Flash House

by Aimee E. Liu

  “Mr. Malcolm?”

  A thin man, tall for an Indian, with a long graying beard and penetrating gaze, stood over him. “Krishna Gosh.”

  Lawrence rearranged his head. “Yes. Of course.” They shook hands and Gosh sat down. He was here for the same reunion of Indian news writers that ostensibly had brought Lawrence to Calcutta. Like Kamla’s father, these former agents had posed as merchants, servants, traders, and pilgrims—Britain’s eyes and ears throughout Central Asia before 1947. They’d had a rough time of it, between the Nationalist warlords and Soviet “liberators.” Some had returned only recently, and it was these men Lawrence had spent the past week interviewing—asking questions about their view of the Great Game while casting fruitlessly for clues to Aidan’s fate. Gosh was neither more nor less promising than the others. But he was the last.

  “I spent eleven years in prison in Tihwa,” he announced in a perfect Sandhurst accent, “accused of stealing vegetables.”

  He recalled smuggling out weekly cipher notes on the political rumors floating between prisoners and guards. His reports were relayed back to Simla, Calcutta, and ultimately London. No attempt was ever made to free him, yet his loyalty to British India remained unshaken. He was proud, he said, that several shipments of Soviet arms had been intercepted on the Afghan border as a result of his intelligence, and he fervently believed that India’s Independence had been a ghastly mistake.

  “What better proof of folly than the slaughter of all those innocent women and children—all Indians by Indians—during Partition?” Gosh shook his head and sipped his tea. He’d missed Independence, sitting in his distant jail cell.

  The piano tuner hammered away. The British had sucked India dry, Lawrence thought. They’d imprinted their language, their system of justice and government, even their network of railroads and trade on a country that never looked on them as anything but outsiders—firenghi. A country most of them openly despised. Yet they had forced a unity, a sense of common identity and purpose that could inspire men like Gosh to risk their lives and feel good about it. And when the Brits left, all hell broke loose. Was that the legacy of their commitment, or a reaction to their abandonment?

  The British had left a similar stamp on Aidan. The Shanghai schools of his youth, his predilection for Burberry’s trench coats and fair-skinned women. However Aidan might struggle against it, he’d been colonized every bit as thoroughly as these news writers. And, arguably, he’d turned around and occupied Joanna in exactly the same way.

  “Did you ever go up to the border territory around Ili?” he asked Gosh.

  “The rebel territory in Sinkiang, you mean?” Gosh shook his head.

  “Anything on a fellow named Osman?”

  “Hunh! I met him once in passing. Like a Turki pirate that one. Do you know, he killed his own nephew—a twelve-year-old boy. No, he’s madder than a hatter, in my opinion. Madder, I dare say, than Stalin.” He lifted an eyebrow. “Just don’t let Henderson know I said so.”

  Yes, they all knew the British consul Henderson, who must have been even more in cahoots with Weller and Osman than Lawrence had suspected. Having evacuated everyone else in his consulate, Henderson had stayed on in Tihwa long enough to be arrested by the newly arrived Liberation Army. Lo and behold, the Reds found the consul sitting on a sizable cache of arms and explosives. Eventually he was expelled from the country, saved by his diplomatic skin, and was now taking extended gardener’s leave in Surrey while Whitehall decided whether to excommunicate or commend him.

  “On your way out of Sinkiang, did you run across any Americans who might have been left behind?”

  “Personally? No. But I heard of a few.”

  “Such as…?”

  “Well, the American consul, for one. Mr. Weller was still in Tihwa when I left.”

  “Yes. Well, we know he got out. Anyone else?”

  Gosh stroked his beard. “Not in Sinkiang, but there was one story I heard—I came out through Afghanistan. I met another fellow there—he’d had a most terrible journey. The Soviets imprisoned him in Kazakhstan. He remained there for nearly two years. His only luck was in his size—he was just this big.” He held his hands up, inches apart. “Every night in the dark he worked to loosen one of the bars in his jail cell. Finally he succeeded. Only a man so very small could have made it out, and only a man so very strong could have made it alive to Kabul.”

  “An American?” Lawrence asked.

  “I believe he was Nepalese.”

  “But…you said there was an American?”

  “Ah, yes. This fellow saw a foreigner in the prison in Alma-Ata just a few days before he himself escaped.”

  “He actually saw him with his own eyes?”

  “I believe so, though he did not know the man’s name.”

  Ting, ting—the piano tuner was still at it. Lawrence frowned. “Dark-haired?”

  “Mmm. I don’t think so. I remember he said the man resembled the young Lord Mountbatten—like you, one who reddens instead of browns with the sun. But he spoke—and swore—like an American. I believe he was heard being tortured.” Gosh stared at the piano tuner.

  “Is this Nepalese fellow findable now?”

  Gosh shook his head. “He was dying with tuberculosis when I met him.” Then he asked, “Are you looking for someone in particular?”

  Lawrence considered the question. “No,” he said. “No, just chasing shadows.” He brought his hand to his forehead in a salute. “The King should knight every one of you mates.”

  Gosh stood up. “I appreciate that, sir. But I have a pension. I have my health, God willing, and a new young wife and a child on the way. I am one of the lucky ones. That is enough.”

  “The lucky ones,” Lawrence repeated to himself as he watched Gosh stride into the rain. “Yes, you bastard, I suppose you are.”

  He stood up and went over to the piano. The tuner was a wiry young fellow with the sharp features of a Eurasian. “Mind giving that a break?”

  The man squinted back at him appraisingly. “If you buy me a drink.”

  “A’right.” He held out his hand. “Lawrence Malcolm.”

  The piano tuner grinned. His handshake was strong and game. “Lazarus Figredo.”

  “You Goan?”

  “Nah.” Lazarus seated himself at Lawrence’s table. “Father was Portuguese, mother Malay. Grew up in the Philippines.”

  “You’re not in the Philippines now.”

  He shrugged. “Parents were killed in the first Jap offensive. Missionaries tossed me into a boatload of refugees headed for Bengal, and I wound up at Dr. Graham’s school for Eurasians in Kalimpore. I was twelve. Been here ever since.”

  Yet another colonized soul, Lawrence thought. “How’d you come to be tuning pianos?”

  “Apprenticeship. Here in Calcutta, a Mr. Jamison. Bloody racist, called me Blackie, but he taught me the trade. I can build a goddamn piano from scratch. Or the better part of a house, for that matter.”

  Lawrence smiled. “Good ear, good hands, eh?”

  Lazarus shrugged, asked what he was drinking, and told the waiter he’d have the same.

  Lawrence liked the man’s scrappiness. He took full possession of that black leather club chair. Appearances meant little, he seemed to say, but to let an opportunity pass unexplored was a fool’s mistake. With his snapping black eyes and long bony beak of a nose, the young man reminded Lawrence of a crow. He had that interested but disengaged look that birds do have. Lawrence found it easy to talk to him.

  By the time he’d finished his fourth gin and tonic that talk had come around to Joanna—and Aidan. It was the confidence of strangers. An exhilarating release. “The thing is,” Lawrence concluded, “I’m not convinced she ever really knew this husband of hers. She loves the idea of him, and it’s that idea she can’t give up. But ideas don’t keep you warm at night, do they? My God, you’ve never met such a stubborn woman—”

  “What is the idea?”

  “Ah, you know. The dashing
adventurer who’d sweep her off her feet and show her the world, turn her into something she never thought she could be.”

  Lazarus squeezed his face back, showing large yellowed teeth. “Not a bloody bad idea.”

  “No.” Lawrence sighed, abruptly sober. “Quite irresistible, in fact.”

  The noise of the monsoon hammered across the wide veranda and through the open windows, but he could still hear the cries of peddlers and dying children, the city’s staccato of bicycle bells and honking horns. For all the hotel’s spit and polish, it was a fragile fortress.

  “You want to know what I think?” Lazarus asked.

  “What?”

  “I think you’re out of your bloody noggin over this memsahib, but maybe she’s as much an idea to you as you say her husband is to her.”

  2

  The rains turned the streets to rivers, the gardens to sludge. They flattened the tarpaulin tenements of the poor and forced the lizards to swim. Two of the girls at Salamat Jannat were hospitalized with typhus, and encephalitis and cholera lurked in every pitcher of unboiled water. Dozens drowned in the swollen Yamuna, hundreds more in the Ganges. Every day the Hindu Times trumpeted another monsoon disaster. Bridge collapse. Mud slide. Train derailment. Family of ten crushed in their sleep when a lorry skidded off the road and through their bedroom wall. There were shortages of clean water all over the city and daily electrical outages. A leak in the roof caused Salamat Jannat to flood with the final downpour. Joanna welcomed the distraction if not the ordeal of mopping up and patching, interminable consultations with workmen and even more interminable phone calls and petitions to the Committee for money to do the repairs properly. She threw herself into this minor crisis with such fervor that Vijay (product of a Catholic grammar school) jokingly called her Noah. “We should be renaming this place the Ark and bringing in animals two by two. But what, then, must we be doing with all these unwed girls?”

  Joanna looked past him to the veranda where the new teacher Mrs. Sen was upbraiding said girls for failing to distinguish between prepositions and pronouns. “I suppose,” she said quietly, “it’s not that kind of ark.”

  She didn’t blame Lawrence. That, perhaps, was the hardest part. She’d pushed him and pulled him in so many directions, it was a wonder he wasn’t hamstrung. Still, he’d remained, so constant, so patient. He’d gone with her to the end of the earth.

  But what he was asking in return she simply could not do.

  Two weeks after he’d left for Calcutta, he sent a note along with a package of books for the children. The note read, “Visiting Ambala, Kipling’s locale. Thought it only fitting to send Simon a copy of Kim from the very place, but it turned out the bookstore had a few other irresistibles as well.”

  The note contained no more information than that. No suggestion how long he ’d be gone or where else he intended to travel. The tone, Joanna thought, seemed forced, as if he were covering his tracks. She actually turned the parcel over to check, but it had indeed been posted from Ambala.

  Inside, the children found the announced edition of Kim, plus Gulliver’s Travels and a beautiful volume of Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairy Tales containing the story “The Moon Maiden,” which Kamla said her father once read to her. There was also a book of magic, The Stolen Secrets of Harry Houdini, with an inscription from Lawrence to Simon, “You can accomplish the impossible through mirrors and sleight of hand. You can tumble whole mountains. You can make a pig fly. Just remember, it’s all in the timing. I hope you’ll do better than I.”

  Joanna, reading over Simon’s shoulder, wondered if this message wasn’t really meant for her. All in the timing, indeed. It was just like Lawrence to send the truer, more heartfelt and painful farewell coded to her son. Simon, fortunately, didn’t read it that way. He immediately flipped to the middle of the book and began studying the illustrations of Houdini handcuffed and hanging upside down off the side of a skyscraper or bound and chained in a box at the bottom of a river. “Escape artist extraordinaire!” trumpeted the caption for one drawing. “He wants me to learn these,” Simon explained importantly, “to show him when he comes back.”

  Kamla looked up from her fairy tales. She and Simon were sitting on the living room sofa with the tats lowered against the midday sun, so that as her eyes widened the pupils expanded, turning her gaze half black. She seemed about to say something. Indeed her lips moved as though the words were already forming. But she remained silent. The page open in front of her showed an Indian girl crouched beside a moonlit river. A burning lamp floated in front of her. The caption read, “He lives!”

  Joanna rested her hands on the back of the sofa. She could feel the heat rise from Simon’s body. The temperature in the room was well over ninety degrees, yet her arms were covered with goose flesh.

  In August the children returned to school, where, to Simon’s chagrin, Kamla was placed another year ahead of him. But otherwise they seemed steady enough, and a second postcard arrived from Lawrence, now in Dehra Dun, where he said he was “plowing through archives of the Game.” In his absence Joanna felt more helpless than ever. She was tempted to fire off yet another round of letters about Aidan, but the news from Korea stayed her hand. MacArthur was using Taiwan as a staging ground, and Chiang Kai-shek’s influence in Washington had never been greater. Meanwhile, fanatics like that Senator Joseph McCarthy were using the war as an excuse to turn the witch-hunt for Communists into a national obsession. By criticizing Chiang, Aidan had virtually ordered up his own persecution—and now complete abandonment by the U.S. government. Without Lawrence, Joanna was on her own, and on her own she’d run out of ideas. Unable to think where else to turn, she cabled Ben Eldon. Had he found anyone who was willing to stand up for Aidan?

  About three weeks later, as she was concluding a meeting at Safe Haven with Vijay and Hari, she looked up and saw a short, slight, towheaded man hovering out on the veranda. He seemed familiar, but it wasn’t until she saw the ungainly way he moved that she permitted herself to believe it. She quickly excused herself and went out to him.

  “Ben!”

  He gave her an emotional hug. He still looked boyish, his face and arms heavily freckled, his straight hair falling into brown eyes. He wore a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, blue jeans, and the shoes Americans were calling loafers. Even before he opened his mouth it would be impossible to mistake his nationality.

  “I don’t want to interrupt,” he said in his molasses-thick drawl.

  “Don’t be silly. We were just finishing.” She made the introductions, and Hari looked as though he might linger, always prospecting for useful connections, but when she said Ben was a personal friend of her husband’s the meeting disbanded.

  Joanna clicked the ceiling fan to top speed and poured two glasses of limewater. The girls’ chanting recitation of poetry in the outer room made it possible for them to talk without fear of being overheard.

  “How are you?” Joanna asked, with a nod to his left leg. “It looks good.”

  “Yeah, the technology of prosthetics is right up there with A-bombs, y’know? ’Specially now they’re getting ready for a whole new crop of blasted boys coming back from Korea.”

  “It’s going to be bad, isn’t it?”

  “Bad enough.”

  “You’re not heading out there, are you?”

  “Nah. I quit the news. Working for Kodak now. I’m a camera salesman.” He grinned, his big straight white teeth like a farm boy’s. “Least it’s got me traveling again. Asia and the Middle East are my beats. A day here, a day there. Chop chop.”

  “So you’re just passing through Delhi on work.”

  Ben rolled his glass between his hands. His voice dropped. “Not entirely.”

  She felt her fingers and feet start to tingle.

  “Joanna, you asked me to dig up what I could back home. I got a couple old buddies at State. One of them called me last week, as I was packing for this trip. He said some news about Aidan had just come in. Heavily classif
ied, and he risked his job getting it to me.” He passed her a manila envelope. “I can tell when shots have been doctored. It’s become one of my specialties. This hasn’t. Been doctored, that is.”

  Joanna took the envelope. She could no longer feel her fingertips, and had to concentrate to undo the clasp. A photograph fluttered into her lap, face up.

  It was Aidan.

  Alive.

  Perceptibly older.

  Doctored. The word pounded in her ear. There were flashes of gray in his hair. This was impossible. The man in this photograph smiled, relaxed. He wore a laborer’s jacket and had his hands clasped in a gesture of friendship with another man. A Chinese man who looked familiar, though in her shock Joanna didn’t recognize him. Instead another, clearer image of Aidan raced through her mind. A dream image so vivid she knew it must be part of a recurring nightmare. Aidan’s face was superimposed on those pictures Weller had shown them of Kamla’s father. Hacked to death. Martyred. Without thinking why, she knew the picture in her hands was worse.

  Ben read her confusion. “It’s Chou En-lai, Joanna. Aidan’s shaking hands with the Communist Premier. This was taken early this summer, just before the Reds pushed south in Korea.”

  She realized he was watching her intently, expecting her to fall apart. She wasn’t sure when she’d breathed last. She inhaled. Exhaled. The fan whirled precariously overhead. The background in the photograph was anonymous, a wall, a window, blurred. Outside anywhere. Neither man looked at the lens, and the image was grainy. They were not posing, she realized. This had been taken covertly. “Where is he?” she asked.

  Ben took a drink and set his glass down. He ignored her question. “I’d be careful what I said, if I were you. You know me, Jo. Aidan saved my life, and I stand by my friends, but it don’t look good. You’d best watch out for yourself and your boy.” He licked his lips and brushed his fair hair back from his eyes, glancing briefly at the ceiling. “May God strike me dead if I’m wrong, but the absolute worst thing would be if any of this rubbed off on you, and it could, what with the war and feelings running so high back home. I’ve tried and tried to think what I would do if I were in your shoes, after all you’ve been through. You’re a brave woman, Joanna, and a good one, too. But there’s got to be a limit, you know?”