Ministers of Fire. Mark Harril Saunders

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СКАЧАТЬ I meant,” Burling said, accepting the fresh drink. They stood close, their glasses resting against each other in salute. “When the charter flight leaves tomorrow, I need you to stay. Come over here.”

      “Be careful,” she warned. “Jack is probably out in the garden right now. He’s getting high again, and when he does that he likes to talk to the marines.”

      “That’s why I can’t take him with me,” he said, setting down his glass on the corner of the desk, “even though he knows the terrain.” On a yellow legal pad, he wrote, I have to go up North, to Mazar-i-Sharif, to talk to the mujahedin. “Things are happening faster than I thought, and I need someone with languages.”

      “I came out here to help with girls’ education,” she said, sounding slightly desperate now. “Just because I speak Dari doesn’t mean I understand what these men are up to. And I don’t care what Jack says, killing Godwin didn’t make any sense.”

      “Oh, yes, it did,” Burling said, sampling the new, stronger, mixture. “Ever heard of Franz Ferdinand?”

      “That’s another problem. I’m not as smart as you are.”

      “Now you’re patronizing me,” Burling said. “You know what I think?”

      April raised her eyebrows. “I wish I did.”

      “You’re perfect for this.”

      sunday morning, burling’s family left, boarding the DC-3. Only Luke, young and game enough still for the flight on an airplane to excite him, looked back across his shoulder at his father. Amelia stared resolutely at the seatback in front of her, and their daughter Elizabeth already had her nose in a book about Emily Dickinson. Jack Lindstrom sat in front of them, “headed for an epic druggie meltdown in the States,” as April put it.

      As the plane took off, leaving a trail of oddly black exhaust, and tilted across the mountains to the east, Burling thought about his children. Another secret thing he cherished was a potent love for Betsy and Luke, but he had probably lost them, too, if he had ever really had them. They were beautiful, but he had thrown off the delicate balance of that beauty through his failure with their mother. It made what he was about to do all the more important, so that someday they would understand, and the pieces could be put back together into a larger, more beautiful whole.

      That afternoon he took April on a different kind of plane, a light Cessna of the type they had used in Vietnam. Its spartan cabin shook as the engines choked to life. In the front seats rode the pilot and a young Afghan man named Abdul Hadi who worked as a liaison to the government, but was run as an asset by Burling. In the narrow seats aft, pushed together by the tapering fuselage, sat April and Burling. As the Cessna climbed above the mountains to the north, April smiled at him quickly from behind her shining hair. She wanted to be a part of his world, but what did he want from her? In his office, sharing the arak, he hadn’t kissed her again, but the possibility had hung between them like a strong magnetic field. It crackled there now, at the margins. The hard stuff—as Godwin had called it—excited her. He knew that he was taking advantage of that, and yet he didn’t, couldn’t seem to, stop himself.

      “On the way back—” Burling was talking above the engines to the pilot, pointing his finger at the windshield—“we may have to get in down there.”

      A spine of dry, trackless hills hunched up before them, and the pilot nodded, taking a drink from a flask and offering it to Burling, who politely refused it.

      “Is this where the ones who killed Godwin went?” April asked.

      Abdul Hadi turned to look at her. He was uncomfortable with her presence, and Burling felt it as a judgment on him. The Afghan might be on his payroll, but where Abdul’s ultimate loyalties lay—to the Americans, Taraki, or his clan—was definitely a matter of concern. “She’s merely cover,” Burling had told him. “When we get to Samarkand, she’ll be my wife.”

      “Hey, Lucius,” said the pilot, cocking his head to one side. They looked down at the pocked, ochre dirt.

      “Mines,” said Burling, nodding. The plane’s feathery shadow blew across the expanse. “That’s the Soviet border down there.”

      in samarkand, the minarets were silent. the madrassah with its symmetrical blue-tiled façade was empty of life. In the center of town, an old hotel faced a large, shaded square. Its lobby had the stale, dour feeling of a place for English travelers on the Continent; the old British ladies who played bridge in the cool dusty corner by the stairs seemed right at home. On the roof was a terrace strung with multicolored lights, and on the night following their arrival, Burling boarded the creaky old lift with April, to eat “en plein air,” as he said. He had dressed in khakis and his white linen shirt, as if playing the part of a colonial in a play. His hand spread gently across April’s back as he helped her to her chair.

      Children ran through the tables while their parents sat smoking over the wreck of their meals. The night air was blue with their fetid tobacco, which smelled as strong as Jack’s dope, and the savor of herbs and roasted meat. In one corner of the roof a raggedy band sat on the edges of folding chairs, war medals flapping on their chests in time with the swing.

      “Dance?” Burling said.

      On the floor, the touch of their hands seemed quite harmless, refined.

      “I’ve never been asked like that,” she told him when her cheek was close to his. He could feel the slight tremble returning, and he didn’t answer her for fear he would stutter, something he had struggled with as a child. “In southwest Virginia the boys don’t typically ask, they just take you.”

      No one else joined them, and the old English ladies nodded their approval; their milky blue eyes tacked from April to Burling as the couple drew more closely together beneath the star-strewn globe of the sky. The ladies said they hadn’t seen a man dance like that since the Blitz, and they fixed April with watery stares that were fond and regretful. The music was flat, an uneasy rendering of the big bands that Burling used to play in the living room at home—his Washington home—in a time that seemed long ago now. The music felt wrong in this dry, spicy air. No scratch of cicadas with their manic crescendo, no scent of honeysuckle sweetening the night. So far from Amelia advancing through the soft, firefly dusk toward the picnic table, flowered apron tied loosely across her hips, leaning over to pick up plates. No Glenn Miller from the open kitchen window behind her. The arid Soviet night had an electric taste of betrayal and he and April glided through it with ease while the people talked about them in Russian and English and the keening of Dari.

      “Why did you really bring me up here, Lucius Burling?”

      Across the tables, the lift opened and a young Chinese man emerged. Burling knew from the sharp concentration of her eyes that April had seen him. Her body stiffened, which improved their dancing, as if she had taken the lead. Behind the younger Chinese came a short, fat man about Burling’s age, his thin hair combed across his scalp. The thought ran through Burling’s mind that he wanted to spoil this now, to save himself. Bringing the Chinese in complicated the whole thing beyond what he was able to predict.

      “I’m serious,” said April. “If you brought me up here just to fuck me, that I can understand. And Jack can’t seem to do that anymore, in case you didn’t know, so I might just be up for it. But if you pretend there’s something else, if you’re just putting on a show . . .”

      “I don’t know how to do this properly,” Burling told her, watching the Chinese colonel take his seat. “Even those ladies over there, watching our every move, I don’t СКАЧАТЬ