My Lady of the Bog

by Peter Hayes

  “Do they remember where they found it?”

  “It was dark.”

  “And the silk. What happened to it?”

  “Somehow got left behind, and the next night were a cold one. One of the lads threw it on his filly.”

  “And that’s where it’s been for the past three months. On a horse’s ass.”

  Strugnell laughed.

  I wasn’t surprised. In archeology, such things happen all the time. The Bedouin boy who found the Dead Sea Scrolls spent the better part of the following winter burning them in his stove for warmth.

  “And where’s this cloth now?”

  “Aren’t I looking at it? Fine design. One end’s got a sort of fringe.”

  “What’re its dimensions?”

  “Say . . . six by one.”

  “Feet?”

  “Meters.”

  “Thank you.” It was a sari.

  So my Lady really could be Queen Mayura!

  Eagerly, I reopened the “enchanted book”—hoping to confirm her identity once and for all. On the page to which I turned, however, we were fighting a wild, Afghani tribe . . . and as we watched them coming at us, some central nerve inside my body quivered with a sort of sickening joy—for being charged by five hundred ululating Uzbeks is, in truth, an indescribable feeling, and one you record in the depths of your bowels.

  But God was with us. We turned their charge and in the end, we counted forty-seven enemy dead, including their chieftain, Aziz Beg Khan, plus twenty-nine prisoners, some of whom were maimed.

  Approaching them, I gave them a choice: join us or die. Every one to a man opted for the former. In fact, some of them wept and kissed my hands, though I had few illusions. They would be loyal for as long as they shared our booty.

  ‘Abd al-Wali, who was strutting about like a peacock who believes himself the reason for the autumn rains, led me to the spoils, including treasure from other raids. I inspected a golden crown inlaid with yellow topaz and coral. An inscription declared it the Rāja of Indore’s, and I wondered how it had come into their hands. Was it seized in a raid? Or had my brother plucked it from the head of Mul (I did not believe he’d been slain by the Queen) and given it to their Khan? However obtained, returning it brought me great satisfaction.

  I had the chieftain’s hands removed and placed upon a golden plate, the crown secured between his fingers, and sent it thus to the Rani of Indore with this greeting:

  O Queen — The grace of He without Stain allowed me to retrieve this Precious Crown from One who is now a Traveller on the Highway to Annihilation. May you remember me always and read in this gift the Sign of my Brotherly Love and Protection.

  Prince Sikandar

  Then I ordered that the chieftain’s head be separated from his body, wrapped in straw and conveyed to Jafir with these words:

  O Brother — I send you the first fruits of this Harvest of Uzbeks who dared to flourish in our Father’s Field. May you be pleased with this offering and read in it the Sign of my Loyalty and Brotherly Affection.

  Kando

  I had other pieces of the Khan sent to other restive princes. Then the headless, armless, legless corpse was hung from a balcony, beneath which pooled a sty of blood in which the pups and piglets wallowed.

  Finally, I had the heads of the enemy dead removed and piled in the town square. They looked like bearded human fruit. Regrettably, they would not stay up. Whenever a dog nibbled an ear, the whole pyramid collapsed and heads went rolling, careening about like cabbages. So, after some consideration, I ordered built a pillar of victory, for whose uses I was gaining a new regard. On it I had carved:

  On this spot, in the year A.H. 725, Prince Sikandar Khilji delivered Khadya from a band of mutinous Uzbeks, dispatching 47 of their Crooked Souls to the Hiding-place of Nothingness. Let this Pillar be a support to all who uphold Dharma and may these Faces of Ruin appear as a Warning to those Ungrateful Servants who would become their own Masters.

  Finished with these measures, I went to the Chambal and bathed the dust and blood from my body, watching it swirl away in the stream. I felt elated. Life was sweet. And it struck me now that everything my eyes took in was mine: men, women, horses, jewels.

  My servant, Ram, laid out fresh garments; donning a lime-green floral robe and a silken turban, I went back to the town square where I had myself weighed against cotton, paddy, grain and fruit, milksweets, ghee and toddy, which were then distributed to the poor.

  Declaring a holiday, I invited the town’s nobles to a wine-feast in a merchant’s garden, which I renamed Vijayabagh—that is to say, Garden of Victory.

  Dancing lulis and beguiling charmers whose caresses would have captivated the hearts of angels incited the assembly, while musicians sang that graceful ode:

  Sing, Minstrel,

  Fill my cup,

  For the world has ordered itself

  As I desire.

  And what was a song by the great Nizami without another tune by Khayyam?

  Later, I patronized Nāmadev, the captain of my scouts. And to my loyal commander, ‘Abd al-Wali, whose bravery was unmatched, I presented a golden robe of honour. I then gave orders that whosoever amongst my men might wish for exhilarating drinks and drugs be not debarred from using them.

  That evening, the village women brought us roasted pigeon and the wine of the country: a rough white with a nose that we consumed in swinish quantities. Sitting there before the yellow fire in the chill desert night with gold in our pockets, squab in our mouths, wine and the smoke of kif in our blood and the grease of the sweet, white doves smeared and shining on our sunburnt faces, we revelled in the nectar of victory and youth, thinking it but an appetizer, a hint of things to come. And yet, alas, I tell you now, my life never tasted so sweet again!

  Part V

  JAFIR

  The antidote is hidden in the poison.

  —Rumi

  The Diwan

  Chapter 31

  I awoke to two cops standing over my bed. Vidya, too, was hovering above me—though as our eyes met, she dropped down beside me and laid her head upon my chest.

  “Now, now, miss, there’ll be none of that,” the bobby fussed. The CID man cleared his throat. “Alexander Donne. We arrest you for the murder of Jai Prasad. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say may be taken down and used against you.”

  I looked up at the two of them, staring down so intently. I recalled the wine-feast in the pleasure garden, overseen by the pillar of heads.

  In one world, I was the rising man; in another, a murderer—when, in fact, I was neither.

  Maybe that’s why I was the calmest one there. For being charged by the British police with murder is really nothing compared to being charged by a band of ululating Uzbeks!

  Then something happened that savaged my calm: they handcuffed Vidya and led her away.

  “. . . you know the type: family of six, kids and all, wasted on an Easter Sunday; German turista gunned down in Chinatown by a ‘Ghost Shadow’—worst shots in the fuckin’ world! Or some tony professor, like your buddy, Prasad, cut to bits in his book-lined study . . . . Cases like that tend to stick in the public craw. Citizens demand action. Governor calls hizzoner; hizzoner, the commissioner; commissioner, the deputy commissioner of pleece—and next thing you know, some fuck’s got a microscope and is lookin’ up my rectum.”

  “Good to see you, Houlihan,” I said.

  “Likewise,” he said, with something almost like affection. “N’other words, bunk, this thing ain’t gonna quit—if that’s, you know, the two of you was hoping.”

  On a table in the interrogation room they’d laid out the “murder weapon.” It had a prop-like air, as if its sight was supposed to jog my memory.

  Houlihan shifted his position and tone. He tweezed his pant crease between his thumb and pointer and hiked his cuff, exposing too-short socks and a hairy band of skin the color of inorganic poultry, before setting his pointed Italiano shoe on my chair. He leaned in closer
, exhaling the odor of mint Life Savers.

  “Look, we got possession of the murder weapon. We got motive, opportunity. Just trying to figure how it all went down. Help me, here. I’m sure there’s a reason well-set-up guy like yourself . . . Hey, he insult you? Accuse you of coming on to the wife?

  “Look, way I see it, you didn’t plan it. Nah.” Houlihan shook his head in vigorous self-agreement. “You brought him the sword as a wedding present . . .”

  “That’s why you nicked it. Along with the treasure.”

  Houlihan ignored his partner’s remark. “. . . ‘Cept you got into an argument and it got outta hand and, wham, you whacked him one. Am I right?”

  “Wrong. I told you. I didn’t kill Jai. I don’t even think it was Jai they were after. I think it was Vidya. And that they still are!”

  “And who is ‘they’?”

  “I don’t know for certain. But here are two names. One, Bunzo Doi—Ibby Habib’s soldier.” And I saw the yakuza’s enormous trapezius and tattooed tree-trunk neck. Vidya was naïve. You don’t walk away from a man like Habib with trinkets worth a quarter of a million dollars.

  “And the other?” Houlihan asked, unimpressed.

  “Henry Carlson Lewis Jones.”

  That stopped the conversation. “And how you know him?”

  “I have my sources.”

  “You know he’s dead?”

  “No. How’d he die?”

  “Let’s just say that’s ‘classified.’ ”

  He looked at me. But I saw the information enter.

  “Anyway, this sword isn’t from the treasure,” I continued. “Look at its condition! And if I had killed Jai, would I really be so stupid as to bring the murder weapon home?”

  “ ‘. . . weapon in question,’ ” the CID man read, “ ‘. . . is a twelfth-century blade of Kura . . . Kuruz . . . Cora . . .’ ”

  I snatched at the page. “ ‘Khorasan . . .’ It’s in Iran.”

  He snatched it back. “. . . ‘manufacture, worth in today’s antiquities market from ten to twenty thousand pounds . . .’ ”

  “Was that?” the lieutenant wondered.

  “Twenty, thirty thou.”

  “For a sword?” Houlihan whistled through his teeth. “I can see why you weren’t gonna chuck it in the river.”

  We all turned and looked at it again. Rainbows danced in its damascened steel. I reached out and hefted it—quick as a whip. “This knife probably severed hundreds of heads. They used to build them into towers, you know, or pile them up like so much cabbage in the market.”

  They looked at me tensely, clearly sorry they had brought it in. I cut at the air, once, to unnerve them further, then laid it back down. It was removed.

  The questioning went on for several more hours. If I’d had any sense I’d have called my attorney and stayed mum—but I was beyond sense. Having dodged pikes, spears and arrows, I believed I could handle whatever Houlihan & Co. threw my way.

  Why had I killed Jai? Wasn’t Vidya involved? Hadn’t I seen her at the party and been so smitten by her beauty that I’d resolved then and there to slaughter anyone who stood in my way?

  “Oh, yeah. I like a girl, I just kill her guy. Why fool around with dating, eh, Hools?”

  Then they switched crimes. How had I come into possession of the book?

  “Because Jai’s isn’t the only murder under investigation. I was probing one myself before I was accused of this one.”

  “Trouble is you started probing with your dick.”

  I invoked upekshā and let it go.

  Houlihan sighed, put his feet up on someone else’s desk, leaned back in his chair and switched personas. Suddenly, it was the philosophical Houlihan. “You know the law, Donne?”

  “Enough to know I haven’t broken any.”

  “Cause what I discovered in the course of my overlong and underpaid public career is there’s two sets of laws, the writ and the unwrit. Writ is what they teach at law school. Unwrit is a certain predisposition on a part of the judge slash jury to think in certain ways. One of the more innaresting of these little-known, unwrit laws of jersprudence is what we call ‘The Bimbo Walks Rule.’ Ever hear of it?”

  I hadn’t.

  “Rule says, in a felony conviction with more’n one defendant one a who’s a babe? Male defendant’ll have the book trown at ’em while the bimbo walks. Just the way it is. Maybe folks don’t feature sending ladies lovely as Vidya Prasad up the river.”

  “What exactly are you trying to say?”

  “Saying, this case goes to trial? You, my friend, are looking at L-wop.”

  “ ‘L-wop?’ ”

  “Life—without parole.”

  “L-wop.”

  “While your partner, the beauteeful Vidya Prasad? Even if convicted, is gonna get five years, max. Trust me. Why? The bimbo walks!”

  I turned away. I knew bheda when I heard it—“divide and conquer.” I wasn’t falling for it.

  In my cell, some of my defiance departed. I’d eaten nothing all day but a relish sandwich and two mugs of oversweetened tea, and I wasn’t depressed so much as empty.

  I lay on the bunk and tried to rally, telling myself they didn’t have a case. But they did have a case and not a bad one at that. Many poor sods have been hanged by the neck until dead on evidence more circumstantial.

  On that cold thought, I fell asleep and had the most vivid dream. In it . . . I was back at the palace, reviewing troops with my father, the Shah. Storm clouds were amassed in the west and a harsh wind buffeted the canopy under which we sat, making its timbers squeak and groan.

  Lightning flared and thunder crackled, startling white cranes into flight. That’s when another sound sickened my heart, as if the bones of the very earth were breaking—a fractious roar that shook the desert floor. And the Tent of Heavenly Dignity folded.

  Blessedly, I found myself unhurt. My father, however, lay pinned by a heavy spar, the toes of his slippers pointing at heaven. He murmured, then started to gurgle and gasp, as though drowning in some invisible sea.

  Sami, his boy, threw himself on him, lavishing his pumpkin beard with kisses. Then the dome of heaven broke and fat drops of hot rain began to spot the desert floor. Scattered at first, they grew quickly closer until, within minutes, the drops converged into rippling, wind-whipped sheets of water that swept across the desert plain. And wherever these curtains of water touched down, spray boiled up in all directions.

  An ecstasy seized the audience. They began to dance, revelling in the start of the monsoon season and praising aloud the Lord of Storms.

  Thunder broke so close it hurt. The strange confluence of the people’s joy, the pouring waters, and my father’s crushed and sodden form united with my own bewilderment and shock to make me want to scream aloud. But though I did, no one heard me.

  Even those who’d heard the tent collapse believed it was a peal of thunder—when in fact, I tell you now, it was the sound of an empire falling.

  “Bada-boom, bada-bing!” Houlihan pronounced as he led me from my cell.

  “Time?”

  “Six thirty-five.”

  “A.M.? Jesus, Houlihan . . . Not more questions!”

  “Nah. You’re headed home.”

  “You mean . . . I’m being extradited?”

  “Did I say that?” Houlihan tucked something in the pocket of my shirt, the way my grandfather used to slip me money. A policewoman brought a wire basket containing my wallet, change and keys.

  “What’s going on . . . ? Where’s Vidya?”

  Houlihan looked surprised. “You don’t know?” He shifted uncomfortably. “Thought you’d put her up to it.”

  “Put who up to what?”

  He took a breath. “Your girlfriend—Miz Prasad—one you been telling us coulda never done a thing like that?” He waited to make sure we were both thinking of the same person. “‘Just confessed.”

  Chapter 32

  By the time I got home it was still early morning, though given the day�
�s unchanging gray light, it could have been any hour between dawn and dusk.

  Other than the charge against Vidya, Houlihan had told me nothing. I called her solicitor, but learned little more. Vidya was claiming she and Jai had argued, and that at some point he had whacked her with the flat of the sword. Insulted, stung, she had wrested it from him and the next thing she knew Jai was dead on the floor. Panicked, she’d frozen for the next several hours, before thinking, at last, to call on me.

  I wanted to see her, to hear from her own lips her confession, but being neither kin nor counsel, my requests for an interview were ignored.

  Stranger still, even if she were a cold-blooded murderess who’d hacked her husband into a dozen bloody chunks, some part of me still loved her. Wasn’t that bizarre?

  I called Houlihan. But all he would say is: “She’s claimin’ self-defense. But the evidence shows she came at ’em while he was sitting and practically took off his head. Nasty.”

  I hung up again and sat back down. Had it all been a lie? And, if so, to what end? Or had she thrown herself at me the night of Jai’s murder like a drowning woman, hoping I would somehow save her? But how in the world was I to do that? And yet some part of me wanted to shield her from everything cold and cruel in this world, even as a wiser part said that I couldn’t, nor should I even try.

  Did Vidya have a temper? Sure. “Fiery” is how she’d once described it. But though she may have barked a bit, it was always short-lived. That she was capable of killing I knew full well. But I could not see her raising a sword or machete and butchering Jai—and while he was sleeping.

  Unless she hadn’t killed him for any good reason, some stubborn voice inside me said. Unless she killed him because she’s bad.

  And that grim little tongue of darkness and terror darted and licked my heart once again.

  I badly wanted to shower and change, but an elderly woman, big boned and formidable-looking, was knocking at my door. Once upon a time, she must have been “handsome.” Now, the rosebuds on her scarf were the only feminine traces left—the rest subsumed in that British matriarchal style that eschews as nonsense all softening refinements such as lipstick, jewelry or footgear other than “sensible shoes.” My visitor’s most distinctive features were a Grecian nose, flanked by a pair of feline eyes that were green, lit, and unreadable as a jaguar’s.