The disciples clearing up in the kitchens were smilingly delighted to provide him with food. A girl with a tiny, squabby, baby papoose on her back scurried off to find him a tray, a bright orange plastic one. A boy with a long swatch of hair held in place by a rubberband, also orange, spread disposable paper plates on it while Ghote wondered why they did not use convenient broad leaves for the purpose. A particularly skinny-looking younger girl wearing a T-shirt inscribed I Love Swami and a boy who had plainly attempted, though without success, to grow luxuriant curls like his dead guru’s began heaping out food left over from the meal.
It was, Ghote noticed, much the same type of food that might be served in an ashram in India—lentils, beans, tomatoes, rice. But it was much, much more abundant and somehow, too, each bean, each grain of lentil, seemed to be bigger and glossier than it would have been at home.
“This is tastier than anything grown with chemicals,” the boy with the impoverished curls assured him, ladling out another spoonful.
“Yeah, and much better for you,” said the girl with the baby on her back.
“Thank you, thank you,” he said, picking up the tray and hurrying out.
No doubt Fred Hoskins was guarding the doors of Swami’s house as rigorously as could be imagined. And yet … and yet …
But across on the other side of the half-darkened circle, he found the huge private eye sitting on the steps of Swami’s house, gun in hand, looking fully content with his lot.
“All is well?” he asked him.
“Couldn’t be better.”
He laid the tray from the kitchens on the step.
Fred Hoskins peered at it in the poor light.
“What the heck is this? You didn’t order steak.”
“They are not eating any sort of meat in the ashram.”
He saw that huge belly swell in the gloom.
“No meat? No wonder those jerks are incapable of rational behaviour. Let me inform you, Gan, it’s an American’s right to eat good red meat daily.”
“Yes, Fred.”
Ghote saw again the enormous, lolloping steak, oozing red blood that he had watched the belly-jutting private eye consume on the first occasion they had eaten together. Was it this right to bloody meat that Americans possessed that was the cause of all the violence in the land?
He settled down on the step on the other side of the vegetarian tray.
No, he thought, we in India can be very, very violent also.
Fred Hoskins picked up one of the plates and a spoon.
“There’s no ice cream,” he exploded, apparently just realising the outrage. “Ice cream, Gan boy, is essential in every red-blooded American’s diet.”
“Yes. Is it? That is most interesting, Fred.”
He found that with the aroma of the food in his nostrils he was after all hungry. He ate voraciously—the various dishes were excellent, though not very spicy—and even polished off two of the plates that Fred Hoskins had disdained in favour of recounting other items that were necessary to all red-blooded Americans and then branching off into tales of how a certain extremely red-blooded American had shown his red-bloodedness to best advantage patrolling the streets of Los Angeles.
Eating some of this dal would be much better for him, Ghote thought, trying to deny admittance to the stream of yammering, hammering, honking, quacking verbiage.
At last underneath the continuing din— “You are going to thank me for this, Gan boy. I am about to tell you how I took one Pete Benito, wanted for Grand Theft Auto, when he …”—he thought he detected the sound of a car labouring up the dirt-track hill. Then he caught a glimpse of headlights and in a few moments Lieutenant Foster’s vehicle pulled up just outside the circle.
“Fred,” he interrupted, “the lieutenant has come.”
Fred Hoskins surged to his feet.
“This will be a memorable experience for you, Gan,” he said. “You are about to witness your first arrest on American soil.”
“Yes, Fred.”
He let the big private eye do the talking, while he stood keeping those double-doors under unremitting observation. It meant that the explanations took a good deal longer than if he had been able to put his quiet, unsmiling colleague from the Sheriff’s Department in the picture himself, but he was determined not to be associated, however remotely, with the idea of Johnananda as the swami’s murderer. Not because, after those three words of confession on the steps of Swami’s house, he could any longer pretend that there was any other explanation of the business, but because he could not bring himself to acknowledge out aloud that after all some mystic means must have been used in the killing, and used too by a person he himself had dismissed as a mere play-acting Englishman.
Yet Emily, he remembered now with shame, had even said clearly that Johnananda possessed powers that people in the West could not attain. And Fred Hoskins had drawn his attention to her words.
Lieutenant Foster heard out the private eye’s long, self-regarding account, delivered through his car window, in silence. He did not even offer a comment until he had opened the car door, gotten out, and taken a quick, assessing survey of the whole area round.
Then he turned to Ghote.
“Inspector?”
Ghote felt the single questioning word as if it had been a punch to the solar plexus, perfectly timed. He was not going to be allowed to escape endorsing Fred Hoskins’ statement.
He pulled back his shoulders.
“As we put Johnananda into Swami’s house,” he answered, “he uttered three words to me. He said: ‘I killed him.’”
“Yup.”
Without another word the lieutenant headed across to the swami’s house. Ghote followed close at his heels. Behind him, a huge triumphant shadow, he felt rather than saw Fred Hoskins.
The lieutenant mounted the steps of the house, pushed open the outer doors, crossed the Nataraj-protected lobby, pushed open the inner door and entered the big, bare room where the swami had died.
Johnananda was not there.
EIGHTEEN
The doors of the two small rooms at the rear of Swami’s house were open, as Ghote himself had left them after completing his examination of the place before they had put Johnananda into it. It had been possible from where the three of them stood by the entrance to see right into both bathroom and bedroom. But Lieutenant Foster, after giving Ghote just the briefest of questioning glances, strode across the big, close-boarded, empty main room and stepped into each in turn.
Eventually he came out of the bedroom and stood by its door, his tanned face more expressionless than Ghote had yet seen it.
Ghote felt a huge interior desolation. He had said to Fred Hoskins, by way of secretly paying him out for many hours of quacking boredom, that if Johnananda were to disappear from this solid, escape-proof building, then it would finally nail the case against the man. But he had not for one moment expected such a thing to happen.
And now it had. Johnananda had done precisely what he himself had firmly believed was impossible for a person of his standing.
“Well,” he said into the air. “He has done it. He has done it for the second time.”
“Where’ll he be, Inspector?” Lieutenant Foster said.
Ghote lifted pained eyes to the wooden ceiling above.
“Since he has gone from here,” he answered, “he could be anywhere. In India even. In Tibet. In his office over in the administration block. Anywhere.”
“I guess so.”
They stood in silence. Even Fred Hoskins had been reduced to speechlessness by the spectacular proof of his own theory.
“Should I put out an all-stations call?” the lieutenant asked at last, plainly afraid he was making a fool of himself by the suggestion.
“Oh, yes,” Ghote replied. “Why not? After all, he may just have moved himself to somewhere nearby where one of your deputies would see him. He could be in California still.”
In California, he thought. Someone, a murderer when all was sa
id and done, who had transported himself by the process of bilocation from one part of California to another. Of California.
“I’ll have to get to a phone that works,” Lieutenant Foster said, moving towards the door with a semblance of his old decisiveness.
Ghote followed him out of the house and over to the administration block. They mounted its steps.
And, as they did so, Ghote caught the faint sound of a raised voice coming from somewhere along the central corridor. A raised, high-pitched, familiar voice.
“… very kind. Very kind of you, Mr. Lansing. Then we’ll say next Thursday at eleven o’clock. Sorry not to make it earlier, but one is snowed under, but snowed under.”
He went at a belting run along the corridor. He heard the tink of a telephone receiver being put down. He glanced swiftly over his shoulder. The lieutenant, who had paused bewildered for an instant, was hurrying after him now. He flung open the door of Johnananda’s office without ceremony.
The sunken-cheeked, shaven-headed Englishman was sitting at his papers-covered, orange plastic desk.
For three long seconds Ghote looked at him. He needed that much time to convince himself he was seeing what he was seeing.
Lieutenant Foster had come up beside him and was standing equally silent. Ghote spared a moment to glance back to see what Fred Hoskins was doing. The mountainous private eye was still at the entrance to the building, a hey-you-guys expression plastered all across his great beef-red face.
Ghote turned back to Johnananda. And, as he did so, he knew what he had to ask him.
“Johnanandaji,” he said, choosing the honorific form of his name with deliberation. “Johnanandaji, if you are the yogi you have just shown yourself to be—far along the path—you did not kill Swami. Please, then, why did you say that you had?”
Johnananda looked back at him. He had shown no surprise when his door had been so abruptly flung open, nor when first Ghote and then Lieutenant Foster had stood there looking in at him without uttering a word between them. Now he gave them a smile, a rather worn smile.
“But I did kill Swami,” he said. “It was my fault he took his own life. My fault, if ever anything was.”
“Yes,” Ghote answered, “I know now that Swami did, of course, take his own life. It was only when you seemed to say very, very clearly that you had killed him that I made the mistake of believing that you had actually cut his throat with that razor.”
“No, no.”
“No, I know. But, tell me please, what exactly do you mean when you say it was your fault he took his life?”
“But, my dear chap, poor Swami was such a cheat, such a cheat towards the end. And at last everything caught up with him. But, you see, I had been letting him go on, and when he killed himself I saw that that had been a terrible mistake.”
“Yes, I see. But why, please, did you let him go on like that—cheating and cheating? I do not understand.”
Johnananda gave them his pale smile again.
“Well, when he came out here to California first he was a truly God-realised person. A true yogi. But, you know, one of the great Masters once said that everything on this earth is like a mingling of sand and sugar. Be like the wise ant, he said, take only the sugar. But, poor Swami, after a while he began to think that Californian sand was sweeter than sugar.”
“And you knew this? You saw it?”
“Well, one doesn’t like to boast about one’s own spiritual stature, but one can see what one can see. And it wasn’t difficult to see Swami had lost his spiritual voltage if one was lucky enough to have eyes. Not your sort of seeing eyes, I’m afraid, Inspector and Lieutenant. But my sort. Our sort here.”
“Yes,” said Ghote.
Johnananda’s fleshless face took on a brief look of pain.
“You see, to begin with Swami wasn’t doing any real harm,” he said. “I thought I could keep an eye on the boys and girls and see that his loss of voltage didn’t affect them. And it didn’t for a long time, you know. I mean, until shortly before the end he wasn’t making hay with any of them sexually or anything.”
“But finally he was,” Ghote said. “Finally he was ravishing those young girls, isn’t it? And you told me that he was not.”
Johnananda’s long-fingered hands flapped once like a pair of exhausted fishes.
“Well, my dear, I didn’t tell you that, not plainly,” he said. “It was wrong of me, I know, even to try to mislead you, picking and choosing all those double-meaning phrases. But Swami was dead, then and I thought it wouldn’t matter if I tried to preserve the memory of him as a remarkable man. He was, you know. When he came West, he was remarkable. He had a great deal to give.”
He looked at them both as they stood in the doorway, his judges.
“Okay,” Lieutenant Foster said. “I’m prepared to accept that on your say-so. Now.”
“Hey!”
A clamorous bellow came from just behind them. Fred Hoskins was staring at Johnananda over their shoulders as if he was simultaneously confronting both a huge, red-blooded American steak and a genuine, clanking, head-under-arm, white-sheeted, mopping and mowing ghost.
“So,” he broke into yammering speech, “you didn’t make it, eh, bud? You couldn’t get yourself far enough away. Well, I’ve got news for you. The California police aren’t so easy to fool. You’ve cooked your goose now, boy. You’ve just given us the final proof of the method you used to murder that innocent man. We’ve outwitted you at every point. I now notify you that you thought you had us fooled when we put you into that Swami’s house, but we now have proof that we …”
Mr. Quack.
Mr. Quack, Mr. Quack, Mr. Quack, Ghote thought. How much longer are you going to go on quack-quack-quacking? But I do not care. That’s all your noise means to me now. A duck on a pond, quacking and quacking.
Carry on. Carry on as long as you want. I have got a little quiet thinking to do, and your quack-quacking will not put me off one little bit.
The honking private eye may have gone on with his diatribe a little longer. Ghote did not hear him. What brought him at last out of his inward-turned, jumping from point to point reverie was Lieutenant Foster’s quiet voice.
“That’ll do, Hoskins. We’ll leave Mr. Johnananda now.”
“Yes,” Ghote said. “Yes, Lieutenant, please let us leave. There is something I am very much wanting to show you.”
“Yes, Inspector?”
“I am wanting to show you, Lieutenant, where is that razor now.”
A little smile lifted the corners of the lieutenant’s mouth.
“You are?”
“Yes, please. Please, come. It would be best, it would be easiest if we go back to Swami’s house.”
“Okay.”
The two of them walked, not hurrying, not dawdling, back across the ashram’s central circle in the direction of the familiar, spiral-roofed building. Fred Hoskins, Ghote was just aware, was following them puzzledly. But he no longer bothered about the fellow.
Fred Hoskins was exorcised at last. Yammering giant had been transmogrified into Mr. Quack, the duck on the pond.
“So he committed suicide after all,” the lieutenant said thoughtfully. “Whatever he may have been once, when it came to the end he was no more than a plain con-man, using his hold on those girls for his own enjoyment. And then all of a sudden things got too tough for him. He knew he wouldn’t be able to get out of what I’d got on him, and he must have reckoned that a guy as noticeable as he was wouldn’t have lasted a week if he’d tried to run for it. So it was goodbye everybody.”
He darted a sharp glance at Ghote.
“And you’re going to tell me how he pulled off that last trick?” he asked.
“Yes,” Ghote said, unemphatically, “I am going to do that. You know, in the end the fellow was no more than what in India we are calling a bhagat, a conjuror fellow.”
“Okay.”
Instead of leading the lieutenant to the swami’s house, however, he took him to the e
ntrance to the passageway between the house and the dining-hall.
“Before we go in,” he said, “I would like you to see something here.”
“I’m interested.”
Ghote pointed.
“It is that bicycle, Lieutenant,” he said. “You can make it out by the light from the dining-hall windows. I saw it myself when I first came to the ashram. I noticed that somebody had begun to repair it and then had stopped. To tell you the truth, it reminded me of India because of that, and I was somewhat pleased. And all the time I have been here I thought that I was remembering the machine because of that only.”
“But?” asked the lieutenant.
“But what I was not realising until just now, when for the first time I seemed to have quiet so as to be able to think, was that when I first saw the bicycle before the swami took his life the wheel under repair had its inner tube lying loose with it. But when I looked at the machine again after the swami’s death that inner tube was missing.”
“A rubber inner tube,” the lieutenant said pensively. “Go on, Inspector.”
“Well, now, please, I would like you to step into the swami’s house.”
“Okay.”
They entered the lobby of the house. But Ghote stopped before opening the inner door.
“Please look at this little statue,” he said. “It is of a god we are calling Nataraj. He is dancing the creation and destruction of the universe. But his statue here is small, and so it has been put on this tall pillar.”
Lieutenant Foster stood looking at the Dancing Nataraj and the solid pillar it stood on.
“You could, if you lifted the statue off and were agile enough, climb up on that pillar,” he said.
“Yes,” Ghote said. “Shall we take it inside?”
“I’ll bring it. You go ahead.”
Ghote went into the swami’s big, bare room once more and walked over the close-fitted boards until he came to the dark pink outline that the lieutenant’s technicians had marked out. The lieutenant came up a moment later, hugging the heavy pillar to his chest.
Go West, Inspector Ghote Page 20
