Pirate Vishnu (A Jaya Jones Treasure Hunt Mystery) (11 page)

Chapter 15

San Francisco, 1903

The scream sounded almost inhuman. But the voices laughing were very human.

“What was that?” Anand asked as he pulled his coat on outside the doors of The Siren’s Anchor. In the month since Anand had met Li, the two had become good friends, frequently visiting the welcoming saloon.

“It’s best not to concern yourself with other peoples’ business,” Li said.

Another scream sounded. It was definitely human. A child. Anand ran down the dark alley without thinking.

“What are you doing?” Li shouted behind him. He swore something in Chinese that Anand didn’t understand, but Anand heard his footsteps following.

The Chinese boy couldn’t have been more than twelve years old. He lay sprawled on the ground, leaning on his elbow as he tried to push himself up. Blood flowed from his mouth and nose. One of his arms fell at an unnatural angle.

Four grown men stood above the boy. One of them held a metal bar in his hand. They looked up as Anand’s feet came to a stop on the gravelly back street. Li followed seconds later, bumping into Anand in the poor light.

The man with the metal bar squinted at Anand and Li. The other men looked to their leader. The boy on the ground whimpered. 

“This doesn’t concern you,” the man said in a slow, measured voice, with the hint of an accent Anand did not recognize.

“He’s only a boy,” Anand said, thinking of his own brother, Vishwan.

“The boy is a thief. You and your chink friend have five seconds to turn around before you’ll be very sorry.”

“I am never sorry,” Anand said. “I have already died, and here I am. I have no fear of death. But I am guessing you do. I am going to give you and your friends those five seconds to leave, or it is you who will be very sorry.”

Li gasped, as did two of the leader’s men. The mouth of the man with the metal bar hung open, but he didn’t make a sound.

“One,” Anand said. “Two.”

The smallest of the four men ran away.

“Stop!” the leader shouted after him. He turned his gaze to Anand. “Nobody tells me what to do.” He lifted the weapon over his head.

Anand pushed Li out of the way, and ran past the man to help the boy off the ground. But the other two men began to move. One of them grabbed Anand’s arms while the other one punched him in the stomach. He knew pain was meaningless, but it still hurt like hell. He would have fallen to the ground had it not been for the man holding his arms.

Li tackled the man with the weapon, wrapping his arms around the man’s mid-section from behind, but the man was twice his size. Li was but a minor annoyance as the man stepped toward Anand, dragging Li with him.

“This doesn’t look like a fair fight,” said a new voice. It was the voice of an Irishman. He stood on the other side of the alley. Anand looked up and caught a glimpse of the newcomer just as a punch hit the side of his face. Pain seared from his jaw. He tried to focus his vision.

“Jesus Christ,” the leader said. “What the hell is this? A party?”

“Just evening the score,” the newcomer said. He took what looked like a step backward, but Anand saw what he was doing. His foot connected with a pile of dirt. He kicked up the dirt into a cloud of dust. The Irishman ran forward through the distracting dust cloud.

A smile crossed Anand’s face right before another punch landed on his jaw.

Anand woke up choking. The sound of rain beat down, but Anand didn’t feel the rain on his body. He lay on a soft surface. Pain pulsed through his head and midsection. For a moment, he was fifteen years old again, unsure of his surroundings but sure he was close to death. But this time was different. His unconscious sleep had not shown him a peaceful light. Only darkness punctuated by the taste of dirt and blood.

Now he tasted whisky on his tongue.

“I told you it would work,” an Irish voice said.

“Anand,” Li said. “Can you hear us?”

“Nobody’s dead,” the Irishman said. “So you can open your eyes and stop faking it.”

Anand opened his eyes to glare at the Irishman. His expression softened when he saw the badly swollen eye that dominated the man’s face.

“This is Samuel,” Li said. “He was a boxer in Ireland before catching a steamer out this way for the Alaska Gold Rush in ’99.”

“I thought that ended in ’98,” Anand said, pushing himself into an upright position. Until he spoke, he hadn’t realized how parched he was. He wondered if his own face looked as bad as Samuel’s.

“The news didn’t reach me until I was already in San Francisco,” Samuel said, handing Anand a half-empty bottle of whisky.

Anand took a drink to moisten his throat. Looking around, he saw he was in a boarding house room, but not his own.

“And now you patrol the streets of San Francisco doing good deeds?” Anand said.

“I like fair fights. This one was not.”

“How long have I been unconscious?”

“Only an hour.”

“Where are we?”

“My place,” Samuel said. “It’s right around the corner from the alley. Your friend helped me carry you here. Nothing is broken, so your friend didn’t want to take you to a doctor.”

Anand nodded. Pain shot through his jaw from the movement. He raised his hand to his face and felt a solid bump. But Samuel was right. Nothing appeared to be broken.

“What about the boy?” Anand asked.

“Ran off home,” Li said. “He whispered something to you before he ran away, but I think you were already unconscious.”

“Yes,” Anand said, nodding more carefully this time.

“You saved his life, my friend,” Li said. “Don’t make a habit of it.”

Chapter 16

“I thought you were dead,” said the intruder in my apartment.

I whirled around.

“You ever hear of checking the messages on your phone?” he continued.

Sanjay sat on the couch with his cell phone in one hand and a splayed pack of cards in the other.

“People have been murdered around you,” Sanjay continued. “It’s not nice to leave me hanging like that.”

“You know I hate it when you do that,” I said. “Would it really be too much to ask that you don’t break into my apartment whenever you feel like it?”

“I was worried. You didn’t answer your phone or return my calls. What happened to your arm?” Sanjay’s eyes focused on the gauze bandage wrapped around my palm.

“I was mugged earlier. That’s why I don’t have my phone.”

Sanjay jumped up, spilling the deck of cards onto the floor. “That’s why I scared you! Jaya, I’m so sor—”

“Forget it,” I said. “I’m fine. And you didn’t scare me. You just
disturbed
me.” I turned away from Sanjay, grabbing a handful of ice and wrapping it in a kitchen towel.

“Please tell me this was a random mugging,” Sanjay said, “that you were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“He got the map. Along with my phone that had the picture of the map.”

Sanjay breathed deeply. “You aren’t badly hurt?” he asked, watching me as I leaned against the kitchen counter and rested the ice on my elbow.

“Superficial.”

“Good,” he said. “Then I can still be pissed at you.”

“For
what
?”

“You fought back, didn’t you? Because you knew you’d lose your only copy of the map. That’s why you got hurt.”

“He got my laptop, too.”

“You’re going to get much more seriously hurt one of these days.”

“Thanks,
dad
.”

Sanjay’s olive skin flushed. “This is serious.”

“I know.” The ice wasn’t helping, so I tossed it into the sink and went to the kitchen junk drawer. I took out a map of San Francisco and opened it up on my small round dining table. I instinctively reached for my bag before remembering it was gone. Sanjay didn’t speak and I rummaged through more drawers to find a red marker. I drew an X on the location that had been marked on the original hand-drawn map. I wrote
Lost
and
Found
where they had been marked before. I wouldn’t have a chance to check the translations now. I circled the few buildings I remembered being drawn on Anand’s map.

“What are you doing?” Sanjay asked.

“Isn’t it obvious?”

“You can’t be serious about recreating the map.
You’re going after the treasure?
Weren’t you listening when I told you earlier about the new information about Steven Healy? That’s why you got mugged. This is dangerous. Not a retired man’s hobby like we thought, but something big. Something that could get you killed.”

“After what Tamarind and I discovered today, I definitely need to go back.”

“They
know about you
.” His dark eyes creased down at the edges. “I don’t want anything to happen to—wait. What did you say? You discovered something?”

“Yeah, it looks like it might be a treasure originally from India, and—”

“Never mind,” Sanjay said, cutting me off. “I shouldn’t have asked. I don’t need to know.
You
don’t need to know either. I don’t want to encourage you about this thing and doing something stupid.”

“When have I ever done anything stupid?”

“Do I need to remind you about what happened earlier this summer? You didn’t tell me what was going on, and look at the mess you got yourself into.”

“I don’t have to tell you everything I do. You’re not my dad. You’re not even my boyfriend.”

Sanjay turned bright red. “Of course not. I just meant—”

“I didn’t do anything stupid there,” I said, “and I’m not going to do anything stupid now.”

“Right.” Sanjay paused to pick up the deck of cards he’d spilled on the floor. “In that case, I suppose you should tell me what you found out at the library.”

I still had the pirate flag sticker in my back pocket. I handed it to Sanjay.

“Tamil pirates?” he asked.

I stared at Sanjay. “How did you know?”

“It’s just one of those things one picks up.”

“About my Uncle Anand, the pirate?”

“What are you talking about?” Sanjay asked. “I was talking about this flag. You said you’d learned something about an Indian treasure and showed me this.”

“So you don’t know about Pirate Vishnu?”

“Who’s Pirate Vishnu? I was talking about the Jolly Roger pirate flag.”

“I thought the flag was English. Or at least European of some sort.”

“Yeah, but one of the theories of where the
name
of the pirate flag came from is that it was named after the Tamil pirate Ali Raja. You know the English with their nicknames. They called him and his flag Ally Roger or something, which evolved into the Jolly Roger. You don’t know this? Jaya, you really are the worst Indian ever.”

“You know too much random Indian trivia.”

“What does the pirate flag have to do with Anand?”

“Tamarind and I discovered why he would have needed to draw a treasure map—he was a pirate in the San Francisco Bay a hundred years ago.”

“A real pirate who commandeered boats and made people walk the plank?”

“As far as the newspapers reported, he didn’t make anyone walk the plank. But the year he attacked ships was the same year of Anand’s letters home that Steven Healy was after.”

“Listen,” Sanjay said after scowling at his phone, “are you really all right?”

“I’m fine.”

“Then I should go. I have to stop by the benefit theater before our music set tonight to check on something. But if you’d rather not be alone, you could come with me to get familiar with the stage.”

“Why would I need to do that?”

“You agreed to be my assistant tomorrow.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Yes, you did. Jaya, it’s just this once. Grace is gone. I can’t do it alone.”

“Can’t you do card tricks like the one you were practicing?”

“Don’t you want to help the orphans?”

“Orphans?”

“Well, it’s not
only
orphans. It’s a homeless benefit, like I told you. I’m sure many of them were formerly orphans. It’s a good cause.”

I felt my will caving. I was now ridiculously behind on my research paper, had to get a new computer and phone, needed to find out how my family history could have been so wrong, and on top of it all I had to be careful in case a murderer was after me. But how could I say no to such a request from my best friend?

“What do I have to do?” I asked.

Sanjay grinned. “Show up at the Folsom Street Theater at noon tomorrow and I’ll show you. Bring some shoes that make less noise than your usual heels.”

A flower appeared in his hand out of nowhere. He handed it to me and was out the door.

After closing the door and making sure it was firmly locked, I pulled at the petals on the flower. The flower wasn’t plastic or silk, but was a real daisy. Sanjay was good. It reminded me of the first time we ever met.

It had been on the first day I moved to San Francisco a year before. I was moving into the apartment above Nadia’s house. My clunky old car had been double-parked in front of the Victorian. It was before I inherited my roadster from my dad’s friend. I’d been bouncing around for so long that I hadn’t acquired any furniture, so all of my earthly possessions, aside from my books, fit in my car. I’d just carried a box of clothes inside. I walked back outside and found Sanjay sitting on the back bumper of my car.

Of course I didn’t know his name at the time. What I saw was a fashionably dressed South Asian man with meticulously styled hair, somewhere around my age, holding a bowler hat in his hands.

“This your tabla?” he asked in a California accent.

My tabla drum case sat nestled lovingly between a duvet and a bag of sweaters.

“If you’re the owner of a local live music venue, the answer is yes.”

Sanjay smiled the broadest of smiles, revealing the whitest of white teeth. Out of nowhere, a bouquet of flowers popped into his hand.

“Almost as good,” he said, handing me the flowers.

I sniffed two fragrant red roses and looked up at him in surprise. “These are real.”

“But of course.”

“How did you—?”

“A magician never reveals his secrets.”

“One of the roses is a little squished.” I prodded a limp red petal.

“Really?” He got up from the bumper of my car to inspect the petals more carefully. “Damn. I thought I’d solved that.”

“You were telling me how you were going to give me a moonlighting job.”

“I can’t give you one myself, but I can get you one.”

The next night I brought my Indian drums to the Tandoori Palace, and the rest is history.