by Ian McDonald
Until now. In a Kerala chai shop, it felt like games, toys. A pocket freak show. The flatscreen was running a soap. Every eye was turned to it. She had read that not only were the characters aeai generated, so were the actors that played them. A vast false edifice threatened to overwhelm the drama, like the huge encrusted towers that dominated the temple architecture of the Dravidians. There is not one CyberEarth, she realised. There are thousands.
Kumarmangalam was back on the half hour. This was a thing she was discovering about this alien world. It only looked like chaos. Things got done and done well. You could trust people to lift your bags, launder your clothes, find your former lover. The street boys jammed into the chai shop. The owner gave the bold Western woman hard looks. The other clients moved their seats and complained loudly that they could not hear the television. Kumarmangalam stood beside Lisa and shouted at this one, then that one and they seemed to obey him. Already he was making himself her lieutenant. As Lisa had suspected, most of them had only meet-greet-and-fleece English but she fanned the photographs of Thomas Lull across the table.
‘One to each,’ she ordered Kumarmangalam. Hands tore at the prints as the rickshaw boy dealt them out. Some he dismissed without a photograph, some he harangued lengthily in Malayalam. ‘Okay, I need to find this man. His name is Thomas Lull. He is American. He comes from Kansas, can you get that?’
Kansas, the street boys intoned back. She held up the shot. It was his publisher’s PR shot, the sensitive one leaning on one arm with the wise smile. How he’d hated it.
‘This is how he looked about four years ago. He may still be here, he may have moved on. You know where the tourists go, where the people who decide to stay go. I want to know where he is or where he has gone. Do you understand?’
An oceanic murmur.
‘Okay. I’m going to give Kumarmangalam here some money. There are one hundred rupees now. There are another four hundred if you come back with information. I will check this information before you are paid.’
Kumarmangalam translated. Heads nodded. She took her new lieutenant aside and gave him the wad of notes.
‘And there’s your two hundred, and another thousand if you keep your eye on these people.’
‘Lady, I will keep them in line, as you say in American English.’
In her first year at Keble Lisa Durnau had taken the crash course in Anglophilia and read the complete Sherlock Holmes. She had always felt that the Baker Street Irregulars never saw enough column inches. Now she had her own. As Kumarmangalam pedalled her back through the rain to the hotel, she imagined them, running out through the city, into a shop here, a café there, a restaurant, a temple, a travel bureau, a money changer, a lawyer, a real estate agent, a leasing factor. This man this man? It pleased her greatly. Women make the best private detectives. At the hotel she swam fifty lengths of the outdoor pool with the rain slashing around her and the attendants huddled together under an awning watching her gravely. Then she changed into a sarong and top with gaudy blue gods printed on it and took a phatphat out to the places Thomas Lull would have gone, the tourist bars where the girls are.
The rain added a new glaze of dismal to the upstairs bars and dance clubs. The Westerners who were stupid enough to have been caught in town by the big rain were all corporate or political spooks. The club owners and barristas and restauranteurs who shook their heads and pursed their lips over her photographs were a hundred Lulls-that-might-have-been; overweight and balding in XL beach-shirts that hung off their bellies like square-rigging. The local bar boys stirred from their stools and came round for the chat and an attempted slip of the hand into her V-string. She worked twenty bars and could take no more. Humming home in the phatphat she sat half-hypnotised by the rhythm of the rain through the headlights and wondered how it was that clouds never rained themselves dry. In the hotel she attempted to watch CNN but it seemed as alien and irrelevant as Alterre. One image lodged with her; warm monsoon rain falling on an iceberg in the Bay of Bengal.
Kumarmangalam was circling on his rickshaw when she ventured out the next morning. He swung her out through the traffic in a big U-turn to an internet shop on the other side of the street. Nobody walked in this country. Just like home.
‘This boy has information,’ he said. Lisa wasn’t even sure he was one of the mob from, the day before. The boy waved his photograph.
‘Four hundred rupees four hundred rupees.’
‘We check it out first. Then you get your money.’
Kumarmangalam glared down the boy’s insolence. They rode on his rickshaw. The boy would not ride in the back with a Western woman; he clung on in front of Kumarmangalam, feet on the axle nuts, leaning back against the handlebars, steering the rickshaw-wallah through the traffic. It was a long heavy haul. Kumarmangalam dismounted and pushed several times. The boy helped him. Lisa Durnau clutched her bag beset by Presbyterian work-ethic guilt. Finally they rolled downhill and through an arch scatter-gunned with filmi flyposters into a courtyard framed by wooden balconies and cloisters in the Keralese style. A cow chewed sodden straw. Men glanced up from a battery of sewing machines. The boy led them upstairs past an actuary and an Ayurvedic wholesaler to an open-fronted office unit beneath the peeling sign Gunaratna Floating Lotus Craft Hirings. A greying Malayali and a younger Westerner in a surf-brand T-shirt looked up.
‘You’ve come about the gentleman in the photograph?’ the local man, Gunaratna, asked. Lisa Durnau nodded. Mr Gunaratna waved the street boys out of his office. They squatted on the balcony, listening hard.
‘This man.’ She slid the Tablet across the desk like a poker dealer. Gunaratna showed it to his associate. Surf-shirt-man nodded.
‘It was a while ago.’ He was Oceanian - Oz, maybe Enzee; Lisa had never been able to tell them apart but then some folk couldn’t distinguish Canucks from Americans.
‘Several years,’ Gunaratna confirmed. Then Lisa realised that they were waiting for the baksheesh. She fanned out three thousand rupees.
‘For information retrieval,’ she hinted. Gunaratna scooped it sweetly away.
‘We only remember him because he bought a boat from us,’ Oz-boy said.
‘We run a bespoke vessel chartering service on the back-waters, ’ Gunaratna chimed in. ‘It is most unusual for someone wanting to buy, but such an offer . . .’
‘In cash.’ Oz-boy was now perched on the edge of the desk.
‘In cash, was impossible for us to refuse. It was most excellent craft. It had not one but two certificates of seaworthiness from the State Inspectorate of Shipping.’
‘You have a record of the transaction?’
‘Madam, this is an upstanding business of immaculate repute and all accounts are triple-filed in strict accordance with State Revenue regulations.’
Oz-Boy hooked up a rollscreen and tapped through a database.
‘There’s your boy.’
July 22, 2043. Ten-metre kettuvallam/houseboat conversion with fixtures and fittings and ten horsepower alcofuel engines last serviced 18/08/42, moored at Alumkadavu. Sold to J. Noble Boyd, US citizen, passport number . . . A true Lull touch; using the name of the Kansas pastor who had made it his religious duty to oppose the evolutionist heresies of Alterre on his false ID. Lisa Durnau jotted the boat’s registration details into the Tablet.
‘Thank you, you have been most helpful.’
Oz-Boy pushed a thousand rupees back across the desk.
‘If you do find Dr Lull could you get him to do another series like Living Universe? Best science show I’ve seen in years. Made you think. There’s nothing but soap these days.’
On the way out she gave the boy his four hundred rupees. In the back of the rickshaw as Kumarmangalam pushed her up the long, slow hill into the city centre Lisa Durnau called for the first time on the full power of the Tablet. By the time Kumarmangalam had slipped back onto his saddle she had her answer. Ray Power Electric Pallakad District Office had registered a hook-up to kettuvallam Salve Vagina registry no: 18736BG
at Thekaddy, St Thomas’s Road Mooring. Supplied’s name: J. Noble Boyd. Revd.
Salve Vagina.
The coastal hydrofoil did not run in the monsoon months so Lisa Durnau spent four hours leaning against the window of an air-conditioned express coach looking out at the buffalos in the village ponds and the country women swaying beneath their burdens along the raised pathways between the flooded fields and trying not to hear the dsh dsh dsh on her neighbour’s fileplayer earphone that was as irrefutable and annoying as Captain Pilot Beth’s whistling nostril. She could not believe she had been into space. She pulled out the Tablet and thumbed through the data from the Tabernacle. Hey, she wanted to say to her Hindi-Hits! aisle-mate, look at this! Have you any idea what this means?
That was the question she must put to Thomas Lull. She found she was dreading that meeting. When his disappearance had crossed the subtle but distinct boundary between temporary and permanent, Lisa Durnau had often imagined what she might say if, Elvis-like, she bumped into Thomas Lull in some hypermarket aisle or airport duty-free. It was easy to come up with smart lines when you knew you would never have to use them. Now every kilometre through the rain and dripping palm trees brought that impossible meeting closer and she did not know what she was going to say. She put it away from her while she found a phatphat in the sodden whirl of people and vehicles at the wide spot in the road that was Thekaddy’s bus station. But as she bounced around the lagoon-sized puddles on the long straight road past the backwater the dread returned, became a fearful sickness in her stomach. She sped past an elderly man labouring through the rain on an enormous red tricycle. The phatphat driver let her off at the mooring. Lisa Durnau stood in the rain, paralysed. Then the red tricycle creaked past her, executed a right-angle turn and bounced down the gangplank on to the rear deck.
‘Well, Ms Durnau, even though I am not sure how Professor Lull can help you, you have been frank with me and it is only proper that I should reciprocate,’ Dr Ghotse says. He shuffles out into the rain to search in the boot of his red tricycle and returns with a sheet of paper, folded and soggy. ‘If you please.’
It’s an e-mail printout. Amar Mahal Hotel, Manasarovar Ghat, Varanasi. My Dear Dr Darius. Well, it’s not that little dive school I promised myself. Against all your advice, I’m in the black north with Aj. Asthma girl, remember? Deep mystery here - never could resist a mystery. Last place on earth I should be - already been caught up in a small railroad incident you might have read about - but could you ease my sojourn in hell by forwarding the rest of my stuff to this address? I will reimburse you by BACS transfer.
There followed a list of books and recordings including the Schubert nestling down the side of the cushion.
Dr Ghotse corrects her pronunciation. ‘A young lady Professor Lull met at a club. He taught her a technique to control her asthma.’
‘Buteyko method?’
‘Indeed so. Most alarming. I would not professionally recommend it. He was most perturbed that this young woman knew who he was.’
‘Stop. I’m not the first?’
‘I doubt she was the operative of any government.’
Lisa Durnau shivers though it is clammy warm in the humid cabin. She thumbs the first image from the Tabernacle upon the Tablet and turns it on the low table to face Dr Ghotse.
‘Again, it is a poor photograph, but that is the young woman.’
‘Dr Ghotse, this is also an image from the artefact inside Darnley 285 .’
Dr Ghotse sits back on his divan.
‘Well, Miss Durnau, as Professor Lull says in his letter, there is indeed deep mystery here.’
Outside the rain finally seems to be lightening.
LULL
In the lawyer Nagpal’s office the windows and shutters are all thrown open. The din from the street is oppressive.
‘Apologies apologies,’ the lawyer Nagpal says showing his visitors to their cracked leather club chairs and settling himself behind his ornately carved desk. ‘But otherwise the heat . . . Our air-conditioning system; it is our landlord’s duty to keep it in good repair. A strongly worded letter, I think. Please, some chai. Personally, I find hot chai the most refreshing beverage when the heat oppresses.’
Thomas Lull disagrees but the lawyer Nagpal has rung his little bell for the office wallah.
‘I have heard it is already raining in Jharkhand.’ The boy serves the hot, sickly chai from a brass tray. Nagpal picks up his cup and gulps it down. Lawyer Nagpal of Nagpal, Pahelwan and Dhavan is a man who acts older than his years. Thomas Lull has long subscribed to the theory that every human has an inner spiritual age at which they remain all their lives. He’s stuck at twenty five. This advocate is late fifties, though from his face and hands Thomas Lull pegs him at no more than thirty. ‘Now, how may I help you?’
‘A photograph was sent from this office to my colleague here,’ he says.
Nagpal frowns, purses his lips in a little oh? Aj pushes her palmer across the desk. Thomas Lull puts the temperature in the early forties but she is cool and poised. Her tilak seems to shine in the shadowy office.
‘It was sent to me on my eighteenth birthday,’ Aj prompts.
‘Ah, I have you now!’ Nagpal opens his palmer in a hand-tooled leather case, taps up briefs. Thomas Lull reads the play of lawyer’s fingers, the movements of his pupils, the dilation of his nostrils. What are you scared of, lawyer Nagpal with your degrees and diplomas and certificates on the wall? ‘Yes, Ajmer Rao. You have come all the way from Bangalore, most extraordinary, and in these troubled times too. The photograph, I believe, is of your natural parents.’
‘Bullshit,’ says Thomas Lull.
‘Sir, the photograph is of . . .’
‘Jean-Yves and Anjali Trudeau. They’re well known A- life researchers, I’ve been working with them for years. And while Aj here was theoretically being conceived, I was in daily contact with Anjali and Jean-Yves in Strasbourg. If anyone had been pregnant I would have known.’
‘With respect, Mr Lull, there are modern techniques, surrogacies . . .’
‘Mr Nagpal, Anjali Trudeau never produced a viable egg in her life.’
The lawyer Nagpal chews his bottom lip in distaste.
‘Our questions then are; who are Aj’s natural parents, and who instructed you to send that photograph? Someone is playing headgames with her.’
‘Much as I feel for Miss Rao’s confusion, I am not at liberty to divulge that, Mr Lull. It is a matter of client confidentiality.’
‘I can always talk to them directly. I’m only here as a formality.’
‘I do not think so, sir. Pardon my bluntness, but Mr and Mrs Trudeau are deceased.’
Thomas Lull feels the dark, sweating, cluttered room turn inside out.
‘What?’
‘Sir, I regret to inform you that Mr and Mrs Trudeau died in an apartment fire yesterday morning. There is a question over the circumstances, the police are investigating.’
‘Are you saying they were murdered?’
‘I can say, sir, that the incident has attracted the attention of the government department known informally as the Ministry.’
‘The Krishna Cops?’
‘As you say. The apartment was alleged to be the location of the Badrinath sundarban.’
‘They were working with the datarajas?’
Lawyer Nagpal spreads his hands.
‘I could not possibly speculate.’
Thomas Lull speaks slowly and clearly so the lawyer can make no mistake about what he means.
‘Did the Badrinath sundarban instruct you to send the photograph to Aj ?’
‘Mr Lull, I have a mother, brothers, a married sister with three children, gods be kind to her. I am a public notary and recorder of oaths in a less than salubrious location. There are forces at work here I do not have to understand to know are powerful. I merely follow my instructions and bank my fee. I cannot help you with any of your questions, please understand. But I can comply with one final instruction from my clie
nts.’
Mr Nagpal rings his bell, chips an order in Hindi at his babu who returns with a book-sized case wrapped in Varanasi silk. Mr Nagpal unwraps the hand-woven silk square. Inside are two objects, a photograph and a carved wooden jewellery box. He passes the photograph to Aj. It is such a photograph as families take, a mother, a father, a girl, smiling by the waterside with the towers of a bright city behind them. But the man and the woman are dead now and the girl blinking in the bright morning has a shaved scalp scarred with the evidence of recent surgery.