My Lady of the Bog

by Peter Hayes

  “Oh,” she laughed, “Americans. You think if everyone has enough to eat and a decent education, they’ll behave like good little boys and girls. Well, rot! Human beings, as you may have noticed, have an insatiable need for violence and gore. They love blood, love to see it spill and run. The Germans were fairly well-educated chaps, as were the Romans, Moguls and Brits. Didn’t stop any of them from trying to conquer the whole bloody world and killing anyone who stood in their way. At least public human sacrifice channeled that need so that it didn’t come out in less acceptable ways. After all, what would you rather (rah-tha)? A handful of criminals sacrificed to the gods, or several hundred innocent children shot to death in Brooklyn?”

  There was another longish pause, during which Vidya challenged me with her eyes.

  “Well, then,” I said, raising my glass. “to arranged marriages. And to human sacrifice. All those in favor, say ‘aye.’ ”

  “Here, here . . .”

  I turned to Vidya to make sure she was not offended. Her glass was raised like all the others, and she was looking straight at me with a cool blue gleam of pure amusement—or was it interest?—in her eyes.

  Chapter 11

  It was midnight. We were alone in Jai’s study with snifters of brandy, sans the cigars. Jai was seated. I was standing. On the wall beside him was a wooden rack displaying half a dozen antique swords.

  “So?” I asked.

  Jai looked up but still said nothing.

  “The codex, Jai. What is it?”

  “Language? Old Gujerati with some Chagtai, Persian and even a smidgeon of Middle English.”

  “Ah! And what’s it about?”

  “Memoirs. Of an Indian prince.”

  “I see,” I said, feeling somewhat deflated, for my hope had been it was about my Lady.

  “Yes, you will see. I’ve translated it.” He nodded. “It’s practically all I’ve done for the past six weeks.”

  Again my interest flared, for I still hoped between the book and the body there must be some connection.

  “Actually, Xan, I know a bit more about all this business than you suppose. Sir August rung me. Claims you lifted the book from a royal find, disturbing the sequence and context of the remains.” He frowned. “Did you? And why would you do a thing like that?”

  “Like what?” I bristled. “Anyway,” I said, “the entire treasure was filched that night. In actual fact, I saved the damn thing.”

  Jai sat back and thought for a moment. “I also hear you blackmailed your way on to the Royal Commission. Threatened Rumple with a god-awful stink.”

  “Well?” I said. “I had to do something. He didn’t seem to know who the hell I was.”

  Jai only smiled and in the silence that followed, I wished I could have taken my last remark back. His face darkened. “Listen to me, Xan: Until now, you’ve had it easy. Everything you’ve wanted has come your way: position, recognition, opportunity, acclaim. And it isn’t that you don’t deserve it. But there’s a downside, too, to that kind of good fortune. You begin to think life owes you it. You’ve never had to face—or wait out—adversity.” He held up a hand. “Don’t interrupt. Then there are your chronic complaints about being single. But you’ve given precious little that I’ve ever seen to any woman who’s wanted to change that. You forget I know you, Xan. I’ve seen you disappear into some trench in Crete whenever a woman has tried to claim you. Or are you still pining over that prima donna? Christ, Xan, that was years ago!

  “Anyway, that’s your business. But now, with this last bit, you’ve crossed a line. You claim to ‘love’ anthropology, but don’t submit to its most basic laws. Bloody Christ, you know it’s about context: not what you find, but where you find it; what it’s next to, above, below.

  “And your sense of entitlement! Unreal! The police call you in to view a dead body and from that moment on, you, apparently, believe that the body now belongs to you. How dare the bloody Queen of England appoint a commission to study it that doesn’t include you—and you’ve no hesitation in applying whatever measures are needed to get your way.”

  “It’s called hardball, Jai—as opposed to cricket.”

  “Yes? Well, don’t be fooled by Sir August’s manner. He didn’t become a Knight of the Realm by being a wuss.” Jai pressed on. “Then there’s the matter of a fourteenth-century manuscript that you so blithely dropped into the post—without anyone’s prior knowledge or consent. You’re a bleedin’ Yank, Xan! What makes you think you can dispose of England’s archeological treasures as you deem fit? Did you know it took me the whole of two mornings, a barrister’s counsel, and all my powers of eloquence and persuasion to prevent the Yard’s antiquities squad from clapping you in jail?”

  I hadn’t. No. Jai held up a hand.

  “Happy to do it. After all, you’re my son. I love you, Xan. And that’s my point. When you love someone, you don’t count the cost. You do for them whatever you have to do.” He paused to let his words sink in. “Love is sacrifice, Xan. That’s the whole of the Vedas—and the Bible to boot.”

  I rolled my eyes, but Jai only pushed back coldly and said, “Of course, that’s something you don’t understand because you’ve never sacrificed anything for anyone, have you? And you know why? I’ll tell you why. Because you lack greatness, kingship, largesse. And if you stay that way, it’s going to be your ruin!”

  I looked up. I had no idea what to say. Jai had never, ever spoken to me this way before.

  “I thought you were . . . compassionate, Jai.”

  “This is my compassion,” Jai hissed back, ramming the volley back down my throat.

  I was too stunned to even feel hurt. I thought for a moment. “What can I do?”

  Jai sat back and smiled for the first time. “Well,” he said, “you can change.”

  Chapter 12

  I won’t pretend that what Jai said that evening hadn’t been said to me before. I will say this time I could not so readily dismiss it. For Jai was one of the few people I loved. In fact, when I was younger, I’d worshipped him. It was not just his brilliance, but his personal style—a zest and an elegance that had set him apart. Even in his poorest days as an instructor, he had managed to drive a Mercedes coupe, and he’d sometimes worn an ascot (or “foulard” as he called it, the only man I’d ever seen on whom it didn’t look asinine). And as marvelous as Jai was with people, equally marvelous was the way he handled things.

  Once, he went shopping and returned with a single, forty-dollar silver teaspoon. It was all he could afford, but it was beautiful, lustrous and heavy as a trowel. He would take it from his pocket, wrapped in a handkerchief, and use it to eat his institutional meal. When he was done, he would dip it in his water glass, wipe it dry and replace it in his pocket. Jai claimed that next he would buy a fork, and then a knife, until he had acquired the entire eighty-piece set.

  His superb library was ordered—not anal-compulsively, but in a most natural, logical way—and he didn’t, therefore, spend hours, like me, looking for lost and misplaced texts. Though we were equally poor, Jai wore clothes of the finest fabric, and they were always clean and always mended, even if they were old.

  He neglected nothing. Once when I remarked on this, he said, “I was taught that if something’s yours, it’s your duty to preserve it.” And he went back to whatever it was he was doing, something I would never do in a million years: oiling the toaster or polishing a bowl.

  Later he told me, “My family worships Vishnu. Vishnu is the preserver of the universe. He’s not its creator or destroyer, but its sustainer. There’s something wonderful about taking care of things, don’t you think?”

  “You mean maintenance?” I cried, in disbelief. “You mean getting your shoes shined, cleaning the refrigerator and washing the goddamn eighth-story windows? Are you mad?”

  He smiled at me kindly. “I mean . . . conservation.”

  It got to the point where I loved to watch Jai handle things, almost anything. Just to see the way he picked it up and la
id it down made you want to do the same (although when you did, it was nothing special, just a scarf of gray Irish wool, nice and all, but hardly the sensual treasure it had seemed to be between Jai’s fingers).

  Then there were Jai’s ideas, which weren’t like anyone else’s. He’d once defined government as “the science of punishment,” referring to the ancient secrets of statecraft by which a rajah rules his kingdom—and prevails.

  And his most recent declaration, “Love is sacrifice.” It wasn’t a remark I myself could have made—springing, as it did, from a worldview as alien to me as it was venerable and old, one that harkened to the caves of Lascaux, Father Abraham, burnt offerings and flaming oblations of ghee and gold. Nor was Jai’s wisdom book knowledge only. Born in Mumbai, schooled in London, he had traveled widely with a father in the Indian diplomatic corps. Young men tend to define themselves by what they’ve experienced, and I was envious of his many exotic (and erotic) adventures. Jai had not only sampled the girls of a Turkish brothel (one whore, Jai claimed, had slipped a pillow beneath her buttocks, something which at the time had seemed to us the nadir of depravity), but had spent a night in meditation in a Maharashtrian cremation ground.

  “Someday, when my work is done, I’ll retire to the forest,” Jai once told me.

  “What forest, Jai? Muir Woods?”

  He laughed. “Hardly. I doubt the National Park Service would permit me to wander around it skyclad.”

  “You mean nude?”

  “I mean clothed only in the wind and ether,” he’d said, spoofing himself.

  Despite his tone, I sometimes wondered if he wasn’t serious. I imagined the distinguished professor emeritus wandering the woods bare-ass naked, living on roots and tubers. It was certainly a different model of retirement than that advanced by the Marin County Chamber of Commerce.

  Now, for the first time, I considered what I’d done. It’s true I’d disturbed the integrity of the trove—but the manuscript had flared before me in the dark, an archeological wonder I could have for the taking. I didn’t think of myself as “entitled” and “indulgent,” only “special” and “lucky,” which were just other words for the same damn thing. Somewhere along the way I’d lost my humility, focus and perspective. Jai was daring me to get it back.

  Then there was Vidya, whose face and form had haunted me since the party—though here, at least, I was fully aware of my pattern of attraction to unavailable women. The girls who’d loved me—and there’d been a few—never seemed to evoke in me that same wave of cosmic connection that the ones who hadn’t did, and do. And I saw now it was an emotional trick to keep me from becoming involved with a real, live, flesh and blood woman instead of her romantic imago. I thought, now, too, how that was a part of my Lady’s attraction: she was real, and she wasn’t—and her demands were few. High class, low maintenance. Just the kind of girl I adored.

  Part III

  VIDYA

  A similar experience befell Menippus,

  a disciple of Demetrius the Cynic.

  For as he was going from Corinth to Cenchreae,

  he met one in the form of a beautiful foreign girl,

  apparently very rich,

  who said that she was smitten with love for him,

  and in a friendly manner invited him to go home with her.

  He in his turn was taken with love for her

  and lay with her often and even began to think about marriage,

  for she had a house decorated in a royal fashion.

  But after Apollonius had examined everything in that house,

  he exclaimed that she was a Lamia

  who would quickly devour the young man entirely,

  or afflict him with some notable injury.

  —Nicolas Remy

  Demonolatry

  Chapter 13

  In the early morning hours of July thirtieth, I was awakened by a phone call from Vidya Prasad, informing me that Jai was dead. She gave no details, only asking that I come to their apartment “straight away.”

  Ordinarily, I would have been skittish about walking the streets of London alone at that ungodly hour, but the spirit of death that had slithered through the wires accompanied me, its rod and its staff keeping lesser anxieties at bay.

  I’d expected to see an ambulance or police, but the street before their mews was empty. Vidya answered their apartment door. She was stunningly dressed in a sheer white, gold-embroidered sari. There was blood on her hands. To my look of astonishment, she lowered her eyes. A bloodstain on her shoulder was in the shape of the state of Florida. The hall inside was overbright.

  I followed her inside to Jai’s study. What greeted us were flies. They orbited the room like a miniature, gleaming belt of asteroids. On the floor lay Jai, wounded beyond description. Cut down, I remember thinking. Slain! For the violence done unto him cried out somehow for archaic language to describe it.

  I didn’t check his vital signs. It would have served no end. Death was proclaimed by the stillness of his corpse. It looked bereft, its spirit fled. Jai’s eyes were half-open, their blind whites half-showing beneath their lids like in portraits of yogis in samādhi. A pool of blood on his chest had dried at its edges, congealing like gravy. Everywhere was splatter: on the walls, rug, desk, ceiling. Hundreds of flies were clustered on Jai’s face, drinking from his nose and eyes, so that it seemed as if his face were moving. I remember for an instant clinging to the notion that he had died naturally—fallen, perhaps, and cut himself on broken glass—and then in the next instant, admitting he’d been slaughtered.

  “Would you care for some coffee?”

  I looked at Vidya. She wasn’t staring at the body but at some meaningless juncture of the floor and wall.

  “Coffee?” And only then did I realize she was in shock. Her eyes were glazed, and as she turned and passed into the living room, she performed a series of meaningless rituals: fluffing pillows, straightening chairs, brushing nonexistent dust from the arm of the couch.

  I turned back to Jai’s corpse. He lay atop a shattered lamp, surrounded by the wooden splinters and spindles of the chair in which he’d apparently been sitting. A shatoosh shawl was wound around his throat.

  The ancient book lay open on the rug before him. I recognized its vellum cover inset with semiprecious stones. Two drops of Jai’s blood were drying on its leather, as though hardening into jewels themselves. Reflexively, I picked it up. I called to Vidya, “Did you phone the police?”

  “Police?” she repeated, in a tone that clearly said she hadn’t.

  And so, I dialed 999. While it rang, I stared at the body of my mentor and dear, dear friend, and waited for something, a thud in my heart—but there was as yet only a smoke-filled vacuum.

  “How may I help you?” an operator answered.

  “Send the police. There’s been a murder.” I hung up. The 999 system logs the caller’s address and I wasn’t about to stay on the line to answer questions. I looked down once more at Jai, then backed out and shut the study door. For dying—like sleep, like making love—is something one does behind closed doors.

  Vidya was in the kitchen, watching a coffee filter drip. I looked into her face—so beautiful and exotic—though marred now by a flicker of something like static electricity around her eyes.

  Discovering I had the book in my hands, I placed it on the table. Vidya looked at it, but said nothing. “What happened?”

  She shivered. “I . . . just found him . . . like that . . . when I came home.”

  “When?”

  “Oh,” she said fretfully. “Three thirty, four.”

  “In the morning?”

  She looked about her, and I followed her eyes. The kitchen was extremely neat, except for a pile of torn circulars and magazines on the counter.

  I looked at the clock. It was just after six. “And what have you been doing since?”

  “Oh,” she said stupidly. “Straightening up.”

  Jai’s death had clearly pushed her over the edge.

/>   Perhaps it had pushed me over it, too, for as our eyes next met, I was shocked to discover a palpable sexual tension between us.

  I stood motionless. The material of her sari shivered. I don’t suppose it was composed of anything so western as crinoline, and yet it made a noise like it as she shifted her thin and elegant limbs.

  She looked at me. Then she sighed and surrendered herself, inviting me to her then and there. I cannot describe how she did this, other than to say she lifted and exposed her throat, tossing back her thick jet hair with a noise that is not in any syllabary, East or West, but is, indubitably, the syllable of desire. I don’t recall approaching; I do remember crushing her to me, the sound her sari made in protest, and the sudden hot wuhhhh of her breath in my ear as it rushed from the delicate cage of her ribs. I opened her lips; her tongue was wet silk, so soft and indescribably thrilling that the fleshy petals of some exotic flower blossoomed in my belly and a suffocating intoxication made me nearly ill.

  “This is . . . mad,” I said and pushed her back. We looked at each other in disbelief, both amazed, I think, by the outrageous act. Our embrace so violated both our standards that it was, in the end, freeing. It had all the hallmarks of possession: the sense of being seized by some greater power that laughs in the face of all one’s scruples, resolutions, ethics, plans.

  “You have blood on you,” I said at last, rather thickly.

  “Oh,” she said, holding up her hands. She looked at my shirt. “You do, too.”

  The doorbell rang and both of us started. Then I remembered I had called the police.

  Chapter 14

  Two plainclothes cops were standing in the hallway. I swear, they grow them for the job. Either that or promotion to homicide dick excites a gland that emits a hormone that turns your face into an Easter ham. “Someone here reported a murder.”