Spy for Hire (35 page)

Mark didn’t have to escort Rad all the way from Dubai to Elizabeth, New Jersey, but he wanted to. It was time to go back.

Elizabeth was an old town. It had been the first capital of New Jersey. George Washington and Alexander Hamilton had walked its streets during the Revolutionary War. But little of that history was evident now. Now, Elizabeth was the kind of place Mark guessed people thought of when they laughed about New Jersey being the armpit of the nation. The city of Newark and its busy airport lay on the town’s northern border. The Port Newark-Elizabeth Marine Terminal, a huge shipping port, was to the east. Massive oil refineries, and an industrial wasteland known as the Linden Generating Station, lay just to the south.

Mark could see the power plant now. He and Rad were being driven down the New Jersey Turnpike in a private ambulance. The smell of toxic smokestack emissions and rotting marshland near the plant reminded Mark of some of the old oilfields outside of Baku.

The ambulance turned off on exit thirteen. Minutes later, Mark was staring out the window at the streets of southeast Elizabeth where he’d grown up. His first reaction was that the place didn’t appear to have changed much. He even recognized some of the stores—Deanna’s Hair Salon, Joey’s Italian Sausage, the Cuba Bakery… Other shops, he didn’t—Payless Liquors,
Gupta Auto Repair, a Portuguese deli, a pharmacy with a neon sign that read
TARJETAS TELEFONICAS DE VENTA AQUI
—but they weren’t so different from what used to be there.

Driving down the same roads he’d walked as a boy made Mark realize that, while he’d never regretted leaving, he liked his hometown.

It was on these streets that he’d first learned to fit in, to go unnoticed, to survive—where he’d learned that, even if a place looked a little rough around the edges, that didn’t mean it had nothing to offer. The town had a fast tough rhythm to it that Mark knew was still a part of him.

As he thought yet again of how and why he’d left, all those years ago, he realized he was dead tired. Tired of thinking about the past, but also just physically tired. The plane ride from Dubai had chased the sun, adding nine more hours to an already long day.

For the first part of the trip, he’d hung out with Decker instead of sleeping. When they weren’t playing electronic narde on Decker’s cell phone, or drinking beer from the minibar, Mark had been on the phone with Kaufman, making sure that the CIA was going to fix it so that Rad would be allowed back into the US without a passport.

After a refueling stop in Paris, Decker had gone to sleep and Rad had woken up. Rad had been more lucid at that point, and had been able to call his fiancée on the plane’s satellite phone. He and Mark had talked some—about what had happened in Bahrain, about Mark being a spy, about what Rad had been doing with his life—but Rad had mostly been focused on his pain. And a good hour of the flight had been devoted to figuring out how to get Rad safely to and from the bathroom.

As a result, Mark hadn’t gotten any sleep the whole trip.

“Jesus, you guys really fixed up the old station,” Mark said when they got to Coventry Avenue. Instead of seeing his dad’s old gas station with the lousy four pumps and the neon Save-A-Lot sign, there was a huge BP sign out front. And eight shiny new pumps. And a convenience store.

“Where are we?” Rad tried to look over his shoulder, to catch a glimpse of the gas station. From his prone position, however, Rad couldn’t see the street the way Mark could.

“Coventry Ave.”

“Oh, the old station. Yeah, we redid that eight years ago. You should check out the one right off the turnpike. That one’s got twelve pumps.”

Mark hadn’t even known that his father had expanded beyond the original station. He and Rad had mostly avoided the subject of their father during the flight.

“And you were the project manager for all this?”

“You bet.”

Rad began to talk about how their father had first secured the rights to a BP franchise, how that had led to the purchase of a second station, then a third, and how Rad had helped put together the business plans for the banks, how he’d gotten tight with all the Jersey contractors, how…

Mark wasn’t really listening. They were pulling up to the old house now. The same chain-link fence stood out front, with several plastic garbage cans lined up just behind it. The aluminum siding looked pretty much the same, just a little more chalky and faded. Up near the roof one of the aluminum soffit panels had fallen away, revealing intricate wood detailing badly in need of a paint job.

He wanted to think of this house, this town, his mother—the faded movie in his head that comprised the first seventeen years of his life—as something unrelated to the person he was today. But it was becoming increasingly hard to do so. He remembered the smell of freshly laundered clothes, the creak the basement
steps had made when he’d sat down, the weak light from a forty-watt incandescent bulb in the stairwell, the drip-drip-drip from a leaky utility-sink faucet.

He remembered the textured ceiling in his room, the bathroom with the pink tile, the way his brothers used to splash bathwater out of the tub…

The ambulance came to a stop. The driver engaged the parking brake, walked to the back of the ambulance, and pulled open the doors.

“We’re here,” said Mark.

Rad lifted his head and squinted as he looked out the rear of the vehicle. “What are you talking about?”

“We’re here.”

The concrete sidewalk out front was riddled with black dots—old gum, Mark knew. He used to walk the sidewalks of Elizabeth and instead of trying not to step on a crack, he’d tried to avoid the gum dots.

“Mark, Dad doesn’t live here anymore. We moved when I was in college. That was like, over ten years ago.”

At the airport, Mark had recited his old address to the ambulance driver as the government orderlies had been securing Rad. He’d done so because Rad had said to bring him home to Elizabeth, home to Dad’s house. He’d said his fiancée was living there temporarily, while Rad was in India.

Mark had just assumed Rad had been talking about the home they’d both grown up in.

“Huh.”

“I was wondering why we were going by the old station. Thought maybe you just wanted to see it.”

“I kind of did.”

Mark glanced at Rad, and then back at his childhood home. It seemed even smaller than he remembered. He thought of his mom sitting on the steps out front, waiting for him to come home from school, asking how his day had been when he showed up.

“Are you sure you’re all right?” asked Rad.

“Yeah, sorry for the mess up. So where are we going?”

They drove across town. Around Spring Street they passed a sign that read
HISTORIC MIDTOWN
and after that things got nicer. The century-old public library, where Mark used to read for hours in the summer—because the library had air-conditioning and his house didn’t—looked recently renovated. The sidewalks out front were paved with newly laid brick.

Mark allowed that things might have changed a bit more than he’d thought.

Five minutes later, they turned onto a street where decent-sized homes sat amid well-tended yards, tall old trees, and mulched flowerbeds. The ambulance stopped in front of a brick house that had an Audi Quattro parked in the driveway. It was one of the larger houses on the street, with wide front steps that led to a large double-door entryway, three front gables, and expansive bay windows on the first floor.

Rad lifted his head just enough so that he could see out the side window of the ambulance. “We’re here.” He sounded relieved.

As Mark was stepping out of the back of the ambulance, a pretty, blue-eyed woman with brown curly hair ran up. She wore a tight white blouse, tight jeans, and glittery flip-flops. Her teeth were white, and straight. And she smelled nice, Mark noted, as she pushed past him.

“Rad!”

“I’m OK.”

“Oh my God baby, oh my God, I can’t believe this happened to you.”

On the plane, Mark had been listening when Rad talked to his fiancée. He knew that his brother hadn’t told her much about
what had happened. Just that he was hurt, and was coming home, and could she be there when he got there?

Mark extended his hand and gave her his first name. “Rad can explain how we know each other later. In the meantime, I think the best thing to do is to get him inside the house.”

An older woman appeared behind Rad’s fiancée. She had gray hair, a bit of a belly, wore big gold hoop earrings, a gold bracelet, and a velour tracksuit. Her eyes fixed on Rad. “Good lord! Did the monkeys do this to you?”

“It wasn’t the monkeys, Mom. I was attacked. Well, shot.”

Her hands went up to her mouth. She looked down at his leg, and then at the bandages on his shoulder. Blood had seeped out of one corner. “This happened in India?”

“Later, Mom.”

Mark recognized her. She was the woman his dad had married after the suicide.

“Shouldn’t you be going straight to the hospital?” she said. She cast a wary glance at Mark, not recognizing him.

“He’s stable,” said Mark.

“Oh baby,” said Rad’s fiancée. “This is crazy. If you think you need a hospital, we should get you there now.”

Mark added, “He should be looked at soon, but you have time to pick your doctor and decide on the right course of action.”

The ambulance driver and the orderly who’d accompanied him walked around to the back of the ambulance and started unfastening the clamps that held Rad’s gurney in place.

Then the front door of the house opened.

Mark recognized Petar Saveljic at once—recognized the slouch of the shoulders, the wide-set darting, reptilian eyes, the hard jawline. His father had gone bald on the top of his head, but he’d always worn his hair short; no hair didn’t look much different than short hair had.

The only difference was the way his father was dressed. In the seventeen years he’d lived with the man, Mark couldn’t remember ever seeing his father in shorts. Typically, it had just been the soiled blue work pants he wore at the gas station, or the worn-out gray dress slacks he’d put on at home after he’d washed up. But it was unseasonably warm for early November—in the upper sixties, Mark guessed—and he was wearing shorts now, pleated khakis that came down to his knees. His legs were spindly and he wore leather Docksiders with no socks. His golf shirt was a bright yellow.

Petar Saveljic walked down to the ambulance, his eyes fixed on the driver and the orderly who was sliding Rad out of the back of the ambulance. “The Indians do this to you?” he asked. Though his tone was hostile, he mostly looked worried.

“It wasn’t the Indians, Dad.”

“We’re going to need help getting him up the steps and into the house,” said the ambulance driver.

At that point, Petar Saveljic noticed Mark. He stared at his oldest son for a few seconds, looking confused, and maybe afraid, as though he wasn’t sure to believe what he was seeing. He took a step back, as if pushed by an invisible hand. “Marko?”

“I’ll help bring him inside,” said Mark. “Then I have to take off.”

“Marko?” He squinted, incredulous.

“It’s a long story. Rad can explain.”

“I don’t understand,” said Rad’s fiancée, looking from Mark’s father to Mark.

Rad said, “This is Mark. You know—”

“You mean—”

“Yeah. The one—”

“Oh my God.” Her hand went up to her mouth.

“Congratulations on your engagement, by the way,” said Mark.

“Two of us are going to need to be on each side of the gurney,” said the ambulance driver, taking a position near Rad’s
head. “Grab the metal bar underneath securely. We’ll roll him to the steps, then lift.” He turned to Mark’s stepmother. “Ma’am, if you could get the front door for us?”