Flash House

by Aimee E. Liu

One day Simon decided he wanted to try his father’s hats. These sat in boxes on a shelf across the top of the closet. They were in the state the rest of the closet had been before Simon’s first visit: neat and orderly, even precise, ranging from small to large.

  Simon fetched a chair and stood on the seat, just able to reach the shelf. He handed down each box in turn. The hats were of felt or straw and stylish as those I had seen in the film magazines on newsstands in Connaught Place. The larger boxes were heavier. One contained a solar topee such as Lawrence sometimes wore. The second to last contained a green helmet. This was the one Simon had been looking for. He eagerly put it on his head, pulling the strap beneath his chin. “My dad’s during the war,” he said. “He wasn’t a soldier, but he was out with them lots, and this is the same as the ones they wore. He told me that a long time ago.” We looked an odd pair staring in the mirror, me in Mem’s blood-red evening gown and Simon in his father’s dinner jacket and green army helmet. Even Simon must have thought so, for he soon was climbing back on his chair to return the helmet to its place on the shelf.

  “Ooph!” he said, lowering the last and heaviest box to me.

  But it contained no hat. Instead we found two brown paper parcels tied with string. Simon did not hesitate. We sat on the floor as he untied the first. He was most disappointed, for the parcel contained two notepads and some documents, nothing more. He tossed them aside impatiently, and I put the wrapping back around them while he wrestled with the other package, which was more solidly tied.

  As first the paper and then the flannel underneath came undone, I heard his breath come out of him like a leaking tire. I looked down and gave a gasp myself, for in his lap lay a gun. I thought it must be a toy, it looked so much like Simon’s own cap pistol, which he called a cowboy gun and often turned on me when he decided that I was the “Indian.” But Simon’s face had drained of color and he was pulling his hands back and away. I reached over and took the gun myself. It was of very heavy metal, with a long stem like a pipe and a smooth black handle. I was surprised at how cool the metal felt in spite of the heat in Mem’s bedroom. I could not resist putting it against my cheek, my forehead. I smiled at Simon to reassure him. I waggled my fingers to show that they were nowhere near the trigger.

  “Put it back,” he snapped at me. “It’s my father’s.”

  Then he got up and left the room.

  I wiped my hands on my skirt and replaced the gun in its flannel pouch and paper wrappings. I returned both parcels to the box, and the box to its place on the shelf. I spent the next hour setting the closet in order, just as I imagined Simon’s father would want it. We did not play dress-up again.

  6

  Aidan once asked, as incredulous as he was direct, how Lawrence could stand to whore. Lawrence replied that whores were simply women who knew their priorities. They understood what they needed, and what they had lost forever. In that, he considered them wiser than the vast majority of their so-called respectable counterparts. Certainly than himself. Aidan told him he was glamorizing poverty—“typical bleeding-heart blather”—that wasn’t what he was asking and Lawrence knew it. “How could you expose yourself like that?”

  Lawrence said exposure was precisely the point. With a whore he could expose everything—or nothing. His anonymity remained the same.

  He let Aidan think he’d frequented brothels from Bangkok to Bokhara. He chose not to deny that he’d slept with streetwalkers, cage girls, barmaids, and courtesans. He knew there was little point in denials because he once boasted such conquests, even stooping to categorize them as just that: conquests. In fact, these women had conquered him with their wheedling hands and predatory smiles, their casual air of destruction. He had let himself be talked into bottles of whiskey, undrinkable wine, swill masquerading as champers. He had let himself be talked to on bar stools and dance floors, in public gardens and vestibules of tenements, always paying and trying to listen, so that he, too, might understand what he’d lost and learn to live with that. But all he’d learned was magic and how to wiggle his ears, how to make other people laugh and forget themselves.

  They had names like Bijoux, Fifi, Queenie, Joy, Arabella, or Liberty. Names that were stolen, grand, and interchangeable. Names that, like the establishments where Lawrence met them, could be abandoned in an instant. Even after he arrived in Delhi and exchanged Aidan’s family and Joanna’s relentlessness for his own listless roamings, he would occasionally wander up G. B. Road with its shoddy, ill-lit “hotels” and pervasive bleat of jazzy film music or late at night to the New Delhi roundabouts where street girls gathered by relic statues of Curzon and Victoria, and he would feel a sorrow so overwhelming that he mistook it for nostalgia.

  Perhaps this was why, when Jack Battersby inevitably turned up in Delhi and asked him to choose a safe meeting place, Lawrence selected the rear car park at the Jai Mahal—a dark, anonymous fucking ground where the street girls sated their babus in the back seats of big sedans. The hotel winked in one direction, the police in another while waiters discreetly slid among the vehicles bearing trays of whiskey and cigarettes in exchange for the understood baksheesh. The park was unlit, identification prohibited, and the mutter and squeak of surrounding sexual activity sufficient to mask any private conversation.

  Jack picked him up outside his flat at eleven o’clock on a week-night in early September. He was driving himself, in a black Ambassador, one of the chancery’s unmarked fleet. The night was cool, rinsed by a rogue shower that afternoon, and a quarter-moon shone down. As Lawrence settled into the passenger seat he could just make out Jack’s trademark silver sideburns and mustache, that squashed toadstool of a nose. Fifty was Battersby’s natural age, though he was only yet in his forties. He’d looked fifty for more than ten years, and doubtless would look it still at eighty.

  Jack had been Lawrence’s superior in Special Operations early in the war, his peer when they both joined MacArthur’s Allied Intelligence Bureau toward the end. Then Jack married, fathered two sons, and rose like a windup toy through the Department of External Affairs. His desire to launch an Australian Intelligence Agency bordered on the obsessive, and he was not amused that Lawrence’s test operation had run aground. “You fucked up” were Jack’s first direct words to Lawrence in fourteen months.

  “Go straight through to the next corner, and turn left,” Lawrence replied evenly. “You’ll like this spot. It’ll remind you of Shanghai. Remember the Kissing Alley?” The pitch-black street lined with trucks and cars seething with groping lovers on hot Chinese nights. Homosexuals and underaged whores, couples violating parental prohibitions, spies passing messages under cover of sex. One of Jack’s favorite ploys, sending Special Operations agents into this cauldron to find each other and trade secrets coded into sweet nothings. The joke of a voyeur, a vicarious thrill for a man who had all the true grit of warm milk.

  “Not personally, no,” Jack shot back as a mangy pariah dog scuttled across the road. It glared into the headlights, and Jack braked with a sharp intake of breath.

  “You’re allowed to hit anything here except the cows,” Lawrence reminded him. “Turn in at those pillars…but turn out the lights first. Otherwise you’re likely to catch some high minister in a compromising position.”

  “Cripes,” Jack said as the drive went dark. The canopy of leaves overhead shut out even the moonlight. “Am I allowed to hit the other cars, too?”

  “Just pull over there. Can you make out the waiter’s white jacket? Slip a twenty-rupee note out the window. He’ll bring us some whiskey and leave us alone.”

  The waiter glided forward. Jack handed him the note and barked, “Whiskey soda.” The man vanished back into the shadows. “No police with little torches?”

  “They’d be breaking their rice bowl if they tried it. I’ll wager half of that twenty finds its way to the local inspector’s pocket.”

  “What about the girls?”

  “Street girls mostly. There’s a roundabout down the road where they s
how their merchandise, then the babus bring ’em here for delivery.”

  “So this is what you’re doing with your hard-earned American dollars.”

  “You know me, Jack. I never pay for the privilege.”

  “What do you pay for, then, Larry?” The voice in the dark turned on him. “More importantly, what do I pay you for?”

  “Look. You asked me to recruit Aidan. That’s what I did. Wasn’t thrilled that he spilled the story to Joanna—his wife—”

  “I know.”

  “But she knows nothing of our involvement. She thinks Aidan got wind of that Czech saboteur through journalistic instinct. Thought he was going up to Kashmir in search of an anti-Soviet news scoop to repair his image back in Washington.”

  “As opposed to an intelligence scoop.”

  Lawrence sighed. “The thing is—”

  He heard a footstep outside the car. The glint of a tray and glassware. Jack rolled down the window letting in a welcome flash of cool air and took the tray. The waiter vanished. Jack set the glasses on the seat between them and poured. “Go on.”

  “That plane crash. The one those idiots wired Joanna about. I’ve been doing a little digging along Embassy Row. It turns out the Czech was supposed to be on that flight.”

  “Along with your man.”

  “Yes. But the Czech canceled at the last minute.”

  “And your man bailed out midway.”

  They drank in silence for several minutes.

  “Sounds like your mate was up to something a touch more sinister than news gathering.”

  “Aidan’s no fool. It might be as simple as the last-minute cancellation tipping him off. He could have been the mark himself.”

  “So he saves his own skin and sends those other poor blokes to their maker?”

  “It would have destroyed his cover to tip them, and if he wasn’t certain, maybe he didn’t want to take that chance. Or maybe it was just an accident.”

  Jack’s glass made a cracking sound against the steering wheel. “Pretty ruthless fellow.”

  “I’ve never seen that side of him, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it’s there. His mother went mad and the rest of his family were wiped out by the Japs.”

  “That why you’ve felt free to help yourself to his wife?”

  Lawrence’s hand squeezed around his glass.

  “You’ve fucked up,” Jack repeated. “About ten times over. This was a little nothing assignment. Bump into an old mate, feed him a juicy story, offer him a sweet if he’d catch this Czech with his knickers down.” Jack shifted in the dark. “Just a bit of simple spying to grease Austral-American relations. Figured I was doing you a favor while we were at it. Get you back in the game, distract you from your bloody melancholia. You realize you’ve single-handedly convinced the home team and the Yanks that we’re a bunch of bludgers.”

  Lawrence still didn’t answer. The car was hot and close and smelled of cheap whiskey, warm skin and sweat, Jack’s old-man cologne.

  “Talk to me about Sinkiang,” Jack said coolly, ignoring his silence. “Who’s recruited your Yank? That’s what I want to know.”

  Lawrence said finally, “What makes you think somebody’s recruited him? Maybe he’s dead.”

  “Nice way to talk about an old mate. Is that really what you think? Or only what you hope?”

  “I saw what was left of the girl.”

  “Alice in Wonderland.”

  “If he was in that jeep with her, he wasn’t likely to have been in much better shape.”

  “But there was no sign of him.”

  Lawrence thought of the picture of Simon. “No.”

  “And what if he wasn’t in the jeep with her? What if he went ahead on foot, or wandered off to take a piss…?”

  “Right. If he can blow up a plane with six U.N. peacekeepers, he can certainly blow up a jeep with one overzealous young blonde. But why would he?”

  The fizz of soda. Then silence. Shadows of two cars rolled past them through the grainy darkness.

  “I was hoping you could tell me that,” Jack said finally.

  “Well, I’m sorry I can’t oblige. You want your money back?”

  “What’s the little girl about?”

  Lawrence felt Jack’s eyes even if he couldn’t see them. He corrected his tone. “My ticket to Sinkiang, you mean. Figured I needed my own mission, in case Joanna lost her nerve and tried to haul me back.”

  “Bit thin, wasn’t it?”

  “Kamla plugged nicely into Joanna’s social ethic. I could see there was a bond—she couldn’t fault me for trying to save the kid. And there was a historical precedent, which appealed to me. Robert Shaw took along a Chinese orphan as a mascot for his expedition.”

  “If I recall, he didn’t bring his kiddie back out with him.”

  Lawrence drank. “That was Joanna’s doing, not mine.”

  “Tough guy.” He could hear Jack’s smirk. Then, “Look. You owe me, Larry. I gave you an assignment. You turned it into a fiasco. And now you’re sleeping with Shaw’s wife. Playing dad to her kids. You’ll excuse me for questioning just how hard you’re really working to locate your old mate.”

  Lawrence stared at the flare of a match in a car on the other side of the yard. A man’s black eyes, a red turban. The edge of a girl’s unsmiling face. Then the light shrank back to a spot of orange.

  “I’m working,” Lawrence said.

  “The Americans want to know what happened. They want us, as they say, to name names.”

  “They still don’t know it was Aidan?”

  “You think I want us to look like a horse’s ass? No, and so far I don’t think they’ve pinpointed you, either. But they’re circling. The Soviets are actively supplying the rebels up in Kashmir, and the Yanks think your botched operation made that possible.”

  “That’s absurd.”

  “Of course it is. But we’re going to remain the scapegoats until we can tell them what the hell actually happened. Which is why, as I say, your motivation concerns me.”

  “Joanna is our best hope of finding him. She’ll never give up.”

  “What makes you so sure?”

  “Believe me.”

  “Ah. Well, I’m sorry to hear that. But I hope you’re doing a little of the digging yourself.”

  Lawrence sipped his drink.

  “You actually working on this book about the Game?”

  “In my spare time.”

  Jack chuckled. “Good. I met an old classmate of yours the other day. Rodney Tynsdale. Said you played football together. He’s a publisher with Morrow and Hoag. Specializes in historical odds and ends. I told him a bit about your book, and he said it was just up his alley. I think you should drop him a note.”

  “Why?”

  “Legitimacy, mate. The wandering historian. Solidify your cover.”

  “What do you want, Jack?”

  “You know me. I want to know which way the wind blows. I want trinkets for our American friends and a trophy to woo the Prime Minister. I want you to find out what the fuck happened to your old mate, Aidan Shaw.”

  “So do I,” Lawrence said quietly.

  “Then we’re fair and square.” Jack started to turn the ignition, but Lawrence stopped him. He collected the tray and glasses, the bottle of soda, and set them on a rise of lawn beside their parking space. “The waiter’ll be docked,” he explained, “if these don’t get back to the kitchen.”

  “What about the whiskey?” Jack asked, holding up the bottle, sloshing its remaining contents. Half full.

  “That’s yours for your trip home,” said Lawrence. “Something to remember me by.”

  7

  When Mem told Simon and me that we would soon be starting school, I was quite beside myself. I had never so much as set foot in a school! When my uncle took me from Tihwa, I was still too young. In the flash house, whenever I mentioned the word, Indrani would tell me not to be stupid. Why would I need schooling? Of my sisters there, only Bharati had passed her l
ower levels. She had been a middling student, she told me, but she’d loved her crisp navy and white school uniform, and the other girls in her class had been more of a family to her than her own. I used to picture school as a kind of party, so many girls together laughing and gossiping, poring over books and scribbling out lessons. I thought this sounded very heavenly, and I could scarcely believe my fortune when Mem said that I should go.

  But fortunes may prove good or bad, and the selection of a school was more complicated than I realized. We could not return to the American school Simon had attended in the past, Mem said, because of “the situation.” Lawrence said that we ought to try the Delhi public school, where the children were mostly Indian, because there no one would know or care whether Aidan was accused of being a Communist. “But,” Mem answered, “everyone would know and care that Kamla is a half-breed—not even an Anglo-Indian, at that, but some combination so obscure that, by Indian reckoning, she’ll automatically be viewed as Untouchable. If her complete background became known, she could be in real danger.” They tried to hold these discussions privately, but there were few conversations in Mem’s house that I didn’t manage to hear, so I knew even before Simon when Mem made her choice. “Prejudice is a reality they’ll both have to face, but at least at the All-Nations School they stand an even chance.”

  The next morning Mem told me we were going shopping, just the two of us. Not even Simon would come along. Lawrence would take him to the cinema.

  “Mothers and daughters do this,” she explained as she steered her green Austin between a line of camels and a bullock cart piled high with sugarcane. “I used to love shopping with my mother. We went every year before school started. My mother did mean well…” Her voice trailed off, and I toyed with my braid, uncertain what she wished me to say. All I knew of her parents was that they had died before Simon was born.

  A knot of grown boys stared through the dust as we pulled into the car park at Khan Market. Typical crony layabouts, they were not serious goondas, but their eyes were sinister, nevertheless, and there were half a dozen of them, some chewing paan, some squatting on the steps, others leaning against the passageway through to the central court of shops. From the looseness of their arms, the tilted jut of their chins, and the sneering set of their mouths I recognized them as high-caste Hindus of no account, probably the sons of village landowners come to make trouble in the city. It was boys like these, I recalled, who had poured through Delhi during Partition, setting fire to the homes and businesses of Muslims and gang-raping any girl they chose to call Muslim. My flash house sister Mira had explained that these zamindar were raised from infancy to know one thing only, and that was their absolute right to take whatever they pleased.