Hands pulled at me, dragging me toward the back door. I struck out, but strong, gentle hands twisted the knife from my fingers. Then I heard the voice, Mahmoud Melbaaf’s voice, and I knew we were safe.
‘Come on, Lin,’ the Iranian said, quickly and too quietly, it seemed, for the bloody violence that had just roared around us.
‘I need a gun,’ I mumbled.
‘No, Lin. It is over.’
‘Abdullah?’ I asked, as Mahmoud dragged me into the yard.
‘He’s working,’ he replied. I heard the screams inside the house ending, one by one, like birds falling silent as night moves across the stillness of a lake. ‘Can you stand? Can you walk? We must leave now!’
‘Fuck, yes! I can make it.’
As we reached the back gate, a column of our men rushed past us. Faisal and Hussein carried one man between them. Farid and Little Tony carried another. Sanjay had a man’s body on his right shoulder. He was sobbing as he clutched the body to his chest and shoulder.
‘We lost Salman,’ Mahmoud announced, following my gaze as we let the men rush past us. ‘And Raj, also. Amir is bad-alive, but hurt bad.’
Salman. The last voice of reason in the Khader council. The last Khader man. I hurried down the lane to the waiting cars and I felt the life draining from me, just as it had when the big man was hitting me at the blue door. It was over. The old mafia council was gone with Salman. Everything had changed. I looked at the others in my car: Mahmoud, Farid, and the wounded Amir. They’d won their war. The Sapna killers were gone at last. A chapter, a book of life and death that had opened with Sapna’s name, was closed forever. Khader was avenged. Abdul Ghani’s mutinous betrayal was finally defeated. And the Iranians, Abdullah’s enemies, were no more: as silent as that bloody, unscreaming house where Abdullah was… working. And Chuha’s gang was crushed. The border war was over. It was over. The wheel had turned through one full revolution, and nothing would ever be the same. They’d won, but they were all crying. All of them. Crying.
I let my head fall back on the seat of the car. Night, that tunnel of lights joining promise to prayer, flew with us at the windows. Slowly, desolately, the fist of what we’d done unclenched the clawed palm of what we’d become. Anger softened into sorrow, as it always does, as it always must. And no part of what we’d wanted, just an hour’s life before, was as rich in hope or meaning as a single teardrop’s fall.
‘What?’ Mahmoud asked, his face close to mine. ‘What did you say?’
‘I hope that bear got away,’ I mumbled through broken, bleeding lips as the stricken spirit began to rise from my wounded body, and sleep, like fog in morning forests, moved through my sorrowing mind. ‘I hope that bear got away.’
SUNLIGHT SHATTERED ON THE WATER, shedding streaks in crystal-brilliant slivers across waves rolling swollen on the broad meniscus of the bay. Birds of fire in the approaching sunset wheeled and turned as one in their flocks, like banners of waving silk. From a low-walled courtyard on the white marble island of Haji Ali Mosque, I watched pilgrims and pious local residents wend and weave, leaving the shrine for the shore along the flat stone path. The incoming tide would submerge the path, they knew, and then only boats could bring them home. Those who’d sorrowed or repented, like others on previous days, had cast garlands of flowers upon the shallower, receding sea. Riding the returning tide, those orange-red and faded grey-white flowers floated back, garlanding the path itself with the love, loss, and longing that was prayed upon the water by a thousand broken hearts each wave-determined day.
And we, that band of brothers, had come to the shrine to pay our last respects, as they say, and pray for the soul of our friend Salman Mustaan. It was the first time since the night he’d been killed that we’d gathered as a group. For weeks after the battle with Chuha and his gang we’d separated, to hide and to heal our wounds. There’d been an outcry in the press, of course. The words
