I gave her one and lit it. She inhaled, letting the smoke trickle from her nose. Then she took my arm and led me to a rattan sofa with palm-print upholstery. We sat down. She was facing me with her legs tucked under her and her bare knees touching my seersuckers about six inches above the knee. The rules of the game had changed.
She said, “Why did you come to India?” Before I could answer, she went on, “Because if you expected to blackmail me, that’s stupid. You had your chance before the body was disposed of. You let us do it. You practically helped us. Now that it has been disposed of, there is no possible way of connecting us with it.”
“Is that what you told your husband?”
She sighed. “My husband. Of course, it would have to be my husband. How much buys you off, Mr. Drum?”
I said, “I wasn’t thinking in terms of money.” Then came the part which, according to the reports I’d had in Washington, was supposed to make her roll over on the sofa. I grabbed her wrist and pulled her toward me. She came up on her knees against me. I kissed her. Her lips parted, and she began to squirm. It was nice work, but I didn’t enjoy it. I began to think that was all Sprayregan had found, all he had died for.
Then her bare arm went around my neck. Her fingers moved in the short hairs at the nape of my neck.
And she jabbed the glowing cigarette against my skin. I jumped only half a mile.
We both stood up. She was panting, but smiling too. I rubbed the back of my neck. The smile wasn’t for me. After a while she stopped smiling. There was controlled fury in her voice when she spoke. “I told you I am a Malabar woman,” she said. “A Malabar woman is not made love to. A Malabar woman makes love. In the time of my grandmother, the women of Malabar took many husbands. Today it is not legal, but we are still the women of Malabar. Isn’t that what your Mr. Sprayregan failed to understand?”
I shrugged. “He wasn’t that dumb,” I said. “He wasn’t nearly as interested in your mating instincts as he was in your relations with Ranjit Ambedkar.”
She didn’t get it, or pretended not to. She continued on in the same tack. “Among the Malabese, there is no such thing as an over-sexed woman. Look at me, Mr. Drum.” It was easy. “I like food, but you wouldn’t call me overweight, would you? I enjoy sex, but … you see? Now, what was it you were going to tell my husband? He knows I am a woman of Malabar. He knows all about the women of Malabar. He understands me. Well?”
I grinned at her. “We’re barking up two different trees, baby. Since we both know it, why don’t we stop playing around and get down to business?”
She took the pack of cigarettes from the breast pocket of my seersucker jacket and lit another one for herself. “Yes, why don’t we?” I was ready for almost anything, but not for what followed. Knowing nothing except that Sprayregan had stumbled onto something he didn’t understand, something in which Sumitra Mojindar and Ambedkar were involved, I had taken the ball as far as I could. I had her worried, I hoped. The rest was up to her. She said:
“The day before you flew to India, Mr. Drum, my husband’s office received a call from Mr. Stewart Hoffman Varley, Sr. Mr. Varley wanted a visa cleared through for you at once. The purpose of your visit to India, Mr. Varley said, was unofficially connected with the United States Observer team at the Benares Conference. He did not say more, but it satisfied my husband. That is how you received your visa.
“Further than that, Mr. Drum, I can only guess. But if, as you say, my penchant—misunderstood though it is—is known in Washington, so is the penchant of the U.S. Observer here at Benares, Mr. Stewart Hoffman Varley, Jr. May I hazard a guess that the older Varley hired you to watch after his son? May I further hazard that your visit here is entirely extracurricular, that you hold me responsible for the death of a man I never even met and a woman who, had she not been stopped, might have killed me, and that if, indeed, this man Sprayregan uncovered anything which could conceivably have me worried, you don’t have the slightest idea as to its nature?
“In short, Mr. Drum, you can just get out of here. You are a cheap man on a cheap mission. You don’t frighten me at all.” She was so close to the truth, and knew she was so close, she could afford to be arrogant. Her eyes were banked amber fires flecked with yellow, but under the surface calm they were deadly. I still had something, though. At least I thought I did. I said:
“Aren’t you forgetting your husband?”
She tried a sneer on for size. It must have fit because she went on wearing it. “You said you were barking up a tree, Mr. Drum. You are. But you did not quote the ldiom of your language accurately. You’re barking up a tree. It’s the wrong tree, so don’t you think it’s time we took it away from you?”
I didn’t quite say, “Oh yeah?”—but she was on her way to reducing me to that. She continued, controlling her voice now by holding it down to a tight whisper:
“Each year has seen my husband wedded more firmly to the doctrines of the Mahatma. For some time now that has come to include the shunning of all physical desire. Such a state of desirelessness, Mr. Drum, includes the shunning of sexual desire, even in a married man. My husband regrets that I cannot follow him in his search for what we call moksha, but as I have said, he knows I am a Malabar woman. I have not slept with my husband for two years, Mr. Drum. I tell you this so you will know, once and for all, that far from being blind to what I’m sure you have regarded as my extramarital escapades. he accepts them as necessary.
“So, Mr. Drum, you see you have nothing to tell my husband that he doesn’t already know. Now, will you get out of here with your cheap insinuations, or shall I call the chokidar and have you thrown out?”
She went to the door. I followed her docilely. All I had left was what Mojindar had seen in Washington, and what he hadn’t seen when he came out of his seizure. But it was too damned little. I didn’t want to see Mojindar now. It wasn’t enough to start a conversation with. It was less than nothing unless I could learn—and establish—why Sprayregan’s snooping had worried Ambedkar, or whoever the little Eton-rowing-crew killer took his orders from, to the point of murder.
As I reached the door, it opened. Gaganvihari Mojindar came in wearing a tight-buttoned jacket and jodhpurs, with a Gandhi hat on his white hair and a briefcase in his hand. He gave Sumitra a fatherly forehead kiss and looked with faint disapproval at the costume she wore.
Mojindar looked at me with polite curiosity. “Pardon me,” he said, “but haven’t we met before?”
“Yes,” I said.
He waited. There was mocking laughter in Sumitra’s eyes.
“The hell with it,” I said. “They’d tell you it was in a dream.”
I got out of there and walked up the street. The chokidar leaned on his rifle, watching me drive away.
12.
FIVE or six bluebottle flies and Marianne Wilder were waiting for me in my hotel room at the Pilgrim Hotel. The flies were the thing you remembered most about Benares, after the stifling heat. Benares may have been an unhealthy city for humans, but it was great for flies. They were fat and glossy, and seemed to buzz around with all the insolence of the sacred cows’ lowing. They fed on carrion, and since here in Benares carrion usually meant human carrion, they made you feel very mortal.
“I thought you were never coming back,” Marianne said.
“If that’s an invitation to dinner, it’s accepted. But I thought by now you’d have Stewart Varley blurting out act three of his life story.”
Marianne didn’t, smile. Some of the perkiness had gone out of her, but in the steady ninety-degree heat that was understandable. She said, “He isn’t here.”
“It’s a free country—for Americans. Where’d he go?”
She lit a cigarette. Her hands shook a little, so I got her a salt tablet from the wall dispenser and made her drink it down with water. “Heat exhaustion,” I said. “It can creep up on you in a place like this.” But she made a face anyway.
She admitted she felt better. Then she said, “About an hour and
a half ago the sadhu’s girl dropped by at the hotel looking for Mr. Varley. We were in his room sharing spiked lemon squash and talking. I started pumping him down at the bar, but you can imagine how it is with other reporters poking around.”
I mopped the sweat off my face with an already damp handkerchief and sat down on the bed. A bluebottle dive-bombed me, learning to its surprise that I was still alive, and flew disdainfully out, the window. I looked at Marianne, who was lighting a second cigarette with the butt of the first.
“Anyhow, we went upstairs and in a few minutes the sadhu’s girl came. She brought a pair of dhotis and a white linen shirt for Mr. Varley. She never said a word, but he seemed very excited. He went behind a screen and changed. Except that his coloring was wrong, he looked like an upper-caste Hindu when he came out, and an ascetic one at that. You know, with his gaunt, serious face and all?”
“He just took off with the girl? Without saying anything?”
“It was eerie. I think the girl was dumb. I mean, literally—can’t speak. He must have thought he wasn’t supposed to talk because she wasn’t, as if it was some kind of religious ritual. She looked at him in the dhotis and open shirt, and nodded. I tried to get him to wait, at least until you came back. He hardly even heard me. I ran downstairs after them. They didn’t try to hide from me. They didn’t have to. The crowd swallowed them up.”
I sat perfectly still while she spoke, as you do when it is very hot and you can’t seem to stop sweating. But sweat kept running down my face, my shirt felt sticky, and I probably could have fried an egg on the back of my neck.
I stripped to the waist and washed myself with tepid water from the cold tap, changed my shirt, and commenced sweating as soon as I put the new one on.
Marianne said, quite ingenuously, “You’ve got about the nicest build I’ve ever seen.”
At first I didn’t know what to say. Then I grinned at her, foolishly probably. Then I said, “Good thing. Makes up for my face.”
Marianne ogled me. “I think you have a very nice face. Very masculine.” I stood there. Marianne stared at me gravely, and giggled. “You should see your face now. You look so confused. You almost look shy. Well, what did you expect? Don’t you think it’s only fair a gal does some leering of her own once in a while?”
I said, “If this is a proposal—”
“What’s the matter, didn’t you ever ogle a gal without proposing to her?” She came over to me and lightly brushed her lips across my cheek. “Here. That’s what it was all leading up to. I like you. I like you, Chet. It doesn’t mean I’m proposing. It doesn’t even mean I want to go to bed with you—at the moment. My goodness, I do believe you’re blushing.”
It was the heat, of course. She stood back from me. I didn’t try to lay a hand on her. We looked at each other and started laughing. Then Marianne said, “And besides, I had an ulterior motive. I wanted you to count ten—at least ten—before you decided what you were going to do about Stewart Varley. He’s searching for something desperately. You know that, don’t you?”
“His wife calls it faith. I think it depends on how you define faith. I think he’s looking for a man he’s lost somewhere along the line. Himself.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Go after him. And see if I can at least find out where to get my hands on him.”
A vertical furrow appeared above Marianne’s pert nose. “Isn’t that kind of presumptuous on your part?”
“It’s what I’m being paid for.”
“He’s a grown man now. He shaves himself and everything.”
“His wife’s a grown woman. With a pretty good idea of how she wants to spend her money.”
“I don’t think I like you so much now.”
“Listen, kid. You didn’t see him in action the way I did. There’s a boy who’s going to get himself hurt. At least half of it is because he wants to be hurt. I’d rather earn my money looking af—ah, the hell with it. You going to let me use that overgrown motor scooter you call a car or do I phone down for a cab?”
“If I come along you can use it.”
I said that would be all right. Ten minutes later we were driving out on the Panch Kosi.
From the Panch Kosi Holy Man’s hill, you could see the blood-red sun-track on the Ganges three miles away. At the hour of sunset, the Panch Kosi was not crowded. The dust had settled. It was red. Even the sadhu’s loin cloth and the robe the girl wore looked almost the color of blood.
Fifteen or twenty disciples of the sadhu clustered around the platform of the pipal tree. The sadhu’s immobility and the utter calm of the sunset hour gripped them. They were like statues carved from the matrix of time.
A few yards off, beyond a stand of stunted hill bamboo, a smaller clot of disciples were wrapping a dead man in a white shroud. Very softly they were chanting the Hindu hymn for the dead. Ram nam sat hai, satya bol gat hai.… After a while they carried the corpse over to the pipal tree, and four of them held it up as high as they could. The sadhu’s girl touched the holy man’s lips with her hand, and touched the dead man’s shroud. Then the mourners marched off with the small shrouded figure and pretty soon all you could see was their dust on the Panch Kosi.
As long as we stood there and minded our own business, no one bothered us. Darkness came quickly, and time returned with it. Some of the disciples lit a fire, there was the odor of tamarind and lentils, something fluttered by overhead and a nightjar sang its song. After a long time the sadhu’s girl went down to the cooking fire. She got a bowl for the Sadhu. She fed him and returned to the fire a second time, filling the bowl for herself and squatting a little way from the fire to eat.
“I’m going over there,” I told Marianne. “Stay in the car.”
“I—”
“Please don’t argue. You’ll stay?”
Far away, I heard the sound of a car. It either stopped or drove out of hearing. “Why should I, darn it?” Marianne protested.
I took her arm. We walked back toward the little Fiat. “Well, is somebody I don’t know about paying you to protect me?” she asked angrily.
“Fellow named Drum,” I said lightly. “He likes you.”
She pulled her arm away from me, but got into the car. She stuck her head out the rolled-down window to say something else. Her face was only a vague shape in the darkness. Before she could talk I kissed her lips. Her palms touched my cheeks lightly. Her lips clung. Then she drew back inside the car. A match flared. Her eyes looked troubled in its light. She lit a cigarette and blew the match out with a plume of smoke.
“Just be careful, you great big lug,” she said.
I went up the hill toward the cooking fire.
The sadhu’s girl was still sitting by herself. If the others heard me coming, they didn’t do anything about it. The girl was sitting up staring through a screen of hill bamboo at the fire. Her eyes gleamed with reflected firelight.
She jumped up like a startled jungle animal. She crouched there, glaring a little wildly.
“Don’t be frightened,” I said. “Please don’t be. I’m not going to hurt you. I just want to talk. Do you understand English?”
She opened her mouth. I thought she was going to yell for help. It was warm, but a shiver seemed to pass over her body. She didn’t make a sound and I remembered that Marianne thought she was mute.
“If you can understand what I’m saying, just nod your head,” I said.
Her eyes opened wider. She nodded.
“You took somebody out here from. Benares,” I said, speaking slowly. “He was a friend of mine. Did you bring him to the sadhu?”
She nodded again.
“Where is he now?”
She stared at me.
“Do you know where he is?”
She nodded.
“But you don’t want to tell me?”
A wind ruffled the flames and a shadow passed over her face. Then she nodded her head.
“Does he want to be—where he is?”
Again she nodded.
“Do you live here?” I asked. “Do you sleep here?”
She looked at me blankly.
“Or do you live in Benares?”
Her head moved up and down.
“And you can come and go as you wish?”
She could. I said, “You’ll be seeing him again, the one you brought?”
She nodded.
“I am his friend. My name is Drum. Can you write?”
She looked at me haughtily, then beckoned with her slim hand. I went over to her. She squatted and with a twig traced something in the sand. She had written Drum.
“Good. That’s my name. Remember it. I’m staying at the same hotel—the Pilgrim. If you need me, if he needs me—”
There was a sound at the fire. A voice called: “Aruna. Aruna!”
She got up quickly, and touched my arm, and looked into my eyes. She nodded her head earnestly, pointing down toward the Pilgrim Road. Heavy footsteps crunched across the sand and the matted chaff of hill bamboo. I ducked out of the circle of firelight and went swiftly down the hill.
When I reached the car, Marianne was gone.
At first I figured she had walked off into the darkness a few yards. I called her name softly, then louder. Fear clutched at my throat and made my voice thick. A nightjar mocked me with its song. I circled the car twice, aimlessly. I called her name again. Suddenly it occurred to me that she might have decided to go up the hill after all. I ran back up there.
The sadhu’s girl, Aruna, was poking the coals of the fire with a bamboo cane. Their fuel was dried dung, and the fire had an acrid stench. One of the men at the fire looked up at me. He climbed to his feet with an angry oath, came very close, glared at me, and shouted something. Aruna stood up quickly. She touched his shoulder. He jabbered something and she shook her head. Then he grabbed the bamboo cane out of her hand and swung it at me. It whipped down across my shoulder, whistling as it came. He lifted it to strike again.
I caught his wrist and forced it back. He was a big man, but his bony wrist was narrow and delicate. He cried out as I took the cane away from him.
Killers Are My Meat Page 9
