Criminals Read Online Free Page A

if it were new itself, this was a country of young, slim people.
    Amy sat on the amah’s terrace at the back of the house, letting her hair dry in the sun. Skylab. It was on every page of the newspaper. Skylab was going to fall on Asia.
    Next door the shirts on the line began to jig as the amah snatched them, with an unsmiling glance at Amy. She was a Malay girl, not an Indian like most of the amahs in this circle of houses built for foreigners, and wore the snowy headscarf. She was known to have gone down on her knees, after the Australian couple stir-fried pork on her day off, to wash everything with red mud as the Koran decreed—cupboards, drawers, refrigerator, the blackened little gas stove these houses all had.
    â€œWholesome dust,” the Koran said. “Pure earth.” When there was no water, pure earth could be used for bathing, for purification.
    Amy and John had no amah. Eleanor, the Englishwoman who ran the Koran study group, said why not hire one simply to avoid flouting custom, but Amy knew they would not, even if her own work permit finally came through and she went to work in the hospital, they would not have somebody in the house with them, in on their life, which was too frail and groggy after the labor and shame of all that had tumbled them down here, and at the same time too full of a hot, irresistible pride in their being here alone, their having left everything behind.
    The blue bee challenged her whenever she hung something on the clothesline. She could see where it had been chewing the clothespins. A bee that ate wood? It was solitary, territorial, more like a shrunken comical dog than an insect.
    She was starting to miss dogs, the easygoing, confident dogs of home. In contrast to the thin and craven animals here, they seemed, those golden retrievers with waving tails, to have been the kindly guards of everything untroubled and ordinary.
    The bee had a routine: it would zigzag in front of her face like a bulldog on a chain, flexing its iridescent hind parts in midair. Did it have a sting? But it was cowardly, it dodged out of sight.
    â€œYou are eating those clothespins,” she said aloud. It ate everything. She had seen it squeeze out from under the lid of the garbage can, going at a drunken sideways crawl. Now, just like a dog giving up on barking, it had blundered downward and zeroed in on something at her feet.
    An eviscerated bird. That was the smell. A bird with empty eye sockets. Yes, the beak pointed at their door. She thought without surprise , They left it. For us, for the infidel.
    Here you saw the word in the paper every day, ever since the Shah had fallen in Iran. Infidel. The Shah had been spat out, he could find no harbor, now he was in Mexico trying to get to the US. In the shade of every building young men stood talking, striking their palms. US. You heard it, a hiss among the soft syllables. Amy wore skirts and long sleeves but eyes followed her. It didn’t matter that she freely borrowed the code for virtue, keeping her eyes down and her step narrow.
    Among the white scarves on the campus a black fin, too, rose now and then, the chador. The chador had to do with men as well as God. Inside it moved women like the nuns of her childhood, but more complex in their loyalties and more secret. The eyes, though, were just embarrassed young eyes, the eyes of girls, students, sending skittish glances.
    Inside, blinking from the sun, she saw a cellophane wrapper on the floor of the amah’s little pantry, where she never went except to trip the hot water heater after a thunderstorm. She reached for it and stood up fast. The pale crinkled thing was the skin of a snake. Along the wall lay eight or ten inches of it, silver and empty, and somewhere behind the water heater the rest of it. However long it was. Its head.
    John would know what to do. He had lived here before. He remembered many things: he knew the plague of frogs in the drain would end, he could predict the