The Empress of India (23 page)

“Then, all at once the head priest stopped stroking the great gong and, as the reverberations died away, the pack of jackals came forward to eat, each to his or her assigned spot, with no fighting or squabbling or
any great fuss. After perhaps five minutes they all, as though at a signal, turned and faded away into the cane. The one I think of as the leader went last, again paying me no more attention than if I were a stone or a clot of earth.”

Captain Helsing, who thought he was wise in the ways of all animals, especially jackals, smiled a superior smile. “Jackals don’t behave like that,” he said.

“These did,” replied Colonel Sebastian Moran.

“Did you discover why or how this ceremony began?” asked Colonel Morcy.

“I asked the head priest, each of us managing to communicate in bad Hindi, the only language we had in common. His native language was Oriya, I believe. At any rate, I asked him how this observance came about, and he said he had no idea. The priests of this temple had been feeding the jackals in his great-grandfather’s time, and would continue it as far into the future as Brahma would allow.”

The officers of the Duke’s Own nodded. That was the sort of answer they understood. They could look forward to many more stories from the experiences of Colonel Sebastian Moran. A pukka sahib, Colonel Moran.

And then there was the trading of names:

“Yes, Binky came out to the Soudan in, I think it was ’84. He was a captain then . . .”

“I knew him when he was a subaltern at Kings; hadn’t got his title then, you know . . .”

“Danforth and old Muzzy were great pals. You remember Muzzy? Son of the Earl of Roberts. Christian name David, I believe. Muzzy.”

“Aide-de-camp of General FitzPacker, back in ’77, I remember.”

“Oh, yes. Old ‘Hannibal’ FitzPacker.”

“Hannibal?”

“That’s what they called him. Older than the moon, and incredibly skin-and-bony. Had a fixation on using elephants in the army. Wanted
the War Department to buy a couple of dozen Indian elephants and start an elephant cavalry brigade. He was overly fond of brandy, I believe.”

The officers’ postprandial cigars were taken strolling about the deck and discussing portents and the state of the world.

“Hot.”

“Deuced hot.”

“Been hot for a while.”

“It’ll get hotter.”

“Not in England.”

“No, not in England.”

“Glad to be going home.”

“Deuced responsibility, all that gold.”

“Nothing to worry about. Our boys’ll guard it well enough.”

“Deuced responsibility. The chaps aren’t trained for this. Should have used marines. The marines are trained to guard things on a ship.”

“Didn’t have any marines.”

“That’s so. All the same . . .”

Colonel Moran interjected, “You think there’s some danger, then?”

“Wouldn’t think so, no,” said General St. Yves. He took a long puff on his cigar and stared contemplatively at the ocean below. “I watched Captain Iskansen closing the outer vault door yesterday evening. He makes quite a ceremony out of it.”

“How do you mean?” asked Colonel Morcy.

“Well, he has this little c-coterie of officers—ship’s officers, I mean—who come along with him. Won’t let anybody else near while he twiddles the locks and such. We even have to move our guards farther away during the procedure. He keeps his little secrets, does the captain.”

“Same thing when he opens it in the morning,” volunteered a plump major named Bosch. “Banging and twisting and standing this way and that.” He illustrated with emphatic arm gestures. “As seen from afar, of course. Even his own officers clustered about him during the process
look away while he’s messing about with the outer door locks. It makes you wonder why he bothers keeping the thing open during the day.”

“So we can all see for ourselves that it’s still there, I suppose,” General St. Yves said. “But all the same . . .”

“There’s something about gold,” Moran offered. “Why, I remember once in the hills above Mawpatta . . .”

After breakfast the next morning Colonel Sebastian Moran carefully selected a cheroot from the twelve tightly rolled Lunkah cheroots in his tooled black leather cigar case and rolled it speculatively between his fingers. “General St. Yves and his officers, they’re good soldiers, all. British to the core,” he told Moriarty, who was sitting in the leather chair across from him in the small, overly furnished upper deck smoking lounge. “I understand them and they understand me.”

“I don’t think they understand quite everything there is to know about you,” Moriarty said dryly.

Moran spent some time poking the end of his cheroot with a toothpick and lighting it before replying. “There are some things, Professor,” he said finally, “that even
I
don’t know about me.”

Moriarty looked at the colonel with some surprise. “Come, now,” he said, “that’s a statement redolent of moral philosophy. Don’t tell me there beats the heart of a Benthamite under that thick skin of yours.”

Moran puffed cautiously at his cigar for a minute before replying. “I couldn’t say one way or the other,” he said, “not knowing just what it is you’re talking about.”

Moriarty grinned. “No matter,” he said.

Moran lowered his voice. “I don’t suppose you’ve had any further thoughts on the gold, have you?”

“No thoughts at all,” Moriarty admitted. “I find it futile to speculate when I’m possessed of so little information.”

“Well, I can add to your store a bit,” Moran told him. “I doubt if it
will help, but just for the sake of completeness . . .” and he told Moriarty what he had heard of the captain’s ceremonial opening and closing of the outer vault door, complete with arm gestures copied from Major Bosch.

Moriarty nodded as Moran finished. “That’s actually interesting,” he said.

“Fascinating,” Moran agreed. “Does it give you any ideas?”

“Actually, it does,” Moriarty told him. “But they’re of no immediate use. For now let us concentrate on retrieving the statuette. Have you had an adequate opportunity to examine the Lady in question?”

“I have poked at her and prodded her admiringly at two dinners now. They bring her out with the soup and place her on a sideboard against the wall behind General St. Yves’s chair. Do the rooms on ships have walls? Bulkheads, perhaps, or scrimshaws, or some such.”

“ ‘Wall’ will do,” Moriarty said. “I assume you’ve verified that it’s the right statue.”

“Under the brass skin of the Lady of Lucknow beats the bejeweled heart of the Queen of Lamapoor, all right,” Moran said between puffs. “There’s no doubt about that. None at all. The brass plating can’t be very thick because it appears to be wearing off in a couple of places. I fear that if the mess stewards keep up their industrious polishing of our little Lady, they’re going to start seeing gemstones peeping out from under the brass.”

He tapped his cigar against the edge of an oversized ceramic ashtray. “The question is, how are we going to induce the officers of the Duke of Moncreith’s Own Highland Lancers to part with their little brass goddess before that happens. That’s the question. And that’s your part, Professor. I think I have my part well in hand. When does your part begin?”

“My part?” The professor polished his pince-nez with a small square of blue flannel and adjusted them on the bridge of his nose.

“Yes. You and that midget friend of yours in the suit of many colors. What is it that you’re planning to do, and when does it commence?”

“It has commenced as we sit here,” Moriarty said. “The mummer is hawking our little statues in the first- and second-class lounges. He’s also passing out a few to the purser and others of the ship’s company who may be expected to display them here and there about the ship. And, of course, he’s telling the tale.”

“That’s it, then?” Moran held his cigar about a foot from his face and stared expressionlessly into the twisting column of smoke rising from its tip.

“One other thing,” Moriarty said. “We have procured a supply of plaster of Paris from the ship’s pharmacy, and the mummer is turning one of our brass statues to stone.”

Moran thought about that for a moment, and then turned his cigar outward and thrust it in the general direction of the professor’s nose. “Are you sure you’re as smart as you think you are?” he asked belligerently. “ ’Cause I have no idea what this mumbo-jumbo’s in aid of, and whenever you try to tell me, I seem to get that much further from figuring it out.”

“Just worry about your part of the job,” Moriarty told him firmly, pushing the cigar aside. “You brought me in on this to solve a difficult and intriguing problem, and I am doing so. Whether you can grasp every strand in the pattern is unimportant as long as you understand your part and do your job. And you’re doing it admirably so far. I have no complaints and, whether you know it or not, neither do you.”

“Well,” Moran said, somewhat mollified by Moriarty’s positive attitude. “I’ll leave you to it, then. But you might tell me a little ahead of time when I’ve to do something, and warn me of what you’re doing, so we don’t cross each other by accident.”

“I’ll be careful,” Moriarty assured him.

“Then what’s next?”

“At dinner tonight,” Moriarty said, “you will take the next step.”

“I will, will I?” Moran put the cigar in the ashtray and pressed his thumbs together. “And what will you be doing?”

“I will be arranging with Captain Iskansen to have a steam launch meet us when we drop anchor in Bombay Harbor.”

Moran picked up his cigar with the thumb and forefinger of his left hand and, holding it in front of his nose, stared at it as though close study would reveal some imponderable secret. When it failed to produce anything but smoke, he looked back up at Moriarty. “And how,” he asked, “will Captain Iskansen accomplish this?”

“Signal flags, Colonel,” Moriarty told him. “Signal flags. He will run the appropriate one up the mainmast as we approach, and a steam launch will await us.”

“They have one for that?” Moran asked.

“Perhaps more than one,” Moriarty allowed. “But the signals officer should certainly be able to do it in one string.”

Moran nodded thoughtfully. “And what’s my part in this charade to be?”

“You are going to inform General St. Yves and any other officers who might be interested that your good friend Professor James Moriarty is arranging for a steam launch to take a selected group of interested and serious-minded friends to Elephanta for the day. We probably won’t be leaving Bombay until the next morning, so we’ll have a long day to explore.”

“Well, you’d best make certain of that before we go haring off to—where?—Elephanta? I thought that was some sort of African disease.”

Moriarty raised an eyebrow. “Elephanta is a small island off the coast of Bombay. It is redolent with caves that have, for centuries, been dedicated as temples to this god or that. The carvings are quite miraculous, or so I’m told.”

“And what will induce a pride of British officers to visit these carved-up caves?”

“They are quite educational and uplifting. They will, of course, take their wives, who will enjoy it immensely.”

“The ladies are fond of being educated and uplifted, I’ll grant you that,” said Moran. “But as to the gentlemen . . .”

“There is one cave that ladies are not permitted to enter,” Moriarty told him. “The officers will find that one quite, ah, uplifting.”

“Ah!” Moran said. “Now you’re talking. Fun for the whole family, eh? I’ll see what I can do.”

Margaret and Lady Priscilla had lunch together in the Ladies’ Dining Room, and then Lady Priscilla went off to pursue her interests—a subaltern named Welles whom she was permitting to pay a certain amount of polite, proper, and discreet interest in her. Margaret settled into a deck chair under the canvas canopy on the first-class promenade deck, where she could enjoy the almost cool ocean breeze, and worked at transliterating the Devanagari alphabet in the badly printed English-Hindi military phrasebook she had found discarded at the post library. She was determined to increase her Hindi vocabulary by at least two words a day, picked at random from the pages of the phrasebook and devised into the silliest sentences she could imagine. Margaret had found that silliness was a great aid to learning, and a military phrasebook was a great aid to silliness.

She stopped reading as a man in a light tan linen suit paused by her chair to light a cigarette. The match flared, the man puffed, and a stray bit of wind blew the first puff of smoke in Margaret’s face, sending her into a fit of coughing.

The man turned to her, an expression of dismay on his face. “I apologize most terribly, madam,” he said. “Allow me to—Why, it’s Miss St. Yves. How do you do? Well, I see how you do, and it is the fault of myself. I am most horribly sorry.”

After a minute the coughing became sporadic, and then ceased, and Margaret peered up at her inadvertent tormentor. “Well!” she said.
“Professor Gerard August Demartineu. I didn’t know you were aboard the ship.”

“Why, you have remembered the whole of my name,” said the French professor, plumping down on the chair next to Margaret’s and extending his arm out to the side to keep the smoke from his cigarette far from Margaret’s face. “I am honored. Yes, it is that I am aboard
The Empress of India,
as you can plainly see. My, ah, partner and protégé, Mamarum Sutrow, and I are headed to England to begin our career as prestidigitators of the first water.”