The Game (38 page)

“His superior air field, with stockpiled arms and explosives,” Holmes added. “Its proximity to the border. A trip to Moscow; three British spies found dead in the vicinity of Khanpur.”

“The remarkable number and variety of guests who come through this rather remote kingdom.”

“The maharaja of Khanpur as a Lenin of the sub-continent?” Holmes mused. “We are reasoning in advance of our data, but it is an hypothesis worthy of consideration. What was your other reason?”

“My other—? Oh yes, for keeping O’Hara in custody. Because the maharaja wants to gloat over him. Not openly, but secretly—what was it he said to me? ‘I like to keep some things to myself.’ His private rooms show it, that the things that are really important to him he guards close to his chest. And,” I said more slowly, trying to envision the complete picture, “maybe he even regards it as a sport, trying to get inside the man and twist him.”

Holmes did not respond, and I glanced to see his reaction. His face was stoney, his eyes far away.

“Holmes, I’ve heard a great deal about Kimball O’Hara, from you and from Nesbit, and I suppose you could say from Kipling’s story before that. So, what
is
O’Hara’s weakness? How would the maharaja turn him?”

We had covered half a mile before Holmes answered me. “O’Hara’s greatest weakness, when I knew him, was his unwillingness to lie. Oh, he was superb at playing The Game, turning the truth until it went outside-in, creating stories for himself—those small deceits of history and character that are part of a good disguise. But when it came to direct questions, and particularly when dealing with a person who knew him, telling a lie was almost physically painful for the lad. He had an almost superstitious aversion to breaking his word.”

I thought about this the remainder of the afternoon, asking myself how a person might use a man’s honesty against him. Offhand, I couldn’t come up with anything terribly likely, but I had no doubt that, if it were possible, the maharaja of Khanpur would be the man to do it.

Well before dusk we came to the village the farmer had described to us, a small but prosperous collection of walls and trees, fields stretching out in all directions. I waited with the donkey and cart, surrounded by the excited twitter of the village children, while Holmes came to an agreement with the headman. We set up camp beneath the assigned tree, then hobbled the donkey and gave it food.

Dusk settled in; the men came in from their labours; the odours of dung fire and spices rose up in the soft air. I missed Bindra, more than I would have thought, and hoped the urchin had found safe haven on the other side of the border—and then I caught myself and chuckled aloud. That boy would survive in a pit of angry cobras.

The sky shed the sun’s light, giving way to half a moon, and Holmes and I readied ourselves for the evening performance.

It was a dramatic setting
for a human sacrifice, give my murderer credit. He had drawn together the entire populace, crones to infants, in a dusty space between buildings that in England would be the village green, and all were agog at the sight. A circle of freshly lit torches cracked and flared in the slight evening breeze, their dashing light rendering the mud houses in stark contrast of pale wall and blackest shadow. The bowl of the sky I was forced to gaze up at was moonless, the stars—far, far from the electrical intrusions of civilisation—pinpricks in the velvet expanse. The evening air was rich with odours—the oily reek of the rag torches in counterpoint to the dusky cow-dung cook-fires and the curry and garlic that permeated the audience, along with the not unpleasant smell of unsoaped bodies and the savour of dust which had been dampened for the show.

I lay, bound with chains, on what could only be called an altar, waist-height to the man who held the gleaming knife. My sacrifice was to be the climax of the evening’s events, and he had worked the crowd into a near frenzy, playing on their rustic gullibility as on a fine instrument. It had been a long night, but it seemed that things were drawing to a finish.

The knife was equally theatrical, thirteen inches of flashing steel, wielded with artistry in order to catch the torchlight. For nearly twenty minutes it had flickered and dipped over my supine body, brushing my skin like a lover, leaving behind thin threads of scarlet as it lifted; my eyes ached with following it about. Still, I couldn’t very well shut them; the mind wishes to see death descend, however futile the struggle.

But it would not be long now. I did not understand most of the words so dramatically pelting the crowd, but I knew they had something to do with evil spirits and the cleansing effects of bloodshed. I watched the motions of the knife closely, saw the slight change in how it rested in my attacker’s hand, the shift from loose showmanship to the grip of intent. It paused, and the man’s voice with it, so that all the village heard was the sough and sigh of the torches, the cry of a baby from a nearby hut, and the bark of a pi-dog in the field. The blade now pointed directly down at my heart, its needle point rock-steady as the doubled fist held its hilt without hesitation.

I saw the twitch of the muscles in his arms, and struggled against the chains, in futility. The knife flashed down, and I grimaced and turned away, my eyes tight closed.

This was going to hurt.

But as the knife began its downward descent, as the mechanical device now built into the bottom of the upturned cart clicked open and gave way, as the lit pyrotechnic sputtered in my ear, my eyes flew open again, for in that brief instant, a stray splash of light had illuminated a pair of figures at the back of the crowd. But I was too late: By the time my eyes came open again to seek them out, the trick knife had collapsed against my body and I was dropping to the rocky ground beneath the cart, artificial blood flying all over and the flash blinding everyone but Holmes. Cursing furiously under my breath, I shook free of the chains, fighting to turn over in the restricted space without overturning the cart and giving myself away, while Holmes raised his voice above the sudden clamour that the flash always stimulated, telling the villagers that the sacrifice had been taken up by the gods. I pressed my bare eye to the side of the cart where a small crack let in the torchlight, searching for the figures.

Even without my spectacles, the turbans caught my eye: red and high, with a gleaming white device over the forehead; and beside them, a smaller, bareheaded man, his features indistinct—but I didn’t need to see them.

The maharaja of Khanpur had caught us up.

There were more guards, I saw, closing in on our rustic stage as the villagers faded quickly back behind the protection of their walls. I lay helpless, waiting for strong hands to lift the cart and drag me away. But to my surprise, the maharaja seemed more interested in Holmes than in me.

“How did you do that?” he asked, speaking Hindi.

“Oah, my lord, it is the Arts,” Holmes replied.

“It is trickery.”

“My lord, no trickery. I am a follower of the Prophet, but my skill is in the hands of Vishnu and Shiv.”

“I wish to see it again.”

“I will happily come to your court and—”

“Good,” the maharaja said, and turned away. I let out the first breath in what seemed like several minutes, but too soon. The prince’s hand came up in command, and through my thin crack I saw figures in red
puggaree
s closing in on the cart—or rather, on the cart’s owner. Holmes had only time enough to bend over where I lay and speak what sounded like an incantation, but which was actually a command, in German: “Stay there, then go for aid.”

There was a scuffle and Holmes’ querulous voice demanding explanation, followed a minute later by the sound of a motorcar starting up. Then, awfully, silence.

Chapter Twenty-One

I
crawled out from beneath the shiny wagon, rubbing unconsciously
at my wrists and at the bruise on my hip that came with every fall through the trap-door. What the hell was I supposed to do now? I asked myself. We’d avoided the maharaja because we feared he might recognise me; we hadn’t even considered that he might go to the effort of hunting down a magician to add to his collection, however temporarily.

I pulled my spectacles from my pocket, but clarity of vision had little effect on clarity of thought. Holmes had said, “go for aid,” which meant that he didn’t think I should wait around for him to be returned. “Aid” could only mean Geoffrey Nesbit, but even if the man was at home in Delhi, it could take him days to get here. And I couldn’t see that walking openly into a telegraphist’s to send a message would be the most sensible action: Clearly, the maharaja had ears throughout his country, or he’d never have found the magician Faith had seen in Khanpur city.

Think, Russell!

I had, it seemed, three choices. I could wait here; I could go after Holmes by myself; or I could ask Nesbit for help. And if I forced myself to overlook the alarming method by which the prince had laid hands on the magician—not an easy thing to do, to ignore my body’s nearly overwhelming impulse to race down the road in the wake of the car—I had to admit that Holmes was very probably in no great danger. Yes, he had been abducted in an alarmingly similar fashion once before, and yes, that time the results had been nearly catastrophic, but I had no reason (no rational reason) to feel that anything of the sort was going to happen here. Potential Lenin or no, there was no indication that the maharaja was arresting Holmes for a spy; his words had said merely that the prince of Khanpur wanted to see a magician do his tricks. Annoyed he might be by having to search for the magician, and granted, he was in the habit of “inviting” his guests to stay on, and on, but once my heart had ceased to pump in buckets of adrenaline, my mind’s voice could be heard, saying that it would not be much harder to retrieve Holmes in four or five days than it would be if I stormed the palace tonight.

And—my brain at last beginning to function with clarity—it was quite possible that Holmes might find traces of Kimball O’Hara where I had failed. Particularly if, as I thought possible, the spy was quartered in Old Fort rather than among the European guests.

Still, I did not think that sitting in this mud-walled village would help anyone, so I wiped away the artificial blood from the “slashes” on my arms and legs, doused the guttering flares, and went to look for the headman.

It took some doing to convince the man that I was neither dead nor spirit. In the end, the solidity of the rupees I put in his hand decided the matter. He would guard the wagon and feed the donkey, and although he had no horse himself to sell me, he could send for a man who did.

By midnight, I was jogging north out of the village on a sturdy pony that had a bone-jarring gait but loads of stamina. I took the first road that came in from the right, and pressed on for half an hour before the moonlight failed entirely and the horse let me know that it was blind. I hobbled the creature and curled up in a blanket for a short time, rising and setting off again as soon as the road became visible.

We travelled all day, passing Khanpur city with the end of my
puggaree
drawn across my face against the dust, without spectacles most of the time, trusting to my anonymity and the pony’s sureness of foot. In the afternoon I began to watch the telegraph lines that dipped and rose on poles beside the main road to Hijarkot, but I found no telegraph office until the road gave birth to a caravanserai, its air already heavy with a dozen smokey cook-fires, clusters of men sitting around eating, coughing heartily, and spitting red splashes into the dust. I might have gone another hour or two before dark, and certainly would have continued had I wished merely for sleep, but instead I hired a string
charpoy
from the same establishment that stabled my pony, and bought a large plate of rice and dhal so hot it brought tears to my eyes. The smoke rose and then died away in the serai, the horses and camels complained and quieted, the lights were turned out in the telegraph office, and eventually the
charpoy
s around me subsided into a night-time chorus of snores and mumbles.