Out of Order (17 page)

Chapter Twenty-two

Propped up by three pillows, Jason leaned back against the headboard of the double bed and sipped a cold Kingfisher beer as he watched the Indian version of MTV’s All-Request Live. On the screen, a dozen beautiful women danced in unison through a shopping mall, part of a video requested, the show’s equally beautiful hostess explained in a mix of English and Hindi, by a loyal viewer in Mysore. Over the high-pitched singing and the rubbery thump of traditional Indian drums, Jason could still hear the shower, the steam curling up from under the door.

On the low dresser next to the television, the room service tray of fruit and croissants was picked clean, the last two beers of the six-pack sticking out of the copper ice bucket. The bouquet of tropical flowers that covered the table by the balcony doors filled the room with lush, green smells, and the rattan ceiling fan created the illusion of a warm, soft breeze. It was a bright and comfortable room, just like the woman at Raj-Tech had promised.

The driver had dropped them off near the cricket stadium, Sarosh waving as the car pulled away, wishing them a wonderful stay in Bangalore. They had wandered through a nearby park for a half hour before Jason remembered Ravi’s email.

“Mr. Murty told us there was a chance you might ring,” the woman at Raj-Tech’s Bangalore headquarters had said. “So please, feel free to make any request. You are our most welcome guests.”

On a cell phone he had borrowed from a peanut vendor, Jason had told the woman about the stolen credit card, how they had no money and no place to stay, leaving out any mention of industrial spies and festering knife wounds. With a smile he could hear in her voice, the woman assured him that she would have a new card delivered to the Karnataka Hotel on Lavelle Road, a five-minute walk from their location, where he would find a room waiting, her assistant finalizing the details with the hotel as they spoke.

“Mr. Murty has also asked me to apologize in advance,” the woman added. “His schedule is filled with meetings here in Bangalore and it is doubtful he’ll be able to get away.” Jason chuckled to himself as they walked to the hotel, picturing Ravi’s face when he had learned he’d have to come back to India after all.

After devouring half the welcoming snacks and chugging a beer, Rachel declared herself fit and announced that she would attempt to use up all of the hotel’s hot water in a scalding shower. Fifteen minutes later the shower was still running.

While the TV blared Shalini from Hyderabad’s request—a sari-filled dance with a flashing number one in the corner of the screen—Jason thumbed through the folded printouts he had kept from the train station’s Beachfront Internet Café, a half-dozen emails from potential contacts in Bangalore and the “wafty crank of a monologue” downloaded from the London comedy club, the small hole punched through the stack hinting at the role they had played in saving his life. He ran his palm across each sheet, flattening out the wrinkles, and thought about his next move.

His Air India flight back to the States was scheduled to leave in four days. Jason’s ticket was one of the things that had disappeared while he was blacked out in Goa, Rachel insisting that he was lucky that that was all they took, not sure what she meant since they had taken everything else as well.

According to his original itinerary, found crumpled at the bottom of his pack, the bus from Freedom Tours was scheduled to pull into Bangalore at noon tomorrow. He had paid extra for flight insurance, the travel agent in Corning frightening him into the pricey purchase with tales of lost tickets and bankrupt airlines. He’d contact fast-talking Danny and get it all straightened out. It would probably cost him a couple hundred bucks and there would be petty bureaucrats to suck up to and reams of redundant paperwork to endure, but those were the things, he realized with a sigh, that he did best. Sitting in the travel agent’s office in Corning, everything had seemed so simple. Fly to India, track down Sriram’s mother, give her the sari. But nothing was simple now—not India, not Sriram, not the sari.

Then there was Rachel.

In the melancholy week between Christmas and New Year’s, Jason had spent his evenings surfing on-line dating sites, filling out the personality profiles and ticking the “my perfect match” checklists, reading the computer-generated ads, closing out each website, careful not to hit the click-here-to-sign-up-now button. The questions were different but the results all sounded the same. Single white male, twenty-eight, average looks, average build, office worker, some college, good organizational skills, honest, responsible, punctual, no hobbies, likes to read magazines, stay-at-home kind of guy, non-smoking, no pets, seeks single beautiful woman with similar background.

She was beautiful, he’d give her that. Bright eyes that seemed to shift from brown to green, a toothpaste ad smile, that wild auburn hair, a tight body that was made to wear low-slung jeans and half-shirts. Standing in the road outside of the train station in Goa, fists clenched and jaw set, he knew she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever known.

But that was all he knew about her. She was reckless and unpredictable, making her life up as she went, creating a personality to fit the moment, telling people just what they wanted to hear. He had seen her passport, so the Canadian part was probably true, but the rest? Did she really win the trip? Did she honestly like trains? Did she expect him to believe that the pattern on the sari was not a stylized circuit board?

And did it really make a difference? He’d spend the next few days with her and maybe they’d fly back to North America together. There’d be promises to keep in touch, emails that first month, maybe a phone call or a lunch date in Niagara Falls, then they’d drift apart, him back to his gray-on-gray cubicle, her back to whatever it was she did. It was not the way he wanted it, but it was the way it was going to go. Her? With a guy like him? Too much even for a Hindi movie.

Jason could hear her in the shower now, her off-key version of
Jingle Bells
a half-beat off the dance moves on the request video. He tried not to think about her, focusing on all the things he needed to get done. Like delivering a sari.

***

“I’m gonna get the vegetarian thali, some prawns, a double stack of nan bread and a side of this coconut crab curry,” Rachel said from behind the restaurant’s tall menu. “Wanna split an order of chicken vindaloo?”

“I guess you got your appetite back,” Jason said, closing his menu, Rachel’s order enough for the both of them.

“Nothing like a hot shower and a good romp in the hay to bring a girl back to life.”

Jason cupped his hand along his eyebrows, sneaking a glance out from under his fingers. “Geeze, Rachel. Not so loud.”

Rachel waved off his complaint without looking up. “It’s not like anyone could hear me over the music,” she said, tilting the menu towards the tinny speaker that hung on the wall near their table. “And besides, they shouldn’t be listening in. Just like the people across the hall. I can’t believe they called the front desk.”

“Well, you were a little….”

“Excited? It doesn’t make a difference. Polite people ignore those things.”

After the second verse of
Jingle Bells
she had called him into the shower, telling him it was his last chance for hot water that day. He had tapped politely on the door, asking her to let him know when she was decent, Rachel laughing, telling him she was a hell of a lot better than just decent.

The hot water lasted another five minutes. They dove, dripping wet, under the covers, wrinkled emails flying, interrupted an hour later when the manager phoned and asked them to keep it down, Rachel saying that she was working on it. That evening, when Jason went down to the concierge’s office to sign for the replacement Visa card, he endured the blushing grins of the women at the registration counter and the bellhop’s knowing smirk.

“The way I see it,” Rachel said after placing her order, the waiter not correcting her pronunciation or pointing out she had ordered enough for four, “your friend was a classic example of an unresolved Oedipus complex.”

A fresh pint of Kingfisher lager hung suspended in front of his lips as Jason looked across the white foam. “A what?”

“Psychology 101, Jason, hello. Hates the father, wants to have sex with the mother. It’s pretty obvious.”

Jason looked at his beer and thought about chugging it, settling for a healthy sip, motioning with his fingers for her to continue. Rachel clicked her tongue and looked up at the ceiling, letting him know how elementary it all was.

“How well do you know mythology?” she asked.

“It’s all Greek to me.”

“Cute. Well, there was this king who went to a fortune teller and he found out that one day his son would grow up and kill him and then a whole bunch of things happened and then the kid, this Oedipus, he kills the father….”

“Before or after he slept with his mother?”

“Before I think. Or after. So anyway, Freud….”

“Sigmund Freud?”

“You know any others? Anyway, Freud comes up with this theory that all male children secretly want to kill their fathers and have sex with their mothers.”

Jason took another long pull on his beer. “I don’t believe it.”

“You just don’t remember it,” Rachel said. “You were like five years old, you dealt with it and moved on. But the memory is still there, locked away in a dark corner of your mind.”

“Where I plan to keep it, thank you,” Jason said, holding his beer up in mock salute.

“But your friend, Sriram? Obviously he didn’t deal with it. It sat there, right on the surface, gnawing away at him for all those years. Kill dad, hook up with mom.”

“But his parents were here in India.”

“Exactly. He had to get away from them or he’d go nuts, but he still had issues.”

Jason set his chin in his hand. “How do you know all this stuff?” he started to say, then changed his mind and waved off her answer, knowing she’d be making it up anyway. “Go on, Herr Doctor.”

“His wife, what was her name? Vidya? Well, Vidya must have started to remind your friend of his father.”

“Trust me,” Jason said, recalling the tight black jeans and tee shirts Vidya had favored. “There’s no way she looked like anyone’s father.”

“I don’t mean physically, I mean the way she acted. Maybe she was domineering, maybe she put him down a lot, you don’t know, you didn’t live with them. It’s all about resentment of parental authority and if he saw her as a parental figure….” She let her voice trail off as she picked up her beer. “You said yourself he didn’t want his wife to know about the sari. That doesn’t sound too normal. Maybe he felt she was coming between him and his mother, just like his father had done ever since he was a kid. The sari might represent that hate he felt for his father. Or better yet, maybe it was a symbol of the love he felt for his mother and that’s why he wanted to get it to her, to declare his love.”

“I don’t know, Rachel. It sounds so….”

“He shot himself in the head, right?”

“I suppose so,” Jason said, his voice dropping as he spoke.

She held her hands open in front of her. “When Oedipus realizes he had sex with his mother and killed his father he puts his eyes out. The gun is the phallic symbol, the shot to the head the symbolic blinding. It all fits.”

“Except you didn’t know Sriram and Vidya.”

Rachel shook her head. “You’re too close, Jason. You can’t see it. The only thing special about that sari is that it saved your life. It was just this poor, demented guy’s security blanket.”

“I think it’s more than that.”

“No, you
want
it to be more than that. Because that way your friend didn’t kill his wife and shoot himself.” She reached across the table and took his hand in hers. “I know you want it to be a treasure map or a blueprint or something, but it’s not.”

Jason looked down at her hand, her stubby thumbnail rubbing against his palm. It all made sense, but something inside kept him from admitting it. “I still need to deliver it,” he said.

“Believe it or not, that sorta makes sense,” she said, leaning back in her seat as a team of waiters arrived. “But I wouldn’t plan on her being too happy.”

***

The man cracked open the service stairwell door with one finger. He set the toe of his shoe against the spring-loaded door and lowered his arm, his hand brushing against the pistol tucked in his waistband. He looked down at his shirt, checking again to be sure that the gun was covered. He wasn’t used to carrying a gun and was surprised how easy it was to keep it hidden.

He could see him across the lobby, twenty yards away, printing out emails from the Internet kiosk that stood near the concierge’s empty desk. He had watched them as they ate dinner, hidden in the shadows of the hotel bar, the couple’s table angled so that he could only see the girl’s face. Beautiful. He had watched her as she ate, her smile so infectious that, half a building away, he smiled, too.

They sat at their table till after midnight, downing pints of beer like college freshmen. He expected the girl to stumble each time she walked to the restroom, but she held her alcohol well. When they finally left—over-tipping by the look on the waiters’ faces—she gave him a kiss on the cheek and headed to the bank of elevators while he had logged onto the Internet.

The man was thinner than his photographs, but they had been taken on his first day in India, before the unfamiliar food and the predictable illness. And his clothes looked different, the color and shape beat out of them by a few Indian hand-washings. Yet despite the changes, there was no mistaking that this was Jason Talley, and the man wondered again why no one else had found him first.

The picture had been posted for over a week now and the reward for information was up to seven hundred US—more than a hotel maid would earn in a year. But hotel maids weren’t logging on to that chat room, and the money might not have been enough to attract attention among the high-paid computer engineers and software designers who were the site’s regulars. Whatever. It didn’t make a difference now anyway.

It would be easy to follow him up to his room. He could knock on the door, smile up at the peephole, no doubt get invited right in. And he could end it there, everything cleaned up, that bastard Sriram paid back in full, these two atoning for their friend’s sins.