Catherine hesitated, then turned toward her with the reluctance Marina had come to expect. “To the jail. To see Nagarajan.” Her voice, hoarse from chanting, was almost a whisper.
At one time, Marina would have said the things that came into her mind: that the police were unlikely to let Nagarajan’s followers visit him, that walking down Palika Road might be dangerous under the circumstances, that the best thing would be to wait. Now, she said, “OK.”
Catherine started toward the others, then returned to Marina. She reached out and took Marina’s wrist, and Marina’s knees gave slightly. Marina looked down at the cheap bangles on Catherine’s thin arm, the ring with a pink stone on her middle finger. She didn’t want to look at Catherine’s face, but when Catherine didn’t let go Marina’s eyes moved upward. Catherine’s hair, the hair Nagarajan admired so much, hung greasy and limp. Shadowed by the edge of her sari, her face seemed sunken. “You’re happy now. This is what you wanted,” Catherine croaked.
Marina wondered if Catherine could feel the tremor that moved through her body. It came, not from fear, but from a weird exultation that Catherine had, voluntarily, touched her, spoken to her.
She wet her lips, trying to choose a response, but Catherine let go and turned away. Marina watched them cross the strip of packed earth to the gate, then go down the road in the growing light. They had not returned when, in the blazing midmorning, Marina splashed her body with tepid water, put on fresh clothes, and went to catch the bus from Halapur to Bombay.
Guru Nagarajan, Parama Sukhadam. Guru Nagarajan, Chrana Shranam. Guru Nagarajan, Eternal giver of happiness. Guru Nagarajan, We take refuge at his feet. The damp spot her forehead had made was dry now, another smudge on a window covered with smudges. Now on the return journey, she watched the outskirts of Halapur come into view and slide past as they neared the center of town. Bullocks nosed the earth in the blasted garden of the District Administration Center. Posters of men with guns chasing other men with guns were plastered outside the Town Talkies movie theater. An old man laboriously pedaled a bicycle whose rear baskets were full of empty milk bottles.
The staff at the consulate in Bombay was accustomed to seeing Marina, and usually paid little attention to her. Today it had been different, because of Nagarajan’s arrest. She was allowed to see someone right away. The plastic nameplate beside the door said “M. Hayes.”
“A situation like this brings out strong feelings,” Mr. Hayes said. “The Indian people don’t understand these Westerners claiming to be practicing some form of Hinduism, and many of them don’t particularly like it.” Despite the heat, his tie was knotted tightly at the neck of his white short-sleeved shirt. The blinds were drawn against the glare, and the breeze from the ceiling fan stirred the papers on his desk and Marina’s damp hair. If only she could bend and rest her head on the arm of her chair she could sleep.
“Strong feelings,” Mr. Hayes said. “We’ll send someone this afternoon. How many did you say are living there?”
She roused herself to answer. “People come and go all the time, but right now there are my sister and me and two other Americans. An Indian man named Joginder looks after the place, but he doesn’t live there. Compared with some of the other sects, it’s very small.”
“I suppose this Nagarajan is claiming he didn’t kill the boy?”
“I don’t know. Nobody at the ashram has told me anything. They went this morning to try to see him, but they hadn’t gotten back when I left.”
Perspiration had made yellow stains under the arms of Mr. Hayes’s shirt. “I wish to God these kids would all stay home,” he said.
The bus pulled up at Halapur’s central square, causing its usual flurry of quickly extinguished interest in the passersby. As always, a knot of men squatted under the peepul tree chewing betel, and women lingered at the public pump, balancing babies or clay jars on their hips, while birds fluttered in the spilled water curling over the muddy stones. When Marina stepped out of the bus, the sun hit her face like a slap. She started back through town to the ashram.
Black birds wheeled against the hot blue sky. A bullock cart rattled past her, raising dust that settled in her throat. When she reached Palika Road, she heard a roaring sound that suggested nothing. The sound had been in her ears several minutes before it occurred to her that it might be voices, and she saw the mass of people far down toward the ashram. As she continued walking, shading her eyes, a figure detached itself and ran toward her. It was Joginder, his turban disarranged, his eyes bloodshot. “Come away, miss!” he cried, and when she stood, confused, he gestured violently. Something in his movement animated her, and she followed him down a side street, stumbling, infected by his terror.
They passed a bicycle repair shed, its dirt yard filled with bicycles swaying against one another, and went through a gate into an earthen courtyard. Three string cots almost filled the small space, and bedraggled chickens scratched and pecked in the shade of a dusty, broad-leafed tree. Joginder sank down on one of the cots, trembling, and she said, “Joginder, what’s happening?”
“It is burning,” he said, and at that instant she smelled smoke.
Part I
California
Ten Years Later
1
RISK
Things you should know about risk:
1. Risk is always present. There is no such thing as zero risk.
2. Actual risk may differ greatly from perceived risk.
3. If you reduce risk, you may reduce benefits.
4. You must decide what level of risk is acceptable for your situation.
Excerpt from Why Breakdown? — company brochure for Breakdown, Inc.
The Fun World maintenance chief breathed heavily. Maybe he had emphysema. “—inspected daily,” he was saying. “Nothing like this ever happened—”
But now it has, Marina thought, and what that means is just dawning on you. The sky was dark now, the wind steady and cold. The ambulances had left, but the television people were still around, preparing their stories for the eleven o’clock news.
The maintenance chief looked about sixty. His face was yellow in the glare of the lights. When talk about blame started— and it had started already, she imagined, on the news bulletins— the maintenance crew would be the first to go up against the wall. There would be portentous discussions about “human error,” as if most things didn’t go wrong because a human made a mistake at one point or another. “Every day,” the chief said. His words had a phlegmy roughness. “Mr. Bolton insists.”
It took Marina a moment or two to put together: “Mr. Bolton” and Bobo the Clown. “Why would it break?” the chief said, and began to gargle and wheeze.
Marina looked past the maintenance chief’s pinkening ear. It was time for a cup of coffee. She disliked these scenes— the self-justification, the assertions of blamelessness, the constant terror of being found to be in the wrong. People never realized that charm, self-pity, excuses couldn’t change what the numbers told her and were a waste of her time. She’d look at the records and make the measurements, and if the maintenance chief had done his job right he’d be OK. Meanwhile— “Excuse me,” she said, and walked away.
She went to pick up her kit, one of the leather cases she and her colleagues, with heavy irony, called their “doctor’s bags”— and stopped to listen to a wispy teenaged girl talking to a television crew. A drop of blood had dried under one of the girl’s nostrils. “They were having a good time,” the girl said. “Laughing and all. They rode twice.”
A woman in a blazer checked a clipboard. “You’re talking about Randy and Annette Wilson?”
“The fat ones.”
The girl looked shocked, but excited too, and gratified at the attention she was getting. Marina had seen it dozens of times. First you had to coax and cajole the story out of them and then, about the time you had all you needed, they started to like it and wouldn’t leave you alone.
She wiped her hands on the front of the jumpsuit she wo
re over her jeans, picked up her bag, and took another look at Loopy Doop.
It was beautiful. Magnificent, really, with its long, spiderlike legs ending in bright pink-and-yellow gondolas. A lovely, elegant design. What a shame that an hour or so ago one of those attenuated steel legs had given way and sent the gondola carrying Randy and Annette Wilson, who liked Loopy Doop enough to ride it twice in a row, smashing into the ticket booth.
She had taken a close look as soon as she arrived, while they were still loading Randy and Annette and the ticket-taker and the kid and his mother who’d been buying tickets into ambulances and hoping they might make it to the hospital. The leg had broken right next to the hub. She had eyeballed the fracture, photographed it, and made an impression of the surface with dental imprint material. She could tell by looking that it was a fatigue failure caused by the steel tubing bending back and forth. What had caused it to bend was another question.
She’d have to get someone to come out with a saw to cut the fracture surface out and take it back to the lab so she could study it and have specimens made up for tests.
A shame. It had been beautiful.
She picked her way through the shards of glass around the wrecked ticket booth and went to look for coffee.
2
Marina got out her notebook and started a list.
She had: taken the photos, made a sketch of the scene, gotten names and phone numbers of witnesses, examined and made an imprint of the break. She needed to: get the Loopy Doop specifications from somebody, the inspection records from somebody— she’d ask the maintenance chief, if he’d gotten his breath back— get the piece of Loopy Doop’s leg sawed off.
She sipped watery coffee from a Styrofoam cup. In the background, a radio murmured about “the Loopy Doop disaster.” She was sitting in the Bobobar, a juice bar that had been left open when the park was closed after the accident. A bigger-than-life-sized Bobo the Clown was stenciled on the wall in red.
It was chance that she’d been at the office and the maintenance chief had gotten her instead of the service. This was going to be a big case— exactly the macabre kind of scenario the press adored, which meant Sandy would probably take it himself. So what if she’d been here first and done the groundwork?
The smell of stale beer and cigarette smoke wafted over her, and she looked up to see a man with thinning hair and a medium-sized paunch, a cup of coffee in one hand and a cigarette in the other. He sank into the chair across from her and nodded at her notebook. “Who’re you covering it for?”
“I’m not a reporter.”
“Police?” The man put his cup down and pulled a ballpoint pen and a thin tan-colored notebook, spiral-bound at the top, out of the inside pocket of his corduroy jacket.
“No.”
“Then what— oh, right.” He pointed at the red-stitched “Breakdown, Inc.” on the pocket of her jumpsuit. “The disaster-mongers. Down on the waterfront. You on the job here?”
“I can’t say anything right now.”
The man clicked his pen. “You’re here, right? Looks to me like you’re working. Who’re you working for? Bobo? Get him off the hook?”
If she got into the papers without Sandy’s OK it would be a major misstep. “I can’t say anything.”
The man scribbled something. “Sure. What’s your name?”
“I said I can’t—”
“OK, OK. Who called you in?”
The tightness was starting in her forehead. It was the same tightness she sometimes felt when, as an expert witness, she was being cross-examined by a hostile attorney. “I absolutely am not going to say anything. I have to get on with what I’m doing, so—”
The man shrugged and closed his notebook. His mouth twisted in a sour little smile. “Grist for the mill to you people, I guess. It’s an ill wind that doesn’t blow somebody some good, right?”
Marina watched him wander off. Ill Winds, Inc. She had a Ph.D. in engineering. She could have been building bridges. In her mind, she saw buzzards, their wingspans huge, wheeling in a blazing blue sky. This kind of work was perfect for her. She bent back to her list.
3
A navy-blue Porsche with BRKDWN license plates was pulled up near the ticket booth. Sandy must have gotten the message she’d left with the service. She looked around and saw him in the shadow of Loopy Doop talking to the maintenance chief. The jeans, deck shoes, and fisherman’s sweater he was wearing meant he’d spent the afternoon on his sailboat, the Disaster-Pro.
Now, Marina would be relegated to supporting player. When Sandy was in a scene, he was the lead. He beckoned her over. With his lean body, his tan, his gray hair ruffling in the wind, he so outshone the maintenance chief that the other man might not have been there at all.
“Marina, I think you’ve already met Ed, here. I was just telling him how fortunate it is that he called us in so soon after the accident.” Sandy’s voice was somber, but managed to convey congratulations to Ed for his good sense.
“I didn’t even wait to get authorization,” Ed said. From his tone Marina guessed he was as dazed by that fact as by the tragedy itself.
“It makes all the difference in the world when we can get on the scene fast,” Sandy said.
What’s this we? It was good old Marina who was working on a Sunday afternoon and jumped into her Toyota to drive down to Redwood City and take care of business. I wasn’t out of touch on some boat with a cutesy name getting myself written up in the society columns.
Still, fair’s fair. If Sandy wants to play Dr. Alexander Drake, socialite engineer, it probably doesn’t hurt business. Nobody’s better than Sandy at soft-soaping people like Ed, or whatever his name is. Besides, if Patrick and I hadn’t broken up I wouldn’t have been at the office either.
Sandy, still talking, had clapped Ed on the shoulder, but Ed, who had first seemed enthralled, was letting his attention wander. His hand strayed to his tie as he gazed at a point beyond Marina’s shoulder. “Mr. Bolton is here,” he said.
The shrunken, frail-looking old man who got out of the limousine didn’t look at all like the jolly gent with the straw hat and red nose who did the Fun World television commercials. On television Bobo, the clown-turned-entrepreneur, bounced and mugged. This Bobo—Mr. Bolton, chairman of the board of the Bolton Amusement Group— leaned heavily on the arm of the tall, blond man at his side. As he shuffled forward, the television lights illuminated his flyaway white hair and then caught the gleam of tears on his cheeks.
The little man waved away shouted questions as he approached. He ignored Ed’s introduction and said, “My God, my God. Children. I love kids, and they love me. They always crowd around, and they say, ‘Bobo—’” Shaking his head and mumbling, he moved to one side, to be replaced by the man who had helped him out of the car.
“Eric Sondergard, president of Fun World,” the man said, extending his hand to Sandy. Sondergard looked about fifty. His face was thin, his blond hair graying. A nerve jumped near his eye but his voice was firm, and when he shook Marina’s hand his palm was dry. After the handshake, his eyes flicked over the top of Marina’s head as he devoted his attention to Sandy.
Closed out, Marina found herself standing next to Bobo, who was wiping his face with a handkerchief. She edged away from him. The last thing I need is to be trapped by an old guy who isn’t only senile but slobbering, even if he is the famous Bobo the Clown.
She had put an additional foot of distance between them before Bobo looked up and his faded brown eyes focused on her. “You’re a lovely child,” he said.
Caught. Maybe he’d rebury his face in his handkerchief. He didn’t. “A lovely child,” he repeated.
She stifled the impulse to tell him that thirty-two didn’t qualify as a child in anybody’s book. And as for lovely— well, Catherine had been lovely, with her rippling yellow hair and big blue eyes. Marina’s eyes were blue, but her hair was dark. She looked like an ordinary person instead of an angel in a Renaissance painting. “Thanks,” she said.
She sighed. He thinks I’m one of his kiddie fans. I’ll tell him my name, and he’ll tell me it’s a very pretty name and ask me what grade I’m in. “Marina.”
The old man didn’t say what a pretty name it was. He swayed toward her with an air of confidentiality, putting a hand on her arm. “I knew a woman named Marina once. Knew her very well. We were on the road together back— my God, it must’ve been the twenties. She was an equestrienne. You know what an equestrienne is?”
“A bareback rider?”
“Very good. Marina Valdez. She had a silver-gray horse. Prince something. She wore blue, with silver spangles.” His grip tightened. “We were close, Marina and I. Close. My God, she could ride.”
Marina didn’t answer. She was trying to catch the drift of the conversation between Sandy and Eric Sondergard. She heard Sondergard say something about “your top people.”
“Do you like the circus, Marina?”
“Yes,” she answered absently. “When we were kids, my sister and I—” She stopped, her face burning.
“What’s your sister’s name?”
How long had it been since she’d done that? Stupid, stupid. “Catherine.”
Thank God he seemed to lose interest. She breathed deeply, willing her face to stop radiating heat, feeling a drop of perspiration sliding down between her breasts.
Tears began to trickle from his eyes again, and he dabbed at them with his handkerchief. “Children have been hurt, and it’s my fault,” he said.
The Complete Mystery Collection Page 41