Wives to Burn, page 17
“Those are Mauser rifles,” the Brahman said.
“What difference as long as they shoot straight?” said Ahalya Bai.
“How can you fight for freedom with the weapons of oppression?” the Brahman protested. “How can you expect to secure liberty with the weapons designed to enslave Europe? What good will come of fighting an old imperialism with the help of a new imperialism?”
“You must take the long view, father,” said Ahalya Bai. “We accept whatever means will accomplish our end. Look at China. Chiang Kai-shek accepted Communist aid to unite China. He used the Communists as long as he needed them. Then he liquidated them. We accept German or Italian or Japanese aid in the same spirit.”
The Brahman shook his head sadly. “And I suppose,” he said, “that you will liquidate Fred Oaks when he has served you.”
“Oaks is no real friend of ours,” said Ahalya Bai.
“He is a friend of mine,” the Brahman declared.
“He’s a double-crosser,” said Ganeshi Lal, “but he hasn’t fooled me. Unless he comes through with more rifles and more ammunition, I’m going to let the raj get rid of him.”
“Why?” asked the Brahman.
“Because he doesn’t give a damn for our cause. All he wants is to see the raj embarrassed and the British discredited with Islam.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because Oaks has furnished the Moslems of Shakkarpur with dynamite. He’s let Hajji Ahmed think that the movement of liberation will be a Mohammedan movement, that Mohammedans will rule when India is free. But Hajji Ahmed will never get to use that dynamite. Not against us. We are exploding it tonight,” said Ganeshi Lal, with smug satisfaction.
“What is all this talk of dynamite?”
“Ahalya Bai knows where it is stored,” said Ganeshi. “She is friendly with one of the young men who brought it down from Curring’s plantations. The dynamite is in Hajji Ahmed’s chambers in the north minaret of the mosque. We have verified this fact. And tonight, at nine o’clock, the dynamite will blow up.”
“Why must you fight the Moslems?” asked the Brahman. “How can you have a free India, if you do not have a united India? Why must you be such an easy prey to the tyrant’s device—divide and rule?”
“If we do not destroy the dynamite,” Ganeshi declared, “the Moslems will use it against us. Tonight at nine o’clock, during the procession of the Taziyas, there will be no one near the north minaret of the mosque, they will all be marching with their papier-mâché biers to the river. Oh, there may be a sentry or two, but nothing to stop a man firing a rifle bullet into the dynamite. I know where it is. It is in a corner of Hajji Ahmed’s chambers, covered with prayer rugs. One bullet will detonate the lot. Don’t go near the mosque at nine o’clock tonight, father.”
The old Brahman shook his head again. “I prefer not to listen to all this,” he said. “I am going to the temple to offer a garland to Shiva, asking him to let you see the light.”
He went out quickly, not waiting to lock the heavy door behind him, ignoring the protests of the sentries who locked up after him.
Just outside the door of the godown he saw Rhoda Curring. She moved away rather awkwardly, made futile little gestures with her lipstick, as though to cover her embarrassment at being caught eavesdropping, then belatedly recognized the Brahman.
“Salaam, Mem-Sahib,” said Shivaji Lal, the ghost of an amused smile upon his lips. “You were wishing to see someone?”
“I was looking for Major Smith,” said Rhoda. “Is there a Major Smith inside?”
“You have been misinformed, Mem-sahib,” said the Brahman.
“Isn’t this Chunder Bose’s godown?”
“It is. But there is no Major Smith here.”
“Then there must be some mistake. Sorry,” said Rhoda. She dropped a closely smoked cigarette and got back into her ghari.
The Brahman watched her drive off. Then he looked down at his feet. There were two cigarette stubs on the ground, both tipped with lip rouge, both burned down to the last half-inch.
The Brahman made mental computations as to the time it took to smoke two cigarettes. He tried to remember the exact conversation that had gone on inside during the past ten minutes.
Chapter Twenty-three
The Trap
Virginia hatton spent a miserable day. She had been so certain that she would find Fred Oaks at the station after the Mail came in from Madras that the disappointment was doubly bitter. At least she had expected to claim the “invalid chairs” and to make contact with Fred that way. The device of the riot in front of the station had come with such suddenness that she did not realize its import until the last of the bullock carts was far down the road. By this time the Subadar of Police was by her side, insisting that he would be held responsible if she were injured. She was afraid of attracting his attention to the carts. If she set out in pursuit, the Subadar would follow—and Fred would again accuse her of having betrayed him to the authorities. By the time she could get rid of the Subadar, she had lost the bullocks—slow as they were—and an hour’s effort to find them proved in vain.
She called on the Brahman, but there was no response to her repeated rapping on the door or the closed wooden shutters. The house of Ganeshi, his son, was also deserted.
She went to Dr. Forsythe’s clinic. There was no sign of Fred, but there was work to be done. Until long past noon, she helped bandage cracked heads and disinfect knife wounds—the result of the fighting in the cotton bazaar. It kept her from thinking too much. She went home for tiffin.
Her brother was so busy that he scarcely noticed her presence at the family table. He was sending and receiving messages, consulting with the Subadar of Police, arguing with William Shakespeare Gabriel. The American detective ate heartily, in contrast to the nervous gulping of an occasional spoonful of curried dal by the District Officer, and said little. He seemed to avoid Virginia’s eyes, every time she tried to look at him across the table. He had no comment on her brother’s latest theory of the Lucy Steel murder. James Curring was obviously the culprit. Curring had spoken to Lucy Steel when she arrived; he had not been seen since the death of Gwendolyn Small; he was therefore guilty. Fred Oaks was of no further interest to the District Officer. Fred had fled the country, now that he realized that his game was up. He was fleeing charges of inciting to sedition, rather than charges of murder. Good riddance.
Alvin Brinker came in while they were eating dessert. He, too, was full of questions. No, there had been no troops sent for, and there would be none, said the D.O. No need for troops. The police were taking care of everything quite efficiently. They had kept order without firing a shot. They, would not have to fire a shot. There hadn’t been one life lost and there wouldn’t be. A few bloodied noses and bruised heads were nothing. A D.O. who couldn’t administer his own zil’a without the aid of the military wasn’t worth his salt. A Hatton could always run his own show without outside help, and the people of Shakkarpur knew it. There was no danger. There would be no serious uprising. After the final procession of the Muharram holiday tonight, everything would quiet down.
After tiffin Virginia got Gabriel alone for a moment on the veranda. Before she could say anything he shook his head.
“What happened?” he asked.
“He woke up just after you left,” the girl replied.
“You were going to take care of him for me until I got back.”
“Yes, I know. I tried.”
“And he wouldn’t stay?”
“He wouldn’t listen to me.”
The detective made a small noise with his tongue.
“Funny how many bad guesses I make these days,” he said. “I would have sworn he’d listen to you. Did you—talk to him right?”
“I did the best I could.”
“Look, sister.” Gabriel lit a cigarette. “Why don’t you just forget about him?” He blew a thin funnel of smoke in the general direction of a shaft of sunlight slanting in through bamboo blinds, and watched the swirling eddies turn blue and golden brown in the hot brilliance.
“Mr. Gabriel! You haven’t changed your mind? You don’t think he’s guilty after all?”
“I don’t know, sister. I got a cable from San Francisco this morning. My office sent me the highlights of his old man’s will. It’s a funny document. The old man seemed to have a fit of remorse just before he died and is taking it out on Fred. The boy gets all the money on condition he locates every woman he ever walked out on or lied to—and makes proper financial retribution. Do you happen to know if Fred ever walked out on Lucy Steel?”
“Fred told me he divorced her in Yucatan.”
“Without her knowledge, wasn’t it?”
“Fred doesn’t know whether she was informed of the divorce or not.”
“That’s the angle, then,” Gabriel said. “Lucy came to India because she had a two-way claim on some of the Oaks money. Either she was going to insist that she was still Fred’s wife—those Yucatan divorces don’t always hold up in American courts, you know—or she was going to cut herself in for a big slice as a poor, abandoned woman who’d been treacherously ditched in the Caribbean.”
“Are you sure that Lucy Steel knew the terms of this new will?” the girl asked.
“Sure I’m sure,” Gabriel replied. “My San Francisco office has been digging into the case. According to my cable, Lucy had been snooping around the offices of old man Oaks’s attorneys and made friends with a young law clerk who gave her the inside dope. Lucy had a way with young law clerks.
“And here’s another point. Do you know who the Oaks will’ named as judge to decide whether Fred had done right by the women in his past? Gwendolyn Small—as long as she was alive. In case of her death, the Oaks attorneys were to decide when, if, and how much of the money was to go to Fred. It seems to me, if I was in Fred’s shoes, I’d rather take a chance on the tolerant masculine viewpoint of a firm of attorneys than on the judgment of a woman who’d been jilted herself!”
Gabriel blew a huge smoke ring to punctuate his declaration.
The girl looked at him blankly for a moment. When the significance of Gabriel’s report dawned upon her, she said, “But Fred couldn’t have killed Miss Small! He was unconscious—in your room.”
“That’s what I thought. But apparently he was conscious when I left him with you—and was playing ’possum. Maybe he wrote that note about barbiturates himself.”
“And is that why you say I should forget him?”
“That’s part of it. Do you know where he’s hiding?”
“No. Do you?”
Gabriel shook his head.
“What’s the other part, Mr. Gabriel?”
“Well,” the detective began. He stopped, smoked for a moment, then resumed, “When a man makes up his mind—or when he makes up his mind not to make up his mind—there’s nothing much to do but let him fry in his own fat-headedness.”
“What about the other side of it, Mr. Gabriel? When a woman makes up her mind?”
“That’s another reason you ought to forget about him,” he said. He started away, then came back, taking a deck of cards from his pocket. “By the way,” he said, “do you recognize these?”
“Should I?”
“I don’t know. I found them on the floor of Gwendolyn Small’s rooms.”
“Then they’re probably Gwendolyn’s. They’re dog-eared enough to be hers, poor thing.”
“Funny thing,” the detective said, “but I could have sworn the ones she was telling fortunes with last night were different.”
“In what way?”
“They were foreign looking. The spots were funny shaped, and the kings and queens didn’t look much like kings and queens.”
“Oh, those. They were continental cards.”
“You remember them?” Gabriel asked eagerly.
“I gave them to Gwendolyn. They were sent to me by my—my brother. Oh, not Reggie. I used to have another brother, although we’re not supposed to talk about him. He was a little like me—not quite a Hatton. He volunteered to fight for the Loyalists in Spain. He was killed on the Ebro.”
“What about the cards? What were they like?”
“They were proletarian cards. I’m not sure they were Spanish; perhaps Russian. My brother sent them to me because he thought I’d be amused by the way the ultra-democratic card designers had done away with kings and queens, even in pasteboard. The kings were all workers or farmers. Instead of scepters, they held hammers in their hands, or sickles.”
“Hammers, eh? And what did the jacks hold?”
“The jacks? Oh, the knaves. I don’t remember exactly. I think one was a fisherman, and one a shepherd. Why don’t you look at Gwendolyn’s deck?”
“That’s just the point,” Gabriel said. “It’s gone.”
“Gone?”
“I’ve been over those rooms again with a fine-tooth comb. There’s no trace of any cards but the ones I found scattered on the floor—the ones I just showed you.”
“Why should anyone want to steal cards, I wonder?”
“I don’t know—yet. You haven’t another deck somewhere about, have you? The funny ones?”
“Yes, I think I have,” Virginia said. “I’m not sure where it is, but I could probably find it for you.”
“I wish you’d look when you get a chance,” Gabriel said. “I’ll see you later. I got to go now. I got work to do.”
He went down the veranda steps three at a time.
Virginia returned to Dr. Forsythe’s clinic. There was a lull in the emergency cases, however, because Shakkarpur had actually quieted down, as Reggie had said. Or perhaps it was just too hot to fight. In any event, she had plenty of time to think. And at the end of the afternoon she realized what Bill Gabriel had been trying to say to her.
“When a woman makes up her mind … That’s another reason you ought to forget about him….”
She had really known what woman Gabriel was talking about, almost immediately, but it had taken most of the afternoon to get herself to admit as much. Strange, how the mind could shut out unpleasant facts.
Virginia had a peculiarly empty feeling as she knocked at Rhoda Curring’s door. There seemed to be nothing inside her but a great, uncertain, tremulous coldness. She was foolish to come, she knew. She had no claim on Fred, really—no more than Rhoda, except that Rhoda was already married. Yet she could not have stopped herself from coming. It was her last chance and she was driven to it by the knowledge that Fred Oaks was the one man in the world she wanted, a knowledge that had come to her painfully, in spite of everything she had believed in before. She had told him so, shamelessly, and she supposed she should feel humiliated because he had spurned her, run away when he knew he could have taken her for the asking. But she didn’t. It was because he had run away that she was here now. He still had a spark of something fine left in him, something noble, even. That was why he had run away.
“Come in, my dear. Do come in and have a cup of tea with me. The water must be boiling now.”
Rhoda Curring was very gracious and very lovely in a fluttery green négligée. She held the door open with such a gesture of welcome that one would have thought that Virginia was a very old and dear friend. And Virginia knew that she detested all women on general principles.
“Thank you,” said Virginia. “I won’t stay but a moment.”
She sat down in a fan-backed chair while Rhoda stretched herself languidly in a chaise longue and called for the khansama to bring the hot water. She directed the making of the tea and the serving of it with almost imperceptible movements of her slim white hands, and a few lazy words of Hindustani to the servant.
“It’s been a trying day, hasn’t it, dear?” said Rhoda when the tea had been poured and they were alone.
“Rather,” said Virginia. “Any news of Mr. Curring?”
“Not a word,” said Rhoda. “But I’m not worried. Jim’s no doubt in the plantations again. He’s been very busy these days.”
“Yes, of course.” No, naturally Rhoda Curring wasn’t worried about her husband. She wasn’t even thinking of him, unless it was to rejoice in his absence. Because she was certainly rejoicing. There was a triumphant glow about her, a happy radiance of a great, turbulent joy that must be temporarily suppressed—the complete, self-contained happiness of a woman in love, a willful woman who has at last got what she wants. As she looked at the shapely, feline loveliness of Rhoda stretched on her chaise longue, studied the perfect poise of her head, the strange light of both satisfaction and anticipation in her green eyes, Virginia knew that she was right in her supposition. She said abruptly, “So you’re running off to join Fred Oaks after all?”
Rhoda made a slight purring sound. “Wherever did you get that notion, my dear?” she asked languidly—too languidly to hide the emotion that Virginia’s question had produced.
“Just looking at you,” Virginia replied in a voice she did not quite recognize. “You’re the perfect picture of love triumphant.”
“Is that why you’ve come?”
“Yes.”
“To be the first to congratulate me? Or to prevent my making a horrible mistake?”
“Neither. I merely stopped by to say good-by to Fred.”
Rhoda made a careless gesture to brush back a wisp of copper-colored hair from her temple. She was working very hard to maintain her casual, gracious composure, but her eyes were shrewdly appraising Virginia. Clearly she was on the defensive. She said, “My dear, aren’t you being rather naïve?”
“Possibly. But I thought that you might allow yourself the luxury of being generous—now that you’ve won.”
“I hadn’t realized there was any serious competition,” said Rhoda. “Surely you don’t imagine that Fred is here now?”
“No. But I did think this was the first step on the road to seeing him.”
