36

Prin saw the sacrilegious manspreader again a few hours later, in the Duty-Free Shop at the Dragomans airport. The young man and his friend were deliberating between towering bottles of rum. Prin took a step towards them. Something needed to be said.

The Nephew seemed to think so, too.

He was also in the Duty-Free Shop, wearing a velour tracksuit,fur-lined leather slippers, and a neck pillow with built-in headphones, and was making his way over to the young men ahead of Prin. Rae was pushing a full shopping cart behind him. Prin tried to catch her eye but she was busy making faces with a little kid strapped into a stroller while his mother sampled skin creams. The kid was stamping his feet against the stroller’s bottom strap, which activated the red lights in the heels of his shoes. He was extremely proud and was rewarding himself with scoops of goldfish crackers after each stomp. Rae’s bright face told him she wanted to see more and more and more.

Meanwhile, The Nephew was lecturing the impressed young men. What kind of vulgar morons bought rum? He took them over to a coolly lit display of Japanese single-malt whisky. Tall, thin young women in elegant taupe hijabs were positioned everywhere, smiling and faintly nodding with an air that suggested they were happy to help without touching anything or being touched.

Prin left. He went next door to a gift shop. He wanted to pick something up for Molly and the girls. He had planned to find them gifts in the famous markets of the old city. The leather shops of Dragomans turned out such beautiful purses, the world’s most splendid women, from Josephine Bonaparte to Angelina Jolie, had owned one. But no one from the government complex had been willing to take him there before he left. They assured him it was safe to go, totally safe, that there were no problems at all, safe totally; but still, even if it were that safe, which it was, this was true, why take a chance? Totally safe.

In the back of the airport gift shop, amid T-shirts and fuzzy stuffed camels and dates, he found a small selection of soft, deep burgundy leather purses, each tagged with a picture of the saffron tented market where they had been made, for centuries, according to secret, family-held traditions. Prin read the fine print at the bottom of the tag. Made in China. He could cut off the tags before giving them to the girls. He picked up four, then made it five, then went back to four.

On a shelf full of snow-globe mosques that you could shake into sandstorms, Prin found two bookends modelled after the chapel in the mountain. He picked one up. It was heavy, far too heavy to take home in his luggage. He’d have to carry it himself, the whole way. He’d keep it on his lap in the plane. Right where her sleeping leg would never lie again. Nothing would be enough to merit her mercy, her forgiveness. But this was something he could do, and if she took it from him and threw it in the trash, or dropped it on his toe, or told him to keep holding it until it was time for him to be buried with it, he would accept this. He would accept anything, just so long as she responded.

He called her again.

Straight to voicemail. Again.

He brought the purses and bookend to the counter and left them there to go look for a book. Then he went back and picked up the bookend. The whole point was to carry it the entire time, from now until he saw Molly.

And he neither wanted nor deserved any Simon’s help.

Prin walked past breath mints and magazines and a device-charging station where a large man checked his phone while standing at a painful-looking angle for a large man. A clerk stood beside him, stooped in smiling replica.

Prin made his way to the books section. Other than a few local histories, here was standard airport reading: popular novels and prize-sticker novels; biographies and memoirs and manifestos of retired generals and presidential hopefuls and tech gurus and tech titans and tech prophets and tech prophets of doom; leadership books that promised to “unleash” some things and “conquer” others; histories of the world in seven volcanos, in fifteen paperclips, in five Steven Spielberg movies, in a recipe for jambalaya; books that promised all life’s lessons could be learned from Homer and Virgil and Zuzu’s Petals and marmots and earthworms.

Prin flipped through a few. He found his situation in some books and didn’t want to read on, or he failed to find it, and wondered what was the point of distracting himself. He’d fly home with nothing to read. He would tell her that, too.

Prin returned to the counter, paid for everything at an automated checkout, and declined to have the bookend boxed. He put the purses in his book bag and left with the bookend in his free hand.

Wende was waiting for him outside the store, drinking a smoothie. She smiled in a sad way and waved in a very small way. Because of his bag and the bookend, he physically couldn’t wave back, thank God. But shouldn’t he, at least, smile? Wasn’t there a seeking-mercy-and-forgiveness in her smile? And if he was so desperate for Molly to respond to him, couldn’t he at least offer to Wende what—

“GUARDS! STOP HIM! SOMEONE! STOP HIM!”

Prin turned around and put the bookend down to find his receipt. It must have looked like he’d just walked out of the store with it. But the clerk wasn’t pointing at Prin. She was pointing at a man in a drab cloak and black balaclava who was jogging towards Wende. He stopped and pulled up a long black gun and shot her and she fell with a look on her face like someone had just pulled a giant stitch out of her back. Then he stepped close and shot her some more. He stumbled backwards with the recoil and the gun slipped down and he rubbed his shoulder. He looked around and began jogging again.

More men, many more men in drab cloaks and black balaclavas now filled the terminal, guns firing, their barrels waving away screaming hijab women and their shrieking, clutching children. The gunmen jogged around shooting and people were screaming and glass was shattering and everything and everyone was falling down everywhere.

Running backwards Prin bumped against the wall beside the Duty-Free shop. There was a big potted plant on the floor. He slipped behind it. The plant was thick and bushy. How long until they found him? He smelled burning and hot metal and sulfur and piss. His crotch was soaking.

He tried to say a Hail Molly for Wende’s life and another that he be spared but couldn’t remember because a gunman was there, right there. He shot up the liquor bottles in the Duty- Free. The sacrilegious manspreader sprinted out and tripped on someone’s luggage. He got up and the gunman shot him. He walked over and saw the bikini blonde rippling across the front of the writhing young man’s long white shorts, and he shot and shot. Then he just stared down at the bodies.

When the gunman looked up he’d see Prin. His head was pure and empty. So was Prin’s. Not it wasn’t. His only thought was that Wende was dead and now Molly need never have known. Damn. Just then he felt something open up near his chest. In it. All this noise of gunfire and casings dropping on the floor—had he been shot without noticing? No. So what was this sudden blackness come into him? It was that in these, his final moments, that, that, had been his only thought. Not for Wende’s soul. Not for Molly’s mercy. Not for his girls, or for all of them in the life to come, a life without him, and for him a life without them, but that it was unfair he had told Molly something that now never needed to have been told.

Also: God, how dare You ask me to come here, for this!

Damn You.

Damn me for damning You.

Damn me for all of this dare.

The gunman looked up and Prin pressed against the wall and sobbed and held his breath, but then another gunman ran past and called and the nearby gunman stepped over the dead young man and slipped a little and ran on.

Prin sobbed for air and almost made a sign of the cross but then jumped back against the wall at the sound of sirens coming on—bells ringing and also a metallic whining. There wasn’t as much gunfire immediately around him. Suddenly, there was no noise at all. The lights went out and everything was grey-brown. Prin peeked out from behind the potted plant. No one moved. Here was his chance.

To do what, exactly?

His ears were ringing and he took off his glasses and wiped his face.

Hide in a better place than behind a potted plant, at least.

Eyes going everywhere, heart gorging his throat, he held his breath and stepped out and they starting shooting and he jumped back and breathed out hard. But this time the gunfire wasn’t near him. He held his breath and stepped out again and shook and convulsed with the noises and ran into the Duty-Free shop.

Kicking glass and shells, he slipped through broken bottles and amber puddles and goldfish and blood from a limp, velour-covered arm stretched out on the floor. The Nephew’s. Prin looked around for Rae. Then he almost tripped, dear Jesus he’d stepped into an empty baby stroller fallen on its side.

Not goldfish. Goldfish crackers. Those were a child’s goldfish crackers. That child’s. Prin stopped and crouched and listened for crying. In vain. Then, crying, he looked for a body. Blunt-shock wrong was Wende’s death and who knows how many more in the airport. Sad, tragic, wrong.

But who shoots a baby in a stroller?

Then, closer to the back of the store in the murk-light, he saw bright red flashing lights. Coming from a shoe, an empty shoe. Hunched over and now smelling alcohol and perfume, Prin went looking for the child. A little boy standing all by himself biting his fingers raw so no bad men could hear him crying. He checked behind a dark, wooden display of single malt Scotches. There was no one hiding there.

Someone must have picked up the child. Someone good, God, let it be someone good who picked up the child and ran from here and be safe now and at the hour of her death, and let that hour be long and far from here and now, amen.

Rae.

Rae had the child.

Gunfire again.

This time it came from closer. There was yelling, too. Why were they yelling now? Was it even them? Was it the Dragomans army? Would they know Prin was innocent? He was brown and he had a beard but he had his passport and didn’t he have a rosary his mother made him always carry a rosary when he travelled but he didn’t tell her this time but wasn’t there one in his jacket pocket and he went to check but then gunfire started again. This time it was coming from the far side of the terminal. The yelling became more frantic, and then suddenly everything went silent. There was a scratchy walkie-talkie noise and then everyone started shooting everywhere.

He looked around the shop and saw a plain door in a far corner. An exit? Prin ducked down and held his breath and ran there and pushed through and the door closed right after him and now he was standing in the dark.