“Remember in Bela when the parrots used to flock around every afternoon to get fed?” Major Sandiman reminisced.
“Parakeets,” Colonel Morcy corrected. “Psittacula alexandri, as a matter of fact. The red-breasted parakeet. They were enamored of bread crumbs, which the wallah used to throw down at three every afternoon but Tuesday, for some reason.”
The others nodded. Tuesday. They remembered.
“At the foot of the Himalayas,” Moran began, staring into his cigar smoke, “by that swash of jungle called the Terai, there’s a bit of grassland abutting the forest where my chaps and I used to go on maneuvers every spring.”
The officers of the Duke’s Own turned to listen. They’d never been to the Terai. Moran’s story, if nothing else, would be new.
“One day a Hindu in my service, a bright chap named Jivana who went on to become something big in the Kashmir-Afghanistan Railway, told me there was a great tamasha—a sort of spectacle—to be seen at a temple nearby. He assured me that it would not violate any taboos if we went to watch, so the next evening five of us went to see what it was all about. We skirted the woods for about half a mile, and came to a great stand of bamboo, perhaps two hundred yards on a side. Jivana led us through a winding path to a clearing in the center of the bamboo thicket. At the far end of the clearing was a small Hindu temple, a whitewashed clay structure of indeterminate age. The roof of thatched elephant grass sat on ancient teak beams, the ends of which were carved like gargoyles, but in shapes to which the Western eye is unaccustomed. A large bronze bell inlayed with words in an alphabet I did not understand stood to the side of the temple doorway.”
Moran paused to puff on his cigar. “Go on,” one of the listeners urged, and several others nodded; as good a tribute as a standing ovation from a different audience.
“Across the long side of the clearing there was a row of small, un-adorned huts, in front of which sat a row of dhoti-clad priests, each of which was cooking chappattis over a wood fire in front of him. A thin line of blue smoke rose up from each of the fires, and they spread out and joined perhaps a hundred feet up, forming a layer of blue haze that obscured the mountains. The priests ignored us entirely, as though we were meaningless, or perhaps invisible watchers at some ancient and inevitable ceremony.”
Moran paused again, and a lieutenant named Jimlis interjected, “That can’t have been the show—a dozen half-naked Hindu priests sitting around frying bread.”
“That’s how it began,” Moran told him. “Jivana motioned for us to be quiet and stand there, and so we did. I noted that the chappattis were singularly large and course, more cakes than bread.
“Just as the last rays of the sun were coming over the bamboo, the chief priest, an ancient man clad in white robes, emerged from the temple and began striking the great bronze bell with a great bronze hammer. A deep thrumming sound filled the clearing, and the bamboo shivered to the vibrations emitted.”
Moran took another puff on his cigar, stared moodily into it, and went on: “Something brushed by my leg, and I looked down to see a jackal, a great brute of a beast with red eyes and a foul breath, enter the clearing and pause, sitting on its haunches and staring at the chief priest as he continued to stroke the bell. The animal was totally fearless and unconcerned about our presence there.”
Moran’s audience of hardened professional British officers sat entranced; here was a story they hadn’t heard before. “Go on,” said General St. Yves.
Moran nodded. “More of the beasts gathered, coming through subtle pathways in the cane, until there were perhaps a score of them. As each one emerged from the thicket, it sat as the leader had, silently observing the stroking of the gong. Finally, when all had assembled, the priests gathered their rough chappattis and went around the compound, breaking off a bit by this stone, a chunk by that bit of earth, a morsel on top of that flat rock, and so on, until all the cakes were crumbled and distributed and the priests had resumed their cross-legged positions in front of their small huts.
“Then, all at once the head priest stopped stroking the great gong and, as the reverberations died away, the pack of jackals came forward to eat, each to his or her assigned spot, with no fighting or squabbling or any great fuss. After perhaps five minutes they all, as though at a signal, turned and faded away into the cane. The one I think of as the leader went last, again paying me no more attention than if I were a stone or a clot of earth.”
Captain Helsing, who thought he was wise in the ways of all animals, especially jackals, smiled a superior smile. “Jackals don’t behave like that,” he said.
“These did,” replied Colonel Sebastian Moran.
“Did you discover why or how this ceremony began?” asked Colonel Morcy.
“I asked the head priest, each of us managing to communicate in bad Hindi, the only language we had in common. His native language was Oriya, I believe. At any rate, I asked him how this observance came about, and he said he had no idea. The priests of this temple had been feeding the jackals in his great-grandfather’s time, and would continue it as far into the future as Brahma would allow.”
The officers of the Duke’s Own nodded. That was the sort of answer they understood. They could look forward to many more stories from the experiences of Colonel Sebastian Moran. A pukka sahib, Colonel Moran.
And then there was the trading of names:
“Yes, Binky came out to the Soudan in, I think it was ’84. He was a captain then . . .”
“I knew him when he was a subaltern at Kings; hadn’t got his title then, you know . . .”
“Danforth and old Muzzy were great pals. You remember Muzzy? Son of the Earl of Roberts. Christian name David, I believe. Muzzy.”
“Aide-de-camp of General FitzPacker, back in ’77, I remember.”
“Oh, yes. Old ‘Hannibal’ FitzPacker.”
“Hannibal?”
“That’s what they called him. Older than the moon, and incredibly skin-and-bony. Had a fixation on using elephants in the army. Wanted the War Department to buy a couple of dozen Indian elephants and start an elephant cavalry brigade. He was overly fond of brandy, I believe.”
The officers’ postprandial cigars were taken strolling about the deck and discussing portents and the state of the world.
“Hot.”
“Deuced hot.”
“Been hot for a while.”
“It’ll get hotter.”
“Not in England.”
“No, not in England.”
“Glad to be going home.”
“Deuced responsibility, all that gold.”
“Nothing to worry about. Our boys’ll guard it well enough.”
“Deuced responsibility. The chaps aren’t trained for this. Should have used marines. The marines are trained to guard things on a ship.”
“Didn’t have any marines.”
“That’s so. All the same . . .”
Colonel Moran interjected, “You think there’s some danger, then?”
“Wouldn’t think so, no,” said General St. Yves. He took a long puff on his cigar and stared contemplatively at the ocean below. “I watched Captain Iskansen closing the outer vault door yesterday evening. He makes quite a ceremony out of it.”
“How do you mean?” asked Colonel Morcy.
“Well, he has this little c-coterie of officers—ship’s officers, I mean—who come along with him. Won’t let anybody else near while he twiddles the locks and such. We even have to move our guards farther away during the procedure. He keeps his little secrets, does the captain.”
“Same thing when he opens it in the morning,” volunteered a plump major named Bosch. “Banging and twisting and standing this way and that.” He illustrated with emphatic arm gestures. “As seen from afar, of course. Even his own officers clustered about him during the process look away while he’s messing about with the outer door locks. It makes you wonder why he bothers keeping the thing open during the day.”
“So we can all see for ourselves that it’s still ther
e, I suppose,” General St. Yves said. “But all the same . . .”
“There’s something about gold,” Moran offered. “Why, I remember once in the hills above Mawpatta . . .”
After breakfast the next morning Colonel Sebastian Moran carefully selected a cheroot from the twelve tightly rolled Lunkah cheroots in his tooled black leather cigar case and rolled it speculatively between his fingers. “General St. Yves and his officers, they’re good soldiers, all. British to the core,” he told Moriarty, who was sitting in the leather chair across from him in the small, overly furnished upper deck smoking lounge. “I understand them and they understand me.”
“I don’t think they understand quite everything there is to know about you,” Moriarty said dryly.
Moran spent some time poking the end of his cheroot with a toothpick and lighting it before replying. “There are some things, Professor,” he said finally, “that even I don’t know about me.”
Moriarty looked at the colonel with some surprise. “Come, now,” he said, “that’s a statement redolent of moral philosophy. Don’t tell me there beats the heart of a Benthamite under that thick skin of yours.”
Moran puffed cautiously at his cigar for a minute before replying. “I couldn’t say one way or the other,” he said, “not knowing just what it is you’re talking about.”
Moriarty grinned. “No matter,” he said.
Moran lowered his voice. “I don’t suppose you’ve had any further thoughts on the gold, have you?”
“No thoughts at all,” Moriarty admitted. “I find it futile to speculate when I’m possessed of so little information.”
“Well, I can add to your store a bit,” Moran told him. “I doubt if it will help, but just for the sake of completeness . . .” and he told Moriarty what he had heard of the captain’s ceremonial opening and closing of the outer vault door, complete with arm gestures copied from Major Bosch.
Moriarty nodded as Moran finished. “That’s actually interesting,” he said.
“Fascinating,” Moran agreed. “Does it give you any ideas?”
“Actually, it does,” Moriarty told him. “But they’re of no immediate use. For now let us concentrate on retrieving the statuette. Have you had an adequate opportunity to examine the Lady in question?”
“I have poked at her and prodded her admiringly at two dinners now. They bring her out with the soup and place her on a sideboard against the wall behind General St. Yves’s chair. Do the rooms on ships have walls? Bulkheads, perhaps, or scrimshaws, or some such.”
“ ‘Wall’ will do,” Moriarty said. “I assume you’ve verified that it’s the right statue.”
“Under the brass skin of the Lady of Lucknow beats the bejeweled heart of the Queen of Lamapoor, all right,” Moran said between puffs. “There’s no doubt about that. None at all. The brass plating can’t be very thick because it appears to be wearing off in a couple of places. I fear that if the mess stewards keep up their industrious polishing of our little Lady, they’re going to start seeing gemstones peeping out from under the brass.”
He tapped his cigar against the edge of an oversized ceramic ashtray. “The question is, how are we going to induce the officers of the Duke of Moncreith’s Own Highland Lancers to part with their little brass goddess before that happens. That’s the question. And that’s your part, Professor. I think I have my part well in hand. When does your part begin?”
“My part?” The professor polished his pince-nez with a small square of blue flannel and adjusted them on the bridge of his nose.
“Yes. You and that midget friend of yours in the suit of many colors. What is it that you’re planning to do, and when does it commence?”
“It has commenced as we sit here,” Moriarty said. “The mummer is hawking our little statues in the first- and second-class lounges. He’s also passing out a few to the purser and others of the ship’s company who may be expected to display them here and there about the ship. And, of course, he’s telling the tale.”
“That’s it, then?” Moran held his cigar about a foot from his face and stared expressionlessly into the twisting column of smoke rising from its tip.
“One other thing,” Moriarty said. “We have procured a supply of plaster of Paris from the ship’s pharmacy, and the mummer is turning one of our brass statues to stone.”
Moran thought about that for a moment, and then turned his cigar outward and thrust it in the general direction of the professor’s nose. “Are you sure you’re as smart as you think you are?” he asked belligerently. “ ’Cause I have no idea what this mumbo-jumbo’s in aid of, and whenever you try to tell me, I seem to get that much further from figuring it out.”
“Just worry about your part of the job,” Moriarty told him firmly, pushing the cigar aside. “You brought me in on this to solve a difficult and intriguing problem, and I am doing so. Whether you can grasp every strand in the pattern is unimportant as long as you understand your part and do your job. And you’re doing it admirably so far. I have no complaints and, whether you know it or not, neither do you.”
“Well,” Moran said, somewhat mollified by Moriarty’s positive attitude. “I’ll leave you to it, then. But you might tell me a little ahead of time when I’ve to do something, and warn me of what you’re doing, so we don’t cross each other by accident.”
“I’ll be careful,” Moriarty assured him.
“Then what’s next?”
“At dinner tonight,” Moriarty said, “you will take the next step.”
“I will, will I?” Moran put the cigar in the ashtray and pressed his thumbs together. “And what will you be doing?”
“I will be arranging with Captain Iskansen to have a steam launch meet us when we drop anchor in Bombay Harbor.”
Moran picked up his cigar with the thumb and forefinger of his left hand and, holding it in front of his nose, stared at it as though close study would reveal some imponderable secret. When it failed to produce anything but smoke, he looked back up at Moriarty. “And how,” he asked, “will Captain Iskansen accomplish this?”
“Signal flags, Colonel,” Moriarty told him. “Signal flags. He will run the appropriate one up the mainmast as we approach, and a steam launch will await us.”
“They have one for that?” Moran asked.
“Perhaps more than one,” Moriarty allowed. “But the signals officer should certainly be able to do it in one string.”
Moran nodded thoughtfully. “And what’s my part in this charade to be?”
“You are going to inform General St. Yves and any other officers who might be interested that your good friend Professor James Moriarty is arranging for a steam launch to take a selected group of interested and serious-minded friends to Elephanta for the day. We probably won’t be leaving Bombay until the next morning, so we’ll have a long day to explore.”
“Well, you’d best make certain of that before we go haring off to—where?—Elephanta? I thought that was some sort of African disease.”
Moriarty raised an eyebrow. “Elephanta is a small island off the coast of Bombay. It is redolent with caves that have, for centuries, been dedicated as temples to this god or that. The carvings are quite miraculous, or so I’m told.”
“And what will induce a pride of British officers to visit these carved-up caves?”
“They are quite educational and uplifting. They will, of course, take their wives, who will enjoy it immensely.”
“The ladies are fond of being educated and uplifted, I’ll grant you that,” said Moran. “But as to the gentlemen . . .”
“There is one cave that ladies are not permitted to enter,” Moriarty told him. “The officers will find that one quite, ah, uplifting.”
“Ah!” Moran said. “Now you’re talking. Fun for the whole family, eh? I’ll see what I can do.”
Margaret and Lady Priscilla had lunch together in the Ladies’ Dining Room, and then Lady Priscilla went off to pursue her interests—a subaltern named Welles whom she was permitting to
pay a certain amount of polite, proper, and discreet interest in her. Margaret settled into a deck chair under the canvas canopy on the first-class promenade deck, where she could enjoy the almost cool ocean breeze, and worked at transliterating the Devanagari alphabet in the badly printed English-Hindi military phrasebook she had found discarded at the post library. She was determined to increase her Hindi vocabulary by at least two words a day, picked at random from the pages of the phrasebook and devised into the silliest sentences she could imagine. Margaret had found that silliness was a great aid to learning, and a military phrasebook was a great aid to silliness.
She stopped reading as a man in a light tan linen suit paused by her chair to light a cigarette. The match flared, the man puffed, and a stray bit of wind blew the first puff of smoke in Margaret’s face, sending her into a fit of coughing.
The man turned to her, an expression of dismay on his face. “I apologize most terribly, madam,” he said. “Allow me to—Why, it’s Miss St. Yves. How do you do? Well, I see how you do, and it is the fault of myself. I am most horribly sorry.”
After a minute the coughing became sporadic, and then ceased, and Margaret peered up at her inadvertent tormentor. “Well!” she said. “Professor Gerard August Demartineu. I didn’t know you were aboard the ship.”
“Why, you have remembered the whole of my name,” said the French professor, plumping down on the chair next to Margaret’s and extending his arm out to the side to keep the smoke from his cigarette far from Margaret’s face. “I am honored. Yes, it is that I am aboard The Empress of India, as you can plainly see. My, ah, partner and protégé, Mamarum Sutrow, and I are headed to England to begin our career as prestidigitators of the first water.”
Margaret looked around, but did not see the little round-faced jadoogar.
“Mr. Sutrow is in our cabin with a sickness of the stomach,” Demartineu told her, correctly interpreting her visual search of the deck. “He believes that it is the result of something he ingested, and feels sure that some beef was inserted in his lamb curry. I feel sure that he has the sickness of the sea, since it began shortly after we left port and ceases not. But he insists that he is a good sailor and never suffers from the sickness of the sea. But, as he has never been to sea before, I do not understand how he can be so positive of this.”
The Empress of India Page 17