The zenith angle (15 page)

Anjali lip-synched to the piercing Hindi soundtrack while whirling, fluttering, bumping, and grinding. Repeatedly, glowingly, beautifully. Take after grueling take, on a sunny midwinter day, at a nine-thousand-foot elevation.

Indian film fans loved romantic mountain scenes. So much so that the Indian movie industry had worn Switzerland out, and Tony Carew was supplying them with Colorado’s mountains, instead. The audience for Bollywood movies was rather peculiar about snow. The core Indian village audience, all billion of them, regarded snow as a mythical, romantic substance, something like fairy dust or cocaine. So Hindi film actresses never wore coats or jackets while dancing in the snow. They had to perform bareheaded and bare-armed in their customary midriff-baring chiffon, brilliantly smiling and bitterly freezing. Between takes, Anjali rushed to the sidelines to drink hot goat’s-milk cocoa and breathe oxygen from a black rubber mask.

Anjali’s co-star, Sanjay, who was also her cousin, was the film’s male lead. Being a man, whenever Sanjay was in snow, he got to wear thick boots, long trousers, and an insulated jacket. Sanjay was big, solid, deft, graceful, and wonderfully handsome. The Bombay film clan of Sanjay and Anjali had been breeding movie stars for a hundred years. In Sanjay the family had produced a huge, beautiful animal. In Bollywood, actors weren’t just movie stars—they were “heroes.” Sanjay was a twenty-first-century Indian hero. Sanjay wasn’t kidding about this ambition, either.

Like most film-star children, Sanjay had started his film career as a teen romance lead, but he needed those big mid-career payoffs as a tough-guy Indian action star. So, Sanjay had boldly enlisted in the Indian Army. Young Sanjay had been a soldier against Moslem terrorists, on patrol in the blood-spattered mountains of Kashmir. He had driven an Army jeep and carried a machine gun along the dangerous Indo-Pakistani Line of Control. Sanjay had won a huge amount of worshipful Indian media coverage for these patriotic publicity stunts. Pundits in the know were already talking wisely about Sanjay’s future political career.

The Bharatiya Janata Party or “Indian People’s Party” were Sanjay’s brand of leaders. The BJP were tough, heavily armed right-wingers who had been running the Indian government since 1998. Sanjay was the BJP’s kind of movie star, a modern guy with big modern Indian muscle, great Indian clothes, cool Indian moon rockets, and extremely dangerous Indian atom bombs. Sanjay’s violent adventure movies always played well with these tense, nervy Indian superpatriots. Sanjay’s dad, who had won huge popularity playing Shiva in a TV soap opera, was a BJP member of the Indian Parliament. Knowing all this, Tony was very concerned about Sanjay, and not in a good way. Tony’s wild romance with Anjali had gotten a lot of play in the Bollywood film press. Bollywood always publicized the love life of its film stars, and the more peculiar, the better.

Sanjay could break both of Tony’s arms like matchsticks. And yet Sanjay had never said a word about the Anjali situation. Tony wasn’t quite sure if this dicey situation was just a given, or completely unspeakable. Many, many things in India were both at the same time.

Tony had a lot of investments in Bangalore, and offshore outsourcing was one of his major lines of work lately. What Anjali got out of all this was less clear to Tony, but Anjali always went along for Sanjay’s hunting trips, no matter where in the world he went. While she was hunting, Anjali was allowed to live without her golden saris, her heavy jewels, her movie cameras, and her greasepaint. Hunting trips were the closest thing to freedom that Anjali would ever be allowed.

Tony was also pretty sure that Anjali had been deputized by the family’s women to spy on Sanjay. She always went along with the big-game hunter to make sure the family’s favored son didn’t do anything unpredictable and James Dean-like, such as blowing his own head off.

The sudden glamorous arrival of Indian film stars had absolutely thrilled the Indian staff at the Colorado telescope facility. The Indian staffers that Tony had hired were Bangalore software hacks, living in America on business visas. Most of the time, the Indian staffers felt very isolated in the remote Colorado mountains. Sanjay and Anjali had done wonders for their morale. Sanjay and Anjali seemed pleased to tour the wonders of the telescope and to pose for friendly snapshots with the staffers. Bombay film stars took their offshore fans very seriously.

With another day’s shooting wrapped up and in the can, the film stars drove to Pinecrest to kill some elk. They took a sturdy set of nicely heated Jeep SUVs, with ruggedized tires and the standard Pinecrest luxury tourist provisions. Their driver and hunting guide was a Chinese servant who called himself “Chet.”

Like all of Mrs. DeFanti’s Chinese ranch staff, Chet was so tidy and reserved as to be practically invisible.

Sanjay sprawled in the Jeep’s toasty passenger seat, wearing a brand-new black cowboy hat and a spotless leather jacket. Pinecrest Ranch had loaned Sanjay an enormous .338 Winchester Magnum. When he wasn’t caressing the rifle, Sanjay made a lot of use of his silver hip flask. Sanjay tended to drink steadily while “hunting,” also easing the tedium with high-stakes poker games and dirty songs in Hindi. Tony and Anjali also rode in Sanjay’s Jeep, sharing the backseat with Tony’s smaller, very uncomfortable 30.06 rifle.

They were trailed by two other big Jeeps from the Pinecrest fleet, bristling with weapons and crammed with Sanjay’s male drinking buddies from the film crew. Being from Bollywood, Sanjay never went anywhere in life without a posse of backup dancers.

The Jeep lurched over a boulder in the uphill trail, and Anjali brushed against him. “Tony,” she fluted. Tony brushed a wrinkle from his nylon jacket. “What,
sajaana
?”

“Tony, you’re too quiet. What are you thinking, Tony?”

“Why, I’m thinking of you,
maahiyaa.
”

Anjali’s eyelids fluttered. She was twenty-three years old and had the eyes of a Mughal concubine. Her eyes inspired in men an uncontrollable urge to shower her with jewels. “So, what, my dear, thinking what? That you miss me when I don’t see you? Because I miss you so much, Tony. Morning, noon, and night.” In a gesture of limpid sincerity, she placed a slender hand against her brassiere. Tony coughed in the dry mountain air. “Baby, sweetie, honey-pie,
terii puuja karuun main to har dam.

”

Anjali broke into a musical peal of laughter. She loved it when he quoted her song lyrics. “Oh, you, you lover boy! Just shut up,
yaar
!”

The Jeep lumbered into a chilly patch of open air and twilight. The long drought had been unkind to Colorado. A local mountain, federal park territory, had snowy slopes measled all over with big seared patches of black ash.

“Your little mountains look so sad,” said Sanjay. “They’re not the Himalayas, dear boy.”

“You’re absolutely right about that,” said Tony.

“And your fancy telescope is too low. Lower than India’s big mountain telescope.”

“Yeah, you mean that Indian Astronomical Observatory up in Hanle?”

“It’s four hundred meters higher than yours.”

“Two hundred meters,” said Tony. “I measured it.”

Sanjay turned in his seat, throwing back a leather-jacketed elbow. His gazellelike eyes were reddened with altitude and drink. “Is that a joke?”

“If you like.”

“I don’t like jokes.”

“I don’t like
you,
” said Tony. Two heartbeats passed.
“Ruup aisa suhaana tera chaand bhii hai
diiwaana tera.”

The Jeep erupted in laughter. Even stony Chet the driver chuckled, relieved to see that Sanjay was guffawing at Tony’s wit instead of putting a bullet through somebody. Sanjay was all chuckles now. “
Bindaas,
” he told his cousin.

Anjali lifted one dainty thumb and wiggled it enthusiastically. It was a gesture completely without any Western equivalent. “
Yehi hai
right choice!” she purred.

The Jeep’s engine labored as Chet fought the slope. Anjali put her pink-nailed hand around Tony’s forearm. “You’re so good with him,” she whispered.

“Am I good for you, precious?”

Anjali glanced toward the front seat. Sanjay was sinking into boozy indifference. Anjali drew her tapered finger down Tony’s cheek and gently caught and pinched his lower lip. This was her favorite caress. Incredibly, as always, it worked on Tony. It blew every circuit in him. It plunged him instantly, wildly, uncontrollably, into the head-spinning saffron depths of the Kama Sutra. Tony had never believed that such things were possible. When he was away from Anjali—and he spent a lot of time away from Anjali, for the sake of his sanity—he found himself incredulous that such things could ever happen between man and woman. But then she’d be back in his arm’s reach, and oh, my God. It wasn’t her beauty that had trapped him, or the fantastic sex, or even the looming, steadily growing danger that some angry man in her family would shoot him dead. It was the sheer sense of wonder, really. Anjali Devgan had been Miss Universe 1999. She was quite likely the most beautiful woman in the entire world.

Chet pulled the Jeep into a sloping meadow.

Sanjay drained his silver hip flask, zipped his leather jacket, shoulder-slung his heavy rifle, and bounded right out the Jeep’s door. The other two vehicles pulled up and stopped, crunching through some low-hanging pine branches. Nobody looked eager to follow the great man and his gun. There had, apparently, been some unlucky incidents in the past.

These Hindi film guys were good-natured media pros. Unlike Sanjay, they were not rifle-toting assassins by conviction. The hip Bombay film dudes were mostly interested in the nifty contents of their Jeeps, which had been loaded with Teutonic thoroughness for the benefit of German hunters. Big windproof tents, portable tables and chairs, gas stoves, odd German board games, ecologically correct windup lanterns, rope, matches, cases of German beer, latrine shovels . . .

In the back of a Jeep, Anjali discovered a thin, silvery NASA space blanket. She pulled it from its plastic wrap. “How pretty.”

“Yeah, baby, that’s for astronauts.”

With a practiced whip of her wrists, Anjali fluttered the thin silver garment through the air. Then she wrapped herself in it with a well-rehearsed, arm-twisting spin. Instant space-age sari. The film boys looked up and applauded cynically.

“It’s warm,” she told him, eyes glowing.

Tony nodded speechlessly. On her, it was so very hot.

Anjali shot him a come-on look that burned the marrow of his thighbones. Then she drifted off into the pines, gently trailing her silver scarf, her spotless Timberland boots flashing over the fallen trees. With a steely effort, Tony waited until Anjali had faded from sight. Inflamed though he was, it wouldn’t do to run off with Anjali in full, blatant sight of the entire crew. Anjali was a clever and practical girl. She wouldn’t run much farther than earshot.

Tony fiddled unconvincingly with his rifle while the boys struggled to set up a nylon and aluminum tent. Stalking elk in Colorado snow was the last thing on the film crew’s minds. As soon as they could manage, they’d be settling into those heated camp chairs to get right into the German beer and the poker cards.

Tony set about to track down his girlfriend.

Unfortunately Tony Carew was a dedicated urbanite. Once in the huge, chilly forest, he quickly lost her footprints and all trace of her. A few discreet Nelson Eddy forest love-calls got no response. When Tony searched harder, he even lost the camp and the Jeeps. How had he managed to wander off without a handheld Global Positioning System? He stumbled through the pines in increasing dismay. He heard the repeated boom of Sanjay’s rifle.

Sanjay had blown away not one, but three elk. The three huge dead animals were lying in a clearing, almost nose to tail, big heaps of bloody meat.

Tony emerged from the woods, his rifle in the crook of his arm.

“They didn’t run,” Sanjay told him.

“They didn’t run?”

“No. What’s wrong with them? They should run from me.”

Tony led Sanjay across the brown, snow-choked grass to his nearest kill. An elk was a huge beast, three times the bulk of a deer. It had a lustrous sofalike hide, and a rack of antlers the size of an easy chair.

The black skin of the animal’s muzzle had a scorched, cracked look. Its eyes were filmed and filthy. Caked slobber was streaked down its muzzle.

Tony switched his rifle from one arm to the other. “Nobody’s been looking after these animals since the old man went wrong in the head.”

Sanjay was as stupid and vain as most young actors, but he had flashes of lucidity. “These animals are sick, Tony. They are
very
sick.” Sanjay tipped his black hat back and raised his elegant brows. “They are blind.”

Tony nodded soberly. “Yes, they are. Do you know of a sickness called ‘elk wasting’?”

“No. So this is it?”

“It’s similar to Mad Cow Disease. From the same source, really. It starts in tainted food. Old DeFanti used to feed his elk cattle chow, to keep them sleek during the winter. I always warned him that the cattle chow might be tainted. But he was an old man, stubborn. Sometimes he wouldn’t listen to good sense.”

An ugly smile spread across Sanjay’s face. “So that is your story, eh?”

“How’s that?”

“I could make a film from this. I could make an epic. The story of Mad Cow Disease. The story of the West. It first came when the British slaughtered sick sheep, and fed the bone meal to innocent cows. A very wicked practice. For years they tried to conceal the sickness from those who ate the flesh of cattle.”

Tony shrugged. “Well, everybody really needed the money.”

“Then the sickness came to America. Not in England’s cattle. In America’s wild animals. ‘Elk wasting,’

it gets a new name here.”

“Well, yes, I guess that’s all true, more or less.”

“And then that Western sickness struck down Tom DeFanti himself! Because the owner of this land fed his animals that evil poison. Then he ate their flesh! Now the madness is inside his own body! The world’s great master of high-tech media is a sad, mad beast!”