Brother's Keeper

by C. E. Smith

  A motion sensor illuminates Tarik’s front yard and driveway. This could be a problem for Burkett. To avoid it, he’ll need to approach from the other side of the house, the side closest to the father and son, and even then, he can’t be sure there isn’t a second light.

  He waits for the father and son to go inside before he emerges from his car. Hands in his pockets, head down, Burkett climbs across their macabre display, circling the foam graveyard and brushing past the noosed effigy. He pushes through the branches of hyssop that seem to mark the border of Tarik’s property.

  Light emanates from a shuttered window. Through the tilted louvers he can make out a tiled floor and part of a toilet. A chain link fence forms a perimeter around Tarik’s back yard. Burkett kneels and opens his back­pack and finds what he expects – the pistol, flashlight, and box of latex gloves. He snaps on a pair of gloves and uses a rubber band to tie down the loose finger.

  Sliding doors lead into the back of the house. Through the glass he can see a small kitchen that opens onto a living room. The only light comes from the front of the house, but he can make out the couch and coffee table, the shape of a flat screen television. On the wall the new flag of South Khandaros is cast in shadow – the inscribed Shahadah barely visible against the background of purple and green. A free standing sculpture catches the light – a shark carved from driftwood in the tradition of Khan­darian folk art. He pulls the handle but the door is locked.

  At the bottom of a concrete staircase is a door with a window. He shines his light into an unfinished basement with puddles on the floor, a crawl space beyond.

  A thumb twist lies within easy reach of the nearest pane. He reverses his grip on the flashlight, holding it close to the lamp to keep from cutting himself. He hesitates ever so briefly (the moment I become a criminal, he thinks) before knocking the flashlight against the pane. He clears the tinkling shards from the sashes and reaches inside and unlocks the bolt.

  The basement is partitioned into three rooms, all empty but for the washer and dryer and utilities. The door at the top of the stairs is latched on the other side with what feels like a hook and eyelet. He wishes he’d brought a knife, but the door opens easily enough when he slams his shoulder against it.

  He stands in a kind of pantry, a vestibule off the kitchen. The shelves hold an array of spices and condiments. A stained apron hangs from a hook, embroidered with the word Chef. Could someone else live here? He can imagine killing Tarik, but not the hapless roommate or wife who happens to come home at the wrong moment.

  He pads down a short hallway and checks each door. The layout is simple: in front a bedroom, bathroom, small foyer, and office – and in back the kitchen and living room. There is no further sign of a roommate, no sign of anyone living here but a single man.

  Back in the kitchen he checks the refrigerator, drawers, and cabinets. On the glistening marble counter, a set of steak knives is sheathed in a wooden block. A checkered towel hangs from the stove handle. In the bedroom he finds the carpet vacuumed, the bed made, and clothes folded neatly in each drawer.

  It is almost a cliché, he thinks: the torturer who is finical in his personal life – who relishes the sight of men bleeding and fouling themselves, but at home finds the slightest stain intolerable.

  He looks under the bed and in the closets. He finds a set of empty suit­cases with tags bearing the name Hussein Al Bihani.

  In the office, he sits in the cushioned chair at the desk. A Qu’ran lies on a square piece of felt. Burkett picks it up and flips through the pages and thinks how Akbar would approve of his wearing gloves. He wakes the laptop but finds it locked. On the desk is an old family photograph: a hijab covering the mother’s hair, and the father in a black suit that seems to match the gloom in both of their faces. There are two children – a baby girl in the arms of her mother, and a boy around three or four. The son must be Tarik.

  A photo album in one of the desk drawers memorializes Tarik’s stint at an English university. He lived in a dorm, he rowed crew. An attractive blonde appears in enough of the photographs to qualify as a girlfriend. The young version of Tarik had the same look of natural arrogance, but he must have held more liberal views, enough at least to tolerate pubs and short skirts, his girlfriend in a bikini. Perhaps he broke things off when their cultural differences became too much to bear – the pressure from his parents to marry a Muslim – and perhaps he later came to realize his mistake, but only when it was too late, only after she’d taken up with another man. If he had married this woman would he still have adopted jihad as the sixth pillar of Islam? Would he have taken leave from medi­cine to champion the secessionist cause of South Khandaros? Perhaps Owen, Abu, Nick, and untold others would be alive. Burkett would still have his finger.

  Light comes through the blinds – the motion sensor in the driveway. He takes out the pistol and chambers a round and thumbs the safety catch. He glances through the slats as Tarik draws a key from the lace of his shoe. On impulse Burkett slips into the coat closet. He stills the few hangers and squats in the darkness. Within moments he hears the sounds of the front door, hinges and bolt, followed by heavy respirations just outside the closet. Tarik clears his throat, mumbles to himself in Arabic. A rustling sound: he must be taking off his shoes. Burkett thinks he hears the tick of the laces against the hardwood floor. If he puts the shoes in the closet with the row of others Burkett will have no choice but to carry out his task.

  From beyond the door comes only silence. A shift of shadows tells him that Tarik is still in the foyer. He must be sitting in the solitary chair, recov­ering from his run.

  Burkett’s hands are shaking, beyond the baseline tremor he’s had since returning from Khandaros. He can feel the sweat inside his latex gloves. He passes the gun from one hand to the other. When the ache in his left thigh becomes unbearable, he gingerly settles into a seated position, his back against the deep wall of the closet. He holds the gun in his lap. He can feel it trembling. In either hand it seems to make his tremor worse, so he sets it down on the carpet.

  Does he have what it takes? He read somewhere that a man with a horrible duty should convince himself beforehand that it is already done. Before carrying out the deed, he should internalize it, make it an irrev­ocable part of himself.

  Tarik pads toward the back of the house. Burkett hears water flowing in the sink in the kitchen and after a period of silence the mumbling yet again of Tarik’s voice. He must be praying.

  All Burkett has to do is walk a short distance and aim the pistol and pull the trigger. What is stopping him? Is it cowardice? Is it the idea of Tarik putting aside jihad and devoting the rest of his life to medicine? No, Burkett thinks: the bloodlust runs too deep. Tarik even now could be pre­paring an attack on innocent civilians. The human race would be better off without him.

  Now Burkett too is praying, but it is his brother whose face he sees when he closes his eyes and thinks, Tell me what you’d have me do. The dark­ness of the closet, now complete, allows him to imagine it as a space with room enough for him and Owen to sit facing each other. He remembers that broken bone in Owen’s hand, the boxer’s fracture. By killing Tarik, would Burkett not fulfill the intention of that final blow?

  But he can’t bring himself to reach for the gun on the carpet between them. It’s not cowardice, he realizes, but something even more prosaic: he simply can’t imagine committing murder. That word, murder, pierces him like a barb, a twisting pain that he somehow feels in both his mind and his gut. It reminds him of his first days of captivity, his days of withdrawal. And what is this, if not withdrawal of a different sort? Not from drugs or alcohol but from the hatred that seems to be ebbing out of him.

  All at once his path is clear: he will slip away unseen, even if he has to leave a murderer unpunished, Owen unavenged. Even if he has to worry for years to come about Tarik – who surely learned the source of the FBI investigation – seeking vengeance of his ow
n. But if Tarik came for him, he would be waiting. The killing then would be easy.

  At the sound of the shower Burkett begins to rise. His hand catches the edge of a shoebox, causing the contents to spill. He turns on his flashlight and finds on the carpet a pair of expensive watches and a velvet purse with a drawstring. He sets down the flashlight and dumps out a small pile of jewelry. Spreading out the gold and silver he recognizes the Celtic weave of his brother’s ring. He holds it to the light and reads the inscription on the inner surface.

  There wrestled a man with him until the break of day.

  Now he is crossing the foyer. He passes the prayer rug and stalks toward a frame of light at the end of the dark hallway. He seems to follow himself at a remove, like his own shadow, his body nothing more than an instru­ment of rage. He pushes into the wisps of vapor and yanks back the shower curtain to find Tarik blinking in a white lather, the watery suds streaming down his body. Tarik shouts, startled, but then his eyes register Burkett, and his face slackens as if Burkett weren’t an intruder at all but rather an expected visitor. Tarik shifts his head from the stream, wiping his eyes and pushing back his hair, and for a moment he is looking not at Burkett but at the fogged mirror, which holds only the dim outline of a man with a gun.

  Burkett mops the sweat from his face. When he displays the ring, Tarik gives only the slightest of nods, an acknowledgment of either the ring or the shortened finger, perhaps both. Tarik opens his mouth to speak, but then closes it, making it clear that he intends no argument. Burkett would have preferred some final utterance from Tarik, a word of defiance, any­thing to compel him to pull the trigger. He pockets the ring so that he can hold the increasingly heavy pistol with both hands.

  ‘Damn you!’ he shouts.

  At the sound Tarik flinches, stumbling backward with his hands lifted in defense. He slides into a seated position on the floor of the tub.

  ‘Just pull the trigger,’ he says, his voice shaking, his twitching eyes unable to hold Burkett’s. ‘Come on. Shoot.’

  Shoot. It is a term from wrestling: to attack the legs. The word brings back the voice of his brother, his brother calling to him, cheering him from the edge of the mat. Burkett has little memory of that particular match, beyond losing it, but now he can see his brother on the periphery of the ring, drenched in sweat and still in his singlet after a match of his own. Owen yelling, ‘Shoot! Shoot!’, and Burkett failing to do so, Burkett falling short. In that clenched, pained expression he saw what he’d taken for granted as long as he could remember, perhaps since before their mother died, not just that Owen was suffering along with him, but also a corollary of that selflessness: Burkett could hurt his brother by hurting himself, or honor him by striving to become more like him.

  29

  Burkett sits outside a cafe in Atlanta, near the hotel where he’s booked to stay the next four nights. A novel lies face down on the table. He checks his phone, confirming what he already knows – Véronique is fifteen minutes late and she hasn’t called.

  His colleagues ridiculed his choice of Atlanta rather than some exotic resort, but their gentle chiding was preferable to the gossip that no doubt would have ensued had he mentioned his real motive: a woman from his past now in Atlanta for a job with CNN. A woman who might not even be available, who was engaged to be married when he saw her last. But if Véronique were spoken for, he wonders why she would reach out to him after so many years. Why send an email out of the blue?

  How did she say it? I’ve been thinking about you and meaning to write.

  His reply, even before he was sure he could arrange the time off: It just so happens I’ll be in Atlanta next week.

  But now she’s late. Maybe she’s standing him up. Perhaps the nurses were right: for his first vacation in years – an advantage of hiring a junior surgeon – he should have done something more tropical, however depressing the notion of a man his age, forty-two, alone at the beach.

  But his time in Atlanta hasn’t been entirely wasted. This morning he finally emptied his father’s storage unit, a problem he’d put off far too long. He spent four hours with a pair of movers processing the dust-covered boxes, clothes, appliances, and furniture. His rummaging yielded at least one interesting discovery: a sheaf of fifty or so letters handwritten by their father but never sent – each with its own painstaking copy, iden­tical but for the name at the top. Dear Owen or Dear Ryan, written during their first years in medical school. Those he’s read so far discuss little beyond the mundane details of a retired surgeon’s solitary existence. His tedious account of a grocery store visit and oil change somehow leads to his favorite surgical dictum.

  Remember, the perfect is the enemy of the good.

  Burkett is momentarily distracted by the driver of a passing car, a woman he briefly dated during his residency. Or someone who looks just like her. There appear to be children in the back seat, which shouldn’t sur­prise him. This has become the salient characteristic of his social circle: a gradual accretion of spouses and offspring. He was recently asked to be the godfather of Rory Bird’s daughter, a role for which he feels distinctly unqualified, but it would have been a grave insult to refuse, and Rory knows him well enough not to expect very much in the way of moral or spiritual guidance.

  He stands when Véronique arrives. She apologizes for being late and offers a genuine laugh when he says he’s glad to see her in something other than Kevlar. It is a joke she’s heard before, he’s sure.

  ‘What brings you to Atlanta?’ she asks as they embrace.

  ‘I did all my training here,’ he says, not quite answering her question. He explains the storage unit and the letters from his father, all the while glancing at her left hand as though expecting the former engagement ring to emerge from her very flesh.

  When they go inside for drinks, he holds the door and insists that she walk ahead of him, from either decorum or an impulse to conceal his limp. Likely something of both. The pain seems to grow worse by the month, a consequence of joint degeneration on the side of the fracture. Post-traumatic osteoarthritis: it’s only a matter of time before he needs a prosthetic hip. But why the embarrassment? Perhaps it’s only natural when courting a woman to suppress all evidence of weakness, even if he can’t imagine her writing him off for something so superficial as a limp.

  After ordering they wait at the counter for a heavily tattooed barista to prepare Véronique’s espresso. Burkett sips his black coffee from a twenty-ounce cup, feeling the warmth of it through the corrugated sleeve. Cus­tomers nearby whisper and stare at Véronique, no doubt recognizing her from television, and Burkett enjoys watching her pretend not to notice.

  ‘Any word on our friend Tarik?’ she asks when they return to their table.

  He appreciates the our, and also her use of the nom de guerre, the impli­cation that he wasn’t delusional after all.

  ‘Tarik seems to be doing well,’ he says, rotating the Celtic ring on his finger. ‘Last I checked, he’d gone back to his caliphate to practice endocrinology.’

  For months after his ill-advised break-in, he feared a visit from the police or, worse, Tarik himself intent on some torturous revenge. He still keeps that pistol in the drawer of his nightstand, and some nights, even while convinced of Tarik’s return to South Khandaros, he lies awake anticipating the squeal of the alarm, yearning for a shot of bourbon if only to help him sleep.

  He looks at her and asks, ‘Weren’t you engaged the last time I saw you?’

  ‘That was doomed from the start,’ she says.

  But she is looking over his shoulder, toward the strip mall across the street.

  ‘Is someone filming a movie?’ she asks.

  He sees what she does: a barricade holding back a small crowd. Craning, he discerns the standing lights, a microphone on a boom. He catches only a glimpse of the actors, a pair of men in matching suits, whose faces he can’t quite distinguish. When he turns back
to her she wears a smile half formed, her eyes not on the set but on Burkett himself. They play at guess­ing the type of movie, eventually settling on a marriage caper, gangsters doubling as groomsmen. Perhaps in the final cut he and Véronique will appear as anonymous figures in the distant background.

  ‘How romantic,’ she says.

  When they’ve finished their drinks she offers to show him where she works. A tour of the newsroom holds little appeal, but he takes the invi­tation as a pretext for spending more time together. They walk out to the parking lot where he finds himself lagging behind. His limp seems worse than ever, but not even halfway to her car she stops and waits.

  Acknowledgements

  I’m grateful to Rebecca Carter for her invaluable insights and commitment to this novel. It’s been a privilege to work with Margaret Stead, James Rox­burgh, Tamsin Shelton, and everyone at Atlantic Books. I’m indebted to Geoff Hayden for his incisive reading; Christopher Costanzo for sharing his knowledge of missions; and Jim Wood for help with surgical detail. All mistakes are mine alone. I’m especially grateful to Brooke Smith, without whose patience and support this novel wouldn’t exist.