The Conor McBride Series Books 1-3

by Kathryn Guare

  She toggled her head at Conor and Thomas with a genial smile. They did not make the mistake of underestimating its mildness.

  “Well, I guess that’s settled,” Conor said drily. “What about you and Radha, though? Do you not want to see it as well?”

  Kavita waved a hand breezily toward her young nursing assistant. “Another time. Radha and I will be keeping busy while you are making the tour. Some shopping, some visiting.”

  He turned to Radha to see how this arrangement sat with her. She beamed at him with eager reassurance and gave a small bounce in her chair. “Yes, this is so. Kavita-ji and I will be keeping very busy while you are seeing these tombs and stones.”

  He smiled back at her, marveling that such a transformation from bitter enemy to fervent acolyte could be accomplished in the course of ten days. He also breathed a prayer of gratitude that the hard, desperate hunger he had seen in her at the Mumbai train station had also been wiped away. Radha’s eyes were now as they were meant to be—not downcast or frightened or fidgeting restlessly in search of a fix, but shining with intelligence and expectation. Her resilient spirit humbled him and reminded him that he bore some responsibility for ensuring the fulfillment of its promise.

  They emerged from the Agra train station into a warm, March morning, and the usual assortment of auto-rickshaw drivers collected around them. Conor knew any eye contact led to protracted exchanges that ended in disappointment for everyone. He did his best to politely ignore the drivers and set his gaze on the middle distance, where it came to rest on a gleaming black sedan with tinted windows. It idled smoothly in a parking area across the square, providing a sharp contrast to the battered, colorless vehicles surrounding it. Thomas had noticed it as well.

  “Friends of yours, I suppose, ji?”

  “Yes, Tom.” Kavita squinted up at him with a smile. “This car is coming from Agra cathedral complex on Wazirpura Road. You will come join us after your touring.”

  Conor and Thomas shared a puzzled glance.

  “Who do you know at the cathedral?” Conor asked.

  “Archbishop.” Kavita put a hand on Radha’s shoulder, and they set off across the square with the sound of her low, infectious laugh still hanging in the air.

  “Well, naturally. The archbishop.” Thomas shook his head. “She looks like she’s up to something, don’t you think?”

  “She’s always up to something.” Conor shrugged. “We’ll find out eventually, I imagine. Now, before we get into it with this crowd, do you fancy a cab or an auto-rickshaw?”

  “Auto-rickshaw,” Thomas replied immediately. “I’m after starving for a bit of adventure.”

  Should guilty seek asylum here,

  Like one pardoned, he becomes free from sin.

  Should a sinner make his way to this mansion

  All his past sins are to be washed away.

  With the guide booklet lying open on his lap, Conor read the words again. It was from the passage Kavita had cited earlier—the Mughal emperor, Shah Jahan, extolling the marvels and near divine powers of the mausoleum he had created as the final setting for his priceless jewel, the beloved Mumtaz.

  In front of him sat the thing itself, shimmering like a mirage under the hot afternoon sun. He and Thomas had explored every inch of it, along with its surrounding gardens and outbuildings, and were resting now in the shade of the Darwaza-i rauza, the monumental structure that served as the main gateway into the compound. He shut the booklet and returned to a contemplation of the living postcard before him, soaking up the atmosphere and the irony.

  Here he was again—the serial penitent—once more casting himself on the doorstep of another religion’s iconic shrine seeking absolution. He didn’t feel it and wasn’t surprised. Despite the medieval emperor’s assurance, he didn’t expect the Taj Mahal to supply the same measure of peace he’d found in the cool stillness of the Jain mandir. Maybe it was because the Taj technically wasn’t a mosque and therefore not actually a house of worship. More probably it was because blowing off a man’s kneecap didn’t share the same order of magnitude as shooting him to death.

  He glanced at Thomas and blinked. “Did you say something?”

  “I did, yeah,” Thomas replied. “I said you’ve gone awfully quiet. We walked around a fair bit. Have you overdone it, do you think?”

  “No, I’m fine, I was just—I don’t know—daydreaming.” He faced forward again, focusing now on the watery replica of the monument in the long reflecting pool.

  “Want to talk about it?” Thomas asked quietly.

  “Not really, no.”

  “You hadn’t any choice, Conor.”

  “I know that.” He wished his brother would stop talking. The familial sixth sense often floated forward when it was least wanted.

  “So then, you shouldn’t feel as though—”

  “Thomas, for the love of God.”

  “Right.” Thomas brushed a hand awkwardly across Conor’s back and got to his feet. “I’m going for a bottle of water. Do you want one?”

  “Sure.”

  Watching him disappear through the huge, red marble archway, Conor felt a twinge of regret for the rebuke and envious appreciation for the unchangeable nature of his brother. Thomas was older and sadder and encumbered with his own weight of guilt and self-reproach, but fundamentally he was the same person he had always been. Whatever he had been doing, it had not altered the essential man. He was simply himself—stolid, straightforward, and at home in his own skin. He was a model of stability in contrast to the splintering psyche of his younger brother.

  When he returned, Conor accepted the water with a nod of thanks and apology. He took a long pull, and with his elbows on his knees, rolled the plastic bottle between his hands, staring at it. “When you’re doing whatever it is that you’re doing, have you ever needed to . . .?”

  Again, Thomas intuitively understood what remained unspoken and shook his head. “I’ve never carried a weapon— that’s Sedgwick’s department. I wouldn’t know what to do with it if I had one.”

  “I’m glad,” Conor said, his voice growing husky. “It generates its own sort of addiction, I’ve found. You want to get rid of it, but after a while you’re afraid to be without it. You start learning things about yourself you didn’t want to, and it . . . changes you because you can’t unlearn them. As much as you might want to, you can’t go back to not knowing or to who you thought you were before you did.” He looked at his brother with a brief grin. “Sorry. I’m talking shite. That barely made any sense, even to me.”

  “Conor, please,” Thomas whispered. “Please, will you not let me put you on a plane and send you home? Before he got off the train, Sedgwick told me what you’ve been doing for the past few months. We had a hell of a fight over it. I’ve seen for myself how good you are with the gun, little brother, and I can see what it’s doing to you. You don’t belong in this mess.”

  “No more do you,” Conor said, calmly. “You may as well give over, Thomas. You want me to go home, I want you to come with me, and neither of us is going to get what we want. We’re stuck on this ride until it winds down or crashes, so we might as well face it. Sedgwick has told you what I’ve been up to, but I’m still in the dark about you. If he doesn’t show up by the time we leave tonight, you’re going to have come clean and tell me what’s going on. Agreed?”

  “Yeah. Agreed.”

  With a groaning oath, Thomas deflated and seemed to age even more, right there in front of him.

  28

  In obedience to Kavita’s informal command, they set out to locate the cathedral complex in the early afternoon. In the Wazirpura neighborhood of Agra, the Catholic archdiocese had established a sprawling, well-tended enclave that their driver found without difficulty. They coasted through its gates and up a wide avenue lined with bougainvillea, passing signs for various buildings that were just visible beyond thick stands of trees. It seemed the grounds housed a number of schools and convents in addition to the main cathedral.
r />   The auto-rickshaw circled around the church and deposited them in front of the main building, in a wide courtyard that was empty when they arrived, but by the time Conor had finished paying the driver, Kavita had appeared, walking alongside a priest in a long, white cassock. He was a handsome, middle-aged man, tall and slender, with skin the color of rich, burnished copper. He walked with a graceful, dance-like gait, which he was tactfully moderating to match the stride of his companion.

  “Your Grace,” Kavita said, smiling fondly as they approached, “I am presenting to you now my two good friends, these brothers Conor and Tom. Now boys, you will please shake hands with his Grace the Archbishop, Cecil de Cunha.”

  Like dutiful schoolchildren, they both stepped forward.

  “Very pleased to meet you, Your Grace.” Conor deferentially took the warm, brown hand extended to him.

  “It’s . . . Thomas, actually,” his brother said with a note of apology, shaking hands in turn.

  “Like the saint,” Archbishop de Cunha replied. His voice, deep and mellow, held a hint of dry amusement.

  “A pretty far whack from that, I’m afraid, Your Grace.” Thomas flushed with embarrassment and glared at Conor, who had choked off an involuntary laugh.

  “Oh, yes?” The archbishop regarded each of them with a raised eyebrow and then relented with a nod. “Yes, a ‘far whack.’ All of us.”

  There was something regal about him, and yet his dark eyes, framed by large, square-rimmed glasses, radiated peaceful, good-humored warmth. He and Kavita seemed well suited and entirely at ease with each other. So well suited, in fact, that Conor narrowed his eyes with a flash of intuition. “The two of you wouldn’t happen to be related at all?”

  Archbishop de Cunha’s face lit up with a broad smile, and Kavita’s gurgling laugh rang through the courtyard.

  “Very good, beta. Very clever. He is my nephew.” She reached up to give the taller man an affectionate pat on his chest. “My sister’s son. I was bringing Radha here to meet him and to be showing her this place. We have talked of many things together. Now I will be talking to you, and we will see what is to be done.”

  “Something needs to be done?” Conor asked.

  At this, she and her nephew exchanged a nod of understanding. The archbishop inclined his head to each of them and wished them an enjoyable visit. With swift, stately elegance, he returned to the building, leaving the three of them standing in the courtyard, looking at each other.

  Conor’s question had come out sounding strained and overly casual. He’d seen the sign for St. Patrick ’s Junior College for Girls when they entered the complex and had immediately understood what Kavita was plotting. Just a few evenings earlier, they had discussed the question of Radha’s education, after she’d gone to her room. He hadn’t expected things to progress so quickly and was surprised by how conflicted he felt about it.

  It was unquestionably the right thing for her. She would be safe, comfortably beyond the reach of Rohit Mehta. She would be given the chance to learn and thrive in a stable environment. If it was not for this that he had committed larceny to bring her out of Kamathipura, then for what? She deserved the opportunity; it was his duty to facilitate it. And yet, it was difficult—more painful than he had ever imagined—to think of leaving Agra without her.

  “Do you not think so?” Kavita prodded, gently. “Truly, she is choti bahan, ‘little sister’ to you, and you are very loving, but is it being wise to carry her with you, where you are going? Will you carry her farther even, one day, when you are going home? There is a place for her here. Is it not better for Radha to remain?”

  “Yes. Of course it is.” He forced the words past the dryness in his throat. “Have you talked with her? Does she want to stay?”

  She nodded. “We have talked. I believe she wants it, but so devoted she is to her bhaiyya. What you will be wanting—this is very important to her.”

  “I understand, ji. Where is she?”

  “She is just there by the church, sitting with Curtis. He reached this morning also.” Kavita motioned across the courtyard with a sigh. “This troubling matter, not so easy to fix, I think.”

  Beyond a large garden of flowering shrubs, the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception sat at the center of the compound. It was a long, Victorian-style confection, painted in creamy yellow. On the steps in front of the main door, Radha and Sedgwick sat together. Their heads were bowed, almost touching, their attention focused on Sedgwick’s right arm, which was turned up and lying across her knees.

  Thomas sucked in his breath, and Kavita wagged her head sadly. “Yes. He is struggling also, Tom-ji. He will not speak of it to me. I think maybe he does not understand even, but you see how it is.”

  Conor could see it well enough also. With his shirtsleeves rolled up to the elbows, Sedgwick’s lean, tanned arms were plainly visible, and the trails of angry red marks scored along the underside of each looked raw and painful, even at this distance. Radha appeared to be rubbing them with ointment. He couldn’t see Sedgwick’s face, but it was clear that he was speaking and that she was listening intently. Every few seconds, she looked up at him, her eyes wide and solemn.

  “Oh my God,” Conor breathed, feeling a queasiness in his stomach. “Does that mean what I think it does?”

  “No, it doesn’t,” Thomas said brusquely, but then added in a softer voice, “At least . . . I mean, Christ, I hope not.”

  “No, you are right in this,” Kavita reassured him. “He is taking no drugs. He is remaining strong, Tom-ji.”

  Thomas breathed a sigh of relief. “It’s the scars,” he explained, seeing Conor’s confusion. “In some ways, it’s good they never faded. They remind him what he’s been through, but he says they sometimes itch like hell. That’s how it works on him now, tickling at him when his defenses are low. He’s managed to fight it for two years, but every so often he tears his arms apart, usually in his sleep.”

  They watched Radha carefully roll the sleeve down over Sedgwick’s right arm and reach for his left. Thomas grimaced in sympathy. “I haven’t seen them this bad in a long while. I’m surprised he’s letting her do that for him, though.”

  “I asked him to,” Kavita said, acknowledging with a shrug that it made Sedgwick’s submission a foregone conclusion. “It is good for them to know one another better, for her to understand the menace of the thing that reached for her and for him to accept tenderness and help another, as he has been helped.”

  “I wonder what brought it on,” Conor mused. He felt a reluctant, growing respect for the agent, for his perseverance in what had to be a weary struggle. “Do you suppose he had another run-in with the Khalil gang?”

  “I doubt it,” Thomas said. “If anything, he’s better when he’s kept busy.”

  “You were very angry with him,” Kavita suggested. “So much yelling that first night on the train.”

  “I had good reason to be angry. Ah, go on now, Kavita,” Thomas scowled, his face incredulous. “You’re not saying he’s ripped his arms to pieces because I yelled at him. Sure we’ve yelled at each other before, fairly often as a matter of fact.”

  She took his arm, giving it a small shake. “He is afraid that soon he will miss your yelling. Radha has her bhaiyya and Curtis also. You too have been big brother to him, and this bond is everything for him. He grew well with you caring for him. This business of yours moved slowly, but now it becomes quick. When it is finished, you also will go away. He sees this already, and it is frightening for him. You had not seen it.”

  “No. I hadn’t thought that far ahead.” Thomas looked down at the tiny woman, his surprise changing to distress. “That’s a hell of a thing to put on me, you know. A hell of a thing.”

  He abruptly turned and made a quick circuit around the courtyard’s central fountain. Conor saw he was close to the breaking point.

  “When do I get some rest from all this?” Thomas hissed desperately. “I promised to see it through with him, but am I meant to stay a fugitive my
entire life?”

  “Thomas, take it easy,” Conor began, but his brother flung an arm in his direction and continued in a strangled voice.

  “I ran away. I abandoned obligations and left my family to suffer the consequences. Is it wrong that I might like to go back and clear my name, and—please God—beg my own mother’s forgiveness before she dies? Is that what counts as betrayal now? Is that considered desertion?”

  “Bas.”

  Kavita’s voice was not loud, but the word cracked emphatically in the courtyard. Thomas looked as though he’d been punched. He sank onto the edge of the fountain at the center of the courtyard, and she came to stand before him. Conor followed and sat down next to him.

  “I’m sorry, ji. I didn’t mean to be yelling at you,” Thomas said, morosely. “I do understand what you’re saying. It’s no one-way street, after all. God knows Sedgwick has been there for me plenty of times.”

  He scrubbed his hands over his face and then looked at them both with a weary sigh. “So, what now?”

  “No more of this nonsense, talking of ‘betrayal’ and ‘desertion,’” Kavita said. “Be a bit more calm. Matters will arrange themselves without such drama. Only let him know that it is well between you. Help him to know that your strength will find him, even if you are not here.”

  Thomas rolled his eyes with a faint groan and looked at Conor. “I’m not much good at this.”

  “Nope, me either,” Conor said. “Looks like we both have some work to do, bhaiyya.”

  Thomas nodded. “It seems unfair. No matter what we do, we’re always leaving someone behind.”

  “In time, we leave everyone behind, beta, but something of us remains, always.”

  Kavita had turned to look at Conor as she spoke, and her eyes filled with a bright, sad sympathy. Again, he felt the return of that portentous, jittery tapping at the back of his brain. It was a whisper of something he couldn’t quite hear. He could only feel its feathery breath, freezing his heart.