Chapter 43
'Namaste.”
“ Namaste to you too, pal.” Wilbert Hawkins pointed at a plastic lounge chair on the veranda. “Have a seat.”
Prasad Naidu, deputy superintendent of the Gannapalli Police, glanced toward the central district, then shook his head. “I think we should sit inside.”
Hawkins followed Naidu’s eyes, and then scanned the street. A half-dozen buffalo were walking the dirt track, heading home from the fields on their own, and beyond them a group of men had collected at the bus stop, some looking sideways in Hawkins’s direction. He grabbed his beer from the low table, then led the deputy superintendent into the living room. Naidu shut the door behind him and sat down. He wore a long-sleeved, dark green uniform pressed like folded paper. No gun on his black belt. No badge on his shirt.
“An American is asking where you are living,” Naidu said.
Naidu’s accent was heavy, sometimes sounding to Hawkins like comical gibberish, but not now.
“Same one?” Hawkins asked.
“Different.”
“By himself?”
“With a Telegu language interpreter from the U.S.”
“Did he say who he was?”
“He said he is working for the American consulate in Chennai and is coming here to check on your welfare. No one is believing him. Half the population has applied for visas, so they know the consulate only uses local translators.”
Hawkins felt his stomach tighten. “What are people saying about me?”
“Playing dumb. He is not handing out money, yet. I think he is afraid they will figure out he is not for real once he does.”
“But they’ll take it.”
“Yes, they will take it.”
Hawkins rose. He walked into the hallway, then up the stairs into his bedroom. He returned two minutes later with an inch-high stack of hundred-rupee notes still stapled together like he had received them from the bank. Two hundred dollars U.S. He handed them to Naidu.
“Tell him I’m in Hyderabad for a few weeks,” Hawkins said. “Say I needed hernia surgery.”
“He’ll be wanting to see your house.”
“Bring him by. Walk him around the place like there’s nothing to hide. That way I can get a peek at him.”
B oots spent a jet-lagged, frustrating day trying to weasel information from a dozen different Hyderabad hospital clerks until he found a friendly one at the Deccan Infirmary, one who smiled at him and told him the doctors had recommended “Mr. Wilbert” have his surgery at the Parvatiben Gujarati Hospital in Chennai.
He felt like kicking himself. Hawkins had been no more than ten miles away from where Boots’s flight from the U.S. had landed at the Chennai Airport, and not twenty hours down clogged and dust-swirling roads first to Gannapalli, then to Hyderabad, and back.
Twelve hours later, after speaking to the Deccan Infirmary clerk, he knew he’d been had: nobody at the Parvatiben Gujarati Hospital had ever heard of Wilbert Hawkins. And five hundred dollars in bribes had gotten him records proving they were telling the truth.
Boots felt like slitting a buffalo’s throat.
A nother guy trying to find him.
When Hawkins had peeked out of his upstairs window toward the dirt track running in front of the house, he had a nauseous feeling he wasn’t so sure anymore who the good guys were. He knew who they used to be. Back then it was easy to tell. They gave him a million dollars and a first-class plane ticket to Karachi, then to Hyderabad.
But everything turned upside down when Gage appeared in his living room, and he still hadn’t found his feet.
First he thought he’d call the good guys to find out who his more recent visitor really was and what he might be up to. But he didn’t know any of them anymore. He didn’t even know who still worked at TIMCO. He’d never met any of the lawyers. He’d heard of Marc Anston, but never saw his face. And Charlie Palmer was dead.
Hawkins walked downstairs to the kitchen and grabbed a Kingfisher beer from the refrigerator. The five regular girls were sitting at the dining table giggling, painting their palms with henna and drinking mango juice through plastic straws. They knew he was worried so they went silent when he entered and didn’t even look over to see if he wanted sex. Usually, he’d catch the eye of one or two, then jerk his head toward the door. It took them a while to learn what that meant since Indian men avoided using the insulting gesture, but now it was second nature to the girls. This time he walked past them through the kitchen and out to the back sleeping porch.
Hawkins stared at the monkeys sitting on the brown stucco wall. When he’d first arrived in India he thought they were cute; now they just seemed like big red rats. He couldn’t even sit outside and eat anymore because of them begging or grabbing food off the table. Damn annoying.
Annoying. A face appeared in his mind, along with an answer. The only way the visitor could have figured out where he lived was from Jeannette. He hadn’t talked to anyone at TIMCO for eight years, maybe more; at least since he moved from Hyderabad to the countryside. And he believed Gage when he said he’d keep his location a secret because he knew Gage still needed him-maybe.
But all Jeannette had was a telephone number. Without his cop friend from Hyderabad, Gage never would have found him. And if it was police coming to arrest him on the criminal complaint in Richmond, they’d have been Indian, not American, and the first thing they’d do was stick out their hands for a bribe to go away.
Then the truth rose up before him: If the good guys were still the good guys, they would’ve called and just asked him if Gage had come by. Hawkins wouldn’t have told them, but he figured they’d ask. Try to take his temperature. See if they needed to send somebody out to snip off a loose end.
Hawkins set his beer down and returned to the kitchen and picked up the telephone. He woke up the person at the other end of the line and told him the story.
“What did he look like?” Gage asked.
“I guess you could say he looked like a younger George Strait. Same build, but a little taller.”
“Does the name Pegasus mean anything to you?”
“Peg-a-sus… Peg-a-sus… That’s it. That’s who sent me the money… Shit. You didn’t tell Jeannette about the money, did you?”
“No reason to. And don’t call her yourself until I tell you it’s okay. I don’t want anyone else figuring out where you are.”
Gage also didn’t want Hawkins to figure out that the criminal complaint was bogus.
“If I were you,” Gage said, “I’d hightail it. The George Strait-looking guy is named Boots Marnin. There’s no doubt he’s on his way back to Gannapalli, and I don’t think it’s to drink a beer with you on the veranda. Now that you’ve ducked him, he knows for certain you’ve got something to hide.”
Chapter 44
Old law partners. Thursdays, 11:45 A.M. at Tadich Grill in the San Francisco financial district. None of the waiters and none of the other regulars gave it a second thought after all these years.
Countless attorneys had been cut off mid-closing argument, even in mid-sentence, FBI agents had been left waiting outside chambers with search warrants to be signed, and juries left sitting with verdicts held over, all so Brandon Meyer could make it to lunch on time.
