Pirate Vishnu (A Jaya Jones Treasure Hunt Mystery) (5 page)

Anand nearly fell to the ground as his body shook with laughter.

“That was a children’s story,
thambi
! To make you go to sleep. I never threw rocks at a monkey in my life. And I never met a monkey who threw them at me.”

Vishwan’s large eyes grew wide. “But...” He looked up at the tall tree.

“How long have you been attempting this?” Anand asked.

“I tried since the month you left for Kochi.”

“All these months?”

“You weren’t home to help me,
anna
. I thought I must be doing something incorrectly.”

Anand tried to stop laughing. “You finally found a monkey smart enough and angry enough to make your persistence pay off.”

Vishwan’s lower lip quivered for a short moment, as if he might cry. But as only a child can do, a second later a wide smile replaced the sadness.

“I did better than you!” Vishwan cried out.

He gripped the coconuts firmly in his hands and ran toward the house.

Anand watched his little brother run through the tall grass. He knew he was destined to travel the world, but how could he leave Vishwan on his own?

Chapter 6

The cold rains of San Francisco are nothing like the humid rains of south India I remembered from my childhood. I shivered as I walked the three blocks from my car to my apartment. In San Francisco an umbrella is a must even when it’s a clear blue sky when leaving the house. But I hated to give up the space in my messenger bag. Between my laptop, photocopies of documents from the library, magnifying glass to study original documents, music player, phone, notebook, and pencils, who has room for an umbrella?

I left my tabla case at the restaurant, since I’d be playing another set the next night, so at least my drums would be dry. I, on the other hand, had hair plastered to the sides of my face. Water droplets pooled at the ends of my hair before falling onto my neck.

The treasure map was safely in its plastic sleeve inside my messenger bag. But at the moment I didn’t care about the map. I wasn’t sure how much of my shivering was caused by the rain versus the knowledge that a man I met a few hours before had been murdered.

The timing of Steven Healy’s murder could have been a coincidence, couldn’t it? I knew nothing about him and his life. For all I knew, he could have been a loathsome guy who a lot of people wanted to kill. Maybe something in his legal career had caught up with him. Was I supposed to call the police? What could I tell them?

I was so distracted by my thoughts that I nearly walked past my house. I had to back up a few steps to get to the side gate. I lived on the upper floor of an old Victorian house in the Haight Ashbury neighborhood of the city. My landlady Nadia Lubov had converted the spacious attic into an apartment with its own entrance, accessed by a set of stairs at the side of the house. My wet shoes squeaked with each step as I climbed the stairs.

The four-foot-square landing at my doorway was empty. I must have beaten Sanjay back. Not surprising. He drove like one of the timid bunny rabbits he could pull out of a hat.

I had agreed to meet Sanjay at my apartment. He said I shouldn’t be alone. But that’s not why I agreed. I’m good at being alone. But I think better with someone to bounce ideas off of, and there was a hell of a lot that I needed to figure out. Just because I didn’t understand what was going on with Lane, didn’t mean I would stare at my walls feeling sorry for myself.

Sanjay was a better person to help me, anyway. With no romantic entanglement, there wouldn’t be any distractions. And I trusted Sanjay completely. He was like the little brother I never had. My older brother Mahilan had always been more like a father to me than a brother. At least much more like a father than our dad, who self-medicated his problems away. Mahilan had told me he wasn’t always like that, but I was too young when our mom died to remember much.

My mom died so long ago that I didn’t actively miss her. Yet sometimes I felt her presence. I wished I could have asked her more about Anand. As a child, I hadn’t realized that I would want to know more, or that her time with me would be cut short.

I knew that Anand had made an impression on my mom’s grandfather, Vishwan. Through Vishwan, Anand had touched many lives. My mother gave me the middle name of Anand, which means “happiness” in Sanskrit. My first name, Jaya, means “victory,” a testament to what she was able to achieve by marrying a man of her own choosing, because of the uncle who had come before her and made his own choices.

But what if nothing we knew about him was true? Even if I wanted to learn the truth, my last link to the past was now dead. All I had was the map.

Where was Sanjay, anyway? I was in no mood to be left with my own thoughts.

I changed out of my wet clothes, slipping into a pair of black leggings and trading my black turtleneck for a fuzzy black sweater. I wrapped a towel around my wet head just before Sanjay knocked on the door.

“You didn’t have an umbrella?” he said, looking at the towel. “You should have told me. I would have given you mine.”

“People survived for thousands of years before the invention of the umbrella.”

“You really need to move to a building with parking,” he said, closing his sprawling umbrella and wiping his feet before stepping inside. He removed his bowler hat and twirled it in his hand.

“Do you want anything to eat?” I asked, remembering that he hadn’t eaten at the restaurant.

“You actually have food in your house? That would be a first.”

“Probably not.” I opened the fridge. “Definitely not. Unless you want to eat that half-full jar of spicy mango pickle. But I can offer you the finest coffee this side of Golden Gate Park.”

“You don’t have any milk,” Sanjay said, peering over my shoulder into the fridge.

“Lightweight.”

“Some of us like our stomach linings intact. I don’t think that type of cheese is supposed to be fuzzy. Can I put that in the trash?”

I closed the fridge and turned to face Sanjay. “I can’t believe he’s dead.”

“I know,” Sanjay said. “That’s a really odd coincidence.”

“We should put on the news to see if they’ve said anything else.”

“I was listening to the radio on the way over here,” Sanjay said. “They’re now saying how he was killed—someone bludgeoned him to death.”

My knees felt weak. “What the hell is going on?”

“I’ll make the coffee,” Sanjay said. He tossed his hat so it landed squarely on the coat hook next to the door. I leaned against the counter and watched Sanjay struggle with the stovetop pressurized contraption.

“That’s not an answer.”

“Are you going to call the police?” Sanjay asked.

“And tell them
what
exactly? That he told me one of my ancestors was murdered because of some mysterious treasure over a century ago? Maybe he was a horrible guy and someone completely unrelated to the treasure killed him.”

“Are you going to give the map back to his family?” Sanjay asked.

“God, I hadn’t thought of that. I suppose I should.”

“Don’t do it,” Sanjay said. “He gave it to you. Besides, it’s probably rightfully yours.”

“He loaned it to me,” I reminded Sanjay. “He even gave me a receipt. I think a receipt from a lawyer is a little bit better provenance than my saying a distant relative may have drawn it to hide his illegal treasure.”

“Point taken,” Sanjay said. “It’s too late to do anything tonight, anyway.”

“Maybe I should go to the police,” I said. “What do you think?”

“I think you should show me this thing that may have caused all this trouble.”

The Italian coffeemaker hissed. Sanjay poured us two cups of strong black coffee as I retrieved the map from my bag.

I hung the map on a corkboard on the wall across from the couch, careful to pin the protective sleeve so I wouldn’t damage the map. I placed it between copies of a detailed map of British India from the 1940s and a set of black-and-white photos of unnamed Indian Sepoy soldiers. I liked to tack up photocopied pages of research to help me organize my thoughts. To the casual observer, my apartment might have looked like a disaster area, but I knew the purpose of each of the papers strewn about my furniture and across the floor. It was easier to spread out at home than in my office since colleagues and students came by my office on a regular basis. Fewer people visited my apartment, so I could mostly avoid comments about my organizational habits. I could gather my thoughts together at home, then get work done at the office.

“Whatever this map leads to,” I said, “nobody has found it in over a century.”

Sanjay handed me a mug of coffee and we stood in front of the map in silence. I breathed in the strong scent of the coffee. As the warmth from the ceramic mug began to warm me up, I wondered what Uncle Anand had thought of San Francisco after growing up in India’s tropical south. The map of San Francisco didn’t look exactly as it did today, but a lot had changed in a hundred years, especially after the earthquake that destroyed so much of the city. As I’d noticed before, there wasn’t much text, and I only recognized some of the locations. I looked again at the English translation at the very top.
My Cities.
Shouldn’t it have been
My City
instead?

“You weren’t kidding,” Sanjay said. “A real treasure map with an X that marks the spot.” He pointed to the script next to the English translations. “That’s Tamil?”

I nodded. “Quite possibly written by Uncle Anand.”

“You can read it?”

“Of course not.”

“Jaya, you really are the worst Indian ever.”

“You’re just begging for a pickle-eating contest,” I joked, but I was all too aware that my words came out as stiff and serious as I felt.

It’s a conversation we had all the time. I smothered imported hotter-than-hot Indian pickle on a lot of things I eat, unlike Sanjay, who was born in California and grew up eating organic foods from Silicon Valley farmers’ markets and food festivals. In spite of my affinity for any food that would make most grown men cry, Sanjay was right that I had some serious gaps in my cultural knowledge. Sanjay was the one with a more ingrained sense of Indian culture. I only lived in India until I was seven years old. My father was an American hippie who had gone to India to find himself and met my mother. But after she died, he thought it would be easier to raise my brother and me back in America. I grew up with the aging flower children of Berkeley, not within an Indian community.

“I don’t think that jar of mango pickle in your fridge is sanitary,” Sanjay said.

“Coward.”

Sanjay cleared his throat. “I guess we should get back to this map. Are these good translations?”

Sanjay was Punjabi, and his parents were from north India, whereas my family was from the south. The languages of the different regions were nothing alike, and the only thing Sanjay and I had in common in this case was that neither one of us were equipped to read the Tamil writing.

So much can be lost in translation. It’s one of the hazards for a historian when reading non-primary accounts. Luckily for my own specialty, the British East India Company, most accounts and records were kept in English.

“I’ll have a linguist check it out,” I said.

“Meaning you decided to keep it,” Sanjay said.

I glared at Sanjay before retrieving my phone. I snapped two photos of the map. “There,” I said. “Now I can give the map back. Happy?”

“If Anand Paravar was as clever as your mom led you to believe,” Sanjay said, “maybe he put invisible ink on the map.”

I glared at Sanjay again.

“Don’t shoot the messenger, Jaya.”

I groaned and sat down on the couch. I couldn’t resist the historical lure of the map. As soon as Steven Healy came to me, there was little chance of my turning back. And now…

“
Lost
and
found
,” Sanjay read aloud from the map. “
Path of the Old Coast
. I’ve never heard of the
MP Craft Emporium
or
The Anchored Enchantress
. Sounds like a video game. And what do you suppose this drawing to the north of Lands End is? Looks kind of like wobbly triangles.”

“Wobbly triangles?”

A loud pounding at the door startled us both. Sanjay was good at masking his reactions, since he’s a performer, but I saw his shoulders tense.

“It’s Nadia,” I said, getting up to answer the door. “That’s the way she knocks.”

My landlady wore a black one-piece jumpsuit that looked straight out of 1968. She hated colorful clothing, just like me. It might be one of the reasons we got along so well. A hint of musky perfume hovered around her.

“You did not come for your mail today,” she said. I didn’t think my apartment was legally supposed to exist, so all of my mail was delivered to the main mailbox at Nadia’s door. “I hear voices upstairs, so I know you are home and awake.”

I ushered her inside from the rain as she pushed a handful of mail into my hands. Rain drops glistened on her white-streaked blonde hair. I wasn’t sure how old Nadia was, and she wouldn’t tell me even after we’d become friends. I knew she’d come to San Francisco from Russia as a young woman in the 1960s and fallen in love with the city. My apartment used to be the space where she grew pot plants for medical marijuana patients.

“Sorry if we woke you, Nadia,” I said. My wall clock, an antique from a thrift store in London that worked most of the time, showed it was well after eleven p.m.

“Of course not, Jaya. You know I never sleep until well after midnight. I was finishing dinner.”

“You eat dinner at 11 p.m.?” Sanjay said.

Nadia’s blue eyes narrowed as she noticed Sanjay. She told me once that she disliked all magicians. I’m sure there’s a story there, which I might ask her about when I had a full evening to spare. 

“A good meal is a civilized way to end the day, no?” Her eyes caught sight of the map on the wall. “What is that?” She walked across the room until she stood a few feet in front of the map.

“Just a map I picked up for my research,” I said casually, catching Sanjay’s eye and giving a shake of my head while Nadia’s back was turned. For all of the benefits of having a free-spirited landlady who couldn’t care less that I tack, nail, and duct-tape my latest research projects to my walls, the downside was she had a nosy streak. It’s how she knew Sanjay in the first place.

“I did not think you studied local history,” Nadia said. “Why is this on your wall?”

“It’s—” Sanjay began.

I “accidentally” stepped on his foot.

“We can’t figure out what these are,” I said as Sanjay swore. I pointed to the wobbly triangle hash marks above Lands End.

“Oh, that’s easy,” Nadia said.

“You know what those are?”

“Of course,” Nadia said. “What I cannot understand is why on earth they are
here
.”