The Mystery of the Merry Magician (21 page)

Balbir was looking around. Suddenly his glance came to rest on an enormous man in a yellow turban. He was sitting, with the ramrod posture of a drill sergeant, at a table halfway across the room.

“There is Thakur Bedkar! He is an acquaintance of my father’s. Perhaps he can help us.”

Before Gully could rise, Balbir was striding toward the man’s table. He bowed respectfully and said something. The man swung around in his chair. Even seated as he was, his head was almost level with Balbir’s.

Balbir sighed when he came back. “Thakur was to have met my father for lunch here at one-thirty yesterday, but my father never came.”

“Is your father usually on time for appointments?” Gully asked.

“Yes.”

“Then we’ve learned something!” Gully exclaimed. “Mr. Singh disappeared some time between eleven and one-thirty.” He made a note of this new fact in his little red book. “Did Mr. Bedkar have anything else to say, Balbir?”

“Only that another friend might have seen my father,” Balbir replied. “They often play chess together, and Thakur Bedkar says the man should be here soon.”

“Meanwhile, let’s begin Gully’s education in Indian food,” Prema said as the waiter lowered a well-filled tray to a stand near their table. “Here’s our first course, Gully. Fried shrimp with
poorie
.”

Gully found the unfamiliar food not half as bad as he had expected. The
poorie
turned out to be a sort of warm brown puffed-up bread that was delicious. The
mulligatawny
soup that followed was like a vegetable soup with an odd flavor—Prema said it was because there was curry in it—and he actually liked the three round, darkish balls in the soup, called
bhujia
, which Balbir assured him were an Indian version of vegetable fritters. There was something called
kofta
curry that looked like meatballs, the first bite of which set Gully’s mouth on fire and made him reach frantically for water, to Prema’s amusement; but he enjoyed the chicken
kurma
curry and the lamb
kurma
in
dhal
gravy—especially the gravy, which his two friends instructed him to sop up with a kind of light, flaky bread they called
paratha
. He did have to reach often, however, for his water glass.

Suddenly a drum throbbed, and two Indian musicians marched onto the small cleared space in the middle of the restaurant. They wore red pantaloons, and their chests were bare except for heavy silver necklaces. One musician thumped a small drum. The other, barefooted, was playing an odd-looking stringed instrument with a bow.

“We’re lucky!” Prema cried. “The dancers are here today.”

The restaurant darkened, a spotlight shone on the floor, and two Indian women strode into the light. They, too, wore bright pantaloons, and yellow blouses with short sleeves. At each step, their metal anklets jingled rhythmically. But as they began to dance, it was their hands that fascinated Gully. Their fingers parted, joined, pointed, spread, and touched in intricate movements.

“Their fingers express their feelings, Gully,” Prema explained. “It’s a sort of sign language—called
mudras
.”

The dancers’ hands told a story, Prema whispered, that their faces and bodies only emphasized. When the lights came on, Gully sat motionless in wonder.

Prema smiled. “Would you like me to teach you a few of the
mudras
signs, Gully?”

Without waiting for his answer, she took Gully’s hand and bent, twisted, pulled, and prodded his long fingers, showing him the meanings of a dozen different signs. Then the Jalpuri girl insisted that he repeat them, to prove that he had really learned them.

“If you can make the signs, you can understand them. And next time, you’ll enjoy the dancing that much more.”

Balbir grinned sympathetically as Gully reviewed
mudras
signs till dessert was brought to the table. He had just put a piece of mango into his mouth when Balbir cried out, jumped up, and rushed toward an elderly Sikh gentleman who had just entered the restaurant. When he returned, he was bursting with news.

“He
did
see my father! They played chess together in Central Park. He left shortly after noon, but my father stayed to watch the others play.”

“Now we’re getting somewhere,” Prema said with satisfaction.

“We certainly are,” Gully said. “We’ve narrowed the disappearance period by over an hour!”

Balbir’s face brightened hopefully as Gully made the new entry in his notebook. Gully was just finishing when he heard Prema utter a startled cry.

He looked up. Looming above Ambassador Jind’s daughter was a dark and very large East Indian with menacing little eyes. His powerful hand came down to grip Prema’s shoulder.

“I have been looking for you,” the stranger said in a gruff deep voice. “Come!”

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1961 by Pocket Books, Inc.

Cover design by Andy Ross

978-1-5040-0401-5

This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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New York, NY 10014

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