The other, already ahead of him in the corridor leading to the rear of the house, waved a hand and shouted back something that sounded like, “Bedroom!”
Lessing rounded the comer at the end of the passage. He couldn’t see Mulder any more: the old man must have entered one of the two doors there or gone upstairs. Lessing chose the door to his left and skidded into the dining room The closed, stuffy darkness smelled of spices and cooking, but the woven -bamboo blinds and ornate, imitation-Mughal furniture were undisturbed. A door at the far end opened into a shadowy hall beyond which lay the pantry and the serving kitchen. Meals were actually prepared in a separate building, some twenty meters away. From there a train of servants bore the dishes up to the main house or over to the staff refectory. Even in these days of electric appliances and do-it-yourself housework old traditions died hard; India had swarmed with servants long before the British had arrived. Now it was only foreigners, the rich, and corporations like Indoco who could afford them.
Lessing glanced around and snatched up a heavy poultry knife from a drainage board. Any weapon was better than nothing. He checked quickly and found the back door locked Goddard habitually opened it at dawn for the “bearers” with their “morning bed tea”: another Indian custom, one that Lessing rather enjoyed.
He whirled and dashed back out to the hallway, then up the slippery, polished, concrete stairs two at a time.
Mulder knelt in the corridor by the door of the master bedroom, hands to his face. A trickle of dark liquid oozed between his fingers. Lessing stopped and made sure he was alive. He crouched down and peered around the doorjamb.
It was lucky that he had decided to duck. He found himself staring at a gleaming silver belt buckle, black trousers below it, so close he could see the weave of the fabric, and a dark jacket above. An Israeli stitch-gun hissed like a striking viper in his ear, and he heard the tiny, deadly explosions blasting three-centimeter craters in the cement-block wall across the stairwell behind him.
He reacted as training had taught him: he shoved the big poultry knife up between bis adversary’s thighs, into his abdomen. The other gagged, doubled over, tried ineffectually to bat at Lessing with the stubby gun barrel, and then crumpled over, full on top of him. Blood and entrails splattered Lessing’s chest. A gun bellowed from across the room, not a gas-powered stitch-gun this time but gunpowder.
Lessing felt nothing: the shot had missed. There were two or more opfoes, then. Grimly he set himself to getting free from the thrashing body on top of him — and to finding the damned stitch-gun.
Somebody behind Lessing yelped, and a second gun roared there. The voice sounded like Wrench’s. Goddard must have given him a weapon. With all the concentration of a man defusing a time-bomb as the seconds tick away to zero, Lessing fumbled around on the floor for the stitch-gun.
He found it, clutched at its blood-slippery butt, and rolled to avoid presenting a stationary target.
He needn’t have bothered. The room was silent except for someone wheezing just above him. He recognized Wrench’s breathing.
“You okay?” the little man gasped. “You dead? Hey, Lessing?”
“God damn it, I’m all right. See to the opfoes. And Mulder.”
“Goddard’s bringing the doctor. Stay put if you’re wounded.”
“I told you, I’m not hurt. Check Mulder. One of them hit him with a pistol butt or something when he entered the bedroom.”
He heard voices, noises, footsteps behind him. On the floor, a meter from his face, his erstwhile opponent still twitched feebly. He clambered to his feet and felt his way across the room, past the gigantic double bed with the satin coverlet Mrs. Mulder had imported all the way from Denmark There he stumbled over a spindly-legged chair and ended on all fours beside the second opfo.
Moonlight through the tangled drapes picked out splinters of white bone and a dark, liquid smear where the man’s face should have been. Wrench was a good shot for a non-mere. Or just lucky.
Lessing knelt to secure the man’s gun: a neat, oil-fragrant, Belgian 9-mm automatic. Darkness swirled and swam around him. Dimly, ebon upon black, he perceived shapes on the floor beside the body: flat, squarish things. A thought struck him, and he squinted up at the wall behind the bed.
A cavity yawned there: Mulder’s wall safe stood open.
So the object of the intrusion was just simple burglary!
Or was it?
Bauer’s visit so late at night? His talk of “thumbing?” The stabbing down by the vehicle park? Now this.
Too many coincidences.
Lessing groped on the polished terrazzo floor. His fingers touched a snarled mass of jangling, metallic objects: one of Mrs. Mulder’s necklaces, probably. Then five or six of the flat rectangles. They felt like record books of some sort, ledgers or diaries. He held one up to the fitful moonlight
The book’s cover was embossed in tarnished gold with a double lightning-bolt design above a line of numerals. He slanted it toward the window and read “1948-1955.”
It couldn’t be: that would make the book almost a hundred years old, a near antique!
Yet it felt real. He didn’t know what to think: Mulder had never evinced interest in anything cultural, much less in rare books. Lessing picked up another volume, his curiosity piqued. It was newer, dated 1985-1987. Perhaps a dozen similar volumes lay scattered on the floor beneath the safe.
Were these what the intruders sought, then? Were they so rare and valuable? They certainly weren’t Indoco ledgers: those were kept in the main office at the factory, and Lessing would have recognized them. Nobody had to risk a breakin to see those anyhow. The company was scrupulous about keeping “open books” for the benefit of the Indian government.
He looked again, carefully this time. Two or three more of the same set protruded from a black cloth bag under the dead man’s shoulder. The opfocs had been seriously desirous of reading material!
The double-lightning motif nagged at his memory. He turned the book around so that it was upright.
The symbols resolved themselves into a design he recognized, one known to every child who had grown up in America.
They were not lightning bolts but runic characters that stood for the letters “SS”: Schutzstaffel, the elite organization of the German Third Reich in the first half of the last century.
Lessing goggled at the volume, so surprised that he forgot even the corpse on the floor next to him. The SS was almost a century gone now; the last veteran of the Second World War had been in his grave since about 2025, seventeen years before. Yet the media kept the sides, the issues, and the propaganda as current as today’s soap operas. Movies, books, and TV dramas refused to let the war go the way of the Crusades, Napoleon, the American Revolution, or a dozen other conflicts. On TV the SS still marched— the same, ancient footage — and the black-uniformed troopers still murdered, tortured, and swaggered for the titillation of twenty-first-century American audiences. The SS was money: it sold books, movies, and deodorants just as well as heroic cowboys, sinuous starlets, acid-tongued private eyes, tough meres, or naked “Banger” pom-dancers, who were the latest craze back home.
None of which explained what these books were doing out here in India. They certainly weren’t sadomasochistic “Nazi-porn!”