The Caretaker

by A. X. Ahmad

  A Red Line train pulls into the station, and he gets on, seeing only a pair of necking students and a few tired Hispanic workers. Finding a seat, he remembers Anna’s lips soft and warm against his, her hard, muscular body pressing into him. He had thought all that was over, but her touch has awakened something in him, and he feels confusion, mixed with an urgent desire.

  All that evening, alone at the Garibaldi Hotel, he feels her warm fingertips tracing the scar on his neck. Even a bowl of soup and another bottle of Bacardi will not dull his thoughts. He tries not to, but he falls asleep thinking about her.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  The Captain lies awake all night in the long, empty hospital ward, its one window a dark rectangle high up on the wall. He falls asleep just as light begins to seep into the sky, and is still sleeping when the Major returns and shakes him awake.

  Even at this early hour, the Major’s uniform is immaculately pressed, and his wavy hair gives off the sweet scent of fresh coconut oil. He looks around the long, empty ward, clears his throat, and begins.

  “Well, Captain Singh, you’ve had time to think about our conversation. I’m sure you understand it is for the good of our country.”

  The Captain stares up sleepily. “I was up all night thinking about it. I discussed it with my Sergeant.”

  The Major frowns and looks around. “Someone else has been here? We told you, Captain, this is top secret.”

  “It’s quite all right. My Sergeant is dead. He shot himself in the mouth. I told you all about it, remember?”

  “Captain Singh, you are not making any sense. You say the man is dead?”

  “Yes, that’s what I thought, too. But he was here, he was most definitely here.”

  The Major makes a chopping gesture with the edge of his hand. “Enough of this nonsense. I assume we can count on you? The Japanese TV crew is waiting to interview you. Keep it short. Tell them that you saw Pakistani planes destroying our command post. Be very clear about this.”

  The Captain shakes his head, as though trying to clear his mind of sleep. “My Sergeant came to me last night. He stood right where you are standing. We talked it over, and sorry, the answer is no. I will not lie about what happened.”

  “If you refuse to cooperate, Captain, you will be court-martialed for your failure. You will go to jail. Do you understand that?”

  The Captain nods silently.

  “Then why are you doing this?”

  “The Sergeant said he’s very cold up there. He wants to be brought down.”

  The Major’s face turns red, and his voice trembles with rage. “Captain, think again. This is the biggest mistake of your life. You will be transferred to a prison and we will start court-martial proceedings immediately. Think about it.”

  “I have.”

  The Major walks away, his back stiff with anger. When he is gone, the Captain turns over and falls into a sleep as deep as a crevasse.

  All day long he sleeps. Many hours later he jerks awake, convinced that Sergeant Khandelkar is standing by his bed.

  The ward is dark, and there is no sign of anyone else. The feeling fades, and the Captain lies still, wishing he knew the time. From the silence outside, he guesses that it is late evening.

  There are footsteps at the end of the ward, and he turns his head to see a hospital orderly walking down the aisle, pushing a cart of medicines. He doesn’t want to take any more of the blue pills, so he closes his eyes and pretends to be asleep.

  The footsteps stop by his bed, and he hears a squeak as the cart comes to a halt. He waits for the orderly to remove the clipboard from the foot of his bed, make a note on his chart, then move on.

  Instead there is only silence, broken by the orderly’s rapid breathing. When Ranjit opens his eyes, he sees that the man is preparing a hypodermic syringe, pulling back the plunger and releasing a small squirt of colorless liquid into the air.

  “Hey, what is this?”

  The burly orderly starts. “Oh, you’re awake. Time for your injection.”

  “I don’t have injections. What is this for?”

  The orderly steps forward, smiling unconvincingly as he taps the glass of the hypodermic.

  “This is something new. It will help with the frostbite…”

  The orderly reaches out for the Captain’s arm, and the needle comes down fast, but the Captain slaps away the hypodermic. It flies out of the man’s hand and smashes on the wall.

  “Stupid bastard.”

  The orderly reaches under his hospital smock and a blade flashes in the darkness. The Captain feels a hot sting across his neck.

  The orderly’s knife hand rises, preparing to slice down again. The Captain throws up both his hands, feeling the IVs rip away, grabs the bottle of saline hanging above his head, and brings it down hard.

  There is the sound of glass hitting skull. The orderly falls sideways, stunned, and the whole IV stand goes over with a crash. Lights come on at the end of the ward.

  There is the shocking hot leak from the Captain’s neck.

  The orderly rises from the floor, staggers to the wall, and boosts himself out of the high window.

  The dark-haired nurse comes running down the corridor just as the Captain slips into unconsciousness.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  The next afternoon Ranjit sits in a crowded room at the Boston Public Library. On the floor next to him is a bulky plastic bag that contains a Finnish army surplus snowsuit and an expensive folding pair of Zeiss binoculars that have eaten up the last of his money.

  The Microtext Room, tucked away in a corner of the library, has a vast archive, and he looks through old issues of The New York Times, the spools of microfilm whirring across a bulky reader with a backlit glass screen. The freezing cold has driven many of the city’s marginal inhabitants into the library, and next to him an old woman mutters to herself as she scans headlines from World War Two. Across from him, a homeless man grins as pinups from ancient Jet magazines flash across his screen.

  Ranjit stares intently as the blurry black-and-white pages flash across the screen.

  The North Korean crisis last summer started when the Korean-American reporter accidentally crossed the border into North Korea and was arrested as a spy. Ranjit reads about the outcry in the international press, the denunciations by the United Nations, and the tightening of the trade embargo, all of which just seemed to make the North Koreans angrier.

  He stares at a grainy picture of the reporter peering out from a prison cell, surrounded by hard-faced Korean men with brutal army haircuts. Then come the reports from the trial, and an angry press release from the North Korean government announcing her death sentence. Senator Neals flies into Pyongyang at the eleventh hour, and after two days of negotiations, he emerges with the reporter, a wide smile creasing his face.

  There are articles about the reporter, articles about the brutal and repressive North Korean regime, and interviews with a few dissidents and a human-rights group, and Ranjit reads them all, finding out nothing new. Anna’s explanation makes perfect sense.

  The steam radiators in the crowded room whistle and clang, and he feels a headache coming on as he feeds a new reel of microfilm into the reader.

  This one is from The Times of India, and for the next three hours he scans the columns, reliving the tense year when nuclear war almost broke out between India and Pakistan.

  He had been on the Siachen then, taking his patrols into Pakistani territory and earning a reputation as a gung-ho young Captain. As rumors of war thickened he had watched as troops massed along the Kashmir border, but it had all seemed unreal. On the Siachen, weren’t they already at war with the Pakis? And this kind of war wasn’t so bad, it was an adventure, with the satisfaction of climbing mountains that no civilian mountaineer could. Now, looking back at those months, it seems incredible that the year hadn’t ended in the flare of nuclear missiles and the senseless deaths of millions.

  He stares at photographs from December 2001, seeing image
s of the masked terrorists who rammed through the gates of the Indian Parliament, intent on killing the politicians within. The attackers were Muslim terrorists from Kashmir who had been armed and trained by the Pakistanis. In a flurry of recriminations, both countries went on high alert, moving troops to their borders, and the nuclear bluster began.

  By May of 2002, the Pakistanis were threatening to launch their nukes if the Indians crossed the Line of Control in Kashmir. The Indian Defense Minister was quoted as saying that India “could take a bomb or two more, but when we are finished, there will be no more Pakistan.”

  As he whirrs through the reels, day by day the posturing and blustering slowly turned toward a real war.

  Pakistani-backed Muslim militants attacked an Indian Army camp in Kashmir, killing the wives and children of soldiers. Pakistan began shelling the northern state of Jammu. An Indian Army pilotless drone was shot down over Pakistan. And just when war seemed inevitable, the Americans arrived.

  He pops in another roll of microfilm, and there, at last, is Senator Neals. The black-and-white pictures of him are grainy, but there is no mistaking his brilliant smile as he poses at a conference table, surrounded by the Indian Army’s top brass.

  Ranjit zooms in closer and closer.

  Neals’s seersucker Brooks Brothers suit is crumpled, speaking of his mad dash from halfway across the world, but he is smiling broadly and radiating a calm competence. What a clever strategy to send a black man to India, sidestepping all the colonial implications of white skin. Neals must have been giving his “I’m one of you, I understand what it means to be oppressed” speech to anyone who would hear it.

  A week later, the threat of Armageddon is still hanging over the world, but here is the Senator at a formal banquet in New Delhi, a garland of marigolds hanging around his thick neck. There is a man sitting next to Neals, his face hidden by the shadow of the flash, but there is no mistaking the pale hands and neatly manicured nails. It is definitely Kohonen. Ranjit studies the picture intently, zooming in till it degenerates into a blur of pixels.

  Soon the microfilm heats up and the smell of hot plastic fills his nostrils; he turns off the reader and sits in front of the blank screen. How had Kohonen obtained the blueprints for the Agni missile? And what the hell is that one frame of microfilm doing inside the doll?

  His head begins to throb, and his throat is parched. Walking to a water fountain in the corridor, he bends over it and slurps ice-cold water.

  When he returns, the librarian looks up at him from her desk. She is a slim Hispanic woman, her eyebrows carefully plucked, her large silver earrings jangling as she speaks.

  “Are you doing okay? Finding what you’re looking for?”

  “Thank you, yes. I’m just researching a paper.”

  Her smile is tentative. “Well, if you need anything, just ask. That’s why I’m here. And just to let you know, we’ll be closing early, because of New Year’s Eve.”

  New Year’s Eve. Of course. Christmas now seems like a year ago.

  When he sits down, the librarian is still looking at him. Catching his gaze, she blushes and turns away.

  Popping in another reel of microfilm, he fast-forwards, searching for more news about the Senator.

  For six weeks going forward—till the nuclear crisis passes—Neals’s pictures appear regularly, but Kohonen does not make another appearance. The Senator is shown speaking to the Indians, then the Pakistanis, shuttling back and forth between New Delhi and Islamabad. Never once does his smile slip, and he radiates a calm authority. Talks are always “frank and extensive,” the Senator is always “hopeful for constructive dialogue.” But Neals’s presence is working: both countries withdraw troops from the border and diplomatic relations are reestablished. Warships sail back to base from the Indian Ocean. And just like that, the nuclear threat goes away.

  So the Senator’s plan had worked; showing the Agni blueprints to the Pakistanis had scared them off.

  Ranjit’s headache is growing worse. He needs to get out of this stifling airless room and breathe in some fresh air. He has found out nothing new except information that confirms Anna’s story.

  He rewinds the microfilm, and as the year rushes back onto itself, he watches ads zip by for saris, for farm equipment, for mosquito repellent. He sees all the garish Hindi movie posters for the romances and action flicks that he’d missed that year; Preetam, alone, had seen them all.

  And just then, one last picture catches his eye. He stops the microfilm with a jerk. How had he missed this?

  In the photograph, Senator Neals is getting off a jet and being received by the Indian military. Standing on the tarmac, waiting in line to shake the Senator’s hand, is a familiar figure. A thick-set man with the gold insignia of a general, his chest dripping with rows of medals. He is bare-headed, as usual, holding his heavily brocaded cap in his square, large hands. There is no mistaking the bulk of General Bear Handa.

  Ranjit feels his headache worsen. Neals, the envoy of peace, was meeting with the General who had wanted to prolong the war. It makes no sense.

  The librarian is going around from carrel to carrel, saying that the library is closing.

  “Please, ma’am,” Ranjit says, “I need five more minutes. Just five.”

  The woman’s face softens. “All right. But then I really have to lock up.”

  He spins back through pages of microfilm, looking for the General’s face, for any mention of his name, but there is nothing else, and soon Ranjit’s time is up. Putting the reels into their boxes, he drops them onto a re-shelving cart. As he’s leaving the librarian walks up to him. She moves with an easy grace as she pulls on a belted overcoat.

  “Did you find what you were looking for? By the way, my name is Juanita.”

  “I’m Ranjit, and no, I didn’t find it. But it’s all right. I understand you have to close.”

  “We have other archives, you know. If you come back on Monday, I could help you.”

  By Monday everything will have changed. “I might not be back next week,” he says gently.

  She blushes and looks away, biting her lower lip. “Oh. Well, I’m here most days.”

  “Thank you for your help. I appreciate it.” He touches her lightly on her shoulder, gathers up his plastic bag, and walks quickly down the stairs.

  Exiting through the massive library doors, he stops for a moment at the top of the bank of stairs. From the Copley Plaza Hotel he can hear faint music, and sees people hurry by, the men in tuxes and bow ties, the women tripping along in high heels. Now that he knows, it certainly feels like New Year’s Eve.

  His headache recedes as he cuts through the darkened expanse of the Boston Common. It has been transformed into a wonderland, with giant ice sculptures of swans, dragons, and castles, all glittering in the glow of colored spotlights. Groups of revelers are already out, swathed in scarves and thick coats, passing bottles to each other. From a far-off bandstand comes the crackle of an electric guitar.

  Shanti would have loved to see this, he thinks, walking past children who run excitedly from one sculpture to the next.

  “Happy Nooo Year,” someone shouts out, but he ducks his head and doesn’t return the greeting.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  He leaves the Garibaldi Hotel the next morning, stopping to give James a bag of Snickers and a manila envelope. For once, the streets of Chinatown are silent, the sidewalks littered with the red shards of exploded firecrackers and frozen pools of vomit, the remnants of last night’s celebrations.

  The first day of the new year is just like the old one, cold and gray, and the passengers on this morning’s Peter Pan bus to the Vineyard are sullen and hungover. Ranjit looks out of the window as the highway unspools, grateful for the lack of conversation.

  When he alights at the Woods Hole ferry terminal, a sign says that the “threat index” is elevated to Level Orange, but whoever is threatening Woods Hole seems to have taken the day off, because the rows of wooden benches inside the ferry
terminal are deserted. He buys a paper cup of coffee from a machine and takes a few sips before tossing it into the trash, wishing for the millionth time that he could have some real chai.

  It has started snowing again, and the afternoon light turns muddy. A few cars roll on board the ferry, a flat-bottomed freighter with an open hold, not the large, multistory ferry of the tourist season. He walks up the ramp and heads to the cabin behind the bridge. It is littered with beer cans and old newspapers, and he clears a seat by the window.

  The freighter lets out a whistle and heads out in a straight line before starting its slow dogleg toward the island. The ocean grows rougher, and the cars on deck groan with each successive line of waves.

  He picks up a copy of the Vineyard Gazette left on the seat next to him. On the front page is a headline that says BURGLARIES CONTINUE. The article below it says that there have been three more break-ins up-island. The locals are outraged, and angry questions have been asked at an evening community meeting with the police. An Officer Gardner is quoted as saying, “We have some very good leads, and are close to apprehending the suspects.” When asked by the Gazette reporter why it is taking them so long to make an arrest, the officer replied that the suspects were hiding in different summer properties throughout the island. He advised the year-round residents to “be aware of any unusual signs of inhabitation, such as lights in windows, unfamiliar parked cars, or nighttime comings and goings.”

  Ranjit knows that Plaid-shirt and his brother have plenty of houses to choose from and can probably hide out for weeks. Shaking his head, he folds the paper shut. They will inevitably be caught, but even a life sentence will not bring back the old lady they had murdered. Justice, when it happens, is inevitably too late, and can never compensate for the crime.