The Midnight Palace - Carlos Ruiz Zafon [64]
‘After some years had gone by, Llewelyn’s anger was rekindled. His own career was floundering and he urgently needed some dramatic incident, a new bloodbath, with which to recapture the attention of the London authorities and restore his reputation as the panther of Bengal. His solution was clear: to put pressure on Chandra but this time using different weapons.
‘For years Llewelyn had been investigating the engineer, and finally his henchmen sniffed out the series of crimes linked to Jawahal. Llewelyn almost let the case come to light. Then, just at the point when your father was more enmeshed than ever in his Jheeter’s Gate project, he intervened, closing down the case but threatening to reveal the truth unless your father created a new weapon for him, a deadly instrument of repression that would put an end to the riots that the pacifists and pro-independence campaigners kept strewing in Llewelyn’s path. Chandra had to comply, therefore the Firebird was born, a machine that could turn a city or a village into an ocean of flames in a matter of seconds.
‘Chandra developed the railway and the Firebird side by side, under constant pressure from Llewelyn, whose greed, together with the suspicions he was starting to arouse among his superiors, threatened to expose him. A man who until then had been considered calm, even-tempered and dutiful was now showing himself to be an obsessive maniac whose desire for success and recognition blocked his own chances of survival.
‘Chandra realised that Llewelyn’s downfall was only a matter of time, so he played along with him and made him believe that he would hand over the finished project sooner than planned. This only increased Llewelyn’s mania and tore apart what little sanity he had left.
‘In 1915, a year before the opening of Jheeter’s Gate and the railway line extending from it, Llewelyn ordered the slaughter of a defenceless crowd, with no possible justification, and was thrown out of the British army in a scandal that even reached the House of Commons. His star would never shine again.
‘His madness now took on new dimensions. Llewelyn gathered a group of officers who were loyal to him – like Llewelyn, they had been stripped of their rank and instructed to give up their weapons. With this horde of butchers he set up a sinister paramilitary squad that operated in secret. They sported their old uniforms and medals in a grotesque parody, congregating in Llewelyn’s former residence so that they could maintain the fiction that they were a secret elite unit and that it would not be long before they would force out the very men who had signed their expulsion orders. Needless to say, Llewelyn never admitted that he’d been downgraded and disciplined. According to him and his collaborators, they had all resigned in order to found a new military order.
‘Soon your father received death threats against himself and his pregnant wife if he did not deliver the Firebird. As the project was clandestine, Chandra had to handle it with great care. If he asked the army for help, his past would eventually come out. His only option was to make a pact with Llewelyn and his men.
‘Amid all that tension, two days before the projected opening of Jheeter’s Gate – and not afterwards, as I told you before – Kylian gave birth to twins. A boy and a girl. Your sister Sheere and you, Ben.
‘A symbolic journey had been planned for the inauguration of Jheeter’s Gate. The first train would transport three hundred and sixty-five orphaned children – one for each day of the year – from Calcutta to the orphanages of Bombay. What Chandra proposed to Llewelyn and his men was this: he would load the Firebird onto the train and, taking advantage of a technical stop that he would arrange about a hundred and fifty kilometres after departure, in the vicinity of Bishnupur, the soldiers would