The Golden Leopard Read Online Free PDF Page B

let himself be turned, felt behind him for the seat cushion, and lowered himself gingerly. When it wasn’t spinning, his head was splitting like a log at the sharp end of an ax.
    The wages of virtuous living, he reflected sourly. Having fallen out of the habit of vice, he was having considerable difficulty falling into it again.
    “If you wish, Duran-Sahib, I shall provide a remedy for the consequences of your godless immoderation.”
    Duran focused his bleary eyes on the slender man who was standing in the invisible envelope of stillness that always surrounded him. Arms relaxed at his sides, Shivaji wore loose white cotton trousers and a knee-length overtunic belted with a pewter-colored sash. His straight black hair, gray streaked and parted in the middle, reached below his shoulders. He left off his turban when they were in private, and his shoes as well, but he never removed from his left earlobe the inch-long emblem of his profession.
    A eunuch at the nizam’s court had told Duran what it signified. “The Iron Dagger,” he had whispered in a reverent tone. “The Sign of the Assassin.”
    There were more subtle signs as well, Duran had soon begun to notice. The hard calluses along the soles of Shivaji’s narrow feet. The power in his slender hands. The controlled, assured grace with which he moved.
    “The draught will ease the pain in your head,” Shivaji said. “Shall I prepare it for you?”
    Duran nodded assent and let his eyes drift shut. It had been a long night, the first he’d been permitted to spend outside the dingy rooms they had taken in Little Russell Street, and he had set himself to make the most of his unaccustomed freedom. Shivaji could not follow him into Christie’s, nor into White’s Club, where he’d gone after leaving the auction house.
    The manager, remembering him, had advanced him a handful of markers on credit, and the few gamesters who had braved the thunderstorm were ripe for the plucking. He had come away with several hundred pounds that had to be hidden before Shivaji took them from him.
    But where could he conceal a stash of banknotes in this sparsely furnished room? He wrenched open his eyes and looked around. There was a lumpy bed several inches shorter than his height, the shabby chair he was sitting on, a stand of drawers, a commode with a basin and shaving mirror, and not much else.
    Shivaji slept on a pallet in the dressing room, where he kept the battered portmanteau and large wooden cabinet that seemed to be his only possessions. Once, when he was left alone for a few minutes, Duran had rifled through the cabinet, discovering scores of bottles and vials, packets of herbs and powders, mortar and pestle, and metal implements suitable for drawing teeth, lancing boils, and performing most any form of primitive surgery.
    There were poisons, too, he had no doubt. A man under sentence of death could not help but notice potential means of dispatching him.
    Escape was the ticket. Gathering and hoarding money. Making contact with people who might help him. Not many candidates for the position, once he ruled out anyone who had known him in India. His reputation there, not quite all of it earned, placed him square on the border between rakehell and traitor to his countrymen. He was, he supposed, a little of both.
    There were two or three men he recalled from his previous visit to England, but the last time he’d seen them, he was collecting the gaming debts they owed. They were unlikely to remember him with any great fondness.
    That left John Pageter, a decent, straitlaced military fellow who had boarded the Bombay Caravan in Cape Town. Pageter had been reasonably good company on the voyage, despite his refusal to gamble or procure for his shipmate the occasional bottle of brandy. But any man could be corrupted. Duran had only to find Pageter’s weakness and exploit it.
    His thumbs pricking, he looked up to see that Shivaji had returned with a half-filled glass, which Duran