A man of discretion and ingenuity was needed for the mission in Ceylon. Jayasata, rickshaw man, was such a man.
Captain Booter of the British Colonial Service sat at ease behind his desk, his pale blue eyes filled with an expression of doubt. Before him, in a position of rigid attention, stood Jayasata, owner and operator of a rickshaw in the port city of Colombo, Ceylon. In deference to the captain he had loosened the tucked up folds of his plaid sarong so that it hung shabbily to his ankles. He held his head high, his thin bony chest stuck out, the stringy arms that looked as though they were woven of leather hung rigidly at his sides.
�Needless to say, you are a man of much honor and discretion, Jayasata.� Captain Booter was proud of his command of Singhalese, but less confident of his ability to read the minds of these unpredictable natives.
�For one year now Booter Master has used my conveyance. Never has he been charged too much. Even through the heavy rains I have waited for him.� The heavy bones of Jayasata�s cheeks and jaw showed that some of the wild Vedda blood of a hill village flowed in his veins.
For almost a minute there was silence in the little office. Then Captain Booter made up his mind.
�I wish to entrust you with a dangerous mission. I understand you are a man who is without fear.�
�I am honored. I have fear but I am its master. I have great respect for Booter Master and will do his bidding.�
�On this mission it must be understood that if you come to trouble, you cannot expect my help. Should you call on me for help, I must say that I know nothing of your trouble, only that I use your rickshaw. If your mission is completed to my satisfaction I will make you a gift of one hundred rupees.�
A smile which showed the gaps of several missing teeth split the impassive face of Jayasata. An eager light came into his eyes. One hundred rupees would buy a fine new bell for the rickshaw. The other rickshaw men would hear it and realize that a man of consequence was coming down the road. Then there would be money left for new clothes and many feasts with bottles of honey and wine.
�The privilege of serving Booter Master is worth more than many hundred rupees to a humble man. What is the mission?�
�It is said that Anazhan, the Malay man of politics has in his bungalow a gun which was stolen many months ago from the Americans. It is of this size.� He fumbled in the desk drawer, and then held up a forty-five automatic. �It is a gun of much power. Would you recognize a twin of this gun?�
�I would.�
�It is further said that men in the small group of political persons who are in sympathy with Anazhan are planning to kill a Singhalese man of much power in politics with the gun which is now in the bungalow of Anazhan. That has been told to me by a Malay man who is not pleased that such a killing should happen.�
�It is true that any killing for politics is bad.�
�Are you familiar with the ways of the thief in Ceylon?�
�Yes, Booter Master. I have heard much talk of their methods.�
�I desire you to steal the gun from the bungalow of Anazhan. It is in a locked desk which stands beneath the second window from the street on the left side of the bungalow of Anazhan. It is in the top drawer of that desk. The desk is weak. Here is a small tool with which it can be pried open.� He slid a small steel bar with a chisel end across the desk. Jayasata picked it up and looked at it with curiosity. �All these things I have learned from the friendly Malay. You know the house of Anazhan?�
�Yes, Booter Master, it is one of the fine bungalows in Slave Island. But why could you not go by day and demand the gun? There is long imprisonment for the possession of such a gun.�
�To do so would cause suspicion to be directed to all men who knew of the location of the gun. Thus no information would be trusted in the minds of some of them in the future. We would lose our chance to know the future plans of this group. In truth, they are more like men of crime than men of politics. They seek only personal riches. The Malay men of honor are not their friends.�
�I will carry out the instructions of my master. Tonight I will steal the gun. Tomorrow morning I will bring it to this compound and give it to Booter Master.�
�Very well. May Buddha crown your efforts with success. Remember that if you are captured or hurt, I can do nothing for you.�
�I will remember. Good day, Master.�
During the long day the people who rode in Jayasata�s rickshaw became frequently angry at his absent-mindedness. No matter where the fare wanted to go, he kept turning the rickshaw toward Slave Island, until rudely awakened each time by the loud shouts of the passenger. But he did manage to take two fares past Anazhan�s bungalow. He noted with satisfaction the high thick bushes on the left side of the buff colored plaster house. He began to think about how he could get through the barred window, and cursed the prevalence of thieves which caused all bungalows to have barred windows throughout.
When night came after the short dusk he was at the Clock Tower in the heart of the business section. He lighted the two flickering lamps on his rickshaw, and then started padding along on his over-sized calloused feet toward Slave Island.
As he went by the bungalow he noticed that, as he had expected, it was brightly lighted. Another half mile and he turned down a dark alley. He parked the rickshaw and hurried into a little room with a dirt floor which he shared with two other rickshaw pullers. He took a key on a string from around his neck and then went back out to the rickshaw. In a moment he returned with one of the flickering lights which he had detached, and knelt down by a tin box that contained all of his possessions. He opened the box and brought out a heavy Indian padlock and a length of chain. He tied the key to the padlock onto the same string with the box key. Some more fumbling, and he brought out a small ball of newspaper. He partially unwrapped it and felt of the lump of heavy grease it contained, then nodded in satisfaction. He slipped out of his sarong and put on a shabbier one, being careful to transfer the tool Captain Booter had given him to the top folds of the sarong. He deposited the day�s earnings in the box, shut and locked the box, tucked the grease into a top fold of his sarong along with the tool, and went back out to the rickshaw. He tucked the lock and chain under the seat cushion. Then he blew out the lights, lay down on the ground with one arm thrown over a pole of the rickshaw, and went to sleep.
A long time later he awoke. He looked around him in the faint starlight and saw by the chained rickshaw nearby that one of his friends had turned in for the night. He listened to the muted street noises, and decided it was time.
Fifteen minutes later a dark figure dragged a rickshaw up close to a fence about two blocks from Anazhan�s bungalow. In a few seconds the wheel of the vehicle was securely chained to the fence. Like a shadow in his dark sarong, Jayasata drifted down the street toward the house of the gun. As he walked by Anazhan�s house he looked carefully for lights but saw none. A quick glance satisfied him that the street was deserted, so he slipped into the black cave between the bushes and the bungalow. He stopped and squatted on the ground beneath the second window, holding his breath while he listened for sounds of movement around him. There were none.
Unclasping his linked silver belt, he let belt and sarong drop noiselessly to the ground. Then he felt for the package of grease, found it and with long careful strokes spread a coating of grease over his entire body. He dropped the package and picked up the tool he had been given, placing it between his teeth like a pirate knife.
He reached up in the darkness and found the window ledge over his head. With fingertips on the window ledge and feet against the plaster wall, he climbed up quickly, and, in a moment, was crouched on the narrow ledge, holding onto the thin bars of the window. The branches of the tall bushes touched his back gently. He reached cautiously through the bars and found to his satisfaction that the window was open.
Then he put his plan into operation. Gently he shifted his weight until he was lying on one hip on the ledge with his feet braced against the vertical ledge at one side of the window. He grasped one of the slim bars with both hands at a point which he estimated was about in the middle of the bars. Then he began to straighten out his stringy legs against the edge of the window. Those legs were full of power. For years he had been jogging along the hard streets of Colombo. Now he called on all of their power, and as he straightened them and as his arms felt as if they were being pulled from their sockets, he felt the bar slowly bend. When he estimated that he had bent it far enough, he reversed his position, and bent the bar next to it in the opposite direction. He gingerly fitted his head into the space between the bars and found that it was possibly wide enough to admit his body. He dropped silently onto the ground, found the grease and climbed back onto the ledge. Then he put a thick smear of grease along each of the two bars he had bent. He placed the grease on the outside ledge and swung his feet through the opening. He let himself into the dark room by inches, feeling cautiously downward with his feet until they touched a hard surface. The bars were tight around his shoulders. For one horrible second he thought he was stuck. Then he got additional leverage with his hands and suddenly popped through so quickly that the tool in his teeth hit one of the bars. He clung to the bars while the sharp clink seemed to resound through the silent rooms. After two minutes of silence he assumed that he hadn�t been heard, and climbed down from the desk onto the floor.
He felt the desk over carefully, locating the top drawer and the lock on the front of it. With infinite care he inserted the chisel edge of the tool near the lock and then began to exert pressure steadily upward on the handle of the tool. It was at this point that he realized how frightened he was. He, Jayasata, an honest man and the owner of a rickshaw with yellow wheels, skulking here in the dark like a criminal. But his luck had been so good and he was so far advanced on his job that he ignored his sudden desire to get out quickly.
Captain Booter had been right. The desk was frail. It was made of crisp old wood. Suddenly under the increasing pressure the entire front of the drawer came off with a rending crash and clattered onto the floor. Jayasata made no further attempt to be quiet. He fumbled into the drawer in the dark, found the chill bulk of the gun, climbed back onto the desk and squeezed himself through the bars feet first. As he was halfway through he heard loud shouts from the back of the house and saw a light flickering in the next room. Terror gave him such strength that he plunged wildly out, gouging his thigh on the ledge as he tumbled to the ground. Without taking the tool from his teeth, he grabbed the paper of grease, his sarong and belt with his free hand and ran back down the cave toward the lighter darkness of the street. Fortunately no one was nearby as he plunged out naked onto the sidewalk, falling in his anxiety to get away. He bounded back onto his feet and ran furiously up the sidewalk. About half a block from the house he plunged into some thick bushes. In haste he swabbed the grease from his face and arms and chest, then climbed back into the sarong. He buckled the silver belt tightly around him, and then placed the gun and tool into one of the top folds that overlapped the tight belt. He spent a moment arranging the cloth so as to best conceal the shape of the gun before hurling the grease into the bushes. Then he stepped quietly out onto the sidewalk. As he walked away toward his chained rickshaw he tried to control the thumping of his heart by breathing slowly and deeply. He looked back. All of the lights were on in the Anazhan bungalow. A man stood in the middle of the road looking quickly in both directions, but the friendly darkness concealed Jayasata. In half an hour he was back in the little room with the gun safely in his tin box. He lay for a time listening to the faint snores of the two men who shared the room with him. When he finally dropped off to sleep there was a smile on his lips and in his head was the melodious chiming of the new rickshaw bell.
At eight o�clock the next morning Jayasata was padding happily up the Galle Road to pick up Captain Booter at his bungalow. In a high whining tone he was singing one of the old songs of his village. Safely tucked away under the seat cushion of the rickshaw was the ugly bulk of the automatic. Maybe he was too absorbed in his song, maybe he was planning one of the feasts he was going to have with the hundred rupees. Maybe he was wondering if the captain would let him keep the pretty tool which even now was tucked away in the top fold of his sarong. At any rate he made a foolish mistake for a rickshaw man of long experience. When he turned into Captain Booter�s street, he turned directly into the path of an oncoming rickshaw.
The other driver shouted and Jayasata saw his danger too late. In spite of his sharp turn away from the path of the other, and in spite of the other man�s frantic attempts to slow his rickshaw down, the weight of the passenger in the other rickshaw carried them together. Both vehicles overturned, and the passenger was thrown out onto the pavement. Jayasata wasn�t knocked off his feet, but when he saw the gun glittering in the morning sun, he fell heavily onto it. He scooped it up, tucked it into his sarong and stood up. He looked guiltily at the other driver and at the passenger. But the other man, a brutal looking fellow, was too busy righting his vehicle and examining it for damage to have seen what Jayasata had done. The passenger, a pretty Burgher girl, was too busy examining the tears in her stockings and the dirt on her dress to have noticed. Soon a crowd gathered around them.
Just as Jayasata righted his undamaged rickshaw, the other driver grasped his arm. He held his face close to Jayasata, and looked down at him.
�Clumsy black son of a pig! For this there will be police.� He turned to his passenger. �Do you wish to inform the police of the stupidity of this unwashed one?�
A torrent of Singhalese came from the girl, �Call them now. Call them at once. The man is obviously unfit to be on the street. He is a danger. My clothes are ruined. It was not your fault. This black jungle man must see the inside of a jail.�
She started to weep, and Jayasata looked at her with the contempt of all natives for their half-breed cousins. At that moment a tall native policeman elbowed his way through the grinning crowd.
One hour later Jayasata squatted on the dirt floor of a cell in the Bambalipitya Police Station. He held one hand to his throbbing cheek where the policeman had struck him when he tried to run away in sudden panic. He had been told that his trial would not take place until three days had passed. But for one thing he was grateful. He had not been searched. Of necessity, that would take place before his trial. He thanked Buddha for clouding the brain of the man who had forgotten to search him, and for misting the eye of the man who might have seen the obvious lump of the gun in the fold of his sarong.
All day he squatted tirelessly trying to think of some way out of his trouble. He moved only to eat hungrily of the gritty rice and tea which was shoved into his cell at noon and again in the early evening. He hoped that no one would be brought in to share the cell.
After dark he tested the bars of the tiny window. He exerted all of his strength until the sweat popped out on his forehead without budging the bars a fraction of an inch. He did not really want to escape. If he did, his rickshaw, now chained in the police yard would be forfeit. But he felt a sense of obligation to Captain Booter and thought that maybe if he could make good his escape, deliver the gun and then give himself up again, his absence would be forgiven.
Above all he did not wish the gun to be found on him. Possession of a gun is a most serious offense in Ceylon. And an American gun which had been stolen. He would probably spend the rest of his life in the darkness of a prison.
He sat up trying to think of a plan until he could think no more. Then he went to sleep and dreamed of a gun that slowly grew until he could no longer conceal it. He woke up beaded with cold sweat and then dropped off again.
By noon the next day he was no nearer a solution. He decided that he must take the gun apart somehow, and bury it in the dirt floor in holes which he could dig with the tool. He took the tool out and made a few stabs at the floor. He picked up a chunk of dirt and crushed it between his fingers. It felt like the clay of his native village, clay that the women had used to fashion crude pots and set them out in the sun to bake hard. Then he noticed that the floor was as hard as concrete in the center of the cell where the beams of the late afternoon sun struck it. The germ of an idea began to grow in his mind.
He selected what looked to be the dampest corner of the cell, and began to dig rapidly with the edged tool. When he had extracted sufficient dirt from the hole, he began to moisten the pile with saliva, and knead it with his hands like dough. After half an hour of moistening and kneading, he estimated that the consistency was right. Then, after waiting silently to see if he could hear footsteps approaching, he quickly placed the gun and the edged tool on the pile of clay and formed the clay around the two objects. He shaped and patted until he had a shapeless mass, roughly oval in shape.
He next tore the hem from the bottom of his sarong and with racing fingers unraveled about an inch of it. This gave him a pile of thread on the floor which he rapidly wound into strands of heavy string. He then tied the pieces of string together into a crude sling. He placed the damp mass of clay in the sling, fitted it between the heavy bars of the cell window and lowered it so that it hung against the outside wall, suspended by one of the strands which he tied firmly around one of the bars. He then scraped loose dirt together and filled the hole he had made. The entire operation had taken less than an hour and a half. With a smug smile of satisfaction he again squatted against the wall and began to formulate the last half of his plan. As the late afternoon sun beat through the window he would occasionally walk over and twist the strand supporting his sling so that the clay would revolve in the hot sun like meat in front of a fire.
The following morning Captain Booter took a strange rickshaw to the compound from his bungalow, puzzled by the continued absence of Jayasata. His Malay friend had reported the theft of the pistol and had stated that the thief had escaped. He had practically decided that the greater value of the gun had influenced Jayasata to give up the opportunity of claiming his hundred rupee reward. He was glad that the gun had been stolen, but he felt uneasy over his misplaced trust in his rickshaw man.
Although his work often led him into strange situations, Captain Booter will never forget his interview with his first visitor that morning.
The visitor, a tall swarthy individual with a small beard, dressed in civilian clothes, was sitting in the outer office when the captain entered. In a few minutes the girl brought in his card � Fernando Perez � Deputy Supervisor of Police.
When Perez walked into the captain�s office he was carrying a hard lump of baked clay which he deposited gingerly on the captain�s desk. He smiled and bowed.
�Regretting the intruding, sir, it is necessary to be asking questions to you.� The man acted embarrassed.
�Certainly. Please sit down. And you may speak Singhalese. I understand and speak it quite well.� Booter�s smile was cordial while underneath his mind raced trying to guess the cause of the visit. The lump of baked clay baffled him.
The man sat down with an obvious sigh of relief at being able to attack this delicate subject in his own language. �Is it true, Captain Booter, that your hobby is to experiment with the causes of diseases?�
�And what if that is true?� Booter had been in service long enough to avoid any positive answers to peculiar questions. He always attempted to hedge until he had found out why the question was being asked.
�Do you know a clumsy man who pulls a rickshaw whose name is Jayasata?�
�Yes, I do. Up to the day before yesterday he brought me to work each morning and took me home each night. I cannot understand his sudden absence.�
�Did you entrust Jayasata with the delivery of this... ah... this object?�
�Yes, I did.�
�Is not the carrying of such an object through the streets in a rickshaw a danger to the entire city? And this man Jayasata forgot the address to which he was to deliver it and was returning to your bungalow to have you tell it to him again. Does that not show he is a careless man? He had an accident while returning to your bungalow. Suppose the... ah... bundle here had broken in that accident. The germs of black plague would have been at large in this city.�
�I admit it was careless of me. I shall entrust such items to more capable messengers in the future.�
�I am glad to know that Jayasata was not lying when he told us of the contents of the clay. We would have cracked it open, but he fell into such a hysteria of fear that it was not done. I should have felt foolish in bringing it to you if it contained some other object.�
�I am glad you had the intelligence to bring it to me. It is most dangerous. Do you wish to see me open it � I will probably be able to keep the germs under control.� He picked it up and handled it carelessly.
Perez licked his dry lips with the tip of a nervous tongue. �It is not at all necessary, sir. I must hurry back. Jayasata informs you he will be detained about a month, at the end of which time he will resume his practice of taking you to and from your bungalow, should you be willing.�
�Please tell Jayasata that I am pleased that he did not permit the contents of the clay object to escape and that I will be pleased to rehire him at the end of his period as a guest of the city. Good day.�
The tall figure of the deputy supervisor retrieved his soiled calling card from the corner of the captain�s desk and hurried out.
After he was gone, Booter tested his guess by cracking open the clay. Inside, still coated with moist dirt were the gun and the tool.
He did some rapid juggling of the official budget and decided that one month hence he could well afford two hundred rupees. One hundred for the theft, and one hundred for the method of delivery.
Jayasata became known as one of the happiest and most cheerful prisoners that had ever been locked into Bambalipitya prison.