T.C. Boyle Stories

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  As we hurried into the entrance hall, dripping like jellyfish, the nawab, who had lost two more children in the interval between his summons and our arrival, came out to meet us, a distraught begum at his side. Servants sprang up like mushrooms after a rain, turbaned Sikhs with appropriately somber faces, house-boys in white, ladies-in-waiting with great dark staring eyes. “Mr. Beersley, I presume,” the nawab said, halting five paces from us and darting his eyes distractedly between Rupert’s puggree helmet and my plaid tam-o’-shanter.

  “The same,” answered Beersley, bowing curtly from the waist and stepping forward to seize the nawab’s hand. “Pleased, I’m sure,” he said, and then, before pausing either to introduce me or to pay his respects to the begum, he pointed to the wild-haired sadhu seated in the corner and praying over the yellowish flame of a dung fire. “And what precisely is the meaning of this?” he demanded.

  I should say at this juncture that Beersley, though undeniably brilliant, tended also to be somewhat mercurial, and I could see that something had set him off. Perhaps it was the beastly weather or the long and poorly accommodated trip, or perhaps he was feeling the strain of overwork, called out on this case as he was so soon after the rigorous mental exercise he’d put into the baffling case of the Cornucopia Killer of Cooch Behar. Whatever it was, I saw to my embarrassment that he was in one of his dark India- and Indian-hating moods, in which he is as likely to refer to a Sikh as a “diaper head” as he is to answer “Hello” on picking up the phone receiver.

  “Beg pardon?” the nawab said, looking puzzled.

  “This fellow over here in the corner, this muttering half-naked fakir—what precisely is his function?” Ignoring the shocked looks and dropped jaws of his auditors, Beersley rushed on, as if he were debating in a tavern. “What I mean to say, sir, is this: how can you expect me to take on a case of this nature when I find my very sensibilities affronted by this … this pandering to superstition and all the damnable mumbo jumbo that goes with it?”

  The beards of the Sikhs bristled, their eyes flared. The nawab, to his credit, made an effort to control himself, and, with his welcoming smile reduced to a tight grim compression of the lips, he explained that the holy man in the corner was engaged in the Vedic rite of the sacred fire, energizer and destroyer, one of the three sacred elements of the Hindu trinity. Twice a day, he would also drink of the pancha garia, composed in equal parts of the five gifts of the sacred cow: milk, curds, ghee, urine, and dung. The nawab had felt that the performance of these sacred rites might help cleanse and purify his house against the plague that had assailed it.

  Beersley listened to all this with his lip curled in a sneer, then muttered “Humbug” under his breath. The room was silent. I shuffled my feet uneasily. The begum fastened me with the sort of look reserved for the deviates one encounters in the Bois de Boulogne, and the nawab’s expression arranged itself in an unmistakable scowl.

  “’Do not all charms fly / At the mere touch of cold philosophy?’” Beersley said, and then turned abruptly on his heel and strode off in the direction the lackey had taken with our baggage.

  In the morning, Beersley (who had refused the previous evening to attend the dinner the nawab had arranged in his honor, complaining of fatigue and wishing only that a bit of yogurt and a bowl of opium be sent up to his room) assembled all the principals outside the heavy mahogany door to the nawab’s library. The eighteen remaining children were queued up to be interviewed separately, the nawab and begum were grilled in my presence as if they were pickpockets apprehended on the docks at Leeds, the night nurses, watchmen, chauffeurs, Sikhs, gardeners, cooks, and bottle washers were subject to a battery of questions on subjects ranging from their sexual habits, through recurring dreams and feelings about their mothers, to their recollections of Edward’s coronation and their perceptions as to the proper use of the nine iron. Finally, toward the end of the day, as the air rose from the gutters in a streaming miasma and the punkah wallah fell asleep over his task, Miss Compton-Divot was ushered into the room.

  Immediately a change came over Beersley. Where he’d been officious, domineering, as devious, threatening, and assured as one of the czar’s secret police, he now flushed to his very ears, groped after his words, and seemed confused. I’d never seen anything like it. Beersley was known for his composure, his stoicism, his relentless pursuit of the evidence under even the most distracting circumstances. Even during the bloody and harrowing case of the Tiger’s Paw (in which Beersley ultimately deduced that the killer was dispatching his victims with the detached and taxidermically preserved paw of the rare golden tiger of Hyderabad), while the victims howled their death agony from the courtyard and whole families ran about in terror and confusion, he never flinched from his strenuous examination of the chief suspects. And now, here he was, in the presence of a comely russet-haired lass from Hertfordshire, as tongue-tied as a schoolboy.

  “Miss Compton-Divot,” I said, to break the awkward silence. “May I present the celebrated Mr. Rupert Beersley?”

  She curtsied and smiled like a plate of buttered scones.

  “And may I take this opportunity to introduce myself as well?” I continued, taking her hand. “Sergeant-Major Plantagenet Randolph, retired, at your service. Please have a seat.”

  I waited for Beersley to begin, but he said nothing, merely sitting there and fixing the governess with a vacuous, slack-jawed gaze. She blushed prettily and looked down to smooth her dress and arrange her petticoats. After an interval, Beersley murmured, “’And soon his eyes had drunk her beauty up, / Leaving no drop in the bewildering cup, / And still the cup was full.’”

  And that was it; he had no more to say. I prompted him, but he wouldn’t be moved. Miss Compton-Divot, feeling, I think, the meaning of his stare, began to titter and twist the fabric of the dress in her hands. Finally, heaving an exhausted sigh and thinking ahead to dinner and the nawab’s fine Lisbon port, which I’d been pleased to sample the previous evening, I showed her out of the room.

  That night, little Govind, aged three and a half, disappeared without a trace.

  I found Beersley in the garden the following morning, bending close over a spray of blood-red orchids. Had he found something? I hurried up to him, certain he’d uncovered the minute but crucial bit of evidence from which the entire case would unravel like a skein of yarn, as when he’d determined the identity of the guilty party in the Srinagar Strangler case from a single strand of hair found among countless thousands of others in a barber’s refuse bin. Or when an improperly canceled stamp led him to the Benares Blackmailer. Or when half a gram’s worth of flaked skin painstakingly sifted from the faded homespun loincloth of a murdered harijan put him on the trail of the Leaping Leper of Mangalore. “Beersley,” I spurted in a barely suppressed yelp of excitement, “are you on to something, old boy?”

  I was in for a shock. When he turned to me, I saw that the lucid reptilian sheen of his eyes had been replaced by a dull glaze: I might have been staring into the face of some old duffer in St. James’s Park rather than that of the most brilliant detective in all of Anglo-India. He merely lifted the corners of his mouth in a vapid smile and then turned back to the orchids, snuffing them with his great glorious nostrils like a cow up to his hocks in clover. It was the sun, I was sure of it. Or a touch of the malaria he’d picked up in Burma in ‘ought-two.

  “Rupert!” I snapped. “Come out of it, old boy!” And then—rather roughly, I must admit—I led him to a bench in the shade of a banyan tree. The sun slammed through the leaves like a mallet. From the near distance came the anguished stentorian cries of the nawab’s prize pachyderms calling out for water. “Beersley,” I said, turning him toward me, “is it the fever? Can I get you a glass of water?”

  His eyes remained fixed on a point over my left shoulder, his lips barely moved. “’Some demon’s mistress,’” he murmured, “’or the demon’s self.’”

  “Talk sense!” I shouted, becoming ever more alarmed and annoyed. Here we’d been
in Sivani-Hoota for some two days and we’d advanced not a step in solving the case, while children continued to disappear under our very noses. I was about to remonstrate further when I noted the clay pipe protruding from his breast pocket—and then the unmistakable odor of incinerated opium. It all became clear in that instant: he’d been up through the night, numbing his perceptions with bowl after bowl of the narcotizing drug. Something had disturbed him deeply, there was no doubt about it.

  I led him straightaway to his suite of rooms in the palace’s east end and called for quinine water and hot tea. For hours, through the long, dreadful, heat-prostrated afternoon, I walked him up and down the floor, forcing the blood to wash through his veins, clear his perceptions, and resharpen his wits. By teatime he was able to sit back in an easy chair, cross his legs in the characteristic brisk manner, and unburden himself. “It’s the governess,” he croaked, “that damnable little temptress, that hussy: she’s bewitched me.”

  I was thunderstruck. He might as easily have confessed that he was a homosexual or the Prince of Wales in disguise. “You don’t mean to say that some … some trifling sexual dalliance is going to come between Rupert Beersley and the pursuit of a criminal case?” My color was high, I’m sure, and my voice hot with outrage.

  “No, no, no—you don’t understand,” he said, fixing me as of old with that keen insolent gaze. “Think back, Planty,” he said, lifting the teacup to his lips. “Don’t you remember the state I was in when I first came to you?”

  Could I ever forget? Twenty-two or -three, straight as a ramrod, thin as a whippet, the pointed nose and outsized ears accentuated by a face wasted with rigor, he’d been so silent those first months he might as well have entered the Carthusian monastery in Grenoble as the India Corps. There’d been something eating at him then, some deep canker of the soul or heart that had driven him into exile on the subcontinent he so detested. Later, much later, he’d told me. It had been a woman, daughter of a Hertford squire: on the eve of their wedding she’d thrown him over for another man. “Yes,” I said, “of course I remember.”

  He uncoiled himself from the chair, set down the teacup, and strode to the window. Below, on the polo maidan, the nawab and half a dozen of his retainers glided to and fro on pampered Arabians while the westering sun fell into the grip of a band of monsoon clouds. Beersley gazed out on the scene for half a moment, then turned to me with an emotion twenty years dead quivering in those magnificent nostrils. “Elspeth,” he said, his voice catching. “She’s her daughter.”

  That evening the nawab threw a sumptuous entertainment. There was music, dancing, a display of moving lights. Turbaned Sikhs poured French wines, jugglers juggled, the begum beamed, and platter after platter of fine, toothsome morsels was set before us. I’d convinced Beersley to overcome his antipathy to native culture and accept the invitation, as a means both of drawing him out of his funk and of placating the nawab. As we were making our way into the banquet room, however, Beersley had suddenly stopped short and seized my arm. Mr. Bagwas and Mr. Patel were following close on our heels and nearly collided with us, so abruptly did we stop; Beersley waited for them to pass, then indicated a marble bench in the courtyard to our left. When we were alone he asked if I’d seen Miss Compton-Divot as we’d crossed the foyer on our way in.

  “Why, yes,” I said. She’d been dressed in native costume—a saffron-colored sari and hemp sandals—and had pulled the ginger hair back from her forehead in the way of the Brahman women.

  “Did you notice anything peculiar?”

  “No, not a bit,” I said. “A charming girl really, nothing more.”

  “Tell me,” he demanded, the old cutting edge restored to his voice, “if you didn’t see her bent over the fakir for a moment—just the hair of a moment—as we stepped through the door.”

  “Well, yes, yes, old boy, I suppose I did. What of it?”

  “Nothing, perhaps. But—”

  At that moment we were interrupted by Mr. Bagwas, who stood grinning before us. “Most reverend gentlemen,” he said, drawing back his lips in an idiotic grin that showed off the reddened stumps of teeth ravaged over the years by the filthy habit of betel-nut chewing, “the nawab awaits.”

  We were ushered to the nawab’s table and given the place of honor beside the nawab and his begum, several of the older children, Messrs. Bagwas and Patel, the nawab’s two former wives, six of his current concubines, and the keeper of the sacred monkeys. Miss Compton-Divot, I quickly ascertained”, was not present. I thought it odd, but soon forgot all about her, as we applauded the jugglers, acrobats, musicians, temple dancers, and trained bears until the night began to grow old. It was then that the nawab rose heavily to his feet, waved his hands for silence, and haw-hawed a bit before making a brief speech. “Even in the darkest hour shines a light,” he said, the customary fat pout of his lips giving way to a wistful grin. “What I mean to say, damn it, is that the begum here is pregnant, gravid, heavy with child, that even when we find ourselves swallowed up in grief over our lost lambs we discover that there is a bun in the oven after all.”

  Beersley gave a snort of withering contempt and was about, I’m sure, to expatiate on the fatuity of the native mind and its lack of proportion and balance—not to mention rigor, discipline, and concentration—when the whole party was thrown into an uproar by a sudden ululating shriek emanating from the direction of the nursery. My companion was up like a hound and out the door before anyone else in the room could so much as set down a water glass. Though I tend to stoutness myself and am rather shorter of breath than I was in my military days, I was nevertheless the fourth or fifth man out the doorway, down the corridor, across the courtyard, and up the jade steps to the children’s nursery.

  When I got there, heaving for breath and with the sweat standing out on my forehead, I found Beersley kneeling over the prostrate form of one of the watchmen, from between whose scapulae protruded the hilt of a cheap ten-penny nail file. The children had retreated screaming to the far end of the dormitory, where they clutched one another’s nightgowns in terror. “Poison,” Beersley said with a profound disgust at the crudity of the killer’s method as he slipped the nail file from its fatal groove. A single sniff of its bloody, sharpened point bore him out. He carefully wrapped the thing in his handkerchief, stowed it away in his breast pocket, and then leaped to his feet. “The children!” he cried. “Quickly now, line them up and count them!”

  The nawab stood bewildered in the doorway; the begum went pale and fell to her knees while her retainers wrung their hands in distress and the children shuffled about confusedly, their faces tear-stained, their nightgowns a collision of sad airy clouds. And then all at once Miss Compton-Divot appeared, striding the length of the room to gather up two of her smaller wards in her lovely arms. “One,” she began, “two, three, four …” It wasn’t until several hours later that we understood what had happened. The murder in the dormitory had been a ruse. A diversion. Vallabhbhi Shiva, aged sixteen, a plump, oleaginous boy who’d sat directly across from Beersley and me during the entertainment, was nowhere to be found.

  “A concentrate of the venom of the banded krait,” Beersley said, holding a test tube up to the light. It was early, not yet 9:00 A.M., and the room reeked of opium fumes. “Nasty stuff, Planty—works on the central nervous system. I calculate there was enough of it smeared on the nether end of that nail file to dispatch half the unwashables in Delhi and give the nawab’s prize pachyderms the runs for a week.”

  I fell into an armchair draped with one of my companion’s Oriental dressing gowns. “Monstrous,” was all I could say.

  Beersley’s eyes were lidded with the weight of the opium. His speech was slow; and yet even that powerful soporific couldn’t suppress the excitement in his voice. “Don’t you see, old boy—she’s solved the case for us.”

  “Who?”

  “The Lamia. It’s a little lesson in appearance and reality. Serpent’s venom indeed, the little vixen.” And then he was quoting: �
�‘She was a gordian shape of dazzling hue, / Vermilion-spotted, golden, green, and blue …’ Don’t you see?”

  “No, Beersley,” I said, rising to my feet rather angrily and crossing the room to where the clay pipe lay on the dressing table, “no, I’m afraid I don’t.”

  “It’s the motive that puzzles me,” he said, musing over the vial in his hand as I snatched the clay pipe from the table and stoutly snapped it in two. He barely noticed. All at once he was holding the nail file up before my face, cradling it carefully in its linen nest. “Do you have any idea where this was manufactured, old boy?”

  I’d been about to turn on him and tell him he was off his head, about to curse his narcotizing, his non sequiturs, and the incessant bloody poetry-quoting that had me at my wits’ end, but he caught me up short. “What?”

  “The nail file, old fellow.”

  “Well, er, no. I hadn’t really thought much about it.”

  He closed his eyes for a moment, exposing the peculiar deep-violet coloration of his eyelids. “Badham and Son, Manufacturers,” he said in a monotone, as if he were reading an advertisement. “Implements for Manicure and Pedicure, Number 17, Parsonage Lane”—and here he paused to flash open his eyes so that I felt them seize me like a pair of pincers—“Hertford.”

  Again I was thunderstruck. “But you don’t mean to say that … that you suspect—?”

  My conjecture was cut short by a sudden but deferential rap at the door. “Entrez,” Beersley called, the sneer he cultivated for conducting interrogations or dealing with natives and underlings scalloping his upper lip. The door swung to and a pair of shrunken little houseboys bowed into the room with our breakfast. Beersley, characteristically indifferent to the native distaste for preparing or consuming meat, had ordered kidneys, rashers, eggs, and toast with a pot of tea, jam, and catsup. He moved forward to the table, allowed himself to be seated, and then called rather sharply to the retreating form of the first servant. “You there,” he said, pushing his plate away. The servant wheeled round as if he’d been shot, exchanged a stricken look with his compatriot stationed behind the table, and bowed low. “I want the nawab’s food taster up here tout de suite—within the minute. Understand?”