BLOOD RED SARI (21 page)

‘An accountant, maybe? Or a lawyer?’

‘Not that kind of help. Not with the actual documents, I mean. This is a guy who has powerful connections with … with all kinds of people. I think he might be able to find out who the men were who tried to kill me earlier. Or who’s behind them and behind the police and bureaucracy that’s harassing me too. Because this thing is big, Anita, I hope you know that? Whoever these people are that your friend Lalima pissed off, they have great resources. The fuckers shut down my business and ruined my life, all in a couple of hours. Now I’m a fugitive on the run trying to figure out what the hell I did to get into this mess. I thought I was done with this kind of shit.’

Anita was silent a moment. ‘Were they Malayalis?’

Sheila frowned. ‘Who? The men who tried to kill me?’ She grinned despite her anger. ‘No, Anita, they were definitely not Malayalis. I think they were Americans.’

‘Americans? Really?’ Anita sounded confused.

‘Like I said, this is bigger than either of us may know. Listen, do you have a number where I can reach you?’

‘I lost my cell phone when I … I have to get another one. When I do, I’ll call you.’

‘Okay. But don’t text or email. Those are easier to intercept and track.’

‘I know. I’ll be in touch. I hope your powerful shady friend can give you some info.’

‘I hope so too.’ Sheila thought of mentioning the professor, poring over the documents and analyzing them even now, but for some reason decided against it. ‘You take care, girl. Survive.’

‘It’s what I do,’ Anita said, then was gone.

Sheila stood for a moment, holding the iPhone in her hand and leaning against the car. A little dew had started to collect on the metal top but it was absorbed by the construction dust. There was an enormous old banyan tree – bathed in the same blue–green glow from the tower – bang in the middle of the construction site she was looking at.
The Burj.
It looked like some tree out of mythology, yggrdrasil. Or parijata. She wondered how leaves could breathe in that environment. She supposed if people could survive, they could too. Probably better than people. She liked the sound of this woman Anita’s voice and her attitude. She felt better just knowing she wasn’t alone in this thing, that there was someone else out there going through the same shit. It also gave her more information than she had before. That could only be good.

She got into the taxi and told the driver to take her to the tower.

Eleven

11.1

ANITA FELT BETTER AFTER
she had spoken to Sheila. She liked the sound of the woman’s voice, her discreet yet matter-offact attitude. She hadn’t said more than she needed to, yet she had been frank and open to a stranger. She wondered what Sheila looked like, what she was wearing. She put the HTC down on the examination table and when her fingers touched the steel table, it felt ice cold. She felt her neck and forehead with the back of her hand. Yes, she was feverish. Not just feverish. Really, really hot. Maybe it was something the doctor had given her; maybe it was just the past couple of days and her injuries catching up with her.

I got Philip shot. He’s dead. It’s my fault.

She realized it had been too long since the doctor had been away. There were no other human patients in the clinic, but should he have left her alone this long? Where was the male nurse she had seen earlier? They were a regular doctor and nurse, not vets, she had heard the injured boy’s mother or aunt say earlier. So they couldn’t have gone back to the main veterinary hospital to treat the sick animals. Maybe they had gone off duty for the day. It still didn’t explain why the place was so empty. And quiet.

Something’s wrong. It’s been more than half an hour. If he called an ambulance it would have been here by now. So would the police.

A woman moaned loudly with pain, the kind of moan a delirious malaria-ridden woman makes in a hospital bed when she’s racked by the shivers that accompany the disease.

Anita realized with a shock that it was her.
She
was the woman moaning.

She looked down. She had put her foot down on the ground. That was what had elicited the moan.

Bastard gave me something. Some kind of sedative or tranquilizer.

And then he had called someone.

She had to get the fuck out of here, fast.

She tried to take a couple of steps but the pain was excruciating. Yet there was a layer of numbness between her and the pain. So the doctor had given her something, but the fracture could probably not deal with having her weight on it anymore. The memory of the day was doubtless making it scream in agony. No more.

But she
had
to step on it. She
had
to walk. She had to get the fuck out of here before Isaac and Graham and whoever else they were mixed up with came to get her. Because this time there would be no Bibles, no mistakes. They would
get
her.

‘Come on, bitch. Man up,’ she said, then snorted a burst of laughter, spraying mucus from her running nose. Her eyes and nose and throat were all running because of the pain and because she was literally weeping with the pain. She had laughed because of the incongruity of her being a woman telling herself to ‘man’ up. ‘Woman up, bitch,’ she corrected herself. That sounded better. Toughness wasn’t an exclusive male privilege.

If women can have babies without epidurals, I can fucking walk on a broken foot.

She gritted her teeth and limped towards the entrance of the clinic.

By the door, she spotted a crutch, leaning against the side of a medicine cabinet with a glass front. There were two or three of them. She almost cried again with relief.

‘Give me that, fucker,’ she said aloud, not even aware she was speaking aloud.

She tried on and discarded the first one for being too high. It was taller than her head. She tossed it aside. It fell against the front of the cabinet and cracked the glass. She didn’t care. She tried the second one. It was a perfect fit.

‘Howzzat!’ she cried, shooting up a finger in the universal gesture of a cricket fan.

She fixed the crutch under her armpit, happy that it was padded. She hopped a step or two on it and was so pleased to have the weight taken off her broken foot, she cried a little more out of relief.

She turned and hopped out of the entrance, into the main zoo.

Except for the distant sounds of various animals, it was quiet outside. She sniffed at the raw stench of manure, piled somewhere nearby in the darkness. She hobbled down the pathway, trying to remember the way she had come with the security guard. Not a soul was in sight, and from down here, she couldn’t see a thing. She might as well have been in the backwater swamplands. The zoo was heavily wooded and she guessed the trees and animal habitats blocked the light and the view.

She saw a few glimmers of light here and there in the darkness, but they seemed very far away. Still, there was light enough on the pathway to see by, so she decided to stick with it and put as much distance between herself and the clinic as possible. Once she was at large in the zoo, it would be as difficult for them to find her as it was for her to see anything. She hopped until she found a divergence in the path and turned right without thinking about it. Either the painkiller was kicking in now or the activity was making her feel better. She wasn’t moaning any more or crying, and damn, she loved this fucking crutch.

She continued for what seemed like kilometres and hours. Finally, she stopped, exhausted and feeling as if her joints were stiffening from the exertion. She hobbled close to a wall and leaned against it. She was afraid to sit because she knew it would hurt like hell when she had to get up again. She didn’t know what the security system was like in the zoo; whether the guards did regular sweeps or searches or just went home for the night.

Yeah, sure, it’s a concentration camp. They have searchlights sweeping the walls and sentries in towers with precision rifles. It’s a fucking zoo, Anita. The only occupants are in cages or behind high walls.

She shook her head at her own stupidity, knowing it was the continual pain of the injury and then the medication that were clouding her thinking. But that was dangerous. It could get her killed. She had to stay sharp.

Nobody came, no voices yelled out in the night, no gun shots rang out, no police sirens – or even the wails of an ambulance.

She leaned against the wall more, letting almost all her weight rest on it. It felt so good just to be still and to have the weight off her feet. Foot, actually. Damn, she loved this crutch.

It was dead quiet in this part of the zoo. She had no idea where she was. With its labyrinthine turns and slopes, the layout of the place eluded her. But she thought she would be able to hear anyone approaching. She decided to chance making another call. By the light of the HTC, she fumbled with the courier receipts, searching for the phone number of the last recipient.

11.2

RAJENDRA POWAR RETURNED WITH
a doctor and a nurse. The nurse looked terrified witless, eyes darting this way then that. She saw the man on the ground and Advaita, and reacted as though they were the first dead bodies she had ever seen. Rajendra Powar pointed emphatically at Advaita, then jumped over her body and came towards Nachiketa. The doctor bent and began checking Advaita with a stethoscope. The nurse just stood staring around her as if expecting gunmen to leap out of the corners and start shooting. She chanced on Nachiketa across the room and stared at her wide eyed. Nachiketa raised her hand to Powar and the nurse started, as if shocked that Nachiketa was not a corpse. Powar pulled her legs free of the last bit of the bed sheets – damn, these hospitals really tucked those sheets and blankets in tightly – and began to pick her up.

‘Wait, wait,’ she said. ‘Tehro.’

He paused, bent over in an awkward angle. The whole thing was taking place in a pantomime, she felt. The doctor was still examining Advaita with the stethoscope. Couldn’t he see that her eyes were open and she wasn’t breathing and she had vomited gouts of blood? The nurse was still standing there doing nothing but gaping, like a character in a black-and-white slapstick comedy. The Three Stooges, or Abbott and Costello, or Laurel and Hardy. Nachiketa reached out and grabbed the sheets on the bed, trying to align them by hitting them on the floor so she could get them into the yellow manila envelope. It was difficult with the mittens on, but she managed somehow. She thought there might be a few pages strewn here or there, the ones Advaita had been holding up to demonstrate the point she was making before the gunman came in, but she didn’t want to search for them. She just wanted to get the hell out of here and so put the envelope on her lap and nodded to the security guard.

‘Okay,’ she said to Powar. ‘Uthao.’

He took hold of her and picked her up with almost no effort. He was trying to avoid holding her with his hands, not out of modesty but because of the burns on his palms. She could identify with that. Her own palms felt awful and she didn’t know if it was the ointment inside the bandages or blood or pus or what-the-fuck. He carried her around the bed just as the LCD TV’s screen, hanging together like a glassine spiderweb, came crashing down in pieces on the side table with the flower vase. A little glass fell on his shoulder and she brushed it off with her mittens – that’s what the bandaged hands looked and felt like, hands in oven mittens – without thinking about it. He continued around the bed, then stepped over Advaita’s body to get to the door.

The doctor raised his head from the dead body of Nachiketa’s friend just as Powar stepped over it, and Powar’s knee struck the doctor’s forehead a slight glancing blow. The doctor fell back on his bum, landing heavily. The stethoscope, not anchored to his ears at that instant, fell somewhere behind him on the floor with a metallic clatter. The nurse made a sound and stared down at the doctor who was sitting with his head exactly between her legs, looking up her skirt without intending to. Beside him, the German gunman lay on the ground, his head, mouth and hand smashed by the stool Powar had wielded.

The security guard carried Nachiketa out of the private room into the main burn ward. There were doctors and nurses and ward boys milling about. Some of them crouched behind stretchers and tables when they saw Powar emerging, ducking to avoid being shot. They were all staring wide-eyed, but one very old ward boy with his cap perched at a jaunty angle on his almost-bald head was grinning for some inane reason. He grinned at Nachiketa as she was carried past him down the corridor.