Killers Are My Meat
Page 16
I’d been feeding them curve balls all the way. The leak to All-India Radio on Varley’s death. The inevitable New Delhi Times pickup of it. Passing myself off to Ambedkar as the new unofficial American Observer. I didn’t know yet what it would all add up to, but I had built myself up in Ambedkar’s eyes as a substitute Stewart Varley, and he had wanted Varley bad enough to risk kidnaping and murder.
He didn’t have Varley now. He had settled for the next best thing. He had me.
“Like it?” Sumitra asked.
“If you like gin it’s the best straight-drinking gin there is.”
“You don’t know the trouble I have getting it. They transship it for me from Portuguese Goa. Another?”
This time we toasted Mojindar’s defiant speech. Sumitra downed her gin in a gulp and I was right behind her. Then I remember looking at the bright orange-brown crock the gin came in and telling myself two was my limit this afternoon even if Sumitra wanted to drink a toast to every Observer in Benares, since I wanted a clear head for whatever was coming. Then the tall narrow crock wavered like a slow, watery dissolve on a TV screen.
I blinked. Sumitra said something. I didn’t quite make it out. I yawned. Sumitra got up and seemed to be moving through clear but swirling water. Her bracelets jangled and her arm brushed against the crock of Holland gin, which fell off the cocktail table and shattered on the floor.
“My,” she said, her voice coming back clear and strong, “that was clumsy of me.”
I wandered over to the sofa, stumbling only once en route, and flopped there on the base of my spine with my limbs feeling like lead. My jaw dropped and I gulped air. Sumitra was standing now.
Whatever she had put in my drink had slammed into me suddenly like a pile-driver. But, I told myself, dreamily confused, that doesn’t make sense. She drank the same stuff. She guzzled it. It had to have been perfectly safe.
There are knockout drops and knockout drops. The ones Sumitra used came and went in waves, attacking my senses one at a time. I couldn’t hear the air conditioning. Then I could hear it but couldn’t see Sumitra. Then I could see her and she didn’t look so good. She looked green in the face, but at least she could stand. Then I couldn’t feel the sofa under me, but seemed to be floating in a black cloud as wide as India and as deep as the sea. Then, when sensation returned, I got up and lurched toward Sumitra.
She said something which I didn’t hear. I tried to grab her. I felt silk and smelled jasmine and heard a jangling, but didn’t see her. I clung until the black cloud came to engulf me. My knees thudded on the floor. I still clung. I could feel the silk of her sari slipping through my fingers. She pushed me and very gently I floated over on my back in the pool of spilled Holland gin.
I did not remember getting up, but I was on my feet. I saw Sumitra walking toward the door through which we’d entered the room. She got bigger and smaller, bigger and smaller. She opened the door and closed it quickly. I remembered thinking: another drop of the stuff and I’d have been out until the monsoons came. But apparently it had been measured out with an eyedropper in a steady hand. Two drinks—just enough to make me come all unhinged but not enough to put me out.
Sumitra hadn’t gone anyplace. Someone else was in the room. Then he blacked out and the door closed audibly.
It was Ambedkar. They stood together talking. First I saw them, then I heard them, then I smelled the spilled Holland gin and clasped my hands behind my head and floated.
In a dark dreamy world I heard—
Ambedkar: “He out?”
Sumitra: “Look at him.”
“He’s trying to get up.”
“He’ll never make it to the door.”
“How do you feel?”
“Weak. Awful. It would help if I could be sick.”
“Then go inside and get it out of your system.”
“Is there time?”
“Yes. What did you take?”
“Ghee. Clarified butter. To line the stomach.” A noise, like an unhappy drunk might make. Unsteady footsteps.
“Here. I’ll help you.”
“Hurry.”
Everything went away.
Breathing was easy. Everything else was work. I crawled a little way. Experimentally I opened my mouth to yell. I yelled. It was about half as loud and almost as deep as a mouse’s squeak. I got up somehow. The first step was the hardest. Gravity helped me with the second and third. I looked up. The door was at a slant and didn’t seem to be any closer.
Then I saw Ambedkar. He was flashing on and off like a neon sign. He had a small automatic in his hand.
“You won’t need that,” Sumitra said.
“Better rest for a minute.”
“No. I’m all right now.”
“Then you’re ready?”
“What time is it?”
“We still have ten minutes.”
“Hadn’t we better hurry?”
“If you’re ready.”
“I’m ready.”
“Remember, all you have …”
“I know what I have to do.” Sumitra’s bracelets jangled.
Then they shut off the sound track. I smelled jasmine again. Sumitra got down on her knees in front of me. She made a grab for my hair and tried to lift my head up, but the crew cut didn’t help her. A hand supported my chin instead. She was very close. Her amber eyes had darkened to a muddy color and her face was pale. She breathed through her mouth and with her free hand made claws. She raked them down my cheek, drawing blood.
“Rip his clothes,” Ambedkar said. I began to think there was hope for me: I could hear and see at the same time.
Sumitra’s strong tan fingers tore at the lapel of my cord jacket. I started to fall forward. The cloth ripped and a button dropped to the floor. Sumitra leaned down over me and rubbed her cheek against mine. When she moved back there was a smear of red on her cheek.
“Well?” she said.
Ambedkar studied us like a stage director. He looked nervous now, as if something very important was going to happen very soon. “Now come here,” he told her.
Sumitra stood up and went over to him. I tried standing too. I reached my knees and swayed. I was close enough to the cocktail table to grab it and hold on. It was the only thing that kept me from falling. They seemed to know exactly what the mickey they had given me would do. They didn’t pay any attention to me.
“This,” Sumitra said with faint, unexpected contempt in her voice, “is the part you’re going to enjoy.”
Ambedkar seemed genuinely hurt. He complained: “How can you say that?”
“I know your proclivity. I ought to, don’t you think?”
“Perhaps you would rather Mr. Drum did it?” There was a whine of self-pity in his voice, as if what he really wanted to say was, Nobody understands me, not even you. He had come into the room as if he owned it, but steadily Sumitra had gained ascendancy over him. That might have been something I could use, if I had been in a position to use anything.
In his right hand Ambedkar held the small automatic. With his left he grasped the front of Sumitra’s sari and pulled. The gun in his right hand was like a leaf in a wind. The strong silk did not tear.
“Give me the gun,” Sumitra said contemptuously.
Ambedkar gave it to her, and used both hands to tear the silk. Finally there was a ripping sound and Ambedkar stepped back. Sumitra’s sari was torn from right shoulder to waist. She wore nothing under it. Her skin was tanned satin. Her small, firm right breast was exposed, the rosette puckered and the nipple erect.
“Well?” she asked Ambedkar again.
“Help me carry him over to the sofa.”
“No. Wait.”
Sumitra bent down near me. Her arms went around my head. Ambedkar grunted but did not speak. Sumitra pulled my head against her, turned her body slightly and let go of me. There was a red smear on her bare breast from the blood on my cheek.
After that Ambedkar pulled the cocktail table out of the way and they dragged me
to the sofa and draped me there. Ambedkar put the cocktail table back where it belonged. Panting slightly, Sumitra watched him. No one said anything for a while.
What they were planning was as subtle as a taxi dancer’s perfume. I didn’t know who was supposed to walk in on us in a few minutes, but it was pretty obvious what he would find. He would find me apparently in the process of raping the wife of the chief delegate of the host nation at the Benares Conference. And probably he would find Ambedkar clobbering me to account for any inability to get up on my hind legs.
Ambedkar opened the door I had entered and looked outside. Then he said over his shoulder, “There’s no one out there. You’ll hear his footsteps before he opens the other door. He won’t come in very fast. He can’t. When you hear him …”
“I know what I have to do.”
“… start screaming and fighting with Mr. Drum. I’ll come to your rescue and—”
Ambedkar’s voice went off like a snuffed flame goes out. At first I thought it was the mickey acting up again, but Ambedkar’s lips weren’t moving. His jaw hung wide and his eyes were round O’s in his face. From where he was standing he was the only one who could see the other door. He had been wrong about footsteps; we hadn’t heard any. And the door had opened silently.
A quavering, old-man voice said:
“If all this has been arranged for my benefit, miss-sahib, you might as well proceed with your scream.”
Sumitra whirled as if she’d been on wires. In the open doorway across the room stood Aruna and the Panch Kosi Holy Man.
20.
THE SADHU came into the room. His withered legs moved stiffly. One arm was around Aruna’s shoulder. The girl looked scared. The sadhu’s knees and elbows were like melons in his pipe-stem limbs. He wore clean saffron dhotis and carried a staff in his right hand. He had been cleaned and scrubbed for his surprise appearance at the evening session of the Conference, but his sun-blackened skin was creased and wrinkled like very old leather and a very faint odor of dry rot and decay had entered the room with him.
Ambedkar threw the first door open, the knob banging against the wall. If his face meant anything he was going to run and run like hell.
“Come back in here,” Sumitra said. Her voice was steel. “Shut the door.”
Ambedkar turned around like a marionette. His face was a mask of self-pity and defeat. His eyes were bewildered, his lower lip twitched, and he uttered a single wordless cry of despair. But obediently he closed the door.
“We have lost nothing,” Sumitra told him. “The sadhu and his girl found Mr. Drum attacking me. Mr. Drum was quite frantic. With this gun he killed both of them.”
The sadhu said something to Aruna. Terror glazed her wide eyes but she shook her head.
I watched Sumitra lift the gun. With Aruna beside him trying to help, the sadhu got halfway back to the door. His frail legs moved like sticks. His joints creaked. His frail arms tried to thrust Aruna in back of him.
I got up off the sofa. All the blood drained from my head and I swayed there. Then I lurched toward Sumitra, overturning the cocktail table. Ambedkar took two steps and hit me in the face and I went down.
Then Sumitra fired. The little gun jumped in her hand. Mute Aruna opened her mouth—and screamed. With each shot the sadhu’s emaciated body jerked. Aruna screamed again. The sadhu cried out to her, and she turned and ran. Sumitra emptied the clip at the holy man. He didn’t fall until the gun was empty, then fell bonelessly, as if Sumitra’s bullets had healed his body of its stiffness.
“Go after the girl,” Sumitra said. She wasn’t even out of breath.
Ambedkar ran after the girl. I don’t know how long he was gone. My brain was absolutely clear. Move, it said. Get up. Get up now. I lay there. My body was dead. There was the smell of cordite in the room and the jangle of Sumitra’s bracelets as she stalked around the room like an impatient tigress. The dead sadhu hardly bled at all. After a while Ambedkar came back.
“I couldn’t find her.”
“Fool.”
“What could I do?”
Sumitra came over to me. I heard running footsteps and voices as she crouched over me. The automatic was thrust into my hand. My fingers were squeezed around it. Sumitra started to scream. Ambedkar kicked me in the head. It was his specialty.
Two elephants with the high cranium and comparatively small ears of the Indian pachyderm lumbered trumpeting across the steps of a burning ghat at each other. At the last moment, to avoid crushing the single body awaiting cremation on the ghat, they reared ponderously on their hind legs.
Each elephant had a lady mahut perched high on its enormous head. Sumitra Mojindar in spangled circus tights was one of the mahuts. Priscilla Varley, similarly attired, was the other.
I was the body on the burning ghat.
The Sumitra Mojindar elephant scooped me up like a teak log between tusks and trunk, and lumbered off with my arms and legs dangling. Trumpeting, the Priscilla Varley elephant went away. It was one hell of a bumpy elephant ride up the wide stone steps of the ghat, and one hell of a dangerous elephant ride through the streets of Benares with wild angry crowds chasing us, shouting, and waving torches in my face. In her spangled circus tights the Sumitra mahut sat above it all, gloriously out of reach. She smiled down at me.
A voice made the kind of sound voices make coming out of nightmares. It was my voice.
I sat up, drenched with sweat. I was on a canvas cot in a small, hot room. Faces peered at me. A single bare bulb on a chain glared overhead.
“He’s coming out of it,” Assistant Collector Banerjee said.
I looked at him. Soft hands, not Banerjee’s, touched my face. Banerjee was smoking a cigarette in his ivory holder, and sweating. “The mounties,” I said. “Always trust the mounties to get there in the nick of time.”
“I beg your pardon?” Banerjee said.
The soft hands stroked my head. When they reached the soft lump of pain in back, I winced. Something cool was placed gently against it.
“I mean,” I said, not yet successfully identifying the soft hands, “you rescued me.”
“No, we didn’t.”
I said something like, “Huh?”
“You are being used,” Banerjee explained, “as a ‘patsy.’” His voice put quotation marks around the word patsy, to show he knew it but knew it didn’t belong to his language. “The police were called. The police came for you. By that time word had been leaked—intentionally, I suppose—to the crowds. The crowds were very ugly. We brought you here in an armored car. The crowds wanted your blood, and still want it. You killed the Panch Kosi Holy Man.”
“Like heck he did!” the voice that belonged to the soft hands said indignantly.
I located a face in shadow. Her blonde hair clung damply to her head, there were smudges on her cheeks, and she had a wan smile for me. It was Marianne Wilder.
“How do you feel, Chet? We were so worried about you.”
I considered it. I didn’t feel at all bad. Weak, but not bad. In fact, I felt good. Suspiciously good. Too good. I said so.
“Rauwulfia,” a sleepy voice said. It belonged to Manbir.
“Rauwulfia,” Banerjee repeated. “Your Western scientists only know those derivitives of rauwulfia, like reserpine, which are used medically as tranquilizers. But here in India the root of the rauwulfia plant has been used as a drug for thousands of years. You were given an overdose.”
“Knockout drops,” I said.
“With a euphoric ‘hangover.’” Banerjee was still using quotation marks. “Also, you probably had a nightmare. Rauwulfia, you see. Further, your blood pressure is probably dangerously low. Stand up, if you can.”
I tried it, swinging my legs over the side of the cot and pushing against the canvas with my hands. He was crazy. I didn’t feel bad. I felt marvelous, in a carefree, dreamy way. Who cared about the crowds outside? I could hear the muted sound of their voices. Somewhere not far away, glass broke. But there weren’t any windows in th
is room. There was a staircase, going up. I decided we were in a cellar—probably the cellar of the Darjeeling Gate Police Station.
I stood up. Manbir caught me as I swayed. Everything rushed out of my head and went around and around.
“Have a smoke,” Banerjee said. A cigarette was shoved between my lips and a small cardboard box in my hands. “Keep smoking. It raises blood pressure.”
I ate smoke for a while. Marianne made sympathetic noises. My head stopped spinning.
“They started gathering half an hour after you were brought in,” Banerjee was saying. “They’re not just rabble, Drum. They’re organized, I would say. And this I know: we don’t have enough strength to keep them out of here forever.”
“They want me?”
“They want the murderer of the Panch Kosi Holy Man. They want the man who tried to rape the wife of Gaganvihari Mojindar.”
“They didn’t waste any time getting the word around.”
“Organization. Can you tell me exactly what happened?”
“Why?”
“The collector. He’s been on the phone with Conference officials. Another mob has gathered there and wants the foreign observers, the Westerners, to go home. They’re organized too. They even have posters and banners, but I suppose that doesn’t interest you.”
I smiled. Banerjee must have considered it in poor taste; he stared at me gravely. We both lit cigarettes and I said: “Hell yeah, they have posters and banners. They’ve been planning it for days. Remember I told you they wanted Varley, the American Observer? They needed a fall guy. If they could make the world’s worst villain, when the time came, out of the American Observer, and if they could swing into action at once—don’t you see? They’d kick us all out and have the kind of closed Conference they wanted.”
“But they couldn’t have known that Sir Gaganvihari would bring the Panch Kosi Holy Man to the Conference as his ‘trump card.’”
“No, of course they couldn’t. They didn’t have to. Not as long as Sumitra Mojindar was playing their game with them. Wouldn’t attempted rape have been enough? You see,” I went on, chain-smoking and talking quickly, “they hadn’t planned on killing the sadhu. But the sadhu walked in on them before they were ready for him.” I told them everything that happened from the moment I met Ambedkar near the fountain in the rotunda of the Conference Building.