There followed moments of chilling merciless disbelief as David had his answer. No language was needed. As confirmation there now came the sound of the photograph being torn up under the table. Three long rips that must have divided the rectangle of paper into narrow strips; these were gathered together and there were three shorter, thicker rips that must have carved the whole thing up into sixteen small squares. David remembered her telling him how someone from the mosque in the refugee camp — believing her child was illegitimate — had broken into her trunk and drawn a large dagger on her mirror as warning. She had lifted it out and seen the weapon superimposed onto her face.
David leaned back against his chair and closed his eyes, suddenly drained, Christopher’s stare still fixed on him.
He wanted to cry out, the noise a raised welt in the air.
‘It’s over, Christopher,’ he managed to say. ‘I am finished.’ Homer used the same word, keimai, for Patroclus lying dead in battle as for Achilles falling beside his body in grief. And later when Thetis came to comfort her son, the poet had her take his head between her hands — the gesture of the chief mourner in the funeral of a dead man.
It was then, just after 12.17 p.m. that February afternoon in 1993, that the thirteen-hundred-pound bomb exploded a block away in the underground garage of the North Tower of the World Trade Center.
It was a yellow Ryder truck, parked there by a graduate of one of the training camps set up in Afghanistan to fight the Soviets. The explosion was meant to release cyanide gas into the building but the heat burned it away. And one tower was supposed to fall into the other — the terrorists had hoped to kill a quarter of a million people.
The ground shook. Some fragments of the woman’s image scattered from Christopher’s hands. They had almost arranged to meet at the Windows on the World, 106 floors directly above the bomb.
They rushed out into the street now. There were flakes of snow in the air, floating like sparse bits of airborne glass, mixing with the smoke. People from all directions were running towards the site — soon there were doctors, ambulances, police cars, bystanders, groups of workmen from a nearby construction site, one of them wearing an IRA — FREEDOM FIGHTERS T-shirt. Sirens and cries and shouts.
He could have been up there, the elevators and the electricity having failed, smoke pouring up through the Tower towards him. And he felt as though he was, with devastation all around him and the howling depth outside.
‘They are here,’ he murmured to Christopher in the shocked recognition of inevitability.
He saw himself clearly, making his way down the black stairwells, and the deeper he went the greater the number of wounded and disorientated people who joined him like shades in Hell, the darkness and smoke increasing. Wherever you may be, death shall overtake you, though you may put yourself in lofty towers, said the Koran.
They are here.
Cops with flashlights were guiding people out as they neared the giant hole at the bottom.
Christopher dragged him away into a doorway. ‘Who was she?’
But he was still up there with them.
‘Who was she, David?’
‘I loved her.’
‘I didn’t know who she was or I wouldn’t have allowed her to die.’
‘Where are her remains?’
‘I don’t know. I doubt if anyone does.’
The workers digging the foundations of these buildings years ago had found ancient cannonballs and bombs, a ship’s anchor of a design not made after 1750, and one small gold-rimmed teacup made of china but still intact, with two birds painted on it.
He left Christopher and walked away.
The cleric who had inspired the attack — he lived and preached across the Hudson in Jersey City, having sought asylum in the United States — had called on Muslims to assail the West in revenge for the centuries of humiliation and subjugation, ‘cut off the transportation of their cities, tear it apart, destroy their economy, burn their companies, eliminate their interests, sink their ships, shoot down their planes, kill them on the sea, air, or land’. The bomb resulted in more hospital casualties than any event in American history since the Civil War. And what did his life resemble from that point onwards? He became fundamentally inconsolable. It was like missing a step on the stairs or losing one’s balance for a moment — that sensation extended to hours to days to years.
*
He looks towards the window of Lara’s room, as yet unlit. Midnight, and she is still with Marcus. No one has ever mentioned — anywhere — the dust-and-ash-covered sparrow that a man leaned down and gently stroked on September 11, the bird sitting stunned on a sidewalk an hour or so after the Towers collapsed. It is one of his most vivid memories of that day’s television, but no one remembers seeing it. Perhaps he remembers it because he has since read that Muhammad Atta’s nickname as a child was Bulbul.
*
David didn’t want to retaliate against Gul Rasool — for killing Zameen, and for lying about her to his men during torture. Too sickened and exhausted, and also because it could have jeopardised Marcus’s safety.
And now Gul Rasool is a US ally, James Palantine providing him with security. James must know that Rasool had once wanted to kill his father. In the wake of the 2001 attacks, Gul Rasool was the only one who was around to help root out the Taliban from Usha, to help capture al-Qaeda terrorists, and to keep them at bay, the United States paying him handsomely for his support. The first CIA team that arrived in Afghanistan soon after the attacks, to persuade warlords and tribal leaders, had brought five million dollars with them. It was spent within forty days. Ten million more was flown in by helicopter: piles of money as high as children — four cardboard boxes kept in a corner of a safe house, with someone sleeping on them as a precaution against theft.
Originally the idea of asking Gul Rasool was resisted, Nabi Khan’s name being put forward instead. But when Gul Rasool heard of it, he put together a death squad to assassinate Nabi Khan. Khan — who, also scenting money, had dispatched his own men to kill Gul Rasool — was the first to be wounded and was therefore unable to fight with the Americans.
*
David watches as the light comes on gently in Lara’s room, can visualise the candle flame stretching itself to full height. He wonders what news James Palantine would bring for Lara. He hadn’t seen the boy for years when he contacted the family after hearing of Christopher’s death. He enters the house, going past the bird’s nest on the shelf, and walks down the dark green floor of the hallway.
Book Two
6. Casabianca
THE YEAR 1798 was a disaster for Islam. Napoleon Bonaparte’s invasion that year of Egypt — the very centre of the Muslim world — was the symbolic moment when the standard of leadership passed on to the West. From that point on, Western armies and Western capital overran the lands of the Muslims.
And Casa got his name from a poem about a boy who died in 1798 at the Battle of the Nile. Giocante Casabianca. The twelve-year-old son of a French admiral. He was on board the L’Orient, the principal ship of the fleet that carried Bonaparte and his army to Egypt. Cannon fire set the L’Orient ablaze and further shooting meant the blaze could not be put out, but Giocante Casabianca remained on the burning deck, unwilling to abandon the post without his father’s permission. The flames consuming the sail and shroud above him.