The PuppetMaster (6 page)

At first he had rejected the idea based on redundancy. A similar event eight months earlier had gone well, but one of his rules was never to repeat events. Repetition created patterns and patterns brought traceable clues.

However, the more he considered this new design, the more he liked it. There was enough variation to it.

Ultimately, his decision to accept the plan came from the numbers. The earlier attacks required more plastique, more charges, and a larger team. This required a small team and in all likelihood, only six charges. But the numbers, the deaths it could produce . . . that was the deciding factor.

With the basic idea still twisting around in his mind, Sutradharak got out of bed and made a pot of coffee. Details always needed research, and research needed to be done in the capital. He began preparations to travel to New Delhi.

Nine

I screamed and strained every muscle against the walls of the cell, but like an animal being slowly choked into submission, no sound came out. The sphere that surrounded me, trapped me, was transparent and nauseatingly tight. I clawed and scratched at the slickness, pushed out in four directions like DaVinci’s naked man. But the surface only flexed like thick, unyielding cellophane. Impenetrable. I screamed again. Silence. Colors pulsed from blue to scarlet and back again, the colors of blood. I sobbed. Beaten, I slid to my knees. With shoulders slumped, I began twisting in slow spirals. It was always slow spirals. My nightmare had returned.

I woke up drenched in sweat. The air was still cool by summer standards of Uttar Pradesh. The sun had not yet risen above bank of the river, but atop my linen, I was soaked in pools of my own perspiration.

The fan above me spun in a slow thwumping tempo, and I exhaled in panicked breaths into the draft. Three years I had suffered through my nightmare. Like a soap opera it came with variety, but always with the same theme. Over the last ten months it had receded enough that I believed it had left for good, but like a silent thief it had crept back. And the bubble, that fucking corpuscle of blood, still trapped me.

That bubble had changed my life, every facet of it. It was the tiny unforeseen event that had altered my course of life forever.

I stared at the blades of the fan. For a year now I’d been able to push her memory down, or back, or wherever we push such things--managed to keep her fragrance and eyes locked inside a vault of unwanted recollections.

The fan drew me in, and there at the center lay Lilia--where I always saw her--curled and shaking upon the carpet. She looked strangely peaceful, like a child twitching in an afternoon nap. Our pizza sat half eaten on the table, our mugs of beer half full. The air was dry and hot with the Santa Anas that had been whistling in from the Mojave.

Moments earlier we had been laughing--an exchange of childish stories that lovers do so well. She was telling me about her mother’s house in Oaxaca, of eating mole poblano with her cousins on the porch. Then mid-sentence she stopped, and with a puzzled look, stared at me, and then looked at the lights as if they were too bright for the softness of her eyes. Like a priest beseeching the heavens, her eyes rolled upward. Her hand reached out to touch my face, then she leaned forward and slid most naturally from her seat, looking as if she were simply retrieving a napkin from the floor. But Lilia Garza Morales, the woman I had loved for a year and a thousand lifetimes, slid to the carpet and never got up. She died with my hands wrapped pleadingly about her head.

The doctors explained everything. They clipped images and scans onto white lights and showed me the post-aneurysm section of her brain. Pointed with sad, intelligent fingers at the bubble, and explained in practiced phrases all the reasons for how Lilia had slipped from my life.

But none of them, not a single one, could explain why.

It was September, and we were to be married in November in a ceremony of elegant simplicity on a knoll above the ocean. It was something we looked forward to more for our family and friends than for us, because Lilia and I were already joined. We knew it the moment we met--a union of a thousand lifetimes, the botanist and the linguist our friends called us, naturals together.

We had met during a dreary wait in the admissions office at the university in Berkeley. She was standing behind me swearing colorfully in Spanish and I began laughing at the creativity and turned to see who the speaker was.

Our eyes met, and we laughed, and she asked my name, but it was as if she already knew.

The next day we shared chili rellenos in a restaurant on Telegraph Avenue, and the second half of that day was spent in a library together. We were grad students after all. But it was like we were simply re-acquainting after a time apart. By the week’s end we were rolling naked in a bed too small, in an apartment with one closet. We kissed chow mien from each other’s lips, memorized lines from old movies, and body-surfed in cool waves. It became a single year of bliss.

For three hundred and seventy days Lilia and I were a union, studied together, and spoke the language of academicians and lovers. The future was ours, I ready to discover the roots of great poetry, she the roots of healing plants. Then the bubble, in a few short seconds, took it all. And those horrible seconds replayed far too often in my nightmares.

I spread Lilia’s ashes in our favorite swimming cove the day we were to be married, and in the months that followed, friends came to me the way the doctors had, comforting me with selected words, telling me to keep her face in my memory. They wrapped consoling arms about my shoulders and said in sad intonation, ‘celebrate your time together, Marty. Take the joy you shared and never forget how wonderful it was.’ Fuck them. Fuck them! They didn’t feel the blade that sliced into me when I saw the curve of her shoulders and hair. They didn’t feel the ripping of arteries when I gazed into the eyes that no longer looked back. No, I wouldn’t celebrate those memories. I couldn’t, because every time I did it felt like my flesh was on fire and my soul was being charred.

So, I took the union of a thousand lifetimes and hid it. I took her face, her smell, her touch, every piece of her, and set it in a box and cast it into the closet of my past life. And I left. Some might even say I fled.

I looked at the fan again and drew a breath. I was in back in Varanasi and Lilia’s face had receded once more. Sahr’s coffee was calling me to splash it with milk and sip it in my wobbly chair. Read the local news. Ease into the day. There were the cave photographs to be loaded into the computer, linguistic mysteries to be solved.

“Good morning, Sahr.” I entered the kitchen sheepishly, having been too exhausted the previous evening to eat much. I'd snacked only on a few fritters and gone straight to bed instead of sitting down to the meal she had prepared for me.

“Good morning, Master Bhimaji. How is the famous explorer of caves doing this fine day?” I glanced at her frown. Behind it was the faintest hint of a grin, and behind that the same worried look as the day before. The fear that my journey was going to cause some great physical harm to me, if not induce worldwide calamity, still hovered.

“I am doing quite well this morning, as you can see. I thought it might be good to eat a few of those delicious puris you prepared last night, and some pakoras too. No American toast for me today.” Good way to start the conversation.

“As you wish, Sahib. I will heat them for you. The puris will likely be flat and oily since they have gone uneaten for ten hours, but the pakoras will be nearly as good as they would have been last night.” I didn’t miss the ‘nearly’ part. I was receiving Sahr’s version of a slap on the wrist. I also noted her use of the title ‘Sahib,’ her verbal version of a frown.

I ladled out a healthy portion of compliments as I ate breakfast, and as Sahr was clearing the plate I had nearly licked clean, added one more, “You could have cooked for Radha and Krishna, Sahr. No one on the planet makes pakoras as good as yours. They are fit for the gods.”

“Bhimaji is either joking with me or he wants something.”

“No, it’s true, they are the best, but I actually do need something of you.”

“Ah, I knew it. I can read you better than my deva cards.”

“Not a doubt in my mind, but I do have a request, small but important.”

She waited, expecting me to add some task to her daily chores, which wouldn’t have irked her in the least. She looked a tad disappointed when I said, “It’s important that you tell no one that Devamukti and I traveled outside the city yesterday. No mention of caves, photographs, or a journey, nothing at all. Okay?”

In addition to all the other things Sahr did well, she understood when I was serious about a request, and unlike Lalji, I could depend upon her prudence. He was my weak link, and she--by the nature of her consultations--was quite discreet.

“As Bhimaji wishes,” She looked at me as if the specters of ill fortune were still floating around my head. “and I will not ask the reason for this secrecy, though I am certain that it has something to do with the danger that Durgabal and my cards predicted.”

“We are not in any danger, Sahr. It is just important no one hear that Master and I went to this place. You know how people talk about us ferenghis and what we do.”

She smiled for the first time that morning. “Yes, Bhimaji. Bahut, bahut gupchup in this city.”

“Well, let’s make sure there isn’t any gupchup about my journey.” I tried to look as authoritative as possible. “And if you will be so kind as to remind Lalji of this. A firm reminder?”

“It will be my pleasure. And what would the rajah of the house wish for dinner tonight? That is assuming he will be here for dinner.”

“I will definitely be here, Most Glorious One, and I will dine on your best selections. You prepare whatever delights come to mind and I will be here. How’s that for an answer?”

She grinned. “That is a good answer, Master Bhim.” She turned to the pantry, while I went to the salon to read the newspaper and load the photographs from the camera into the laptop.

The local news wasn’t good. Followers of Yakoob Qereshy had decided a protest march wasn’t a clear enough signal to send to the authorities for detaining Muslims. A police station in Jaunpur, between Lucknow and Varanasi, had been attacked and torched overnight. No one was injured, but the message of anger had been sent.

I looked out the window. Still no sign of rain.

Ten

There were two reasons I was certain no thief would attempt to steal the bicycle I left unlocked on the right side of my villa. It was so old and looked so unsafe as to be un-rideable even by Asian standards. It also had a frame with seat raised so high any thief would have toppled headlong into the first tree along the escape route. She was unsightly, shimmied unmercifully on hard right turns, and she was mine. I knew every nuance of her maneuverability, and after hours of careful consideration I’d dubbed her Ugly Bike. On better days, Miss Ugly. I loved every square centimeter of her disfigured surface. Five days a week I would swing a leg over the saddle and pump her mud-caked pedals like a log-roller to weave down Shivanan Avenue, scattering chickens, children, and dogs like a mad horseman. I was a seasoned cyclist in the streets of South Nagpur and even wily rickshaw drivers paid me homage. The image of colliding with such a large ferenghi on such an ugly bicycle put enough fear in their hearts, or sense in their heads, that they pulled prudently to the side whenever I hurtled towards them.

My home was on the southern edge of Varanasi, in a less populated neighborhood two hundred meters from The Ganges. The villa had been a fortuitous discovery a month after my arrival. All the others I had inspected were either in very crowded neighborhoods or so rundown and mildewed as to deter me from living in them. My house was spacious and clean, with a shaded courtyard, a wall with wrought iron fence and rusty blades jutting from the top. From the veranda one stepped into a large salon with comfortable, overstuffed furniture. To the side there was a bedroom complete with—praise the devas—a quiet, high-speed fan. In the back, there was a kitchen outfitted with a small oven, acres of counter space, and a large refrigerator--Sahr’s domain that I entered cautiously.

In the rear were two cottages for her and Lalji, though he usually slept in the hammock in the front. This was to demonstrate his diligence as a night watchman. I'd snuck up on him a dozen times, shaken the hammock with enough force to tumble him to the ground, where he would snuffle, roll over and slip quickly back into his dreams. So much for security.

My backpack bounced to the side as I raced down Shivanan Avenue to Sonapura and across the bridge above the Asi. Two reference books, a few leftover chapattis, and my HP laptop were wedged carefully inside. On the outside a cold Nalgene was nestled in the webbing, perspiring almost as much as I was. It was eight-fifty in the morning, and the thermometer had just topped forty degrees centigrade. Another cloudless scorcher was heating up.

On the far side of the bridge a pregnant Brahma cow glanced up at the clang of Miss Ugly’s bell and shifted a lazily to the right. I breezed past her flank and swerved around two women with water pots balanced on their heads. Bicycle rickshaws, ox carts, pedi-cabs, and scurrying dogs flew behind me. I shifted into highest gear and elbowed my pack back into position.

Devi’s erroneous Timex was ticking, and I was racing to beat it. Glancing at my own watch, I did some calculation. A six-minute margin. His compound was off Madanapura Road near the Raja Ghat. The first part of my route along the main avenues would be easy, but the moment I turned east into the gullies, the pedaling would be slower, if not down to walking entirely.