Killers Are My Meat

by Stephen Marlowe

But I stayed with her. Pretty soon the Siva man came back for us. He was hardly winded, but he spoke without hope. “We are too late, Englishman,” he said.

  We walked with him. Marianne’s breathing came in gasps. Two hundred yards ahead the road turned. Beyond the curve, something dark loomed. It was a truck parked in the middle of the road. Above it a high masonry wall blocked off starlight. “Already they have come to the sanctuary for her,” the Siva man said.

  I went over to the truck. I touched the hood. It was hot. The cooling, contracting metal of the engine ticked. Just then something roared and reverberated behind the wall.

  Gunfire.

  We ran to the gate. It was wrought iron and ornate with carvings from the multitudes of the Hindu pantheon. Beyond it torchlight glowed in a courtyard between thick walls. Shadows moved in there.

  The gate was not locked. I pushed and one of its leaves swung heavily and noisily on rusted hinges. The courtyard ran the length of the outside wall, maybe a hundred yards in each direction from the gate. Torches spaced on the wall threw alternating pockets of light and shadow. The inner wall, a dozen yards across the courtyard, was the façade of a building forty or fifty feet high with small dark holes of windows near the top and big bas-relief metal doors showing more gods and demons than the gate had. The courtyard was crowded with people in small dark clots like flies on the carcass of a dead animal.

  A gnome of a man barely four feet tall, and wearing rags, brought a smell of earth and rotting flesh over to us. In the torchlight his face was a catastrophe with sunken cheeks like holes poked in soft dough, with faint gleam of eyes in deep black sockets and with no nose at all. The Siva man spoke to him in Hindi. The gnome listened, jabbered animatedly, and pointed at the ornate doors of the sanctuary. At first I thought his fingers were merely short and stubby, but then I saw they were missing their final joints and were hardly more than jagged finger stumps. He was a leper.

  The Siva man took the paddle from Marianne. I cocked the Webley. Another shot rang out inside the sanctuary, echoing. A dirgelike sound rose from the beggars and lepers in the courtyards.

  “They are here,” the Siva man said. “Bringing their violence, their profanation, into the shrine of Siva.” He was shaking with rage, as if this final, although expected, profanation was more than he could bear. He threw back his head and cried out with swollen arteries bulging and pulsing in his neck, “Siva, O Mahadeva! Slay them! Slay, O Mahadeva! O Destroyer of the Universe, give strength to my arm!” He swung the paddle in a blurring arc overhead like a dervish with a sword. Then he ran at the heavy metal doors of the shrine. I almost expected him to batter them to pieces with his paddle.

  He pulled at a brass ring half the size of a cartwheel. The door opened outward ponderously with gods and demons in sudden swinging motion. Brandishing the paddle, he plunged into the shrine.

  I told Marianne to wait outside. She complained that this was probably the biggest story to come out of the Conference. Another shot rang and echoed in the shrine, louder now that the door was open. The beggars and lepers wailed and some came across the courtyard.

  “With them?” Marianne said, jerking her head toward the mob. A stone clanged against the metal door. A hand that was all bone and shiny yellow skin plucked at my jacket. I brushed it away, took Marianne’s arm, and ran inside.

  At once our footsteps echoed. Trays of arati fire on pedestals shed lurid light in which incense smoke drifted and coiled. We ran across a large square chamber with a single monstrous statue, twice man-size, at its center. The statue had four arms and five faces with three eyes each. It wore tiger skin and a necklace of skulls and neck-entwining serpents. It sat astride a gilded bull and carried a trident in one hand and an hourglass in the other. It had the crescent of Siva on its forehead. At the feet of the gilded bull lay a dead man in dhotis with his brains blown out the back of his head.

  Marianne sobbed. Bare feet shuffled on the tile floor behind us. I swung around. Half a dozen of the courtyard people had come into the shrine. We sprinted, shoes sharply striking and echoing, to the far wall of the chamber.

  We reached an archway with arati burning in a niche and a heavy bronze door. There did not seem to be any locks in the Siva shrine. The door swung when I pushed it.

  We entered Walpurgis Night, Benares style.

  Near at hand the trays of arati burned steadily. In the middle distance they flickered. Further, they winked like distant stars. It was a vast room with four doors like the one we had entered. The ceiling was lost in utter darkness above. In the middle of the room stood a pillar of stone eighteen or twenty feet high, its base resting on a stone lotus. This was the lingam, the symbol of Siva as Creator, which stands at the center of all Siva shrines. In front of it, like tenpins, sat the holy men of the sanctuary.

  They were flesh and blood, but they might have been carved from stone like the lingam. They sat in the yoga position, legs crossed and arms crossed, right foot upon the left thigh and left foot upon the right thigh and crossed hands grasping the big toe of left and right foot, and bearded chins slumped to concave chests. Eight of them sat that way. Two of them, legs still crossed, had fallen over on their sides. They had been shot.

  Ranged before them and about twenty paces closer to where I stood with Marianne just inside the door, were four men, one big and one small in chalk-stripe suits and two really big fellows in dhotis, and a woman in a sari. The bigger of the two men in Western-style clothing was doing the shooting.

  He had taken dead cold aim at the third of the human tenpins, and he was waiting for something. At last the little man in the chalk-stripe suit spoke. He had a tenor voice and he could speak Hindi as well as he could speak English. It was Ambedkar. When he got no answer, the big man fired. The third sadhu fell, legs still crossed and knotted. He never made a sound.

  I looked around. Arati light glowed, pulsed, flickered. I couldn’t see the Siva man anywhere but I knew he was in here somewhere, making his way from arati pedestal to arati pedestal armed with his paddle and belief in his god.

  I raised the Webley to eye level and extended my arm. Ambedkar spoke again. None of the sadhus answered him. I got a good sight-picture of the broad back of the other man in Western clothing. He would be Rukmini, of course. When he raised his own pistol and pointed it at the next sadhu, I fired.

  Lurid light rose and fell. The Webley jumped in my hand, roaring. In the immense, high-ceilinged room it went off like a cannon in an echo chamber.

  Its only effect was to make Rukmini spin around and fire blindly. I had missed. His pistol spat yellow flame in the twilight glow of the arati fire. One of the big fellows wearing dhotis turned too. He had a rifle. He lifted it to his shoulder and fired. A bullet whanged off the metal door behind us.

  I jerked Marianne with me and went down on hands and knees behind the nearest arati pedestal. It was round, four feet tall, almost as wide as a telephone booth, and supported a tray of burning oil on which a wick floated. I stuck my head around the side of the pedestal. They hadn’t seen us yet. They had fired blindly. Rukmini and the fellow with the rifle were running zigzag in opposite directions ducking in and out among the arati pedestals. They wanted to come at us from two sides of the room. I snapped a shot off at Rukmini, and missed. He didn’t return the fire. Ambedkar and the woman in the sari, who must have been Sumitra Mojindar, and the fourth man, had disappeared.

  Then I saw the Siva man.

  He had crouched behind a pedestal in the path the fellow with the rifle had been taking. He stood up all at once like a statue come to life and the fellow with the rifle had time for a scream but not time to bring his rifle up before the Siva man brought the edge of the paddle down on his head with a sound like splitting a watermelon with a woodsman’s ax.

  The rifle clattered on tile, then the Siva man retrieved it. I didn’t wait to see what he would do. “Stay here,” I told Marianne.

  Her eyes were big. Her mouth hardly opened. “I’ll stay here,” she said.

&n
bsp; I ran crouching toward where Rukmini had disappeared among the pedestals. A shot roared and echoed. Marble splinters flew from the pedestal in front of my face. This time Rukmini had seen me. I waited. I heard the click-tap, click-tap, click-tap of his shoes and the answering echoes which made it impossible to locate him by the sound. It was cool in that high-vaulted room, but I was sweating. My heart was beating much too fast, and shallowly. It was the rauwulfia. The sweat on my skin was cold and clammy.

  I lifted my head for a quick look around. Rukmini’s pistol roared instantly, the bullet clanging off the metal arati tray on the pedestal in front of me. I fell flat and to one side as the tray overturned. Burning oil cascaded down. It bounced and splattered in smaller and smaller globules like mercury. I remembered how the fellow with the rifle had screamed. I thought it was worth a try. I opened my mouth and let go like a stuck pig.

  Almost at once I heard the click-tapping of Rukmini’s shoes again. He was coming close. His arm appeared around a pedestal. Then his shoulder. He wasn’t twenty feet away. I lay on my back with my elbow propped on the marble floor. His face came into view, the bald head gleaming, at the same instant that he brought the muzzle of his pistol around and down at me. That was also the instant I squeezed the trigger of the Webley and sent a bullet crashing up through the base of his jaw to his brain.

  He fell face down in a puddle of still-burning oil. I got up and ran toward the lingam. Ambedkar, I thought. And the other fellow in dhotis. I didn’t know if either of them was armed. And Sumitra Mojindar. We had the Siva man’s rifle. We had my Webley. That and the rauwulfia made me feel pretty good.

  I went around the pedestal. I almost tripped over the Siva man. He didn’t have the rifle. He was down on his stomach with a black gleam of blood on his hairless head. I crouched there and listened to his breathing, which was irregular but deep. I started to get up.

  I saw Ambedkar in profile making his way stealthily around a pedestal not fifteen feet away, crouching, carrying a rifle in his hands and moving with the elaborate care of a child in a cap-pistol ambush. I raised the Webley, pointed it at him, and pulled the trigger. It went click. Ambedkar spun around. I straightened up and pulled the trigger again. The Webley responded with another click. I hurled it and it struck Ambedkar’s arm just as he fired, the rifle jerking to one side and the bullet whining harmlessly away. I dived behind an arati pedestal. There were voices in the vast inner shrine now. Bare feet shuffled. I waited for Ambedkar. There wasn’t anything I could do except wait. I could hear his shoes on the marble floor. If I got out from behind the pedestal he would shoot me down. If I waited he would come for me with the rifle. I waited in a crouch.

  His footsteps stopped on the other side of the pedestal. He couldn’t be sure I was unarmed. I took my shoes off and threw one of them in an underhand arc to my right. It landed and rolled. Ambedkar ignored it. I might have heard him laugh.

  I flipped the other shoe up over the pedestal to distract him and give me a chance, not a very good chance, to run for it. As I did so I saw the tray of arati fire sitting there, the flame floating and dancing on the sacred oil. I heard an oath, which probably meant that the shoe had come down on Ambedkar’s head or shoulder. Now he would expect me to make a break for it. What would I do in his place? I would move back a step or two and wait with the rifle on my shoulder and my weight on both feet ready to spin in either direction and fire when my quarry darted to left or right.

  I didn’t go left or right. I went straight up and I pushed the tray of arati fire over. I heard oil sloshing, metal clanging, flames hissing, and a single hoarse scream. Then I darted around the pedestal.

  Ambedkar had dropped the rifle. He crouched in a pool of burning oil. Oil had burned off his hair and gone down his face in two fiery runnels. He half-turned and spread his arms wide as if he wanted to embrace the Siva lingam across the room. He ran toward it. This was what the little tentative flames licking at his clothing had been waiting for. They flared. They burned brightly. It was as if retribution had been in the hands of the Ayyangar crone. I remembered the intensity of my hatred and my vow to kill Ambedkar. All that was left of them now was the bitter taste of gall in my mouth. Ambedkar was a torch that fell and smouldered.

  I picked up the rifle and ran toward the holy men seated before the lingam. One of them surprised me by lifting a withered arm and pointing. I started to turn, and saw Sumitra coming toward me. She wasn’t five yards away. She held a small automatic up with both hands. Her hands were shaking. She must have seen what had happened to Ambedkar. I took two steps toward her, not raising the rifle. She shot at me.

  Something seared my left arm. I got the small handgun before she could shoot again. With her small hard fists she struck my chest, sobbing. I caught one of her hands and led her to the lingam. She came docilely.

  The Siva man was there. So was the other big fellow in the dhotis. The Siva man had gone behind the holy men to the rough stone surface of the lingam, running his hands across it. A lump the size of a lemon stood out on the back of his bald head. The fellow in the dhotis was down before the holy men, blubbering. No one paid any attention to him.

  Then Marianne came running. Tears were on her cheeks. She couldn’t talk coherently. “Oh, Chet … when I heard … the way you cried out … I thought …”

  Her hand touched my left arm. The sleeve was wet with blood. It probably looked much worse than it was. Marianne said something, but I didn’t hear her. For a while I leaned on the rifle and listened to the roaring in my ears. Then I looked up.

  The Siva man had found a door in the lingam. He had known it was there of course.

  Aruna came out timidly, uncertainly. Behind her, wearing dhotis and needing a shave, was Stewart Varley. He blinked. After the darkness inside the lingam, the arati light must have been painful to his eyes. He saw me and nodded. His face was gaunt and grave. He had changed. The old Stewart Varley would have given me his best ingenuous smile; the new one said, “I sent Aruna to tell you I was dead. I’m sorry. I needed time. I thought I had found what I wanted.…” His voice trailed off in embarrassment. It must have been a new emotion for him.

  “And?” I said. I had given the rifle to the Siva man, who stood guard over Sumitra. The lepers from the courtyard who had entered the inner shrine were silent now, unseen, waiting.

  Varley’s hands gestured to take in the shrine of Siva. “They accepted me without question,” he said. I looked at the row of sadhus. I felt nothing one way or the other about them. There are some things you just can’t understand. Varley said: “They sit here, doing nothing.” Something of the old grin returned fleetingly. “Or perhaps they do everything a man should do.”

  “What about the corpse Aruna showed me?”

  “In Benares? He was a dead man, that’s all. He was one among thousands.”

  “Are you going back?”

  I don’t think he heard the question. He said, “Would you believe it, I’d already advanced to the stage of light trance. It’s autosuggestion. It … But that doesn’t matter now. When they came for Aruna, I took her inside the lingam. There’s a peephole in there, for use in the shrine ceremonies. I saw what the sadhus did. The big men in dhotis came and moved them. They would crawl back painfully and resume the lotus position in front of the lingam. They were protecting Aruna with their lives. Finally Ambedkar told Rukmini to shoot them. It was the only way. They love her. She was the servant of their leader, the Panch Kosi Sadhu. Is he really dead?”

  I nodded.

  “It’s a great loss, Drum. You can’t begin to realize how the people of India and how the leaders of all Asia looked to him for guidance. I had just one talk with him before I came here to join his disciples. He was a simple man and his way was not the way of the West, but he knew profound truths and he was the greatest man I ever met …”

  Aruna had been in a daze. She had come out of the lingam with head bowed and eyes shut. Now she raised her head. She saw Sumitra and flung herself, at her, shouting, “Y
ou killed him! You killed the sadhu!”

  Sumitra did not try to protect herself, but the Siva man pulled Aruna off her. His eyes were big with astonishment both because he had heard Aruna speak and because she had attacked another living creature. Then for the first time I saw him smile. It lit up his whole face. “Aruna,” he said, holding her. “Little Aruna. And would the sadhu have wished that?”

  Aruna shook her head. The Siva man was still holding her. I stood with Varley and Marianne.

  Alone for the moment, Sumitra turned and ran.

  There was a sighing. Figures appeared among the fire pedestals, shuffling, dressed in rags. The lepers of the courtyard. They heard Aruna’s accusation. Didn’t the miracle of her speech mean it was absolute truth? Mean it was a command to them?

  They fell on Sumitra. Rags moving in the lurid light. Animal sounds. They surged like a tide back out into the courtyard with her. I ran after them with the Siva man. The first light of dawn had come to the hills above the river and a cold wind, the only cold wind I ever felt in India, blew. The gray rags that were men fluttered in it. The Siva man roared at them in Hindi. I fired the rifle over their heads into the cold hill dawn.

  Finally the wind stirred them or the Siva man’s words prevailed or the rifle frightened them. They settled in clots about the dirty courtyard. It seemed as if they had never moved at all.

  I went to Sumitra. Her body was twisted grotesquely and there was blood on her face. She tried to get up, but couldn’t. She glared up at me defiantly and opened her mouth. She was dying.

  “Don’t try to talk, Malabar woman,” I said.

  Calling her that made her smile. “India must make its own way in the world,” she said. “And Asia. Isn’t it so?”

  I didn’t answer her. I said, “Lie still. We’ll get help.”

  “Tell me, Drum, please, what did your Mr. Sprayregan really learn? Ambedkar told me … I didn’t know at first … he found out we … Ambedkar and I, more than lovers … working from inside the Indian Embassy, deceiving my husband so we could subvert the Conference …”