The Assassins

by Jeremy Trafford

  The parrot was just outside, moulting and malevolent, with a lethal-looking yellow beak, and a thin, black, pointed tongue. It cawed loudly in bilious distaste and shuffled up and down its pole with growing indignation, as if offended by some intolerable impertinence.

  The monkeys were usually quite lively. They would swing from their long, prehensile tails or cling tenaciously to the bars of the cage, thrusting out sharp little paws and blinking imploring eyes at anyone who passed by. Now, though, they were darting frantically around, twisting their white faces from side to side, chattering shrilly with excited fear.

  This got Clare worried. Was there a predator nearby? Was it animal or human? She drew in her breath sharply. The phone had stopped ringing; presumably, someone had answered it.

  Suddenly, the peacock came running back into view, not in pursuit of his reluctant mate but more as if it was fleeing in fear. She heard someone calling out up at the house. Then, far away, above the sound of the calling voice and the shrieking of the bird, she heard the wailing of a police siren.

  A crowbar was being violently thrust between the outer door and the doorjamb.

  Clare screamed.

  The crowbar was being levered backwards. The wood splintered, and the instrument was forced further in. There was a harsh crack, and the door was prised half-open.

  ‘Tammy!’ yelled Clare, rushing to bolt the inner door, with its metal anti-mosquito mesh.

  Again the crowbar was thrust forward, and the outer door was torn wide open. Behind the mesh Clare could see the outline of a man, holding a knife. He put his shoulder to the inner door and pushed. Tammy, meanwhile, had sat up in bed. He quickly realised they were under attack when he saw Clare’s frightened face, sweat breaking out upon her forehead.

  Tammy leapt out of bed just as the intruder threw his weight against the inner door and it burst open. A man half fell and half stumbled into the room. He had a stocking over his head, covering his face and flattening his features.

  Tammy reached for the nearest object he could find to defend them. He picked a chair and held it out in front of himself and Clare. The man leapt forward with his knife. Clare felt sick with terror but she also felt extreme anger. She seized a stone ashtray from a table and threw it at the man, striking him hard in the chest. The knife fell from his grip, clattering to the floor as he cried out in surprise and pain. Tammy darted forward and kicked the weapon beneath the bed.

  That voice, the one that had been calling, was getting closer – as was the sound of the siren. The intruder pulled a handgun from his pocket and fired. The bullet hit Tammy in the shoulder, sending him staggering backwards, his blood spraying.

  The voice was right outside.

  It was the hotel manager. He was in the doorway now, resolutely gripping a revolver in his shaking hand.

  ‘Stop!’ he shouted. ‘Or I’ll fire!’

  The siren was howling. The man ran from the room. He pushed past the hotel manager just as Clare heard a car swing fast into the drive.

  Tammy, clutching his shoulder, stumbled to the door with Clare just behind him. Kneeling there, they watched their attacker race for his motorbike. The police car stopped with a shriek of brakes and three police officers leapt out, Veerapan among them. The assassin rushed towards the wall surrounding the compound. He turned as he ran, firing at the police before diving behind a bamboo clump.

  The policemen knelt for cover, one of them behind the monkeys’ cage. They fired repeatedly, and the man fired back. A tiny howl came from the cage. Silence followed, broken only by a little plangent wail that grew to a shrill pitch and then ceased.

  The silence intensified. Clare remembered there was a ditch at the edge of the garden. She presumed the man was trying to make his escape by squirming his way along it.

  Then, with a sudden rustling of leaves, the peahen broke from cover, her wings beating. She scuttled with harsh cries across the grass. At that moment, Clare saw the attacker’s head, his arm. He was in the ditch, wriggling towards the gate at the far end of the compound, which was covered in a mass of bougainvillea. He had almost reached it.

  ‘Inspector!’ she shouted out, signalling the man’s position.

  The Inspector saw her signal and barked an order to his men.

  The assassin attempted to leap up the wall, but the police opened fire again. His body jerked as the bullets struck him. He reached out, grasping desperately at the bougainvillea, before slumping to the ground. The police ran up to him and fired shots into his body at point-blank range; Clare thought this a senseless act.

  Tammy, meanwhile, had sunk to the ground, blood pouring from his shoulder. As Clare bent to help him she saw alarm in his eyes. Tammy put a hand on her arm, urging her to look behind her. She turned and saw the cripple lurching towards her on his crutches, his shoulders rising and dipping.

  He came right up to her. Her heart was beating fast, although she saw he was unarmed. His face was ravaged by grief as he glanced at the body of the assassin, bloody and still. With tears pouring down his face, the cripple turned back to stare at Clare, his eyes full of fury. Why? Because of her signal to the police? Without that they wouldn’t have seen his accomplice trying to escape. Or was it because he’d seen his body jerking horribly from the bullets being fired by the police, whom she had aided.

  Clare froze. The cripple made a decision, opening a lid in the top of one of his crutches and pulling out a small knife from inside. He grabbed Clare by the arm.

  ‘No!’ she screamed, struggling to break free. He held her fast with surprising strength.

  Tammy struggled to get to his feet to defend her, but was too weak now from the loss of so much blood. Clare turned to see where Veerapan and his officers were; they were at least twenty metres away, engrossed in taking off the assassin’s stocking and examining his face.

  Clare stared directly into the cripple’s eyes. She saw desperation in them, and he saw her terror. Perhaps remembering how she’d saved his daughter and how he’d later promised not to harm her, his hold on her arm loosened.

  He let her go.

  With a gesture of futility, he slid the knife back into its hiding place. Mere seconds later, Veerapan was there, slapping handcuffs on his wrists and leading him, without protest, to the police car.

  Max arrived only five minutes later and found Clare attending to Tammy’s shoulder. Despite his injury, Tammy seemed weirdly cheerful, perhaps from sheer relief. Clare was not in the same spirits. She’d hated seeing the body of the gunman. It had turned out to be the older of the two young men. The body bled profusely but the face remained unscathed. In one hand was a sprig of bougainvillea, which had torn away as he’d grasped at it. Clare had been saddened by the sight of one of the monkeys, its chest shattered by a bullet; she cried as she watched its mate utter lonely little whimpers over its lifeless body.

  The parrot shrieked its disapproval of anyone who came near, flicking its tongue and irritably scattering its seed.

  Tammy was taken to hospital. Later that morning Clare had to go alone to identify the body of the boy assassin. Veerapan was there, acutely embarrassed at having told them the two youths had been killed. He apologised profusely.

  ‘The cripple’s wife has been to see me,’ Veerapan said. ‘She heard on the radio what happened. It’s all over the news. I said you would be expected to identify her husband in a line-up, and she desperately wants to speak with you. She has no English, of course, but I can translate. You see… their daughter has died.’

  ‘No!’ Clare exclaimed, knowing how much she’d meant to them.

  ‘Yes, from typhus,’ Veerapan went on. ‘There’s been an outbreak of it in the shantytown where they live; it was brought on by crowded, insanitary conditions. The medical facilities are inadequate to deal with the spread of the infection.’

  Clare agreed to see her and they met at the police station. The woman’s eyes were red from weeping and her hair was dishevelled. She looked exhausted. She spoke with restraint at first, Vee
rapan translating.

  ‘Our daughter has never been strong and succumbed to the disease. Her father’s off his head from grief. This made him react insanely to the shooting of his nephew. He’s been like a father to him ever since his parents died.’

  She began to weep.

  ‘Please forgive him,’ she asked Clare. ‘He’s never forgotten how you saved our daughter. In his right mind, he’d mean no harm to you. There’s good in him as well as bad.’

  ‘I do forgive him, Clare replied, ‘but I have to do my duty as a witness.’

  Veerapan hesitated before translating what the cripple’s wife said next.

  ‘You see, I fear the police might torture him to get information on who has been employing the assassins. They’ve worked out he’s been paid certain sums, but it was in cash that had been left in various hiding places. I knew nothing about this.’

  Veerapan spoke to the woman, trying to reassure her.

  ‘A confession extracted under torture is totally unreliable. I promise they’ll not resort to anything so wrong as well as so ineffective.’

  Clare was horrified to think this was even a possibility, but she could not deny her obligation to testify correctly.

  After the woman left, Clare was alone for a time while Veerapan arranged the two identification parades. She longed to have Tammy with her, to give her moral support and let her escape the burden of sole responsibility.

  ‘I’ve told the boy of the death of his accomplice,’ Veerapan said as soon as he returned.

  Clare thought this had been unfair, since it was now obvious which one was him – only one of the young men in that line-up seemed on the point of breaking down. She looked into his tearful eyes, trying to avoid feeling pity.

  When she came to the cripple in his line-up, she thought of her promise to forgive him and of the possibility of his being tortured if Veerapan’s scruples were ignored. But she also thought of the bullets striking the temple walls, and of Tammy being almost drowned. And she thought of the cripple’s appalling look of triumph as Venkataraman was knifed to death.

  She turned back to the boy, who fell to his knees. They ordered him to his feet. He didn’t move so someone forced him to stand up. He seized her hand, crying out as they prised him from her. He stood still, his arms being held behind him. She hardened herself, recalling that lethal cruel embrace.

  ‘This is Venkataraman’s assassin,’ she said, ‘but he seemed extremely reluctant to do the deed.’ She turned back to the cripple. ‘This man spoke twice to this boy just before the killing. He obviously put great pressure on him.’

  She was torn between compassion for the cripple over his daughter’s death and abhorrence of the murder he’d incited and the murder he’d attempted at Sandeha. He appeared to stand in dignified withdrawal, as if the world around him held no further claims upon him.

  Afterwards, Veerapan told her all they’d been able to discover; some of the information had come from the informant and some from the cripple’s wife.

  ‘The dead man was the boy’s elder brother,’ he said, ‘and the cripple was their uncle. It seems their parents were killed in a sectarian clash between Muslims and Hindus, and the brothers were led by their uncle to join a terrorist group.’

  ‘Have you any idea who hired them?’ Clare asked.

  ‘We think it was an alliance of industrialists and politicians that had felt threatened by Venkataraman’s anti-corruption campaign, although we’ve no hard proof who they are.’

  ‘The boy was too naïve and confused not to have been dominated by the other two,’ Clare insisted. ‘They gave him the security he’d so violently lost. A ferocious loyalty seems to have bound them together. It was all they had.’

  Next morning Veerapan came to see Clare at the hotel to tell her about cripple.

  ‘They found him at dawn, lying in a pool of blood. His wrists had been cut and his crutches lay on the floor beside him.’

  In the rush of events, Clare had omitted to tell them of the knife hidden in one of the crutches, and was saddened to learn that he’d used it in this horrendous way.

  ‘Did he think he was going to be tortured?’ Clare asked. ‘Or was he driven to suicide because of his nephew’s death and his grief over his child?

  ‘Certainly he might’ve feared he’d be tortured,’ Veerapan conceded. ‘So now both he and his nephew are dead. The boy was just a catspaw. It’s going to be difficult finding out who hired them.’

  ‘The boy won’t be tortured? Can you be sure of that?’

  ‘Fairly sure. He’s obviously too simple-minded. He’d know nothing.’

  Clare remembered the first time she’d seen the boy. She recalled his beautiful face lit up by the roving spotlight as he followed Max, trying to snatch his camera. And she remembered the first time she’d seen the cripple – coming out of the dark at that election meeting in Madurai. She imagined the long years of imprisonment he might have had to face. Then she thought about his widow and was in two minds about the deliverance he’d sought.

  ‘My superior’s raised the question of her being an accessory to the crime,’ Veerapan told her. ‘He thinks she must’ve known of her husband’s assassination plot.’

  Clare thought, with horror, about the possibility of this poor woman being hanged. She could see the woman was loyal to her husband, but believed she could have been ignorant of what her husband was involved in. [Add this?]

  Max and Clare were in the departure lounge of the airport, waiting to board the plane that would take them back to Los Angeles. Tammy had insisted on coming to see them off, despite his heavily bandaged shoulder. The lounge looked so anonymous and bleak, but the women in their brightly coloured saris and the excited, jostling children provided some relief. A sudden shaft of sunlight burst through the window, dazzling Max.

  All too soon for Clare, the departure of their plane was announced. While Max was seeing to the tickets, he caught a glimpse of Tammy kissing Clare goodbye behind a screen. They both looked as bit abashed when they joined Max again, perhaps suspecting Max had seen them and not wanting him to feel humiliated. Tammy embraced Max warmly, as if to make up for what he had just done. Max and Clare walked out of the departure lounge and across the tarmac towards the plane, leaving Tammy feeling somewhat lost.

  Max reflected on recent events: Veerapan phoning him, his racing to the hotel to find the crisis over, the cripple handcuffed and led into the police car. Clare had been very brave, according to Tammy, and Max was proud of her defiance. These reflections filled his mind, blocking out thoughts of Narayan. It was as well Narayan was by now in Kolkata and wasn’t coming to see them off. Tammy had phoned Narayan to tell his what had happened, and he had been understandably horrified. He’d passed on his deep commiserations to Clare, for neither she nor Max had wished to speak to him directly. Clare could not forgive him for leaving Max to marry Mohini, and Max knew he could not have stood it.

  As they approached the plane, the sun blazed down on its aluminium wings, shimmering in the afternoon light and heat, reminding Max of the shimmering rock face carvings at Sandeha that had seemed so insubstantial in the dazzle of the sun. It was as if even with their physical solidity, and their great age, they were just a fleeting mirage dissolving in the shadow of a lonely cloud.

  As he neared the steps to the plane, he looked back and saw someone standing on the roof of the airport building, looking forlorn. The way he stood reminded Max of Narayan, although of course it could not possibly be. Max tried to believe that what had happened the previous morning had been Narayan’s form of valediction and his way of saying sorry. He didn’t want to see Narayan ever again, but he was determined not to feel hard done by or to entertain, even in his unspoken thoughts, useless and embittering resentments.

  As he began to climb the steps, he turned to peer again at the distant figure. It could just conceivably have been Narayan, he thought: his stance, his shape, the lonely waving of his hand but, in the heat and dust and at that deceptive distan
ce, it was obviously Max’s wishful thinking. But then he had a sudden memory of Narayan running out of the haze of the afternoon sun, with the great beach behind him. He thought of his body lying on the beach: the wide masculine shoulders, the powerful legs. He knew it was now most unlikely he’d ever get Narayan back or preserve his marriage save as a continuing good friendship, based on a hard-won, unsentimental knowledge of each other. He took one last look at the distant figure but he’d stopped waving. He turned and entered the aircraft, Clare just behind him.

  They took their seats, Max closest to the window. He looked out at the airport roof, but the figure had disappeared.

  ‘You okay?’ Clare asked.

  ‘Just thinking some strange thoughts.’

  ‘Share them?’ Clare invited, smiling faintly.

  Shiva was the Lord of the Dance, Max thought, and the dance was everlasting. Despite that, he wasn’t sure the Hindu religion had reconciled him yet to the existence of evil in the world, whether it came from the murderous will of man, or the effect of economic circumstances, or something purely arbitrary. But he did believe in the strength and courage Krishna gave to Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita: the freedom from egotistic pride and anger.

  ‘I’m thinking about Subramaniam,’ he said at last. ‘I’m thinking about his death… and his cremation. We talked a lot.’

  Clare nodded, a little sad.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I don’t think I’ll ever forget that. I can see the flowers… scattered on the water with the ashes.’

  ‘The smoke in the sky… dissolving in the wind as it blew down the river,’ said Max. ‘He believed so deeply in the human spirit.’

  ‘He certainly did. We’re going to miss him.’

  ‘Tammy and Narayan will miss him too,’ Max said, then added decisively, ‘I’m going to do more with my life. I want to make it count for something.’

  ‘For Subramaniam… or Narayan?’ Clare asked tentatively. She paused. ‘Or Rick?’

  Max shook his head, almost imperceptibly.