Pirate Vishnu (A Jaya Jones Treasure Hunt Mystery) (17 page)

Chapter 25

My excitement from earlier that morning turned to fear. I was losing my hold on what was real. I was so sure I had temporarily escaped the present-day problem by eluding the person who was willing to kill for this treasure. Nobody else knew Anand’s letters were there. Steven and his family didn’t know which was why he had come to me.
How had the treasure-hunting killer followed me across the ocean?

Joseph and I sat drinking strong coffee for ten rupees a cup at the India Coffee House on MG Road located in the basement of a concrete high rise. All the major cities in India seemed to have an MG Road, short for Mahatma Gandhi. I was buying. Ten rupees was approximately twenty-five cents, so it wasn’t especially generous of me.

The India Coffee House wasn’t one of the modern trendy coffee houses that had started springing up. The chain had been around since before I was born. The strong coffee and cheap food kept it in business despite the sparse decor. We sat in plastic chairs in the crowded café.

“I don’t know what could have happened,” Joseph said. “It does not make sense that the letters could be gone from the archive reading room. They should not have been removed!”

“Could they have been misplaced or misfiled after you first found them?” I knew it was unlikely, but I didn’t want to believe Steven’s killer was a step ahead of me.

Joseph shook his head. “The whole box is missing.” He added something in a language I didn’t understand. From the guttural sound in his throat I guessed he was cursing.

“It makes no sense,” he continued. “We have never had a theft. And to think it happened under my supervision. You have my sincerest apologies, Professor Jaya.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “This is my fault.” I glanced anxiously around the bare-bones surroundings. I couldn’t tell if it was the smell of sweaty bodies or the fact that my problems had followed me to India that made it difficult for me to breathe.

“Your fault?” Joseph said. “For asking for help of a colleague with research? No. I only wish I could have been more help. To think you came all this way—”

“There’s more going on than a simple research project,” I said.

“Your family history, I understand.” Joseph looked dejectedly into his empty coffee cup.

“Let me order us more coffee,” I said, hailing the waiter. I was stalling as I decided how much to tell Joseph. I didn’t want to drag him into this mess, but it appeared that he was already involved. Because of me, he was the latest victim. But I didn’t understand how someone had followed me across the ocean. What was I missing?

The waiter appeared at our table. I ordered fried cutlets to go with our coffee. I hadn’t had breakfast, and it felt like dinner time to my stomach.

“I’m sorry for getting you into this,” I said after the waiter had left. “I should tell you that the letters might provide information leading to a treasure. There’s a lot at stake. That’s why someone has stolen them.”

“Yes, this is what Miss Tamarind indicated when she first contacted us. It is always exciting when our archives can provide such relevant information.” He smiled and adjusted his thin glasses.

“There’s something else you should know, too,” I began slowly, “in case you come across the person who has taken the letters. The person might be dangerous. A man was murdered.”

Joseph’s coffee cup clattered to the table.

“Murdered?” he whispered, the color draining from his face.

“A man was murdered in San Francisco,” I said. “He was the person who contacted me to find the letters.”

“Murder,” Joseph repeated over and over as he attended to the spilled coffee as best he could with the thin napkins on the table. He avoided my gaze as he repeatedly pushed drenched napkins across the table. Seeming to notice the futility, he stopped, but he didn’t seem to know what to do once he ceased mopping up the mess. His thin hands flitted nervously from his glasses to his empty coffee cup.

“I’m sorry to have to tell you,” I said, “but I thought you should know.”

“Yes,” he said slowly. He resumed absentmindedly wiping the spilt coffee on the table. It wasn’t the kind of place where a doting waiter would appear to help. Joseph looked up, his large brown eyes meeting mine. “He was murdered over the letters? You are sure of this?”

“Unfortunately,” I said, “I am.”

The old archivist looked more frail than he had an hour ago as we walked out of the coffee house. He assured me he’d be fine, and I caught an auto-rickshaw back to my hotel.

In the hotel lobby, I walked past an Anglo man dressed in local attire. He sat alone, reading an English-language Indian newspaper. I could only see an obscured view of his head, and in spite of the fact that he wasn’t wearing glasses, he reminded me very much of Lane Peters. I was about to kick myself for continuing to think about him, when the man turned his head.

It wasn’t my imagination. It was Lane.

I don’t remember walking over to him, but I found myself standing right in front of him. He smelled of aftershave and sandalwood. I felt a comforting familiarity in his presence, the force of which took me by surprise.

“For someone who says they want nothing to do with me,” I said, “you’ve got a really strange way of showing it.”

“I had to come,” he said. He stood up and tossed the newspaper aside.

I felt my stomach do a little flip, only to be followed by a sinking feeling when I heard what he had to say next.

“I didn’t want to,” he said. “But Naveen Krishnan is in India. He killed Steven Healy. Now he’s after the treasure.”

Chapter 26

“You’d better start at the beginning,” I said.

If Naveen was in India, did that mean it hadn’t been my imagination at the university? Why couldn’t I know people who didn’t have their passports at the ready? Both Naveen and Lane did research in India, so of course they would have long-term visas.

“Not here,” Lane said.

“Where, then?”

“My room is more private.”

I nodded, not trusting myself to speak. There were a lot of things I might have wanted to do in a hotel room with Lane, but talking about a murderer wasn’t one of them.

“You okay?” he asked, raising an eyebrow. He was far too observant for his own good.

“Fine,” I said as he led the way. “Just fine. Um, what are you wearing?”

“I thought that would be obvious.” He couldn’t help smiling.

He was wearing a white dress shirt and a white lungi cloth that looked like a long skirt. With his fair coloring he would never pass as an Indian He was dressed more like an American in India for enlightenment, like what my father had done over thirty years ago. As part of his past life as a thief, Lane was good at disguising himself. He wasn’t hiding his identity in his current disguise, but he was blending in as a certain type of person.

Lane unlocked the door of his hotel room. As soon as he closed it behind us, he tilted my head up and kissed me. It wasn’t a casual kiss to say hello. He brought his mouth down on mine with such force that he pushed me against the wall.

I didn’t resist the kiss. I pulled him closer to me, and he responded in kind. His lips were urgent and his breath spicy.

All thoughts of treasures and murders slipped away, and all I could think about was how much I’d missed him.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered in my ear as his lips moved from my lips to my neck.

“For what?” I whispered back. I pulled him back to my lips, but he resisted.

He let go of me and stepped back.

“Sorry,” he repeated. “I hadn’t meant to do that. Forget I did that.”

He ran his hand through his hair and turned toward the window. The hotel room faced a wall covered with colorful advertisements for Malayalam and Tamil movies. By the look of the graphics, most of the films were tragic romances.

“You need to tell me why you’re here,” I said, my heart still racing from the kiss I wasn’t likely to forget, “and what you meant about Naveen.”

“Your colleague Naveen is on the same treasure hunt you’re on,” Lane said, turning back to me but keeping his distance. “He killed Steven Healy and now you’re the one in danger.”

“You came all the way to India because you thought I was in danger from
Naveen
? The Naveen who freaks out if he spills a drop of tea on one of his suits?”

“It’s him, Jones. I couldn’t reach you, so I had to come warn you.”

I found myself temporarily speechless. Lane hated flying. He’d endured the slog of two long flights across the world because he believed I was in danger.

“Are you okay?” Lane asked.

“That,” I said, “has got to be the most romantic thing anyone has ever done for me. Twisted and incredibly screwed up, but also horribly romantic.”

Lane’s lips twitched and he began to laugh. I had missed that. This time when he swept me up in his arms, he didn’t kiss me. Instead, he held me in his arms so tightly that I wasn’t sure he’d ever let go.

“I’m happy to see you,” I said when he finally pulled away, “but there’s no way Naveen killed Steven. Naveen didn’t know about the map until I showed it to him. I grant you he’s a devious bastard. If he’s here in India, it’s because he’s trying to hone in on the discovery after I inadvertently handed him the information. That makes him a jerk. Not a killer.”

“You’re forgetting something,” Lane said.

“What?”

“Somebody,” Lane said, “had already translated the map.”

I stared at Lane, letting the idea sink in. “You think
Naveen
was the one who translated it in the first place?”

“He’s a linguistic wunderkind,” Lane said. “When I looked him up I saw that he’d won some big award last year, before you two were hired as faculty.”

“Don’t remind me.”

“He’d be the natural person for Steven to go to when he needed to translate the map.”

I groaned. “I had the sense Steven was lying to me when he told me the map was already translated when he found it. That explains why Naveen was so surprised that I’d bring him the map! I thought he reacted oddly when I showed it to him. And that also explains why he was so insistent that the translations were perfect.”

“I wasn’t making up my suspicions about him,” Lane said. “He
already knew
Steven Healy.”

“Back up. Tell me why you suspect him.” Something else dawned on me. “And how did you find me to warn me?”

“You registered under your own name, so it only took a few calls to figure it out.”

“Guess I’d make a terrible spy.”

“That’s not such a bad thing, you know.” A smile crept onto his face.

“And Naveen?”

“He’s working with an archivist at the University of Kerala, after the same letters you are.”

“You mean Naveen is the person who stole the letters?”

Lane’s smile disappeared. “The letters have been stolen?”

“That’s why I’m back at the hotel already. Otherwise I’d still be there looking at them.”

“Damn,” Lane said. “Maybe Naveen bribed the archivist.”

It made sense. Bribery was common in India, and wasn’t thought of in the same morally corrupt way that it was at home.

“How did Naveen know where the letters were?” I asked. “I didn’t tell him.”

“You clued him in that you were on to something,” Lane said. “It was Naveen who I saw outside your apartment, not your friend Sanjay. I’d gone to your place to see you, to make sure you were all right. This was the day before yesterday, in the morning after Inspector Valdez contacted me, before I caught up with you at Lands End—”

“It was the morning
before
that when Sanjay was at my house,” I said, thinking over the confusion when Lane first told me he saw an Indian guy outside my house. “Naveen showed up a few minutes after I’d talked to him, while I was at the library doing research. I thought it was a little weird that he came to find me to essentially tell me nothing new, but at the time I chalked it up to Naveen’s big ego that he wanted to tell me again that he was right.”

Lane nodded. “The strange thing about him the first time I saw him was that he was looking around like he was trying to find a way into your apartment.”

“You didn’t call the police?” I asked. “Never mind. I forget who I’m talking to.”

“He didn’t behave like a burglar, so I didn’t know what was going on. Then I saw him again when I saw you later that day—”

“You were following me again?”

“You were the last person to see a man who was murdered, Jones. And don’t you dare say that’s romantic.”

“I won’t say it out loud, then,” I said. It was reassuring to have Lane there, on my side. I was beginning to feel optimistic again. “I suppose I should get you up to speed.”

“That’s probably a good idea.”

I told him what I’d learned about the treasure’s historic significance to India and the pirate stories I found at the library. I ended with my discovery that the map was of Kochi, not San Francisco, so the missing treasure was somewhere in Kochi.

“Clever,” Lane said. “You and that uncle of yours are both very clever. But you still don’t know what the treasure is?”

“I can’t figure it out,” I said. “If we had those missing letters, maybe they would tell us.”

“You just told me a murderer stole the letters. You can’t be serious about going after them.” 

“You really think Naveen could have killed someone? I can’t see it.”

“Believing the best about people is a luxury you can’t afford right now,” Lane said. “Just because you know him doesn’t mean he wouldn’t kill someone. You need to get out of his way.”

“I can’t get out of the way. The only chance I’ve got at going back to the normal life I want is to solve this.”

“Are you listening to yourself?” Lane stared at me for a moment before beginning to pace. He kept his distance from me in the small room. “You don’t have to be involved.”

“The police can’t—”

“The police are good at doing their jobs, Jaya. You’re kidding yourself if you think you’d be arrested for a murder you didn’t commit, so don’t use that as an excuse.”

“It’s not only that,” I insisted. “Anand’s treasure is out there—his secrets are out there. You understand what this means to me. How could I live with myself if I don’t figure this out? I don’t have a choice.”

“No, you
do
have a choice.” Lane shook his head. “The misdeeds of a long-dead ancestor of yours don’t matter. Not really. If you really wanted that nice safe life you claim to want, you’d be at home rewriting your research paper and getting ready for the semester. But you’re not.”

“You don’t know me at all,” I said, feeling my voice shake as I spoke. “Not the way I thought you did.”

“I’m not wrong about this,” he said. “I’m not wrong about you. You’re here because you like the danger and excitement.”

I had been confused about Lane, then comforted by his presence, but those feelings were gone now, replaced with white-hot anger.

“I can’t believe I thought you knew me,” I said, “and that I thought I knew you. I never should have rescued you that night in the Scottish jail. I should have told them what you really were.”

I regretted the words as soon as they came out of my mouth, but it was too late to take them back.

Lane stopped his anxious pacing. He stood still, his body rigid.

“You want to be on your own?” he said. “Fine. You’re on your own.”