Leave It to Me - Bharati Mukherjee [37]
“I’m dead?”
“Killed when you were a baby.” Fred picked up a small rock, weighed it in his palm, then lobbed it at the ruins. “You turned into a ghost hours after you were killed.”
Hari’d witnessed the murders of two firangi the night he’d been drinking with his buddies in the dead rajah’s broken palace. Overnight, one of the corpses had changed itself into a ghost. The morning after, four boys on their way to the Late Maharaja Mohan Primary School stumbled upon only one female firangi body. They’d found the corpse lying facedown across a path that had connected, once upon a time, Maharaja Mohan’s palace with the school he’d built. Her neck had been snapped back and broken. Vultures had torn into the corpse. Field rats had feasted on soft tissue.
Soft tissue, I thought. What a concept.
Bio-Daddy of the killer hands had wanted the body found. Admire my art, envy my strength. He’d seen himself as a proud artist. I could learn a lesson or two from Bio-Daddy.
“My man Rajeev lucked out,” Fred said. “Turns out that one of the four schoolboys who discovered the body is chief constable in a neighboring district.” Then he did a Peter-Sellers-doing-Indian-English number. “What murder? No murder was committed by no person. It was an open and shut case of self-indulgence, you see. Hippie people are having only sex and drugs on their brain, no? A decision was made at highest levels to keep such nonsensical business out of press et cetera. Why harm India’s fledgling tourist industry?”
“It’s not funny,” I said.
“If you can’t handle it, maybe you should quit.”
“Soft tissue,” I said out loud.
Mr. Raj stayed on the footloose strangler’s trail. The strangler killed again, in another village not far from Hari’s. Bodies were discovered again, this time in a clearing not far from a dried-out well. And again, again, on fogbound plateaus and silvered beaches. The victims were always young backpackers. Bio-Dad killed at first to be admired, then kept killing to be noticed. I was back in Frankie Fong’s Asia: hot, smoky, full of liars and cheats. In Bio-Dad’s overcrowded Asia, how does even an ambitious killer get himself noticed? No media coverage, no computerized Victim-Net, no milk cartons, no xeroxed flyers.
In Bangkok the lovers quarreled. They made up in Bali, to break up again in Surabaja. In Katmandu he added a Romanian to his harem. In Colombo, a Swiss. In Kabul he spent a day in jail for cursing a policeman. In all these cities, and in Chiang Mai, Srinagar and Taipei, he strangled, he conned, he made love to women he liked and to women he scorned and, who knows, maybe left my half siblings behind. In Singapore the lovers quarreled one final time. The woman went to the Singapore police and ratted on the man. She accused him of having strangled give or take seventeen men and women. The cops locked her up on drug-peddling charges, and passed her stories on to Interpol. Two Interpol agents interviewed her, and one of them believed her. She repeated her story about the seventeen murders, and went into detail about the when, where and how they’d been committed. She said nothing about the two killings in Devigaon, she said nothing about me at all. Interpol tracked her lover through Turkey, Thailand, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, to a hill station in India. The name the lover gave the Indian police when they booked him was Romeo Hawk. The suspect confessed to killing five, but was convicted of killing nine and sentenced to nine consecutive life sentences. He let Mr. Raj visit him in jail on condition that Mr. Raj brought him the latest Tom Clancy and a carton of cigarettes.
“Rajeev says the guy’s a nutrition purist and a work-outaholic. The cigarettes were for bribing guards,” Fred explained.
Rajeev Raj has met Bio-Dad; I envy him that. I don’t have any idea what he looks like and what he sounds like. Smooth as butter, I’ll bet. I got my good looks from him, and my fantastic good luck. So I chant Frankie’s Asia mantra. Hot, smoky, full of liars and cheats and murderers. But all I can picture is a pair of hands. The hands