More than a year passed after that terrible night in Queens.
Farhan disappeared, and no one in the family heard from her again. They
hired a detective, tried to locate her, and failed, resulting in all sorts of
theories: That Farhan had overdosed. That she had been killed by one of her
abusive boyfriends. But this was all conjecture: Without a body, it was
impossible for the Khan family to reach any kind of closure.
Then summer arrived, and Maryam and I drove up to the house in
Southampton. Once we were there, the magic of the ocean began to work.
Maryam went swimming every day and grew tan. She even laughed a little,
and I felt hopeful — but then a heart was found buried in a salt pile, and
Maryam turned ashen. Her panic spread to me, and there was no choice.
After I gave her a Valium and put her to bed, I went up into the woods to
check on the grave, but of course nothing had changed: George was still up
there, covered by a layer of lush green grass.
I returned to the house and lay down in bed next to Maryam, who
mumbled and groaned in her sle ep. To calm her, I stroked her sleek, dark
hair, and her eyes fluttered open; she muttered something about Farhan and
then settled back into her pillow.
The worst part of the last year had been seeing Maryam suffer.
Look at it from her point of view: Farhan calls her from Tokyo and says
that JHK is back and that she needs help. Maryam meets Epps, who
confirms that the killer is still around. Farhan then convinces Maryam that
her life is in danger and that she must go away to Florida for a week —
which she does — and when she returns, Farhan has vanished without a
trace.
Maryam eventually broke down and cried and confessed all this to me,
and I had to act surprised. I assured her that the killer was merely a fiction
in Farhan’s mind, that Farhan was erratic and had probably made up all this
stuff to get attention — and then fled to es cape the mess she had made. I said
that Farhan would eventually turn up like a bad penny — but of course
Maryam didn’t believe me, because what did I know?
I could not say to Maryam — without incriminating myself — Look, your
sister is fine. She’s gone off to Costa Rica, to a small town on the Pacific
coast, because she bludgeoned JHK to death with a metal pole. I was there,
I heard his head cave in like a rotten coconut. I helped to wrap his mangled
skull in my Italian overcoat — it was leaking black blood, and we bundled
his corpse into a bedsheet and drove it out to Southampton. JHK is
decaying up in the woods you love, mulch for the grass that grows tall
above him. I even dug his grave — five feet down, to prevent the foxes from
excavating his body — and it was filthy, backbreaking work. All the while
Farhan stood to the side and instructed me with contempt, as if I, and not
she, were the killer.
After the burial was done, Farhan and I drank whiskey in front of a
roaring fire in the living room. She said that since Abbas had already frozen
all her accounts and canceled her credit cards, she was terrified he was
going to follow up on his threat and have her committed. She said that she
was going into hiding, that she needed a big chunk of money — and then she
used my laptop to log in to the Tiger Corp network.
I protested, of course — this was embezzlement, plain and simple — but
Farhan assured me that she had used a VPN, and the crime could not be
traced back to me. Besides, she knew the password to a secret bank account
that Abbas k ept, a slush fund to bribe building inspectors; the money was
not accounted for, so he could not r eport it missing. Using my laptop,
Farhan drained the stash and moved a million and a half dollars to her own
offshore account in the Bahamas.
On her way out, Farhan took George’s suitcase containing the eight
human hearts. She said that she would “dispose of them,” but I think she
was unable to throw them away and, driving past the salt pile, attempted
some sort of ceremonial burial. A disastrous move — now the cops would
DNA test the hearts and find that they belonged to JHK’s victims. All the
conspiracy theorists would insist that the killer was still alive, and
Maryam’s fear would intensify.
The worst part of all this? Right before Farhan drove off into the
darkness, she turned to me and said, “Not a word about any of this. Ever.
Remember, you’re an accomplice. If they dig George up, they’re going to
find your fancy Italian jacket — they won’t even have to test for DNA, your
initials are sewn into the lining. Not a goddamn word to anyone — and that
includes Maryam. Is that clear?”
So: There was nothing I could say to put Maryam’s mind at rest.
The months passed, Farhan did not reappear, and Maryam became more
and more obsessed. Her mind worked like a double - entry accounts ledger:
All credits and debits had to be balanced. Untidiness, loose ends, gray areas
— they drove her crazy. Maryam had become a psychiatrist not because she
had a vast tolerance for the variations of the human mind, but because she
was scared of its strangeness and needed a theoretical framework to contain
it.
Maryam’s mind returned endlessly to Farhan’s disappearance, like a fly
hitting against a glass wall. She became convinced that her sister was the
latest victim of the Jackson Heights Killer, a man who officially had been
convicted and executed. “Is he still out there?” “Where is Farhan’s body?”
“What has become of Epps?” These became her refrains, and on dark days
she remained curled up in bed and could not go to work. On several
occasions, I almost broke down and told Maryam the truth, but I was held
back by my own guilt — how could I justify my actions without revealing
my affair with Farhan?
That night after I visited George’s grave, I lay in the darkness next to
Maryam and cursed her sister: Farhan had locked me inside her secret.
Farhan had left me helpless to aid poor Maryam. Farhan was in Costa
Rica, lounging under the palm trees, no doubt with some new man,
enjoying her freedom.
It just made me more agitated. There was no use trying to sle
Ep I went downstairs and pulled on Abbas’s waxed jacket again, and the
woodsy smell of the old man made me sick. I now spent countless hours
with Abbas on the West Side Project, and it was a continuous struggle to
ke ep my feelings under check. I told myself that, to survive, I had to
compartmentalize: There was Abbas the monster — and then there was
Abbas the business genius, canny, charismatic, resourceful.
I had learned so much from him about instilling just the right amount of
fear in my subordinates. From Abbas I also learned that numbers —
seemingly black - and - white — can easily be made to lie and must always be
measured against physical reality. Lately, though, the old man had been
strangely absent from the job meetings, and all kinds of decisions were
being delayed. There were rumors that Abbas had suffered a heart attack,
but they were laughable. The old man had assured me, over text, that he
was down with “a touch of flu,” and that very soon he would be “as right as
rain.”
In any case, that night in Southampton, I pulled on Abbas’s jacket and
tall rubber boots and went outside. The pool lights refracted through the
surface of the water and cast wavy shadows on the facade of the house.
Clouds of moths arrived and buzzed the water, and there was the occasional
soft splash as one hit the surface and drowned.
I grabbed a long - handled net, but it was a Sisyphean task. If I left the
lights on while I scooped out the dead moths, more would just immolate
themselves; if I shut the lights off, I would not be able to see anything.
Ah, to hell with it.
I dropped the net and collapsed on a lounger. It was impossible to think
of living like this, year after year, with Maryam in mourning for her “dead”
sister. If only Farhan would emerge from hiding, my problems would be
solved, but I knew that she would never return. The one and a half million
dollars she had stolen would take her far away from her tyrannical, vengeful
father.
Above me, the sky — freed from the light pollution of the city — was
filled with whirling clusters of stars. I remembered reading that it took
hundreds of years for the light from a star to reach the earth — and by then,
the source could be burned out, extinct.
Farhan was gone. She was somewhere on a beach in Costa Rica, far
away from her father, and she’d never, ever return to New York.