The electricity was on at the hotel, but the laboring air conditioner had not cooled the room appreciably. Amrita showered first and I had just pulled off my soaked shirt when there was a heavy knock at the door.

"Ah. Mr. Luczak! Namastey."

"Namastey, Mr. Krishna." I remained standing in the doorway, blocking it.

"You had a successful conclusion to your transaction?"

"Yes, thank you."

The heavy eyebrows went up. "But you have not read Mr. Das's poem?"

"No, not yet." I braced myself for a request to borrow the manuscript.

"Yes, yes. I do not want to bother you. I wish to give you this in anticipation of your meeting with Mr. M. Das." Krishna handed over a wrinkled paper sack.

"I have no plans to meet with —"

"Yes, yes." Krishna shrugged from the waist up. "But who is to know? Good-bye, Mr. Luczak." I shook Krishna's extended hand. Before I could look in the sack he was gone, whistling down the corridor toward the elevators.

"Who was that?" called Amrita from the bathroom. I sat on the bed.

"Krishna," I said and opened the sack. There was something wrapped in a loose bundle of rags.

"What did he want?"

I stared at the thing in my hands. It ws an automatic pistol: metal, chromed, tiny. It was as small and light as cap pistols I'd played with as a boy. But the muzzle opening looked real enough, and when I figured out how to slide the small clip out, the jacketed cartridges were all too real. Tiny lettering above the handgrip read GUISSEPPE .25 CALIBRE. "Goddamn it to shit," I said softly.

"I said, What did he want?" called Amrita.

"Nothing!" I yelled and looked around. Four steps took me to the closet. "Just to say good-bye."

"What did you say just now?"

"Nothing." I stuffed the pistol and clip in the bag separately, wrapped them tightly in rags, and tossed the bag as far back as I could on the wide shelf above the hangars.

"You mumbled something," said Amrita as she emerged from the bathroom.

"Just trying to get you to hurry up," I said and pulled a green knit shirt and tan slacks from the closet and closed the door.

We made arrangements for a cab to take us to the airport at 4:45 A.M. and then we turned in early. I lay there for hours, watching the silhouettes of furniture slowly materialize as my eyes adjusted to the darkness.

It would have been an understatement to say that I felt dissatisfied with myself. I lay there in the moist Calcutta night and realized that my actions during the entire time I'd been in the city had been either pointless or hesitant or both. Half the time I had behaved like a brainless tourist, and the other half I had let the locals treat me like one. What the hell was I going to write about? How had I let a city frighten me for no real reason? Fear . . . nameless, asinine fear . . . had controlled my reactions more than any attempt at logic.

Krishna. That insane son of a bitch. What is the gun for? I tried to convince myself that the present of the gun was another one of Krishna's senseless, melodramatic gestures, but what if it was part of some elaborate scam? What if he contracted the police and told them that the American was carrying an illegal firearm? I sat up in bed, my skin clammy. No. How the hell could that benefit Krishna? Are handguns illegal in Calcutta? For all I knew, Calcutta was the home office of the N.R.A.

Sometime before midnight I arose and turned on the tiny table lamp. Amrita stirred but did not wake. Victoria was asleep with her rump raised under the light blanket. The catches on the briefcase made a soft click in the silence.

The pages were yellowed, tattered, and strewn about the inside of the briefcase, but they were also numbered with bold strokes of a fountain pen and it took me only minutes to set them in order. There were over five hundred pages, and it made for a heavy stack of poetry. I smiled ruefully as I thought of any American magazine editor being confronted with five hundred pages of verse.

There was no cover page, no title, no cover letter, and no author's name on the pages. If I hadn't know that the massive work was purported to have been written by M. Das, there would have been no way to guess from the manuscript.

The first page looked like a poor carbon copy. I leaned closer to the light and began reading.

Several more stanzas of this rough verse painted a grisly picture of the demon Mahishasura, a powerful, malevolent thing which threatened even the gods. Then, on page 3, the meter and "voice" changed drastically. I translated a scrawled marginal notation as Kalidasa: Kumarambhava 400 A.D. new trans.

I yawned. "A fearful flock of evil birds." God help me when I give this to Chet Morrow. Nothing could help me if I brought this as my "new Das epic" to Abe Bronstein. I skimmed through several pages of similar turgid verse. The only reason I didn't put it down then was a vague curiosity as to how Parvati was going to beat the apparently invincible Demon Mahishasura. Stanza after stanza described the opening of the battle between the gods and demons. It was vintage Homer via Rod McKuen.

I could identify with that. Still, I continued reading. Things looked bad for the goddess Parvati. Even with the assistance of the great god Siva, she could not best the mighty Mahishasura. Parvati was reborn as the warrioress Durga, ten hands brandishing weapons of battle. Millennia passed as the struggle progressed, but Mahishasura could not be conquered.