was too convincing, the kind of kid who should have had his own school and been playing by his own rules. I said yes only because this place needs classes morning to night. We need to be a factory in the best sense of the word.”
Frank faltered, his hand hanging between us like a pale spider. The moment increased in focus as if a faint incandescence gathered in the room. What I’d sensed — the story — it was here. Frank wasn’t searching for words. He was trying to restrain himself. I nodded, my headscarf slipping a little more.
“‘America,’ Justin told me, ‘is asleep. We have no clue where we’re going or why we’re doing what we’re doing. Half of us say we need to reclaim what we lost, and the other half say we need to forget about it and move on, but neither of those options are any good. I can’t use a gun, so I figure I might as well educate as many kids as possible.’
“‘That’s the way to do it,’ I placated him, and he said he’d read that every insurgent we shoot inspires five more, and every one we educate will make five less. I agreed it was a plausible theory. I suspected he was a kid who’d done well but had reached the point where whatever had driven him still anchored him. He’d come to the end of his chain like a dog running across a yard. It had to hurt. I saw this in people. I’d felt it myself. Why else does a man come back from Vietnam, spend decades building businesses and selling them, marry a good woman and have four daughters, and then, when he’s supposed to retire, pick up and head back to a war zone? After that first war I’d seen so much destruction I was hungry to go home and build, and after thirty-some years I’d evened things out and there wasn’t enough destruction left in my memory to keep me building. So I came to Afghanistan. My wife remarried. She did so four years ago. It took her five to realize I wasn’t coming back. My daughters have all exceeded my expectations, and I have another decade of raising girls here.”
Frank adjusted his glasses.
“For the first few years,” he said, “I helped run the American University of Afghanistan, but the vision was buried in the details. There’s nothing wrong with grammar and math, and I know it takes time to nail all that down, but a country needs more than translators and accountants. I kept thinking about a school built on a vision. Who wouldn’t be changed just by sitting and talking to a man who’d been through war and who’d invested in society? An entrepreneur who’d played a hand in his country’s local politics? I remember one day asking myself: What’s the worst that can happen? And having the thought: some talented young people will get to learn from me.
“So I rented this place from two expats who went home. That’s when expats were beginning to leave. The golden days of the occupation were ending. Everyone was ready to drop what they were doing and run. The nice thing about being seventy-five is you get gunned down in the streets of Kabul and you die happy. I’ve had a fuller life than anyone I know.
“Since then, I’ve brought in more than two dozen volunteers, most of them just staying the three months of their visas and teaching what they could, when it suited them. But Justin was sending me syllabi and curricula before he even arrived.”
Frank chuckled — a dry, mirthless sound in his throat.
“I remember his look when he walked in here. ‘If it were an ivory tower,’ I told him, ‘we wouldn’t need you.’ He just asked where his room was and who was responsible for what, and we’ve all had headaches ever since. Until a few days ago, I guess. Well, no, the car bomb, that’s been the biggest headache of all.”
Frank hesitated, guilt obscuring his glow of pride. He no longer seemed so primed to voice his conflicts with a recently dead man.
“Would you like to see his room?” he asked.
“Yes, please.”
He led me to the door and opened it for me. I stepped in and turned.
“Can I have a moment alone?”
His small bloodshot eyes focused in on me briefly from behind his glasses.
“You 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.