Chapter 16

  

“I thought you were dead,” said the intruder in my apartment.

I whirled around.

“You ever hear of checking the messages on your phone?” he continued.

Sanjay sat on the couch with his cell phone in one hand and a splayed pack of cards in the other.

“People have been murdered around you,” Sanjay continued. “It’s not nice to leave me hanging like that.”

“You know I hate it when you do that,” I said. “Would it really be too much to ask that you don’t break into my apartment whenever you feel like it?”

“I was worried. You didn’t answer your phone or return my calls. What happened to your arm?” Sanjay’s eyes focused on the gauze bandage wrapped around my palm.

“I was mugged earlier. That’s why I don’t have my phone.”

Sanjay jumped up, spilling the deck of cards onto the floor. “That’s why I scared you! Jaya, I’m so sor—”

“Forget it,” I said. “I’m fine. And you didn’t scare me. You just disturbed me.” I turned away from Sanjay, grabbing a handful of ice and wrapping it in a kitchen towel.

“Please tell me this was a random mugging,” Sanjay said, “that you were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“He got the map. Along with my phone that had the picture of the map.”

Sanjay breathed deeply. “You aren’t badly hurt?” he asked, watching me as I leaned against the kitchen counter and rested the ice on my elbow.

“Superficial.”

“Good,” he said. “Then I can still be pissed at you.”

“For what?”

“You fought back, didn’t you? Because you knew you’d lose your only copy of the map. That’s why you got hurt.”

“He got my laptop, too.”

“You’re going to get much more seriously hurt one of these days.”

“Thanks, dad.”

Sanjay’s olive skin flushed. “This is serious.”

“I know.” The ice wasn’t helping, so I tossed it into the sink and went to the kitchen junk drawer. I took out a map of San Francisco and opened it up on my small round dining table. I instinctively reached for my bag before remembering it was gone. Sanjay didn’t speak and I rummaged through more drawers to find a red marker. I drew an X on the location that had been marked on the original hand-drawn map. I wrote Lost and Found where they had been marked before. I wouldn’t have a chance to check the translations now. I circled the few buildings I remembered being drawn on Anand’s map.

“What are you doing?” Sanjay asked.

“Isn’t it obvious?”

“You can’t be serious about recreating the map. You’re going after the treasure? Weren’t you listening when I told you earlier about the new information about Steven Healy? That’s why you got mugged. This is dangerous. Not a retired man’s hobby like we thought, but something big. Something that could get you killed.”

“After what Tamarind and I discovered today, I definitely need to go back.”

“They know about you.” His dark eyes creased down at the edges. “I don’t want anything to happen to—wait. What did you say? You discovered something?”

“Yeah, it looks like it might be a treasure originally from India, and—”

“Never mind,” Sanjay said, cutting me off. “I shouldn’t have asked. I don’t need to know. You don’t need to know either. I don’t want to encourage you about this thing and doing something stupid.”

“When have I ever done anything stupid?”

“Do I need to remind you about what happened earlier this summer? You didn’t tell me what was going on, and look at the mess you got yourself into.”

“I don’t have to tell you everything I do. You’re not my dad. You’re not even my boyfriend.”

Sanjay turned bright red. “Of course not. I just meant—”

“I didn’t do anything stupid there,” I said, “and I’m not going to do anything stupid now.”

“Right.” Sanjay paused to pick up the deck of cards he’d spilled on the floor. “In that case, I suppose you should tell me what you found out at the library.”

I still had the pirate flag sticker in my back pocket. I handed it to Sanjay.

“Tamil pirates?” he asked.

I stared at Sanjay. “How did you know?”

“It’s just one of those things one picks up.”

“About my Uncle Anand, the pirate?”

“What are you talking about?” Sanjay asked. “I was talking about this flag. You said you’d learned something about an Indian treasure and showed me this.”

“So you don’t know about Pirate Vishnu?”

“Who’s Pirate Vishnu? I was talking about the Jolly Roger pirate flag.”

“I thought the flag was English. Or at least European of some sort.”

“Yeah, but one of the theories of where the name of the pirate flag came from is that it was named after the Tamil pirate Ali Raja. You know the English with their nicknames. They called him and his flag Ally Roger or something, which evolved into the Jolly Roger. You don’t know this? Jaya, you really are the worst Indian ever.”

“You know too much random Indian trivia.”

“What does the pirate flag have to do with Anand?”

“Tamarind and I discovered why he would have needed to draw a treasure map—he was a pirate in the San Francisco Bay a hundred years ago.”

“A real pirate who commandeered boats and made people walk the plank?”

“As far as the newspapers reported, he didn’t make anyone walk the plank. But the year he attacked ships was the same year of Anand’s letters home that Steven Healy was after.”

“Listen,” Sanjay said after scowling at his phone, “are you really all right?”

“I’m fine.”

“Then I should go. I have to stop by the benefit theater before our music set tonight to check on something. But if you’d rather not be alone, you could come with me to get familiar with the stage.”

“Why would I need to do that?”

“You agreed to be my assistant tomorrow.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Yes, you did. Jaya, it’s just this once. Grace is gone. I can’t do it alone.”

“Can’t you do card tricks like the one you were practicing?”

“Don’t you want to help the orphans?”

“Orphans?”

“Well, it’s not only orphans. It’s a homeless benefit, like I told you. I’m sure many of them were formerly orphans. It’s a good cause.”

I felt my will caving. I was now ridiculously behind on my research paper, had to get a new computer and phone, needed to find out how my family history could have been so wrong, and on top of it all I had to be careful in case a murderer was after me. But how could I say no to such a request from my best friend?

“What do I have to do?” I asked.

Sanjay grinned. “Show up at the Folsom Street Theater at noon tomorrow and I’ll show you. Bring some shoes that make less noise than your usual heels.”

A flower appeared in his hand out of nowhere. He handed it to me and was out the door.

After closing the door and making sure it was firmly locked, I pulled at the petals on the flower. The flower wasn’t plastic or silk, but was a real daisy. Sanjay was good. It reminded me of the first time we ever met.

It had been on the first day I moved to San Francisco a year before. I was moving into the apartment above Nadia’s house. My clunky old car had been double-parked in front of the Victorian. It was before I inherited my roadster from my dad’s friend. I’d been bouncing around for so long that I hadn’t acquired any furniture, so all of my earthly possessions, aside from my books, fit in my car. I’d just carried a box of clothes inside. I walked back outside and found Sanjay sitting on the back bumper of my car.

Of course I didn’t know his name at the time. What I saw was a fashionably dressed South Asian man with meticulously styled hair, somewhere around my age, holding a bowler hat in his hands.

“This your tabla?” he asked in a California accent.

My tabla drum case sat nestled lovingly between a duvet and a bag of sweaters.

“If you’re the owner of a local live music venue, the answer is yes.”

Sanjay smiled the broadest of smiles, revealing the whitest of white teeth. Out of nowhere, a bouquet of flowers popped into his hand.

“Almost as good,” he said, handing me the flowers.

I sniffed two fragrant red roses and looked up at him in surprise. “These are real.”

“But of course.”

“How did you—?”

“A magician never reveals his secrets.”

“One of the roses is a little squished.” I prodded a limp red petal.

“Really?” He got up from the bumper of my car to inspect the petals more carefully. “Damn. I thought I’d solved that.”

“You were telling me how you were going to give me a moonlighting job.”

“I can’t give you one myself, but I can get you one.”

The next night I brought my Indian drums to the Tandoori Palace, and the rest is history.

  

A knock on my door startled me from the memory. I reached for the doorknob without looking through the peep hole, figuring Sanjay had forgotten something.

Instead, an unsmiling man with an unruly head of black hair stood in my doorway. Maybe Sanjay was right and I was in over my head. I was about to slam the door and hope for the best when the dark-haired man held up a badge in his hand.

“Inspector Valdez,” he said. “Homicide.”

I didn’t know whether to be relieved or not.

“You Jaya Jones?”

“That’s me.”

“You want to tell us why a murder victim gave you a handwritten receipt for a valuable object hours before he was killed?”