The Conor McBride Series Books 1-3

by Kathryn Guare

A little over an hour later, Conor’s eyes flew open and his head jerked up from his arms, which had been resting on top of the now deserted dining room table. A deep, shuddering cough had shocked him awake. It was alarmingly loud and even more alarmingly painful. As he reached groggily across the table for the water pitcher, several more followed. He smothered the noise with a table napkin and snatched his arm back to wrap it around his chest.

  “Shit, that hurts.” He squeezed his eyes shut.

  The dose of medicine taken the previous evening had served him well for almost twelve hours, but its effect had finally evaporated. As he braced against a third wave tearing up through his throat, Kavita materialized at his side. She brought one of the ubiquitous brown bottles down on the table with a decisive thump.

  “Next patient,” she said.

  Conor jumped at her sudden appearance and dropped his head back onto his arm. “Do you buy those bottles by the case? Everyone in Mumbai seems to have one.”

  “Yes. I do.” Her head wiggled a cheerful assent. “And the recipe I mix by the gallon.”

  “Well, give us a shot of it, woman,” he croaked. “I’m after choking to death here.”

  “Drink water first. Medicine after.” She poured out a glass of water and set it in front of him.

  “Where’s Radha?”

  “Radha is sleeping.” Kavita nodded at the bottle on the table. “She will sleep for some hours now, but she will feel very unwell later. She is in my room.”

  “That little cloth purse, I should have noticed it earlier. I’m sorry, ji.”

  “Nonsense,” she chided. “It will be well. She cannot bear to be parted from this small bag, but she will be. By and by, she will be free from all of it.”

  “I admire your confidence. You make it sound simple.” Conor sat up with a sigh that started him coughing again.

  “Not simple though.” She rested a hand on his back. “For a time, she may hate you for this, beta. You must prepare. Because you love her, it will be hard for you.”

  Lifting the water glass, he discovered he needed two hands to hold it steady. He drank and sat back, breathing delicately and realizing that for the moment, there was little more he could do for Radha. While it felt good to have executed an operation that had actually gone according to plan, he had again reached the end of a road without knowing where the next began.

  Having at least partially blown the cover of a sketchy American operation and now having stolen from one of the most dangerous dons in Mumbai, there were not many roads from which to choose. Crying uncle and heading for home was still the most obvious, but even now he wasn’t ready to pull the emergency brake.

  The prospect of eventual failure was ever more likely, and his zeal for the original objective of bringing a nebulous, money-laundering mastermind to justice was even weaker than when he’d started, but what remained was an idée fixe he could not relinquish. He had signed on to this misadventure to find his brother and try to save him, although whom or what he was trying to save him from was even less clear than when he’d started.

  If Curtis Sedgwick was to be believed, the next move was out of his hands, and his impatience at the forced immobility was aggravated by a jittering anxiety, signaling in his brain like a distress code. Its message continued to elude him, and if he couldn’t decipher it, he at least needed to do something to keep it from driving him mad. He looked at Kavita with an inquisitive frown.

  “Are you working in the zopadpatti today, ji? Maybe I could come along and—what’s so funny?”

  Kavita’s low, musical chuckle was like a tonic to his soul.

  “You are a good man, Conor. Very kind and loving, but many times you are too ridiculous. No zopadpatti today. Today, you sleep. Come now.”

  She provided him a pair of light cotton pajamas and ordered him to shower off the lingering fumes of the Kamathipura streets. When he was finished, she pointed him to the bedroom at the end of the hall that her granddaughter Surabhi had vacated. He stood in its doorway, reluctant to assume occupancy. A large window with lacy, flower-print curtains filled the wall opposite the door. Near the window, a rocking chair piled with stuffed animals sat on one side of the bed. On the other, a school desk and small chair had been placed in the corner, below a bulletin board plastered with the faces of bare-chested movie stars.

  Holding his clothes—and his gun—in his hands, he looked blearily around the room and finally walked in and slipped the Walther under the bed’s pink, fringed pillow. Kavita returned and insisted on tucking him in, pulling the cool sheets into place while scolding his peevish resistance. As his mother had often complained, Conor was intransigent in illness. He loathed being pampered and fussed over, but he had never won any battles with Brigid McBride, and he didn’t win this one either.

  His eyelids were already drooping when Kavita presented a dose of her paregoric potion. He squinted at the contents of the small glass with its iridescent sheen of mustard oil floating on top.

  “I don’t think I need it after all. I’m nearly asleep as it is.” The dangerous flash in Kavita’s eyes warned him that like Bishan, her tenderhearted patience was not inexhaustible.

  He swallowed the shot without further protest. The warm glow began spreading through his chest, reminding him of the previous evening’s events and of a request he had not yet fulfilled.

  “I forgot to tell you earlier,” he said sleepily. “Curtis Sedgwick sends his love. He wants you to know he’s doing all right.”

  “Ah, this is good.” Kavita smiled. “I was worried for him. Curtis has not come to see me in many months. I knew he was your friend. Parvati was telling me he came to collect you that first evening but asked that we not speak of him with you.”

  “I’m not sure ‘friend’ is exactly . . . well, anyway, he’s fine.” Conor regarded her thoughtfully, his esteem growing even stronger as he considered what it must have taken to tame Sedgwick’s demons and drag him from the brink of oblivion. “He must have been quite a challenge.” His eyes irresistibly dropped shut again. “Sedgwick is hard to manage under the best of circumstances.”

  “Yes, a challenge. He was very sick and very angry for some long time. And very strong.” Kavita gave a soft laugh. “Too strong for a tiny one such as me but not too strong for Tom. Always Curtis was sneaking and peeking, looking for escape, but Tom-ji would not allow. He was more stubborn even, no matter how many bumps and bruises. I think Curtis would not be so fine now, if not for him.”

  Tom-ji.

  Of course. Sedgwick knew Thomas. Kavita knew Sedgwick. Kavita must know Thomas. It was a flawed syllogism but a perfectly reasonable one in his mind. If he’d been able to construct it sooner, he and his brother might have been home by now.

  Tom-ji.

  Conor had surrendered to exhaustion. He had descended too far into twilight to pull himself back, but an ironic smile played over his face as he repeated the name to himself like a lullaby.

  “He always hated being called Tom,” he mumbled as sleep reached out, greedily pulling him under its black veil of silence. “Neither of us ever liked nicknames.”

  “Who the hell are you?”

  The question rustled over Conor’s vocal cords in a hollow scrape, which startled him almost as much as the large, square face filling his field of vision. Seeing the flower-print curtains rippling against the open window, he knew he was still in Surabhi’s bedroom, but the fuzzy gray light was too indistinct to help him judge the time of day. It could be early dawn or approaching dusk. In either case, it seemed to suggest he had been asleep—or maybe more accurately, unconscious—for quite some time.

  He had opened his eyes to discover the face looming over him in extreme close-up, close enough to distinguish the individual pores on a very broad, mahogany forehead. Above the forehead was a shock of thick, carefully coiffed black hair. Below it, a pair of chocolate-brown eyes stared at him, their air of detachment accentuated by a surgical mask obscuring the bottom half of the face. The sea-green mask gave the vo
ice behind it a muffled, otherworldly quality.

  “Doctor Francis deSa. Breach Candy Hospital.”

  Like the eyes, the voice was unemotional, with the casual, irreverent tone of a young man, and an accent that sounded more British than Indian.

  Conor blinked several times, trying to bring his surroundings into focus. He felt groggy and stupid, as though just waking up from a weekend bender. He cleared his throat before venturing another question.

  “You’re Kavita’s doctor, I suppose?”

  At this the eyes narrowed, signaling that the invisible mouth of Dr. deSa had twitched in affection.

  “Yes, I am the personal physician of Shrimati-ji.”

  The doctor had rolled him onto his left side and was running a stethoscope over his back. Beyond his shoulder, Conor could see Kavita moving back and forth in the rocking chair.

  “What time is it?” he asked her.

  “It is just coming on to five o’clock in the evening,” she said, nodding peaceably at him.

  “So, I’ve been asleep for nearly eight hours?”

  “Haan ji, this is so; eight hours plus three days.”

  “You’re joking me.”

  “Not joking, beta. You reached on Monday morning. It is now Thursday afternoon, so four days total. Not always sleeping, but you were having high fever, and I think you are not remembering being awake.”

  “I guess not.” He gave a weak, nervous laugh. “Damn, four days. Stop the lights.”

  Dr. Francis deSa stood upright. He removed the stethoscope and then the mask, revealing a rigid jaw and a haughty self-confidence. He turned abruptly from Conor to face Kavita. “He is stable. I believe we were correct to begin treatment immediately, but the test results should be ready in two weeks, and then we will have more useful data.”

  Conor hiked himself onto one elbow and threw a hard stare at the stiffly averted profile. “Treatment for what? What test results? I don’t remember any tests.”

  “That is not surprising.” Dr. deSa glanced back at him. “You were delirious when I took the samples. We are testing for tuberculosis. On average, the cultures take two weeks to develop.”

  “Tuberculosis.” The syllables rolled from Conor’s tongue like the inflections of an occult chant. “You think I have TB?”

  “I’m almost certain you do,” Dr. deSa said, with smooth confidence. “Possibly complicated by pneumonia, given the high-grade fever onset.”

  “Gently, Francis,” Kavita said. “It is a matter of routine for you, but it is a troubling shock for him.”

  “It’s all right, Kavita,” Conor said, his voice flat. “It’s actually not that big of a shock.”

  He felt strangely composed. It was almost a relief to say the word out loud. The suggestion of it had floated through his mind more than once during the past few weeks, but until now he’d not had the nerve to believe he was dealing with something so dangerous.

  The next, most obvious question was one he didn’t intend to ask. He thought he knew the answer and was content to leave it unspoken to avoid causing pain to someone who didn’t deserve it. Unfortunately, the self-important family physician was not finished displaying his intellect.

  “It is most likely you were infected by Kavita. The epidemiology makes sense. I saw her immediately after her flight from London, and her disease was highly active at that time, quite infectious. You were in close proximity for the duration of the flight, and I understand that after the flight—”

  “Yeah, okay,” Conor said, curtly. “We get the picture, Francis. So, what do I do now?”

  A flush of annoyance colored Dr. deSa’s smooth, self-assured face. “Once the test results are finalized, we may need to correct the therapy. Until then, continue bed rest and reduced activity. Continue the course of antibiotics I have prescribed and continue the palliative treatments Shrimati-ji prepares for you.”

  With these instructions, the house call ended. As Kavita steered Dr. deSa from the room, Conor dropped back onto his side and closed his eyes, still feeling oddly calm. Even without a definitive diagnosis, he was grateful for the unambiguous, if insensitive, analysis of the young doctor and for their clarifying effects. The sharpness of a knife existed only in theory until a finger pressed against it.

  He dozed off again. The next time he woke, he was still on his side facing the window, and a far more compassionate pair of brown eyes met his gaze.

  “Please God, I haven’t been sleeping for another three days?” He smiled at Kavita.

  “One hour only.”

  She had pulled the rocking chair closer to the bed, and her kind, wise face was creased with mournful regret. He lowered his brow in a half-serious scowl.

  “Don’t be starting up with that, now. You’ll destroy me entirely with a look like that. Anyway, it’ll be all right, you know. Something you maybe don’t know about the Irish is we don’t go easily where we don’t want to—we’re a mulish, balky lot, right enough. If my mother were here, she’d tell you I’m even balkier than most.”

  “She has been here.” Kavita’s head toggled a rhythmic reinforcement of this unexpected announcement. “Many times you were talking with her these three days during your fever. I heard this myself.”

  Conor smiled. “It wouldn’t surprise me. What did we talk about?”

  Kavita shook her head. “I could not understand. You spoke the language of your region. Strange sounds, but beautiful.”

  “I seem to be doing that a lot lately. So, how could you tell who I was talking to?”

  Kavita lifted her chin and aimed it at a point somewhere behind him. “He knew. He sat and listened and understood each word.”

  Conor had not realized anyone else was in the room. With a wave of premonition tickling his scalp, he pushed up to a sitting position and turned to face a pair of squinting, ocean blue eyes. He had forgotten how much they looked like his father’s, and until that instant, he had not realized how much he’d missed them.

  “Heard you were wanting to see me,” his brother said. Conor absorbed the facetious tone and the gruff, thick country accent like a man taking in the first rays of sunshine after a long confinement. It was almost too bright to look at, but the warmth was delicious. He felt an affectionate, loopy expression stealing over his face but returned volley with the sarcasm he knew was expected.

  “Wanting you, Thomas? Divil a bit. What put that into your head, at all?”

  21

  They sat facing each other, and the silence after their initial exchange seemed harder to break the longer it lasted. For his part, Conor clung to the temporary grace of the moment—a moment when the reunion itself was all that mattered. When it was enough to linger in a neutral territory where the things they shared—history, memories, blood, and ancestors—needed no explanations. They both seemed to recognize it would shatter eventually. Neither could muster the courage to produce the first crack.

  Predictably, it was Kavita who ended the suspense. She rose from the rocking chair, and as she circled Conor’s bed, Thomas’s eyes followed her with resigned understanding. She came to a stop next to him and placed a hand on his shoulder.

  “One must make a start. You are the eldest.”

  “Right.” His brother’s fingers brushed over hers before falling away. “I’m just thinking maybe he needs to rest a bit more. I can come back in the morning.”

  Conor started up with an alarmed yelp, but before he could form a coherent protest, he was interrupted by Kavita’s melodious laugh.

  “In this way you will escape? So easily? He has been resting. Soon, he will need to rest again, but for now it is not what he needs. The voice of his brother—this is what he needs.”

  Without another word, she glided across and out of the room, pulling the door shut behind her. They both watched her leave and stared at each other again until Conor broke the silence.

  “You’ve been here before.”

  Thomas nodded. “I lived here for a few weeks, mostly right here in this room.”
>
  “Helping Sedgwick through withdrawal,” Conor said.

  “Yeah.” His brother surveyed the bedroom with a perfunctory glance. “We’d nearly destroyed the feckin’ place by the time we were done. It’s the first time I’ve seen it since then. I hadn’t seen Kavita in a while, either. You’ve been spending a lot of time with her, I gather.”

  “I met her on the plane from London. Was that an accident, or did she already know who I was?”

  He held his breath, not sure he could bear having the question answered, since it meant confronting the possibility that even Kavita Kotwal had been secretly yanking his chain from the beginning. Thomas shook his head.

  “Not until I showed up Monday night. I know it seems hard to believe. Bizarre coincidence or fate, whatever you want to call it. Anything’s possible where Kavita’s concerned.” He moved his head in exaggerated imitation of the South Asian head toggle. “You know how she is.”

  “I do, indeed.” Conor released his breath and added hesitantly, “Does she remind you at all of Ma?”

  “What do you think? Sometimes I almost believe she is Ma.” His brother’s smile died abruptly, and he dropped his eyes to stare at the folded hands in his lap. “How is she?”

  So, beginning with sorrow, Conor thought. He felt the emotion grip him with a strength he had not permitted in many weeks, wondering if his brother was about to feel the peculiarly nauseating force of it for the first time and thinking it was no more than he deserved. “Thomas, I don’t know what anybody has been giving you for news about home. So, I don’t know whether you’ve heard—”

  “Of course I’ve heard, for fuck’s sake.” Thomas sucked in his breath and released it with a shudder. “Sorry. I have heard. I know about it. I was just wondering—”

  “How she’s doing now?” Conor fired back acerbically. “I wonder that, too. I haven’t seen her myself for a good while. She wasn’t very well the last time I did.”

  Thomas nodded but made no further response. Conor looked at his bowed, motionless head, beginning to register how much the man had changed—or more specifically, aged— in six years.