Lie down with lions - Ken Follett [64]
She wondered how Jean-Pierre felt. Was he angry, or frustrated, or disappointed? It was hard to imagine someone being disappointed because people had not been killed. She stole a glance at him, but his face was blank. I wish I knew what’s going on in his mind, she thought.
Their patients melted away within minutes: everybody was going down to the village to welcome the travelers home. “Shall we go down?” Jane said.
“You go,” Jean-Pierre said. “I’ll finish up here, then follow you.”
“All right,” said Jane. He wanted some time to compose himself, she guessed, so that he could pretend to be delighted at their safe return when he saw them.
She picked up Chantal and took the steep footpath toward the village. She could feel the heat of the rock through the thin soles of her sandals.
She still had not confronted Jean-Pierre. However, this could not go on indefinitely. Sooner or later he would learn that Mohammed had sent a runner to divert the convoy from its prearranged route. Naturally he would then ask Mohammed why this had been done, and Mohammed would tell him about Jane’s “vision.” But Jean-Pierre knew Jane did not believe in visions. . . .
Why am I afraid? she asked herself. I’m not the guilty one—he is. Yet I feel as if his secret is something I must be ashamed of. I should have spoken to him about it immediately, that evening we walked up to the top of the cliff. By nursing it to myself for so long, I, too, have become a deceiver. Perhaps that’s it. Or perhaps it’s the peculiar look in his eyes sometimes. . . .
She had not given up her determination to go home, but so far she had failed to think of a way to persuade Jean-Pierre to go. She had dreamed up a dozen bizarre schemes, from faking a message to say that his mother was dying, to poisoning his yogurt with something that would give him the symptoms of an illness which would force him to return to Europe for treatment. The simplest, and least far-fetched, of her ideas was to threaten to tell Mohammed that Jean-Pierre was a spy. She would never do it, of course, for to unmask him would be as good as killing him. But would Jean-Pierre think she might carry out the threat? Probably not. It would take a hard, pitiless, stone-hearted man to believe her capable of virtually killing her husband—and if Jean-Pierre were that hard and pitiless and stone-hearted, he might kill Jane.
She shivered despite the heat. This talk of killing was grotesque. When two people take such delight in one another’s bodies as we do, she thought, how can they possibly do each other violence?
As she reached the village she began to hear the random, exuberant gunfire that signified an Afghan celebration. She made her way to the mosque—everything happened at the mosque. The convoy was in the courtyard, men and horses and baggage surrounded by smiling women and squealing children. Jane stood at the edge of the crowd, watching. It was worth it, she thought. It was worth the worry and the fear, and it was worth manipulating Mohammed in that undignified way, in order to see this, the men safely reunited with their wives and mothers and sons and daughters.
What happened next was probably the greatest shock of her life.
There in the crowd, among the caps and turbans, appeared a head of curly blond hair. At first she did not recognize it, even though its familiarity tugged at her heartstrings. Then it emerged from the crowd, and she saw, hiding behind an incredibly bushy blond beard, the face of Ellis Thaler.
Jane’s knees suddenly felt weak. Ellis? Here? It was impossible.
He walked toward her. He was wearing the loose pajamalike cotton clothes of the Afghans, and a dirty blanket around his broad shoulders. The little of his face that was still visible above the beard was deeply tanned, so that his sky blue eyes were even more striking than usual, like cornflowers in a field of ripe wheat.
Jane was struck dumb.
Ellis stood in front of her, his face solemn. “Hello, Jane.”
She realized she no longer