The Game (13 page)

“Thank you for coming. I see Hari has brought you tea. Did he give you the Indian or the China?”

“The Indian,” Holmes answered, “and very nice indeed.”

“Good. With Hari, one can never be sure. I am very pleased to meet you, Mr Holmes. We did, in fact, encounter each other long ago, when you visited my father’s camp in Himachel Pradesh, but you won’t have remembered. I was seven; my last tour with him before I went home to school.”

Holmes held the man’s hand for a moment as he studied the man’s features, and then his mouth twitched in a brief smile. “He was a district officer and you were in short trousers. A boy with a thousand questions about . . . turquoise and rubies, wasn’t it?”

Our host’s face opened in a grin. “I should have known you would forget nothing. And you must be . . . Miss Russell, I’m told you prefer? I’m Geoffrey Nesbit.”

His hand was cool and strong, and I thought, as he turned to face me fully, that Holmes’ act of memory was less impressive than inevitable: Even as a child, this would have been a difficult person to forget.

Nesbit was one of the most beautiful men I have ever laid eyes on, the thin scar running down his jaw line merely serving to emphasise his looks. Neat, blond, and sun-burnt, he was not the kind who usually stirs me to admiration, but his green eyes shone with intelligence and humour, and he watched with the quiet attentiveness of a cat, missing nothing. Like a cat, too, he appeared ageless, although the skin beside his eyes and down his throat testified to an age near forty. He reminded me eerily of T. E. Lawrence, another small, tow-headed, and youthful man who looked at the world out of the corners of his eyes, as if in constant dialogue with an amusing inner voice.

Nesbit was dressed in an odd combination of garments, jodhpur trousers beneath a long muslin
kameez,
and if the aura of horse he carried with him explained the trousers, he had certainly changed his footwear upon returning from his morning gallop. Unless he was in the habit of riding in soft leather slippers, in the style of an American Indian. Certainly in the photographs the man wore ordinary riding boots.

He poured himself a cup of tea, taking it black with sugar, and urged us back into our chairs, sitting down on the other side of the low, intricately carved table. He settled into a third, legs stretched out, ankles crossed.

“How is your brother?” he asked Holmes.

“Improving. I had a telegram yesterday night, he sounded himself.”

“I am glad. The world would be a lesser place without Mycroft Holmes. And a great deal less secure.”

Which observation declared, as surely as an exchange of Kipling’s whispered code-phrases, that this man knew well that Mycroft Holmes, who described himself as an “accountant” in the Empire’s bureaucracy, kept ledgers recording transactions considerably more subtle than pounds and pence. The suspicion was confirmed with his next words.

“When we have drunk our tea, we shall take a turn through the garden.” His raised eyebrow asked if we understood; Holmes’ curt nod and my reply answered him.

“We should love to see your garden,” I told him. And, clearly, to talk about those things the walls were not to hear. It was difficult to press one’s ear to a key-hole when the speakers were surrounded by open space. And the sad fact was, there were some things with which servants were not to be trusted.

So we drank our tea and passed a pleasant quarter of an hour hearing Nesbit’s suggestions about what to see during our stay in the country. He particularly urged us north, even though the weather would still be cool, and suggested one or two of the hill rajas who might show us an entertaining time.

“Do you shoot, either of you?”

I suppressed a wince: The last shooting party I’d joined had nearly ended in tragedy for the duke who was our host and friend.

“Some,” Holmes replied. “Russell here is a crack shot.”

“Of course, it’s pretty tame compared to some sports—even going after tiger from the back of an elephant pales once you’ve tried pig sticking. Or tiger sticking, although that’s harder to come by. You ever ridden after boar, Mr Holmes?”

“Er, no, I’m afraid not.”

“Is that what the Kadir Cup is about?” I asked, adding, “I noticed the photographs.”

“Yes, that’s it. Held annually, near Meerut, just north of here. Pig sticking is the unofficial sport of British India. Great fun. Though not, I fear, for the ladies.” He smiled at the thought. I smiled back, automatically plotting how I might go about learning to stick pigs—until I caught myself short. I didn’t even like fox-hunting, much less what sounded like a rout fit for overgrown adolescent boys, scrambling cross-country after a herd of panicking swine. Still, it brought up the obvious question.

“With what does one stick the pig?”

In answer he nodded towards the weaponry on the wall. “That’s the spear I took the Cup with last year.”

“The broken one?”

“Er, no. That one’s there to remind me to be humble.” He threw us a boyish grin. “Big job, that. No, the broken one’s from the ’22 Cup. The first day, I’d flushed a big ’un, run it across the fields a mile or more, right at its heels when it jinked back in a flash and came for my horse. Which very sensibly shied, dumping me top over teakettle. Somehow I landed on my own spear and took a great hunk out of my arm. Nearly the end of my career.”

“So, what, did you shoot the creature? Or did it run off?”

“Good Lord, no,” Nesbit said, affronted. “One doesn’t carry a gun when pig sticking. And once a pig’s decided to fight, it generally doesn’t quit until one or the other of you stops moving. No, one of the other fellows took the beast. And the Cup as well. Native chap—maharaja in fact, though nothing like what you think of at the title. That’s him in the photo. He nearly had the Cup from me last year, he’s that good. ’Course he should be good, he has enough practice going after any kind of game you can mention. African lion, giraffe—you name it.”

Sports; maharaja; exotic animals: The unlikely conjunction rang some bells in my mind, but Holmes got the question out first.

“What is the name of this maharaja?”

“They call him Jimmy. Rum chap, a bit, but a great sportsman. He’s the ruler of a border state named—”

“Khanpur.”

Nesbit’s eyes locked onto Holmes over the top of his cup. Then, calmly, he took the last swallow, placed the cup and saucer on the tray, and stood. “Shall we go and look at the garden?”

“Looking at the garden” seemed to be a common ritual in the Nesbit establishment. At any rate, the ground was clear for a circle of thirty yards around the two benches he led us to, benches located in the shade of a tree which had recently been thinned so its inner structure could hide no person, benches facing in opposite directions to cover all approaches. A low fountain played nearby, obscuring our voices.

“You seem to have an interest in the maharaja of Khanpur,” he said as soon as we were seated.

“Not directly, but the name has come to our attention.”

It took a while, the story. Thomas Goodheart and the bison-collecting maharaja who had been at a Moscow gathering attended by Lenin. The defiant words of the drunken Goodheart, and his odd choice of fancy dress, preceded the odder decision to enter Aden with a debilitating hang-over on the day a balcony fell. To say nothing of the interesting coincidence that Khanpur was one of the kingdoms along the northern borders insulating British India from her long-time Russian threat. Holmes even mentioned my missing trunk, although by this time neither of us thought that was due to anything more sinister than inefficiency, or at the most a garden-variety thievery.

Nesbit listened without comment, but with such intensity that I thought he might well be able to recite Holmes’ words verbatim afterwards. At the end, he sat forward with his elbows on his knees, his eyes not seeing the playing fountain while his mind explored the information. Eventually, he sat upright.

“If Goodheart is a known Communist, we probably needn’t worry, although I’ll pass his name on to the political johnnies. As for Khanpur, the state has always been staunchly loyal to the Crown. During the Mutiny, a handful of sepoys fleeing north attempted to pass through the kingdom, carrying with them two English captives, a mother and her young daughter. The then raja, Jimmy’s grandfather, allowed them entrance, but then set up an ambush on the road that passes through two halves of his hill fort. Dumped a thousand gallons of lamp-oil down the hill and set it alight. Killed them all, including the woman, unfortunately, but the child lived and was returned home. By way of recognition of their service, all the Khanpur tribute is remitted annually. And the raja’s rank was raised to maharaja. Khanpur has a seventeen-gun salute, which is big for its size—the girl’s family was important.”

“The Mutiny was a long time ago.”

“The Mutiny was yesterday, as far as every white man in the country is concerned. But it is true, that was the grandfather, and much can change in sixty-seven years. I shall bring this to the attention of my superiors.”

His eyes came back into focus. “Now, as to the reason why you are here. Kimball O’Hara. Mr Holmes, you knew O’Hara, did you not.” It was not a question.

“When he was a boy.”

“By all accounts, the man he became was there from the beginning.”

“The lad was remarkably well suited to The Game,” Holmes agreed.

“Which makes it all the more troubling that he has vanished.”

“How long has it been since he was last heard from?”

“Just short of three years.”

“Three—”
Holmes caught himself. “We were told that he had not worked for the Survey in that time, but I had the impression his actual disappearance was considerably more recent than that.”

“It’s only in the past months that we’ve become aware of it. But once we cast back to look for his tracks, the last sure sighting we could come up with was in August of ’21.”

“Where was that?”

“In the hills above Simla. He stopped the night with an old acquaintance, and told her that he was going back to Tibet for a time, although he intended a detour to Lahore first to visit a friend.”

“But the friend in Lahore never saw him?”

“We could uncover no one in Lahore who had seen him. In fact, we couldn’t even find anyone there who would admit to being O’Hara’s friend.”

“And the amulet?”

“Ah. That arrived ten weeks ago. By post.” The dry answer forestalled any exclamations, for clearly the surprise of such an unadorned delivery had sent waves through the department, leaving a thousand questions in its wake. Holmes ventured one of those.

“Posted where?”

“In Delhi. Handed in at an hotel by a French tourist, a lady here to paint botanical watercolours. She was given it by a middle-aged Parsi who guided her through the gardens in Bombay, requesting that favour in return.”

“Extraordinary. I don’t suppose you still have the paper it came wrapped in?”

“Of course. It’s in my safe, if you’d like to see it.”

“Very much.”

I broke in with a question. “Pardon me if I ask things I either should not, or which I ought to know already, but was Mr O’Hara still on what you might call ‘active duty’?”

“Not really. After the War, with the Bolsheviks apparently having their hands full in Russia, we had all begun to think we might relax our guard and turn to other concerns. Since O’Hara’s expertise is that of the borders and Tibet, he sat at a desk for a year, possibly a bit more, then in late 1920 asked for a holiday. He was forty-five and had not taken one since returning from Tibet when he was nineteen, so one could scarcely object. But when we needed him this past autumn and went looking, we couldn’t find him.”

“You say you needed him. The Russians are back?” Holmes asked.

“If not yet, then soon. You know that Labour will grant the Bolsheviks formal recognition?”

“It is to be expected.”

“A mistake. MacDonald has his head in the clouds if he imagines The Bear will turn cuddly simply because they share a theoretical conviction. Belief was, The Game was finished with the Anglo-Russian convention seventeen years ago. But then the Reds came in and tore up all the treaties and back we went. Lenin—or whoever’s in charge while he’s ill—is buying time to sniff out our weak places, and will very soon be nudging through the passes like the Tsar before him. Our enemy may have changed his hat, but the Bolsheviks want a Communist East as much as the Tsar did, you can count on it. They won’t settle for the Congress Party—as far as they’re concerned, Gandhi’s worse than we are, a religious reactionary. And since the Bolsheviks will assuredly look to Tibet as a potential point of entry just as the Tsar before them did, we need O’Hara back on the force. True, Tibet has been receiving our own overtures of late—our giving the Dalai Lama shelter in 1910 saw to that—but whether the Russians or the Chinese get to Lhasa first, we’re going to need Tibet, and they us. We’re sending a political officer out this summer, but that’s all bells and whistles. We need someone who can see outside the diplomatic circle, and O’Hara knows the ground as a tongue knows its teeth.” He paused, to watch a pair of small black-headed birds dive at the fountain, and gave an almost imperceptible sigh.

“Still, that is not the main consideration here. What it boils down to is, O’Hara’s one of ours, and we want to know where he is.”

“And, perhaps, to know if he actually is still ‘yours’?”

Nesbit stood abruptly, taking three quick steps to bend over a fairly unexceptional flower. When he spoke, his voice was even but taut. “I refuse to believe that O’Hara has turned coat. I worked with the man. He is the King’s man to his bones.”

I waited for Holmes to agree, but he said nothing. Clearly, he had been rethinking the question since his vehement declaration in Mycroft’s rooms three weeks before. It sounded to me as if he was no longer quite so certain of Mr O’Hara’s bone-deep loyalties.

Holmes allowed the silence to hold for a while. Nesbit prowled up and down, gravel crunching under his soft shoes, until Holmes spoke.

“How many other agents have you lost in recent years?”

“That depends on what you mean by ‘lost.’ ”