Page 319 - The Kite Runner

308 Khaled Hosseini

“You can hardly walk.”
“I can walk to the end of the hall and back,” I said. “I’ll be
fine.” The plan was this: Leave the hospital. Get the money from
the safe-deposit box and pay my medical bills. Drive to the
orphanage and drop Sohrab off with John and Betty Caldwell.
Then get a ride to Islamabad and change travel plans. Give myself
a few more days to get better. Fly home.
That was the plan, anyway. Until Farid and Sohrab arrived that
morning. “Your friends, this John and Betty Caldwell, they aren’t
in Peshawar,” Farid said.
It had taken me ten minutes just to slip into my pirhan-
tumban. My chest, where they’d cut me to insert the chest tube,
hurt when I raised my arm, and my stomach throbbed every time
I leaned over. I was drawing ragged breaths just from the effort of
packing a few of my belongings into a brown paper bag. But I’d
managed to get ready and was sitting on the edge of the bed when
Farid came in with the news. Sohrab sat on the bed next to me.
“Where did they go?” I asked.
Farid shook his head. “You don’t understand—”
“Because Rahim Khan said—”
“I went to the U.S. consulate,” Farid said, picking up my bag.
“There never was a John and Betty Caldwell in Peshawar. Accord-
ing to the people at the consulate, they never existed. Not here in
Peshawar, anyhow.”
Next to me, Sohrab was flipping through the pages of the old
National Geographic.

We got the money from the bank. The manager, a paunchy
man with sweat patches under his arms, kept flashing smiles and
telling me that no one in the bank had touched the money.