John Irving - A Son of the Circus

He shut the water off. The tub couldn’t be very full, Nancy thought.

“I suspect everybody,” Inspector Patel said, “but I didn’t really suspect you of strangling the boy.”

Nancy was simply too curious; she got up from the bed and went to the bathroom. Inspector Patel was sitting on the edge of the tub, watching the dildo float around and around like a toy boat.

“Just as I thought—it floats,” he said. Then he submerged it; he held it under the water for almost a full minute, never taking his eyes off it. “No bubbles,” he said. “It floats because it’s hollow,” he told her. “But if it came apart—if you could open it—there would be bubbles. I thought it would come apart.” He let the water out of the tub and wiped the dildo dry with a towel. “One of your friends called while you were registering,” Inspector Patel told Nancy. “He didn’t want to speak with you—he just wanted to know if you’d checked in.” Nancy was blocking the bathroom door; the inspector paused for her to get out of his way. “Usually, this means that someone is interested to know if you’ve passed safely through customs. Therefore, I thought you were bringing something in. But you weren’t, were you?”

“No,” Nancy managed to say.

“Well, then, as I leave, I’ll tell the hotel to give you your messages directly,” the inspector said.

“Thank you,” Nancy replied.

He’d already opened the door to the hall before he handed her his card. “ Do call me if you get into any trouble,” he told her. She chose to stare at the card; it was better than watching him leave. There were several printed phone numbers, one circled with a ballpoint pen, and his printed name and title.

Nancy didn’t know how far from home Vijay Patel was. When his whole family had left Gujarat for Kenya, Vijay had come to Bombay. For a Gujarati to make any headway on a Maharashtrian police force was no small accomplishment; but the Gujarati Patels in Vijay’s family were merchants—they wouldn’t have been impressed. Vijay was as cut off from them—they were in business in Nairobi—as Nancy was from Iowa.

After she’d read and reread the policeman’s card, Nancy went out to the balcony and watched the beggars for a while. The children were enterprising performers, and there was a monotony to their stunts that was soothing. Like most foreigners, she was easily impressed by the contortionists.

Occasionally, one of the guests would throw an orange to the child performers, or a banana; some threw coins. Nancy thought it was cruel the way a crippled boy, with one leg and a padded crutch, was always beaten by the other children when he attempted to hop and stagger ahead of them to the money or the fruit. She didn’t realize that the cripple’s role was choreographed; he was central to the dramatic action. He was also older than the other children, and he was their leader; in reality, he could beat up the other children—and, on occasion, had.

But the pathos was unfamiliar to Nancy and she looked for something to throw to him; all she could find was a 10-rupee note. This was too much money to give to a beggar, but she didn’t know any better. She weighted the bill down with two bobby pins and stood on the balcony with the money held above her head until she caught the crippled boy’s attention.

“Hey, lady!” he called. Some of the child performers paused in their handstands and their contortions, and Nancy sailed the 10-rupee note into the air; it rose briefly in an updraft before it floated down. The children ran back and forth, trying to be in the right place to catch it. The crippled boy appeared content to let one of the other children grab the money.

“No, it’s for you—for you! ” Nancy cried to him, but he ignored her. A tall girl, one of the contortionists, caught the 10-rupee note; she was so surprised at the amount, she didn’t hand it over to the crippled boy quite quickly enough, and so he struck her in the small of her back with his crutch—a blow with sufficient force to knock her to her hands and knees. Then the cripple snatched up the money and hopped away from the girl, who had begun crying.

Nancy realized that she’d disrupted the usual drama; somehow she was at fault. As the beggars scattered, one of the tall Sikh doormen from the Taj approached the crying girl. He carried a long wooden pole with a gleaming brass hook on one end—it was a transom pole, for opening and closing the transom windows above the tall doors—and the doorman used this pole to lift the ragged skirt of the girl’s torn and filthy dress. He deftly exposed her before she could snatch the skirt of her dress between her legs and cover herself. Then he poked the girl in the chest with the brass end of the pole, and when she tried to stand, he whacked her hard in the small of her back, exactly where the cripple had hit her with his crutch. The girl cried out. Then she scurried away from the Sikh on all fours. He was skillful in pursuing her—at herding her with sharp jabs and thrusts with the pole. Finally, she got to her feet and outran him.

The Sikh had a dark, spade-shaped beard flecked with silver, and he wore a dark-red turban; he shouldered the transom pole like a rifle, and he cast a cursory glance to Nancy on her balcony. She retreated into her room; she was sure he could see under her bathrobe and straight up her crotch—he was directly below her. But the balcony itself prevented such a view. Nancy imagined things.

Obviously, there were rules, she thought. The beggars could beg, but they couldn’t cry; it was too early in the morning, and crying would wake the guests who were managing to sleep. Nancy instantly ordered the most American thing she could find on the room-service menu—scrambled eggs and toast—and when they brought her tray, she saw two sealed envelopes propped between the orange juice and the tea. Her heart jumped because she hoped they were declarations of undying love from Inspector Patel. But one was the message from Dieter that the inspector had intercepted; it said simply that Dieter had called. He was glad she’d arrived safely—he’d see her soon. And the other was a printed request from the hotel management, asking her to kindly refrain from throwing things out her window.

She was ravenous, and as soon as she’d finished eating, she was sleepy. She closed the curtains against the light of day and turned up the ceiling fan as fast as it would go. For a while she lay awake, thinking of Inspector Patel. She even toyed with the idea of Dieter being caught with the money as he tried to pass through customs. Nancy was still naïve enough to imagine that the Deutsche marks were coming into the country with Dieter. It hadn’t even crossed her mind that she’d already brought the money in.

It seemed to her that she slept for days. It was dark when she woke. She would never know if it was the predawn darkness of the next day, or the predawn of the day after that. She awoke to some sort of commotion in the hall outside her room; someone was trying to get in, but she’d double-locked the door and there was a safety chain, too. She got out of bed. There, in the hall, was Dieter; he was surly to the porter, whom he sent away without a tip. Once inside the room, but only after he’d double-locked the door and hooked the safety chain in place, he turned to her and asked her where the dildo was. This wasn’t exactly gallant of him, Nancy thought, but in her sleepiness she supposed it was merely his aggressive way of being amorous. She pointed to it in the bathroom.

Then she opened her robe and let it slip off her shoulders and fall at her feet; she stood in the bathroom doorway, expecting him to kiss her, or at least look at her. Dieter held the dildo over the sink; he appeared to be heating the unnatural head of the penis with his cigarette lighter. Nancy woke up in a hurry. She picked up her bathrobe and put it back on; she stepped away from the bathroom door, but she could still observe Dieter. He was careful not to let the flame blacken the dildo, and he concentrated the heat not at the tip but at the place where the fake foreskin was rolled. It then appeared to Nancy that he was slowly melting the dildo; she realized that there was a substance, like wax, dripping into the sink. Where the fake foreskin was rolled, there emerged a thin line, circumscribing the head. When Dieter had melted the wax seal, he ran the tip of the big penis under cold water and then grasped the circumcised head with a towel. He needed quite a lot of force to unscrew the dildo, which was as hollow as Inspector Patel had observed. The wax seal had prevented any air from escaping; there’d been no bubbles underwater. Inspector Patel had been half right; he’d looked in the right place, but not in the right way—a young policeman’s error.