The creep who collared Tanuja was no prize, but he didn’t scare her as much as did his partner. The bigger man stood maybe six feet five and weighed about 230 pounds, but it wasn’t just his formidable size that disturbed her. His cold stare impaled her with his contempt. He was graceful for such a giant, but his every move was oiled with arrogance, as if during all the years since he had been born into the world, he’d never seen one smallest reason to doubt he was superior to everything and everyone in it. He radiated a potential for sudden violence no less than did a tiger with its ears pricked and nostrils flared and fangs bared as it watched a lame gazelle.
The dishes, champagne glasses, and ampules having been cleared from the table, they were replaced now with rubber tubing to be used as a tourniquet and foil-wrapped antiseptic wipes with which to sterilize the point of injection.
Tanuja sat catercorner to Sanjay, as she had when they’d been eating, now bound neck to stretcher bar as he was. Her dear chotti bhai said he was sorry, as though by some mistake solely his, he’d brought these two down on them.
The giant advised them to be quiet if they didn’t want to have their tongues cut out, and although the threat was over the top, no feverish imagination was required to envision him fulfilling it with the deft use of a scalpel.
The smaller man, blond with blue eyes, had a prep-school air, though he appeared to be in his thirties. Now he placed on the table an insulated cooler identical to the one that Linc Crossley’s buddy with caterpillar eyebrows had brought to their house earlier in the night. After slipping his hands into a pair of cotton gloves, the preppy took from the cooler two hypodermic syringes, a few plastic-wrapped objects that Tanuja could not identify, and then a nine-inch-square stainless-steel box that was maybe eight inches deep. When he opened the lid of the box, dry ice exhaled a frosty breath that winnowed away in the warm air and candlelight.
Tanuja felt as if she were dreaming a nightmare that she had dreamed before.
From the steel box, the preppy withdrew six insulated sleeves with Velcro closures. He shut the box and stripped off the gloves.
Sanjay tried to pull away when the big man began to tie the tourniquet around his right arm, but resistance only earned him a blow to the face with the heel of the giant’s hand, which snapped Sanjay’s head back and stunned him as might have any other man’s point-blank punch with a tightly closed fist.
Tanuja saw a thread of blood issue from one of her brother’s nostrils. She tried to get up, but the leash secured her to the chair so that she couldn’t stand.
The preppy turned on the kitchen lights so that his partner might better see the target blood vessel in Sanjay’s arm.
With the efficiency of a trained phlebotomist, the big man used the hypodermic needle to insert a cannula in the vein, then set the needle aside. He punctured the seal on the first of the cold ampules and fitted it to the valve on the cannula. He held the ampule in an elevated position and opened the valve to whatever setting might be required. By intravenous infusion, the cloudy amber fluid began to move from the glass ampule into Sanjay’s bloodstream, its nature unknown, its purpose unfathomed.
Tanuja urgently wanted to know what, to understand why, but there was no point in asking, for these men would not tell her, and there was nothing to be gained by screaming because no one would hear her in time, nor any way to resist that would long forestall whatever fate filled those ampules. She felt ten years old again, in fresh receipt of the news of their parents’ long fall from the sky, in the shadow of her smiling aunt Ashima Chatterjee, for whom a sister’s untimely death was less a grievous loss than a golden opportunity. As a child, she had found the world mysterious and forbidding, wound through with more darkness than light, had perceived threats coiled everywhere from the attic to the space under her bed, from an open woods at noon to the front yard at night. Sanjay, too, had early on been of a noirish sensibility, and yet it was because of him that Tanuja had over time been able to put her countless fears behind her, to reconceive the world as a place of wonder brimming with magical possibilities, to have such conviction in that revised conception that her career as a writer flowered from it. By his kindness, by his caring, by his patient and wise instruction, her little brother, with two minutes less experience of this life, had been her therapist, her spiritual guide, teaching her the truth and power of free will to make of this world more than it seemed to be, more even than it was, and thereby purge the darkness of all threat and find in it as much magic as in the light. Only a year or so ago, she had realized that Sanjay’s noirish point of view had remained, primarily, the way he perceived this life; though he believed in free will and was never in a mood as dark as any in his writing, he didn’t see a world with wonder brimming and magical possibilities, as he had so passionately, persistently encouraged her to see it. In a family with too much stoicism, with too little love expressed—and, following the plane’s fall into the sea, with no love at all—Sanjay openly adored his sister; he was troubled that so much frightened her and so little enchanted. One day he resolved to banish her fears and see her grow in happiness. He had pretended that the vision of a wondrous world, full of miracles and marvels, was his to share, and he had championed it with such enthusiasm that his pretense had become her truth, her unshakable conviction. She and Sanjay had been conceived in the same moment, had come into the world together, and she could not imagine her life unspooling past the moment when her chotti bhai no longer breathed. As she watched the third ampule drain through the cannula into her brother’s arm, Tanuja welcomed the infusion of the remaining three into herself, for regardless of what might now have been done to Sanjay, she must follow him into the unknown and, if given the chance, be for him what he had always been for her.
The hateful rakshasa finished the first phase of his demonic task by removing the cannula from Sanjay’s arm. He didn’t bother to press a Band-Aid over the needle puncture, but allowed a button of blood to form in the crook of the elbow and a scarlet thread to slowly unravel from it, like a misplaced stigmata.
Tanuja didn’t resist—nor did she allow them the satisfaction of seeing her fear—as the preppy applied the tourniquet to her right arm. He palpated the visible veins to find the most generous one and swabbed the skin with the sterilizing pad.
The big man came around the table, carrying another cannula, the second hypodermic, and three large ampules.
42
At twenty-three minutes past midnight, headlights swept off the street and arced onto the circular driveway, followed by a gleaming black Cadillac limousine with heavily tinted windows. The long car motored to the portico with surprisingly little engine noise, as menacing as it was elegant. The quiet limo seemed even somewhat eerie at this hour and in these circumstances, as if skull-faced Death had traded in his classic horse-drawn carriage for a modern conveyance and would step out with a silver scythe, wearing not a hooded cloak but a Tom Ford suit.
Standing back from the foyer window, Jane Hawk watched as the chauffeur opened a starboard door and Simon Yegg appeared. He was attired not in a suit but in red-and-white sneakers, tan chinos, a brightly striped rugby shirt, an unzipped leather jacket, and a pink baseball cap with a large number three on it: a forty-six-year-old white guy who thought he could pull off the look of a cool black rapper half his age.
The limo glided away as Simon unlocked the deadbolt. The alarm sounded as he stepped into the house.
Jane stood on the hinge side of the door, concealed from him.
“Anabel, disarm security. Five, six, five, one, star.” The alarm fell silent, and Anabel informed him that it was disarmed, whereupon he said, “Anabel, follow me with light.”
As the chandelier brightened, Simon Yegg closed the door and saw Jane holding the six-ounce plastic bottle at arm’s length. She sprayed his nose and mouth with chloroform, and he dropped with a swish of clothing, like a basketball through a net, although when he hit the floor, he had no bounce in him.