As the beggars scattered, one of the tall Sikh doormen from the Taj approached the crying girl. He carried a long wooden pole with a gleaming brass hook on one end—it was a transom pole, for opening and closing the transom windows above the tall doors—and the doorman used this pole to lift the ragged skirt of the girl’s torn and filthy dress. He deftly exposed her before she could snatch the skirt of her dress between her legs and cover herself. Then he poked the girl in the chest with the brass end of the pole, and when she tried to stand, he whacked her hard in the small of her back, exactly where the cripple had hit her with his crutch. The girl cried out. Then she scurried away from the Sikh on all fours. He was skillful in pursuing her—at herding her with sharp jabs and thrusts with the pole. Finally, she got to her feet and outran him.
The Sikh had a dark, spade-shaped beard flecked with silver, and he wore a dark-red turban; he shouldered the transom pole like a rifle, and he cast a cursory glance to Nancy on her balcony. She retreated into her room; she was sure he could see under her bathrobe and straight up her crotch—he was directly below her. But the balcony itself prevented such a view. Nancy imagined things.
Obviously, there were rules, she thought. The beggars could beg, but they couldn’t cry; it was too early in the morning, and crying would wake the guests who were managing to sleep. Nancy instantly ordered the most American thing she could find on the room-service menu—scrambled eggs and toast—and when they brought her tray, she saw two sealed envelopes propped between the orange juice and the tea. Her heart jumped because she hoped they were declarations of undying love from Inspector Patel. But one was the message from Dieter that the inspector had intercepted; it said simply that Dieter had called. He was glad she’d arrived safely—he’d see her soon. And the other was a printed request from the hotel management, asking her to kindly refrain from throwing things out her window.
She was ravenous, and as soon as she’d finished eating, she was sleepy. She closed the curtains against the light of day and turned up the ceiling fan as fast as it would go. For a while she lay awake, thinking of Inspector Patel. She even toyed with the idea of Dieter being caught with the money as he tried to pass through customs. Nancy was still naive enough to imagine that the Deutsche marks were coming into the country with Dieter. It hadn’t even crossed her mind that she’d already brought the money in.
It seemed to her that she slept for days. It was dark when she woke. She would never know if it was the predawn darkness of the next day, or the predawn of the day after that. She awoke to some sort of commotion in the hall outside her room; someone was trying to get in, but she’d double-locked the door and there was a safety chain, too. She got out of bed. There, in the hall, was Dieter; he was surly to the porter, whom he sent away without a tip. Once inside the room, but only after he’d double-locked the door and hooked the safety chain in place, he turned to her and asked her where the dildo was. This wasn’t exactly gallant of him, Nancy thought, but in her sleepiness she supposed it was merely his aggressive way of being amorous. She pointed to it in the bathroom.
Then she opened her robe and let it slip off her shoulders and fall at her feet; she stood in the bathroom doorway, expecting him to kiss her, or at least look at her. Dieter held the dildo over the sink; he appeared to be heating the unnatural head of the penis with his cigarette lighter. Nancy woke up in a hurry. She picked up her bathrobe and put it back on; she stepped away from the bathroom door, but she could still observe Dieter. He was careful not to let the flame blacken the dildo, and he concentrated the heat not at the tip but at the place where the fake foreskin was rolled. It then appeared to Nancy that he was slowly melting the dildo; she realized that there was a substance, like wax, dripping into the sink. Where the fake foreskin was rolled, there emerged a thin line, circumscribing the head. When Dieter had melted the wax seal, he ran the tip of the big penis under cold water and then grasped the circumcised head with a towel. He needed quite a lot of force to unscrew the dildo, which was as hollow as Inspector Patel had observed. The wax seal had prevented any air from escaping; there’d been no bubbles underwater. Inspector Patel had been half right; he’d looked in the right place, but not in the right way—a young policeman’s error.
Inside the dildo, rolled very tightly, were thousands of Deutsche marks. For the return trip to Germany, quite a lot of high-quality hashish could be packed very tightly in such a big dildo; the wax seal would prevent the dogs at German customs from smelling the Indian hemp inside.
Nancy sat at the foot of the bed while Dieter removed a roll of marks from the dildo and spread the bills out flat in his hand. Then he zipped the marks into a money belt, which was around his waist under his shirt. He left several sizable rolls of marks in the dildo, which he reassembled; he screwed the tip on tight, but he didn’t bother resealing it with wax. The line where the thing unscrewed was barely visible anyway; it was partially hidden by the fake foreskin. When Dieter had finished with this, his chief concern, he undressed and filled the bathtub. It wasn’t until he settled into the tub that Nancy spoke to him.
“What would have happened to me if I’d been caught?” she asked him.
“But they wouldn’t have caught you, babe,” Dieter told her. He’d picked up the “babe” from watching American movies, he said.
“Couldn’t you have
“Then you would have been nervous,” Dieter said. “Then they
After his bath, he rolled a joint, which they smoked together; although Nancy thought she was being cautious, she got higher than she wanted to, and just a little disoriented. It was strong stuff; Dieter assured her that it was by no means the best stuff—it was just something he’d bought en route from the airport.
“I made a little detour,” he told her. She was too stoned to ask him where he could have gone at 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning, and he didn’t bother to tell her that he’d gone to a brothel in Kamathipura. He’d bought the stuff from the madam, and while he was at it he’d fucked a 13-year-old prostitute for only five rupees. He was told she was the only girl not with a customer at the time, and Dieter had fucked her standing up, in a kind of hall, because all the cots in all the cubicles were occupied—or so the madam had said.
After Dieter and Nancy smoked the joint, Dieter was able to encourage Nancy to masturbate; it seemed to her that it took a long time, and she couldn’t remember him leaving the bed to get the dildo. Later, when he was asleep, she lay awake and thought for a while about the thousands of Deutsche marks that were inside the thing that had been inside her. She decided not to tell Dieter about the murdered boy or Inspector Patel. She got out of bed and made sure the card the inspector had given her was well concealed among her clothes. She didn’t go back to bed; she was standing on the balcony at dawn when the first of the beggars arrived. After a while, the same child performers were perfectly in place, like figures painted by the daylight itself—even the crippled boy with his padded crutch. He waved to her. It was so early, he was careful not to call too loudly, but Nancy could hear him distinctly.
“Hey, lady!”
He made her cry. She went back inside the room and watched Dieter while he was sleeping. She thought again about the thousands of Deutsche marks; she wanted to throw them out the window to the child performers, but it frightened her to imagine what a terrible scene she might cause. She went into the bathroom and tried to unscrew the dildo to count how many marks were inside, but Dieter had screwed the thing too tightly together. This was probably deliberate, she realized; at last, she was learning.
She went through his clothes, looking for the money belt—she thought she could count how many marks were there—but she couldn’t find it. She lifted the bedsheet and saw that Dieter was naked except for the money belt. It worried her that she couldn’t remember falling asleep, nor could she remember Dieter getting out of bed to put the money belt on. She would have to be more careful, she thought. Nancy was beginning to appreciate the extent to which Dieter might be willing to use her; she worried that she’d developed a morbid curiosity about how far he would go.
Nancy found it calming to speculate about Inspector Patel. She indulged herself with the comforting notion that she could turn to the inspector if she needed him, if she was
