The Midnight Palace - Carlos Ruiz Zafon [60]
‘Thank you, sir,’ said Michael. He made his way back through the mass that was gathering in the hope of some gruesome discovery.
Once he was free of the crowd, Michael examined the adjacent buildings, trying to guess where the old lady might have fled. Both ends of the street merged into the Black Town, with its tangle of buildings, bazaars and palaces. Aryami Bose could be anywhere.
For a few moments Michael considered the options, then finally decided to head for the banks of the Hooghly River, to the west. There thousands of pilgrims immersed themselves in the sacred waters of the Ganges, hoping heaven might purify them, although mostly they received only fevers and diseases in return.
With the sun beating down on him, Michael wove his way through the throng that flooded the streets, a constant gabble of merchants, quarrels and unheeded prayers. The voice of Calcutta. Some twenty metres behind him a figure wrapped in a dark shawl peered out from an alleyway and began to follow him through the crowd.
IAN OPENED HIS EYES with the absolute certainty that his persistent insomnia would allow him no more than a few hours’ respite, despite the exhaustion brought about by recent events. Judging from the quality of the light bathing the room in the western tower of the engineer’s house, he calculated that it must be somewhere around mid-afternoon. The hunger pangs that had assaulted him at dawn had returned with a vengeance, making him grit his teeth. As Ben used to joke, parodying the words of the writer Tagore, whose castle was only a short distance away: when the stomach speaks, the wise man listens.
As Ian slipped quietly from the room, he noticed with some envy that Ben and Sheere were still enjoying the sleep of the righteous. He suspected that when they woke up even Sheere would be prepared to swallow the first edible object within reach, and as far as Ben was concerned, there was no doubt whatsoever. Ian imagined his best friend was probably busy dreaming about a tray of gastronomic delights and a sumptuous dessert of chhena sweets – a mixture of lime juice and boiled milk that all sweet-toothed Bengalis adored.
Aware that he had already been granted more sleep than expected, he decided to venture out in search of provisions with which to placate his hunger and that of his friends. With a bit of luck he’d be back before either of them had even had time to yawn.
As he crossed the large hall containing the model town and made for the spiral staircase, he was pleased to see that in daylight the house looked considerably less menacing and that nothing else had changed. Ian noticed that the building was remarkably efficient at insulating them from the soaring temperatures outside. It wasn’t hard to imagine the stifling heat beyond those walls, yet the engineer’s house felt almost spring-like. Downstairs, he walked through some of the galaxies on the floor mosaic then opened the door to the outside world, hoping he wouldn’t forget the combination of the eccentric lock that sealed Chandra Chatterghee’s sanctuary.
The sun beat down mercilessly on the dense vegetation of the garden. The lake, which the night before had resembled a sheet of polished ebony, now threw bright reflections against the front of the house. Ian walked towards the secret tunnel beneath the wooden bridge and entered the passageway. Before its pungent stench could fill his lungs, he was out again, passing through the entry that led to the street. There, he threw an imaginary coin in the air and decided to begin his search for food by heading west.
As he walked along, humming to himself, he could never have imagined that behind him the four circles of the combination lock had slowly started to turn again, and that this time the four-letter word they would form when set in a vertical line was not Dido, but the name of a goddess much closer