The Complete Mystery Collection

by Michaela Thompson

“I could’ve gotten Catherine out before it happened. I could’ve dragged her out, but I waited and waited because I couldn’t quite bear to give him up just yet—”

  “I will not listen to this, Marina!” Vijay’s lips were trembling. He stood, turned his back, and walked a few steps away from her.

  Marina felt the cool stone beneath her hands. Perspiration made a liquid track past one of her ears.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “You said horrible things.” His voice was choked.

  “I’m sorry.”

  He turned toward her again. “You are determined to try to find him?”

  “I have to know what’s going on.”

  “How can you know?”

  She hadn’t thought about it, but the words came. “I’ll go back to Halapur. Talk to people there, the guard at the prison…” Her voice trailed off.

  His shoulders sagged. “Perhaps it is time to leave. Shall we return to the boat?”

  They didn’t speak on the way down the hill. His face, when she glanced at it, looked solemn and closed. She had struggled never to think of what had happened between her and Nagarajan. When she discussed it with Clara, she was detached, clinical. Patrick knew, but he didn’t want to talk about it. She had never before been so possessed by the memory.

  Attempting to ease the strain, she said, “Do you think the people at the snack bar have heard of Elephanta Trading and Tours?”

  “Perhaps I should ask before we leave.” Vijay’s tone was courteous but distant. When they reached the landing stage she waited on the ramshackle dock while he talked with the elderly man who ran the ice cream stand.

  He joined her in a few minutes and said, “That was easy enough. Elephanta Trading and Tours is the company responsible for bringing supplies over to the island. The agent in charge is a man with a twisted back and a club foot. His name is Raki.”

  28

  The trip that had begun in unexpected enjoyment ended bleakly. They disembarked at the Gateway of India and walked silently back across the street to the hotel. In the lobby Vijay said, abruptly, “I must leave for an appointment. Tomorrow morning we go to Halapur. The driver and I will be here at seven-thirty.”

  “You’re coming with me?”

  “Why not, since it is my job to accompany you?” His tone was remote.

  “You’re obviously feeling—”

  “How I feel does not enter in.”

  “Vijay—” She was at a loss. “Can you come have tea, or a drink?”

  He checked his watch. “I must go to my other commitment.”

  It was no use. “I’ll see you tomorrow, then.”

  She watched him walk briskly away. Give me a break, Vijay. I know you’re prim and proper and I shouldn’t have babbled on about having sex with Nagarajan, but just— give me a break. Don’t you think I would’ve shut up if I could?

  She went to her room and collapsed on the bed, letting the air-conditioning dry the perspiration from her skin. Tomorrow, Halapur. It was the next obvious move. There was one Bombay lead she hadn’t followed up, though. Joginder. He might know something, but even if he didn’t she should find him, see how he was. Joginder had saved her from the mob, from the sight of the burning ashram. If Vijay had stayed around, he could’ve accompanied her, but he had an important appointment. And besides, she wasn’t planning to break into anything. She washed her face, brushed her hair, and went downstairs to have the doorman call her a taxi.

  Although Marina had visited Joginder in Bombay before she left the last time, she didn’t remember much about the place where he had lived with his brother except that it was in a warren of tin-roofed houses off the road to the airport. The driver grunted when she described it and pulled into the clogged traffic, where red double-decker buses, bicycles, motorbikes, ox-carts, and cars competed for space.

  She stared out the window, unable to escape Nagarajan’s image. Knowing his power, he had toyed with her, playing on her desire and despair. His beauty, perfect except for the mottled scar at the base of his throat, was addictive, dangerous. Angry at her helplessness, she had focused on the scar. Because he didn’t want her to touch it, she had always tried to, and never succeeded. Even overcome by passion, even asleep, he would push her fingers away. It was a game she’d played, and like every game she played with him, she’d lost. She tried to concentrate on anything else. A tree with fiery blossoms. A woman in a green sari, shading herself from the sun with a white umbrella.

  The driver slowed and looked at her inquiringly; she recognized the place. He turned into the winding dirt street and she knew the way without having to stop and ask. When they pulled up in front of the house, with its packed-earth yard and sagging frame of weathered, unpainted wood, she asked the driver to wait and crossed to the open door.

  She rapped on the door frame, then peered inside. A woman with long, loose hair, holding a naked baby, pulled the baby closer and stared at her. In a corner an older woman crouched.

  “I’m looking for Joginder. Joginder?” She wished for Vijay and his command of the language.

  She thought the younger woman understood. She beckoned Marina in and led her to a back door opening on a tiny courtyard. In a corner, squatting in the dust, was a figure Marina barely recognized as Joginder.

  His face looked caved in, and his mouth moved in a ceaseless mumble as his hands twisted and writhed. He did not look up as she approached. “Joginder?” she said, but he continued to mutter and stare in front of him.

  She crouched down. “It’s Marina. From the ashram, remember?”

  “He rarely speaks.”

  She looked up, startled, into the face of a man who bore a strong resemblance to Joginder. She had, she remembered, met Joginder’s brother briefly when she came here before. She couldn’t remember his name. “I’m—”

  “I remember you.” The man’s face was bony and handsome, but his eyes looked tired. “You were here long ago.”

  She got to her feet. “Yes. Then, I came to thank Joginder for helping me. I was hoping to talk with him again.”

  A small distortion of his mouth was gone an instant later. “He is as you see him. After he came from Halapur, he changed. For years now he cannot work. He must be led like an animal from place to place. His wife, his children, have gone to another. What else could she do? We could help only a little.”

  “Does he ever speak?”

  “From time to time. But he speaks only to his guru.”

  “His guru?”

  “Sri Nagarajan.”

  Marina fought to keep her voice steady. “Are you saying…”

  “I am saying that he speaks as if to someone, but there is only air. He speaks as if Sri Nagarajan were before him.”

  “What does he say?”

  “He says, over and over, that he will be faithful, he will keep the great secret. That is all.”

  “Keep the secret?” She plunged ahead. “Do you think he believes Nagarajan is still alive?”

  “Who can say what he believes?”

  Marina looked at the gibbering, dust-covered figure of the man who had led her away from the mob and the burning ashram. “He’s been like this since he came from Halapur?”

  “He changed slowly, but since that time he was never at ease in his mind.”

  Never at ease in his mind. Both of us running away from the fire. “I’d like to give you something toward his care.”

  “You are kind, but he is my brother. It is for me to look after him.”

  She tried to insist, but Joginder’s brother impassively refused as they walked to the door. When they said goodbye, he said, “I am sorry you do not find him better. I still hope— he is my brother. But I begin to think he will not be better in this life.”

  She woke the taxi driver, who was dozing behind the wheel, and told him to take her back to the Taj. Nagarajan had claimed another victim.

  29

  Marina ate a hasty breakfast of toast and coffee from room service, took the newspaper fr
om her tray, and went downstairs to wait outside for Vijay. The early-morning air was cool, with only a hint of the sultriness that would come later. Joginder had been in her thoughts since the previous afternoon. He speaks only to his guru. He says he will be faithful. He will keep the great secret.

  She had never believed Joginder to be one of Nagarajan’s devotees. Her impression was that he regarded his work as a job, not a religious vocation. Something must have convinced Joginder that Nagarajan did indeed have great power. Something like Nagarajan appearing to Joginder after Joginder had been told he was dead. He would have used Joginder’s awe and fear to elicit whatever he wanted— help in getting out of Halapur, possibly.

  A car pulled up. Vijay was sitting in the back seat with his briefcase on his knees. His smile when he saw her was perfunctory. “So. It will take us two hours,” he said. He opened his briefcase, got out his pen, and began making notations on papers.

  I’m not going to cajole him. She settled in her corner of the back seat and read the newspaper accounts of a train derailment that had left twenty dead, the parliamentary outcry over the temerity of the dacoit Baladeva, the burning of the huts of untouchables. By the time she looked up, they had left the industrial environs of Bombay and were crossing a rocky plain. She remembered the scenery from the bus trips she had taken between Halapur and Bombay to visit the consulate. The car met a bus, and as it flashed by, she searched the windows as if for a trace of her former self, but no pale, strained face looked back at her.

  “There. You see? It is a fort. There, on top of the hill.”

  Vijay had decided to talk. When she followed his pointing finger she saw the rocky ruins. “One of Shivaji’s?”

  “I think so.”

  He was putting his papers away.

  “You’re through with your work?”

  “One is never through with work. For the moment, yes.”

  She would try a little conversation. “How did your appointment go yesterday afternoon?”

  His face closed. “It went well.” He looked out the window for a minute or two, then said, “My parents have found a wife for me. I met her yesterday.” His tone held no enthusiasm.

  “Congratulations. What’s her name?”

  “Sushila.”

  “She’s pretty?”

  “Very pretty. Just finishing at university. Specializing in biology.”

  “She sounds nice.”

  “Very nice.” Vijay drummed his fingers on his knees.

  It was impossible to ignore his disquiet. “Don’t you want to get married?”

  Vijay frowned. “It is suitable that I marry. I want to please my parents. I want to have children. Yet sometimes I feel there is still much to do, to see. I feel that once I am married I will stay in my corner of Bombay only.” He was, she saw, even more upset than she had imagined. “My father says I have been too much with the Americans. That these are American ideas.”

  “A lot of Americans do feel that way about— being tied down.”

  “Exactly! Tied down!” he burst out. “We shall live with my parents, as the custom is. I shall come home from work at night, and my wife will tell me of the terrible things my mother did to her. Then my mother will take me aside to tell me that my wife is slovenly, or lazy, or doesn’t look after the children properly. Then my wife will tell me—” He put his hands over his ears, as if to shut out the imagined voices.

  “You don’t know it will be like that.”

  “It is always quarrelling, always rivalry.”

  “I don’t believe you. If it were that awful, people wouldn’t have been living that way for thousands of years.”

  Since when, Marina wondered, did I start arguing in favor of matrimony? An image floated through her head of Patrick, laughing.

  Vijay looked so woebegone she had to smile. He shook his head, his own smile rueful. “I do not want to get married.”

  “That’s obvious.”

  “Sushila is a pretty girl, a good girl, but if I were choosing, I might choose— someone very different.”

  “Do you have to go through with it?”

  “The astrologer is studying his charts to pick the most auspicious day. Everyone except me is very happy.”

  “That doesn’t answer my question.”

  “I do not know the answer to your question.”

  They fell into a companionable silence. In half an hour or so Marina recognized the outskirts of Halapur.

  Ten years had made no difference. Women still sat outside their roadside lean-tos and wove baskets of long, supple, white-yellow rushes. It could have been the same broken shutter that hung loosely from one of the windows of the District Administration Center, the same bullocks that nosed in the brown stubble of its garden. In the central square the peepul tree spread its branches, and in its shade small groups of men crouched, chewing betel and talking about— what? Marina had always wondered. At the public pump women with their water jars laughed and talked, their saris bright, bangles gleaming on their arms.

  The bus had stopped here. It was down one of the little streets leading off the square— Marina picked out the one immediately— that she had walked to reach Palika Road and the ashram. She could remember every turn of it. The barber shop, where customers reclined while the barber scraped their faces with his straight razor; the temple, with the maimed or blind beggars in its precincts; the shop with saris hanging outside, rustling in whatever breeze reached its cramped confines—

  “Marina? I was asking where you would like to go.” The car had stopped, and Vijay and the driver were looking at her. The starting point had to be the last place Nagarajan had been seen alive, the place where he was supposed to have died.

  “Let’s go to the police station,” she said.

  30

  When Marina had last been in the Halapur police station, she had said she didn’t want Catherine’s ring with the pink stone, and the man had put the piece of misshapen metal into a brown envelope. He had watched her guardedly, as if afraid she would suddenly scream, cry, accuse, not knowing how little chance of that there was. She could no more have wept or raised her voice than she could have touched the ring. She had thanked him and walked out of the ugly orange stucco building with its flat roof and concrete arcades.

  Her work had taken her to other police stations since then, and now she knew that the one in Halapur was typical. There was the long counter, the smell of paper and of strong cleanser, the bulletin board with its printed sheets, and the man behind the counter, who looked drowsy no matter the time of day. He blinked as they came in, and sat up straighter.

  “I think it will be better if I make our request,” Vijay had said outside, and now he swept up to the drowsy man and spoke in Marathi, taking from his breast pocket an envelope from which he drew a sheet of official stationery with a brief text, embossed stamps, and a signature endowed with loops and flourishes. The man glanced at it, then reached for the telephone near his elbow. While he spoke into it, Vijay picked up the paper and put it away.

  The man hung up, said something to Vijay, and left the room. As they waited, Marina said, “What was that you showed him?”

  “An official request for assistance with our inquiries into the incidents on Palika Road.”

  “But we don’t have an official request.”

  “Now we do.”

  “Mr. Curtis signed that paper?”

  “Well—” Vijay hesitated.

  “Vijay—”

  “I signed it myself. With my own name, of course.”

  Marina was amazed. Nothing could be more completely out of character. “You can’t have! You’ll get into trouble!”

  “Suppose we came here and asked politely to inquire into the case. We would at this moment be walking out the door. Whoever reads the document carefully, which you have noticed he did not do, will see that it says, in very elaborate language, that we are not doing this under the auspices of the consulate. It is not my fault if they do not read carefully. And beside
s,” he went on fiercely, “suppose I do get into trouble. I have at least done for once what it was my own wish and decision to do.”

  Before Marina could answer, the man returned and indicated that they should follow him. A short way down a hall he showed them into an office where a heavy man in shirtsleeves, with slick gray hair and a hanging underlip, was dictating to a secretary in a blue sari. He ignored them for several minutes before dismissing her with a gesture and turning to them.

  “I am the chief of police. You wish to see me?”

  Vijay stepped forward. When he spoke, his manner was authoritative with an overtone of pompousness. “Vijay Pandit, of the American consulate in Bombay. Miss Robinson, here, is the sister of a girl killed on Palika Road in the ashram fire some years ago. We are looking into the circumstances surrounding that event.”

  The chief leaned back and plucked at his underlip. He didn’t ask them to sit down. He looked at Marina. “What are you hoping to find, Miss Robinson?”

  Marina’s job at Breakdown, Inc., had given her some practice in being pushy. She tried to follow Vijay’s lead. “I’ve had indications recently that my sister is alive, that she somehow escaped the fire. I want to find out the exact circumstances.”

  “I see.” The chief hesitated, then sat forward. “I cannot open our files to you unless you go to a great deal of legal trouble. I was, however, a junior officer here at that time, and I remember the incident well. I can tell you without doubt that no one could have escaped or survived. Fuel oil had been thrown into the blaze, and it was very hot. We found the remains of three bodies in what we later learned had been the room set aside for meditation. In such cases identification is not easy, but we established to our own satisfaction and, as I recall, that of the consulate”—he glanced at Vijay— “the identities of the victims. I am sorry I cannot hold out any hope to you.”

  “And the— the guru, Nagarajan,” Marina said. “He killed himself here, in jail. Are you familiar with the circumstances of his death, too?”