In the days following the bloodbath, which the press named the Feverdrops Slaughter, Daniel felt both overly tired and alert. The massacre woke him at night like someone pounding at the door. Thoughts raced through his mind or moved as slowly as the beggars downtown. The newspapers used the event to underscore the dangers of Communism.
Sherzai stopped by without notice. Daniel was glad to see him. They shook hands and embraced in a quick succession of stiff but earnest gestures. He appeared to be almost in shock.
“Which faction would do this?” he said. These aren’t normal Communists.” His voice was strained. “Where’s the liquor cart?”
“I had it removed.”
“I see.” There was concern in agha’s voice. He squeezed into his usual chair, resting his cane across his legs and accepting a cigarette. “What will you do now? Rebecca won’t want to live here after this.”
“She’s stronger than you think. But maybe you’re right. I assume you know what Smythe said? You two seem to have a good rapport.”
Sherzai sought his eyes, but Daniel would not look up from the stack of mail he was sorting. “I would never harm you, batche’m.”
“You threatened to ruin me.” Daniel tossed pointless letters into a wastepaper bin. “What would you call that?”
“What would you call lying to someone who took you in as a son?” Sherzai shook his head and changed the topic. “This is no place for your wife or for you.”
“I don’t see how I can leave.”
“Please, listen, for once in your life. I’m trying to help you.”
“I know. But sometimes I wonder if that’s all there is to it. I’m not a child anymore, and I want to ask you something. Man to man.”
Daniel asked Sherzai to forgive him for what he was about to say. Before, he would never have considered it. But before barely existed in the wake of the Feverdrops Slaughter. And so he said, “Maybe you want the Reform to be your legacy rather than mine. Maybe you’re tired of it, being in Sayed Sajadi’s shadow?”
As soon as he’d said it aloud, the idea sounded both absurd and cruel. Grief melted into tears in Sherzai’s eyes.
“I’m sorry, agha,” Daniel whispered. “I didn’t mean for it to sound like that.”
Sherzai dabbed at his cheeks with a handkerchief. He stood with difficulty and circled around the desk without his walking stick, then rested his hand on Daniel’s shoulder. In that hand, Daniel felt the weight of a lifetime of promises and duties and love, along with pain.
Miss Soraya arrived with a steaming pot of tea. After cursing the Darjeeling for burning his tongue, Sherzai said, “Let’s say you manage to turn a few fields into something better. So what? In the end, what will have changed? And what will it have cost you?”
“Everything worthwhile comes at a cost,” Daniel said.
“Everything worthwhile has to be worthwhile.”
“I have to believe it will be.”
“Believe all you like. That won’t make it so.”
“I have to stay, Sherzai.”
“All men are willing to make sacrifices before they understand what those sacrifices are,” Sherzai said. “What if things get worse and USADE shuts down in a few months?”
“What if it does?”
“Won’t you wish you had left earlier, instead of putting Rebecca through months of worrying, the two of you sitting an ocean apart, waiting for the inevitable?”
“USADE won’t back down that easily, especially now. As Smythe likes to say, we can’t let terrorists change us.”
“He said that because he has to. Of course terrorists change us. They get us to change ourselves. How we act, how we think. And all the while, as we shout that they aren’t changing us, they laugh and watch us become even worse than they hoped.”
Daniel wished he hadn’t asked Miss Soraya to remove the liquor from his office. Later that day, Rebecca called. She’d heard about the Feverdrops Slaughter from Peter and Laila, who had reached her hours ago. She wasn’t calmed by Daniel’s promises that he was safe. If anything, she grew more anxious when he described the steps taken by USADE and the regime. He tried to change the subject. They talked about Sandy. The gravestone had arrived. Rebecca’s mother was better, but still finding relief in little blue pills.
Telaya had fallen utterly silent, though he found himself searching for her the morning after the tragedy. It was almost a betrayal, this silence when he expected her to join him in rage. At the State Department, everyone worked overtime, trying to formulate an explanation for how they hadn’t seen this coming. Everyone wondered if USADE would continue its operations at all.
After a tense waiting period, the agency learned its fate. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance’s decision was, as Smythe put it, unequivocal.
“Vance thinks Daoud looks weak if we pull anybody out, and if you ask me, he’s right. Which isn’t an everyday occurrence for Vance. Those Commies are terrorists, and we don’t let terrorists win. The people who did this aren’t regular red, they’re big red.” Smythe made a spitting sound. “That goddamn gum has too much cinnamon for me, but the grandkids like it.”
Daoud’s regime dispatched soldiers to guard every field slated for reform. It was an irony of sublime proportions, a military presence to help the opium harvest proceed undisturbed. The other great khans harvested quickly, their poppy workers looking over their shoulders. Everyone passing through Fever Valley was warned to bring an ID and an explanation, and no vehicle could bring in more than four men or six women.
Daniel wondered what Taj might be thinking. Washington and Kabul couldn’t be the only ones talking; the Manticores would be deliberating their own fate.
At USADE, the focus shifted to smaller fields with farmers happy to hire local villagers. The office was now open only Monday through Wednesday. Guards patrolled the building. Telaya’s commentary started again, but it wasn’t the anger Daniel had expected after the massacre, just more pleas and provocations that he barely heard amid the deafening new silences in his head.
In the evenings, Daniel worked with Ian on projects in the shed. They barely spoke and never drank. Ian hosted poker nights, which Peter and Laila joined. An easy rhythm had returned to Daniel’s friendships, as if the Feverdrops Slaughter had melted the fences around him. When they played cards, Pamela often sat with them, teasing them about their unimpressive skills, sometimes playing a hand. She made milkshakes and served homemade cakes and wore her hair in a ponytail. She asked if the men were okay, her voice different from before, now that of a woman who was done hiding both her fears and her strengths. Her nail polish was often chipped, but she seemed prettier without the layers of makeup. The stilettos were still present, especially the pink flowery ones, which she wore often. Where they had seemed creepy before with their too-girlish sexiness, they were now an emblem of a whimsical era quickly slipping away. Sometimes Daniel caught her studying her feet as if wondering whether that time had ever really existed.
“Royal flush,” Peter said, displaying his hand.
Daniel pushed his tokens toward him. “You’re better at this than I remember.”
“I’ve been playing with Sherzai a lot.”
“Really? He never mentioned it.”
When Peter told him the vice-minister was helping him with research, Daniel was surprised. “I didn’t realize you were writing.”
“Why wouldn’t I be? It’s what I do.”
“How much longer are you planning to stay?” Surely it couldn’t be long. “Most foreigners are taking off, and here you are making yourself at home.”
“A historian doesn’t walk away from history when it’s unfolding before him.”
Ian reached into his pocket and scattered cigarillos across the card table. “You writing about the Commies, Mr. Prof?”
Peter shook his head. He said he wasn’t writing about the massacre, either. “I write about the past, remember? I’ve had some ideas since arriving here.”
Daniel offered to introduce him to other officials, but Peter declined. “Sherzai is enough. Most of what he’s told me I’d already guessed, but it’s good to have him as a source.”
Afraid Peter would launch into a tedious lecture, Daniel changed the topic to baseball. “Who do you like for the Series?”
“Yankees,” Ian said.
“Dodgers,” Peter countered, handing him the deck.
Ian dealt while Daniel considered his old professor, who’d come here without much of a plan. He realized something else, too. If he and Rebecca were the best friends Peter had, the professor was a lonely man.