The Sultan's Tigers

by Josh Lacey

“He’s the guy you hired to kill my grandfather.”

  That was when everyone started shouting at once. My uncle told me to calm down and J.J. said he didn’t know who I was talking about. Two of the advisors jumped in as well, although I’m not actually sure what either of them was saying. I didn’t say a word. I just stood there smiling. I didn’t care how much they shouted at me. I just wanted to find the man who killed Grandpa.

  When the shouting stopped, I repeated my offer. “You can have the tiger if you hand over Marko to the police. But you also have to get him to confess. There’s no point in them arresting him if he denies what he’s done.”

  “This person, this Marko,” said J.J. “Who is he? Why do you think I have anything to do with him?”

  “Oh, come on. You don’t have to keep pretending you don’t know him.”

  “I am not pretending. I really don’t know him.”

  “He knows you.”

  “Many people know me. I do not know all of them. What does he say about me, this Marko? What has he been telling you?”

  My uncle stepped in. “Wait a minute. Let’s all calm down. Marko has nothing to do with the tiger. It’s a separate issue and we’ll deal with it later.”

  “No, we won’t,” I said.

  “Tom—”

  “He’s a murderer. He killed Grandpa. You can’t just let him get away with it.” I turned from my uncle to J.J. “You told him what to do. You sent him to kill my grandfather. That makes you a murderer too.”

  The atmosphere in the room had changed. It was as if someone had opened a window and a chilly draft had blown past us all, sending a shiver up our spines. Smiles had gone from faces. Everyone was looking serious. J.J. was glaring at me as if I were an idiot, some little fool who had managed to sneak past his guards and get inside his private palace. He didn’t appear to be frightened or even worried; he just looked cross.

  “I want to do a deal with you,” he said. “I will offer you a certain sum of money. You will want to earn more. I shall wish to pay less. We shall discuss the precise amount and, I hope, come to an agreement which is acceptable to us all. This is business. If you do not wish to do this—if you wish to make accusations and talk nonsense—then you are welcome to do so, but, please, not here. Not with me. I am too busy for such games. I have people waiting to see me. There you have it, Mr. Trelawney. The situation is not complicated. Do you want to deal with me or not? Yes or no?”

  I managed to answer before my uncle. “Yes,” I said. “But I’ve told you already, we don’t want money. We want Marko.”

  “You don’t want to sell the tiger?”

  “No.”

  J.J. looked at my uncle. “He is talking for you both?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “I thought not. Because he looks quite small to be in charge.”

  “He is younger than me, yes, but we’re a team, him and me. We work together.”

  “So he speaks for you?”

  Uncle Harvey hesitated. I could imagine what he was thinking. He wanted the money. He needed the money. But he cared about his father, too, and he wanted to catch his father’s killer, just as I did. “Can I have a moment to talk to my nephew?”

  “Of course you can.” J.J. spoke to one of his assistants in a low tone. She answered him. Another of them stepped in. I wished I could speak their language. They talked for a minute or two, and then J.J. turned back to us. “We will talk tomorrow,” he said. “Meera will call you in the morning. I am busy with meetings, but you can negotiate with her. She speaks for me. I hope we manage to reach an agreement. Goodbye, Tom. Goodbye, Harvey. It has been very interesting to meet you both.”

  33

  Meera escorted us out of the museum. I was worried my uncle would double back and say we’ve changed our minds, here’s your dumb tiger, give us the cash, but he stuck with me.

  Meera said goodbye at the museum’s entrance. Uncle Harvey gave her his card and told her the name of a hotel where we would probably be staying. It was where he always stayed when he was in Bangalore, he said. She tucked the card carefully into her purse and promised to call him in the morning. Then she folded her arms and waited for us to leave.

  Uncle Harvey and I walked across the moat. Searchlights illuminated the enclosure below us. The three tigers were pacing silently back and forth.

  My uncle said, “What’s up, pussycat?”

  The nearest tiger glared at him for a few seconds, as if it were measuring the distance between us, then dipped its head and continued padding around its drab home.

  The black limousine was still waiting outside the museum, but its doors stayed firmly shut and the driver didn’t even glance in our direction. We’d have to find our own way home.

  We walked along the driveway toward the gates. I could see the guard in his uniform, standing under a spotlight, waiting for us. From here he looked like a toy soldier.

  Uncle Harvey’s voice came out of the gloom. “Tom?”

  “Yes?”

  “Do you want to tell me what that was all about?”

  “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before,” I said. “But I couldn’t. I knew you’d try to stop me.”

  “You owe me a lot of money.”

  “You mean for the flights?”

  “I mean the money I would have got from J.J. The money that would have paid off my debts. The money that would have saved me from getting two broken legs. Did you think I was joking around?”

  “No, but—”

  “I’ve got to get the money by the end of next week or he’s going to break my legs. Do you understand what that means?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “We were this close to walking away with two million dollars. All my problems would have been solved. And you had to screw it up. I hope you’re feeling pleased with yourself.”

  “Don’t you care about catching the guy who killed Grandpa?”

  “Of course I do. But I can’t believe J.J. had anything to do with it. Marko looked to me like a loner. If he really killed Grandpa, he wasn’t following orders.”

  “What do you mean, if he killed Grandpa? He told me he did.”

  “Like I said before, he might have been lying. Trying to scare you.”

  “He wasn’t lying. He killed him. Now you just blew our one chance to catch him.”

  “I don’t want to sound callous,” said Uncle Harvey. “But Grandpa’s dead. I care about my legs. And I’m a bit worried you might have blown my one chance to save them.”

  I thought about that for a moment. Then I said I was sorry.

  “So am I,” said Uncle Harvey. “I’m quite attached to my legs. I’m not looking forward to having them broken.”

  “Couldn’t you borrow some money?”

  “No one will lend me anything. I’ve already tried everyone I know.”

  I had thought I was being clever. I thought I’d thought of the perfect way to take my revenge on Marko and force him to face justice. Now I began to feel quite stupid. Was Uncle Harvey right? Had I messed everything up?

  “We’ve still got the tiger,” I said. “If you sold that, wouldn’t you make enough money to stop them from breaking your legs?”

  “I hope so. I’ll let J.J. calm down overnight, then ring him in the morning.”

  “Are you going to sell it to him?”

  “Who else? I’m sorry, Tom. I know you want revenge for Grandpa, and maybe we’ll find a way to do it, but it’s not going to happen right now. I need that money.”

  The guard opened the gate for us. We wished him good night and walked down the dark street that ran alongside the museum’s high walls.

  There were no streetlamps and the only light came from a few flickering lanterns in the village. Someone from there must have seen us, or been watching from the moment that we walked out of the gate, because he came running through the darkness toward us. As he came closer, I saw he was just a kid, smaller than me and skinnier, too.

  “Money,” he said. “Money.”
/>   If he’d been bigger, I would have thought he was mugging us. He looked hungry.

  “Sorry,” said my uncle. “I don’t have any cash.”

  “Please give him something,” I said.

  Uncle Harvey stared at me. “What?”

  “Just a few coins.”

  “You’ve just cost me a million dollars. Now you want me to give what little money I’ve got to a kid I don’t know?”

  “Yes.”

  “Fine. Whatever.”

  Uncle Harvey opened his wallet and handed over a note.

  The boy wrapped his fingers around the money. “Thank you,” he said, addressing me rather than my uncle. He knew who had really given him the money. “You are from which country?”

  “The U.S.”

  “Why are you here? Where do you go?”

  “We’ve been in the museum and now we want to find a taxi. We need to get back to the center. Do you know where we should go?”

  “Come with me. This way.”

  He gestured into the dark woods. I glanced at my uncle. Should we really dive in there, away from the light, away from the road, into the darkness, following a kid who we didn’t know?

  My uncle shrugged his shoulders. “Lead the way.”

  The boy led us into the woods. He told us his name. It sounded like “Methi,” although I couldn’t be sure; when I asked him to spell it, he just laughed. He didn’t know how to spell in his own language, he explained, let alone ours. So we called him Methi.

  As we walked through the dark woods, he chatted to us, asking our business, but he soon saw that we didn’t want to tell him. So he told us his own story instead.

  He had been born right here on this land, the same place that his family had lived for generations. Two years ago, a group of men arrived and announced that the land had been bought for development. They wouldn’t say who had bought it or why. That didn’t matter, they said. But you can no longer live here. You must move. We will pay you to go away.

  Some of the villagers took the money and bought themselves plots of land in another village, thirty miles outside the city, but Methi’s mother and father refused to move. This was their land, they insisted. Our parents had lived here, our grandparents too, and we aren’t going to leave, no matter how much we’re offered.

  I asked Methi what he thought of their decision—what would he have done? Taken the money? Or stayed?—but I couldn’t get him to understand my questions.

  Architects and engineers came next, he said, taking photographs and surveying the land. Then the builders arrived. Huge machines ripped down trees and tore up the earth.

  The villagers had watched the digging of the foundations, the construction of the walls, the arrival of trucks delivering great slabs of marble and sheets of glass.

  Now the museum was almost finished and their shacks were clinging to this high wall. Methi didn’t know how much longer he and his family would be here or when the order would come for them to be moved. Until then, they lived alongside the billionaire’s museum, watching the artwork arriving, the security guards pacing around the walls, the helicopter flying in and out, bringing J.J. to inspect his most prized possessions.

  “What about the tigers?” I asked. “Have you seen them?”

  Through the gloom, I could just make out the big smile on Methi’s face. “The tigers are very good,” he said. “I love the tigers! They are my good friends.”

  “How do you get to see them? Do you climb up and look over the wall?”

  He laughed again. He and his friends didn’t worry about walls or guards, he explained. When they wanted to see the tigers, they got a lift on one of the trucks driving through the gates and up to the museum. A man arrived every morning with fresh meat to feed the tigers. Methi and his friends sprang aboard as the trucks drove past, then rode them inside.

  “Don’t you get caught?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Then what happens?”

  “They beat us,” he said. “Here, see.”

  He pulled up his shirt to show me his scars. I could just barely see the welts crisscrossing his skin. He told me that his wrist had been broken by one of the guards and hadn’t healed properly, so the bones were still wonky. But he didn’t seem to care about any of this damage, as if getting beaten every now and then was just what you had to pay to see the tigers.

  Soon we saw some lights glinting on the horizon. As we came closer, we saw they were the headlamps of cars on a main road. That was where Methi said goodbye and we waved down a cab. Methi didn’t ask for any more money, but my uncle gave him another bill anyway.

  The taxi drove us to the center of Bangalore and delivered us to a slightly rundown hotel where Uncle Harvey had stayed when he was last in the city.

  The clerk jotted down the details of our passports, took Uncle Harvey’s credit card details, and gave us a key for a room on the ninth floor. The elevator shuddered upward. Not everything in Bangalore was as smart and modern as J.J.’s tower.

  The room itself was small and grubby. The window looked out at the ninth floor of other tower blocks. Uncle Harvey bolted the door and propped a chair against the handle. “Better safe than sorry,” he said. “Now, which side of the bed do you want?”

  We’d paid for two twin beds, but the clerk had given us a double. I chose the side nearest the window.

  “We’ll get it changed tomorrow,” said my uncle. “You don’t mind sharing for one night, do you? I don’t snore.”

  He was lying. He fell asleep almost as soon as we got into bed and his snores kept me awake for a long time. I lay beside him, listening to the extraordinary noises coming out of his nose, the rattles and snuffles and snorts, and tried to decide what I would do in the morning when Uncle Harvey called Meera and offered to sell the tiger to J.J. for the bargain price of two million dollars. I knew he needed the money. I didn’t want him to get two broken legs. But I wanted justice for Grandpa. Was there any way we could both get what we wanted?

  34

  I woke up suddenly and blinked into the darkness.

  What was that? What had just woken me up?

  Uncle Harvey?

  He was lying beside me. Still fast asleep.

  Had he been shouting in a dream? Or snoring again? Had he snored so loudly that I’d jolted awake? Could anyone make that much noise snoring?

  Then I heard it again.

  Someone was knocking on our door.

  No, not knocking. Banging. Hammering. Throwing their whole weight against the panels.

  That wasn’t the sound of room service or the maid coming to change our sheets. That was someone trying to break down our door.

  Who was it? J.J.? Had he come to steal our tiger? Or was it Marko? Would he kill us, wiping out the only people who could connect him to a murder?

  I shouted a warning to my uncle. “Wake up! Wake up!”

  “Huhhh?”

  “Someone’s breaking into our room.”

  Another crash. Heavier than the first.

  Uncle Harvey was already scrambling out of bed. He yelled at me. “Open the window!”

  The window? Why the window? But I didn’t question him. I ran to the window and struggled with the lock. I yanked it. The window jerked upward. I thrust my head outside. It was a long drop down to the street. I turned my head to the left, then right, searching for a fire escape, a drainpipe, but there was nothing. No way down. Except jumping. And that wouldn’t end well.

  I turned around, wanting further instructions. Uncle Harvey had picked up a chair by two of its legs and now he was swinging it from side to side, testing its weight, ready to use it as a weapon.

  “The window—” I said, but I didn’t manage to speak another word before there was another crash and the door burst open.

  A burly man stumbled into the middle of the room. He was wearing a uniform of brownish-khaki shirt and trousers, a thick belt pulled tightly around his waist, and heavy black boots. A beret was pulled down over his head. He looked lik
e a Boy Scout. A tall, middle-aged Scout with a long wooden baton in his right hand, raised and ready to cause some serious damage. He saw me. His mouth opened. Then a chair hit him on the side of the head. He gave a low moan and fell to the floor.

  A second man ran into the room. He was wearing the same uniform as the first. My uncle swung at him, too, but this guy was prepared. He dodged backwards, reached down to his belt, and pulled out his own baton.

  Uncle Harvey swung the chair back and forth, preparing to take another blow. For a moment, nothing happened. They faced off, the Boy Scout and my uncle, the baton and the chair, each waiting to see what the other was going to do. Then three more men came into the room. They screamed at us.

  I didn’t know what they were saying. I looked at my uncle. Should I jump out of the window?

  No way. I didn’t want to drop nine floors. I’d slither a floor or two, then drop the rest of the way.

  My uncle was swinging the chair aggressively in front of him. I wished I had some kind of weapon too. There was nothing useful within reach.

  One of the soldiers stepped toward me. He lifted his baton and lunged. I dodged. He swung again. I darted backwards. The window was right behind me. I didn’t want to fall out. I shimmied one way, then the other. The soldier swung wildly at me, once, twice, then connected the third time and thwacked my shoulder with unbelievable force. I heard the thud before I felt the pain. Then I couldn’t think of anything except the agony shuddering through my bones. I doubled over. The soldier hit me again. I slumped to the floor.

  I got a glimpse of my uncle. He’d been surrounded by two more men. He got one of them in the belly with the chair. Then the other hit him in the face. Uncle Harvey collapsed against the wall, clutching his jaw with both hands.

  I tried to get to my feet and help him, but the soldier kicked me in the stomach. I gasped and fell down. He kicked me again. I rolled over, trying to get away from his boots, and found myself face-to-face with my uncle. His cheek had been split open. Blood was dribbling through his nostrils and out of his lips. Even so, he managed to keep control of himself and say in a surprisingly calm voice, “What’s going on? Why are you arresting us?”