But it was the rest of them. A nympho wife, a hophead chauffeur, a butler who could barely keep from keeling over in the presence of murder but who didn’t call the cops when he’d been told to, and most of all a houseboy who called the First Secretary’s young and beautiful wife by her first name, who apparently was having an affair with her which was just one among her many affairs, and who made decisions which the rest of them seemed inclined to follow—and who had, in cold blood, killed first Gil Sprayregan and then his wife.
After my half-hour was up, I got out of there. I went over a wall in the courtyard and out to the street and through someone else’s back yard. No one tried to stop me. No one shot at me.
With luck, they would dispose of Gloria Sprayregan’s body tonight. Someplace about fifty miles out in Virginia or Tidewater Maryland, I thought, where they’d never be connected with it.
I hoped they would get away with it. I had a hunch they would.…
I drove the De Soto over to my office in the Farrell Building and let myself in.
The other alternative, I thought, was the cops. You could go to the cops, I thought, but the only one that would put in a box was you.
Not that I wouldn’t have been able to crawl out eventually, but figure it out for yourself. You do your best to help a scared and foolish guy and his scared and foolish wife out of a jam, and they both wind up dead, so your best isn’t only not good enough, it leaves the kind of taste in your mouth that a three-week bender wouldn’t wash out. Sure, you could go to the cops.
Go ahead, you tough shamus, I thought, go call the buttons. Go call them and watch how fast Ambedkar ducks behind his cloak of diplomatic immunity.
But of course I wasn’t going to call the cops. I could have called them from the Embassy and hung around for the wrinkle-suited men from Homicide. I’d already made up my mind back there. Now I was only batting it around to make myself feel better. Tough shamus, I thought. A fat lot of good you did them.
I took out the office bottle and belted it twice, once to Washington in the spring and once to the ghost of Gil Sprayregan’s long slide. Then I picked up the phone and dialed it.
Priscilla Varley surprised me by answering it herself.
“This is Drum,” I said. “Does the offer still stand?”
“Of course it does, Mr. Drum! And I can’t tell you how delighted I am.”
We decided I couldn’t hope to leave with Stewart Varley today, but she thought her father-in-law could cut the red tape for me so I could catch a Pan-Am World Airways flight on Monday. She hung up telling me how delighted she was again.
There was nothing in the Sunday papers about Gloria Sprayregan. I read all of them.
Monday morning Priscilla Varley called and told me to pack. She delivered my visa and Pan-Am ticket to me in person. She even saw me off, but no bands were playing.
9.
STEWART HOFFMAN VARLEY spoke effusively three days later. “So it’s really you. Come on in and get a load off. Drink?”
He led me into his room at the Pilgrim Hotel in Benares, India. “Hot as a son of a bitch, isn’t it?” he asked, pouring lemon squash from a pitcher and spiking it with gin. A big ceiling fan turned sluggishly. It was the nearest thing to air-conditioning they had in Benares. They also had burning ghats on the banks of the Ganges, where the dead were carried and the living dead dragged themselves to be burned to ash and strewn into the waters of the Holy Ganges, and they had two million Hindu pilgrims crowding the pilgrim road every year and a quarter of a million natives to fleece them, and they had fakirs and snake-charmers with hooded cobras, and they had sacred blue langur monkeys and the sacred bony cows, and they had mango trees and heat and stink and dust and this year, as an extra added attraction here in this city of death, for death, and by death’s door, they had a conference of twenty-one Afro-Asian nations as if to prove that life could go on somehow in a city dedicated to the rites of death. They had all that and a lot more, but I hadn’t sorted out my impressions yet.
I drank spiked lemon squash with Stewart Hoffman Varley, and he said, “Nice trip out?”
It was an inane question, for all. I’d seen on the way out was a three-day string of airports stretching from Washington and New York to London, Brussels and Munich in Europe, and Istanbul, Beirut, Basra, Karachi, Delhi, Calcutta and finally Benares in Asia. But inane or not, Stewart Varley managed to ask it with his usual exuberance, an exuberance which went with a smile which, as usual, sat awkwardly on his gaunt, grave face.
I made an appropriate remark and followed him to the window, where he stared down at the crowds in the street below. Sweat had plastered his shirt to his back. I mopped the back of my own neck with a sodden handkerchief and waited for him to turn around. Coming from the Benares airport, I’d had enough of those pilgrim crowds for a while. My taxi, an ancient Ford which had been around when I wasn’t old enough to know there were Indians any place but in the western U.S.A., broke down midway between the Panch Kosi Pilgrim Road and the hotel, so I’d walked the rest of the way with a couple of cowhide valises, eating the dust of those crowds and thinking they’d probably stamp me to death if they knew what my valises were made of.
Varley swung around to face me. Ice clinked in the bottom of his glass, then melted so quickly in the fierce heat you could actually see it getting smaller. Varley said, “Doesn’t it kind of get you?”
“Doesn’t what kind of get me?”
“Those crowds down there, the noises, the smells—man, the feel of it! Just outside that window, waiting to be explored, to be known, the heart of timeless Asia, the mysteries of the East, if you’re lucky, the Peace That Surpasseth All Understanding … Okay, okay,” he said, smiling. “You don’t have to look at me that way. I know it’s why you’re here.”
“It bother you?”
“Hell, no. But don’t get the idea Priscilla wears the pants, because she doesn’t. Maybe she knows what she’s doing, though, because I know I’ve been looking too hard for something and I’m still looking and when I look I’ve been known to be careless.”
“Your wife called what you’re looking for faith.”
“Okay then, faith. I don’t expect to find it here, Drum. If I were frank with myself, I probably don’t expect to find it anywhere, but I’ll be looking. I’ve got to keep looking.” He grinned engagingly and a little shyly as if the dead-seriousness of what he’d said embarrassed him. He told me, “That’s where you come in.”
“Yeah,” I said doubtfully. “Want me to be frank?”
“Of course.”
“Your wife is paying me to protect you from yourself, from the lure of the timeless East, as she put it, and from Sumitra Mojindar and her hatchetman. The pay is damned good and I intend to earn it.”
My knowledge of his extramarital activities didn’t seem to bother him. He whistled and said, “She never let on she knew about Sumitra. She’s a wonderful woman, Drum. I don’t deserve her.”
I ignored the way he was airing the wash and asked him, “Is Sumitra Mojindar something special to you or just a way of exercising the libido?”
He grinned again. He did it so often I found myself fighting an impulse to make him throw it on the floor and step on it. “Exercising the libido,” he said. “That’s pretty good. Yes, you might call it that.”
“And if I told you to keep away from her for your own good?”
“I’d say advice was cheap.”
“Even that kind of advice—to the official U.S. Observer at the Benares Conference?”
“Ouch! You make it sound so grim.”
“The way I hear it, you went out after the job. They didn’t force it on you.”
For the first time he bristled. “I’ll do my job.”
“Good. And I’ll do mine.”
“Want some advice yourself, Drum?”
“Only if I can afford it.”
He grinned again. “It’s cheap, just like yours.” He finished his second drink and went to the wall hooks for his tie and w
hite linen jacket. There wasn’t any closet in the room. “Here it is: do your job, and good luck to you. Maybe I can use your help. But if I happen to find what I’m looking for here, don’t try to drag me off. You wouldn’t be able.”
“Think you’re going to find it?”
“Unfortunately, no. Although there’s a sadhu—that’s a holy man—on the Panch Kosi I’ve been wanting to meet. You might put him down in your notebook, if you keep a notebook.”
“Why the tie and jacket?”
“Press conference in the lobby in about ten minutes. I’m still kind of surprised anyone would want to interview me. We Western Observers aren’t exactly the most popular figures in Benares these days. There’s a feeling it should have been Asia for the Asians, but Gaganvihari Mojindar figured the Asian nations had nothing to hide from the rest of the world and in fact would have reason to be proud of their accomplishments here in Benares, so he rammed his plan for Observers through the preconference meetings in a one-man crusade that was more a tribute to his own popularity than anything else. Anyway,” he added lamely, “most of the reporters waiting for my words of wisdom are Western. Want to join me?”
Before I could answer, the window broke.
It broke because someone in the crowd outside had heaved a rock through it. The rock was the size of an Idaho potato, lost much of its momentum in the process of shattering the window glass, just managed to reach the far wall, struck it, fell to the rush-carpeted floor, and rolled to a stop in the center of the room.
Neither one of us jumped quite high enough to reach the ceiling.
I went to the window and leaned out, avoiding the shards on the sill. The crowds surged by in yellow swirls of dust. There were thousands of people out there, all heading for just one place, the bank of Holy Ganges about half a mile up the crooked street. Most of them were half starved. They wore filthy rags and were desperate enough to believe almost anything and try almost anything. Any one of them could have thrown the rock and disappeared immediately in the noise and confusion.
“Take a look at this,” Varley said. He was holding the rock in his hand. Someone had scratched into its surface in English, WE DON’T WANT YOU HERE.
“I was beginning to think I had B.O.,” Varley told me. “Most of the other Western Observers already got theirs. Well, coming?”
Since the rock seemed to amuse more than frighten him, I didn’t get any gray hairs over it either. Varley was that kind of guy. I went downstairs with him. There were rush chairs and some ornate and well-worn pieces of teakwood furniture in the lobby and about a dozen people in Western-style clothing, most of them sipping lemon squash and looking uncomfortably hot.
The press room was too small for the twenty or so reporters crowded into it. Someone introduced Varley, and he began to answer their questions. Since the Benares Conference didn’t get underway until the weekend, the questions had to do with Varley’s impressions of India. His impressions were of the timeless mysticism of the East, of Hindu piety, cycles of worlds, Mogul and Dravidian architecture and something or other about the University of Benares. My impressions were of heat, dust, filth, starvation and squalor. I guess his impressions made better copy than mine did. Anyhow, they helped explain why he was United States Observer at the Benares Conference and I was a private richard grubbing for a living.
Then I decided to go out and have myself a drink, something which foreigners were permitted in dry Benares. I wasn’t the only one. A girl reporter came out after me and closed the door. Then she surprised me by saying:
“Chet! Chet Drum! I thought it was you in there. I couldn’t believe my eyes. What on earth are you doing in Benares?”
I stared at her. My eyes saw a trimly attractive blonde with short-cropped hair, brown eyes which weren’t enormous but weren’t mousy either and promised more intelligence and more curiosity than most men like to cope with, a vividly red mouth against tanned skin, and the kind of small-hipped boyish figure that looks better on a tennis court than at a formal ball and was now wearing a sensible lavender dacron dress, no stockings, and low-heeled shoes. That was what my eyes saw, but my mind went flipping back three years through the pages of time to the memory of an innocent little affair which had almost grown to a thing until we both had decided to call it off. It was an unexpectedly poignant memory, so I didn’t say anything for a minute, not trusting my voice.
I reached out for her hand, started to shake it and wound up squeezing it. We smiled at each other while her eyes grew big and a little misty.
“I was looking for a drink, Marianne,” I said finally.
She took my arm and moved alongside of me in that jaunty stride of hers. She was the perkiest girl I’d ever known, and with the assortment of femme fatales you meet in my business it was more than enough of a recommendation. Her arm slipped around my waist and I put mine around hers as we walked. She smiled up at me like a little girl about to leave for summer camp. By the time we walked that way into the Pilgrim Hotel’s European Bar, the three intervening years had dropped away. We sat down at the bar and settled for Scotch because they didn’t have bourbon.
“D.C. and Hall Mountain, California,” I said lightly, “wasn’t it?”
“Hah! As if you didn’t know.”
“Still in the writing racket?”
“Uh-huh. I’m covering the Benares Conference on assignment for Life.”
I toasted her with my Scotch-on-the-rocks. “You,” I said gravely, “have come up in the world.”
“Look who’s talking. The peripatetic Mr. Chester Drum.” She smiled and we clinked glasses and drank. “You know,” she said, “I’ve been following your checkered career in the papers. Did you know that Time once did a piece on you? They called it ‘Nero Wolf and His Seven-League Boots’ or something ilke that. It was about the time you flew down to South America and started a revolution or ended a revolution or something. But I’m glad you don’t look like Nero Wolf.”
That called for another Scotch. After that we got pretty hungry and the barman knew of a place called the Occidental, Benares’ only decent restaurant, he assured us, where we could get good Occidental food. We went over there in a cab. The food was good, but it wasn’t Occidental. We had roghan josh, which is mutton in ghee and curds. We had lentils and chutney in little brass bowls on a brass tray on which the chunks of mutton were heaped, served by a thin old waiter whose teeth were black from chewing betel nut. And mostly, we had the kind of un-sniping small talk which is rare in the circle I travel in.
Then, while we rolled our paan in betel leaves and tried chewing it and told each other how silly we looked, Marianne said: “I haven’t asked you what kind of case you’re on.”
“No. You haven’t.”
“Okay. I can take a hint. For now.”
“Life wouldn’t be interested in it, Marianne.”
“Is that so? It’s my guess Life would be interested in anything that brings you to Benares.”
“No, they wouldn’t.”
She ignored that. “If I can take a hint, I can also give one. If you don’t watch out you’re going to get yourself followed by a newshen looking for a story. My hint is, don’t fight the inevitable.”
She looked so solemn, with a little frown puckering her brow, that I couldn’t help smiling. First it made her frown some more, then it made her smile. She said, “Besides, Marguerite Higgins followed an army around and look what happened to her. She married a general.”
“All right, inevitable,” I said, “you’re leaking paan all over the table. Let’s get out of here.”
The sun had gone down. The tropic night was hot and dry, but most of the Benares pilgrims were now indoors, so the dust had settled and you could see a thin sliver of moon that hung low on the horizon. Marianne said the Life bureau in Calcutta had supplied her with a car. We went over to the Pilgrim Hotel for it. The car was an Italian Fiat. I did the driving, but Marianne showed me the road that cut south from the heart of Benares to the river, two or three miles b
elow the city. We got out and walked on the sandy bank. From where we stood you could see the red glow of the burning ghats upstream, but the wind was blowing north, so the sweetish burning smell which hung over Benares like a pall hadn’t followed us from the city.
We walked about a mile, holding hands and not talking. Marianne had left her shoes in the car. Every once in a while our hips brushed. She had the kind of ingenuous sex appeal most girls would give their right arms for.
We sat down on the hard sand. I lit a pair of cigarettes and gave her one. She took one drag, then flipped the butt into the water. “Who wants to smoke?” she said.
She came into my arms as if we’d never purposely lost track of each other. Her skin was cool. A light breeze blew off the water. “Oh, Chet,” she whispered. “I don’t care why you’re here. I’m just so darned glad you came, I could cry. It’s been such a long time …”
There was jasmine in her hair. There were tears in her eyes. She made every girl I have ever known seem cheap and tawdry by comparison.
In a little while she said, “Go slow, Chet. Go slow.”
So we took it up to the point that the kids in the borrowed jalopies back in the States, drunk on malted milks, reach, and we cut it off there. We stayed on the sand a long time, watching the red glow fade from the water.
It was wonderful just being with her. It was the kind of unexpected interlude that helps you through all the bad times in life. But still, I’m glad we didn’t know then what was waiting for us in Benares.
10.
IT BEGAN innocently enough Friday morning, when Varley poked his head into my room at the Pilgrim Hotel and said, “Hey, ayah, want to come out to the Panch Kosi with me?” An ayah is a nursemaid. His manner was light, but knowing Varley that probably meant he was on his way to steal the crown jewels.
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