The Game

by Laurie R. King

  It was, but only just. I think, looking back, it was probably the thought of that stairway that kept Nesbit from fighting harder about being tied to the bed. His wounded leg would never have got him up it.

  But it did mean that, once we had shinnied up the abandoned stones and pulled ourselves over the gaps, we were in a place no one would have expected to find us. I had gone first, as the lightest and most agile, and now I folded the rope the others had used to traverse the final gap while we discussed what came next.

  “It sounds to me as if the maharaja is having a pretty determined party,” I said, in little more than a murmur.

  “Which merely means that the Fort will sleep late in the morning,” Holmes replied, his voice deliberately soothing. “Are you ready, O’Hara?”

  “Oah yes,” he said. “May the Compassionate One be watching over us all.”

  We stole north along the corridor towards the lighted section, there to reconnoitre. On the other side of a bend in the corridor, restoration had taken place: The carving around the doors gleamed; intricate carpets lay on the polished marble; brightly coloured frescoes graced the fresh plaster walls. There were even electrical lights in this section, as if a line had been drawn between the twentieth century and the seventeenth. O’Hara walked down the hall-way, opened a door, and disappeared from sight. We settled ourselves for a long wait.

  This portion of the evening’s sortie had caused us the most vigorous argument. The maharaja was rarely alone for more than a few minutes while he was awake. Therefore, our best opportunity for laying hands on the man, short of a pitched battle with his guards, was to take him asleep, or at least alone in his rooms. And if he was not alone, at least the numbers would be few, and presumably any woman he took to his bed would not be armed.

  But we couldn’t all three hide in a wardrobe or under his bed. And in the end, O’Hara’s talents, and the fact that he was smaller than either of us, gave him the job. He had the morphia, he could move as silently as a ghost, and heaven knew he had as much patience as might be required. So Holmes and I watched him go, and adjusted the revolvers in our belts, before settling ourselves to wait beyond the reach of the lights. As we waited, my hand kept creeping to my near-naked scalp, exploring the loss, and the freedom.

  It is always at least mildly astonishing when plans actually work out, and I was indeed mildly astonished when, an hour later, the maharaja actually appeared, accompanied by two stoney-faced guards and a giggling German girl. The guards took up positions on either side of the door; after a few minutes, however, they looked at each other, and in unspoken accord retreated to the head of the main stairway, standing with their backs to the lit corridor.

  I tried not to grin at the picture of O’Hara, silently reciting his rosary and trying to close his ears to the noisy events that had forced the guards’ retreat. It seemed forever before the shrieks of the girl’s laughter faded, and longer before the thuds and sense of movement died away, but in truth, less than an hour after we had come up the derelict stairway, the door nearest us eased open and the girl slipped out. Five minutes later it opened again, and Kimball O’Hara looked out at us.

  We were on our feet in an instant. Holmes held up two fingers to warn him of the guards, then put one finger to his lips before gesturing that he should come. O’Hara stepped back inside for a few seconds, then reappeared with a weight slung across his shoulders, pausing to glance down the corridor at the two distant backs. He emerged fully, pulled the door shut, and in a few silent steps was with us.

  The maharaja, wrapped in a dark red dressing-gown, stank of alcohol, but his sleep was that of drugs as well. He stayed limp as we slung him down the pit of the stairs; he remained lifeless across O’Hara’s shoulders through the shadows of the ground-floor arcade. The festivities on the other side of the gardens seemed to have died rapidly away once the maharaja was gone; half the lights had been extinguished, and the only voices I could hear were the querulous calls of the over-worked servants. Still, we kept to the deepest shadows, and made the western wing without raising an alarm.

  We shifted our unconscious burden from O’Hara’s back to that of Holmes, and I led the way through mostly unlit passages to that off which the toy room opened. Nearly half the oil lamps had burnt out, including the one nearest the blue door itself. In near darkness, I reached for the doorknob, when the smoothly working mechanism of abduction suddenly hit a rough patch that sent it through the roof.

  “Hey,” said a familiar voice. “What’s going on here?”

  O’Hara stepped in front of Holmes as if he might conceal a six-foot-tall man with an insensible maharaja on his shoulders, and I reached for my gun, only to freeze when the figure down the hall-way stepped under a lamp, a large Colt revolver in his hand.

  Thomas Goodheart.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  The tableau held for six long breaths, seven, and then all hell broke loose. Another figure appeared beside Goodheart, dressed in the uniform of a chuprassi with a scarlet turban and an outraged voice.

  “What is this thing?” the newcomer demanded in the lilting accents of the Indian, looking from us to him. “You have found dacoits stealing the master’s treasures, oah, sir—”

  But to my utter confusion, Goodheart raised his revolver and pointed it, not at us, but at the red puggaree. The servant choked off his words in confusion and stared at Goodheart, as flabbergasted as I.

  Tommy started to gesture with his gun, saying “You’ll have to come—” when the man broke, turning on his heel to sprint for the outside door. Without a moment’s hesitation, the American shot him.

  Instantly, he turned and said urgently, “You two come fetch him, then stay in that room until I join you.” And without a word of explanation he fled up the passageway and burst outside into the courtyard gardens.

  O’Hara and I looked at each other, then he kicked open the toy room door for Holmes and we ran to gather up the chuprassi. The servant had died instantly, shot through the heart. We took him, shoulders and feet, and scurried back to dump him inside the blue door.

  “What the hell was that about?” I demanded of Holmes, but he could not enlighten me. I looked down at the dead man, but he, too, could tell me nothing apart from the obvious: that Goodheart had shot him, and not us.

  “I think you two should get into the tunnel,” I said.

  “I will wait here,” O’Hara said, but I was already shaking my head.

  “You’re stronger than I am,” I told him. “Easier for you and Holmes to carry the maharaja five miles than Holmes and I.”

  I did not wait for the men to agree, merely ripped the red turban from the dead man’s head and hurried back to where he had fallen, thinking that I might remove the worst of the stains from floor and wall, thus delay a full-scale search of this specific area. I shook out the tightly wrapped fabric and was just kneeling down to scrub at the stains when more gunfire cracked the stillness, followed by shouting voices. Or rather, a shouting voice.

  I pinched out the oil lamp over my head, then ventured down the corridor to the nearest window onto the courtyard gardens. There I saw a puzzling sight: Thomas Goodheart, swaying like a foundering sailboat, seemed to be arguing with a pair of chuprassis.

  “These god-damned bats!” he roared. “They drive a man insane with their infernal chatter. All night, in and out, get in the rooms and try and roost in your hair! I’m going to shoot every one of the accursed monsters.”

  Quieter voices could be heard, apparently pleading for reason; the servants continually glanced over their shoulders at the dark rooms above.

  “I won’t give it to you, damn you both!” the American raged. “I tell you the bats are—what’s that?”

  More rapid conversation, much patting of hands in an attempt to reassure, and Goodheart swayed again, then suddenly relinquished his gun. The relief of the two servants was palpable and immediate, and the one with the gun took a step away from this obstreperous guest. The hand of the other hovered near Go
odheart’s elbow, urging him back in the direction of the guest quarters, and he succeeded for a time. But when they reached the shadowy edges of the gardens, Goodheart shook the hand off. I heard him shouting again, something about leaving a man alone to have a quiet smoke.

  Both servants immediately retreated. Goodheart slumped into a bench, his legs alone visible by the light of a lamp on the nearby terrace; then came the flare of a lighter, followed by the unsteady waver of a cigarette. His voice said something else, quieter now but still threatening, and both of the servants went away across the terrace into the hall.

  I was not particularly surprised when, before I had reached the end of my muslin turban and the bloodstain was faded and nearly colourless, the man appeared at the far end of the passageway, moving without the slightest sign of drink, and without a cigarette. I stood up, bundling the last end of the sticky fabric into itself.

  “Captain Russell?” he asked dubiously, peering into my face.

  “And his sister as well,” I said. After all, I was armed, he was no longer; I could afford to experiment with honesty.

  “Thought that might be the case. Where are the others?”

  “In the toy room.”

  “Where’s that? And once you’re there, how do you think you’re going to get out of here? That was the maharaja you had, wasn’t it?”

  But I was not about to give him the secret passageway, not yet.

  “Look, who are you?” I demanded.

  “You know who I am. Shouldn’t we get out of this hall-way?”

  He did have a point. I led him to the toy room, pulled a candle from my pocket and lit it, sheltering it with my hand while I bent to feel the chuprassi’s pulse. Yes: dead. Goodheart knelt beside me at the man’s side, tentatively pushing on one shoulder to reveal the face and the bloody chest. After a minute he stood up, unnecessarily wiping his hands on his evening jacket.

  “He’s dead.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ve never … I didn’t intend to kill him. But he had to be stopped.”

  “Why?”

  That distracted him from staring at his victim. He stared at me instead. I hoped Holmes and O’Hara could hear all this.

  “Oh God. Don’t tell me you’re kidnapping Jimmy for ransom?”

  “What other reason might you imagine?”

  He heard in my voice not an answer, but a test question. He nodded slowly, and looked around him into the darkness, clearly searching for my accomplices. “I think it’s very possible we’re both working toward the same goal.”

  “And what might that be?”

  “Jimmy’s clearly … unbalanced. But I wouldn’t guess it’s easy to arrest a native prince openly on his own ground.”

  I let the words stand, and waited, cocking my head at the darkness. Goodheart waited, too, although he could not know for what. In seconds, I had my partners’ answer.

  “Bring him,” said Holmes’ voice.

  Once inside the hidden passage, we let the door click shut. I made cursory introductions. “Thomas Goodheart, Mr O’Hara, and you know my husband.”

  Hands were shaken, and Goodheart said, “Mr Holmes, not Mr Russell. The purser told me, the day after the fancy-dress ball.”

  “So the costume was an accident?” Holmes asked.

  “Er, not entirely. I’d heard one of the passengers, a lady from Savannah, talking about Sherlock Holmes. At the time I just thought she meant that you looked like Sherlock Holmes, not that you were him. I hadn’t meant any disrespect.”

  “I shouldn’t worry, young man. A lady from Savannah, you say? I don’t remember meeting her.”

  “Yes, odd that. She must have left the ship at Aden; I didn’t see her again.”

  “Holmes, can we leave this for later?” I suggested.

  “Indeed,” he said, although the puzzle remained in his voice.

  It proved impossible to shoulder our still-limp burden down the narrow passageway, but with one each at his head and feet and the spare two lighting the way with candles, we transported him through the belly of the hill, sweating and cursing, and no doubt bruising him all over. But the maharaja didn’t complain, not in his condition, and the necessarily slow rate of progress made it possible for me to repeat my question to Goodheart, at the fore of the procession. This time I received an answer.

  “So, who are you?”

  “Tommy Goodheart, travelling through India with his somewhat dotty mother.”

  “But something else as well.”

  “Yes. You see, when I was at Harvard, one of my friends had an uncle who is high in the War Department. Military Intelligence. He told me that I had such a superb poker face, I mustn’t waste it. And so I played along with him, went to a couple of Red meetings, even got myself arrested once—what a lark. Then when I graduated, and he found out I was going to be travelling in Europe, he called me in and gave me a serious talk.

  “Our government believes that the Soviet Union is a spent force, militarily. We’ve been helping them rebuild their factories, giving them food, in the hopes that they might stay where they are. I mean to say, one only has to look at a map to be a bit nervous about the Reds, don’t you think? There’s a considerable acreage there.

  “So he sort of suggested that if I went in that direction, I might just keep my eyes open. Nothing formal, you know? The U. S. of A. as a whole doesn’t have much of an interest in Intelligence—we seem to think it’s what the Brits would call ‘unsporting.’

  “But when I got to Russia, I found the factories looked just fine, and there are an awful lot of healthy-looking soldiers. And then I’ve been told that the Soviets are buying guns and planes from the Germans. A whole lot of planes.

  “I’d guess this uncle of my friend’s feels even more jittery after the last few months, what with your new government and all. Too many comrades make an outsider feel a mite uncomfortable. Although truth to tell, I haven’t been in touch with him since I left Europe, so I’m sort of playing it all by ear, here.”

  “A one-man Intelligence operation,” Holmes commented from his position at the maharaja’s shoulders. He did not, however, sound disbelieving, and I had to agree with him: It made a certain amount of sense that the young man was independent, rather than under the control of some organised group.

  “Did you arrange for that balcony to fall on us in Aden?” I asked Goodheart.

  “Balcony? Is that what happened to you? Good Lord, no.”

  I listened carefully, and could not hear a lie, but as I was at the rear, I could not see his face. His poker face. “What about the hotel fire in Delhi?”

  “Ah. Well, there wasn’t really a fire. That is, there was, but it sort of … got out of hand.”

  “And my missing trunk, off the boat?”

  “Well, yes, I am terribly sorry about that. I tried to work some way to have it returned to you, but then you disappeared from the hotel. I only arranged to have it mislaid for a while. It seemed to me that searching your luggage would be one way of finding out if you were Russian spies.”

  At that, all three of us stopped dead to stare at his back. At our sudden silence, he turned and saw our expressions. “Really!” he protested. “I’d been told that the most dangerous Bolsheviks were those that didn’t look like the enemy. And I couldn’t see the two of you travelling to India for any of the usual reasons, you just didn’t fit in. So I thought, maybe …” His voice died away in the tunnel.

  Then O’Hara began to laugh. It started with a snort, then merged into giggles, and in a minute he had dropped his half of our prisoner and collapsed into uncontrolled merriment. Holmes, too, was grinning widely, and despite the vast inconvenience this man’s amateur sleuthing had caused me, even I had to grin. O’Hara giggled, repeating to himself, “Bolshevik spies! Sherlock Holmes a Russian spy!”

  Goodheart looked vastly embarrassed. “It’s … I know. It was stupid of me, and I’d better give up this spy business before I do something really dangerous. So anyway, when I saw you wi
th Jimmy, I figured you must know what you were doing, and I’d better throw my lot in with you. Um, can I ask, where are you taking him?”

  The simple question triggered another paroxysm of mirth in O’Hara, and he began to choke, tears seeping from his eyes. I finally took pity on the American.

  “As you said, we’re arresting him—taking him to Delhi to answer for his crimes. If the Army has to come in after him, a lot of people will die unnecessarily.” The original summons to Delhi, of course, the letter that had set off the maharaja’s final madness, had concerned the disappearance of the neighbouring nawab’s daughter—a sin which seemed less and less likely to be laid to his account. But that summons had been sent before the contents of the godowns came to light; once Nesbit’s report reached his superiors, a stern letter would not be deemed sufficient. I was hit by a brief vision: serried ranks of Tommies marching up the road to Khanpur, while just over a rise lay a phalanx of those machine-guns I had seen, draped and oiled and waiting.

  “Is this kind of arrest legal here?” Goodheart asked, then hurried to explain, “Not that I mind, if it’s not. I’d just like to know.”

  “Probably not,” Holmes said.

  “Oh. Well, all right. How can I help?”

  “You can take his legs for a while, since O’Hara seems to have lost his strength.”

  Goodheart and I took a turn lugging our royal prisoner, and conversation lapsed. When we switched over again, twenty minutes later, he caught his breath and then asked, “How do you plan on getting him out of Khanpur?”

  “Carrying him.” Holmes said it sharply.

  “You could take some horses from the stables.”

  “There are a dozen or more syces living at the stables,” I explained. “The way we came, cross-country, we may not be noticed until the first farmers rise.”