Hidden River

12: THE HIDDEN RIVER

Through the window it’s morning. Night slinking away over the lighthouse and the milk churns and the cliff path. The moon’s breath, cold, in the gray light that in the east they call the wolf’s tail.

Across the Irish Sea, the peak of Ailsa Craig and the hills of Galloway.

A line of yellow in the sky.

A smattering of vessels, fishing boats, tankers, and big container ships waiting for the pilot to guide them to the container docks of Belfast. Closer to the shore, a lobsterman, pulling nets, swearing so loud that you can actually hear him.

A man is coming up the road.

This isn’t my house. I’ve come here, to hide as best I can. Dad was useless as usual, but Mr. Patawasti suggested their cottage up the Antrim coast if I wanted a place to rest.

There is only one way to the house.

Along the cliff, around the lighthouse. Coming over the boggy fields would be a nightmare.

An assassin has to come up the one narrow road.

That’s the beauty of the thing.

And he’s here. I can’t tell if he’s being furtive. There isn’t enough light. But I can see him. Glimpses of him between the thorns and the blackberry and the bramble bushes. Walking fast. Not running. That’s how I’d come too. At dawn. In the half-light. I would never have spotted him but for the fact that all I do in my waking hours is look out at the sea, the cliffs, the path.

And now the decision.

There is a shotgun over the fireplace. I checked it as soon as I moved in. Twelve-gauge. Nice. Clean. For shooting foxes, badgers. A box of shells near the range. It would be easy to slip out the back, circle behind the cottage, and take him as soon as he gets to the front door. Easy.

And yet.

I sit here, the gun untouched, the shells untouched.

I’ll let him come, I say, and smile. Aye, I’ll welcome him.

For I have failed in everything.

The debacle in the Eastman Ballroom. I didn’t even fire my weapon. More than a dozen people injured, two nearly died, and, of course, Charles and Amber completely unharmed. More famous now than ever while an inquiry sorts out what on earth happened. No one really knows, but they think a security guard panicked and started shooting at a man he thought had a gun.

Charles has been on 20/20 and even Larry King, displacing for a moment the round-the-clock O. J. Simpson coverage. CAW’s profile has been raised a hundredfold. I couldn’t have given them a better gift. He’s a shoo-in for Congress, a rising star. He’s got a chance of running for governor or even being the balance on the GOP presidential ticket at some point in the future.

I have fucked up utterly, in all ways.

I fell in love with heroin, I fell out of love with truth. I was beguiled by a killer, smarter than me. I let down my old love, failed her, too, failed my friend.

So come, assassin.

I’ll wait here.

Come. And he does.

Who would they get to kill me? Would they have told the IRA that I was a senior police officer, or an independent drug dealer, something like that? The IRA, the UDA, it doesn’t matter. As long as they are efficient.

I look out the window. The Scottish coast, the ships, the birds, farther up the channel the barest outline of the Mull of Kintyre.

And the worst part is, the day I got back to Carrickfergus Mr. Patawasti had come around and thanked me. Congratulated me for a job well done. Dad had told him that I had helped Hector Martinez’s lawyer get him off. Mr. Patawasti had said that although I hadn’t found the person who killed their daughter, at least I’d helped set an innocent man free, got the police looking for the real killer.

I almost threw up.

I had to get out of there. Get up here. Where I would be safe. For a while. Until now. I suppose it was inevitable they would find me. Northern Ireland is a small place.

The assassin.

Closer. I can make out a few details now. He’s wearing a parka raincoat and a flat cap.

Breathing hard.

His breath curling into the morning air.

His footsteps heavy.

His gray face.

He opens the gate and walks to the house.

He knocks on the door.

Which is slightly unusual.

I open it.

“You’re a hard man to find, Lawson,” he says.

I recognize him at once. It’s Commander Douglas from the Samson Inquiry.

Not an assassin, then, but just as bad. As good as a gun. As good as a bullet in the brain. Just more complicated.

“So this is where you’ve been hiding for the last couple of months,” he says.

It’s more like a couple of weeks, but I don’t quibble with him. He sits in the chair by the window. Lights himself a cigarette. It doesn’t calm him down.

“Well, since you’ve no phone, I thought I’d drive up here myself and let you know. I wanted to see your fucking face. You’re just like every other paddy in this fucking country. Be in the papers tomorrow, Lawson, you’re off the fucking hook.”

“What do you mean?”

“The first question you should ask is how I found you.”

“How did you find me?”

“Broke into your house yesterday, found a letter your father was about to post, careless, very careless.”

He blew smoke aggressively in my face.

“You want to get me a drink?”

“There’s only water,” I said.

“Forget it then. Typical. Anyway, so you’re off the hook, Paddy, we won’t arrest you, and your own lads won’t kill you. You’re free as a fucking daisy.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Only the collapse of the entire Samson investigation into the Royal Ulster Constabulary. Only thousands of man-hours of work and millions of pounds down the drain. Only the destruction of a good man. Not to mention a couple of dozen senior Northern Irish coppers getting away with graft of the most outrageous kind. I tell you, it’s no coincidence, I see the work of MI5 in all of this.”

“Yes, but what, how?” I asked, getting frustrated.

“Samson’s been arrested for fraud, criminal mischief, falsifying documents, and, get this, statutory rape. Apparently, Tony Samson’s casebook wasn’t as clean as we all thought. He just did things every other copper did, cutting a few corners here, losing papers there, you know, fitting up a few hoods who deserved it. He’s been arrested and the whole inquiry has of course collapsed, all the preliminary findings are suspect now, it’s all going to be scrapped. The PM has already said he wants this finished, we’ve been instructed to close our files and send them to the Home Office for permanent seizure, or at least until after the thirty-year rule releases them again to the public domain. Yes, Lawson, you might have to watch your back sometime around 2025, but until then…”

“I still don’t understand,” I said.

He looked at me, disgusted. Took off his cap. Spat on the floor.

“Thought you had that big IQ. They fitted him up. Samson has been arrested, for corruption. Ironic, eh? Oh, aye, and they even threw one at him for having sex with his sixteen-year-old baby-sitter. His career is over, the inquiry is over, you won’t be forced to testify. The story will break on today’s evening news. You fucked us. You sneaky Paddy bastards, I don’t know how you did it, but you fucked us.”

I sat for a while. The RUC, or MI5, or the Home Office, or someone else entirely had seen that Samson was going to blow the lid off corruption within a section of the police in Northern Ireland, had seen that it could jeopardize Northern Ireland as a political entity in and of itself, had therefore begun digging for dirt on Samson himself, had found enough to bury him. His whole inquiry was compromised, useless. He was just like me now, the poor bastard.

And it really was over. No one would compel me to testify. Nothing to testify about. I was what I’d always been. A drugged-out, worthless, wasted cop. I was safe.

“Tell me one thing,” Commander Douglas said.

“What?”

“Off the record, Lawson, why did you resign?”

I believed him. I didn’t mind telling him.

“It’s very simple. Buck McConnell was my mentor in the peelers, he pulled me along. He used me. He put me in the drug squad, figured I’d shake things up. I did. I found out that several senior RUC officers were allowing the IRA and UDA to traffic heroin and e, protecting them, regulating the market, I could have blown the lid off a dozen big careers, but they found out about me. They weren’t sure if I was loyal or if I was going to go to Special Branch. I wasn’t sure if I was going to go to Special Branch. I didn’t want to be killed, I didn’t want to live in fear in some witness-protection program, so I took a third way out. I destroyed my credibility. I injected myself with heroin, enough times to convince them I was an addict. Then I stole heroin from the police evidence room, I got myself caught stealing, they said they wouldn’t prosecute if I resigned. I resigned in disgrace.”

Commander Douglas grimaced, stamped his cigarette out.

“Very clever, Lawson, you made yourself a pariah. Sneaky. You’re all alike. I don’t know why we stay in this bloody country. It’s like the fucking Raj and you’re the niggers.”

I said nothing, Douglas rubbed his hands over his face. His eyes narrowed, closed. A comic effect in a man incapable of comedy. He sighed, nodded to himself.

“Well, you fucker, you don’t get off that easy,” he said.

He pulled out his gun and pointed it at me.

“You were lying,” I said, surprised.

“No, I wasn’t lying. It’s all true, you’re off the hook, with Samson, with the Brits, with your own side. Off the fucking hook with everyone. Everyone except me.”

“But you can’t do anything, the investigation’s over.”

He nodded in agreement. Sighted the revolver.

“You fucking bastards, ruin a good man like that, you just sitting up here waiting for your pals to do the dirty work. You fucking coward. You fucker. Biding your time. Well, Paddy, let me tell you about this gun. It’s not a cop gun. It’s off the books. If I shoot you, no one will ever know who did it.”

I looked at him, looked at the gun, saw that he was serious. Did I want to die now? Now that I was free? Things were different. I wasn’t sure. Douglas got up and walked over toward me. He put the gun against my temple. Was he really this fucking crazy?

The touch of the cold steel. This is not how I want to go. Every second of every day someone dies. Every minute someone’s murdered, someone’s murdering. But not now, not me. Not this place.

“I could kill you, Paddy,” he said, furious. “I could fucking kill you easy. A squeeze of this here trigger. Nice gun. Browning. Yes. I’d enjoy it. I would.”

His face was dispassionate, resolved. He meant to do it, he would do it. His eyes, ice. It was a decision he had made in advance.

He took a step back so the blood spray from my skull wouldn’t get on his clothes.

I knew he’d do it. For I was everything he hated about this country. I was the distillation of all that rage. I was the symptom and the disease.

“What do you want?” I asked.

“What do I want? What do I want? I want what I’ve always wanted. A fucking bit of cooperation. One fucking Paddy who knows right from wrong. I want to know the name of the copper running the heroin, I want to know his name. Give me that. Fucking give me the name. I don’t care if they fucking kill you. I don’t care if the investigation has collapsed. I want that fucking name. I’m going to count to three.”

For emphasis, he clicked the hammer back on the revolver. One slip of his finger and I was dead.

“One,” he said.

The barrel and the sweat. This little room. The sea outside. His mouth fixed, resigned, one way or the other, it didn’t matter. If I didn’t give him the name, he’d top me.

“Two.”

That face, that scarred hand, the paratrooper wings on his wrist. That gun. Would this be the last impression in my retina, the last memory in my brain?

I gagged. I was afraid.

No.

“Thr—” he began.

“John,” I said.

“What?”

“John Campbell. Big guy, blond hair, only a constable, part-time RUC. He’s the one you’re after. Carrickfergus Police Station. You won’t find him, though. He’s already run. He’s in America. But he’s the one, he ran all the drugs, he was the kingpin. Low-key character. He’s the one you want. Constable John Campbell, smart guy, wouldn’t even take promotion. Stayed out of the limelight. He’s the one all right, the one you want.”

I swallowed, felt sick.

Douglas looked at me for a second. Revulsion crept over his face. He knew mentioning that name had cost me something. He believed me. What a coward I was. Douglas spat. And I hated myself. Doing down John like that to save my skin.

Another betrayal.

Douglas nodded, took his finger off the trigger.

“Piece of shit,” Douglas said, put the gun in his pocket, picked up his hat, walked out of my life forever.

The river begins on the roof of the world. All the great rivers of Asia are born there. The Hindus believed that their gods were born in the Himalaya and went there to die. The Tibetans felt that the air was so full of spirits that not even the clean vision of the Buddha could purge it.

The plane flying over the Hindu Kush. Over the opium fields of Afghanistan. I look out the window. The Flower of Joy. I remember. Sip my orange juice.

A round-trip ticket from London to Delhi costs five hundred pounds. I didn’t have that kind of money. But Dad did. Dad, amazingly, had gotten fifty-eight votes in the local council elections. He got his deposit back, for the first time ever. And he promised me he’d lend me the dough if he got the money back. I held him to his word. India? Why not. What else was there? The plane flying over the hazy brown Indian subcontinent.

Touching down. The Morris Ambassador taking me from the airport. The heat, the orange sky, the pollution so palpable it coats your tongue. Child beggars at the traffic stops, filthy and in rags.

“Jao,” the taximan says, which means piss off.

The insane streets around Connaught Place. Connaught — the wildest of Ireland’s four provinces, an appropriate name for central New Delhi.

The hotel. Pancakes from southern India. Delicious. All the food, in fact, incredible. And if you put a lot of spice on and don’t drink the water, you don’t get sick.

Two days in Delhi, amazing grub, sights. At the hotel on CNN International I happen to see Charles Mulholland in an interview. He ends it by saying that a friend is taking him and his wife for a yachting vacation in the Virgin Islands. A wealthy and influential friend, no doubt. Cigar smoke, cognacs: So tell me, Charles, what are your long-term political ambitions?…

The train station. Black and nightmarish in the morning mist. Beggars by the legion, the homeless, the lame, the halt.

The wrong train, directions, the right train. The second-class car. Breakfast. Toast, tea, marmalade. A hot napkin. The Times of India, the Hindustan Times. Hindu matriarchs, blue-turbaned Sikhs, Muslim businessmen, Jain priests, Buddhists, students, hippies. Like a scene from Kim.

A delay. The moving train. The squalor of the suburbs, more beggars, shantytowns, muddy fields, an elephant, vultures, and the brown flat earth of the Ganges Valley all the way to the horizon.

The Ganges is not the longest river in India, certainly not the most beautiful. The continent takes its name from the Indus, so why is the Ganges the holy river of India?

Because the gods say so.

The Ganges begins as a gurgle on a mountaintop. Glacial peaks, permanent snow, spring flowers, yellow, red, blue. It’s a foot wide, this river. If you lay your body down across it, you can stop the flow, you can dam Mother Ganga.

From the mountaintop it moves on inexorably down onto the sienna plain, where everything becomes the color of mud. And down into the holy cities of Varanasi and Allahabad. The latter given that name by the Muslim conquerors who supposedly did not believe in that sort of thing.

Varanasi is the city of Lord Shiva. To die in Varanasi is a great thing. Shiva will look favorably upon you and your next incarnation will be a blessed one.

But holier still is the upstream city of Allahabad. The most sacred site in India. Indeed, when the world is destroyed, only one place will remain and that is Allahabad — Prayag, to give it its Hindu name.

Allahabad is sacred because it is the confluence of three holy rivers. The Ganges, of course, but also the Yamuna and the Saraswati.

The Yamuna is the second holy river of India. Mahatma Gandhi’s body was burned by this river. Three prime ministers also were cremated by its banks in sandalwood funeral pyres, their ashes drifting from the burning ghats into the sacred waters.

The Yamuna and the Ganges meet in Allahabad. An important place. The hometown of the Nehrus. The hometown of Victoria Patawasti’s family.

The train stops. I get off. I walk around, looking at fort ruins, at Jawaharlal Nehru’s house, at Victoria Patawasti’s house.

I visit her paternal grandparents, who are both alive. They have fourteen grandchildren, two of whom have been incarnated already into another form. I spend the day with them and I stay that night in their big turn-of-the-century mansion, exquisitely designed to take cooling breezes off the river.

We talk and we drink nimbu pani soda and we eat sweetmeats.

And Dr. Patawasti tells me the story about the Hidden River.

The river Saraswati flows only in Heaven or, say some, underground. It is the river of Paradise, of the gods, the Ganges and the Yamuna are only its earthly mirrors. They are imperfect. The Saraswati is perfection itself. But Vishnu so loved the world that he allowed the Saraswati to bend down to Earth at one place, at only one spot on the whole globe. At the point where the Ganges and the Yamuna meet. And if you bathe here, your sins are wiped away. Indeed, so sacred is the water that not only your sins but those of seven generations backward are wiped clean too.

“My sins will be wiped away?” I ask.

“Do not even think of bathing in that river,” Mrs. Dr. Patawasti says, “you will catch cholera and die. The peasants defecate and throw their waste in these supposed holy waters. Industrial plants, tanneries, all pump their poisons into the rivers. Dead cows and buffalo are in this water. Why are there no fish? These rivers are toxic.”

“There are many fish,” Dr. Patawasti says. “Mark Twain said that the cholera bacillus cannot survive in the Ganges.”

“Say that to the thousands who catch cholera and typhoid every year,” Mrs. Dr. Patawasti says, a furious look across her face.

“Still, my sins, and seven generations backward,” I say.

“The scriptures are far from clear on this,” Mrs. Dr. Patawasti says, “if you ask me it’s a swindle to bring in tourists to the Kum Mela.”

“That is an outrageous thing to suggest,” Dr. Patawasti says.

Mrs. Dr. Patawasti looks at me seriously. Gray hair, thin, but more than a hint of her former beauty in the dark skin and pale eyes. What Victoria would have looked like at age seventy-five.

“Young man,” she says to me, “do not swim in the river, I beg you. And don’t you encourage him,” she says to her husband.

“I don’t know, all my sins,” I say again.

Mrs. Dr. Patawasti groans, Dr. Patawasti laughs….

Early morning. The family still asleep. A bicycle rickshaw. My shorts, sandals, T-shirt, a wide-brimmed hat.

Houses, dirty streets, dust. Children staring vacantly at me, others grinning, playing with a football.

The Ganges, brown and solemn. The Yamuna, yellow and sluggish.

The bank of the Ganges is littered with refuse. Newspaper, cans, rags, bits of old boats.

I pay the rickshaw man, look for a boatman.

People are washing their clothes, doing Puja.

I step over a dead dog.

The boatmen spot me, come racing over, and I find one I like.

We negotiate twenty rupees to row me out to the junction of the two rivers. To the point where the Saraswati comes down from Heaven and cleanses sins and past mistakes and makes a man anew.

He rows me out in a leaky boat, with mended oars and rowlocks made of hemp.

The head of a water buffalo floats by.

The boatman is named Ali. Thin, dark, nervous, dressed in a ragged white caftan.

We talk about the rivers and the legend of the Hidden River and Ali gives ambiguous and noncommittal answers. I suppose he’s seen many Westerners get rowed out here with the intention of bathing, take one look at the water, and then sensibly chicken out.

We stop at one of the many wooden pillars that are set into the river specifically for bathing pilgrims. We tie the boat. I strip. I lean over the side and dip my feet into the water. I lean on the edge of the boat. Ali leans on the other gunwale to prevent a capsize.

I let myself slip down the side of the rowboat and immerse myself up to my chest.

The water embraces me, and I let go the side of the boat.

I can feel the current from both rivers. The Ganges is warm, the Yamuna colder. It’s shallow. My feet touch the bottom and I walk along it.

Ali laughs delightedly.

A hundred feet to the right I can see another large animal carcass floating past. I dunk my head under. I come up, breathe, the sun is bright, the water glitters. Ali thinks this is hilarious.

I dunk my head under again.

And this time I know it’s the right place.

The Platte wasn’t it.

This is the right river.

I am here at last.

The water washes over me.

I open my eyes, it is hard to see. But my vision is perfect and I do understand, I understand the purpose of it all. To bring me here, on this day, at this time, now.

I see, and I am resolved. I have failed. I did not bring redemption, I did not bring justice down from heaven. I did not have Victoria’s killers put to rights. It has been a catalog of failure. As a son, as a policeman, as a man with a second chance, as a human being. I have let the guilty slip through my fingers, indeed enhanced their position. I have let my friends die. I have not done anything with this life.

Take from me my sins.

And I see her.

Ma. She dies. Her cold fingers. Her fingertips. They let her die. His words of comfort, meaningless. All of it, meaningless. How stupid not to know that lesson. You can’t save her. No one can save her.

And I’m here.

At last.

This river of death. This continent of death. My feet stand on the mud. My sins have been ones of omission. I have let things happen. Sure, you could say that I saved Da, that he would have fallen apart if they had killed me, but it was cowardice. I was afraid. And I took the easy way out and let things happen. And to cap it all, I slandered John to save my neck again.

And now all I have to do is open my lungs. Open my lungs and let the river cleanse me.

And my body will writhe and my trachea will scream — water there instead of air — and my heart will beat but there will be no oxygen in the blood returning from my lungs. No place for the CO₂ to be expelled. And my heart will beat; but it will eventually cease to work. My brain will soldier on for a minute, perhaps two, starved for oxygen, crying out for it, for air. And then it, too, will slow and the chemical reactions will cease and I will lose consciousness, perhaps seeing that white tunnel that people see when the neurons fire random images in the cortex.

I will float there and in another ten minutes the last of the electrical activity in my brain will stop forever. And I will be nothing. Appropriate, wasn’t it, the Hindu mystics who invented the concept of zero?

I reach down and grab the mud between my fingers.

The river flows and my smile widens and my mouth opens. Thick filthy water pouring over my tongue and into my throat.

I gag and force open my jaw with my fingers. I expel the last of the air and I breathe in.

The pain is terrible. Like an electric shock. My lungs howl and my body bucks against this terrible intrusion. I war against the pleading of my lungs and brain. I fight against the urge to surface.

And again I swallow.

I am coming to you.

Mum and Victoria, John.

That holy trinity of loss.

I am coming to you.

Even though I know what awaits is not you, not sleep, but annihilation. In this brown filthy water. Dirt on my teeth. Fire in my nostrils.

But I’m coming anyway.

This place, this is the time.

The river pours in.

Yes.

To you.

John.

Victoria.

Ma.

My hair.

A hand.

The sun.

A hand pulls me up out of the water by the hair.

A voice:

“You must not be fooling around in this water. You are catching dreadful things. Do not be believing stories about the purity of this water. It is foul. I am Muslim. I am above such superstition. This town is called Allahabad. There is no God but Allah. There is no God but Allah. There are no spirits. There is no magic water. There is no Hidden River.”

“No?” I sputter, coughing, puking, spitting the water from my mouth.

“No, come, I will pull you in.”

Before I can reply, his big hands tug me into the boat, and I cough and vomit water and gasp for air.

He looks stern, shakes his head.

“You are seeing what I am explaining?” he says with disgust.

“Uh—”

“Very dangerous, very dangerous, you are not seeing the dead cow?”

“No.”

I spit some more, cough. He wags his finger.

“So what do we do now?” I ask him after a while.

“You are sitting in the boat and drying off in the sunshine and I am rowing you to shore. No. We are not doing that. I am rowing you to hotel, where you are showering that filthy water off your body. Insh’Allah, you are unharmed. Insh’Allah.”

“Ok,” I say.

The ocher river. The yellow sky.

I lie back in the boat.

Ali looks at me and laughs at my foolishness.

He doesn’t know it, but he’s given me my life back. I lie there and I am at peace, lullabied by oars and the gentle harmonic motion of the boat, drifting on the golden waters of the Ganges, on the edge of sleep. Saved. Alive.

Ali is still talking:

“Those Hindus are crazy men. There is no vanishing river. The Saraswati was a real river long ago that dried up. They do not know their history. The Prophet, may his name be blessed, cured us of such pagan superstition. The Hindus see magic where there is no magic, they see—”

I sit up suddenly in the boat.

“What did you say?”

“I said that they are crazy men who—”

“No, no, about the Saraswati?” I ask.

“A real river. It dried up centuries ago.”

“Dried up. A drought, of course. That was why I survived the Platte. A drought. The creek. Pat tried to tell me it’s only two feet deep at the best of times. She wouldn’t know that. She despised the place, thought a river was a river. Don’t you see? Don’t you see?”

Ali looks at me, uncomprehending.

“I am rowing you to shore,” he says.

“Yes, yes, yes,” I say excitedly.

The Patawastis were still asleep. Their twelve-year-old servant boy making tea. He ignored me when I grabbed the phone and dialed the international operator. I talked to her for a while and finally she gave me a number in Colorado. I dialed it, got through to the switchboard.

“I’ll put you through to his voice mail, ok?” the switchboard woman said.

“Ok,” I said.

“This is the voice mail of Detective David Redhorse. At the tone, please leave me a message and a number and I’ll get back to you.”

I spoke fast:

“Redhorse, you don’t know me, but I’ve got information. On June fifth, 1995, in Denver, on the night of that freak snowstorm, Victoria Patawasti was murdered. Her killer was Amber Mulholland, the wife of Charles Mulholland, who is running for Congress. Amber killed Victoria and walked the gun down to Cherry Creek and threw it in. Probably the closest part of the creek to Victoria’s building. Amber thought it would get washed down to the South Platte River. But there’s been a drought. She doesn’t know the city, doesn’t know Cherry Creek is only a couple of feet deep, and now it must be completely dry. It’s a special gun, a Beretta, with her initials on it. Do you see? The gun is still there. It’s got to be. El Niño’s brought freak weather. Snow in June. A bone-dry spring and summer. Look in the creek, not too far from Victoria’s building. Find the gun. The forensics will match. The gun dealer in Italy will tie it to Charles Mulholland. What else? Yes, motive. Amber killed Victoria because Victoria found out her husband was stealing millions from the charity to pay a blackmailer named Alan Houghton. He’s disappeared, but there might still be something in CAW’s computers. Anyway, the important thing is the gun, find the gun, find the gun, find the bloody gun.”

I hung up the phone. Yes, goddamnit, yes.

I got myself a drink. I went onto the balcony overlooking the Ganges.

Dozens of men and women doing Puja, letting the holy water trickle through their fingers for the rising sun. And the Ganges itself a vast trunk road. Kids, priests, metalworkers, water buffalo herders, cycle rickshaw drivers, boatmen. I sipped my nimbu pani, sat down, watched it all.

And I don’t know — maybe it was escaping death or maybe it was being in India — but just then I saw how it could be. How it should be.

The final act….

Seven time zones west of Belfast, twelve time zones west of Allahabad, two policemen check their arrest warrant and extradition papers and board a plane from Denver to Atlanta to the U.S. Virgin Islands.

The plane lifts off from Denver International Airport, circles to gain altitude, and heads east. For the policeman in the window seat it’s his first time ever in an airplane. David Redhorse is afraid to fly. But this is too important. Time is of the essence. The Mulhollands are taking a well-needed break on a luxury yacht. At the moment they’re in U.S. territory, but tomorrow they’re going on to the Bahamas. You couldn’t solve every case. That Klimmer one had gone dead, but this, this was a juicy high-profile murder.

Redhorse looks out over Denver and Aurora and Boulder and the Rocky Mountains. He stares down at the South Platte River and at Confluence Park, where the South Platte merges with Cherry Creek. The gold nuggets in Cherry Creek, the whole reason for Denver’s existence in the first place.

Cherry Creek. After getting the phone call, Redhorse took one of the police department metal detectors and searched the dried-up creek. He found the gun in about fifteen minutes. Forensics matched the pistol with the bullet they took out of Victoria Patawasti. And Beretta told him who owned a fancy gun like that. The wife of Victoria’s employer: Amber Mulholland. The gun. The murder weapon.

“There’s the creek,” he says.

His partner, Detective Miller, doesn’t reply. He’s reading the newspaper. The engines whine. There is a terrible grumbling noise.

“Undercarriage coming up,” Miller says kindly.

The plane hits turbulence and falls sixty feet. Redhorse bites down a yell and looks around. No one else seems alarmed in the least.

The aircraft straightens out.

Redhorse unclenches his fists and when the “Fasten seat belt” sign turns off, he goes to the toilet, stands on the seat, disables the smoke detector, pulls out a pack of cigarettes, and smokes.