Dan Simmons - Song of Kali

"Jesus," I said stupidly, "where will we get fifty thousand dollars?"

Amrita looked out the window at the evening chaos on the street. "I would have offered twice as much," she said. "But that would have been almost a million rupees. This amount is more believable somehow, more exciting to the greedy."

I shook my head. I hadn't seemed able to think of anything. I quickly called Singh and gave him the information about Shah. He promised to follow up on it immediately.

I dozed for an hour or so. I hadn't meant to. One minute I was sitting in the chair near the window, watching the last of the gray eveing light fade, and the next minute my head snapped up and it was night outside with heavy rain banging at the glass. One of the police lines was ringing. Amrita came in from the hall, but I beat her to it.

"Mr. Luczak?" It was Inspector Singh. "I was able to get through to Mr. A. B. Shah at his home in New Delhi."

"And?"

"Indeed it was he who received your Mr. Bronstein's cable. Mr. Shah has great respect for your friend and immediately dispatched a Foundation subordinate of his, a young man named R. L. Dhavan, to travel here to offer his services to you as a guide and interpreter."

"Dispatched? From Delhi to Calcutta, you mean?"

"Exactly."

"So where is he?"

"That is what Mr. Shah was beginning to wonder. That is what we wondered. We took a very careful description of the gentleman's appearance and clothing when last seen."

"And?"

"And, Mr. Luczak, it seems that Mr. R. L. Dhavan has been with us all along. His body was found stuffed in a trunk at Howrah Station last Thursday afternoon."

There was a power failure shortly after ten P.M. The monsoon storm outside had entered some realm of ferocity beyond my experience. Lightning slashed the night every few seconds and did a better job of illuminating the room than did the two candles a porter had brought. The streets were flooded within minutes of the initial deluge, and the frightening downpour grew worse by the hour. No lights were visible up Chowringhee. I wondered how the squatting millions in their burlap huts and the hutless street people survived nights like this.

Victoria is out there somewhere.

I moaned out loud and paced the room. I picked up one phone and then the other to call Singh. The phone lines were dead.

The assistant manager came up to explain to the sleepy policeman next door and to apologize to us. Thousands of phones in the area were out of order. He had sent a runner to the telephone company, but the offices were closed. No one knew when service might be resumed. Sometimes it took days.

When the clerk left, I removed our clothes from the closet and hung them on a shower rod in the bathroom.

"What are you doing?" asked Amrita. Her voice was slightly slurred. She had not slept in over forty hours. Her eyes were dark and weary.

I said nothing, but pulled out the heavy round wooden dowel that had served as a rod for hangers. It was almost four feet long and felt agreeably solid in my hands. I propped it behind a chair near the door. Outside, lightning crashed nearby and caught the flooded scene in a second's stroboscopic clarity.

At ten minutes after eleven, there was a heavy knock. Amrita startled awake in her chair while I stood and hefted the dowel. "Who is it?"

"Inspector Singh."

The Sikh wore a pith helmet and a dripping black raincoat. Two soaked policemen stood in the hall. "Mr. Luczak, we would like you to come with us on an important matter."

"Come where, Inspector?"

Singh shook water from his helmet. "To the Sassoon Morgue." At Amrita's involuntary intake of breath, he hurried on, "There has been a murder. A man."

"A man? Does this relate to whatshisname? Dhavan?"

Singh shrugged. Water fell to the carpet. "We do not know. The . . . style of the murder has connotations of the goondas . The Kapalikas, if you will. We would like your help in identifying the body."

"Who do you think it is?"

Again the shrug. "Will you come, Mr. Luczak? My car is waiting."

"No," I said. "Absolutely not. I'm not leaving Amrita. Forget it."

"But for identification to be made . . ."

"Take a photograph, Inspector. Your department has a camera, doesn't it? If not I'll wait for close-ups in the morning paper. Calcuttans seem to enjoy viewing corpse photos the way we get a kick out of comic strips back in the States."

"Bobby!" said Amrita. Her voice was raw. We were both exhausted. "The Inspector is only trying to help."

"Yeah," I said. "Tough. I'm not leaving you again."

Amrita picked up her purse and umbrella. "I'll go too."

Both Singh and I looked at her.

"The phones are out," she said. "No one can call us. It's been twenty-four hours, and there has been no ransom demand. No contact of any kind. If this can help, let us do it now ."

Lightning illuminated the boarded windows and the two rain-pelted stone lions left over from some earlier, more innocent era. The morgue entrance was reached by a rear drive that curved between dark, dripping buildings and heaps of garbage which were melting in the downpour. A crumpling overhang sheltered the broad doors to the Sassoon Morgue.

A man in a rumpled suit met us in an outer office. Even there, the air was thick with the high-school-biology scent of formaldehyde. Kerosene lanterns threw shadows behind filing cabinets and tall stacks of folders on every desk. The man steepled his fingers at me, bowed perfunctorily, and released a veritable tirade of Bengali at the dripping Inspector.

"He says that Mrs. Luczak can remain here," translated Singh. "We will be in the next room."

Amrita nodded and said, "He also said that the morgue needs an emergency generator, Inspector. He invited the politicians at City Hall to get off their asses and come down here to sniff the roses. Is that right? It was an idiom."

"That is correct," said Singh and surrendered a grim smile. He said something to the morgue official, and the little man blushed and led Singh and me through swinging doors and down a short, tiled hallway.

A hanging lantern showed an area which might have been Jack the Ripper's idea of an operating room. It was filthy. Papers, cups, and various detritus lay everywhere. Knives, scalpels, and bone saws were scattered across stained trays and tabletops. A huge dish of a light — inoperative now — and the gleaming steel table with open drains confirmed the purpose of the room. That and the body which lay exposed on the table.

"Ah," said the Inspector and stepped closer. He beckoned impatiently for me to join him. The morgue official lifted the lantern from its peg on the wall and hung it from the bar of the curved operating-room light. The swinging light threw swirls of patterns on the slick steel.

When I was a child my parents had invested in a set of Compton's Pictured Encyclopedias . My favorite section was the chapter on the human body. There were pages there of translucent overlays. You started with the whole body, skin and all, and as you flipped the delicate pages you descended farther into the mysteries of the body's crowded interior. Everything was neat, color-coded, and labeled for reference.

The body before me now was the second page — MUSCLES & TENDONS. From the neck down the skin had been flayed open and pulled back. It lay bunched under the corpse like a moist and wrinkled cape. But there was no neat labeling of muscles here, only a human being looking like raw meat, greasy fluids catching the light; thick, white fibers disappearing into raw, pink striations; and yellowish tendons stretched like bloody thongs.

Singh and the other man were looking at me. If they expected me to cry out or be sick they were to be disappointed. I cleared my throat. "You've already begun the autopsy?"