The Spy's Little Zonbi (20 page)

“
You're a total troublemaker, aren't you?” Chase looked down at her almond eyes, breathed her in. For the first time in two months he didn't care where the idiots from Iran were. Let them kidnap the governor and set fire to the gold-domed State House. She had tiny freckles and soft lips. There was a new song and she took the cup from his hand and emptied it in one long swallow.

“
I bring out the worst in people,” she said and left him to dance alone, before the mob of college kids began to descend.

He let her go for now.

C
hase fell in love with the little dancer. He fell fast and hard and did everything possible to convince her to feel the same way. It was a take-no-prisoners approach, with scenic small plane rides out of the Princeton Airport, slaved-over candle-lit dinners, and lovemaking matched to the music.

It took two weeks for things to even out. Under the ugly glow of yellow streetlights outside the club, she said she loved him back and kissed him in a different way.

“
You're beautiful,” she had whispered later, swaying to the gentle music coming from the speakers next to the bed. She had sung the lyrics of some New Age lullaby in his ear and it seemed different, too. “You are the light, the dark, the fire, and all the rain.” She repeated these same lyrics as her wedding vows a few months later, eloping in a living room ceremony at the home of the local mayor. Their witness was the mayor's niece. Chase couldn't call Stoney, and Mitra's plan was to break the news to her father after the fact, when it was too late.

Mitra had no idea of his real work. There was no spy manual to use for reference, but Chase had been warned away from close friendships. He was a journalist and had the news clippings as proof. What a great story it would have been to tell, the coincidence of a group of half-assed Iranian terrorists bringing them together. He imagined her father would have laughed heartily, pounded the table and complained how typical it was of the men charged with securing his nation, his former homeland. But Chase kept his secret for now, maybe forever.

According to what had always been a cloudy recounting of her recent family history, Mitra's father had fled the politics that had overrun any ability to teach at the University of Tehran. He had arrived in America on Thanksgiving Day, 1979, just a few weeks after a group of Islamic revolutionaries stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and took hostages.

Doctor Bamdad Hami, who repeated this story each time Mitra had taken Chase for visits, could tolerate just so many interruptions in and around his classroom. There had been smoke everywhere and the constant stench of gasoline being sloshed around in jars to be used as propellants. His classroom stank like an auto repair garage, and by the end of his lectures his students were in an oxygen deprived buzz. There had been smoke from burning American flags and Jimmy Carter effigies. Then there had been smoke from the clothes of the protesters who caught themselves on fire while lighting the effigies. It was all more than the doctor could tolerate.

“
I can tolerate this no further!” Doctor Bam, as he preferred to be addressed, claimed to have shouted at his cowering secretary. “Pack my dugong, I'm out of here.”

Doctor Bam's secretary had a lot of work ahead of her if she was going to pack the dugong all by herself. Even though it was dead and therefore not moving, it was nearly three meters long and over three-hundred kilograms. Plus, there would be all that ice to keep it from rotting and stinking like only a blubbery dugong could rot and stink.

“
I'll bring you over to the college and you can have a picture taken with the famous dugong,” Mitra had told Chase, teasing her father.

The death of the dugong had been something of a tragedy, a victim of scientific exploration mixed with alcohol. Dugongs had been having a tough time trying to peacefully subsist on Persian Gulf sea grass since humans were constantly spilling oil, Doctor Bam had explained in his story. These great mammals were a nearly extinct version of sea cow, with paddle-like forelimbs and fluked, dolphin-like tails. Furthermore, they liked to hang out and play just under the surface of the water, a practice that put them in constant danger of getting struck by boats.

Doctor Bam admitted to nudging along the extinction process by accidentally killing this particular dugong with a thirty-foot outboard motorboat. He'd struck the poor creature while, ironically, helping a coworker gather data on the critically endangered hawksbill turtle. Truth be told, the pair of professors had been doing more drinking than data gathering just prior to the accident, but they blamed that mostly on the stress from all the burning effigies everywhere they looked.

“
The young people in my country burn everything,” he'd said, shaking his head wistfully.

The two Iranian doctors of education would take kabob koobideh and bottles of Russian vodka, then motor around the Persian Gulf oil tankers while blasting Aerosmith from a Chinese-made boom box.

A drunken Doctor Bam would sing snatches of “Sweet Emotion” in his thick accent at the dinner table—the part about a big woman with a man's face—raising his glass of clear liquor to the light. “The lyrics prove Steven Tyler knew many Iranian women!”

Bamdad Hami was a short man, with a thick head of black hair, a perennial five-o'clock shadow no matter how often he shaved, and the growing belly of someone who loved his vodka and kabob.

Doctor Bam explained he hadn't needed to sneak out of Iran under the cover of darkness. Nor did he have to purchase fake credentials or slip through secret border crossings to find his way onto an America-bound airplane. In fact, the university board members were both delighted and relieved to help him secure a special visa and all the accompanying paperwork for a one-way trip to the United States. His habit of throwing open his classroom window and shouting at the revolutionary protesters that Saddam Hussein should gas their mothers made the regents nervous.

“
Awaladi kus mashk
!” the doctor would proudly scream at the protesters, which he claimed translated to something like “son of a woman with a gigantic vagina.”

When Doctor Bam became distracted with his collection of vinyl records during their visits, Mitra would tell the part of the story about the young girl caught up in Doctor Bamdad's madness. Without a mother, little Mitra was something of a mascot around the University of Tehran science wing. She spent so many hours in the building that one of the secretaries brought in a mattress so she could nap in one corner of the doctor's office. Most of the child's toys were fashioned from scientific instruments. Her tea sets were test tubes and beakers. Her erector sets were really DNA and molecular models. Her stuffed animals were actual stuffed animals. The ingenious little girl would set up various jars of aborted and preserved fetuses all around, then read them to sleep from lab manuals.

Her favorite pet was an old anatomical display labeled Common House Cat, in which the tabby had gone through a preservation process prior to being cut in half the long way and placed under a glass frame. The wonderful teaching tool was turned into an even better pull toy after Doctor Bam attached small wheels and the string from a discarded lab coat.

What had become of the girl's mother was never discussed by her father.

“
The subject was taboo. Late at night, when Dad would tuck me into the bed in his office, I'd sometimes ask about my mother. I remember being snuggled in with my pet frog safely sealed in a jar of formaldehyde, looking up at his huge hairy face. ‘I am your mother,' he would always tell me. ‘I made you from an experiment. Go to sleep now and may your dreams be sweet, my little sugar plum.' ”

Doctor Bam and his little girl arrived in New York City on November twenty-second, his frozen dugong following two weeks later on a cargo ship. All took up residence in the Trenton State College science department for the spring semester of 1980. The nearly extinct dugong went from a crate of ice to an enormous tank of its own formaldehyde, while the good doctor and his nine-year-old girl found their very own house in Newtown, Pennsylvania, an easy commute to the college.

“
Dad's never gotten used to these winding country roads. He runs over animals all the time and feels just terrible. Like with the dugong. And he always stops, always picks them up and rolls them into a newspaper and brings them home. The refrigerator freezer is packed. You should see the freezer chest in the garage.”

“
What does he do with them?” Chase asked, and Mitra frowned while looking at her father pulling records from sleeves to blow away dust.

“
Dinner parties for his Intro to Biology sections,” she said. “The vegetarian kids get off easy.”

“
No kidding? He eats them off the road?”

“
I loved the parties when I was little. I helped marinate the squirrels and things. We wore lab coats for aprons, pan-frying pigeon hash with diced onions and garlic. He taught me how to make fried chipmunk cakes. Each patty needed the meat from at least a dozen squashed rodents.”

“
They are the delicacies of our new homeland!” Bamdad cried out happily from beneath the record player, a half-empty bottle of vodka perched next to the turntable.

“
Yes, Dad, your students loved every bite,” she said, then lowered her voice. “I was allowed to play dress-up for his students. Colorful silk Persian robes I imagined my mom had worn.”

Mitra described her castoff scientific toys as she eyed the eighteen and nineteen-year-old students from various dark corners, Steven Tyler's “Uncle Salty” blaring in the background.

To little Mitra, all the commotion in the house was wonderful. Such was the life of a girl born on a microscope slide, cultivated in a test tube, and raised in a series of Petri dishes before being set free to walk on two legs. She loved her strange father like any child of a strange father would.

“
I never knew anything different.”

Mitra had no remnants of an accent, and not a single family photo album or any other artifacts from her past, besides her toys. It was as if she'd been born and raised in a reasonably sterile laboratory. She seemed to exist just as a twenty-seven-year-old biochemist, with dancing as her only diversion.

As with her father, the line between Mitra's work and personal life was blurred. She had a bed in her laboratory break room. Some people crow about being workaholics, with their seventy or eighty hour work-weeks. Mitra explained that before meeting Chase, she'd quietly spent a hundred or more hours each week at her lab in a cancer research center. Other than her dance nights, she didn't have anything particularly interesting to go home to, especially since her dad had stolen a mattress out of an unoccupied dorm room and delivered it as a gift to his hard-working sugar plum.

She found time for her real passion, the one thing she claimed made her feel alive. It usually came sometime around midnight on the vibrating air in front of banks of speakers. It was the frantic bedlam that moved her body from the inside, and the pounding bass that took her breath away. Nine Inch Nails, Depeche Mode, OMD, and Ministry were some of her favorites. And the passion she felt for them was the reason she had always danced alone. A partner, she said, got in the way of the magnificent feeling she got from the fusion of sound and light.

“
And then I danced with you,” she told Chase on the way home from breaking the news of their marriage, and he loved her more than ever.

They danced and made love, while Chase still tried to keep an eye on the Iranians. But they'd apparently been especially frightened by their City Gardens encounter with the bouncers. They were playing more living room videogames than ever.
Fine
, thought Chase.

***

Everything had been falling into place until an email assignment landed in Chase's inbox. It was a feature story on a Haitian pot farmer who was raising money for a run at the presidency.

Mitra's dad had insisted on going with them to the Philadelphia airport, scooting them along in his little pickup down Route 95 with Chase's stuffed backpack bouncing around in the back bed. Doctor Bam worried about Mitra's ability to drive because she'd been crying steadily ever since Chase agreed to the assignment.

“
You have to come back,” she managed to say from the middle of the front seat. Chase's shirt was wet from her tears. “You can't go there and get killed. We just got married.”

“
I promise I'll be fine.”

“
Haiti is a shit place, lousy murderers running around everywhere,” Doctor Bam announced, which made his daughter cry more. They bounded down the highway in relative silence, past the Betsy Ross and Benjamin Franklin Bridges, past the baseball stadium and the Naval Shipyard, and on to the airport exit.

In the terminal Doctor Bam shook Chase's hand, then gave the couple room to say their goodbyes. He went to poke around at a postcard display, while Mitra crushed Chase with a long, last hug.

“
You have to come back. Promise you'll come back to me.”

Chase's plane was called for boarding as he promised to return in one piece and gave her a final kiss. He hoisted his backpack over one shoulder and headed for the gate.

“
I love you,” she said from behind.

“
I love you, too.”

“
If he doesn't come back, you can marry a scientist,” Chase heard her dad say.