Secrets of State

by Matthew Palmer

  She stopped at the bridge to pay the ten-rupee “toll” to Tahir.

  “How were the lessons this evening, madam?” he asked politely.

  “Just fine, thank you. Why don’t you come one night and see for yourself?”

  “No thank you, madam. My place is here, guarding the entrance to the district. It is an honorable profession.”

  “Yes, Tahir. Yes, it is.”

  She dropped the coin in his bowl.

  There was nothing fancy about Lena’s small apartment. She made a good salary and she could have afforded a larger place in a nicer part of the city, but most of her pay went to buy books and equipment for the school. She dropped her purse on the end table by the door and slipped her shoes off. It had been a long day, and she wanted nothing more than a quick meal, a shower, and bed. But she had promised her father that she would call him this evening and she did not want to disappoint him.

  Lena was worried about her father. It seemed to her that he was spending too much time alone, too much time thinking about the past. Lena was afraid that her move back to Mumbai, to her mother’s old neighborhood, might have been too much for her father to handle. But she knew he was strong. He had proven that over the years, caring for her mother when she got sick, dealing with Lena’s rebellious teenage persona as a single parent, and trying to do some good in South Asia even as he was forced to advocate for policies he frequently did not believe in. It had not been an easy road for him. But he had done well, and he was a good man.

  She hoped he could find some way to be happy. A girlfriend might help. There had been one or two over the years, but they had not lasted long.

  She was one to talk. Her father was the top entry on her Skype favorites bar. Someday, maybe, he would be bumped out of the top spot by a boyfriend who might become a husband. But that opening remained vacant, and Lena was in no rush to fill the position.

  Lena sat down at the desk in the living room and called up the Skype application on her computer. She clicked the button next to his picture.

  Her father picked up after half a dozen rings. The picture was a little jumpy, and Lena guessed that he was using his iPad rather than the desktop. The resolution was still good enough for her to see that Sam did not look well.

  “Hi, Dad.”

  “Hi, baby.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You don’t look so hot.”

  “That’s too bad. You look great. What have you been up to?”

  It did not take a rocket scientist to recognize the brush-off. Okay. No frontal assaults. She would have to find a back door in the conversation.

  “I’m a little tired of wrestling with the accursed BMC. I’d swear there’s no bureaucracy quite like the Indian bureaucracy.”

  “They’ve had thousands of years of practice,” her father agreed. “Any luck moving the ball?”

  “None,” Lena admitted. “It feels like I’m just spinning my wheels. And I’m afraid that Uncle Ramananda is planning to take things in . . . a different direction.”

  “Violence?”

  “More like destruction of property. But still the kind of thing likely to attract the attention of the BMC in an altogether different way than I had in mind.”

  “Don’t let Ramananda drag you into anything. I know he’s your godfather and my friend, and I know I’ve told you this already, but he is totally unworthy of trust.”

  “I know, Dad. Don’t worry. But I’m torn. Uncle Ramananda is doing something that I think is basically right. He’s going to go all Edward Albee on the Gummadi brothers, and I’m going to sit on the sidelines too scared of the consequences to pull my weight.”

  “You can contribute in different ways. The school for one. Ramananda has lots of guys who can put sugar in a gas tank, but not one who can design a microchip or go toe-to-toe with a BMC lawyer and come out on top.”

  “Actually, I don’t know the first thing about chip design and the sugar-in-the-gas-tank thing doesn’t work. I thought so too, but Ramananda says . . .”

  “Okay. Okay. But the point’s the same. I know this is important to you. But it’s his fight.”

  “It’s mine too.”

  “Is it?”

  “I’m an Indian citizen and I’m from Dharavi . . . sort of,” she acknowledged.

  “Sort of.” He was gentle, but Lena could hear the emphasis in his response. “Remember that the defining feature of life in a place like Dharavi is the inability to leave. You’re there by choice, but you and Ramananda are among only a handful who are. Your mother got out the first chance she had and she never looked back.”

  “But she never forgot.”

  “No,” Sam agreed. “She didn’t. She couldn’t.”

  “And she fought for what she believed in. She fought against caste prejudice, for one.”

  “In her art, yes. In her words. By her actions. Not in the streets battling the police.”

  “Don’t worry. I’m not going to start channeling Patty Hearst.”

  “That’s a relief. Did you know that the Symbionese Liberation Army’s seven-headed cobra was originally a Sri Lankan symbol? It was a guardian naga that would watch over the irrigation network and the rice fields.”

  “Actually, that’s kind of cool.” One of the things that Lena loved about talking to her father was the way his mind worked. He jumped quickly and easily from subject to subject, making linkages that were not always obvious but invariably interesting. Like many FSOs, he was also dynamite at Trivial Pursuit.

  “Still,” she continued, “I don’t want to man the barricade. But I do want to do what’s right.”

  “So do we all, sugar.”

  Lena could see that her father was distracted. Something heavy was weighing on him. She knew that look. After her mother had died, her father had tried to shield her from so much, tried to protect her from the world. She had rebelled against it and perhaps she still was. Maybe that was part of the reason she had come back to Mumbai.

  “Dad, what’s bothering you?” she asked. “Don’t deny it. I can read you. Something’s wrong. Tell me.”

  “It’s nothing. Just some trouble at work.”

  “I thought your new job was supposed to be low-stress.”

  “I thought so too, but it’s more . . . complicated than I thought it would be.”

  “Are you eating okay?” Lena knew that her father had a tendency to rely on Indian and Chinese takeout as his primary source of nutrition.

  “More than okay. I could stand to lose a few pounds. I need to get back on the bike.”

  “I miss riding when I’m out here.” Lena shared her father’s love of the D.C. area’s extensive network of bike trails. The C&O Canal offered mile after mile of shaded trails and the W&OD Trail ran some forty miles out toward the beautiful Shenandoah Mountains. Riding a bike through the chaotic Mumbai traffic and sucking on diesel fumes while dodging overloaded trucks on potholed streets wasn’t quite the same.

  “Come home, then. Even just for a visit. We’ll go riding out by Chincoteague.”

  “Maybe this summer,” Lena offered.

  “Listen.” Her father’s face was suddenly quite serious. “Things are really starting to heat up in Kashmir. Another war with Pakistan is absolutely not out of the question. And this time, they’d both have nuclear weapons. There’s no way of knowing just how far they’d go. Maybe it’s time to think about coming home.”

  This was not the first time they had covered this ground, and Lena knew that it would not be the last.

  “It’s not going to happen, Dad. Rangarajan is totally reasonable, and he’ll find a way to compromise with Talwar.”

  “Hey, which one of us is the political analyst? It takes two to compromise, and Talwar’s increasingly boxed in at home.”

  “I know. I know. We’ve t
alked about this. But I have a good job out here and I feel perfectly safe.”

  “Okay for now. But I want you to promise me that you’ll get out immediately if I tell you that things are moving closer to a fight.”

  “We’ll see,” Lena equivocated.

  • • •

  It was a good thing, Sam thought after he broke the connection with Lena, that he had stopped playing in high-stakes card games. His poker face was clearly not what it once was. Or maybe it was only Lena. Maybe she understood him in ways that no one else could. No one except her mother, at any rate.

  Sam took a look around the townhouse. His housekeeper, Carmen, had been by that day, and the place was in reasonable shape. He had a date with Vanalika in just a few hours, and if the planets aligned, there was a chance she would be able to come home with him. Of course, that depended in part on how well things went with the difficult conversation that Sam knew they had to have. He took a quick shower and changed into a pair of dark slacks and a blazer. Vanalika, he knew, would be dressy. She always was.

  It was a forty-five-minute drive to Rockville, Maryland. Rockville was actually considered a close-in suburb of D.C. It was not far from Capitol Hill as the proverbial crow flies, but there was no easy way to get there. Rather than cut north through the city, it actually made sense to drive south and get on 395. This soon put Sam on the George Washington Memorial Parkway, one of his favorite drives in D.C. There was a Coltrane disc in the CD player and he let Giant Steps wash over and through him as he sped down the rain-slicked parkway.

  Rockville was a soulless suburb that seemed to be made up entirely of car dealerships and tae kwon do studios with grubby windows, but it had at least one redeeming quality: spectacular ethnic food. A few minutes before eight, Sam pulled up in front of Goa, an Indian restaurant that was nothing special to look at from the outside. Inside, however, Goa was intimate and charming, decorated by someone with good taste and the budget to make good use of it. The decor was midcentury modern rather than Indian kitsch, and the artwork on the walls was more than a cut above what one would have expected from a strip-mall restaurant.

  The reservation—somewhat unimaginatively, Sam thought—was under the name of Johnson. Vanalika claimed to like the cloak-and-dagger aspects of their illicit relationship, but she was not especially good at it.

  The maître d’, a young Indian woman in an elegant emerald green sari, seated Sam at a table in the corner under a Keith Haring lithograph.

  He ordered a Kingfisher.

  Vanalika walked in and bypassed the maître d’ and came straight over to Sam. They did not kiss their hellos. Avoiding PDA was part of what Vanalika in mock seriousness called their OPSEC protocol.

  “Hello, handsome,” she said, taking the seat across from him.

  “Good evening, beautiful.”

  Under the table, Vanalika slipped one foot out of her pump and rubbed it against Sam’s calf. Secret PDA was part of another equally important protocol.

  “You look . . .” Sam paused, looking for the right words. “Like a goddess.”

  “Is it my elephant head?” She giggled.

  “If only. I have a thing for girls with substantial noses. But I was thinking more of the one with eight arms.”

  “Careful. That’s Durga the Inaccessible. She hurls thunderbolts and rides a lion. You sure you want to go there?”

  “I like my chances.”

  “Play your cards right and you’ll believe I have eight arms before the night is done.”

  The waiter came by to take their orders. Goa specialized in South Indian food, which was generally spicier than its northern cousin, and Vanalika chose a vegetarian biryani made with saffron and nutmeg, and a yogurt chutney. Unconstrained by Vanalika’s vegetarianism, Sam ordered lamb with coconut curry, roti, and a cucumber and mint pachadi to help cut the heat of the curry.

  While they waited for the food, they chatted about largely inconsequential things: a conference of South Asia academics that Vanalika was helping to organize in Chicago in a month’s time, a new biography of Nehru that Sam was reading, and the upcoming India-Australia cricket test match.

  The waiter arrived with a large tray balancing half a dozen dishes. Steam from the dishes wafted across the table redolent of curry and tamarind. The food at Goa was worth the drive up from Capitol Hill. Sam had eaten here before, but it was Vanalika’s first time.

  “I’m impressed,” she said, after sampling the food. “This is the real deal.”

  Sam had to nod his agreement, his mouth full of lamb.

  After the food had been cleared away, they ordered coffee and cognac. It was the perfect counterpoint to the spicy Indian meal.

  “Vee, there’s something I want to talk to you about,” Sam said.

  “I’m still not moving in with you, Sam,” Vanalika replied lightheartedly.

  “Not that. Or at least not only that. No. It’s something else.”

  “Okay. Shoot.”

  Sam hesitated. This was uncertain ground for him. No matter how general he was, he was about to discuss highly classified information. It was a breach of not only his professional obligations but also the law. He could, in theory, go to jail for what he was about to say. Choosing his words carefully seemed the least he could do.

  “You’re familiar with the intel-sharing setup that we have with you and Islamabad?”

  “Sure. You share stuff on Pakistan with us and stuff on us with Pakistan, something of a confidence-building arrangement.”

  “Yes. And it’s been a successful program up to now.”

  “Up to now?”

  “Yes. I have reason to believe that there is information being passed through that channel that is . . . not accurate.”

  “How inaccurate?”

  “Try 100 percent. Like fiction, only considerably more dangerous.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because you’re a part of the story, Vee. When was the last time you talked to Guhathakurta?”

  “Panchavaktra? It’s been a couple of weeks. Maybe even a month or so.”

  “Well, I saw an intel piece last week in which you supposedly called Guhathakurta in Delhi to complain about the prime minister coddling the Pakistanis. It was pretty aggressive stuff, but Guhathakurta is known as a hardliner, and people who don’t know you would find it pretty credible.”

  “Panchavaktra’s a knuckle-dragging Neanderthal. He and I disagree on many things, politics not least among them.”

  “People see what they want to see or what they expect to see. Guhathakurta sets the frame for this piece. People expect him to be like this. They could have picked any of a dozen people senior enough to be the foil in the conversation, but they picked you. On top of that, you supposedly made the call on the evening of March 29.”

  “That Saturday? The day we went to the mountains?”

  “Yeah.”

  “With no phone lines and no cell reception?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Kind of poor planning on their part.”

  “Or good planning on ours.”

  “Except that we can’t tell anybody where we were that night. It would cost us both our jobs.”

  “There is that.”

  “And this work of fiction has been shared with Pakistan’s intelligence services?”

  Sam thought Vanalika looked worried. She had reason to be.

  “I think so.”

  “That’s not good.”

  It was an enormous understatement.

  “No. It’s not.”

  They were silent for a moment as Vanalika seemed to mull over what Sam had told her.

  “It’s not the only one, is it?” she asked. “There would be no real point to it if it was the only one.”

  Vanalika, Sam thought to himself again, was extremely smart.

  “No
,” he acknowledged. “It’s not.”

  “How bad are the other messages?”

  “Pretty bad.”

  “And they go in both directions? Some for Islamabad and some for us.”

  “Yes.”

  “What are you going to do about it? Besides telling me, I mean.”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “Who’s behind it?”

  “I don’t know that either.”

  “Why? What’s the purpose? Who benefits?”

  Sam shrugged.

  “Sam . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “Whoever is in a position to do something like that is in a position to do an awful lot of other things too.”

  “The thought had crossed my mind.”

  “Be careful,” she urged.

  “I will.”

  “Don’t do anything stupid.”

  “We’ll see.”

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  APRIL 8

  Andy is dead.”

  Sam felt like he had been punched in the gut. He did not need to ask which Andy Sara meant.

  “How?”

  He could see that Sara had been crying. Her eyes were red, and there was a dark smudge on one cheek where she had tried to wipe off a line of mascara that had blackened her tears.

  “He was murdered. Maureen in INR told me that the police are calling it a mugging gone bad. You know that he moved into that apartment up by the Mount Vernon metro stop a few months ago. It’s kind of a rough neighborhood that’s starting to turn around. ‘Pioneering,’ he called it.”

  Sara started to cry again, and what was left of her eye makeup dripped onto her cheeks. Sam pulled a pack of Kleenex out of his desk drawer and offered it to her. As Sara wiped her eyes, Sam walked around the desk. With a stifled sob, she turned toward him and buried her face against his chest, clinging tightly to his arms with both hands.

  They stood that way for a minute or more before Sam broke the clinch and steered Sara to one of the two chairs in his office. He sat across from her. His shirt felt hot and wet where she had cried against his chest.