A Son of the Circus

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 told me?” Nancy asked him.

“Then you would have been nervous,” Dieter said. “Then they would have caught you.”

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 really in trouble. Although the morning was intensely bright, Nancy didn’t close the curtains; in the light of day, it was easier for her to imagine that leaving Dieter was merely a matter of picking the right time. And if things get too bad, Nancy thought to herself, I can just pick up the phone and ask for Vijay Patel—Police Inspector, Colaba Station.

But Nancy had never been to the East. She didn’t know where she was. She had no idea.

12

THE RATS

Four Baths

In Bombay, in his bedroom, where Dr. Daruwalla sat shivering in Julia’s embrace, the unresolved nature of the majority of the doctor’s phone messages depressed him: Ranjit’s peevish complaints about the dwarf’s wife; Deepa’s expectations regarding the potential bonelessness of a child prostitute; Vinod’s fear of the first-floor dogs; Father Cecil’s consternation that none of the Jesuits at St. Ignatius knew exactly when Dhar’s twin was arriving; and director Balraj Gupta’s greedy desire to release the new Inspector Dhar movie in the midst of the murders inspired by the last Inspector Dhar movie. To be sure, there was the familiar voice of the woman who tried to sound like a man and who repeatedly relished the details of old Lowji’s car bombing; this message wasn’t lacking in resolution, but it was muted by excessive repetition. And Detective Patel’s cool delivery of the news that he had a private matter to discuss didn’t sound “unresolved” to the doctor; although Dr. Daruwalla may not have known what the message meant, the deputy commissioner seemed to have made up his mind about the matter. But all these things were only mildly depressing in comparison to Farrokh’s memory of the big blonde with her bad foot.

“Liebchen,” Julia whispered to her husband. “We shouldn’t leave John D. alo

ne. Think about the hippie another time.”

Both to break him from his trance and as a physical reminder of her affection for him, Julia squeezed Farrokh. She simply hugged him, more or less in the area of his lower chest, or just above his little beer belly. It surprised her how her husband winced in pain. The sharp tweak in his side—it must have been a rib—instantly reminded Dr. Daruwalla of his collision with the second Mrs. Dogar in the foyer of the Duckworth Club. Farrokh then told Julia the story: how the vulgar woman’s body was as hard as a stone wall.

“But you said you fell down,” Julia told him. “I would guess it was your contact with the stone floor that caused your injury.”

“No! It was that damn woman herself—her body is a rock!” Dr. Daruwalla said. “Mr. Dogar was knocked down, too! Only that crude woman was left standing.”

“Well, she’s supposed to be a fitness freak,” Julia replied.

“She’s a weight lifter!” Farrokh said. Then he remembered that the second Mrs. Dogar had reminded him of someone—definitely a long-ago movie star, he decided. He imagined that one night he would discover who it was on the videocassette recorder; both in Bombay and in Toronto, he had so many tapes of old movies that it was hard for him to remember how he’d lived before the VCR.

Farrokh sighed and his sore rib responded with a little twinge of pain.

“Let me rub some liniment on you, Liebchen,” Julia said.

“Liniment is for muscles—it was my rib she hurt,” the doctor complained.

Although Julia still favored the theory that the stone floor was the source of her husband’s pain, she humored him. “Was it Mrs. Dogar’s shoulder or her elbow that hit you?” she asked.