The Virtuosic Spy 01 - Deceptive Cadence (29 page)

Complicating his condition was the emotional residue from having killed two men in a violent gun battle. Although he slept continuously for several days, hardly conscious for ten minutes at a time, it was never enough. His sleep was restless, filled with noise and jumpy images. Frequently he would wake, sweaty and gasping, wondering if it was possible to sleep twenty hours a day and die of exhaustion.

Fortunately, the antibiotics did find traction and encouraging signs appeared as they gained the upper hand. His lungs began clearing; the quick, shallow snatches of air lengthened; and the painful scrape in his chest subsided. These were all positive developments, but as it turned out, the most important accelerant to his recovery was Radha.

At first, out of an abundance of caution, he had asked that she not be allowed into his room at all, but she misinterpreted that directive and suffered from it more than he realized. Still fragile in her own recovery, Radha was confused and forlorn, feeling somehow to blame for bringing sickness on the rescuer who had twice delivered her from Rohit Mehta.

Because she was kind, Kavita took pity on the young girl’s misery, and because she was wise, she found an answer for it. When Radha appeared at Conor’s bedside one afternoon, her eyes peeking anxiously above a familiar, sea-green respirator mask, he was completely undone. A happy glow of affection shot through his heart at the sight of her. He couldn’t summon the will to even try turning her away.

“What are you doing here, little one?” he asked softly, in Hindi.

“I am becoming nurse,” came the muffled reply, in English. “Kavita-ji has asked me. She is doing many, busy things, and she is somewhat old,
bhaiyya
. I am to be helping her.”

“
Accha
. I see. What assignment has she given you?”
 

“Bringing food,” Radha replied briskly. “And watching you eat. You must be sitting up now, Con-ji. You cannot eat soup lying down flat like this.”

Hiding a smile, he pushed himself up and helped her to lift the tray onto his lap. She slid it into place and took up a position at the foot of his bed, regarding the tray expectantly. He tilted an eyebrow at her.

“Are you really going to watch me eat it?”
 

“
Haan ji
. Each bite, even. So strict I will be.”

Her hazel eyes above the mask twinkled with such devilish glee that he couldn’t help laughing. It didn’t hurt as much as he might have expected.

With the addition of Radha’s tender, half-comical ministrations, Conor’s recovery gathered momentum, and he began venturing from his bedroom to the sitting room couch for extended periods. Relaxing there one evening, his mulish character at last resurfaced when Kavita presented the nightly dose of cough medicine from her trusty brown bottle. When he flatly refused it, complaining he was tired of feeling half drunk all the time, he saw her share a satisfied smile with Thomas. She put the bottle away, and after some experimentation, came up with a narcotic-free alternative that was nearly as effective, and—perversely—tasted twice as bad.

Owing to the haphazard route, the journey to Agra took four days longer than originally planned. When they pulled into the Cantonment Station on a Monday morning, they had been traveling for ten days and were looking forward to the twelve-hour layover. Palatial accommodations notwithstanding, they were all anxious for a break from the Pullman. Even Conor had recovered to the point of becoming stir crazy and insisted he was strong enough for an outing.

They were gathered for breakfast in the crystal-encrusted dining room discussing what to do with their brief hiatus when Thomas paused with the butter knife in his hand and glanced around the table sheepishly. “I’ve been rambling around this country for nearly six years and would you believe I’ve never seen the Taj Mahal?”

He was slathering butter over slices of toast and tossing them onto the plate in front of Conor, who was eating them as quickly as they arrived. His appetite had resurfaced with a vengeance, and ever since his brother had been stoking him like a coal-burning furnace.

“Ah, it is very beautiful,” Kavita sighed. “The precious stones, the inlay, and marble carvings, the tomb of Mumtaz, and the names of God. A sight that ‘creates sorrowing sighs, and the sun and moon shed tears from their eyes.’ These are words of emperor Shah Jahan. Yes. You must go, both of you.”

She toggled her head at Conor and Thomas with a genial smile. They did not make the mistake of underestimating its mildness.

“Well, I guess that’s settled,” Conor said drily. “What about you and Radha, though? Do you not want to see it as well?”

Kavita waved a hand breezily toward her young nursing assistant. “Another time. Radha and I will be keeping busy while you are making the tour. Some shopping, some visiting.”
 

He turned to Radha to see how this arrangement sat with her. She beamed at him with eager reassurance and gave a small bounce in her chair. “Yes, this is so. Kavita-ji and I will be keeping very busy while you are seeing these tombs and stones.”

He smiled back at her, marveling that such a transformation from bitter enemy to fervent acolyte could be accomplished in the course of ten days. He also breathed a prayer of gratitude that the hard, desperate hunger he had seen in her at the Mumbai train station had also been wiped away. Radha’s eyes were now as they were meant to be—not downcast or frightened or fidgeting restlessly in search of a fix, but shining with intelligence and expectation. Her resilient spirit humbled him and reminded him that he bore some responsibility for ensuring the fulfillment of its promise.

They emerged from the Agra train station into a warm, March morning, and the usual assortment of auto-rickshaw drivers collected around them. Conor knew any eye contact led to protracted exchanges that ended in disappointment for everyone. He did his best to politely ignore the drivers and set his gaze on the middle distance, where it came to rest on a gleaming black sedan with tinted windows. It idled smoothly in a parking area across the square, providing a sharp contrast to the battered, colorless vehicles surrounding it. Thomas had noticed it as well.

“Friends of yours, I suppose,
ji
?”

“Yes, Tom.” Kavita squinted up at him with a smile. “This car is coming from Agra cathedral complex on Wazirpura Road. You will come join us after your touring.”

Conor and Thomas shared a puzzled glance.

“Who do you know at the cathedral?” Conor asked.
 

“Archbishop.” Kavita put a hand on Radha’s shoulder, and they set off across the square with the sound of her low, infectious laugh still hanging in the air.

“Well, naturally. The archbishop.” Thomas shook his head. “She looks like she’s up to something, don’t you think?”

“She’s always up to something.” Conor shrugged. “We’ll find out eventually, I imagine. Now, before we get into it with this crowd, do you fancy a cab or an auto-rickshaw?”

“Auto-rickshaw,” Thomas replied immediately. “I’m after starving for a bit of adventure.”

S
HOULD
GUILTY
SEEK
asylum here,

Like one pardoned, he becomes free from sin.

Should a sinner make his way to this mansion
 

All his past sins are to be washed away.

With the guide booklet lying open on his lap, Conor read the words again. It was from the passage Kavita had cited earlier—the Mughal emperor, Shah Jahan, extolling the marvels and near divine powers of the mausoleum he had created as the final setting for his priceless jewel, the beloved Mumtaz.

In front of him sat the thing itself, shimmering like a mirage under the hot afternoon sun. He and Thomas had explored every inch of it, along with its surrounding gardens and outbuildings, and were resting now in the shade of the
Darwaza-i rauza
, the monumental structure that served as the main gateway into the compound. He shut the booklet and returned to a contemplation of the living postcard before him, soaking up the atmosphere and the irony.

Here he was again—the serial penitent—once more casting himself on the doorstep of another religion’s iconic shrine seeking absolution. He didn’t feel it and wasn’t surprised. Despite the medieval emperor’s assurance, he didn’t expect the Taj Mahal to supply the same measure of peace he’d found in the cool stillness of the Jain
mandir
. Maybe it was because the Taj technically wasn’t a mosque and therefore not actually a house of worship. More probably it was because blowing off a man’s kneecap didn’t share the same order of magnitude as shooting him to death.

He glanced at Thomas and blinked. “Did you say something?”

“I did, yeah,” Thomas replied. “I said you’ve gone awfully quiet. We walked around a fair bit. Have you overdone it, do you think?”

“No, I’m fine, I was just—I don’t know—daydreaming.” He faced forward again, focusing now on the watery replica of the monument in the long reflecting pool.

“Want to talk about it?” Thomas asked quietly.
 

“Not really, no.”

“You hadn’t any choice, Conor.”

“I know that.” He wished his brother would stop talking. The familial sixth sense often floated forward when it was least wanted.

“So then, you shouldn’t feel as though—”
 

“Thomas, for the love of God.”

“Right.” Thomas brushed a hand awkwardly across Conor’s back and got to his feet. “I’m going for a bottle of water. Do you want one?”

“Sure.”

Watching him disappear through the huge, red marble archway, Conor felt a twinge of regret for the rebuke and envious appreciation for the unchangeable nature of his brother. Thomas was older and sadder and encumbered with his own weight of guilt and self-reproach, but fundamentally he was the same person he had always been. Whatever he had been doing, it had not altered the essential man. He was simply himself—stolid, straightforward, and at home in his own skin. He was a model of stability in contrast to the splintering psyche of his younger brother.

When he returned, Conor accepted the water with a nod of thanks and apology. He took a long pull, and with his elbows on his knees, rolled the plastic bottle between his hands, staring at it. “When you’re doing whatever it is that you’re doing, have you ever needed to . . .?”

Again, Thomas intuitively understood what remained unspoken and shook his head. “I’ve never carried a weapon— that’s Sedgwick’s department. I wouldn’t know what to do with it if I had one.”

“I’m glad,” Conor said, his voice growing husky. “It generates its own sort of addiction, I’ve found. You want to get rid of it, but after a while you’re afraid to be without it. You start learning things about yourself you didn’t want to, and it . . . changes you because you can’t unlearn them. As much as you might want to, you can’t go back to not knowing or to who you thought you were before you did.” He looked at his brother with a brief grin. “Sorry. I’m talking shite. That barely made any sense, even to me.”

“Conor, please,” Thomas whispered. “Please, will you not let me put you on a plane and send you home? Before he got off the train, Sedgwick told me what you’ve been doing for the past few months. We had a hell of a fight over it. I’ve seen for myself how good you are with the gun, little brother, and I can see what it’s doing to you. You don’t belong in this mess.”

“No more do you,” Conor said, calmly. “You may as well give over, Thomas. You want me to go home, I want you to come with me, and neither of us is going to get what we want. We’re stuck on this ride until it winds down or crashes, so we might as well face it. Sedgwick has told you what I’ve been up to, but I’m still in the dark about you. If he doesn’t show up by the time we leave tonight, you’re going to have come clean and tell me what’s going on. Agreed?”

“Yeah. Agreed.”

With a groaning oath, Thomas deflated and seemed to age even more, right there in front of him.

28

I
N
OBEDIENCE
TO
K
AVITA
’
S
INFORMAL
COMMAND
,
THEY
SET
OUT
to locate the cathedral complex in the early afternoon. In the Wazirpura neighborhood of Agra, the Catholic archdiocese had established a sprawling, well-tended enclave that their driver found without difficulty. They coasted through its gates and up a wide avenue lined with bougainvillea, passing signs for various buildings that were just visible beyond thick stands of trees. It seemed the grounds housed a number of schools and convents in addition to the main cathedral.

The auto-rickshaw circled around the church and deposited them in front of the main building, in a wide courtyard that was empty when they arrived, but by the time Conor had finished paying the driver, Kavita had appeared, walking alongside a priest in a long, white cassock. He was a handsome, middle-aged man, tall and slender, with skin the color of rich, burnished copper. He walked with a graceful, dance-like gait, which he was tactfully moderating to match the stride of his companion.

“Your Grace,” Kavita said, smiling fondly as they approached, “I am presenting to you now my two good friends, these brothers Conor and Tom. Now boys, you will please shake hands with his Grace the Archbishop, Cecil de Cunha.”

Like dutiful schoolchildren, they both stepped forward.

“Very pleased to meet you, Your Grace.” Conor deferentially took the warm, brown hand extended to him.

“It’s . . . Thomas, actually,” his brother said with a note of apology, shaking hands in turn.

“Like the saint,” Archbishop de Cunha replied. His voice, deep and mellow, held a hint of dry amusement.

“A pretty far whack from that, I’m afraid, Your Grace.” Thomas flushed with embarrassment and glared at Conor, who had choked off an involuntary laugh.

“Oh, yes?” The archbishop regarded each of them with a raised eyebrow and then relented with a nod. “Yes, a ‘far whack.’ All of us.”

There was something regal about him, and yet his dark eyes, framed by large, square-rimmed glasses, radiated peaceful, good-humored warmth. He and Kavita seemed well suited and entirely at ease with each other. So well suited, in fact, that Conor narrowed his eyes with a flash of intuition. “The two of you wouldn’t happen to be related at all?”