long?’

       
He looked away.

       
‘Thought so.’ Despite the disappointment there was a satisfaction about being right.

       
‘Kim, you and I – we’re going to spend a lot of time together soon. More than you want. Take that as a threat or a promise.’

       
‘Sure,’ she said, her voice tight with disbelief. ‘When the abstract noun is defeated . . . or will you be going after horror and misery next?’

       
He couldn’t help laughing.

       
‘Your father’s an old man. I’ll be sixty-five in June. Retirement time, sweetheart.’

       
Kim snorted.

       
‘You’ll never retire.’

       
‘Well, OK,’ he admitted. ‘But I’ll take a holiday. How about we go to Delhi together? I’ll show you my childhood.’

       
It was an old promise, but she couldn’t help being drawn in by it. That was the thing about Harry Burton which made his smiles so impossible to resist – when he said a thing, he meant it. For that moment.

       
As they walked down the street there was a strangled sound behind them – Kim turned to see the collie straining at his leash, eyes fixed on Harry.
Pathetic
, Kim thought, even as she allowed Harry to take her arm and loop it through his own again.

       
‘Mom sends her condolences,’ she said. ‘She offered to fly across, but I’m not sure I can handle dealing with both of you at the same time.’

       
Harry’s laugh was an acknowledgement of the truth behind that lightly uttered comment.

       
‘How is she? Still masterfully hiding the heart I broke behind a veneer of total happiness with what’s-his-name?’

       
‘Yes, Dad, she’s still very happily married. Desperately worried about me, though. She thinks the fact that I’ve been single for over three months is some kind of curse. Last time we spoke she said when I meet men I shouldn’t tell them what I do for a living. Apparently, engineering is too macho. It scares off the boys. I think she’s trying to tell me I come across as a lesbian.’

       
‘You come across as you,’ Harry said. ‘And if the boys think that puts you out of their league, they’re probably right!’

       
She knew he wasn’t just trying to win her over with cheap compliments. Whatever else could be said about Harry as a father, he left no doubt about his belief that his daughter was the best thing his life had ever produced. She took his hand in hers, as she used to when she was still young enough to pretend she needed his help crossing the road.

       
Further down the street, a woman – elegantly dressed in camel-coloured winter coat with a beret jauntily angled on her head – was staring intently at a store window.

       
‘What is she looking at?’ Harry whispered, horrified, and Kim laughed and let go of his arm to rush forward to Hiroko.

       
The window was dominated by a male mannequin dressed in skintight leather, an improbable bulge below his waist. Kim put her arms around Hiroko’s shoulders and they stood there – half laughter, half tears – recalling Ilse stopping in front of the mannequin on her ninetieth birthday, saying, ‘I wonder what this decade will be like? My eighties were not what I anticipated – Viagra, you know. All those old lovers crawled out of the woodwork.’

       
Harry cleared his throat uncertainly behind the two women and Kim winked at Hiroko.

       
‘He’s so not ready to hear it,’ she said.

       
Hiroko stood on tiptoes, as tall as her sensible old-lady shoes would allow, and kissed Harry’s cheek, watching the blush spread across it to reveal just how rare such gestures of affection were in his life.

       
‘Come to China with me,’ she said, taking his arm.

       
Kim watched Harry carefully modulate his gait to keep time with Hiroko’s without making it evident that she was slowing him down and suddenly she knew that they would go to Delhi. Harry, Hiroko and she – and Raza.

       
Kim had never met Raza Konrad Ashraf – his blink-and-you’ll-miss-it trips to see Hiroko never coincided with her more frequent sojourns in New York – but he was framed on the mantel of the Mercer Street apartment and in every third sentence out of both Hiroko and Harry’s mouths, so perhaps it wasn’t so surprising that he sometimes made his way into her dreams. He would appear in the strangest situations, his presence never a surprise.

       
They’d probably drive each other crazy when they met, she thought. It was clear that Raza was just another version of Harry himself. Their two personalities a collision waiting to happen. She found herself smiling at the prospect, lagging behind Harry and Kim as they neared Chinatown, her mind in Delhi already.

       
Harry was glad for the distance between his daughter and him, so he didn’t have to feel her bristling disapproval as he said firmly, in response to Hiroko’s question, ‘Of course Raza’s not in India or Pakistan. I promised you I’d keep him out of danger, didn’t I?’ Harry made many promises but that one to Hiroko was among the few he had tried his utmost to keep. As far as possible he ensured Raza stayed in the sterile world of Arkwright and Glenn’s Miami head office, translating his way through client meetings and contracts and emails and wire-tapped conversations. But Afghanistan was different – the first time A and G had been contracted by the US military, an opportunity that had the shareholders giddy with prospects both short-term and long. And Raza Konrad Ashraf, the translating genius who had once passed himself off as an Afghan, was an asset too great to be left behind.

       
Hiroko was unsure how to raise her next question. It concerned a matter they’d never discussed since the day they stood together over Sajjad’s corpse. To allow herself a moment to decide how best to broach the subject she slowed and looked at the faded poster pasted on to the heavily graffitied wall of a loft building. It consisted of a picture of a young man and the words:
MISSING SINCE 9/11. IF YOU HAVE ANY INFORMATION ABOUT LUIS RIVERA PLEASE CALL  . . .

       
Hiroko thought of the train station at Nagasaki, the day Yoshi had taken her to Tokyo. The walls plastered with signs asking for news of missing people. She stepped closer to take in the smile of Luis Rivera, its unfettered optimism. In moments such as these it seemed entirely wrong to feel oneself living in a different history to the people of this city.

       
‘You must still have friends in the CIA.’ The question tumbled out of her mouth.

       
‘Everyone’s doing their best to make sure both sides back down, Hiroko,’ he said, understanding precisely why she had asked the question.