My Lady of the Bog

by Peter Hayes

  “ ‘Torn? Are you blind? It has just come from the weaver!’ ”

  “ ‘The fabric I speak of is your word. Now that you have broken it, no amount of mending can repair it. For if your word meant nothing to you last month, why should it mean something tomorrow?’

  “And so ended a twenty-year partnership—one highly beneficial to all.”

  “You are saying . . . ?”

  “. . . that the fabric won’t be rent by me. I gave this queen my word of honor. I swore it on the Highest Power. How can I betray her?”

  “Will you betray your Sultan, then? And your clan?”

  “Ghazil,” Sikandar pleaded, “I have sworn an oath! Before the gods!”

  “The gods be damned!” Ghazil declared. “It’s not the gods you have to worry about. It’s Jafir. Do you know what he will do if he thinks you’re a threat? He will impale you on a stake in the middle of his courtyard. There you will writhe and squirm for a week until death mercifully overtakes you. Is that what you want? A stake up your ass? My God,” Ghazil thundered. “You’ve forgotten the very first lesson I taught you.”

  “Hardly; it was matsa nyāya: the Law of the Fish: ‘Big fish swallow little.’ The problem, Ghazil, is that I am not a fish. I am a prince. And I intend to act like one.”

  “Why?” Ghazil called after him. “So that you may congratulate yourself on your righteousness?”

  Sikandar paused and said over his shoulder, “For no other reason than I feel wretched when I don’t.”

  Sikandar (and I) made our way to the river. There, in the tepid pools, I glimpsed our reflection. We were wearing a red floral kurta with matching turban, and lovely pearl-and-ruby studs.

  I tried to make sense of my condition, though even then, I could feel the heat of the sun-baked boulder and hear the cacophony of desert birds bedding down for the night.

  What was this? Was it a book? A dream? A vision? It was filled with so much love and squalor, gems and death, poetry and cruelty—and parallels so unique to my life—I could only believe it was my own. Perhaps some primordial part of me yearned to experience the fullness of life, to hold real gold and priceless jewels, or maybe some ancient eye inside me needed to see red blood spill, pooling in the ochre dust, and the white of defleshed bone.

  Our tent stunk to high heaven. The odors of horse and human manure competed with those of smoke and curry. There was no furniture to speak of, nothing but rugs and a folding table, no semblance even of privacy and quiet. Someone was singing in a nearby tent and a servant was snoring loudly in the corner.

  The tent flap opened and ‘Abd al-Wali entered, his arms around two gorgeous houris. Where he found them I can’t imagine, though from the way they were dressed (or undressed, really) and the wanton boldness of their gazes, they were clearly not your village virgins. “Hey, Kando!”

  I hoped Sikandar chose the one on the left—a delicious, sloe-eyed slut in an embroidered vest and harem pants. For a moment, she seemed surprised to see him. Then she turned and pranced, daring us to follow, her anklets tinkling and her heavy breasts exuding a carnality that left me weak in the knees.

  Thus I was dismayed to feel her presence creating no heat within my brother. “Oh, Great One,” he said to ‘Abd al-Wali, “you will have to be twice the man tonight.”

  ‘Abd al-Wali frowned. “Kando, come. Surely the King of Rajasthan deserves a little love.”

  Sikandar laughed, unhappily. “Be careful what you call me, brother. ‘Many a tongue has cut many a throat.’ ”

  “Kando,” ‘Abd al-Wali pleaded. “Look at her!”

  But Sikandar wasn’t interested. He was thinking of the Queen of Indore and remembering the heavenly realm of her eyes, except the Queen was thirty miles away. Instead, Sikandar shook his slave awake and asked him for a drink of water. The man returned with a sweating kalash. Christ, but it was poisonous: hot and reeking of saddle leather.

  Then the slave unrolled a Persian rug. This was our bed. Was I missing something? The man was a prince. He owned a diamond the size of the Ritz, and this is where we were sleeping tonight? On a rug, on the sand, in a room with a fool and no furniture—a rug that was crawling with fleas and vermin?

  Occasionally, the courtesans flickered in his mind as one of them giggled or moaned in a nearby tent, sounds soon lost in his longing for the Queen.

  He replayed their encounter. Ghazil was right. If viewed in one light, the Queen’s overtures could be seen as an attempt to undermine their kingdom, a covert campaign of political war. But what a harsh and wretched light to view things in! In its glare, every goddess was a demon. No, Sikandar did not believe this was her motive. He had felt the tension, seen her fear and grief. It was not manufactured.

  As for Ghazil’s conviction that he’d been seduced, that, too, was nonsense. Sikandar did not deny that Mayura was lovely, though when he recalled her, it wasn’t her loveliness he remembered but her fire. He kept seeing the way she spoke of her enemies, her mouth spitting poison, her eyes hot, burning stars.

  He remembered a time as a boy when he and Ghazil had come upon two dueling Mamelukes. When Sikandar had asked why the men were fighting, Ghazil had motioned to a woman nearby and said, “That girl has a hole between her legs. These men are killing each other over who will stick their thingamajig in it.”

  Sikandar and I both laughed at the memory: his introduction to “the birds and the bees.”

  Eventually, he said his prayers. Christ, but they went on forever! He thanked God for this and the Goddess for that, and at least thirteen other deities for his victory in Indore. He thanked the Earth for allowing him to walk upon Her and for giving rest to his weary head. He thanked the rivers for their water and then called down blessings upon his ancestors, father, people, and the Queen.

  I tried to sleep, but it was useless. Instead, I kept picturing the Queen of Indore, helpless, on her knees before us. There are men for whom such sights, instead of inciting their chivalry, bring out their worst. Perhaps I am one. For as Sikandar fell asleep that night, I found myself imagining the many bold and wanton things that such a man as I might have done.

  1.yakshi: a female fertility genie

  2.rākshasi: a demoness

  3.vetali: a vampire

  4.aghori-tantrikas: Practitioners of tantra, particularly those unorthodox rites involving meat, wine, ganja, and sexual relations

  Chapter 26

  I returned to Dorset in the dead of night—or more precisely, the dead of morning. The clock read 4:29 a.m. I had begun reading Sikandar’s memoir at nine o’clock the previous evening. Seven and one half hours had passed.

  I looked down at the book. It was open exactly to where I’d just been: with Sikandar asleep on the flea-bitten rug. Had I been reading—or dreaming? Or had something entirely else occurred?

  I went upstairs. Despite the hour, Vidya was seated on our bedroom floor, cross-legged and bent at the waist so that her brow was pressing the carpet, her ringlets covering her face like a veil. It was difficult to say what she was doing. Meditating? Praying? Bowing? Sleeping? A stick of incense fumed before an idol of Ganesh. The elephant-headed god, noose in one hand, axe in another, a cobra girdling his voluminous belly, was dancing on a mouse, an illusion made all the more vivid and real by the fluttering light of a flickering candle.

  Sensing my presence, Vidya lifted her head and drew back her long black hair. She looked at me slowly with soft, dark eyes.

  “I know where you were the night Jai was murdered.”

  She said nothing.

  “In the book.”

  She gazed at me intently, then bowed to her god.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  She uncurled her legs and stretched them to the side. “Would you have believed me?”

  “No.”

  She made a very Indian gesture—a side to side rolling shake of her head that has any number of meanings, including: yea, nay, never in a million years and maybe.

  “Now tell me, Vidya, what happe
ned.”

  She paused for a moment. “I did go to the theater. And I did walk home. I got in at midnight. Just as I said.”

  “And Jai was dead?”

  She shook her head. “He was seated in the study, covered by his shawl. He would do that—draw a shawl up over his head—when he wanted to sleep or . . . just retire. I was trying to decide whether to wake him or not when the buzzer rang. I queried the intercom; there was no reply.”

  “So you buzzed them in.”

  She shook her head, no. “Jai had warned me. He said it was how miscreants gain entrance. Still, I wondered if perhaps the intercom was again out of order and so I went downstairs to see who it was. Actually, I thought it might be you. The lift was engaged, so I took the stairs, but when I got to the lobby, no one was there.

  “I realized then I had neglected to fetch the post. It was wedged in our mailbox and I struggled with it for quite some time, ripping it frightfully, I’m afraid. When I was finished, I rang for the lift. It came straight away.

  “The door to our flat was open a bit, though I couldn’t recall if that’s how I’d left it. The moment I entered, I smelled something odd, almost like . . . animals. I thought it might be the gas at first, so I went to the kitchen. Then I returned to the study and Jai was . . .” Reliving the moment, she closed her eyes.

  “You didn’t phone the police. Why?”

  “There was no . . . urgency. You saw him. There was blood . . . on . . . everywhere! . . . Then I noticed the book on the rug and picked it up. You see, I had this fantastic notion that someone had come out of the book and killed him.”

  “Come out of the book?” I asked, in disbelief.

  “Correct. For Jai had told me it was enchaunted. He said it was infused with maya shakti at a time when people could still do such things. And that it would captivate whomever read it. So when I saw it, I picked it up. No sooner had I read a line or two than I was . . . gone.”

  Believe me, I knew what she meant.

  “But weren’t you afraid the killer was still around?”

  “Truly? No. I don’t know why. And a moment later, I was . . . somewhere else.”

  “Where were you?”

  For the longest time, she didn’t answer. Then in a faraway voice she said, “In a tower. In a desert place. At night. The stars were unbelievably bright. And I could smell the smoke and bougainvillea . . .”

  She paused. “When I returned, it was getting light. And I realized then I’d been entranced for hours. And that, you see, presented a dylemma. Because I knew there was no bloody way in hell I could ever explain to anyone, including myself—or you—where the bloody fuck I’d been!”

  Christ, we were screwed. For up until then, I had still hoped she might be able to explain herself in some defensible way. There was no chance the police—or a judge and jury, if it came to that—would ever believe she’d been trapped inside a literary tower.

  “And who were you?” she asked me now.

  “A prince. With his men . . .”

  “Ah,” she said in a voice that made my heart go gray. “You’re the one she fears will betray her.”

  I looked at her then in the light from the window. It was hard to say who had spoken those words.

  “Tell the Queen we won’t betray her. Tell her . . . we . . . Sikandar loves her.”

  I turned to the window. It had long been dawn: the white nights of English summers last a bare handful of hours. I looked out at the graying downs, the rolling hills, the rising sun.

  Chapter 27

  I didn’t go to bed that morning but sat out in the lightening garden, trying to make sense of what I’d seen and heard. Try as I might, I couldn’t. In Houlihan’s words, I was “a lost soul in a strange world,” a world of love and a world of magic that nothing in my experience permitted me to understand. For, like the little Dutch boy who found a hole in a dike that, left unchecked, would unbolt the sea, so I seemed to have come across a tear in the very fabric of existence—a hole that led to God-knows-where!

  That the book’s strange effect was like nothing I’d encountered was beyond discussion. Whether it was “enchanted” or not, I really couldn’t say.

  I did know this: I couldn’t speak of it to anyone but Vidya. To have even hinted to my colleagues I possessed a codex that was somehow “charmed” would have been career suicide. Grants, funding, affiliations, publication and access to sites and materials would have dried right up.

  The only person who might have explained it to me was Jai, and Jai was in a place beyond all explanations.

  Somehow, I’d crossed a border. And if I had crossed in one direction, who was to say that a Rajput warrior, as Vidya had surmised, could not have crossed it in the other and, leaping from the pages, slain Jai with his sabre before vanishing back from whence he’d come, where no earthly Houlihan would ever find him. It gave “lost in your reading” a whole new gloss.

  It was then I had the strangest notion, like none I’d ever had before: what if my life were also a story and Xander Donne a character in another enchanted book? I flipped between the two: Xander and Sikandar, but neither was any more real than the other.

  I work with hard data: materials, dirt. I have never been a metaphysician. So to even entertain this notion told me this: that I had changed. It was as though with each immersion in the tale, I returned to Dorset dyed a deeper shade of Sikandar. For I did feel different: younger, braver, as though Sikandar’s mind and person were subtly, but progressively, informing my own.

  Then I had the wildest idea yet: if I were a character in some magical story, then why not play my role in it with all the grace that I could muster, and enact it in such a rollicking manner that it kept the Reader—whoever that was—up and reading way past bedtime?

  Silly as it was, the fantasy was liberating. I felt lighter and freer than I had in days. I speed-dialed Houlihan. I thought I’d try sāman on him, conciliation.

  “Yeah?”

  “You know, Mick, I’m actually a homicide detective just like you. Only the cases I work aren’t just cold. They’re below zero. So since we’re in the same basic business, why not work this case together? You show us yours; we’ll show you ours.”

  “No can do.”

  “And why’s that?”

  “ ‘Cause you and your honey there is about two cunt hairs away from being grabbed. I tell you a thing, you’ll just use it to fix up your alibis.”

  “There’s nothing to fix. We didn’t do it.”

  “Maybe you,” Houlihan conceded. “General census is you’re a pain to the butt, but probably not a murderer. And I ain’t sayin’ she did it all by her lonesome. Coulda had help. But lemme tell ya. For your education. Your lady friend ain’t who she say she is. Nuh-unh. Not by a long shot. Now, how ya like them apples?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Let’s just say it’s more’n I can put inta words . . . . You wanna, I can draw you a picture.”

  At the stationhouse in Stour, Chief Superintendent Dahmer’s assistant laid out before me half-a-dozen grainy photos appearing to document a party of wastrels exiting a silver Bentley. A bald, squat, neckless monster in the foreground was obviously the bodyguard, and from the sedan’s creamy leather interior, an older gentleman was emerging. His eyes were so dark and pouched with dissipation that it looked like he was wearing mascara. Behind him, jewel in her nose, cigarette in a glittering fist, bending in a way that displayed the creamy ravine of her cleavage, was a lovely young woman: your basic moneyed, Asian beauty. The bodyguard, whose colorful tattoos burgeoned from his collar, was holding the car door open for her while clearly peering down her dress.

  “Goes by the name Rukmini Patel,” Dahmer said. “Indian girl, Kenyan national. She’s a . . . how does one phrase it ? . . . royal concubine . . . a ruling-class tart.”

  “Who’s the old man?” I asked.

  “Ibrahim Saluk Habib, international arms dealer and all-round bunghole. She was his plaything for a while. Disappeared from h
is entourage six months back.”

  “And The Hulk?” I asked, eyeing the bodyguard.

  “Bunzo Doi. He’s yakuza.”

  I studied the girl. “And you think this is Vidya. This . . . plaything of the sheik. But you’re not sure.”

  “Hey,” Houlihan observed from London by speakerphone, “it’s not exact, but you gotta admit, the resemblance is there.”

  I scrutinized the photos. She did look like Vidya.

  “We can’t find any record of her in Kenya or Switzerland, where she says she went to school, or anywhere else for that matter,” Dahmer added. “That’s why we think she may be Rukmini Patel.”

  “That’s absurd!”

  “Is it? Rumor is she absconded with a pot of Habib’s jewels and money. Could be in hiding. Could be dead. Or could have married Jai Prasad.”

  I rolled my eyes. “You really think the whore of some Saudi prince is going to enter into an arranged marriage with a professor of religious studies who made, if he was lucky, sixty a year?”

  “Hey!” Houlihan offered. “Maybe it was love!”

  “Yeah. It was love. And then she killed him.”

  Cartoon characters bang their heads against inanimate objects in frustration; as I left the stationhouse, I wanted to do the same. The slurs against Vidya were never-ending. No sooner was one answered than, hydra-headed, two more appeared.

  Opening the hatch, I rifled a valise in which Vidya had tossed some clothes to be dry-cleaned. Don’t ask what I was looking for. Something—anything—that proved who she was.

  A Ravissant shawl. Two custom-made salwar kameezes devoid of labels. And an assortment of “western” duds by Dolce & Gabbana, Pierre Balmain, Prada, Tse . . .

  A Louis Vuitton valise yielded a string bag containing several fire opals, a folded wad of Cape Verde escudos, and a cheap mirror—in short, nothing that would prove or disprove Vidya’s identity. Neglectfully crumpled in the bottom of the tote was a notice of deposit at Banque Sarasin & Cie, 4002 Basel, for a cool 97,000 Swiss francs . . . And, in an inner pocket, an expired Kenyan passport in the name of one—Glory be to God—Rājakumāri Shrī Vidya Rao.