The Game - Laurie R. King [161]
“I shouldn’t worry, young man. A lady from Savannah, you say? I don’t remember meeting her.”
“Yes, odd that. She must have left the ship at Aden; I didn’t see her again.”
“Holmes, can we leave this for later?” I suggested.
“Indeed,” he said, although the puzzle remained in his voice.
It proved impossible to shoulder our still-limp burden down the narrow passageway, but with one each at his head and feet and the spare two lighting the way with candles, we transported him through the belly of the hill, sweating and cursing, and no doubt bruising him all over. But the maharaja didn’t complain, not in his condition, and the necessarily slow rate of progress made it possible for me to repeat my question to Goodheart, at the fore of the procession. This time I received an answer.
“So, who are you?”
“Tommy Goodheart, travelling through India with his somewhat dotty mother.”
“But something else as well.”
“Yes. You see, when I was at Harvard, one of my friends had an uncle who is high in the War Department. Military Intelligence. He told me that I had such a superb poker face, I mustn’t waste it. And so I played along with him, went to a couple of Red meetings, even got myself arrested once—what a lark. Then when I graduated, and he found out I was going to be travelling in Europe, he called me in and gave me a serious talk.
“Our government believes that the Soviet Union is a spent force, militarily. We’ve been helping them rebuild their factories, giving them food, in the hopes that they might stay where they are. I mean to say, one only has to look at a map to be a bit nervous about the Reds, don’t you think? There’s a considerable acreage there.
“So he sort of suggested that if I went in that direction, I might just keep my eyes open. Nothing formal, you know? The U. S. of A. as a whole doesn’t have much of an interest in Intelligence—we seem to think it’s what the Brits would call ‘unsporting.’
“But when I got to Russia, I found the factories looked just fine, and there are an awful lot of healthy-looking soldiers. And then I’ve been told that the Soviets are buying guns and planes from the Germans. A whole lot of planes.
“I’d guess this uncle of my friend’s feels even more jittery after the last few months, what with your new government and all. Too many comrades make an outsider feel a mite uncomfortable. Although truth to tell, I haven’t been in touch with him since I left Europe, so I’m sort of playing it all by ear, here.”
“A one-man Intelligence operation,” Holmes commented from his position at the maharaja’s shoulders. He did not, however, sound disbelieving, and I had to agree with him: It made a certain amount of sense that the young man was independent, rather than under the control of some organised group.
“Did you arrange for that balcony to fall on us in Aden?” I asked Goodheart.
“Balcony? Is that what happened to you? Good Lord, no.”
I listened carefully, and could not hear a lie, but as I was at the rear, I could not see his face. His poker face. “What about the hotel fire in Delhi?”
“Ah. Well, there wasn’t really a fire. That is, there was, but it sort of . . . got out of hand.”
“And my missing trunk, off the boat?”
“Well, yes, I am terribly sorry about that. I tried to work some way to have it returned to you, but then you disappeared from the hotel. I only arranged to have it mislaid for a while. It seemed to me that searching your luggage would be one way of finding out if you were Russian spies.”
At that, all three of us stopped dead to stare at his back. At our sudden silence, he turned and saw our expressions. “Really!” he protested. “I’d been told that the most dangerous Bolsheviks were those that didn’t look like the enemy. And I couldn’t see the two of you travelling to India for any of the usual reasons, you just didn’t fit in. So I thought, maybe . . .” His voice died away in the tunnel.
Then O’Hara began to laugh. It started with a snort, then merged into giggles, and in a minute he had dropped his half of our prisoner and