The Game

by Laurie R. King

  “But the friend in Lahore never saw him?”

  “We could uncover no one in Lahore who had seen him. In fact, we couldn’t even find anyone there who would admit to being O’Hara’s friend.”

  “And the amulet?”

  “Ah. That arrived ten weeks ago. By post.” The dry answer forestalled any exclamations, for clearly the surprise of such an unadorned delivery had sent waves through the department, leaving a thousand questions in its wake. Holmes ventured one of those.

  “Posted where?”

  “In Delhi. Handed in at an hotel by a French tourist, a lady here to paint botanical watercolours. She was given it by a middle-aged Parsi who guided her through the gardens in Bombay, requesting that favour in return.”

  “Extraordinary. I don’t suppose you still have the paper it came wrapped in?”

  “Of course. It’s in my safe, if you’d like to see it.”

  “Very much.”

  I broke in with a question. “Pardon me if I ask things I either should not, or which I ought to know already, but was Mr O’Hara still on what you might call ‘active duty’?”

  “Not really. After the War, with the Bolsheviks apparently having their hands full in Russia, we had all begun to think we might relax our guard and turn to other concerns. Since O’Hara’s expertise is that of the borders and Tibet, he sat at a desk for a year, possibly a bit more, then in late 1920 asked for a holiday. He was forty-five and had not taken one since returning from Tibet when he was nineteen, so one could scarcely object. But when we needed him this past autumn and went looking, we couldn’t find him.”

  “You say you needed him. The Russians are back?” Holmes asked.

  “If not yet, then soon. You know that Labour will grant the Bolsheviks formal recognition?”

  “It is to be expected.”

  “A mistake. MacDonald has his head in the clouds if he imagines The Bear will turn cuddly simply because they share a theoretical conviction. Belief was, The Game was finished with the Anglo-Russian convention seventeen years ago. But then the Reds came in and tore up all the treaties and back we went. Lenin—or whoever’s in charge while he’s ill—is buying time to sniff out our weak places, and will very soon be nudging through the passes like the Tsar before him. Our enemy may have changed his hat, but the Bolsheviks want a Communist East as much as the Tsar did, you can count on it. They won’t settle for the Congress Party—as far as they’re concerned, Gandhi’s worse than we are, a religious reactionary. And since the Bolsheviks will assuredly look to Tibet as a potential point of entry just as the Tsar before them did, we need O’Hara back on the force. True, Tibet has been receiving our own overtures of late—our giving the Dalai Lama shelter in 1910 saw to that—but whether the Russians or the Chinese get to Lhasa first, we’re going to need Tibet, and they us. We’re sending a political officer out this summer, but that’s all bells and whistles. We need someone who can see outside the diplomatic circle, and O’Hara knows the ground as a tongue knows its teeth.” He paused, to watch a pair of small black-headed birds dive at the fountain, and gave an almost imperceptible sigh.

  “Still, that is not the main consideration here. What it boils down to is, O’Hara’s one of ours, and we want to know where he is.”

  “And, perhaps, to know if he actually is still ‘yours’?”

  Nesbit stood abruptly, taking three quick steps to bend over a fairly unexceptional flower. When he spoke, his voice was even but taut. “I refuse to believe that O’Hara has turned coat. I worked with the man. He is the King’s man to his bones.”

  I waited for Holmes to agree, but he said nothing. Clearly, he had been rethinking the question since his vehement declaration in Mycroft’s rooms three weeks before. It sounded to me as if he was no longer quite so certain of Mr O’Hara’s bone-deep loyalties.

  Holmes allowed the silence to hold for a while. Nesbit prowled up and down, gravel crunching under his soft shoes, until Holmes spoke.

  “How many other agents have you lost in recent years?”

  “That depends on what you mean by ‘lost.’ ”

  “Any of the word’s definitions will do,” Holmes said irritably.

  “Sorry,” Nesbit said, coming back to his bench. “I don’t mean to evade your question. It is merely that the answer is difficult to give. In the sense that we’ve ‘lost’ O’Hara, there have been four others in the past thirty months. In England, or if they were Army, that number would be alarming. But here, it’s commonplace to go months, even years without hearing from one of our ‘pundits,’ as the native agents are called—it’s often just not possible for a man to report in. And frankly, I expect that one or two of those missing simply decided that their period of service was over and slipped quietly back to their families. I am aware of three other such who informed us openly of their retirement from The Game. All of whom, I have confirmed, are healthy and home, thank you very much. It is more than possible that the four missing agents have done the same, merely neglecting to tell us—which would be a typically Indian way to do things, by the way. Indians hate to disappoint a person to his face, and often say yes to something they know they can’t provide. I shouldn’t have expected the attitude from O’Hara, but it’s not beyond the imagination. We’ve made enquiries for him in all the obvious places, including his old lama’s home monastery. He’s either not there, or won’t respond.”

  “And what about the other sense of ‘lost’?” Holmes pressed.

  Nesbit’s green eyes wandered across to the playing fountain. “Three. All in the last nine months. John Forbes, Mohammed Talibi, and a new man—just a boy—Rupert Bartholomew. All good men. All dead.”

  “How?”

  “One shot, one knifed, one strangled.” He paused, and then gave us the worst. “All tortured first, beaten and burnt.”

  It was suddenly all too clear why Mycroft had sent us.

  “You have a traitor in the ranks,” Holmes said.

  The handsome face grew still, as if movement might bring a return of pain. After a moment, he nodded, once.

  “I no longer know whom I can trust. Even Hari, who has been with me for twelve years, even him …” Nesbit broke off, to dig a silver case from a pocket and light a cigarette, pinching the match between his fingers and tucking it back into the case. “I begin to understand how the officers must have felt during the Mutiny. Their own men, men they’d fought beside, marched with, trusted with their lives—with the lives of their wives and children, for God’s sake—turning on them, slaughtering them. And five years ago, I saw Jallianwala Bagh, the morning after. I saw the results of Dyer’s order to fire on the demonstrators. Sixteen hundred and fifty rounds and nearly every one of them hit civilian flesh—men, women, and little children heaped against the walls where they’d tried to get away from the machine-gun fire. I’ll never outlive the nightmares, never. Hundreds dead, thousands bleeding, and every white man in India wondering when the country would rise up and kill us in our beds, rid themselves of us once and for all.

  “And who could blame them? We collect their taxes and we give them nothing but the bottom of our boot. You heard of Dyer’s ‘crawling order’? Where he set guards to make certain no native could walk past the spot where an Englishwoman had been attacked, but had to crawl—even the natives who’d rescued her? God help us, with such officers. There are days when, if I heard that someone in a position to undermine the Survey from within had chosen to do so, I couldn’t altogether bring myself to condemn him.”

  “Yet you don’t believe O’Hara capable?”

  “No. Not him.”

  “Even though since he was a child his white blood has warred against his love and loyalty to the country that nurtured him?”

  “Even so. He would not deceive his friends in that way.”

  “O’Hara is quite capable of practising deceit, when it comes to playing The Game.”

  “No.”

  Holmes looked at the younger man and gave a small shake of his head, but said
merely, “I’ll need all the details on the three men found dead, and on those missing.”

  “I’ve included a précis in the O’Hara file I have for you. I prepared it myself; no one has seen it.”

  “That’s as well.”

  Nesbit crushed his cigarette out under his heel, then said abruptly, “I am having doubts as to the wisdom of this venture.”

  “That is understandable, but we shall take the file nonetheless.”

  “I should not have allowed you to come here, openly to my home. What if you were seen, and followed?”

  “Who knows we are here?” Holmes asked.

  “You and Miss Russell? By name? No more than four men within the Survey, all of them high ranks. But still …”

  Holmes smiled happily and reached over to clap the man on his shoulder. “I shouldn’t worry. By tomorrow, your two English visitors will have ceased to exist.”

  The smaller man looked taken aback, then forced a grin. “And I’m supposed to find that reassuring?”

  With that, the more clandestine portion of our interview was at an end. Nesbit led us inside to his study, where he opened the safe and took out a flat oilskin envelope and a japanned-tin box, laying both on his desk. The tin contained a crumpled and torn paper wrapping with an address in the government offices. Holmes laid the paper out on the desk and set to with the magnifying lens he carried always, but in the end, it told him little more than it had Nesbit: that some tidy person—a man, to judge by the printing—had parcelled up O’Hara’s amulet and sent it to Captain Nesbit, but as the address was entirely in capital letters, it had little personality.

  “I couldn’t say if that was … our man’s writing,” Nesbit told us, his voice low and avoiding names, “but I’d lay money that it was a St Xavier’s boy who wrote it—the way he’s made the numerals is fairly distinctive. I went to the school myself for two years,” he explained. “Not at the same time, of course, but these numbers look like what I might do, were I attempting to conceal my hand.”

  Holmes bent again over the paper, and when he stiffened at some characteristic invisible to me, standing at his shoulder, Nesbit said, “The sand, yes. Unfortunately, there’s nothing to set it apart—it might have come from anywhere in the country.”

  “In London,” Holmes muttered, “I could say for a surety that a mite of soil had come from one spot or another, but in this vast land, there are ten thousand places where such grains might have come from.”

  “Such as from another parcel,” I pointed out, unnecessarily. Holmes laid the paper back in the tin and took up the twine, turning his lens on its knots. But as they were not tied in a manner known only to Bolivian merchant sailors or a small tribe of gipsies from northern Persia, and since the fibres bore no traces of raw opium, gold dust, or a face-powder sold only in one exclusive shop in Paris, the string told him no more than the paper it had covered. Nesbit seemed mildly disappointed, but unsurprised. He put the box back into his safe, pulling out a lumpy envelope in return. Bringing it to the desk, he fished from it a pair of small silver lockets strung on copper-wire chains and handed us each one.

  Holmes smiled, as if he’d seen an old friend, and thumbed the surface of his with familiarity. I held mine up to the light. It was a rude piece of jewellery, with touches of black enamel in the silver and an almost invisible latch on one side, which opened to reveal a small twist of soft rice paper around a hard centre. I unfurled this cautiously, set aside the tiny chip of turquoise it contained, and examined the paper. It had been stamped with an inscription, its ink bleeding into the fibres; the script was unknown to me.

  “What does the writing say?” I asked Nesbit.

  “It’s a standard Buddhist benediction, for protection on the road. The usefulness of the charm lies in catching the eye of another who holds one. And since such objects can be stolen, the phrase that accompanies it is paramount.” He told us the phrase, in Hindi, and had us repeat it twice so he could be sure we had the proper and essential emphasis on the fourth word.

  Holmes dropped his over his neck, working it inside his collar, then murmured, “The three men found dead and tortured. Were they, too, ‘Sons of the Charm’?”

  “They were. And yes, the charms each wore are missing.”

  I thought to myself that it might be time to replace this style of charm with something less widely circulated, but at least we were forewarned. Holmes slid the oilskin document case into his inner pocket, and stood up.

  We shook Nesbit’s hand, and he locked the safe and walked us to the door. We paused on the verandah, listening to the sound of an approaching motor. As it pulled up before the house, Nesbit turned his head slightly and said, “It might be best to commit as much of the file as possible to memory, and burn the rest. I’ve also given you three methods of reaching me in an emergency. If there’s anything at all I can do, any time …”

  “We shall be in touch,” Holmes told him. Hari stepped out of the motorcar to hold its door for us, then climbed behind the wheel and drove us back into the city.

  Chapter Eight

  Somewhat to my surprise, we did not instantly pack our bags and dash from the hotel into hiding, taking refuge in some Oriental equivalent of Holmes’ London bolt-holes. Rather, he poured the contents of the leather case out onto the floor and set about reading them.

  “I thought you and Nesbit agreed that we might be in some danger here,” I said, with what I considered admirable patience.

  He looked up with a frown at the distraction. “Oh, no more than usual. We shall be away before any rifles can sight down on our necks.”

  “Good to hear,” I muttered, and picked up a page from the file.

  Nesbit had made no attempt at presenting a coherent narrative of Kimball O’Hara’s life and work; he’d merely copied specific documents pertaining to the man’s last year or two of active field service in the Survey, before he had vanished from the Simla road. The ongoing problem of independent border kingdoms had been O’Hara’s main concern, as indeed it had been the concern of his superiors since the days of the East India Company: One minor king who defied British rule and surreptitiously opened his state to the enemy could spell disaster for British India. And in the past, hereditary rulers of the native states had not all demonstrated an unswerving sense of loyalty when it came to bribes and blandishments. Moslem nawabs and Hindu rajas, squelched into their borders first by the Company and later the Crown, had spent their entire lives with nothing to do but squabble over rank and invent ways to spend their money. The idea of an hereditary prince joining sides with the Communists was, of course, absurd on the surface, but that by no means ruled out the possibility, no more than it had for that American aristocrat, Thomas Goodheart.

  O’Hara’s last report, three tightly written pages reproduced in photograph that we might recognise the handwriting if we happened upon it again, concerned a number of apparently unrelated but nonetheless provocative events and overheard statements concerning two of the principalities along the northern border. A seller of horses commenting on the sudden interest in his wares by the raja of Singhal’s men; an itinerant fakir bemoaning the treatment he had received in Khanpur’s main city, where before his begging had been welcomed; a huge order for raw cotton, enough to clothe all of Khanpur’s subjects in one go; and a dozen other incidents.

  Cotton, I reflected idly, was also an essential element in the manufacture of high explosives.

  When I had absorbed the contents of the letter, I turned to the writing itself. The distinctive running script was indeed similar to that of his copyist, Nesbit, although whether or not the printed numerals of the parcel reflected the same school’s training I was not prepared to say. In either case, behind the anonymous precision of the script could be seen evidence of a remarkably self-contained and self-assured hand. There was a touch of egotism in his capital Es and obstinacy in his lowercase Bs, but those were balanced by the humour in his Ss and Is and the simplicity of his capitals in general. All in all, the han
d that had written this document was ruled by precision, toughness, and a high degree of imagination, and I found myself thinking that, if “Kim” had indeed sided against the British government, he might well have had good reason.

  I caught myself up short. That kind of romantic nonsense would get us nowhere. In any event, we had to find the man before we could lay judgement upon his actions, and I could not see that the documents provided us with any clear direction.

  “What do you think, Holmes?” Generally, venturing such a vague query resulted only in a burst of scorn, suggesting as it did that I was at a complete loss to know where I stood; but sometimes, and particularly if Holmes was as wrapped up in his thoughts as he appeared to be now, a vague probe merely loosed his tongue. To my relief, so it proved.

  “Simla first, I believe. Three years makes for a glacier-cold trail, but he has always been a memorable character, and cautious enquiry might uncover a trace from his passing.”

  “From what you told Nesbit, we will not be openly taking the train as Sherlock Holmes and wife.”

  “I shouldn’t think that a good idea, no. And as we shall have to assume that we have attracted notice, it would be pushing our luck to board the train as two stray Europeans.”

  I sighed to myself, and told him, “Well, whatever disguise you come up with, kindly make sure that the shoes aren’t too crippling.”

  He paused to gaze up into mid-air. “Yes. Odd, that your trunk has not come to light.”

  “You think its disappearance may be related? But that would mean that someone knew we would be on board that ship before we left Marseilles.”

  “Not necessarily. It could have been diverted with the first rush of coolies in Bombay.”

  “In either case, what would anyone want with my trunk?”

  “The Baskerville case began with a missing boot,” he mused. “The same question occurred then. Perhaps they wished to compile evidence. Or wanted to steal your revolver. Which reminds me, we shall have to get you another one.”