The Game (14 page)

“Any of the word’s definitions will do,” Holmes said irritably.

“Sorry,” Nesbit said, coming back to his bench. “I don’t mean to evade your question. It is merely that the answer is difficult to give. In the sense that we’ve ‘lost’ O’Hara, there have been four others in the past thirty months. In England, or if they were Army, that number would be alarming. But here, it’s commonplace to go months, even years without hearing from one of our ‘pundits,’ as the native agents are called—it’s often just not possible for a man to report in. And frankly, I expect that one or two of those missing simply decided that their period of service was over and slipped quietly back to their families. I am aware of three other such who informed us openly of their retirement from The Game. All of whom, I have confirmed, are healthy and home, thank you very much. It is more than possible that the four missing agents have done the same, merely neglecting to tell us—which would be a typically Indian way to do things, by the way. Indians hate to disappoint a person to his face, and often say yes to something they know they can’t provide. I shouldn’t have expected the attitude from O’Hara, but it’s not beyond the imagination. We’ve made enquiries for him in all the obvious places, including his old lama’s home monastery. He’s either not there, or won’t respond.”

“And what about the other sense of ‘lost’?” Holmes pressed.

Nesbit’s green eyes wandered across to the playing fountain. “Three. All in the last nine months. John Forbes, Mohammed Talibi, and a new man—just a boy—Rupert Bartholomew. All good men. All dead.”

“How?”

“One shot, one knifed, one strangled.” He paused, and then gave us the worst. “All tortured first, beaten and burnt.”

It was suddenly all too clear why Mycroft had sent us.

“You have a traitor in the ranks,” Holmes said.

The handsome face grew still, as if movement might bring a return of pain. After a moment, he nodded, once.

“I no longer know whom I can trust. Even Hari, who has been with me for twelve years, even him . . .” Nesbit broke off, to dig a silver case from a pocket and light a cigarette, pinching the match between his fingers and tucking it back into the case. “I begin to understand how the officers must have felt during the Mutiny. Their own men, men they’d fought beside, marched with, trusted with their lives—with the lives of their wives and children, for God’s sake—turning on them, slaughtering them. And five years ago, I saw Jallianwala Bagh, the morning after. I saw the results of Dyer’s order to fire on the demonstrators. Sixteen hundred and fifty rounds and nearly every one of them hit civilian flesh—men, women, and little children heaped against the walls where they’d tried to get away from the machine-gun fire. I’ll never outlive the nightmares, never. Hundreds dead, thousands bleeding, and every white man in India wondering when the country would rise up and kill us in our beds, rid themselves of us once and for all.

“And who could blame them? We collect their taxes and we give them nothing but the bottom of our boot. You heard of Dyer’s ‘crawling order’? Where he set guards to make certain no native could walk past the spot where an Englishwoman had been attacked, but had to crawl—even the natives who’d rescued her? God help us, with such officers. There are days when, if I heard that someone in a position to undermine the Survey from within had chosen to do so, I couldn’t altogether bring myself to condemn him.”

“Yet you don’t believe O’Hara capable?”

“No. Not him.”

“Even though since he was a child his white blood has warred against his love and loyalty to the country that nurtured him?”

“Even so. He would not deceive his friends in that way.”

“O’Hara is quite capable of practising deceit, when it comes to playing The Game.”

“No.”

Holmes looked at the younger man and gave a small shake of his head, but said merely, “I’ll need all the details on the three men found dead, and on those missing.”

“I’ve included a précis in the O’Hara file I have for you. I prepared it myself; no one has seen it.”

“That’s as well.”

Nesbit crushed his cigarette out under his heel, then said abruptly, “I am having doubts as to the wisdom of this venture.”

“That is understandable, but we shall take the file nonetheless.”

“I should not have allowed you to come here, openly to my home. What if you were seen, and followed?”

“Who knows we are here?” Holmes asked.

“You and Miss Russell? By name? No more than four men within the Survey, all of them high ranks. But still . . .”

Holmes smiled happily and reached over to clap the man on his shoulder. “I shouldn’t worry. By tomorrow, your two English visitors will have ceased to exist.”

The smaller man looked taken aback, then forced a grin. “And I’m supposed to find that reassuring?”

With that,
the more clandestine portion of our interview was at an end. Nesbit led us inside to his study, where he opened the safe and took out a flat oilskin envelope and a japanned-tin box, laying both on his desk. The tin contained a crumpled and torn paper wrapping with an address in the government offices. Holmes laid the paper out on the desk and set to with the magnifying lens he carried always, but in the end, it told him little more than it had Nesbit: that some tidy person—a man, to judge by the printing—had parcelled up O’Hara’s amulet and sent it to Captain Nesbit, but as the address was entirely in capital letters, it had little personality.

“I couldn’t say if that was . . . our man’s writing,” Nesbit told us, his voice low and avoiding names, “but I’d lay money that it was a St Xavier’s boy who wrote it—the way he’s made the numerals is fairly distinctive. I went to the school myself for two years,” he explained. “Not at the same time, of course, but these numbers look like what I might do, were I attempting to conceal my hand.”

Holmes bent again over the paper, and when he stiffened at some characteristic invisible to me, standing at his shoulder, Nesbit said, “The sand, yes. Unfortunately, there’s nothing to set it apart—it might have come from anywhere in the country.”

“In London,” Holmes muttered, “I could say for a surety that a mite of soil had come from one spot or another, but in this vast land, there are ten thousand places where such grains might have come from.”

“Such as from another parcel,” I pointed out, unnecessarily. Holmes laid the paper back in the tin and took up the twine, turning his lens on its knots. But as they were not tied in a manner known only to Bolivian merchant sailors or a small tribe of gipsies from northern Persia, and since the fibres bore no traces of raw opium, gold dust, or a face-powder sold only in one exclusive shop in Paris, the string told him no more than the paper it had covered. Nesbit seemed mildly disappointed, but unsurprised. He put the box back into his safe, pulling out a lumpy envelope in return. Bringing it to the desk, he fished from it a pair of small silver lockets strung on copper-wire chains and handed us each one.

Holmes smiled, as if he’d seen an old friend, and thumbed the surface of his with familiarity. I held mine up to the light. It was a rude piece of jewellery, with touches of black enamel in the silver and an almost invisible latch on one side, which opened to reveal a small twist of soft rice paper around a hard centre. I unfurled this cautiously, set aside the tiny chip of turquoise it contained, and examined the paper. It had been stamped with an inscription, its ink bleeding into the fibres; the script was unknown to me.

“What does the writing say?” I asked Nesbit.

“It’s a standard Buddhist benediction, for protection on the road. The usefulness of the charm lies in catching the eye of another who holds one. And since such objects can be stolen, the phrase that accompanies it is paramount.” He told us the phrase, in Hindi, and had us repeat it twice so he could be sure we had the proper and essential emphasis on the fourth word.

Holmes dropped his over his neck, working it inside his collar, then murmured, “The three men found dead and tortured. Were they, too, ‘Sons of the Charm’?”

“They were. And yes, the charms each wore are missing.”

I thought to myself that it might be time to replace this style of charm with something less widely circulated, but at least we were forewarned. Holmes slid the oilskin document case into his inner pocket, and stood up.

We shook Nesbit’s hand, and he locked the safe and walked us to the door. We paused on the verandah, listening to the sound of an approaching motor. As it pulled up before the house, Nesbit turned his head slightly and said, “It might be best to commit as much of the file as possible to memory, and burn the rest. I’ve also given you three methods of reaching me in an emergency. If there’s anything at all I can do, any time . . .”

“We shall be in touch,” Holmes told him. Hari stepped out of the motorcar to hold its door for us, then climbed behind the wheel and drove us back into the city.

Chapter Eight

S
omewhat to my surprise, we did not instantly pack our bags and
dash from the hotel into hiding, taking refuge in some Oriental equivalent of Holmes’ London bolt-holes. Rather, he poured the contents of the leather case out onto the floor and set about reading them.

“I thought you and Nesbit agreed that we might be in some danger here,” I said, with what I considered admirable patience.

He looked up with a frown at the distraction. “Oh, no more than usual. We shall be away before any rifles can sight down on our necks.”

“Good to hear,” I muttered, and picked up a page from the file.

Nesbit had made no attempt at presenting a coherent narrative of Kimball O’Hara’s life and work; he’d merely copied specific documents pertaining to the man’s last year or two of active field service in the Survey, before he had vanished from the Simla road. The ongoing problem of independent border kingdoms had been O’Hara’s main concern, as indeed it had been the concern of his superiors since the days of the East India Company: One minor king who defied British rule and surreptitiously opened his state to the enemy could spell disaster for British India. And in the past, hereditary rulers of the native states had not all demonstrated an unswerving sense of loyalty when it came to bribes and blandishments. Moslem nawabs and Hindu rajas, squelched into their borders first by the Company and later the Crown, had spent their entire lives with nothing to do but squabble over rank and invent ways to spend their money. The idea of an hereditary prince joining sides with the Communists was, of course, absurd on the surface, but that by no means ruled out the possibility, no more than it had for that American aristocrat, Thomas Goodheart.

O’Hara’s last report, three tightly written pages reproduced in photograph that we might recognise the handwriting if we happened upon it again, concerned a number of apparently unrelated but nonetheless provocative events and overheard statements concerning two of the principalities along the northern border. A seller of horses commenting on the sudden interest in his wares by the raja of Singhal’s men; an itinerant fakir bemoaning the treatment he had received in Khanpur’s main city, where before his begging had been welcomed; a huge order for raw cotton, enough to clothe all of Khanpur’s subjects in one go; and a dozen other incidents.

Cotton, I reflected idly, was also an essential element in the manufacture of high explosives.

When I had absorbed the contents of the letter, I turned to the writing itself. The distinctive running script was indeed similar to that of his copyist, Nesbit, although whether or not the printed numerals of the parcel reflected the same school’s training I was not prepared to say. In either case, behind the anonymous precision of the script could be seen evidence of a remarkably self-contained and self-assured hand. There was a touch of egotism in his capital
E
s and obstinacy in his lowercase
B
s, but those were balanced by the humour in his
S
s and
I
s and the simplicity of his capitals in general. All in all, the hand that had written this document was ruled by precision, toughness, and a high degree of imagination, and I found myself thinking that, if “Kim” had indeed sided against the British government, he might well have had good reason.