The Game - Laurie R. King [99]
So what was he doing in Khanpur?
I stirred myself from my thoughts and was picking my way through the dark garden towards the lighted walls of the palace when the darkness nearby suddenly moved. “Who is there?” I asked sharply.
In response, a flame snapped into being, settling at the end of a cigarette being held by Gay Kaur. “Oh, Miss Kaur, you startled me.”
“Sorry, I was just enjoying the garden. Care for a smoke?”
“Thanks, no, never got the habit.” I felt for the edge of the bench her flame had illuminated, and eased down beside her.
“I hear you made a great success at the pigs,” she said.
“Purely by accident. And I’m black-and-blue all over.”
“Yes, it’s a fairly ferocious sort of entertainment.”
“Your cousin is very good at it.”
“People like us have to be good at something.”
There are a number of ways to approach a statement like that, but in the end, I decided to let it lie, and come in at an angle, trusting to the darkness to encourage confession. “The maharaja seems to have a variety of friends. I mean to say, men with single-minded passions often surround themselves with people of similar interests. But here I’ve met a novelist, a playwright, two avant-garde artists, and of course the Goodhearts.”
“Jimmy’s pets.”
“Pardon me?”
“Jimmy likes to collect interesting people. Animals, too, of course—he’ll probably show you his zoo tomorrow, although he prefers to take people there under a full moon—but he’s forever bringing home some odd character from his travels and giving him a job. Usually something the person is most unsuited for. I suppose it’s more amusing that way.”
“I don’t think I understand,” I said, although I was beginning to catch a glimmer.
Gay drew in from her cigarette, the sudden flare of light showing her pensive face, then let out a cloud of fragrant smoke. “We’re spoilt children, all of us, and it can be difficult for someone in Jimmy’s position to think of ways to fill the day. Unless one is taken with administering roads projects and building schools, there’s basically nothing to do. My own father drank himself to death at the age of thirty-one, there’s another uncle who reached the age of forty and locked himself up in his palace to become what you might call a connoisseur of perversion. Jimmy himself spent a few years gambling in Monaco, then he turned to racing cars, and of course you’ve seen his aeroplanes. I think he found danger boring after a time, if that isn’t a contradiction in terms, because he threw it all over and came home. He spent a couple of years setting up elaborate practical jokes on people, and getting a reputation for sorcery—the servants are still convinced he can walk through solid walls—and then got tired of those games as well. That’s when he began to restore The Forts, and a couple of years later he started the zoo. So far that’s kept him busy. I suppose African lions and Australian birds make for a more satisfying collection than Moghul miniatures or Japanese armour, or even motorcars and fast planes.”
“Are you saying that your cousin, what? Collects human oddities?”
She snorted delicately. “Those you’ve met, they’re nothing, they’re practically normal. He had a two-headed child for a while, although I think she died last year, and he found a pair of albino dancers in Berlin who can’t venture into the daylight. And you won’t have seen his village of imported dwarfs—it amuses him to put the smallest people he can find in charge of the lions and giraffes. The village headman is three feet tall, and used to be with Barnum and Bailey. Not that the circus was sorry to be rid of him—he’s got