Arthur Clarke - The Last Theorem

Ranjit got the message. He kissed her again, with the intensity dimmed down much lower this time, waved a farewell to Maggie, and left.

Back in the van, he considered. He had the van and his own freedom for at least a week. But there was nothing to keep him in Colombo, and nothing to attract him to any other part of Sri Lanka. So he shrugged and started the engine and began the long drive back to Trinco.

An hour later he was outside of the Colombo city limits, and wondering what his father would say when he returned the van so early. Most of his wondering, though, was devoted to the subject of Ms. Pru Never-Did-Know-Her-Last-Name. Why had she behaved in the way—no, in the several contradictorily different ways—that she had in their short but, at least for Ranjit, highly significant relationship? He was nearly thirty kilometers down the road before he came to a satisfactory answer.

Well, “satisfactory” wasn’t the best word to use. He was fairly sure he had the explanation, but he didn’t like it at all. His conclusion was that Pru’s actions were a function of his skin color. Having sex with a short and dark-skinned Asian man—what was the name people in Pru’s social class used for that sort of person? Oh, yes. “Wog.” For wily Oriental gentleman. Having sex with such a man might be an enjoyable experiment when no one knew about it except another young woman engaged in doing the same thing. But it was not acceptable where one might be seen by people who might speak of it to people in London, or to people in Shaker Heights, whatever Shaker Heights might happen to be.

So for the next hour or so Ranjit’s thoughts were glum. They didn’t stay that way, though. Whatever thoughts might have been in Pru’s mind, the things her body had been doing while she was thinking them were quite pleasing for him to remember. It had been, Ranjit admitted to himself, one of the most intensely pleasurable experiences of his life. All right, it appeared that it was to be a one-time-only event with that particular partner, but there were other women in the world, were there not? Including some who were not concerned about the color of his skin?

Including, for instance, Myra de Soyza?

That was an interesting new thought for Ranjit. Experimentally he set his imagination a new task, which was to replay his memories of the night in bed with Pru Something, but replace Pru in the role of Female Partner with Myra herself.

Ranjit had not previously been thinking of Myra in that way, exactly, but he discovered that it wasn’t hard to do. It was pretty enjoyable, too, until, unfortunately, the thought of the Canadian hotel man, Brian Harrigan, began to come up in his mind. That part wasn’t pleasant at all.

Reluctantly Ranjit gave up that experiment and, doing his best not to think of anything at all, simply drove on.

The sun was nearly setting by the time he at last got to Trincomalee. Ranjit thought about going back to his lonely room, but what he wanted was someone to talk to about—well, not about Pru Last-Nameless, of course, but anyway just to talk. He took a chance on driving to the Kanakaratnam house, and won.

They were all inside. Though the door was closed, he could hear Dot Kanakaratnam’s voice, but no one else’s. When Tiffany answered his knock and let him in, he saw that her mother was sitting at the table and talking into a cell phone. (Ranjit hadn’t known she owned one.) When she saw him in the doorway, she said a few quick words into the phone and folded it shut. There was something in the look on her face that troubled Ranjit—anger? Sadness? He couldn’t tell. What she said was “You’re early, Ranjit. We thought you’d be spending more time with your friend.”

“So did I,” he said, a tad ruefully, “but it didn’t work out. I had a good time, though.” He had not been intending to tell them exactly how good, more about what an interesting place Colombo was, but the expressions on the faces of the children stopped him. “Is something wrong?” he asked.

Dot answered for the whole family. “It’s George. My husband. He’s escaped.”

That was news that trumped anything Ranjit might have said. He pressed for details. George Kanakaratnam, for some inscrutable police reason, had been in the process of being transferred from one prison to another. There had been a car crash. The guard and the driver had been killed. Kanakaratnam had not, and he had simply walked away.

“The Trinco police were here all day,” Harold volunteered when his mother paused to breathe. “They said Da might have got away on a boat. There was a bridge that went over a pretty big river right down the road.”

“But there wasn’t any blood there,” Rosie said triumphantly, puzzling Ranjit. It seemed to him that with two dead, there had to be some spilled blood somewhere around the scene.

Tiffany clarified the matter. “She means there wasn’t any blood inside the bus, except for right around the front seats. So our father probably didn’t get hurt.”

Dot met Ranjit’s look with a hostile look of her own. “You’re thinking of George as a jailbird, but to them he’s their father. Naturally they love him,” she informed Ranjit. Then, in a friendly tone, “Can I give you a cup of tea? And we’d like to hear all about your trip.”

Obeying her gesture, Ranjit sat at the table. He didn’t get a chance to tell them his story, though, because Tiffany was waving her hand. When the girl spoke, it wasn’t to Ranjit but to her mother. “Is this when we should tell him about the letter?” she asked.

Dot gave Ranjit a stricken look. “Oh, I’m sorry. There was so much going on here that I just forgot.” She scrabbled in the litter of papers on the table for a moment, then pulled out an envelope and handed it to Ranjit. “One of the monks brought it. It’s been sitting in the temple mail room for a week because nobody told them where you were staying.”

“And then this morning, when they figured it out, they tried to deliver it to your room, but you weren’t there,” Tiffany put in. “And our mother told them they could leave it here and we’d see that you got it.”

Dot looked embarrassed. “I did, yes. The police were here, and I just wanted everybody to go away….”

She stopped when she realized Ranjit was no longer listening to her. The envelope had the return address of the beach hotel nearest the construction site. So did the sheet of notepaper inside, and what it said was:

Dear Ranjit,

I’ll be here for a few days. Is there any chance we could get together for a cup of tea or something of the sort?

It was signed Myra de Soyza.

Ranjit didn’t wait for the tea with the Kanakaratnams. “I’ll see you later,” he said, already on his way out the door.

Driving to the hotel didn’t take longer than twenty minutes. The young woman at the desk was as helpful as she could be, but when it came down to it, all she could tell him was, “Oh, but they checked out yesterday, Ms. de Soyza and Mr. Harrigan. I think they may have gone back to Colombo.”

Back in the van Ranjit allowed himself to admit how much he regretted having missed her—and how much he disliked the fact that she and the Canadian were traveling together. His mood depressed, he drove slowly back. At the turn that would have taken him to the Kanakaratnam house he paused, then turned the other way. It was interesting, in a way, that Dot’s husband had managed to escape from a federal prison. Ranjit had looked forward to telling the children about his trip, too. Well, about parts of it.

But not right now. Right now he didn’t want to talk to anybody about anything.

The next day he went back to his job. The foreman’s brother-in-law was not at all happy to see him, but when Ranjit picked up the Kanakaratnam children, they were happy enough that it made up for it. When it became story time, they loved hearing about how the kings of Kandy had fought off the European invaders for so many years (as Ranjit had read off his computer first thing that morning) and did not seem to want to talk about their escapee father.