Max O'Brien Mysteries 3-Book Bundle. Mario Bolduc
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to get around easily, intercity transit had been cut back to the minimum, so this vehicle was crowded, and Max found himself as just one more human sardine. There were mostly foreigners, several of whom had stopped over at the Sinbad. Is this the way David had done it? It normally took twelve hours, but today with the military convoys to make way for, it required three or four more.
Udhampur appeared on the far side of the ravine, the last large town before Srinagar. It too was full of soldiers. Then they started out again, bobbing and weaving as always, with hairpin turns and endless waits for convoys to pass. The road was very narrow in places, and reduced to a single lane at best. The ravines contained the carcasses of rusted-out vehicles abandoned after their tumble as much as ten, twenty or thirty years ago. The driver knew what he was doing and took what seemed like senseless risks, overtaking on the edge of ravines, with one hand on the horn and a smile on his face, then whiplash braking behind vehicles loaded with explosives, or accelerating on the long curving declines, as though exempt from the law of gravity.
The first roadblock was at the Banihal Pass, about halfway into their sixteen-hour journey. There was a smattering of police mixed in with the soldiers. Max showed his camera by way of ID: “We’re journalists on our way to an appointment in hell.” It worked. Then off they were again, fast. The waiting, the dangerous curves. At night, all of a sudden, beyond a moon-shaped mountain, was the famous valley. The heat returned, as well, and there was Srinagar, or so Max guessed, behind the blackout and human presence despite the curfew. Tons of frightened people were hunkered down at home as was their habit these past fifty years.
There was a densely packed crowd at the bus terminal. That was hardly a surprise. People had spent the night there to get the first bus out in the early morning for Jammu. A board on the wall had about fifty ads for hotels and houseboats. Max found the Mount View Hotel, while Jayesh was haggling over the price of a rickshaw. It was curfew, and the police would be patrolling, but the rickshaw man knew shortcuts and byways, so they relied on him to avoid that sort of problem.
They headed out into the Srinagar night, which a few hours earlier had been like a dark spill of lava submerging houses and businesses. Unlike Pompeii, where all life had stopped instantly, one could see that behind drawn blinds, down dead ends and under the eaves of houses, a world unknown was bustling. The beauties of Srinagar, though, were not to be seen. Every street corner had its sandbag piles, and here and there improvised guard towers had been raised by the Indian Army. Surveillance posts, some of them brand new, others dating from the late eighties, remained from the last really nasty turn in events.
The Mount View Hotel was part of the collective mourning. Its once-luminous sign had been turned off for months. The glimmer of a candle appeared through a parted curtain. There was no other sign of human habitation. The place had its charms, though. It must have been fully booked in the past, but the rear garden where the clients could breakfast or relax — bombardments permitting — had not been kept up.
“Are you phoning from prison?” asked Juliette, when he managed to reach her that evening. Max burst out laughing.
28
The immense register, like those in all hotels long ago, unfortunately held no mention of David. Max’s nephew must have had no difficulty using an assumed name. India wasn’t in the habit of requesting any ID, passport or other, when one rented a room. Max had already noticed this in Delhi, but the corpulent, stern-faced owner recognized David from the photo Max showed her.
“How many days did he stay?”
“One night I think.”
“Was he alone?”
She nodded.
“What did he do? Make any appointments, visit the city, receive any phone calls?”
“Shabir!” she yelled.
The handyman was elderly, frail, barefoot, and dressed in a salwar. He seemed better prepared for hunting flies than for painting or woodworking. The owner conferred with him, intoning in a language Max didn’t recognize. He later learned it was Kashmiri.
Shabir tilted his head one way, then the other, as though on the point of falling into a trance or passing out, but he was really saying, “I know some things, but only at a price.” Jayesh held out a few rupees, and Shabir slipped them into his salwar as imperceptibly as a magician. He remembered David, oh yes, because he was the only Westerner in the hotel, in fact the only client who hadn’t stayed shut up in his room, especially with the curfew.
“Where exactly did he go?”
This brought a fresh round of nodding and rupee-ing. They’d never find it, he said, without someone who really knew Srinagar the way he did, having lived there all his life. Oh, the horrors he’d seen. More rupees to help him bury the past.
The capital sprang back to life in the daytime, but still a life under military occupation. Armed men looking for possible terrorists patrolled the squares, streets, and markets constantly. David had probably taken this same route and passed the same patrols. He’d no doubt laid out the rupees, too, and that was exactly why he was remembered. The old man walked steadily in front of them, as if he’d done it hundreds of times, as he surely had. He was right — the city was a labyrinth, and, for an hour, they went through narrow streets and narrower ones, even alleys and inner courtyards, as well as false dead ends that actually did lead somewhere, into dark ways apparently designed for throat-cutting, then to a square a little more sunlit than the others, where Shabir pointed to a rundown three-storey building painted sickly green like the rest of the neighbourhood.
“I brought him here,” he said with great authority, as though fearful of not being taken seriously, “He went inside here.”
How many apartments were there? Quite a few, judging by the number of windows, some of them covered but showing silhouettes. David had given Shabir a generous tip. Jayesh got the message loud and clear, so out came the roll of rupees. After David went in, which apartment did he go to? Why? To do what? Max had to resign himself to the fact that Shabir didn’t know. They had no choice but to knock on every door and show everyone the picture of David, risking a few rounds from a Kalashnikov instead. While Shabir waited outside, the two went in. A chubby type, poorly shaven, wearing just an undershirt, who had watched them from his window, emerged at once from a ground-floor apartment.
“Are you here to look at the studio, is that it?”
Then they heard him fumbling for keys as he went back inside. Then he headed upstairs before them without bothering to close his door. He was painfully heavy and slow, and used the handrail not just for direction, but for support. He couldn’t get up the stairs otherwise.
“I have to warn you,” he said, coughing, “I can’t rent it until things are settled, what with this bloody business and all …”
Max pretended to understand, explaining he’d just arrived in Srinagar and was at the hotel for the time being, so he could wait a few days. The fact that a stranger had showed up didn’t seem to surprise the caretaker: he probably wasn’t the first to visit. Since things had broken down with Pakistan, the city was crawling with foreign reporters.
“And when do you suppose this ‘business’ will be over?”
The man shrugged. “They’ve got other things to worry about, and they say I’ve already had my commission so I’m not short.”
“They?”
He, as if noticing him for the first time. “You’re not with the papers.”
“We just got here from Delhi.”
“Well, you’ll have to work it out with them, if you want the place right away.”
“With who?”
“The Srinagar Reporter.”
Max remembered seeing it on billboards when they got into town. It was a daily, like The Times of India, but focused on Kashmir. The concierge slid the key into a lock at the end of the third floor in the back, and opened the door. When he turned on the light, the