The Game

by Laurie R. King

  Suddenly, Nesbit caught himself, and his handsome face flushed. “Sorry, I’m not used to strong drink at these altitudes.”

  “I do know what you mean about O’Hara,” Holmes reassured him. “Did you ever meet the old Pathan horse-dealer?”

  “Mahbub Ali? Of course.”

  “He told me that the boy was a steel whip, although he gave far too freely of the truth. He said the lad could bend and contort into all sorts of shapes, but he always returned to himself, and he would only be broken when forced to break his word. Mahbub intended that as a criticism, I believe.”

  “No doubt. In any event, this map is the work of O’Hara’s hand, and accurate down to the last stream and serai. And if you study it for a bit, you will begin to see the strategic potential of the kingdom of Khanpur.”

  I had been studying it, while the two men exchanged their eulogies of the lost Survey agent, and could well see what he meant. The state was a long, narrow strip, mountains in the north giving way to a broad central plateau, where the capital city straddled a river. Four or five miles north of the city was a dark square marked “The Forts”; far beyond it, at the state’s northern tip, a pair of reversed brackets marked a pass, beside which was written “9400 feet.” Khanpur city was perhaps sixty miles from its southern neighbour and the city of Hijarkot, where the railway ended, but a scant fifteen from the country’s eastern boundaries; the square marking The Forts was even nearer the border, perhaps six or eight miles. Beyond the country’s eastern boundaries an uneven square marked a British encampment, but my eyes strayed to the strategic, relatively low pass at the northern end. The brackets were less than two hundred miles from the southernmost point of the Russian railway system: by aeroplane, perhaps two or three hours.

  As if he had seen the direction of my gaze, Nesbit said, “That pass was actually a fairly late discovery, not on the maps at all until the late eighties. There used to be a lake there, with sheer mountain sides, until the big Kashmir earthquake of 1875. It brought an enormous flood down the valley, hundreds killed, but it wasn’t until three years later that a Scottish botanist wandered up there looking for new flowers and before he knew it, found himself in Afghanistan.”

  “And suddenly Khanpur is of strategic importance,” I remarked. “Captain Nesbit, it’s been a long day and Holmes and I have spent far too much time on the road already. Why are we here?”

  “Um, yes,” he hesitated, and finally decided to meet bluntness with bluntness. “You came here to search for O’Hara, inadvertently bringing me this conundrum of the American Thomas Goodheart. I do not know if the two cases are at all related—as I told you in Delhi, it is more than likely that O’Hara is living in a hill village somewhere, growing rice and raising a family. But I do know that Khanpur and its maharaja have suddenly become an urgent concern. Let me ask you this: Do you believe that Goodheart’s costume on the boat, dressing as a stage Sherlock Holmes, was a coincidence, or a deliberate statement?”

  The question was odd, but the intent was clear. Holmes answered him. “If you are asking, does Thomas Goodheart know who I am, I can only say that if he does, he’s a better actor than he is a political analyst. I am constitutionally opposed to the idea of coincidence, but I spent the better part of two weeks in his company, and he never let his mask slip.”

  “So you would say that he does not regard you, or Miss Russell here, as the enemy?”

  “Apart from our unwillingness to commit to the Socialist cause, no.”

  “Very well. You two are in a unique position, one that would take a Survey agent months to duplicate. I realise that you have spent the last weeks in perfecting your travelling-magician disguise, but I would like to ask you to drop that disguise and take up your friendship with the Goodheart family.”

  “No,” Holmes said flatly.

  “What friendship?” I said simultaneously.

  “Acquaintance, then,” Nesbit said, choosing my objection as the less intractable. “I believe you more than capable of ingratiating yourselves into their lives to the extent that they would invite you to accompany them to Khanpur. The girl seemed particularly fond of you, Miss Russell. She mentioned you this morning, with no prompting on my part, I should add.”

  “Fine,” Holmes said. “Russell will change back into an Englishwoman and observe the palace from within. Bindra and I will take the more circuitous route, and we shall meet in Khanpur.”

  This time it was Nesbit and I who spoke at the same instant.

  “I don’t think—” he began.

  “Look at me!” I demanded. “I’m dark as a native—I even blacked my eyelashes, for pity’s sake. And my arms have burn scars all over them from the cursed fire-toss.”

  “—that it’s a good idea for you to … Fire-toss?”

  “The dye will come off, Russell.”

  “Yes, along with most of my skin.”

  “Suffering for the sake of enlightenment, Russell?”

  “And who is Bindra?” Nesbit asked, to no effect.

  “I never asked for enlightenment. Apart from which, it’s my skin that needs enlightening, not my soul.”

  Nesbit finally decided to return to his original objection, and inserted firmly into our bickering, “I don’t know that it’s the best idea for the two of you to divide up. It might not be entirely safe.”

  “Holmes,” I said, distracted by his remark, “have we ever had a case in which you and I did not go our separate ways at one point or another?”

  He paused to reflect. “I believe we spent most of the Colonel Barker spy investigation in each other’s company.”

  “A minor investigation, nine years ago,” I said. “No, Captain Nesbit, we generally work separately at some point in an investigation.”

  “But this is India, and I shouldn’t like to think of a woman—”

  I froze the words on his tongue with a gaze as flat and icy as the Simla Skating Club rink. Holmes threaded his fingers together over his stomach and studied the ceiling. Nesbit cleared his throat and tried again.

  “I am sure you are remarkably competent, Miss Russell, but were anything to happen to you—”

  “Captain Nesbit, what sort of demonstration would satisfy you?”

  Holmes murmured sotto voce, “Swords, or pistols at dawn?” but Nesbit did not hear him.

  “I do not require—”

  “Oh, I think you do,” I said, and in the blink of an eye the slim little knife I wore in my boot whipped past him and thunked into the bad painting on the wall, parting Nesbit’s hair in its passing. He whirled around, stared at the slip of the throwing handle where it quivered between the eyebrows of the man in the portrait, then turned to look at Holmes for explanation. Holmes was now studying his fingernails.

  Nesbit glanced at me, stood up, and went to look at the knife. After a minute, he pulled it out, rubbed at the canvas as if to heal the scar, and brought my blade over to lay it beside my glass on the table. I returned it to its boot-top sheath, and we looked at each other.

  “Very well,” he said. “I stand corrected.”

  “I still don’t want to go with the Goodhearts,” I told him.

  Holmes spoke up. “I think you should.”

  “Oh God, Holmes. Why don’t you go with Sunny and her mama? I’ll stay behind and teach Bindra the fire-toss.”

  “Who the deuce is this Bindra chap?” Nesbit demanded.

  “Our general factotum,” I told him.

  “Sorcerer’s apprentice,” Holmes amplified. “No, if one or the other of us needs go with the Goodhearts, it should be you. Even if it was not Goodheart who tried to kill me, he would be more closely guarded around me than he would be with you. If,” he added, “you can refrain from demonstrating your extreme competence with him as well.”

  I thought about it. If O’Hara had been killed or was being held prisoner inside Khanpur, evidence would be somewhere within the palace. And having one set of ears inside, the other in the town outside the walls, I had to admit, greatly increa
sed our chances of hearing something. I should much rather be with Holmes than with the Goodhearts, but my own preferences could not be of primary consideration here. And it need only be for a few days, before I rejoined Holmes.

  I looked down at my arms, trying not to think too closely about the coming ordeal. “What can we do about my colour?” I asked. “And I shall have to have something other than homespun salwaar kameez to wear.”

  “I brought with me the things you left at the hotel,” Nesbit told me. “And I have the necessary bleaching materials for your skin and hair.”

  “Very sure of yourself, weren’t you?” I said, but he was not about to repeat his mistake.

  “Merely relying upon your professionalism, Miss Russell.” His boyish grin was irresistible.

  Chapter Fourteen

  I stayed on that night at the Viceregal Lodge after Holmes left, having been given a room considerably more luxurious than our hotel in the native bazaar. In the end, however, I spent little time in the room itself, and many hours in the marble bath-room, scraping some of the brown from my face and hands and turning my black hair back into a substance the colour and, alas, texture of straw. Dawn found me damp, raw, jaundice-skinned and red-eyed from the combination of chemical fumes and lack of sleep. And because Nesbit and I agreed that the fewer people who witnessed this transformation the better, I saw no servants until one brought me a breakfast tray at seven o’clock. He was followed shortly by Nesbit, who apologised for the early hour, and ushered in a pair of the staff carrying not only my things from Simla but the bags I had abandoned in Delhi.

  “I see the hotel didn’t burn to the ground,” I commented. “Coffee?”

  “Thank you. And no, it was but a smokey collection of oil-soaked rags in a cellar stairway.”

  “The alarm was the thing.”

  “If we assume that the fire was deliberately set and aimed at you two, yes. However, even if it was not an accident, that same stunt has been pulled at two other hotels in the past year. An hotel emptied of fleeing foreigners makes rich grounds for a burglar.”

  I handed him his coffee without comment.

  “The Goodhearts plan to leave for Khanpur today,” he said, but when I set down my cup with alacrity he added, “however, I fear they will find that their porters are infected with the current intransigent attitude of the Indian working classes, and are holding out for more pay.”

  “You talked the workers into going out on strike?” A gambit Mycroft would be proud to claim.

  “Not precisely. But one of my agents filled their ears with sedition. And, incidentally, their bellies with strong drink.”

  “Leaving them too hung-over to work.” He was good; his humble smile told me that he knew it.

  “They should be fully restored to the maharaja’s services by Monday.”

  “That gives me two days in which to ingratiate myself. Should be plenty. Thank you.”

  “I have also arranged for a durzi to come here and provide you with two or three new garments for your time in the palace, and a shoemaker waits downstairs to measure your feet.”

  My toes cringed in anticipation of the native craft, but there was always the leprous footwear, and a pair of formal slippers in my bags if I needed those. He drained his cup, preparing to leave, but first I had a question.

  “What did you mean yesterday, that O’Hara counted his steps on Tibetan prayer-beads?”

  “Oh, yes. It’s a thing the ‘pundits’ do, when surveying. The standard Tibetan prayer-beads hold 108 beads, along with two subsidiary strings of five each. If one removes eight, the rosary appears the same, but an even hundred becomes quite useful for survey purposes: One bead for each hundred steps, ten thousand steps to a circuit; with the side-beads a man can survey a small country. Assuming the length of his steps is unchanging.”

  “I see.” I tried to imagine keeping track of steps while carrying on a conversation, and maintaining perfect distance on each stride; I failed.

  When Nesbit left, he took with him the débris from the enlightenment of skin and hair so as not to provide fodder for below-the-stairs gossip. As I struggled to bring my straw-like mane under control, I made a mental note to purchase some sort of oil in the town to keep the strands from snapping off entirely. A short session with the white-bearded durzi, choosing samples and lending him some of my clothes to copy, and a shorter session with the shoemaker, then I was off to town.

  I reminded myself to use the front door of the Lodge, where I nodded briefly to the regal chuprassi who held it for me, and was about to take to the road when I noticed the motorcar, its driver holding its door. You’re English again, Russell, I reminded myself, and climbed inside.

  Nesbit and I had sketched out a plan to bring me back into the Goodheart circle, beginning with a chance meeting at the tea shop where he had taken the family the day before. As soon as he heard of their distressing abandonment by their porters, he would extend a breakfast invitation to the family matron, who would no more leave Sunny behind than she would walk the two miles to Viceregal Lodge. And indeed, when I happened to wander through the Gothic doors of that particular tea shop across from the band-stand, Mrs Goodheart and her Flapper daughter were seated opposite the eligible young British officer, all smiling merrily over their coffee cups. The other patrons of the shop watched Sunny from the corners of their eyes, as much, I thought, for the gaiety of her person as the extremity of her wardrobe. Mrs Goodheart’s smile faded somewhat when I came to their table with my exclamations of surprise, but then she remembered that I was safely married, and invited me to join them.

  “My, Mary, haven’t you gone dark!”

  You don’t know the half of it, I thought, and accepted the invitation to coffee with some remark about the strength of the sun at these altitudes.

  It was Sunny who asked the question. “Where is your husband this morning?”

  “Oh, nothing would do but that he had to go off and climb some mountain or another, can you believe that? So vexing, he’s simply abandoned me here at the end of the world. No offence meant, Captain Nesbit.”

  “None taken; I agree there is not much to occupy a young woman in Simla at this time of year.”

  “Come with us,” Sunny piped up. I forbore to look at my wrist-watch, but out of the corner of my eye I saw Nesbit pull his own watch from his pocket and note the time; I had to agree, even for me thirty seconds was something of a record for the manipulation of innocent victims. I beamed at dear, fresh, pretty, boring little Sunny.

  “Oh, I couldn’t do that. What do you call it, ‘crashing’ your party?”

  “Oh baloney. Mama, tell her she has to come along. Tommy’s friend would think it was posalutely nifty.”

  I blinked, but the phrase seemed to indicate affirmation, and although I couldn’t imagine having the temerity to invite myself to a maharaja’s house party, that is precisely what I seemed to be doing. I put on my most lost and wistful expression to say, “Well, it would be perfectly lovely. What do you think, Mrs Goodheart?”

  Had I been an unmarried woman, she’d have abandoned me in the snow without a gram of compunction, but a matronly companion for her daughter might have its advantages. By providing contrast to the child’s looks and sparkle, if nothing else. “It does seem a bit forward of us, but … I know, I will ask Thomas to cable his friend, and see if we might bring another guest. Seeing as how we’re stuck here for the day, anyway.”

  Sunny clapped her hands and I said, “That is very generous of you, Mrs Goodheart,” and to the disappointment of both women Nesbit took his leave, pleading the demands of work. Mrs Goodheart eyed the heaps of snow with no enthusiasm and declared her intention of returning to the hotel, but I suggested that Sunny might enjoy a walk through the town. The older woman hesitated, then concluded that I was capable of guarding her baby girl from harm in broad daylight, and agreed.

  We began at the skating rink, hiring skates and edging out onto the uneven ice. It had been so long since I had been on blades,
I clung to the rail like a child, but to Chicago’s daughter ice was a lifelong companion, and she sailed merrily back and forth, her cheeks pink as a china doll’s, her teasing laughter ringing across the trees. My ankles were watery when we turned in our hired skates, and we paused to drink a cup of sweet tea sold by the establishment.

  I used the moment of leisure to question my young companion. “It was a lovely surprise to see you,” I told her. “But I can’t really imagine what you’re doing here.”

  The innocent did not hesitate to answer. “I know, Simla’s not much compared to Jaipur or something. But Tommy wanted to see it, and the maharaja isn’t at home until tomorrow. We had thought to go to Khanpur today, or at least go back down today and head for Khanpur tomorrow—what a fantastic train ride, isn’t it? All those tunnels? But then today the coolies wouldn’t work, so we’re here for longer. I’m glad; it gives us a chance to see something of each other. Have you finished? It’s pretty chilly, sitting here.”

  We returned our cups, and Sunny tucked her arm into mine as if we’d been friends for years.

  “I have to say, it’s absolutely fantabulous of you to have found something that I can do better than you. I’ll bet you planned it out.”

  “What on earth do you mean?”

  “Oh, Mary, you can do just everything. You know everything, you’ll talk to anyone, you do all these things that just give me the heebie-jeebies, sometimes I feel about six years old around you. But I am so glad you’re coming with us to see Tommy’s maharaja—a genuine maharaja, for gosh sake! I just know that when I stand there in front of him my lips will just freeze up, but with you there it’ll make it easier, sort of following your lead.”

  I looked down at her fur-covered head, astounded. Although why should I be? Elaborate fronts were often constructed to conceal doubts and insecurities. I laughed, and said, “Just think, you’ll probably be the first Flapper to reach Khanpur.”