Secrets of State

by Matthew Palmer

  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.

  The van followed her.

  Lena looked over her shoulder. It’s a coincidence. He was making a delivery and now he’s moving on to his next stop.

  She turned onto a side street that led toward Jasmine Mill Road.

  The van turned with her.

  Lena quickened her pace. The driver of the van matched it. She could see his face now. Dark skin. A beard.

  Her heart began to beat faster and there was a tightness in her chest that Lena recognized as the first stirrings of fear. A delivery van was not the kind of vehicle you would choose to follow someone in the streets of a crowded city like Mumbai. It was the kind of vehicle you might choose for a kidnapping.

  She bumped into an older woman who was selling betel nut wrapped in paper tubes.

  “Murkha,” the woman cursed her, using the local Marathi word for idiot. Her teeth and gums were stained black from years of chewing betel and her breath was foul.

  “I’m sorry,” Lena muttered, without breaking stride.

  The van was closer now. She could feel the driver’s eyes on her. Looking over her shoulder, she saw that the van was no more than twenty feet behind her. The intense look on the man’s face kicked her heart rate into an even higher gear. She started to run down the crowded sidewalk. The van accelerated, pulling closer. Although there were hundreds of people on the street, none paid any attention to either Lena or the van. It was merely a single vignette in the vast, sweeping tapestry of the Mumbai cityscape.

  Up ahead, just before the intersection with Jasmine Mill Road, Lena saw one of the most beautiful things that she had ever seen. A traffic jam. An auto rickshaw had hit a cow, knocking both the animal and the three-wheeled scooter onto their sides. A crowd of onlookers had gathered around the accident site shouting out their version of events. The drivers in the cars and trucks backed up behind them were already honking their horns as they searched unsuccessfully for a way to maneuver past the tangled knot of sacred cows and profane vehicles that blocked the road.

  Moving now at a dead run, Lena shot past the intersection onto Mahim Station Road. Behind her, she could see the gray van turn off into a narrow alleyway lined with carpet shops and stalls trading in low-end merchandise. It was exactly the kind of place where a beat-up panel van would be making a delivery.

  Lena slowed to a walk. Had the van really been following her, she wondered, or was the paranoia of Tahir and her father making her jump at shadows?

  • • •

  Tahir greeted her that evening with a joy typically reserved for the return of a long-lost relative.

  “Madam, I thought you were dead,” he said, and Lena could see that there were tears in his eyes. “When the van started after you, I was certain.”

  “It was nothing,” Lena said, more than half convinced that this was true. “I don’t think he was looking for me at all.”

  She put ten rupees in the bowl.

  After school, Lena went straight back to her apartment.

  She had left the blinds open and there was enough light coming into the apartment from the outside that she did not bother to flip on the lights. Dropping her bag on the chair by the door, she walked straight to the kitchen and retrieved a bottle of cold water from the fridge. The heat and grit of Mumbai always left her feeling dehydrated and run-down by the end of the day. She stood in the kitchen drinking straight from the bottle and looking out the window onto the corrugated tin roofs of the slum on the far side of 60 Feet Road.

  The lights came on.

  Lena froze.

  “Good evening, Ms. Trainor.”

  She turned around slowly.

  There was a man standing by the door to the hall with one hand on the light switch and the other resting easily on the handle of a pistol tucked into his waistband.

  He was the driver of the van that had followed her that morning.

  The intruder had chestnut-colored skin and a neatly trimmed beard. His hawkish nose was framed by piercing eyes that were so brown they were almost black. There was an intensity to his gaze that Lena remembered from her single glimpse of him behind the wheel.

  She thought about screaming. But this was the outer edge of Dharavi. Screams in Dharavi were like car alarms in an American suburb. If you ignored them long enough, they would stop. The police were almost completely uninterested in what happened in the slum. The people there were just Dalits after all.

  Lena set the bottle of water down on the countertop behind a stack of cookbooks next to a paring knife with a sharp six-inch blade. Her right hand crept slowly toward the handle even as she maintained eye contact with the intruder.

  “Who are you and what are you doing in my apartment?” she asked calmly.

  “I need to talk to you, Ms. Trainor.” His English was perfect. If he had an accent, it was not subcontinent. If anything, it sounded New York or New Jersey to Lena. Definitely tristate.

  “Just talk?”

  “No.”

  “What do you want?”

  As they talked, her fingers closed around the handle of the knife. The cookbooks, she hoped, would conceal what she was doing. She slipped the blade up inside the sleeve of her shirt with her wrist angled to keep it in place and the handle balanced lightly in the crook of her palm.

  “Please,” the man said, gesturing to the table. “Let’s sit and I will explain.”

  Lena crossed over to the dining table, casting a furtive glance at the front door as she considered whether to make a run for it. The intruder seemed to sense what she was thinking.

  “Don’t,” he said. “Sit. Please.”

  Although the man looked relaxed, she could see that he was anything but. He was a coiled spring. If she ran, he would catch her.

  Lena sat down, uncertain.

  “What do the Gummadi brothers want from me? They’re winning. They’re going to get everything they’re after.”

  “I do not work for the developers,” the man said.

  Now Lena was afraid.

  “What do you want, then?” she repeated, trying to keep the sharp edge of anxiety out of her voice. “Who are you?”

  “Would you like a glass of water? It’s quite warm in here.”

  “Who are you?” she insisted.

  “You can call me Khan.”

  “Okay, Khan. I’m listening.”

  Under the table, Lena let the knife slip free of her sleeve. Her palms were damp with sweat and the handle was slick to the touch. She grasped it tightly as though the knife were as much a talisman as a weapon.

  “I mean you no harm,” Khan said.

  “Well, I’m glad we’ve cleared that up.”

  To her surprise, Khan smiled and it softened his features. He seemed less fanatical, less intense. He didn’t look like a serial killer, or what Hollywood had taught her to believe they should look like. Even discarding the superficial, Lena was certain that this was something different. Whatever was happening to her was extremely dangerous, but she did not believe it was a random act of violence. The intruder was in her apartment for a reason.

  “I’m going to have to ask you to come with me,” he said.

  “Why? Where?”

  “You will find out when we get there.”

  “Am I being kidnapped?”

  “Yes. You are.”

  “But not by the Gummadis?”

  “No.”

  “Who do
you work for?”

  “That I cannot tell you.”

  Lena felt strangely calm.

  “What if I refuse to cooperate? Will you hurt me?”

  “No.”

  “So why should I come with you?”

  “Because of the boy sleeping under the bridge.”

  Tahir. Oh my God, had they taken him too?

  Lena forced herself to show the man who called himself Khan neither fear nor anger. Either would be a sign of weakness.

  “What have you done to him? If you have hurt one hair on that boy’s head, I swear to God . . .”

  “He is fine. And he will remain fine . . . if you cooperate.”

  “And if not, you will hurt him. Is that what you are telling me?”

  “No. I will not. He is a boy with no legs. I would not hurt him. But I am not alone. There are other men I work with who are not above this. So, while I assure you that I will not hurt the boy, that does not mean he is not in danger. It would be better for you and for him if you come with me.”

  “What do you want from me?”

  “I do not know,” Khan said, and Lena sensed that he was being truthful. “I only know what I have been instructed to do.”

  “I think I’ll have that glass of water,” Lena said, rising from her seat and pressing the blade of the paring knife against her thigh to keep it hidden. As she stepped past Khan, she swung the knife up toward his throat, unsure even as she did so whether she intended to kill the intruder.

  It didn’t matter.

  With an alarming nonchalance, Khan caught her wrist and twisted it in such a way that the knife popped out of her hand and clattered onto the floor. Whatever he had done, it did not hurt, but her fingers tingled and she could not close them into a fist.

  “Don’t worry,” Khan explained. “The numbness will pass in a few minutes. Don’t do anything like that again.”

  He let go of her wrist and Lena flexed her hand open and closed as much as she could in an effort to restore feeling.

  “I will ask you once more, please, to come with me.”

  She considered her options. None were especially appealing.