The Empress of India (22 page)

He led them to the door of the gold vault. “This is my responsibility,” he said ponderously, pointing through the bars of the inner door at the crates of gold that gleamed in the cold light of the powerful electric bulbs in the ceiling fixtures. “The vault is my first line of defense, and you and your men are my second.”

“That is so,” St. Yves agreed.

“Go over with me one more time how you’re positioning your men and just what their orders are,” the captain said.

“Colonel Morcy has made the dispositions,” St. Yves said, indicating his adjutant.

Morcy nodded. “The watch is divided into four six-hour shifts per day,” he said, ticking off the points on his fingers as he made them. “Each shift contains a corporal of the guard and ten or eleven men. The two posted guards, one at each end of the corridor, are relieved every two hours, the rest of the men staying on call in the guardroom at all times. All the men are armed with the Martini-Henry carbine and bayonet, and carrying a whistle. They also each are equipped with a bull’s-eye lantern to light in case the electrical power should fail. Their standing orders are to allow passage through the corridor but to keep alert for anything untoward or out of the ordinary. If they see anything
in the least unusual, they are to blow the whistle and all the men in the guardroom will immediately turn out. One man is immediately sent to the officers’ dayroom, where one of us or another senior officer will always be on duty in case of need.”

“And the guns,” Captain Iskansen asked, “they are loaded?”

“Yes, sir. The men are under instructions to shoot if threatened.”

“But the bayonets? I don’t see the bayonets.”

“Because of the close quarters,” Morcy explained, “the bayonets are kept in their scabbards, only to be drawn if needed.”

“Ah,” said the captain. “I see. Is there anything else I should know?”

“What sort of thing?” asked St. Yves.

Iskansen lifted his hands expressively. “Any contingency plan, any clever little secret plot to better guard the gold?”

“No,” said St. Yves, looking faintly puzzled. “That’s all of it.”

“Good,” Captain Iskansen said firmly. “I want to know everything that’s happening on my ship. I hate surprises.”

“So do we,” St. Yves assured him. “Let us hope that we don’t encounter any during this voyage.”

“Then we understand each other,” said Iskansen.

“Have you any other questions or suggestions?” St. Yves asked.

The captain thought for a moment. “No, no,” he said. “It sounds quite well done. Thank you.” He nodded at them and walked off.

“Well,” Major Sandiman said when Iskansen had rounded the bend. “What do you suppose that was about? He surely knew all of that already.”

“Chain of command,” suggested Colonel Morcy. “He wants us to clearly understand that he’s at the top of the chain.”

“As long as we’re here,” St. Yves said, “let’s drop in on the guardroom. Make sure everything’s shipshape. Then I’ll stand you both to a drink.”

“Good plan,” approved the colonel.

“Very good, sir,” said the major.

S
UNDAY, 9
M
ARCH 1890

Genius is the ability to see things invisible, to manipulate things intangible, to paint things that have no features.
—Joseph Joubert

T
he steam sloop
Endymion,
a thin stream of oily black smoke wafting out of its tall, pencil-thin smokestack, oozed its way into Bombay Harbor at a bit past eight in the morning. Passing Oyster Rock Battery, it glided along the line of piers, basins, yacht clubs, dockyards and a row of large stone elephants, their trunks upraised in eternal challenge, and pulled up alongside a grimy pier at a dilapidated boatyard, whereupon it promptly shut down its engines and coasted to a stop.

Pin Dok Low, slender and immaculate in a loose white muslin jacket and baggy white pants, stood atop the steering house closely studying the flock of docked and moored ships as the
Endymion
passed them in the harbor. “It isn’t here yet,” he called down to his two companions waiting on the deck below.

“How do you know it ain’t been here and left already?” Cooley the Pup yelled back at him.

The Artful Codger stomped his feet noisily. “Now, wouldn’t that just be something to write home about, wouldn’t it just?”

“Highly unlikely,” Pin Dok Low said. “But we will, of course, check that eventuality out immediately.” He lowered himself into to the steering house and spoke briefly to the captain, and then leaped like a great bird of prey onto the deck below. “Now, gentlemen,” he said to his two companions, “the adventure begins.”

“It seems to me, Pin, that thissere adventure begun the first time I run’d acrost your name,” said Cooley the Pup. “It’s been nothin’ but ups and downs ever since.”

“Don’t mind him, Pin,” the Artful Codger said. “He’s suffering from
mal
of the
mer,
which makes everything shine in a baleful light.”

Dr. Pin Dok Low smiled at the Codger, showing an uneven row of yellow teeth. “Why, Codger,” he said. “That’s almost poetry. ‘Shine in a baleful light.’ However did that occur to you?”

“I think I read it somewhere,” said the Codger, determinedly not looking embarrassed.

“I didn’t know you could read,” said Pin.

“It don’t come up offen,” the Codger said. He squinted at Pin in the morning light. “You know, Pin, when you ain’t dressed like a Chinee, you don’t look hardly Oriental at all. You could almost pass for a white man.”

Pin smiled broadly, the gold caps on two of his teeth flashing in the sun. “What a compliment,” he said. “I am honored to almost resemble a member of your uncultured and barbaric race.”

“This ain’t getting us nowhere,” said Cooley the Pup. “Here we are in Bom-bloody-bay, and it seems we got here before
The Empress of India
pulled in. What I wants to know is, what does we do from here? After we make sure that the
Empress
ain’t been and gone already, o’course.”

“Yes,” Pin agreed. “Always making sure of that, of course. We find the booking office and book passage on
The Empress of India
. Whereupon we set about watching the gold in the ship’s vault as though it were our own—which it shortly shall be.”

“Oh, great,” groaned Cooley. “More pitching and tossing about.”

“The
Empress
is quite a bit larger than the
Endymion,
” said Pin. “You shouldn’t get sick.”

“I’ll get sick,” said Cooley.

“Why didn’t you think of that before you come with us?” asked the Codger.

“Well, I didn’t know I was going to get sick, did I? I mean, it ain’t like I ever been on a bloody boat before.”

The captain of the
Endymion,
a corpulent giant of a man who said his name was Georgidios and claimed to be a Greek, thumped down from the steering house to the deck. “We are tied off now,” he boomed. “You can go ashore.” He slapped Pin on the back. “Did I not tell you that I could get you to Bombay in ten days, if the blessed boilers did not burst?”

“Indeed,” Pin admitted.

“And the blessed boilers did not burst, and so here we indeed are.” Georgidios beamed and patted the ship on its cargo hatch. “The
Endymion,
he is a good, speedy little craft, he is.”

“I thought all ships were called ‘she,’ ” said the Codger.

“The
Endymion
is a boy,” Georgidios said. “Named for a Greek shepherd, a lad who was so beautiful that the goddess Artemis, whom you call Diana, fell in love with him and bestowed many kisses upon him.” Georgidios blew several kisses into his plump hands and bestowed them onto the air in front of him.

“We’re going to leave you now, Captain,” Pin told Georgidios “Many thanks for your prompt and efficient traverse of several seas and a rather long canal.”

“Yes, yes,” Georgidios said. “And thank you for your more-than-adequate payment.”

“I told you we should have argued him down a bit more,” said the Codger in an undertone. Captain Georgidios heard and glowered at him, and he glowered back.

“Have one of your deck hands bring our luggage from the cabin,” Pin told Georgidios. “We’ll send a runner for it as soon as we locate a hotel.”

“Aye, aye,” said Captain Georgidios. “Good luck on your venture, whatever it may be.”

Man never knows what he wants; he aspires to penetrate mysteries and as soon as he has, he wants to reestablish them. Ignorance irritates him and knowledge cloys.
—Henri Frederic Amiel

O
n the third day at sea Colonel Sebastian Moran was invited to join General St. Yves and the officers of the Duke’s Own at their table at the last seating for dinner. His stories of hunting man-eaters in the Himalayas and fighting the Mahdi and his dervishes in Egypt—basically true and told with even more than the usual British understatement—made him a desirable dinner companion for these professional soldiers. After all, they had been together for many years, and had listened to their own stories many times.

“Remember in Bela when the parrots used to flock around every afternoon to get fed?” Major Sandiman reminisced.

“Parakeets,” Colonel Morcy corrected. “
Psittacula alexandri,
as a matter of fact. The red-breasted parakeet. They were enamored of bread crumbs, which the wallah used to throw down at three every afternoon but Tuesday, for some reason.”

The others nodded. Tuesday. They remembered.

“At the foot of the Himalayas,” Moran began, staring into his cigar smoke, “by that swash of jungle called the Terai, there’s a bit of grassland abutting the forest where my chaps and I used to go on maneuvers every spring.”

The officers of the Duke’s Own turned to listen. They’d never been to the Terai. Moran’s story, if nothing else, would be new.

“One day a Hindu in my service, a bright chap named Jivana who went on to become something big in the Kashmir-Afghanistan Railway, told me there was a great
tamasha
—a sort of spectacle—to be seen at a temple nearby. He assured me that it would not violate any taboos if we went to watch, so the next evening five of us went to see what it was all about. We skirted the woods for about half a mile, and came to a great stand of bamboo, perhaps two hundred yards on a side. Jivana led us through a winding path to a clearing in the center of the bamboo thicket. At the far end of the clearing was a small Hindu temple, a whitewashed clay structure of indeterminate age. The roof of thatched elephant grass sat on ancient teak beams, the ends of which were carved like gargoyles, but in shapes to which the Western eye is unaccustomed. A large bronze bell inlayed with words in an alphabet I did not understand stood to the side of the temple doorway.”

Moran paused to puff on his cigar. “Go on,” one of the listeners urged, and several others nodded; as good a tribute as a standing ovation from a different audience.

“Across the long side of the clearing there was a row of small, un-adorned huts, in front of which sat a row of dhoti-clad priests, each of which was cooking
chappattis
over a wood fire in front of him. A thin line of blue smoke rose up from each of the fires, and they spread out and joined perhaps a hundred feet up, forming a layer of blue haze that obscured the mountains. The priests ignored us entirely, as though we were meaningless, or perhaps invisible watchers at some ancient and inevitable ceremony.”

Moran paused again, and a lieutenant named Jimlis interjected, “That can’t have been the show—a dozen half-naked Hindu priests sitting around frying bread.”

“That’s how it began,” Moran told him. “Jivana motioned for us to be quiet and stand there, and so we did. I noted that the
chappattis
were singularly large and course, more cakes than bread.

“Just as the last rays of the sun were coming over the bamboo, the chief priest, an ancient man clad in white robes, emerged from the temple and began striking the great bronze bell with a great bronze hammer. A deep thrumming sound filled the clearing, and the bamboo shivered to the vibrations emitted.”

Moran took another puff on his cigar, stared moodily into it, and went on: “Something brushed by my leg, and I looked down to see a jackal, a great brute of a beast with red eyes and a foul breath, enter the clearing and pause, sitting on its haunches and staring at the chief priest as he continued to stroke the bell. The animal was totally fearless and unconcerned about our presence there.”

Moran’s audience of hardened professional British officers sat entranced; here was a story they hadn’t heard before. “Go on,” said General St. Yves.

Moran nodded. “More of the beasts gathered, coming through subtle pathways in the cane, until there were perhaps a score of them. As each one emerged from the thicket, it sat as the leader had, silently observing the stroking of the gong. Finally, when all had assembled, the priests gathered their rough
chappattis
and went around the compound, breaking off a bit by this stone, a chunk by that bit of earth, a morsel on top of that flat rock, and so on, until all the cakes were crumbled and distributed and the priests had resumed their cross-legged positions in front of their small huts.