Part Four — The Trial · Adam's Robe Book 3
Chapter Twenty-Five
Udvada, Gujarat, India — Day 33
By nine the lane was full, and nobody had been told what for.
Leah stood in the open gateway of the green door with her back to the peepal and watched them come. They came in ones and twos, in their white and their ordinary clothes, the women in saris with narrow borders, the men with their sleeves rolled, children by the hand. They carried covered dishes. A boy had a pot of tea on a tray, with the cups chinking. At the corner a man was setting up a table under an awning and unpacking, with great ceremony, a tin of sweets. The sign in the square said Assembly at the Panthaki house, all welcome, and the town, having read it, had decided that this was an occasion one attended with food.
"They always bring food," Roshan said at her elbow. She wore her gray sari and looked as though she had broken a law before breakfast and was waiting to be caught. "I told you."
"You did."
"I told Father. He said that it was not a prayer meeting. I said that it was now."
It was already hot. The bell in the sanctuary was ringing, slowly, and under it ran the sound of two hundred people not quite sure how to behave, a low murmur, the scrape of a bench, a child being hushed. Nobody pushed. Nobody called out. They stood in the lane in the sun and looked, with polite, patient curiosity, at the old house with its green door and its open gate, and Leah understood that she had done this. It was her idea. Standing here, she wondered whether she had been right.
An act done where everyone can see it is safer than an act done where no one can.
She said it to herself, once, and let it go.
Cho came up the lane at ten past nine. She walked the way she always walked, short and square, with her hands in the pockets of the navy coat, and she did not look at the crowd. She looked past it. She stopped in front of Leah and said, in the flat voice she used for the dangerous parts, "Three cars."
"Where?"
"The road in. Where it comes off the highway, a quarter mile before the first houses. A white Innova, a gray Scorpio, a gray Ertiga. Mumbai plates, all three." She did not turn her head. "Four men in the first, three in the second, two in the third. They got there at six. They haven't moved. They're not watching the house. They're not watching anything. They're sitting."
"Waiting."
"For a different event than this." Cho took a hand out of her pocket and rubbed the back of her neck. "I don't like it. It's too tidy. If I wanted to be somewhere with nine men and nobody noticing, I'd park where I could see the road in and the road out and nothing else. That's what they did."
"Livnat?"
"No. These aren't hers. Hers wouldn't be in Innovas." She looked at Leah then, steadily. "These are somebody's local people. Somebody who knows the town. Somebody who's paid by the day."
"Bhatti's."
"I didn't say it."
"No," said Leah. "I did."
Her phone buzzed against her palm. It was a quarter past nine in Udvada and a quarter to six in Tel Aviv, and she knew who it was before she looked. She stepped back, under the arch of the gate, and answered it.
"Ronen."
"I will not keep you." Katz's voice was low and level, with the flat care of a man reading from a page. "I called to tell you one fact. I wished you to hear it from me, and not from anyone else, and not afterward."
"Tell me."
"The Director kept her word. She said that she would not deploy the team before the hearing, and she has not." He paused. "The hearing begins at ten. Last evening her aide changed the booking. The seven seats were on tomorrow's flight. They were moved to the night flight, and they are in the air now. They land in Mumbai at two."
She stood quite still. A woman went past her through the gate, carrying a copper pot.
"She said it to me herself," Katz said. "She telephoned. It was a courtesy. She was precise. She said that she had kept her word to the letter, and that a team that lands at two is not a team that has been deployed at ten. She said that she hoped I would understand that the morning after, in Mumbai, begins when the plane touches the runway."
"That's—"
"That is a lawyer's sentence. I have spent fifty years among such sentences. I did not think she would be so quick." He drew a breath. "They will be four hours on the road. They will be in Udvada by dusk. I do not know what they will do, and I do not think that she does. She will want to see it. She will go in with her eyes open. I tell you so that you will have the afternoon."
"Ronen. There are two hundred people at the gate."
"Yes. I heard. Erin told me." A note in the old voice moved, slightly. "It was a good idea, Leah. I think that it may be the best idea that anyone has had in this affair. I think that it will not be enough. But I think that it will be of use."
"I'll tell Framroze."
"Tell him that I am sorry. I have never met him. I should like to have met him." A pause. "I shall stay on the telephone. I have a chair, and a pad, and a pot of tea. If you need me, I am here. If you do not, I shall listen to the breathing."
"I'm going to put you in my pocket."
"That will do," said Katz. "Go well."
She slid the phone into her pocket with the line still open, and the small warm weight of it lay against her hip.
He came at a quarter to ten, alone, on foot, from the direction of the station.
She saw the crowd see him. It was a small movement, the kind a field makes when a wind goes over, a turning of two hundred heads and then a hush. Nassiri walked up the middle of the lane in the full light, in a plain pale shirt and dark trousers, with his hands at his sides, open, and the people stood back to let him by. Nobody spoke. A child stared. A woman put a hand on her small son's shoulder and drew him against her skirt.
He was not what she had remembered.
She had spent three weeks rebuilding him from what Katz had said, and Karam, and the file. A colonel. A hard, precise officer with a long record of efficient harm. What came up the lane was a spare, gray, middle-aged person with a tired face and a straight back. He walked as one walks who has been ill, and kept his eyes on the green door and nothing else. He looked like a schoolmaster on the last day of term. He looked like a guest at a funeral who did not know the dead.
Beside her, Karam had gone entirely still.
He stood a little behind her left shoulder, in his dark coat, with his hands folded. He stood motionless. She heard him breathe in, once, and hold it. She kept her eyes ahead. She understood that he was looking again at the face he had last seen turning away from an old woman's gate in Isfahan. There was nothing to say, and she did not try to say it.
Nassiri stopped at the gate.
He stopped a pace short of the threshold, at the edge of the shade, with the sun on his back. He was quite alone. He looked at the arch, at the peepal beyond it, at the open door of the sitting room across the courtyard. His hands did not move.
Framroze came out of the house.
He walked across the courtyard slowly, in his white coat, with Delnaz at his shoulder, and Roshan a pace behind. He stopped at the inside of the gate. For a moment the old man and the colonel stood facing each other across the line of the threshold with the whole lane watching and not a sound in it but the bell.
"Colonel Nassiri," Framroze said. "Thank you for coming when you said you would. I find that it matters to me more than I expected."
"I do not break commitments."
"No." The old man inclined his head. "I do not think you do."
He turned slightly, with the courtesy of a host, to the people standing in the gateway behind him. "You are entitled to know who will witness this. It is the doctrine's own requirement, and not a courtesy for you alone. Dr. Sarkisian, and Mr. Yonan, whom you have met before. Ms. Manukian and Mr. Manukian, of the family that has kept the first covering's history for four hundred years. Kersasp, a priest from Navsari. My cousin Jehangir, from Bombay. My late brother's wife, and her sister. Mrs. Daruwalla, in whose house you have lodged for two weeks, and who tells me that you pay on time." He paused. "Mr. Dinshaw."
At the back of the group stood the old stall keeper from the foot of the sanctuary wall, in a clean white cap, with a bundle of sandalwood under one arm. He had the untroubled air of a guest asked to attend a wedding. He inclined his head.
"I told him," Framroze said to Nassiri, in a lower voice, "that he is a great scoundrel and has never in his life been wrong about a stranger. He said that he would see for himself. And my daughter Roshan, who was not asked and has decided. That is eleven."
"There is one at the end of the lane," said Nassiri. "She is not on your list."
Leah felt Cho, behind her, shift her weight by a fraction.
"Miss Cho has asked to stand outside," Framroze said. "She has a better view of the road, and she is not a witness of the room. She is a witness of the street."
"Katz," said Nassiri. It was not quite a question.
"He is not here." Cho's voice came from the edge of the crowd, flat and clear and not quite loud. "He asked me to say that his absence is deliberate. It's not that he's avoiding this. It's that what happens in that house isn't his to watch." She walked forward, three steps, until she stood in the full sun at the edge of the gate, short and square, with her hands out of her pockets. "He also asked me to say that if this ends in a way that hurts anybody in that room, there's nothing he'll be able to do for you after. He wanted you to hear it from somebody standing in front of you."
Nassiri studied her. It was a long look, shorter than a stare and longer than courtesy, a flat appraisal, the kind that knows what a person weighs.
"Understood," he said.
"I'm not here to stop you," said Cho. "I'm here to count."
"That is an honest thing to be."
"It's the only thing I'm any good at."
He almost smiled. It lasted less than a second. Then he turned back to the old man, and the smile was gone, and what was left was the schoolmaster's face, tired and exact and gray.
"I would like to say one thing, before we go further," Nassiri said, "to the household that I am about to ask for a great deal."
He looked, for the first time, at Delnaz.
She stood beside her grandfather with her narrow hands folded, in a plain dark dress, with the iron key on its cord against her breast. She was pale. Her face was composed, and under the composure Leah could see, as one sees the grain under varnish, how much it cost.
"I do not know what this will show of me," said Nassiri. "I have spent two nights being uncertain of that, more uncertain than I have been of anything in a long time. I wish you to know that whatever it is, I am grateful that you offered me the chance to find out honestly. I expected to be turned from your gate. I would not have blamed you."
Delnaz held his eyes. She took a moment.
"I am not offering it because I am certain what it will show," she said. "I am offering it because my family has believed for a thousand years that certainty was never the point." Her voice was steady, and low. "Come in, Colonel. I do not think any of us gains by learning it in a doorway."
They went in together, the principals first, then the witnesses, in a slow, awkward, solemn file that none of them had any precedent for managing.
The sitting room was empty. They crossed it and went through the door at its far end, along a short passage that smelled of old wood and sandalwood and, faintly, of rain, and out into the room.
It had been changed. The window on the east was shuttered, so that the morning came in only as a thin bright line between the boards. The lamp on the table was lit, and two others besides, set at the corners. The room had a warm low light of its own, in which every face looked a little older and every shadow a little kinder. The chairs had been taken out. Cushions lay in a half circle along the walls. And at the north end, where it had always stood, the small dark cabinet waited, with its door shut and its lock turned, and a clean cloth laid over its top.
Leah did not look at it for long. She took a cushion by the east wall, between Karam and Ani, with the telephone against her hip, and sat. Vartan went to the far end and stood a moment, looking round the room with an expression she knew. Then he moved a lamp six inches to the left and a stool a foot to the right, came back, and sat beside his cousin, and said nothing.
Nassiri stood in the middle of the floor.
He had been told where to stand. He stood there, in the lamplight, with his hands at his sides, and looked at nothing. He seemed not to notice the people at the walls. She thought that she had never seen anyone more alone in a room full of people.
Dinshaw lowered himself onto a cushion near the door with a grunt, put the sandalwood beside him, and folded his hands on his stomach. Kersasp, a stout cheerful man, was not cheerful. The two aunts sat side by side with their backs straight. Roshan stood at the door with her arms folded, and her face had gone hard and still.
Delnaz took her place at the north end, to the left of the cabinet. Framroze stood in front of it.
He turned and faced the room. In the low gold light he looked old and large, with his white beard and his white coat and his hand lifted, palm out, as one stills a crowd.
"We should begin," he said. His voice was quieter than it had been at the gate. It carried without effort to every corner of the room. "I am about to open the cabinet. I shall ask that all of you remain silent until both coverings have been brought into the room together. I shall ask that you remember, whatever you see, that you are here to witness and not to intervene. If you cannot do that, you should leave now, and no one will think the less of you."
Nobody moved.
"Then I shall begin."
He took the cord from round his neck. He held the key a moment in his open palm, small and dark, a key that had hung against the breastbone of eight men and one woman before him. He turned to the cabinet. In the silence the sound of the lock was loud.
It was only a click. It was the kind of sound that a drawer makes, or a clasp. But Leah, sitting on the cushion with her hands pressed flat against her knees, felt the whole room draw in around it. Across from her Ani had closed her eyes. Beside her Karam's breath had stopped. And from the north end, along the floor, over the matting and the lamplit boards, as it had come to her once before, came a draught, cool and steady.
The door of the cabinet swung slowly open.