Part Four — The Trial · Adam's Robe Book 3
Chapter Thirty
Udvada, Gujarat, India — Day 33
They put the garments back together.
It was Nassiri who asked. The ring had loosened, and the witnesses had begun to sit down on the floor where they stood, as people sit when their legs have stopped. Nassiri rose from his knees with the first covering folded across his hands. He went without being told to the open cabinet at the north end of the room. The second covering lay on its shelf, in its clean linen, where Delnaz had put it. He looked at it for some time.
"May I?" he said.
Delnaz had not yet stood. She looked up at him from the matting. She was gray to the lips. Her hand was still pressed flat to her chest, where the light had gone out of her. She had the dazed, shining look of one set down on a step after a long walk in a high wind.
"Yes," she said.
He laid the first beside the second. He did it slowly, with both hands. For a moment the two lay side by side on the dark shelf, cream and cream, in the lamplight, and nobody spoke. They looked small. They looked like two folded handkerchiefs. They had been parted for longer than any people on earth had a name for, and had been made, by a tradition nobody could swear to, from one skin.
He drew his hands back. They shook.
"I carry nothing now," he said, to the room. "I wish it witnessed."
"It is witnessed," said Framroze, from where he sat against the wall with his legs stretched out and his white head tipped back. His eyes were closed. He was smiling.
Leah got her telephone back from Roshan at ten past two.
Roshan opened the drawer and handed it over without a word. Her face was scrubbed raw and her braid had been pinned up again in a hurry. Leah had not forgiven herself and had not expected to be forgiven. She said "Thank you," and Roshan said "Do not," and turned away. There were seven messages on the screen, all from one number, all the same.
Call me.
She went out into the passage and stood against the wall and dialed.
"They have landed," said Katz.
He said it before she had spoken. His voice was low, with scrupulous care. He had sat for five hours beside a telephone and had decided how to say it.
"Six men and a woman. They came through the arrivals hall at ten past two and out to two vehicles that were waiting. The woman is Livnat. I have it from Zohar, who has it from someone who owes her a favor." He paused. "The Director has come herself. I did not think that she would. I think she wished to see."
"Where are they going?"
"Not to you. Not yet. To a house in Vapi, belonging to a man called Sethi, an agent in Mumbai. He has been paid by the Brigadier for three weeks. The Brigadier's people have found a local inspector of police who will accompany a notice." Katz's voice did not alter. "It is a notice from the Archaeological Survey. It says that an object of antiquity, in private hands and unregistered, is believed to be at the Panthaki house, and that officers will take it into temporary custody for its protection. It is a good notice. It has a stamp."
"It's a lie."
"A correct lie. The inspector will be in uniform. Men in plain clothes will go in behind him and say that they are the Survey's security. The Director will wait in a car at the end of the lane and let it happen." He paused again. "They will come at dusk, Leah. It is what I would do. There is more cover, and the crowd will be thin."
"The crowd's not thin."
"No?"
"I asked Roshan to keep the gate open. There are two hundred people in the lane who think they went to a prayer meeting. They've been fed. They won't go."
The line was silent for a long moment. Behind it she heard the small sound of a cup being put down.
"That was well done," said Katz.
"It wasn't me. It was a lot of old women with rice."
"It was well done." His voice moved slightly. "I have been in this service for fifty years, and I do not recall an occasion on which a street full of people with rice stood in the way of a notice with a stamp. It is a lesson. I shall think about it afterwards. I shall stay on the telephone. Do not put me in your pocket. I would rather hear it from your hand."
She laughed. It cracked. "Ronen. Thank you."
"For what?" said Katz. "I have sat in a chair."
The afternoon went by in a light, floating way, like the hours after a fever.
Leah would remember it as a festival. The town had not gone home. It had waited in the sun for hours for a prayer meeting and had smelled a garden that no one could name. It had heard, through a shutter, the sound of a room in which a great matter was settled. It had decided, without being told, that it was not done. Roshan's table under the awning became six tables. The sweet seller ran out of sweets. Two aunts from the Bombay branch set up a cauldron of lentils in a neighbor's courtyard and ladled it into whatever anyone held out. Children ran in the lane. A boy climbed the peepal and was fetched down.
They kept asking.
She had not expected that. She went out into the lane at three, with Karam, and stood in the sun. The first woman to come up to her was a stout grandmother in a pale sari, with a child on her hip. She said, in clear English and without preface, "What did we smell?"
"I'm sorry?"
"In the lane. At eleven. It came out under the door, and through the boards. It was a garden." The grandmother shifted the child. "I have lived in this town for sixty-three years. I never smelled a garden in it. My husband said that it was the drains. It was not the drains."
Leah looked at Karam. He looked steadily back.
To speak truly of it, if you are asked, by anyone who has a right to ask.
"I can't tell you what it was," she said. "I don't know what it is. I can tell you what I saw, if you'd like to hear it. I think you've a right to."
The grandmother considered her. Then she set the child down, took it by the hand, and said, "Come and sit."
They sat on an upturned crate in the shade of a wall. Leah told it as plainly as she could, in short sentences, without adjectives. A room. A cloth. A light. Two people who had put on what they had carried and been shown. She did not say what the light had shown. That was theirs. She said that it had been witnessed, that she had been one of the witnesses, and that she would not lie about it to anyone who asked.
By the time she had finished, thirty people stood round the crate.
Cho came in from the east lane at ten to six.
She walked up the middle of the road with her hands in the pockets of the navy coat. She wore a face that was not her routine one. She stopped in front of Leah and said, in the flat voice, "They're here."
"How many?"
"Three cars, same as this morning. They moved at half past five. They went round the back of the town and came in by the sea road, not the highway. And two white vans." She looked, not at the crowd, but over its heads. "Nine in the cars. Eleven in the vans. All men. The ones in the vans have cases. I counted four long ones."
"Guns."
"I'd say so. Nobody carries a long case to an archaeology notice." She took a breath. "There's an inspector. Uniform, bad shoes, a clerk with a file. And a gray Toyota behind the second van with the windows up. I can't see in. I'd put money on who's in it."
"How long?"
"Fifteen minutes. Maybe twenty." Cho looked at her at last. The dark eyes were steady, and the face under them was tired. "I'm going to be at the gate, Leah. Not at the end of the lane. I want to be where I can see their faces."
"Why?"
"Because that's what I'm for," said Cho. "I'm a witness. It's the only job I've got."
They came up the lane at ten past six, in the long slanting gold of an Indian evening, and the lane let them through.
Leah would remember that best. The crowd did not shout. It did not close, or surge, or threaten. It drew aside as water does round a stone. It stood back to the walls on either side, in white and saffron and ordinary brown, three hundred of them now, perhaps four. Men had their sleeves rolled and women had children on their hips. Old men leaned on sticks. They let a column of strangers walk up the middle of the road, and watched them come.
The inspector came first. He was stout and sweating, in khaki, with a leather folder under his arm and the glazed, wary eyes of a man told that this would be simple. Behind him walked a thin young man with a file. Behind them, in a loose double line, with their hands at their sides and their faces carefully empty, came men in plain clothes. They were not dressed alike. They were of the same kind. Some had short hair. Some wore good shoes. Two of them carried, in their left hands, black cases as long as a man's arm.
At the corner by the tea stall a gray Toyota had stopped. Its engine was running. Its windows were black.
Leah stood in the gateway.
She had asked Roshan to leave it open. She stood in the middle of it with the peepal behind her and the lane in front, in the plain gray scarf, with her hands at her sides. She felt her whole spine go cold. To her left stood Karam. To her right and a pace behind stood Ani and Vartan. At the edge of the gate, outside, with her back to the whitewash and her hands out of her pockets, stood Cho.
And on the threshold itself, on a cane chair that Roshan had carried out and set at the exact center of the gate, sat Framroze Panthaki. He wore his white coat. His stick lay across his knees. His granddaughter stood at his shoulder.
He had asked for the chair. He had said that he was eighty-one, and had not the knees to stand, and that he had promised to stand at the gate, and that it was a matter of finding the nearest honest approximation.
The inspector stopped three paces short.
"Panthaki sahib," he said, in English. His voice was thick and loud. "I am Inspector Desai, of the Valsad district. I am here with a notice from the Archaeological Survey of India." He held up the folder. "An object of antiquity, unregistered, is believed to be held at this address. Officers of the Survey will enter and take it into temporary custody. It is for its protection. There is a threat." He swallowed. "You will please stand aside."
"I am sitting," said Framroze.
A ripple ran through the lane. It was not a laugh. It was three hundred people drawing breath through their noses.
"I beg your pardon?"
"I said that I am sitting, Inspector. It is the better part of valor at my age." He had not raised his voice. It carried the length of the lane. "I have read your notice. It is a handsome notice. I do not think that it is true. I think that the Survey has not heard of my house. I think that the gentlemen behind you are not of the Survey. I think that you have been told a story by someone who paid you to repeat it." He folded his hands on the stick. "I do not say it to shame you. I say it so that these good people, who have come from all over the town to a prayer meeting, may hear it said."
The inspector's face had gone a dull red.
"I have the law—"
"You have a paper. It is not the same." The old man's voice was gentle. "You may come in, Inspector. If you wish to look at my house, you may go from room to room with my daughter, and she will show you everything that a house contains. You may not take what is not mine to give."
"It is not yours to keep."
"No," said Framroze. "That is correct. It is not."
It was then that the dogs began to lie down.
Leah saw it from the corner of her eye. She had been watching the plain-clothes men, who had halted at the inspector's back and were exchanging small movements of the head. She sensed a movement low along the walls, and turned.
There were a dozen. There had been fifteen or so in the lane all afternoon, thin, yellow-gray, the ordinary dogs of a coastal town, nosing at the tables and being shooed. Nobody had seen them gather. They were in a half circle in the dust at the foot of the gate, six paces from the old man's chair, and they were lying down.
They lay in a line, chins on their forepaws and eyes on the gateway, in the long gold light, as a congregation sits. The three that had followed Karam were at the front. The one with the torn ear had come right up to the threshold and lay across the old man's feet.
Nobody spoke. The crowd had gone still. From far off Leah heard a bell.
Then the scent came. She had met it once that day in a shuttered room and had not known she could meet it twice. It was faint, and she was not sure she was not imagining it. It lay in the lane under the smell of hot stone and lentils, thin as a thread: a cut stem, a wet bank, a country where nothing freezes. It had gone out under the door at eleven and lain down in the dust of the town and waited.
"What is that?" said one of the men in plain clothes, quite loudly.
Nobody answered.
He spoke English, with a faint accent. He was tall, perhaps thirty-five, broad, with a crew cut and a gray jacket. He had stepped half out of the line. He was looking at the dogs, and his hand had gone, without his knowing it, to the pocket of the jacket.
"Stand easy," said the inspector, over his shoulder, sharply.
"There's a wrong feeling about the—"
"I said stand easy."
The woman got out of the Toyota at that moment.
Leah saw the door open at the end of the lane. She saw a foot in a flat shoe, and a gray jacket that had not been bought for comfort, and a lean dark head. Livnat did not hurry. She stood a moment by the car and looked up the lane over three hundred heads. Her eyes came to the gate and the cane chair and the old man, and they stayed there.
She walked up.
She came through the crowd as the inspector had, and the crowd stood back for her too, but in a different way. It was not that she was welcome. She walked as if she had never in her life had to ask. She came to the head of the column and stopped at the inspector's shoulder, and the inspector, with visible relief, stepped aside.
"Dr. Sarkisian," said Livnat. She was looking at Framroze. "I believe that we have not met."
"No."
"I am sorry for the circumstances." She spoke good, clipped English. "I did not come to frighten anyone. I came because I have reason to think that this house, and the objects in it, are in danger from persons I cannot name before a crowd. I am not here to take them. I am here to see that they are safe." Her eyes, clear and cold and sane, rested on the old man's face. "Mr. Panthaki. I should like to speak to you in your house for five minutes. After that, if you ask me to leave, I shall."
"Madam," said Framroze, "I should like to know your name."
"Livnat."
"You are of the service of the gentleman who telephones Dr. Sarkisian."
"I am his director."
"Ah." The old man looked at her with a long, mild, attentive look. "Then I am glad that you have come. He speaks of you with great exactness." He inclined his head. "I shall say to you what I said to the inspector. You may come in. You may speak to me in the sitting room, with my daughter at my side and the door open. You may not take what is not mine."
"Whose is it?"
"I do not know," said Framroze. "That is the whole of the matter. It was given to be held. It is not mine, and it is not yours, and it belongs to no government that I have heard of. I do not know whose it is. I know that it has been kept for longer than anyone can count by people who did not know either, and I do not think the world will be improved by the first person who decides that he does."
"That is a beautiful answer."
"It is not an answer. It is a refusal." He smiled faintly. "It is the only kind I have."
"Mr. Panthaki." Livnat's voice did not change. "I am going to ask once, as courteously as I can. Please stand aside."
"I am sitting."
"I can see that."
"And I shall go on."
It was the third time. Leah counted. In the courtyard behind her Delnaz made a small sound, and then none.
It happened quickly.
Leah would try for the rest of her life to slow it down, and could not. It had no beginning. It was a movement at the edge of the picture, to the left, among the plain-clothes men, a ripple in the double line as when a wind crosses a field. It was the tall man with the crew cut. His hand had come out of his pocket.
She saw the dull black of it. She saw him take a half step forward, past the inspector, past Livnat, head down, shoulders hunched, as if walking into rain. The dogs, in their line, lifted their heads together. Cho said, quite quietly, "No."
Livnat said a single word, sharply, in a language Leah did not know.
The sound was not as loud as she had been told it would be. It was a flat hard crack, with an echo that ran up the lane and came back off the whitewash. A silence followed that she would never forget, the silence of three hundred people who have all, at the same instant, stopped breathing.
The old man in the cane chair sat still.
He looked surprised. It was the first thing she saw. He looked down at his white coat, at a place on the left breast where a dark spot had appeared, as one looks at a stain on a good shirt. He lifted one hand from the stick. It was steady. He touched the spot with two fingers and looked at them. Then, with an air of courteous apology, as if he had sat too long, he leaned a little to one side and slid, slowly, out of the chair.
"No," said Delnaz.
She was on her knees. She had gone down on the step with the cane chair knocked over and the dogs scattering, and she had his head in both her hands. He was looking up at her. His beard was white against the stone. He was smiling.
Nobody ran.
That was the second thing Leah would remember. In a lane of three or four hundred people, in the long gold light, within sight of a man with a gun, nobody ran. They neither screamed nor broke. They stood in their white and their ordinary brown with their children against their skirts, and looked at the old man on the step. They looked at the tall man with the dull black thing in his hand, who stood frozen, the color of paper, staring at what he had done.
Then, from the wall, a man stepped out.
It was Dinshaw. He was small and bald and bent, in a clean white cap, with a bundle of sandalwood still under one arm. He walked into the open road without haste and stopped three paces from the tall man. His face was like a walnut.
"I know you," said Dinshaw, in English, quite loudly. "You were in the white car at six this morning. I sold you a bundle of sandalwood. You said it was for your mother."
Nobody spoke.
"I shall remember," said Dinshaw. "I swore it. I shall remember your face for as long as I live. I shall tell anyone who asks."
Behind him in the lane a woman said it. Then another, then a man's voice, deep and clear, in Gujarati, then more, until it was not a voice but a sound, rising and settling over the length of the lane like the sea in a shell. Leah did not understand the words and had no need to. She had heard them in a shuttered room just before noon. I will remember.
"Put it down," said Cho.
She had walked out into the road. She stood in front of the gate, short and square in the navy coat, with her empty hands held out from her sides. Her voice was flat and level and carried like a bell.
"My name is Erin Cho. I'm an American. I'm on leave. I've been counting you since six this morning, all of you. I've got the plates on your cars and the faces of twenty men." She looked, not at the tall man, but at Livnat. "Ma'am. There are four hundred people in this lane. There's an old man shot on the step. I'm going to tell my government tonight exactly what I saw, in order, without adjectives. So is everyone else here. I'd say that's a hard story to put a stamp on."
"Put it down," said Livnat.
She said it in English, to the tall man, without raising her voice. It had an edge of cold clarity.
He did not move.
"Put it down."
He put it down. He did it slowly, as in a dream, bending, laying the dull black object on the dust of the road, and straightening with his hands open. He shook. He looked at no one.
Leah was kneeling.
She had no memory of going down. She was on the step, on the stone, beside Delnaz. The old man lay across his granddaughter's knees with his white head on her arm. His coat was dark under her hand. His eyes were open and clear and untroubled, and he was looking, past all of them, at the peepal against the evening sky.
Roshan had come out of the house. Nobody had seen her. She stood at the edge of the step with both hands pressed flat against her mouth, quite silent, and then she knelt, on the other side, and took her father's other hand and held it against her cheek.
"Delnaz," he said.
His voice was thin. It did not sound like pain. It sounded like a voice a long way down a corridor, calling back to say that he had arrived.
"I am here."
"It held."
"It held," said Delnaz. Her face was wet and perfectly still. "Grandfather. It held."
"Do not—" His breath caught, and went on. "Do not make it a victory. That is what I have been trying to tell—" He stopped. "It is a morning. It is only a morning. You will have to be—" His hand moved on the stone. She took it. "Be kind to Roshan."
"I will."
"Tell her that I was not afraid." The old man's eyes moved slowly and found Leah's. "Dr. Sarkisian."
"Yes."
"Write it down." He smiled. "As it was. Do not improve it."
"I won't," said Leah. She could not see. "I promise."
"Good." He looked up again at the tree. "The key is on my neck. It is yours now, Delnaz. It was always going to be." There was a long breath, and a smaller one. "It is such a lovely evening."
He said nothing more.
Nassiri came out of the house.
Leah did not see him come. She knew that he was there when the crowd, which had stood like stone, moved. It parted from the gate as it had for the inspector. A man walked out of the courtyard and across the step, in a plain pale shirt buttoned wrongly, with his hands held open at his sides. His face was gray. His eyes were dry. He walked past the kneeling women and the overturned chair and the scatter of dogs, and stopped in the middle of the road, in the dust, in front of Livnat.
"Director," said Nassiri.
She looked at him.
She had not moved since she said the word. In the long gold light she looked a good deal older than she had at the beginning of the lane. She said nothing.
"My name is Farhad Nassiri. I was a colonel in the Guards. I believe that you have been looking for me for eighteen months." His voice was level. It was the old flat voice, with no armor on it at all. "I am what you came for. I said in that room that I carry nothing, and it is true. You will not find the object on my body, or in my bag, and I will not tell you where it lies. But I carry eleven years of the Guards' internal arrangements. I know the names of men whom you have wished to name. I know where a great deal is buried. I shall tell you all of it. In return, you will leave this house and these people, and what they keep, as they were before you came."
"Colonel—" said Cho.
"Be silent, please, Miss Cho. I have been silent a long time. It is my turn to be useful." He looked at Livnat. "You will find nothing in that house. The old man did not lie. There is nothing for you in this town but four hundred witnesses and a dead priest. There is me."
"You are offering yourself."
"I am offering what I have."
"I do not make bargains in the street."
"No," said Nassiri. "You make them in cars." He lifted one hand, palm up, a small gesture toward the gray Toyota. "I am asking you to make this one."
It was quiet. The dogs were rising, one by one, in the dust. The crowd stood. And Livnat, with a dead man on the step at her back and a black object on the road, stood still, and Leah watched her do a sum. It was short. She did it with her eyes, in about the time it takes to say a brief prayer. She weighed a stamp and a notice and twenty men and a stout inspector against four hundred faces, and a woman from Washington in a navy coat, and an old man's white head on a girl's arm.
"Get in the car," said Livnat.
He went.
He went as he had come, without haste, up the middle of the road, with a lean man in a dark shirt at one shoulder who did not touch him. The Toyota waited at the end of the lane with its engine running. He did not look back. At the corner he stopped and turned, once, and lifted his open hand toward the gate. It was not a wave. It was the small, grave, exact movement of one who greets his host.
Then he got into the car.
Livnat did not follow at once. She stood where she was, in the middle of the lane, with her hands at her sides. She turned her head. Her eyes found Leah's, on the step, over the old man's body, and held them.
"I did not intend this," she said.
Her voice was steady. It was not an apology. It was a statement, set down as one sets an item on a desk.
"Then you shouldn't have come," said Leah.
"No."
"Do you want to know what he said, at the end?"
"Not now."
"He said that it was a lovely evening."
A look moved in the lean dark face and was gone. She nodded once, sharply, as one acknowledges a figure that does not agree with the books. Then she turned and walked down the lane through the crowd, which parted for her in a silence so complete that Leah heard every step.
The inspector had gone. She never saw when. The thin young man with the file had gone. The vans were starting, one after the other, down at the sea road, and the cars, and the sound of them went away over the roofs and thinned and ceased. The tall man in the gray jacket was walked away between two others, without a word. The black object lay in the dust of the road in the evening light, and nobody went near it.
Then the bell in the sanctuary began to toll.
It tolled slowly, nine times, and then nine, and then nine. She would learn afterwards that nobody had told the priest to ring it. It rang for a long time. The people in the lane, three hundred, four, stood in the dust and listened. When it stopped, the old stall keeper, still holding his bundle of sandalwood, walked up to the step and set it down at the dead man's feet.
Then they came, one by one, the whole length of the lane, with their hands empty, and stood.
Leah said nothing. She sat on the stone, with her hand on Delnaz's shoulder and the old man's dog across his feet, and the evening going down over Udvada the color of an apricot, and she witnessed.