T. Boyle - Greasy Lake and Other Stories

“Rupert!” I snapped. “Come out of it, old boy!” And then — rather roughly, I must admit — I led him to a bench in the shade of a banyan tree. The sun slammed through the leaves like a mallet. From the near distance came the anguished stentorian cries of the nawab’s prize pachyderms calling out for water. “Beersley,” I said, turning him toward me, “is it the fever? Can I get you a glass of water?”

His eyes remained fixed on a point over my left shoulder, his lips barely moved. “‘Some demon’s mistress,’” he murmured, “‘our the demon’s self.’”

“Talk sense!” I shouted, becoming ever more alarmed and annoyed. Here we’d been in Sivani-Hoota for some two days and we’d advanced not a step in solving the case, while children continued to disappear under our very noses. I was about to remonstrate further when I noted the clay pipe protruding from his breast pocket — and then the unmistakable odor of incinerated opium. It all became clear in that instant: he’d been up through the night, numbing his perceptions with bowl after bowl of the narcotizing drug. Something had disturbed him deeply, there was no doubt about it.

I led him straightaway to his suite of rooms in the palace’s east end and called for quinine water and hot tea. For hours, through that long, dreadful, heat-prostrated afternoon, I walked him up and down the floor, forcing the blood to wash through his veins, clear his perceptions, and resharpen his wits. By teatime he was able to sit back in an easy chair, cross his legs in the characteristic brisk manner, and unburden himself. “It’s the governess,” he croaked, “that damnable little temptress, that hussy: she’s bewitched me.”

I was thunderstruck. He might as easily have confessed that he was a homosexual or the Prince of Wales in disguise. “You don’t mean to say that some. . some trifling sexual dalliance is going to come between Rupert Beersley and the pursuit of a criminal cause?” My color was high, I’m sure, and my voice hot with outrage.

“No, no, no — you don’t understand,” he said, fixing me as of old with that keen insolent gaze. “Think back, Planty,” he said, lifting the teacup to his lips. ”Don’t you remember the state I was in when I first came to you?”

Could I ever forget? Twenty-two or — three, straight as a ramrod, thin as a whippet, the pointed nose and outsized ears accentuated by a face wasted with rigor, he’d been so silent those first months he might as well have entered the Carthusian monastery in Grenoble as the India Corps. There’d been something eating at him then, some deep canker of the soul or heart that had driven him into exile on the subcontinent he so detested. Later, much later, he’d told me. It had been a woman, daughter of a Hertford squire: on the eve of their wedding she’d thrown him over for another man. “Yes,” I said, “of course I remember.”

He uncoiled himself from the chair, set down the teacup, and strode to the window. Below, on the polo maidan, the nawab and half a dozen of his retainers glided to and fro on pampered Arabians while the westering sun fell into the grip of a band of monsoon clouds. Beersley gazed out on the scene for half a moment, then turned to me with an emotion twenty years dead quivering in those magnificent nostrils. “Elspeth,” he said, his voice catching. “She’s her daughter.”

That evening the nawab threw a sumptuous entertainment. There was music, dancing, a display of moving lights. Turbaned Sikhs poured French wines, jugglers juggled, the begum beamed, and platter after platter of fine, toothsome morsels was set before us. I’d convinced Beersley to overcome his antipathy to native culture and accept the invitation, as a means both of drawing him out of his funk and of placating the nawab. As we were making our way into the banquet room, however, Beersley had suddenly stopped short and seized my arm. Mr. Bagwas and Mr. Patel were following close on our heels and nearly collided with us, so abruptly did we stop; Beersley waited for them to pass, then indicated a marble bench in the courtyard to our left. When we were alone he asked if I’d seen Miss Compton-Divot as we’d crossed the foyer on our way in.

“Why, yes,” I said. She’d been dressed in native costume — a saffron-colored sari and hemp sandals — and had pulled the ginger hair back from her forehead in the way of the Brahman women.

“Did you notice anything peculiar?”

“No, not a bit,” I said. “A charming girl really, nothing more.”

“Tell me,” he demanded, the old cutting edge restored to his voice, “if you didn’t see her bent over the fakir for a moment — just the hair of a moment — as we stepped through the door.”

“Well, yes, yes, old boy, I suppose I did. What of it?”

“Nothing, perhaps. But—”

At that moment we were interrupted by Mr. Bagwas, who stood grinning before us. “Most reverend gentlemen,” he said, drawing back his lips in an idiotic grin that showed off the reddened stumps of teeth ravaged over the years by the filthy habit of betel-nut chewing, “the nawab awaits.”

We were ushered to the nawab’s table and given the place of honor beside the nawab and his begum, several of the older children, Messrs. Bagwas and Patel, the nawab’s two former wives, six of his current concubines, and the keeper of the sacred monkeys. Miss Compton-Divot, I quickly ascertained, was not present. I thought it odd, but soon forgot all about her, as we applauded the jugglers, acrobats, musicians, temple dancers, and trained bears until the night began to grow old. It was then that the nawab rose heavily to his feet, waved his hands for silence, and haw-hawed a bit before making a brief speech. “Even in the darkest hour shines a light,” he said, the customary fat pout of his lips giving way to a wistful grin. “What I mean to say, damn it, is that the begum here is pregnant, gravid, heavy with child, that even when we find ourselves swallowed up in grief over our lost lambs we discover that here is a bun in the oven after all.”

Beersley gave a snort of withering contempt and was about, I’m sure, to expatiate on the fatuity of the native mind and its lack of proportion and balance — not to mention rigor, discipline, and concentration — when the whole party was thrown into an uproar by a sudden ululating shriek emanating from the direction of the nursery. My companion was up like a hound and out the door before anyone else in the room could so much as set down a water glass. Though I tend to stoutness myself and am rather shorter of breath than I was in my military days, I was nevertheless the fourth or fifth man out the doorway, down the corridor, across the courtyard, and up the jade steps to the children’s quarters.

When I got there, heaving for breath and with the sweat standing out on my forehead, I found Beersley kneeling over the prostrate form of one of the watchmen, from between whose scapulae protruded the hilt of a cheap ten-penny nail file. The children had retreated screaming to the far end of the dormitory, where they clutched one another’s nightgowns in terror. “Poison,” Beersley said with a profound disgust at the crudity of the killer’s method as he slipped the nail file from its fatal groove. A single sniff of its bloody, sharpened point bore him out. He carefully wrapped the thing in his handkerchief, stowed it away in his breast pocket, and then leaped to his feet. “The children!” he cried. “Quickly now, line them up and count them!”

The nawab stood bewildered in the doorway; the begum went pale and fell to her knees while her retainers wrung their hands in distress and the children shuffled about confusedly, their faces tear-stained, their nightgowns a collision of sad airy clouds. And then all at once Miss Compton-Divot appeared, striding the length of the room to gather up two of her smaller wards in her lovely arms. “One,” she began, “two, three, four. .” It wasn’t until several hours later that we understood what had happened. The murder in the dormitory had been a ruse. A diversion. Vallabhbhi Shiva, aged sixteen, a plump, oleaginous boy who’d sat directly across from Beersley and me during the entertainment, was nowhere to be found.