The Assassins

by Jeremy Trafford

  ‘His murder was unwittingly filmed by an amateur photographer,’ he said. ‘The photographer died in the explosion but his camera was found at the site. That was an election meeting, too. Rajiv was approached by a suicide terrorist who had an explosive device hidden under her sari. As she touched his feet in pretend respect, she detonated it. I hear Venkataraman’s assassin approached him with similar false devotion, but no one inadvertently filmed this killing. At least not as far as we know.’

  ‘They could be lone fanatics with personal, obsessive grievances,’ Tammy suggested.

  ‘I agree it’s possible,’ said the Inspector. ‘I fear, however, that they’re hit men hired by some group that felt threatened by Venkataraman’s campaign against corruption.’

  Max told him about the attempted theft of his camera.

  ‘Do you think there’s a connection?’

  The Inspector nodded.

  ‘I think it’s very likely,’ he said. ‘I suspect you must have unwittingly photographed more than just Venkataraman speaking.’

  ‘The cripple and the older youth urged on the younger one,’ said Clare. ‘He seemed nervous at first. He seemed reluctant. The cripple looked… well, he looked triumphant when Venkataraman was stabbed. The killer looked so delicate and innocent, though.’

  ‘That might be why he was chosen,’ the Inspector said. ‘Anyone looking rough or sinister would hardly have presented a flower without exciting suspicion. The guards would’ve been alerted. Venkataraman wouldn’t have so readily stepped forward. This suggests it was a group operation, and the boy had been carefully selected.’

  ‘He’d probably been chosen because of his slimness and agility,’ Tammy added. ‘The other youth was far too fat and lumpish to have been able to leap up the side of the bus like that.’

  Veerapan pushed long fingers through his impeccably burnished hair before fastidiously polishing his already brilliant spectacles.

  ‘I’ve studied the psychology of terrorists,’ he went on. ‘They feel fear, certainly, but they transmute it into angry grievance. They suppress any guilt by feeling outraged instead.’

  ‘Is there a lot of terrorism these days?’ Max asked.

  ‘It’s much increased of late. Questions have been asked in Parliament about the country’s capacity to defend itself against terrorist attacks. Three months ago, a radio journalist was shot in Chennai. We don’t yet know who’s responsible. He was due to lead a demonstration against corruption and attempts to stop it being investigated.’

  The Inspector hesitantly touched his flawless hair again, as if fearful of it getting even mildly out of hand. Clare suspected he was worried because it might have been dislodged; such perfection told her it was probably a wig. He now spoke about an aim to strengthen those in charge of prosecutions, although it was hard to prove how widespread the corruption was.

  ‘It’s a worldwide problem, like terrorism. It’s a political disease we must do our best to see eradicated.’

  He asked for a copy of the photo Max had taken at the election meeting. The photo did include the boy but only in quarter-profile. As Veerapan readied himself to leave, he stressed there was a need for Clare and Tammy to be cautious about where they went alone, since hit men might pursue a couple of prime witnesses. The couple were disturbed by this warning, although Tammy made light of it once the Inspector had gone.

  ‘Being alarmist makes him feel important,’ he declared. ‘There’s no great reason for us to worry. I’m quite sure nobody is coming after us.’

  CHAPTER TWO

  Clare’s respect for Tammy grew after witnessing his struggle with the killer, while the danger somehow aroused and intensified her need for Max. Moments after they went to bed that night, Max fell asleep. As he slept, Clare looked down at his body and wondered again what had come between them. She found herself thinking back to the night they first made love, three years earlier, after they’d looked out from their window in the castle in that twisting valley. A river of cloud had moved slowly above it, investing her with a feeling of both calm and reassurance. The beauty of the moment had been unaffected by the noise made by rats scuffling beneath the floorboards. Clare remembered the suggestion she’d made: the rodents were just having a bit of fun. Max had kissed her then, with greater confidence, as if her humour had lent him this. He gently caressed her breasts, slowly seducing her. Clare’s urgent response took her by surprise, and Max displayed equal passion as he hungrily penetrated her. She loved the feeling of his thrusts inside her, and the tension of his body. He cried her name. The commencement of his spasms filled her with an awed delight. She exulted in his obvious deep attraction to her and in the gasps he made on coming so convulsively.

  They rose early the following morning. Together they watched as the night mist evaporated, curling and twisting up and away like bonfire smoke. The air was vibrant as they walked along the riverbank, and the little river quivered in the dazzle of the sun. They stretched out by a river pool while a breeze blew over them. The poplars above them rustled and the autumn grasses shivered. Tiny insects hummed delicately all around them.

  They undressed and waded into the water. As they floated in the pool and kissed, holding each other in a loose embrace, Max told Clare that he was falling in love with her. He flushed as he admitted this, and she was touched by his being so tenderly disarming. Although flattered, Clare was puzzled by the suddenness of this disclosure, thinking people didn’t fall in love that quickly.

  Clare brought her thoughts back to the present and set about waking Max. She kissed his mouth before sliding her hand down his body to caress his cock. He didn’t respond with the immediacy she was accustomed to, and this provoked her into saying what was on her mind.

  ‘What’s come between us?’ she forced herself to ask but felt the question falter on her tongue. ‘You’re elsewhere. You’re with me and not with me.’

  The fan swished on. Clare waited for his reply, too long she thought. She became aware of the soft beat of rain upon the roof. Max shifted uncomfortably.

  ‘I can’t tell you,’ he said at last. ‘I’m sorry. I really am.’

  He reached out, obviously wanting to protect Clare from something. He pulled her towards him and embraced her tightly. This caring part of him had always impressed her but now she didn’t know what to think. She said nothing; she hardly moved. Max’s hold on her loosened and he fell asleep again, lost to her in dreams. Waves of slow fatigue began to wash over her too and she gave in to them.

  She dreamt of the figures of Vishnu and his wife, Lakshmi, holding each other in an amorous embrace. But the dream kept changing. A boy appeared; he bore a look of innocence that changed abruptly to one of cold brutality. He had a flower in his hand, which was sweating drops of blood, and a man was staring up in cruel triumph. A little girl had fallen down and Clare was desperate to save her. She picked the child up and gave her to a man who looked at her with melting pity. But then he changed too. His look altered to one of murderous fanaticism as he began swinging towards Clare on his crutches.

  Horrified, Clare jolted awake.

  Forcing the nightmare from her mind, she resolved to put the whole terrible experience behind her. She deliberately recalled the image of Shiva, his hand raised in a gesture of intrepidity. Then she turned her thoughts back to the castle: the wooded hills visible through high lancet windows, firelight reflected on the frescoed walls and fluttering in the shadows on the coffered ceiling. All the students had been dining there together on their last night, when Max, surrounded by that loud and vivacious company, had whispered in her ear.

  ‘Will you marry me?’ he asked.

  Clare said yes, thinking she’d never met a man as gentle and solicitous as Max.

  Max was scrolling through the photos on his camera. When he came to those of the crowd around the orator, he focused his attention on a face in quarter-profile that might be that of the boy assassin. There was the shadowy suggestion of the cripple but no image of the chunky young man who
’d made that feint lunge at him with his flick-knife and had subsequently gone on to threaten Tammy with it.

  Max hoped Tammy was right in thinking the two youths were just crazy loners, although he took seriously Inspector Veerapan’s theory that the youths belonged to a group of hit men who might want to eliminate the key witnesses to their crime. The youths knew that Tammy and Clare had seen their faces, but it was the mysterious cripple who had paid Clare most attention. It was his child she’d rescued and his gratitude had seemed genuine. Clare thought it was he who’d approached them at the election meeting, and Max recalled being impressed by his quiet dignity.

  Max was anxious, however. He was worried for his wife’s safety and for Tammy’s as well. Their time in Madurai was coming to an end, though, and then they’d be returning to Chennai, with its larger population and greater anonymity. The fact of their imminent departure reassured him, and his thoughts switched to his personal dilemma, which was growing ever more pressing and demanding to be faced. He knew he had to tell Clare, and he’d have to tell her soon. She’d be more hurt than angry, he reasoned. Although he knew he could confront anger well enough, he was far less certain he could face up to hurting her. She wasn’t always as tough as she liked people to think. It had been that combination of strength and sensitivity that had first attracted Max to her.

  The early days of their lovemaking were still warm in Max’s memory. He’d been surprised by Clare’s passion, not having encountered strong sexual feelings in women before. His two previous experiences had been disappointing; they had made him feel undesired and intrusive and diminished his passion.

  Rick’s tanned and animated face, his bold advances, his enviable lack of inhibitions and his impetuous flood of words all stood in sharp contrast to Max’s experiences with women. Rick had moved too fast, though, and he’d been too demanding. Their affair came to a head two months before Max met Clare. In the end, Max had rejected the man he’d half-wittingly encouraged, responding to Rick’s resentment and indignation with a level of anger he knew was more assumed as a protective measure; it wasn’t what he truly felt.

  As Max had been determined to push his feelings for Rick away, he met Clare while in a decisively reactive mood. He fell in love with her in Italy, delighting in the quickness of her mind and the quiet irony of her observations. He hadn’t minded that she often outshone him. He felt himself to be one of life’s admirers, unable to love someone unless he much admired them and the other person displayed obvious reassuring affection.

  When Clare returned from Italy to London, she introduced Max to her mother. Her father had died some years before. It was then Max learned of Clare’s younger sister, Violet, who had Down’s Syndrome. Their mother had developed a heart complaint, which meant she now had to keep Violet in a care home. Clare confessed how she felt guilty for having ever resented her sister getting so much more of her mother’s attention, even though she felt so sorry for her.

  ‘You have to let me help you overcome that,’ Max said. ‘We should share each other’s irrational anxieties.’

  They’d made love with a demanding intensity. Max revelled in the soft kisses they shared, although sometimes he would find himself involuntarily recalling Rick’s harder, rougher kisses, knowing he’d found them to be equally exciting. He still sometimes thought of Rick and his seemingly endless supply of sexy stories; he recalled how he’d laughed at some of those erotic flights of fantasy. It was as if the more frustrated Rick became, the more bizarre the anecdotes. But then the furious and inevitable row had happened. Max knew how unfair he’d been to Rick, aroused by his ardent declarations yet nervous of the demands they’d seemed to place on him.

  Because of that, Max had tried to be more honest with Clare, at least as far as it seemed necessary. He’d told her about Rick’s existence but not everything about their relationship; he said they’d been good friends. He didn’t talk about the mutual sexual attraction because it seemed a needless risk to take.

  Their marriage had worked extremely well until recently. Max took pride in his wife’s career. He respected her feelings about having children, which they’d decided to put off till they were in their early thirties. Max could see that Clare needed to have children eventually but was now driven to establish her career. She achieved more than Max had done. Her success as a fundraiser for charity contrasted with his occasional photographic commissions, and the one book he’d had published had attracted very mixed reviews, the worst of them having depressed him enormously. He hadn’t felt competitive, though. He was proud of Clare’s abilities. He suspected, however, that she nurtured a covert anxiety about being seen to so obviously outshine him. Was this why she took time off from her career to accompany him on this shared enterprise? Had she already had a premonition that their marriage was threatened? Or was there a blind spot in her vision, some unconscious determination not to see? Was this similar to what had affected Max when he’d first met Narayan?

  Max often thought back to those first encounters in Los Angeles a year ago, those demonstrations of Narayan’s vitality and sometimes rather disconcerting humour. Max’s first sight of him had been in a gym, where he was lifting weights from his chest. Max had been struck by his handsome face, high cheekbones, responsive eyes and finely delineated lips. He loved his cheerfulness when he’d later asked Narayan where he came from.

  ‘Southeast India,’ Narayan had replied. ‘Tamil Nadu. Perhaps you’ve heard of Madras, which is now called Chennai, or the Coromandel Coast, with its tropical palms and thousand temples? Most foreigners visit Northern India, though, knowing nothing of Tamil Nadu and its ancient culture.’

  ‘It sounds fascinating,’ Max said. ‘So what are you doing in Los Angeles?’

  ‘I’m a physicist… a university lecturer. I’ve just qualified and I’m on an exchange scheme with the university here: UCLA. I’m feeling a little cast adrift. So, what do you do?’

  ‘I’m a writer and photographer. So far I’ve published only one book. It’s on Mexico.’

  ‘You must let me read it some time. Have you always lived in LA?’

  ‘Yes,’ Max confirmed. ‘I went to UCLA, too. I majored in political economy. I also studied comparative religion, which has always fascinated me. My father didn’t approve of either. He was a three R father: rich, reactionary and Republican. He was also a fundamentalist Christian who hated gays, illegal immigrants and single motherhood.’

  ‘He doesn’t sound much fun.’

  ‘He wasn’t. But I wish I’d got to him more before he died last year.’ He paused. ‘So why’ve you taken up weight training?’

  ‘Because I don’t want to become all fat and flabby,’ Narayan said with a smile. ‘With too much wobbling stomach and too little breath.’

  ‘There doesn’t seem to be much risk of that!’

  ‘You don’t know what might happen in a few years’ time. You see, I’m really greedy, which makes life difficult in this land of the hot dog and the hamburger. All this horrible meat you Americans wolf down, which I can never touch, being a respectable vegetarian. You know, back home in Tamil Nadu, beef and pork are quite unheard of, save among a few benighted Europeans.’

  ‘Cattle for you being sacred animals?’

  ‘Yes. But to eat meat of any kind is pretty horrific. We Tamils think of vegetables as the food of the god Shiva, who’s especially venerated in the South. But you Americans do have some vegetarians, fortunately for me. Not all of you are shameless carnivores.’

  Narayan laughed then, amusing Max with his slightly aggressive humour.

  ‘I do the weight training,’ Narayan went on, ‘only partly because I fear to become as fat as my two almost elephantine uncles, whose examples I’m not at all keen to follow. It’s also because of the physical release it gives me when I feel anxious and self-doubtful.’

  Max had felt much the same after his father’s death. Narayan’s openness impressed and disarmed him. He invited Narayan home the following week, as Clare was away. Max
showed Narayan around and then offered him a drink. Narayan made clear that he found the house and garden beautiful. His spontaneous reactions and the fact he didn’t affect a lack of interest became his endearing characteristics for Max.

  ‘I’m afraid I’m going to be boring,’ Narayan said. ‘I just don’t drink alcohol at all.’

  ‘That’s not against your religion, is it?’

  ‘Not really. Some of my friends back home are virtual slaves to alcohol, although Hinduism is against us being slaves to anything material. We’re allowed to seek artha, a reasonable level of prosperity, but must be free from the prison of our physical desires. Our souls should not be captive to our bodies. Well, that’s the distant ideal that most of us never reach: moksha, spiritual enlightenment.’

  ‘Do the joys of sex also represent the captivity of the soul by the body?’

  ‘Well, it is captivity of a sort,’ Narayan answered. ‘Some Hindus believe in brahmacharya, the sacred joys of chastity.’

  When Max asked if he believed in that, Narayan ruefully joked that unfortunately he’d experienced those joys far more than he’d wished to. He laughed then, curiously embarrassed, and Max found his amused confusion disconcertingly appealing.

  As Max talked Narayan about those differences in customs and culture, he became aware that he found him attractive but thought he could deal with this without getting at all frustrated. He liked Narayan’s weirdly humorous charm but he’d been able to resist masculine charm before; at least he had with the shamelessly appealing Rick. So Max had concluded that the situation between him and Narayan would go no further than he wished, and he felt sure that it would be no threat to his marriage with Clare. What he hadn’t anticipated was how, in time, thoughts of Narayan would fill his mind by day and agitate his dreams at night. He couldn’t have predicted how far he would travel on this unintended, much resisted, journey.