John Irving - A Son of the Circus

“Not to me,” Nancy told him. She explained that she’d not seen the moment of impact; she’d thought all three of them were hit—probably because she’d shut her eyes.

The Englishwoman hadn’t observed the moment of impact, either, Inspector Patel informed Nancy. “She was looking at you instead,” the policeman explained.

“Oh, I see,” Nancy said.

The Englishman was quite sure that a body—at least an unconscious body, if not a dead one—had been pushed into the path of the oncoming car. “But the taxi-walla doesn’t know what he saw,” said Inspector Patel. “The Tamil keeps changing his story.” When Nancy continued to stare blankly at him, the policeman added, “The driver says he was distracted.”

“By what?” Nancy asked, although she knew by what.

“By what you hit him with,” Inspector Patel replied.

There was an uncomfortable pause while the policeman looked from chair to chair, surveying her emptied bags, the two books, her clothes. Nancy thought he must be at least five years older than she was, although he looked younger. His self-assurance made him seem disarmingly grown-up; yet he didn’t exhibit the cocksure arrogance of cops. Inspector Patel didn’t swagger; there was something in his controlled mannerisms that came from an absolute correctness of purpose. What struck Nancy as his pure goodness was riveting. And she thought he was a wonderful coffee-and-cream color; he had the blackest hair—and such a thin, perfectly edged mustache that Nancy wanted to touch it.

The overall nattiness of the young man stood in obvious contrast to that absence of vanity which is commonly associated with a happily married man. Here in the Taj, in the presence of such a buxom blonde in her bathrobe, Inspector Patel was obviously unmarried; he was as alert to the details of his appearance as he was to every inch of Nancy, and to the particular revelations of Nancy’s room. She didn’t realize he was looking for the dildo.

“May I see the thing you hit the taxi-walla with?” the inspector asked finally. God knows how the idiot Tamil had described it. Nancy went to get it from the bathroom, having decided to keep it with her toilet articles. God knows what the British couple had told the inspector. If the inspector had talked to them, they’d doubtless described her as a rude young woman brandishing an enormous cock.

Nancy gave the dildo to Inspector Patel, and again sat down at the foot of her bed. The young policeman politely handed the instrument back without looking at her.

“I’m sorry—it was necessary for me to see it,” Inspector Patel said. “I was having some difficulty imagining it,” he explained.

“Both drivers were paid their fares at the airport,” Nancy told him. “I don’t like to be cheated,” she said.

“It’s not the easiest country for a woman traveling alone,” the inspector said. By the quick way he glanced at her, she understood this was a question.

“Friends are meeting me,” Nancy told him. “I’m just waiting for them to call.” (Dieter had advised her to say this; anyone assessing her student clothing and her cheap bags would know that she couldn’t afford many nights at the Taj.)

“So will you be traveling with your friends or staying in Bombay?” the inspector asked her.

Nancy recognized her advantage. As long as she held the dildo, the young policeman would find it awkward to look in her eyes.

“I’ll do what they do,” she said indifferently. She held the penis in her lap; with the slightest movement of her wrist, she discovered, she could tap the circumcised head against her bare knee. But it was her bare feet that appeared to transfix Inspector Patel; perhaps it was their impossible whiteness, or else their improbable size—even bare, Nancy’s feet were bigger than the inspector’s little shoes.

Nancy stared at him without mercy. She enjoyed the prominent bones in his sharply featured face; it would have been impossible for her to look at his face and imagine it—even in 20 years—with jowls. She thought he had the blackest eyes and the longest eyelashes.

Still staring at Nancy’s feet, Inspector Patel spoke forlornly: “I suppose there’s no known phone number or an address where I could reach you.”

Nancy felt she understood everything that attracted her to him. She’d certainly tried hard to lose her innocence in Iowa, but the football players hadn’t touched it. She’d spoiled her real innocence in Germany, with Dieter, and now it was lost for good. But here was a man who was still innocent. She probably both frightened and attracted him—if he even knew it, Nancy thought.

“Do you want to see me again?” she asked him. She thought the question was ambiguous enough, but he stared at her feet—with both longing and horror, she imagined.

“But you couldn’t identify the two other men, even if we found them,” said Inspector Patel.

“I could identify the other taxi driver,” Nancy said.

“We’ve already got him,” the inspector told her.

Nancy stood up from the bed and carried the dildo to the bathroom. When she came back, Inspector Patel was at the window, watching the beggars. She didn’t want to have any advantage over him anymore. Maybe she was imagining that the inspector had fallen hopelessly in love with her and that, if she shoved him on the bed and fell on top of him, he would worship her and be her slave forever. Maybe it wasn’t even him she wanted; possibly it was only his obvious propriety, and only because she felt she’d given away her essential goodness and would never get it back.

Then it struck her that he was no longer interested in her feet; he kept glancing at her hands . Even though she’d put away the dildo, he wouldn’t look in her eyes.

“Do you want to see me again?” Nancy repeated. There was no ambiguity to her question now. She stood closer to him than was necessary, but he ignored the question by pointing to the child performers far below them.

“Always the same stunts—they never change,” Inspector Patel remarked. Nancy refused to look at the beggars; she continued to stare at Inspector Patel.

“You could give me your phone number,” she said. “Then I could call you.”

“But why would you?” the inspector asked her. He kept watching the beggars. Nancy turned away from him and stretched out on the bed. She lay on her stomach with the robe gathered tightly around her. She thought about her blond hair; she thought it must look nice, spread out on the pillows, but she didn’t know if Inspector Patel was looking at her. She just knew that her voice would be muffled by the pillows, and that he’d have to come closer to the bed in order to hear her.

“What if I need you?” she asked him. “What if I get in some trouble and need the police?”

“That young man was strangled,” Inspector Patel told her; by the sound of his voice, she knew he was near her.

Nancy kept her face buried in the pillows, but she reached out to the sides of the bed with her hands. She’d been thinking that she’d never learn anything about the dead boy—not even if the act of killing him had been wicked and full of hatred or merely inadvertent. Now she knew—the young man couldn’t have been inadvertently strangled.

“ I didn’t strangle him,” Nancy said.

“I know that,” said Inspector Patel. When he touched her hand, she lay absolutely motionless; then his touch was gone. In a second, she heard him in the bathroom. It sounded as if he was running a bath.

“You have big hands,” he called to her. She didn’t move. “The boy was strangled by someone with small hands. Probably another boy, but maybe a woman.”

“You suspected me ” Nancy said; she couldn’t tell if he’d heard her over the running bathwater. “I said, you suspected me —until you saw my hands,” Nancy called to him.