by Sonali Dev
“We’re going to a police safe house in Colaba,” he said more evenly. Then he took one of those deep calming breaths and threw her a conciliatory look. “You should be, you know, safe there.” Was that the hint of a smile in his voice? Was Stonewall Savant attempting to resuscitate his long dead humor?
Was he crazy? She might have moved on, but she wasn’t far enough away from all those stupid dreams she had dreamed for attempts at banter. There would be no sliding into playfulness, not when she needed to stay away from all the slippery slopes that led straight to where he had no interest in going. Not when she knew the pain of being kicked to the curb by him. Once was quite enough, thank you very much.
Plus, the idea of heading to a safe house needed a little more time inside her head before it would feel, you know, safe there.
Fortunately, his phone buzzed, and they were saved from any more asinine attempts at making this ridiculous situation seem in any way normal.
“Yes, Maney,” he barked and then followed it up with a furious, “What the fuck?” and a quick “Sorry” thrown in her direction.
She waved it away.
He emitted some sub-human-decibel growls into the phone. Maney must know him very well, because he seemed to understand the growled code.
“Okay. Great job. Thank you,” he said before hanging up, and she hung on to his kind, albeit gruff, tone to keep from being terrified of what was going to come out of his mouth next.
“The safe house location has been compromised,” he snapped, sounding like such a cop.
What did that even mean?
Before she could ask, he went on. “Maney has intel that someone leaked the location of the safe house. We can no longer use it. And we still don’t have any leads on where Asif is. Whatever is left of Asif’s gang, they’re lying low. We can’t find a single bastard anywhere.”
Fantastic. “So where do we go to be safe now that there’s no safe house to be safe in?” She was proud of how breezy she sounded in the face of his neat little recap that essentially meant that a psychopath might drive up any minute and empty some bullets into her.
He looked over her shoulder at the window she’d pictured being shattered by bullets just as a pedestrian ran across the street in front of the car. Rahul slammed on the brake, reaching out with one hand to hold her back as she jerked forward against the seat belt. For once she was glad her heart didn’t know when to speed up because, hello! his hand was splayed across her chest!
He pulled it away with super-cop speed, apologized, and then clasped the steering so tight his knuckles looked like they might pop their sockets. Then just as fast he gained his calm again and eased the car back into motion. Well, “motion” was pushing it, because this was Mumbai, and traffic and movement didn’t often meet.
She knew his silences and this one meant the gray matter was in overdrive. DCP Savant was in case-cracking mode.
“We can’t go to The Mansion,” he said finally, in the tone he had used when they solved the Times crossword puzzle together. He always called her home that. Never “your home.” Always “The Mansion.”
“Why can’t we go to The Mansion?” Yes, she stressed the words, because sometimes being juvenile actually made you feel better.
“Because Asif Khan called Kirit-sir and threatened to come after you. The Mansion is out.”
“How about your office, then?” she asked, falling into their puzzle-solving two-step.
“Too many people there who could leak our location.”
He meant her location, naturally. She was the hunted, after all, not him. And it was really pissing her off.
“Listen, Rahul,” she said, knowing it was a bit silly to say that when she knew he was already listening, rather intently at that. “I thought you needed to find Asif Khan.”
His thick brows furrowed as though he knew he wasn’t going to like where this conversation was about to go. “Um, yes, except I need to focus on making sure you’re safe first. The rest of the force is hunting Khan down. We’ll find him.”
She turned in her seat and looked at his hands on the wheel. At some point she was going to have to stop avoiding his eyes. “Why are you the one charged with being my bodyguard?”
He didn’t answer, but his pursed lips told her exactly what he thought of the question.
“Did Papa force you?”
“He didn’t have to force me, Kimi.”
She squeezed her hands in her lap. “Right.” The Great United Front of KAKA. How could she forget? “What if I refuse? What if I don’t want you protecting me? What if I asked for a different officer to be my bodyguard?”
“It wouldn’t matter. I’m the one who’s doing it.”
Of course. “So I don’t get a say?”
He had the gall to sound apologetic, and she wanted to shake him. “Not in this. No.”
She laughed and it tasted bitter in her mouth. “Yes, it’s a truly unique situation, isn’t it? Papa and you making all the decisions.”
The traffic light turned red, but they hadn’t moved for a while. This felt remarkably like the conversation they were having. He did another very cop-like sweep of the traffic before trying to catch her eye again. But she couldn’t bring herself to look away from that red light. “I should have killed the bastard. If I had done my job right, we wouldn’t be in this situation. But until we find him, this is how it has to be. I’m sorry.”
Finally, she met his eyes, and an explosion of horns went off all around them as the light turned green.
“Isn’t ‘detective’ part of your job description?” she bit out. “Shouldn’t you be trying to find out why he’s after me? Why he came after me in the first place?”
“I told you it has to do with Kirit-sir not being able to end the investigation and save the bastard’s arse. It has to do with the case becoming too important to me.”
Of course, it was all about his guilt. Always his damn guilt. Rahul in all his heroic glory wanting to take on all the blame, and missing the point.
“I don’t think it’s that simple.” Despite her resolve to stay detached, her tone rolled up all her bitterness.
He made everything worse by looking past her anger at what she was trying to say. “What do you mean?”
Okay, here went nothing. Or everything. “Whatever he’s after me for has to do with my heart, not with the fact that Papa couldn’t stop your investigation.”
Yet again the crawling traffic came to a standstill, and he turned all the focus in those eyes on her. “Your heart?”
His tone made her want to squeeze her eyes shut. But she kept them wide open. “Yes, I need to track down where my heart came from. That is what will tell us what Asif is hiding.”
“Dammit, Kimi.” He glared at her, as though he had suddenly figured out some sort of nefarious scheme. “This is about finding your donor again? Come on! Kirit-sir has already told you the donation was anonymous.”
“What kind of cop are you that you believe anything can actually be anonymous?” Another cacophony of horns rose around them, but he didn’t move and she didn’t look away. The traffic was packed tight around them like leeches on a wound. There was really nowhere to go. “I have to go to Hong Kong and trace my heart back to its donor.” All on its own, her hand rubbed her chest. His eyes picked out the action that had become such a habit she usually didn’t even notice it.
Naturally, she noticed now, because he noticed. She stilled her hand. “If you have any intention of convincing me to let you guard me with this psycho on the loose, you’re going to have to do this my way and help me.”
Miraculously, the cars in front of them started moving and he looked back at the road, his dark-tar eyes so intense, she knew exactly how this was going to go.
“Help you how, exactly?”
“You found me at the airport.” He had to have wondered where she was headed. “Go with me to Hong Kong and help me trace the donor.”
“You know that’s not possible, Kimi. I can’t do that.”
“Why?” She wanted to tell him that she couldn’t move forward with her life, really move forward, until she put this to rest. But it felt too much like groveling, too much like exposing her heart again. “I’ll postpone my ticket to tomorrow, but I am going. You can’t protect me once I leave. If you go with me, you’re doing your duty and keeping me safe and moving forward with your investigation, because—and you have to trust me on this—this will lead us to the bottom of Asif’s plan.”
He threw her another one of those gauging looks and she knew exactly what was going through his head. It had always made her feel powerful, reading him this way. Now it made her awfully sad.
“Do you have any proof at all?” he asked, flicking away her sadness and filling her with hundred-proof anger.
“Hold on, let me think about that.” She stared off into the distance and did a slow blink. “Oh yes, the man held a gun to my belly and told me to find out where my heart came from.” Her glare told him exactly how long he’d have to wait for any more proof than that. “You don’t think that’s proof enough?”
“He’s a sociopath. He messes with people’s heads.” But he knew she had a point. She could see it in the tightening of his jaw. “Even if I wanted to I’d never get authorization. Kirit-sir has already refused. I’ll lose my job. And don’t say you’ll get your papa to take care of it.”
“I would never say that!”
He narrowed his eyes at the road.
Unbelievable! He was bringing that little piece of their history up? “That’s not what I had meant. I still can’t believe you would accuse me of saying that. I know this job is yours because you’ve earned every bit of it. I know how much you deserve it, how good you are at it. How can you forget that I was the one who always knew?”
He looked at her again, but he wouldn’t have that conversation. Not now, not ever. Good. No trips down memory lane for them. “Listen to your cop’s intuition, Rahul. You know what I’m saying is correct.”
“This is important to me,” she almost added when he didn’t respond. Instead she said, “This is vital to the case, don’t you see?”
He still didn’t respond. But he cut across four lanes of traffic and made a U-turn.
16
Rahul
A long time ago
Rahul landed on the balcony outside Kimi’s room. It had been six months since he’d been helping her with her homework. At least it had started with him helping her, but then one day she had started arguing with him about the right way to solve polynomials and he had brought his backpack up to the balcony to show her something and then they had both sat there with their backs against the glass pane of the sealed French door, side-by-side, and started to do their homework together, and it had become a habit.
Today, however, she wasn’t here. Usually, she stood on her side of the glass, bouncing on her heels, waiting for him to finish scrubbing the windows before he could join her. And she always looked so excited and impatient it made him work at warp speed.
Fortunately, at that time of the afternoon no one came out to check up on him. Her father was at the office or out of town, and her mother had her prayer meetings at the temple and it was off-duty time for all the other servants. Bhola would let him in, ask his usual questions about how he was doing in school, and then go back to napping in the gatehouse. Sarika would hand Rahul a list of things he had to get done and then go back to studying for her master’s degree. The afternoon heat was no one’s favorite thing. Except maybe his. He hated when it got cold. Something about the sun burning his skin made him feel like he was working hard. He loved the feeling.
The strange thing was that Kimi’s shades were drawn, and something about that made the sun on his skin burn more harshly. Plus, he had finished Moby-Dick—despite being bored out of his mind when he’d started. And she was right; it caught on, once he gave it enough time to get to know the characters. His reasons for liking it would be different from hers though, and he had to find out what they were.
He hopped off her balcony and walked to the side of the house and into the kitchen. The cook always left a glass of milk and a snack out for him when he got here from school. He had tried to refuse the food when he first started, but Kirit had let him know that it was non-negotiable. Rahul had to eat when he got here and he had to keep his school grades up—that was the only way Kirit would let him work. And Rahul could consider it part of the debt he was paying off. Which was moot, because his debt was unpayable anyway.
Rahul walked across the kitchen and while washing his hands did something he never did, started peering into the house through the double doors.
“What do you need, Rahul beta?” the old cook asked, pouring him another glass of milk with her gnarly, workworn fingers. “Still hungry? There’s a lot more vadas. Here, let me get you more.”
He didn’t really want more, but he nodded.
“Is the saheb home today?” he asked, watching her ladle the vadas and the sambar onto his plate, not quite sure what he would say if Kirit was at home.
“Yes, he’s with Kimi-baby. She’s sick. Been sick since yesterday.” She touched the Ganesha locket hanging by a chain around her neck, closed her eyes, and chanted a little prayer. “Why Ganesha is putting our precious child through so much I don’t know. What is His plan I don’t know. Here, eat. It’s not like anyone else will eat in this house until her fever reduces.”
“Do you know what’s wrong with her?”
“Only Ganesha knows. But they say her blood cannot fight germs.” She waved around the kitchen as though the germs Kimi could not fight thickened the air. “So she gets sick all the time.”
“Can I see Kirit-sir? I needed something,” he lied. Kimi hadn’t told him that she got sick often. She’d always implied that as long as she stayed inside her room, she would be fine. Or maybe he’d simply assumed that.
“Well, the saheb is very fond of you, only Ganesha knows why. So go, go on up and find him. But if it can wait I would wait. He has not left our baby’s room since yesterday. He doesn’t need any more tension.” She grabbed her locket and started chanting another prayer, which Rahul took as a dismissal.
The house had an eerie silence about it. There was a distant chiming of prayer bells, almost a constant sound in The Mansion—it seemed Kimi’s mother spent more time in the prayer room than anywhere else in the house. Aie only used her prayer bells on festival days and on the days when he or Mohit had exams. There were almost no servants around The Mansion today and the lights inside were dimmed.
He climbed up the servants’ staircase that led up the side of the house and emerged into an endless corridor with no idea which way to turn when Kirit’s personal assistant, Rafiq, came out of a door in his usual kurta and formal pants. He pulled off a surgical face mask he was wearing and gingerly shut the door behind him.
“Arrey, Rahul beta, what are you doing here. Do you need something?”
“I need something for school.” Rahul hadn’t meant to ask, but it was the only thing he could think of to convince the man to let him see Kirit.
The man looked thoughtful. “Sir is busy today. Is it urgent?”
The school was asking them to pay for computer classes, but they didn’t need the money until next month. “Yes.” He nodded.
The PA scratched the back of his neck, considering. “Well, Sir has said never to turn you away if you needed anything, and he could use the distraction.” He beckoned to Rahul.
“Wait here. I’ll go see what I can do.”
“Rafiq-sir, wait. Can you tell me what’s wrong?” He looked at the door Rafiq had come out of.
Rafiq pressed his fingers into his eyes. “It’s our Kimi-baby. Sir’s daughter. She does not keep well.”
“Is she going to be all right?”
Rafiq raised both hands heavenward. “Only Allah knows. But she better be, because her parents won’t let her go. Poor child. How long will the little mite fight?”
As soon as he had said it,
his terribly sad eyes got wary. “I didn’t mean that—you know that, right? I was just . . . Never mind all that. You wait here.”
He put the mask back on and slipped into the room. As Rahul waited he took in the house. It looked nothing like it had that day when he had walked in here and argued with Kirit-sir about letting his siblings go to St. Mary’s by themselves. He pushed away the familiar pain in his gut that always lingered beneath the surface and tried not to think about the second time he had walked in here in the middle of the night. But he couldn’t block out the look on Kirit’s face when he had driven Rahul back to the hospital in his car with a briefcase of cash that had not saved his baby sister.
The third time he had been inside The Mansion was when he had asked Kirit to let him work off those hospital fees. Was Kimi’s condition the reason Kirit had been that understanding and compassionate? Could someone as chirpy and bright as Kimi really be that sick? No one else he knew would be so filled with life if they were stuck in a room endlessly. He himself needed the football field so badly, sometimes when practice was canceled at school he felt like he might explode.
All these months he’d been doing his lessons with her, and he had never thought about the fact that she was stuck indoors while he sat out there with the sun and the breeze in his hair. She had seemed so pristine and cozy in her air-conditioning, all bundled up in sweaters—like a princess in her tower—that he hadn’t taken a moment to consider what it must be like.
Rafiq stepped out of the door again and waved Rahul toward a bathroom and pointed to the sink. “He’ll see you. But get cleaned up a little and here, put this on.” He handed him a mask. “Stay close to the door and don’t touch anything.”
Once he’d cleaned up, Rahul pushed the door open and went in and was instantly accosted by the strongest medicinal smell. The smell of a hospital multiplied a hundred times over. The room was pure white with white plastic furniture that looked like it belonged inside a spaceship. A few chairs were arranged around a coffee table and some medical-looking machinery. Kirit Patil sat amid all this whiteness, his clothes covered with a blue gown, gloves, and a blue shower cap. His eyes were sunken deep and dark rimmed. “Hello, beta, Rafiq bhai said you need something for school?”
