A Thousand Splendid Suns

enough, enough for one or maybe two months' apartment rent."
The shopkeeper gave him a bus ticket, Tariq said, and the address of a
street corner near the Lahore Rail Station where he was to deliver the
coat to a friend of the shopkeeper's.
"I knew already. Of course I knew," Tariq said. "He said that if I got
caught, I was on my own, that I should remember that he knew where
my mother lived. But the money was too good to pass up. And winter
was coming again."
"How far did you get?" Laila asked.
"Not far," he said and laughed, sounding apologetic, ashamed. "Never
even got on the bus. But I thought I was immune, you know, safe. As
though there was some accountant up there somewhere, a guy with a
pencil tucked behind his ear who kept track of these things, who tallied
things up, and he'd look down and say, 'Yes, yes, he can have this, we'll
let it go. He's paid some dues already, this one.'"
It was in the seams, the hashish, and it spilled all over the street when
the police took a knife to the coat.
Tariq laughed again when he said this, a climbing, shaky kind of laugh,
and Laila remembered how he used to laugh like this when they were
little, to cloak embarrassment, to make light of things he'd done that
were foolhardy or scandalous.
* * *
"He has A limp," Zalmai said. "Is this who I think it is?"