up, and the boy cried out, but the old woman said something to shush him and comfort him.
As they approached the SUV, the interpreter looked close to a nervous breakdown. He barely heard Tim calling for them to leave, shouting that there was nothing they could do but go. The man was gibbering and nodding, but he didn’t move to call to the soldiers in Hindi. Tim yelled in English to one of the soldiers up ahead in the road, brandishing his rifle but with nothing to fire on, telling him the obvious: We have to go.
He heard the soldier call out four names, but only three men returned. They piled into the SUV and drove away, and no one looked back.
There was silence in the vehicle for a long time, and then at last, Tim tapped one of the soldiers on the shoulder. No point asking the interpreter—the man was traumatized to a sobbing wreck.
“Ask her their names.” He meant the old lady and the boy.
Most of the soldiers looked haunted by what had happened back there. The soldier he addressed looked vaguely angry, and he took it out on their guests, snapping Tim’s question at the old woman. She answered him back in a low but firm voice, and Tim didn’t think he needed a translation. She had told him in so many words to go to hell. His kind wasn’t trusted in their province, and they would be avoided even more after tonight. The soldier gave her a contemptuous look and shrugged at Tim. The old woman looked out the window, and the little boy moved closer to her, trying to nestle to her bosom. She patted his arm absently.
About twenty miles passed, and then the woman spoke up in rapid staccato bursts of her dialect, pointing out the window. Tim couldn’t imagine how she could identify anything through the storm, but she clearly wanted them to stop.
The angry soldier barked back at her, refusing, and Tim leaned forward. “What? What is it?”
“There’s another village here,” explained the soldier. “She wants to go there, says she and the boy will be safe. I have told her to shut up and do as she’s told.”
“Let her out,” ordered Tim.
“You do not understand these people, sir. They should not be indulged with their—”
“Let them out. You’re here as my escort, and we have no right to detain this woman. I coaxed her into the car so that she would be safe. She probably knows every village and resident from here to Patna! If anyone can find a relative for this kid to take care of him, it’s probably her. I mean, what do you guys want to do? Take the kid back and stick him in an orphanage? Now stop the goddamn car!”
The soldier driving pulled up on the side of the muddy road leading to a set of pinprick lights in the distance. Tim opened the car door for the old woman, and she mumbled something to the boy. He slid his small bottom along the upholstery of the seat and jumped out, taking her hand.
“You’ll be okay here?” he asked needlessly. He knew she couldn’t understand a word, but he asked anyway.
She muttered something back and then made a scattering, waving motion with her hand. Go away now. Leave. The soldier reached for the door handle and shut it with a slam. Then the SUV roared away, and Tim could barely see the old woman and boy navigating the muddy path to the new village. There was silence in the vehicle all the way back to Patna.
Coming into the outskirts of the city, Tim pressed the button on his window, listening to the whrrr of the electronics for the door and held his palm out to feel the beaded curtain of rain. These drops, he knew, were real. They were the most tangible things in his world now that the old woman and boy were gone, and so he focused on them. Feel the rain, his mind insisted, trying to shut out the memory of the horror they had witnessed. Listen to the rain, feel the drops, feel them…
This much, he knew, was still real.
It wasn’t over after he returned to Delhi. The Indian government managed to keep it out of the media, but its leaders, as well as the US ambassador and the State Department, were fiercely interested to know how the entire population of a border village could disappear. After all, the houses, the market stalls and the modest headquarters of the single local official were all intact, which proved no rebel group had gone on a mad spree.
Even the bodies with their blue eyes were now missing.
While pools of blood had been detected from satellite photos near the sad building where Tim met the robed strangers, it wasn’t a large enough quantity to suggest this was where systematic butchery was carried out. No, all the people had been taken elsewhere. Everyone wanted to know where.
The soldiers who had been Mr. Cale’s escort told a preposterous story, and the interpreter tried to hang himself but botched the job. He was left with the mind of a retarded child after his brain was deprived of oxygen.
What could Timothy Cale tell them? He couldn’t say the escort fought back. Their rifles hadn’t been fired, and the proof of that was that each gun magazine still had all their rounds. He didn’t have a scrap of evidence to back up a plausible lie. For a week, the ambassador let him have compassionate leave, inclined to believe Tim had suffered post-traumatic stress disorder from having seen something terrible. “But when you come back, we need answers,” he was told.
Sitting behind his desk again, feeling as if he had been away for years, Tim felt the draft of the rumbling air conditioner and sipped the strong coffee the Indian staff always liked to brew. He looked at his incident reports and knew he had no answers. He didn’t know what to tell his boss at his two o’clock appointment.
And then there was “a development,” as it was discreetly put.
During his leave, a warrant officer and lance corporal of the Army of Nepal had discovered the old woman and the little boy living not far from where the SUV had left them on the muddy road. They claimed to be from the empty village. The boy turned out to be close to seven years old, and the old woman had been born into a lower caste. She had suffered much from her neighbors. The two were driven to Patna where police and government bureaucrats questioned them. Yes, they had seen the visitors in robes. No, they didn’t know who these bizarre strangers were. They had felt searing agony and then nothing.
Obviously, they had been returned… Minutes before Tim Cale had discovered them and had them whisked away in the vehicle.
So, thought Tim. Those deadly beings had found two innocents after all.
You thought you rescued them, but maybe you were part of the plan.
The Indians decided the matter was closed. The Americans did not. They sent Tim home under a neat disciplinary rule of the service that involved a gag order, and they kept him on a desk in Washington until it dawned on him that he would never get a foreign posting again.
He had done minor studies in medical ethics, as well as business ethics, and he had a large enough network of Washington and New York contacts that he could launch his own consultancy business. As far as the Beltway was privately concerned (but never to his face), the boy and the old woman who survived the village massacre were a peculiar vindication for Timothy Cale. He began to land assignments that involved the seemingly unexplainable, the fringe science that occasionally spelled disaster when it found gullible congressmen as advocates or when his former colleagues in the diplomatic corps fell prey to “magicians” in Bangkok or Manila.
He racked up a lot of billable hours and air miles casually exposing frauds when he wasn’t tapping out reports on stem cell research. He prospered. He didn’t think too often about the village near the Indian border. He tried not to think about why the strangers in robes had selected him to be their witness. Receptive, they had called him. Whatever that was supposed to mean, it made his flesh crawl.
And now the booths.
The government had brought him into this mess because of what had happened in Bihar. But the border incident years ago fell under the category of the supernatural. These amazing transposition booths were science. “Doesn’t matter,” he was told on the phone. “You are the only sane American we’ve got who’s had experience with, well, for lack of a better word, resurrection.”