wall, facing the door. Seated behind the desk was a petite round-faced woman who looked to be about sixty. Her dark eyes, which seemed to be set very far apart, had an odd glittery gleam, and her hair, which had probably once been jet black, was dramatically streaked with jagged zones of white, like flashes of lightning cutting across the night.
Glancing at a paper she was holding, she said, looking at the Pole, “Are you Kr—Kyz—Kzyz—Kryz—” She could not get her tongue around the letters of his name. But she seemed amused rather than irritated.
“Krzysztof,” he said. “Krzysztof Michalski.”
“Michalski, yes. And that first name again?”
“Krzysztof.”
“Ah. Christoph. I get it now. All right: Christoph Michalski. Polish name, right?” She grinned. “A lot easier to say it than to read it.” Khalid was surprised at how chatty she was. Most of these quisling bureaucrats were chilly and abrupt. But she had what sounded to him like an American accent. Perhaps her being American had something to do with that. “And which one of you is Khalid Haleem Burke?” the woman asked.
“I am.”
She gave him a long slow look, frowning a little. Khalid stared right back.
“And then you,” she said, turning now toward the North African, “must be—ah—Mulay ben Dlimi.”
“Oui.”
“What kind of name is that, Mulay ben Dlimi?”
“Oui,” the North African said again.
“He doesn’t understand English,” said Khalid. “He’s from North Africa.”
The woman nodded. “A real international group. All right, Christoph, Khalid, Mulay. I think you know the deal. You’re going to be transported again, day after tomorrow. Or possibly even tomorrow, if the paperwork gets done in time. Pack your stuff and be ready to leave your quarters as soon as you’re called.”
“Can you tell us,” Krzysztov said, “Where we’re going to be sent this time?”
She smiled. “The good old U.S. of A., this time. Las Vegas, Nevada. Do any of you know how to play blackjack?”
The transport plane once had been a commercial airliner, long, long ago, in the days when the citizens of the countries of Earth still moved about freely from one place to another on journeys of business or pleasure and there were such things called airlines to carry them. Khalid had not known that era at first hand, but he had heard tales of it. This plane, whose painted hull was faded and even rusted in places, still bore an inscription identifying it as belonging to British Airways. For Khalid, stepping aboard it was in a little way like returning to England. He was not sure how he felt about that.
But the airplane wasn’t England. It was only a long metal tube with blotchy gray walls and scars on the floor to mark the places where the seats had been ripped out. Bare mattresses had replaced the seats. There was no place to sit; one could only walk about or lie down. Long bars had been soldered to the walls above the windows, something to grab if the flight turned turbulent. Threadbare curtains divided the passenger compartment into several subcompartments.
For Khalid there was nothing new about any of this. All the planes that had carried him from one detention camp to another had been much like this one. This one seemed bigger, that was all. But that was because they were going to the United States, a lengthy journey that must require a larger plane. He had only the vaguest idea where the United States might be, but he knew that it was very far from where they were now.
The small woman who had met with them in Room 109 was aboard the plane, supervising the departure arrangements. Khalid assumed that she would leave once everybody who was being transported had been checked off the master list, but, no, she stayed on the plane after the checkoff was complete and the doors were closed. That was unusual. The detention-center officials did not normally accompany the transported prisoners to their destinations. But perhaps she wasn’t actually staying. He watched her disappear through the curtain that separated Khalid’s sector of the plane from the zone up front where the official personnel were, and wondered if there might be some other door up there through which she might leave before the plane took off. In a curious way he hoped there wasn’t. He liked her. She was an amusing woman, lively and irreverent, not at all like any of the other quisling officials with whom he had come in contact in his seven years of internment.
Khalid was pleased to see, not long after the plane had taken off, that she was still on board. She emerged from the front compartment, walking carefully in the steeply climbing plane, and halted when she reached the mattress where Khalid and the North African man were sitting.
“May I join you?” she asked.
“You need to ask permission, do you?” said Khalid.
“A little politeness never hurts.”
He shrugged. She spiraled down next to him, lowering herself to the floor in a quick, graceful way that belied her age, and folded herself up opposite him on the mattress with her legs crossed neatly, ankles to knees.
“You’re Khalid, is that right?”
“Yes.”
“My name is Cindy. You’re very pretty, Khalid, do you know that? I love the tawny color of your skin. Like a lion’s, it is. And that crop of dense bushy hair.” When he offered no reply, she said, “You’re an artist, I understand.”
“I make things, yes.”
“I made things once, too. And I was also pretty, once, for that matter.”
She smiled and winked at him, rendering Khalid somehow a co-conspirator in the agreement that she had once been pretty. It hadn’t occurred to him before this that she might have been an attractive woman once upon a time, but now, taking a close look at her, he saw that it was quite possible that she had been: a small and energetic person, trimly built, with delicate features and those bright, bright eyes. Her smile was still very appealing. And the wink. He liked that wink. She was definitely unlike any quisling he had ever encountered. With his artist’s eye he edited out the grooves and wrinkles that her sixty years had carved in her face, restored the darkness and glossiness of her hair, gave her skin the freshness of youth. Yes, he thought. No doubt quite pretty thirty or forty years ago.
“What are you, Khalid?” she said. “Some sort of Indian? At least in part.”
“Pakistani. My mother was.”
“And your father?”
“English. A white man. I never knew him. He was a quisling, people told me.”
“I’m a quisling.”
“Lots of people are quislings,” Khalid said. “It makes no difference to me.”
“Well,” she said. And said nothing further for a while, simply sat there cross-legged, her eyes looking into his as though she were studying him. Khalid looked back amiably. He was afraid of nothing and nobody. Let her stare, if she wanted to.
Then she said, “Are you angry about something?”
“Angry? Me? What is there to be angry about? I never get angry at all.”
“On the contrary. I think you’re angry all the time.”
“You are certainly free to think that.”
“You seem very calm,” she said. “That’s one of the things that makes you so interesting, how cool you are, how you just shrug within yourself at everything that happens to you and around you.
It’s the first thing anyone would notice about you. But that kind of calmness can sometimes be a mask for seething anger. You could have a volcano inside you that you don’t want to allow to erupt, and so you keep a lid on it a hundred percent of the time. A hundred twenty percent of the time. What do you think of that theory, Khalid?”
“Aissha, who raised me like a mother because my mother died when I was born, taught me to accept the will of Allah in whatever form it might manifest itself. Which I have done.”
“A very wise philosophy. Islam: the word itself means ‘absolute submission,’ right? Surrendering yourself to God. I’ve studied these things, you know.—Who was Aissha?”
“My mother’s mother. Her stepmother, really. She was like a mother to me. A very good woman.”
“Undoubtedly she was. And I think you’re a very, very angry man.”
