knew him?”
“I did.”
“Well, I don’t see why not. I’ll just be in my office.”
I closed the door and breathed. I needed a moment after Frank’s oration. I’d felt caught in its rhythm as the story poured out of him.
I sat on the bed and placed my hand at the compressed center of the foam mattress. The closet shelf held a bottle of contact lens solution, a hand mirror, and neatly folded shirts, pants, and underwear, their colors dark. On the desk: books on pedagogy, English as a second language. A Bible lay on the sill. A notepad was empty except for a Kabul phone number that I copied. His laptop was shut. A drawer with pens also held a 32 gig zip drive.
I took the drive and paused. His room was even plainer than Alexandra’s, the line where the tile floor met the concrete wall uninterrupted but for the unadorned desk and bed. Had he lived with the minimum so he could test his loyalty to the spirit? His brief relationship with Alexandra made little sense. He’d appeared less a lover than a priestly chaperone.
Frank was waiting in his office, stick-thin legs crossed, one hand holding his glasses, his mouth chewing with a ratlike motion on the part that hooked over the ear. The plastic had been gnawed off, the metal serrated with teeth marks.
“Justin wanted to save the boy,” he told me as soon as I sat.
“The boy?”
“Idris. Most of the students here are girls, but we do have a few boys. Justin and Idris were usually together. Idris was there when that party was attacked.”
I had no memory of Idris in the safe room, though I did recall from other occasions the young Afghan man who’d driven Justin around Kabul.
“Idris was in the car,” Frank said. “At least that’s what the police told me.”
“He and Justin were friends?”
“Well, that’s not quite right. Justin thought he could be Idris’s savior, and Idris used him.” Frank was speaking more deliberately. “That’s how he met Clay.”
“Clay?”
“Clay and Justin were old friends, from Louisiana.” Frank pursed his lips, wrinkles bunching around his mouth.
“What does Clay have to do with the car bomb?”
“Clay disappeared that day as well. The company he worked for thought he’d been kidnapped. They checked the security feed outside his compound. It showed him getting into the car with Justin and Alexandra and” — Frank looked me in the eyes now, as if to say he needed to tell somebody and had no one else — “and Idris. Idris was driving. But there were only three bodies, what remained of them anyway. The security company never went to the police. They asked me not to in a, well, not very friendly way.”
“If you will permit me,” I said, “I would like to approach the security company.”
“You?” Frank stared at the ashen carpet cut to fit below his desk and chair, to damper the cold from the concrete.
This was the story I’d been looking for. Clay’s presence in the car with Justin and Alexandra reinforced my conviction that the bomb wasn’t Taliban retribution for teaching girls.
“Did you know them all well?” I asked.
“Clay not so much, but Alexandra a little more. I met her through Justin. I asked her to come and speak to the girls. We need female mentors. I’d go so far as to say . . . well, no . . .”
“Pardon me?” I eased my tone, sounding confused and in need of guidance, concealing my excitement that Tam would be doing an embed and everything I’d just learned was mine.
“If you ask me — I’d never go on record with this, but — she’s the tragedy. The others . . .” He shrugged. “Anyway, I hope you have all you need from me for your article. The bit about the security company is off the record. Don’t mention my name to them. But if you have other questions or if you find something out, just come by whenever.”
“Thank you,” I said, wondering if he would ask me to be a mentor as well.
He walked me downstairs. The school’s driveway was empty, and we went out the gate and stood in the street. I’d imagined Justin and Alexandra propelled by their missions, reeling incautiously toward a point of combustion, but the story was more complicated.
“Why,” I asked, “did Justin think he had to save Idris?”
Frank’s jaw went crooked. “Everybody who comes here believes he’s got to save someone. I remember telling him, you don’t fix a country overnight. It must have been his third day. He was already assigning homework, and the girls complained to me. I told him they were too busy for homework. They all had jobs, accounting for a pharmacy or a clinic, translating and typing. ‘Think in decades,’ I said.”
He appeared to be trying to pick up where he’d left off in his monologue, to regain the conviction to finish the polemic he’d been harboring so he could drive his verdict home. But he’d waited too long. He fumbled at his pocket and took out his wallet, as though to pay for my taxi. He pinched at a worn leather fold, removed a card, and extended it to me.
“You know,” he said, half his face contracted as he squinted off down the muddy street, “people tell me I’ve had a good run and it’s time to head home, that I’ll be next. But that’s how you lose a war. You turn tail. You show them their barbaric tactics work. So let them target me. What was it Tennyson said of the aging Ulysses? Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will. I know what I’m doing, and so did Alexandra. She told me that everyone she worked with talked women’s rights and wrote up reports, but had almost no contact with Afghan women other than a few who came through the office. She wasn’t the one visiting the prisons and seeing the abuses. Meeting the girls here changed her. She said that Afghan women aren’t as weak as people think, and she was right. The strongest women I’ve ever met have studied in this school, and if I have to die to see that they have their freedom, that’s a small price to pay.”
At that, he blinked and lifted his gaunt palm, and I got in the taxi. As it pulled away, I inspected the card. On its back, a number was written, the pen strokes angular and uneven, like tiny cuts, but too wet, blotting. I flipped it over. Printed in a stern font were two more numbers, an email, and a name: Steve Hammond.
ALL THAT WEEK, Kabul was quiet — traffic jams and construction and impromptu checkpoints, but quiet nonetheless. Spring arrived in sunlit days. Afternoon showers stripped dust and smog from the air, and tamped it into the earth. The nights hovered at freezing: brittle stars, drafts at windows, and the creaking of metal as the fire took in my bukhari.
I sat next to it, working my way through Alexandra’s scuffed journal with the help of an iPhone French-English dictionary and Google Translate, searching for what compelled her into a love triangle like a Wild West standoff between a hayseed missionary and a gun for hire. In expats’ speculation about who had died, Clay was absent, and I enjoyed his mystery as I read her entries, anticipating his arrival.
During high school, I studied French. Its sound evokes refinement for the Japanese. My professor said the history of France and Japan is a love story between aesthetics, each finding in the other the embodiments of ideals. But I knew nothing about French Canadians.
