The Dalliance of Leopards

by Alter, Stephen;

  “What’s their real motivation?” Holman had asked. “What’s the driving force behind their work?”

  “I suppose they want to improve the lives of those they serve,” Luke answered.

  “You don’t suspect some larger political purpose?” Fletcher suggested.

  “Maybe.” Luke threw up both hands. “But, honestly, I don’t know what it would be.”

  Everyone knew there were troubling questions about the trust, partly because it had grown so quickly. Luke had tried to get information about their board of directors and SEA’s decision-making process, but he couldn’t even lay hands on an organizational chart. Unlike most agencies, they didn’t publish glossy brochures or have an active website. SEA’s offices were simple but well equipped, and the people who worked there always had a positive energy and purpose about them. But they became guarded when anyone asked where the money came from or who was controlling their operations. The institutions they funded had few complaints, though some of them privately questioned SEA’s priorities.

  Fletcher and Holman had tried to get Luke to reveal the identity of the man called Hakim, but he wasn’t going to betray his source. In fact, Hakim was a social worker at one of the SEA hospitals in Azad Kashmir. He seemed a sincere and honest man, who had been employed by the trust for a year and a half. Though Hakim praised SEA for the support they gave the hospital, providing everything from generators to CT scan machines, he had his doubts.

  “Sometimes it seems almost like a secret cult,” Hakim had said, speaking off the record, “as if they’re twisting history, using ancient myths to justify current realities.”

  Sikander-e-Azam was the Urdu name for Alexander the Great. The trust’s primary mission was to provide education, healthcare, and poverty alleviation programs in the Hindu Kush and Karakoram region. Many of the people in this part of the world traced their ancestry to Alexander’s army, when Greek satraps once ruled the borderlands of India, around 300 BCE. Among the clans who claimed a Hellenistic heritage were the Kalash, Pathans, and Burusho. Kafiristan was the traditional homeland of the Kalash, where the inhabitants worshipped deities that could be traced back to early Persian and Greek faiths. Under Muslim rule most of the inhabitants had converted to Islam, and Kafiristan was now known as Nuristan, the land of enlightenment, which had been purged of idolatry. Yet even among conservative Muslims like the Pathans, ethnic chauvinism was an appealing agenda, reviving the lost glory of Bactria and Gandhara. Fundamentalists condemned these claims as un-Islamic, but the Sikander-e-Azam Trust had a working relationship with even the Taliban, and they weren’t seen as a foreign threat.

  Luke had researched SEA for the past two years. He had contacts among the NGOs they funded, but very few people were prepared to go on record, fearing that if they talked to journalists the money would dry up. Most grants included a confidentiality clause. Within a feudal society like Pakistan, there was nothing unusual about this or that SEA didn’t appear to comply with government regulations. They had never been audited and seemed to avoid any form of official oversight. Part of the reason was that almost all of their funds were disbursed in semiautonomous tribal agencies, AJK and Chitral. In Afghanistan, too, there was little control. The medical and educational work they did was situated in parts of the country where nobody else bothered to build schools or hospitals. Locally, SEA cultivated a level of goodwill and loyalty that protected them from governmental interference. A few months ago, when Luke was in Kabul and asked about the Sikander-e-Azam Trust, one of the government officials told him, “Why should we stop them? It is God’s will that they are doing good.”

  “You have to understand,” Fletcher had said, returning from a cigarette break. “We don’t want to interfere with the work they do. It’s the people and power behind them that interests us.”

  “Maybe it’s better not to find out,” said Luke.

  “What do you mean by that?” Holman jumped in, as if he were finally opening up.

  “I don’t know,” said Luke. “Stir the shit, and you never know what sort of stink you’ll discover.”

  “Are you suggesting that SEA is a cover for something else?” said Fletcher.

  “No, I think you’re the one who’s suggesting that,” said Luke. “Come on! We can spin all sorts of conspiracy theories, and half of them might even be true, but in the border areas you never know what the real story is. All you can do is patch together some reasonable approximation of the truth. Everybody is trying to claim a piece of the action, whether it’s drug deals or illegal arms, extortion and contract killings. The Taliban, the CIA, the DEA, the Chinese, even the Canadians and Brits have agents on the ground, and none of them know who’s working for who.”

  “But we’re not trying to solve the whole puzzle. We just want to know who’s behind SEA and what they’re all about.” Fletcher scratched the side of his face where the skin was dry and peeling.

  “For all I know, the whole thing could be a CIA scam,” said Luke, “Some sort of covert trust-building operation. How to Win Friends and Influence Your Enemies? You guys probably still use Dale Carnegie as a standard ops manual.”

  Fletcher showed no amusement, though Holman gave Luke a tight-lipped smile.

  “Actually, we believe that SEA represents a significant threat to American interests in South Asia,” said Fletcher. “Behind its benevolent façade, there’s a serious effort to undermine peace and destabilize the region. We don’t know for sure who’s running this thing. But we know that it’s dangerous, particularly when we’ve got a nuclear standoff between India and Pakistan.”

  There was a pause, and Luke could see Fletcher’s eyes fixed on him now.

  “If you don’t want to talk to us, we can’t force you,” Fletcher continued. “But then maybe you’ll have Armageddon on your conscience.”

  Luke didn’t blink. He was used to this kind of intimidation. Whether it was Americans or Pakistanis, government officials always tried to pressure journalists into revealing hidden truths. The fact that the Sikander-e-Azam Trust attracted the interest of American intelligence agencies wasn’t surprising. It seemed suspiciously successful where many other NGOs had failed. Living and working in Pakistan, Luke had been approached several times by spooks who tried to persuade him to work for them. “Informal cooperation” was the euphemism they used. Of course, they paid much better than the money he got for articles and interviews he published. But Luke understood that the minute he crossed that line, his position in Pakistan would become untenable. As a journalist, he had a reputation for reporting events without the arrogance and judgmental voice of most foreign correspondents. He was often critical of American interests and policies. The US press attaché in Islamabad once called him a “Goddamn fucking Jihadi,” to his face, soon after 9/11, when he wrote a story about embittered youth in Pakistan who saw America as a satanic power.

  Despite everything, Luke tried not to take sides, though he understood that objective truth was the first casualty of armed conflict, a discredited myth sacrificed on the altar of global security. Often, when asked about his nationality, he lied and said he was Irish or Canadian, not because he was afraid but because it made things far less complicated. His US passport was a liability, and more than once he’d thought of applying for Pakistani citizenship. When he mentioned this to journalist friends in Pindi or Lahore, they looked at him as if he’d gone mad. “I’ll tell you what,” Shauqat Ali, a stringer for the Boston Globe, had said, “why don’t we just trade passports? I’ll happily take yours and go back to a nice little apartment in Cambridge, eating Dunkin’ Donuts for the rest of my life.”

  Ten

  Daphne emptied the ashtrays and tossed the rest of the cigarettes into a garbage bag before putting her trash on the curb. She hated the smell of stale tobacco smoke, the way it lingered in a room like the dead odor of someone who’s never coming back. Long ago, when she was in her twenties, Daphne had smoked—everyone did in those days—but she quit after she got pregnant and hadn’t t
ouched a cigarette since. Until yesterday. And only to protect him. They would have asked about the stubs in the ashtrays, evidence of his visit. He had surprised her the night before, arriving at the house without warning, as he always did. A year had gone by since she’d seen him last. Though they spent the night together, neither of them slept, sitting in the living room, sharing a bottle of Australian Shiraz, talking, and arguing. Finally, long after midnight, he took her to bed and they lay awake until dawn, not making love but finding solace in each other’s arms.

  When daylight filtered through the drapes, she made breakfast for him, just as she used to do so many years ago. Before he finished eating, a man in a beige Toyota arrived, and the two of them left in a hurry, a rushed good-bye. He warned her that nobody should discover he’d been here. Daphne cleaned up the kitchen, rinsing their plates and bowls before putting them in the dishwasher. A short while later, she saw the Winnebago pulling up and quickly went to the bedroom. Finding the pack of Benson and Hedges he’d forgotten on the dressing table, Daphne panicked for a moment, before taking one and lighting it just as they broke down the door.

  While the armed men were searching her house, she pretended to smoke a couple more cigarettes. They had found nothing, except for pictures from Bombay, which she could explain. Daphne knew exactly what to say and kept it simple. If you tried to tell too many lies they got tangled up in knots. Better to stick with an edited version of the truth. She’d known him long ago, back in the eighties. After that, “he left me and I haven’t seen him for fifteen years.” Almost everything was true … almost.

  The cellphone she used had been given to her two years ago, a Blackberry that she kept switched off in a toolbox in the basement, tucked behind the boiler, along with the charger and spare valves and wrenches. She only used it when he sent her a signal: a wrong number on her other phone, somebody asking for a man named Bruce, which meant he wanted to talk. He had promised her that nobody could trace their calls, but she took her own precautions, driving away from the house and switching on the Blackberry when she was at the mall or supermarket. He always answered after the second ring, though she never knew where he was.

  Having put out the trash, Daphne opened the garage and backed her car down the driveway and onto the street. The front door had been nailed shut by a carpenter who said he would replace it next week. Driving past the college, she headed north out of Eggleston. It was a bright spring day, and the fields were turning green. A red-tailed hawk hovered over a pasture, ready to drop from the sky onto a mouse or maybe a snake.

  She knew this road by heart. It was the only drive she did outside of town, crossing the county line and heading onto the interstate for two exits before turning off at Upfield. Her mind was spinning, afraid and angry, but also calculating what must be done. Before she knew it Daphne was at the Cleveland Clinic’s Critical Care and Rehabilitation Centre, a cheerful sign out front, painted yellow, promising hope. The institutional facade of three low buildings hid the tragedies within. Daphne pulled into a parking spot near the entrance. Today she had come earlier than usual.

  At the front desk, the nurse on duty greeted her. Daphne waved and smiled, heading down the hall, carrying a bouquet of daffodils.

  The door was ajar, and another nurse was changing an intravenous bottle.

  “Hello, Daphne,” she said, then saw the flowers. “Aren’t those beautiful! Are they from your garden?”

  Daphne nodded. Crossing to the bed, she looked down at the expressionless face, then kissed her son’s cheek. He hadn’t been shaved for a couple of days, and she could see gray hairs amid the stubble. Was he really that old? Thirty-two now, almost thirty-three. Daphne brushed her fingers through his hair, noticing how thin it had grown. The skin on his arms was still soft, but it pained her to see the needles in his veins and the tubes that fed into his body as well as those that drained out of him. He was alive but locked away inside a solitary confinement of flesh and bones. She wondered if he ever dreamed. Sometimes his eyelids flickered or his legs twitched under the sheets. These movements had once given her hope, though she knew it was pointless. The instruments that measured his heartbeat and other signs of life displayed a monotonous regularity. When she was alone with him, Daphne sometimes spoke to her son.

  “Naseem,” she’d say. “Can you hear me? Naseem?”

  The name on his medical charts was different, part of an elaborate charade that she had been forced to maintain for all these years.

  In the beginning, Daphne had come here every day, but now she visited twice a week. The doctors had told her there was no hope of recovery. A persistent vegetative state. Each day, they moved his arms and legs to stimulate circulation and keep his joints and tendons pliable, exercising useless muscles as he lay there like a marionette whose strings had been cut. Yet he looked strangely healthy, as if he might wake up any minute now and open his eyes, unlike the night she’d seen him after the accident, fifteen years ago, his face bruised and swollen. A stupid, senseless accident that had no meaning anymore. It had left him in this coma, lying here unconscious, still breathing, blood pumping through his veins. But Naseem would not answer her, refusing to wake up.

  When the nurse finally left, Daphne took the Blackberry out of her purse and stared at it with a surge of anger that brought tears to her eyes. She didn’t switch the phone on or put it to her ear, but spoke at it. “You fucking bastard,” she said. “You fucking, fucking bastard!”

  Eleven

  Afridi disliked Delhi, though he had grown up in this city. Too much had changed for the worse. The Delhi he remembered was green and spacious, with broad avenues and verdant lawns. Now, as he crossed over the outskirts of the capital, the sprawling colonies below him looked like a glacier of concrete, extending slowly outward. The disappearing contours of the Aravallis, a range of hills far older than the Himalayas, had been reduced to insignificance by multistory buildings that jutted above eroded ridgelines. The highest points near Delhi, besides office towers and five star hotels, were the rubbish heaps in Noida, smoldering mountains of garbage, filth, and discarded rubble from construction sites. As the rotting waste burned out of spontaneous combustion, pariah kites glided through the smoke, scavenging off discarded scraps. Bandicoots and rats infested the stinking mounds of refuse. Having flown down from Mussoorie, Afridi’s helicopter circled over this decomposing wasteland before crossing the Yamuna upstream from Okhla. The Ministry of Defense had granted him special permission to land at Safdarjang Aerodrome, in the heart of the city.

  A car received Afridi on the tarmac, a white Ambassador with a spacious rear seat that two Sikh soldiers helped him into, lifting him with courteous ease. The April air was warm and dry, the beginnings of a Delhi summer. His suitcase and two folded wheelchairs were placed in the boot. One was a standard model for everyday use. The other was a racing wheelchair he used for exercise. A protocol officer, Major Karamjit Singh, welcomed him and took his place in the front seat of the car. As they left the aerodrome and joined the tide of traffic, Afridi scowled.

  “Is there ever any time of day when these streets are empty?” he asked, while they waited at a red light, amid a swarm of vehicles.

  The major seemed confused by the question.

  “Sir?”

  “Never mind,” Afridi said. “Where are we going first?”

  “South Block, sir. The defense secretary has asked to see you immediately.”

  “And Shinde?”

  “Sir, he’s already there.”

  Ten minutes later, they turned onto Rajpath and drove toward the Central Secretariat. Here was one part of Lutyen’s Delhi that still retained its expansive grandeur. Afridi studied the monumental silhouette of the buildings with an appreciative eye. When they entered the sandstone hallways of South Block, he wheeled himself into a lift. He ignored the gestures of assistance from the PA who rushed ahead to open doors.

  The defense secretary’s office contained most of the original furniture designed by Edwin Lutyens and
his team, including a massive teak desk and cabinets with glass fronted doors, filled with books that would never be read. As Afridi entered, the defense secretary and Manav Shinde got to their feet. None of them spoke until they were alone.

  “Thank you for coming, Colonel,” the defense secretary said. He was a short, stout man with cropped gray hair and a reputation for losing his temper, especially with his superiors. Afridi liked him better than his predecessor, who had a fawning, diplomatic manner.

  Shinde was his usual rumpled self, looking like a politician who just lost an election. His handloom kurta was unironed, and his feet splayed out of Kolhapuri chappals. If he were walking down the street, nobody would have taken him for an intelligence officer, one of the best-informed and most perceptive minds in the Research and Analysis Wing.

  “I’m sure this must be very important,” he said, “if Colonel Afridi has deigned to leave his hill station hideaway and come down to Dilli at short notice.”

  “You received my message?” Afridi said.

  “Yes, it made us curious.” The defense secretary nodded, returning to his chair behind a polished expanse of Burma teak. Afridi once calculated that the trees that were felled to make this desk must have been more than five hundred years old, predating the British Empire itself.