The Grand Tour: Four International Mysteries

by Michaela Thompson

  It couldn’t be from Catherine, because Catherine was dead. She tried to avoid the thought that she hadn’t actually seen Catherine’s body. There had been no body to see. Neither Catherine’s nor those of the two other members of the faithful who refused to desert Nagarajan no matter what atrocities he’d committed. She had seen Catherine’s ring, which the police had found, along with the bones and teeth of three people, after the ashes cooled. The ring, a bauble picked up for a few rupees in some bazaar, was twisted, but by some fluke not entirely melted, and it had a pink stone. She could see it, lying in the light from the desk lamp, and she could smell the bureaucratic police-station smell of paper crumbling, year after year, in the damp heat. They had asked, tentatively, if she wanted to keep the ring. When she said no, they put it carefully in a small brown envelope that had probably long since disintegrated in its turn.

  By that time Nagarajan had hanged himself in his jail cell and there was little to do but come home, despite the threats of the parents of the other victims and some posturing by the government. Even then, Marina had seen irony in the king cobra strangling himself. Unless he actually had been beaten to death by the police, a distinct possibility. Nobody had been left but Marina, who hadn’t wanted to be there in the first place, who had come to India only because that was where Catherine was, and she was responsible for Catherine. She had flown to Bombay full of determination to regain her sister. She had left with nothing, not even Catherine’s ring.

  Catherine was dead, so this letter couldn’t be from Catherine. It was like Catherine, though, to be so cryptic. To jerk Marina around, just to prove she still could.

  When Marina had gotten back from India, she had thrown out or given away everything that belonged to Catherine— her Western clothes, which she’d long since given up wearing; her school notebooks; the pictures she’d drawn when she was a child. Because if Catherine had done what Marina wanted and gone back to school instead of getting mixed up with Nagarajan and going to India, she would be alive. It was Catherine’s fault. But it was Marina’s fault, because Marina was responsible for Catherine. How many times had Marina gone around on that wheel?

  Their parents’ death, in an airplane crash on the way to a football game in Los Angeles, had been Marina’s introduction to disaster. She was eighteen when it happened, and was getting ready to start her freshman year at Stanford. Catherine was fifteen. Two orphans with few relatives, and those far away. It seemed best to everyone that she and Catherine do what they preferred— continue living in the little house in the Avenues near Golden Gate Park where they had grown up. Marina forgot Stanford and enrolled in San Francisco State.

  For several years, it worked. It was fine. They shared household tasks, got decent grades, worked at part-time jobs to supplement the insurance money. Once the initial shock of bereavement wore off, they were— Marina was, anyway— reasonably happy.

  Catherine apparently wasn’t. How else to explain her rejection of their life together, in her first year at State, in favor of placing herself in the hands of Nagarajan, a two-bit guru whom even the gurus had never heard of? At that time, there were dozens of Indian saints, Tibetan saints, Chinese and Japanese living gods, yogis, boddhisattvas, Sufis, dervishes, you name it running around San Francisco and Berkeley establishing ashrams, temples, meditation halls, giving lectures, classes, intensives. Everybody was seeking the Way and the Path. So Marina simply laughed and kidded Catherine when Catherine hung the photograph of Nagarajan in her room and put fresh flowers in front of it every day.

  It took a long time for Marina to realize it was serious. She had worried from time to time that Catherine might get pregnant or become a drug addict, but something like this had never occurred to her. One afternoon when Catherine wasn’t home, Marina went in to look at the picture. Catherine’s room smelled of incense. A brightly printed Indian cotton spread covered her bed.

  The picture of Nagarajan hung over the incense burner. It was in color, heavily and too brightly retouched. It showed, from the waist up, a slim young Indian man with prominent facial bones and large dark eyes. Curly luxuriant black hair hung to his shoulders. His bare brown chest was smooth and muscular, and his lips, half-smiling, were full and well-molded and looked, to Marina, almost feminine. Behind his head was a chair or a piece of sculpture shaped like an umbrella of golden cobras with their hoods flared open.

  When Marina looked at the picture she felt, for the first time, dread at what might happen to Catherine. Despite its tackiness, she couldn’t scoff at it.

  “The nagas were ancient Indian gods,” Catherine said when Marina questioned her later. “They can take the form of humans or snakes. A nagarajan is a naga king.”

  “How did this guy get to be a nagarajan?”

  “He had a wise teacher, who recognized that he was one.”

  “Are you telling me you believe that? You believe this guy is a snake-god in human form? Do you know what Freud would say about all this snake business?”

  “I believe in Nagarajan, yes. Yes.”

  “But Catherine—” Catherine was so beautiful, Marina thought, with her long, shining yellow hair disarranged by the vehemence of her affirmative nod, looking flushed and embattled and resolute. “You’ve never even seen Nagarajan himself. How can you say you believe in him?”

  “I’ve felt his spirit.”

  “What does he teach, or preach, or whatever?”

  “That we are one, and the universe is one, and we must be what we are.”

  “That’s fine, that’s fine, that’s all very well, but—”

  Catherine touched Marina’s cheek. “If your mind is closed, how can you possibly understand? Why don’t you come to a meditation service with me?”

  Marina went, following the theory that she had to know her enemy. She felt ill at ease beforehand, despite Catherine’s touching eagerness for her to approve of everything. Some gurus, Marina knew, had wealthy devotees who remodeled mansions for their headquarters. That was evidently not the case with Nagarajan. The next evening Catherine took her to a storefront in the Tenderloin, wedged between a rehabilitation center and a pornographic bookstore. Banner-sized posters of Nagarajan, the same photograph that hung in Catherine’s room, were plastered on the dusty, smeared windows. Young Americans in robes and saris greeted them. Incense was burned, the small company swayed and chanted. The ritual carried out in the bare, seedy-looking little room seemed harmless enough— or would have seemed so, if it hadn’t been for Nagarajan’s image on the wall.

  Watching Catherine’s ecstatic response as she chanted and swayed, her eyes closed, smiling, Marina felt closed off and bereft. Afterward, Catherine pressed her for a reaction: “Did you feel the vibrations? Wasn’t it terrific?”

  “Well, sure. It was really interesting.”

  “You didn’t feel it. You didn’t feel anything.”

  “I don’t think I felt exactly what you feel, but—” After that, Catherine had not invited her again.

  What do the trees tell you now? Can you read the sky? It was suffocating in here. Marina blotted her upper lip with the back of her hand and realized she was still wearing her raincoat. She took it off and turned down the thermostat. Can you read the sky? No. She closed the curtains.

  Yet as she watched the cloth swing and settle in front of the windows something exploded in her body— a blinding throb of pain or joy. Catherine. As beautiful, as impossible, as infuriating as ever. Marina heard with astonishment her own gasping, breathless laugh. Catherine again. She giggled, and pressed her hands against her mouth to cut off the absurd sound while her body continued to quiver. She had to bite down on her fingers before she could stop.

  Hiccuping, she sat on the couch. The couch felt different— the rough, nubby texture of its cover almost insupportable against the backs of her legs, the palms of her hands. If Catherine wrote, she doesn’t hate me. If Catherine wrote— The thing I keep forgetting is that Catherine’s dead.

  Marina was tired, almost too tired to mov
e. She leaned her head back and closed her eyes. If Catherine’s dead, then who wrote the letter? Catherine. No. If Catherine’s dead, who wrote the letter? Catherine. No.

  A joke or something. You couldn’t trace a letter like that. I don’t even know anybody in Bombay. Except Catherine. Except— except I do know somebody in Bombay. Joginder was in Bombay, or he had been ten years ago. She had had the taxi go there on the way to the airport, weaving through the narrow streets looking for Joginder’s brother’s house. Somehow, they had found the street in a warren of tin-roofed huts, and a teenaged boy, shorts flapping around his thin legs, had led them to Joginder. She had tried to thank him, tried to give him money.

  She didn’t know the address, or if she could find the place again.

  Find the place again.

  She sat up. The letter was still in her hand. She held it away from her body while she went to the hall closet. She stuffed it in a shoebox that contained paid bills from past years and slid the box to the back of the closet shelf. Now it was gone.

  12

  FAILURE

  Failures will occur. It’s inevitable. We can even calculate, by multiplying frequency and severity, the total risk— or cost, in the largest sense— of failure. On a continuum of severity of safety failures, at one end we would put a failure that resulted in no injury. At the other end, we would put a failure that resulted in death.

  Why Breakdown?

  Marina’s eyes slid from the sheet of specifications back to the screen. The specifications said Loopy Doop was made of heat-treated 4140 steel. The yield strength— the amount of pressure that would make the steel bend— was 125,000 pounds per square inch. The ultimate strength, the point where the steel would break under pressure, was 140,000 pounds per square inch.

  Plenty of safety margin, even with steel gondolas. Loads would be only a quarter to a fifth of the strength.

  Why, then, did she have a hardness number of sixty-five on the Rockwell B scale? No 4140 steel would give such a low reading. Something was strange.

  If the steel really was that soft, the weight of the gondolas could have been a factor in the break. She felt a spurt of elation. Sure. Weak steel, an extra load— it might work. She might have the loose thread she needed to unravel the case.

  First, she had to find out exactly what the steel was. Results of the other tests would tell her for sure. She dialed the testing division. The voice on the other end said, “The Loopy Doop tensile test? I know the specimens were made. I saw them around yesterday.”

  She spoke with exaggerated politeness. “If you happen to run across them again maybe you could run them for me and get them out of your way?”

  The voice was unrepentant. “Glad to. I’ll call you.”

  Next, she called Don. “Haven’t seen a thing,” he said when she asked about the chemical analysis. “I’ll get in touch with the lab and tell them to step it up.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You sound a little weird. Is anything wrong?”

  “Oh— I noticed something that doesn’t check out, that’s all.”

  “I’ll get back to you after I talk to them.”

  Marina hung up. Is anything wrong? Just a few nightmares. She had been standing in a gray fog, and Catherine’s ash-covered figure rose up in front of her. She’d awakened drenched with sweat, the way she used to in India— wet, thirsty, wrung out with needs she couldn’t understand or control. Is anything wrong? What a question.

  She told Clara. Of the dreams, Clara said, “The sleeping dragons have awakened.”

  “I didn’t think they were sleeping. I thought they were dead.”

  “They don’t die. They will not leave you. But they may change their form.”

  “I want them dead.”

  “When you realize that they are you, I think you will prefer to have them live.”

  Clara seemed woozy, and acted as if speaking were an effort. Marina wondered what drugs she was taking.

  Sixty-five on the Rockwell B. She’d have to look up— The phone buzzed, and Don said, “The lab will messenger the report over tomorrow— the day after at the latest. And Eric’s on the phone. He wants to know if you’re free for lunch.”

  “Well— sure. I guess so.”

  “He said if you said yes, tell you he’d be by at twelve-thirty.”

  So she’d have the test results in a couple of days, and then everything would be squared away. In the meantime, she had to concentrate, sharpen up. She remembered Bobo asking one of his razor-cut flunkies to look into why Fun World had canceled their contract with Gonzales Manufacturing and switched to gondolas from Singapore. Probably nothing had been done, and Bobo had forgotten about it two minutes later. Still, if he hadn’t— She started to pick up the phone, then rested her hand on the receiver. Talking to Bobo in person was hard enough. Talking to him on the phone, she had discovered the couple of times she’d tried to avoid a personal meeting, was impossible. She checked her watch. She just had time to run to the Mark Hopkins and see him before lunch with Eric.

  When she called his room from the lobby, though, the smooth-sounding man who answered the phone stayed off the line a very long time. She heard his quiet voice, punctuated by querulous-sounding retorts from Bobo that finally got loud enough for her to hear, or to think she heard, “For God’s sake, what does she want?”

  Screw you too, she thought, not quite suppressing a flicker of dismay. This wasn’t how it was supposed to go. Bobo had wanted to see her, had insisted on it. He would have nobody but her in charge of the case. Maybe she hadn’t heard right. In any case, the volume of the conversation lowered and a moment later the smooth voice told her to come up.

  Bobo did not, as he always had, struggle to his feet when she entered the solarium. He remained slumped in his rattan chair, looking at her with red eyes that were almost lost in the wrinkles around them. He hadn’t shaved, and the late-morning light picked out every hair of the white stubble on his cheeks and chin. His stare seemed distracted and hostile at once, and she wondered if he knew exactly who she was. When he didn’t ask her to sit down, she balanced on the edge of a chair.

  She was deciding whether to broach the subject of Gonzales Manufacturing or give up and leave when he said, “Make a good thing out of this business, don’t you?”

  “What?”

  “It’s how people are today. Professionalism, loyalty—” The hand with which he waved away the rest of his remark was shaking.

  Great idea to come here. Great move. “I don’t understand.”

  He muttered something in a tone so low she couldn’t make out the words.

  She stood up. “I’d better go.”

  “No, no, no.” He must’ve had one of his turnabouts from irrational to rational, because the glance he shot at her was keen. “What can I help you with, little lady?” The sarcastic tone wasn’t her imagination.

  By the time she explained about Gonzales and Singapore and the steel, he was drifting. “The steel might be too soft— much softer than it should’ve been. You’d asked somebody to investigate why the contract was canceled, so I thought…” She let her voice trail off, watching him rub his hands over his face in obvious confusion.

  “I’ll see about it,” he said distantly. As she left, she heard him ask, “Isn’t that Al Gonzales? With the margaritas?” She didn’t answer.

  She was losing ground, she thought as she drove back to the office. She watched the traffic intently, feeling that any moment a bus, a truck could demolish her. Bobo had acted angry, but it was impossible to know whether he was angry at something that had happened today or twenty years ago. It would’ve seemed simple enough, though, to keep at least this on the rails. At least this, if nothing else.

  ***

  Sondergard took her to an Italian place— all red tile, natural wood, and white walls— near the opera house. He looked thinner, and his blond hair was now more obviously shot through with silver. His appearance seemed refined, somehow. The edges were obvious, the angles barely
hidden. They drank Bloody Marys and he said, “The first suit is about to be filed. Six million dollars on behalf of the little boy.”

  “That’s just the beginning.”

  “Sure. They’ll be flying thick and fast now.” He consulted the menu. “Pasta? The linguine with clams is pretty good here.”

  The suits would come in and the insurance companies would scream and Fun World would be looking for a scapegoat in its turn. “There’s one thing I’m looking into— a chance you’ve been sold inferior steel.”

  He put his glass down. “What are you talking about?”

  “A test I did indicates that Loopy Doop may have been made out of steel much softer than it should be. I’m waiting for confirmation now. If it turns out to be true, you might have a case against Singapore Metal Works.”

  His fingers felt cool against the back of her hand. “Do you mean it? Are you sure?”

  “Yes, I mean it. No, I’m not sure.”

  His fingers tightened. “Do you realize this could get us off the hook? If it turns out Singapore was screwing us—”

  She felt warm, almost too warm. After her unpleasant encounter with Bobo, Sondergard’s intimacy was working on her body like a balm. “Look. I shouldn’t have said anything. The tests—”

  He turned her hand over and kissed her palm. When his lips touched her skin she felt a ripple of shock. “Thank you,” he said.

  There was another thing, something she hadn’t thought of until now. “If it turns out the steel was substituted and somebody in the company knew—”

  “Oh God. You mean Bobo.”

  “It just occurred to me. I had a very strange meeting with him this morning. Something seemed to be wrong, and I can’t figure out what it is.”