The Grand Tour: Four International Mysteries

by Michaela Thompson

  The journey was arduous— bone-rattling, dusty, and hot. Swaying in the back of the cart, the end of her sari shading her head from the sun, Marina gazed at mile after mile of tumbled rock. She wondered what had happened to their captors. She scanned the horizon. It was empty.

  After several hours, they began to see other travelers— people on foot or bicycle, bullock carts, a truck painted with bright designs whose rear-view mirror was hung with garlands of flowers. “Everyone is coming to see Baladeva,” Vijay said.

  In midafternoon, after a brief stop to eat on the side of the road, they approached Goti. The village was located in a curve of a slow, meandering river— the same one, Marina guessed, that flowed by the Nathu Dada farm. The cluster of huts and low buildings seemed alive with activity. Nathu Dada maneuvered the bullock cart to a stone temple, in front of which was the market— blankets spread on the ground, makeshift stalls selling batteries, plastic combs, oranges, guavas. A loudspeaker blared music. After the quiet of the farm, the scene seemed feverishly alive.

  At a corner of the market, Marina saw two flatbed trucks pulled up in front of a circle of huts surrounded by a low wall. Next to the wall a man wearing a loose-sleeved, thigh-length shirt and baggy cotton trousers, a rifle slung over his shoulder, was speaking into a walkie-talkie. A crowd milled about in the enclosure. She pointed and said, “Baladeva?”

  “Yes, that will be where he is having darshan. If you ask the people there, they will tell you he never touches anyone who has less than ten lakhs of rupees, which means they are very rich. They will say he gives money to temples and to the poor, that he pays no attention to barriers of caste but treats all alike.”

  “Is it true?”

  “I don’t know. People have a great need to believe such things.”

  Nathu Dada and his son tied the bullocks, and Marina and Vijay climbed down from the cart. Nathu Dada accepted their expressions of gratitude with a grave nod, and in answer to Vijay’s query pointed out the way to the police station.

  When they found the office of the district police, however, it was locked and deserted. “I should have thought,” said Vijay. “Of course they will not be here, with Baladeva in town. They will be patrolling far from here. We must find a telephone elsewhere.”

  A little farther down the street they came to a building slightly larger than the rest with a drooping flag hanging over the door. “This will be the office where the village administration is located,” Vijay said. “Here there will be a telephone.”

  The office was manned by a clerk who seemed prepared to negotiate with Vijay indefinitely over the use of the telephone. Even after Vijay produced his identification, the clerk regarded his rumpled appearance with obvious scorn and, as Marina interpreted his demeanor, professed continued reluctance to let Vijay touch the old-fashioned black instrument at his elbow. After a final exchange in which Marina hoped Vijay had been insulting, the clerk placed the telephone within Vijay’s reach and turned ostentatiously back to the papers on his desk.

  There followed twenty minutes or so of Vijay trying to contact the operator without success, reaching someone and shouting to make himself heard, being cut off, and starting the process over again. Eventually he carried on an extended conversation and hung up.

  “What did they say?” asked Marina.

  “It was the operator only. I have asked to place the call to Bombay, and she says it will be perhaps an hour or two before the call can go through. She will ring back.”

  “An hour or two?”

  He nodded. “I see you have not had much experience with our telephone system.”

  Marina felt weak, exhausted, and hungry. It had been a long time since their lunch in the shade of the bullock cart. “Should we go out and get something to eat, and come back to wait for the call?”

  “Better not. She says two hours, but she may call back in five minutes. It’s impossible to know. We must simply wait.”

  They sat side by side on a bench. Marina watched the slowly turning ceiling fan. The clerk shuffled his papers, bustled out, and did not return. The telephone did not ring.

  Finally, Marina said, “I’ll go find something to eat and bring it back. You wait here for the call.”

  “Yes, go. But be careful, please.”

  “I will.”

  The market was busier than before. Marina bought oranges from a toothless old woman, then drifted on until she saw a man selling peanuts roasted in the shell. He measured them in a balance, then put them in a cone made from the page of a magazine and gave them to her. As she paid him, a flash of something bright caught the corner of her eye.

  A woman across the market was adjusting her sari over her head, pushing back long yellow hair that had caught the sun. The woman’s face was hidden. Her hand and arm were fair, her sari red and white.

  “Catherine!” Marina cried, but her voice was lost in the babble of the market and the blare of the loudspeaker. The woman was moving away from Marina, weaving her way among the throng. Marina shoved after her, the peanuts she had just bought dribbling from their makeshift holder.

  “Catherine!” she called again, but her throat had closed. The red-and-white sari moved farther away as a bullock, his tail lashing at flies, crossed Marina’s path. When Marina caught sight of her again, the woman had reached Baladeva’s compound. The guard glanced at her and nodded. As the woman disappeared behind one of the huts, Marina pressed desperately forward.

  41

  The oranges she had bought rolled around Marina’s feet as she pushed her way to the entrance of the compound. She could no longer see the yellow-haired woman in the red-and-white sari. At the gate a legless beggar sitting in the dust cried for alms. Beyond him, inside the compound, people stood in groups and children chased each other.

  As she hurried through the gate the guard with the walkie-talkie called out. She hesitated as he approached. “You’ve got to let me in!” she cried. “The woman who just came through here is my sister!”

  The guard looked at her impassively. As she took a hopeful step forward he said, “You must wait.”

  Seething with frustration, scanning the area, she stood by while he spoke into his walkie-talkie. He finished his conversation just as a wiry man with a camera hanging around his neck approached. Holding out an identification card the man said, “Chatterjee. Times of India.”

  “What do you want here?” the guard said to the man.

  “To speak with Baladeva.”

  “And why? All of you print nothing but lies. What is this camera? Baladeva does not allow himself to be photographed.”

  “My editor is prepared—”

  Marina sped through the gate in the direction she had seen the woman take, around the side of the nearest hut. She found herself in an open area in the center of which was a hearth. A large pot over the fire filled the air with a pungent smell. More armed men. They lounged against the walls of the huts or lay on string cots scattered around the courtyard. Two stood guard outside a hut where the crowd was largest — petitioners or offering-bearers, Marina assumed, waiting to see Baladeva. She did not see the red-and-white sari. The woman could be in any of the five or six huts scattered about the compound. She would have to search.

  The huts were being used, apparently, as barracks for Baladeva’s gang. The first one she looked in was uninhabited, with clothing, bed mats, and boxes of ammunition strewn about carelessly. In the second a man and woman, both Indian, were energetically making love on a mat in the corner.

  She ran to the third hut. A curtain hung over the door and from behind it voices, none of them feminine, drifted. She moved closer. Some of the conversation was muffled, as if people were speaking with their mouths full.

  Cautiously, she pulled back the curtain. Several men were sitting around a communal bowl of curry, dipping into it with pieces of flat bread. She did not see the yellow-haired woman.

  As she let the curtain fall, she felt a presence behind her. She turned and saw a man who looked about ei
ghteen. A rifle was slung over his shoulder. Behind him, Marina saw the guard from the front gate hurrying toward them. “I’m looking for my sister,” she said to the young man. He muttered something as the guard ran up to them.

  “I have told you to wait!” the guard said angrily.

  “I’m looking for my sister. She just came in here.”

  “Who are you?”

  “My name is Marina Robinson, and—”

  “You must wait when I say wait,” said the guard. “You do not enter Baladeva’s camp against my orders.”

  “You don’t understand—” she began.

  “I understand that there are many spies, many people who wish to do harm to our cause.”

  Behind him, she thought she saw the woman in the red-and-white sari walk past the door of a hut. “Catherine!” she called, but the woman didn’t hesitate or turn, and in a moment she was hidden again.

  The people waiting outside Baladeva’s hut were looking at her, and a babble of disquiet swept the courtyard. “Who is paying you to spy? The police?” demanded the guard.

  Marina shook her head. Before she could say anything, the guard spoke with the younger man, who shoved her with his rifle butt toward the hut where Baladeva’s petitioners were congregated. They crossed the threshold into a crowded room. Babies cried in women’s arms, a shrunken old man regarded her with rheumy eyes, a group of chubby, prosperous-looking men stopped a discussion to stare.

  The next instant the man with the rifle prodded her forward across the room and through another door. They were in an enclosure stacked with clay jars, baskets, a rake, a wooden yoke, the large wooden wheel from a bullock cart. “I will see Baladeva,” the guard said. He spoke rapidly to the younger man and went out the door.

  Marina called, “Come back!” but he didn’t return, and the slim fingers of the young man played nervously with his rifle. She would have to wait.

  42

  The room was obviously a storeroom. Its one small window was covered by a piece of sacking. There was no other door. She could hear the murmur of the group in the anteroom discussing, she supposed, her unexpected entrance. The young man guarding her looked as frightened as she was.

  “I was looking for my sister. She’s wearing a red-and-white sari,” she said, but when she saw his hands tighten on his rifle she decided not to say anything else.

  She sat on the dirt floor and rested her forehead on her bent knees. She had been unutterably, unforgivably stupid to follow the woman— Catherine?— yet the compulsion had been overwhelming. She would, she knew, do the same again. Even now, despite the trouble she was in, she felt prickles of excitement and apprehension at the thought that Catherine might be near. Baladeva might understand, if she explained it the right way. She tried to remember if any of the newspaper stories she’d read mentioned whether he spoke English.

  By this time Vijay will be worried. I ran off without thinking about him, not once.

  The guard was taking a long time to return. Staring at the wheel from the bullock cart, she thought abruptly, unexpectedly, of Loopy Doop. How could she think of it now, when it had hardly crossed her mind since she arrived in India? Yet looking at the wheel, she thought that the design was much the same. The wheel’s spokes were like Loopy Doop’s legs, reaching out from a central hub and traveling in a circle. For Loopy Doop, though, the ends of the spokes weren’t connected into a wheel, but carried gondolas. One of the spokes had broken near the hub, and the gondola crashed into the ticket booth.

  Marina looked intently at the wheel. A twig lay near her foot. She picked it up and on the dirt floor began to scratch a fault tree.

  She hardly noticed her guard’s apprehensive look as she drew the top rectangle, the Most Undesired Event. The Most Undesired Event was the breaking of Loopy Doop’s leg. Under the rectangle, she drew a line and then half a bullet pointing up, the symbol for an Or gate. The Or gate meant that only one cause was required for the Most Undesired Event to happen, although there could have been more.

  She felt hypnotized. Analysis of this kind had been, for a long time, her only release from anxiety. She lapsed into it with a feeling of physical easing.

  Now the tree branched into the possible causes for the leg’s fracture. She drew another rectangle and labeled it DF, for Design Fault. Maybe Loopy Doop’s design had too small a margin of safety, and didn’t take into account mechanical stresses inherent in its operation. Not likely. Bobo had other amusement parks, other Loopy Doops. None of the others had had problems, and they’d been operating for years. She went on to another rectangle: Improper Operation. A lot of possibilities there. The ride could have been unbalanced, operated at too high a rate of speed, badly inspected and maintained. Her investigation had shown, though, that the ride hadn’t been unbalanced, and the speed had been within safe limits. As for maintenance and inspection, the records had looked fine.

  Her guard muttered something. She looked up and said, “I’m not doing anything. It’s OK.” One more aspect to think through. She drew a third rectangle and labeled it Material Defect. She stared at the MD scratched in the dry earth. A material defect would mean that the steel had failed. That was where she’d gotten into trouble. She’d thought the steel was too soft, inferior, but that was because she’d blown the hardness test. The tensile and chemical tests hadn’t borne her theory out.

  According to this fault tree, nothing went wrong. Loopy Doop never broke.

  She pushed her hair back with her gritty hand. But it broke. It broke, and it’s taken me this long, and I’ve had to come this far, to realize that somebody’s lying. I spent all my time messing around with the numbers while somebody else was pulling the strings.

  So, who’s lying, and about what? Design’s out. That you couldn’t cover up, in these circumstances. Operation? Possibly. Records can be faked. It’s not unheard of.

  Material. I convinced myself I was wrong on the hardness number, but what if I was right? What if I did the goddamned test right, and the other tests were wrong, or got screwed up somehow? Or somebody screwed them up. What if I jumped at the chance to be wrong?

  She put down the twig. I may never get out of this, but if I make it back to California I’m going to do that test again. “Sixty-five on the Rockwell B,” she said to her guard.

  He was shifting his weight from foot to foot. Brought back to the present, she realized that the atmosphere had changed. She heard male voices, speaking in tones of urgency. The crying babies, the buzz of conversation from the anteroom, had subsided. In a few minutes came the sound of running feet and shouts.

  She stood up, her eyes meeting those of the young man. His Adam’s apple bobbed. He went to the door and looked out, then called to someone.

  The answer seemed to disturb him. He looked at Marina. “What is it?” she said, and he responded in his own language. She heard motors. Vehicles were pulling up in back of the hut. Keeping his rifle trained on her, the man looked out the window, then let the curtain drop and paced back to the door. Voices came from another room, then sounds of scuffling feet passing the door. Marina tried to see out, but the young man waved her back.

  She knew immediately that the staccato cracks she heard a second later could be nothing else but gunfire. Then came shouts, and more shots. Her young guard took her arm and pulled her toward the door.

  She resisted instinctively, unwilling to go toward the firing, but he shouted at her and grasped her roughly, dragging her with him through the now-deserted anteroom. When they reached the entrance to the hut he peered out into the silent courtyard. After a moment he ran, pulling Marina after him.

  They had gone only a few steps when Marina heard more cracks. Puffs of dust exploded near their feet. The young man’s knees buckled, his hold on her loosened, and Marina saw the rifle slip to the ground. He fell on top of it, blood spurting from his neck. A bullet thumped into the wall beside her. She turned back, thinking she would return to the shelter of the hut, but there were footsteps approaching and she was knoc
ked to her knees and almost trampled, buffeted by gang members running toward the truck. When one of them stumbled against her it caught the attention of another, who stopped to stare. She recognized the hostile face of the guard at the gate, who had left her to go speak with Baladeva.

  His eyes were bloodshot, his face bathed in sweat. “It is you!” he cried. “You who are responsible for this!” He yelled something to his comrades, and she felt herself being pulled, by many hands, into the back of the truck, crushed by the bodies of the men. A few more jumped aboard, and as the truck pulled out she saw figures in khaki-colored uniforms rounding the side of the hut. The truck accelerated.

  Through the uproar, she heard a voice calling her name. Shoving through the crush she saw Vijay running toward her, a few feet away.

  “Vijay!” she cried, and saw by the set of his body that he heard her. He had reached the side of the truck, and she was pushing to get a hand out to him, when one of the gang members hit him on the side of the head with a rifle butt. She saw his glasses fly off, saw him stagger and drop back and lie motionless. Then the truck rounded the trees, and he was lost from view.

  43

  Marina hardly felt the bodies jostling against her as the truck bounced over the rocky, unpaved track. She was only peripherally aware that the shooting had stopped, and that the men had subsided into grim, watchful silence. She gave way to a terrible fear for Vijay, seeing his anxious face as he ran, seeing him lie so still. Vijay could be dead, he’s certainly hurt, and it’s my fault. I should make a fault tree of my life— every branch a mistake, every fork a wrong decision.