Necropath (7 page)

My friends now call me Tiger.

It had been the best present Sukara had ever received—proof, after so long, that her little sister was alive and well. She kept the scarf safe beneath her pillow and dreamed of one day meeting Pakara again outside Nazruddin’s.

* * * *

THE GRIEF THAT CORRODES

Vaughan dosed himself on chora before setting out to meet Jimmy Chandra. The drug had its usual effect of dulling his mind to the emanations of the teeming millions around him, and the side effect of damping his melancholia. He found he could think about Tiger without wanting to lash out in rage— as he had done at midday when, unable to sleep despite the chora, he’d paced his apartment, kicking furniture and punching the wall.

He stepped from the upchute station into the light-spangled night of the upper-deck and forced his way through the oncoming tide of humanity. Chandi Road was packed with a solid flow of dark-faced, white-shirted Indians, less a collection of individuals than some great gestalt being, constantly shedding units of itself and gaining others on its snaking progression through the canyon-like streets.

Stalls and carts and kiosks lined each side of the street before the lighted shop-fronts, opportunist one-man enterprises selling cooked food, incense, fruit and vegetables, plaster-cast effigies of Hindu gods, juices, and cure-all elixirs. A warm wind carried a thousand fragrances, mixing the scent of hair oil, rose-water, joss sticks, and masala paste in a cloying perfume predominantly sweet but occasionally shot through with the pungent reek of air-car fumes and cow dung. The noise was constant, the jangling tinnitus of Indian pop music accompanied by a never-ending hubbub of chatter.

Vaughan had never before experienced crowds like those in the Himachal sector of Bengal Station. Overcrowding had inculcated into the Hindu psyche no concept of the inviolability of personal space. There was no taboo on physical contact. Flesh pressed flesh; bodies squirmed against bodies.

He had long since learned how to negotiate the crowds: you had to tread the fine line between being forceful and aggressive. Use of the hands was necessary to part reluctant bodies, as was the judicious employment of the shoulder. Retiring Westerners and colonists new to the dog-eat-dog etiquette of the Station were lost in the flow, like non-swimmers caught and carried off in a riptide. Most visitors chose to travel by exorbitant taxi-flier, or avoid the Indian sectors altogether. The Thai area of the Station, to the north, was a comparative haven of space and civilization, and, as far as Vaughan was concerned, lacked character.

In scan-mode he would have been unable to face the torrent of minds in the thoroughfare—the overload of so many individual identities invading his own would have obliterated his sense of self. Even unaugmented, the buzz of a thousand minds so close would have affected him like a severe migraine. But with the sedative of the chora damping his senses he felt safe: each mind was a sphere of modulated music, contained within itself.

A gaudy array of neon arrows pulsed in the darkness up ahead, pointing to the entrance of Nazruddin’s. Vaughan paused outside the restaurant, watching the street kids. They were a sorry gaggle of waifs and strays, pot-bellied and skinny-limbed—or missing limbs altogether—which Vaughan seemed to see afresh tonight with eyes made observant by loss. Every time a diner approached the open doorway, a couple of kids forced themselves across the sidewalk on crutches, palms outstretched. Occasionally they were rewarded with a carelessly tossed confetti of low-denomination notes, grudgingly given. More often than not they were ignored. He tried to banish the image of Tiger from his mind’s eye.

He hurried into the restaurant, glanced around the packed tables for Chandra—but the cop was late. Nazruddin lifted a meaty hand in greeting from his station behind the counter and ambled over as Vaughan seated himself in his booth.

“Mr. Vaughan! Are you dining tonight? Today’s speciality—”

“Just a beer, P.K.”

Nazruddin squeezed a wink, a gesture at once servile and complicit. He snapped his fingers and yelled in Hindi. A thin-legged, teenage waiter hurried over with a bottle of Blue Mountain lager. Nazruddin made a performance of drying the condensation from the bottle and pouring a glass.

“No Tiger, Mr. Vaughan?”

“No,” he said. “No, not tonight.”

As Nazruddin smiled and sailed away, Vaughan found himself wishing that Nazruddin had known about Tiger’s death and expressed his condolences. It seemed a slight to Tiger’s memory that her passing was not universal knowledge—people’s ignorance of the fact that she was no longer around seemed to devalue her existence retrospectively: she was just another parasitical street kid, after all, and one fewer would not be missed.

He cursed his muddled introspection. The chora was wearing off. He pulled the vial from his pocket, tipped a liberal dose into his glass, and drank. He began to feel his senses dull.

Jimmy Chandra arrived five minutes later.

“Jeff, good to see you. It must be what... three, four years?”

Chandra stood uncertainly before the booth, the confidence of his greeting not matched by his expression. He was a short, trim, boyish-faced Indian in the khaki uniform of an investigator. His smile was the perpetual feature of his round face, but today the smile was uneasy.

“It’s okay, Jimmy. I’m not reading. Why don’t you sit down? I’ll get you a beer.” He gestured to the waiter.

Chandra slid into the opposite seat. “I’ve got nothing to hide, Jeff. Nothing personal, that is— even if you were in scan-mode. But, you know—investigations...”

“Hey, don’t mention it.”

Chandra’s smile lost its uneasiness, became eager. “So, how are you? It’s been a long time. I called by your apartment, but you were always out.”

“I work unsocial hours, Jimmy.” In fact, Vaughan had always ignored Chandra’s odd call. He had nothing against the young cop, but the thought of socialising had never really struck him as that important.

The strange thing was, he liked Jimmy Chandra. He reminded Vaughan of himself before the operation to make him telepathic had spoilt his illusions. Like Chandra, he’d been idealistic, hopeful for both himself and humanity.

Chandra sipped his beer. His mind emanated a melody of harmonious emotions. Vaughan was unable to read individual thoughts without his augmentation-pin, but he received a general mood of charity and well-being from the young cop. It seemed that he’d changed little over the years.

Chandra rolled his glass between flattened palms. “Well, how are you?” he asked again.

Vaughan shrugged and turned his palm in a
you-know, so-so
gesture. He knew that Chandra found his negativity, his laconic cynicism, more than a little discomfiting.

The beer and the chora combined were having an effect. He found himself saying, “Can you remember Tiger? Street kid, one leg?”

“Sure.” Chandra smiled. “Sure I remember her— you helped her out, right?”

Vaughan recalled Chandra’s approval, tinged with just the hint of suspicion, when he’d introduced the cop to Tiger years ago.

“Tiger died early today.”

He could not look into Chandra’s face when he, said this. He waited five seconds, then looked up.

Chandra was not smiling; his mood had darkened. Perhaps he sensed that Vaughan was baiting him, taunting him with another example of how horrible the world was. Vaughan recalled one drunken meeting when he had, cruelly and cynically, tried to explain to Chandra the true awfulness of the human condition. It had been here, in this very booth. He recalled that he’d repeated one line over and over—
if you could only see what I’ve seen
—without telling the cop too much about his past: his work with the Toronto police, the minds he’d read.

“I’m sorry,” Chandra said now.

Vaughan stared down at his beer. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this.”

“Perhaps by talking, sharing the pain, it might make it a little easier.”

Vaughan almost smiled. The same idealistic Chandra as ever. He looked up. “Nothing can make it any easier, Jimmy. That’s bullshit. It might make it easier at the time, briefly. But nothing can take away the grief that corrodes over the years.”

Chandra stared at him. “I thought you said Tiger died this morning?”

The cop was fishing, but Vaughan was not taking the bait. There were some things that were beyond discussing.

“Like I said, I don’t know why I’m telling you about Tiger.” He paused. “She was just another scheming street kid. But she meant something to me.” He dried up; he couldn’t tell the cop why she meant something to him.

Chandra said, tentatively, “I remember you saying that no one meant anything to you, or words to that effect.”

Vaughan shrugged. He pushed his glass around the table. “I arranged her funeral earlier today. And guess what?” He forced an ironic laugh. “They’re all booked up down at the burning ghats during the day. The only time they’ve got free is at one in the morning. How about that?”

Chandra shrugged. “Tough.”

“Yeah, tough.” Vaughan said. “It’ll make a pretty bonfire, though.”

The cop cleared his throat, nodded at Vaughan’s empty bottle. “Another beer?” He turned and called the waiter.

Vaughan stared at his empty glass. He’d stay here till past midnight, get loaded, then go down to the ghats and attend the funeral ceremony which, now that he’d arranged it, seemed increasingly meaningless. Drunk, he might not be able to recall all the morbid details. Tiger would have understood.

When the beer arrived, Vaughan sat up and looked across at Jimmy. “So much for all that shit, Officer Chandra. You didn’t come here to watch me crying into my drink.”

Chandra gave a
think-nothing-of-it
smile. “I must admit, it was a surprise to hear from you. I’m pleased you got in touch.”

Vaughan wondered if the cop was lying. “So you got something on Weiss?” he asked.

“Came up with some interesting facts.” He looked at Vaughan. “Can you tell me what you have against this guy?”

“It might be nothing. I might be being paranoid, who knows? What did you find?”

“Well, it appears that his identity is suspect for a start. He has papers to certify he’s a citizen of the European Federation. But I’ve run checks with Europe and drawn a blank. He just doesn’t exist. The persona of Gerhard Weiss is a front. Likewise all his qualification cards and records—all forgeries.”

Vaughan nodded, showing a calm he did not feel. He’d had no idea what might be discovered by putting Chandra on the trail of his boss at the ‘port, but this was far more than he’d hoped for.

“Okay, but this is between you and me.” He poured two beers and told Chandra about Weiss and the ships from Verkerk’s World, Vega II.

Chandra looked up from his beer when Vaughan stopped talking. “Could he be smuggling something to Earth?”

“More like
someone
—someone he doesn’t want me reading.”

“Wouldn’t this someone just leave the ship wearing a mind-shield?”

Vaughan shook his head. “I have the authority to take every traveller with a shield into custody and demand its removal. Weiss wouldn’t want me doing that.”

“Right.” Chandra said. “But why didn’t you just read Weiss’s mind?”