Sagramanda, a Novel of Near-Future India

*10*

"Riot in progress." Her tone apologetic, Keshu's driver glanced over at the chief inspector. "It may take some time to get to the address you specified, sir."

He nodded absently. His mind was not on the traffic, or on the river of humanity off to his right that flowed east to west, paralleling the direction the unmarked patrol vehicle was trying to take. In another attempt to assist traffic flow in a city the likes of which humankind had never known, decades earlier the city authorities had somehow managed to get together long enough to agree to make all the main streets not only one way to vehicular traffic, but to pedestrian as well. To walk west to east through Beypore District, pedestrians had to go one block north to Pudumandapa, or one block south to Kerala Place. Such radical changes had not been written into law to make walking easy. They had been done to make it possible. Vehicular gridlock was frustrating. Pedestrian gridlock was often fatal.

Attesting to the efficiency with which the Department of Pedestrian Affairs enforced the laws, Keshu could see a pair of foot patrol officers administering punishment to someone who had committed

the crime of attempting to walk against the one-way flow of traffic. It had been before the inspector's time when vociferous argument had greeted the radical proposal to reinstate physical chastisement as punishment for such minor crimes. Considering himself a modern, enlightened citizen, he could not understand the reason behind the objections. Laws were only respected when they were perceived to be effective.

What, after all, were the alternatives to beating such lawbreakers? It had been shown that lectures on civic responsibility did nothing to dissuade habitual offenders. Fining them was useless, since most had no money. With its promise of a roof over one's head and two meals a day, to a substantial portion of Sagramanda's swollen population the promise of jail time was an inducement rather than a deterrent. What remained to deter the repeat reprobate except the threat of physical punishment?

From what he could see from inside the cocoon that was the patrol car, the two officers appeared to be administering a level four thrashing: use of open palms only with not less than two and not more than four swift kicks. A minor infraction, then. Perhaps the man had come out of an alley or a shop and had inadvertently turned the wrong way, only to be unlucky enough to have been spotted by the pair of police. That would likely have been his claim, anyway: the illegal walker's equivalent of a driver's insistence that he had not been drunk. Among the river of pedestrians, all intent on their own business, hardly a one bothered to turn to observe the swift meting out of justice.

One of the officers was male, the other female. The pairing was necessary in a city with a Muslim population in the millions, since by law no male officer could manhandle a female of that religious persuasion. Justice was not impaired, however, since the city's female officers were just as well trained and equally as adept at meting out punishment as their male counterparts. Besides ensuring that foot traffic flowed on the city's sidewalks and rampways, such officers were responsible for keeping people and animals off those

main thoroughfares that had been designated for vehicular traffic only, as well as the sad, sorry task of keeping them clear of the kind of makeshift housing and temporary shelters that so sorely afflicted the older, more traditional parts of the metropolis.

As the car moved forward in fits and starts, he lost sight of the small drama. Occasionally, a pedestrian attempting to pass part of the flow would step off onto the street. This happened less often than might be expected since most vehicles, both public and private, were equipped with dispersers. Via conduits embedded in the carbon-metal car frames, an electric charge flowed from the vehicle's motor through the vehicle's exterior. Anyone coming in contact with this would receive a low-voltage jolt that was strong enough to make them want to avoid such contact, much less lean on a vehicle so equipped.

City vehicles were allowed to generate much more powerful charges. Unlike private cars and taxis whose repelling nuisance voltage was limited by law, those of fire engines and police cars responding to emergency calls could be cranked up to truly uncomfortable levels. Nobody in their right mind would attempt to get in the way of or hitch a ride on an ambulance with siren wailing. Touch a bumper or a door and the current flowing through it could knock a man off his feet and leave him quivering helplessly on the street for several minutes or more.

Trying to contain his irritation, he checked his wrist chronometer instead of asking the car's AI for the time. "How much longer until we can get through this?"

The driver pursed her lips. "Hard to say from here, sir." She indicated the heads-up schematic that hovered in the air between them and above the dash. "You can see the problem for yourself. There is not one riot, but two."

Keshu nodded and sighed. "What is it this morning? People still protesting the proposed infill for the new stadium up on the bend of the Hooghly?"

"No sir." The driver was a sergeant, middle-aged and experienced. Henna-tinged curls bunched up over the back of her collar; a current fashion that did not violate departmental dress code. "One involves about a thousand chanters protesting conditions in a couple of out lying northern region jails where mistreatment of alleged political prisoners is claimed to be rife." Leaning forward slightly, she checked a readout. "Latest information indicates four dead so far, a dozen pro testers and two police seriously injured, with the situation being brought under control."

Keshu nodded. Nothing out of the ordinary. "And the other?"

"Something to do with Raj Tanur Khan's latest picture not being granted a license for general exhibition because of social censorship concerns. His fans are fighting with objectors from two religious groups who are trying to have the film banned outright." Again she eyed the relevant readout. "Twelve dead, forty-two seriously wounded. No breakdown on which side is dominating, but there are half a dozen mobile tactical squads now on the scene, with crowd dispersal and arrests in progress."

That was about right, the chief inspector mused. Far greater out rage and injury was being inflicted over the content of a film than over the behavior of human beings. There were times when the actions of the citizens of Sagramanda made the prospect of taking early retirement loom large in his thinking. Such thoughts eventually passed, however, most commonly for two reasons.

He loved the challenge of his job, and he loved the city that was his home.

Which made his exasperation at not being able to capture one particular suspected serial killer, or even latch onto a stronger lead as to that individual's identity, all the more frustrating.

He shifted in his seat. "If one disturbance is breaking up and Tactical is down on the other, it shouldn't take us too much longer to get to the Chatham." The driver said nothing, concentrating on making her way through the jam.

He could have taken a chopper. But five-star hotels were understandably uneasy about having police copters set down in their parking lots. It tended to provoke awkward questions from the guests. This need to respect the wishes of the influential and well-connected had already cost him an hour this morning. An hour that could have been spent more usefully than fuming helplessly in traffic. To be fair, while riots were a daily occurrence, they were usually avoidable. Encountering two of them at the same time was just bad luck. Then, just as he was ready to give vent to his frustration once more, they were safely around the corner, and the Chatham International hove into view.

Sheathed in fake sandstone and decorated with carvings of animals, plants, and temple dancers (but no gods) that had been brought forth not by artisans' hands but by a computer-controlled industrial lathe, the hotel combined Mughal architecture in the style of the Taj Mahal with the shikhara spires of a traditional Hindu temple. It was all very Disney. Keshu supposed the hotel's guests loved it. If only, he ruminated, the real India were so simple.

While unobtrusive, the gate barring the entrance to the main hotel lot was solid enough to stop a war elephant-or a runaway eighteen-wheeler being driven by a wild-eyed terrorist or extortionist. Picking up the special low-frequency broadcast from the police vehicle, it opened automatically to admit them. His driver parked near a pair of cruisers and a van housing a mobile forensics lab. Seeing him step out of the car, a junior officer introduced himself while Keshu stared at the architectural jumble that was the hotel. If not for his purpose in being there, he would have found the sight amusing.

"The fatality is still on site?" he asked the junior officer as the latter led him toward the nearest service entrance. It was flanked by two armed men; an officer from the department and a senior member of the hotel's security staff. Both nodded in recognition as the senior inspector and his escort passed between them.

"Yes, Inspector," the younger man assured him. "Forensics have been taking their time with it. When the crime fits an ongoing modus, nothing is to be disturbed until the chief investigating officer in charge of the pertinent file has been allowed to make his own observations." He stepped to one side and gestured. "I'll take you there, sir."

Straight from the manual, Keshu reflected, but he didn't upbraid the junior officer for reciting the blatantly obvious. One did not encourage improvement by slapping down those engaged in its pursuit.

Their route took them through service areas camouflaged with expensive landscaping, around the back of the hotel grounds, out of sight of the laughing, yelling guests frolicking unknowingly in the pool. Happening to glance through the vegetation, Keshu noted the fashionable slenderness of many of the swimmers and sunbathers. While they eschewed food and lay in the heat of the tropical sun out of choice, a few hundred meters down the road and a world away local people were starving unwillingly and dreaming impossibly distant dreams of shade and air-conditioning. What a species, he reflected.

The appalling handiwork of one of its more disagreeable extant representatives was to be found nearby, in the hotel's designer under ground facility dedicated to the ancient healing arts of Ayurvedic mas sage and the extraction of millions more rupees in supplementary fees from paying guests. Discreet signage at the top of the stairs leading down to the entrance indicated that the hotel regretted that the facility in question was closed for temporary repairs. At the bottom of the stairway, Keshu found inconspicuous plainclothes officers ready to assist hotel security staff in gently but firmly turning away any curious wandering guest who might happen to stumble across the crime scene. Or Krishna forbid, hotel management's worst nightmare, a representative of the media.

So far, a sergeant on duty assured him, they had been able to keep this one off the Net and the vit. It was only a matter of time, of course, before the incident became common knowledge. In an age of near-universal access to and hunger for information, secrets were impossible to keep for very long. Where the police were concerned, this unstoppable flow of information cut both ways.

Acknowledging the duty sergeant's assistance, Keshu adjusted his turban slightly and looked past the officer toward the shadowy interior of the closed facility. An idiosyncratic mingling of aromas he could not recall having previously encountered emanated from somewhere within: sandalwood, rose, and human blood.

"Where is it?"

The sergeant jerked his head slightly in the direction of the facility's interior before starting in. His expression grim, Keshu followed.

Ignoring the forensics team that was still actively scouring the interior of the private massage chamber for evidence, the chief inspector studied the body without approaching or touching it. The poor victim was very definitely beyond the help of the Ayurvedic arts or anything else. Quite a lot of blood had been cleaned up. The woman's skin was pale and waxen. Kneeling, he had a look at the face on the front of the head that had rolled some distance away from the corpse after it had struck the floor and bounced, a consequence of having been neatly severed at the neck from the rest of the body.

The duty sergeant hovered nearby. "Mai-ling Xinzhou. Vice presi dent Hiang Manufacturing Consortium, home office Guangdong Province, China." Unnecessarily, he added, "Had meetings scheduled with two local companies for this morning. Did not make either of them." He nodded at the headless cadaver. "Competitors playing rough?"

"What do you think?" To his surprise, Keshu found that he was angry. It was rare that he allowed what he felt inside to seep out, but

this time he could not keep his feelings from communicating them selves to the sergeant.

The other man was clearly taken aback. "It was just a thought, Chief Inspector. I did not mean to appear disrespectful, either to you or to the victim."

"Forget it." Putting his hands on his knees, Keshu straightened and walked over to Bachchan. Having completed necessary chemical analysis of the body and its surroundings, the elderly forensics spe cialist was now imaging the corpse from every angle.

"Whaeguru ji ka khalsa, wabeguru ji ki. Fateh," Keshu murmured to his fellow Sikh. "The Khalsa belong to God, Victory belongs to God," following which he added immediately, "Haven't you retired yet?"

It was a running joke in the department. Bachchan was one of those unfortunate men born with a long face and premature wrinkles, who had looked old when he was twenty and who was short to boot.

"How can I retire, when there are so many incompetents in the department?" His grin flashed through a perfectly trimmed beard that was gray fading to white. With a nod, he indicated the cadaver. "Poor woman. I know what you are going to ask, Chief Inspector, and here is your answer." Holding up his scanner, he let Keshu have a look at the readout. As the technician had implied, the inspector did not need to ask for an explanation.

"The pattern of the cut matches others already on file for similar cases."

"Enough of them, anyway." The tech nodded. "You had better catch this evil person or persons, Chief Inspector. They are not going to stop killing until they are caught."

"I know that." Mindful of the effect his tone had had on the sergeant, Keshu kept his response carefully neutral. "Don't you think I and my people are trying?"

Bending over, Bachchan ran the tips of the sensor-implanted glove on his left hand over the stump of the dead woman's neck. "You need to try harder, Chief Inspector, or you will never achieve mukti."

"This job isn't conducive to becoming a gurmukh," the inspector responded. "Candidate for residence in an asylum, maybe." He added something in Punjabi so that it would remain private between himself and the technician.

Straightening, Bachchan looked up at his nominal superior. "You must not let your frustration lead you to make this personal. One murderer is no different from another, because a victim is always just a victim."

"I know that's how I should look at it, my friend, but this is different." He gestured at the corpse. "A visiting Chinese businesswoman. Two Australian tourists. Local citizens respected and otherwise. Serial killings tend to follow patterns. They're sexual in nature, or the killer has a grudge against some business, or the government, or relatives. Nothing matches up here." Despite his determination to maintain con trol, his voice rose slightly. "There's no pattern to these slayings."

"Does not that suggest a kind of pattern in itself? Could not this seeming randomness be suggestive of something in the murderer's state of mind?"

"Yes, yes." Keshu agreed tiredly. "I've thought of that. But it makes it damn difficult to try and predict where she will strike next."

" 'She'?" Bachchan's reaction showed that he had not been brought up to date on the latest suppositions.

"There are indications that the killer may be a woman, or perhaps a transvestite," Keshu informed him moodily.

His gaze returning to the corpse, Bachchan nodded solemnly. "Not a virtuous date. But if true, one with a strong arm, who has had much practice at their vocation."

"Practice?" Keshu frowned slightly.

Leaning forward again, the technician did not hesitate as he ran his gloved palm across the dead woman's open neck. "This decapitation was accomplished with a single blow. The sharpness of a blade aside, one does not make a cut like this without being well versed in the use of the chosen weapon."

Too well versed, Keshu mused. "I can understand that. If, as we are coming to believe, it is the same individual who is responsible for all these murders, then she has had plenty of practice indeed." Nodding farewell to the technician, he walked back to rejoin the duty sergeant.

"Witnesses?" he inquired tersely.

"Nothing yet." The sergeant indicated the electronic pad he held. "We have to be circumspect about it. The hotel management is naturally frantic to keep this as quiet as possible."

"I know." Keshu let his gaze take in the entire crime scene: the white walls presently devoid of full-depth virtuals, the curved ceiling stripped of its projected sky and clouds, the pair of massage beds; one with its marble-like victim. The blood stains on the floor. The disem bodied head near the feet of another forensics tech. Unbidden, a line from the Sidhha Goshth came to him.

" 'The perverse are gone astray and are under the sway of death.' "

A sudden and atypical wash of claustrophobia overtook him. He needed to get out, back into the sunshine and the heat, the city air that was far from fresh but was at least alive with familiar smells and not the stink of waning death. He needed a break from dreadfulness.

"Let me know the moment you have anything." He headed out before the sergeant could reply.

To help clear his mind, he and his wife spent the evening in their local Gurdwara, helping out in the langar, the community kitchen that was open to people of all faiths. On the way out he made sure to swipe his credcard through the reader at the entrance so that it would deduct his regular, voluntarily pledged sum to help with the running of the place of worship and the community service in which it was engaged.

The evening's prayers helped to settle his emotions, but not his thoughts. Every crime assigned to him that he could not solve caused him to lose sleep, but it had been a long time since he had taken the activities of any lawbreaker as a personal affront, as he was doing with this still-unidentified serial killer. The sheer randomness of the attacks, the indifference to the innocence of the slain, rankled him both personally and as a Sikh. The ineffectualness of the ongoing investigation was beginning to trouble him night and day. He could not put it out of his mind even as he recited the sohila, the prayer before retiring for the night.

"The Khalsa is of the Wondrous Destroyer of darkness." So the prayer went. It was incumbent on him to find and stop the person or persons responsible for these killings, not only professionally but because of who he was-and he was failing in that responsibility.

What was it Bachchan had said? "Could not the seeming random ness of the killings be suggestive of something in the murderer's state of mind?" Something like that. Randomness, randomness. The reason the killer was killing seemed to be nothing more than that he or she enjoyed killing. Reveling in murder. In death.

It gave him an idea, but he could only put it into practice tomorrow.

There were a number of cults that venerated death. Put the word out on the street and perhaps something useful would come back.

As it turned out, the following morning brought to light information more useful and specific than he could have hoped for. Nor could it have come at a better time, what with the pressure from his superiors to produce results threatening to become onerous. Not that he blamed them. As was inevitable, word had finally reached the media about the death of the visiting businesswoman and the gruesome manner of her passing. The Chinese embassy was now involved. Coming so close on the heels of the deaths of the two Australian tourists, the travails of his section were threatening to go global. It was the kind of international publicity his department, the municipality of Sagramanda, and the country at large could do without.

Efficacy arrived in the person of a familiar diminutive operative from downstairs. Mustering a smile and waving to one side the projections that were hovering above his desk, the chief inspector greeted his visitor. "Ah, Mr. Subrata-the man who likes to search for patterns. I hope you've found a useful one."

The researcher permitted himself a half smile; about as effusive an expression as he allowed himself while on duty. "Better even than that, it may be hoped. A match. May I?" He extended the police spinner he was carrying.

In response to a positive gesture from his superior, Subrata switched on the compact device he was holding in his right hand. Exchanging codes with Keshu's desk, it inserted therein a number of items of information together with several three-dimensional images. As the images rotated, the chief inspector's excitement rose. One image was the computer-generated re-creation of the woman seen by the elderly museum guard in the company of the two Australian tourists just before they had turned up dead in the Hooghly. The second was brand-new, but similar enough to excite immediate comparisons. He asked his visitor for clarification.

Subrata halted the rotation of the second projection. "This composite is based on a description provided by the young man who was tending the poolside bar the afternoon of the Chinese businesswoman's murder. It depicts, as best he could recall, a woman seen sharing drinks with the deceased that same afternoon. Notice, sir, the similarities between the two separate descriptions."

"Unavoidable." Keshu had to restrain himself from thrusting a fist skyward. "Can you do a fusion?"

"Already programmed, sir." Murmuring into his spinner's pickup, Subrata complied. As both men watched, the two three-dimensional images merged into one. Unseen software smoothed and blended.

Where two composites had hovered, a single woman now hung in the air between them.

"Doesn't look Indian," Keshu observed tautly. "That was apparent from the description provided by the guard at the museum. This con firms it."

"Not a Latin type, certainly not Oriental." The technician had resumed rotating the combined image. "Preliminary maxillary-cerebral structural analysis suggests a European or North American origin. She could still be a resident, or an expat working here."

"Those possibilities are already being considered," Keshu informed him. "But this finally gives us something solid to work with. See that suitable reproductions are distributed to all media as well as being put out on the street. Unless she is Muslim or a pretend Muslim and goes about veiled, sooner or later someone is bound to recognize and report her. Given that she's been seen unveiled by at least two witnesses, that may not even be a concern."

"Yes sir." The tech turned to go.

"Oh, and Mr. Subrata? My compliments to you and your associates downstairs. Very good work. With luck and continued persistence, hopefully we can take this person and her associates, should she have any, into custody before she can kill again."

"That is the hope of myself and my colleagues as well, sir." Subrata let himself out.

For the first time in weeks, a tiny bit of the gloom that had hovered over the chief inspector's every working day lifted. They had, at last, a plausible description of the possible killer-or at least someone who could be a link to the actual killer. It seemed too far-fetched for coincidence to expect that a museum guard and a hotel bartender had seen the same woman in the company of three unreleated people just prior to their untimely deaths.

Maintained by his desk, the representation continued to hang in the air before him. The impassive face was that of a still young woman, attractive without being striking. It could not show what lay within, what drove someone like this to commit or conspire to commit multiple murders. Though it was difficult to tell just from a computer-generated image, the visage hovering before him did not have the aspect of the criminally insane. All the more dangerous, then, for not being non compos mentis

Privately, he was ashamed to admit he was relieved that the first solid lead they had obtained on the serial killer strongly suggested that she was not Indian. It distressed him to think that he could be so provincial.