The streets were relatively empty at the late hour. I turned up Talvin Singh’s tabla beats on the stereo and drove my roadster as it was supposed to be driven.
Back at my apartment, I pulled a suitcase out of the top of my closet and began throwing clothes into it.
A knock sounded on my door. I was really going to have to go get a new phone so people would stop showing up unannounced. I opened the door.
“Miss Jones,” Inspector Valdez said, “may I come in?”
Damn. I should have checked.
“It’s late,” I said.
“I know. I’m sorry, but with your phone stolen it was the only way to talk to you. Connor Healy stopped by the station tonight. I know he and his wife disrupted a magic show you were in tonight. I didn’t realize you were a magician in addition to a professor and musician.”
“I’m not,” I said. “I was only helping a friend. What did Connor tell you? Is he the reason you’re convinced I had something to do with Steven Healy’s death?”
“He’s got some interesting ideas.”
“Maybe he’s the one who did it,” I suggested. “His wife thinks he’s unstable.”
“He’s got an alibi.”
“From what I can tell, his wife would say anything he wanted her to say.”
“They didn’t alibi each other,” Valdez said. “They were both at an art show with dozens of witnesses.”
“I know you talked to the people I was with, too.”
Valdez nodded. “I checked out what you told me. Looks like you were on your own for quite a while that evening, stuck in some pretty bad traffic.” The homicide inspector ran a hand through his wild black hair. I couldn’t tell if he was smiling or stifling a yawn. “I’m not here to arrest you, you know.”
“Why did you come?”
“Connor Healy isn’t going to bother you anymore. But you aren’t planning on going anywhere, are you?”
I shifted the angle of the door to block his view of my suitcase.
“My wallet was stolen, remember?”
I didn’t add that my passport hadn’t been in my wallet. It was probably best to not completely lie to the police when one was a suspect in a murder.
PART II: THE MONSOON
Chapter 23
The plane touched down in the middle of the night.
I was wide awake, my adrenaline pumping with nervous energy. Far away from the danger of a murderer and the confusion of a potential romantic entanglement, a hopeful feeling crept up in me. I wasn’t sure I was ready to let myself feel optimistic about the prospect of tracking down the secrets of Uncle Anand and his treasure, but I couldn’t quash my excitement.
Why had Uncle Anand been declared a pirate by the San Francisco press? What treasures did he steal from the San Francisco Bay? How did one of those treasures wind up hidden in Kochi? My fingers drummed against my knees as the plane taxied to our gate. I was so close to finding answers to those questions.
Even in the dead of night, the temperature in India could rival San Francisco’s hottest day of summer. Stepping outside of the Trivandrum airport, I breathed in the humid air. Muggy, but not sticky. Hot, but not the kind of heat you feel right away, until it catches you off guard and hits you like a brick. There was something about the power of the monsoons that produced a quality in the air I had never felt anywhere outside of India.
Unlike a rainstorm back home in the U.S., monsoon rains are fickle. The rain crashes down full force, drenching everyone to the bone within minutes, then clears out as suddenly as it appeared. It had stopped raining when I emerged from the airport, but I could tell it was in the air.
Since India had been moving back to the traditional city names that existed before British rule, the city of Trivandrum was now called Thiruvananthapuram. The locals still called it Trivandrum; it’s significantly faster to say.
Before India became a series of unified states, the city of Trivandrum was part of the princely Kingdom of Travancore. My great-grandfather and great-granduncle grew up thinking of themselves as from Travancore, not as citizens of India.
I caught a cab to my hotel. Three o’clock in the morning was one of the only times the roads weren’t overflowing, so the trip didn’t take long. It once took me two hours to get four miles across town in Bangalore. It would have been quicker to walk at the time, but then I wouldn’t have had the protection of a metal vehicle, which came in handy on the dangerous roads.
After checking in, I checked my email in the hotel’s business center. I sent off quick emails to Sanjay and Nadia to let them know where I was and that I’d arrived safely.
That left me time for a few hours of sleep before heading to the university.
I must have hit snooze on the hotel alarm clock without realizing I’d done so. My subconscious had an annoying habit of taking over when I was in need of sleep. The university staff would have arrived hours ago. I took the world’s shortest shower and pulled on a white blouse and a skirt before jumping in an auto-rickshaw.
Auto-rickshaws, the small three-wheeled taxis that are ubiquitous in India, were the presence on the road that truly reminded me I was back in India. They shared the road with motorcycles, scooters, cars including Tatas, classic Ambassadors, imported Suzukis and Hyundais, police Jeeps, colorful hand-painted trucks, and bicycles ridden by braver souls than I.
India’s big cities didn’t only rival America’s most crowded cities—they could drink them under the table. Like the better-known cities of Delhi, Calcutta, and Bangalore, Trivandrum’s streets carried millions of people on roads that looked like they should carry two lanes of cars, but drivers squeezed five lanes of traffic into them.
I held my breath as we zigzagged through streets that lacked both street signs and lanes. I suppose you could technically say they had lanes, since there were lines painted on some of the larger streets, but I had yet to see a single driver stay inside one.
The words “sound horn” were painted on the back of most of the trucks, like I remembered. It was meant as a remedy for the chaos. Drivers were supposed to honk their horns if they planned to pass a truck, signaling the truck driver not to weave too erratically until the other vehicle had passed. With the number of people honking at a given time, I never understood how anyone knew if any particular honking was directed at them. But it seemed to work most of the time. The rickshaw driver and I made it to the university without dying or killing a single pedestrian.
I quickly realized that the university campus wasn’t one central complex, but a series of buildings around the same central part of town. Even though street signs were rare in India, the driver found the section of the university I was after without too much difficulty.
I walked past the dark red wall that surrounded the section of the campus where the archivist worked. Like most things in India, what could simply have been a utilitarian fence was instead an ornate affair. A low concrete wall was painted red and topped with a decorative wrought-iron fence that raised the height of the wall while allowing people to see inside the campus. White pillars with painted red flowers stood at the entrances.
The signs on the campus were written in both English and Malayalam, so it was easy to find the building. I entered a hallway that I hoped would lead me to the archivist’s office, but stopped in my tracks. For a second, I thought I saw a familiar face.
It wasn’t possible. I must have been so tired that my mind was playing tricks on me. I could have sworn I saw Naveen Krishnan disappear around a corner.
I hurried ahead, following the man. When I turned down the hallway, I found several men walking and talking. None of them looked like Naveen.
I rubbed my hands over my eyes, feeling the effects of the long flights. My mind must have made a subconscious connection, making me think I saw Naveen because I was standing in a university hallway and saw an Indian
guy with a similar build. I desperately needed some coffee to think straight, but I was so close to finding the man who had Anand’s letters.
The sparse hallway lacked the bulletin boards I was used to at my own university. The concrete floor was clean, but the signs of age were apparent. New universities were springing up outside of urban areas across the country to keep up with the demand from the growing educated population, but this was one of the older institutions.
The door of the office I was seeking stood open. An elderly man with a well-kept mustache and wire-rimmed glasses stood beside a metal desk in a sparsely furnished office. A large crucifix adorned an otherwise barren wall.
“Ah!” The man said when he spotted me. “You must be the American professor. I’m sorry I missed your telephone calls.”
“Nice to meet you, Mr. Abraham.” I said.
“A pleasure, Professor Jaya.” He used the standard Indian greeting of adding a title to someone’s first name. He extended a thin hand. “Please, I am Joseph.”
“Thank you for letting my colleague know you have the letters I’m after.”
“Such an interesting project. I’m sorry we have not yet digitized these letters.” He paused and adjusted his glasses, an unreadable expression on his face. The delicate frames matched his thin body. “May I offer you some tea before we retrieve the letters?”
A hot plate with a rusty pan filled with steaming water sat on a metal side table.
“Thank you,” I said, relishing the thought of sugary caffeine.
Indians love their coffee and tea sweetened, so sugar was a given. Water in India wasn’t safe, even in big cities, so boiled drinks were common even in the hot climate. I was up-to-date on my vaccinations, but there were a lot of nasty waterborne diseases. When I was a kid, we boiled our drinking water and used precious space in our tiny fridge to keep it cool in glass jars.
Joseph mixed a cup of tea with even more sugar than I was expecting before picking up a rotary phone on his desk. I sipped the sweet liquid—heavenly—as I listened to him speak quickly in either Tamil or Malayalam to the person on the other end of the line. The languages were related so I couldn’t easily tell them apart.
Even though I didn’t understand the words, I could tell he was agitated. His voice rose, and he spoke more quickly. His mustache twitched from side to side.
He put the receiver down into the cradle of the phone.
“I’m so sorry,” he said, “but the letters are gone.”
Chapter 24
San Francisco, 1904
“I can help you find work while your leg heals,” Samuel said to Anand.
“Working as a spiritualist with you?” Anand asked. “I think that is best left to you.”
“Hear me out.”
“My living in New York for some months hardly qualifies me to help with your deceptions.”
“Deception is such a harsh word.”
“Since when have we ever been polite around each other?”
“You’re right,” Samuel said, “I suppose not. I’ll get right to the point then. I have a patron. Mrs. Lancaster.”
“Should that name mean something to me?”
“She’s from one of the wealthy families that helped build San Francisco. Don’t you read the papers, Anand?”
“Not as carefully as you do, it seems. Some of us work for a living.”
“Mrs. Lancaster is getting on in years,” Samuel said, ignoring his friend’s remark. “She has become interested in spiritualism from the Orient. At first, she wished to contact her mother, who had passed some years ago -- which was easy.”
“For a man of your talents.”
“Now that she has faith in me, she confided her interest in spiritualism from the Far East. She has quite a collection of artifacts from your homeland and also from China.”
Anand broke into a smile. “You need more details of my kingdom’s gods to impress the lady?”
Samuel looked down at his hands. “Not exactly...I may have mentioned to her my guru lived locally in San Francisco.”
“Your guru?”
Samuel looked up and met Anand’s eyes. “She wants to meet you.”
“I can’t believe you’re making me wear this,” Anand said a week later, adjusting his turban in the small mirror above Samuel’s dresser. “I’ve never worn one of these in my life.”
“Mrs. Lancaster will love it,” Samuel said.
Anand grumbled under his breath in Tamil.
“Admit it,” Samuel said. “You’re having more fun than you have fixing ships.”
“I’m only doing this because I have to let my leg heal for another few weeks before going back to work.”
“It’s not right how they treat you,” Samuel said. “First paying you less even though you have more skills, and now blaming you for the theft.”
Anand felt his face darken.
“A lot of things are not fair in this world. Such as a charming young man deceiving wealthy old women.”
“I bring her more happiness than she’s seen in years. And I’m not exactly forcing you to join me tonight.”
“You would go regardless.”
“Of course,” Samuel said, nudging Anand aside to adjust his tie in the mirror. “But this brings a bigger payoff.”
“I thought she was interested in China, too. Why didn’t you ask Li to help?”
“He knows much less about China than you know about India. He can’t even do a proper Chinese accent. Can you believe the tourists buy it? You, however, my dear Anand, are the real thing.”
Chapter 25
My excitement from earlier that morning turned to fear. I was losing my hold on what was real. I was so sure I had temporarily escaped the present-day problem by eluding the person who was willing to kill for this treasure. Nobody else knew Anand’s letters were there. Steven and his family didn’t know which was why he had come to me. How had the treasure-hunting killer followed me across the ocean?
Joseph and I sat drinking strong coffee for ten rupees a cup at the India Coffee House on MG Road located in the basement of a concrete high rise. All the major cities in India seemed to have an MG Road, short for Mahatma Gandhi. I was buying. Ten rupees was approximately twenty-five cents, so it wasn’t especially generous of me.
The India Coffee House wasn’t one of the modern trendy coffee houses that had started springing up. The chain had been around since before I was born. The strong coffee and cheap food kept it in business despite the sparse decor. We sat in plastic chairs in the crowded café.
“I don’t know what could have happened,” Joseph said. “It does not make sense that the letters could be gone from the archive reading room. They should not have been removed!”
“Could they have been misplaced or misfiled after you first found them?” I knew it was unlikely, but I didn’t want to believe Steven’s killer was a step ahead of me.
Joseph shook his head. “The whole box is missing.” He added something in a language I didn’t understand. From the guttural sound in his throat I guessed he was cursing.
“It makes no sense,” he continued. “We have never had a theft. And to think it happened under my supervision. You have my sincerest apologies, Professor Jaya.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “This is my fault.” I glanced anxiously around the bare-bones surroundings. I couldn’t tell if it was the smell of sweaty bodies or the fact that my problems had followed me to India that made it difficult for me to breathe.
“Your fault?” Joseph said. “For asking for help of a colleague with research? No. I only wish I could have been more help. To think you came all this way—”
“There’s more going on than a simple research project,” I said.
“Your family history, I understand.” Joseph looked dejected
ly into his empty coffee cup.
“Let me order us more coffee,” I said, hailing the waiter. I was stalling as I decided how much to tell Joseph. I didn’t want to drag him into this mess, but it appeared that he was already involved. Because of me, he was the latest victim. But I didn’t understand how someone had followed me across the ocean. What was I missing?
The waiter appeared at our table. I ordered fried cutlets to go with our coffee. I hadn’t had breakfast, and it felt like dinner time to my stomach.
“I’m sorry for getting you into this,” I said after the waiter had left. “I should tell you that the letters might provide information leading to a treasure. There’s a lot at stake. That’s why someone has stolen them.”
“Yes, this is what Miss Tamarind indicated when she first contacted us. It is always exciting when our archives can provide such relevant information.” He smiled and adjusted his thin glasses.
“There’s something else you should know, too,” I began slowly, “in case you come across the person who has taken the letters. The person might be dangerous. A man was murdered.”
Joseph’s coffee cup clattered to the table.
“Murdered?” he whispered, the color draining from his face.
“A man was murdered in San Francisco,” I said. “He was the person who contacted me to find the letters.”
“Murder,” Joseph repeated over and over as he attended to the spilled coffee as best he could with the thin napkins on the table. He avoided my gaze as he repeatedly pushed drenched napkins across the table. Seeming to notice the futility, he stopped, but he didn’t seem to know what to do once he ceased mopping up the mess. His thin hands flitted nervously from his glasses to his empty coffee cup.
Pirate Vishnu (A Jaya Jones Treasure Hunt Mystery) Page 14