by Glen Duncan
‘Okay, okay, don’t panic,’ Eugene said. ‘We’ll just keep cool and play dumb. They may not even notice.’
‘What are you, insane? There’s a resealed wagon twenty-eight bales short and they’re not going to notice?’
‘They’ll notice at the destination,’ Eugene said. ‘But that could be miles away. It’s probably going to Hyderabad for the Nizam.’
‘It doesn’t matter where it’s going. That wagon’s got a Malkapur seal on it and the paperwork’s going to have it all in black and white. How long do you think it’s going to take them to figure it out?’
Not long, but the investigation, which began two weeks after the incident, dragged itself with exquisite inconvenience into the boxing season and the Olympic trials. Ross had trouble keeping his weight up. Two flecks of grey hair appeared above his left ear.
To make matters worse, there was no money.
‘It’s idiotic,’ Skinner said at Chick’s, the night before the investigation was due to begin. ‘I mean, it doesn’t make business sense. I’ve worked with him before. He’s never stiffed me for a single cent.’ ‘He’ was Grishma Pilay, a roving Maharashtran fence with whom Skinner had had until now a mutually profitable relationship. There had been a small down payment for the silk information. The rest of the money was supposed to be handed over to Skinner at the rendezvous just outside Varangaon the night of the robbery. Skinner and Chick had turned up as agreed. No one else had. Silk and money had skipped town. ‘He’s not stupid,’ Skinner said. ‘He knows I’m going to spread the word and he knows my bloody word counts. He’s sawing off the branch he’s sitting on. I just don’t understand it.’ The conspirators had taken to meeting at Chick’s after dark to drink and mull over the treachery.
I don’t know why you’re bothering, Kate had said to Ross. There’s nothing you can do about it now. She’d been reluctant for him to go through with the job in the first place, not from fear for its success but because this latest encounter with Skinner had convinced her that the Englishman was competing with her for Ross’s intimacy. She, too, saw the Satanic contempt, but felt herself an object of it. She and Ross had had their first real fight. He doesn’t think of you as his equal, he thinks of you as his instrument. He’s not interested in anything or anyone other than himself. You’re just flattered because—She’d gone further than she’d meant to. Because what? Ross had demanded. They were in the kitchen at Armoury Road. Dondi had scoured all the pans and hundis the day before and in the room’s trapped sunlight they glowed with pointless benevolence. Because he’s English, she’d said, with a sort of exhausted violence which had started Carl, in her arms, bawling. She was trembling herself.
A detatched, analytical part of her was thinking the longer you left it before having your first fight with your husband the more devastating it was when it happened. Suddenly the explosion into mutual strangeness seemed possible. It was terrible to see him sitting there with his face gone pouchy and all the prideful easy motion of his body stilled because she’d told him the truth and it hurt. It thrilled and wounded her that she had the power to unman him like that. At a stroke she saw how a wife might become addicted to doing it–and Thy desire shall be unto Thy husband, and he shall rule over Thee–but knew she never would. The revelation–that she was bigger than him–released both a surge of love and a spasm of disappointment: he was after all only a man, dependent on her. Men were needful. Your softness inexhaustible for them. And afterwards troubled, ashamed of how far from themselves they’d been carried. The penis afterwards was like the man himself, shrunk into itself as if traumatized by the desperateness of its own need.
Ross had been awkwardly gentle through both pregnancies, a bit hurt each time because what were they but confirmation that he, her husband, was no longer the main thing in her life? The man was the little king, Kate thought, until you got pregnant, then his littleness was revealed. He shuffled at the perimeter of the glow you and the child made, became a sorry-for-himself petitioner. (Even God conceded it, she’d thought, stayed off stage, left the Madonna and Child in the spotlight.) But then if he really was a man he drew back, forced himself to stop needing you in the same way, made provision and fierce, cold protection the business of his kingship. Ross had done this, she knew, but the self-containment of her pregnancies had ravaged him. Like all men he’d had the choice between yielding to love and keeping the flint of himself to go after adventure or God. He’d softened for her, given her children, and she’d betrayed him by loving the children more; and after love the flint self could never really be the same. Adventure–maybe even God–could never be enough. Skinner (the thought had seemed ludicrous to Kate, shushing Carl and moving over to Ross to give his face the soft hand-touch she knew he wanted) saw all this. She’d told herself subsequently that she was imagining it. She just didn’t like the man.
‘Come with me for a minute, will you?’ Skinner said. The evening at Chick’s had broken up. Eugene had passed out (frowning) and been left to sleep it off. Chick needed hardly any sleep. He spent hours at night sitting in a canvas chair in the blossom-scented darkness of the garden.
‘Where?’
‘The Ambassador. Won’t take long. There’s something I need to give you.’ The Ambassador was one of Bhusawal’s three small hotels. In the lobby, where an Indian desk clerk dozed at his post, Skinner said: ‘Come up. Really it’ll just take a moment.’ Over his shoulder as Ross followed him up: ‘Don’t worry, sport, I’m not a fruit.’
Which, since it was precisely what Ross had been thinking (the suspicion had lingered; Skinner never mentioned women), left an oppressive silence until they reached the landing. ‘I don’t think that,’ Ross managed to get out, while Skinner struggled with his door’s sticky lock. ‘There’s no need to—’
‘Skip it,’ Skinner said, still wiggling the key. ‘No need to waste breath.’ The door opened. ‘Bingo,’ he said. ‘I really do feel one oughtn’t to need burgling skills to get into one’s own bloody room, don’t you? Close the door behind you, please.’
Skinner crossed the spartan room (one crisply made bed, one dresser, one dark wardrobe, one cane chair, one coir mat), got down on his hands and knees and reached under the bed. Jiggery-pokery with floorboard or skirting followed. Ross stood in the middle of the room quite seriously admitting to himself that were the Englishman to turn around, point a revolver at him and pull the trigger, he wouldn’t in fairness be able to justify surprise. Skinner got to his feet, held out an envelope. ‘Take this,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘Take it.’
‘What is it?’
Ross knew what it was. The envelope wasn’t sealed and the edges of the bills were visible. Skinner stepped forward and with a sort of formal care forced it into his hand. Stepped back, put his hands in his pockets, met Ross eye to eye. ‘There’s five hundred in there,’ he said. ‘About what your cut would’ve been. It’s yours.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Yes you do, sport. You’ve been wondering if I stiffed you. All of you.’
‘Is that what this is?’ Ross said.
‘That’s five hundred of my own. I want you to have it. I didn’t stiff anyone. I’m down on the deal myself. The other two are just going to have to take my word for it. But you’re different.’
‘I don’t—’
‘Listen to me. I owe you. In my scheme of things I owe you double. I owe you for pulling me out of the shit five years ago and I owe you for getting you in the shit now.’
‘That’s not your fault. I went in voluntarily. This is ridiculous.’
‘Tell me you haven’t been wondering.’
Ross felt his face warming.
‘You’d be a bloody fool not to. It’s okay. If I were in your shoes I’d feel exactly the same. And now you’ve got this tribunal or whatever the hell it is and I can’t believe a bit of cash won’t come in handy. For Christ’s sake don’t you see? Grease the buggers.’
You’re different. Ross looked
down at the envelope. He could smell the bills. Money stank. ‘I’m not taking this,’ he said. In among the other feelings was painful relief that Kate had been wrong. He tossed the envelope on to the bed.
Skinner picked it up and held it out again. ‘Don’t be an ass,’ he said. ‘I don’t mind you doubting me. It’s all right.’
Ross shook his head.
‘Take it, for God’s sake.’
‘No.’
For a moment the two of them stood like that, Skinner holding out the envelope, Ross with his arms by his sides. There was an attentiveness in the silence, as if the hotel’s guests were collectively listening, an effect which in seconds became absurd. They both chuckled. Ross wanted to say something. He didn’t know what. Whatever it was he couldn’t frame it. Instead, saying nothing, he turned, raised a hand in farewell, opened the door and went out.
The head of the investigation was the divisional transport superintendent, an Englishman, Edmund Hoggarth, who’d been in India thirty years. The first thing he said to Ross, as if opening a casual conversation, was ‘Do you by any chance have a passport?’ Ross said he hadn’t. Hoggarth nodded and gave him a crisp smile; he was in his late fifties, a tall, square-shouldered man with coarse grey hair and a long, good-looking, calm face. His full smile was dazzling but his eyes remained distant. ‘That’s fine,’ he said, then with emphasis, ‘That’s absolutely fine.’ Pause. ‘Because if this becomes a police matter the first thing they’ll do is confiscate it to stop you toddling off.’ The interview took place in the assistant traffic superintendent’s office in Bhusawal. Ross stood, initially, while Hoggarth, the ATS and another British pen-pusher, whose long neck and head together looked like a slender spring onion, sat in a line behind the scalloped walnut desk. The stewed office’s only ornament was a series of framed anatomical drawings of horses. A rotating electric desk fan (the ceiling fan had that morning broken down) hummed ineffectually, turned its face from Hoggarth to Ross, Ross to Hoggarth as if with careful slow observation. Hoggarth spent the first few minutes doctorishly reading various fan-ruffled documents in front of him, from one of which he looked up and said to Ross, ‘Please do sit down,’ almost (but calculatedly not quite) as if Ross needn’t have bothered waiting to be asked.
The passport question put Ross on his guard. He wasn’t lying: he didn’t have one. But he had applied. He and Kate would need them, obviously. (Filling in the application had been a strange experience: Passport of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. To be on the safe side he’d applied to the Indian passport office as well, since technically they were eligible for both.) What was Hoggarth trying to tell him? That he knew how much rode on the outcome of this case?
The Indian Olympic Selection Committee’s plan was to use as many as practicable of the national and regional amateur tournaments as a filter for a series of elimination contests, which would be held in Bombay at the end of April. Despite the flecks of grey and the low weight Ross had won the divisional bantamweight title for the third time (but for the Tryst with Destiny it would have been the fourth), and was to fight in the All-India Inter-Railway finals in Calcutta on 1 April. Winning that (for what would also be the third time) would take him to the Olympic eliminators. Victory there, naturally, would take him to Helsinki.
‘The mathematics of this don’t change, do they?’ Edmund Hoggarth said. They’d been in the ATS’s office for three hours. The ATS himself and the onion-headed pen-pusher had been dismissed but Ross had been asked to stay.
‘Sorry?’ Ross said.
Hoggarth was sitting back in the ATS’s creaking swivel chair languidly pressing the knuckles of his left hand with the fingers of his right as if to soothe arthritis. The desk fan remained on duty, turning its face to Ross, giving a few moments of interrogative warm breath, then turning to Hoggarth, breathing on him, then back. The motion threatened to drive Ross mad if he attended to it. He hadn’t been surprised that Hoggarth wanted to speak to him alone. Throughout the interview there had been an awareness between them. Hoggarth had, as the idiom was, stayed on. There was a plump gold wedding ring–so not alone. There was a wife, assuming she was living. Ross pictured a big house, liveried servants, kids grown or boarding away. Burra Sahib.
‘The mathematics,’ Hoggarth said. ‘The logic, the facts.’
Ross came back to the moment. Christ, these drifts. It was this room, the heat, the hypnotic repetitiveness of the desk fan. Some antechamber of Hell would be like this, the creeping realization that time had stopped, that you were stuck here for ever.
Hoggarth rotated the chair a few degrees, crossed his left leg over his right, took the hot balm of window light on his face. He could do the two things simultaneously, put the fear of God into you and keep a little of himself aside for the world’s sensuous flux. ‘At Bhusawal you sign the station master’s log: “All seals intact.” Just short of Varangaon you stop the train for twenty minutes because, you say, the rear hosepipe needed recoupling. By the time the train gets into Malkapur, the seals on both near and offsides of one wagon are broken. The wagon is resealed, and on you go. When you reach your destination at Badnera you again sign the station master’s log: “All seals intact.” The shipment in the resealed wagon is subsequently found to be short by twenty-eight bales of finest-quality silk, which on the black market would fetch, shall we say, a tidy sum. Correct?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why didn’t you mention that the wagon had been resealed?’
They’d returned to this question several times. Ross wished he had an answer, or at least a better answer than the truth, which was that by the time they got to Badnera he hadn’t been able to decide whether it was better to mention the reseal or not. The whole journey his head had buzzed with small electrified loops of thinking. Time and miles had passed, his mouth getting drier. He had one hour left to decide. Forty minutes. Eighteen. Badnera. Ten. The platform. Five. Station master’s office. Two minutes…one…and there he was with the last shreds, the slow-motion seconds as the log was handed to him and he lifted his pen. He didn’t know. The pen hovered while he thought: should have tossed a coin. Some fractional tilt towards hoping for the best decided him. He signed: ‘All seals intact.’
‘It was just one of those things,’ he said. He was tired of the whole phantasmagoric business. He kept thinking: Just tell this sonofabitch where he can stick…But the thought swerved away from completion. He needed him.
Hoggarth smiled. Closed his eyes for a moment. Opened them. ‘We’re running a test today,’ he said. ‘We’re duplicating the conditions you say caused the rear hose to uncouple. We’re testing the theory with an actual train, reducing the vacuum pressure with a tied-on hose.’ Pause. ‘My guess is the hose won’t come off. Of course, even if it doesn’t it’s not conclusive. You still have in your favour Mr Granger’s testimony. In fact, you have a superabundance of character witnesses, most of whom have been to see myself or my colleagues over the last weeks. No doubt all hoping you can bring a gold medal home to India. I’ve seen the collection of newspaper clippings in the running room.’
Neither man spoke for a few moments. Hoggarth very gently swivelled the chair back and forth through five degrees.
‘You were planning on emigrating, were you?’ Hoggarth asked. Quieter. Man to man.
‘If I won. If there was interest.’
‘Everyone’s been telling me what a prospect you are.’
It wasn’t a compliment. What does he want? Does he want something?
‘Did you try out in ’48?’
‘I was injured. Got sick.’
‘Perhaps it’s not your destiny.’
Silence. The fan turned its head towards Ross, softly assaulted him with its breath. With relief he realized he was very close to losing his temper. It would be a liberation to jump up and smash something, all the agony of not knowing his fate gone in an instant. Half the world’s murders must be committed that way, to settle some unbearable uncertainty.
‘
Do you think things have got worse since Independence?’ Hoggarth asked.
This was such a non sequitur Ross had to fight the reflex to say, What? even though he’d heard clearly. On the wall by the window to his left there was a pendulum clock of dark wood, the soft toonk…toonk…toonk of which emphasized how long it was taking him to think of how to answer.
‘In what way?’
‘Slack. Less efficient. Less honourable.’
‘I don’t know about any of that.’
‘Not interested in politics?’
‘Not really.’
‘Same here. Always seems to me politicians’ll do anything rather than tell the truth. Best just to deal with the rights and wrongs that put themselves under your nose. They’ll always be there, no matter who’s in government, wouldn’t you say?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘The thing is, Monroe, I know you were in on it. Don’t say anything. This conversation’s off the record but still, it’s best if you just hear me out. I know you were in on the robbery. I know Drake was in on it. I know the hose didn’t need recoupling, and I know I could make this into a criminal case.’
Ross stared at the polished surface of the desk. The walnut grain was a mesmerizing mix of compressed and languid ripples, here and there irregular concentricities gathered round an angry little knot. God thought big–oceans, skies, mountains–but also doodled in every available inch, even the secret insides of trees. ‘You know, the feeling among my countrymen, Monroe, has always been that without them this place would be a shambles. Too many religions, too many languages, too many agendas. Too hot. A friend of mine actually said that to me on the docks at Bombay just before he sailed for England: “It’ll get hotter now we’re going.”’ Hoggarth chuckled. ‘The feeling among those who left was that those of us who stayed behind would be facing insurmountable odds, you know? I never shared that belief. My belief is in the possibility of honourable actions.’
A vague discomfort had been growing in Ross as Hoggarth had gone on. Suddenly it moved with a spasm of weariness into understanding. Hoggarth had an idea of himself: one of the honourable men who stayed on when the less constant had turned their backs. He would maintain Empire standards without the hope of thanks. This was the myth concocted to rationalize the truth: that in England he’d never be the little demigod India had made him and that nothing less than that would do. The wife would have grasped this in spite of him. The wife was devoted. He was the sort that inspired it. But the truth would be with them in the palatial house like the first whiff of something dead that could only, with time, get worse. Seeing this deflated Ross. The man-to-manness had beguiled him for a moment. He decided to concentrate on the walnut grain, and the option to get up and smash the desk fan over Hoggarth’s head.