Authors: Steven Gore
J
eanette Hawkins was wrong. Son of a Bitch wasn't in an Islamic country. Gage had recognized it the moment she'd handed him the yellowed slip of paper bearing the telephone number. He'd also seen the hand of genius: laundering a witness through Muslim Pakistan, then depositing him in its Hindu enemy.
I
t was the overripe end of mango season in southern India when Gage arrived at the Rajiv Gandhi Airport outside Hyderabad. Vendors were selling juice and sodas from carts bordering the parking lot in front of the arrivals hall. Between them and Gage as he walked out of the automatic doors was a mass of men in short-sleeved shirts and women in saris standing pressed up against a low metal barrier. A dozen taxi drivers swarmed him, grabbing at his forearms to lead him toward their cars. Porters wearing dhotis tied around their thighs and pulled up between their legs reached for his rollaboard. He shook them off as he scanned past the hotel placards held up by drivers bearing the names of arriving business travelers, but he couldn't find the face he was looking for.
Instead, the face found him.
Gage grasped that customs superintendent Basaam Khan was standing behind him when the drivers and porters backed away. He turned toward a stubby man in a crisp white shirt and brown slacks, then reached out his hand, smiling. “Babu.”
Khan was the youngest child in a family of ten who'd stayed in India after the partition in 1947, when millions of Hindus fled from Pakistan and an equal number of Muslims fled in the opposite direction into India. He was among the forty percent of the population of Hyderabad who were Muslim. As the youngest son, he was simply known among friends and relatives as Babu. Sonny in English.
Babu pushed aside Gage's hand, then hugged him, his head reaching only the middle of Gage's chest. When they separated, Gage could see Babu had gained twenty pounds since they last worked together.
Gage pointed at his stomach. “Married life?”
Babu nodded, proud not only that his happiness was reflected in his body, but that his parents had allowed him to choose his own bride.
Babu took Gage's briefcase out of his hand, and then led him along the barrier and through the opening toward a white Ambassador taxi, a five-year-old four-door sedan of the lumpy style manufactured in the U.S. in the 1940s. The driver set Gage's rollaboard inside the trunk. Gage and Babu climbed into the back. The seat was coved by a clean, white sheet, pulled tight and tucked in.
They didn't talk about Wilbert Hawkins as they drove from the airport and along Hussain Sagar Lake, the city's main water supply, toward the hotel. There was no reason to share the purpose of Gage's trip with the taxi driver. Instead, they talked quietly and cryptically about their last case, a multimillion-dollar diamond theft out of New York when Babu was deputy superintendent of customs at the Hyderabad Airport.
Gage had tracked the diamond cutter-turned-thief from Singapore to Bangkok, and finally to Hyderabad, then hired a local lawyer to analyze the legal issues involved in getting a warrant to search the man's house. The judge decided Gage hadn't met the probable cause standards imported into the Indian criminal code from British common law because Gage had no witness to testify that the man had the diamonds with him.
The judge suggested Gage speak with Babu, who reviewed the evidence, examined the law, considered the various legal options, and then kidnapped the thief's wife and imprisoned her in the squalid, lice-ridden central jail until the man surrendered both himself and the diamonds.
All but a single twenty-thousand-dollar gem was recovered.
The insurance company hadn't objected to Babu deducting his commission, they just wished they'd had the opportunity to offer it first.
Gage hadn't objected either. He knew someday having an Indian cop in his debt would eventually pay off.
And that day had come.
Babu pointed toward the windshield. A hundred yards in front of them on the Tank Bund Road bordering the lake, a sash-wearing young Muslim rode a galloping white horse to his wedding. Babu then tapped his chest and smiled, indicating that he, too, had taken the same ride.
They lost sight of the groom as they turned into the tree-lined driveway of the colonial-era Viceroy Hotel.
Only when seated in Gage's seventh floor room overlooking the earth-toned city did Babu mention Wilbert Hawkins.
“He is still living in Gannapalli,” Babu said. “I'm not sure he is leaving the village since he finished building his house.” Babu spread his hands. “Why he is picking the second hottest district in all of India, I am not understanding.”
“Probably because it's the last place anyone would think he'd hide.”
Babu grinned, his head working a slight figure eight, the Indian head bob variously meaning
I understand
, or
Yes
, or
Maybe
. “That, and the women, no?”
T
he forty-minute drive west from Hyderabad toward Gannapalli in Babu's Land Cruiser took them from the cool world of offshore Web designers to the scorched farmland of those whose lives were measured not by digital clocks, but by the gestation periods of cattle and the growing seasons of rice.
Villagers dragged flat wooden carts piled with coconuts and potatoes toward the city, while others pulled empty ones back to the countryside. Cows and buffaloes grazed along the undivided two-lane road. Travelers waited for buses in whirlwinds of dust while breathing diesel fumes belching from aging truck engines, and the occasional monkey begged for food from laborers gathered under the shade of axelwood and laurel trees.
“Have you decided on an approach?” Babu asked as he turned north from the highway toward Gannapalli.
“You mean since there's no one to kidnap?” Gage said.
Babu pulled away, as if offended. “I am understanding from you last time that investigation is an art, a matter of applying the correct technique at the proper time. I am not a one-trick horse.” He grinned at Gage and asked, “Horse?”
“Pony. A one-trick pony.”
“Yes, indeed, a one-trick pony.”
W
ilbert Hawkins didn't expect to find a white man sitting in his living room when he woke from his afternoon nap.
It hadn't been difficult for Gage and Babu to obtain entry. The low-caste ten-year-old servant girl had cowered at the sight of them fifteen minutes earlier, then backed away from the front door, eyes down.
The stucco house stood three stories tall on the edge of the town of ten thousand people bordering rice paddies and mango gardens; the rice tended by girls and women with their saris pulled up to their knees as they waded the shallow fields, the trees swarmed by young men in dhotis and sandals.
And Babu had known right where to find the house.
Hawkins was still rubbing his eyes as he walked from the kitchen and through the dining room carrying a bottle of Kingfisher beer. He first spotted Gage's briefcase on the marble living room floor, then took two more steps before he froze as his eyes first widened and then narrowed on Gage sitting on a bamboo-frame cushioned couch to his right.
Gage recognized the remnants of the oil field scrapper displayed in the fifteen-year-old photo his wife had provided. Sixty-three years of weathered skin hung on his thin body. Wire-rimmed, aviator-style glasses and a receding hairline framed his face. Skinny arms extended from the sweaty T-shirt encasing his pot belly.
Gage rose as Hawkins stepped into the room. Babu remained seated.
“What the hell are you doing in my . . .” Hawkins didn't finish the sentence. They all knew the answer.
Gage handed him a business card.
“TIMCO,” Gage said.
Hawkins frowned as he examined it, then shook his head as he looked up.
“I've got nothing to say.”
Having made his stand, Hawkins gestured for Gage to sit back down and settled himself into a lounge chair along the wall dividing the living room from the dining area.
Hawkins whistled, and a thirteen-year-old girl strode in from the kitchen, past the dining table, and into the living room as though she was the queen of the house rather than a servant. She was wearing a full sari of an adult woman, not the half sari of a teenage girl. She stopped in the doorway next to Hawkins's chair.
“Beer? Coke?” Hawkins asked.
Gage and Babu both nodded at Coke, then the girl went back the way she'd come.
“You guys got something else to talk about besides TIMCO, I got lots of time.” He grinned. “That, I got a whole lot of. Information? Zip.”
“Just to make sure we're on the same page,” Gage said. “I think you know what really caused the explosion at TIMCO.”
Hawkins rolled his eyes. “You didn't have to travel all this way through this godforsaken country when you could've read that in my deposition.”
Gage sat forward, then aimed a forefinger at Hawkins's face. “You lied during your deposition.”
Hawkins's face flared. “So Porzolkiewski's lawyers said, but they couldn't prove shit.”
Gage glanced over at Babu, then fixed his eyes on Hawkins. “I don't have time to screw around.”
He opened his briefcase and took out an eight-by-ten photograph taken by Babu four days earlier. It was a view into Hawkins's bedroom on a night too hot to close the drapes.
Gage rose, took two steps, loomed over Hawkins, and then dropped it in his lap.
Just then, the girl walked up behind Hawkins carrying a hammered aluminum tray bearing two Cokes. She looked down at the photo, wild-eyed, mouth gaping open. The tray fell from her hands. The bottles exploded on the marble floor.
The photo showed her on top of Hawkins. Legs spread over his face, his penis in her mouth. She darted toward the front door. Babu leaped up, grabbed her by the arms, and swung her down on the couch in one motion.
Hawkins stared at the image, not bothering to wipe the soda spray off his face and arms. He finally looked up at Gage, forcing a smile.
“When in Rome . . .”
Gage reached down and yanked Hawkins up by his T-shirt, stretching it to its limits. Hawkins hung backward, suspended, gasping, flailing. Gage dropped him in his chair, then backed away, and locked his hands on his hips.
“You know how much time you could get for child molesting?” Gage said.
Hawkins looked past Gage toward the front door. “The police here won't do anything.” Hawkins returned his eyes to Gage. His voice strengthened. “They don't care. I pay them not to care. Hell, girls around here get married at nine.”
Gage shook his head. “Not here. In the States.”
Hawkins straightened himself in the chair.
“There's no way India's gonna extradite me to the U.S. for coming over here to screw these girls. Brings in too much money. Bombay is the new Bangkok. Just check the Internet. The worst they'll do is tell me to lay off.” Hawkins shrugged. “So maybe I got to pay off some prosecutor. So what?”
“Not child molesting here, you idiot. In Richmond. Your kids.”
Hawkins's jaws clenched.
Gage walked over to his briefcase and pulled out a criminal complaint charging Wilbert Hawkins with molesting John Doe and Jane Doe, forged by Alex Z a couple of hours after Gage had left Jeannette's house.
Hawkins's eighteen-year-old son awaiting trial for fondling little girls. His teenage daughter screwing thirty-year-old men. It wasn't hard to figure out how it all started.
Gage tossed the complaint at Hawkins. He grabbed at it too late.
Hawkins picked the Coke-soaked pages from the floor. Shaking hands jerked them around in front of his face, making it hard to focus his eyes.
He got the point anyway.
“Relax,” Gage said. “Nobody knows where you are . . . except me.” Gage pointed at Babu. “And him.”
Gage reached into his pocket and pulled out a tape recorder.
“You're going to tell me what happened at TIMCO, who ordered it, and who sent you out of the country.” Gage paused, then scanned the furniture, the marble floor, and the half-dozen girl servants now gathered at the kitchen door. “And how you're paying for all this.”
A
s they were driving away from Gannapalli two hours later, Babu let out a sigh.
“I only was kidnapping a wife, but you . . .” He glanced over at Gage, then shook his head. “You crushed that man.”
O
f course there's a litmus test. Only fools think there isn't.”
Senator Landon Meyer pulled the phone away from his ear, then glared at it as if it were the idiot, not the Republican National Committee member on the other end of the line. He spoke into it again: “There are a half-dozen litmus tests this time around: abortion, gay marriage, stem cell research, terrorism, assisted suicide, prayer in schoolsâyou think I chose Starsky and Hutch for their good looks?”
Landon slammed down the phone.
Screw these people. I was elected senator in a Democratic state because of a litmus test.
It was called the death penalty, and he never let thoughts of that election drift too far from his consciousness for fear he'd begin to take the gifts of chance for granted.
As soon as Senator Doris Wagner called for a moratorium on executions, the election was over. Maybe not that day, but no later than the following one when a maniac murdered six students and two teachers at a Compton elementary school. The Democratic base began to collapse when African-American political leaders prayed for the revenge they called justice on the schoolhouse stepsâthat and a last-minute revelation that fifty thousand dollars wired into Wagner's campaign bank account early in the year had originated with Arab charities under FBI investigation for supporting jihadists.
Landon picked up the telephone again. His brother answered on the first ring.
T
he next morning Senator Landon Meyer, federal judge Brandon Meyer, and Senator Blanche Zweck, chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, sat on facing couches in Landon's office. Half-empty china cups of now cold coffee lay on the low table along with an oversized spreadsheet. Only forty-six senators were committed to vote for Starsky and Hutch, five short of confirmation. Forty-four against. Ten undecided, and seven of those up for reelection.
“I don't see it,” Zweck said. “It's political suicide for at least four of the seven on abortion and the Patriot Act alone. Women and liberals in those states will gang up, and hard-line don't-trust-the-government conservatives will stay away from the polls. The cost of getting our own voters to show up would be astronomical.”
“That's why Brandon is here,” Landon said.
“We're talking maybe an extra twenty million dollars.” Zweck shook her head. “There's no way we'll get it, not with a presidential election coming up. Too many of us are chasing the same money. Contributors are already feeling like punching bags.”
“As I said, that's why Brandon is here.”
Brandon leaned in toward the table. His crowlike eyes peered up at Zweck.
“If you can come up with five million,” Brandon said, “I'll find the rest.”
Zweck shook her head again. “The president needs this vote in a matter of weeks. He wants to push it through like a tsunami before the opposition gets organized. The swing senators aren't going to carry IOUs out on a limb that skinny. They'll want money in the bank. No way you're going to raise fifteen million dollars that fast.”
L
andon dropped into the high-backed black leather chair behind his desk after Zweck left the office, then looked over Brandon.
“Will you need to dip into our own money?”
“I don't think so.” Brandon stood and stretched. He hadn't slept on the red-eye from San Francisco. “But so what if we do? You get Starsky and Hutch onto the Supreme Court and Duncan will bless you as the next presidential nominee. That'll save us fifty million in primary costs alone. Maybe more.” Brandon smiled. “Call it an investment of real political capital.”
“How long is it going to take to come up with what you promised Zweck?”
“A week, maybe. A little money committed to us slipped away a couple of months ago.”
“How?”
“It's not important. We'll get it back in time.”
“Fifteen million isn't small change.”
Brandon gazed down through the office window toward the Supreme Court.
“Don't worry. We'll get it. We have no choice.”
I
t was only after Brandon was halfway back to California that Landon remembered he'd wanted to ask him if he ever got his wallet back.