A Star Called Lucky

by Bapsy Jain

  “What’s want got to do with it, Lucky Boyce? Who wants any of these assignments?” He gestured with his hand toward the door. “Do you want what’s on my desk right now? You can have it.” He turned and stared out the window. It was already drifting into late afternoon. He suddenly looked back at Lucky. “You can’t be serious? You’re not thinking about turning Coleman down? The only thing I can think of worse than working for him would be crossing him.”

  “What would happen if I did?”

  “Why on earth would you?”

  “I’ve got Sean to think about, and my house. Coleman wants me to go to Washington for a few days. Tomorrow. I don’t know. It’s a lot to think about.”

  “Sean? Get a babysitter! Your house? If they move you around—and to my knowledge nobody has suggested that they will—then you can find a house wherever he sends you.”

  Lucky paled.

  Barkley paused and looked her over. “Oh, all right. That house of yours. So it’s nice. I’m sure you’d be happier and better off in an apartment like…ahhhh,” Barkley said, breaking into a grin. “Nobody’s said anything about money yet, have they? Got the old accounts book to think about, don’t we? I’m sure if Coleman wants you that badly there’ll be a raise and a promotion. Might even buy you a house. At least they’ll pay some hefty relocation money. Wouldn’t expect them to toggle you around for nothing, now would we? I’m sure his boys have already cracked the details.”

  “That’s not what I said.” Lucky stood up and walked to the window and looked down at the street. It was clear now, just the usual traffic. But there were a handful of policemen loitering around on the front steps, just in case. Coleman and his detail appeared from the entry. They had no sooner reached the street than a caravan of black SUVs, preceded and followed by NYPD cruisers, roared around the corner. It took only seconds for the entourage to pile into vehicles and race off. But Lucky noticed another black SUV facing the opposite direction, parked on the other side of the street. It wasn’t going anywhere. “Money’s not an issue for me. Hell, I work for you for nothing. But what if I don’t want the job? What if I refuse? What happens then? I’ve got this education project, and I’ve put six months into it. I believe in what I’m doing, and I’d like to see it through.”

  Barkley stood up and placed his hand on Lucky’s shoulder in a fatherly gesture. “Of course you do, my girl,” he said. “We all believe in what we’re doing here. And a splendid job of it you do, too, if I must say so myself. No wonder Coleman swoops down and snatches you out of the nest.” He turned and crossed the office to the door and looked up and down the hall. Then he stood with his hands clasped behind his back, looking at the floor. “You’re a strange duck, Boyce. You’re not like the rest of us, what with your chartered accountancy and multiple degrees…”

  “Just a double major in accounting and psychology,” Lucky said.

  “Okay, pysch, then. But you’ll get bored with this work. And you’ll get tired of bureaucracy—dealing with Albany and all that. This education thing is near fruition. One thing you’ll find is that if you get too attached to your projects they’ll only cause you grief. Know why everyone complains that politicians are cold, stodgy, and insensitive?”

  “Why?”

  “Because they are cold, stodgy, and insensitive. Have to be. Only way to survive in this business. If your program gets funded, the first thing that happens is that a hundred men and women not half your equal all want their say in things. Where it goes, how big it grows, how much goes into it, how long—you may create the thing, but in the end it won’t be yours. It won’t even resemble it much. They’ll name it after somebody famous and dead, you know, another Lincoln Project or Washington Something or other. As if a name makes it any better. Somebody else will take the credit. You’ll only get mentioned if something goes wrong and they need a scapegoat.”

  Lucky shrugged. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “I said I’d take it. I guess I was just getting the usual cold feet, that’s all. It all happened too fast.”

  Barkley smiled. “What was that crap you were spouting earlier? We don’t realize what we can do until we know what we have in us? Or something like that?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Well, you better start realizing, young lady. You’re running with the big boys now. So unless you want to spend the rest of your life teaching yoga to inmates, when Coleman says ‘Jump!’ you’d best ask, ‘How high?’ Though I wouldn’t mention any of that yoga stuff to him either.”

  “Yeah, I gathered that already.”

  “Good luck,” Barkley said. He checked his watch. “I suppose you’ll want to leave straight away and get cracking on this. Go on. We’ll do fine here.” And with that, he disappeared out of the door.

  Lucky got up and surveyed her office. She looked around at the little Indian trinkets dotting the wall: plaster of Paris elephants set with colored glass stones, a tapestry from Rajasthan stitched from fragments of old wedding dresses, a painting of Ganesh, a collection of old sepia-tone photographs of maharajas from the 1800s. Only a few years ago she would have written to her mother excitedly about her prospects, but now, well, she had an uneasy feeling about all of this.

  “It is simple to promise the moon,” Shanti used to say, “but another thing altogether to deliver. Beware of men who make promises that sound too good to be true.” But now, Lucky’s mother was dead, Shanti was dead, and Alec and Susan would not understand her reluctance. She wondered, “What would Shanti say about longevity?”

  Be careful what you ask for? Who wants to live forever? No, more likely she would say, What makes you think that we don’t? What is death but a part of life?

  Lucky started to go but then went back to her desk and opened a browser on her computer. She Googled ice mushroom. A games forum came up. Great, she thought. It read: Obtain Ice Mushrooms in Battle Quest: Big Horn Yeti. Wonderful. The yeti. Lucky sighed but kept staring at the monitor. On a whim, she connected to the NYPD website and started a search. Misdemeanor arrests. Male. Under 40. Blond hair. Arrested before noon yesterday. Manhattan.

  The search returned multiple pages, at twenty photos to a page. Who would have thought there were so many blond troublemakers in Manhattan yesterday? Luckily, he was on page two, staring into the camera with that same, calm, unperturbed look. What a mug shot. He might just as easily have been ordering a latte as being booked into jail. His name: Usko Tahti. What kind of name is that? Lucky wondered. She Googled it, and found that it was Finnish, meaning “faith star.” She smiled, hearing his voice again: “You can help or just walk away.”

  He was thirty-five, and a newly enrolled doctoral candidate at Columbia working on a PhD in Comparative Religions. He was also a writer with a half-dozen articles in journals and another dozen or so poems. She read two of them, “Starlight over Bones” and “Red Dust Kandahar.” In the first, a young soldier was writing home to his sweetheart and child while standing guard over a mass grave. In the second, a sniper watched a boy planting an IED (improved explosive device) in the road at night but couldn’t bring himself to pull the trigger. What the hell? Lucky wondered.

  She dug deeper. Thanks to Finland’s universal male conscription, Usko Tahti had been in the army for years, rising to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel and obtaining two college degrees along the way: mechanical engineering and psychology. He had served with distinction in Bosnia and Afghanistan. But something had happened. The articles weren’t very forthcoming about what. He had disobeyed orders. Mutiny? Insubordination? What orders? Lucky wondered.

  She kept reading. Usko had nearly been court-martialed. Even his acquittal was tainted with political implications; according to the articles, Usko had wanted to go to prison. He had threatened to testify—against himself. Had been ordered by the courts to keep silent. Here was a front page article in Helsingin Sanomat and another in Kuukausiliite. The latter had a picture of Usko in uniform in front of a tribunal, with exactly the same expression as his mug shot. Lucky c
hecked the date; that was in 2004. Well, here he was, six years later, sporting a saffron robe and protesting institutional violence against animals. What happened to you, Usko Tahti? Lucky wondered.

  She shook her head. Why should she care? Why should she get worked up over whether a bunch of PETA activists went to jail? He was nothing to her. But communication had passed between them and she’d looked deep into his piercing grey eyes while he looked into hers. For a man who had—allegedly—stared down the scope of a sniper rifle, he didn’t look like a killer. He didn’t even look that old; he might have been thirty. What could he have known or done that was so dangerous as to deserve a court-martial? Ignorant, foolish, impulsive, naïve, idealistic, misguided, there were any number of things Lucky would have believed about him. But a criminal?

  She thought it through. Was it worth the risk? Her finger hovered over the SHUT DOWN icon, but finally, she clenched her teeth and emailed her attorney, John Black.

  John,

  Would you do me a favor?

  There were some protestors arrested this morning in Manhattan just outside my office. PETA activists, I think. I heard they are going to be tried as terrorists and held without bail. Sounds crazy, I know, but there are some politicians involved and maybe some ruffled egos. Will you see that they get bail—at least one of them—if you can’t get them all out? The whole thing is ridiculous, really. His name is Usko Tahti. He’s a student at Columbia. Please send me the bill. And don’t mention my name. Thanks,

  Lucky.

  She hit send. There, she thought. You’ve done it now.

  Chapter 5

  A platform; a line; the press of swearing, sweaty bodies; a careless child and a drink spilled; a gummy red stain that probably won’t wash out; a fat, angry woman in a multicolored blouse hustling a cute little runny-nosed boy out of sight for a beating. “It’s okay!” Lucky called after her. “It’s just a… an old pant suit. I was going to throw it away anyway.” No reply. “Or give it to Goodwill.” Her voice trailed off as the woman and boy disappeared. Goodwill.

  A train going east, the air-conditioning working (thank God!), a rocking click-clack and murmur of glazed-eyed banal conversations. Some pro sports draft or another—a lottery of lucky new millionaires. Lucky tuned it out. Was there anything less important than knowing who in Los Angeles was going to make fifty thousand dollars a minute playing a stupid game? Weren’t there enough hungry people in the world? The train slowed and Lucky stood, almost the last passenger off. To the west, she saw the pale glow of the sky over the horizon; to the east, a hazy dusk. Suburbia. Connecticut. Further east, a half-moon would be rising over the Atlantic. Dawn in New Delhi, dusk in Manhattan. Lucky smiled.

  Her phone rang. Maria was cooking chili rellenos for dinner; could Lucky stop by the grocer for some milk and oatmeal and fruits and fresh cilantro? She could and would. Oatmeal and cilantro? Lucky wondered. I hope the oatmeal isn’t going in the tortillas.

  In the checkout line, the woman just ahead of Lucky dug through her purse for loose change. She was a few dollars short for her groceries. A teary-eyed little girl clung to the woman. A gum-chewing clerk eyed them indifferently while a long-nosed manager with a brown mustache and a poorly fitted wig hovered in the background. On the counter before the woman was flour and salt and oil, a lump of hamburger, a few tomatoes, a dozen eggs, a box of donuts dusted with powdered sugar. “I’ll pay,” Lucky said, proffering her card. The manager eyed her suspiciously, the woman gratefully. The clerk didn’t seem to see her at all.

  “I’ll put these back,” the woman said, removing the donuts.

  “Those, too,” Lucky said, nodding to the clerk.

  The little girl clutched them to her chest.

  “It’s her birthday,” the mother said—whether by way of apology or explanation, Lucky wasn’t sure.

  “Happy birthday,” Lucky said, bending down. “How many?”

  The girl held up three fingers.

  “You’re four now,” the mother said. She lingered beside the manager while the clerk rang up Lucky’s things. The woman was attractive, in a curvy, motherly kind of way. “I changed my handbag and left my wallet behind,” she said.

  “Happens to us all,” Lucky replied.

  “Thank you,” the woman said again, “if you give me your address I’ll repay you.”

  “Happy birthday,” Lucky said. “Pass it on.” When the woman was gone Lucky thought about the child. There was something only a woman could understand about carrying a baby for nine months. It was inside of you, a part of you. She had Sean, but was it the same? Why did she yearn for this experience that most women complained about and suffered through? How many women had Lucky heard say, “If we didn’t forget the pain, we’d never do it again.”

  Thinking of children made Lucky think of Amay, and she frowned, realizing she’d never replied to Amay’s text asking about dinner. Well, she was too tired to go out now.

  Poor Amay. He was steady, predictable, trustworthy—a real Boy Scout. Lucky and Amay’s parents had been good friends, and they’d grown up together. They’d lost touch for a while, and finally reconnected in New York. But since his divorce from Leila, he’d been following Lucky around like a little lost puppy, turning up at her house, at her office, inviting her to his gallery for every sort of opening and lecture. Now he was pestering her to come to Europe with him. He wanted to open another gallery there—one dedicated entirely to children’s art and supporting some kind of charity for war orphans. “Why don’t you marry me and help me run it?” he’d asked. Right. Just what I don’t want to be. A pet wife. Again. Why couldn’t Amay get it through his head? Was it that hard to understand she would never again put herself in a position where she was not in control of her own life?

  “I’d rather be kidnapped by terrorists,” she’d said. He’d sulked for a week or two, and then the invites began again. On the other hand, Lucky thought, if it weren’t for me coming back to New York, they might have still been married. And Leila was such a sweet girl. Lucky knew how it felt to lose a husband to another woman. It was not how she wanted things to turn out for Leila and Amay, but sometimes, life was like that. Mistakes were made.

  She picked up her groceries. It was less than a mile from the grocer to the road that cut through a little swatch of woods and down a hill that led to her house. Lucky always enjoyed the walk, unless it was pouring cold rain. And sometimes, she liked it even then. Walking, she thought, is good for the soul.

  Along the way, Lucky stopped at Collette’s. Collette was the punky sixteen-year-old daughter of one of Lucky’s neighbors. She was a skinny girl with hair dyed jet black and a gold ring in her nose. She was, Lucky thought, the kind of teenager who made you glad you weren’t her mother. Not that she was involved in anything seriously bad—Lucky hoped—but she was exasperating. Which was why Collette’s mother had never minded Lucky’s being sort-of friends with Collette.

  Analise Kennedy-Skyles—Collette’s mom—was an ambitious hot-shot PR consultant, always jetting around the country from this city to that, from one corporate office to another. Collette’s father, Wayne Skyles, was a London-based corporate raider and a borderline alcoholic. The parents had met on the job, but their whirlwind romance had plummeted from glossies on the society pages to nasty write-ups in the gossip columns as they battled through a bitter divorce. All kinds of rumors had swirled around them. From what Lucky gathered, Analise was now somewhat on the rebound. Meanwhile, Collette was a teenager in New York with her mother and prided herself on being a computer junkie. She’d practically raised herself—along with a circle of computer friends with names like , acidf8ce, and Not only had Collette never met any of these people in person, she had never even seen them, since they all conversed through 3D graphic renditions called avatars. Their world was an electronic playground of pseudo-cloak-and-dagger intrigue. They were always tinkering with their computers and Internet connections. Collette had showed Lucky her avatar, once, a donkey made into a parody of a unicorn.
It had deer horns, bat wings, and a scorpion’s tail. “It looks dorky, but watch out for the sting,” Collette said.

  “Aren’t you worried about online predators?” Lucky asked.

  Collette yawned. “They’re the ones who should be worried about me. Do you know how many pervs I’ve reported to the FBI?” Lucky didn’t know and didn’t ask.

  Lucky set down the groceries and knocked on the door, and after a moment, her phone rang. She took it out and Collette sang, “Hi, Lucky. What can I do you for today?”

  How had Collette known who was at the door? Lucky looked up and down the porch. In one of the hanging plants she saw a glint of glass and red LED. A camera. Lucky looked for a wire, but there was none. Wireless? The number on her phone said UNKNOWN. “I was wondering if you could take a look at my computer for a moment?” she said.

  “K,” Collette replied. A moment later, Collette opened the door and led Lucky into the kitchen. She poured two glasses of cherry Kool Aid, forgetting as usual that Lucky never drank it.

  “How come you’re not showing up on my caller ID?” Lucky asked.

  “It’s a new application I downloaded on the bird. It turned our microwave into a pirate cell tower.”

  “On the bird?” Lucky asked.

  “Cheep, cheep. Cheep, cheep,” Collette replied.

  “So you hacked it?”

  Collette shrugged. “Somebody might as well do it. I mean, it’s not like they’re going to sell this for iPhones or anything. What’s up with your ‘puter?”

  Lucky handed it to Collette, who sniffed it, then turned it over and squinted as she read the specs. “So what’d you do to it?”