69
Ian Kendall’s wife had died twelve years earlier. Without children or close relatives, he’d kept the home in Chiswick, a leafy, pub-strewn London suburb. The house was two stories of beige brick with red-stone accents at its angles and peaks, tall windows, and matching yews in the front yard.
Built in the reconstruction frenzy after World War II, it was sound except for a crack that had opened five or six years ago in the brickwork of the back wall. The crack started at the foundation and rose almost to the eaves. It had opened a little more with each passing year, not a structural threat — yet, anyway — but clearly visible.
Kendall had brought in a man to affix a trellis to the wall and plant English ivy, which grew eight feet a year. By now, the crack was completely hidden behind a façade of snaking vines and slick, shiny leaves.
Shortly after his wife’s death, Kendall had hired a large, meticulous Jamaican woman named Gardenia to keep house. On Wednesdays she rode the tube out from the city. She cleaned, did laundry, changed linens, and “neatened” the place. He always let her know when he was going away so that she could find other work if she chose.
Thus she was surprised, this particular day, when Kendall didn’t answer her knocking. A friendly and courteous man despite having done something important in science, unlike so many of the arrogant and disdainful she cleaned for, he never kept her waiting on the small porch. She knocked again, louder, and a third time, and still no one came.
He had shown her a spare hidden key, after forgetting his own in the house or losing it once too often while out. It was so unlike him to be away without calling that she retrieved the key from beneath a flower pot and let herself in.
“Dr. Kendall, are you here, sir?” she called, two steps inside the door. “Dr. Kendall?”
She put the key on a kitchen counter and thought about what to do next. Elderly people who lived alone tended to die alone. Often, after becoming very unpleasant, they were discovered by landlords or housekeepers. She took a deep breath and let it out slowly, steeling herself. Dr. Kendall had treated her well for more than a decade. He deserved better than being found by some stranger.
He was not downstairs. She climbed to the second floor and searched it all, leaving his bedroom for last. The door was closed. She knocked, waited. Knocked again. Swallowed, afraid of what she would surely find, and eased the door open.
The bed was neatly made, everything in place. The room smelled musty, in need of a good airing, but not like death.
Back downstairs, she had to admit that this time he’d simply forgotten to let her know he would be away. Not so surprising, really. He was almost eighty, after all. She would mention it to him when he returned, and he would reimburse her for her tube fare. He might even offer to pay her for the whole day. She would not come back here, though, until he called. It was a long way from Brixton Station to Chiswick.
70
Shortly after Gardenia visited Ian Kendall’s house, The Times of India newspaper reported a crime in South Delhi’s Jor Bagh district. A Delhi police spokesman stated that a victim had been found in an alley, dead of multiple stab wounds, not far from the free medical clinic where he practiced. His wallet and cellphone had been stolen. His watch, wedding band, clothing, and a solid silver crucifix had not. Police said they believed the assailant could have been interrupted in the act.
The brief report appeared below the fold on page 3. Delhi was the crime capital of India and had been for nine years. Homicides were nothing special, and this particular victim, whose name was being withheld pending notification of next of kin, was not even Indian.
71
David Gerrin was walking back to his hovel in Karail with two plastic jugs of water. The new home was a shack of plywood and cardboard and rusting metal. He and a dozen families shared an open pit toilet beside which lay a bag of lime no one used. The nearest water he considered less than life-threatening lay almost half a mile away, and he waited until the sun was long down before starting such a trek, even in February.
Difficult, all of it, but better some time here than life — or death — in an American prison. He could endure it all for months — a year, even — in exchange for the anonymity this vast and teeming slum engendered. Eventually he would work his way back into the world, slowly, patiently, one stratum at a time, all the while shedding layers of his old self like a molting snake.
He believed that Karail was the last place authorities would suspect him of going. In addition, the Dhaka police were perfectly useless. His call for the dying woman had demonstrated that, as he had known it would. She would never have made a breeder, so he had thought it worth a try at least. Horribly corrupt and rarely visible even in the city proper, the Dhaka cops had written Karail off completely years ago. It was a world all its own, seething and primal, but if you knew its ways, as he still did, you could survive. Not easily or pleasantly, but it was possible.
He kept to himself, dressed badly enough to blend in, went unshaven and dirty, though it would not be long before he had to wash in muddy Gulshan Lake, which formed Karail’s border. Now he was halfway home from the well, a trip that had taken him farther than he liked to go from the slum’s steaming center, when he came upon a boy standing over a woman on the sidewalk. He was trying to pull a cloth bag out of her hand. The boy could not have been more than twelve. His shirt and shorts were ragged, his feet bare. His calves were almost as big around as his thighs.
The woman was too old to be a breeder, so Gerrin set his water jugs down, walked up to the two of them, and pushed the boy away from her.
“Stop this,” he said in Bengali to the boy. To the woman: “Go away.” She rose and scuttled off.
He turned to face the boy and caught the familiar stench of garbage and filth, smells he himself was absorbing. This boy was one of those deep-slum denizens who ventured out to hunt the edgelands at night, where things like an old woman with a bag of spoiled lemons might be found. As Gerrin himself had done so long ago.
The light here was dim, only a couple of unbroken streetlamps in two full blocks. Even so, the boy’s eyes shone, huge and white and bright with hunger, but with something else as well, very intent, scrutinizing, registering. Gerrin thought he saw something familiar in the boy’s face, those eyes. Intelligence recognized itself.
“Tell me why you were robbing that woman,” Gerrin said, thinking he knew already how the answer would form.
“I am so sorry, sir.” The boy’s voice was as thin as the rest of him, but he spoke clearly, keeping his eyes on Gerrin’s. “I will tell you. Please do not beat me. My sisters are starving to death, and so am I.” The boy put his head down and his hands behind him, in a pose of submission. “Please, sir.”
He did not think this man would beat him, though. He had been beaten often enough that he could tell, in seconds, what would happen next. This man was not one of those. He had a heart. The boy had learned many valuable things about the human heart.
Gerrin saw one of the boy’s hands come from behind his back. It held a rusty knife. Gerrin stepped away and said, “I am no threat to you. And I have nothing worth stealing.”
“There is always something worth stealing.” The boy moved toward Gerrin and raised the knife for a stab to the left side of his chest.
A hiss, and he froze in mid-strike, his hand at the top of its arc. A small red spot appeared over his heart. Gerrin watched blood run down the boy’s torso. The boy gazed at it, his mouth open. The knife fell from his hand, his hand dropped from the air, and he collapsed like a pile of disconnected parts onto the sidewalk.