Blackmail Earth (6 page)

*   *   *

Starlit, Rafan crept alongside Fatima, Musnah, and Senada to within whispering distance of the cemetery.

“Wait behind there.” He pointed to two towering palms that rose inches from each other.

The three women in headscarves crouched down. Rafan took a steadying breath and walked to the entrance. An Islamic inscription had been chiseled into the arch centuries ago:
ALLAH GIVES LIFE, AND ALLAH TAKES IT AWAY
.

He headed directly to where Basheera’s body salted the earth with minerals and blood. He did not sink down, as he had earlier that day. Instead, he listened with the ears of a sentry as his eyes studied the commanding stillness, looking for those who would condemn him and the three women by the palms.

Slowly, he walked back to the gate, hanging his head as a bereaved man. But he was still searching for what he did not want to find.

*   *   *

Adnan had stopped snorkeling more than a decade ago, when the reefs began to die. He’d been sickened by the disappearance of batfish, with their bold stripes and wing-shaped bodies; and the loss of speckled green puffer fish with their long, snoutlike faces, bulgy eyes, and professorial airs. So many whimsical species—angelfish and triggerfish and the grumpy-looking grouper—had vanished as quickly, it seemed, as the tiny tessellated schools that had darted away in flashes of yellow, pink, blue, and orange.

Only this whiteness remained. This blankness. Adnan touched the coral again. White was the color of death. Not black.

Swimming over the reef, he peered down into the small caverns where moray eels once lurked, evil-looking and sly, and nattily attired parrot fish had nibbled contentedly on algae. The emptiness shocked him.

He circled back over the reef to swim to shore. He would tell Parvez what he had seen: nothing. The blank white face of nothing.

A shadow passed so swiftly on his left that it didn’t register fully. Then he turned and saw that the shadow had a body fifteen feet long and a mouth that could crush his skull.

*   *   *

Fatima, Musnah, and Senada stepped away from the palms. None of them spoke, but Rafan saw light in Senada’s moist eyes, and thankfulness. Basheera had been at Senada’s side when she gave birth to a stillborn son; and his little sister, who had always been the quiet one, had stood up to Senada’s husband when he had screamed at his grieving wife, “Murderer. Murderer.”

To be out at night with Rafan and two women was dangerous for Senada. Not so much for Fatima and Musnah: As single women, they did not have threats to fear in their homes. Only threats from those who might be spying on the cemetery.

“You are sure no one is there?” asked Senada, half a head taller than the other two.

“I am sure,” Rafan said, though certainty was never possible with so many followers of Allah searching for the sins of others.

They did not pass under the arch. Rafan walked them along the perimeter, four hunched, hurrying figures moving through starlight and shadows until he turned and led them to Basheera’s grave. The women gathered side by side. Rafan stepped back to keep watch.

A murmur of prayer arose. Rafan’s surveillance revealed not a trace of movement in the cemetery. A stillness as absolute as death.

Fatima, Musnah, and Senada reached into a woven bag and released handfuls of lush pink petals. They glittered and floated to Basheera’s grave like the snow the women had never seen. A blanket, luminous and pure, covered the freshly dug earth.

*   *   *

Adnan stared at the massive tiger shark and tried to tread water with the slightest movement possible, torso and legs dangling in the water like bait from the great hook of heaven. Dozens of shark species lived in the seas around the Maldives, most no more threatening than a squid, but tiger sharks attacked swimmers, divers, even boats.

This one swam so close that Adnan felt water shift against his stomach. Then the shark moved on.

No, it was turning back for another pass. Hunting. Adnan looked wildly for a fisherman, sailor—anyone—to haul him aboard, but saw only a fin cutting the glassy surface of the sea.

The shark circled him, a lazy, rippling whirlpool. Any second it might bump him, see if he was a living creature.

Adnan prayed, guilelessly and true for Allah to save him, and imagined his God saying, “For what? What shall I save a such a sinner for?”

Adnan gave Allah the first answer that came to mind, repeating what Parvez had whispered in his ear: A life for a life.

*   *   *

Rafan led the three women from the cemetery, forsaking care for a hasty retreat. He saw no gain in staying a moment longer, for now it was essential to escort Senada home before her fisherman husband returned from days at sea.

When they stepped back on the street, Musnah, dark hair cascading from under her headscarf, breathed loudly in relief. Rafan smiled to himself, for he felt the same freedom. They moved a few more steps before a voice ordered them to stop.

Imam Reza walked up to them. He’d conducted Basheera’s funeral and burial, always keeping his back to the young woman’s body, his eyes on the faithful, though Rafan knew he would question their faithfulness now.
If he knows.

“You have been to the cemetery,” Imam Reza said. His beard was a dark bush that brushed his chest, and in the sparse light his turban could be glimpsed only in outline.

“Yes,” Rafan said. “I took a message from Basheera’s friends to her.”

“We watched him go,” Fatima said.

“You have no faith that your prayers can be heard in paradise?”

“Yes, Imam Reza, I’m sure they can.” Musnah spoke without looking up. “But we miss her so.”

Rafan noticed that all three women kept their heads bowed. Senada stood behind her friends, almost cowering. Imam Reza would like that.

“What prayer did you take to your sister?” Imam Reza asked him.

This was a test. Rafan refrained from glancing at Senada; as a married woman, she would not wish to be noticed under such compromising circumstances.

“The prayer of forgiveness for all my sister’s sins,” Rafan answered. “The prayer of hope for all the faithful. The prayer of memory, that she would never be forgotten.”

Imam Reza’s eyes moved over the headscarves that faced him. “Did you enter the cemetery?”

“No, they did not,” Rafan said “Only I—”

“I asked them.”

“No,” answered the women, keeping their heads low.

He doesn’t believe us,
Rafan thought.
But he doesn’t have to. This isn’t Iran or Waziristan. Not yet.

Imam Reza walked toward the cemetery, leaving Rafan chilled by the man’s sudden silence, by what it promised for the future. By flower petals resting on a grave, and footprints in the dust.

“Did he believe us?” Musnah whispered after they’d walked on.

“I do not know what he believed or what he saw.” Rafan looked over his shoulder. “I know only that these imams never forget.”

*   *   *

Senada stepped lightly toward the back door of her home, sticking close to the wall, away from the starlight. What would she say if Mehdi was waiting in their bedroom? She would tell him the truth.

That you lied to Imam Reza? That you were with Rafan?

Mehdi hated Rafan. A man who consorts with women. A man who doesn’t go to mosque. A man who doesn’t pray. A man too proud for his faith.

Senada touched the door handle, wondering if her husband had left a trace of his heat, if he’d gripped it so hard in anger, twisted it so violently—as he had her—that she could sense him even now.

But the metal was cool in the night air, and when she opened the door the room was black. Silent. She struck a match and held it out like a frightened child, peering into the pitch. Her bed was empty. She did not smell fish.

She climbed under the covers and said a prayer of gratitude: for safety, for friends, for Rafan.

*   *   *

“Allah saved me,” Adnan told Parvez, who stood in the door of his one-room house on the north end of Dhiggaru. A lantern burned behind him, lighting a simple desk and an open Koran. “He drove the shark out to sea after I made a vow.”

Parvez nodded knowingly, but then asked which vow. Adnan spoke without moving: “The vow of paradise.”

Parvez took the lantern and walked him along the path through the palm grove still teeming with their secrets. He didn’t stop until he brought Adnan to the end of the seawall, where he placed the lantern before putting his arm around his friend’s shoulder.

“If you could see through the darkness for many miles,” Parvez said, “you would see diamond island.”

*   *   *

Not its real name—what the Maldivians called the richest resort island. Adnan’s mother took a boat there every weekday to make sure that the rooms were cleaned and that every toilet was scrubbed till it shined. Then, on Saturdays, a small supply ship picked her up on its way back from Malé. She usually added a big bag of locally grown limes to the hold, already heavy with cases of champagne, caviar, chocolates, and the other everyday luxuries of diamond island. Her job, though she wasn’t paid for the crossing, was to watch the seamen for pilferage. Not a lime, not a single dark chocolate truffle could be missing when they docked. Bags and cases had to be sealed tighter than a hatch in a storm.

His mother had been astonished the first time that she’d seen the resort. The “bungalows” were larger than any house she’d ever known, almost as big as the presidential palace, but roofed with ornamental thatch to look native. Each was lavishly appointed with silver, gold plate, marble, and exotic hardwoods, and came with a staff of three, a private pool, and a yacht for $10,000 a night. More than his mother earned in four years of hard work on diamond island.

“Your mother could put the dead to rest,” Parvez said in the quiet that had fallen.

“No.” Adnan shook his head. “You said I would do this. I would put the dead to rest.”

“So you will. But your mother can do what you cannot: She can go to the heart of diamond island and stop their sins forever. Every hour of every day they slap Allah in the face.”

Liquor, sex, drugs, parties with unmarried girls.
Muslim
girls corrupted by the West.
Muslim
men corrupted by the West.
And she worries about their truffles and toilets.
That thought—and Parvez’s words about Allah—stung more sharply than the memory of his mother’s hand when he was nine years old. All his young life he’d waited for his father to come home. “Mother,” he’d said one afternoon when he realized that the sandy path to their house had never borne any footprints but their own, “he’s not coming home.”

She’d slapped him. Just the once. Told him that his father was a jihadist fighting the Russians in Afghanistan. “Maybe a martyr, and you say such things.”

But then she’d wrapped him in her arms, weeping as she wiped away his tears.

It is so much worse for Allah to witness the sins of diamond island,
Adnan thought,
than for a boy to feel even his mother’s deepest grief.

“You can bury the gift of paradise in a bag of limes,” Parvez said. “She’ll carry it to them. She’ll never know. We can time the arrival.”

“But this is what they did in Malé. They made a bomb.”
And you said it was wrong.

“No, they killed many brother and sister Muslims in Malé. Out there,” Parvez turned his gaze seaward again, “the dead still wait for their rest.”

“But what about me? The vest?” So much more willing to take his own life than his mother’s.

“The vest will still be filled, and when the time is right and Allah speaks, you will wear it. You will see your mother in paradise. Someday, you will see me, too.”

Parvez turned away, leaving Adnan trembling in the sultry tropical night.

CHAPTER 5

President Victor Reynolds gripped Jenna’s hand in both of his, looked directly into her bright blue eyes, and thanked her profusely: “Your president and your nation deeply appreciate your service.”

She was impressed. He was the
president,
after all, even if he was afflicted with that annoying, self-important tic of referring to himself in the third person. Indeed, his warm welcome might have overwhelmed Jenna, if she hadn’t already heard him repeat the very same words to nine other members of the newly assembled task force. And there were still a half dozen in line behind her.

Little matter, she was proud to shake the chief executive’s hand and enter the Oval Office. They’d been herded here by Vice President Andrew Percy, who was well positioned to succeed his boss in four years. The press corps had dubbed him “Hair Apparent,” hardly a unique sobriquet, but aptly applied to Percy with his wavy black locks; at sixty-three, they remained suspiciously unstreaked by gray, à la Reagan, and rose like a crown above his handsomely weathered face. It was as if every hair were straining to reach the nation’s highest office, openly betraying the man’s scantily clad ambition.

For Jenna, walking up to the White House gate this morning had come as a welcome distraction. Last night’s arrival at Washington’s historic Union Station had capped a trip horribly tainted by the terrible news from the Maldives. Bidding good-bye to Dafoe had been sweet, but the weekend’s pleasure had dimmed the moment Jenna had read about Basheera’s death. She’d made her way to the venerable Hay-Adams Hotel still stunned by the news—and grateful for the capital’s edifices of white marble with their reassuring displays of permanence and resilience. Even in Washington’s most frenetic periods, the city offered a mellower mood than New York. And the District, though hot and muggy, hadn’t endured the grisly murders that had made New York so bleak and edgy of late, perhaps because the high temperatures didn’t feel like an order of magnitude beyond what this Southern town had always known.

Jenna glanced around the Oval Office.
How great is this?
she asked herself.
Very great
. By joining the task force, she’d plunged right into the fiercely unpredictable currents of history.

As her eyes settled on the carpet’s presidential seal, she realized, with a bolt of sadness, how dearly she wished that her parents could have known about this event: Their lives had been swept away by black ice just outside Burlington three years ago, a mere month after their only child had joined
The Morning Show.