Bill had wondered about the scar, and Casey’s talking about it gave him courage to ask how he had gotten it.
Casey answered, “Oh, it was a thick binder of a co-pilot I had with me taking a load of freight out of Karachi four years ago. On the take-off, something went bust with the fuel pump. I got this Indian bloke to work on the wobble pump and we started to lift okay. I was going to circle and put her in again, when bash, we dropped. We both walked away from it, even though the biggest piece of the aircraft that was left was about the size of an oil drum. Know what the silly blighter had done? Stopped pumping when his arm got tired! He didn’t even get scratched.”
That lead to more stories of the strange accidents of flying in India, and all Bill had to do was listen. The only time Casey paused in the conversation was when they had sat down at a table in the Grand Hotel. Then he stopped for a few seconds to order a pitcher of arrak punch. Bill winced a little at the thought of consuming so much of the smooth deadly native liquor, but he didn’t object. His aim was to completely forget Carson and the job and the letter.
At eight they had a chicken curry dinner, and then started on straight arrak. By ten o’clock things were pretty dim. Casey was having trouble forming his mouth around any word longer than one syllable, and Bill had trouble making sense out of what he said. A band was blaring American music into the smoky room, and most of the tables were filled with noisy, gay customers of the middle-class Colombo night life. Bill thought once that it certainly was a place that you wouldn’t find Mr. Carson, and then cursed himself for not being able to forget the man. He poured himself an extra large shot of arrak.
He looked down at his glass and then looked up to see a third person sitting at the table with them. He shook his head, half expecting the vision to fade, but it didn’t. The stranger sat calmly staring at Casey and waiting for a chance to break into the monologue. He was a middle-aged Singhalese, with a long mournful face that made Bill think of a chocolate bloodhound. He giggled, and the man looked at him with such sad, abused eyes that Bill went off into a fit of half-drunken laughter. The stranger was dressed in a white shirt, a flowered sarong and a British tweed coat, as thick as a carpet.
Casey realized that he was being interrupted by Bill’s laughter, so he stopped his rambling story of being forced down into a jungle, and looked up. He saw the stranger, and then he knotted his brows as though trying to remember something. Then his face lighted up with sudden intelligence.
“Thas right. Suppose to meet you here. Is it ten o’clock aready? Hey, Bill, meet my very good friend, Doctor Purayana. Doctor this is Bill Brucker or Drucker or something. Great bloke! You two people have to know each other.”
The doctor didn’t speak. He nodded gravely at Bill, and then lifted a brown package roughly the size of a football out of his lap and placed it on the table in front of Casey.
Casey looked at it and asked, “Is the... ah—”
“I assure you,” the doctor interrupted, “that what you desire is within the package.” Then he rose, as silently as he had arrived, nodded again at Bill and slipped away.
Casey seemed to have no interest in continuing any more of his stories. He slouched back in the chair, and watched the perspiring figures of the dancers circling around in the smoke. He fished out some damp Woodbines and managed to light one with a wavering hand. Bill could see, even in his own fog, that Casey was much further gone than he. Bill looked at the package, thought of the mysterious conversation, and asked, “What you got in the package, Case?”
Casey looked at him stupidly, and said, “What? What you say?”
“I said, what’s in that bundle there, in front of you?”
“Oh, this thing? Elephant. Big elephant.”
“You’re nuts. Let’s see!”
With fumbling fingers, Casey clawed the paper off the package. It was indeed an elephant. A large, cheap ebony elephant, not very well carved, the same sort of elephant that you see in a thousand shops in Colombo.
It stood on the crumpled paper, gleaming blackly in the lights, with bits of bone carved and stuck on it for tusks and toenails. Casey-fingered the crumpled paper until he found a hundred-rupee note. With great care, he folded the note and tucked it away in a pocket of his uniform, while Bill watched with great curiosity.
“Hey, what’s the money for?”
“Always get a hundred rupees. That’s pay for taking the elephant to Bombay and for keeping my bloody mouth shut. It’s a piece of cake. Can’t tell anybody about it.”
Bill could see that Casey was in that alcoholic trance where he was thinking aloud, a semi-hypnotic situation. He couldn’t resist trying to find out more, so he asked, “How often do you get an elephant?”
“Every time I bring the kite down here. Three times a week. Three hundred rupees a week. Lovely rupees.”
“What do you do with the elephants in Bombay?”
“Go to the Taj Hotel at ten o’clock. An American comes and gets them. Don’t know his name.” Bill had to strain to hear him. “Can’t open my bloody mouth about all this.”
“What makes those cheap elephants so valuable?”
“Don’t know and don’t care. All I want is the rupees. They look like plain elephants to me.”
“What does the man in Bombay look like?” Bill asked, feeling himself getting more and more sober, even as Casey got drunker.
“White-haired bloke. Got speckled hands.”
“Speckled hands?”
“Yeah. White blotches on ’em. Nice bloke.”
Bill had the vague idea that he had seen or heard of someone with spotted hands, with some type of pigmentation disease in the East, but he couldn’t remember. His brain was fuzzed by the liquor. He shook his head and tried to remember, but it didn’t work. He reached for the elephant, and said, “Here, let me get a look at this thing.”
At that, Casey seemed to awaken out of his spell. He snatched at the elephant and clumsily wrapped it up. Then he placed it in his lap, and peered over at Bill, his eyes full of dull suspicion. “No you don’t,” he growled. “Nobody looks at the elephant! That’s what Doctor Purayana said. Only the customs blokes, sometimes, and they only look at it for a minute.” He lapsed into sullen silence, and Bill realized that as far as good cheer was concerned, the evening was over.
After paying the check, he transferred Casey, his bag and the elephant to a rickety taxi with instructions to take the sodden pilot out to Ratmalana. Bill decided to walk back to the Galle Face Hotel and give the sea breeze a chance to clear his head, leaving his car in the Grand Hotel parking space.
It was late as he walked past the clock tower in the center of the city. The cool breeze from the sea dried the perspiration on his temples. He opened his linen coat to give it a better chance at his damp body. He heard the muted chiming of the bells on the rickshaws, the pad of bare feet on the road, the snatches of whining song from some of the natives he passed. It was a beautiful tropical night, and his heart ached with the thought of having to leave it so soon.
As he rounded the corner and saw the lights of his hotel in the distance, he could hear the whispering surge of the sea on the sandy beach. A few clouds scudded across the ceiling of sparkling stars.
As he crawled into bed, he expected to stay awake for hours, thinking of Carson and the lost job, but he fell asleep almost immediately.
In the morning, he was awake and standing by his window looking out at the sea before he remembered the letter, remembered the blow that had knocked him loose from his job and his future. He felt his face sag as he remembered. He sat on the edge of the bed and read it again, deep gloom in his heart. He didn’t look up as Ramasinghe, his hotel boy came in to draw his bath. When he finally noticed the servant, he had to grin as he saw that the boy’s naturally cheery face had dropped into lines of sympathetic sorrow. “Cheer up, Ramasinghe!”