The Virtuosic Spy 01 - Deceptive Cadence (21 page)

Bishan’s eyes immediately filled with tears of wounded remorse. “I am sorry, my friend. It is very early morning, and I am confused. I was not thinking of anything, but only trying to understand why you are here in Kamathipura at five a.m., and why there is a young girl falling asleep in the back of my car. I meant no offense. Forgive me.”

Conor turned and put his back against the car. He shook his head with a grimace of self-disgust. “No, forgive me. You’re one of the kindest men I’ve ever met, Bishan Singh. You’ve come out to this shite neighborhood at the crack of dawn to help me and what do you get in return? I’m sorry, Bishan. I’m really, really sorry.”

Sliding down the side of the car until he was almost sitting in the dirt, Conor put his face in his hands. He thought it felt rather comfortable. He was shivering again, and it seemed a bit warmer here, close to the ground. He thought it might be nice to sit like this for a while, maybe catch a few winks.

He felt the powerful arms of his friend lifting him up, steadying him for a moment, and then gently guiding him into the passenger seat of the car. Once the door was shut, he collapsed against it, murmuring thanks in an assortment of languages. Bishan climbed into the driver’s seat and regarded him with a look of profound worry.

“You are very ill. There is a hospital close by. I will bring you.”

“No,” Conor protested, struggling into a sitting position. “It’s just a fever, and it’ll be gone soon. It comes and goes like that.”

“A fever that is coming and going is not a good thing, Con.”

“Yes, right. I know. I’ll get it checked, but not now. We need to go to the Jyoti, please, Bishan. After that we need to go to Mahim.”

By the time they reached the apartment complex, he had recovered enough to insist that Bishan remain with Radha while he retrieved the packed luggage he’d left there earlier. After the previous evening’s revelations, and even before hatching the plan to defraud Ahmed Khalil, he had known it would be madness to remain in the flat. Too many people knew where he’d been living. It would be the first place they’d come looking for him.

After retrieving his bags, he returned to the Ambassador bathed in sweat and trembling with exhaustion. Bishan took the bags from him with a small sigh.

“You are finished here?” he asked, quietly.
 

Conor nodded. “Yeah, finished.”

When they rolled to a stop under the covered parking lot of Kavita’s building in Mahim, Radha was still sleeping in the back seat. Conor pulled the door open and crouched next to her, but then hesitated.

“I hate to wake her up,” he said, looking up at Bishan. “I can carry her upstairs if you get the bags.”

At this, Bishan’s attitude of reluctant compliance evaporated. Taking Conor by the elbow he pulled him up with a ferocious hiss. “
Bas
! Enough! Idiot. You are shivering head to toe and barely standing on two feet. If you carry your own self upstairs, this will be an astonishing thing. I will bring the child, and I will return for all the baggages. If by this time you have not yet reached, I will carry you as well.”

Conor could not help laughing at his friend’s indignant rant, but the deep rumble it produced in his chest quickly sobered him. “
Accha
. I get the message. You’re probably right.” It belatedly occurred to him that it would have been courteous to phone ahead before turning up so early in the morning, but he reasoned that although their timing might be unexpected, his appearance with Radha would not come as a complete surprise. Unable to think of a way to help the young girl, he had sought Kavita’s advice, and her response had been characteristically succinct and generous.

“Bring her to me.”

Coming from anyone else it might have sounded like a casual suggestion, but from her, it had the force of a gentle command. He’d been grateful for its unambiguous clarity. It was a directive he could embrace without confusion, an assignment that made sense. As a result of what he’d recently learned, it made even more sense now. Kavita apparently had some experience with the kind of intervention that was going to be needed.

He was able to make it up the stairs under his own steam, but only just. As they reached the third floor landing, he stopped to catch his breath and noted that Kavita’s uncanny internal radar had provided an early warning of his arrival after all. The door was once again ajar, and the aroma of fried eggs wafting into the hallway signaled she was expecting him.

The collapse of Conor’s mythic appetite had been a source of dismay in the Kotwal household over the past few weeks. Kavita’s daughter, Parvati, had tried coaxing it back to life with a variety of recipes, but it was only when she surprised him one day with a traditional Irish breakfast—complete with grilled tomato and brown bread—that her efforts met with any success. It had become one of the few meals he could be persuaded to eat, so it was presented to him regularly.

Leaning against the stairway wall, he looked at Radha, still sleeping in Bishan’s arms, and felt the tension melting from his tight, stiffened muscles. He was tired—dangerously exhausted, in fact—and there seemed little promise of rest or safety ahead of him. He sensed the approach of calamity as surely as he could sense the trickle of perspiration sliding down his face; and topping everything else was the unavoidable fact that he was going to need a doctor and some serious drugs to tackle whatever had fastened onto his lungs.

He pushed it all to the back of his mind, because for the moment he was savoring a quiet sense of victory, and because for the moment he knew he was safe. Kavita Kotwal was safety itself. Rest and refuge at the edge of chaos.

20

R
ADHA
WOKE
ALMOST
AS
SOON
AS
THEY
ARRIVED
. B
ISHAN
had laid her on a couch before going to collect the luggage, and Conor had remained hovering close by. He worried that waking up in a room full of strangers would frighten her, but when her eyes opened, she looked around with an expression of alert curiosity.

“You belong to this place, Con? These are your families?”
 

“In a manner of speaking,” he said, marveling at her self-possession. “They are my very good friends, and we’re going to stay with them for a bit. We could both do with some rest and recuperation.”

“What does it mean, ‘recuperation?’” she asked, raising herself from the couch.

“Well . . . ” he hesitated. He knew what the word meant for him, and that it would mean something rather different for her, but it wasn’t the time to discuss it. In fact, confronting Radha with the news that her heroin supply had dried up was a task he hoped to avoid altogether. He was counting on Kavita to venture into that hornet’s nest and was happy to plead cowardice as an exemption.

“It’s a fancy word that means our friends are going to look after us,” he said. “Which begins with breakfast, and since you are awake and alert—ah, no, don’t be pulling the long face, now. It’s not optional. Most important meal of the day.”

They joined the family and Bishan, who looked happier now with a mug of chai and a plate of hot rotis in front of him. Conor introduced Radha and seated her among Parvati’s three daughters. The four girls exchanged greetings and stared at each other with shy fascination.

He slipped into the chair next to Bishan, and as Kavita began circling the table serving the eggs, she regarded Conor with a look that made him squirm. He had been doing his best to hide his weariness, but her penetrating gaze made the futility of that effort obvious. When she tried to slip a second egg onto his plate, he stopped her hand with a gentle squeeze.

“Let’s not be overly optimistic. I’m trying to set an example, but I can probably manage just the one.”

“This is not managing well enough,
beta
.”

Kavita turned his face toward her. The faraway look in her eyes so reminded him of his mother’s that his throat ached with the pressure of suppressed grief.

“You have had some fever today also,” she said. It was not a question.

“Coming and going,” Bishan grumbled in disapproval.

Conor confirmed the observation with a small grin. “Coming and going, just like Bishan Singh’s patience. I’ll likely get the fever back sooner than his good opinion of me.”

“Idiot. God forbid it.” Bishan gave his shoulder an affectionate thump and pulled at his beard in embarrassment.

Kavita touched Conor’s cheek, and before he could protest, she had smoothly transferred another egg onto his plate. “Set a finer example, even. Eat the two eggs.”

He watched Radha closely during the meal, and after Bishan departed, and the table began clearing, he at last saw the change he had been dreading since they’d left Kamathipura. Beneath lowered lids, her eyes began darting around the room, miserably avoiding his gaze as her fingers clutched nervously at a small cloth purse she’d placed on her lap.

Conor silently swore at himself. Why had it not occurred to him that she would bring drugs with her? Didn’t he always check for cigarettes before he went anywhere? Even now, when he was trying to quit, the reflexive slap against his pockets was a habit as tenacious as the craving itself, a constant reminder of the persistence of addiction. How could he have imagined she would blithely come away without knowing her next fix was secure? And even the one after that? As a crushing fatigue descended over him, he wondered exactly how much heroin she might be carrying in her little cloth purse.

A
LITTLE
OVER
an hour later, Conor’s eyes flew open and his head jerked up from his arms, which had been resting on top of the now-deserted dining room table. A deep, shuddering cough had shocked him awake. It was alarmingly loud and even more alarmingly painful. As he reached groggily across the table for the water pitcher, several more followed. He smothered the noise with a table napkin and snatched his arm back to wrap it around his chest.

“Shit, that hurts.” He squeezed his eyes shut.

The dose of medicine taken the previous evening had served him well for almost twelve hours, but its effect had finally evaporated. As he braced against a third wave tearing up through his throat, Kavita materialized at his side. She brought one of the ubiquitous brown bottles down on the table with a decisive thump.

“Next patient,” she said.

Conor jumped at her sudden appearance and dropped his head back onto his arm. “Do you buy those bottles by the case? Everyone in Mumbai seems to have one.”

“Yes. I do.” Her head wiggled a cheerful assent. “And the recipe I mix by the gallon.”

“Well, give us a shot of it, woman,” he croaked. “I’m after choking to death here.”

“Drink water first. Medicine after.” She poured out a glass of water and set it in front of him.

“Where’s Radha?”

“Radha is sleeping.” Kavita nodded at the bottle on the table. “She will sleep for some hours now, but she will feel very unwell later. She is in my room.”

“That little cloth purse, I should have noticed it earlier. I’m sorry,
ji
.”

“Nonsense,” she chided. “It will be well. She cannot bear to be parted from this small bag, but she will be. By and by, she will be free from all of it.”

“I admire your confidence. You make it sound simple.” Conor sat up with a sigh that started him coughing again.

“Not simple though.” She rested a hand on his back. “For a time, she may hate you for this,
beta
. You must prepare. Because you love her, it will be hard for you.”

Lifting the water glass, he discovered he needed two hands to hold it steady. He drank and sat back, breathing delicately and realizing that for the moment, there was little more he could do for Radha. While it felt good to have executed an operation that had actually gone according to plan, he had again reached the end of a road without knowing where the next began.

Having at least partially blown the cover of a sketchy American operation and now having stolen from one of the most dangerous dons in Mumbai, there were not many roads from which to choose. Crying uncle and heading for home was still the most obvious, but even now he wasn’t ready to pull the emergency brake.

The prospect of eventual failure was ever more likely, and his zeal for the original objective of bringing a nebulous, money-laundering mastermind to justice was even weaker than when he’d started, but what remained was an idée fixe he could not relinquish. He had signed on to this misadventure to find his brother and try to save him, although whom or what he was trying to save him from was even less clear than when he’d started.

If Curtis Sedgwick was to be believed, the next move was out of his hands, and his impatience at the forced immobility was aggravated by a jittering anxiety, signaling in his brain like a distress code. Its message continued to elude him, and if he couldn’t decipher it, he at least needed to do something to keep it from driving him mad. He looked at Kavita with an inquisitive frown.

“Are you working in the
zopadpatti
today,
ji
? Maybe I could come along and—what’s so funny?”

Kavita’s low, musical chuckle was like a tonic to his soul.

“You are a good man, Conor. Very kind and loving, but many times you are too ridiculous. No
zopadpatti
today. Today, you sleep. Come now.”

She provided him a pair of light cotton pajamas and ordered him to shower off the lingering fumes of the Kamathipura streets. When he was finished, she pointed him to the bedroom at the end of the hall that her granddaughter Surabhi had vacated. He stood in its doorway, reluctant to assume occupancy. A large window with lacy, flower-print curtains filled the wall opposite the door. Near the window, a rocking chair piled with stuffed animals sat on one side of the bed. On the other, a school desk and small chair had been placed in the corner, below a bulletin board plastered with the faces of bare-chested movie stars.

Holding his clothes—and his gun—in his hands, he looked blearily around the room and finally walked in and slipped the Walther under the bed’s pink, fringed pillow. Kavita returned and insisted on tucking him in, pulling the cool sheets into place while scolding his peevish resistance. As his mother had often complained, Conor was intransigent in illness. He loathed being pampered and fussed over, but he had never won any battles with Brigid McBride, and he didn’t win this one either.