The Complete Mystery Collection

by Michaela Thompson

  The huts were being used, apparently, as barracks for Baladeva’s gang. The first one she looked in was uninhabited, with clothing, bed mats, and boxes of ammunition strewn about carelessly. In the second a man and woman, both Indian, were energetically making love on a mat in the corner.

  She ran to the third hut. A curtain hung over the door and from behind it voices, none of them feminine, drifted. She moved closer. Some of the conversation was muffled, as if people were speaking with their mouths full.

  Cautiously, she pulled back the curtain. Several men were sitting around a communal bowl of curry, dipping into it with pieces of flat bread. She did not see the yellow-haired woman.

  As she let the curtain fall, she felt a presence behind her. She turned and saw a man who looked about eighteen. A rifle was slung over his shoulder. Behind him, Marina saw the guard from the front gate hurrying toward them. “I’m looking for my sister,” she said to the young man. He muttered something as the guard ran up to them.

  “I have told you to wait!” the guard said angrily.

  “I’m looking for my sister. She just came in here.”

  “Who are you?”

  “My name is Marina Robinson, and—”

  “You must wait when I say wait,” said the guard. “You do not enter Baladeva’s camp against my orders.”

  “You don’t understand—” she began.

  “I understand that there are many spies, many people who wish to do harm to our cause.”

  Behind him, she thought she saw the woman in the red-and-white sari walk past the door of a hut. “Catherine!” she called, but the woman didn’t hesitate or turn, and in a moment she was hidden again.

  The people waiting outside Baladeva’s hut were looking at her, and a babble of disquiet swept the courtyard. “Who is paying you to spy? The police?” demanded the guard.

  Marina shook her head. Before she could say anything, the guard spoke with the younger man, who shoved her with his rifle butt toward the hut where Baladeva’s petitioners were congregated. They crossed the threshold into a crowded room. Babies cried in women’s arms, a shrunken old man regarded her with rheumy eyes, a group of chubby, prosperous-looking men stopped a discussion to stare.

  The next instant the man with the rifle prodded her forward across the room and through another door. They were in an enclosure stacked with clay jars, baskets, a rake, a wooden yoke, the large wooden wheel from a bullock cart. “I will see Baladeva,” the guard said. He spoke rapidly to the younger man and went out the door.

  Marina called, “Come back!” but he didn’t return, and the slim fingers of the young man played nervously with his rifle. She would have to wait.

  42

  The room was obviously a storeroom. Its one small window was covered by a piece of sacking. There was no other door. She could hear the murmur of the group in the anteroom discussing, she supposed, her unexpected entrance. The young man guarding her looked as frightened as she was.

  “I was looking for my sister. She’s wearing a red-and-white sari,” she said, but when she saw his hands tighten on his rifle she decided not to say anything else.

  She sat on the dirt floor and rested her forehead on her bent knees. She had been unutterably, unforgivably stupid to follow the woman— Catherine?— yet the compulsion had been overwhelming. She would, she knew, do the same again. Even now, despite the trouble she was in, she felt prickles of excitement and apprehension at the thought that Catherine might be near. Baladeva might understand, if she explained it the right way. She tried to remember if any of the newspaper stories she’d read mentioned whether he spoke English.

  By this time Vijay will be worried. I ran off without thinking about him, not once.

  The guard was taking a long time to return. Staring at the wheel from the bullock cart, she thought abruptly, unexpectedly, of Loopy Doop. How could she think of it now, when it had hardly crossed her mind since she arrived in India? Yet looking at the wheel, she thought that the design was much the same. The wheel’s spokes were like Loopy Doop’s legs, reaching out from a central hub and traveling in a circle. For Loopy Doop, though, the ends of the spokes weren’t connected into a wheel, but carried gondolas. One of the spokes had broken near the hub, and the gondola crashed into the ticket booth.

  Marina looked intently at the wheel. A twig lay near her foot. She picked it up and on the dirt floor began to scratch a fault tree.

  She hardly noticed her guard’s apprehensive look as she drew the top rectangle, the Most Undesired Event. The Most Undesired Event was the breaking of Loopy Doop’s leg. Under the rectangle, she drew a line and then half a bullet pointing up, the symbol for an Or gate. The Or gate meant that only one cause was required for the Most Undesired Event to happen, although there could have been more.

  She felt hypnotized. Analysis of this kind had been, for a long time, her only release from anxiety. She lapsed into it with a feeling of physical easing.

  Now the tree branched into the possible causes for the leg’s fracture. She drew another rectangle and labeled it DF, for Design Fault. Maybe Loopy Doop’s design had too small a margin of safety, and didn’t take into account mechanical stresses inherent in its operation. Not likely. Bobo had other amusement parks, other Loopy Doops. None of the others had had problems, and they’d been operating for years. She went on to another rectangle: Improper Operation. A lot of possibilities there. The ride could have been unbalanced, operated at too high a rate of speed, badly inspected and maintained. Her investigation had shown, though, that the ride hadn’t been unbalanced, and the speed had been within safe limits. As for maintenance and inspection, the records had looked fine.

  Her guard muttered something. She looked up and said, “I’m not doing anything. It’s OK.” One more aspect to think through. She drew a third rectangle and labeled it Material Defect. She stared at the MD scratched in the dry earth. A material defect would mean that the steel had failed. That was where she’d gotten into trouble. She’d thought the steel was too soft, inferior, but that was because she’d blown the hardness test. The tensile and chemical tests hadn’t borne her theory out.

  According to this fault tree, nothing went wrong. Loopy Doop never broke.

  She pushed her hair back with her gritty hand. But it broke. It broke, and it’s taken me this long, and I’ve had to come this far, to realize that somebody’s lying. I spent all my time messing around with the numbers while somebody else was pulling the strings.

  So, who’s lying, and about what? Design’s out. That you couldn’t cover up, in these circumstances. Operation? Possibly. Records can be faked. It’s not unheard of.

  Material. I convinced myself I was wrong on the hardness number, but what if I was right? What if I did the goddamned test right, and the other tests were wrong, or got screwed up somehow? Or somebody screwed them up. What if I jumped at the chance to be wrong?

  She put down the twig. I may never get out of this, but if I make it back to California I’m going to do that test again. “Sixty-five on the Rockwell B,” she said to her guard.

  He was shifting his weight from foot to foot. Brought back to the present, she realized that the atmosphere had changed. She heard male voices, speaking in tones of urgency. The crying babies, the buzz of conversation from the anteroom, had subsided. In a few minutes came the sound of running feet and shouts.

  She stood up, her eyes meeting those of the young man. His Adam’s apple bobbed. He went to the door and looked out, then called to someone.

  The answer seemed to disturb him. He looked at Marina. “What is it?” she said, and he responded in his own language. She heard motors. Vehicles were pulling up in back of the hut. Keeping his rifle trained on her, the man looked out the window, then let the curtain drop and paced back to the door. Voices came from another room, then sounds of scuffling feet passing the door. Marina tried to see out, but the young man waved her back.

  She knew immediately that the staccato cracks she heard a second later could be nothi
ng else but gunfire. Then came shouts, and more shots. Her young guard took her arm and pulled her toward the door.

  She resisted instinctively, unwilling to go toward the firing, but he shouted at her and grasped her roughly, dragging her with him through the now-deserted anteroom. When they reached the entrance to the hut he peered out into the silent courtyard. After a moment he ran, pulling Marina after him.

  They had gone only a few steps when Marina heard more cracks. Puffs of dust exploded near their feet. The young man’s knees buckled, his hold on her loosened, and Marina saw the rifle slip to the ground. He fell on top of it, blood spurting from his neck. A bullet thumped into the wall beside her. She turned back, thinking she would return to the shelter of the hut, but there were footsteps approaching and she was knocked to her knees and almost trampled, buffeted by gang members running toward the truck. When one of them stumbled against her it caught the attention of another, who stopped to stare. She recognized the hostile face of the guard at the gate, who had left her to go speak with Baladeva.

  His eyes were bloodshot, his face bathed in sweat. “It is you!” he cried. “You who are responsible for this!” He yelled something to his comrades, and she felt herself being pulled, by many hands, into the back of the truck, crushed by the bodies of the men. A few more jumped aboard, and as the truck pulled out she saw figures in khaki-colored uniforms rounding the side of the hut. The truck accelerated.

  Through the uproar, she heard a voice calling her name. Shoving through the crush she saw Vijay running toward her, a few feet away.

  “Vijay!” she cried, and saw by the set of his body that he heard her. He had reached the side of the truck, and she was pushing to get a hand out to him, when one of the gang members hit him on the side of the head with a rifle butt. She saw his glasses fly off, saw him stagger and drop back and lie motionless. Then the truck rounded the trees, and he was lost from view.

  43

  Marina hardly felt the bodies jostling against her as the truck bounced over the rocky, unpaved track. She was only peripherally aware that the shooting had stopped, and that the men had subsided into grim, watchful silence. She gave way to a terrible fear for Vijay, seeing his anxious face as he ran, seeing him lie so still. Vijay could be dead, he’s certainly hurt, and it’s my fault. I should make a fault tree of my life— every branch a mistake, every fork a wrong decision.

  She was alone, caught in something she understood only vaguely, en route to a destination she could not imagine. Her bag, with the tools that had seen her through, with her passport and money and even her clothes, had been taken away. What remained? Her sandals and underwear and the sari she had bought to bribe Hari to talk, which was now filthy and impregnated with dust.

  The men seemed to relax slightly now, and talked among themselves, although they still watched the road behind them closely. Aside from curious looks, they paid little attention to her. She had noticed the guard from the compound glaring at her, but even he made no aggressive move. She guessed it would be up to Baladeva, who must be in front of them in the other truck, to decide what to do about her.

  They continued to climb, and the road narrowed. She tried to remember what she had read about Baladeva’s gang. They camped in these hills, moving from place to place, sweeping down to carry out raids, presumably on the rich. The ease with which they got away and their increasing popularity among the poor were turning them into a political embarrassment. That must have been the reason for the police action today. Still, the attack could have been window-dressing. If the police were serious about capturing Baladeva they would follow, and there was no sign of them. She thought for the first time about the young man who had guarded her, remembered the blood spurting from his neck. That had been serious enough.

  It was well after nightfall when the truck stopped. The road had become an all-but-impassable track. The headlights briefly illuminated the gray face of the rock they had pulled up behind, and the other, now-empty, truck. Then the lights went out and the darkness was almost total. Someone’s hand jerked her to her feet as the men jumped to the ground. She jumped in her turn, still in a strong grip. When her eyes adjusted, she could see the dark forms of the men disappearing over the side of a hill, and could make out the face of the man holding her. As she had thought, it was the guard from the compound. The two of them followed the rest.

  She could see no path, and the men had spread out through the rocks and scrub. She heard their running feet. Occasionally, the heavy sound of their breathing mingled in her ears with her own labored gasps. As they gradually descended there were trees, and plants with sharp spines that caught at her sari. The descent became steeper and the vegetation more dense; eventually the group consolidated into single file to pass through a narrow opening between boulders. When Marina went through, she could just make out that she was in an open area where tents had been pitched. Aside from the occasional brief flicker of a flashlight, there was no illumination except the moon, high and silver in the starry black sky.

  Figures hurried through the encampment, speaking in hushed voices. Marina’s captor pulled her down behind a rock where he crouched with his rifle at the ready. Marina struggled to catch her breath. They’re waiting to see if the police are coming, if they’re going to be attacked.

  She wasn’t sure what determined the moment when the threat of an attack was considered to be over. People began walking around the encampment, a lantern was lit in one of the tents. Someone approached and handed Marina and the guard a cold chapati and an orange. Marina ate while she watched the camp come cautiously to life. A few more lanterns were lit and hung in trees, and a small fire was teased into life.

  Spitting out the last pits of the orange, Marina said to the guard, “I didn’t intend to hurt anybody. I saw a woman come into the compound. Do you know her? She has yellow hair, and she’s wearing a red-and-white sari. I think her name is Catherine.”

  The guard grunted. “It is for Baladeva to say. You have brought the police down on us like a herd of jackals.”

  “I didn’t. I swear I didn’t. I had nothing to do with it. I don’t know why the police came.”

  “Our brother is dead because of you.”

  “I wasn’t spying. I was looking for my sister. I swear.”

  “Baladeva will decide.”

  He stood and hauled her to her feet and led her through the dimly lit camp, past groups of men speaking in low tones, chewing on their cold bread.

  They reached a tent in the center of the clearing, outside of which stood a tall man with a rifle. The guard left her under the tall man’s surveillance and entered the tent. After some low conversation Marina heard a voice say, in lilting, musical English, “Yes, yes, you must bring her to me now. Immediately.”

  The next moment, she was entering the tent.

  44

  Light from a swaying lantern cast increasing and diminishing shadows of Marina and the guard on the side of the tent. It played on the barefoot man in the long, loose, V-necked shirt and pajama-style trousers who sat cross-legged on a rug richly patterned in blue and gold. When he saw Marina, he placed his palms together and bent low over them. There was mockery, Marina thought, in the depth of his bow.

  Nagarajan’s once-luxuriant hair was roughly clipped close to his head. Without it and his flowing robes, and with the moustache that now shadowed his upper lip, his aspect was more conventionally masculine than when she had known him before. His face, with its dark eyes and exquisite bone structure, showed no sign of the passage of ten years. Just above the neck of his shirt, she saw the scar she remembered. She had always tried to touch it, just to see if she could. He always pushed her hand away.

  He spoke briefly to the guard, and when the man withdrew he gestured for her to sit on the rug in front of him. She lowered herself slowly. When they faced one another he smiled the familiar amused smile.

  “You have reached me after all, Marina,” he said. “I would have thought it simpler to come directly from Halapur with
the men I sent to fetch you. Now I recall that the simple way never appealed to you.”

  “Where is Catherine, Nagarajan?” How often had they played this scene? Had nothing changed at all?

  “Please to call me Baladeva now. In India, you know, we believe in many incarnations, many lifetimes. Nagarajan was another life. But you do not know, do you, that Baladeva is also the name of a nagarajan. Taking that name was a tiny game I played.”

  “And Catherine?”

  “It is strange how things do not change.” He knew, she felt, that he was echoing her own thought. “When you came to see me first, it was to search for Catherine. Now you have come again, and still you search for her.”

  “Where is she?”

  “She is dead, as you know, yet she has led you to me. It is a paradox. How can the dead lead the living? Yet you have followed her all these years, and not these last days only.”

  “You say she’s dead. I got a letter, a phone call.”

  “What are those? Words on paper, a voice in the air. They have significance only when mingled with your own need.”

  “I saw her come into the compound.”

  “Suppose you see a white dove fluttering in the top of a tree. When you look again closely, it is a white cloth caught on a branch, blown by the wind. The dove is not real, you will say, but was it not real in some sense when you saw it? You must ask yourself, more important, why out of harmless cloth you have created a flapping bird.”