Mumbai Noir (27 page)

“I’ll see you hanged even if I have to do it myself!” roared Ramratan.

The hakim turned to Mangesh. “There’s no hope for you, boy, opium’s got your soul.” He soothed his neck and mopped his face. “You must be Oak saab. It hasn’t been easy getting past you.”

“Where’s the stuff you stole from the dead?”

The hakim pointed sullenly to the alembic. Its sinuous conduit led to the far end of the table and there it dripped into a thin glass flute. Tiny amber globules condensed on its sides and rapidly filled the flute with a clear golden liquid. Hakim Arif Khan sealed off the glass tube and held it out to Ramratan.

“Here! The essence of your dead. Take it! It has the strength of four men. Take it with my promise—I will stop making eunuchs of dead men. Out of respect for you, for I hear you treat the dead as your own.”

Ramratan hesitated.

“Take it. Arif Khan Dehlavi is in truth Arif Khan Barmaki. If you know what that means, you will take me at my word.”

The name meant nothing to Ramratan. Nevertheless, he took the hakim at his word. What else could he do?

“Leave Prescott to me,” said Hankin when they were out once again in sunlight. He took the glass tube from Ramratan and smashed it to pieces on the pavement.

The crunch of glass jolted Ratan back to the present. The table by the mirror now had a second occupant. Prescott’s guest had arrived. Ratan had missed the opening act. Prescott had his face buried in his hands. His companion stood by and watched him with dispassion. Glass glittered on the floor between them.

“There!” the man said, and Ratan recognized the voice at once. “There! That’s the end of it all.”

“No!”

Ratan crossed the room in rapid strides.

“It didn’t quite end like that. You didn’t let him go that easily, did you? Don’t you remember how it ended, Mr. Prescott? Hakim Arif Khan Dehlavi didn’t let you off so easily.”

They turned, not to answer Ratan, but to follow his eyes.

In the mirror, they were back at his table. Older, much older now. Scarred. Hankin had lost most of his hair, but the mustache still bristled gallantly.

And Ramratan?

Ratan saw himself, twenty years older.

The date was December 8 again. The year was 1923.

“Remember Prescott?” asked Hankin. “Hakim Dehlavi didn’t let him off easy.”

“Twenty years ago. To the day.”

“Is it? Good god!”

“Whatever happened to Prescott? You sailed home with him, didn’t you? It was the end of the hakim’s elixir. I certainly had no trouble with him after that.”

“No stolen testes?”

“Not another one. As long as I ran things there—”

“You still do.”

“No, Ernest. Not any longer. Just fingerprints. Bloodstains. Fussy stuff like that. I only do police autopsies now. Earlier, till the end of the war, I checked every single corpse myself before I released it from the mortuary. Never missed any more testes. I put the fear of the noose in Bhiku.”

“And his son?”

“Mangesh? Dead. Never woke up from a weeklong trance in Liang’s chandol-khana.”

“Pity.”

Ramratan was silent. His city was built on opium. Libraries, hospitals, railway stations, and most other emblems of philanthropy—they were all built upon the wreckage of lives.

“Prescott came to a bad end, Ramratan. I am certain our hakim had everything to do with it.”

Hankin had sailed back to England with Prescott. They parted at the pier. He never saw Prescott again.

Last year the name cropped up in a conversation. Prescott, he learned, had run wild. His family, torn between embarrassment and despair, had finally ceded all hope of reforming him. He ended up in the madhouse and died gibbering in a straitjacket.

“Reformed? Did he behave like those rats he told you of? Did he run around naked? Old men do terrible things. I worry sometimes over what lies ahead.”

“I went down to Shropshire to find out. I visited the family—a son and a daughter. I told them I’d known Prescott in Bombay. He’d gone to pieces a year after his return from India, reeling about drunkenly with not a drop of alcohol in him. Lasted another six months in the asylum.”

“Poor man! Ernest, could it have been something entirely unrelated? You destroyed that extract Arif Khan gave us.”

“I asked them about medication. They were quite emphatic. No, he wasn’t taking medicine. Of any sort. But I can be devious too! I asked about his general health. Headaches, colds, fevers, that sort of thing.”

“Ah.”

“Exactly. He was a martyr to the common cold, the daughter said, and never without his little flask of nasal drops. I was, don’t forget, asking these questions nearly twenty years after. People can’t be expected to remember details.”

Ramratan pondered a long while.

“Even if Prescott kept receiving supplies from the hakim, why should the elixir drive him crazy? Any daughter would gloss over such embarrassments. Are you certain, Ernest, they didn’t mean randy when they said mad?”

“Yes, yes. I made quite sure of that. I read all the notes at the asylum. No sexual excitement of any kind. I wondered about that
any kind
!”

“So it didn’t work like that. It changed his behavior, his mentation, and his intellect. What do testes have to do with that?”

“Men often think with theirs.”

Ramratan nodded. The war had made cynics of them all.

He couldn’t let go of the story. It happened so soon after Prescott reached England. A yammering idiot in a year, and in six more months he was dead. He used nasal drops.

That’s as swift as injecting the drug into a vein. It had addled Prescott’s brain.

* * *

“The elixir turned you mad, didn’t it, Mr. Prescott?”

Prescott turned to Ratan in startled disbelief, and then laughed. “I’ve never felt saner. How would you know about the elixir, anyway?”

Ratan did not reply. He’d made a complete fool of himself. Prescott was
dead
. But this man—

“I think this gentleman is speaking about your grandfather, Mr. Prescott,” said the hakim. “And also, about mine.”

He scrutinized Ratan with astute eyes.

“Your name? Is it Oak?”

Ratan stared back, baffled.

“I think we better have a word, Mr. Oak—or is it
Dr
. Oak? I’m almost through with Mr. Prescott here.
Permanently
through. Please? Will you give me five minutes?”

Ratan nodded, walked back to his table and pondered the physics of breaking glass. It splinters in conchoidal fractures as shock waves ripple out. This was a mirror, not a windowpane. The dark space within it, he alone could explore.

Prescott—that Prescott—had gone mad from the elixir. This one might too. Madness is a convenient label for all things inconvenient. What exactly happened to Patton Prescott? Today it would be termed dementia, poor coordination, ataxia. A neurologist might not make the connect, but Ramratan Oak did—because he knew what the elixir really was. He lacked a name for Prescott’s illness, because in his time it had no name.

He, Ratan, made the diagnosis because Prescott’s illness now had a name. It was a prion disease, and the elixir had transmitted it.

Ramaratan’s cadavers were never robbed again. Yet Hakim Arif had ensured that Prescott in England received enough elixir to last a year.

* * *

Hakim Arif Khan Dehlavi walked over to Ratan. He was very different from the man who had made a gift of the vial to Ramratan. His light brown eyes, though gentle and lustrous, yet recalled that carnelian flash. He drew up a chair and sat down next to Ratan.

“You’re not Hakim Arif Khan, are you?”

“No. My name is Moinuddeen.”

“Moinuddeen Khan Dehlavi. Or Moinuddeen Khan Barmaki?” Moinuddeen’s face lit up. “Your grandfather knew! We were told he didn’t.”

“So, it is family lore?”

Moinuddeen shrugged and suppressed a smile. Ratan felt a lance of anger.

“The name meant nothing to Ramratan Oak, and it doesn’t to me.”

“Barmaki is the ancient name of hakims who studied medicine before Islam. Charak, Sushrut, Jalinoos. And also— the medicine of the pharoahs.”

Something glimmered in Ratan’s memory but he couldn’t place it.

Moinuddeen nodded.

“I see it begins to make sense. You are cleverer than your grandfather.”

A hook.

What did a hook have to do with it?

Ask him for the hook.

Ramratan’s urgent voice in his brain compelled Ratan.

“You have a hook, I suppose,” he said. “I’d like to see it.”

Moinuddeen gaped. “You knew?”

“He did. Ramratan Oak, the man who met your grandfather.”

Ratan looked down. He didn’t want Moinuddeen to guess what he had just realized. Vision or memory, call it what you will, he knew each word before Ramratan’s broad-nibbed Waterman set it down on paper.

… I can’t help thinking we were wrong all along about that elixir. I continued counting testes, I became obsessed with that, and it kept me from seeing the larger picture. It had nothing to do with testes at all.

I tell you, Ernest, it was the pituitary! Extracted with a hook, through the nostrils, in the ancient Egyptian manner, leaving no trace of intrusion. How am I going to live this down?

Every one of those cadavers I passed as legit was missing its pituitary gland. God forgive my ignorance, because I never can.

“How many more victims, Moinuddeen?” asked Ratan quietly.

“Prescott’s grandfather?”

“He died mad and demented.”

Moinuddeen laughed. “He was mad and demented to begin with, wasn’t he?” He nodded at the bullet holes. “Look at this Prescott! This one here, now. You think he looks mad or demented?”

“Actually, yes. He does.”

Prescott had recovered his magisterial calm. His back obliterated the bullet holes.

“Men like Prescott live on the edge of time,” said Moinuddeen. “No matter what age, they’re always on the edge of time.”

“What does that mean?”

“All they see is the abyss. Nothing registers but that emptiness. Nothing is real except their terror.”

“And you cash in on it.”

“Why not? The day after the Lashkar shootout, that very morning, he was waiting for me by the door. The corpses were still here and blood was everywhere. He didn’t seem to notice. Nothing mattered but his fix.”

“You were here too, weren’t you? Vial in hand, to offer him his fix?”

Moinuddeen lowered his eyes. “Yes, I was. Demand and supply.”

“Why did you break the vial just now?”

“Because I broke with him.”

“Why?”

Moinuddeen shrugged and looked back at the table by the mirror. Prescott responded with a quick grimace of pain.

“Look at him. Don’t you think he’s lived long enough?”

“He doesn’t think so,” said Ratan.

“Who is he to decide?”

“Who are you?” asked Ratan.

“I’m his timekeeper, that’s who I am!”

Despite himself, Ratan asked, “Does it work?”

“How old do you think I am?”

“Thirty-five?”

Moinuddeen smiled. Ratan noticed a craquelure of gray on his pale skin, as if its depths abjured light.

“Was that your grandfather? Mortuary Oak?”

“Great-grandfather. Dr. Ramratan Oak, pathologist.”

“Your
great
-grandfather? There’s your answer! Pathologist, mortician—what’s the difference? They’re both doctors of death. We, on the other hand, are doctors of life. The elixir allows you life. You’ll want to know how it works. You’re a doctor too? Like Ramratan Oak?”

“Microbiologist.”

“Then you’ll know. I’ll make you a free gift of the idea— in apology to Ramratan Oak.” He patted Ratan’s shoulder in farewell. “Tell the world when you find out.”

Prescott intercepted Ratan at the door. “Do you know any others?” he asked in an urgent whisper.

Ratan looked at him with contempt.

“Any other hakims?” persisted Prescott. “He broke the vial! I have just enough for five more years.”

He stayed Ratan with a trembling hand.

“What’s five years?” He snapped his fingers. “Gone, like tomorrow.”

Ratan shook him off and stepped out into the bustle of Colaba Causeway.

Moinuddeen was astride a Bajaj Chetak. Morning light gilded his brown hair. He raised a hand in salute to Ratan.

“It’s goodbye to all that now. I’m done with the whole tamasha!”

“What will you do now?”

“What do you think?” He laughed. “I’ll live!”

THEY

BY
J
ERRY
P
INTO
Mahim Church

T
hese things don’t happen in Mahim,” Milly said angrily.

“What things don’t?” Peter asked mildly. He knew that his wife was not a morning person. She had never been. But now she was not an afternoon person either. Slowly her citric rages had begun to spill across the day. Eventually, she would not be a day person or a night person. The logical conclusion? She would not be a person at all.

“Murder,” she said, and waved the tabloid at her husband.

“It’s here already?” he asked, slightly disturbed. When he was a boy, the tabloids had come out in the evening. When he was an adolescent, they had shifted to the afternoon. Now they arrived, it would seem, with morning coffee.

Milly was reading the report with the concentrated attention of the dyspeptic.

“In your gym too,” she said, throwing it down amid the debris of the dining table’s morning meal. “In your very own gym.”

“EverFit isn’t my very own gym,” he replied. “I only exercise there.”

“Forgive me, senior copy chief,” she said. “I should be more accurate in my diction.”

She was laying a little trap for him. She wanted him to say that she had used
diction
in the wrong sense. Peter sidestepped it neatly. He knew the original meaning of the word.

“It’s time to go there anyway,” he said.

“I can’t see what a man your age wants with a gym,” said Milly. This was more formula than complaint. “Anyway, it’s probably closed. Scene of the crime,” she added. “I remember the time there was a body found in a gunnysack outside this very building.”