Ali was looking toward the door, and Sharaf realized that the place had suddenly gone quiet. Old faces all around them were looking up from their card games toward the entrance. Sharaf turned to see what was happening as his last swallow of coffee settled into a muddy lump at the base of his stomach.
Three rank-and-file policemen stood just inside the doorway, led by a Sudanese sergeant in lettuce green—the very fellow who had handled a favor for Ali a few years back, even though he was known to have a steep asking price. The moment they spotted Sharaf they began moving in his direction, not even bothering to remove their shoes. A low murmur went up from the regulars. The scurrying waiters halted in their tracks.
Sharaf sat still, but his mind moved quickly. By now, Keller would be alone in the house, assuming the police hadn’t already picked him up. Laleh was at her office. Amina was visiting friends, and probably wouldn’t turn on her mobile phone until after lunch. He could tell Ali to phone the house, but Sam Keller might not have the nerve to answer.
“Call Laleh at her office,” he said under his breath. “Tell her what has happened. Find any way you can to get Keller out of the house immediately. And you’d better take him to one of those tougher locations you had in mind.”
“What about you?”
“Contact the Minister,” Sharaf said. “But unless you want to get me into even bigger trouble, don’t mention the American.”
The policemen arrived at his side. One gripped Sharaf’s right arm, another took his left, and they raised him to his feet. The sergeant spoke loudly enough for all to hear.
“You will hand over your phone, your keys, and your wallet and come with us, Lieutenant Sharaf. You are under arrest.”
“On what charge? Under whose orders?”
They said nothing in reply. Sharaf didn’t resist as they escorted him to the door.
A police car was outside, with a detention van idling behind it. Already a crowd was forming. A show of force like this was for more than just an arrest. It was designed to humiliate him. Even Lieutenant Assad probably couldn’t have rigged up this big of a display, and that suggested involvement at a higher level. This train of thought led Sharaf to the most chilling possibility of all—that the Minister himself, for whatever reason, was behind this.
An officer shoved Sharaf toward the van. He looked back toward the majlis and saw Ali standing at the entrance, grim faced.
“I’ll do what I can,” Ali called out.
Normally, such words from Ali meant the deed was as good as done. This time, to judge from his deepening frown, they both realized that the odds were against them.
As if to drive home the point, the officer produced a blindfold and roughly tied it into place. He then gripped Sharaf by the shoulders and shoved him through the van’s open panel doors, barking Sharaf’s shins on the rear bumper in the process. The doors slammed shut, and the agonized Sharaf was in darkness. The driver revved the engine once, then they careened away in a clatter of spraying gravel. Sharaf took a deep breath and held it until the pain in his shins subsided.
Between that and the darkness, it reminded him a little of diving for pearls in deep waters. Stay calm, he told himself. Relax and keep your eyes open. If further dangers arise, revel in them. Embrace them. But he had better keep holding his breath. He had a feeling he wouldn’t be coming up for air for quite a while.
13
Earlier that morning, Sam Keller awoke to an empty house. All was quiet. The window shades were drawn against the sunlight.
Sam had been dreaming of his father, and as he opened his eyes he still heard the voice from some of his earliest memories; the old man telling him to live a little, to give it a try, to go ahead and see what happened and let the chips fall where they may.
Flipping back the blinds onto a view of a scorched courtyard, Sam tried to pin down exactly when he had stopped heeding that advice. Or maybe he had never paid it much attention to begin with. Such words—on the surface, at least—had always seemed pat, even trite, the sort of pep talk that any father might offer.
But now, after having been in the workforce for five years, he recalled the gray face of resignation his dad had always worn when he came through the kitchen door every evening at six—or more often at nine during tax season—looking frayed at the edges as he cracked open an ice tray to mix the ritual daily pitcher of gimlets to be shared with Sam’s mom. Paul Keller had hated his job, Sam realized, now that he could recognize the symptoms. Accountancy had paid the bills and then some, and the technical side had probably come easily enough for a man with such a mathematical mind. But what stood out now was all of the little ways in which his father had tried to steer Sam in other directions, not least by teaching him to sail at the earliest possible age under all conceivable conditions, even when the wind was up and skies were aboil. As if, by seducing the boy with a few thrills, he might guide him toward a more exciting vocation.
“You’re a good man in a storm,” his father always insisted, whenever the boy held the tiller firm against a fresh gust. But it was really the old accountant who had needed to get out on the waves, Sam realized, if only for a way to unbend his mind and let it play among the angles of wind and water, pushing the boat to its limits. More math, when you got right down to it, but calculated on the fly, with a face to the breeze, tiller in hand, the hull’s trammeled force straining beneath his grip with the quiver of a saddled horse.
Of course, when Sam’s aptitude had emerged along similar lines as his father’s—a head for numbers, a knack for analysis—the boy had inevitably begun tacking the same general course. His father had nodded stoically at the news that Sam would seek his MBA at that eggheads’ paradise, the University of Chicago. But the man hadn’t been able to bite his tongue when, on graduation day, Sam announced he had accepted an auditor’s position at Pfluger Klaxon.
To Sam the job had sounded exciting—loads of travel, an apartment in Chelsea. Wasn’t that bohemian enough? But perhaps his father had foreseen where that course would really chart, and Sam now recalled with sudden clarity a long-forgotten conversation. They had just emerged from a downtown tavern after sharing beers with his two best pals from grad school and their dads. His father turned to him in the afternoon glare on a busy sidewalk and
