Secrets of State (25 page)

Bizarrely, Howlin' Wolf was still playing on the stereo.

“Something just ain't right. That's evil. Evil is goin' on wrong.”

Sam unbuckled the seat belt. His body felt sore and bruised. The door would not open. He kicked it and it popped loose.

He looked up toward the road. It was dark, but he could hear the sounds of two men clambering down the slope.

“You go for the car,” he heard one of them say. “I'll head to the river.”

The river.

Sam shook his head in a vain attempt to clear it. There was a ringing in his ears and he felt oddly distant from what was happening. He was in shock. But if he did not move, that wouldn't matter because he would soon enough be dead.

He turned and ran as quickly as he could downhill. He misjudged a leap over a log and went sprawling into a bank of soft mud at the edge of the mighty Potomac River. It might have saved his life. He looked up and saw the lantern-jawed soldier dressed up as a park police officer. A wolf in sheepdog's clothing. His gun was drawn and he was scanning the riverbank. As quietly as he could, Sam slithered into the cold, dark waters of the Potomac. The icy current grabbed him and threatened to pull him deep under the surface, but a few quick, strong strokes underwater brought Sam into deeper water where the flow was not quite as fast. He stayed under for as long as he could, swimming out toward the middle of the river and letting the current carry him away from the crash site.

When he could no longer hold his breath, Sam stuck his face out of the water long enough to quickly exchange the carbon dioxide in his lungs for a gulp of life-giving oxygen. His limbs were already heavy with cold. In April, the river was still running high with snowmelt.

He did not dare return to the Virginia side, however, and he swam the breaststroke on the surface toward the Maryland shore, trying not to think about the stories of the six-eyed fish and eight-legged frogs that had come out of the polluted Potomac. Eventually, he made landfall by the point near Fletcher's Boat House. He was shivering and he had to beat his arms and legs to get some feeling back into them.

Oddly, the dominant emotion he felt was vindication. Two of Vanalika's zebras had just tried to kill him.

“At least I'm not crazy,” he said out loud to no one in particular.

MUMBAI, INDIA

APRIL 19

T
he taste of defeat wasn't so much bitter as it was sour. Even more interesting, Lena thought, was that it had texture as well as flavor. It was like trying to eat a mouthful of ash. You could chew it, but you could never swallow it.

The Gummadi brothers were coming. Ramananda's little monkey-wrenching trick had bought Dharavi a little time, maybe two weeks but no more. Her last meeting with the brothers had ended badly. In truth, she did not know what she had expected. The land the slum was built on was worth too much and the people who lived there were worth too little for the outcome to be in doubt.

She had stayed late at the school, ostensibly to organize the tools and equipment but really to organize her thoughts. She was just about out of ideas. One of the lawyers she had hired had told her that day that he would keep taking her money if she insisted on it, but there was nothing more that he could do. The legal battles were over. The PR campaign had never really taken off. And there was no political white knight ready to ride in on his trusty charger to save the day. Lena was on her own, and she had failed.

It was so late when she reached the little bridge across the fetid canal that Tahir had already crawled onto his sleeping mat under the stairs.

“Madam,” he called out, as Lena crossed the bridge. “Madam, I must speak to you.”

“Good evening, Tahir. I hope you weren't waiting up for me.”

“No, madam . . . well, not entirely.” The boy stammered as he pulled himself up onto the bridge by his hands. Lena wanted desperately to help him, but she knew that she could not. It would have been an insult. Instead, she reached into her pocket for a ten-rupee coin.

“No, madam. No toll tonight. There is something I must tell you.”

“What is it?”

“Do you know that you are being followed by a man?”

“Is it Brad Pitt? Or maybe Shahid Kapoor?”

“No, madam. A much less handsome man with a beard.”

“Do you see him now?”

“No,” Tahir admitted. “He comes and goes. I think he knows that I see him. But he watches for you, and when you leave, he follows you.”

“How long has this been happening?”

“Just a couple of days, madam. I do not know what he wants with you, but I am afraid.”

“Don't worry, Tahir. I'm not. It will be fine.”

“But . . .”

“It's okay. Really.”

“Of course, madam.”

And the young legless Indian boy who so tugged at her heartstrings dragged himself back under the bridge.

As she picked her way carefully across the trash-strewn bridge, Lena found herself scanning 60 Feet Road looking for the man Tahir had described. He was just a boy, with a boy's imagination, but Lena had no trouble believing that the Gummadi brothers had sent someone to keep an eye on her. Not that they really stood to gain much from it. For all intents and purposes, they had already won. At this point, her campaign against the Five Star development amounted to little more than tilting at windmills.

Maybe they thought that she was responsible for the vandalism of their heavy machinery. Even a few weeks' delay in the schedule would have been costly, and an old-fashioned gumshoe tracking her movements would be a cheap countermeasure. It would be in character for the Gummadis to assume that Lena would look for some last-ditch way to hurt them, even if the effort was fruitless. It is what they would have done.

Lena saw nothing out of the ordinary as she crossed the street to her building. There was no mysterious bearded figure lying in wait in the entryway. Everything seemed perfectly normal.

By the time she reached her small apartment, Lena felt ready to surrender to her exhaustion. It had been a long and emotionally trying day.

Once through the door, she kicked off her shoes and wiggled her toes, enjoying the feeling of release and freedom that came with bare feet. Nandi and the other boys went barefoot all the time and Lena might have envied them if she had not known that it was only because their families could not afford shoes.

There was a bottle of cold Bisleri mineral water in the refrigerator and a clean glass in the dish rack. She sat down on the couch and thought idly about putting the next episode of
Mad Men
on the DVD. She was about halfway through the third season and seriously addicted to the travails of Don and Betty.

There was a knock at the door. Soft. Almost tentative.

Nandi was there, carrying a bright blue plastic bag.

“Oh my. Is it Wednesday already?”

Every Wednesday, Nandi delivered a small bag of groceries to Lena's apartment. She really did not need him to, but she wanted him to have the experience of doing honest work and making honest money. The temptations of the criminal life for the boys of Dharavi were hard to resist, particularly for a kid with Nandi's natural talents.

“It is, Miss Lena. I have your dal and some rice and some chilies and a bit of chicken.”

“Are you sure it's chicken?”

“Well, it had feathers on it.”

“That's a relief.”

Nandi smiled and it went a long way toward brightening her mood.

“Go ahead and put it in the kitchen, please,” she said. “Do you want a glass of water?”

“No thank you. I have to meet my friends.”

“What are you boys going to do?”

Nandi smiled again, but this time it darkened her mood.

“No stealing. You promised.”

“And you would trust the word of a thief?”

“I would trust the word of a friend.”

The boy had the good grace to look sheepish.

“No stealing, Miss Lena. I promise. We are playing
kabaddi
.” Lena remembered playing the same game on the streets of Dharavi when she was a girl waiting for her father to finish his meeting with Ramananda or some other political figure in the slum. It was a cross between tag and capture the flag with simple rules. Lena could see her nine-year-old self darting into enemy territory, calling
“Kabaddi kabaddi kabaddi”
the whole time to show that she was not breathing when she was across the line. If you took a breath, you were captured.

Lena was not certain that she believed Nandi's alibi. But she chose to. She was too tired to fight with him.

After the boy left, Lena cooked dinner. While the rice soaked, she heated oil and a few tablespoons of ghee in a deep dish and blended in garam masala, a mix of spices that she kept in a plastic container. She chopped a small onion and a few of the chilies that Nandi had brought and simmered them in the mix. There were thousands of recipes for chicken
biryani
, but this was the one that her mother had taught her. It called for tomato and coriander, mint leaves and coconut water. Like most Indian dishes, it involved a multitude of ingredients and numerous steps. Lena had made it so many times, however, that she could have done it blindfolded. It was a shame, really, to go through all of this effort to make dinner for one. She needed some more friends, Lena realized, women her own age. Maybe even a boyfriend. Her best friends were an eleven-year-old thief and a ten-year-old beggar. The only family she had within eight thousand miles was a geriatric mob boss. This was not much of a social life.

She ate in front of the television and caught herself tearing up at the graceless way the beautiful but self-centered Betty Draper responds to the death of her father. Lena was worried about her own father. Their last conversation had been so strained. His ramblings about terrorist conspiracies had sounded so off-the-wall that Lena wondered whether he might be suffering some kind of breakdown. Maybe she should go back to Washington, at least for a few days. She could see her father, judge for herself whether he was okay. Maybe they could go hiking together in the Shenandoah, like they had when she was young. It would be nice to get out of Mumbai for a while, she admitted to herself. She loved this city, but it was hard living. It could wear you down.

At least some of this, she understood, was self-inflicted. She had a good job and a perfectly respectable salary, and she insisted on living on the margins of South Asia's most notorious slum. Maybe she had done enough. Or maybe it was all just a self-aggrandizing fantasy. When the Gummadi brothers' bulldozers knocked down her school, maybe she should take that as a sign to move on. She could rent a nice apartment in a part of town where there were young educated people she could be friends with. She could accept the offer from Parnaa in accounting who wanted to fix Lena up with her neurosurgeon brother. Maybe it was time to grow up.

On
Mad Men
, Sally fell asleep clutching her deceased grandfather's copy of
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
.

We all deal with grief in our own way,
Lena thought. She was self-aware enough to know that the penance she was paying in Dharavi was on some level part of the grieving process for her mother's death. Her father was dealing with it in his way. Slowly. Haltingly. She wished that there was something more she could do to help him.

Lena turned off the TV, consigning the troubled employees of Sterling Cooper to suspended animation where they would be forced to await her pleasure.

She did not dare leave the dishes unwashed. The battle with roaches was hard enough as it was.

As soon as the dishes were done, however, she dressed for bed in an oversize Stanford T-shirt and turned in. It had been a hell of a day.

•   •   •

Everything seemed
a little brighter in the morning light. Lena had no better idea about what the future would hold, but she was more confident of her ability to handle it. After a good night's sleep, Tahir's dark warnings about shadowy figures trailing her across the city seemed even more fantastical, the product of a young boy's active imagination.

She fixed a mug of masala chai, boiling water and milk with a mix of cardamom, cinnamon, cloves, and other aromatic spices. She spooned in some black tea and let it steep for a few minutes before pouring it through a strainer into a chipped celadon mug. Lena did not eat much for breakfast. To go with the tea that she sweetened with brown sugar, she boiled an egg and sliced it over a piece of flatbread. That would see her through to lunch.

While she sipped her tea, Lena skimmed the morning papers on her iPad, first the
Mumbai Mirror
and then the
New York Times
. She wished she had time to do the crossword puzzle. Maybe over her lunch break.

Lena dressed for work in an aggressively cheery outfit, as though she were pushing back against the black cloud that had threatened to envelop her the day before.

She slipped sandals into her shoulder bag and put on a pair of sneakers. She needed to stop by the school before work. Two of the older kids had entrance exams for a state-run science academy next week and she had promised them an extra tutoring session in trigonometry.

By eight-thirty, Lena had finished up at the school and was on her way to the office. She enjoyed the work at SysNet. It was challenging and her colleagues were top-notch professionals. Even so, it did not come close to providing the emotional satisfaction she got from her work at the school. Lena did not suffer from false modesty when it came to her engineering talents. She was good. But at this point in her life, engineering paid the bills so that she could teach the lower-caste kids of Dharavi. That was why she had come back to Mumbai.

At the bridge, she leaned over to drop the ten-rupee “toll” into Tahir's bowl. The boy handed it back to her.

“Madam. You must not cross this morning.”

“And why not, Tahir?”

“The man is back.”

“Really? Where is he?” Even this early in the day, the streets were crowded. In truth, they were never empty. Mumbai was a city of twenty million, more people than lived in the entire state of Florida, and the sidewalks were home to tens of thousands who had no place else to go.

“I cannot see him now,” the boy admitted. “But I am certain he is there. Watching. You should not cross here.”

Lena was already running late and she did not have the time to humor the boy.

“Don't worry, Tahir. I'm not walking into a dark alley. I will be careful. It's the middle of the day and there are thousands of people around us. Nothing is going to happen to me.” She forced herself to smile, acknowledging that his advice was well intentioned. Even so, he did not look happy.

“If I had legs, I would walk with you to work,” he said miserably. “Then I could keep you safe.”

Lena thought her heart might break. She squatted as low as she could in a skirt and took his hand.

“You already do that, my friend. You don't need legs to look out for me.”

Lena crossed the bridge.

She waited for the light and crossed to the far side of 60 Feet Road, skirting around the back of a beat-up panel van that was parked halfway up on the sidewalk.

She turned right on 60 Feet Road.