“You have no idea what caused him to say this?” Nadia asked her cousin who had already started to put her clothes into a small trunk.
“No,” she said, “he called me in his tent and then was silent for a long time. I feared it had something to do with me but when he spoke he told me to keep my distance from you and asked me to immediately pack my things and shift with Helena.”
“Was there someone else with him at that time?”
“Yes, Uncle Billy.”
TWENTY-FOUR
The Brightest Basement
Ernst would have met his death at the hands of Manu, the chief of the security guards, if not for his extremely stale breath, which came directly at him once he had pulled the High Guard by the collar in front of his face and grunted angrily. It became torturous to stay in the line of his oncoming breath, so Ernst bent his face down and his glance went to the one area of his muscular frame which he thought could be vulnerable, and which was now accessible from his higher vantage point.
Gathering all his energy, Ernst brought his knee upon the man’s groin hoping dearly that he still maintained some softness in that organ.
He was not disappointed. The impact sent Manu staggering back, his mouth closed firmly as all wind was knocked out of him. Ernst pulled himself out of his loosened grasp and bounded towards the exit. The man reached out with his long hands but could only snatch at Ernst’s shirt, a part of which he was able to tear. Holding the white fabric in his hand somehow increased his anger even more and Manu took off, hot in Ernst's pursuit, shouting at other men to aid him.
Ernst had no clue which way he had taken when he had been led here. All the lobbies and doors looked the same. Even the portraits on the walls and the murals and busts looked the same. He ran with no concern for direction, taking whichever seemed like the darkest turn or whichever door he found open. He could hear that more than half a dozen men were now on his trail, shouting to each other hoarsely, looking to block him in his way. But the haphazard way that Ernst was running due to his lack of knowledge of the place was putting them off. Ernst seemed to be taking the route that they least expected him to. While it was good in the sense that he still evaded capture, it clearly meant that he was getting no closer to the exit. But it did not matter now, not with blood-thirsty men on his trail. He turned one more corner and found himself face to face with a man who was guarding the only exit. The man braced himself for the onrushing Ernst. The High Guard replenished his breath for a fraction of a second before launching himself headfirst towards the man. A few yards from him, Ernst slipped and his momentum carried him sliding on the marble floor and through the legs of the man who toppled forward. The door behind him did not open in a lobby, but into a flight of steep stairs, ill-lit and made of wood.
Ernst tumbled down the stairs and crashed heavily with the wall at the landing. He had hurt his feet and his elbow was bruised as well. But there was no time to assess his injuries, steps were already sounding on the top of the stairs. He got up and bounded past another door.
The sudden light blinded him for a moment. He felt like he had ventured straight into a street lamp. Not stopping still, Ernst stumbled upon a wooden stool and heard the sound of glass breaking and a loud hiss.
When his eyes adjusted to the light, he found himself in a long, cold hall, lined with wooden tables laden with glass vessels and burners. The place was lit by numerous lamps that hung on the ceiling. But they were not oil lamps, nor gas lamps. He had seen them before. He was standing in a room lit by what they called electrical lamps. That wasn’t something Ernst saw every day, very few households in Cardim had even a single electrical bulb, and this place had enough to light a whole street. Ernst would have spent more time appreciating the bright lights if he wasn’t being chased by an army of angry men.
He ducked down and moved under the line of tables. Which place was this? He wondered crawling between wooden legs. It seemed like some kind of laboratory, but what was it doing in the basement of an ashram. He saw the legs of half a dozen men emerge near the door. The bright light of the room would do him no favors. One of these men only needed to bend down to see him scurrying like a rat as far away from them as possible. There seemed to be no other door to the basement hall and not a single dark spot where he could hide.
Ernst seemed to be doomed, but he didn’t stop till he reached the wall. The men were looking all over the hall but none of them had decided to duck down as yet. Perhaps luck was with him. And just as well, Ernst saw a line of wooden boxes some way from where he sat. If he could slip behind those the men would not be able to see him even if they bent down.
He slithered slowly towards the box and pushed himself headfirst in the gap between the box and the wall. Ernst barely resisted an impulse to scream. There was already someone in the gap.
“Hello there,” said the man who was sitting there with a small lamp and a magnifying glass, studying what seemed like a wilted lily in a glass dish, “May I know what you are doing in my laboratory?”
TWENTY-FIVE
An Unexpected Gift
Maya sat down on a bench in the empty kitchen (even Helena had disappeared somewhere) and had her breakfast porridge while thinking about the mystery. Natasha had left the circus to take care of some business and had asked Maya to wait for her return before leaving. Maya had no intention of leaving the circus so early, not with the unsolved mystery prowling around in her head anyway. She had talked to people around and found that, though there were no hotels around the area, there was an ashram whose boundary wall touched that of the circus ground on the east, and it was known to offer food and shelter to homeless people. It would be a perfect place for her. She could easily jump the boundary wall during the night and continue her investigation. She was sure Helena could help her as well, probably give her some signal when Bill was not in his room, so that she could come and explore once more. She was sure that he had recently hidden something in that trunk.
Apart from Bill’s trunk, Maya also needed to give the missing account book some more consideration. That was the biggest piece of the puzzle. If she could get her hand on that she might be able to prove Bill’s motive to get rid of Harold. Then again, how he or the perpetrator had actually managed to force Harold to jump from the tower on his own accord was also something that she was yet to figure out. The mystery was quite twisted.
Maya cleaned her plate and put it back in the utensil basket, then made her way back to the dormitory tent looking for Helena. She needed her help if she wanted her plan to succeed. But the dormitory tent was empty as well. Her bed, however, was not.
She already knew what it was even before she had actually picked it up. Lying on her bed, partly hidden by a pillow, was the missing circus account book.
Who had left it here? She looked around the tent but it was definitely devoid of any person.
Maya picked up the book and flipped through the pages. It was filled with rows upon rows of numbers. She didn’t know why but she was slightly disappointed to see all those numbers. Perhaps because she had been expecting something more apparent. She was almost expecting to open the account book and the reason why Bill wanted it would jump out of it.
Maya sighed at her naivety.
She would need to study it much more intently to know Bill's motive and she did not want to do it so openly in the dormitory and risk unwanted questions. Worse still Bill might see her with the book and insist on getting it back or he’ll quit the circus. Maya put the book in her purse and focused on the other mystery at hand. Who had kept the book upon her bed? Someone wanted her to succeed in proving that Bill had a motive to get rid of Harold. Why? To shift the blame from himself?
Maya tried to think of all the people who knew that she was looking for the account book. As hard as she thought she could only think of Bill and Natasha. Surely Bill would not hand over a weapon of his own undoing to Maya. And Natasha couldn’t have access to the account book or she wouldn’t have asked Bill for it. Who else knew she wa
s after it. The answer came to her mind like a flash of lightning.
The kitchen. She had told Natasha about the account book while getting served tea and one person was close enough to hear her.
That was it.
The account book must have been sneaked on her bed by Helena.
TWENTY-SIX
Helena's Secret Potion
Helena? Maya wondered why she had never thought of Helena as a suspect before. Perhaps it was her age or even the way she’d been behaving with Maya – as a helpful assistant. Maya had initially seen this as a way to be in the center of things she could gossip about with others. But now she saw her help from a different angle. It was she who had pushed her into investigating Harold’s death, told her she had heard Bill fight with Harold. She was clearly trying to push Maya in Bill’s direction. She was also aware of the history between Bill and Maya. Was she only trying to use that to shift the blame from herself to Bill?
But Helena pushing Harold to his death seemed absurd. And what motive did she have for that? She was an old lady who had worked all her life with Harold and, as far as Maya knew, she had loved him almost as a child. What could she gain from his death? However hard Maya tried she could not think of any reason.
She was pacing around the empty tent lost in thought, when Helena walked inside holding a handful of margosa and aloe vera leaves and a mortar and pestle.
“Hello Nadia,” she said brightly to her and settled down on a bed with her baggage. She slowly tore the margosa leaves from the stalk and placed them in the mortar.
“I am trying to make my secret potion,” she explained when she saw Maya gawking at her, “If you pay attention you can make it as well, it has just two ingredients essentially. Margosa leaves and aloe vera, you just mix them, half and half, and grind them till you get a consistent paste. That’s it. You can mix some clay to get even better results but I don't bother. I use it once a month and I am sure you can’t tell my age.”
The old woman smiled good-naturedly at Maya, ripping an aloe vera leaf in half and scooping the gel in the mortar.
It didn’t look like she had any hand in keeping the account book on Maya’s bed.
“Someone left a gift for me on my bed,” Maya said, trying to test her innocence further.
Helena continued to scoop aloe vera gel in the mortar.
“What gift?” she asked casually.
“A notebook,” Maya said, “A notebook with lots of numbers in it but I can’t seem to figure out what it is.”
Helena looked up from the mortar.
“A notebook with numbers?” she exclaimed, “Someone must have left it on your bed by mistake. Probably Natasha. I’ve seen her take care of finances in a notebook. She has grown quite forgetful lately. Just yesterday, I told her that the kitchen needed some new bowls and spoons, and today when I checked, she did not even remember that we had a conversation about it. Poor girl, all this pressure is taking its toll.”
Helena refocused her attention on the preparation of her cosmetic while Maya settled back on her bed.
It seemed very unlikely that Helena had any knowledge about the account book. Either that or she was an incredibly good actor. Maya was not convinced of the latter.
If it wasn’t Helena who had overheard her conversation with Natasha and given her the account book then who was it?
TWENTY-SEVEN
The Circus Accountant
Since there was some time before Natasha arrived back from her errand and Maya had to bid farewell to the circus, she decided to rest the mystery about who kept the account book in her room and focus on the book itself. She needed to find a lonely spot devoid of activity to do that, and the only spot which had any semblance of privacy in the circus was the wooden watch-tower. Harold’s cabin would have been a good spot as well but Natasha had already taken her hoop of keys and Maya did not want to be accused of breaking into another room. Anyway, the tower was in many ways a better place. She was so far above everything else that it made it easy for her to focus. She sat on the balcony on the other side from where Harold had jumped, so that she had a clear view of the endless forest in front of her. A gentle breeze blew across her face as she opened the account book, cradling a melody of bird chirps from the verdant woods below.
It reminded Maya faintly of Messrs. Grington and Basse, where she worked five days a week as a junior clerk. She did not like the feeling. She would have to return to the office in a couple of days, back again on her chair by the window, her sight blocked by a pile of account books similar to these.
Maya shrugged the image away and focused on the book in her hand. Her experience as a clerk made it easier for her to skim through the pages. The book had details of the circus finances for the current year. Instantly she noticed that although she had heard that the circus was not doing well financially, the ticket revenues were healthy. Though the audience was not as great as one would expect of the bigger circuses but it was definitely not that bad, especially given the small towns that the Golem Circus now camped in and the outdated acts. And yet she saw that in this year the circus had actually made a loss of around 10,000 Cowries. There was an overall debt of 60,000 Cowries and the bank account of the circus had only around 12,000 in it. Apart from the creditors, the circus also owed money to suppliers and dues to artists which totaled to around 8,000 Cowries. All this highlighted that the financial situation of the circus was actually quite grim, even with a decent audience. This meant only one thing, the circus was spending much more money than it should, which again was surprising given the equipment was old and the artists not exactly top class.
Where then was all the money going? Maya studied the salaries of the artists, then the money spent on supplies – rice and meat and wood, even tools and repair costs. All of that seemed too high to her. There was no way that the circus could be buying things at such high rates in bulk. Maya then had an idea, she searched the account book for dues to Olsen security. There it was. For the last 12 shows a price of 7 Cowries per guard had been quoted totaling 2,261 Cowries. She remembered that Bill had only given around 1500 to Olsen. What about the remaining 700 Cowries. The answer was clear to Maya. What she had been suspecting was true. Bill, the man in-charge of accounts, was defrauding the circus. He was misappropriating funds to pocket the money for himself. And going by the fraud in just this one case, the magnitude of his graft was quite high. That is why Harold had a fight with Bill, he had found out about the accounting fraud and that his brother was looting money from him. So much so, that the circus had actually drifted into a loss.
Maya wondered how long Bill had been doing this, and how much money he had already pocketed in this exercise. Immense, she was certain. A thorough analysis of the account book and the actual prices would give her a better understanding of the exact amount, but she had a rough idea already and that should be good for the time being.
It disgusted her how he could do something like this with his family. But then that was Bill as she knew him, he never did care about family.
TWENTY-EIGHT
The Miraculous Chemist
Ernst would have liked to wriggle out from under the table and if possible escape the room, but he was too shocked to make a move. The man who sat behind the boxes, a magnifying glass in hand was not particularly impressed to see him. He had an egg-shaped head with gray hair at the sides, his small frog eyes were set as far away from each other as possible and his nose was narrow and long.
“Have your superiors not told you that I am not to be disturbed during the day,” he said to him sliding out of his dark hiding place, “I am trying to do some very important experiment here. There are certain toxins in this lily flower that become active only in the dark, and I do not like people disturbing me here."
The men chasing Ernst heard the scientist and one of them crouched under the table to get him.
“You’ve got company as well?” said the doctor irritably, his breath smelling distinctly of alcohol, “there is no use explaining to t
hese illiterate men, they never understand. If only they would realize that I am literally funding their lives.”
“Sorry, sir,” said the man, “It was not our intention to disturb you, this man is an intruder, we were chasing him.”
“Oh really,” the scientist sized him up once all three of them had emerged from under the table. Two men had pinned Ernst to the wall as soon as he had gotten out.
“Wait,” said the scientist to the men as they tried to take him out of the basement, “Who sent you to spy in my laboratory? Has someone finally realized my secret brilliance?"
“He is a policeman, sir,” said Manu, “says that he is looking for his missing father, but he is merely trying to investigate the claims of some crazy men who say weird things about the Guru.”
The scientist laughed. ‘They are not crazy men,” he said, “they are saying the truth. And it is because of me that people like you think that they are crazy.”
Ernst wasn't exactly sure what the scientist was talking about, but he had a feeling that it was in his best interest to play along. He might even end up having some more information about the ashram, the secret meditation rooms, and his father's strange mental condition.
"I am not supposed to say this," said Ernst trying to free himself from the grasp of the men, "But it seems I have no choice now. I am not a policeman. I was sent here to look for you."
"To look for me?" exclaimed the scientist, going to a shelf on the wall and leisurely pouring himself some whiskey which he drank in one go and then refilled his glass.
"Not exactly," said Ernst, "I didn't know what I was looking for till I found you. I mean, I was sent here to find out the real reason for the popularity of the Guru. Why so many devotees flock to him and donate all their money to him? Going by what I hear, you seem to have a hand there."
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