“Don’t worry. I won’t tell Sandy.”
She walked back to her office and dropped into her chair. Results of the chemical analysis, which would give her the exact components of the alloy, hadn’t come in yet. There was still some hope, but not much. She’d wait till she got the word on that before telling Eric. In the meantime, she’d better start thinking about what besides weak steel would cause Loopy Doop’s leg to break.
Who had called? Miss Cloud in Bombay, her own Cloud Sister. Or somebody else. You could tell the police about harassment. Maybe it was against the law to pretend to be a dead person, to try to call your dead sister— no, she was mixing it up. It wasn’t against the law to call your dead sister. It was against the law to call your living sister. If you were dead. She laughed, then clamped her teeth down hard to stop herself. When the feeling subsided, she reached for the Loopy Doop file.
14
That night, Patrick came over. She started violently when the buzzer for the downstairs door sounded, and stared at the speaker box on the wall, her heart surging. When she answered, would Catherine’s voice say it was Cloud Sister? She wouldn’t answer. After a minute the buzzer sounded again and she pushed the speaker button. “Yes?”
“It’s Patrick.”
She pushed the button to let him in and collapsed against the wall in the hallway, waiting for him to get the elevator up to her floor.
When she opened the door to his ring, she was amazed at how familiar and at the same time how alien he looked, in his jeans, running shoes, sweater, and glasses, a copy of his favorite magazine, The Gramophone, in one hand and a bottle of wine in the other. “I finished rehearsal early,” he said.
“Come in.”
“Brought some Gamay Beaujolais.” He put the wine on the kitchen table, got the corkscrew out of the drawer, and opened the bottle. She watched the light sift through his straight, silky hair as he bent over his task.
He poured and handed her a glass. “You’re wondering why I’m here.”
She was almost too numb to care. “Yes.”
He looked at her closely. “Are you all right? You look wiped out.”
For a second, maybe less, she wanted to tell him everything, to babble it all out like a child and beg him to help her. He would help her. She knew that. The impulse flashed, exploded, died before she could speak. “I’m fine. Working hard.”
He sipped and put his glass down. After a moment’s hesitation, he said, “Over the past few weeks, I’ve been seeing somebody. Her name is Nancy.”
A nerve pulsed in Marina’s throat. “You have?”
“Yes. On the rebound, I guess you might say. She’s very nice. But I didn’t come here to try to make you jealous.”
“You came because—”
“I came because I can’t let you go. I can’t let you go, and it isn’t fair to her, and I guess I have to hear you tell me one more time that we’re finished.”
“It must be a serious thing with her, then.”
“It could be. Sometime. Not the way things are now. What I’m saying is, if there were any chance with you—”
“I know what you’re saying.”
Marina refilled their glasses. She could tell Patrick she had had a change of heart. She saw the two of them, surrounded by golden light, receding to a tiny black dot and obliterated in a burst of brightness. “It can’t happen, Patrick,” she said.
His expression didn’t change. “So Catherine and Nagarajan are stronger than I am. You’ll hold onto them and let me go.”
Hearing him speak their names was a physical shock. As if he had invoked them, she felt Catherine and Nagarajan hovering.
I could tell him. He might understand better if he knew they were still real. She stared at the floor.
He put his glass down. “I’m off.”
She walked him to the door. As he opened it she said, “I’m sorry.”
His head bobbed in a quick nod. “Goodbye.”
She leaned against the door, listening to his footsteps recede. The bottle of wine sat on the table, along with the two glasses. His copy of The Gramophone lay on a chair. She wouldn’t call him to give it back to him. She sat down again, poured more wine into his glass, and sipped it slowly.
15
“Try to think,” Marina said.
Don closed his eyes. Marina crumpled and threw away the message to call the phone company. The woman had sounded only slightly regretful when she told Marina they’d done what they could, but they couldn’t trace the call.
“It was person-to-person for you. I think the operator said, ‘Marina Robinson, please. Miss Cloud calling.’ No, wait. She said ‘Miss Cloud’ after I said you weren’t here.”
Marina wiped her palms on the front of her skirt. “Maybe she said it was Bombay calling the first time,” Don said. He screwed his eyes closed tighter. “Anyway, after that there was even more static on the line, and a lot of clicking. I was yelling about leaving a message, and I couldn’t hear her much at all, except at one point I thought she was spelling something for me, because I heard her say something about a comma.” His eyes opened. “That’s it.”
“You have no idea what she was spelling?”
“I wish I did, but no.”
She turned away, not wanting him to be able to read in her face her desire to hit him, to batter him until he was bruised and pulpy and would be forced to tell her even if he didn’t know. Sandy emerged from his office and gestured to her. “You can come in now.”
It was only a routine briefing on Loopy Doop, but she wasn’t getting through it very well. She couldn’t quite connect her thoughts, explain what she’d been doing. What had she been doing? The business about the steel and the tests. She started through the story, feeling that she was carrying a heavy bundle and things kept falling out and she had to stop and pick them up. Like a donkey on a dusty road on a hot day, loaded with— oh, mangoes, say, and first one mango and then another tumbled out of the basket and rolled in the dust—
Sandy’s eyes were shadowed. “What about the chemical results?” he said.
“I don’t know. I should get them today.”
“You’re telling me that you thought there was a question of low-strength steel but you’ve got almost nothing to back you up.”
“I guess so.”
Sandy leaned back in his chair. “You aren’t showing me much, Marina.”
Rama. Rama. Rama, not comma. The hotel in Bombay where Catherine had stayed when she first went to India. I wrote her there, at the Hotel Rama. For you to leave without telling me, taking the money we had agreed was for school, is indefensible. I realize that Nagarajan is your god, your guru, or something, but…
Sandy stopped in the middle of a sentence. “Forgive me if I’m boring you.”
“No. I mean, you’re not.”
“I want to see something solid. I don’t have to tell you how important this case is, do I?”
“No.” It was the Hotel Rama. She could find out the number, maybe call back.
“—Bobo notwithstanding,” Sandy was saying.
“All right.” She stood up. She noticed that Sandy was frowning as she left.
An envelope from the lab was lying on her desk. The chemical analysis. It could wait, couldn’t it, until after she called international information and got the Rama’s number? No, better open it. She sucked in her breath.
The steel was 4140. Chrome, molybdenum. Lower-strength alloys wouldn’t have those. She dropped the paper on the desk. It had looked so good, so perfect, all because she’d made a mistake on the hardness test and built a theory around it. The whole case was in fragments again. She sat down and reached for the phone, not to call international information but to call Eric Sondergard.
“Oh Jesus, no,” he said when she told him.
“I can show you the figures.”
“I’m stuck here. Can you bring them over?”
Sondergard’s office was in an Embarcadero Center highrise, walking distance from Break
down. She clutched her portfolio and bent her head against the chilly, wet wind. She didn’t want to see Eric. She didn’t want to think about it— about him, with his long, pale limbs, his soapy smell.
On the Embarcadero Plaza, despite the wind and overcast sky, stands were set up to sell T-shirts, ceramic pots, decorated mirrors, lithographs of San Francisco, to appeal to whatever tourists might venture out. In India, tourists would be surrounded by hawkers selling toys—articulated wooden snakes, serious-looking whips made of braided leather thongs, jointed wire puzzles that could be bent in many shapes. Little-boy peddlers demonstrated the puzzles, going through their singsong “Is ball, is lotus, is bowl, is water jar—” In India there would be a cobra, its hood flared open, swaying to the disturbing music its charmer played.
Sondergard’s office had a view of the Golden Gate Bridge rearing into the fog above gray-green swells topped with foam. He closed the door behind her and slid his hand across her back. She shivered from attraction or revulsion.
She didn’t look at him as she took the test results from her portfolio, and barely glanced up as she explained that these were definitive, much more so than the hardness test, and that she’d probably blown the hardness test anyway.
He listened, his fingertips placed lightly together, gazing at the papers. When she finished he said, “I was so sure.”
“So was I. It had the right feel about it, somehow.” As soon as she said the words she was engulfed by grief. As it rushed over her she clung to the tiny voice of rationality that said, You’ve had theories shot down before. What is this? Then the voice was silenced in the overwhelming conviction that everything was lost, everything, finished, no good. She wanted to say something about how she’d keep trying, but she couldn’t say it.
His fingers were under her chin, raising her face to his. “I’d like to come see you again,” he said.
She still couldn’t speak. For a long moment she stared at him, feeling herself stretched more and more taut. When it was almost unbearable he let her go. “I’ll be in touch,” he said.
When she got home that afternoon and opened her mailbox the feeling of the onionskin envelope in her fingers was entirely expected. She carried the letter upstairs. Bombay postmark again, everything the same.
Rain Sister,
The Rig Veda says, “Now, Agni, quench and revive the very one you have burnt up.” Do you understand, Rain Sister?
Cloud Sister
She sat on the edge of her bed. She knew the Rig Veda was a collection of Hindu holy texts. From the smattering of information she had picked up during her days with Catherine she remembered that Agni was the god of fire. If Agni was fire, Catherine was the one who had been burnt up, whom the fire must quench and revive. Catherine quenched, revived. Catherine had walked out of the fire that had been kerosene-fed by a mob, leaving her ring behind. Her ring and her bones and her teeth. Reconstituted now, like instant soup, sitting in a hotel room in Bombay tapping out notes and making phone calls.
Marina rested her arms on her knees, bent, and buried her head in them. For a long time, she didn’t think at all.
When she raised her head, she knew she was going back to India.
16
A flight attendant in a flowered sari held out a plastic tray, offering wrapped candies scattered around a bowl of anise seeds. Marina shook her head. The plane was full, and around her people were settling into their seats— black-haired women wearing sweaters over saris, post-hippie hippies with long hair and embroidered shirts, an old man in a white cotton coat and a Gandhi cap, Western tourists with cameras, Sikhs in turbans, their beards bound in nets. The fretting of babies counterpointed the pre-takeoff babble.
She closed her eyes. She hadn’t realized it would be this bad. From the time of her decision until now, she had functioned with all the confidence that had deserted her in the previous days. She had been firm, implacable. Now chills racked her, and she pulled the thin airline blanket around her chin and tried to push herself deeper into her seat.
She had been prepared for argument from Sandy, but he had seemed almost relieved to let her go. He had made the objection she expected— that it was a wild-goose chase— but without vigor. Of the letters and phone call he had said, “You know this is some nut who read about you in the papers over there and remembers you were involved in the Palika Road incident.”
“Some nut who knows the games I used to play with my sister.”
“Oh, come on. Maybe it’s somebody who knew your sister.”
“Maybe it’s my sister.” When she said the words she was embarrassed, as if she’d involuntarily screamed an obscenity.
He shook his head. “I wouldn’t go too far with that one.” After a moment he punched a button on his intercom. “Hey, Don. Marina’s going to be taking some vacation time, effective immediately. She’ll come out and tell you so you can revise the schedule.” He looked at her. “OK?”
“One more thing. Would you tell Eric Sondergard?”
His expression altered slightly, and she wondered whether he and Sondergard had talked about her, maybe laughed about her. He nodded. “I’ll smooth it over. Say it’s a family emergency or something,” he said.
“Thanks.”
“I won’t tell Bobo, though. That one’s your baby.”
In fact, Bobo hadn’t seemed to care. She had found him in his solarium, smoking a cigar and clipping an article out of The Wall Street Journal. He looked healthier and more tuned in than she’d ever seen him, and she realized that the shock of the Loopy Doop collapse must be wearing off. His manner was brusque, with a touch of the antagonism that had puzzled her before.
“Whatever’s right,” he said when she told him, turning his cigar between knobby fingers and thumb.
“I’m sure the investigation will be in good hands.”
“Yeah. Lots of fine people over at your place, I expect.”
Feeling once again rebuffed and confused, she had said goodbye and left him in his cloud of smoke, reaching for the telephone.
So here she was, shuffled out the door by her boss and her champion, having made a mess of and then deserted her big case, going back to a place she’d never wanted to see again to look for a dead woman.
She opened her eyes. The announcement about fastening seat belts had started. As she pulled hers tighter, her toe touched her khaki-colored canvas shoulder bag, stowed under the seat in front of her. Without knowing quite why, she had outfitted herself with something almost like a Breakdown “doctor bag.” In its zippered compartments were a tape measure, dial calipers, screwdriver, fountain-pen sized flashlight, tweezers, Swiss Army knife, and the pocket-sized camera she liked. Putting the kit together had made her feel that what she was doing might be rational.
Which it wasn’t, as every nerve in her body was telling her. The plane began to accelerate. She wished desperately, feverishly, with all her strength that she could get out, go back. Then she grasped the arms of her seat hard as the plane rose.
17
As the plane droned through the hours from San Francisco to New York, New York to London, Marina dozed and woke, gazed blearily at the screen where movies ran soundlessly, ate and drank at times that had no relationship to her body’s messages.
She thought about Loopy Doop. Her mind, perversely, didn’t want to let it go. Steel gondolas and aluminum gondolas. Sixty-five Rockwell B and thirty-five Rockwell C. Gonzales Manufacturing and Singapore Metal Works. The little quad case, Tommy or Ronnie.
Think about something else, for God’s sake. A picture of Patrick came into her mind. She had not let Patrick know she was going to India. What would he have said? She knew, suddenly and forcibly, that he would have told her to go. He would have said she needed to go. Marina blinked, and remembered Patrick and his new love, Nancy. She saw Patrick caressing Nancy, his hands light and tender and warm, his breath blowing the hair next to Nancy’s ear as he whispered to her. Marina didn’t know what color Nancy’s hair was. She closed her eyes and tr
ied to sleep again.
When the plane took off from London for Bombay, she was fully awake, with a film of sweat on her body that came not from heat but from fear. She remembered the other time she’d made this trip. Then, she had been rigid with determination, coming to get her sister and take her home. She had seen Nagarajan in person by that time, and knew what she was up against.
Catherine had been simmering with excitement for weeks before Nagarajan’s visit to San Francisco. She began wearing a sari. She stood on street corners, the bright silk streaming in the wind, handing out leaflets announcing his appearance.
“Aren’t you cold?” Marina asked one morning as Catherine was leaving the house with her stack of flyers. Catherine, who by that time seemed to regard anything Marina said as a criticism, didn’t reply. Marina stretched out her hand. “Can I see one of those?” Catherine handed one over and left. In the brief moment when the flyer changed hands, Marina saw goose pimples on Catherine’s arm.
She studied the leaflet. There was a picture on it, a black-and-white version of the one in Catherine’s room, and the words, “SRI NAGARAJAN WILL VISIT US! The master of the wisdom of the cobra shares his knowledge at Bay Area appearances.” There was a list of dates and times. Marina decided to go see him.
On the evening she chose, she waited outside the auditorium, hoping to slip in without Catherine’s noticing her. As she paced nervously, a voice spoke from the shadows at the side of the building. “You wonder whether to see me, is it?” the voice said. The voice had a musical lilt and the suggestion of a British accent. “Is it?” the voice persisted, and when she realized it was addressing her, she saw him.
He stood half-hidden in a dim angle of the building. He was alone, and his face seemed to float disembodied between the dark robe he was wearing and his mass of black hair. He laughed, and she saw his eyes glimmer as they caught the light when he tilted his head. “Come here,” he said.
The Complete Mystery Collection Page 46