“Lucky guess.”
Kolabati stepped up to him and put her arms around his neck. “I’m sorry to run off like this again.” She kissed him. “Can we meet tomorrow?”
“I’ll be out of town.”
“Monday, then?”
He held back from saying yes.
“I don’t know. I’m not too crazy about our routine: We come here, we make love, a stink comes into the room, you get uptight and cling to me like a second skin, the stink goes away, you take off.”
Kolabati kissed him again and Jack felt himself begin to respond. She had her ways, this Indian woman.
“It won’t happen again. I promise.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“I just am,” she said with a smile.
Jack let her out, then locked the door behind her. Still naked, he went back to the window in the TV room and stood there looking out at the dark. The beach scene was barely visible on the shadowed wall across the alley. Nothing moved, no eyes glowed. He wasn’t crazy and he didn’t do drugs. Something—two somethings—had been out there tonight. Two pairs of yellow eyes had been looking in. Something about those eyes was familiar but he couldn’t quite make the connection. Jack didn’t push it. It would come sooner or later.
His attention gravitated to the sill outside his window where he saw three long white scratches in the concrete. He was sure they hadn’t been there before. He was puzzled and uneasy, angry and frustrated—and what could he do? She was gone.
He walked through the front room to get a beer. On the way, he glanced at the shelf on the big hutch where he’d left the bottle of herbal mixture after taking the swallow.
It was gone.
14
Kolabati hurried eastward. Jack’s was a residential area with trees near the curb and cars lining both sides of the street. Nice in the daytime, but at night—too many deep shadows, too many dark hiding places. It was not rakoshi she feared—not while she wore her necklace. It was humans. And with good reason. Look what had happened Wednesday night because a hoodlum thought an iron and topaz necklace looked valuable.
She relaxed when she reached Central Park West. Plenty of traffic here despite the lateness of the hour, and the sodium lamps high over the street made the very air around her seem to glow. Empty cabs cruised by. She let them pass. She had something to do before she flagged one down.
Kolabati walked along the curb until she found a sewer grate. She reached into her purse and removed the bottle of rakoshi elixir. She hadn’t liked stealing it from Jack, for she would have to fabricate a convincing explanation later. To assure his safety she would steal from him again and again.
She unscrewed the cap and poured the green mixture down the sewer, waiting until the last drop fell.
She sighed with relief. Jack was safe. No more rakoshi would come looking for him.
She sensed someone behind her and turned. An elderly woman stood a few dozen feet away, watching her bend over the sewer grate. A nosy old biddy. Kolabati found her wrinkles and stooped posture repulsive. She never wanted to be that old.
As Kolabati straightened, she recapped the bottle, and returned it to her purse. She would save that for Kusum.
Yes, dear brother, she thought with determination, I don’t know how, or to what end, but I know you’re involved. And soon I’ll have the answers.
15
Kusum stood in the engine room at the stern of his ship, every cell in his body vibrating in time to the diesel monstrosities on either side of him. The drone, the roar, the clatter of twin engines capable of generating a total of nearly 3,000 bhp at peak battered his eardrums. A man could die screaming down here in the bowels of the ship and no one on the deck directly above would hear; with the engines running, he wouldn’t even hear himself.
Bowels of the ship … how apt. Pipes like masses of intestines coursed through the air, along the walls, under the catwalks, vertically, horizontally, diagonally.
The engines were warm. Time to get the crew.
The dozen or so rakoshi he had been training to run the ship had been doing well, but he wanted to keep them sharp. He wanted to be able to take his ship to sea on short notice. Hopefully that necessity would not arise, but the events of the past few days had made him wary of taking anything for granted. Tonight had only compounded his unease.
His mood was grim as he left the engine room. Again the Mother and her youngling had returned empty-handed. That meant only one thing. Jack had tried the elixir again and Kolabati had been there to protect him … with her body.
The thought filled Kusum with despair. Kolabati was destroying herself. She had spent too much time among Westerners. She had already absorbed too many of their habits of dress. What other foul habits had she picked up? He had to find a way to save her from herself.
But not tonight. He had his own personal concerns. His evening prayers had been said; he had made his thrice-daily offering of water and sesame … he would make an offering more to the Goddess’s taste tomorrow night. Now he was ready for work. No punishment for the rakoshi tonight, only work.
Kusum picked up his whip from where he had left it on the deck and rapped the handle on the hatch that led to the main hold. The Mother and the younglings that made up the crew would be waiting on the other side. The sound of the engines was their signal to be ready.
He released the rakoshi. As the dark, rangy forms swarmed up the steps to the deck, he relocked the hatch and headed for the wheelhouse.
Kusum stood before his controls. The CRTs with their flickering graphs and readouts would have been more at home on a lunar lander than this old rust-bucket. But they were familiar to Kusum by now. During his stay in London he had had most of the ship’s functions computerized, including navigation and steering. Once on the open sea, he could set a destination on the GPS, phase in the computer, and tend to other business. The computer would choose the best course along the standard shipping lanes and leave him sixty miles off the coast of his target destination, disturbing him during the course of the voyage only if other vessels came within a designated proximity.
And it all worked. In its test run across the Atlantic—with a full human crew as backup and the rakoshi towed behind in a barge—there had not been a single hitch.
But the system was useful only on the open sea. No computer was going to get him out of New York Harbor. It could help, but Kusum would have to do most of the work—without the aid of a tug or a pilot. Illegal, of course, but he could not risk allowing anyone, even a harbor pilot, aboard his ship. He was sure if he timed his departure carefully he could reach international waters before anyone could stop him. But should the harbor patrol or the Coast Guard pull alongside and try to board, Kusum would have his own boarding party ready.
The river lay dark and still, the wharf deserted. Kusum checked his instruments. All was ready for tonight’s drill. A single blink of the running lights and the rakoshi leaped into action, loosening and untying the mooring ropes and cables. They were agile and tireless. They could leap to the wharf from the gunwales, cast off the ropes from the pilings, and then climb those same ropes back up to the deck. If one happened to fall in, it was of little consequence. They were quite at home in the water. After all, they had swum behind the ship after their barge had been cut loose off Staten Island, and had climbed back aboard after it had docked and been cleared by customs.
The Mother scrambled to the center of the forward hatch cover. This was the signal that all ropes were clear. Kusum threw the engines into reverse. The twin screws below began to pull the prow away from the pier. The computer aided Kusum in making tiny corrections for tidal drift, but most of the burden of the task was directly on his shoulders. With a larger freighter such a maneuver would have been impossible. But with this particular vessel, equipped as it was and with Kusum at the helm, it could be done. It had taken Kusum many tries over the months, many crunches against the wharf and one or two nerve-shattering moments when he thought he had lost all contr
ol over the vessel, before he had become competent. Now it was routine.
The ship backed toward New Jersey until it cleared the wharf. Leaving the starboard engine in reverse, Kusum threw the port engine into neutral, and then into forward. The ship began to turn south. Kusum had searched long and hard to find this ship—few freighters this size had twin screws. But his patience had paid off. He now had a ship that could turn 360 degrees within its own length.
When the prow had swung ninety degrees and was pointing toward the Battery, Kusum idled the engines. Had it been time to leave, he would have thrown both into forward and headed for the Narrows and the Atlantic Ocean beyond. If only he could! If only his duty here were done. Reluctantly, he put the starboard into forward and the port into reverse. The nose swung back toward the dock. Then he alternated forward and reverse for both until the ship eased back into its slip. Two blinks of the running lights and the rakoshi were leaping to the pier and securing the ship in place.
Kusum allowed himself a smile of satisfaction. Yes, they were ready. It wouldn’t be long before they left this obscene land forever.
And Kusum would see to it that the rakoshi did not return empty-handed tomorrow night.
SIX
West Bengal, India
Saturday, July 25, 1857
People were going to die today. Of that Sir Albert Westphalen had no doubt.
And he might be one of them.
Here, high up on this ledge, with the morning sun on his back and the mythical Temple-in-the-Hills with its walled courtyard spread out below, he wondered at his ability to carry his plans through to completion. The abstract scheme that had seemed so simple and direct in his office in Bharangpur had become something quite different in these forbidding hills under the cold light of dawn.
His heart ground against his sternum as he lay on his belly and peered at the temple through his field glasses. He must have been daft to think this would work. How deep and cold was his desperation that it could lead him to this? Was he willing to risk his own death to save the family name?
Westphalen glanced down at his men, all busy checking their gear and mounts. With their stubbly faces, their rumpled uniforms caked with dirt, dried sweat, and rain, they certainly didn’t look like Her Majesty’s finest this morning. They seemed not to notice, however. And well they might not, for Westphalen knew how these men lived—like animals in cramped quarters with a score and ten of their fellows, sleeping on canvas sheets changed once a month and eating and washing out of the same tin pot.
Barracks life brutalized the best of them, and when they had no enemy to fight they fought each other. The only thing they loved more than battle was liquor, and even now, when they should have been fortifying themselves with food, they were passing a bottle of raw spirits spiked with chopped capsicum. He could find no trace of his own disquiet in their faces; only anticipation of the battle and looting to come.
Despite the growing warmth of the sun, he shivered—the aftereffect of a sleepless night spent huddled away from the rain under a rocky overhang? Or simple fear of what was to come? He had certainly had his fill of fear last night. While the men had slept fitfully, he had remained awake, sure that wild things skulked about in the darkness beyond the small fire they had built. Occasionally he had glimpsed yellow glints of light in the dark, like pairs of fireflies. The horses too must have sensed something, for they were skittish all night.
But now it was day, and what was he to do?
He turned back to the temple and studied it anew through his field glasses. It sat hunched in the center of its courtyard behind the wall, alone but for a compound of some sort to its left against the base of a rocky cliff. The temple’s most striking feature was its blackness—not dull and muddy, but proud and gleaming, deep and shiny, as if it were made of solid onyx. An oddly shaped affair, box-like with rounded corners. It seemed to have been made in layers, with each higher level dripping down over the ones below. The temple walls were ringed with friezes and studded along their length with gargoyle-like figures, but Westphalen could make out no details from his present position. And atop it all was a huge obelisk, as black as the rest of the structure, pointing defiantly skyward.
Westphalen wondered how—short of a daguerreotype—he would ever do justice to any description of the Temple-in-the-Hills. It was simply alien. It looked … it looked as if someone had driven a spike through an ornate block of licorice and left it out in the sun to melt.
As he watched, the door in the wall swung open. A man, younger than Jaggernath but swathed in a similar dhoti, came out carrying a large urn on his shoulder. He walked to the far corner of the wall, emptied the liquid contents of the urn onto the ground, and returned to the compound.
The door remained open behind him.
No longer any reason to delay, and no way in hell or on earth to turn his men back now. Westphalen felt as if he had started a huge juggernaut on its way down an incline; he had been able to guide it at first, but now its momentum was such that it was out of his control.
He clambered off the ledge and faced his men.
“We shall advance at full gallop in a double column with lances at the ready. Tooke will lead one column and take it left around the temple after entering the courtyard; Russell will lead the other column to the right. If there is no immediate resistance, you will all dismount and ready your rifles. We will then search the grounds for any pandies that might be hiding within. Any questions?”
The men shook their heads. They were more than ready—they were slavering for the fight. All they needed was someone to unleash them.
“Mount up!” Westphalen said.
The approach began orderly enough. Westphalen let the six lancers lead the way while he brought up the rear. The detail trotted up the path until they were in sight of the temple, then broke into a gallop as planned.
But something happened on the road leading down to the wall. The men started to whoop and yell, whipping themselves and each other into a frenzy. Soon their lances were lowered and clamped under their arms in battle position as they leaned low over the necks of their mounts, bloodying their flanks as they spurred them to greater and greater speed. They had been told that a band of rebel sepoys was quartered beyond that wall; the lancers had to be ready to kill as soon as they cleared the gate. Westphalen alone knew that their only resistance would come from a handful of surprised and harmless Hindu priests.
Only that knowledge allowed him to keep up with them. Nothing to worry about, he told himself as the wall drew nearer and nearer. Only a few unarmed priests in there. Nothing to worry about.
He had a glimpse of bas-relief murals on the surrounding wall as he raced toward the gate, but his mind was too full of the uncertainty of what they might find on the other side to make any sense of them. He drew his saber and charged into the courtyard behind his howling lancers.
Westphalen saw three priests standing in front of the temple, all unarmed. They ran forward waving their hands in the air in what appeared to be an attempt to shoo the soldiers away.
The lancers never hesitated. Three of them fanned out on the run and drove their lances through the priests. They then circled the temple and came to a halt at its front entrance where they dismounted, dropping their lances and pulling Enfields from their saddle boots.
Westphalen remained mounted. He realized that made him an easy target, but felt more secure with his horse under him, able to wheel and gallop out the gate should something go wrong.
During a brief lull Westphalen directed the men toward the temple entrance. They were almost to the steps when the svamin counterattacked from two directions. With shrill cries of rage, a half dozen or so charged out from the temple; more than twice that number rushed from the compound. The former were armed with whips and pikes, the latter with curved swords much like sepoy talwars.
It was not a battle—it was a slaughter. Westphalen almost felt sorry for the priests. The soldiers first took aim at the closer group emerging from
the temple. The Enfields left only one priest standing after the first volley; he ran around their flank to join the other group which had slowed its advance after seeing the results of the withering fire. From his saddle, Westphalen directed his men to retreat to the steps of the black temple where the light weight and rapid reloading capacity of the Enfield allowed them second and third volleys that left only two priests standing. Hunter and Malleson picked up their lances, remounted, and ran down the survivors.
And then it was over.
Westphalen sat numb and silent in his saddle as he let his gaze roam the courtyard. So easy. So final. So quick. More than a score of bodies lay sprawled in the morning sun, their blood pooling and soaking into the sand as India’s omnipresent opportunists, the flies, began to gather. Some of the bodies were curled into limp parodies of sleep, others, still transfixed by lances, looked like insects pinned to a board.
He glanced down at his pristine blade. He had bloodied neither his hands nor his sword. Somehow that left him feeling innocent of what had just happened all around him.
“Don’t look like pandies to me,” Tooke was saying as he rolled a corpse over onto its back with his foot.
“Never mind them,” Westphalen said, dismounting at last. “Check inside and see if there’s any more hiding around.”
He ached to explore the temple, but not until it had been scouted by a few of the men.
After watching Tooke and Russell disappear into the darkness within, he sheathed his sword and took a moment to inspect the temple close up. Not made of stone as he had originally thought, but of solid ebony, cut and worked and polished to a gloss. He could not find a square inch anywhere on its surface that had not been decorated with carvings.
The friezes were the most striking—four-foot-high belts of illustration girding each level up to the spire. He tried to follow one from the right of the temple door. The crudely stylized art made whatever story it was telling impossible to follow. But the violence depicted was inescapable. Every few feet … killings and dismemberments and demon-like creatures devouring the flesh.