Title: The Game
Author(s): Laurie R. King
Publisher(s): Bantam Books
Pages: 384
Year: 2004
Format: MOBY
Language: English
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For two days, we camped in a tiny room in the back of a spice-seller’s in a small bazaar to the south of Delhi. The warring fragrances were a mixed blessing, becoming at times so powerful as to make one dizzy, but even when sealed up for the night they succeeded in overriding the less appealing odours of our surroundings.
I should say, rather, that I camped there, for Holmes spent the entire first day scavenging through the city for what we should need; on the second day, he abandoned the shack well before dawn, leaving me with a jug of a particularly disgusting and considerably more permanent skin dye. He was away until the afternoon, and returned to find me black of hair and brown of skin, to say nothing of bored to tears. He rapped on the sheet of metal that was the door, and I removed the prop to let him in.
I had to admit, Holmes dressed down better than I did. Apart from being far too tall, he was every inch a native labourer, and even his height he could disguise by rearranging his spine to drop a full six inches. He set a frayed flour sack onto the dirt floor and dropped to his heels by my side, pulling a dripping leaf-wrapped parcel from his breast and laying a slab of friedpuri on top. I eagerly peeled back the leaf and mashed the rice and lentils into manageable little balls, a technique I had perfected in Palestine.
“Did you get everything you needed?” I asked around a mouthful.
Holmes chuckled. “Nesbit nearly rode me down. It would appear that beggars are not welcome along the British rides, and he sits a high-strung horse. But yes, his sources are better than my own, and even if the wrong person hears of his purchases, little will be thought of it—the man is forever acquiring odd objects for his own purposes.”
Most of what Holmes required for the next stage in our campaign he had found in the bazaars, but it would appear that revolvers were not generally available on the open market, and to ingratiate himself into the underworld of Delhi in pursuit of firearms would have taken time. So he had set off that morning with the intention of asking Nesbit for one, and had clearly returned successful. I swallowed the last of the rice, scrubbed the inside of the banana leaf with the stub of bread, and pulled the flour sack over to see what he had found.