He knew three things. Stories should never begin on airplanes. He would never go back. And he wouldn’t lower the tray table for the rest of the flight to Addis Ababa. He wasn’t one for keyboards to begin with. He’d always preferred a simple notebook and barring that, the margin of a newspaper, his handwriting something from another time, always at a slant, leaning toward a sort of spiritual admonition rather than simple reminder.
Sitting beside him was a remarkable dark-skinned older man in a fine suit, his head back and his mouth open. He hadn’t spoken a word to Smith as they found their seats and settled in, though he too had a newspaper which he’d tucked into the seat-back pocket before he drifted off to sleep. His old hands were big and ringless, not businessman’s hands. They lay nested in his lap as if prepared to gather water.
Smith turned and looked down the length of the airliner, then to the front where the two beautiful Ethiopian stewardesses gracefully nodded their heads again and again, handing out drinks. He unlatched the lock once more, felt his heart decelerate as it did before dilemmas, and lowered the tray. As before, it was spattered with blood.
His story had not begun here, Dubai to Addis, or even Karachi to Dubai. He was thirty-seven with a shaved head and eyes that always seemed to get him into trouble. Full eyebrows that described each and every thought, gray irises that always seemed too intent, or too eager. Or both. It wasn’t the face of a soldier or a spy, but of a rabbi or a priest. Smith.
Now his brows moved up and crowded the space above his long nose. The blood was dry of course. There would be a different set of problems had it been wet. But the pattern was a concern. One hit, it seemed. And no staining of his seat cushion. Nothing along the curved plastic and carpeted bulkhead around his porthole window.
Smith didn’t think of himself as a detective, as someone who investigates. Rather he was adept at reacting to trouble. He didn’t solve things; he resolved them.
He looked at the tray for a good five seconds longer and then raised it back into its cradle. Wiped his fingers along his blue jeans.
The businessman slept soundly; dreaming of what, Smith thought for a moment. The work he had left or to which he would arrive? His family or his lover? There was a second more, as the plane rode just three mild pockets of turbulence, when Smith wondered if the businessman’s tray also had dried blood sprayed across it. What was possible was that the blood itself was a message as he left Afghanistan. Don’t come back; or, you cannot escape what you have seen; or, we have done this to others and can do it to you.
Smith did the trick she’d taught him, where he isolated one muscle group, thought about the fibrous material of that part of him, and then very slowly began to contract the muscle. This was not a martial art, or anything as facile as a meditative practice like yoga or tai chi. She was clear about how it worked, how our bodies worked within us: every single thing we do is remembered. Your body recalls the time when you were eight and cried so hard that you curled up on your bedroom floor and felt your back tighten and twist with your sobs. Your father’s every smack and punch. The body remembers the feeling of calm elation that followed it all, and so as he’d lie in the snowy Nangarhar ridge, as his Afghan trainees slept in the rocky declivity beneath him, he could conjure the muscle action “of the same.” She would use this phrase with him, “of the same.” So that now as he tried to understand the blood and the airplane’s gradual drift into East Africa, he could bring that sensation, of the same. He used his stomach, he breathed. He kept his eyes open and always kept his eyes open. This was the trick.
There was a simple duffel beneath his feet. A wallet, a toothbrush inside his father’s oiled bomber jacket. A second passport that wasn’t his own. For he knew little, very little. Not even three things anymore, since he’d lowered the tray to examine the stain. All he knew was that he shouldn’t have. The tray. The plane. Left Helen’s body in Afghanistan. Accepted work protecting the family of the second-wealthiest businessman in Ethiopia, who someone had tried to kill six Tuesdays past.
The plane was landing.
Excerpt continues below cover reveal.
At the terminal he described the letter from Frobisher and then showed it. The customs agent was a matronly fifty-year-old woman who hadn’t slept for two nights—the pilots had informed the passengers that there was a disputation, an action taken by customs officials in lieu of a strike which was still not permitted by the socialist and likely corrupt regime. His companion on the airplane, the elderly businessman, was behind Smith during the hassle with his letter and he interjected with a word that sounded like “hup,” like the noise one made when a call to attention was needed. The man, for his size and lethargic manner, then launched quickly through a patter of syllables, the customs agent peering past Smith with an air of defeat and more defeat. They’d already lost the disputation, it seemed, but Smith’s own dispute carried on.
A security man himself, Smith understood the woman’s need for order. The airport was pleasant, at least. The walls kept clean and white, the windows set high above within modern steel buttresses. He was certain, too, that however they had reached out to him through the blood on the plane, nothing was over. His dispute. His everything. The tread of his shoes still carried the high mountain mud. His duffel still dusty. And his brain, of course, was still a room filled with houseguests, drinkers, criminals, and Helen laughing with a slice of lime held in her teeth.
Frobisher’s letter was nonsense, but it was bonded by the US government, and manufactured by his security firm, and neatly folded into the shape of his escape. Ethiopia, the first place and the last place. Here was his disappearance. For she was already lost. For they had killed her.
In his bag were three firearms, the one that broke his heart and the second that killed three combatants and the third that had never been fired. They were good machines, cared for and respected while being hated a little too. It was important, Smith had been told more than once, to admit the unhappiness they wrought. It wasn’t a book or a video game—doing what he did wasn’t pretend—but here he was with them still, his tools, in a city that smelled of eucalyptus and exhaust and swift execution. His sleeping friend from the plane shuffled him through the rest of the airport, muttering, nodding, seeming to split the sea of people before them.
Outside the man gave him a big smile, held it, and then let the smile fall completely. Smith didn’t like him still holding his arm. There was just a briefcase in the man’s other hand. Passengers and skycaps and hustlers moved about.
“What?” Smith growled. “What the fuck is this?” He moved to pull his arm away but the businessman held on. “The fuck.” He pulled harder. “Don’t—” And as Smith spoke he felt the opposite of panic kick in, panic’s brother, action, and he dropped the duffel between them, darting back an inch before minutely launching forward, upward, his free right hand firing into the man’s armpit, and then fluidly gripping the reedy muscle that connected the man’s shoulder to his neck.
The appearance was of pulling one in for a hug, though he felt the man’s breath squeak to a halt. His nervous system not broken but interrupted.
The man blinked and nodded his long face once, twice, and then over and over. “It’s oh-kay.” He nodded. “It’s oh-kay. Okay.”
He let Smith go and hailed him a taxi, smiled again, feebly this time, and then spoke in halting English: “You,” he said, pausing and rubbing a massive hand on Smith’s arm, “are here.” The quality of a rehearsal to it, even to Smith a small violence. “Be cool, Mr. Smith. Not easy . . . now. But you will . . . be cool.”
That was it. Smith let himself into the back of the old green taxi. The driver only stared a moment through the rearview and upon pulling into traffic also spoke in English. “To Bukko. Dam Bukko, ahh, to Mr. Sebadi.” The driver’s eyes darted away as he said it, and Smith wrenched himself around to see the well-dressed man walking back into the terminal.
Terminal, he thought. Businessman. Bukko.
“I’m going here,” Smith finally said as they merged onto the tarmac road. An old receipt, the address scribbled upon it. “Sebadi, oh-kay? Mr. Miles Sebadi.”
The driver shook his head and merged forward with speed. This route reached upward before him, the high air thin and the many hills and hills beyond them a carpet of shared movement, of bustle beneath construction cranes and more construction, and meanwhile no one cared. No one cared about this city, no one smelled its scent of eucalyptus, or thought of its flexing sun. No one cared any longer, and Smith got his wish. To drag his ghosts here, to lose himself with nothing to lose. He was done.
Miles Sebadi, like his father, Abraham Sebadi, was a criminal, a big man, but essential. He was connecting this place to everywhere else. And everyone knew it, he thought. And Smith? Smith was a fist and an arm behind it, both Frobisher and Aden had told him, and nothing else. Smith had needed out of the war, and Sebadi, the son, was a criminal trying to do something good. They were building networks for Ethiopian infrastructure, and networks beyond that: energy, power. The car bomb six weeks before meant the Sebadis needed another man or two.
__________________________________
