It was a pretty common practice in the CIA for officers to bring their spouses on board. Often they worked in the same office, and between the two of them got twice the pay for doing what was frequently substantially less than two jobs.
“That was when we were stationed in Moscow and raising two kids. And I needed an assistant I could trust.”
“Someone you could trust, but who had no exper—”
“There’s no need to go insulting my wife, Sava.”
“Just figure it out, Ted. Those are my terms.”
18
Daria was on her way to the neighborhood supermarket that evening when her cell rang.
“Hey,” said Mark. “How’s it going?”
Because she was using one hand to hold her phone to her ear, it was a struggle for her to push the stroller straight over the bumpy sidewalk. “Fine. Well, not fine, really. She still has a diaper rash and she’s cranky.” After being up half the night before with Lila and with her all day, Daria was cranky too. “I walked around with her too much. Sorry.”
It embarrassed her that, after being around small kids so much at the orphanages, she would have screwed up with her own. But most of the kids at the orphanages were older. And she wasn’t responsible for changing their diapers.
“Don’t be sorry.”
“Our neighbor downstairs said I should try egg whites. As in smear the egg whites all over her butt.”
Egg whites! Sure, why not baste her baby’s bottom as if it were a pie shell? It sounded to Daria like a good way to give Lila salmonella poisoning. Before Lila had been born, she’d researched diaper creams and had come up with three that she thought were the best. None had been available in any of the pharmacies in Bishkek, so she’d had to settle for a Chinese-made brand that she worried might have radiator fluid in it.
“Yeah, let’s not do that,” said Mark. “Listen, I’ve got some bad news and some really good news.”
Daria checked the time. Mark was supposed to be in flight at the moment. “Where are you?”
“That’s the bad news part. I agreed to do a job for Kaufman.” A three-second silence, then, “Mark—”
“It might be related to what happened to Larry, otherwise I wouldn’t have said I’d do it. That airline sticker from Nakhchivan that you noticed, it’s had some ripple effects.”
“You already accepted this job?”
“I said I’d see what I could do over the next couple days.” Before she could object, he added, “I know, I know, the timing completely sucks.”
Another silence, then, “You didn’t think to maybe call me first? I mean, dealing with Larry, that I understood. But…” Daria shook her head. She’d known calls like this would come. Just as she knew there’d be times when her work would get busy and she’d need Mark to cover the home front. They’d talked about all that. But she hadn’t thought it would start up so soon after Lila had been born. “What kind of job?”
“An investigation of sorts.”
“Why do they need you?”
“I guess the guy they have on it now is running into some trouble.”
“What kind of trouble? And if he’s running into trouble, why wouldn’t you?” Upon not receiving an answer, Daria said, “Mark, I don’t—”
“Listen, the good news — make that the great news — is that the job is in Azerbaijan. I’ll be in Baku by tomorrow morning.” He neglected to mention that he’d be traveling to Baku, a mere three hundred miles southeast of Tbilisi, via Istanbul, which lay over eight hundred miles to the west. If the Russians really were after him, it would be better to stay moving, and to get out of Georgia sooner rather than later. And he’d feel safer sleeping on the plane than he would here at the airport, even in the secure zone. True, the Russians also had deep ties to Azerbaijan, but that was Mark’s turf as well; if anyone tried to follow him there, he’d lose them in no time.
“OK, now I’m confused.”
“Kaufman got our PNGs lifted, Daria. It was part of the deal I struck with him. We can go back to Azerbaijan. We can raise Lila in Baku.”
The news was so unexpected that Daria didn’t know what to say. But she could hear the excitement in Mark’s voice, and he wasn’t an easily excitable guy. And she knew how much he loved Baku. She didn’t want to be a downer. Besides, they’d talked before about the possibility of moving back to Baku if their PNGs ever got lifted, and she’d agreed she could run her foundation from there, maybe expand into helping orphanages on that side of the Caspian.
But those talks had always been theoretical, because Mark had never been able to make any headway with the Azeris on getting his PNG, much less hers, lifted. “I thought Kaufman hated me?”
“I told him that I wouldn’t take the job unless we both could resettle in Baku.”
“Oh. Thanks.”
A year earlier, she might have greeted the news with more enthusiasm. She’d come to Bishkek not because she’d harbored any particular fondness for the city, or for Kyrgyzstan, but just because it happened to be close to some of the orphanages she’d arranged to help fund. She’d originally viewed the move as temporary, while she did penance for past misdeeds and figured out what to do with the rest of her life. But her penance had become her passion. She took immense satisfaction from interacting with the kids, and working with Nazira, and managing a foundation that was now funded by real donors instead of just money she’d wheedled out of the CIA.
And at the same time, she’d come to like Bishkek. She liked the leafy parks, the nearby mountains, and summer trips to Lake Issyk-Kul. And she sensed that undertaking a major move — Baku was a thousand miles away — on top of running her foundation and raising Lila would be a recipe for stress and anxiety.
“Baku has got so much more going for it than Bishkek. We’ll have better schools—”
“And if Lila never says she wants to be president she might even be able to attend them.”
Daria was referring to an incident she and Mark had discussed, where a young student in Azerbaijan had been asked what he wanted to be when he grew up and he’d made the mistake of saying he wanted to be president. The student had been told there was only one president, and that the position was taken; the student’s parents had been taken to task for having raised a child to would dare utter such an effrontery. As a result of the attention, the child had been pulled from the school.
“She’ll be in a private school. We’ll have better health care—”
“People in Azerbaijan go to Iran for health care.”
“Used to go to Iran. It’s getting better in Baku. A lot better. All the oil money, you know? They’re building a brand new hospital downtown, and the private clinics, a couple of them are great.” Then, sounding a little less flip and a little more annoyed, “I thought we’d talked about this.”
“Yeah, we did.” But that had been a year ago, thought Daria. When moving to Baku had been a theoretical possibility instead of a real one.
“I thought you said it wouldn’t be a big deal, that you could run your foundation from there.”
Daria had never been crazy about Baku. It was a big city — over two million people — and surrounded by desert. But Baku was definitely more cosmopolitan than Bishkek and there was a ton more money sloshing around there, which meant far more modern amenities. She had no interest in patronizing the Gucci and Tiffany stores in downtown Baku, but figured it was a pretty safe bet that the mothers who did weren’t basting their baby’s asses with egg whites. And there was no denying that the health care system in Kyrgyzstan was abysmal. Before Lila, she hadn’t given it a second thought. She knew the risks — millions of people around the world dealt with lousy health care systems, she and Mark could too — but what if Lila got sick? Was it fair to put her at risk?