The Game (49 page)

We left with a rucksack
Bindra had found somewhere, provisioned with food, water, and candles; two knives and an ancient revolver Holmes had got from the
khansama;
the rope and morphia, which Holmes had hidden about his person ever since the night in the gaol; and several small but vital pieces of inside information possessed by Nesbit. Only when we had extracted the facts did we reveal to the man that we were leaving him behind. He was not pleased; we had to chain his wrist to the iron bed to keep him from joining us.

His curses, however, followed us far down the snowy road.

Nor was Bindra happy to be left outside of the Khanpur border with the horses, but the boy had to admit, when pressed by a father employing all the logic of Socrates, that bearing the weight of an abducted maharaja would be beyond his abilities, and that someone needed to watch the beasts. We built a makeshift shelter for them below the snow-line, in an area of deep brush and woods far from the track, where Bindra could keep the animals quiet: The weightiness of that responsibility calmed him. At least we hadn’t left him back at the
dak
bungalow, making sure that Nesbit did not get free.

Just before dark we reached the end of the forest, east and slightly to the south of The Forts, more or less where Nesbit and I had left O’Hara after the gaol-break. The moon rose with the darkness; when it was well clear of the mountains behind us, we slipped from the trees into the cultivated edges of the rough
terai
.

At ten o’clock, with an enormous, bright moon full in the sky, we crossed the main road without having disturbed anything more than pi-dogs and a few night birds. On the other side, the land was more heavily used, but in India even farmers tend to live inside village walls. We gave those wide berth, keeping to fields and paths and moving cautiously; we saw no person.

Well before midnight, the smells of the zoo came to us across the frigid air. A rooster crew, some big animal—one of the lions, perhaps?—coughed irritably, nocturnal habits lying uneasy beneath the daylight régime of its keepers. Another half mile, and we were at the walls surrounding the village of dwarfs. There we paused for whispered consultation.

“The fence here seems to be nothing but thorn brush,” I noted.

“Too noisy to move,” Holmes countered. “We go around.”

The tangle of dry thorn eventually gave way to high, strong wire fencing that kept the maharaja’s giraffes from straying into the sugar cane. We had brought rudimentary burglary tools with us, but it proved unnecessary here, as the fence was not topped by barbed wire. We climbed up and dropped into the pen, keeping near the fence as it pushed deeper into the zoo, then at the far side climbed out again. The white gravel paths glimmered in the light from over our heads, giving us direction, although we did not walk on the gravel for fear of the betraying crunch.

The lions’ pen would have been easy for a blind person to locate, stinking of carnivore, the faint splash of water from the hillside spring the only noise in the great stillness. Our boots made no sound on the winter-soft grass, our clothing gave less rustle than the breeze in the leaves. We drew near the high, gleaming bars, the trees and rock wall behind them a dapple of light and dark.

Then a lion roared from what seemed ten feet away, and I nearly screamed in response. We froze, and my heart coursed and leapt in my chest, making me dizzy; the night seemed to pulse and fade. There came the sound of a large body shifting, the pad of enormous feet, and a second roar. We remained motionless. Would a night watchman come to investigate? Did the roar of lions mean the same as the bark of a dog? Or was the animal merely calling into the night, in hopes that his voice might be heard by another?

After an interminable time, which was probably only six or eight minutes, the animal grunted to itself and padded across the ground. Then it dropped with a breathy grunt and quieted.

I began to breathe again. After a minute, one of the men touched my arm, and we crept forward, cautious as mice in a cattery.

At the end of the lion cage, the greenery closed in so it became impossible to avoid the gravel, but when I gingerly set my foot onto its pale surface, I found that here it had not been refreshed as recently as in the centre of the zoo, and the stones in this damp place had sunk into the ground. We passed the door to the keeper’s building behind the cage where the food and cleaning equipment was stored, and where the white gravel came to an end.

But as I had remembered, there was an unnatural space between the bushes and the building where the salukis had bounded as at a familiar way, and the ground under our feet bore the unmistakable imprint of traffic. Working by feel alone, unable to see anything but the glow of the sky above, I patted my way along the walls until I came to the place where baked-mud wall merged with the naked rock of the hillside.

There we found the door. Unevenly shaped to suit the rough wall, too low for even a short man to pass while standing, and narrow enough to require slipping through sideways.

And locked.

Holmes eased past me to deal with that little problem, and when his pick-locks had done their work, we all breathed a sigh of relief to find the door unbarred. A battering-ram would not have suited our purposes at all.

We slipped inside, into a tight space that smelt of must and stone and the dampness of ages. Holmes closed the door behind him, and I lit a candle. We stood in a hollow perhaps five feet square and seven feet tall, rough-hewn from the rock. I had expected one passage, but we found two, both just wide enough for a man’s shoulders and tall enough for Holmes to walk without being forced to duck. We took the one to the left, which began by heading north, but soon doubled back south, then north again. We were, I decided, cork-screwing upwards in the hill below New Fort, the floor of the passageway ever rising beneath our feet. Twice we came to junctions, and after debate, we took care to mark our choice with small pebbles. After the second junction, we went for five minutes or so before Holmes and I stopped almost simultaneously, sensing the way diverging from where we wanted to be. Returning to the junction, we shifted the pebbles and went on, ever climbing, until the passage came to an end at a door as broad as the outside one had been narrow.

This door, however, had no lock, merely an expanse of uneven, time-darkened wood. I pushed against it, then dug my fingernails into one of the cross-pieces and pulled, but the heavy thing did not budge. Without a word, I stepped back far enough to allow Holmes to pass, and handed him the candle.

He ran the light back and forth over the surface, looking more for signs of wear than for a trigger, but found nothing. Not until he began to search the surrounding rock did he give a grunt of triumph. Shifting the low-burning stub to his left hand, he reached up with his right forefinger to press something hidden by a rough place in the stone. There was a faint click, and the flame danced wildly and snuffed out in the sudden current of air from around the concealed door.

Holmes pressed back against the rock to allow me passage. I laid my hand against the wooden surface, which despite its weight gave way with the silent ease of oiled hinges, and felt forward with the toe of my boot for the high marble trim that had run around the toy-room floor. It was there, and moreover, the air smelt of dust and machine oil. I stepped inside, listening for motion or the sound of stifled breathing, until I was satisfied that we were alone.

I turned back to the invisible door, and breathed, “It’s clear. Could you do something to the lock so—”

“It’s done,” Holmes whispered back. The last thing we needed, should this mad mission actually succeed, would be hunting for another trick switch with an abducted maharaja on our hands.

The two men slipped into the toy room beside me, and I pushed the door shut, more or less. As I turned into the room, two hands came to rest on my shoulders, Holmes’ familiar long fingers gripping my left, O’Hara’s on my right. Now was the time to make good on my foolish assertion to Kimball O’Hara that I could find my way through a black room I had visited only once.

I bent my head and allowed my mind’s eye to summon a view of the room as it had been. The door; the high shelves of mechanical dolls and animals to its left; the scattered arrangement of glass-enclosed mechanisms across the floor—not in a haphazard pattern, not once one knew that there was a doorway hidden behind them. The Englishman-eating tiger was over
there,
the erotic toys
back there
. Which meant that we need only circle the piggies’ tea party and dodge the pair of fortune-telling gipsies, and we would be at the room’s entrance.

I led the way forward—slowly and with my hands stretched out to be sure, since I was not all that supremely confident. But we reached the door without noise or mishap, and I felt a surge of pride as I laid my hand upon the doorknob.

The corridor stretched out in both directions, lit by oil lamps every thirty feet or so. The nearest one was smoking and guttering, a black stain on the ceiling showing that it had not been properly trimmed. We closed the door quietly and turned south, away from the
durbar
hall and the billiards room, where late guests and their attendant servants might still be up.

The southernmost quarter of the New Fort, hidden from view behind a thick stand of timber bamboo, had not yet known the hand of the maharaja’s renovators. Behind the greenery, the plaster was chipped, the paint long peeled away, the stone floor of the arcade worn and gritty underfoot. But not uninhabited—these were the servants’ quarters, with faint cooking odours wafting in from the open corridors. We slipped from one darkness to the next, freezing into imitations of the stone pillars around us when two tired-looking
chuprassi
s scurried from the Fort’s central courtyard and slipped between two columns into the south wing.

I stood pressed up against the greasy stones and looked through the bamboo at the guest centre above the
durbar
hall and dining rooms. It had to be nearly one o’clock, but all the lights were still burning, the band played, the sounds of merriment spilled over the lotus pond and trimmed bushes. I thought the merriment sounded more than a little forced, but perhaps that was imagination. Certainly the sound was drunken. What state could the maharaja be in? Thwarted at every turn, his captives escaped, first Mary and then Martin tweaking their Russellian noses at his compulsory hospitality. No wonder the servants looked edgy.

For the first time, it occurred to me that the man might be too overwrought to enter his rooms at all. Our loose plan called for abducting the maharaja as soon as we found him alone, and either taking him away immediately or, if it was too near dawn, finding an abandoned corner of this vast place and keeping him drugged until night fell.

It was, frankly, a terrible plan. It was no plan at all. But it was marginally preferable to watching a regiment march across the borders and force a madman into open battle, and the three of us were all old hands at making do with whatever opportunities that presented themselves.

And in the event we did not succeed, the servants at the
dak
bungalow had been given a letter for the commander at the encampment. It would be taken to him if we did not return by dawn Wednesday, some thirty hours hence.

The two
chuprassi
s came back out of the crumbling corridor, carrying what appeared to be a canvas stretcher. The object seemed weighty with implications, and my eyes followed it all the way across the gardens and up the steps into the hall. Holmes had to tug my sleeve to get me moving again.

The maharaja’s private quarters lay adjacent to the main gates at New Fort’s easternmost limits. The so-called “gun-room” with its fur walls was to the north of the gates, and according to Nesbit, the prince’s bedroom and private suites were immediately to the south of the gates, reached by a corridor that linked both halves of the wing on the top level. We planned to reach his quarters from the rear, by means of a little-used servants’ stairway at New Fort’s most southeastern corner, which Nesbit had seen but never tried to enter. He thought it might be passable.

It was, but only just. I think, looking back, it was probably the thought of that stairway that kept Nesbit from fighting harder about being tied to the bed. His wounded leg would never have got him up it.

But it did mean that, once we had shinnied up the abandoned stones and pulled ourselves over the gaps, we were in a place no one would have expected to find us. I had gone first, as the lightest and most agile, and now I folded the rope the others had used to traverse the final gap while we discussed what came next.

“It sounds to me as if the maharaja is having a pretty determined party,” I said, in little more than a murmur.

“Which merely means that the Fort will sleep late in the morning,” Holmes replied, his voice deliberately soothing. “Are you ready, O’Hara?”

“Oah yes,” he said. “May the Compassionate One be watching over us all.”

We stole north along the corridor towards the lighted section, there to reconnoitre. On the other side of a bend in the corridor, restoration had taken place: The carving around the doors gleamed; intricate carpets lay on the polished marble; brightly coloured frescoes graced the fresh plaster walls. There were even electrical lights in this section, as if a line had been drawn between the twentieth century and the seventeenth. O’Hara walked down the hall-way, opened a door, and disappeared from sight. We settled ourselves for a long wait.

This portion of the evening’s sortie had caused us the most vigorous argument. The maharaja was rarely alone for more than a few minutes while he was awake. Therefore, our best opportunity for laying hands on the man, short of a pitched battle with his guards, was to take him asleep, or at least alone in his rooms. And if he was not alone, at least the numbers would be few, and presumably any woman he took to his bed would not be armed.

But we couldn’t all three hide in a wardrobe or under his bed. And in the end, O’Hara’s talents, and the fact that he was smaller than either of us, gave him the job. He had the morphia, he could move as silently as a ghost, and heaven knew he had as much patience as might be required. So Holmes and I watched him go, and adjusted the revolvers in our belts, before settling ourselves to wait beyond the reach of the lights. As we waited, my hand kept creeping to my near-naked scalp, exploring the loss, and the freedom.