Shalimar the clown forged a friendship of sorts with Zahir, who often seemed lonely and scared, and whose need to confide was great. Zahir spoke of Kandahar, of parents and friends, of his closed, destroyed school, of his love of kite flying and horses, and of what he had seen of blood and terrifying death. It was from Zahir the Boy that Shalimar received, by the merest chance, news of the man he wanted to kill more than any other man on earth. “The Americans bring us weapons to kill the Russians,” Zahir said. “Thus even the infidel can be made to do the work of God. They send their important people to deal with us and think of us as allies. It is amusing.” Ambassador Max Ophuls, who these days was supporting terror activities while calling himself an ambassador for counterterrorism, had been in charge of liaison with Talib the Afghan’s branch of the Muj. A tiger leapt up inside Shalimar the clown whenever he heard that name, and caging it again was hard. Talib’s one eye would have seen that leap and suspected it at once, but Zahir the Boy was too wrapped up in the past to see what was going on under his nose.
Our lives touch again, Shalimar said silently to the ambassador. Maybe the gun I’m holding was brought to this region by you. Maybe one day it will point at you and fire. But he knew he did not want to shoot the ambassador. His weapon of choice had always been the knife.
He was ready for battle. Winter was dissolving into spring and the mountain pathways were becoming passable. The forward bases were filling up with men. FC-22 was bursting at the seams with men with the snarling, spittle-flecked manner of attack dogs straining to be unleashed. New groups were appearing every day, or so it seemed: Harakats, Lashkars, Hizbs of this or that, martyrdom or faith or glory. The word was that Amanullah Khan had come to Pakistan from England to assume command of the JKLF. Shalimar the clown went through his daily routine, the fitness regimen, the commando training, the weapons work, and wondered what it would be like to kill a man. Then the iron mullah asked him if he would like to go abroad.
The weight of her lost daughter still hit her almost every day, and as the daughter grew older in the other world to which Boonyi had surrendered her the weight increased. Now when Boonyi thought about Kashmira it was like being crushed beneath a house. It was as though the earth’s gravitational force increased and dragged her down and shackled her. The pressure on her chest was so great that her lungs could barely function. If you’re going to kill me, my husband, she thought, come home and do it soon, or else my daughter, whose name I don’t know, whose face I can’t see, will beat you to the punch. But her husband did not come to her for a long time. When at last he did come, there were strange words in his messages, the names of places of whose existence she was only dimly aware: Tajikistan, Algeria, Egypt, Palestine. When she heard these names she knew only that the old Shalimar was dead. In his place, bearing his name, was this new creature, bathed in strangeness, and all that was left of Shalimar the clown was a murderous desire. She gave up her dream of a happy ending and waited for his return.
And all of a sudden he was forty years old, battle hardened, and no longer needed to ask himself what murder might be like. On a street corner outside a car park in North Africa an agent of the FIS had paid a cigarette vendor a few dinars to leave his tray behind and disappear for an hour. Then he had been brought forward, Shalimar the clown clean shaven and wearing Western clothes, and a bearded man wearing a khamis robe and smelling heavily of musk put the strap of the vending tray around his neck and left a pistol on it wrapped in a white cloth and then disappeared. Shalimar the clown felt strangely potent, he felt like Superman, because they had stuck a needle in his arm and injected an off-white liquid into it. He had no language in common with the people for whom he was carrying out the hit, but one-eyed Talib had sent Zahir the Boy with him to be his translator and aide. Talib said that Zahir the Boy spoke excellent Arabic and it was time he became a man. They had shown Shalimar the clown a picture of a man and brought him here in a windowless van and injected him and left him on the street with the gun. In the van Zahir the Boy had translated what the bearded man said. The man he was going to kill was a godless man, a writer against God, who spoke French and had sold his soul to the West. That was all he needed to know. He should not need to ask questions. It was a simple job.
Shalimar the clown stood on the street corner surrounded by Arabic and when men came up for cigarettes Zahir the Boy did the work and Shalimar the clown grinned stupidly and pointed at his ears and open mouth, meaning I’m deaf and dumb, I can’t talk to you, I have no idea what you’re saying. Then the man in the photograph appeared, wearing blue-tinted sunglasses and an open white shirt and cream slacks and carrying a folded newspaper in his left hand. The man walked quickly toward the car park and Shalimar the clown took off the vending tray, picked up the cloth with the pistol inside and followed him. He was holding the cloth in his left hand and didn’t take the gun out because he wanted to know what it would feel like when he placed the blade of his knife against the man’s skin, when he pushed the sharp and glistening horizon of the knife against the frontier of the skin, violating the sovereignty of another human soul, moving in beyond taboo, toward the blood. What it would feel like when he slashed the bastard’s throat in half so that his head lolled back and sideways off his neck and the blood gushed upwards like a tree. What it would feel like when the blood poured over him and he stepped away from the corpse, the useless twitching thing, the piece of fly-blown meat. Zahir came running and the windowless van came round a corner fast and the man who smelled of musk pulled him inside and slammed the door and the van drove away quickly while the man who smelled of musk shouted at him for a long, long time. Zahir the Boy said, “He says you are insane. The gun had a silencer fitted and would have been quick and clean. You disobeyed orders and he should kill you for this.” But Shalimar the clown was not killed. Zahir the Boy translated what the man who smelled of musk said after he had calmed down. “For a man like you, a complete fucking crazy asshole, there will always be plenty of work.”
So he knew the answer to his question and had learned something about himself that he had not known before. The years passed and indeed there was plenty of work. He became a person of value and consequence, as assassins are. Also, his secret purpose was achieved. He had passports in five names and had learned good Arabic, ordinary French and bad English, and had opened routes for himself, routes in the real world, the invisible world, that would take him where he needed to go when the time for the ambassador came. He remembered his father teaching him to walk the tightrope, and realized that traveling the secret routes of the invisible world was exactly the same. The routes were gathered air. Once you had learned to use them you felt as if you were flying, as if the illusory world in which most people lived was vanishing and you were flying across the skies without even needing to get on board a plane.
FC-22 was different when he returned: larger, more solidly constructed. It no longer looked like a bandits’ hideout. Many wooden houses had been built, and Nissen huts erected. Talib the Afghan had returned to active military service and Zahir the Boy was also long gone. Maulana Bulbul Fakh was there, however, and welcomed Shalimar the clown with the words, “You’re just in time. The uprising is near.” He had been away too long. Sheikh Abdullah, the Lion of Kashmir, had been dead for five years. There had been India-Pakistan clashes on the Siachen Glacier, twenty thousand feet above sea level. But it was the just-concluded polls that changed everything. This was the year 1987, and the Indian government had held state elections in Kashmir. Farooq Abdullah, the Sheikh’s son, was the government’s preferred choice. The opposition party, the Muslim United Front, named as its candidate one Mohammad Yousuf Shah, described by General Hammirdev Kachhwaha as the state’s “most wanted militant.” Unofficially, as the results came in, it became plain that the wrong man was winning. So the election was rigged. MUF supporters and electoral agents were seized and tortured. Mohammad Yousuf Shah went underground, and as Syed Salahuddin became the chief of the militant group Hizb-ul-Mujaheddin. His closest aides, the so-called HAJY group (Abdul Hamid Shaikh, Ashfaq Majid Wani, Javed Ahmed Mir and Mohammad Yasin Malik), crossed the mountains and joined the JKLF. Thousands of previously law-abiding young men took up arms and joined the militants, disillusioned by the electoral process. Pakistan was generous. There were AK-47s for everyone.