Page 129 - The Kite Runner

118 Khaled Hosseini

curtains. Then he took a deep breath and gave us the bad news:
His brother Toor couldn’t take us to Peshawar. It seemed his
truck’s engine had blown the week before and Toor was still wait-
ing for parts.
“Last week?” someone exclaimed. “If you knew this, why did
you bring us here?”
I caught a flurry of movement out of the corner of my eye.
Then a blur of something zipping across the room, and the next
thing I saw was Karim slammed against the wall, his sandaled feet
dangling two feet above the floor. Wrapped around his neck were
Baba’s hands.
“I’ll tell you why,” Baba snapped. “Because he got paid for his
leg of the trip. That’s all he cared about.” Karim was making gut-
tural choking sounds. Spittle dripped from the corner of his
mouth.
“Put him down, Agha, you’re killing him,” one of the passen-
gers said.
“It’s what I intend to do,” Baba said. What none of the others
in the room knew was that Baba wasn’t joking. Karim was turn-
ing red and kicking his legs. Baba kept choking him until the
young mother, the one the Russian officer had fancied, begged
him to stop.
Karim collapsed on the floor and rolled around fighting for air
when Baba finally let go. The room fell silent. Less than two hours
ago, Baba had volunteered to take a bullet for the honor of a woman
he didn’t even know. Now he’d almost choked a man to death, would
have done it cheerfully if not for the pleas of that same woman.
Something thumped next door. No, not next door, below.
“What’s that?” someone asked.
“The others,” Karim panted between labored breaths. “In the
basement.”