All That's Left to Tell(4)

“I would think it would get tedious after a while.”

“Maybe,” she said. “Maybe it’s like washing your face. Most days you do it without thinking, but now and then, as you’re patting your skin dry, you catch a glimpse of yourself in the mirror that’s such a surprise that it affirms your faith in the familiar.”

Perhaps she was both a jihadist and a poet, he thought.

“That would depend on the face, I think.”

“Yes, I suppose. I saw Azhar show you the picture of his daughter.”

He tightened his eyes again beneath the blindfold. “Did you ask him to do that?”

“No. I did tell him that your daughter had been killed.” She left the words suspended in the air for several seconds. “He’s softhearted. He’s a butcher by trade, but, like any butcher I’ve known, gentle and funny away from his work.”

“Less gentle seeming when he’s carrying a gun.”

She shifted in her chair, and he heard her resettle her garments. Even with the blindfold, the room seemed to have darkened with nightfall.

“We reached your wife. You underestimated her, I think. She seemed very concerned about you. But perhaps that was just a manifestation of her grief.”

“Don’t,” he said, shaking his head. Like everything else, he’d held at bay what could have been easily imaginable images of Lynne getting the phone call about the murder, or answering the knock at the door, or receiving mourners alongside the coffin, near which photographs of their daughter at various ages—finger-painting in blues and yellows at age five, and water-skiing on a lake where one summer they rented when she was twelve, and laughing, arms linked, with girlfriends at age fifteen at a birthday party—told the half truths of a half-happy life.

“She wasn’t angry with you for not flying home, or for not answering her calls.”

“You must have had quite a chat.”

“Woman to woman. She used the words lost soul, and seemed to suggest that ransoming you wouldn’t change that.”

This he knew was false. “You didn’t talk to her at all, really, did you?”

“Does it make any difference?”

The peculiarity of the conversation struck him then, where the threat of her asking about his wife and daughter seemed more present than the blindfold, the rope around his wrists, or the man outside with the machine gun.

“What is this, exactly?” he asked.

“What do you mean?”

“I have no value to you. I’m not a journalist. I’m not rich. Yesterday you used the words mid-level executive. We’re sitting here talking about my ex-wife. My daughter. I don’t understand why anyone would kidnap me.”

“You’re an American,” she said. “You were wandering where you shouldn’t have been. We didn’t choose you, especially. You happened by, more or less. You could have been anyone. What you were doing in Lyari I can’t imagine.”

“I was— I wanted to see how other Pakistanis live.”

“Don’t do that,” she said. Her tone was suddenly cold.

“Do what?”

“Don’t look for the suffering of others as a salve to your own wounds. It’s arrogant. You see where that gets you.”

“It wasn’t a salve. I was trying to—I don’t know. Put things in perspective.”

“Well, did you?”

He didn’t answer her, and she was silent for a while. Then she said, “Marc, you might be here for a long time for the simple reason that we hope to get something of value for you. I can’t promise that I—” She stopped herself for a moment and then cleared her throat before continuing. “When I heard that your daughter had been killed. And that you didn’t go home when you heard. I admit that interested me in ways that have nothing to do with your ransom.”

“You’re interested in a murder of someone you don’t know? In this country where innocents are killed almost daily?”

“Unlike your country? No one is ever shot dead in your own country? Where your own daughter died?”

He flinched at these questions. He would be unable or unwilling to muster a political argument even if it weren’t for his circumstances.

“Perhaps she wasn’t an innocent, but I’m sorry your daughter was killed,” she said eventually. “And you’re right to think, for me, she’s as faceless as any other daughter who lost her life senselessly. But I’m more interested in the story of a man who didn’t even return home when he heard she’d been murdered.”

“Why?”

“Why? Because I’ve seen many men grieve. Say what you want, but men here are not afraid to show their grief. Or rage. Or how one feeds the other.”

“You think I’m not sad or angry?”

“What I think,” she said, and he heard her bring her hands down with a light slap on the top of her thighs. “What I think,” she said again, “is that you will have many long days here. At least you should be hoping for that. Here, with me. Or with Saabir or Azhar. You’ve noticed that their company doesn’t involve much conversation. And so you will mostly only have me to talk to. And I am—compensated for talking to you, for getting information from you that might lead to more money. But I am not in charge of your fate, and I’m not at liberty to jump into an SUV and travel across the border or take a plane to London. I’m trapped here, in many ways, just as you are. More or less alone with my first language. So almost every day, we’ll talk. If you want to talk about the weather, we can do that. Or stock prices at PepsiCo, and whether a bullish year for your company might loosen the purse strings of your ransom. Or we can talk about something else.”