"Sure," I said. I went over and kissed her on the forehead. I could not remember seeing Amrita so upset before. "It's all right. We'll leave tomorrow morning." I looked at my watch again. It was 9:08. "I'll be right back."
"You have to leave?"
"Yeah, for a few minutes. I have to give these books to someone. I'll only be a little while, kiddo." I stood in the doorway. "Listen, make sure this is locked and put the chain bolt on, okay? Don't open the door for anyone but me. If the phone rings, let it ring. Don't answer it. All right?"
"But why? What — "
"Just do what I say, damn it. I'll be back in thirty minutes or so. Please, Amrita, just do what I ask. I'll explain later."
I turned to go then but stopped when I saw Victoria waving her arms and legs from the blanket where Amrita had been changing her. I crossed the room, swept the baby up in the air, and blew noises on her bare stomach. She was naked, soft, wiggling with joy. She grinned widely at me and reached for my nose with both pudgy hands. She smelled of Johnson & Johnson Baby Shampoo, and her skin was soft beyond imagining. I laid her back down and bicycled her legs with my hands. "Take care of your mom until I get back, okay, Little One?"
Victoria stopped her wiggling and stared at me solemnly.
I kissed her stomach again, touched Amrita on the cheek, and hurried out.
I never got to the Kalighat. I had just come out the front door of the hotel and was thinking about how to get rid of the Durrell book when the black Premiere pulled up next to me. The heavy man in khaki was driving. A stranger opened the backdoor.
"Get in, please, Mr. Luczak."
I stepped back and clutched the bag of books to my chest. "I . . . I was supposed to go . . . to meet someone at the Kalighat," I said stupidly.
"Get in, please."
I stood frozen for several seconds. Then I looked up and down the street. The hotel entrance was only twenty paces away. An affluent-looking young Indian couple laughed together under the awning while porters carried their luggage from a gray Mercedes.
"Here," I said. "This is what I promised him." I folded the top of the sack over and handed it to the man in the backseat.
He made no effort to take the books. "Please get in, Mr. Luczak."
"Why?"
The man sighed and rubbed at his nose. "The poet wishes to see you. It will be brief. He says you agreed to this."
The heavyset driver frowned and turned sideways in his seat as if to say something. The man in the back put a hand lightly on the other's wrist and spoke. "The poet has something he wishes to give you. Please get in, Mr. Luczak."
I was amazed to find myself bending to enter the vehicle. The door slammed and we accelerated into traffic. Into the Calcutta night.
Rain and flames. Highways, side streets, alleys, and muddy ruts past overgrown ruins. The glow of lanterns and reflected city lights. And through it all, I waited for the Kapalika to turn to me, to demand to inspect the books. I waited for the shouts and fists to follow.
We rode in silence. I held the sack of books on my lap and kept my face to the window, although I remember seeing little detail except my own pale reflection staring back. Eventually we stopped before a high iron gate. Somewhere nearby, two tall brick chimneys poured flame into the night. This was not the way I had come before. A man in black came out of the drizzle and opened the gate to let us pass.
The headlights revealed empty brick buildings, railroad sidings, and a small mountain of dirt on which an abandoned truck lay half-buried in the weeds. When we finally stopped, it was in front of a wide door illuminated by a yellow bulb. Insects threw themselves at the light.
"Get out, please."
There were doors and corridors. Two men in black carrying flashlights joined us. From somewhere there came the muted strum and crash of sitar and drums. At the top of a narrow staircase we stopped and the men in black spoke sharply to the driver. Then came the search.
One of the men took the sack of books. I stood passively while rough hands patted my sides, poked along my inner thighs, and ran quickly up and down my legs. The driver opened the package and took out the first three paperbacks. He flipped the pages almost angrily, tossed them back in, and removed a larger, hardback book. He showed it to the other three. It was not the Durrell anthology. The man in khaki tossed it back in, folded the sack, and handed the package to me without speaking.
I stood there and began to breathe again.
The Kapalika in black gestured with his flashlight and I followed him up another short staircase and then to the right down a narrow hallway. He held a door open, and I entered.
The room was no larger than the first one we had met in, but there were no curtains here. A kerosene lantern sat on a wooden shelf next to a porcelain cup, some wooden bowls, a few books, and a tiny bronze statue of the Buddha. Strange that the avatar of Kali should keep an image of Buddha near.
Das sat hunched and cross-legged on the floor near a low table. He was studying a slim book, but he looked up as I entered. The brighter light made his affliction all the more evident.
"Ah, Mr. Luczak."
"Mr. Das."
"You were kind to return."
I looked around the tiny room. An open doorway in the back led to darkness. From somewhere came the smell of incense. I could faintly hear the discordant strumming of a sitar.
"Those are the books?" asked Das and gestured clumsily with his heavily wrapped hands.
"Yes." I knelt on the wooden floor and set the package on the low table. An offering. The lantern hissed. The greenish-yellow light illuminated circles of flaking corruption on the poet's right cheek. Deep fissures in his scalp showed whitely against the darker skin. Mucus clogged Das's torn nostrils, and his breath whistled audibly over the hiss of the lantern.
"Ahh," sighed Das. He laid his hand almost reverently on the wrinkled paper. "Manny's Booksellers. Yes, I used to know him well, Mr. Luczak. Once, during the war, I sold Manny my collection of romantic poets when rent money was scarce. He set them aside until I could buy them back some years later." Das's large, liquid eyes turned up to look at me. Again I was all but overwhelmed by the knowledge of pain visible there. "You brought the Edwin Arlington Robinson?"
"Yes," I said. My voice trembled and I roughly cleared my throat. "I'm not sure that I think as much of him as you do. You might reconsider. His 'Richard Cory' really is not worthy of a poet. It holds out no hope."
"Sometimes there is no hope," whispered Das.
"There's always some hope, Mr. Das."
"No, Mr. Luczak, there is not. Sometimes there is only pain. And acquiescence to pain. And, perhaps, defiance at the world which demands such pain."
"Defiance is a form of hope, is it not, sir?"
Das looked at me for a long minute. Then he glanced quickly toward the darkened back room and lifted the volume he had been reading. "This is for you, Mr. Luczak." He laid it on the table so that I would not have to take it from his hands.
It was an old book, thin, beautifully bound, with thick, heavy parchment pages. I ran my hand over the embossed fabric cover and opened it. The heavy pages had not yellowed or grown brittle with age. The spine had not stiffened. Everything about the thin volume spoke of craftsmanship and care.
Some of the poems were in Bengali, some in English. Those in English I recognized immediately. The flyleaf held a long inscription in Bengali, but the same hand had penned a final note in English: For young Das, the most promising of my 'Chosen Eight.' Affectionately — The signature would have been indecipherable had I not seen it very recently, behind glass, hastily scrawled beneath a Nobel Prize acceptance speech. Rabindranath Tagore, March 1939.
"I can't accept this, sir."
Das only stared at me. The eyes were ancient beyond age, sad, yet lit with a purpose I had not seen before. He stared at me and I did not argue again.
A tremor went through the poet's body, and I realized what exertion it must take for him to speak, to concentrate. I rose to leave.
/> "No," whispered Das. "Closer."
I dropped to one knee. There was a smell that rose from the poor man's disintegrating flesh. My own skin crawled as I leaned over to hear better.
"Today," he rasped, "I spoke of power. All violence is power. She is such power. She knows no limits. Time means nothing to Her. Pain carries the sweet smell of sacrifice to Her. This is Her time. Her song knows no ending. Her time has come round once again, you see." He slipped into Bengali, then a smattering of French, then a torrent of Hindi. He was raving. His eyes were focused elsewhere, and the pained, sibilant rush of words went nowhere.
"Yes," I said sadly.
"Violence is power. Pain is power. It is Her time. Do you see? Do you see?" His voice rose to a shout. I wanted to hush him before the Kapalikas rushed in, but I could only stay there on one knee and listen. The lantern sputtered in rhythm to his agitated hissing. "The centre cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world! Her song has just begun . . . "
The old man leaned forward, dry breath wheezing up out of his damaged lungs. He seemed to come back to himself then. The wild, distracted look left his eyes to be replaced by a terrible weariness. The leprous hand stroked the stack of books on the table as if it were a cat. When he spoke, his voice was calm, almost conversational. "Know this, Mr. Luczak. This is the age of the unspeakable. But there are acts beyond the unspeakable."
I stared, but Das was not looking at me. He was not looking at anything in the room.
"We have always been capable of committing the unspeakable," he whispered. "She can commit the unthinkable. Now we are free to follow."
Das stopped. Saliva moistened his chin. I knew now that his mind had been damaged. The silence stretched out to several minutes. Finally he brought himself back by a great effort and focused his gaze on me. A rotting stump of a hand, wrapped in filthy, reeking rags, raised itself in a gentle benediction.
"Go. Go now. Go."
I was shaking violently when I stumbled out into the corridor. Flashlights bobbed through the darkness toward me. A rough hand took the Tagore volume, turned it over, handed it back. I clutched it in both hands and followed the circle of light down the maze of halls and stairways.
We were at the open door; I could see the car and smell the rain, when suddenly the shots rang out. Two sharp sounds, almost simultaneous, sounding flat and final in the dark.
The four men stopped, shouted back and forth in Bengali, and ran back up the stairs. For several seconds I was left alone at the open door. I stared blankly out into the dark and rain. I was numb, disbelieving, afraid to act, barely able to think. Then the heavy man in khaki ran back down the stairs, seized me by the shirtfront, and dragged me upstairs with the other running men.
The lantern still spilled its cold white light. Flashlight beams bobbed and converged. I was pushed forward, scraping through shoulders, past the circle of noise into a center of silence.
Das seemed to be resting his head on the table. The small chromed pistol — gripped firmly in his left hand — was thrust obscenely into the bulging mouth. One eye was almost closed, while the other showed only the white and seemed to balloon out as if some great pressure were still building within the shattered skull. Already a pool of dark blood had accumulated in the steady flow from mouth, ears, and nostrils. The air was redolent with incense and cordite.
There were shouts. At least eight or nine men were in the room, more in the dark hall. One man was screaming. Another accidentally jabbed me in the chest as he swung his arms around. The man in khaki reached down and jerked the pistol from Das's clenched jaws, breaking a front tooth off as he did so. He waved the bloodied pistol and let out a high, thin wailing that might have been a prayer or a curse. More men shoved into the room.
This is not real. I felt almost nothing. There was a loud humming in my ears. The buffeting all around me was a distant, unrelated thing.
Another man entered. He was older, bald, and wearing a simple peasant's dhoti. The plainness of his appearance, however, was belied by the deference with which the crowd parted for him. He looked down on Das's body for a moment and then touched the leprous head gently, almost reverently, the way the poet had touched my gift of books. Then the man turned black eyes in my direction and said something softly to the crowd.
Hands closed on my shirt and arms, and they took me away into the dark.
I sat in an empty room for an unknown time. There were sounds beyond the door. A small oil lamp gave me light. I sat on the floor and tried to think about Amrita and the baby but could not. I could concentrate on nothing. My head ached. After a while I picked up the book they had left me with and read some of Tagore's English poems.
Sometime later three men entered. One held out a small cup and saucer to me. I saw the steam rising form the dark tea.
"No, thank you," I said and returned to my reading.
The heavy man said, "Drink."
"No."
The man in khaki took my left hand and broke my little finger with an upward twist of his wrist. I screamed. The book dropped to the floor. I grabbed the injured hand and rocked back and forth in agony. The tea was offered again.
"Drink."
I took the cup and drank. The bitter tea scalded my tongue. I coughed and spluttered some out, but the three watched until I swallowed the rest. My little finger jutted backward almost comically, and there was a nerve of fire running up my wrist and arm to a point at the base of my neck.
Someone took the empty cup and two of them left. The heavy man smirked and patted me on the shoulder as one would a child. Then they left me alone with the bitter taste of tea and cowardice in my mouth.
I tried to tug the finger back into place, but even the act of touching it made me cry out and come close to fainting. Sweat poured from me and my skin turned cold and clammy. I picked up the book with my right hand, flipped to the page I had been reading, and tried to concentrate on a poem about a chance encounter on a train. I was still rocking slightly and crooning soft syllables of pain.
My throat burned from whatever had been in the tea. A few minutes later the words on the page slid crazily to the left and ran together.
I tried to stand then, but the oil lamp chose that second to flare into blinding brilliance and then to fade to blackness.
Blackness. Pain and blackness.
The pain brought me out of my own comforting darkness into a less benign but no less absolute lack of light. I was lying on what felt like a cold stone floor. There was not the faintest gleam of light. I sat up and cried aloud as the pain coursed up my left arm. The ache throbbed more fiercely with each heartbeat.
I felt around with my right hand. Nothing. Cool stone and hot, moist air. My eyes did not adapt to the dark. The only time I had ever experienced darkness this total was one time spelunking in Missouri with friends when we had turned off all our carbide lamps. It was a claustrophobic, inward-pressing darkness. I moaned as a thought struck. What if they have blinded me?
But my eyelids felt normal enough to my hasty touch. There was no pain in my face, only the sickening dizziness that the tea had brought. No, thank you, I had said. I giggled, but stifled the ragged sounds while I could.
I began crawling, cradling my throbbing left hand to my chest. My fingers encountered a wall — smooth masonry or stone. Was I underground?
When I stood up, the dizziness grew worse. I leaned against the wall, pressing my cheek to the cool surface. A quick touch told me that they had left me dressed in my own clothes. I thought to search through my pockets. Shirt pockets held an airline receipt, the smaller of my two notebooks, a felttip pen, and flakes of clay from the stone I'd carried there earlier. Trouser pockets held my room key, wallet, coins, a slip of paper, and the book of matches Amrita had given me.
Matches!
I forced myself to hold the matchbook in my throbbing left hand while I struck a match, shielded it, lifted it.
The room was actually an alcove, three solid walls and a black curtain. Déjà vu rose
up in me. I had time to lift back the edge of the curtain and to sense a larger darkness beyond before the match burned to my fingertips.
I waited, listening. Currents of air moved against my face. I dared not light another match in case someone was waiting in the larger room. Over the ragged sound of my own breathing I could hear a soft, susurrant undertone. The breathing of a giant. Or of a river.
Testing with my foot, I slid past the heavy cloth and into an immense, open space. I could see nothing, but it felt immense. The air seemed slightly cooler and moved to random currents, bringing to me the scent of incense and of something heavier, as rich and heavy as the smell of week-old garbage.
I took short steps, moved my right hand in front of me cautiously, and tried not to remember the images — filtered through the memory of singsong English — which nonetheless rose to mind. Twenty-five steps brought me in contact with nothing. The Kapalikas could be back at any second. They could be there now. I began to run. I ran heedlessly in the dark, openmouthed, clutching my left hand to me.