The Game

its sheath, I continued in.

“I had word that men were seeking me in the town,” said Holmes in Hindi, to explain his haste in drawing steel.

“The maharaja and his friends, in search of entertainment.”

“Ah. And you?”

“The time has come for Mary Russell to return to her husband.”

“And time for her to disappear as well, do I take it?”

“It would be best. The maharaja dislikes . . .” I did not know the Hindi word, so I used the English. “. . . ingratitude.”

“Interesting. Fortunately, I have a good supply of walnut dye.”

“Holmes, it is best if we depart the city. Its prince might think to look again tomorrow, and it would be easier if he were to find you gone.”

“And O’Hara?”

“I have a few ideas on that,” I said. “However, it’s complicated, and I think we should get on with doing my skin. Oh, but Holmes, remember when Nesbit made mention of a report that the maharaja had been buying large quantities of cotton? I found it.”

Say one thing for Holmes: He always appreciated the little gifts I brought him, and this no less than any. He even permitted me to tell the story properly: creeping past the inhabited buildings at the air field and to the silent godowns; the makeshift pick-locks I had fashioned from hair-pins; the discovery of no fewer than three of the big triple-engined Junkers planes, awaiting assembly; a disconcerting number of machine- guns and light artillery; and (best for last) the biggest godown with its store of cotton bales, floor to ceiling, and neatly arranged beside them, drums of the other materials one would need for making explosives.

Oh yes; Nesbit was going to love this.

The more, perhaps, if we could find him Kimball O’Hara as well.

We slipped away from the serai during the night, again disguised as a pair of itinerant Moslem magicians, and headed west into the broad plateau that formed the centre of the state, a rich source of pulse and cane, wheat and vegetables. I had been, I thought, remarkably patient; no more.

“Holmes, it is your turn. What happened after you left Simla?”

“Remarkably little,” he replied. “Quite odd, really.”

“As a narrative, Holmes, the statement is by no means sufficient.”

“No? I suppose not. Very well. Bindra and I left the hotel early. I had decided that the train out of Simla being unlikely to provide a rich source of information concerning that itinerant monk O’Hara, we should walk out of the hills.”

“Walk? That must have taken days—what was Bindra’s reaction to that?”

“He was not pleased. I did offer to provide him with a ticket back to Kalka, but for some reason the boy decided he would rather stay with me. So we walked, and caught rides on bullock-carts and tongas, and stopped regularly to thaw ourselves out in wayside hostelries, drinking tea with the locals and gossiping about this and that.”

“Monks, particularly,” I suggested.

“By all means, especially considering the way a certain scoundrel of a red-hat Buddhist monk had just made off with my purse and train ticket, leaving me to trudge through the snow and survive on cups of tea bought with the few coins that remained in my pocket.”

“And did any of them recall another such monk, oh, say about three years before?”

“Surprisingly few. And both of those who did—the sweeper of one inn and the cook in another—remembered him as going uphill, towards Simla, not away.”

“So he took the train out,” I said, disappointed.

“Or went overland to the north. In the summer months, the passes there would be reasonable, for a man who loves the hills at any rate. One thing did come to light: A band of dacoits—robbers —was working in the area north of Simla during that time.”

“Do you think—?”

“I think it highly unlikely that Kimball O’Hara was the victim of casual dacoitry.”

Still, it gave me thought, as I walked along. A while later, another question came to mind.

“What did Bindra make of your tale of woe?” I asked.

“The boy seemed unsurprised. In fact, he tended to embellish my stories rather more than was necessary.”

And that, too, was thought-provoking. The child was shrewder than he appeared and without doubt unscrupulous, but I could not bring myself to picture him as a spy planted in our midst, by Nesbit or anyone else. For one thing, the child was too young for that sort of sustained purpose of mind: Holmes had habitually used youthful Irregulars in his Baker Street days, but only for specific and limited missions.

But if the child was not there under orders, why did he stay? And more to the point, why did he not question the oddities of Holmes’ behaviour?

The mysteries kept me occupied all that day, but they remained mysteries.

We set up that night in a village of perhaps ninety souls, earning a handful of copper for our pains, but with the coins supplemented by a generosity of food and fodder. The village got a bargain, because in my absence Holmes had cobbled together the equipment for a new act which, together with the levitation frame, my bottomless Moslem cap, and the conversions to the blue cart effected by blacksmith and carpenter back in Kalka, was spectacular enough to make even the least superstitious folk uneasy.

Not until we were in our bed-rolls that night could we speak freely, murmuring into each other’s ears in English, the sound inaudible from outside the walls of the tent. Holmes had been thinking about what I had said.

“You say Old Fort appears deserted, but is not,” he said.

“There are no lights, but when one watches with care, one sees the occasional splash of lamp and gleam of a sentry’s gun atop the walls. And twice, a guard’s careless cigarette.”

“What of its gates?”

“They are generally open. I presume they’re guarded, although if the men are anything like those on the main gates, it should be no great task to get past them. You wish to see inside Old Fort?”

“Why else should we be here?” he asked.

Why else, indeed? “I merely thought that perhaps we ought to send word to Nesbit first, in case something happens.”

“Report or no, Nesbit knows where we are. Our disappearance alone would tell him all he need know.”

Slim comfort.

We moved on the next day, our path a wide circle leading back to The Forts. Here the ground was less fertile, with fewer people working the fields. We strolled the dusty road, the unnaturally amiable donkey following along behind, and as we went I tried to describe the maharaja and his coterie.

“He is, as Nesbit said, a fine sportsman. Having ridden after pig myself now, I understand Nesbit’s praise of the man. Of course, he’s completely insensible to damage inflicted on horses or coolies, but he does play the game by the rules, and was unwilling to leave a wounded boar to die in the bushes.”

“Which may merely be because, were the boar to recover, it would be both ill tempered and experienced when it came to men.”

“True, and it wouldn’t do to have a berserker pig come after, say, a visiting Prince of Wales.”

“But you already told me that the hearty sportsman is not the only side to his personality.”

“His cousin said it: He collects grotesques. In his zoo, but also the people living under his—ach, the sun is so hot today,” I broke off to say, as a farmer reclining in the shade of a tree stirred and sat up at our approach. Holmes asked the man about the next village, and learned that it was tiny but that a few miles farther on was a larger village, with two wells and many clay-brick houses. We thanked him, shared a bidi with him, and returned to the road.

“You were saying, Russell?”

“His pet grotesques. He collects them, but I would have to say, he also creates them. In the zoo, he plays