by Dixie Lyle
[I’ve opened the pocket. It contains a small plastic object with a squared-off metal prong on one end, and a short, black metal tube with glass inside it.]
The first object sounds like a thumb drive. The second one could be a camera lens. Does the tube have white markings around it? Little dashes, maybe?
[No. No markings at all.]
Ben and I walked out of the house and toward the gate.
[There’s a pair of pants with a stain on them that has some interesting scents, too. I smell cooked green beans, banana that isn’t quite ripe, purple yam, chickpea flour, fenugreek, salt, turmeric, chili powder, sugar, oil, and coconut.]
So he’s a messy eater?
[No, the stain is quite small. All these scents are ingredients from a single dish, cooked in an earthenware pot. My olfactory library identifies it as undhiyu, a popular local dish in the Indian province of Gujarat.]
Sometimes it’s extremely handy to have a partner with instant access to a supernatural scent database. Okay. Grab the thumb drive and bring it to my office. Hopefully it’ll have something on it that we can copy—then we’ll replace the drive and hope he doesn’t notice anything wrong.
[Roger.]
We reached the gate and went in. Tango was sunning herself on top of a grave marker, waiting for us and completely ignoring the outraged stare of the ghost budgie the grave apparently belonged to.
I glanced at Ben. It was good advice. Mostly. Where’s Augustus?
Ben and I walked over the hill and found Augustus sitting very still. He wasn’t looking at the statue, though; he was looking at Piotr himself.
Piotr is one of the graveyard’s more famous residents. He belonged to an itinerant Russian circus back in the thirties, and died quite abruptly while on the road. They elected to bury him rather than eat him, which showed just how highly they regarded him. Those were hungry times.
Piotr had apparently been a born performer, and from what I’d seen death hadn’t changed him all that much. But a performer requires an audience, and I guess the other bears in Bear Paradise weren’t all that appreciative of his talents. So he hung out at the Crossroads, zipping around on a little ghost unicycle in his tutu, juggling little ghost pineapples. Don’t ask me why he used pineapples, because I never asked. I didn’t even know a bear could be trained to juggle. Or where you get a unicycle or a tutu in the afterlife—is there a specialty store for that kind of thing?
Anyway, he’d found a dedicated fan in Augustus, who was watching his act with great interest. I almost hated to interrupt him, but I knew Piotr could keep going for hours. Dead bears don’t tire easily.
“Excuse me, Augustus?” I said. “Can we—that is, my friend here, Ben—talk to you for a minute?”
Augustus tore his gaze from Piotr and gave Ben the once-over. {Talk to me? About what?}
“About your new home, big guy,” said Ben.
{Will it have bears?}
“Um. No, I don’t think so.”
{This place has bears. Or one bear, anyway. I haven’t seen any others.}
“I think this might be the only one.”
{Oh.} He sounded disappointed.
Ben tried again. “But there are two other places that both want you. And I think you’d be happy in either one.”
{But neither one has bears?}
“Well … no.”
{This place has a bear. I’m going to stay here.}
Uh-oh.
I took a deep breath and restrained myself from saying a word. This was Ben’s responsibility, and he could handle it. I hoped.
“I understand that you like bears, Augustus,” Ben said. “But what about other cats like you? Wouldn’t you like to be around them?”
{Other ligers, you mean?}
“Not exactly. But other big cats—lions, or tigers. Which one would you prefer?”
Augustus considered this. {I’d prefer bears.}
To his credit, Ben didn’t groan or roll his eyes. Instead, he smiled. “I get that, I really do. But sometimes we can’t get what we really want, and we have to choose the next best thing. This is one of those cases. So if you had to pick a non-bear place—and your only other choices were a place with lions or a place with tigers—which one sounds better to you?”
{I don’t know. I’ve never been to either one of those places, so how can I tell?}
“Well, that’s what I’m here for. I’ve been to both those places, and I’m going to do my best to tell you what I know about them. You can ask me questions—any questions at all—and I’ll do my best to give you honest answers. If I don’t know the answer to one of your questions, I’ll go find out, then come back and tell you. Okay?”
{I suppose. But couldn’t I just go see for myself?}
Ben shook his head. “I’m afraid not. See, if you go to one of these places, they might not let you go to the other place. That wouldn’t be fair. So we’re going to have to do it this way.”
He seemed to be doing pretty good, so far. I decided to check in with one of my other partners. Tango? Can you relay a message to Whiskey?
You’re closer to the edge of the graveyard. You can reach him easily.
Tell him to plug the thumb drive into my laptop.
It’s not that hard. He can change into something small, like a Chihuahua. Just ask him, please.
Ben was describing Apedemek’s Lion Paradise to Augustus. He was being accurate and fair, not trying to sell it. Augustus was listening intently.
Good. Now tell him to use his nose on the trackpad—
What? It’s not that hard. The trackpad moves the cursor over the icon of the thumb drive, and he pushes down with his nose to double-click on it.
He might not have to. Could be the file contains video, or pictures, or audio. If that’s not the case, I’ll go read it.
I’m so sorry. I know you have a packed schedule of lying in the sun and occasionally twitching your tail, which I really, truly hate to interrupt.
And yet, I are. Because I recently came to the conclusion that I don’t have to do everything myself and maybe I should trust the people I work with to actually be good at what they do. Except maybe I was wrong, because apparently this is too hard.
No, no, I get it. Communicating complex ideas between two different species via telepathic contact is tricky at the best of times, but when you throw in advanced technology and—gasp!—the written word, then obviously somebody’s out of her depth—
Thank you so much for putting that in my head. Now, here’s what I want him to do …
The next quarter hour or so was intense. Listening to Ben and Augustus discussing the relative merits of two different afterlives while trying to mentally relay instructions to a dog on how to work a computer via a telepathic cat: It was confusing and intricate and kind of exhausting. By the time I
got to the end, my brain felt the way my muscles do at the end of a workout at the gym. Tired and sore, but in a good way.
I loved it. Multitasking; it’s what I do.
And at the end of those fifteen minutes (okay—sixteen point five) I’d learned three very interesting things: one, that my dog is scarily capable of operating a computer with just a few instructions; two, that Augustus still didn’t prefer one of the afterlives on offer over the other; and three, that Rajiv Gunturu seemed to be more interested in diamonds than ligers.
What the thumb drive contained was documentation on something called the Star of Africa. (No, Tango didn’t teach Whiskey to read. There were only eleven letters involved, and one is repeated. Letters were fairly easy to describe if you treated them as objects.) From that, and the pictures in the file, I remembered something about a famous, really big diamond, though the details escaped me.
I knew what the object Whiskey found in Gunturu’s suitcase had to be, too. It wasn’t a camera lens, it was a jeweler’s loupe—one of those monocle things they used to examine gemstones with. But what did that have to do with a dead liger?
Ben straightened up and thanked Augustus. Piotr, who had been patiently waiting nearby, launched into his act again. Augustus went back to watching him.
“Maybe we can convince one of them to take the bear, too,” Ben said. He sounded like he was only half joking. “Or get him a DVD player and a whole lot of episodes of Yogi and Boo-Boo.”
“Sure. Where are we going to get a DVD player that works in the afterlife?”
“Same place the bear got the unicycle and tutu?”
“Yeah, problem solved.” I sighed, and then added, “Not that I’m criticizing. You did a good job; you engaged his attention, you asked relevant questions, you answered his honestly.”
Ben shrugged. “Thanks, but we both know talking to Augustus is the easy part. Letting the big cats know that we’ve reached an impasse—that’s not going to be pleasant.”
“Any ideas on how to handle that?”
He frowned, but it was a thoughtful frown. “Maybe. I need to give it a little more thought, though. Right now, I feel like I’m missing something. Something obvious.”
“Then by all means, follow your instincts. Why don’t we leave the feline contingent here and take a little break? I have some research I really need to do, and you could use the time to ponder. We could reconvene at the house in, say, an hour?”
“Sounds good.”
* * *
I grabbed a large mug of Irish breakfast tea before heading upstairs to my office. Whiskey greeted me at the door, wagging his tail enthusiastically just like a normal, non-telepathic, living dog would.
[This is exciting! What took you so long? Let’s go look at it together!]
I stared down at him in amazement. “Wow. Did you get into some ectoplasmic chocolate or something? You seem a little amped up.”
He stared at me with lively, mismatched blue and brown eyes, his tongue hanging out, then sat down. [Sorry. Blue heelers are smart, but a little high-strung. It occasionally affects my demeanor.]
“Hey, fine by me. You can be a little stuffy sometimes, you know. It’s okay to cut loose and just be a dog now and then.”
[Very well.] He bounded to his feet and ran in a circle, barking excitedly. I grinned, and let him go at it for thirty seconds or so. Then I said, “Okay, playtime’s over. You can go back to being stuffy again.”
He stopped immediately. [Thank you. Invigorating, but a little goes a long way. Shall we study the new data?]
“Let’s.”
I sat down at my desk and began sorting through the information on the thumb drive. I frowned, then started interrogating Google.
[Don’t just jump around from page to page. Tell me what you’re learning.]
“Oh, sorry. Well, I figured I’d start here, with the Wikipedia entry on the Star of Africa—” Whiskey had taken a seat beside my chair, and when I turned to talk to him, I had to stifle a yelp of surprise at the soulful-eyed Great Dane that was now inches from my face. “Geez, give me some warning when you’re going to do that, will you?”
[My apologies. I can see better like this.]
I got up and locked the door, just in case someone wandered by—it’s hard to explain random oversized canines hanging out in your office—then sat back down.
“All right. The Star of Africa, according to this, was at one time the largest polished diamond in the world: five hundred thirty point four carats. It’s also known as the Cullinan the First Diamond, and is currently mounted in the head of the Royal Sceptre of the British Crown Jewels. Apparently it can be removed and worn as a brooch.”
[For less formal affairs, I suppose.]
“Sure. When you’re just going for coffee with a head of state, as opposed to a formal ball or coronation or what-have-you.”
[What else?]
“Let’s see … couple of interesting anecdotes. Says that when it was moved from South Africa to England in 1905, they were so worried about security they sent a fake on a steamboat, loaded with detectives.”
[What did they do with the real one?]
“Plain brown parcel, sent through the mail. Ballsy, but smart—huh. Now, that’s interesting.”
[Please elaborate.]
“The original stone the Star of Africa was cut from was the biggest gem-quality diamond ever found up to that time, over three thousand carats. It was divided up into a bunch of smaller stones, the Cullinan the First being the biggest—but according to Sir William Crookes, the scientist who originally studied the uncut diamond, its structure indicated it was only a fragment of another, even larger crystal.”
[So there’s another huge diamond out there, still waiting to be found?]
“Maybe. Some people think it’s already been found.” I hit a key and took us back to the thumb drive. There were a number of image files on it, and some of them had very interesting names. I opened the one that sounded most promising, and found myself looking at a photo of the original rock, the Cullinan Diamond itself. There were also sketches of it from various angles, with appended notes and diagrams. Whiskey and I studied the diagrams, and came to the same conclusion.
[Those dotted lines on the sketch. They’re an extrapolation.]
“Yeah. Possible sizes and shapes of the other half of the crystal.”
[It would seem Mr. Gunturu counts himself among those who believe it’s been found.]
“Not just found.” I clicked through a few more files, finding more sketches and notes. “Cut, too. Into one big honking stone—according to this, he’s estimating its size at around seven hundred carats. Making it the biggest, most valuable rock in the world.”
[And definitely worth killing for. But why kill a liger?]
“I don’t know.” I thought about it, drumming my fingers on my desk. Connections, connections … a casino in India, a diamond from Africa. Tigers are Indian, lions are African. Gunturu is Indian, Abazu is African. Abazu tried to steal Augustus’s corpse. Were they working together, or at cross-purposes? Were they agents of the cat gods, trying to take ownership of the liger’s body while their masters battled for his soul?
Well, when in doubt, there was always the sorcery of the search engine. I typed in India, Africa, diamond, pondered for a moment, then added cat and hit return. That gave me a bunch of sites selling cat food, so I eliminated the last word and tried again.
That produced more satisfactory results. The fifth hit told me that 90 percent of the world’s diamonds wound up in India for cutting and polishing. I did a little more reading and hit something seven paragraphs down that sounded familiar. “Whiskey, what was that dish you said you smelled on Gunturu’s clothing?”
[Undhiyu.]
“Right. Which is a popular local dish in which part of India, again?”
[The province of Gujarat.]
“Gujarat. Which just happens to be the center of the Indian diamond trade.”
[Suggesting Mr. Gunturu is
n’t from Goa, as he claims.]
“Or at least that there’s a strong possibility he was in Gujarat recently. And he once played tennis with an American drug kingpin. None of which is exactly criminal.”
[No,] admitted Whiskey.
I shook my head. “Things are getting murkier and murkier. We still don’t know who killed Augustus, or why.”
[And there are still two feline deities on the brink of turning the Great Crossroads into a supernatural battlefield.]
Not only that, my tea had gone cold. I drank some anyway, and tried to figure out what to do next.
As it turned out, the next thing I needed to do was have sex.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Okay, maybe needed to have sex was a little strong.
Wanted wasn’t quite right, either, because it wasn’t like I went in there with a plan. I mean, it definitely wasn’t unwanted, but neither was I on the top of my to-be-done list. It, I mean. It wasn’t on top, not I wasn’t on top.
Well, not at first.
Um. Maybe I should start over.
So, after the agreed-upon hour was up, I went to see Ben. He was downstairs in his office, which was a little hole-in-the-wall with a desk and two chairs. Ben sat behind the desk, his square chin resting on one fist like he was posing as a statue. “Hey,” he said when I rapped on the door frame. “C’mon in.”
I pulled up the other chair and sat down. “Any brilliant insights?”
“Not so much. You?”
“I found out a few things.” I told him about Rajiv and what was on the thumb drive. “Whiskey’s putting it back now. I made a copy.”
“Great. Just when I think things can’t get any more complicated, now there’s some kind of international jewel conspiracy. Which, of course, makes perfect sense.”
“Oh, sure. It all fits together neatly.”
“Like a puzzle.”
“Or a clock.”
“Or a clockwork puzzle. Made of string cheese and marbles.”
I cocked an eyebrow. “Wow, you’re good. It took me the better part of half an hour to figure out the string cheese angle. What tipped you off?”
