The Five Fakirs of Faizabad (13 page)

B
umby’s luck had improved a little since John had persuaded Zagreus the Jinx to accompany him back to London. The local newspaper, the
Bumby Chronicle and Echo,
was even reporting that “green shoots of recovery” had been observed, which was a journalist’s way of saying that people were feeling a little more optimistic about the town’s fortunes. This newfound optimism was largely based on the recent success of the town’s annual cheese-rolling festival, in which several hundred of the stupider inhabitants chased a ten-pound roll of Bumby Cheddar down the slope of a very steep hill. Normally, at least a dozen competitors were injured — mostly broken legs and concussions — and given the town’s run of bad luck, the mayor, Mr. Higginbottom, had actually considered canceling this year’s race out of fear that it might result in some more serious injuries or even a fatality.

Mr. Higginbottom’s controversial decision to go ahead with the ancient race had been vindicated when, to everyone’s
amazement, the race had gone ahead without any injuries at all. Not even a sprained ankle.

“What a ghastly little town,” observed Moo as she flicked through the newspaper with its stories of stolen tortoises, lost cats, dead badgers, and radioactive beaches. “And you say that Mr. Groanin comes here every year for a holiday?”

“Yes,” said Philippa. “It’s weird, isn’t it?”

“Weird? I should say it is weird. The man needs his head examined.”

“Groanin’s always been a bit contrary,” said Philippa. “But he has a good heart.”

“Rag.” Moo tossed the newspaper in a trash bin and followed Philippa into the small family beachfront hotel where they had decided to stay. Mrs. Lightbottom, the proprietor of the Stately Pleasure-dome Guesthouse, eyed Philippa’s luggage, which included her rolled-up flying carpet, with unfriendly suspicion.

“What’s with the blue carpet?” she said sharply. “Linoleum not good enough for you Americans, I suppose.”

“It’s my exercise mat,” lied Philippa.

“Aye, well, I trust you’ll keep the noise down,” said Mrs. Lightbottom. “I wouldn’t want your exercise disturbing the other guests.”

“Are
there any other guests?” inquired Moo.

“Of course there are other guests,” said Mrs. Lightbottom, coloring a little.

“You do surprise me,” said Moo, staring out the door so that she wouldn’t have to look at Mrs. Lightbottom’s
unwelcoming fat face. Every time she saw its tight mouth and supercilious eyebrow she wanted to slap the woman, hard, and shout at her, “You’re a disgrace to British hotel keeping!”

“For your information,” Mrs. Lightbottom said crisply, “there’s an Indian gentleman in Room 11. Mr. Swaraswati.”

“Now there’s a name you don’t hear every day,” murmured Moo.

“Yes, it’s interesting,” agreed Philippa. “Mrs. Lightbottom? What does he look like, this Mr. Swaraswati?”

“What’s it to you?”

Moo sighed. She’d had enough of this woman’s obstreperous ways. She opened her bag and took out the identity card that identified her as the head of the British KGB. “Police,” she said sharply. “Just answer the question.”

Philippa and Mrs. Lightbottom noticed the large gun in Moo’s handbag, and the handcuffs, and the blackjack, which is a kind of police baton; there was also a police radio, a smaller gun, a pepper spray, a large roll of banknotes, and a makeup bag.

“Police?” Mrs. Lightbottom paled and then curtsied. “I’m sorry, Your Ladyship,” she said. “I don’t want no trouble or nothing.”

“Just answer the question, you silly woman,” Moo said brusquely.

Philippa was beginning to think Moo would be a useful person to have along on this adventure. She was a formidable old lady.

“Well, he’s an odd-looking sort and no mistake,” said Mrs. Lightbottom. “Very pale and thin — painfully thin — like he hasn’t eaten in a long time. All he’ll eat now are a few dried biscuits. I never seen anything like it. No appetite at all. A waste I calls it, me being such a good cook ‘n’ all. All he wants is dried water biscuits, almost like his stomach couldn’t handle much else.”

“What else?” said Philippa.

“Let’s see now. Well, he’s old. Very old. Hard to say how old exactly but I wouldn’t be surprised if you said he was a hundred. He wears a long gray beard. And a robe, like one of them foreign monks. And, well, I hope he’ll forgive me for saying so, but he’s just a bit dirty, like he doesn’t wash very much. And dusty, like he’s been lying on the ground.”

“Or in it, perhaps,” said Philippa. “As if he’d been buried alive for a long time.”

“You’re right, Philippa,” said Moo. “That could be our fakir. The one with the great secret that those fake fakirs are looking for.”

“He goes out every day like he’s looking for someone and just wanders around the town. A few years ago, he’d have stuck out like a sore thumb, but not these days. There are all sorts like him in Bumby these days. A regular Khyber Pass ‘round here, so it is.”

“That’s probably why he hasn’t been spotted yet,” said Moo.

“Does he have any friends?” asked Philippa. She was thinking of the fakir’s
dasa,
the servant who was supposed to guard the secret of the fakir’s burial place and be there to
serve him now that he had returned after many centuries of being buried alive.

“None that I’ve seen. He keeps himself to himself. He’s always asking if anyone has left a message for him. But they never have. Not ever. Not so far.”

“Who’s paying his bill?” Moo asked suspiciously.

“He is.”

“With what?”

Mrs. Lightbottom looked guilty.

“Come on, come on.” Moo snapped her fingers. “We haven’t got all day.”

“Now look,” said Mrs. Lightbottom. “I was going to give him any money that was left over, you understand.”

“Left over from what?” asked Moo.

Mrs. Lightbottom opened a drawer in the reception desk and took out a cash box, which she unlocked with a little key that was hanging around her fat neck.

“This,” she said, and handed Moo a gold medallion. “It was hanging around Mr. Swaraswati’s neck when he came in and I said I’d hold on to it by way of a deposit against the final bill.” Mrs. Lightbottom started to wring her hands. “You’re not going to arrest me, are you?”

“Do shut up,” said Moo. “No, I’m not going to arrest you. Not so long as you continue to help us with our inquiries.”

Moo showed Philippa the gold medallion. On one side there was a swastika and on the other a goose.

“Nazi gold, is that?” Mrs. Lightbottom asked lightly.

Moo frowned at her. “What?”

“The swastika, I mean,” said Mrs. Lightbottom.

Moo shook her head. “The swastika is an ancient Hindu good luck or religious symbol,” she said. “Very ancient. The earliest recorded example is some three thousand years old.”

“Is that so?” said Mrs. Lightbottom. “I didn’t think he looked like a Nazi. Not with those sandals.”

“It’s him,” Philippa told Moo. “It has to be him.”

“I agree,” said Moo. “Is he in his room now?”

Mrs. Lightbottom looked at the key rack behind her head. There were only three keys missing: the two she had given Philippa and Moo, and one other, which was the key to Room 11.

“Yes,” she said.

Moo unfolded a sheet of printed paper and laid it on the reception desk. “Sign this,” she said. “What is it?”

“It’s the Official Secrets Act. Basically, it means you’ll be sent to prison if you tell anyone about the man in Room 11, or repeat the details of our conversation.”

“And if I don’t sign?”

“You’ll be sent to prison immediately,” said Moo.

Mrs. Lightbottom snatched up a pen, quickly signed the Official Secrets Act, and then curtsied again as Moo folded up the piece of paper and placed it carefully in her handbag.

“You mentioned a great secret,” said Mrs. Lightbottom. “Is this Mr. Swaraswati dangerous?”

“I can’t tell you how dangerous,” said Moo. “What he knows could affect the safety not just of the country, but of the whole world.”

Hearing this, Mrs. Lightbottom felt a little faint and sat down heavily.

Moo and Philippa went upstairs and along a cold corridor to Room 11.

“You know it’s just possible he really is dangerous,” Moo whispered.

“I was thinking the same thing,” confessed Philippa. “At the very least he’s likely to be a bit cranky. After all, you’re buried alive for centuries you expect a bit of TLC when you surface again.”

Moo took out her gun and checked that it was loaded.

But Philippa shook her head. “You won’t need a gun,” she said. “Really. I know what I’m doing. So, take it easy with that thing.”

To her own surprise, Philippa realized that she really did know what she was doing. For the first time in her young djinn life she felt entirely equal to the situation that now presented itself. And she supposed that this was all down to what Nimrod would have called “experience.” The kind of experience that told her it might just be a good idea to enter the room invisibly.

“Come on,” she said, walking farther along the corridor and opening the door to her own room. “I think we’d best do this the subtle way.”

Philippa lay down on her bed.

“This is no time to lie down on the job,” said Moo.

“I’m going to slip out of my body for a few minutes,” Philippa explained. “So that I can take a look in his room without any risk.”

“The softly, softly approach,” said Moo. “I understand. Good idea.”

“You won’t notice anything until I come back,” Philippa added. “Except that I’ll appear like I’m in a trance or something. So don’t worry. I’m not dead. Okay?”

Moo nodded. “Understood.” She sat down on a chair and slipped off her shoes to await Philippa’s return.

Philippa floated invisibly out of her room and back along the corridor. Outside Room 11, she paused for a moment and looked more closely at the door. Over a period of time she’d noticed that some materials were harder to penetrate as spirit than others, with steel being the hardest. It was easier slipping through solids when you knew exactly what they were made of. This door was made of wood, which was relatively easy to walk through. That is, as long as you were spirit. A transubstantiated state was a different thing altogether. It always struck Philippa as a strange paradox that a djinn could be trapped inside a lamp or a bottle merely because a djinn’s transubstantiated, smokelike form was very different from a djinn’s disembodied, spiritual state. As different as it was from a djinn’s physical body.

She braced herself and stepped through the door.

The room was plain and cold and, in this respect at least, it seemed to reflect Mrs. Lightbottom’s forbidding personality. The floor was covered in brown linoleum. On the wall was a picture of a Chinese girl wearing a brown dress with a golden collar that was the same as the one in Philippa’s own room and in the corridor outside. The Chinese girl had a sad, green face as if she’d eaten something that had
disagreed with her badly, and for this reason it seemed like a strange picture to hang on a wall of a hotel where, if the smell from the kitchen was anything to go by, the food was likely to be quite horrible. It seemed more than likely that Mr. Swaraswati might have agreed with this: On the bedside table was a large plate of water biscuits and a glass of water.

On the bed lay what looked to Philippa like the dead body of a very old man. He appeared to be a thinner, dirtier, more ancient version of Mr. Burton, although such a thing seemed hardly possible. A strong smell of earth hung about the man, the result, Philippa concluded, of having been buried alive for many centuries. His eyes stared straight up at the featureless ceiling. And there was no discernible sign of movement from his chest or stomach to persuade her that the man was alive. It appeared that she was too late.

“Oh, no,” said Philippa. “Please don’t say he’s dead.”

The man lying on the bed blinked slowly.

“Not dead,” he said. “Just resting.”

“Sorry to disturb you,” said Philippa. “I just popped in to see that you were all right.”

“I’m very much, as you can see,” said Mr. Swaraswati. “Perhaps a more interesting question is why can’t I see you?”

“Please don’t be alarmed, Mr. Swaraswati,” said Philippa. “I mean you no harm.”

“I can tell that from your voice,” said Mr. Swaraswati.

“You’re looking for your
dasa,
am I right?”

“Yes. And the
dasa
should be looking for me. Has something happened? Are you the
dasa?”

“No, I’m a djinn, called Philippa,” said Philippa. “But I am here to help you if I can.”

Mr. Swaraswati smiled faintly. “Now there’s a coincidence,” he said. “That’s what I’m here for. To help. Or so I thought.”

“You’ve been tricked,” said Philippa. “By some wicked mendicant fakirs. Somehow, they were able to identify the
dasa
who lives here and have been watching him in the hope that he might lead them to you and your secret. We think they brought about a radical change in the luck that exists in this little town in the hope that it would provoke you to raise yourself up from your buried state. We think that the
dasa
knows this and is reluctant to come and look for you for fear of giving you away.”

“Who is ‘we’?” asked Mr. Swaraswati.

“My uncle Nimrod is a djinn, too,” said Philippa. “He asked me to come and find you and offer you some assistance.”

“How do I know that you’re not in league with these wicked mendicant fakirs that you mentioned?”

“You don’t,” said Philippa. “Not for sure. But I think you can trust me just as long as I don’t try to find out your secret. The one given to you by the Tirthankar of Faizabad.”

“Good point,” said Mr. Swaraswati. “But still, it’s a little hard to trust anyone who remains invisible.”

“That’s for sure,” said Philippa. “Perhaps if I was to go and fetch my physical body? It’s in the next room with my friend Moo.”

“Is she a djinn, too?”

“No. She’s human. Would you like to come and meet us?”

“Yes. Perhaps that would be best.”

“We’re in Room 13.”

Mr. Swaraswati sat up and swung his thin legs off the bed. Then he stood and arched his back with difficulty. “I’m rather stiff,” he said. “It comes from being buried alive.”