One splotch of scarlet in the midst of it all was clear, however: a body on a company stretcher.
He could not see the face, but he sensed it was Bauer.
Wrench was already at the gate when Lessing arrived. Both had dutifully endured Indoco’s Hindustani lessons, but this was Jameela Husaini’s special duty, and Lessing had to go back, wake her up, and then wait impatiently while she donned the shalwar-qameez costume she favored, essentially a tunic and slacks, much different from the Hindu sari. She took along a shawl, which she wrapped around her head and shoulders when she went forward to speak to the plant watchmen, the Pathan chaukidars Mulder had hired to supplement his European security people. The Pathans surrounded her, reporting, re-enacting, and gesticulating. Enough dramatic talent for a TV series.
He looked down at the stretcher. An arm moved, and he heard breath bubbling beneath the rustred company blanket. Bauer was alive.
God, he was tired. His head hurt, and he couldn’t concentrate on poor Bauer. Let the company doctor, the little Bengali gentleman now chattering with Jameela, handle that. He just waited, an automaton whose motor functions had been turned off but whose sensors were still on. His eyes were a TV camera, recording but not comprehending. Sharp gravel pricked his slippered feet, and his skin was simultaneously clammy and dry with the unforgiving, relentless heat of the Indian night, the harbinger of the scorching morrow. The air smelled of baked brass, charcoal, alien spices, and warm earth as old as God, all mingled with animal manure and flower scents and people. Endless people, now over a billion in this fifth decade of the twenty-first century.
Jameela said something soothing to the senior chaukidar of the plant. She came back to Lessing and Wrench.
“The taximan struck him, they think. He’s not with his vehicle now. Nobody saw any fight. The stranger…” she shot a quizzical glance at Lessing “…returned from the compound and went straight toward his taxi. The watchmen didn’t see him again until he came staggering up from the auto park, all bloody. Mahmood Khan took him inside and called the others.”
Jameela was good, Lessing thought. He had served with dozens of meres who couldn’t make a report as concise as that. He smiled at her, then realized she would think he was patronizing her.
“Who is he?” Jameela asked. It was her job to make any statements to the Indian police.
“He vill live,” Doctor Chakravarti interrupted excitedly. “Live, if’ve get him to Balrampur Hospital in time! Mr. Wren, Mr. Lessing, please to give permission for the station vagon. Kuldeep can drive.”
“Any other problems?” Wrench threw in, speaking over the doctor’s head to Jameela. “Other breakins? Trouble with the students? The villagers? Outsiders?”
She rubbed at her forehead, pushing her heavy tresses out of her eyes, then translated for the senior chaukidar. A babble of voices answered her. She replied, “No… nothing.”
“Somebody go get Mr. Mulder up!” Wrench ordered “Search the plant, the perimeter.” He was visibly excited. But then Wrench struck Lessing that way: an over-reaction for every occasion.
“Bring him on inside,” a new and deeper voice said. “We can see to him there. If he’s critical, we’ll have to drive him to Lucknow.”
Lessing turned his head to see Bill Goddard, Mulder’s senior executive officer. Behind him, a hulking shadow in the darkness, stood Herman Mulder himself. The commotion had brought him down from the mansion.
Dr. Chakravarti would have gone on insisting on the station wagon, at once if not sooner, but nobody argued with Goddard. The man was a rock: huge, massive, as solid as the ramparts of the Delhi Red Fort itself.
Goddard said, “You, Lessing. You, Wren. Come with.” He ignored Jameela as though she didn’t exist. He disliked Indians, even those with European features and light skin like Jameela, and Lessing had often wondered why the company had sent him out to Lucknow, of all places.
Lessing gestured, and two of the chaukidars took up the stretcher and carried it through the gate, past the staff quarters, and up the inner drive to the Director’s house. What a parade: squat, hairless, old Mulder lurching along in front, his bald head as shiny as a dress helmet; then Goddard, wrapped in his own self-importance; then the two Indians with Bauer, the main float; then Dr. Chakravarti trotting behind; and Wrench and Lessing bringing up the rear: the trained-dog act, the big, rangy German shepherd and the nervous, yapping, little terrier.
The big house was cement block and concrete, a pink monstrosity that looked more like a transistor radio than a residence, the sort of “modem bungalow” one found everywhere in the “best” suburbs up and down the subcontinent. It was air-conditioned throughout, so cold that it was almost an affront after the sticky night outside. It smelled of furniture varnish and the disinfectant with which the servants mopped the concrete-chip mosaic floor.
The cavernous “drawing room” beyond the screened verandah was empty. There was indeed a Mrs. Mulder, but she appeared so rarely that Wrench called her the “Fairy Godmother”: “Comes out with her wand three times a year… Christmas, the Fourth of July, and Indian Independence Day… to sprinkle stars and bless us all. Then, poof!… back to limbo!”
The watchmen set Bauer’s stretcher down, and Dr. Chakravarti knelt for a better look under the popping, fizzing fluorescent lights.
“Not so bad as I had “
“Fine,” Goddard snapped. “Fix him up. Who the hell is he?”
Lessing stepped forward before Wrench could offer any snide, little sarcasms. “Friend of mine. Came to see me. No idea who knifed him… or why. Some quarrel with the taxi-wala, maybe.”
“Charming. All we need is a tangle with the police. Prime Minister Ramanujan’s government would love an excuse to send all foreign companies packing. And confiscate our installations in the bargain.” Goddard looked to Mulder for confirmation, but the old man was watching the doctor, puffy, heavy-lidded eyes as blank as a temple statue’s.
“The wound is in the chest,” the doctor went on, clinically and precisely, as though no one had spoken. “A bandage, antibiotics, rest. He will be all right.”
Lessing saw that Bauer’s eyes were open. “Who stuck you? The taxi driver? Can you talk?”
The other grunted something in German — or maybe it was Flemish or Dutch. Then he said, quite clearly, “Not the taximan. Another. Come for you, maybe, or something else important. I was just a… a by-the-way.”
Mulder opened his mouth to ask a question, but he was interrupted. The double doors at the far end of the room swung open to reveal Mrs. Mulder herself. Without makeup, coiffure, and French chiffon, her fairy-godmother magic was sadly lacking: a gaunt, vinegary American housewife in the latter years of menopause. She bore neither wand nor sparkling stars.
“Dear,” she trilled, “you told me to call you if the red lights came on.” She stopped, dismayed by the size of her audience. “Oh, I had no idea…”
“Red lights?” Mulder asked blankly.
Goddard said, “The security-alert lights! Somebody’s gotten inside…!”
“Intrusion!” Wrench cried. Neither he nor Lessing had brought weapons.
“Which light?” Mulder heaved himself toward his spouse, a plump and hairless white whale. People said he was over seventy, but he had the energy of a much younger man.
“The little one… on the end….” The woman dithered. Lessing had never seen anyone actually dither before.
“Get my…!” Wrench shrilled. The doctor and the two chaukidars were in his way, and he did a ridiculous dance to get around them.
Lessing knew which light was lit; he had helped install the system himself. Outside, beyond Indoco’s compound, lay wasteland, a crumbled mosque, and a deserted Muslim cemetery that the government wouldn’t let anybody uproot. Camera twenty-six there was out of order, whether by accident or design. That meant that an intruder who knew the layout had a clear route over the plant’s back fence all the way up into Mrs. Mulder’s formal rose garden behind the mansion, if it wasn’t a false alarm, the red light on Mulder’s panel indicated a security breach in the main house itself! “Weapons?” Lessing threw at Mulder.