The Game (37 page)

I witnessed none of these events within New Fort for the simple reason that I was not there. I left my rooms less than five minutes after entering them, having stopped there only long enough to pull on black trousers and a long dark pull-over. I wrapped a dressing-gown over the clothes and handed a note to the servant who lurked at my door, asking him to take it to Sunny Goodheart. When he had gone, I dropped the gown and grabbed my soft Simla boots, pausing only to dip my hands into the lamp’s soot and wipe it across my face. Then I slipped unseen down the stairs and into the dark gardens. With my boots on my feet and a handful of tiny pebbles in my pocket, I took up a position near the gates, crouching there for a few moments until the guards went to investigate the rattle of tiny stones in the shadows. I eased out of the gates and over the waist-high stone wall onto the rocky hillside. Easing down the faint, near-vertical path that I felt more than saw, inching on all fours from rock to shrub, the back of my neck crawled with awareness of the mysterious eastern half of the fortress, looming behind me in the darkness. As I moved with infinite care down the slippery slope, I fancied I could hear the ghostly echoes of screaming Mutineers, trapped and burning sixty-seven years before.

I reached the road at last, leg muscles quivering, two fingers ripped and bleeding from a rock, but undiscovered. I gazed south, where lay the town of Khanpur, then turned resolutely north. This was the first time that I’d been out unobserved, and I was not about to waste the opportunity. I strode briskly north, towards those beguiling
godown
s that had been calling to me since I had first laid eyes on them from the window of the maharaja’s aeroplane.

Little more than an hour later, I was hunkered behind the lip of a drainage ditch halfway between The Forts and Khanpur city while the maharaja’s laden Hispano-Suiza flew raucously past. I rose to watch the great head-lamps illuminate the stone drive, its driver blithely unaware that the disapproving eye of the Crown was about to turn upon his little kingdom. I watched the car stagger its way through the gates, then turned, finally, towards Holmes.

The city gates were shut for the night, so I went on to the
serai
south of town, and there in the dying firelight I found the outlines of a familiar mirrored wagon. As I laid my hand on the flap of the tent, a faint slipping noise came from within, and I stopped to say, “It is I.” When I heard the blade slide back into its sheath, I continued in.

“I had word that men were seeking me in the town,” said Holmes in Hindi, to explain his haste in drawing steel.

“The maharaja and his friends, in search of entertainment.”

“Ah. And you?”

“The time has come for Mary Russell to return to her husband.”

“And time for her to disappear as well, do I take it?”

“It would be best. The maharaja dislikes . . .” I did not know the Hindi word, so I used the English. “. . . ingratitude.”

“Interesting. Fortunately, I have a good supply of walnut dye.”

“Holmes, it is best if we depart the city. Its prince might think to look again tomorrow, and it would be easier if he were to find you gone.”

“And O’Hara?”

“I have a few ideas on that,” I said. “However, it’s complicated, and I think we should get on with doing my skin. Oh, but Holmes, remember when Nesbit made mention of a report that the maharaja had been buying large quantities of cotton? I found it.”

Say one thing for Holmes: He always appreciated the little gifts I brought him, and this no less than any. He even permitted me to tell the story properly: creeping past the inhabited buildings at the air field and to the silent
godown
s; the makeshift pick-locks I had fashioned from hair-pins; the discovery of no fewer than three of the big triple-engined Junkers planes, awaiting assembly; a disconcerting number of machine-guns and light artillery; and (best for last) the biggest
godown
with its store of cotton bales, floor to ceiling, and neatly arranged beside them, drums of the other materials one would need for making explosives.

Oh yes; Nesbit was going to love this.

The more, perhaps, if we could find him Kimball O’Hara as well.

We slipped away from the
serai
during the night, again disguised as a pair of itinerant Moslem magicians, and headed west into the broad plateau that formed the centre of the state, a rich source of pulse and cane, wheat and vegetables. I had been, I thought, remarkably patient; no more.

“Holmes, it is your turn. What happened after you left Simla?”

“Remarkably little,” he replied. “Quite odd, really.”

“As a narrative, Holmes, the statement is by no means sufficient.”

“No? I suppose not. Very well. Bindra and I left the hotel early. I had decided that the train out of Simla being unlikely to provide a rich source of information concerning that itinerant monk O’Hara, we should walk out of the hills.”

“Walk? That must have taken days—what was Bindra’s reaction to that?”

“He was not pleased. I did offer to provide him with a ticket back to Kalka, but for some reason the boy decided he would rather stay with me. So we walked, and caught rides on bullock-carts and
tonga
s, and stopped regularly to thaw ourselves out in wayside hostelries, drinking tea with the locals and gossiping about this and that.”

“Monks, particularly,” I suggested.

“By all means, especially considering the way a certain scoundrel of a red-hat Buddhist monk had just made off with my purse and train ticket, leaving me to trudge through the snow and survive on cups of tea bought with the few coins that remained in my pocket.”

“And did any of them recall another such monk, oh, say about three years before?”

“Surprisingly few. And both of those who did—the sweeper of one inn and the cook in another—remembered him as going uphill, towards Simla, not away.”

“So he took the train out,” I said, disappointed.

“Or went overland to the north. In the summer months, the passes there would be reasonable, for a man who loves the hills at any rate. One thing did come to light: A band of
dacoit
s—robbers—was working in the area north of Simla during that time.”

“Do you think—?”

“I think it highly unlikely that Kimball O’Hara was the victim of casual dacoitry.”

Still, it gave me thought, as I walked along. A while later, another question came to mind.

“What did Bindra make of your tale of woe?” I asked.

“The boy seemed unsurprised. In fact, he tended to embellish my stories rather more than was necessary.”

And that, too, was thought-provoking. The child was shrewder than he appeared and without doubt unscrupulous, but I could not bring myself to picture him as a spy planted in our midst, by Nesbit or anyone else. For one thing, the child was too young for that sort of sustained purpose of mind: Holmes had habitually used youthful Irregulars in his Baker Street days, but only for specific and limited missions.

But if the child was not there under orders, why did he stay? And more to the point, why did he not question the oddities of Holmes’ behaviour?

The mysteries kept me occupied all that day, but they remained mysteries.

We set up that night in a village of perhaps ninety souls, earning a handful of copper for our pains, but with the coins supplemented by a generosity of food and fodder. The village got a bargain, because in my absence Holmes had cobbled together the equipment for a new act which, together with the levitation frame, my bottomless Moslem cap, and the conversions to the blue cart effected by blacksmith and carpenter back in Kalka, was spectacular enough to make even the least superstitious folk uneasy.

Not until we were in our bed-rolls that night could we speak freely, murmuring into each other’s ears in English, the sound inaudible from outside the walls of the tent. Holmes had been thinking about what I had said.

“You say Old Fort appears deserted, but is not,” he said.

“There are no lights, but when one watches with care, one sees the occasional splash of lamp and gleam of a sentry’s gun atop the walls. And twice, a guard’s careless cigarette.”

“What of its gates?”

“They are generally open. I presume they’re guarded, although if the men are anything like those on the main gates, it should be no great task to get past them. You wish to see inside Old Fort?”

“Why else should we be here?” he asked.

Why else, indeed? “I merely thought that perhaps we ought to send word to Nesbit first, in case something happens.”

“Report or no, Nesbit knows where we are. Our disappearance alone would tell him all he need know.”

Slim comfort.

We moved on the next day, our path a wide circle leading back to The Forts. Here the ground was less fertile, with fewer people working the fields. We strolled the dusty road, the unnaturally amiable donkey following along behind, and as we went I tried to describe the maharaja and his coterie.

“He is, as Nesbit said, a fine sportsman. Having ridden after pig myself now, I understand Nesbit’s praise of the man. Of course, he’s completely insensible to damage inflicted on horses or coolies, but he does play the game by the rules, and was unwilling to leave a wounded boar to die in the bushes.”

“Which may merely be because, were the boar to recover, it would be both ill tempered and experienced when it came to men.”

“True, and it wouldn’t do to have a berserker pig come after, say, a visiting Prince of Wales.”

“But you already told me that the hearty sportsman is not the only side to his personality.”

“His cousin said it: He collects grotesques. In his zoo, but also the people living under his—ach, the sun is so hot today,” I broke off to say, as a farmer reclining in the shade of a tree stirred and sat up at our approach. Holmes asked the man about the next village, and learned that it was tiny but that a few miles farther on was a larger village, with two wells and many clay-brick houses. We thanked him, shared a
bidi
with him, and returned to the road.

“You were saying, Russell?”

“His pet grotesques. He collects them, but I would have to say, he also creates them. In the zoo, he plays God with animals, seeing how far he can drive them before they go mad. And in the palace, he does a similar thing with his ‘guests,’ finding their weaknesses and twisting his blade in an inch at a time. It’s a game to him, baiting and teasing his hangers-on, undermining their skills, seeing if he can drive them nuts.” Then I told him about the zoo, the casual extermination of the thin creature and my impression that he was using the act deliberately to disturb Sunny Goodheart. And, for the sake of completeness but feeling somewhat embarrassed, I went on to describe the toy room, its taxidermied inhabitants, and my profound distaste for that as well.

Holmes walked for a while, staring sightless at the bright wagon, deep in thought. I was braced for his disapproval, that I had not told him this part of it earlier, when I first saw him in Khanpur city. I had my refutations all in a line: that simply failing to reappear in The Forts would have stirred up all kinds of uproar, that not being a small furry animal nor a servant, I was hardly in any danger, and so on. But he just kept walking, and eventually sighed to himself, as if he’d gone through all my arguments in his head and had to admit my position. Sometimes, the speed of Holmes’ wit could be disconcerting.

“An unbalanced man” was, in the end, all he said.

“But you, Holmes, you’ve been in Khanpur nearly as long as I have. What impression of the prince have you got from his subjects?”

“The people are extremely wary of their ruler. They acknowledge that he has improved their lot in any number of ways, appreciate that their sons are learning to read and that their villages have clean water, but they accept these things with the caution that an experienced fox will use in retrieving bait from a trap. And twice I have heard rumours of men vanished into the night.”

“Men, not women?”

“Strong, middle-aged men.”

“Not the sort of target one would expect for perversions.”

“No. And as evidence, it would be dismissed by the most forgiving of judges. Men disappear for any number of reasons, in Khanpur as in London.

“So tell me, Russell, having spent five days in his company: If the maharaja of Khanpur did lay hands on Kimball O’Hara three years ago, would he have killed him or kept him?”

“Kept him,” I answered instantly, then thought about it. “Assuming he knew who the man was. And unless O’Hara drove him to murder.”

“For what purpose?”

What Holmes was asking me to do might to the uninitiated sound like guesswork, but was in fact a form of reasoning that extended the path of known data into the regions of the unknown. Unfortunately, this sort of reasoning worked best with the motivations and goals of career criminals and other simple people; the maharaja of Khanpur was not a simple man.

“I can envision two reasons, although they would not be exclusive. One is, for lack of a better term, political: The maharaja knows O’Hara is in fact a spy, and he wishes to extract from him all possible information about the workings of the British Intelligence system. Although after three years, I can’t imagine there would be much he had not got out of the man.”

“You see political power as the maharaja’s goal?”

I found myself fiddling with the silver-and-enamel charm around my neck. “Nesbit indicated something of the sort, that a native prince might be a compromise between the Congress Party and the Moslem League.”

“Even if he does not come into power through the ballot box.”

“You think the maharaja is setting up a revolution of his own? He could hardly expect to take over the country as a whole.”

“Even a small blow at the right place might be enough to shatter the British hold on the country, given the current political climate.”

“‘By surprise, where it hurts,’ ” I murmured. Goodheart’s drunken cry at the costume ball had stayed with me.

“Precisely. And the provocative elements in this drama are mounting.”

“His friendship with a self-avowed Communist who, according to his sister, has considerable experience with aeroplanes—perhaps to the extent of piloting them himself,” I said. “The capture—possible capture,” I corrected myself before he could, “—of one of the lead spies of the occupying power.”