“Where is that? Do you know how to get there?”
“You can go there by the new railway. It is not far — two hours from here, on the coast in Orissa.”
“Do you know who he went to see there? Maybe a man called Belur?”
“I do not know. Maybe.”
“How about something that begins with R-I? A place or a person.”
“I do not know.” It seemed to me that there was now an evasiveness in her answer. “It could be Riang, or Riga in Assam . They are far away from here.”
I realized that I was being irrational, asking a blind fourteen-year-old girl for details of Indian geography. Ameera could help only if she recalled something particular that Leo had said or done.
“Ameera, did Leo ever tell you about his work in America ? Who he worked for, or what he was doing in India ?”
There were tears welling from the dark eyes. I felt ashamed at what I was doing to her.
“No, Leo-yo-nel. If he told anyone, would it not be his own brother, when the brother was from one egg? Did he not tell you?”
“No. He did not tell me.”
And that was the curse of it. Leo hadn’t told me, and he was having trouble telling me now.
“Ameera, I will go tomorrow to Cuttack . Do you know where the man lives that Leo went to see?”
“Some company. A company that makes — what is the word? — computings? Things that are used for calculations.” It seemed to me that there was definite relief in her voice. “Lee-yo-nel, if you go there, to Cuttack , can I come with you? I can speak the language — it is Oriya spoken there — and I want to help you. I cannot help you if I stay here in the house.”
It seemed to me that I could easily find somebody there to act as an interpreter — but even if I couldn’t, I didn’t want Ameera with me. I had no idea what we’d be finding.
“No!” I spoke more loudly than I had intended. “I do not know what might happen there. Definitely not.”
Ameera did not speak; but the tears that welled silently from those dark eyes were more persuasive than any words. I swore under my breath, and most of it was directed at the right half of my brain. But some of it went to the prurient fantasies that were conjured as I put an arm around Ameera to comfort her.
“Hello? Operator, what in God’s name is happening on this line? I can hear four other people speaking.”
“One moment more, sir, you will be connected.”
I stood in the dark of the pantry, sweating and swearing. For twenty minutes I had been struggling to get a connection through to Sir Westcott at the Queen’s Hospital Annex in Reading . The lines were full of chattering monkeys and dolphin-like squeaks and chirps, and every few minutes the line went entirely dead.
“Hello?”
“Hello, hello?” I felt like a character in a P.G. Wodehouse short story. “Hello, hello, hello.”
“No need to shout like that — I’m not deaf. What do you want?”
Thank God. It was the familiar grumbling voice. “Sir Westcott, this is Lionel Salkind. I’m calling because I’m having trouble — trouble inside my head.”
“What do you expect, if you go piddling off all over the globe? You ought to be back here, where we can keep an eye on you.”
He didn’t seem at all worried. It was a huge relief just to hear that gruff complaint.
“So what’s your symptoms? Something new?”
The line had that built-in quarter-second delay that indicated it was being sent via satellite transmission.
“I think so. I’ve been getting bad headaches, and sometimes I don’t seem to have the proper control over the things I’m doing.”
“Join the club. Look, is that all? ’Course you’re getting bad headaches — didn’t you read that stuff I gave you when you left? You’re gettin’ atrophy of the Schwann cells now they’ve done their stuff, an’ the axons are beginning their main growth. That’s what the Madrill treatment is all about. Read the bloody reports — why do you think I gave ’em to you?”
I felt like an idiot — the papers he had given me were still sitting in my suitcase. In the excitement of leaving for India I hadn’t given them a thought, and it had certainly not occurred to me that they might be useful to tell me what was going on inside my head.
“D’yer read the papers out there?” Sir Westcott’s voice had taken on a new tone. “I don’t think this would be in ’em anyway. I hate to say it, but I owe you an apology. Remember you told me about somebody called Valnora Warren?”
“What about her?”
“She’s dead. They fished her out of the Cherwell four days ago — dead a couple of weeks. An’ she’d been beaten to death before she was put in the water. Can you hear me?”
“I hear you. Do they know who did it?”
“If they do, they’re not telling.” Sir Westcott sounded grim. “Watch your step out there — I’ve put in too much work on you to have it buggered up by some bunch of gangsters.”
“I’ll be careful.” I had just got the closest I would ever get to an expression of concern for my welfare from Sir Westcott.
“Another thing while we’re at it. Remember tellin’ me that your thug friends thought you were carrying Nymphs?”
“I’ll never forget it.”
“Well, I did a bit more checking with the police here about where the drug is coming from. It gets to England from Athens , like I told Tess. But it’s manufactured a lot further East — somewhere like India . An’ Calcutta is one of the biggest centers for use of Nymphs. So keep your eyes peeled for that while you’re there.”
I didn’t say anything — it seemed to me I had more than enough problems, without throwing Nymphs into the act.
“Anyway, are you ready to come on back home yet?” he went on. “Tess seems to have been worrying about you. Beats me why.”
“Tell her I’m fine.” I drew in a deep breath. “I wanted to ask you another thing — not about me this time, and not about Nymphs either. There’s somebody here with an eye problem, and I think it’s caused by childhood ulcers that have scarred the cornea. Can it be operated on?”
“If you’re right about the cause of the problem, it should be easy enough. How old is the patient?”
“A teenager. A girl.”
I don’t think that I imagined the sniff over the phone. It was easy to visualize him, scowling into the set on his desk. He seemed to be a thought reader for my guilty conscience.
“Aye. A girl, you say? Well, a patient is a patient. If you bring her here, I’d see what we could do for her. But watch what you’re playing at. No point in fixing up her eyes if the next thing you know Tess is scratching ’em out. Behave yourself out there — you know damn well Tess is too good for you. Don’t you try—”
The line chose that moment to die completely. I was left standing sweating in the cool of the dark pantry, cursing India in general and its telephone company in particular. Upstairs, the gong was sounding. Ahead lay another evening with Ameera, and whatever went with that thought.
Damnation.
I climbed slowly up the stairs. Leo had got me into all this, completely against my will. It seemed only fair that he ought to be doing a lot more to get me out of it, and I had no doubt at all that the secret of the Belur Package lay in the city of Cuttack. But although Leo’s notes and Ameera’s recollection both pointed in that direction, together with a deep instinctive feeling that perhaps came from my brother, I had no sensation of accomplishment or progress.
What I felt, like a tightness in my gut, was powerful foreboding.
- 11 -
When the brain tissue is cut, as for example in the separation of the hemispheres via severing of the corpus callosum, the damaged nerve cells will not normally regenerate. Although the axons of each cell can produce new sprouts, which could in principle connect anew to the target cells, this sprouting is short-lived. It lasts for only a few days, and it does not produce the needed links to the neuron target cells.