The Last Theorem - Arthur Charles Clarke [47]
Well, “satisfactory” wasn’t the best word to use. He was fairly sure he had the explanation, but he didn’t like it at all. His conclusion was that Pru’s actions were a function of his skin color. Having sex with a short and dark-skinned Asian man—what was the name people in Pru’s social class used for that sort of person? Oh, yes. “Wog.” For wily Oriental gentleman. Having sex with such a man might be an enjoyable experiment when no one knew about it except another young woman engaged in doing the same thing. But it was not acceptable where one might be seen by people who might speak of it to people in London, or to people in Shaker Heights, whatever Shaker Heights might happen to be.
So for the next hour or so Ranjit’s thoughts were glum. They didn’t stay that way, though. Whatever thoughts might have been in Pru’s mind, the things her body had been doing while she was thinking them were quite pleasing for him to remember. It had been, Ranjit admitted to himself, one of the most intensely pleasurable experiences of his life. All right, it appeared that it was to be a one-time-only event with that particular partner, but there were other women in the world, were there not? Including some who were not concerned about the color of his skin?
Including, for instance, Myra de Soyza?
That was an interesting new thought for Ranjit. Experimentally he set his imagination a new task, which was to replay his memories of the night in bed with Pru Something, but replace Pru in the role of Female Partner with Myra herself.
Ranjit had not previously been thinking of Myra in that way, exactly, but he discovered that it wasn’t hard to do. It was pretty enjoyable, too, until, unfortunately, the thought of the Canadian hotel man, Brian Harrigan, began to come up in his mind. That part wasn’t pleasant at all.
Reluctantly Ranjit gave up that experiment and, doing his best not to think of anything at all, simply drove on.
The sun was nearly setting by the time he at last got to Trincomalee. Ranjit thought about going back to his lonely room, but what he wanted was someone to talk to about—well, not about Pru Last-Nameless, of course, but anyway just to talk. He took a chance on driving to the Kanakaratnam house, and won.
They were all inside. Though the door was closed, he could hear Dot Kanakaratnam’s voice, but no one else’s. When Tiffany answered his knock and let him in, he saw that her mother was sitting at the table and talking into a cell phone. (Ranjit hadn’t known she owned one.) When she saw him in the doorway, she said a few quick words into the phone and folded it shut. There was something in the look on her face that troubled Ranjit—anger? Sadness? He couldn’t tell. What she said was “You’re early, Ranjit. We thought you’d be spending more time with your friend.”
“So did I,” he said, a tad ruefully, “but it didn’t work out. I had a good time, though.” He had not been intending to tell them exactly how good, more about what an interesting place Colombo was, but the expressions on the faces of the children stopped him. “Is something wrong?” he asked.
Dot answered for the whole family. “It’s George. My husband. He’s escaped.”
That was news that trumped anything Ranjit might have said. He pressed for details. George Kanakaratnam, for some inscrutable police reason, had been in the process of being transferred from one prison to another. There had been a car crash. The guard and the driver had been killed. Kanakaratnam had not, and he had simply walked away.
“The Trinco police were here all day,” Harold volunteered when his mother paused to breathe. “They said Da might have got away on a boat. There was a bridge that went over a pretty big river right down the road.”
“But there wasn’t any blood there,” Rosie said triumphantly, puzzling Ranjit. It seemed to him that with two dead, there had to be some spilled blood somewhere around the scene.
Tiffany clarified the matter. “She means there wasn’t any blood inside the bus, except for right around the front seats. So our father