Out of Order (9 page)

There were not as many questions as Jason had expected, the porters and the sweating stationmaster explaining everything to the police. Outside he could see more uniformed men lifting a misshapen body bag onto the platform, a small crowd of onlookers kept back by sergeants wielding riding crops. He looked back in time to see the doctor tapping a long yellowed fingernail against the side of a syringe.

“I will give you a tetanus shot, just in case, as well as some antibiotics to apply later. Keep your arm clean and avoid contact with animals.”

“See? It’s a good thing you played tag with the monkey yesterday,” Rachel said, drawing his attention away from the needle.

“A monkey stole my backpack in Jaipur,” Jason explained. “But we got it back.”

The doctor did not smile. “Tourists get too close to the monkeys. A monkey bite is a serious thing, much worse than this.” He gestured with the dripping needle at Jason’s arm, implying the pettiness of his wound. “And if you had had a run-in with the monkey’s owner it could have been very dangerous.”

“This was a wild monkey. It lived in the Palace of Winds.”

The stationmaster rested a heavy hand on Jason’s back. “Not all the monkeys you see are wild. Some are kept as pets and some are the property of unscrupulous individuals who train the monkeys to steal things and bring them back to their homes. Not so much here but in Jaipur….” He raised his shoulders, hinting at the lawlessness of the fabled Pink City.

“My friend is right. Some entrepreneurs even rent out their monkeys. You point out what you want and they get it for you. Now this will not hurt much,” the doctor lied, forcing the large-gauge needle into Jason’s upper arm.

Chapter Ten

“Oh my god, that was amazing,” Rachel said as she swung her feet off the edge of the bed. “That was an
incredible
night.” She smiled at Jason, reaching over to run a hand through his disheveled hair. “You really know how to treat a woman.”

“You slept in your clothes on a fold-down bench on a train in India. How does that qualify as amazing?”

“Look at this,” she said holding her arms out to her sides. “This is a first-class, AC sleeper for four. And it’s just us.”

“Us and everybody who walks by,” Jason said, jerking a thumb at the sliding glass and metal door that separated the cabin from the narrow passageway that ran down the right side of the car. Two large windows on either side of the door gave anyone who cared to look an unobstructed view of the entire cabin.

“We didn’t have to fold up the seat backs to make the bunk beds and we didn’t have to do that stupid trick with the blanket so we could sleep together.”

“True,” Jason said. “But that’s because we slept on different beds.” He waved his hand in the open area between the thick-cushioned bench seats that served as the bottom bunks in the box-sized cabin. There was a barred window opposite the glass door with the same dingy-brown curtain from the last train, and a small, hinged shelf was propped open under the window supporting Rachel’s guidebook and an empty bottle of water. Outside the early morning sun cast long shadows on the tracks and outbuildings of what had been known for a century as Victoria Terminus but was now the Chatarapati Shivaji Station in a city that Indians called Mumbai but that the rest of the world would always refer to as Bombay.

“And I slept
so
good,” Rachel said, rummaging through her backpack as she spoke. “The train was rocking nice and easy and when we went through a town I could hear the train’s horn in my dreams. It made it easy to sleep.” She pulled out a toothbrush case and a tube of toothpaste. “That and those pain pills the doctor gave you.” She pushed her hair away from her face and looked into his eyes. “This is why I came to India, for train rides like this. And it wouldn’t have happened if it wasn’t for you. Thanks.”

Jason shrugged, not sure how to answer since all he had done was bleed. The stationmaster had insisted they get the private accommodations, his way of apologizing for “a most unusual and unfortunate incident that in no way should influence your opinion of this fine railway system or of the people of India on a whole.” His arm ached under the bandage, and blood seeped through the gauze in several spots. He flexed his left hand—it was stiff but otherwise seemed normal, the site of the tetanus shot causing the most pain, and his chin hurt where the doctor had pulled through a few quick stitches, no extra charge.

But it wasn’t the pain that had kept him awake. Despite a double dose of the pills that had knocked Rachel out, Jason had spent the night staring at the patches of light that raced along the blue-gray ceiling of the cabin.

He could see the man’s face, a look somewhere between terror and embarrassment as he made his awkward stumble into the path of the train. It had slowed to pass through the station but it had struck with enough force to rip the man’s head off his shoulders, knocking it down the track like an errant soccer ball before it rolled under the steel wheels. Three times that night the smell of the man’s cheap cologne wafted into his memory and three times that night he hurried down the passageway to the communal restroom, dry heaving into the piss-covered black hole that opened to the tracks.

And the man had known his name.

They had asked him directly did he say anything to you and he had said no, nothing he could understand. He didn’t know why he had lied but at the time it felt right, and as he lay awake in the cabin, Rachel’s deep, measured breathing in sync with the clatter of the tracks, the lie still felt right.

Tell them what they want to hear. It makes them happy and it doesn’t cost you a thing.

Alone in the darkness he thought about what he carried in his backpack. He knew it was the reason why he needed to get to Bangalore, the reason why he kept going when all he wanted to do was stop. An economy-class, return ticket to the States. It was the only reason he needed.

“I’m going to freshen up as they say,” Rachel said, tugging her Blue Jays cap tight on her head. “We’ll be in the station soon, so pack up.” She opened the door, apologizing to the porter who slid past their cabin with a tray of hot tea. “Oh yeah,” she said over her shoulder. “I took that red blanket out of your pack last night when you went to the bathroom. That air conditioning got frickin’ cold. I think it fell under my bed. Don’t forget it.”

***

“Look over there,” Rachel said, pointing across his body towards the crowd at the gate. “Isn’t that your name?”

Standing under the ornate Victorian clock and dressed in a black suit and tie, a copper-colored man held a computer printed sign on legal-sized paper that read
MR. JASON TALLEY
.

“Go ask him what he wants,” Rachel said, giving Jason’s good arm a tug. Jason didn’t move.

“What are you, nuts? The last guy I ran into at a train station tries to cut my throat and you want me to go up and ask this guy what the sign’s for?”

“Oh, get over it,” she said. “It’s not like that guy knew your name or something.”

Jason shuddered. “I’m not that curious.”

“Well, I am,” she said and before he could stop her she cut through the crowd to where the man was standing.

“Hi, I’m Rachel Talley and this is my husband, Jason.” She held her hand out as Jason caught up to her, Jason watching the man’s gloved hands on the sign.

The man stepped to the side and gave a slight bow. “Please. Your car is this way.”

“You must mean another Jason Talley. I didn’t order a car.”

“Shut up,” Rachel whispered through clenched teeth. “It’s a free ride.”

“There is no mistake,” the man said, pretending he didn’t hear Rachel’s comments. “The car is courtesy of Mr. Kumar. I have been instructed to take you to his home where you are to be his guests.”

“I don’t know a Mr. Kumar.”

The driver bowed again. “Mr. Kumar said you might know him as SFX Wizard at India Gate Films dot com.”

“Oh yeah,” Rachel said, hitching her backpack higher on her shoulders. “Good old SFX. Let’s go.” The driver took her cue and led them through the station and out the arch-shaped wooden doors.

“I have no idea who this Kumar guy is,” Jason said, trying to keep up to Rachel as she weaved around the clumps of baggage-heavy travelers who swam upstream to the station’s entrance. Ahead the driver held open the door of a black, American-sized SUV, the words
Tata Safari
emblazoned on the metal spare tire case. “He could be another lunatic.”

“If he is, at least he’s a rich lunatic. Come on, Jason,” she said, handing her backpack to the driver. “What’s the worst that could happen?”

Chapter Eleven

“Now
this
is a vacation.” Jason sipped his gin and tonic, the frosted glass cold on his fingertips. He closed his eyes behind his sunglasses and listened to the ornamental waterfall that splashed into one of the concrete coves of the pool that wound through the palm trees, rock formations, and tropical plants that covered the terrace. Above, a white-hot sun inched across the cloudless blue sky.

He peeked out of the corner of his eye at the cedar chaise lounge at his side. The coconut sunscreen glistened on Rachel’s flat stomach and smooth, toned, and already tanned legs. The straps of her bikini top were pulled off her shoulders and he watched as a lucky rivulet of sweat and lotion disappeared between her round breasts. Behind them a blender whirled as a silver-haired servant in a white coat and bow tie blended another banana daiquiri. “You gotta admit this beats riding around in a train all day.”

“I’ll admit that it’s nice,” Rachel said, “but that’s as far as I’ll go.”

After picking them up at the station, it had taken the driver over an hour to negotiate the morning rush-hour traffic. It seemed that every one of the city’s sixteen million residents was on the road, all of them directly in front of the high-riding SUV.

The city was as crowded as Delhi and Jaipur combined, yet it seemed as if the drivers were making a valiant attempt to follow many of the traffic rules. Most waited a respectable amount of time at red lights before cutting through the wave of cars with the right of way. There were no rickshaws in Mumbai—either bicycle or auto—and drivers limited themselves to just a few ear-numbing horn blasts a minute. Even the pedestrians appeared willing to play along, and Jason saw more than one wait for the okay from the crosswalk signal before venturing off the curb.

Jason was surprised by the neat, modern office buildings, each as well maintained as any in Corning, only taller and better designed, and when the driver eased the black Safari onto the palm tree-lined Marine Drive and he could see the city’s skyline and the sandy beach and the blue horizon of the Arabian Sea, he was reminded of picturesque drives along the Florida coast. Rachel’s guidebook had said that half of the population of the city lived in slums, some that sprawled on for miles, but on this one stretch of road in this one corner of town, Mumbai was a beautiful city.

On a lush, tree-filled lane on Malabar Hill, an electronic gate opened at the side of the road. The driver gave the horn a discreet toot. Silhouetted by a bank of blue monitors, a uniformed and armed security guard waved back from his air-conditioned sentry box. The house was hidden behind banks of trees and shrubs, but through the branches Jason could see portions of white stucco walls and red-tiled roofs that jutted out from the core of the building. With a slight nod of his head the driver passed his charges off to a smiling house servant in a tailor-made black suit.

Inside, the main hall reminded Jason of the lobbies of the five-star hotels in New York that he frequented, pretending to be a guest but just looking for the men’s room. The floors were tiled in multicolored marble and above, chrome and glass chandeliers seemed to float below the vaulted ceiling, dating the room from sometime in the near future. Paintings of abstract landscapes hung on the walls while on an oriental rug, antique chairs with wispy-thin legs formed a sitting area around a matching table. A pair of small fountains bracketed a glass elevator and door-less passageways led off to other sections of the home.

In their two-bedroom suite they found new bathing suits laid out on the bed along with a note inviting them to make themselves at home, signed with a flourish,
Narvin Kumar
.

Now, as he took another sip of his drink, the ice already half-melted in his glass, Jason stopped thinking about knife-wielding attackers and kleptomaniacal monkeys, murdered friends, and a sari wadded up in a backpack. It allowed him to focus on thinking about the half-naked woman at his side. The distant sound of a man laughing broke into his fantasy before it went too far.

“I think our host has arrived,” Jason said, tilting down his sunglasses to see into the shadows near the sliding glass doors. The man walked slowly, still laughing as he held a tiny cell phone to his ear, giving Jason and Rachel time to watch his approach.

What with his fellow passengers, the mobs at the train stations, and the endless streams of pedestrians, Jason felt as if he’d seen every male in India. But as he watched the man pause to listen intently to his phone, one arm resting against the open doorframe, Jason knew he had hadn’t seen a man like this before.

It wasn’t just his height, several inches over six feet, or his olympian physique, his hundred-dollar haircut, or the way his smile outshone his blindingly white shirt. Maybe it was the way he ruffled his thick black hair, confident it would fall back in place, or the way he gave a wink to the barman, who grinned back and started mixing the man a martini. It could have been his voice, strong and deep, or the honesty in his laugh or how, when he flicked the phone shut and crossed the patio to their chairs, hand outstretched and smiling, his attention made them feel like they were the most important people in the world.

“Oh. My. God.” Rachel said and fumbled her bikini straps back in place.

“Hi, I’m Narvin Kumar. You must be Jason Talley.”

“That’s me,” Jason said, standing, wiping his palm dry on his swim trunks before shaking the man’s hand. “And this is my….”

“Sister,” Rachel said, cutting him off and leaning forward as she reached out for his hand. “I’m his sister. Rachel.” Narvin took her hand, his smile wider as he held the handshake an extra beat.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t meet you at the station,” Narvin said, lifting Rachel’s daiquiri off the barman’s tray and handing it to her, waiting until she took a sip before taking up his martini. “I’m in the middle of doing four movies right now, all of them with temperamental producers and scripts that are written on the fly. I’m lucky I got away at all. Cheers.” He sipped his drink, dismissing the barman with another wink, pulling up a chair to join them. “I heard from the driver there was some trouble in Ahmadabad. How’s your arm?” He pointed to the fresh bandages.

“Okay I guess. It’s a bit stiff from the tetanus shot though.”

“If you’d like I can have a doctor come by and take a look.”

“Thanks, but I think it’ll be fine. It’s a hell of a place you got here,” Jason said, waving at the house with his drink.

“Absolutely amazing,” Rachel said, staring at the man’s hazel eyes.

Narvin gave a modest nod. “I’ve been lucky. The film industry has been very good to me. No, I’m not an actor,” he said, guessing the next question. “I’ve done some bit parts, a lot of walk-ons when they need an extra, but I work behind the camera. Post production. Computer enhancement, special effects, that sort of thing.”

“Computers. So that’s how you knew Sriram.”

“We were friends since freshman year of high school. Our desks were side by side in every class for years. We roomed together at university.” Narvin chuckled, “I even introduced him to Vidya.”

“Vidya and Sriram were friends of mine in Corning,” Jason said to Rachel and stopped, not knowing how to explain their deaths.

“I hope it was an arranged marriage,” Rachel said, still smiling at Narvin. “I hear that those love marriages don’t tend to last.”

Jason and Narvin exchanged an uncomfortable glance, Narvin turning to Rachel, his smile back in place. “Theirs was definitely a love marriage. I never knew two people more in love.”

“The happiest people I ever met,” Jason added, his doubts falling away, and again met Narvin’s eyes, this time to exchange silent memories of their dead friends.

“It was Sriram who got me interested in the movie industry here in Mumbai,” Narvin said, breaking the silence.

“Weren’t you in on that business Sriram and some others started?”

“Bangalore Worldwide Systems,” Narvin said in a booming, heroic voice, his hand showing the placement of the words in the open, blue sky. “Oh yeah. What pretentiousness. A handful of semi-talented programmers, hunched over a bunch of bashed-together computer terminals in a rented garage on the outskirts of Bangalore. But we were going to change the world.” He held up a forefinger to punctuate the line, laughing his baritone laugh. “Sriram was the only one with any real talent. The others were just hanging on, hoping to make it rich. Myself included, I guess.”

“Were you upset when he….” Jason paused, trying to think of the best way to say it.

“When he left us for the States?” Narvin said, sensing his guest’s discomfort. “It was the best thing that ever happened to me. I would have waited around for BWS to take off, but when he departed and BWS collapsed I finally did what Sriram had been telling me to do for years. I came here to Mumbai and got myself into the tech side of the film industry. Of course I thought it was my talent that had gotten me noticed, but I later learned that it was Sriram—some ancient family connections that he could have called in for himself but instead used to get me started in Bollywood.”

“Bollywood?” Rachel said, finding a way into the conversation. “Don’t you mean Hollywood?”

“India’s film industry is located here in Mumbai, which of course used to be Bombay. Hence, Bollywood.”

Rachel smirked. “What were you saying about pretentiousness?”

“It’s hard to be humble in Bollywood these days. Look at it this way,” Narvin said. “Each year Hollywood puts out about seven hundred movies. Bollywood averages close to eleven hundred. Most are made for less than four million, but three of the films I’m working on now will end up costing over thirty million. Each. And that’s dollars, not rupees. It’s a billion-dollar industry and, unlike Hollywood, it’s growing. But please don’t think I’m offended,” he said, sensing Rachel’s embarrassment. “It’s just that when it comes to movies I’m afraid I’m a rabid patriot.”

“We don’t get too many Hindi movies in Corning,” Rachel said, turning to Jason, who nodded, verifying her assumption.

“Well, don’t tell that to any of the people you meet tonight. There’s a premiere party on Madh Island.”

“Oh, how exciting,” Rachel said, beaming.

“Horribly dull, I’m afraid. Industry types, film people, the press. It will be boring as hell, but thanks to you, I won’t have to suffer alone.”