The Complete Mystery Collection

by Michaela Thompson

Perspiration stood on Marina’s forehead. “Where is Catherine?”

  “Have you not understood? Catherine is with you only. Nowhere else, except in the dust of Halapur.”

  She could see nothing but Nagarajan’s bland, unreadable eyes. “There is a woman who has yellow hair and who wears a sari. I didn’t imagine that.”

  “No, you did not.” He called, and the man outside the tent looked in. Nagarajan spoke to him, and the man replied and left. “We must wait a short while,” he said.

  Nagarajan uncrossed his legs and reclined on the rug, leaning on one elbow. The gesture made Marina’s breath catch. “Baladeva,” she said. “You got out of jail and became Baladeva. How did you convince Joginder and Baburao to help you?”

  His lips curled. “Joginder was frightened out of his wits, and more than ready to get me out of Halapur or do anything else I asked. Convincing Baburao to let me out of jail was a matter of even greater simplicity. More than anything, Baburao wanted to own a field. I offered him the chance to have what he wanted, which is what I have always offered those who came to me.”

  “Whose body was cremated?”

  “A homeless wanderer who slept on the sidewalk near the prison.”

  “You killed him?”

  “I? Locked in a cell, how could I kill him? Baburao brought him in and gave him something to drink, and when his eyes became heavy Baburao twisted the cord around his neck.”

  “All for a field.”

  “It made him happy, I believe.”

  “Until you had him summoned to that field in the middle of the night and killed.”

  “You accuse me, I see. Yet had you yourself not thrown us out of balance Baburao would still be alive.”

  Marina shook her head. “You threw things out of balance when you sent those letters and had someone call me from the Hotel Rama. That’s what made me believe Catherine was alive, and put me on your trail.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Undoubtedly those things put you on my trail, but if you think I was behind them you are mistaken. I sent no letters. I knew about the telephone call because Raki, one of the few people who knows of my former life, told me after it happened. I assure you I had nothing to do with it.

  “Consider, Marina” —he held up a forefinger— “Nagarajan has been cast away, like a snake’s old skin. Baladeva is strong, and loved, and famous. Do you realize how powerful I am now?” His face was radiant.

  “Is Elephanta Trading and Tours a front for moving what you steal?”

  “It is clever, is it not? Boats come to Elephanta from the opposite coast, and from there go to Bombay. I myself go sometimes. I move freely in Bombay because I have many, many friends there. What I am saying, however, is this: The elements of my past life are of no more use to me than a snake’s old skin is of use to him.”

  She wondered if he was lying. “If you didn’t contact me, who did?”

  He shrugged. “For the answer, you must search your own mind. Certainly I would not disturb you with letters and calls about your dead sister. When I learned you were here, I wanted to avoid you. Failing that, I wanted to capture you. I could do neither. Only your own utter determination, which I remember quite well from before, has brought you here.”

  It made a weird sort of sense. As a guru, Nagarajan sought power, wanted to have people in his grasp. As a dacoit, he wanted the same thing. He might have shed his skin, but the essence was unchanged.

  “It’s too bad these men you lead don’t know what you really are,” she said.

  “Do you know what I really am, Marina?”

  Voices came from outside. A woman in a red-and-white sari entered, knelt, and touched her forehead to Nagarajan’s feet. She straightened and looked at Marina.

  Her yellow hair, thick and shining, fell past her shoulders, framing a long, serious face sprinkled with freckles. Her lips were thin, her eyes light brown. I want always around me women with hair the color of mustard blossoms. The woman regarded Marina without expression, but when her gaze shifted to Nagarajan Marina recognized the adoration of the devotee.

  “This is Sylvie. Sylvie came here from Paris to write about me for a magazine,” Nagarajan said.

  Catherine had been taller, blue-eyed, bigger-boned. Sylvie didn’t look any more or any less like Catherine than a cloth caught in a tree resembles a fluttering dove. Marina bent her head, and felt the air stir slightly as the woman left.

  “Sylvie became convinced that we represent a genuine movement of the people, and she has dedicated herself to our cause.” Satisfaction was evident in Nagarajan’s voice.

  Catherine was dead. Catherine had been mixed with the dust of Halapur for ten years. Tears slid down Marina’s cheeks and dropped into the pattern of the carpet. She is with you, nowhere else. She had found Catherine after all.

  After a while, Nagarajan stirred. His voice pulled her back to awareness of her surroundings. “There is an expression, is there not, that one who has died has ‘gone before’?” he said. “Catherine has gone before, and you have followed her to this point. Now, you must join her where she is.”

  He couldn’t let her live. Marina was part of the skin he had cast off, and she must be cast off as well.

  “You’ll sacrifice me the way you sacrificed Agit More,” she said.

  He took a pistol and holster from a pack in the corner of the tent and strapped them around his waist. Over his shirt he slipped a sleeveless vest long enough to cover them. “You have misunderstood the case of Agit More,” he said. “His death was a ritual sacrifice, the holiest of acts. To kill you is a necessary act, not a holy one. For a sacrifice, the victim must be a boy, unblemished, never a woman or an enemy. Catherine understood this, even if she did not approve.”

  “Catherine didn’t help with the ritual?”

  He shrugged. “She did not approve. She did not attend. But she did nothing to stop it from happening. I count her as one of the faithful who perished for the cause.”

  Catherine didn’t approve of the ritual murder of a child. That was something, but it wasn’t enough. Marina, too, if she lived, would from now on count her sister Catherine as one of the deluded faithful who had perished for a horrific cause.

  “As far as my men are concerned, you are a police informer who precipitated the raid on our compound in Goti,” Nagarajan said. “They will not question what happens to you. It will be best, however, if they do not know too much. I think you will simply come with me.”

  She stood. Nagarajan motioned toward the entrance of the tent, and she started on her last walk with him.

  45

  The silent stares of the men Marina and Nagarajan passed as they left the camp were almost tangible— cold, impenetrable, unyielding. Sylvie stood impassively in the shadows. They’ll watch me go to my death. They’ll do that because it’s what Nagarajan— Baladeva —wants.

  Nagarajan’s face was solemn. His hand was gentle on her arm, almost as if he touched her only to keep her from stumbling.

  When they left the camp and passed a patrolling sentry, Nagarajan took the pistol from his belt and pressed it against her side. “You will walk ahead of me slowly. We will not go far.”

  She took a step. “Nagarajan?”

  “Yes?”

  “Don’t shoot me without warning. Let me know when, all right?” She didn’t know why this was important, only that it was.

  “Yes, yes. Walk on.”

  They wound over a rough path through precipitous terrain. There are vultures here, Marina thought. She remembered the tour of Bombay she had taken the day Agit More was murdered. The bus passed by the Parsee Towers of Silence and the guide told how, with solemn ceremonies, dead bodies of the faithful were placed there for the birds to clean.

  My bones will tumble and splinter among these rocks. Her mouth tasted of salt. The grit beneath her eyelids, the itching in the palm of her hand, the stones in the path seemed infinitely precious. She breathed and smelled her own body, and Nagarajan’s, and a hint of smoke from the camp, and a
dry aroma of dirt and vegetation that was the earth. Catherine is dead but I’m not.

  “This is far enough.” Nagarajan turned to face her. They stood by the rocky, sloping side of a gully that seemed, in the darkness, to have no bottom. Nagarajan’s eyes reflected moonlight. The pistol, in his right hand, was by his side.

  He drew her to him as if for an embrace.

  “You’ll really kill me, Nagarajan?” she whispered.

  His arm tightened. “You have been a great bother to me, although you gave me much pleasure also.”

  Much pleasure. She remembered their nights together in the ashram. She reached toward his face, not knowing why exactly, perhaps in supplication, and realized in mid-gesture what she must do. She stroked the scar, the mottled scar at the base of his throat.

  His right hand, as she knew it would, as it always had, moved to brush hers away. In that reflexive instant she threw herself to one side and clung to his wrist.

  The gun went off with a muffled explosion. Nagarajan bent, dropped the gun, and stumbled into the gully. She heard scrambling noises as he slid downward. Had he been hit? She wasn’t sure. She picked up the gun and, standing on the gully’s edge, she fired toward the sound.

  If he wasn’t hit he would be back, but surely he would first go to the camp for another gun, and perhaps reinforcements. She ran frenziedly, then crouched, panting, in a sheltering crevice of rock to catch her breath.

  The first shots had about the same volume and rhythm as the sound of a woodpecker pecking a tree. She shrank back against the rock, certain, even though they were far away, that they were somehow directed at her. She strained to hear. The noise remained distant. Then she understood. The police had attacked the encampment after all.

  Comprehension brought her to her feet. She started toward the noise. If she could find the police, she could get away.

  As the firing got louder she could hear shouts as well, and see an unearthly glare. She gripped the gun more tightly and slipped from rock to rock in the increasingly illuminated landscape. Amid a confusion of shouts, groans, and cries, the firing stopped. On a rise ahead, she saw running figures silhouetted against the light, which she realized must come from searchlights the police had trained on the camp. Through the babble, she heard a motor and saw, off to one side, a jeep pull up next to a patch of scrub. A man vaulted out of it and paused to light a cigarette. The flame of the match glared briefly on his open khaki shirt, his pudgy face and hands. He stared at her, startled, and then she realized that the shrill voice calling for help had been her own.

  46

  The surprised policeman, who told her his name was Sergeant Aziz, placed her in the front seat of his jeep after gingerly taking her gun away. “We have heard of the missing American lady,” he said. “It is lucky you were not with these dacoits. They were determined to fight, and now they have had the worst of it.”

  “Who reported that I was missing?”

  “The American consulate in Bombay, first. Then the driver of the consulate car, who was lured away from his post and given false information that he was to meet you at another place.”

  “I was with an employee of the consulate. Do you know—”

  “Mr. Vijay Pandit was injured earlier today. He is in hospital but I think is not seriously hurt.”

  Tears of relief welled in her eyes. The policeman sketched a salute, said, “I must leave you, Miss,” and dashed toward the light and noise. Marina sagged against the lumpy seat of the jeep.

  She stared for a while at the shadow play of figures moving back and forth. Then she got out of the jeep and walked shakily to the edge of the outcropping. She had to see.

  Below, bleached and unreal in the bright light, was the confusion of the police mopping-up operation. Men in khaki picked their way around fallen tents and kicked overturned cooking pots. Others herded prisoners, tied together with rope, toward a waiting truck. One of the dacoits shouted something in an anguished, angry voice, and a policeman hit him a solid blow with his fist. When the man regained his balance, the policeman hit him again.

  Marina’s eyes were drawn to a row of bodies, ten or so, laid out like game after a day’s hunt. She saw Nagarajan lying among them. The front of his shirt was stained dark red, his legs flung wide apart.

  “You must move back, Miss!” Sergeant Aziz cried, and she obediently turned toward the jeep. He hovered near her, as if afraid she would make some other unexpected move.

  “The leader of the dacoits— Baladeva,” she said. “He was killed, wasn’t he?”

  “He is dead. We found him at the edge of the camp. It is an odd thing. He was covered with blood, as if he had been wounded and run a long way, yet he was at the edge of the camp only.”

  She had shot him, and he made it back to camp only to collapse and die as the police opened fire. It was an irony he would have appreciated. She sat in the jeep, her mind blank.

  When Sergeant Aziz returned, he was carrying something. He handed it to her. “This is yours, I think. We found it in one of the tents.”

  She took her canvas shoulder bag. Everything was in it— her clothes, her tools, her passport. All seemed trivial. She closed the bag and put it at her feet.

  At last, Sergeant Aziz and several other policemen got into the jeep with her and the driver started the motor. The searchlights had been turned off. The area was as dark and featureless as when she had first seen it. The moon was setting. She turned her face toward the breeze stirred by the jeep’s motion.

  As they drove, her mind was filled with images as jerky and speeded-up as an old movie. She saw Nagarajan in his robes, his long hair flowing, and in his other incarnation as Baladeva. She saw Patrick and Vijay, and Clara and Agit More. She saw Catherine, and Sandy, and Eric Sondergard, and Bobo the Clown. As they whirled through her mind an unconsciousness descended from which she awoke when the sky was gray with dawn and the jeep was pulling up in front of a hotel just off the main square in Halapur.

  Sergeant Aziz escorted her inside, rang the bell insistently, and booked a room from the sleepy clerk who emerged from the back. “We shall wish to talk with you later, but I think you must rest first,” he said. “This afternoon I shall call for you.”

  The room was plain, but clean. The ceiling fan stirred thin curtains through which came the light of daybreak. She took off the green sari and folded it carefully, then stood in the uncurtained shower letting hot water stream over her face, her hair, her body, stinging the scratches and cuts on her legs and feet. Scrubbed clean, she lay in her bed, watching the fan and listening to the sounds of Halapur starting the day. The room was bright with the sun’s first rays before she fell asleep.

  She awoke in the afternoon and dressed in her Western clothes once more. They were not only badly crumpled, but scratchy from being washed in the river and spread on bushes to dry. Needing to eat something before she spoke with Sergeant Aziz, she went downstairs and found that she could get an egg and cheese sandwich and a Campa Cola in the hotel dining room. She was just finishing her food when she became aware that someone was standing in the dining room doorway. Expecting Sergeant Aziz, she looked up and saw Vijay.

  He looked worn and tired, and his glasses frames were held together on one side by white adhesive tape. He was smiling, though, his hair was neatly brushed, and his white shirt and beige linen pants were freshly laundered. He again resembled the crisp, dapper young man who had, only days ago, called on her at the Hotel Rama and waited decorously outside the door of her room.

  He walked to her table and pulled out a chair. Marina was almost unable to speak. “I was afraid you were dead,” she said.

  “I wanted to get you away from them. I couldn’t reach you in time.”

  They sat in silence. Marina stared at the red formica of the tabletop. She said, “Vijay, Baladeva was Nagarajan. He was going to kill me. I shot him.”

  He shook his head. “This cannot be true.”

  “It is.”

  “I have heard, of course, that Bal
adeva is dead. But how could he and Nagarajan be one and the same?

  Marina told him everything that had happened since she had left him waiting for the phone call in Goti. When she finished, his face was grave. “He would have killed you, because you knew his true identity.”

  Do you know who I really am, Marina? “Catherine is dead, too. My sister. I’m finally convinced of it. And Nagarajan told me he didn’t try to trick me into believing she was alive. He said he didn’t make the phone call or send the letters.”

  “So in fact, although we found out a great many things, we have not found the explanations you came to India to search for.”

  “I guess that’s right.” The words sounded desolate and small.

  After a moment Marina said, “What about Mr. Curtis?”

  “Mr. Curtis, as you may imagine, is not pleased.” Vijay’s voice had an edge of discomfort. “I have spoken with him this morning. With my father and mother also.”

  “Are your parents terribly upset?”

  Vijay wriggled as if bothered by an insect. “Terribly,” he said. “I am the youngest. They act as if I were still a child only. I had to beg my mother not to come here to Halapur to care for me.”

  “They’ve been frightened.”

  Vijay sighed. “Yes, yes.”

  Marina gazed at Vijay’s face. “Is everything all right? You aren’t going to lose your job, are you?”

  He frowned. “As I said, I have talked with my father and Mr. Curtis. They have also talked with one another. They agree that for the most part I could not have helped what happened, but Mr. Curtis feels that in some areas I overstepped. They have met at the club for a chat and decided that I shall be given another chance.”

  Marina thought she understood. “You’ll be given another chance under what condition?”

  “Condition?”

  “You can keep your job and make your parents happy if you marry Sushila and settle down. Isn’t that it?”

  He gave a rueful shrug. “Yes. That’s it.”