At home, Sayed’s eyes again followed Daniel through the house, his portrait looming larger than ever. Peter, Firooz, and Daniel talked, played, and drank tea, and Daniel found himself laughing at their jokes, everything growing lighter for a while. The night came quickly, painting the windows black, the feeble lamps a poor match for the encroaching darkness. Daniel wondered when he would fly home, and whether Sutherland could arrange a ticket or if he would have to find a way to Pakistan to catch a plane there. He turned on the radio at eleven. A nasal voice rattled off the arrest report. The list was long. Daniel listened for friends, acquaintances, and old classmates and heard one: “Laila Sharifi.”
Peter rose, his cup dropping to the floor. Dr. Sharifi had been caught buying a large quantity of illicit opium, the voice said, and unlike the king or Daoud, the Party made no exceptions for its own. The rule of law was absolute, principles unbendable to personal favor. The voice went on to read more names. Daniel wondered how many nameless people had been killed, too. He kept Peter as calm as he could, hiding his own distress, but the professor was inconsolably shaken.
“I’ll go see Sherzai in the morning,” Daniel said. “He might be able to get her out.”
“Maybe I should come.” Peter wrung his hands like an old woman.
“I think I have a better chance.”
Waiting for daylight, Daniel felt no pain, his wounds soothed by the bitter rain of what he had to do. He felt strangely empty, as if he’d been reduced to some essential element, a single atom, with a great force threatening to split him in two. In the morning, Peter set off for Laila’s apartment, insisting he would wait for her there. It was closer to downtown, and Daniel was to get her out and bring her straight there.
When Daniel appeared at the Ministry of Planning an hour later, he introduced himself to the clerk as Abdullah, one of Mr. Sherzai’s servants. She scanned him head to toe. “You’re here to see the minister?” She leaned her chin in her hand. “Maybe you can wait until he returns home.”
He told her it was urgent. She slowly dialed Sherzai’s extension. He was in a meeting. Daniel waited on an uncomfortable couch, flipping through a magazine about architecture. He asked her to try again after twenty minutes. Sherzai sent down his secretary, a pretty woman in high heels and a formfitting suit. She wore a crystal brooch, a butterfly that caught the light as she led Daniel upstairs. Sherzai did not ask Daniel about his disguise.
In a large but utilitarian office, they stood appraising each other before Sherzai quietly left to fetch tea. Daniel was grateful for the moment alone. The newly minted Minister of Planning brought a pot from his secretary’s desk and poured two glasses. He closed the door. He wanted to know about Rebecca’s health, but Daniel wasn’t here to talk about that. He pilfered a cigarette and lit it with unsteady hands. Without preamble, because he could think of none that wasn’t absurd, he said, “They took Laila. Laila’s in prison.”
Sherzai was about to say something but stopped himself. He leaned back in his leather chair. “Laila is a fine girl,” he said. “An excellent doctor.”
“If you ever cared about me at all, and if you care about the things you say you do, you’ll get her out.”
“I’ll do everything in my power.” Sherzai walked to the door, his limp worse than ever. “You shouldn’t be here. It isn’t safe.”
His hand was on the knob when Daniel said, “I’ve planted a fistful of opium seeds somewhere in this office.” He heard the indignation in his own voice and hoped he didn’t sound like an angry teenager. He was far from that. The filter through which Daniel had seen his old guardian had been shredded by the revolution and the ugly stories it had already made, betrayals more terrible because they were inevitable. War and revolutions were like X-ray photographs: they revealed fractures and decay, and what people were made of deep inside. What gnawed at Daniel besides the pain of feeling like he didn’t really know the old man was a sense that Sherzai had been right. The gemstone firm had been useless in Daniel’s hands. It had given him so much, and he’d never given it anything at all. He should have gifted it to agha. He would have, if he’d thought of it at all. What he couldn’t bear was seeing his father’s life’s work in the hands of killers who would certainly do no better with it than he had.
“You did what? Impossible,” said Sherzai. “I was only outside for a few seconds.”
“A lot can happen in a few seconds.”
“What’s the meaning of this? I told you I would do everything I could.”
“I don’t know who you are anymore.”
“You ingrate. They search these offices whenever they like. They search everyone. They don’t trust us.”
Daniel’s former guardian haphazardly shuffled through books on shelves, ran his hands under cushions, opened and shut drawers. In his frantic search, he tripped on the carpet, which had shifted under him, and fell to his knees. Daniel rushed to his side and helped him up. He wondered if Sherzai really believed in the ideas of this regime. Perhaps he had borrowed them to get ahead. Plagiarized the plagiarists.
Daniel lifted the receiver. “Please make the call and tell them to let Laila go.”
Sherzai returned to the desk and dropped heavily in his seat. He dialed. He spoke to five individuals in four agencies, and at last told Daniel that Laila would be free within the hour.
“Thank you,” Daniel said. He could not leave without saying the next thing: “I never thought there would come a day when we wouldn’t be on the same side.”
“It’s not really sides.” Sherzai had raised his voice.
“Yes, it is. My father never forgot which side he was on.” Daniel admired Sayed now more than ever. He reminded Sherzai that he had never compromised and had still built an army and gone to war against an empire. “What would he say if he could see you now? He thought of you as his brother.”
“Not everything is about your father, and not everything is about you.”
“Exactly, this is not about me!” Both of them were nearly shouting now. “I’m not upset about the company, agha. I don’t really care.” Daniel pointed to the window. “You see what these men are like. The Russians are behind this. Do you want them here?”
“Enough!” Sherzai tossed his hands up as if throwing something high into the air.
“I don’t know how to fight an empire, Sherzai. I’m not my father.”
“No, you’re not. I’ve said so before.”
Daniel put his head in his hands. “I don’t know how he did it.”
Sherzai’s features grew heavy and he let his hands fall in exasperation. “Don’t you, batche’m?”
Daniel looked up. He felt his breath slow down. “What do you mean?”
“I think you know. Somewhere deep down, I think you’ve always known.” He dropped heavily into his chair, as if carrying the weight of a thousand years.
Something Khaiyam had said came back to Daniel. Real war required real money. Then he remembered something Peter had said in his hotel room the morning after the party, when Laila and Rebecca were there. Something about currencies that Daniel had found odd.
Sherzai’s skin looked clammy in the sunlight that streamed mercilessly through the windows. “Do you remember the Stupid Man?” he asked. He leaned forward and his normally grave voice was a forceful whisper. “Of the five houses on the street, didn’t you ever wonder why he sat only in front of yours?”
Daniel nodded. Yes, he had wondered this as a child. It was as if the answer had always been there, but written in a language he could not read.
“The Stupid Man wanted Sayed to see what addiction did to a man,” Sherzai said.
“My father saw many addicts in his time.”
The chair creaked under Sherzai’s body. “Not men who had once been his friends.”
Daniel’s thoughts began to siphon through a tunnel. With reluctance, he asked, “What did my father do?”
“The best he could, batche’m. Now fly home and be there when your child is born.”
“What do you mean, the best he could? Agha, tell me.”
“Daniel, do you know what it costs to bribe English businessmen and Russian generals?” Sherzai shook his head as he spoke to the floor. “They don’t take just any currency. Neither do arms dealers who sell the most modern guns made in America and Germany. You cannot pay them in afghanis.” Sherzai leaned forward. “Corruption is paid for in dollars and pounds.”
There it was again: something that wanted in and another thing that wanted out. Daniel didn’t blink. “You told me a thousand times that Sayed was arrested because he challenged a king who couldn't bear that Sayed was more loved than he was.”
“That’s part of the truth. Your father and the king struck a bargain. If Sayed promised never to challenge him again, he would only serve one year in jail, and the real reason for his arrest would not be made public. It was a good trade for both of them.”
Daniel shook his head. It had to be a lie. He searched for holes in the story. “He burned down a field of poppies. I saw it.”
“Did Sayed burn down the field of a criminal, or the field of a rival?” Creases of sorrow lined agha’s face.
“God.” Daniel slumped back into his chair, giving in to the truth. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“You had no mother. I couldn’t take your father from you, too.” Sherzai loosened his tie. “He wanted you to remember him as the man he wanted to be, not the man he was. It’s what most fathers want.”
“All these stories about my father being a great man—”
“Sayed was a great man. That was never a lie. At first, he used opium only to fight the English. He bought poppy fields and consolidated them. His father had made him swear to never sell gemstones for anything but the local currency, but opium was another story. That was Sayed’s own business. He sold opium for dollars and pounds and deutsche marks and francs.”
“I was in gemstone mines and warehouses all of my childhood. They were real.”
“Oh yes, the gemstone business was real. And what a gift it was!” Sherzai told Daniel that Sayed hired men by the hundreds to score the poppies, collect the resin, and fracture it into small, irregular pieces that looked like any other freshly mined stone.
Daniel hacked out a laugh. Those tubs full of ugly little brown stones, the ones he couldn’t imagine becoming beautiful. The pain from his wounds returned. Another memory shattered.
Sherzai brought his thumb and index finger together. “They were this small. Painstaking work.” He shook his head in awe. “Rolled out by the truckloads into India and Iran with the real stones. When Sayed and I were preparing to resist the English in World War Two, he told me.” He rubbed his face as if trying to wash something off it.
“The field of a rival . . .” Daniel pressed his palms over his eyes. “That wasn’t during the war. I was eight, maybe nine. What need was there to be dealing with opium then?”
“Opium is addictive, whatever side of the business you’re on. Sayed always said that as long as opium was the easiest way, it would remain the primary way. He knew better than anyone how true this was.”
“And after he died? All these years, my company has been—”
“No. You remember the years that the company faltered? I knew you resented me for that. I could see it in your eyes whenever it came up. It was because I divested the company of opium. Profits fell, obviously. I eventually made up for it by selling for foreign currency, as Sayed had refused to do. But that part you already know.”
With shaky hands, Sherzai picked up his tea and slurped. “Luckily, lapis lazuli started soaring in price a few years ago.” He chuckled. “The hippies like it.”
“The Stupid Man was a customer of my father’s?” Daniel asked.
“Not a customer. An employee. Later, a friend. He was a brilliant poppy scorer. He made the finest cuts into the pods.”
“Did my mother know about all this?”
“I’m not sure what she knew. But Dorothy understood much more than she said, unlike Sayed’s second wife. In the end, I think she left because of the new woman. It was a question for the Scale of Sages: her humiliation by Sayed weighed even more than her love for you. And her love for you was very, very great.”
Snippets of the past rearranged themselves, changing colors. It was like Daniel was looking at his childhood through a kaleidoscope held the wrong way. He met Sherzai’s eyes and realized he was truly seeing him for the first time. “My father always said that opium was the only enemy he couldn’t defeat.”
“And it was,” Sherzai said. “It has haunted me for so long, this story. I dreaded the idea that you were going to find out through a book.”
So that was what Peter had been writing. He asked Sherzai, who confirmed. “Peter figured it out a long time ago. The great man who wouldn’t take payment in hard currency but somehow bribed expensive men and waged war against England itself? The story didn’t fit. The book will not be unkind, Daniel. Peter likes to write about men who do what is necessary.” After a time, he added softly, “Did you really hide poppy seeds in here?”
“No.”
“Laila will be out soon.” Both men stood, and Sherzai put his arms around Daniel, who let himself be embraced but could not move. “I know this hurts, batche’m. But sometimes, the past demands to make itself known, or it will drive you mad without you ever really knowing why.”
Tears threatened to flood from Daniel’s eyes. How familiar and yet how foreign the feeling was, a bruising pain behind the eyes, a sharpness in the nose. The dam broke. Daniel wept in agha’s arms.