The Splendor Of Silence (44 page)

At the roundtana where the road branched into many directions, the policeman's box was empty. Sam went around the roundtana twice, missing the turn to the road that led to the Victoria Club, until Ashok said, shouting above the jeep's engine, "We are not going to the club, are we, Captain Hawthorne?"

"No," Sam said. "Do you mind?"

"Vimal?"

Sam nodded, and finally, on the last circle cut out of the road, drove into the lane that led to the Lal Bazaar.

When they reached the house where Vimal's freedom fighters had their headquarters, Sam turned off the jeep and stayed where he was, his thumb and forefinger still curled around the key. The front grounds of the house thronged with people, all dressed in white, just as they were, but Sam did not think that they would all be heading for the White Durbar after this. The men and women--and really, some of them were so young that they could not even have accomplished adolescence--were clad in the khadi of the nationalists. The khadi that Mahatma Gandhi had declared to be the uniform for them all, dull white cloth fabricated by each of the freedom fighters at home, the cotton carded, made into thread, woven in a loom, cut and sewn into clothes. All of this was in defiance of the British Raj, to avoid buying machine-knit clothing made in British mills, to create a boycott of all things British.

The crowd, both men and women, were wearing loose pajamas and tuniclike kurtas, short and reaching only to midthigh for the men, and longer, to the knees, for the women. Even in all their finery, their silk shirts and their white linen pants, Sam and Ashok blended in with the crowd and not one inquisitive glance came their way.

A little twinge of regret washed over Sam and he said, "We can leave if you want, Ashok."

"No." Ashok shook his head, the laughter obviated from his face, his excitement more restrained. Something else, something more powerfu
l h
ad taken over and Sam almost pulled him back into the jeep and drove back to Raman's house. But he had brought him here at Vimal's behest, and already, even though Vimal was nowhere to be seen, the young man's arms had reached out and yanked Ashok in. Sam did place a hand on Ashok's shoulder, but he brushed it off with a surprisingly wiry strength. He got down and joined the crowd, lightly touching an arm here and there for them to make way for him so that he could move up to the front of the house. Sam stayed where he was, at the very back, determined that he would not leave Ashok alone here. Even though he towered well over the heads of most of the crowd, no one paid any attention to him. They did not even talk, they barely seemed to breathe. All they did was stare with an intensity at the still-darkened steps that led up to the front door of the house until it seemed to Sam that surely they must all go up in flames if no one appeared soon.

Five minutes later Vimal came out of the door, dressed as he always dressed, simply, in white, holding his hands together in a namaste. Sam leaned back against the back wall of the compound and searched desperately over the slew of black heads for the one that belonged to Ashok, but from here it was difficult to tell which one was him. When this ended he would take him back home; his promise to Vimal had merely been to bring Ashok here for this meeting and Sam had seen nothing wrong in that. There was no guarantee that Ashok would become a nationalist because of this one night, or be ensnared in some illegal activity. Sam told himself that they were here because he was himself curious about the nationalist movement. But if he was to be perfectly honest, he had owed Vimal this favor--any favor at all--for having helped him find Mike. Besides, he knew, without having talked with either Raman or Mila, that they would have disapproved of Ashok's being here.

Fifteen Indian policemen led by a British police inspector now slipped in through the front gate and lined up along the wall, blocking the entrance. Sam felt a little trickle of fear. The policemen carried rifles; the inspector, who stood in the gateway, legs apart, rested his right hand on his revolver. Sam moved along the wall as unobtrusively as he could, but the inspector's beady eyes swung in his direction and then away. He had been seen. Sam searched again for Ashok, wishing now that he had not let him leave his side. The crowd of students had, upon the arrival of the police
,
turned to stare at them stoically, but all too soon their attention was again riveted upon the beloved figure of their leader. And when Vimal spoke, it was only to voice Sam's own fears.

"Do not worry, comrades," he said, barely above a normal tone, but clear and audible, "there will be no repetition of the Jallianwala Bagh incident. The British are now too cravenly to attempt again to massacre an entire population of men, women, and children at a peaceful meeting by blocking off all exits and firing upon a scrambling crowd. The eyes of the world are upon India; they cannot stand up to such scrutiny again." The crowd began to clap, thumping palm against palm, elbows pumping with effort, sweat drenching brows. "Jai Hind!" they cried. "Hail to India!"

Vimal held up a hand. "And our police inspector, Mr. Dyer, though an admirable man in his own right and fortunately thus christened at birth, can make no pretensions to being a General Dyer."

A laugh rippled through the crowd and they all turned again, in one body, to look upon the reddening face of the police inspector, who blushed. A tic sprang up on the side of his mouth and he gazed ahead, above the heads of the students. Sam smiled at Vimal's silver tongue and his wit. General Dyer was the man who had ordered the firing upon the crowds at Jallianwala Bagh in 1919, killing hundreds of unarmed civilians gathered for a political meeting. When asked why he had not used the machine guns mounted upon the armored vehicles he had brought to the meeting, Dyer had answered that he could not fit the vehicles through the entrance. Dyer had gone to Jallianwala Bagh with the intention of committing a mass massacre; he had blocked all the accesses to the park so that no one could run out, and without a warning to the people, ordered his men to fire. It had been the catalyst of the nationalist movement in India, and after that, nothing but absolute and complete freedom from the British had been acceptable. And yet, Sam thought, here they were in 1942, more than two decades after Jallianwala, witnessing a similar scenario. He glanced at Inspector Dyer and saw that indeed, Vimal had been right. This man was very well aware of posterity's harsh gaze upon him, this crowd too was peaceful and peaceable, and he would not dare order his men to fire upon them.

The meeting went on then and out of Vimal's beautiful mouth rolled words of fire and strength. "What is the name of Rudrakot's only institution for higher learning, my friends?" he thundered. "Annadale College, named for John Annadale. It admits us now--" he held up his hands and rolled back the sleeves of his kurza to expose his skin--"people like you and me, but only for profit. Did you know that it was instated for the use, exclusively, of the children of the Raj? And by that, they did not mean us, the colored, the natives, they meant the children of the whites. But all too soon, they realized that just to keep alive, to barely be able to breathe, they needed the fees we would pay too and opened the doors. And that is why you can call yourself students of Annadale."

A murmur began in the crowd. They glanced at each other with anger. Not many of them had known this history because they were too young--when Annadale had allowed admission to Indians--but now their blood was fired by this past impropriety.

"A fine rule that was, my friends," Vimal said, feeding on the wave of discontent that swept through the courtyard. "When our British friends speak of the Raj, they speak only of themselves--we do not figure in any translation of that word at all. The Raj is the British, and yet, where would they be without us?

"Our government advises patience and yet refuses us independence. And here they are"--Vimal encompassed the air with an arcing movement of one arm--"striving to set other people free, defending the Home country against Hitler's ravages, seeking freedom with one hand--" he flung his other arm out--"dominating an entire other people with the other!" The crowd roared in a massive shout.

Vimal abused the British government of India; he insulted the poor, perspiring inspector; he talked passionately about love for his country and the need for independence. By the end of it, Sam was as swept away as the others. He saw Ashok rapt in the front row, gazing at Vimal with a look of adoration. When Vimal finished, the crowd clapped long and hard, the noise reverberating around the small courtyard while he stood there on the front steps in front of the constabulary of Rudrakot. A policeman walked through the crowd, his khaki uniform like a dab of mud among all that khadi white, and wrote down the names of as many people as he recognized. Sam saw Vimal wilt and collapse into a seated position on the front steps, his chest heaving, exhaustion whitening his face. A hundred arms reached out to him, but he waved them all away and said, "Go. Only he must be here." He was pointing at Ashok.

Ashok went to kneel by Vimal's side, drew out his white silk handkerchief, and mopped his brow. Vimal's breathing returned to normal and the color in his face came back. They both waited for Sam to approach them, and when he did, Ashok said firmly, not even looking up at Sam, "I will stay here with Vimal right now, Captain Hawthorne. You must carry on to the White Durbar."

April 1942, a Month Earlier

Somewhere in Burma

S
o this is it, Sam thinks. This is where his training has brought him.

From basic training in Georgia with its interminable and dragging marches. The lessons in camouflage, with shrubs and branches and twigs and leaves on helmets. Night raids on sandbags masquerading as the enemy. The killing of that enemy, sand spilling out for guts and for blood. Then one afternoon, the major puts his head into the barracks and hollers, "Ridley, Samuel! To the colonel's office. ASAP. With your kit. You're outta here."

That day he becomes Sam Hawthorne. That day Sam learns about a fledgling OSS unit. What, he asks? Office of Strategic Services. You are going to Burma. What do I do there, sir? You'll know when you get there, Hawthorne. Why the change in name, sir? So you are nobody. Use your background, just as it is, but be sparing about your past life. You have a brother and a mother? Keep them. Thank you, sir. I will, if you don't mind, Sam thinks with amusement. The army orders his name changed, orders for him a new identity, and orders him to get used to that name so that whatever he is ordered to do during the war will not be traced back to the Ridleys of Seattle, Washington, USA. It seems like an elaborate act of play to Sam at the beginning, but then he realizes that he does not exist at all on any document extant in his country or Burma or India. Even his CO has only a muddy understanding of the backgrounds of all his men in the Third Burma Rangers--all men like Sam, rife with secrets that will save their lives if the Japanese capture any of them. Eventually, in a few months, the Third Burma Rangers will parachute back into Burma and begin to wage a war behind Japanese lines, to weaken the enemy within itself. But before this, Sam is sent in to rescue Marianne, and finds himsel
f s
addled with Ken, who has collapsed after the sound of the bullet from the plantation bungalow.

All this sweeps through Sam's brain in less than a second. Ken has folded to the ground without a sound, and he falls on his face, wet mud slinging out as his forehead hits the dirt. Sam shoves Marianne down. He kicks at Ken's face in the mud so that he flips onto his back, and so that he can breathe if lie can still breathe. "Don't move," he says in a harsh whisper, "that's an order."

Sam plunges down the hillside, yanks the safety off the pistol, and runs toward the front entrance of the plantation house. Someone has told him a story of an officer who was caught in enemy fire on a flat land with nowhere to hide, on a tennis court, of all places, and the officer ran at the shooter for lack of anything else to do and managed to lob a grenade into the thicket before he was wounded, killing the shooter and earning himself one of the early medals in the war. Sam gallops toward the house, thinking of all this, but not shooting yet, for he does not know where to aim his precious bullets. He thinks he saw a flash of fire when the gun sent its bullet into Ken, to the right of the front door. Sam reaches the long, covered walkway and clatters down its teak surface, moving so fast that two bullets sing into the stagnant air and then sail into the pillars that hold up the roof of the walkway, right after he passes. Sam hears them, hears the soft thud of metal into wood, hears the pillars creak and moan in protest, but keeps his eyes on the window to the right. The glass is broken, an ugly black rifle nose juts out, wavering as it tries to follow his fleeting path.

To the shooter, Sam is a blur of khaki and green, his arms pumping as he runs, his boots almost silent on the polished walkway, his hair flying. Sam means to kill. If he is not killed himself.

Another bullet bursts into the air, but Sam does not even duck as he runs, his breathing strangely even, unhurried. Everything he has learned in training, every exercise he has performed, every lesson taught moves him through that walkway and toward his enemy without hesitation. He barrels through the half-open door and spins into the front porch. Sam comes to a halt and listens. There is a drawing room to his right, the entrance framed by a brick arch. Light spills in from a window. Even though he has been running, his breathing is quiet enough that he can hear the slither of some kind of furniture (a chair perhaps?) near the wall where the window is. Sam picks up a stool from the front porch with his lef
t h
and, and moves toward the arch, his gun held steady in his right. As he nears, he heaves the stool up and throws it into the room. The rifle shots reverberate crazily, and Sam rushes in, his pistol firing also. Once. Twice. He sees a pair of legs behind a sofa and takes aim at both ankles, pulverizing each into a mass of blood and bone.