“I don’t know.” Faith shook her head, then glanced over again. “How can you be so sure Porzolkiewski will tell you what really happened with Charlie if you deliver on your promise? What if the truth about TIMCO isn’t what he thinks it is? Accidents waiting to happen can still be just accidents.”
Chapter 24
Jeanette Hawkins was wrong. Son of a Bitch wasn’t in an Islamic country. Gage had recognized it the moment she’d handed him the yellowed slip of paper bearing the telephone number. He’d also seen the hand of genius: laundering a witness through Muslim Pakistan, then depositing him in its Hindu enemy.
I t was the overripe end of mango season in southern India when Gage arrived at the Rajiv Gandhi Airport outside Hyderabad. Vendors were selling juice and sodas from carts bordering the parking lot in front of the arrivals hall. Between them and Gage as he walked out of the automatic doors was a mass of men in short-sleeved shirts and women in saris standing pressed up against a low metal barrier. A dozen taxi drivers swarmed him, grabbing at his forearms to lead him toward their cars. Porters wearing dhotis tied around their thighs and pulled up between their legs reached for his rollaboard. He shook them off as he scanned past the hotel placards held up by drivers bearing the names of arriving business travelers, but he couldn’t find the face he was looking for.
Instead, the face found him.
Gage grasped that customs superintendent Basaam Khan was standing behind him when the drivers and porters backed away. He turned toward a stubby man in a crisp white shirt and brown slacks, then reached out his hand, smiling. “Babu.”
Khan was the youngest child in a family of ten who’d stayed in India after the partition in 1947, when millions of Hindus fled from Pakistan and an equal number of Muslims fled in the opposite direction into India. He was among the forty percent of the population of Hyderabad who were Muslim. As the youngest son, he was simply known among friends and relatives as Babu. Sonny in English.
Babu pushed aside Gage’s hand, then hugged him, his head reaching only the middle of Gage’s chest. When they separated, Gage could see Babu had gained twenty pounds since they last worked together.
Gage pointed at his stomach. “Married life?”
Babu nodded, proud not only that his happiness was reflected in his body, but that his parents had allowed him to choose his own bride.
Babu took Gage’s briefcase out of his hand, and then led him along the barrier and through the opening toward a white Ambassador taxi, a five-year-old four-door sedan of the lumpy style manufactured in the U.S. in the 1940s. The driver set Gage’s rollaboard inside the trunk. Gage and Babu climbed into the back. The seat was coved by a clean, white sheet, pulled tight and tucked in.
They didn’t talk about Wilbert Hawkins as they drove from the airport and along Hussain Sagar Lake, the city’s main water supply, toward the hotel. There was no reason to share the purpose of Gage’s trip with the taxi driver. Instead, they talked quietly and cryptically about their last case, a multimillion-dollar diamond theft out of New York when Babu was deputy superintendent of customs at the Hyderabad Airport.
Gage had tracked the diamond cutter-turned-thief from Singapore to Bangkok, and finally to Hyderabad, then hired a local lawyer to analyze the legal issues involved in getting a warrant to search the man’s house. The judge decided Gage hadn’t met the probable cause standards imported into the Indian criminal code from British common law because Gage had no witness to testify that the man had the diamonds with him.
The judge suggested Gage speak with Babu, who reviewed the evidence, examined the law, considered the various legal options, and then kidnapped the thief’s wife and imprisoned her in the squalid, lice-ridden central jail until the man surrendered both himself and the diamonds.
All but a single twenty-thousand-dollar gem was recovered.
The insurance company hadn’t objected to Babu deducting his commission, they just wished they’d had the opportunity to offer it first.
Gage hadn’t objected either. He knew someday having an Indian cop in his debt would eventually pay off.
And that day had come.
Babu pointed toward the windshield. A hundred yards in front of them on the Tank Bund Road bordering the lake, a sash-wearing young Muslim rode a galloping white horse to his wedding. Babu then tapped his chest and smiled, indicating that he, too, had taken the same ride.
They lost sight of the groom as they turned into the tree-lined driveway of the colonial-era Viceroy Hotel.
Only when seated in Gage’s seventh floor room overlooking the earth-toned city did Babu mention Wilbert Hawkins.
“He is still living in Gannapalli,” Babu said. “I’m not sure he is leaving the village since he finished building his house.” Babu spread his hands. “Why he is picking the second hottest district in all of India, I am not understanding.”
“Probably because it’s the last place anyone would think he’d hide.”
Babu grinned, his head working a slight figure eight, the Indian head bob variously meaning I understand, or Yes, or Maybe. “That, and the women, no?”
Chapter 25
The forty-minute drive west from Hyderabad toward Gannapalli in Babu’s Land Cruiser took them from the cool world of offshore Web designers to the scorched farmland of those whose lives were measured not by digital clocks, but by the gestation periods of cattle and the growing seasons of rice.
Villagers dragged flat wooden carts piled with coconuts and potatoes toward the city, while others pulled empty ones back to the countryside. Cows and buffaloes grazed along the undivided two-lane road. Travelers waited for buses in whirlwinds of dust while breathing diesel fumes belching from aging truck engines, and the occasional monkey begged for food from laborers gathered under the shade of axelwood and laurel trees.
“Have you decided on an approach?” Babu asked as he turned north from the highway toward Gannapalli.
“You mean since there’s no one to kidnap?” Gage said.
Babu pulled away, as if offended. “I am understanding from you last time that investigation is an art, a matter of applying the correct technique at the proper time. I am not a one-trick horse.” He grinned at Gage and asked, “Horse?”
“Pony. A one-trick pony.”
“Yes, indeed, a one-trick pony.”
W ilbert Hawkins didn’t expect to find a white man sitting in his living room when he woke from his afternoon nap.
It hadn’t been difficult for Gage and Babu to obtain entry. The low-caste ten-year-old servant girl had cowered at the sight of them fifteen minutes earlier, then backed away from the front door, eyes down.
The stucco house stood three stories tall on the edge of the town of ten thousand people bordering rice paddies and mango gardens; the rice tended by girls and women with their saris pulled up to their knees as they waded the shallow fields, the trees swarmed by young men in dhotis and sandals.
And Babu had known right where to find the house.
Hawkins was still rubbing his eyes as he walked from the kitchen and through the dining room carrying a bottle of Kingfisher beer. He first spotted Gage’s briefcase on the marble living room floor, then took two more steps before he froze as his eyes first widened and then narrowed on Gage sitting on a bamboo-frame cushioned couch to his right.
Gage recognized the remnants of the oil field scrapper displayed in the fifteen-year-old photo his wife had provided. Sixty-three years of weathered skin hung on his thin body. Wire-rimmed, aviator-style glasses and a receding hairline framed his face. Skinny arms extended from the sweaty T-shirt encasing his pot belly.