Everyone in the room was on his feet. There were twenty disputations, rain crashed at the windows, Tureen raged in the arms of the Sikhs, and the nawab looked as if he were in the throes of an apoplectic fit. Over it all came the voice of Beersley, gone shrill now with excitement. “Whore!” he screamed, descending on the governess. “Conspiring with Bagwas, tempting him with your putrid charms and the lucre the nawab gave out in exchange for your favors. Yes, drugging the children and night nurses with your, quote, hot chocolate!” Beersley swung round again, this time to face the begum, who looked as confused as if she’d awakened to find herself amid the Esquimaux in Alaska. “And you, dear sinned-against lady: your little ones are dead, smothered by Bagwas and his accomplice Patel, sealed in rubber at the plant, and shipped in bulk to Calcutta. Look for them there, so that at least they may have a decent burial.”
I was at Beersley’s side now, trying to fend off the furious rushes of his auditors, but he seemed to have lost control. “Tureen!” he shrieked, “you fool, you jackanapes! You believed in this harlot, this Compton-Divot, this feminine serpent! Believed her when she lay in your disgusting arms and promised you riches when she found her way to the top! Good God!” he cried, breaking past me and rushing again at the governess, who stood shrinking in the corner, “‘Lamia! Begone, foul dream!’‘
It was then that the nawab’s Sikhs turned on my unfortunate companion and pinioned his arms. The nawab, rage trembling through his corpulent body, struck Beersley across the mouth three times in quick succession, and as I threw myself forward to protect him, a pair of six-foot Sikhs drew their daggers to warn me off. The rest happened so quickly I can barely reconstruct it. There was the nawab, foaming with anger, his speech about decency, citizens of the crown, and rural justice, the mention of tar and feathers, the hasty packing of our bags, the unceremonious bum’s rush out the front gate, and then the long, wearying trek in the merciless rain to the Sivani-Hoota station.
Some weeks later, an envelope with the monogram EC-D arrived in the evening mail at my bungalow in Calcutta. Inside I found a rather wounding and triumphant letter from Miss Compton-Divot. Beersley, it seemed, had been wrong on all counts. Even in identifying her with the woman he had once loved, which I believe now lay at the root of his problem in this difficult case. She was in fact the daughter of a governess herself, and had had no connection whatever with Squire Trelawney — whom she knew by reputation in Hertfordshire — or his daughter. As for the case of the missing children, she had been able, with the aid of Mr. Bagwas, to solve it herself. It seemed that practically the only suspicion in which Beersley was confirmed was his mistrust of the sadhu. Miss Compton-Divot had noticed the fellow prowling about the upper rooms in the vicinity of the children’s quarters one night, and had determined to keep a close watch on him. Along with Bagwas, she was able to tail the specious holy man to his quarters in the meanest street of Sivani-Hoota’s slums. There they hid themselves and watched as he transformed himself into a ragged beggar with a crabbed walk who hobbled through the dark streets to his station, among a hundred other beggars, outside the colonnades of the Colonial Office. To their astonishment, they saw that the beggars huddled round him — all of whom had been deprived of the power of speech owing to an operation too gruesome to report here — were in fact the children of the nawab. The beggar master was promptly arrested and the children returned to their parents.
But that wasn’t alclass="underline" there remained the motive. When dragged before the nawab in chains and condemned to death by peine fort et dure, the beggar master spat forth his venom. “Don’t you recognize me?” he taunted the nawab. “Look closer.” Understanding animated the nawab’s features and a low exclamation escaped his lips: “Rajendra!” he gasped. “Yes,” sneered the beggar master, “the same. The man you wronged thirty-five years ago when you set your filthy minions on me, burned my house and barn to the ground, and took my wife for your own first begum. She turned her back on me for your promises, and you turned me out of the state to wander begging the rest of my life. I have had my revenge. The nawab had broken down in tears, the beggar master was hauled off to be tortured to death, and the nine tongueless children were brought home to be instructed in sign language by Miss Compton-Divot, who became engaged to marry Mr. Bagwas the following week.
And so ends the baffling and ever-surprising case of the Beggar Master of Sivani-Hoota. I did not show the governess’s letter to Beersley, incidentally. I felt that he’d been under an unnatural strain over the course of the past several months, and determined instead to take him for a rest cure to a little hotel in the grassy hills of the Punjab, a place that, so they say, bears a striking resemblance to Hertfordshire.
On for the Long Haul
There was nothing wrong with his appendix — no stitch in the side, no inflammation, no pain — but Bayard was having it out. For safety’s sake. He’d read an article once about an anthropologist who’d gone to Malaysia to study the social habits of the orangutan and died horribly when her appendix had burst three hundred miles from the nearest hospital; as she lay writhing in her death agony the distraught apes had hauled her halfway up a jack-fruit tree, where she was found several days later by a photographer from Life magazine. The picture — splayed limbs, gouty face, leaves like a mouthful of teeth — was indelible with him. She’d been unprepared, that anthropologist, inattentive to the little details that can make or break you. Bayard was taking no such chances.
At their first meeting, the surgeon had been skeptical. “You’re going to Montana, Mr. Wemp, not Borneo. There are hospitals there, all the modern facilities.”
“It’s got to go, doctor,” Bayard had quietly insisted, looking up with perfect composure from the knot of his folded hands.
“Listen, Mr. Wemp. I’ve got to tell you that every surgical procedure, however routine, involves risk”—the doctor paused to let this sink in—“and I really feel the risks outweigh the gains in this case. All the tests are negative — we have no indication of a potential problem here.”
“But doctor—” Bayard felt himself at a loss for words. How explain to this earnest, assured man with the suntanned wife, the Mercedes, and the house in Malibu that all of Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York — civilization itself — was on the brink of a catastrophe that would make the Dark Ages look like a Sunday-afternoon softball game? How intimate the horrors that lay ahead, the privation, the suffering? He remembered Aesop’s fable about the ant and the grasshopper. Some would be prepared, others would not. “You just don’t understand how isolated I’m going to be,” he said finally.
Isolated, yes. Thirty-five acres in Bounceback, Montana, population thirty-seven. The closest town with a hospital, bank, or restaurant was Missoula, a two-and-a-half-hour drive, an hour of it on washboard dirt. Bayard would have his own well, a cleared acre for vegetable farming, and a four-room cabin with wood stove, electrical generator, and a radiation-proof cellar stocked with a five-year supply of canned and freeze-dried foodstuffs. The whole thing was the brainchild of Sam Arkson, a real-estate developer who specialized in subsistence plots, bomb shelters, and survival homes. Bayard’s firm had done some PR work for one of Arkson’s companies — Thrive, Inc. — and as he looked into the literature of catastrophe, Bayard had found himself growing ever more uncertain about the direction of his own life. Remember the gas crisis? asked one of Arkson’s pamphlets. An inconvenience, right? The have-nots stepping on the haves. But what about the food crisis around the corner? Have you thought about what you’ll do when they close up the supermarkets with a sign that says “Sorry, Temporarily Out of Food”?