by Ellis Peters
‘Gladly,’ said Ashok, ‘I shall look forward to it.’ He had asked no questions, and even now he asked only one: ‘Her father has not yet come to take charge of her?’
‘We’ve heard from him, indirectly,’ said Dominic, picking his way among thorns. ‘I hope he’ll be with her very soon.’
‘Good, so it was worth waiting a little.’ Ashok nodded his splendid Epstein head in contentment, and picked up his light overcoat, draping it over one shoulder of his grey achkan like a hussar cloak. ‘Until tomorrow, then! And my reverences to Miss Barber and Anjli.’
He had a taxi waiting for him in the courtyard, one of the biggest Dominic had ever seen; and at the first step he took into the open air the car came smoothly alongside, placing its rear door-handle confidingly in his hand. That was the kind of service Ashok, for all his reticence and modesty, commanded in Delhi, and probably throughout India, for that matter.
The Swami’s Rolls stood in tattered majesty at the end of the ground-floor arcade. The taxi driver gave it a long, respectful look as he turned his own car to drive away, and Ashok, from the rear seat, eyed it even more thoughtfully. Dominic noted, before he turned to go back upstairs in haste, that for once Girish was nowhere in evidence.
The second telephone call came on the stroke of eight, and thereby held up the one for which they were waiting. But the voice that demanded briskly and cheerfully: ‘Have you got my co-director there?’ was merely that of Ganesh Rao, back from Sarnath a couple of days ahead of schedule with the Deer Park scenes in the can, and anxious to get some early co-operation over the rushes.
‘Let me talk to him! ’ Felder took over the receiver. ‘Yes, Felder here! Sure, I’ll be out at Hauz Khas in an hour or two, if all goes well. Have you got the whole bunch back safely at the villas? You must have made good time.’ In the background he could hear the usual exuberant babel of voices, the girls shrilling and laughing, Channa the charioteer fluting mellifluously, the young American technicians deploying their large, easy drawls, the clinking of glasses, the usual party atmosphere. When he hung up his face was grey with strain; and as soon as the receiver hung in the cradle it pealed again, viciously.
Dominic snatched it from under Felder’s hand. This time it must be, this time it had to be, no one could stand much more of this.
‘I am calling,’ said the unpleasant, clacking old voice, rattling consonants like bones, ‘in answer to your advertisement.’
Without a word Dominic held out the receiver to Kumar, who was already stretching out his hand for it. For a moment they could clearly hear the juiceless tones continuing, then Kumar cut them off sharply.
‘Listen to me, and let us be clear. I am Kumar. You have what I want, and I am prepared to pay for it. But there will be no deal, there will be no discussion, even, until I have seen for myself that my daughter still lives. Not one rupee until then. No, I will not even speak of money until I am satisfied. You have my word that I have taken no steps to try and trace this call, or to find you, nor shall I do so. If you restore me what I want, neither I nor any of the people here with me will take any action against you. It is my word, it will have to be enough for you. If you cannot trust me far, you must know I cannot trust you at all. You will show my daughter to me, and to these friends of mine who have seen her more recently than I have. You will show her to us in good condition, or you will get nothing. I am a business man, I do not buy pigs in pokes. Then we will talk terms, and arrange an exchange which will protect both of us. You understand me?’
The old voice hectored, rising, growing angry.
‘You hold just one saleable article, my friend,’ snapped Kumar, ‘and I am offering to buy it… when I have satisfied myself that it is exactly what you are representing it to be. I have promised you we will do no more than that. I have promised you a high price. If you do not want to deal on those terms, where do you think you will find a higher bidder? The circumstances are your problem, not mine. Make up your mind.’
There were brief, acrimonious questions, a note of something like anxiety now in the tone.
‘Certainly. If you make it possible, the exchange can take place tomorrow. First let us see her. Then call me here, and I shall make no more difficulties than I must to ensure that she remains as we have seen her. There is no question of trust. Each of us must formulate his own safeguards. But do you question that my word is worth more than yours? Make your dispositions, then, we are waiting.’
After that he sat quite silent, listening with admirable concentration and patience for some minutes, the clapper vibrating viciously in his ear. He heaved a long, careful sigh. ‘Very well! On behalf of all of us here, I agree.’
Very slowly, as if the smoothness and silence of the action mattered vitally, he cradled the receiver, and sat back in his chair with a shivering gasp, wiping his moist hands frenziedly on a vast silk handkerchief.
‘Well, it’s arranged! Tomorrow, at twelve o’clock, all five of us – oh, yes, whoever he is, he knows how many of us there are! – are to meet for lunch in the first-floor restaurant at Sawyers’, on Connaught Circus, near Radial Road Number Five. A window table will be booked for us in advance – in my name! There is a sweet shop just opposite. Promptly at a quarter past twelve Anjli will be brought by taxi to that shop to buy sweets. He says we shall see her clearly. But if any one of us attempts to leave the table and interfere with her, we shall never see her again. And if we all obey orders, and finish our lunch and go home, then he will call us again to talk terms and make arrangements for the exchange.’
‘And do you believe,’ asked Tossa in a whisper, ‘that he’ll keep his word?’
‘I think,’ said the Swami Premanathanand, very gently but with complete detachment, ‘that he will greatly prefer money and no trouble rather than no money, a dead Anjli and a great deal of trouble. Do you not agree, Mr Felder?’
Felder made a small, protesting sound of revulsion and distaste. Of the impersonal mental processes of India he had had more than enough. ‘I think he took her for money, and he’ll twist circumstances all the ways he has to, to get money for her. So far he hasn’t committed any capital crime, why should he take such a risk now?’
‘No capital crime? Well, of course,’ said the Swami deprecatingly, ‘there is only the little matter of Arjun Baba.’
‘Who,’ asked Felder simply, ‘is Arjun Baba?’
It came as a shock, if a minor shock, to realise that he was in perfectly good faith. They had rushed to confide in him about Anjli, ready to take advantage of sympathy and help wherever it offered, they had mentioned the old man who had been used as a lure for her, but this was the first time Felder had ever actually heard the name of Arjun Baba. Names are powerful magic. That anonymous wisp of India, a puff of grey dust blown away almost unwittingly by the wind of somebody’s greed, suddenly put on a man’s identity and was illuminated by a man’s soul; and suddenly, for the first time, Felder was gazing with horror at the reality of murder.
The Rolls, starting up with somnolent dignity, drove away out of the courtyard with the Swami erect and impassive in the front passenger seat. Kumar, though he had left in company with his friend, was apparently not dependent on him for transport.
‘I don’t like it!’ said Felder, watching the old car round the tall hedge and vanish from view. ‘I can’t help it, there’s something going on that I don’t like and don’t trust, and there goes the man who’s stage-managing the lot of us. It was that driver of his who distracted my attention from the money, just long enough for the parcels to be swopped over. And now tonight, why didn’t he want us to let Ashok in on the truth? Why? You saw as well as I did how he jumped in to put his foot on that instantly. Oh, sure it made sense – sense enough for Kumar to echo what he said. And yet – you’ve seen him at work, he sits there like a god, and nods, and we all do what he says. And now we’re all committed to this lunch tomorrow. And he’s the one who’s pulling the strings!’
‘As long as he pulls the one that produce
s Anjli alive,’ said Dominic, shaken but helpless, ‘does it matter?’
‘No… if he does that, no, nothing else matters. Not until afterwards, anyhow. No, that’s right, we haven’t got much choice, have we? She’s what matters. Once we’ve got her back, we can afford to get inquisitive.’ His tone said that ‘inquisitive’ was an under-statement.
‘You don’t really believe,’ whispered Tossa, appalled, ‘that the Swami can be behind Anjli’s kidnapping? But he’s her father’s friend. You can see it’s true. They’ve known each other for years.’
‘That’s right! And who knows better than the Swami how much money his friend’s good for, and how little he’ll miss it? And who can get him to dance to his tune better?’
‘But it’s crazy! He doesn’t care about money. It means nothing to him…’ she protested, shaking.
‘No, not in dollars, or rupees, or pounds sterling, not one damn’ thing. Only in grain seed, and pedigree stock, and agricultural plant, and expert advice… An opportunity’s an opportunity, whatever you want the cash for, it doesn’t have to be for yourself. Why didn’t he want Ashok to know? Why was his driver watching me on Sunday, why did he pretend to be an innocent in Delhi, when he knows it like the palm of his hand?’
They laboured to find answers for him, and discovered that they had none for themselves. The thin fingers of the Swami Premanathanand were indeed unobtrusively present in the plot wherever they looked, gently stirring, bringing the mixture to the boil.
‘Our hands are tied, anyhow,’ said Dominic flatly. ‘If he really is behind the whole affair, then he genuinely intends to hand over Anjli tomorrow. And there’s nothing we can do except go along with him until she’s safe.’
On which exceedingly chilly comfort they separated for the night, Felder to the villa at Hauz Khas where Ganesh Rao was waiting with the rushes from Sarnath, and Tossa and Dominic to a belated sandwich and a lime soda in the bar, and then a solitary walk round the quiet streets near the Lodi Park. It was the walk that completed their sense of disorientation and confusion; for they returned by way of Aurangzeb Road, and passing by the drive of Claridge’s, were just in time to see one of the handsome, well-groomed, well-heeled couples of Delhi strolling arm-in-arm from the hotel to the taxi rank. A good-looking, austere, proud, pale Punjabi in a European suit, and a very lovely woman in a white and gold sari on his arm, her towering beehive of lustrous black hair defying fashion, which one so beautiful could well afford to ignore. There was nothing indecorous about them, they were talking together gravely and quietly, their faces intent. There was nothing about them, indeed, to excite any feelings but those of pleasure and admiration – except that the man was Satyavan Kumar, and the woman – once seen, never forgotten – was Kamala, whom they knew best as Yashodhara, the bride of Prince Siddhartha, the Buddha.
X
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Anjli sat on a string bed in a tiny room about eight feet square, lit by one little smoky window far above her head. It was the fourth day she had spent in this place, and she knew every article in the room, every fine crinkle of cracks in the dun-coloured plaster of the walls, every crease in the garish almanack pinned above the rickety wooden chest. The ceiling was disproportionately high, the floor of rough concrete with one threadbare cotton rug. On the bed was a thin flock mattress, and a grey blanket. The chest of drawers was of thickly varnished and heavily scratched wood, dark red, with an artificial silk cover in several violent colours spread over it, and above it the smooth, effeminate blue Krishna smiling over his flute with those kind, mischievous, amoral, dangerous eyes of his, the eyes of a fairy rather than a god. Propped on the gay cover were one faded family photograph, so faint now that it had nothing to say to her, not even whether the persons in it were male or female, and one picture of Sri Ramakrishna, cut from a newspaper and stuck askew in a carved wooden frame.
There was nothing else in the room. And all three of them slept there at night, the two little girls on the string bed, the woman on a rug spread on the floor beside them.
This was not the whole of Anjli’s present world, however. She could pass at will through the single door of the room, or most of the time she could do so; but that would merely bring her into a short clay-coloured passage, locked against her at the nearer end, and at the other leading only to two even tinier rooms, the first an Indian bathroom, a concrete box just big enough to stand up in, with a cold water tap on the wall and a drain in the centre of the gently sloping floor, the second a flush lavatory, eastern style, with a porcelain basin sunk in the floor and two raised platforms for the feet. There the passage ended in another locked door. But she thought that wherever she might be, she was on the ground floor, for at the minute window of the lavatory leaves leaned down to her at an angle which suggested the lowest branches of a tree.
This was all she knew, and after four days she knew it like the palm of her hand; but she could not deduce from it anything that might be useful to her.
There was nothing the matter with Anjli’s mind or memory, she was not too much afraid to sift detail from detail and build them laboriously into a picture of her days, but the picture could never be complete, for this place of her confinement was a bubble, without a material location at all. She remembered perfectly the gleam of the old man’s eyes across the brazier, the instant flash of intelligence that warned her this was not Arjun Baba, and spurred her into flight. She remembered the sickening half-suffocation under the folds of the blanket, the struggles that wasted themselves feebly, and soon ceased when she realised that she was in a van in motion. She had not lost consciousness at all, but face-down in her odorous wrappings on the floor of the van, with no light, and the vehicle turning and circling and dodging to complete her confusion, she had lost all sense not only of direction but of distance. Towards the end she had lapsed into something close to a faint, starved for air. Now she did not know even whether she was still in Delhi, much less in which part of it.
Two people between them had carried her in from the van, she thought by the locked door beyond the lavatory, but even of that she could not be sure. All she could be certain of was that they had released her from her wrappings in this room, the old man and the woman between them, and here she had been ever since, watched and guarded.
The old man she saw seldom, he came only now and again to make sure that his catch was still safe. During his few visits she had studied him closely, because she had now no resources but her own ingenuity, and the only food she had for that was observation. The more she recorded, the more chance that some day she might find a weak place in the fortress and its garrison. But she felt from the beginning that it would not be in the old man. Now that she came to study him at close quarters she saw that he was not at all like Arjun Baba, and certainly not nearly so old and frail. This one, grizzled and bent though he might be, and tangled in a wealth of beard, would have made two of Satyavan’s pensioner. He was broad-shouldered, sturdy and muscular, and she had already experienced the strength of his arms and hands. He had a harsh, querulous, irascible old voice that grated unpleasantly on the air and even more unpleasantly on the mind, suggesting as it did a short temper, and a nature subject to malice and panic. He spoke to her not at all, not even one word. It was to the woman he talked, hectoring, bullying and demanding, in Hindi. And the woman did everything he ordered, in cringing haste and for the best of reasons, because she was afraid of him.
It seemed to be the woman who lived here. She was much younger than the man. She looked, perhaps, fifty, but there were factors which caused Anjli to reason that in reality she must be considerably younger still; notably there was the girl, who seemed to be about Anjli’s own age, give or take a year, and yet was almost certainly this woman’s daughter. So it wasn’t time, it was circumstances that had aged the mother. She was painfully thin and worn, her features blurred by timidity and hopelessness, the only rich thing about her her great coil of dark brown hair. She wore blouses and saris of plain cotton dyed in single colours,
and so faded with washing that the once brilliant red had ebbed to a streaked and withered rose. When the old man was there she was a quivering, wary creature obsequious to his every gesture and word, and yet in some insinuating way she seemed to place herself between his possible animosity and Anjli. And when he was not there she was timid and gentle, she offered food with consideration, she left the bed to the children; but she was too cowed ever to be an ally, and too much afraid of the old man ever to forget to lock a door.
Her cooking was done somewhere outside. Anjli pictured a lean-to shed in a corner of a small compound, with pots hissing gently over the inevitable charcoal braziers, such as she had seen in the modest residential areas of Rabindar Nagar. Altogether, there was something about this woman’s living quarters which did not suggest the most primitive poverty, by any means, poor though she undoubtedly was. A certain respectability and security existed here. Somebody’s housekeeper, perhaps? The old man’s? But no, he did not live here, she was almost certain of that. And what sort of place was it, in any case? These rooms were so enclosed that traffic noises did not penetrate. She could not even guess at the kind of road or street that lay outside her prison.
And then there was the girl. Late in the afternoon of the first day she had manifested herself, first as a young, curious voice plying the woman with questions, somewhere beyond the locked door. And surely there had been a low, continuous hum as background to their exchanges, a sound which made itself known in retrospect as the purr of a vacuum cleaner? Anjli could never be quite sure about that, but perhaps only because the idea seemed to her so fantastic. She forgot about it, in any case, when the woman unlocked the door and the girl came sliding through it, and stood staring, mute with shyness, at her mysterious contemporary.