The Game mr-7

by Laurie R. King

  The man, red-turbanned and uniformed, complete with a sidearm in a belt-holster, had stopped dead when I came to a halt and looked back at him. When I reluctantly started up again, he followed at the same distance.

  “Maybe we’ll lose him in the bazaar,” I told Faith.

  “You’d better hope for his sake we don’t,” she answered.

  “The maharaja takes guarding his guests seriously, then?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “All right. I wouldn’t want the fellow to lose his job.”

  “Or his head,” she added. She was joking, of course. I turned my back on the man, physically and mentally, and determined to enjoy the outing.

  Snow-capped peaks lay on three sides of the valley that was Khanpur, brisk contrast to the near-tropical crops that grew alongside the road, the sugar cane and new-planted melons. Men worked the fields, women swayed beneath loads of copper water-jugs and cloth-wrapped bundles, children wielding cane switches urged goats and cattle from the cultivated land, and Faith and I strode alone talking, our armed escort an unvarying two hundred yards to the rear.

  Faith had been here for a little more than three months, she and Lyn having met the maharaja in Paris the previous September. He had seen Lyn’s work at a gallery and showed up one day at their door, toured their studio, and commissioned them to do some projects for him in Khanpur. The only problem was, once they got here, one hindrance after another had fallen across their path. The maharaja had not been here when they arrived; then he’d returned, but been too busy to consult with them. And when he’d finally been able to bend his attention to their projects, it turned out that what he had in mind was some sort of collaboration between what they were accustomed to doing and a traditional Indian style. And Faith had to admit, learning Indian techniques of painting and sculpture was fascinating, and no doubt valuable for the future, and the maharaja was extremely generous with his hospitality and advance payments for works not even begun. She shouldn’t complain, and she wasn’t, exactly, but she could wish she didn’t get the feeling that she and Lyn would sink up to their knees here and grow old eating lotus and sleeping beneath silk bed-sheets.

  Listening to her, I wondered if all native princes were surrounded with as many hangers-on as Khanpur’s seemed to be, stray novelists and feckless wanderers caught in the honey-trap of palace life. Thank goodness, I said to myself, I should soon be on my way.

  The capital of Khanpur was a walled and dusty town of perhaps six thousand souls, fields nearly to its gates, blessedly free of the stench of human waste—as Geoffrey Nesbit had said, the country was noted for the advanced state of its sanitation. The buildings were the usual jumble of Moghul masterpieces and tacked-on petrol-tin shanties, but the dogs wandering its crowded streets had a modicum of flesh over their ribs, and few of the children were completely naked.

  As two Englishwomen, we were the immediate target of every salesman in the town, and offers for carpets and jewellery came fast and heavy. The beggars more or less left us alone, perhaps because of the red-turbanned figure who, once inside the gates, had moved up until he was close to our heels. We did our best to ignore his presence. Faith led me to the Palace proper, where the maharaja’s womenfolk lived—his two wives, dozen concubines, and eight or nine children, according to Nesbit. We could see little but high walls and, in glimpses through the iron gate, trees and the occasional patch of brilliant white marble, so we kept moving through the upper city, into ever-narrower alleys, more or less following our noses until we came to the bazaar itself.

  Because Khanpur was well away from the tourist routes, the bazaar offered little beyond the wants of its inhabitants, its luxury goods running more along the lines of astrakhan caps and golden brocades than carvings of Shiva and mass-produced bronze Ganeshas. Faith paused at a silk merchant’s to finger a length of iridescent green fabric; my attention was caught by an ash-smeared holy man seated nearby: I myself had only been in Khanpur little more than forty-eight hours, and it was unreasonable to expect Holmes this soon; still, I examined him closely.

  “I loved the garment you wore yesterday night,” Faith said, as oblivious of the shopkeeper’s lively attentions as she was of my inattention. “I was thinking of having one made for Lyn. What do you think of this colour?”

  “Sorry?” The near-naked sadhu had a matted beard and wore his hair gathered into a snake’s nest atop his head; he sat motionless on a scrap of what had once been a leopard skin, a brass begging bowl next to one of his folded knees: No, it was not Holmes in disguise. I turned back to Faith, retrieving her words from the back of my mind. “That colour would be beautiful. And the maroon over there would do wonders for you.”

  In the end, she bought lengths of both, arranging that they be sent to New Fort. “Jimmy has a tailor who can sew pretty much whatever a person wants,” she told me. “I’ve seen him produce an evening gown from a pencil sketch.”

  We bought a bangle here, a handful of dried mulberries there, following the curving streets down towards the river, Faith talking while I studied every passing veiled woman over five and a half feet tall, but again, none of them were Holmes. Eventually the buildings fell away, revealing an open square of pavement with a few weedy trees. A shrine occupied one corner, its deity unidentifiable under the heaps of wilting marigolds and the smears of blood-red dye; in the opposite corner a silent circle of men stared down at a cow, which lay panting in a manner that did not bode well. I was wondering what city-dwelling Hindus did with cows that died, whether they just stood back and let the vultures in or if they found someone to drag it away, when my speculations were interrupted by Faith.

  “Oh, look,” she said. “A magician. Shall we go see?”

  I looked: dramatic black garments, shiny fat donkey, a magnificently painted and mirrored little wagon that had once pulled English children, a great eye now gracing its front.

  Sherlock Holmes had arrived in Khanpur.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Holmes was just coming to the end of the preliminary part of the act, the flashy tricks and joking patter designed to capture an audience. He drew glittering balls from the air, made others vanish from sight, and caused one to burst into flame, its ashes floating upwards on the breeze. Young Bindra was nowhere in sight, and Holmes’ face looked tired to gauntness beneath the dye.

  When he had brought together a sufficient number, he turned to the mind-reading portion. Faith’s Hindi was limited to “How much is it?” and “Get away from me,” but the magician’s gestures and the reaction of his impromptu partners was entertainment enough. After he had astonished by perceiving a number of unknowable things about five or six of the men (the process of deductive reasoning working as well in this setting as it did in London), he caused a deck of playing cards to appear, and proceeded to guess which was in a person’s hand (as if Sherlock Holmes would stoop to guessing!). In the smaller villages, he had used coins, but in a large town, playing cards would be common enough to be used for the trick. Again, Faith could not understand what either he or his partners were saying, but there was no mistaking their declarations of astonishment.

  When the man in the black garments had magically transformed the entire deck into black aces, then flung it into the air to float down as fifty-two ebony feathers, he came around with a small bronze bowl. Faith and I dropped silver rupees on top of the annas; I held the grey eyes for a moment, warning him not to speak. But he had already seen the armed guard, and he merely salaamed us and passed on.

  We left him there and headed back into the bazaar. At the narrowest spot, when Faith stopped to take a closer look at a necklace she had been fingering earlier, I spoke into her ear.

  “I just want to check something—I’ll meet you at the main gates in ten minutes,” and before she could object, I ducked my head down so our escort couldn’t see me, stepped behind a water-seller, and scurried away. At the next corner, I craned to see, but Faith was talking to the shopkeeper about the necklace, and the guard had not yet realis
ed that I was no longer with her.

  Holmes was seated on the ground in the shade of the wagon, counting his money, when I slid in beside him. He’d changed his Moslem cap for a black puggaree, tied elaborately with its starched end sticking up, and the thin moustache he’d grown since we parted in Simla added a rakish touch to his exoticism.

  “Greetings, memsahib,” he told me.

  “Holmes, you certainly got here quickly. Where’s Bindra?”

  “It would seem that the same Delhi astrologer who instructed the boy to go with the two Mussalman gentlemen also warned him against entering Khanpur. Our young apprentice remained at the border, swearing to all the gods that he would wait there for me.”

  “Wait there! So you’ve been doing all the work yourself, the donkey and everything?” The magician shrugged, and I muttered, “I’ll take off my shoe and give the brat thapad.”

  “What do you make of the maharaja?” he asked, and he was right, we had time only for urgent business.

  “Holmes, he’s . . . I don’t know, he’s an enigma. It may simply be the circumstances of his upbringing, but he’s thoughtful one minute and horribly cruel the next. An honest sportsman who apparently cheats at cards, a man who surrounds himself with artists and then keeps them from working, who is hugely generous with his hospitality but won’t let his guests out without watch-dogs. I have to get back,” I added, “before mine panics. And there’s a strange assortment of people at The Forts. He hired a best-selling novelist for a secretary; has two lesbian artists so avant-garde they make Epstein look staid, whom he’s commissioned to do works better done by an Indian; there are a couple of criminal types doing heaven knows what—remember the man Harry Koehler? He’s lived here for a year. The odd Communist like Thomas Goodheart. And me, whom he’s trying to convince to take on a project involving the education of Khanpur women. ‘Pets’ for his amusement, his cousin calls them. And a collection of individuals poached from side-shows, dwarfs and albinos. The dwarfs live down at the zoo, which I saw this morning. His treatment of the animals there is . . . troubling.”

  “Cruelty?” he asked, coming alert. He knew, better than I, that a man who mistreats dumb beasts is apt to do the same to his human subjects. And I would have told him all about the zoo, if we hadn’t been so short of time. I’m sure I would have told him, if it wasn’t that I needed to think about it myself first. And if I didn’t know that if I described the maharaja’s act of cruelty, Holmes would become very nervous and would try to convince me that I shouldn’t return to The Forts. One thing I did not need at the moment was a nervous husband.

  “Nothing extreme. It’s more that he’s experimenting to see if he can reshape their natures.”

  “The lion lying down with the lamb?”

  “No, more along the lines of convincing the lamb to become a lion.”

  He thought about this for a moment, then to my relief, pushed it away for future consideration. “No sign of O’Hara?”

  “If he’s here, he’s in the Old Fort. Have you seen the way The Forts are laid out?”

  “I have.”

  “The western half is where all the guests live, there’s a huge courtyard garden, the maharaja’s quarters. But the eastern part isn’t deserted—one occasionally sees guards on the walls. If the maharaja had a dungeon, it would probably be there, where the guests wouldn’t stumble on it.”

  “Is there any way you can get in?”

  “New Fort is locked up at night, although a circumspect individual might come and go. I don’t know about the other side, but it, too, looks the sort of place that might be invaded by one or two.”

  “How much longer do you wish to stay?”

  “Honestly, I can’t see that I’m going to uncover much more than I have. Another day or two, perhaps? And, if you can arrange it, a telegram recalling me to the outside world might be helpful. My host seems reluctant to permit his guests to leave.”

  “Very well. If I’m not here, I’ll be half a mile down the Hijarkot road, there’s a caravanserai there. You’d better go or your watch-dog will come looking for you.”

  I threaded my fingers through his, and we sat for a moment, eye to eye and hands joined, before I separated myself from his presence to dart from the shade of the wagon and into the nearest alleyway. I reached the city gates before Faith; our sweating guard was greatly relieved to see me. We strolled demurely back to the palace, and allowed ourselves to be shut in again.

  The telegram came the following morning, Friday, and said merely, MARY RUSSELL PRESENCE REQUIRED MONDAY MORNING DELHI. It was brought while I was at breakfast; I took it from the golden salver and opened it publicly, arranging a look of intense irritation on my face before wadding the flimsy and dropping it beside my fork. I left it there when I went to watch the morning’s entertainment, which proved to be a doubles tennis-match between dwarfs. Some of the guests seemed to think it uproariously funny, although I found that once my eyes had adjusted to the diminutive size of the players, it was just another amateur game. Perhaps the afternoon’s ostrich race would be more amusing, I thought, and closed my eyes in the sun.

  My doze was interrupted by a cleared throat, and I opened my eyes to find a chuprassi clutching a note. It read,

  Miss Russell, would you join me in the gun-room.

  Its signature was the letter K, with a stamp that I thought might be the crest of Khanpur. I stood up and said, “Could you tell me how to find the gun-room?”

  The chuprassi conducted me to New Fort’s east wing, where the maharaja’s private quarters lay. We entered through a brightly gilded archway just to the left of the gates, and within half a dozen steps, my jaw dropped. I had grown accustomed to the grand opulence of the central wing, but the corridor we walked down, the rooms whose open doors we passed, were another thing altogether. Here were unlocked display cabinets of exquisite miniatures, ivory and gold, beside paintings that any museum in Europe would covet. In one room, I saw Louis XIV furniture, clearly in daily use; in another room stood a display of trophies and photographs, including the one for the 1922 Kadir Cup that I had seen in Nesbit’s house. I tried not to gawp as we walked past, but my head swivelled unceasingly.

  It was a revelation. These paintings, those trophies, had been placed here for the sole pleasure of one man, not as a way of impressing his guests—these fragile carpets took no concern of the wear of many feet, and the rooms had been arranged for his privacy and comfort, not for the appreciation of groups. The maharaja clearly enjoyed—even gloated over—his possessions, but he kept the true treasures to himself.

  At the very end of the long corridor, the chuprassi opened a door and bowed me through; once inside, I stopped dead.

  I do not know what was more disconcerting, the completely muffled sound in the room or its dim light, but one’s immediate response on entering the room was a frisson of alertness up the spine. Perhaps it was some trace aroma of the predator all around that made one go still, not even breathing, until the only motion to defy the room’s smothering atmosphere was the hair creeping upright on one’s skin. In any case, it wasn’t until one’s eyes became used to the light that the sensation of entering a lair became strong. And perhaps a full minute had to pass before the eyes told one why.

  The walls, floor to ceiling, were covered in tiger fur. Black and orange stripes, running first in this direction, then that, fitted together like a jigsaw puzzle, seamless but for a faint rectangular shape in the back wall. In the upper corners of the room, clustered and snarling, were mounted the heads.

  I shuddered in reaction, and someone chuckled, the sound damped and muffled.

  I whirled, and there was the maharaja, sitting in a chair of unrelieved black. Panther, my mind informed me; and the fluffy black-and-gold rug on which his boots were resting was made of the tails of the tigers on the wall. I swallowed convulsively, whether to repress fear or visceral disgust, I was not sure.

  The maharaja rose from his panther-skin chair and walked over to a table that appea
red made of grey-painted wood, and on closer look proved to have a texture. It was covered in elephant hide, I realised, and somehow that final outrage tipped me over the edge, and I was suddenly icy calm.

  “I have something for you,” he said. “Since you did not wish the boar’s head for your wall, I had this small souvenir made, a memento of your first pig-hunt.”

  I looked apprehensively at the velvet-covered box he was holding out to me, and kept my hands at my sides. “That’s really not necessary.”

  So he opened it himself and turned it for me to see.

  Since Wednesday’s hunt, he had somehow contrived to have all four tusks of the boar removed and handed over to a goldsmith for mounting. The object before me had a central shaft as long as a hand, made of heavy, deep-red gold that had been intricately worked with a design I recognised from the stamp on the note that had brought me here, the crest of Khanpur. From the gleaming metal protruded the tusks, the shorter pair curving up from the bottom, the longer upper tusks rising from the shaft above them to curl together, nearly forming a circle above the gold. The tusks themselves had not been touched, aside from their removal, and looked as they had when they came to rest on the ground near my foot: the ivory as yellowed as a smoker’s teeth, the tip of the upper left one snapped off and worn blunt, even the dried spatter of blood that had been burned into my memory when the beast had been struggling to eviscerate me. The art of the goldsmith had been linked to these brutal tools for digging and killing, man’s most intricate craftsmanship used to set off all the nicks, grime, and blood that Nature had provided.

  It was quite the ugliest thing I had ever seen in my life.

  Beyond its mere appearance, the ornament was repugnant on any number of levels: aesthetically, yes, but also emotionally, in its attempt to create beauty from what was essentially a grisly extermination; theologically, in its glorification of the uncleanest of animals; even politically, that in a poor land, so much gold should be used for a frivolity. The maharaja of Khanpur held the box out to me, willing me to take it. I did so, reluctantly, then laid it immediately upon the elephant-hide table.