The Empress of India

by Michael Kurland

  “Perhaps not?” Margaret asked.

  “There may be one or two Phansigar still roaming about, don’t you know,” he explained. “There are signs—”

  Margaret’s father, who had been staring at the young officer for a long moment, interrupted. “Just who are you, Lieutenant, and what are you doing there?” he barked.

  “Oh, sorry, sir.” The man in the doorway brought his heels together, stiffened to attention, and saluted. “Lieutenant Peter Pettigrew, carrier pigeon officer of the Seventh Foot, reporting, sir!”

  St. Yves returned the salute briskly. “Carrier pigeon officer?”

  “Well,” the young man said thoughtfully, looking from St. Yves to Margaret to the viceroy, “not exactly.”

  “How’s that?”

  The man considered carefully, and then replied, “I’m not really a lieutenant, and my name isn’t really Pettigrew. I don’t know whether or not there really is a Seventh Foot, or just what it might be if it did exist, and I don’t know the least about carrier pigeons. Aside from that, everything I told you is the absolute truth.”

  Margaret’s eyes widened and she bit her lip to fight off an impulse to giggle. This was neither the time nor the place for even the slightest giggle.

  The viceroy turned to face the young nonlieutenant. “Of all the effrontery,” he said, some powerful emotion evident in the timbre of his voice. His face had turned just the slightest shade of red. “Please identify yourself, sir, and explain what you’re doing here and why you are wearing a uniform to which you have just admitted you are not entitled.”

  “Sorry, your lordship.” The young man shifted from his rigid position of attention to a close approximation of parade rest. “This is my Lieutenant Pettigrew, ah, persona, as it were. Actually my name is Collins. Peter Collins. The ‘Peter,’ at least, was honest, you see. I happened to be with Chief Constable Parker when your boy ran him down. He immediately sent your boy off for Dr. McWarren, and then went off to see to it that all the exterior doors to Governor’s House were locked and guarded, except the front door, of course, and he sent me along to see if I could be of any help. I’m with the Special Department of the Constabulary, you see. The doctor should be along presently, I imagine.”

  “I don’t think McWarren can do much good,” the viceroy commented. “The chap is dead, you know.”

  “What ‘special department’?” St. Yves demanded. “I never heard of a special department.”

  “Parker seems to feel that nobody is dead until Dr. McWarren says he is dead,” Collins told the viceroy. And then he shifted his attention to General St. Yves. “Our official name is the Department of Special Intelligence. We are not widely known, which is a good thing, for the most part.”

  “The DSI, eh?” the viceroy said. “You chaps keep popping up in the oddest places.” He indicated the corpse with a nod. “Then was this chap one of yours?”

  “You think he might have been a Scout?” Collins asked. “That hadn’t occurred to me. I’d better have a look.” He went over and knelt by the corpse.

  “According to my boy Djuna, the chap had a message for me,” the viceroy told Collins as the young man examined the body. “The chap told Djuna to say, ‘To be or not to be.’ ”

  “Ah!” said Peter Collins. “He did, did he?” Collins peered closely at the body and said, “Hmmm.” And then he said, “Damn!” And then he said, “Excuse me, miss. Didn’t mean to curse in front of a lady.”

  “Don’t mind me,” said Margaret, who was trying to remain as unobtrusive as possible so that her father wouldn’t notice her and send her away.

  Collins took a small ivory-cased pocketknife from his trouser pocket and carefully slit open the seam in the ornate collar of the corpse’s garment. “This man was, indeed, one of ours,” he said, removing a tightly rolled tube of white silk, no longer than a cigarette and no thicker than a toothpick, from where it had been concealed inside the collar. He unrolled it and showed it to the viceroy.

  “A rose,” the viceroy said.

  Margaret leaned over to look. A stylized image of a red rose, its petals tightly closed as though concealing some roseate secret, was stamped on the fabric.

  “It’s our, ah, sigil, so to speak,” Collins said. He flipped over the left lapel of his uniform jacket, revealing a small silver pin of an identical rose, with petals of red enamel.

  “So he worked for you people, did he?” the viceroy asked.

  General St. Yves pulled his ear thoughtfully. “As he was coming here to pass some information on to you, using the password and all,” he told the viceroy, “I would think that makes the idea of it being a robbery less likely. It is probable that he was killed to prevent him from speaking with you.” St. Yves turned to Collins. “What do you say, young man?”

  “It’s extremely probable,” Collins agreed. “And it must have been something both important and extremely urgent for him not to go through the usual channels.” He peered closely at the ornate collar and allowed a puzzled frown to cross his face, and then pushed himself to his feet.

  “Can you find out who he is?” asked the viceroy. “I suppose we must notify his relations, so they can take his body. I think we should pay for the funeral pyre, assuming the chap was a Hindu—the least we can do. Are there any arrangements made for the relatives to collect back pay, or any kind of death payment?”

  “I’m afraid that a funeral pyre won’t do,” Collins said, moving over to a nearby wooden chair and sitting down. “This gentleman will require a proper English burial.”

  “Excuse me?” said St. Yves.

  “The collar of his, ah, garment,” Collins explained. “If you look closely at the collar, you will notice a slight—very slight—discoloration along the inside.”

  St. Yves knelt down by the body to look. “Right enough,” he agreed. “So he didn’t wash his neck as well as he ought.”

  “This discoloration, you will note, is the same nut-brown color as the man’s skin,” Collins explained. “Skin color does not come off, unless it was artificially applied. Looked at in that light, I must assume that he is an Englishman disguised as a native.”

  “An Englishman?” asked the viceroy, sounding startled. “How can you be sure?”

  Collins shrugged. “English, Scots, Irish, Welsh—what you will. He could even be French, German, or Russian, I suppose; but then the question of why he came to Government House to speak to your lordship, and just what he had to say, becomes unnecessarily complicated. I think Mr. Occam would vote for one of Her Majesty’s British subjects of some flavor. I think we will find,” he continued, “that he had some explicit warning to pass on to your lordship, that it was urgent, and that he was killed to prevent him from delivering it.”

  “So that’s your opinion, is it, young man?” the viceroy asked.

  Collins flushed and stood up. “I don’t mean to seem to be giving suggestions to you gentlemen,” he said. “It must sound awfully presumptuous. It’s just that this is my, ah, field, you know.”

  “Nonsense,” said the viceroy. “Any suggestions, comments, or special knowledge that you have, now is the time to share it. If you can throw any light on this”—he indicated the dead man lying at his feet—“we certainly want to hear it.”

  “Yes,” Margaret agreed. “For example, what did you mean, ‘perhaps not’?”

  General St. Yves looked over at her with a frown, as though just realizing that she was still there, but he said nothing.

  Collins pondered for a moment. “What do you know of the Phansigar?” he asked.

  “They were known as Thuggees in the north,” St. Yves said. “Bands of thieves. Used to waylay and rob travelers. Wiped out by the British authorities some fifty years ago. But we still hear stories, of course. The amahs frighten small children with them, like the bogeymen.”

  “And bogeymen indeed they were,” Collins began. “I’ve had cause to do some research on them in the past few weeks. Their customs, habits, and beliefs were enough to frigh
ten any small child, and most adults. The cult of the Phansigar—the Thuggees—was many hundreds of years old. Quite possibly well over a thousand years.”

  “Incredible!” the viceroy said. “A thousand years?”

  “There are carvings dating back to the eighth century in the cave complex at Elura in Maharashtra state, known as the Rock Temples. A series of panels show the Thuggees in operation: one depicts garrotting the victim, another dismembering the body, and so on.”

  “A thousand years—at least,” the viceroy said. “A thousand years of robbery and murder. Amazing.”

  “When they were suppressed there were, perhaps, ten thousand of them scattered about the Indian subcontinent,” Collins said. “They lived in small villages; which is to say that the entire village, men, women, and children, would be Phansigar. They practiced murder and robbery as a religious duty, consecrated to the goddess Kali. They had absolutely no pity for their victims, but would slaughter them as you would kill a chicken.”

  Margaret shuddered. “How can people just murder other people like that,” she asked, “without feeling anything?”

  Collins shrugged. “Ask Tomás de Torquemada,” he said, “or the gentle folks of our own race who burned witches and heretics at the stake for most of a thousand years. The Phansigar believed they had a religious obligation to do what they did. It doesn’t excuse it, or really even explain it, but there it is.”

  “Obligation?” asked the viceroy.

  “Just so. According to the Hindu creation myth, a great demon ate up all humans as fast as they were created, and Kali came along and killed the demon with her sword. But from every drop of demon blood, a little demon was created with the same appetites. According to traditional Hindu belief, Kali solved the problem by licking up the demon blood before it could drop. But the Phansigar believe that Kali grew tired of this, and created two men and told them to kill the demons without spilling any blood. To accomplish this, she gave them long scarves. The men killed the demons and returned to Kali to give her back her scarves. But she told them to keep the scarves, and to make their living from them, strangling other men as they had strangled the demons. It was their duty to obey.”

  “That’s awful!” Margaret said.

  “So it is,” Collins agreed. “In Europe in the Middle Ages bishops used to ride into battle against the infidel. But they were forbidden by their church from shedding blood. So they carried great maces—clubs—in order to smash in the heads of their enemies without shedding their blood.”

  “Enough of that, young man,” St. Yves said severely.

  “Sorry, sir,” said Collins. “But, at any rate, the Phansigar considered what they did both a job and a religious duty.”

  “Wouldn’t people learn to shun their villages?” Margaret asked.

  “You would not notice anything unusual about their villages if you chanced to visit one,” Collins said, “except perhaps how closedmouthed the women were with their gossip when you were present. Indeed, they were considered models of morality. The men did not ply their craft—or practice their religion, if you prefer—within a hundred miles of their own village. They would sometimes follow their intended victims for many miles—remember, this was before the railroads, and all travel was extremely slow—and await just the right location to commit their crimes. They would strangle everyone in the party with the rumal, their ritual scarves, leaving no witnesses, excepting only small children, whom they would bring back to their village and bring up as their own. The bodies of their victims would be ritually dismembered and buried.”

  “Ugh!” said Margaret.

  “How could they have gotten away with these predations year after year?” the viceroy asked.

  “I suppose because of the length of time any journey took,” Collins replied. “Even if everything went well, a long business trip might take three or four months. So a traveler wouldn’t be expected home for at least six months. By the time he was missed, there’d be no way to tell where or when anything had happened to him, or whether it was the result of Phansigar, or bandits, or accident, or whether he’d just decided to stay away. Of course, there were awful rumors whispered about the Kali-worshippers who murdered travelers, but nobody knew anything about them.”

  “But we wiped them all out, didn’t we?” the viceroy asked. “Back in the thirties. Fellow named, ah . . .”

  “Steeman,” Collins said. “Sir William Steeman. He studied everything there was to know about the Phansigar, and spent his career eliminating them. By the late 1840s it appeared his job had been done.”

  “But you don’t think so?” asked the viceroy.

  “He may have missed a village,” Collins said cautiously. “And the Thuggees may have stayed dormant these four decades, awaiting the chance to begin again. They would have to take their time to develop new techniques to keep up with the changing times: railroads, the telegraph, and the like.”

  “Is this just your theory, Collins,” the viceroy asked, “or is their something to support this idea?”

  “There have been some reports recently of travelers—merchants, mostly—who disappeared, and have not been heard of since.”

  “Bosh!” said General St. Yves. “Regular, old-fashioned bandits or dacoits. I’ve had some dealings with them myself upcountry.”

  “Yes,” Collins agreed, “there is a certain amount of banditry going on. Always will be, I imagine. But they don’t go out of their way to hide the bodies. Most of them would just as soon rob without killing at all, if they have no trouble subduing their victims.”

  “That’s true enough,” St. Yves acknowledged. “But people do disappear, you know. Just disappear.”

  “With all due respect,” Collins said, “no, sir, they do not. There’s always a cause. We might not find it out, but it’s there somewhere. And when we can’t find a hint of a cause, and when neither the people nor their bodies turn up, and when the number of people who have developed this distressing habit seems to be increasing, and they’re all from the same general area of the country, one might wish to search a bit deeper for the cause.”

  “You think,” the viceroy asked, “that the Thuggees have returned?”

  “I’m not sure they ever left,” Collins told him.

  The viceroy shook his head. “I could have been back in Roscommon, riding to hounds like a gentleman, or collecting incunabula, whatever they are, but here I am, Viceroy of Her Majesty’s Realm of India, with a resurgence of Thuggee murders to occupy my time.”

  “Here, now,” cried a deep voice from the doorway. “What have we here?” A heavyset man with muttonchop whiskers peered in at them.

  “Dr. McWarren, sorry to impose on you,” the viceroy said. “We have here a, ah, injured man.”

  “Dead, you mean,” McWarren said, glaring at the body with a critical eye. “Well, let’s have a look.”

  TEN

  PUNCTUATED EQUILIBRIUM

  Forsan et haec olim meminisse juvabit

  (Maybe someday it will be a pleasure to remember even this.)

  —Virgil

  For the first few days the trip east was rapid, but it proved unexpectedly eventful. A bullet shattered the window of Moriarty’s compartment in the Express d’Orient at seven A.M. the first morning, as the train sped through the Moselle Valley. “It’s those accursed hunters,” muttered le conducteur who came to investigate, writing in his little notebook. Moriarty accepted the profound apologies le conducteur offered on behalf of La Compagnie International des Wagons-Lits, and was moved to another compartment. When the train stopped briefly at Strasbourg, Moriarty stepped outside to inspect the damage, and discovered that a discreet white X had been chalked beneath the shattered window.

  In Munich, Moriarty and Colonel Moran narrowly missed being run down by a runaway Jaegerlager Bier wagon, and had to step nimbly to avoid being struck by one of the great kegs of beer that came bouncing off the wagon as it jounced down Kaiserstrasse. A day later in Vienna, a crazed man with a knife attacked Pro
fessor Moriarty in the Café Figaro on Neustiftgasse, and succeeded in slashing the back of Moriarty’s arm before Colonel Moran was able to bash him on the head with a chair. Thus reinforcing Colonel Moran’s stated belief that coffeehouses were dangerous places, and that one should spend one’s time in bierstuben or other establishments for the consumption of alcoholic beverages. The Viennese police came and took the man away, and even apologized to their foreign guests for this regrettable incident. Moriarty waved away their offer of a trip to the hospital and bandaged up his arm with the aid of Colonel Moran and a strip of clean tablecloth. Stitching up the sleeve of his jacket would have to wait.

  “Why didn’t you use that pigsticker you’ve got hidden away inside your walking stick?” Moran asked, indicating with a twitch of his chin the black stick with the golden owl handle that Moriarty carried everywhere. “That gent could have done you serious damage.”

  Moriarty smiled grimly. “I had the utmost faith that you would come to my aid in time,” he told Moran. “And I didn’t want to give the police any excuse to hold us here and cause us to miss our connection.”

  “Right,” Moran agreed. “Curious set of coincidences we’re getting here,” he added.

  “It seems certain that the gunshot in France and the beer wagon incident in Munich were no accidents,” Moriarty said. “In which case they must have been planned and prepared before we arrived. You will remember that the gunshot came at exactly seven in the morning. Someone computed just where the train would be at that time. And the shooter knew which window to aim at—someone on the train had marked it with a small X. Likewise, the beer wagon must have been awaiting our passage at the top of that street. And the gentleman here in Vienna who just tried to practice his carving on my chest must have been notified of our pending arrival, and somebody must have pointed us out to him. Which means that our unknown adversary has someone following us. Or, more accurately, traveling along with us.”