Tooth and Nail, Fur and Scale Read online

  They heard the raking sound above them again, and Cruywagen pushed the joystick to the right, making the drone bank hard, tiles flashing across the display.

  ‘There!’ said Hari as a shadow appeared on the screen for just a moment before disappearing. The hunter took the drone higher.

  There! Hari thought to himself this time as they saw the black shape splayed across the roof, poised above one of the skylights. As they watched, a moon-cast shadow fell over them.

  Just then, Hari heard a muffled beeping sound and saw Cruywagen jerk his head to one side. He pulled out an earpiece that the boy hadn’t seen him wearing, and Hari realized that the beeping sound—an alarm indicating that an intruder was on the loft floor—must have been way louder for him.

  Cruywagen frantically tapped on the monitor and began cycling through the views of the interiors again. A shadow flickered past one of the camera feeds, bounded by a thin red rectangle, and the man pressed his eye to the gunsight, scanning the floor in its general direction.

  ‘There!’ the hunter said, and before Hari knew it, he’d sprung to his feet and was sprinting down the catwalk. The boy gasped as the man grabbed the railing and vaulted himself over it. Craning his neck, he saw that the South African was wrapped around one of the metal columns that held the catwalk up, gun strapped across his back. Cruywagen shimmied halfway down and leapt, landing catlike on the floor below. Hari saw that the gun was in his hands again. The boy pushed himself up and ran to the ladder propped against the other end of the catwalk.

  There was a loud ruffling as the birds, made restless by his movements, began flapping around in their coops. Cruywagen had seen the creature streaking across the floor from the direction of the door to the back of the building, where the moonlight didn’t reach. He swept the area with his infrared gunsight, but couldn’t see any movement. For just a moment, he brought up the monitor on his arm, which was set to a six-way split-screen, each showing the feed from one of the motion-tracking cameras on the wires above. If any animal had been moving across one of their fields of view, a red box would highlight it.

  Three red boxes were now on display.

  One of them was obviously Cruywagen himself, moving slowly between two rows of pigeon coops. The smaller vertically oriented object near the back of the loft was probably the boy. In his heightened awareness, the hunter knew that the kid wasn’t on the catwalk any more—he must have come down the ladder.

  In the third red box was a creature on all fours, moving fast between the feeds. But Cruywagen could see nothing in his gunsight apart from the slow rain of feathers from the frenzied birds above.

  When he reached the far end of the building, he saw a shadow out of the corner of his eye—something momentarily obstructing the moonlight streaming through the open door. He whipped around, pointing the gun at it. If he’d been alone, he would have squeezed off a round along the figure’s estimated trajectory, but the boy’s presence complicated things . . .

  ‘Don’t shoot!’ said a frightened baritone.

  A grown man’s voice.

  Cruywagen calmed the chain reaction of logic that was threatening to overwhelm his mind. He didn’t need logic just at this moment. He needed instinct and the lightning-quick reflexes conditioned by years of training.

  He glanced at the monitor and saw that there were several moving objects displayed on it—most of them humanoid.

  He focused on the four-legged creature, which seemed to be darting from coop to coop. As he watched it, it settled near one that appeared empty, and seemed to be peeking inside it. Cruywagen watched it for a couple of moments before he realized that the coop was not empty. There was a single bird inside it.

  He stalked towards the creature, the cage and the bird, his rubber-treaded shoes making no sound on the floor. He swung his gun up and looked through its sight at the roof of the coop.

  The creature didn’t even seem to notice him. Instead, he saw, it was swiping at the bolt that kept the cage’s door in place, trying to open it. But the bolt was just outside its reach, and it kept missing.

  The hunter watched it. Transfixed. It was like nothing he’d ever seen before.

  Rather, it was like a lot of things. It was about the size of a big house cat, with a shaggy black coat and big feline ears. What made it look bigger was the long, bushy tail, which it held high as it struggled to unlock the coop. Its movements were frantic, like a cat’s, but imprecise and redundant in a way that reminded John of a puppy he’d once owned.

  He stared at its eyes—brilliant in the infrared of the gun’s scope—blinking in concentration above the snub snout that ended in a tiny dark nose. It didn’t seem to have any instinct for self-preservation. A man was pointing a gun at it from seven feet away, and there it was, doggedly trying to unlatch the cage.

  A wave of almost maternal affection coursed through him. He wanted to drop his gun and approach it. Somehow, he knew it wouldn’t run—that it would accept his caresses and brush his face with that warm bushy tail, its hairs tickling his nostrils, that it would nuzzle up against him and welcome his warmth. Or at least he hoped it would.

  He was so mesmerized by its movements that he noticed too late that a large figure had detached itself from the shadows behind the coop and was leaping for the creature. His hunters’ instincts came down on him like a hammer, and his finger tightened on the trigger.

  And just at that moment, he felt something barrel into his side, knocking the wind out of him and making him keel over. The shot rang out as he fell, the gun oriented much higher than he had planned.

  ‘Aaargh!’ cried a man’s voice.

  Then Cruywagen heard a series of noises in this order:

  The metallic clatter of a pigeon coop falling to the floor, which turned into a muted clank as something heavy came down upon it.

  The dull thud of his own fall, followed by an internal crunch that only he sensed.

  And the loud and sustained crash of a full-grown adult falling from a moderate height into a stack of wooden crates.

  ‘Keep him down!’ said the deep voice he’d heard before as the lights came on in the loft. ‘Don’t let him shoot!’

  ‘I’m trying,’ said Hari, whom he identified as the body that had slammed into his side. The boy was astride him now, trying desperately to pin down his gun-hand.

  ‘What on earth are you doing?’ Cruywagen said. ‘Get off me!’

  ‘We can’t let you shoot her, Mr John,’ said Hari. ‘We can’t let you kill Bubby!’

  ‘I’ve got his gun,’ said the baritone as its owner pulled his rifle away. ‘I think he shot Prabhu!’

  Cruywagen pushed the boy off, who wasn’t as desperate now that the hunter didn’t have his weapon. Cruywagen sat on the floor and looked around.

  Hari was in front of him, scrambling to get out of his reach. He was breathing hard from fear and fatigue.

  To his side, kneeling beside the coop that he had toppled over, was Virendar, his eyes searching for signs of life among the crates that had broken Prabhu’s fall.

  Behind him stood Manthan Mishra, pointing the gun at him. ‘You shot Prabhu!’ he said.

  On top of the coop, now upended, was the creature, which had finally succeeded in opening the latch. Cruywagen noticed that the coop was empty for real this time, and that the creature looked very satisfied as it tried to swipe away the feathers that clung to its muzzle.

  ‘Bubby ne Ranjha ko khaa liya!’ said Virendar with some consternation.

  ‘What the hell is going on?’ asked Cruywagen, unable to look away from the animal as it rolled itself into a fat, fluffy ball and regarded him, swishing its bottlebrush tail across its face. Its eyes were black pearls.

  ‘We were trying to stop you,’ said Mishra, his eyes following Virendar, who’d run across the loft to where Prabhu lay among the crates. ‘You were going to shoot Bubby.’

  Hari had managed to get on his feet and was following Virendar with some caution.

  ‘And now you’ve shot Pr
abhu instead!’ said Mishra, looking at the bhootbilli gloomily. ‘He was a rank buffoon, but a good man, that Prabhu.’

  ‘Relax, you idiot,’ said Cruywagen. ‘You think I’d shoot some kind of unique animal with lethal bullets?’

  Mishra put the gun down, suddenly alert. ‘You mean you used—’

  ‘That’s a tranquillizer gun you’re holding,’ said Cruywagen. ‘I used a dart with just enough juice to put down a 120-pound beast—he should be fine as long as it didn’t hit him in a sensitive area.’

  Virendar and Hari pulled the skinny man up by his armpits. ‘Buh-buh-buh,’ he was saying as they brought him to the hunter.

  Cruywagen plucked out the dart from the man’s leg. ‘So, you guys have been in on this together all along?’ he asked.

  ‘All along? Hah! Until two weeks ago, I was trying to shoot her down, when these three came to me,’ said Mishra. ‘I didn’t believe them of course, but they made me promise I wouldn’t shoot until I saw the beast!’

  Cruywagen smirked. ‘And why didn’t you guys do the same with me?’

  ‘We didn’t know you! I mean, they didn’t know much about me either, but you were a completely unknown quantity!’

  ‘So you assumed that staging an intervention at the last possible second was the best thing you could do? And you thought I was shooting to kill!’

  Mishra held out a hand, and Cruywagen grabbed it. Once he was standing up, Mishra handed him the gun.

  ‘We’ve been looking for Bubby all evening. Prabhu went up to the roof because we’ve seen her come in through the skylights a few times. But then, we all knew she’d come in when she pleased, and none of us would find her before that. That’s how it always is. Hari was supposed to stick with you and tell you to hold off once you saw her in your camera feeds, but you rushed in before he could stop you.’

  ‘Why didn’t you just scare her away?’

  ‘Look at her!’ said Mishra. ‘Does she look like she’ll scare? She was made without a flight response!’

  The bhootbilli licked the last of Ranjha off her paws and started grooming herself, sitting by the scene of the crime.

  ‘She doesn’t need it,’ Mishra continued. ‘Nothing that confronts her seems to be capable of aggression.’

  Cruywagen watched her for a while, then sighed and started pulling his cameras off the wires. ‘Cuteness,’ he said. ‘It’s a unique self-defence mechanism.’

  ‘What do you plan to do now?’ asked Hari. They’d laid Prabhu on the floor. Virendar was holding his head up as Hari folded a jute sack under his head for a pillow. Mishra was scratching the bhootbilli’s neck.

  ‘I hope one of you gentlemen can call me a cab to the airport,’ said Cruywagen. ‘I don’t think Mr Dalvi’s going to be loaning me his car any more.’

  Mishra called an all-night cab company before he and Virendar took Prabhu away to the local doctor. The sun was just coming up when Cruywagen’s taxi arrived. Bubby had disappeared through the skylight an hour before, as she usually did.

  Hari had helped the South African remove all the wires and equipment from the loft, and felt a pang of regret as he watched the man dump his bags in the car’s boot.

  ‘So, you’re going straight to Johannesburg?’ he said.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Cruywagen, furiously typing away on his phone. ‘I’m just sending an email to Dalvi, telling him I didn’t see anything and that my camera feeds didn’t pick up anything either.’

  ‘Won’t he be suspicious? Ranjha’s gone, after all . . .’

  ‘That might serve to heighten the mystery element, don’t you think?’ He sent off the email with a final tap, and stuck the phone in his pocket. ‘It was nice to meet you, Hari,’ he said, extending his hand.

  Hari shook it. ‘I’m sorry, Mr John,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry you had to come all the way for nothing. It must have cost you a lot of money to—’

  ‘It’s all right,’ said Cruywagen. ‘I’m glad I didn’t let Dalvi pay my fare. That might have made running away like this a bit more unethical.’

  ‘But you’re okay losing all that money?’

  ‘I think I have a shot at making it back,’ said Cruywagen, slapping the boot of the car shut. ‘I’ve got a few videos of Bubby in here that I suspect might be worth something. People seem to like this kind of thing on the Internet.’

  Hari clamped his jaws shut with a click.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Cruywagen. ‘They’re all in close-up. I’ll see that I don’t share anything that can help identify the loft.’ He got into the car, slammed the door shut and rolled down the window. ‘Take care of yourself.’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘And of Bubby. I think the legend should be enough to keep her safe for now, but eventually, you might have to think of something else.’

  ‘Like what?’

  Cruywagen shrugged. ‘Maybe introduce her to Dalvi? Who knows—she might even endear herself to him.’

  ‘Hah! Not him. That man is only moved by money. And his pigeons.’

  The driver started the engine and a black cloud billowed from the car’s exhaust. ‘It might be worth a try,’ said Cruywagen as the car began rolling ahead. ‘You never know where you might find a heart!’

  Hari waved goodbye as the vehicle pulled away, and watched it until it disappeared into the distance.

  BHOOTBILLI

  In October 2010, sightings of a strange catlike creature in the Sanjay Park area of Pune were reported. Eyewitnesses claimed that the creature was ‘fat and broad with a long tail, black in colour, [with] a face like a dog and back like a mongoose.’2 It appeared every evening for ten days, in that span of time, managing to devour forty-five pigeons and a goat belonging to the area’s residents.

  They tried to set traps for it and capture it on camera, but it was always too fast for them. So they christened it the bhootbilli, or the ghost cat, and though there was much speculation about what manner of creature it might be—a panther, a civet or some new species of the big cats—no one ever found out for sure.

  MAGADHA NOIR

  I knew I was in for trouble the moment she walked through the door.

  It was a warm Mangalavasara1 morning in the month of Chaitra2, and I’d just received a long-awaited treatise about the advanced uses of purified opium in Ayurvedic preparations. I had my feet up on my desk, my head resting against the back wall of my office and the manuscript spread open across my lap. I was so absorbed in the recipe for a tincture that was said to induce absolute honesty in anyone who consumed it that I didn’t notice the woman standing at the door until she spoke.

  ‘You the man they call the fixer?’ she asked. Her voice was mature and throaty, but had a playful lilt that pitched the ends of her sentences high.

  I looked up from the book, and there she was—a perfect silhouette of the female form against a rectangle of daylight, the diaphanous layers of her uttariya3 billowing around her in a draught of cool air.

  The manuscript snapped shut in my hands, and my feet came off the table.

  She walked into the room, shoving the door shut behind her. With the glare gone, I could see her better. Her hair was up in an intricate arrangement that looked like it would come loose at any moment. Her garments were of a deep-blue silk patterned with silver threadwork, the antariya4 worn lower than was the fashion in Magadha. She wore heavy silver around her fingers, neck and hips, and unseen anklets jingled with every step.

  ‘I hate that name,’ I said. ‘I prefer the term problem-solver.’

  Her emerald eyes stood out under heavy lids dusted midnight blue, and they sized me up without inhibition. Between slender arched brows, a long bindi wriggled halfway up her forehead. Her lips were pink and full, and when she opened them, her teeth were the purest white.

  ‘Sounds like the same thing,’ she said. ‘I don’t like bothering with names myself, so why don’t you just call me your client?’

  ‘Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,’ I said, indicating the rickety wooden stool on th
e other side of the table, but making no move to clean it of its obvious veneer of dust. ‘I haven’t even heard your case.’

  She glanced at the seat and raised an eyebrow. ‘It doesn’t look like you’re spoilt for choice.’

  ‘Actually, I’m just real picky,’ I said, forcing a smile.

  She walked over to my side of the table and sat on its edge unselfconsciously. Up close, I could smell her perfume—a heady fragrance that didn’t derive from any flower or mineral that I’d ever twigged.

  ‘I need you to find something for me,’ she said. ‘It’s urgent and important, and you’ll be well rewarded for your efforts.’

  Straight to business then. ‘Go on,’ I said.

  ‘It’s a valuable—a jewel that was stolen from me last night.’

  ‘A jewel . . . was it set in a ring? Or perhaps in a pendant?’

  ‘Neither.’

  ‘Huh. What sort of stone was it?’

  She hesitated. ‘It’s not of any kind you might be familiar with,’ she finally said. ‘But I can describe it for you.’

  It was my turn to raise an eyebrow.

  She continued, undaunted. ‘It looks bright blue or indigo, depending on the lighting. Its surface is many-faceted and usually clear, though becoming clouded under certain circumstances. If you hold it against the light, you will see a pattern in what seems like sparkling gold thread, swimming among specks of gold.’

  I stroked my chin several times, myriad lines of questioning diverging in my mind. Finally I decided on ‘Where’d you lose it?’

  ‘In the market district. Near the butcher’s shop on Vasu’s Way.’

  I baulked. ‘You were on Vasu’s Way after sundown?’

  She cracked a wry smile. ‘So? I go where I please when I please.’

  ‘Do you often choose destinations where mugging is a certainty and murder highly probable?’

  The smile soured. ‘I can take care of myself,’ she said. ‘Usually. In fact, I only lost the jewel to the fourth man who laid a hand on me.’