A Son Of The Circus (36 page)

‘May I see the thing you hit the taxi-walla with?’ the inspector asked finally. God knows how the idiot Tamil had described it. Nancy went to get it from the bathroom, having decided to keep it with her toilet articles. God knows what the British couple had told the inspector. If the inspector had talked to them, they’d doubtless described her as a rude young woman brandishing an enormous cock.

Nancy gave the dildo to Inspector Patel, and again sat down at the foot of her bed. The young policeman politely handed the instrument back without looking at her.

‘I’m sorry — it was necessary for me to see it,’ Inspector Patel said. ‘I was having some difficulty
imagining
it,’ he explained.

‘Both drivers were paid then– fares at the airport,’ Nancy told him. ‘I don’t like to be cheated,’ she said.

‘It’s not the easiest country for a woman traveling alone,’ the inspector said. By the quick way he glanced at her, she understood this was a question.

‘Friends are meeting me,’ Nancy told him. ‘I’m just waiting for them to call.’ (Dieter had advised her to say this; anyone assessing her student clothing and her cheap bags would know that she couldn’t afford many nights at the Taj.)

‘So will you be traveling with your friends or staying in Bombay?’ the inspector asked her.

Nancy recognized her advantage. As long as she held the dildo, the young policeman would find it awkward to look in her eyes.

‘I’ll do what they do,’ she said indifferently. She held the penis in her lap; with the slightest movement of her wrist, she discovered, she could tap the circumcised head against her bare knee. But it was her bare feet that appeared to transfix Inspector Patel; perhaps it was their impossible whiteness, or else their improbable size – even bare, Nancy’s feet were bigger than the inspector’s little shoes.

Nancy stared at him without mercy. She enjoyed the prominent bones in his sharply featured face; it would have been impossible for her to look at his facie and imagine it – even in 20 years – with jowls. She thought he had the blackest eyes and the longest eyelashes.

Still staring at Nancy’s feet, Inspector Patel spoke forlornly: ‘I suppose there’s no known phone number or an address where I could reach you.’

Nancy felt she understood everything that attracted her to him. She’d certainly tried hard to lose her innocence in Iowa, but the football players hadn’t touched it. She’d spoiled her real innocence in Germany, with Dieter, and now it was lost for good. But here was a man who was still innocent. She probably both frightened and attracted him – if he even knew it, Nancy thought.

‘Do you want to see me again?’ she asked him. She thought the question was ambiguous enough, but he stared at her feet – with both longing and horror, she imagined.

‘But you couldn’t identify the two other men, even if we found them,’ said Inspector Patel.

‘I could identify the other taxi driver,’ Nancy said.

‘We’ve already got him,’ the inspector told her.

Nancy stood up from the bed and carried the dildo to the bathroom. When she came back, Inspector Patel was at the window, watching the beggars. She didn’t want to have any advantage over him anymore. Maybe she was imagining that the inspector had fallen hopelessly in love with her and that, if she shoved him on the bed and fell on top of him, he would worship her and be her slave forever. Maybe it wasn’t even
him
she wanted; possibly it was only his obvious propriety, and only because she felt she’d given away her essential goodness and would never get it back.

Then it struck her that he was no longer interested in her feet; he kept glancing at her
hands
. Even though she’d put away the dildo, he wouldn’t look in her eyes.

‘Do you want to see me again?’ Nancy repeated. There was no ambiguity to her question now. She stood closer to him than was necessary, but he ignored the question by pointing to the child performers far below them.

‘Always the same stunts – they never change,’ Inspector Patel remarked. Nancy refused to look at the beggars; she continued to stare at Inspector Patel.

‘You could
give
me your phone number,’ she said. ‘Then I could call you.’

‘But why would you?’ the inspector asked her. He kept watching the beggars. Nancy turned away from him and stretched out on the bed. She lay on her stomach with the robe gathered tightly around her. She thought about her blond hair; she thought it must look nice, spread out on the pillows, but she didn’t know if Inspector Patel was looking at her. She just knew that her voice would be muffled by the pillows, and that he’d have to come closer to the bed in order to hear her.

‘What if I need you?’ she asked him. ‘What if I get in some trouble and need the police?’

‘That young man was strangled,’ Inspector Patel told her; by the sound of his voice, she knew he was near her.

Nancy kept her face buried in the pillows, but she reached out to the sides of the bed with her hands. She’d been thinking that she’d never learn anything about the dead boy – not even if the act of killing him had been wicked and full of hatred or merely inadvertent. Now she knew – the young man couldn’t have been inadvertently strangled.

‘/didn’t strangle him,’ Nancy said.

‘I know that,’ said Inspector Patel. When he touched her hand, she lay absolutely motionless; then his touch was gone. In a second, she heard him in the bathroom. It sounded as if he was running a bath.

‘You have big hands,’ he called to her. She didn’t move. ‘The boy was strangled by someone with small hands. Probably another boy, but maybe a woman.’

‘You suspected
me
,’ Nancy said; she couldn’t tell if he’d heard her over the running bathwater. ‘I said, you suspected me – until you saw my hands,’ Nancy called to him.

He shut the water off. The tub couldn’t be very full, Nancy thought,

‘I suspect everybody,’ Inspector Patel said, ‘but I didn’t really suspect you of strangling the boy.’

Nancy was simply too curious; she got up from the bed and went to the bathroom. Inspector Patel was sitting on the edge of the tub, watching the dildo float around and around like a toy boat.

‘Just as I thought – it floats,’ he said. Then he submerged it; he held it under the water for almost a full minute, never taking his eyes off it. ‘No bubbles,’ he said. ‘It floats because it’s hollow,’ he told her. ‘But if it came apart – if you could open it – there would be bubbles. I thought it would come apart.’ He let the water out of the tub and wiped the dildo dry with a towel. ‘One of your friends called while you were registering,’ Inspector Patel told Nancy. ‘He didn’t want to speak with you — he just wanted to know if you’d checked in.’ Nancy was blocking the bathroom door; the inspector paused for her to get out of his way. ‘Usually, this means that someone is interested to know if you’ve passed safely through customs. Therefore, I thought you were bringing something in. But you weren’t, were you?’

‘No,’ Nancy managed to say.

‘Well, then, as I leave, I’ll tell the hotel to give you your messages directly,’ the inspector said.

‘Thank you,’ Nancy replied.

He’d already opened the door to the hall before he handed her his card. ‘Do call me if you get into any trouble,’ he told her. She chose to stare at the card; it was better than watching him leave. There were several printed phone numbers, one circled with a ballpoint pen, and his printed name and title.

VIJAY
PATEL
POLICE
INSPECTOR
COLABA
STATION

Nancy didn’t know how far from home Vijay Patel was. When his whole family had left Gujarat for Kenya, Vijay had come to Bombay. For a Gujarati to make any headway on a Maharashtrian police force was no small accomplishment; but the Gujarati Patels in Vijay’s family were merchants – they wouldn’t have been impressed. Vijay was as cut off from them – they were in business in Nairobi – as Nancy was from Iowa.

After she’d read and reread the policeman’s card, Nancy went out to the balcony and watched the beggars for a while. The children were enterprising performers, and there was a monotony to their stunts that was soothing. Like most foreigners, she was easily impressed by the contortionists.

Occasionally, one of the guests would throw an orange to the child performers, or a banana; some threw coins. Nancy thought it was cruel the way a crippled boy, with one leg and a padded crutch, was always beaten by the other children when he attempted to hop and stagger ahead of them to the money or the fruit. She didn’t realize that the cripple’s role was choreographed; he was central to the dramatic action. He was also older than the other children, and he was their leader; in reality, he could beat up the other children — and, on occasion, had.

But the pathos was unfamiliar to Nancy and she looked for something to throw to him; all she could find was a 10-rupee note. This was too much money to give to a beggar, but she didn’t know any better. She weighted the bill down with two bobby pins and stood on the balcony with the money held above her head until she caught the crippled boy’s attention.

‘Hey, lady!’ he called. Some of the child performers paused in their handstands and their contortions, and Nancy sailed the 10-rupee note into the air; it rose briefly in an updraft before it floated down. The children ran back and forth, trying to be in the right place to catch it. The crippled boy appeared content to let one of the other children grab the money.

‘No, it’s for you – for you!’ Nancy cried to him, but he ignored her. A tall girl, one of the contortionists, caught the 10-rupee note; she was so surprised at the amount, she didn’t hand it over to the crippled boy quite quickly enough, and so he struck her in the small of her back with his crutch – a blow with sufficient force to knock her to her hands and knees. Then the cripple snatched up the money and hopped away from the girl, who had begun crying.

Nancy realized that she’d disrupted the usual drama; somehow
she
was at fault. As the beggars scattered, one of the tall Sikh doormen from the Taj approached the crying girl. He carried a long wooden pole with a gleaming brass hook on one end – it was a transom pole, for opening and closing the transom windows above the tall doors – and the doorman use this pole to lift the ragged skirt of the girl’s torn and filthy dress. He deftly exposed her before she could snatch the skirt of her dress between her legs and cover herself. Then he poked the girl in the chest with the brass end of the pole, and when she tried to stand, he whacked her hard in the small of her back, exactly where the cripple had hit her with his crutch. The girl cried out. Then she scurried away from the Sikh on all fours. He was skillful in pursuing her – at herding her with sharp jabs and thrusts with the pole. Finally, she got to her feet and outran him.

The Sikh had a dark, spade-shaped beard flecked with silver, and he wore a dark-red turban; he shouldered the transom pole like a rifle, and he cast a cursory glance to Nancy on her balcony. She retreated into her room; she was sure he could see under her bathrobe and straight up her crotch — he was directly below her. But the balcony itself prevented such a view. Nancy imagined things.

Obviously, there were rules, she thought. The beggars could beg, but they couldn’t cry; it was too early in the morning, and crying would wake the guests who were managing to sleep. Nancy instantly ordered the most American thing she could find on the room-service menu – scrambled eggs and toast – and when they brought her tray, she saw two sealed envelopes propped between the orange juice and the tea. Her heart jumped because she hoped they were declarations of undying love from Inspector Patel. But one was the message from Dieter that the inspector had intercepted; it said simply that Dieter had called. He was glad she’d arrived safely – he’d see her soon. And the other was a printed request from the hotel management, asking her to kindly refrain from throwing things out her window.

She was ravenous, and as soon as she’d finished eating, she was sleepy. She closed the curtains against the light of day and turned up the ceiling fan as fast as it would go. For a while she lay awake, thinking of Inspector Patel. She even toyed with the idea of Dieter being caught with the money as he tried to pass through customs. Nancy was still naive enough to imagine that the Deutsche marks were coining into the country with Dieter. It hadn’t even crossed her mind that she’d already brought the money in.

It seemed to her that she slept for days. It was dark when she woke. She would never know if it was the predawn darkness of the next day, or the predawn of the day after that. She awoke to some sort of commotion in the hall outside her room; someone was trying to get in, but she’d double-locked the door and there was a safety chain, too. She got out of bed. There, in the hall, was Dieter; he was surly to the porter, whom he sent away without a tip. Once inside the room, but only after he’d double-locked the door and hooked the safety chain in place, he turned to her and asked her where the dildo was. This wasn’t exactly gallant of him, Nancy thought, but in her sleepiness she supposed it was merely his aggressive way of being amorous. She pointed to it in the bathroom.

Then she opened her robe and let it slip off her shoulders and fall at her feet; she stood in the bathroom doorway, expecting him to kiss her, or at least look at her. Dieter held the dildo over the sink; he appeared to be heating the unnatural head of the penis with his cigarette lighter. Nancy woke up in a hurry. She picked up her bathrobe and put it back on; she stepped away from the bathroom door, but she could still observe Dieter. He was careful not to let the flame blacken the dildo, and he concentrated the heat not at the tip but at the place where the fake foreskin was rolled. It then appeared to Nancy that he was slowly melting the dildo; she realized that there was a substance, like wax, dripping into the sink. Where the fake foreskin was rolled, there emerged a thin line, circumscribing the head. When Dieter had melted the wax seal, he ran the tip of the big penis under cold water and then grasped the circumcised head with a towel. He needed quite a lot of force to unscrew the dildo, which was as hollow as Inspector Patel had observed. The wax seal had prevented any air from escaping; there’d been no bubbles underwater. Inspector Patel had been half right; he’d looked in the right place, but not in the right way – a young policeman’s error.