“What about you?” Conor asked, eyes still on the ground. “What do you figure I’ll do?”
Sedgwick put his hands into his pockets and came up to stand next to him again. Looking out across the darkened field, he gave a wistful sigh. “I figure you won’t, but that’s not to say I don’t wish you would.”
“What will you do, then? Kill me?”
Sedgwick pulled out his packet of cigarettes, shaking his head. “That’s above my pay grade, but I have to warn you, they’re going to come to their senses soon and realize they can’t afford to have you hanging around asking more questions. So, if you give us too much time to get organized, we’ll think of something to get you out of the way for a while—get you arrested, kidnapped, something. If you just leave now and keep your mouth shut, it would be safer for everyone, your brother included.”
Conor lifted his eyes from the ground and joined Sedgwick in gazing out into a darkness that had grown blacker during the time they’d been standing there.
“Tell me where he is,” he said calmly, but without hope.
“I can’t do that,” Sedgwick began and raised a hand to forestall Conor’s protest. “I can’t tell you how to find him, but it doesn’t matter much, because I’m pretty sure he’s about to come find you.”
Conor’s half-articulated objection died on his lips. He turned to stare at the averted face next to him. “You’re saying he knows I’m here?”
“Yeah. He doesn’t know what you’ve been doing, but he knows you’re here.” Sedgwick paused to light a cigarette. The lighter illuminated his sharp, angular features and highlighted small flecks of gold in his gray eyes. “He promised to stay out of sight as long as we kept things under control, but he told me he knew we would screw up eventually and that all bets were off once we did.”
The agent gave him a hard, steady look. “I wasn’t kidding, Conor. This thing has been baking for years, and it’s ready to come out of the oven. If you don’t leave, my ‘fake Crimean buddies’ won’t take chances. They’re going to want you snatched up and put on a shelf somewhere, and Thomas knows it. He’ll try to get to you first.”
A silence fell between the two of them. Conor closed his eyes, trying to assimilate everything he had heard and turn it into something coherent. He heard Sedgwick’s lighter igniting as he finished one cigarette and lit another. He opened his eyes and turned to him again.
“The only way he’ll know you’ve screwed up is if he finds out what happened here tonight.”
With an enigmatic squint, Sedgwick dragged on his cigarette and swiveled his head to release a stream of smoke into the night air.
Conor swore in frustration and leaned in closer, his eyes on the agent’s face. “Why are you doing this? Why tell me all this after lying for so long? To help me? Am I supposed to believe that?”
“Call it payment on a debt.”
“I don’t know what that means. Tell me how I can believe what you’re telling me. Why won’t you tell me the rest of it? How can I trust anything you say?”
“You can’t.” Sedgwick expelled the retort in a hoarse growl. Grinding the cigarette beneath his boot, he pushed a handful of blond hair from his forehead and looked at him with a tired smile. “You shouldn’t. Everybody else knows enough not to. I tried to tell you that earlier tonight. The problem is, you don’t have an alternative.”
“Is it an intelligence operation? Are you Thomas’s controlling officer?” Conor demanded.
The agent laughed softly. “It’s probably more accurate to say he’s mine, depending on how you look at it.”
“I don’t—”
“I know you don’t understand, and you’re not going to, even if you decide to stick around and let him find you. He’ll keep you as ignorant as I have; he’ll just be doing it for different reasons. I can’t convince you to go home without him, but maybe he can. Maybe we should have let him try that in the beginning. Hindsight is twenty-twenty.”
They fell silent again. Conor thought there was little left to say and little left for him to do. His soldiering days in Khalil’s army were over. The artifice constructed to keep him occupied for two months—an elaborate, self-contained set piece that had flawlessly directed him farther from the truth—had been disassembled and packed away over the course of an hour.
It left a void he didn’t know how to fill. He was adrift and becalmed, with no immediate strategy to implement and no controlling officer to coordinate his actions. As he wrestled against the paralysis of indecision, he looked absently at his watch and remembered the other activity that had been on his agenda for the evening. Suddenly, he saw an opening—not the way out but at least a way forward. He turned with such a sudden, vigorous movement that Sedgwick took a startled step backward.
“I’m supposed to be meeting Raj in Kamathipura in two hours.”
“Oh, right.” Sedgwick nodded. “I’ll send someone. We presented you as a free agent from the beginning. I’ll tell him and the others you’ve moved on to something else.”
“I don’t want you to send someone or say anything yet. I’ll go for one more night. There’s something I need to do.”
Sedgwick’s eyes widened but then narrowed in shrewd understanding. “Radha. This is your next move? Really? Rescuing a prostitute from the squalor and indignity of the red-light district? That’s wandering pretty far off the track, I’d say.”
“She’s not a prostitute,” Conor said. “Not yet, anyway, and this might be the last chance I get to keep her from becoming one.”
“Very noble but it’s a bad idea.” Sedgwick’s face hardened into disapproval. “You’re buying trouble when you can’t afford what you’ve already got. You steal her away from Mehta, and you’re bringing down a world of shit that is going to—”
“I’m not going to steal her.”
Sedgwick’s bark of laughter echoed over the empty field. With hands on his hips, he took a short, circular walk before returning to confront Conor, his habitual, cutting sarcasm firmly back in place. “You really are—literally—planning to buy trouble, aren’t you? It’s going to be a bigger price than you expect, dude. She’s had an expensive habit for a while now, and he’s been supporting it because it suited him, but he’s going to add it to the bill. You’ll be paying for her and every molecule of smack that’s gone up her nose in the last six months, and that’s not to mention how many ways you’ll be paying after you’ve got her.”
“Why don’t you let me worry about that,” Conor said curtly. “All I’m asking is to keep this little psycho-drama running for one more night. Seems a small enough request, considering the circumstances.”
“Yeah, sure, okay.” Sedgwick threw up his arms in a pantomime of surrender. “Go to it, but I think you’re crazy. It’s like pissing on a forest fire. Do you know how many Radhas there are in the world? In Mumbai? Do you know how many there are, right on that same lane in Kamathipura?”
Conor looked at the face in front of him, its fine features contorted in the perpetual effort of concealing its owner’s insecurity and self-disgust. Once more, despite everything, an irresistible empathy came forward to grind away the sharp edges of his resentment.
“I’ve no idea,” he said, with a pale smile. “Showers of them, no doubt. Showers of Radhas and showers of Sedgwicks, but I only know one of each. Someone helped you once, right? Without worrying how many others there were. I think I know who that was now. I can’t fix everything, I know that, but I can’t help trying to fix what’s in front of me.”
A spasm of pure, unguarded emotion passed over the face of his former boss. Sedgwick dropped his head away, rubbing a hand over his mouth. After a moment, he cleared his throat. Lifting his head, he held out a hand. “Good luck. In case I don’t see you again, I should confess that what they said about you in Gosport turned out to be true; but as usual, they didn’t know the half of it.”
With a slight grin, Conor shook the outstretched hand. “Thanks. They left out the best bits about you, too.”
“What was that?”
“Paregoric,” Sedgwick repeated. “More technically known as camphorated tincture of opium. It’s the secret ingredient she puts in the cough medicine, so you’re smart to be careful with it. It works on stomach bugs, too, and in controlled doses, it moderates the effects of withdrawal.” His face lit up with one of the rare, natural smiles that Conor wished he had seen more often over the past several months. “Tell her I’m doing okay, yaar, and . . . give her my love.”
When Conor turned to continue walking, the night surrounding him was reaching its deepest, blackest peak. In the distance, he knew there was a footpath that bisected the field, serving as an informal boundary between the property of the Gymkhana and the even larger grounds of the public Azad Maiden that lay beyond it. He couldn’t see it. In fact, he couldn’t see more than twenty feet in front of him, but he knew he could get there. With every twenty feet he paced off and left behind, he would be able to see twenty more ahead of him, and that was how he would find his way to it. It was a painstaking way to complete a journey, but it was all anyone could expect when walking through darkness.
17
“TWELVE lakhs?!”
The exclamatory squeak escaped before Conor could stop it. It was not becomin g to his image as a stone-cold gun for hire, but the figure so astonished him that he was thrown off balance and out of character. A lakh was equivalent to one hundred thousand rupees, which meant Mehta was demanding over a million of them.
A week earlier, the bar owner had made it known he would soon be entertaining bids for Radha’s sar dhakna, literally the “veiling of the head.” The term referred to a traditional ritual within the Hindu marriage ceremony, but it also served as a euphemism for the purchase of a dance-bar girl’s virginity. Conor thought it unlikely that a bidding war among patrons would have gone as high as six lakhs. He had been quoted double that price for the privilege of preempting the game and jumping to the head of the line.
Pulling the mask of indifference back over his features, he angled his head to regard the face dominating the wall behind Mehta while he recovered from his shock. The iconic namesake of the Marilyn Monroe Bar gazed back at him. Her hooded eyes, highlighted in dragon fruit-pink, retained their seductive allure despite Warhol’s garish handiwork.
“It is a very large sum,” Mehta acknowledged, with a small smile. “More than you expected and maybe more than you can afford?”
Conor remained silent, privately debating whether he had the stomach to argue about it. He looked at the bar owner with calm speculation, wondering why he felt such an intense loathing for the man.
There was nothing special about Rohit Mehta to distinguish him as any more venal than the other pimps and drug dealers he’d run across in Mumbai’s hotspots. If anything, Mehta appeared to take pains to present a kindlier face to the world than many others he’d met. He had a large, round face encircled by a tuft of white hair and fitted with enormous glasses that gave him a slightly goggle-eyed appearance. He spoke in tones of muted modesty and wore a perpetually cherubic expression that could be taken for soft-headedness or the onset of senility.
Conor didn’t believe it was either. Rohit Mehta was not that old and hadn’t become one of the richest men in the district by being dimwitted. He was quite positive the portrayal of a genial, soup-stained baba was as much an act as the one he was putting on himself. He thought it might be the shameless hypocrisy of the performance that prompted his unusually strong antipathy.
“You must understand,” Mehta said, breaking the silence, “the price is very high because I would be so much happier not to lose her. Radha is like a daughter. It is my joy to have her close to me. In my old age, she is like the jewel—”
“Oh, give over.” Conor cut him off with a flash of irritation. “It’s a peculiar sort of father that condemns his daughter to drug addiction.”
“Condemns? I condemn?” Mehta regarded him with a wide, saucer-eyed stare. “How could I? It is the guests who brought gifts, and my Radha accepted. She is very strong-willed, and now she will have what she wants. How can I refuse her?”
“Rubbish. Even if you didn’t start her on it, you’ve perpetuated it. You could have . . . oh, never mind.” He stopped, pinching the bridge of his nose to moderate the eruption of temper. “You want twelve lakhs, you’ll get it. I’ll be back in about three hours. Make sure she’s still here.”
He rose and headed for the door and in a parting glance saw Rohit Mehta’s disguise slip. His lips opened in a wide, salacious grin, exposing a line of stubby teeth stained a lurid shade of red from years of chewing betel nut. It was the face of a predatory animal, lifting its head from its bloody pursuits with leering satisfaction. In the background, Marilyn’s fulsome, fluorescent lips provided a bizarre, echoing accent to complete the scene.
He returned to the main bar and saw Raj had retreated to a corner and folded himself into one of the small white couches against the wall. Conor skirted the edge of the dance floor and approached with a casual salute.
“Thik hai, Raj. Chalo. Let’s get out of here.”
Even though Raj had watched his advance from across the room, the skeletal young man jumped at the direct address. Conor resisted the urge to swear with impatience. “Sorry, yaar,” he said, limiting his tone to mild sarcasm. “Didn’t mean to sneak up on you. I’m ready when you are.”
“Radha.” Raj accompanied the illogical reply with a timorous head toggle.
“Ehm, right.” Conor turned with slow reluctance to look at the figures revolving around the dance floor.
He had not looked for Radha earlier, not wanting to draw her attention before reaching an understanding with Mehta. Now that he had, he was conscious of even more reasons for nervousness. He thought it likely she would be eager to leave with him, and it was equally likely she would have the wrong impression of what leaving with him signified. He wasn’t looking forward to the explanations that might be required and wasn’t about to go into them with her now.
He walked to the edge of the dance floor, and she saw him immediately, peeling away from the nucleus of women at center stage. She twirled forward with a step that was more graceful than most, but also unsteady—a sign that she was probably floating in the after-effects of a heroin-induced haze.
The string of bells around her ankles jingled as she planted her bare feet on the floor and stood before him with her arms crossed. An impish smirk lit her face, but her large, hazel eyes were shining with affection. Except that she had the sharp wit and impudence of a teenager, Conor could easily have believed her to be closer to nine or ten rather than thirteen. The top of her head reached no higher than his waist.
“How long have you been here tonight?” he asked.
“What time is it now, please?” Radha demanded with exacting formality.
He glanced at his watch. “It’s after midnight. Twenty five minutes after, to be precise.”
“Then it is two hours, twenty five minutes since I am dancing. To be precise.”
“What did you have to eat today?”
“Oh, I have eaten too much today, so many rotis and dal. And rice. Rice I had also.”
“Hmm, I don’t think I believe that.” Conor held out his hands, and without protest, Radha put out her own. Like the questions about her diet, this also had become a routine she submitted to with amused patience.
He turned the palms of her hands up, ran his eyes over the inside of her arms, and breathed a sigh of tentative relief. As far as he could tell, she was still only snorting the heroin, or “brown sugar,” as she called it. If she had graduated to injecting, there were no visible signs of it. Her arms were smooth and unblemished. He knew she could fool him by injecting the drug elsewhere but doubted she would bother to hide it.
“Okay now, Mommy?” Radha inquired sweetly, retu
rning her hands to her hips with an impertinent wriggle. “All this nonsense about eating, bhaiyya. I see you, and what am I to think? Always you are coming and talking, and always you are skinnier, each time.”
“We’re not talking about me. We’re talking about you.”
“But I am talking now.” Radha smiled brightly. “This subject is too interesting. Tell me, what did you have to eat today?”
“Many rotis, and dal. And rice.”
“Oof!”
Her comical exclamation, coupled with the impatient stamp of her foot, gave Conor the first good laugh he’d had in a while. “You’d better get back to dancing,” he said, taking a few steps back from the dance floor. “I have to go, but I’m hoping to be back a little later.”
At this, Radha’s smile faded, and her small, heart-shaped face crumpled. “Always you are coming back, and always going away again, but without Radha. Radha stays where she is. Dancing.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
Conor swallowed hard. He didn’t dare tell her of the conversation with Rohit Mehta and of the terms they had reached. There was still the small matter of gathering up 1.2 million rupees during the next three hours. He wasn’t entirely confident he would manage it and wouldn’t risk raising her hopes.
She wasn’t letting him off easily, however. Pressing her palms together and holding them in front of her face, she appealed to him with quiet supplication.
“Con-ji, will you do this thing for me? Will you take me from this place?”
The Conor McBride Series Books 1-3 Page 14
