A Vision of Fire

by Gillian Anderson

  Though that wasn’t entirely true: now she noticed the blood on the pavement. She looked all over the ambassador’s body before she saw blood gushing from the bodyguard’s sleeve and knew that it was he who had been struck. She called for someone to get the school nurse.

  • • •

  Fifteen minutes later, having just gotten off the phone with his wife, Ganak Pawar gently lifted his daughter’s head from his shoulder and helped her sit upright on the couch in the principal’s office. He pulled a fleck of dry, broken leaf from her cheek. They were alone, both unharmed. Daniel had been rushed to the hospital, losing blood fast, his right arm useless, but the EMTs had assured them he would be okay.

  Maanik had not cried, even as the adrenaline drained out of her. Her deep, ragged breaths calmed into something approaching normal. She was still shaking, but her father could not ignore the knock on the door. The principal looked in.

  “Mr. Ambassador, your car is here.”

  “Yes, thank you,” he said. “I will be right there.”

  Maanik grabbed his hand, held it tight.

  “Maanik, I must.”

  “I don’t want you to.”

  “I know. But I will be all right, I swear to you. Two in one day, it does not happen.”

  She nodded, unconvinced.

  “As soon as you feel up to it, have the principal call Mama and she will pick you up and take you home. You will have a very quiet day.”

  Maanik looked away from him and was silent. Her grip tightened; she dug her nails into his hand.

  “Maanik—”

  “It is hopeless. Everything is hopeless. The UN, your speech, everything.”

  “It is not. You must not lose faith.”

  “I could have lost you. Who can have faith?”

  “But you didn’t lose me; I am here. And when I appear at the United Nations after an assassination attempt, that makes my voice stronger—”

  “I’m not going home.” She let go of his hand.

  “It’s all right—”

  “You have to do your job, so I will do mine.”

  He took a deep breath, gazed at his daughter. This argument was hers. He kissed her forehead, lingering longer than before, and pressed her hands in his as he stood.

  “Then I will see you for dinner, and I will call you during the day. I will make sure the principal allows you to keep your phone on. Maanik Pawar, you make me very proud.”

  “You too, Papa Ambassador.” Her smile was weak but it was there.

  He gave her one more peck on the top of her head, then left with a strong, purposeful stride. Maanik rose and immediately sat down again, her legs still wobbly. But she attended her second-period class, AP United States History.

  The nurse asked the principal to text Maanik’s teachers, telling them to keep an eye on her.

  Amid the subtle stares from kids she did not know well and thumbs up from those she did, Maanik sat in her seat, opened her notebook, and copied words from the board. Her pen ran dry and she scribbled in circles until the blue ink flowed, then she kept scribbling circles until she caught herself with a jerk. It was as if she had fallen asleep and suddenly there were circles on the page. She forced herself to pay attention.

  Maanik listened, moved on with several classmates to Geometry, and midway through the lesson began drawing circles until the paper was full of them. Then she put down her pen and scratched under the sleeve of her dress. She didn’t feel itchy. She just needed to scratch.

  “Papa . . . ,” she whispered, the utterance more breath than word.

  No one around her heard.

  “Papa?” she said, louder this time.

  The girl to her right looked over. “Maanik?”

  The teacher glanced at her.

  Maanik looked at the student beside her and saw a suddenly unfamiliar face. The girl’s flesh was pale, almost translucent, like ice on a pavement. Her eyes had a reddish cast, like a ruby in her mother’s jewel box. Her lips were a pale blue and very pronounced.

  Maanik spoke, her voice wheezing from her chest. “Papa . . . help me!”

  The teacher quickly made her way down the aisle. Maanik began breathing rapidly, digging her pen over and over into the desk with one hand and raking the back of her wrist with the other until rivulets of blood rose up.

  The teacher gently restrained her hands and sent another student for the nurse.

  “Maanik, don’t—”

  Maanik suddenly threw her arms up, sending the teacher back against a desk, and thrashed in her seat before relaxing for the briefest moment. Then she screamed so loudly that the teacher pulled her close in a desperate, helpless effort to quiet her.

  Maanik went limp just as the nurse arrived.

  CHAPTER 2

  Caitlin O’Hara, MD, PhD, two weeks shy of her forties and three sips into a cup of coffee, toggled keys on her tablet.

  “We can’t give them the moon, Dr. O’Hara.”

  “I didn’t ask for the moon,” she said to the voice coming from her tablet. “I asked for money, Ms. Tanaka, for twenty-five test shelters. You can do that.”

  On-screen, a 3-D blueprint of a small house revolved and a wall disappeared so that Caitlin could zoom inside and view the interior. The house would accommodate twenty souls who had been sweltering or freezing in decaying tents for months. This new snap-together unit was created by a modular furniture manufacturer under contract to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. It was an update to a previous model that, among other concerns, had lacked a lock inside the front door. It had that now. All it needed was funding.

  Tanaka’s boss, Director Qanooni, weighed in. “We simply do not have the hundred thousand dollars this project requires.”

  “Which circles back to where we started this discussion,” O’Hara said. “Crowdfunding. I know it won’t deliver the windfalls you get from donor nations and it requires valuable person-hours to oversee. But lives are worth the effort.”

  The conference call with the development officers of the World Health Organization was about to run over its scheduled half hour. But the need for the refugee shelters was absolute. That, and the clock ticking before Caitlin’s next client arrived, made her bold.

  There was a short silence, after which Tanaka murmured to Qanooni and the director said, “I will take it to the board.”

  “Please don’t,” Caitlin urged. “You know what ‘board’ stands for?” She answered her own question: “Bunch of Argumentative—”

  “Thank you, doctor,” Qanooni interrupted hastily. “We are on the board, need I remind you?”

  “You needn’t, and I’m sorry if you were offended.” Caitlin grinned. “But I cannot abide red tape. It never strangles bad ideas, only good ones. So please, just go to the nearest high school in Geneva, put some students to work for extra credit, and they’ll throw a funding website together in a couple of hours.”

  “If only it were that simple.” Tanaka sighed. “There are liability issues.”

  “I sympathize,” Caitlin replied. “I do. I pay more for insurance than I do for rent and office space combined, and that’s saying something in Manhattan. But health issues trump insurance. They must. Otherwise, why are we in this business?”

  “Fair point,” Qanooni said as Tanaka made a thoughtful “hmm” sound.

  “I’m not wrong about this,” Caitlin prodded.

  “But of course,” Qanooni chided. “When was the last time you were wrong?”

  “Cameroon, 2010,” she answered. “It was twilight and I mistook a spotted hyena for a dog. I invented the backward broad jump and set a record for it, all in one.”

  Caitlin’s phone buzzed, buzzed again. It was a call from Benjamin Moss.

  “Director Qanooni, Ms. Tanaka, I do have to go now but I’ll follow up by e-mail. Thank you for your time . . .”r />
  The director thanked her—and reprised the issue of liability instead of saying good-bye. Caitlin’s phone stopped buzzing, then started again. Ben was calling a second time instead of leaving a voice mail.

  Caitlin ended the online meeting, sat back in her chair, and let her eyes rest momentarily on her office walls, full of landscape photos from Thailand, Cuba, the Philippines, her framed degrees and awards—certificates that made her career in adolescent psychiatry easier but didn’t matter, not fundamentally.

  She called Ben back—he picked up on the first ring.

  “Ben, I have a session in one minute, so this has to be—”

  “Can you cancel it?”

  “What? No—”

  “Cai, I’m serious,” he said. “I need you at the United Nations as soon as you can get here.”

  “I’m serious too, Ben, I’ve got—” There was a knock on her door. “One minute!” she called, knowing it was her assistant, probably announcing her client. “Ben, my eleven o’clock is here.”

  “Please cancel the appointment,” Ben implored. “You know I wouldn’t ask if it weren’t important.”

  Caitlin frowned. “This is important too. At least tell me what it’s about.”

  “I can’t tell you over the phone. This area gets electronically swept by every government on the planet. Please, Cai.”

  “It’s that serious?”

  “That serious.”

  Caitlin rose and started toward the door. “Give me five minutes here and I’ll come over.”

  “Thanks. I’ll text you where to meet.”

  Caitlin ended the call, opened the door, and explained the situation. After rescheduling with her client, she caught a cab and headed for the United Nations.

  Ben’s text read 48th and 2nd. As Caitlin’s cab pulled along the curb, she spotted him pacing in front of an apartment tower. He was wearing a tailored suit and a grim expression. She watched her old friend as the cabbie processed her card. A long, dim portico with square arches stretching behind him made his taut stride seem even more restless, as if the arches were boxing him in. He was carefully eyeing every cab that passed. When he eventually registered hers he brightened slightly and hurried over.

  She had only noticed fear in Benjamin Moss twice since she met him as an undergrad at New York University: on September 11, 2001, watching the Twin Towers burn from the foot of Washington Square Park, and in Thailand after the tsunami of 2004 as bodies began to wash up onto the shore. But he seemed fearful now.

  They hugged. The air felt unusually chilly, even though the sun was shining directly on them.

  “I owe you big-time,” he said.

  “Time and a half,” she said. “Why am I here?”

  With a gentle hand Ben steered Caitlin back to the portico. He stopped there and glanced surreptitiously at the doorman. Caitlin suddenly felt trapped with Ben in his imaginary cage.

  “Ben, what’s going on?”

  “How’s Jacob?” he asked quietly. “Still ten?”

  “He’s fine. Taking cooking classes. He wants to take Tai Chi now like the people in the park.”

  “I know a good teacher,” he said. “From China.”

  “Ben? Where’s the graveyard and why are you whistling?”

  He took a breath. Ben was a translator at the United Nations. She had seen him at work: there was always the briefest delay between what he heard and what he said as he processed exactly how to say it. He was doing that now.

  “Early this morning the Indian ambassador to the UN was walking his daughter to school,” he said in a voice barely above a whisper. “You may have heard about it—”

  “Attempted assassination,” she said.

  “Right. The police commissioner put the Counterterrorism Bureau on it and all they’ve turned up is a nameless guy and a fuzzy surveillance video showing two men on their motorcycle racing down York Avenue.”

  “No one’s claimed responsibility?”

  Ben shook his head. “The NYPD thinks the men were lone wolves but both India and Pakistan are pointing fingers.”

  “So no one even knows why this happened?”

  Ben shook his head. “Lots of people have reasons for wanting him dead, or at least sidelined. He’s a pacifist who’s too high-profile to simply recall. More importantly, peace talks started a week ago and most of the United Nations delegates and the Security Council requested that he attend them, over the misgivings of India and Pakistan.”

  “And you’re his interpreter,” Caitlin said.

  “With Hindi, Urdu, Uighur, Shina, and occasionally a tribal language.” He grinned for the first time. “My brain’s kind of spinning.”

  “How’s his brain?” Caitlin asked.

  “Pretty good,” he replied. “It takes a lot to rattle that man.”

  Clearly if he was fine, the ambassador wasn’t the reason she was here. Caitlin waited for Ben to resume.

  Ben’s voice got even softer and he leaned forward conspiratorially. “Everything has been proceeding slowly and cautiously—until today. Ambassador Pawar got a phone call about his daughter and left, canceling the rest of the session. It took about a second for the Pakistani delegates to get annoyed, and we don’t know how long they’re going to stay accommodating. A half hour later the deputy ambassador of India—who was also pretty concerned—pulled me aside and asked me to come to the ambassador’s condo and get him. Which is right here.” He nodded up at the skyscraper above their heads.

  “The man was shot at,” Caitlin said. “Can’t they give him a couple hours off?”

  “It’s not about him, Cai. It’s about using events as platforms. The ambassador was already late and his absence gives everyone time, and an excuse, to get back on a partisan soapbox.”

  “I understand,” Caitlin said. “But the ambassador isn’t why I’m here.”

  “No,” Ben said solemnly.

  What would pull a diplomat out of a crisis session but a crisis at home? Caitlin felt a twinge as she remembered her own father’s careful, loving attention. “The daughter?” She had heard about the shooting on the news.

  Ben nodded, stared down the street, then back at the doorman.

  “What’s happening with her?” Caitlin asked.

  “It’s . . .” Ben’s mouth tightened, then he exhaled. “It’s disturbing. Cai, you’ll have to see for yourself.”

  Taking her by the elbow, he walked her into the building. The concierge at the desk did not bother calling up, obviously familiar with Ben.

  “They brought her in through the service elevator,” Ben said.

  There were security cameras in the lobby and one in the corner of the elevator. Loose lips sink ships, Caitlin thought as they rode up to the penthouse. Ben had not spoken another word. She could not imagine what was so dire that it could not be spoken about . . . and had unsettled him so much that he still had not released her elbow.

  The elevator door opened on a corridor that was eerily silent. There was a vacuum cleaner running in an apartment but the hallway’s thick carpet muted the sound.

  But it’s more than the silence, she realized as they headed toward an apartment at the far end. There was the kind of stillness one felt at sunset in the wild, when all decent things went into their huts, tents, or burrows, and predators woke to feed. It was a strange and surprising sensation here.

  On their first knock an anxious-looking woman in a red-orange sari opened the door.

  “Thank you, Benjamin,” she said, but was looking at Caitlin, studying her with experienced eyes.

  “Dr. O’Hara, this is Hansa Pawar, wife of the ambassador.”

  “Hello,” Caitlin said as a young beagle tried to slip through the door into the hall.

  “Jack London!” Mrs. Pawar snapped, and the beagle slunk back inside. The dog was low to the ground and subdued as he
turned to sniffing Caitlin’s ankles. His attentions were brief, perfunctory.

  Caitlin ran her hand down the dog’s back as she reached down to take her shoes off; she had spent enough time in Mumbai to know that removing shoes was the cultural norm.

  Mrs. Pawar stopped her. “Don’t worry about that. Please just come with me.”

  Caitlin felt another chill as the woman hurried them through a spacious room. It was filled with light from a wall of windows facing the UN building and the East River. There was a pleasant hint of jasmine tea in the air. The apartment was overflowing with artifacts—Caitlin recognized not just Hindi sculptures and Muslim painted texts, but a Sikh helmet, a Christian cross, a Georgia O’Keeffe landscape.

  Ben noticed Caitlin’s wandering eyes. “Ganak calls interculturalism ‘the peace of many choices,’ ” he murmured to her. “He’s trying to embody it and teach it.”

  Caitlin didn’t have much more time to look around before they were ushered into a bedroom, the second off a long corridor.

  Though the drapes were drawn, enough sunlight filtered through for Caitlin to see that each wall was painted a different jewel color, amethyst, sapphire, emerald, and cherry opal. On a desk in the corner, an electronic photo frame flashed groups of friends laughing, smiling, hugging—in sad contrast to the girl who was unconscious in her father’s arms across the room. Urged by Mrs. Pawar’s outstretched hand, Caitlin moved slowly past her to the girl’s four-poster bed. The beagle followed and sat on the floor beside her. Ben stayed by the door.