appeared to transfix Inspector Patel; perhaps it was their impossible whiteness, or else their improbable size—even bare, Nancy’s feet were bigger than the inspector’s little shoes.
Nancy stared at him without mercy. She enjoyed the prominent bones in his sharply featured face; it would have been impossible for her to look at his face and imagine it—even in 20 years—with jowls. She thought he had the blackest eyes and the longest eyelashes.
Still staring at Nancy’s feet, Inspector Patel spoke forlornly: “I suppose there’s no known phone number or an address where I could reach you.”
Nancy felt she understood everything that attracted her to him. She’d certainly tried hard to lose her innocence in Iowa, but the football players hadn’t touched it. She’d spoiled her real innocence in Germany, with Dieter, and now it was lost for good. But here was a man who was still innocent. She probably both frightened and attracted him—if he even knew it, Nancy thought.
“Do you want to see me again?” she asked him. She thought the question was ambiguous enough, but he stared at her feet—with both longing and horror, she imagined.
“But you couldn’t identify the two other men, even if we found them,” said Inspector Patel.
“I could identify the other taxi driver,” Nancy said.
“We’ve already got him,” the inspector told her.
Nancy stood up from the bed and carried the dildo to the bathroom. When she came back, Inspector Patel was at the window, watching the beggars. She didn’t want to have any advantage over him anymore. Maybe she was imagining that the inspector had fallen hopelessly in love with her and that, if she shoved him on the bed and fell on top of him, he would worship her and be her slave forever. Maybe it wasn’t even
Then it struck her that he was no longer interested in her feet; he kept glancing at her
“Do you want to see me again?” Nancy repeated. There was no ambiguity to her question now. She stood closer to him than was necessary, but he ignored the question by pointing to the child performers far below them.
“Always the same stunts—they never change,” Inspector Patel remarked. Nancy refused to look at the beggars; she continued to stare at Inspector Patel.
“You could give me your phone number,” she said. “Then I could call you.”
“But why would you?” the inspector asked her. He kept watching the beggars. Nancy turned away from him and stretched out on the bed. She lay on her stomach with the robe gathered tightly around her. She thought about her blond hair; she thought it must look nice, spread out on the pillows, but she didn’t know if Inspector Patel was looking at her. She just knew that her voice would be muffled by the pillows, and that he’d have to come closer to the bed in order to hear her.
“What if I need you?” she asked him. “What if I get in some trouble and need the police?”
“That young man was strangled,” Inspector Patel told her; by the sound of his voice, she knew he was near her.
Nancy kept her face buried in the pillows, but she reached out to the sides of the bed with her hands. She’d been thinking that she’d never learn anything about the dead boy—not even if the act of killing him had been wicked and full of hatred or merely inadvertent. Now she knew—the young man couldn’t have been inadvertently strangled.
“
“I know that,” said Inspector Patel. When he touched her hand, she lay absolutely motionless; then his touch was gone. In a second, she heard him in the bathroom. It sounded as if he was running a bath.
“You have big hands,” he called to her. She didn’t move. “The boy was strangled by someone with small hands. Probably another boy, but maybe a woman.”
“You suspected
He shut the water off. The tub couldn’t be very full, Nancy thought.
“I suspect everybody,” Inspector Patel said, “but I didn’t really suspect you of strangling the boy.”
Nancy was simply too curious; she got up from the bed and went to the bathroom. Inspector Patel was sitting on the edge of the tub, watching the dildo float around and around like a toy boat.
“Just as I thought—it floats,” he said. Then he submerged it; he held it under the water for almost a full minute, never taking his eyes off it. “No bubbles,” he said. “It floats because it’s hollow,” he told her. “But if it came apart—if you could open it—there would be bubbles. I thought it would come apart.” He let the water out of the tub and wiped the dildo dry with a towel. “One of your friends called while you were registering,” Inspector Patel told Nancy. “He didn’t want to speak with you—he just wanted to know if you’d checked in.” Nancy was blocking the bathroom door; the inspector paused for her to get out of his way. “Usually, this means that someone is interested to know if you’ve passed safely through customs. Therefore, I thought you were bringing something in. But you weren’t, were you?”
“No,” Nancy managed to say.
“Well, then, as I leave, I’ll tell the hotel to give you your messages directly,” the inspector said.
“Thank you,” Nancy replied.
He’d already opened the door to the hall before he handed her his card. “
Nancy didn’t know how far from home Vijay Patel was. When his whole family had left Gujarat for Kenya, Vijay had come to Bombay. For a Gujarati to make any headway on a Maharashtrian police force was no small accomplishment; but the Gujarati Patels in Vijay’s family were merchants—they wouldn’t have been impressed. Vijay was as cut off from them—they were in business in Nairobi—as Nancy was from Iowa.
After she’d read and reread the policeman’s card, Nancy went out to the balcony and watched the beggars for a while. The children were enterprising performers, and there was a monotony to their stunts that was soothing. Like most foreigners, she was easily impressed by the contortionists.
Occasionally, one of the guests would throw an orange to the child performers, or a banana; some threw coins. Nancy thought it was cruel the way a crippled boy, with one leg and a padded crutch, was always beaten by the other children when he attempted to hop and stagger ahead of them to the money or the fruit. She didn’t realize that the cripple’s role was choreographed; he was central to the dramatic action. He was also older than the other children, and he was their leader; in reality, he could beat up the other children—and, on occasion, had.
But the pathos was unfamiliar to Nancy and she looked for something to throw to him; all she could find was a 10-rupee note. This was too much money to give to a beggar, but she didn’t know any better. She weighted the bill down with two bobby pins and stood on the balcony with the money held above her head until she caught the crippled boy’s attention.
“Hey, lady!” he called. Some of the child performers paused in their handstands and their contortions, and Nancy sailed the 10-rupee note into the air; it rose briefly in an updraft before it floated down. The children ran back and forth, trying to be in the right place to catch it. The crippled boy appeared content to let one of the other children grab the money.
“No, it’s for you—for
Nancy realized that she’d disrupted the usual drama; somehow
