Someone Else's Shoes(127)
“I will call you the moment I land.”
“You’re not going to get all hoity-toity and leave us behind now you’ve got money?”
Nisha had tilted her head and given her the same kind of look Jasmine would have given her for leaving the immersion switch on, so that Jasmine started waving her hands.
“I know, babe. I know. I’m just really going to miss you.”
They had hugged tightly, and Nisha had whispered, “Don’t go all sentimental on me. This is just a short break, okay? We have a whole bunch of things to do together. I need to see you opening up that dressmaking business for a start.”
“Passport.” The security officer holds out a bored hand. She hands it over while he checks her ticket, and then, as she takes it back, stamped and readied, she steps to the side of the queue. Aleks passes her the handbag, his face grave.
“So,” he says.
“I’ll call you when I land.”
He nods.
“Oh,” she says. “I nearly forgot. Will you do something for me? Drop these in? I don’t want to put them in the post.”
He looks down at the addresses on the small brown Jiffy bags and says, “Sure. Did you forget to do it last night?”
“Something like that.”
He pulls her to him then and embraces her tightly, silently, oblivious to the mutterings of the crowd, the jostling of the hundreds of people around them. She presses her face against his chest, her eyes closed, and above the noise she can just detect the beat of his heart.
“Call anytime,” he murmurs into her hair. “I’ll be waiting.”
I think he actually will, Nisha thinks. And this thought finally gives her the resolve it takes for her to extract herself from him. She gathers her bags and is waved forward by the airport personnel, fed into the stream of passengers through the opaque glass doors and into the security area.
* * *
? ? ?
Nine hours later Nisha is in a yellow taxi cab, speeding through the watery December sunshine toward Westchester County, the suspension bumping and rattling as it flies over the neglected freeway. There are many things that Nisha has become accustomed to in her new straitened circumstances, but flying cattle class is not one of them. She rubs her neck as she straightens up in the backseat from her short nap, and lets out an involuntary ow as her thumb finds a particularly unhappy tendon. The aircraft had been packed, and turbulent, and the endless adjustments of the seat in front of her and the muttered argument between the two passengers on her right has meant that she has arrived exhausted, crumpled and tetchy, not refreshed and glowing, as she had assumed she would.
“This one, lady?” The driver raps on the glass between them with a fat knuckle.
She looks over and sees the sign. “That’s it. Are you still happy to wait?”
“You’re paying, I’m waiting,” he says, without a smile, and turns up the long driveway, accelerating a little.
She is a quarter-mile from the building when she spies the figures on the steps. She leans forward in the rear seat, trying to see better through the windscreen, and as the taxi makes its way up the sweeping drive, the thinner figure stands. Against the elegant white brickwork of the school building, she sees the shock of dark hair, the gawky limbs, even at this distance. And something starts to pump through her, an energy she has not been aware of these last years, a thread pulled so tight that she feels it must surely snap. Beside him, Juliana stands and says something into his ear, then puts a hand on his shoulder. Nisha is out of the taxi even before it has stopped moving in the parking circle, ignoring the shouted warning of the driver, the fact that she has twisted her ankle in her high-heeled shoes, the way her handbag has dropped onto the drive, its contents spraying over the pale gravel.
And there he is, his ungainly teenage body unfolding, stepping at first tentatively, and then his limbs falling over each other as he jogs down the steps, and then he is running and she is running and they reach each other by the large stone lions and she wraps her boy in her arms, her beautiful, clever, kind boy, and feels his arms around her and suddenly, Nisha Cantor, who rarely cries, is sobbing, her fingers clutching his head, her face pressed against his as she lets herself acknowledge what she has missed.
“Mom,” he says, and he is crying too, holding her so tightly she can barely breathe.
And she screws her eyes closed, just breathing him in, joyous and finally, finally home. “Baby. I’m here.”
epilogue
The case of HMRC Customs v. Mr. Carl Cantor is surprisingly straightforward, despite the battalion of lawyers he employs to obstruct and combat the legal process prompted by the discovery of ?21 million worth of uncertified stones in his possession. Records obtained after his security adviser Mr. Ari Peretz decides to turn Queen’s evidence against him show that this is the fourteenth such smuggling operation Mr. Cantor has completed in five years, moving uncut, uncertified diamonds into the UK where they are polished, then returned to the US and sold on via contacts in the South African and Russian diamond trade. Despite Mr. Cantor’s protestations of innocence, he is found guilty and sentenced to be incarcerated in the US under an extradition agreement, the length of sentence to be decided.
Tabloid newspapers take a special, somewhat triumphant interest in the judge’s observation that Mr. Cantor appears to have been duped by his own contacts. The records of the smuggling operation that caused his downfall appear to be misleading. Discovered among the large, cushion-cut gems removed from the insides of a pair of specially adapted women’s shoes, many worth several million pounds each, are three basic paste stones of the kind one might find in a child’s necklace. The journalists note that Mr. Cantor appears to be as angered by this apparent deception as he is by the prospect of a lengthy spell in prison (a possibility he steadfastly refuses to accept, despite the best efforts of his counsel).