by Mario Bolduc
Max fully expected the city still to be marked by the assassination of Abdul Gani Lone, the moderate independence leader, pushed out of the spotlight by the war. Here and there a Durga had scribbled his emblem, a stylized snake emerging from a marigold, on the walls, but nothing else. Horror had given way to terror already.
The noise of Jeeps and military trucks didn’t prevent Max from sleeping; he was worn out from all this time on bad roads. At seven in the morning, he was brutally awakened by blows to the door. The reception clerk (didn’t this guy ever sleep?) was there with a tray carried by a young Dalit, as though this place were a five-star hotel. There were corn flakes, tea, toast with marmalade, and, once again, The Times of India with the headline: WAR IN A MATTER OF HOURS.
The bus was Jayesh’s idea. So was the camera. To allow troops to get around easily, intercity transit had been cut back to the minimum, so this vehicle was crowded, and Max found himself as just one more human sardine. There were mostly foreigners, several of whom had stopped over at the Sinbad. Is this the way David had done it? It normally took twelve hours, but today with the military convoys to make way for, it required three or four more.
Udhampur appeared on the far side of the ravine, the last large town before Srinagar. It too was full of soldiers. Then they started out again, bobbing and weaving as always, with hairpin turns and endless waits for convoys to pass. The road was very narrow in places, and reduced to a single lane at best. The ravines contained the carcasses of rusted-out vehicles abandoned after their tumble as much as ten, twenty or thirty years ago. The driver knew what he was doing and took what seemed like senseless risks, overtaking on the edge of ravines, with one hand on the horn and a smile on his face, then whiplash braking behind vehicles loaded with explosives, or accelerating on the long curving declines, as though exempt from the law of gravity.
The first roadblock was at the Banihal Pass, about halfway into their sixteen-hour journey. There was a smattering of police mixed in with the soldiers. Max showed his camera by way of ID: “We’re journalists on our way to an appointment in hell.” It worked. Then off they were again, fast. The waiting, the dangerous curves. At night, all of a sudden, beyond a moon-shaped mountain, was the famous valley. The heat returned, as well, and there was Srinagar, or so Max guessed, behind the blackout and human presence despite the curfew. Tons of frightened people were hunkered down at home as was their habit these past fifty years.
There was a densely packed crowd at the bus terminal. That was hardly a surprise. People had spent the night there to get the first bus out in the early morning for Jammu. A board on the wall had about fifty ads for hotels and houseboats. Max found the Mount View Hotel, while Jayesh was haggling over the price of a rickshaw. It was curfew, and the police would be patrolling, but the rickshaw man knew shortcuts and byways, so they relied on him to avoid that sort of problem.
They headed out into the Srinagar night, which a few hours earlier had been like a dark spill of lava submerging houses and businesses. Unlike Pompeii, where all life had stopped instantly, one could see that behind drawn blinds, down dead ends and under the eaves of houses, a world unknown was bustling. The beauties of Srinagar, though, were not to be seen. Every street corner had its sandbag piles, and here and there improvised guard towers had been raised by the Indian Army. Surveillance posts, some of them brand new, others dating from the late eighties, remained from the last really nasty turn in events.
The Mount View Hotel was part of the collective mourning. Its once-luminous sign had been turned off for months. The glimmer of a candle appeared through a parted curtain. There was no other sign of human habitation. The place had its charms, though. It must have been fully booked in the past, but the rear garden where the clients could breakfast or relax — bombardments permitting — had not been kept up.
“Are you phoning from prison?” asked Juliette, when he managed to reach her that evening. Max burst out laughing.
28
The immense register, like those in all hotels long ago, unfortunately held no mention of David. Max’s nephew must have had no difficulty using an assumed name. India wasn’t in the habit of requesting any ID, passport or other, when one rented a room. Max had already noticed this in Delhi, but the corpulent, stern-faced owner recognized David from the photo Max showed her.
“How many days did he stay?”
“One night I think.”
“Was he alone?”
She nodded.
“What did he do? Make any appointments, visit the city, receive any phone calls?”
“Shabir!” she yelled.
The handyman was elderly, frail, barefoot, and dressed in a salwar. He seemed better prepared for hunting flies than for painting or woodworking. The owner conferred with him, intoning in a language Max didn’t recognize. He later learned it was Kashmiri.
Shabir tilted his head one way, then the other, as though on the point of falling into a trance or passing out, but he was really saying, “I know some things, but only at a price.” Jayesh held out a few rupees, and Shabir slipped them into his salwar as imperceptibly as a magician. He remembered David, oh yes, because he was the only Westerner in the hotel, in fact the only client who hadn’t stayed shut up in his room, especially with the curfew.
“Where exactly did he go?”
This brought a fresh round of nodding and rupee-ing. They’d never find it, he said, without someone who really knew Srinagar the way he did, having lived there all his life. Oh, the horrors he’d seen. More rupees to help him bury the past.
The capital sprang back to life in the daytime, but still a life under military occupation. Armed men looking for possible terrorists patrolled the squares, streets, and markets constantly. David had probably taken this same route and passed the same patrols. He’d no doubt laid out the rupees, too, and that was exactly why he was remembered. The old man walked steadily in front of them, as if he’d done it hundreds of times, as he surely had. He was right — the city was a labyrinth, and, for an hour, they went through narrow streets and narrower ones, even alleys and inner courtyards, as well as false dead ends that actually did lead somewhere, into dark ways apparently designed for throat-cutting, then to a square a little more sunlit than the others, where Shabir pointed to a rundown three-storey building painted sickly green like the rest of the neighbourhood.
“I brought him here,” he said with great authority, as though fearful of not being taken seriously, “He went inside here.”
How many apartments were there? Quite a few, judging by the number of windows, some of them covered but showing silhouettes. David had given Shabir a generous tip. Jayesh got the message loud and clear, so out came the roll of rupees. After David went in, which apartment did he go to? Why? To do what? Max had to resign himself to the fact that Shabir didn’t know. They had no choice but to knock on every door and show everyone the picture of David, risking a few rounds from a Kalashnikov instead. While Shabir waited outside, the two went in. A chubby type, poorly shaven, wearing just an undershirt, who had watched them from his window, emerged at once from a ground-floor apartment.
“Are you here to look at the studio, is that it?”
Then they heard him fumbling for keys as he went back inside. Then he headed upstairs before them without bothering to close his door. He was painfully heavy and slow, and used the handrail not just for direction, but for support. He couldn’t get up the stairs otherwise.
“I have to warn you,” he said, coughing, “I can’t rent it until things are settled, what with this bloody business and all …”
Max pretended to understand, explaining he’d just arrived in Srinagar and was at the hotel for the time being, so he could wait a few days. The fact that a stranger had showed up didn’t seem to surprise the caretaker: he probably wasn’t the first to visit. Since things had broken down with Pakistan, the city was crawling with foreign reporters.
“An
d when do you suppose this ‘business’ will be over?”
The man shrugged. “They’ve got other things to worry about, and they say I’ve already had my commission so I’m not short.”
“They?”
He, as if noticing him for the first time. “You’re not with the papers.”
“We just got here from Delhi.”
“Well, you’ll have to work it out with them, if you want the place right away.”
“With who?”
“The Srinagar Reporter.”
Max remembered seeing it on billboards when they got into town. It was a daily, like The Times of India, but focused on Kashmir. The concierge slid the key into a lock at the end of the third floor in the back, and opened the door. When he turned on the light, the studio was tiny and disorderly. To the right was an unmade bed. To the left were a table, a cupboard, and a sink. The place had the relative luxury of running water despite the outward appearance of the building. At the end, a half-open door revealed a wash basin and toilet.
The caretaker was standing in the middle of it all with arms folded to show he was ready for questions or criticisms. Max showed him David’s photo.
“He may have come here to see someone — possibly you?”
The man looked defiantly at both of them. “Police?”
“Do you recognize this guy? His picture was in the papers last week.”
“Never seen him here.”
Max put the photo away. So, they were going to have to go door to door. They got ready to leave.
“Strange that a newspaper would rent a place like that,” Max said before they got to the corridor.
“Owners.”
“The Reporter owns this building?”
“Yesss. They wanted to pull it down, but they changed their minds. I don’t know why. Meanwhile, they rent. That’s how Ahmed got the apartment.”
“Ahmed?”
“Ahmed Zaheer.” He pointed to the furniture and items scattered round the place, “This is all his.”
“And where did this Ahmed go?”
“To Canada. To die.”
29
The Srinagar Reporter occupied a modern block on the southern edge of town. The windows of the editorial office overlooked the road to Jammu and Delhi a little way off, which symbolized accurately their basic political stance. The daily was “secular and progressive,” and, as their highly vocal and visible publicity claimed, an “All-India Publication Promoting Respect & Understanding Among Indians of All Castes & Beliefs.” Deepak Vahsnirian, editor-in-chief, was a sort of Indian Walter Cronkite who spoke in a low voice punctuated with sighs of limited dramatic impact, a gentleman, or trying very much to be one. Any minute now, Max expected him to get out a pipe and start stuffing it like a character in some British film from the fifties. Vashnirian prided himself on being a man of conviction, “not an easy thing in this country, even less in this city.”
A Hindu himself, he hired a number of Muslims, and not necessarily as sweepers and cleaners, he hastened to add. He, of course, was a member of the Indian National Congress, “India’s great party,” chased from power by the narrow-minded nationalists of the BJP.
“Still, those of the Congress weren’t always up to the standards of their illustrious predecessors, Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru,” Jayesh put in, referring to the state of emergency proclaimed by Indira Gandhi in the 1970s.
Vashnirian’s complexion darkened, and Max frowned. This really wasn’t the time.
“We aren’t here for politics, Mr. Vashnirian. We’d like to talk to you about Ahmed Zaheer.”
“How much does he owe you?”
Max and Jayesh exchanged glances as Vashnirian came round his desk to face Max.
“Oh, you’re not the first, you know, and you won’t be the last, but you’ll not get a single rupee from this newspaper, no more than any of the others.”
Zaheer had led a dissolute life, he said: baccarat, roulette, chemin de fer — he was better known in Macao than he was in Srinagar, debts all over town, not to mention his attitude. He annoyed the staff royally with his spoiled-child act. “Why he even showed up at the office dead drunk, and quite often too.”
Vashnirian frowned. “You Westerners imagine them all on hands and knees toward Mecca with a machine-gun slung across their shoulders, as though most Christians are members of the Ku Klux Klan!” He sighed once more his face becoming sad. “Ahmed was the best journalist this paper had. The most formidable …”
“The kind Indira would have loved to throw in jail.”
More poisonous looks from Max to Jayesh, who raised his arms in surrender, “Okay, okay, I’ll shut up.”
“Ahmed had, I don’t know, fifty years of vacation piled up, and he said one morning, ‘I’m going to Sri Lanka for a few Adonises, then …’ ”
Max looked puzzled, so he explained: “I didn’t tell you he was gay? No one knew except for everybody. I mean he wasn’t officially out of the closet and not the slightest intention of even opening the door. And Islam, well, that’s a closet inside a closet.”
“Sri Lanka? I thought he died in Canada.”
“Yes, you’re right, Niagara Falls.”
Now Max was beyond puzzled.
“He changed his travel plans at the last minute, I suppose,” said Vashnirian, then. “A stupid accident, really. He fell, and they only found his body at the bottom of the falls next day.” Vashnirian paused. “I suppose he should have gone to Sri Lanka after all.” He went on to ask them the reason for their interest in Ahmed Zaheer, and Max improvised a story about insurance contracts Zaheer had signed. The editor showed them the journalist’s office, now occupied by a serious young intern with large glasses and curly hair. Anything that might have been of interest had been scattered or destroyed, hardly surprising. There was no hope Zaheer would be careless enough to leave anything the least bit compromising lying around, anyway. Next, Vashnirian invited his visitors to eat in a local café (“if it isn’t closed for the bloody war!”). He just had to make one telephone call while they waited in the entrance hall.
Niagara Falls, huh?
A Muslim homosexual, barfly, gadfly, and gambler. What kind of nutbar had David got himself in with?
Jayesh was thinking the same thing. “Maybe your nephew was gay.”
Max had wondered that, too. Perhaps all this secrecy was just in aid of an ill-fated love-affair. Zaheer would be the inconsolable lover at the foot of the falls. David rushes over to his place to erase all evidence of their liaison. Sure, why not? Naah. “David would never do anything like that with me or anyone else,” Vandana had said. What if she were wrong?
It was a tempting theory nevertheless, but didn’t lead anywhere. David’s trip to Srinagar was nearly two weeks after Zaheer’s death, so why wait that long before rushing off to “save his reputation”? And who would then be responsible for the bombing? Come to think of it, there was no proof of any kind of link between David and Zaheer at all. The lady at the Mount View and Shabir, her handyman, could have invented anything for a few rupees more. Even if what they said was true, there was no evidence that David went to Zaheer’s apartment that night. Possibly any other apartment for any number of reasons.
The more Max thought about it, the more he had the impression his investigation was founded on hypotheses and witnesses who weren’t reliable, starting with Adoor Sharma, the amateur pimp. It was all a house of cards that the slightest breeze could bring down in a heap. Niagara Falls. Adoor Sharma. The strongbox. Max thought and thought, racking his brain, till an intuition, rather an image, took form in his mind. He rifled through his memory — Tourigny and the phone number he’d tried in vain to identify. He thought for a second and looked up. Why not?
Max went over to the reception desk and asked the young lady if he could use her phone. She pointed to an empty room a little way off, and he
went in, dialled the number for Canada Direct. The young Acadian woman asked if she could help him. He read her the phone number kept in David’s safe “… in the Niagara Falls area code, please.” One ring, then two, three, and someone answered the phone brusquely. It was a woman’s voice, melodious, professional.
“Niagara Parks Police, Joan Tourigny speaking. How can I help you?”
Part Three
KLEAN KASHMIR
30
Philippe and his son, two shooting stars, David, with his life before him. New Delhi, his first posting, his very own Tokyo, where he was already outshining others, just as his father had done. Max was convinced of it. Sandmill, Caldwell, and Bernatchez himself had already made their beds in Foreign Affairs with the firm intention of pursuing a career free of ups and downs to a comfortable retirement. Max was not being fair, and he knew it. He really didn’t know David any better than Langevin, Vandana, or Mukherjee. But still, the young diplomat couldn’t help but be exceptional, just as his father had been. He had to be destined for greatness, again like Philippe.
“I’ve become just like him. I feel just what he felt.”
After Rabat, Ankara, and Bangkok, Philippe had become an ambassador himself, slipping in ahead of one of the prime minister’s protégés, a shoo-in whose mentor had promised him Thailand while he waited for a Senate seat. However, the minister of foreign affairs had played hardball, and the Asian Tiger was awakening, so a young wolf was required on the scene, not some sleepy bear who’d get eaten alive. The prime minister had agreed, finally. With the protégé gone to Lisbon, Philippe moved into the Silom Road offices. This was a coup in Canadian diplomatic circles. Philippe was one of the youngest ever named to such an important posting. Max understood better than ever the kind of precautions Béatrice was taking. The rocket was on the launch pad and she was not risking a misfire. Philippe was aimed at the upper atmosphere, and flying close to the sun.