‘No. For me, he said that the Prophet, peace be upon Him, was a great soldier before he was a great teacher. For Jalalaad, he said that the stars shine because they are full with secrets. It is different for every man. And he was in too much a hurry for telling us these things. It is very important for him. I do not understand, Lin. I think it is because we fight tomorrow morning.’
‘Was there anything else?’ I asked, mystified by the exchange.
Mahmoud asked Habib if there was anything else that he wanted to say. Holding the stare into my eyes, Habib rattled away in Pashto and Farsi.
‘He says only that there is no such a thing as luck. He wants you to believe him. He says again that a strong man-’
‘Makes his own luck,’ I completed the translation for him. ‘Well, tell him I appreciate the message.’
Mahmoud spoke, and for a few moments Habib stared harder, searching in my eyes for a recognition or response that I couldn’t give him. He turned and loped away with the stooped, crouching run that I found more chilling and alarming, somehow, than the more obvious, bulging madness in his eyes.
‘
‘He will find Khaled, I think,’ Mahmoud replied.
‘Damn, it’s cold!’ I spluttered.
‘Yes. I am too cold, like you. I am all day dreaming that this cold will be gone.’
‘Mahmoud, you were in Bombay when we went to hear the Blind Singers, with Khaderbhai, weren’t you?’
‘Yes. It was the first meeting, for all of us, at the same time together. I saw you there the first time.’
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t meet you that night, and I didn’t notice you there. What I wanted to ask you is how you got together with Khaderbhai in the first place.’
Mahmoud laughed. It was so rare to see him laugh out loud that I felt myself smiling in response. He’d lost weight on the mission-we’d all lost weight. His face was drawn tight to the high cheekbones and the pointed chin, covered with a thick, dark beard. His eyes, even in the cold moonlight, were the polished bronze of a temple vase.
‘I am standing on the street, in Bombay, and I am doing some passport business with my friend. There is a hand on my shoulder. It is Abdullah. He tells me that Khader Khan wants to see me. I go to Khader, in his car. We drive together, we talk, and after, I am his man.’
‘Why did he pick you? What made him pick you, and what made you agree to join him?’
Mahmoud frowned, and it seemed that he might be considering the question for the first time.
‘I was against Pahlavi Shah,’ he began. ‘The secret police of the Shah, the Savak, they killed many people, and they put many people in the jail for beating. My father killed in the jail. My mother killed in the jail. For fighting against Shah. I was a small boy that time. When I grow up, I fight Shah. Two times in the jail. Two times beating, and electricity on my body, and too much pain. I fight for revolution in Iran. Ayatollah Khomeini makes the revolution in Iran, and he is the new power, when Shah runs away to America. But Savak secret police still the same. Now they work for Khomeini. Again I go in the jail. Again the beating and the electric pain. The same people from the Shah-the exactly same people in the jail-now they work for Khomeini. All my friends die in the jail, and in the war against Iraq. I escape, and come to Bombay. I make business, black-market business, with other Iran people. Then, Abdel Khader Khan makes me his man. In my life, I meet only one great man. That is Khader. Now, he is dead…’
He choked off the words, and rubbed a tear from each eye with the sleeve of his rough jacket.
It was a long speech, and we were freezing cold, yet still I would’ve asked him more. I wanted to know it all-everything that filled the gaps between what Khaderbhai had told me and the secrets Khaled had shared. But at that moment we heard a piercingly piteous scream of terror. It died suddenly, as if the thread of sound had been cut with a pair of shears. We looked at one another, and reached for weapons in the same instinct.
‘This way!’ Mahmoud shouted, running over the slippery snow and slush with short, careful steps.
We reached the origin of the sound at the same time as the other men. Nazeer and Suleiman rushed through our group to see what we were staring at. They froze, silent and still, at the sight of Khaled Ansari kneeling over the body of Habib Abdur Rahman. The madman was on his back. He was dead. There was a knife in his throat where the words about luck had been only minutes before. The knife had been pushed into his neck and twisted, just as Habib himself had done to our horses and to Siddiqi. But it wasn’t Habib’s knife that we stared at, jutting out of the muddy, sinewed throat like a branch from a riverbed. We all knew the knife well. We’d all seen its distinctive, carved, horn handle a hundred times. It was Khaled’s knife.
