The PuppetMaster

by MacNair, Andrew L.

  “Well, they’re the least I can offer. I know what it is like to be in a strange city on one’s own, but I can assure you that, other than a few neighborhoods, it is quite safe here, even at night.” Not that I believed anyone would assault her. The chain mail was too thick.

  She grunted. “Thank you,” She hesitated, not feeling comfortable saying my name, I suppose. “Uli likes this place more than me. I don’t like the smell, but if they have beef stir fry . . that would be gut.”

  From my pack I retrieved a writing pad and for the next two minutes drew the most detailed map possible, one that would bring her safely to Johnny Chang’s House of Mandarin Cuisine. It would also take her through the sweets vendor lanes, which might change her mind about the smells. It usually did.

  With the handshake of a blacksmith as a gesture of a newly formed armistice, and a kiss on the cheek for her sister, Jitka departed.

  “That was very kind of you, Bhim. Und wise. You won over my sister with gifts that she wouldn’t refuse.” Uliana smiled playfully and sat on one of the cracked blocks that bordered the staircase. Her hair was braided with teal ribbons in tight pig-tails that, with her Nordic features, gave her a Swiss Miss look. Heidi of India. Her skirt was a blue-green with a silk border that resembled a sari. Her blouse was a loose kurta of the same shade as the ribbons. Simple, beautiful, and with just enough Indian style that she wouldn’t draw undue attention.

  I tried with questionable success to breathe deeply enough to slow the racing of my pulse. “Well, I did feel badly about not inviting her, and also to give her a better path. If she follows my directions, she will walk past some of the better smells in the city. You just have to know where to find them.”

  She looked at me with cobalt eyes and pigtails and asked, “Will you take me there as well?”

  I gave a short bow. “This very evening Uliana Hadersen. I will pick you up at five-thirty, if that’s acceptable, and show you some of the sights before dinner.”

  Her smile came easily, relaxed but with the earlier sadness I couldn’t fathom. “I look forward to it. It will be like Rama showing Sita the countryside from their flying chariot.”

  I was stunned again. “My God, you know that part of the epic?”

  “Of course, they were some of the most beautiful lines I’d ever read. I even memorized a few of them”

  With a new rhythm in my heart, I took hold of Ugly’s handlebars and told Uli that I would see her at the Riverview at five-thirty sharp.

  Nodding at the bright spokes, she laughed. “And does your shiny chariot have a name?”

  Without thinking I answered, “Surya.”

  “Surya, I like that name,” she replied. “The sun god.”

  Thirty-One

  Sutradharak desired to create the greatest amount of carnage possible with the smallest team and the least amount of plastique possible, and he felt certain he had designed an event to do just that. The scale of devastation it would create would be greater than anything he had previously unleashed. Fear would spread like cholera. The intelligence agencies would scour the cities in a dozen new places, all of them wrong. And that was precisely his intention, or rather the intention of his employers.

  His employers also wanted an event that would trigger a reaction that went beyond the standard political response and intensified investigations. They wanted something that would raise the threat of war regionally, something that would really get sabers rattling.

  Sutradharak believed he had designed an event that would do that as well.

  The media continued to speculate he was a Pakistani extremist. Appropriately so, as his targets had been primarily Hindus traveling along the rail lines. Computer theorists did the same. He smiled to himself, because they were all so mistaken. His motivations weren't religious. They weren't even nationalistic or patriotic. He really didn’t give a flying fuck which of the two countries occupied that frozen piece of shit between them. ‘The bosses’, as he referred to them, wanted Delhi and Islamabad to square off and march down paths of folly to the brink of armed conflict. Escalation on a massive scale. But diversion, at this point, was their topmost priority.

  Sutradharak only wanted to bring about and watch the death. And, in an almost childish way, he delighted in the explosions that made it all happen. It was like a grand fireworks show that he held a front seat ticket to view.

  So, he had his plan now, and a date. What he didn’t have was the location.

  Studying a topographical map for the seventh time that morning, he twirled the ring on his left hand. The entire map south of the Himalayas was spread out in front of him. Geophysical played a big part this time. After a few minutes, with a rare smile, he deftly stabbed the tip of his knife to a place just above the name of a city. Exactly, he mused. A perfect location. Now the only the schedule needs to be set.

  Thirty-Two

  I had a great deal to ponder, puzzles my cloistered, scholarly existence hadn’t really prepared me to do. Five days earlier my priorities had been fairly simple, finish the Bhavabuti play, make sure Sahr and Lalji had provisions for the villa, and get to Devi’s before his Timex snitched on me. Now I owned a different set of priorities.

  Living as a foreigner in a holy city could be like being in an enormous paint ball game or a carnival ride. Surprises of ever sort popped up just when you were feeling complacent. I needed answers. Haroon might have some, so I pedaled from the river up to his club.

  I rolled my newly christened bicycle through the door. The sign said business was closed for two more hours, but he was there and called my name as soon as Ugly was across the threshold.

  “Bhim. You have come to finally plan our vacation. For that you I will fix you the best smoothie on the menu. On the house.”

  “Sorry, Maumed. No planning quite yet, I have other concerns to discuss. Important ones.”

  He frowned, but then patted the bar. “Okay. Sit, my friend. The smoothie will still be free. What are we talking of today? No, don’t tell me. You need advice on how to handle all the new women in your life, and I am the man to give it.”

  I purposefully chose a seat at one end of the bar, wanting to be out of earshot of the bartenders stocking at the other. “Not that either. I need to get information about a mining company, what they are doing, and whether they are operating legally. My guess is they are not. I also need find a way to get some information about a crooked policeman.”

  He ordered one of his barmen to fetch two smoothies and some nuts, and then took the seat next to me. “An illegal mining operation you say? Something close by?” I nodded. “Mmm . . . That requires the use of two things, a new law enacted last year, and a healthy dose of caution.”

  “I’m fairly practiced at being cautious, Maumed, but I know next to nothing about law, especially here. What are you referring to?”

  The blender leapt to life and he waited until it stopped. “Last year our less than expeditious congress created something called the Right to Information Act. It took them over four decades to get it enacted, but now citizens can demand information about what companies are doing in their neighborhoods. Very slowly it is being used to check activities that used to go unmonitored.”

  “Four decades? That is moving slowly.”

  “It started after the Union Carbide gas leak that killed three-thousand people in Bhopal in 1984.”

  “And it is just now becoming law?”

  He nodded.

  “So, why do you say a lot of caution is needed?”

  Our smoothies and peanuts arrived, and Maumed waited until the bartender left. “Some investigators have dug too deeply and demanded to know about too many high–level operations. They paid the ultimate price to obtain it.”

  “Murdered?”

  “Quite. It’s the first time these businesses have been subjected to any scrutiny, and many aren’t keen on the idea. A lot of them are run by powerful people with political connections who don’t want the little people m
eddling. Bhopal was a very ugly example.”

  “Ummm . . . you make it sound as if it isn’t the wisest thing to cite this law. Can I assume a ferenghi with a temporary visa probably wouldn’t be able to?”

  He took a long sip of his smoothie and smiled. “Good assumption, my friend, though a well-connected dance club owner might.”

  I wrote down two names on a napkin. I slid the paper across the bar. As I did so, I realized I was probably creating a debt that meant I would be going to Sandals after all.

  Lalji had left the gate unlocked and the courtyard unguarded again, but with Surya in my possession there was little a thief would covet in the courtyard, unless ripe mangoes were on his list.

  I chained Surya to the tree with a new lock the size of a grapefruit and called out to Sahr as I entered the salon. Her hello was followed by a directive to keep my fat ferenghi nose out of her kitchen. She was up to culinary secretiveness. Fine, I said. I have things to work on. Don’t worry about me.

  I checked my phone messages. One. Mej would be returning from Delhi on the late train and would see me at my gate in the morning. He also had a surprise gift for me, he said. Wonderful. Surprises from Mej could range from practical office equipment to blow-up dolls named Cindy with life-like openings.

  I opened C.G.’s Acer and slid the jump drive into the USB slot. As I clicked through the photographs, I wondered, could this really be more than just medical folklore? An actual cure for something? The pundits believed it was. What if the authors had discovered some workable combination of plants and pressure points? Not likely, I decided, but it wasn't totally out of the question. They had obviously deemed it important enough to carve into very hard rock and decorate it with some nice stain.

  Lilia had once told me that one of the fastest growing fields of pharmacology was ethno-botany, the study of regional medicines and remedies. Pharma companies were spending large sums of money to research indigenous cures in remote areas of the world. Plants and their recipes were being studied from the Kalahari to the Andes. Maybe this was the same type of thing, just ancient and long forgotten.

  I finished scanning our notes and looked at the list of plants again. The nonsense adjectives that C.G. had sworn were junk jumped out at me. Unlike the professor, I wasn’t totally convinced of that. Otherwise, why had the original writers gone to the effort to record them? It seemed like too much work for something useless.

  During my academic time, I'd read and translated a lot of metric language, miles of it. Sanskrit, like Elizabethan, was based on syllables. The patterns had devilish, if not ingenious, designs--long and short vowels in exact mathematical sequences. Truth be known, Shakespeare’s own conventions rose in roundabout fashion from earlier Sanskrit roots.

  The list stared at me. I jotted the nine adjectives onto a fresh sheet, and next to them, the nouns they were modifying--the plants and herbs. Something was wrong--a hard and fast rule was being broken. Nouns and adjectives have to agree. It is a chief grammatical rule--number, gender, and person must match. The endings for the adjectives and nouns were supposed to be the same They weren’t. Quickly, I divided them into syllables, marking the long and short vowels. And then, like Archimedes stepping ever so gingerly into his steaming bath and seeing the water rise, I knew the answer. At least I was fairly certain I did. It would need to be verified, but I knew why those strange little adjectives had been used.

  They were ratios.

  Sahr hustled in to see what was wrong with her Bhimaji, why he was hooting like a drunken hyena at his desk, and finding that he was just fine, returned to the succulent aromas of her kitchen.

  Thirty-Three

  Being a tour guide in Varanasi is not simple. There are too many sights to choose from, rituals to demystify, and too many sensual assaults to filter. Like setting onto a jungle trail, or an Internet search, without a clear sense of direction one becomes rapidly lost. A calculated plan is essential. I, however, being a veteran of the lonelier paths of the city, had that sense of direction. I knew the precise moment the sun’s rays kissed the Durga Temple and bathed her in bashful scarlet, or the best spot to hear the supplications of the holy men at the river. I knew the secret corners of the temple gardens and the purple shadows of the gullies. Guiding was an art form, and though I had never shown anyone else my paths, I was well prepared to reveal the finer distinctions of my Varanasi.

  I picked up Uliana from the Riverview three minutes ahead of schedule, in an autorick that was cleaner and quieter than most. She was standing patiently in the doorway as a hundred Benarsis a minute filed past. A few slowed to stare, because she stood like a princess outside the quarters of the raja’s palace. Her hair was covered by a long silk purple scarf draped in front and behind to her waist. Below that, a pale-green kurta, sheer enough to reveal just a bit more than was acceptable by local standards, hung in diaphanous folds. She had burnt orange pajama pants tapered to the ankles in the Punjabi women’s style Thin-strapped sandals with tiny green sequins graced her feet, and on her arm twenty silver bangles jingled like light rain as I helped her into the backseat.

  The language of dating was obscured under a lot of layers for me. It had been a long time since I had spoken carefully selected words to a woman. I had done it for myself in scraps of poetry, translated plays and regaled in the results. But openly to a woman? I was frightfully out of practice and agonizingly nervous. It turned out not to matter.

  After mutual complements on each other’s appearance—I in my handsomest royal-blue, embroidered kurta—we settled into the relative comfort of the autorick. My driver waited as I turned to Uli. “I thought, if you would like I mean, that we could see a few of the sights you don’t usually see in Varanasi.” Then I added, “We only have forty minutes, and my cook will get grumpy if we aren’t at her table on time.”

  She loosened the knotted scarf, and with a modest smile, slipped it from her head. Her hair glistened like water and smelled of peach and lavender. “You are the guide, Bhimaji of Varanasi. Lead on.” With instructions not to go too quickly, I told my driver in Hindi where we were going.

  We slid into the afternoon tide of bicycles and carts.

  “You speak this language quite fluently. It is Hindi, isn’t it?”

  I nodded. “It’s a local vernacular called Bhojpuri, a little different from what you hear in the movies, but similar enough.” Seeing that she was interested, I continued. “There’re a lot of dialects here, two hundred and twenty-five if you believe a census from the 1930s. A farmer speaks differently from a shop owner in New Delhi. Enough changes in pronunciation and spelling to call them dialects. It makes it hard to get people to concur on things, but nearly everyone understands Carte Bole, standard Hindi, so the country can still function.”

  “Und you enjoy this learning, ya? Like other languages?”

  “I do. I’m a long way from total fluency.” I laughed shyly. “When I was younger my father said I spoke a completely different language because I surfed.”

  “Und surfers in your town speak another language?” Her mouth pursed in a curious smile, and I realized how at ease I felt in the backseat of an autorick with Uliana Hadersen of Tönder, Denmark.

  “It’s like a totally one-to-one dialogue with a righteous set of tubes. Radical, like ripping the lip off a folding section, grabbing a rail, and getting a mountain of air.” I grinned and added, “Babe.”

  She patted the back of my hand. “I understood more of the Bhojpuri.”

  “That’s understandable.”

  Uli had a most endearing feature in her own speech that my ear caught at our first meeting. When she was excited, she would inhale with a tiny gasp that a phonetician might call a guttural implosion. That sounded too much like a digestive problem, so I re-named it Uli’s Delightful Squeak.

  Our driver deposited us outside the Gyanvapi Mosque and closed down his motor to wait. As I helped her out, I explained that it was also called The Great Mosque of Arungzeb, constructed atop
an enormous Hindu temple. As a characteristically feisty Moghul Emperor, he had felt obliged to knock it to the ground in the mid-sixteen hundreds. Now it was the place where Imam Nomani led prayer five times a day and bristled as the police rounded up his followers for questioning.

  “If you look carefully, you can see where his architects copied from the original.” I pointed to the columns and the odd mixture of materials and styles. “Arungzeb had a heart like a glacier. Skewered his brothers and imprisoned his father in a cell at the top of the Red Fort in Agra. Not a particularly sweet guy.”

  She nodded. “I remember that from our visit there. His father watched the reflection of the Taj Mahal in a piece of glass from his prison. I didn’t like the story. Too much sword fighting and beheading.”

  I glanced up. The sun was almost into position. “Come quickly.” I jogged across the avenue opposite the mosque and felt Uli’s arm slid inside mine.

  “Are you going to make me run much on our tour, Bhim?” A gentle squeeze on my forearm.

  “Uh . . . just this once.” We halted near a curved coconut palm. “Now, stand right here,” I turned her shoulders gently, “and look through the minaret.”

  The spire is its finest feature. Dominant, it shoots seventy-one meters skyward like an alabaster needle, and at that moment, the sun’s rays were slipping through its eye--the window of the minaret--to bathe us in a warm afternoon light. Uli drew in a quick breath, and I knew she had seen it. “Mein Gott, It looks like a candle, all orange und yellow with the dust.”

  “Right. You have to squint to see it, but it sort of looks like a huge popsickle stick.”

  She glanced at me and then back at the minaret. “What is a popsickle?” After I explained, we both laughed at how delicious they sounded in the late afternoon warmth.

  She turned from staring at the mosque to look at me. “How did you discover this?”