by Amit Nangia
“You wouldn’t put me in a spot like that, would you? You’re a guy that likes to play fair. You didn’t do it…did you?”
I smiled at him. He waited a moment, and then he grumbled something under his breath. And for a few hours after that, he didn’t have much to say.
I picked up the newspaper and started reading it. The news had made it to the front page. I always wanted to make the front page. This was my first.
There was a big picture of the boy and the parents on the front page. The whole front page was filled with stories of the kidnaping. They, the reporters, didn’t know a thing. Just stories built around a few facts.
The report read:
The kidnappers have demanded a ransom for the boy’s return and a ransom note has been received. How, where, and when the money was to be paid, has not yet been revealed. The details have been kept between the kidnappers and the family.
I went through the stories carefully, making sure that I didn’t miss anything. I took them apart word by word, and they still added up to nothing. But for me, it was a kind of uncomfortable nothing. The police wouldn’t reveal the details about the ransom payment, but there could be more than one reason for that. It could either be that they didn’t know anything, or they were planning something big.
The boy wasn’t to be released until twenty-four hours after the money had been paid. The police might grab the guy at the pay-off, but it was likely to get the boy killed. Thakur had planned things, the way he’d explained them to Silky and me, and everything seemed to be going as per plan. So perhaps everything was okay. But I was beginning to have some doubts. It was too quiet for comfort. Perhaps, toofan ke pehle ki shanti.
It was Thakur’s job to get the money collected. And it was his job to keep track of what the police knew. He could collect the money and disappear easily. The police would be in his hands as far as the information was concerned.
Thakur was grinning to himself. His grey hair pushed back on his head, a fake smile on his face, his eyes warm and over-friendly. Not a good sign.
“How are you going to manage the ransom pick-up?” I simply asked.
“Eh…you are very inquisitive.” He made a stupid face, but continued nonetheless, “Well, the money would be left at the railway station cloakroom in the name of ‘Mr. Ashutosh Rana’. A pick up guy has been arranged by me, of course with a fake id. He would be sent to pick it up. It would be in a black suitcase. There would be ten more people with similar suitcases all around the cloakroom, so plenty of other people around in the station, coming and going from the cloakroom carrying suitcases exactly like it. The cops would not be able to keep track of one of them.”
“That seems like a nice plan. Where did you get such a pick up guy from? And ten more like him?” I enquired, trying to get more details.
“Such people are easy to find. There are people who would do anything for a few bucks.” He sighed and said, “He would take the suitcase to the agreed location and an hour later, I will pick it up from him.” He smiled at me and walked towards the main door. “I need to go now, I‘ll catch you guys in some time.”
He was there, right in front of me, walking away, smiling at me. All set to take the money. There had to be some way, I had to find some way to stop him, somehow.
Should I demand to pick up the money myself? Uh-uh, I guessed not. He could send me into a police trap.
Silky? Should I discuss with her and see if we could work out something together? Uh-uh, again. She might be a part of Thakur’s scheme. Or she might have plans of her own. As it is, it isn’t safe to tell her anything. She might do something crazy and dangerous, just for the heck of it.
I didn’t know what I should do. Hell, I didn’t even know whether I should even be thinking about doing anything. Everything was working out like we’d planned, wasn’t it? I was getting so confused and mixed-up that nothing looked straight to me, and any little thing made me suspicious.
Silky sat still in her place, several feet away from me. She stayed there in the chair, one bare leg crossed over the other.
Bare legs, bare shoulders, pure ivory sparkling in the sunlight. A short denim skirt, curved along her thighs, and the thin white blouse, drawn tight, straining softly with the flesh beneath it.
She saw me staring at her, and smiled. She looked just as fresh and beautiful as I had found her the first time: sparkling eyes, shining hair, and her face as red as a rose.
“Well?” She smiled up at me. “Like to have some?”
I shook my head.
“Some drink, I mean?” she said and started laughing.
I frowned, not realizing that I did. Thinking and hoping that things might really be like they looked. She frowned, too, a sort of a doubtful expression crossing her face. And then she smiled again.
“Tiwari…ask away! You look worried.”
“Well…” I hesitated. “Well, I was just wondering…”
“Let’s see…” She tilted her head to one side. “Didn’t we have a good time every time we were together in my room? Did we or didn’t we, Tiwari? Do you remember?”
“Silky, I…I…”
“Words fail you, huh?” She laughed softly. “Well, let’s hope it isn’t a symptom of any physical weakness. Now, if you’ll just step into the bathroom…”
“The bathroom?”
I got up and went into the bathroom. I heard her draw the shade, and I started to jerk the door open. Then I saw what she was doing, and I stayed where I was until she called to me.
Her shoes were on the floor beside a chair. Her blouse was on the chair, and so was the skirt. She was lying on the bed, her black hair spread out on the pillow. She held out her arms to me.
I cradled her body with my own, grazing my lips over her neck. She rubbed against me, and I locked my hands on her hips and pushed against her. I was hard and insistent and she licked her lips, her eyes drifting shut.
Her legs started to shake, threatening collapse, but I held her tight. There was something incredible about the way she smelled. Each time she moved, I answered. Each time I moved, she moaned.
My hand skimmed lower, flirting between her legs. My hand slid between her legs, higher and higher, and she parted them without hesitation.
Her heart pumped, waiting.
One heartbeat, then two.
I kissed her neck, whispering in her ear, in slow, exquisite detail exactly what I was going to do to her.
I drove inside her, over and over, determined to please her.
I kissed her again, her tongue tangling with mine, her breathing as ragged as my own.
There are some things you can’t fake, that you can’t pretend about, and our time together was one such thing. She wanted me, and she couldn’t have faked it. There wasn’t a second of pretence in the times we had been together. So even if Silky had a reason – and, of course, she did – for allowing the want to take over, there wasn’t any faking afterwards. That was genuine, if nothing else was. At least that’s what I wanted to believe.
When I woke up, she was gone. She’d dressed and gone over to see how the boy was, perhaps. And I stayed there on the bed thinking that she was coming back in a few minutes. She was just going to look in on the boy, she wanted to check to see if Thakur had been calling, and then she’d be back. She’d be back there with me, any minute now. We’d be together again – Silky and I. And this time, we’d talk things out.
I’d find out how she really felt about the boy. Whether she also wanted to get the boy safely to his family? Or would we agree together to just leave all this and go away and start a new life?
I lit a cigarette and lay down again. Wondering just how I could work around to the subject, hoping that she would bring it up first. At least after the past two hours, there wasn’t any suspicion left between her and me. Neither was she suspicious, nor was I. It just got wiped off, I think.
I felt the tension coming back to me. I sat up and began putting on my clothes, shoving the gun into my hip pocket. I he
ard her coming. I reached for my shoes, and started putting them on as she opened the door.
She came in, looked at me for a tad bit longer than she usually did before talking, her face stiff and her eyes nervous and frightened. I guessed there was something she wanted to say, and I stared right at her.
“What’s happened to you? You look white,” I chuckled.
“Tiwari, I…I…” She hesitated, took a deep breath.
“Yeah?” I nodded. I finished tying my shoelaces, and stood up. She took a step back.
“Come on, Silky. Tell me what happened? After all, two people as close as us – sweethearts, I guess you’d call us – shouldn’t be afraid of each other.”
A touch of red came on to her cheeks. She took another deep breath, hesitated, and then at last she let it out, “The boy, Tiwari… He is not in the room.”
The boy couldn’t have gone very far. He was probably somewhere in the house or around it, hiding somewhere.
“N…no! He isn’t anywhere in the house or around,” Silky shook her head. “I looked before I called Thakur,” as if reading my thoughts.
“Well, let me have a look. We’ll look together.”
“B…but…”
“That’s what we’ll do, okay? And we’ll do it right now.”
I took her by the arm and pushed her through the door. We started going through the rooms, with me getting agitated, and Silky stammering and answering me in almost a whisper.
“Well, his clothes are gone. It sure looks like he dressed himself and ran off.”
“Tiwari, we’ve got to…”
“Yes, ma’am. That’s just the way it looks. And it looks like he probably did it when you were over there with me. When we were both pretty busy, with the curtains pulled, and we weren’t paying much attention to anything for about two hours. That’s when it happened; that’s what it looks like.” I let go of her arm suddenly, let go with a force that jerked her shoulder.
She squealed a slight ouch, before taking a grip of things and telling me, “We’ve got to leave, Tiwari! He’s had plenty of time to get to the highway.”
“He wouldn’t get that far. I’m sure of it, and so is Thakur. Otherwise, he wouldn’t be coming anywhere near here.”
“But…”
“Thakur thinks the same thing that I do, that the boy is hidden or passed out somewhere around here. He must have found that place, some nice secluded spot where no one can see him, and that’s as far as he’ll go. That’s what Thakur thinks… and I got a hunch it’s what you think too.”
“No! Aaah, no, Tiwari! I wouldn’t…”
“I told you, Silky. I told you both why that boy had to stay alive. Now, where is he? Where did you leave him?”
“I didn’t …,” She shook her head, “Do you really think I’d do that to him?”
And for a moment, I wavered. For a moment, I could almost see why she’d done it…and perhaps why she’d done it this way. Silky was scared. She wasn’t sure of what I wanted to do, so she’d tried to take the decision out of my hands. She’d hidden the boy, left him where he’d be safe until she could get a word to the police. Then, she’d told me he’d run away, so that we’d have to run. It was the only thing she could do, as she had looked at it. It was practically the same thing that I’d been thinking about doing. Running away with her and starting a new life.
So, I had it all figured out, almost. We were on the same side. We both wanted the boy to get back to his parents. That’s the way I figured, the way I thought it was. But with a thing like this, a guy like me, figuring and thinking wasn’t enough. I needed Silky to tell me, just to come right out with the truth without any tricks or hedging around. It was all she needed to do. And she didn’t do it.
She was too frightened, too anxious. And when a person’s that way, they almost always do the wrong thing. And what she did was the worst thing she could possibly have done.
“Tiwari…I swear I have got nothing to do with this. You need to trust me,” she muttered
I had no answer to this plea. “We need to keep looking.”
We went to the backside of the house and ran across the empty plots searching for the boy. The boy was nowhere to be found. We went to the front of the house too. Still no sign of him. Something wasn’t right. The main gate of the house was locked; the kid couldn’t have jumped such a large gate without anyone noticing him. He had to be inside the house.
Suddenly, something struck my mind and I ran back to the house. I stepped inside the large gate and looked at the car. I looked at Silky and asked her to stay back.
I was right. There he was: in the boot of the car.
She nodded and stood back, and I got down and lifted him out.
I didn’t know whether he was just unconscious from the exertion, or whether he’d been slugged. But there was a big bruise on the right side of his forehead. I looked down at it – so little, and so limp in my arms. And then I looked at her. And if I’d had my hands free just then…Well, it was a good thing for her that I didn’t.
We went back to the house and I put the boy down on the sofa. Silky stood watching, kind of defiantly, as I sponged his face and forehead with cold water.
He came to life and whispered that he felt fine. I guessed that he wasn’t really hurt, just weak and frightened by so many things he couldn’t understand. Most of what I thought were bruises turned out to be dirt and got washed off.
“Well …” Silky sloshed whiskey into a glass; gulped it. “I guess I missed that time, didn’t I? I didn’t hit him hard enough.”
“I didn’t mean that, sweety. The situation was such that I thought you hit the boy.”
“Did I?” She reached for the bottle again. “You’ve got all the answers. You tell me whether I did it or not.”
“I guess you probably didn’t.”
I told her to keep her voice low; she’d disturb the boy otherwise. Silky yelled that she didn’t give a damn if she did disturb him.
“Why the hell should I? Didn’t I try to kill him? Well, didn’t I, you rotten, mean, hateful, son-of-a-bitch? Sure, I did! That’s the kind of girl I am! I meant to kill him! I tried to! I did, I did, I did…”
And I knew that she hadn’t – I knew it in my heart – but still it was easy to believe that she had. Silky looked twenty years older, haggard and vicious, her eyes glaring crazily. She was all crazy meanness and viciousness, drained dry of everything else. And it was easy to believe she’d do anything.
I told her to shut up. She yelled louder, backing away as I moved towards her.
She’d never said anything dirty before; sharp and grouchy, maybe, but never dirty. But now she cut loose, and the names she called me, the things she said! Well, I’ve heard some rough talk, but never anything as bad as that. Some of the words, but never all at one time. No one had ever called me one of them without losing some teeth.
Blood rushed to my eyes and a red haze blurred my vision. I had to get rid of it, let off steam some way so that I didn’t end up killing her. I started yelling myself. I shouted back at her, cursing, calling her names. I yelled and she yelled. Everything was a screaming red haze, yells and filth and redness, and how long it lasted I don’t know.
But it was long enough. Long enough for him to come inside the house.
We heard the main door slam, and that brought us up short. The room went completely silent now. But by then, he was right on top of us. He’d heard it all.
Thakur took me to one corner, and whispered that I shouldn’t be too harsh on the little lady. She was just jumpy, like little ladies got sometimes, and it was up to me and him to keep our heads at such a time.
“I’m going to. That’s just what I’m going to do, Thakur.”
“Great! You’re my kind of guy. Now, you just sit tight here, and I’ll get you fixed up right.”
He wasn’t at all upset about what had happened. It didn’t change the picture at all, he said. Not that much. Everything was working out fine and we’d all be wearing diam
onds in another day or two.
Silky went into the bedroom with the boy.
I looked at Thakur as he started piling groceries, beer, and whiskey on the table. And I saw that he wasn’t carrying a gun. Things were working out real nice for him, he thought, and there was nothing he needed a gun for.
“Well, Tiwari,” he motioned toward the table. “Anything that I have forgotten? Anything you think of, just name it.”
“You’ve got plenty. We’re not going to need all that.”
“Well, you can’t ever tell if it’s enough. I want you and Silky to be comfortable, and you may have to hole up here for quite a while.”
I grinned to myself. I said, “I was sure we’d have plenty of everything.”
“Yeah?” He gave me a sharp look.
“Well, uh, well,” he said hastily, “what I meant was, you might want something and I wouldn’t be around to get it for you.”
“Sure. You don’t have to worry about that at all.”
He hesitated, started to say something else. Then, he gave up on it – chalked it up, I guess, to some more of my screwy talk – and uncorked a bottle of whiskey. We poured drinks. He went on with the gabbing, talking about how fine everything was. And I nodded and grinned and told him he was right.
The fun was going to be over pretty soon. Pretty soon, now, I was going to set him back on his heels. So I let him enjoy himself while he could.
Silky came out of the bedroom and made mashed eggs and milk for the boy. I watched from the doorway as she tried to feed it to him, and it was just not happening. He was refusing to eat anything from us and was getting weaker and looking more pale.
She brought the plate and the glass back into the kitchen. Thakur pulled his everything-is-fine line on her, and she stood and looked at him until he was done, until the words kind of died in his throat. Then, she filled a glass with whiskey and sat down in a corner with it.
Evening came on. Thakur made some food and opened up some of the chips he had got.
I ate a pretty good meal. Silky took a few bites and more whiskey. Thakur didn’t eat anything.