UNGER. I had come to depend on seeing her once or twice a week for the sessions of tantric massage, and I had yearned for her while she'd been away—her week in Mirzapur. I was like an old-fashioned woman waiting for a man to call, passive, dependent, helpless. She said that tantra was all-encompassing ancient wisdom that included sex, as it did every aspect of life. Yet for me the massage was not a sexual act but a way of prolonging desire: at its best it had no end, at least not an explosive finality, but rather a tapering glow of intense well-being. "Better than sex," I'd said to her. She liked my saying that, yet still I was possessed. My week in Calcutta without her had allowed me to plan the stay at the Ananda that resulted in my securing the stained piece of carpet from the closet. I guessed that the entire carpet had been cut and distributed throughout the hotel. And now I had the police working on identifying anything that had adhered to it. I had studied the scene of the crime.
