The Warlord's Son

by Dan Fesperman

  “So I guess you don’t know about the dead man, either.”

  This at least got a rise out of him, but whether out of embarrassment or bafflement Najeeb couldn’t say.

  “You’re out of your mind. What the hell are you talking about? And do you want everyone to hear you?” The Clerk lowered his voice, forcing Najeeb to lean closer. The nearby foreign journalists seemed mildly curious but mostly annoyed, probably figuring that the locals had brought some petty grudge aboard.

  “Do you think I’m the only one on this bus, or this caravan, with something to hide?” The Clerk practically spit out the words, poking a stubby forefinger into Najeeb’s chest and hissing into his ear. Najeeb wanted to grab his collar and shove the round head against the window, but with the Clerk now grabbing his shirtfront it was all he could do to keep from collapsing into the seat atop the man. “Do you think I’m the only person here who can do you harm?”

  The Clerk then pushed him away. Najeeb, jolted by the parting remark, nearly tripped over a duffel bag in the aisle before sagging past his Swedish seatmate to his spot by the window. And now here he was, still fuming and still afraid, both for himself and for Daliya, waiting for the swirl of angry confusion to calm and settle in his head.

  He breathed deeply, his kameez sticking to the sweat on his back. Then he tried to take stock of what he knew and where he stood. Daliya was missing and unreachable, almost certainly due to someone who’d been watching them. By now the police would be looking for her, and possibly for him as well, depending on what Rukhsana had decided to say. A nameless malang, some religious fanatic from the hills, was dead practically on his doorstep, but only after having penned his direst warning yet. And the ISI still had its hooks in him, which might or might not have something to do with the Clerk’s presence on the bus. And who the hell had the Clerk been referring to just now, with the remark about “others” who might do him harm? Then there was Karim, emissary of his uncle Aziz, who’d come all the way to Najeeb’s apartment but apparently without a message.

  As if all that weren’t enough, Najeeb was now trapped in this bus, bound for an unwanted border crossing that might keep him tied down for days, out of touch with everyone who mattered, yet still in harm’s way. His world might change completely in his absence, but he wouldn’t know until they returned. He pulled out his cell phone, but the signal was gone. It wouldn’t be back until they returned to Peshawar.

  He considered all the journalists around him. They were tourists, really, even if of a more knowledgeable and inquisitive strain. And so naive. He wondered how they would react if they really knew how far beyond help they already were in case something went wrong. Even with Fawad’s men aboard, and even with the occasional roadside bunker housing soldiers of the Frontier Police, Najeeb knew from experience that with every mile beyond Peshawar the government’s influence waned like the signal of a weak radio station, or the signal of his cell phone. By the time you entered the Khyber Pass it was lost altogether in static and whine, an unreachable bandwidth. Lawless was an understatement.

  He looked out the window, hoping the view might calm him, but what he saw was a landscape that still haunted and ruled him, and he easily imagined the feel of the stones beneath the thin rubber soles of his sandals. Looking toward the sun, he recalled what it felt like to stand atop a high pass, a moment of calm, bright blueness up where the hawks circled, face raised to the heavens, the air crisp and cool, a clarity that made you gasp for more. He hadn’t taken a deep breath like that in years without feeling the stench of the city clutch at his insides.

  There were plenty of fond memories locked in these hills, but his current mood seemed to be screening out all but the bad ones. When they’d passed the Smugglers Bazaar a half hour earlier he’d been reminded of one of the worst weeks of his boyhood, a spell of servitude ordered by his father, who had angrily deemed him in need of penance, of toughening. For six awful days he had manned a pushcart for a smuggling baron along the tribal border, an ally of his father’s who controlled illicit commerce for dozens of commodities. Najeeb began each circuit at a darkened stone warehouse, piling the cart heavily with cartons of Marlboros and boxes of Surf detergent, then shoved the load at a straining trot a quarter mile down a bumpy path toward the border of the North-West Frontier Province and the crowded stalls of the bazaar, half panicked that a Pakistani customs guard might approach at any moment. If your cart was impounded it wiped out a week’s worth of earnings and won you a flogging from the boss. Even if you made it safely to your destination, some pigeonhole shop deep in the bazaar, you gave up half your thirty-rupee reward to the merchant who controlled the transit area.

  But the worst part of the week had been the other boys, small-time bullies with their own ideas of turf and tribute, punching and kicking and demanding a cut of his pay, then spitting derisively when he handed it over. They’d been forewarned of the young khan’s arrival, the son of the mighty malik, knowing he was usually off-limits to such casual abuse. But not this week, they’d been told. The usual rules were suspended. Treat him as you would any newcomer. Meaning each day brought cuts, bruises and welts along with the few rupees Najeeb managed to hang on to. At times he gave as good as he got, to the point where he was fighting in his dreams. This continued for two weeks after his return home, kicking and scuffling through the night until the blanket came off, then awakening in a fury beneath a sky full of stars.

  Such was the lifestyle of these hills, where every division of power had its subdivision, and every line of demarcation was a zone of struggle and torment. There were four major tribes in the Khyber Agency alone, with each divided into khels, and every khel into clans, every clan into subclans, and so on, down to the rival gangs of begrimed boys, tangling dawn to dusk for the last remaining scraps of pride and conquest.

  Najeeb’s father had stood atop one of the loftier levels of this hierarchy. Of course, this was not royalty in the Western sense of the word, as Najeeb would discover whenever he tried to explain his heritage to friends in college. For all its medieval character, it was a knighthood of kameez and bandoleer, not ermine and armor; of turbans, not tiaras; Kalashnikovs, not lances. The castles of this realm were stone compounds with wrought-iron gates, mud walls and kitchen smokeholes. Or such had been the case until Najeeb was in his teens, for he had come of age in an era of great changes.

  Early in life, his father’s status had brought scarcely more than the right to lord it over their village, where most residents barely fed themselves and paid little in tribute or rent. His family ate the same lentils and spinach as the others, his mother pounding barley into flour on a hollowed stone, his sisters churning soft cheeses and curds, buttermilk and warqa. They drank black tea by day, green tea by night, boiling the leaves with milk and sugar.

  When the villagers brought them anything it was usually tomatoes, which his father shied from, believing they caused impotence, a fear especially acute in a man who had produced only one son. For special meals they might wring the neck of a chicken or dispatch Najeeb and the other local children to help Aziz do some fishing, Pashtun style, not with nets but by cutting a five-rupee stick of dynamite in half, then tying it to a lump of phosphorous wrapped in cloth. Aziz lit the phosphorous, then tossed the bundle into the deepest pool, the flame holding even under water, drawing the fish like a beacon, then exploding with a thud and a bubbling geyser. It was the greatest entertainment the children might witness for weeks, as stunned fish bobbed to the surface, dead eyes turned to the sky, everyone wading in to skim the catch into woven baskets.

  But when Najeeb was only five, war arrived next door in Afghanistan on a wave of Soviet tanks and helicopters, and by the time he was ten the world was a very different place. On came the gunrunners and the quiet men from America with no last names, nodding and smiling with their broken Pashtun, mouths full of promises and briefcases full of cash. Soon in their wake came a strange and sullen breed of holy men, some on horseback, mouths curled in scorn. The men of the v
illage turned ascetic and scornful, yet for all of the new piety the valley’s poppy fields bloomed as never before, and the passing caravans were laden with new cargoes—hand-held missile launchers heading west, oozing brown sacks of opium paste heading east. And wedged between them, families of refugees, stumbling through the passes while Najeeb watched from the shadows of the rocks, at rest with his lunch and a flask of tea.

  The new commerce quickly pushed his family’s standard of living upward, leaping centuries at a time: running water, a telephone in the village, an automobile, even a television. For years its only signal was a screen full of snow with garbled sound, yet it played almost continuously in the hujera, like some new totem of authority.

  Najeeb’s great windfall was to be dispatched across the hills to a school that taught writing and English and mathematics, a three-mile walk that cost him dearly in stones and derision from boys who had learned from their grandfathers exactly what to chant at such presumption:

  You are learning at the English school,

  You are learning for money.

  There will be no place in heaven for you,

  And for this you will hang in hell.

  To extract payment for these indulgent hours of learning Najeeb’s father sent him into the hills every afternoon with an old rifle, on orders to bring home birds for the table, even though by then his family had moved well beyond lentils and barley bread. But the chore proved anything but punishment. Najeeb cherished the old gun, more for its look and feel than for the way it performed. He was never much of a shot, even when drawing a bead on an imaginary redcoat or a rival Shinwari, and the few times he did bring down a bird he enjoyed it more for the opportunity to study his prey than for the satisfaction of the kill, so much so that he began taking along pencil stubs and scraps of paper so he could sketch them. He began to admire these creatures, to envy their independence and mobility—soaring to far valleys whenever they pleased. But he was discerning in his devotion. Birds that fed and hunted in packs earned only disdain—fluttery sparrows, just like the boys in the village. Vultures, too, were loathsome, with one notable exception—the lammergeier, the only one among them that hunted alone, waiting for the rest to eat their fill because only he knew how to unlock the hidden treasures of the marrow, carrying bones aloft, then dropping them to the stones below, prying the red food from the cracks. Clever, that bird, outwitting them all.

  But he hid his drawings, of course, sketching in secret until the day his uncle Aziz came upon him, lost in thought while shading a hawk’s spread of tail feathers in grays and blacks. Aziz’s shadow fell on the page, and Najeeb braced for a scolding. But Aziz only laughed, then praised the likeness, making it clear that this would be a secret between them. Even then Najeeb was aware that at some level this was a betrayal, but an alliance was formed. It was cemented forever weeks later when Aziz trudged up the hill with a smile almost wicked in its joy, then pulled from his baggy pocket a small bundle wrapped in butcher’s paper and tied up with string, stamped with the blue seal of a bookseller in Peshawar. Najeeb tore it open to reveal a flash of colors as brilliant as anything he had ever seen—a set of colored pencils, a small sketch pad and, best of all, A Field Guide to the Birds of the Indian Subcontinent. At last he could put a name to everything he shot or spied, even the huge old owl—a Eurasian Eagle Owl, he learned—that haunted the crumbling ruins of the ancient Buddhist stupa.

  But the gift, of course, led inevitably to the awful moment of exposure, when his father found his hidden drawings and shredded them in a rage, calling his son a bedagh, a whore, and everything he could think of that was womanish or unholy. Yet even his father couldn’t bring himself to destroy something as fine and expensive as the guidebook, so he had merely kicked it, then decreed Najeeb’s week of penance at Smugglers Bazaar. And Najeeb, emerging tougher yet wiser, had stored up his resentment, letting it silently accrue interest until the pivotal moment in Tariq’s office in Islamabad, when he finally paid back his father in full.

  “Yes, I know what is in the cave,” he had said at last, breaking his silence for the patient professional. And he did know, having found the place on one of his walks. Not a new place at all to him, even if at that particular time it had been filled with all sorts of new equipment— boiling kettles and steel drums, pipes and tubing and pressure gauges. Sacks of opium paste were piled along one wall, their contents being transformed as if by magic into much smaller bags holding the white powder of heroin. Najeeb’s father had found the way to eliminate the middleman, and thus became wealthy enough to send his only son off to college, while practically daring federal authorities to do something about it, if they only knew where to look.

  Which they eventually did, of course, once the college boy told them. And when Najeeb was then banished from his father’s lands the following spring, the worn but glossy bird book had been nestled at the bottom of the small sack of belongings handed over to Najeeb. And now he was back in these hills, staring from the window of the bus, the memories sprinting down the slopes toward him like raiders on horseback.

  ASUDDEN SWERVE of the bus lurched him back to the present as his forehead banged the window. The bus was pulling onto the shoulder at a high curve. All the translators and fixers were rising to their feet, filling the aisle to exit. Of course. It was that time of day.

  “What the hell are we doing?” he heard Skelly shout from a few rows back.

  “Prayers,” he said calmly over his shoulder, rising to join the procession. Fawad and his men were already kneeling on the verge, some of them unrolling small rugs. All the fixers were here, too, even the Clerk. Najeeb found an empty patch of ground and whisked away the gravel with his palms. Then he knelt, lowering his forehead to the ground, praying for safety and mercy and peace. He thought of Daliya, wondering yet again where she might be, hoping she was safe. Then he prayed for calm and strength, settling upon a fragment of a sura that had always been a favorite.

  “With every hardship there is ease. With every hardship there is ease.” Repeating it five more times until it calmed him.

  The men around him began to stand, brushing off clothes and hands. For this one moment, he realized, all of them who called this place home had showed their unity and their backsides to the foreigners aboard the bus, and despite his current state of loyalties he momentarily swelled with pride. Faces stared down at them through smudged windows with expressions of boredom and idle curiosity. Najeeb wondered what God must make of this rabble by the road, praying beneath the gaze of the cash-paying infidel. That thought, too, gave him a rebellious sense of pleasure. Then he glimpsed the Clerk, just ahead of him on the left, rubbing dust from his hands, and he relapsed into worry and apprehension.

  Just before boarding he saw Skelly eyeing him with what seemed to be disapproval. If he hadn’t known better, in fact, he’d have said that the man looked mistrustful, which troubled him more than he would have expected. Hardly the sort of relationship you needed if you were heading into a war zone.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  HAD THE PESHAWAR POLICE conducted more than their usual cursory examination of the crime scene outside Najeeb’s apartment, they might have found a tiny cell phone lodged in a bush some thirty feet beyond the body.

  The phone’s battery was dead, or else it would soon have attracted the attention of a passerby, beckoning like a cricket from its hideaway. But even in silence it was an important marker, the starting point for an odyssey of panic and indecision that, by the following afternoon, led all the way to Islamabad.

  The trail ended at Quaid-i-Azam University, at the office of Professor Rana Bhatti in the Department of International Relations. There, beneath the languid whirl of a ceiling fan, one of the professor’s former students sat nervously in a stiff-backed chair by the desk, anxiously awaiting her mentor’s arrival. The visitor had been waiting more than an hour. To kill time she scanned the pages of the newspaper Dawn for any hint of the troubles she’d left behind. Finding none, she aimlessly surveyed t
he posters, placards and photos on the office walls for at least the twentieth time since her arrival, wondering yet again what was to become of her. Because for the first time in her life, Daliya Qadeer was on the run and unsure of herself.

  From the moment she’d broken free of the man with the knife she’d considered calling her parents. She craved the safety and comfort of their familiar voices, the touch of their hands, the softness of the bed in the room where she had grown up. Under the circumstances, she knew, they would welcome her home in a heartbeat. Yet she also knew relief would give way to anger and recrimination once her transgressions became known, and she’d had quite enough of anger and recrimination.

  Returning to her aunt and uncle’s was out of the question for the same reason. They would react more as jailers than protectors, outraged to have lost control of their ward. They’d have locked her up, releasing her only for meals and bathroom breaks until her parents could be summoned.

  She thought next of calling Rukhsana, but when she reached into her purse she discovered that her cell phone was gone. And by then she was so accustomed to the shortcuts of speed dial—pound-one for Rukhsana, pound-two for Najeeb—that she couldn’t have told you the actual number for either if her life had depended on it. And for a while she thought it might.

  Seeking help, she made her way to a PTT call office in the Saddar Bazaar, an ill-lit shack where the man on duty seemed more interested in swatting flies than connecting his customers. First she tried Najeeb at the Frontier Report. But by then it was nearly nine o’clock and just about everyone had gone home. She decided not to leave a message, worried that it might fall into the wrong hands, especially since Najeeb might not retrieve it for days. For all she knew he was in Afghanistan by now, which also meant that returning to his apartment was out of the question. Too much danger there anyway, and next time she might not be so lucky.