I saw what he had tripped over. It was like seeing it for the first time. I retched, and doubled over, and was sick.
When I straightened up, a dozen hands were on me. Voices shouted. They held me while Leather Skin hit me. He was strong, but he didn’t know how to get his shoulder behind a right cross. I pretended to be more hurt than I was. The crowd swirled between us before he could try again. I looked around for Aruna. She had slipped away.
A couple of policemen carrying lathis and looking tough and competent fought their way through the mob, did some questioning and some listening, and escorted me up the steps of the ghat. Once or twice they had to swing their lathis.
At the top of the steps they had a car, and the car took us to the police station near the Darjeeling Gate. When Manbir saw who it was, he went right upstairs after Assistant Collector Banerjee.
16.
BANERJEE came down, and he came down in a seething rage. He ranted for ten minutes. He swore with such physical expressiveness that sweat flew in droplets from his hands and face. Then he jabbered in Hindi at the two cops who had come in with me. He swung on them so suddenly that they cowered, expecting to be hit. Manbir, his radio forgotten, sat at his battered desk taking notes, twisting his topknot with his left hand, chewing betel nut furiously, dribbling juice like blood down his chin and onto his shirt front. The cops answered Banerjee timidly. He seemed satisfied with what they told him. Blood, which had suffused his face, flowed back where it belonged. His voice lowered to—merely—a roar. Then he threw back his head and began to laugh. There was no doubt about his laughter. A little more of it and they’d have had to treat him for a broken neck.
Banerjee whirled on me. Sweat flew. “You interfered with a corpse-burner at his holy work,” he said, his voice gone suddenly soft. “You struck him on a sacred burning ghat.” He paused to light a cigarette. I had never seen him without one so long. “Your time of obstructing justice, Mr. Drum, is ended.”
He meant I was going to jail, where I couldn’t do Varley any good and couldn’t help Marianne either. I said, not altogether sure it was a lie, “I was on my way over here when the trouble happened. I told you to wait for me, didn’t I? I also told you I’d give you the story when I thought it might do my client some good.”
“You mean such as now, when the alternative is a prison term for you?”
“I mean such as now, when I’m bucking heads with a bunch of international fanatics.”
We batted it around. Now that I wanted to sell, Banerjee pretended his reluctance to buy. He was bluffing; in the East they call it saving face. After a few minutes I thought he’d saved enough, so I said:
“My whole story—plus what I saw on that list.”
“In exchange for?”
“My freedom. I don’t have to ask for cooperation. You’re a cop. I’ll get it.”
Banerjee dropped into a chair. In the fierce afternoon heat his tirade had exhausted him. He dismissed the arresting officers. He was limp. He leaned forward and sweat dripped from his nose. Manbir had filled pages with his notes. They were scattered on his desk. I looked at him, and at Banerjee, who assured me the notes were necessary. Probably they were. The story, like all such stories, did not run in a straight line.
I opened up. If I held back anything, it was less important than the color of the socks I wore the day I drank three Martinis with Mrs. Stewart Hoffman Varley. Gil Sprayregan: his assignment, his fears, and his death. Priscilla Varley: her husband and his affairs. Ambedkar at the Anacostia on Good Hope Road. Ambedkar, probably in Tidewater Maryland. Gloria Sprayregan’s murder which wasn’t murder. Rukmini and the green Merc station wagon. A P.I. with a penchant for travel, and Priscilla Varley’s offer. India: Varley, the sadhu, Aruna, Marianne’s kidnaping and Sumitra Mojindar’s sex appeal. In short, the works. I had to spill it. I wasn’t a private dick after the butler who’d absconded with the family heirlooms. I wasn’t a private dick setting up divorces at a couple of hundred bucks per. I wasn’t even a private dick who got his bulldog teeth stuck in murder and wouldn’t let go even when the cops hollered. I was a private dick deep in international intrigue sprinkled with sudden death and political dynamite. I was swimming out of my depth. I knew it, and Banerjee knew I knew it. Finally I got to the part which went:
“The name’s Ayyangar. There was a butler by that name at the Indian Embassy in Washington. He died, possibly violently, because he knew too much.”
Banerjee consulted his list. Ayyangar was a crone, he said. She’d been peddling narcotics for thirty years. No one ever knew what became of all her money.
“She married?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
The bottom started to drop. For all I knew, Ayyangar could have been the Jones or Smith of India.
“But she does have a brother who, I believe, was employed as a domestic in the foreign service. In fact, I’m sure of it.”
We made plans. At first Banerjee was for raiding the Ayyangar address right away. But I was worried about Marianne. We decided it would be safe to bring in half a dozen pushers or so for routine questioning. Banerjee said that happened all the time. About half the pushers in India were professional stool pigeons. No one but the cops knew which half. India started to sound more like the U.S.A. all the time.
Naturally, one of the pushers brought in for questioning would be the Ayyangar crone. If they knew the score, Ambedkar and Rukmini wouldn’t even work up a sweat over it. Embellishing where I had to, I’d tell the old lady about her brother, then put the screws on her. If I got her mad enough, or scared enough, or both, she might deliver Marianne to us without a fight.
It was a good plan, a damn good one, only it didn’t work out the way we planned it at all.
“What about Mr. Varley?” Banerjee asked me.
I chewed on it. “Maybe we ought to let them think he’s really dead. Could you do that?”
Banerjee nodded slowly. “I can plant an item with All-India Radio’s local station. They’re bound to pick it up. Would that help you?”
“It might help Marianne Wilder.”
We shook hands. Banerjee said he would call me as soon as they brought the Ayyangar crone in. Banerjee also said, “I misjudged you, Mr. Drum. You’re a brave man. You’re a very brave man.”
Maybe he had it wrong. Maybe I was just dumb.
It was almost four o’clock when I hit the lobby of the Pilgrim Hotel. I went into the bar and ordered an arak on the rocks. It still tasted like what they mixed iodine with to make a tincture. I washed it down with good Scotch. Time crawled like a centipede missing every other leg. I worried about Marianne. I sweated about Varley. I had another drink and took my whisky breath over to the desk in the lobby.
“There was another wire for you, Mr. Drum,” the Anglo-Indian clerk told me. “But this time, having seen you leave, I kept it at the desk.”
He gave it to me and I opened it to read that the Embassy in New Delhi had passed my problem on to the consulate in Calcutta, whose proximity was such that they could render me better service. It was worded like the letter from the dry-cleaning plant that has lost your pants and admitted it only with reluctance.
“Also, Mr. Drum,” the small, narrow-shouldered Anglo-Indian said, “a Mr. Wallace Baker, a journalist from Calcutta, I believe, called in person.”
“He leave a message?”
“He insisted on going upstairs.” The Anglo-Indian showed me a delicately arched eyebrow. “I have not seen him come down.”
I stuffed the Embassy telegram in my pocket and went up to my room. The louvre door wasn’t locked. That’s what I get, I thought, for walking out on Assistant Collectors of Police. I opened the door. A ton of bricks wrapped itself around my neck.
It had been aimed at my jaw, but I side-stepped it. It belonged to an arm and the arm belonged to the big, broad-shouldered fellow in the rumpled suit. He sobbed, cursed me, and swung again. It was a roundhouse right that Man Mountain Dean could have stepped inside of. I went inside
and tied him up. He butted with his head, got his left hand loose, and whacked at my kidney with it. He wasn’t very scientific in his fighting, but he could really hit. I tied him up again. He butted, and got his left hand loose, and whacked at my kidney with it. I sighed, let go, stepped back, and clipped him one. His eyes rolled, but he wouldn’t go down. I pushed him. He fell across the bed, then sat up sobbing.
I got a glass of water and sloshed it in his face. He spluttered. He looked up at me with grief and rage contorting the kind of masculinely homely face which some women find attractive.
“You son of a bitch,” he sobbed. “Banerjee told me all about you. What’s the matter with you, you want to see them kill the girl?”
I grabbed his lapels and he came up with a surprised look on his face. I shoved him toward the door. He was big and didn’t shove easy. “Okay,” I said, “if you know all about me you can scram.”
He turned around. He was panting. If he had a gun in his hand he’d have shot me. He didn’t. He said, “I’m Wally Baker, Time-Life in Calcutta. I came here to do what I could to help. I saw Banerjee. I was waiting here to beat you black and blue.”
I said, “I joined Banerjee’s team. I’m waiting for a call from him.”
He didn’t hear me. “Your telegram was a kick in the gut,” he said. “I’m in love with Marianne Wilder.” He smiled at his own folly. “When I’m at my most romantic, she calls me Brother Bear. I want her to marry me.” He was about thirty-five, had a deep baritone voice and had come suddenly unraveled so that he had to tell someone about it. Still, he was an engaging guy. He went on, “But you don’t give two hoots and a holler for that. Jesus Christ, you pack a wallop!” He fingered his jaw.
I told him about Marianne. He was a two-hundred-pound pacer and went to work on the rattan rug with the soles of his shoes. When I finished he said, “What do they want this Varley for?”
I shook my head. “The Benares Conference kicks off in the morning. Maybe it’ll give us some idea. Maybe Banerjee already knows something. If he does, he isn’t talking.”
“They hurt her?”
I hadn’t told him that part. He held my eyes, waiting for an answer. I said, “She was beaten,” and watched the big fists clench and the warm brown eyes go cold.
Just then the telephone rang.
It was Banerjee. “Got the Ayyangar dame?” I asked.
“I’m afraid not. There’s been some trouble.”
Wally Baker looked at me. I shook my head. His jaw worked. I asked Banerjee, “What kind of trouble?”
“The collector.”
I said a four-letter word.
“After all, Mr. Drum, I’m only the assistant collector. I was called away from the office. Manbir typed up his notes and the collector came in and saw them. He fears that if we delay long enough to intimidate the Ayyangar crone, dire consequences might befall Miss. Wilder. He therefore wants the Ayyangar place raided right now. This afternoon.”
“He’s got it all bass ackwards,” I shouted into the phone. “If the raid backfires on him, we’ll be right back where we started from. Worse. But if we had the Ayyangar dame on our side and it backfired, at least she might be able to tell us where they took Marianne. Doesn’t he see that?”
“No. He is the collector.”
I said the same four-letter word, applying it in a brief sentence to the collector.
I thought I heard Banerjee chuckle. Then he said, “Stated somewhat less succinctly, those are my sentiments. I am not calling from the office, Mr. Drum, but from outside. I believe I can convince the collector to postpone his raid until tonight. I will do so if I can. That may give you time to reach the Ayyangar crone first.”
“What’s her address?”
He told me, and I wrote it down. “She have a phone?”
“We know of none. There are less than ten thousand telephones in the entire state of Uttar Pradesh. What will you do?”
I said I didn’t know yet. I said I would try something if he could keep the collector off until tonight. Then I asked: “I take it you don’t think much of this collector of yours as a cop.”
There was a silence. Finally Banerjee said, “The collector is a charming man, educated in England, handsome …”
“But what kind of cop?”
Another awkward silence stretched out. “I called you, Mr. Drum,” Banerjee broke it. “I also shook hands with you, something a Hindu rarely does with a stranger. I was guilty of misjudging you. Now I think that if anyone can free Miss Wilder, you can, not the collector.
“Oh, by the way, All-India Radio’s local station has the story of Mr. Varley’s death. It has already been broadcast in Hindi and will be broadcast in a while in English. He died of a severe sunstroke.”
That was how the States got the story that our Observer at the Benares Conference died the day before the Conference began, but if you read the newspapers you already know that.
Banerjee wished me luck, and waited for me to hang up. I lit a cigarette, blew smoke at the floor, looked up, pointed the cigarette at Wally Baker, and said, “Here’s your chance to help.”
“I’ll do anything. What’s Banerjee’s bad news?”
I told him.
“What time is it?” he said.
It was a quarter to six. “We ought to have two hours,” I said. “Maybe two and a half and just possibly three, depending on how long Banerjee can stall the collector. When it gets as dark as it’s going to get, look out.”
“What d’you want me to do?”
“We’ll go over to the Ayyangar place. They know me, but they don’t know you. You’re a reporter. That’s what you’re going to be over there. You’ve heard about Ayyangar being murdered in Washington. That’s how we’ll put it. Murdered. Provided the old lady’s there alone, or provided you can talk to her alone.”
“If I can’t?”
We went downstairs. “Here are three options,” I told Wally Baker. “If she’s all alone—if you’re dead sure of it—we ought to be able to walk off with Marianne.”
“But there won’t be much chance of that?”
“Right. There won’t. If one or both of them are with her, but if you can corner her alone, give her the full treatment so she thinks your newspaper or magazine thinks Ayyangar met with foul play at the hands of some of his fellow domestics who have since left the States for India. That’s option two. It’s our best bet, and it’s the one I’m hoping for. If you get her mad enough, tell her the cops are coming tonight because she’s hiding the American girl. Tell her she’d be a fool to cooperate with the men who killed her brother.”
We went outside. The sun was going down in the west but wouldn’t set for at least an hour and a half, and was fiercely hot. The pilgrims crowding the sidewalk looked wilted.
“And if I don’t get her mad enough?”
“Stall and stick around, Wally. Play it by ear. That’s all I can tell you.”
“What’s option three?”
“That they’re inside with the Ayyangar dame and you can’t get to see her alone.”
“What then?”
I didn’t answer right away. Finally I told him, “Then it isn’t murder. Then it’s just her brother’s death from heart failure; you were in Benares for the Conference, and called on her for a routine statement since he worked at the Embassy in Washington.”
Wally Baker’s face flushed. We stopped walking. “If it were you,” he wanted to know, “would you work it that way?”
“I’m a detective. I have some experience in—”
“Marianne’s life may be in danger! You’ll be outside, won’t you?”
“Yeah, I’ll be there.”
“But if you were inside instead of me—and Ambedkar and what’s-his-name stuck to the old lady like glue?”
I looked at him. There was no evading it. I said, “I’d make enough of an accusation so they’d keep me there until the collector pulled his raid.”
“All right,” he said.
I couldn�
��t chance driving Marianne’s Fiat into the neighborhood, because Rukmini had seen us in it. We didn’t find a cab. It was a twenty-minute walk and every minute counted. We climbed a cobbled hill, and both of us were drenched with sweat when we reached the top. At the top of the hill we stopped at a shop that sold knives. I wished I had a gun, but that wasn’t possible. I bought a small dagger with an ornate handle on which were carved three of India’s three hundred million Hindu deities. The dagger had a four-inch blade, came without a scabbard, and barely fit diagonally into the pocket of my cord jacket. Wally Baker bought an English-made pocket knife and told me he felt foolish buying even that.
On the other side of the shop, the hill fell away steeply. At the bottom, framed with high walls on either side, you could see the river and the tiny scrambling figures of the pilgrims bathing in it. There was a courtyard of blue slate slabs before the sharp downgrade began. A small bazaar surrounded the courtyard and a lotus pool was a cool green jewel in the middle of it. This was the Court of the Lotus Bazaar. The steep hill led down to the Ghat of the Lotus. The Ayyangar crone lived in a house on the hill below the Court of the Lotus Bazaar.
17.
I GOT to know that little bazaar. It traded in all the goods of the East, but most of all it had sellers of brushwood and kerosene for the burning ghat at the foot of the cobbled street that ran down to the river from the Court of the Lotus Bazaar. There was more haggling done over the sale of brushwood and kerosene than over anything else, the mourners rending their clothes, beating their breasts and yanking their topknots to save a few annas or a half rupee, the vendors angrily spitting blood-red gouts of betel juice and looking more bereaved than the mourners if the bargaining was fierce and the prices began to drop.
After one swing around the bazaar, I the only Westerner and feeling about as inconspicuous as Ibn Saud had been walking up Pennsylvania Avenue—I heard the chopping block sound that Marianne had remembered. It drifted up the alley on a thin haze of blue smoke which the slight hot wind blowing off the river carried to the Court of the Lotus, but at the base of the hill the steps of the burning ghat dropped away too steeply, so you couldn’t see anything down there. The haze had the acrid-sweet burning smell which I’d come to associate with cremation.
Killers Are My Meat Page 13
