Killers Are My Meat

by Stephen Marlowe

  Ambedkar had ripped the blouse of her rose dress down to her waist. Her brassiere was torn and hung from one shoulder strap. Her skin gleamed with sweat, and so did Ambedkar’s. She swayed. Long red welts marred her shoulders. One of her ears was bloody.

  Ambedkar, who stood alongside her wearing only a pair of white dhotis and now not looking like a member of the Eton rowing crew at all, reached up as if he wanted to pluck something from the air over his head, going up on his toes gracefully and for maximum leverage in a well-learned rhythm, then swung his arm down in a blurring motion that whipped a thin green switch of bamboo down across Marianne’s bare back.

  I reached him before he could raise his arm again. He started to turn toward me. He had known I was there, of course. They had wanted me to see. It was why they had brought me.

  Rukmini bellowed a warning. Fear twisted the expectant look loose from Ambedkar’s face. I grabbed the bamboo switch. It was light and springy and whistled as I snapped it across his face and then backhanded it the other way, raising a welt on both his cheeks.

  He cried out in surprise and pain. Torchlight raised Rukmini’s shadow over us. I pivoted as he swung his forearm in a harmless-looking little arc. He held a weighted sap in his hand. It hit my biceps and instantly my right arm went dead. I dropped the bamboo switch and drove my left fist into Rukmini’s stomach. He bent over. The natural thing to do was end it by following through with your right. Habit made me try it. My right arm wouldn’t respond. While I tried to move it, Rukmini, his mouth open and his face gray with pain, deftly struck my left elbow with the sap. It sent an electric shock through my arm and left it as useless as the other one.

  I saw Marianne on her knees again, with her head hanging forward. I went for Rukmini the only way I could, with my head lowered. He stood off and measured me, and then he hit me. It didn’t seem to hurt much. It never does when you’re that mad. Later my jaw ached and swelled up some, so I guess that was where he hit me.

  I felt outraged when I wound up on my back. I began to get up slowly. Rukmini was going to walk on my face when Ambedkar called him off.

  For a while they argued in an echo chamber. Then the echo chamber went away and when it did they weren’t arguing any longer but talking together amicably. I looked up in time to see something wetly golden in the torchlight rushing down at me. It was the contents of a pail of water. I coughed and choked on it and felt the shock clear down to my toes. Then I rolled over, got up on my knees, and stood. My arms weren’t any good to me. Ambedkar smiled. At least I thought he smiled. I went for him.

  Rukmini got his arm around my waist and held me. Ambedkar went over to Marianne. He grabbed a handful of her hair and jerked her head up. He held the bamboo switch over it.

  “If you try being a hero again,” he said softly, “she gets it across the face.”

  Rukmini let go of me. I leaned against the wall.

  “Down,” Rukmini said.

  Unable to use my arms, I slid down the wall until I was seated at its base. By the time Ambedkar went out and returned with another pail of water, my left arm had begun to tingle. If it meant Marianne’s life and mine, and finding Stewart Varley, I might have been able to flex the fingers.

  Ambedkar stood over Marianne and poured the water out over her head. She coughed a little and bent her head and then jerked it up and started to cry. The water ran off her head and shoulders and trickled off her chin and down between her breasts. She cried softly and in despair. I turned over on my knees again and climbed to my feet and went over to her. Rukmini came toward us.

  “Let him,” Ambedkar said.

  When I touched her, she cowered away from me.

  “Marianne,” I said. Rukmini was standing over us with a revolver in his hand. Marianne’s skin was cold. I couldn’t even put my arms around her to warm her. I could just lean against her, touching her with a limp hand at the end of a numb arm. I was a great help. I said: “Marianne, it’s Chet.” And I lied: “Everything’s going to be all right now.”

  Her lips were trembling. “… hitting me,” she said. “I don’t know where he is. I honest …”

  “Marianne.”

  “Chet? Chet?”

  I knelt. She came against me, blubbering like a frightened child let out of a dark room. She made sounds and if the sounds were words I didn’t understand them. Her weight was on me. Her breathing changed. Her knight in shining armor had come for her. She was safe now. Safe but exhausted. She slept.

  “A touching scene,” Ambedkar said mockingly in his cultured tenor voice. It was exactly the right kind of cliché to bring me back to the torchlit room and Rukmini standing there with his revolver, and Ambedkar must have known it. “Are you ready to talk now?” he asked.

  “No. Get something she can use as a pillow. Get something to cover her with.”

  Ambedkar looked at Rukmini, who went out. It was a while before he returned with a filthy rag of a blanket. Ambedkar wanted to know what had taken so long, but Rukmini just shook his head and smiled while he spread the blanket on the floor and eased Marianne down on top of it. She stirred but did not waken. He stared at her. There was a patina of sweat glistening on his bald head and the shadowy fuzz of new hair. Like the Siva worshipper’s, his head was shaved. He looked up at me, grinned lewdly, and cupped one of Marianne’s bare breasts with a big hand. I tensed. A knife of hate twisted in my bowels. I had never wanted to kill a man as badly as I wanted to kill Rukmini then. He lifted his other hand and pointed the revolver at me. Then he shrugged and covered Marianne with the filthy blanket.

  He was still smiling, but now his smile had changed. It was a dreamy smile, a distant smile, a smile of remembered fantasies and unshared delight. Fondling Marianne meant nothing to him now. That had been for my benefit.

  “She gave you a shot?” Ambedkar asked sharply.

  Rukmini’s smile came back to Benares reluctantly. “She had the fix ready. Man, I needed that one.”

  “What’s the matter, couldn’t you wait a few minutes?”

  But Rukmini only smiled without malice. You couldn’t argue with him now. You couldn’t insult him. The worst you could do was stir him from his dreams, but not very far from them.

  Ambedkar said to me: “I do believe Miss Wilder told us the truth. She doesn’t know where Stewart Varley went. Does that surprise you? It surprises me. But of course, you know where he is, Mr. Drum. Don’t you?”

  “Is that what you’re after?” I said. “Varley?”

  “Where is he, Mr. Drum?”

  “I don’t know. We were looking for him ourselves. We haven’t found him.”

  “The very words Miss Wilder used. It’s a shame, then, what happened to her. Isn’t it?”

  He stood there in his dhotis, a small, slender, youthful man bare from the navel up. But I saw him in Washington in his tennis sweater again. I saw him handcuffed to the steering wheel of my car. I saw him in the green station wagon, bearing down through the Tidewater rain at Gil Sprayregan. I saw him on the stairs in the Indian Embassy, calmly shooting Gloria Sprayregan through the heart. He had even managed to look clean-cut and not at all villainous when he kicked Stewart Varley in the head outside the Anacostia Tavern. What I felt for him wasn’t the hot, bowels-wrenching hatred I had for Rukmini. This was different. It was something you grew with. It was icy cold. It was an image of him, frozen out of time, poised on his toes to bring the bamboo switch down across Marianne’s back. It was the hatred that breeds murder. It wasn’t wanting to kill him in a hot flood of rage, as I had wanted to kill Rukmini. If you’re normal, you never want to kill anyone very long. This was knowing I had to kill him, and knowing I wouldn’t leave India until I did.

  My left arm had begun to tingle as life returned to it, but the right still felt like a dead weight growing out of the shoulder socket. I took a deep breath, smelling the stale air, the charcoal fire and Ambedkar’s sweat, and said, “Use your head, Ambedkar. If you believe she doesn’t know where Varley is and if I don’t, let me ta
ke her out of here. The American Embassy in New Delhi knows she’s missing. So does the Benares collector.”

  Ambedkar seated himself cross-legged on the bare earth floor. He was very close to Marianne. A slight dreamy smile pulled Rukmini’s mouth open lopsidedly, as if he had a dislocated jaw. He stood in the doorway clicking the cylinders of his revolver.

  Ambedkar gave me a short and unnecessary lecture about the differences between East and West. Then he said, “You are a very great way from the District of Columbia. As for the collector—” An Eastern shrug proved as eloquent as a Western. “Let me tell you about the girl, Drum. She was scared. Brave, but scared. After a little while, it was obvious she would have told us, had she known. She didn’t, though. She didn’t know where Varley was.”

  A nerve fluttered on my left elbow, and the arm was stronger when it stopped. “So the tableau was for my benefit?”

  “Entirely. It’s unfortunate that you don’t know where Varley is. But it doesn’t change things. We want you to find him.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we want you to.”

  “Find him yourself,” I said, but not very loudly.

  Ambedkar flashed his teeth at me. “We’re trying. We have people on it now. So far, unsuccessfully.” Ambedkar’s grin broadened. “Mr. Drum, just what are you doing in India?”

  “Varley’s watchdog,” I mumbled.

  “I see. But not a very good one. At any rate, if you find Varley, that would be in the line of duty?”

  I said it would.

  “Find him, then. When you do, Miss Wilder goes free.”

  “We going to play switch?”

  “Nothing so crude as that. I wouldn’t want you to have any moral compunctions. Find Varley. We’ll remain in contact with you. We’ll do the rest.” He sprang to his feet lithely. “One more thing. Don’t get any ideas about finding Varley and taking him out of the country—if you ever want to see Miss Wilder alive.”

  “Where can I get in touch with you?” I asked.

  “You can’t, so don’t try. But you’ll do as we wish?”

  “It’s my job,” I said, and stood up without showing I could use my left arm. Rukmini drifted around behind me. “But keep this where you can see it,” I told Ambedkar. “If you touch the girl, or if this big hopped-up clown paws her, you’ll wish they carried you to Benares in a winding sheet on two bamboo poles for cremation.”

  Ambedkar seemed amused. “Was there something else?”

  “Yes. I want to see the girl alone.”

  Ambedkar’s slim bare shoulders shrugged. With Rukmini he left the room. The door scraped shut. It was the only way out of the room.

  I woke Marianne. At first there was a blank look in her eyes, then there was fear which melted before the warmth of recognition and trust.

  “Are we back at the hotel?” Marianne asked dreamily.

  My throat was tight. “No, baby,” I said.

  Her eyes widened. She was wide awake now. “Oh, God, I didn’t know. I didn’t know. They have you too. You better be brave, Chet. You better be brave for both of us.”

  I touched her hand. She was cold and shaking under the blanket. I leaned over her, my weight on my elbows and on her body, to give her warmth. It was very hot in the room, but she was suffering from mild shock. When my weight settled on her, she sighed.

  “… whispering …” she said. “I got out of the car. I thought it was you. They took me and I couldn’t even yell. Chet, it was like a nightmare. I wanted to tell them. I would have told them anything they wanted. I didn’t know. I didn’t know.”

  “They’re letting me out of here,” I said. “They want me to find Varley. When I do they’ll let you go.”

  It was like throwing ice water in her face. She started to shake again. Her hand clutched convulsively. “I … can’t … stay … here … alone,” she said so softly I could barely hear the words.

  I didn’t know what to say. I watched her eyes brim with tears, and had another reason to hate Ambedkar. I’d never known a girl as perky as Marianne Wilder, but he’d done this to her in just a few hours.

  I said, “I’ll get you out. I’ll come back for you.”

  Her eyes went past me to the door. She opened her mouth to speak but all I heard was a sob. I said quickly but without telling her her life might depend on it, “Could you see anything when they brought you?”

  Furrows appeared on her brow. “Not a thing. They put a hood over my face. But I heard something.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Like a butcher with a cleaver chopping meat and bones on a big block. And the smell.”

  “What kind of smell?”

  She shuddered. “Benares’ smell. Sickly sweet. You know, Chet. But much stronger. Like … like bodies burning right outside.”

  Maybe it was something. I wondered if they quartered the corpses for burning. I wondered if there was a special place they did it I thought I could find out.

  “Chet …” Marianne said.

  I kissed her lips. They were cold. Her arms went around me convulsively. She didn’t want to let me go.

  I said some things meant to comfort her. My voice sounded flatter than the taste of last week’s beer. As I stood up my eyes scanned the masonry wall and settled on one of the torches suspended there. If you were desperate enough, it might make a weapon. I went over there and reached up. The torch had been thrust into a niche. It’ was stuck. I yanked at it, but it wouldn’t budge. Then it came loose so suddenly that I staggered backward away from the wall several steps. Just then there was a scraping sound. The door opening.

  I started to turn around. Rukmini came through the doorway in a rush. I swung the torch at his head, gripping it down near the bottom with both hands like a baseball bat. I thought it was a pretty classy swing. The flame made a sound like wet wash blowing in a stiff wind, and almost went out.

  Rukmini moved inside the arc of the torch. I wrapped it around his neck. We staggered together. The torch hit a wall, and sparks flew. Then the flame rose, and steadied. I looked at it. One flame became two. Rukmini’s hands were at my neck. I dropped the torch and hit him with fists like bean bags. He let go of me. Inside my head I shouted triumphantly. I heard a squawking sound.

  Then Rukmini did something which made all the torches go out. I never even felt it.

  14.

  THE MAN lying next to me in the gutter rolled over and flung an arm across my chest.

  He said something. I didn’t understand the language.

  I opened my eyes to ochre dawn, and cobblestones, and an embankment of sand. The man spoke again. It began to sound like a cow lowing.

  The cow had a bony flank and sharp horns, and had bedded down in the gutter next to me. Its enormous pink tongue moved like a rasp over my chest again. I rolled away. The cow lowed again and the head followed me, nestling against my ribs.

  I got to my knees. It was a little like running a hundred-yard dash in ten seconds flat carrying someone pickaback. Big bovine eyes stared at me. The cow was beginning to look mean. There are few things that can look meaner, close up, than the sacred cows of India. I scowled back at it. We both made a noise. Mine was involuntary. The cow’s was disappointed. Flanks swaying and tail swishing flies, it went off in search of another salt lick.

  I stood up and lurched toward the sidewalk. A team of wild oxen dragged a plow across the furrows of my brain. Someone had set fire to the sandpaper inside my throat. I went down the street. It wasn’t a walk. It wasn’t a run. Occasionally my knees had something to do with it. I went.

  Rukmini had deposited me a block and a half from the Pilgrim Hotel. I made it as far as the flight of stairs going down to the service entrance, and collapsed there. Voices came and asked questions and carried me. I was set down on something soft. I was searched. A round cool smoothness prodded my lips. I drank. I gagged. It tasted like the alcohol they put iodine in to make a tincture. I was lifted, and carried.

  A voice said, “He hasn’t been robbed.”<
br />
  A second voice said it was amazing.

  A third voice wrapped a sentence around the word police.

  I said, “Assistant Collector Banerjee.”

  I was carried. A door opened. My head brushed against it. I was set down again on a bed. I thought I recognized my own room at the Pilgrim Hotel. It could have been, because they had gone through my papers.

  They went away. I went to sleep.

  The girl had the gray-tan skin unique to the Indian subcontinent. She wore a white robe and had a vaguely earthy but not unpleasing scent. Her dark hair hung loose and was like a waterfall.

  She was Aruna, the sadhu’s girl. She smiled at me timidly. By then I felt a little better. I felt as if I might live. I didn’t try to sit up. She was pressing a slightly cool, slightly damp cloth to my forehead.

  I said, “Did the other American send you?”

  She shook her head.

  “The sadhu sent you?”

  She shook her head and touched one finger to my lips. A centipede with icicles for legs ran down my spine. Aruna and I weren’t alone in the room.

  I sat up and saw Collector Banerjee seated in the rattan chair and holding a yellow envelope in his hand. He smiled around his ivory cigarette holder. His hair was combed and he wasn’t sweating. He was a guy who carried around his own interior air conditioning.

  “This is yours, Mr. Drum,” he said, leaning forward and tossing the yellow envelope in my lap. While I opened it he said, “The girl was already here when I arrived. She’s the Panch Kosi Sadhu’s helper, isn’t she?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Interesting. And the telegram?”

  I read it and wordlessly handed it to Banerjee. Out loud he read: “Arriving Benares first plane Baker Time-Life Bureau Calcutta.” Banerjee took the butt from the ivory holder and lit another cigarette with it. “Then I see you sent those wires.”