The flight from New Delhi had gone reasonably well, although it was delayed by more than a half-hour. It was also very crowded. The ride from the airport to the hotel took almost as long as the plane ride, but both Laurie and Jack had been entranced by the view outside their windows. There had been a constant cavalcade of small, primitive and crowded commercial shops of a bewildering variety, and the closer they got to the center of the city, the more squalid they became. It was easy for the two pathologists to believe India had a billion people, considering the population density they were witnessing, and also a half-billion stray animals.

Check-in at the hotel went smoothly, particularly because the general manager, Pradeep Bajpai, was an acquaintance of Dr. Ram. And Pradeep had been helpful by providing the contact with a professor at the Banaras Hindu University by the name of Jawahar Krishna, who was willing to be a guide. Jawahar had come directly to the hotel, while the group had an early dinner. The thought was that they might be out a good portion of the night, and they’d better eat while they could.

“It is a city that takes getting used to,” Jawahar said, understanding where Laurie was coming from. He was somewhere in his forties or early fifties, with a broad face, bright eyes, and curly gray hair. With his Western-style clothes and flawless English, he could have been a professor at an Ivy League college. It turned out he’d studied at Columbia University for several years.

“I’m alternately impressed with the feeling of religiosity and repulsed by the filth,” Laurie continued. “Particularly the excrement, human and otherwise.” They had passed numerous cows, stray dogs, and even some goats wandering among the throngs of people, the garbage, and all kinds of trash.

“We make no excuses,” Jawahar said. “I’m afraid it has been this way for more than three thousand years and will continue to be like this for the next.”

Jawahar had also been particularly helpful for the group’s real reason for having come to Varanasi—namely, to try to get access to Benfatti’s and Lucas’s corpses. As a Shiva scholar, Jawahar was personal friends with one of the leading Brahmin priests of the Manikarnika ghat. The Manikarnika was the major of the two cremation ghats in Varanasi, and where Benfatti and Lucas were undoubtedly being sent. As a go-between, he’d been willing to negotiate with his friend on Jack and Laurie’s behalf to be notified by mobile phone when the Americans had arrived and allowed access for enough time to obtain their samples. The price was to be ten thousand rupees, or a little more than two hundred dollars. Jack had tried to have Jawahar find how much the hospitals were paying, but whether the Brahmin knew or not, he wouldn’t say.