To yet greater astonishment Dr. Edul Commissariat did not deny the charge.
“Yes,” he said. “Oh, yes, you do not need to remind me of that. Of the disgraceful action a young man took, mortified because when he and his cousin had tossed a coin to decide which of them should pursue which line in the theses they were about to begin, mine had turned out to be, whatever its initial promise, almost certainly a blind alley. I have not forgotten what I did, nor will I as long as I may live.”
“Never mind all that,” Dolly Daruwala said, beginning to puff asthmatically once more. “What you did was absolutely a disgraceful action. And you should be exposed. It is right that you should. What is it it says in the Vendidad, that holy scripture you perhaps still believe in? Something like vermin, pests, and snakes are to be eliminated, yes? It is years since I went to the fire-temple. Well, you should be eliminated, you forger, and I will see to it that you are.”
“Oh, yes, you are right. If the newspapers were to get hold of this, it would see me eliminated. But it would not be myself personally. It would be the elimination of the scientist to whom the Government of India has offered a laboratory, something that will give this country a source of energy perhaps to end forever the poverty so many of its citizens still suffer.”
“Always trying to make yourself out some great soul,” Dolly Daruwala retorted. “Well, you are no such thing, my friend. You are nothing but a cheat and a liar. And it will give me much pleasure to let the world know it.”
And then she spoiled the high tone.
“Unless you are ready to pay me. One lakh was the sum I suggested.”
A lakh of rupees, Ghote thought. As much or more than I would earn in three or four years. No wonder she is owning such a posh flat.
“No,” Dr. Commissariat answered. “No, I will not give you so much as one paisa. But you will hand me back that wretched half-finished thesis in my young man’s handwriting that could do me and my country, our country, so much harm. You will. Now.”
“Just because you are asking?” Dolly Daruwala laughed.
“Yes, just because I ask. But I ask on behalf of the thousands, the hundreds of thousands, whose lives may be made more bearable from my work.”
“Well then, if you are so concerned for all those dalits and low-caste good-for-nothings, it is quite simple. Pay me my lakh. Straightaway, then I will give you your stupid papers—they are here in my safe now—and that will be the end of the matter.”
“Except that you will have made a copy of them. I know how people of your kind conduct their nasty business.”
Dolly Daruwala gave a curt laugh.
“Well, perhaps I have made a copy,” she said. “Perhaps it, too, is in my safe, and perhaps I would have kept it and given you back only your original. I do not pretend to be a saint, unlike some people. But if you have to go on paying till the end of your days, what would that be to you? You can make lakhs and crores from this invention of yours. Wasn’t I reading and reading about it and you both until I was sick of the sight of your name?”
“Only, I have agreed not to exploit my discovery in America for what I could make out of it. I have agreed to bring it to India, for the benefit of my fellow countrymen.”
“The fellow countrymen you did not care one jot for in all the years you were living your fine life in the States.”
“Yes,” Dr. Commissariat said, his voice suddenly less determined, “you are right again. I did live in America heedless of those I had left behind, in poverty by the million. But mercifully I was reminded by a visitor from Bombay of what members of our community—Parsis like yourself and myself—had done for their fellow men in the past. People like Sir Sorabji Pochkhanawala, who created the first truly Indian banking chain—you must know the story of starting in that room with just two chairs in it—or Jamsetjee Tata, who created the whole Indian steel industry, or Ardeshir Godrej, who from being a simple repairer of surgical instruments went on to set up an industry giving work to thousands of his countrymen of all creeds and castes. Of them and dozens of others who, just one Parsi to every five thousand Indians, made such contributions to the nation. Their stories taught me where my duty lay, brought me back here.”
“Oh, too good. But do not be thinking that all that ‘Good thoughts, good words, good deeds’ cuts any ice with me. You say you know what those who practice my nasty business are like. Well, let me tell you the truth of it. How do you think a girl like myself, fat and wheezing even from a baby, disliked by one and all, how do you think she could make her way? I will tell you. By keeping her eyes open, even as a child, and—”
And at that moment a secret fear Ghote had had ever since Dolly Daruwala had returned seized him, the ridiculous idea that, because characters in films and stories hiding like himself always loosed forth a tremendous sneeze at a critical moment, he, too, was bound to do the same. He did not actually feel a sneeze coming on. It was more that, lying there hearing such extraordinary revelations, he could not help thinking that a sneeze ought to give him away. So moment by moment he had become overwhelmed by the fear that he was going to betray his presence there under the bed.
And that brought on, worse by far than a desire to sneeze, a ferocious attack of cramp. A heavy suitcase, one of two he had found in his hiding place, digging into his side made any movement to ease his throbbing leg impossible. Tears came into his eyes. He bit his lip to suppress a gasp of pain. He ground his teeth together and endured.
But through his misery he still just managed to take in what Dolly Daruwala was saying.
“Yes, there was nothing in the world I wanted more than a geometry box like one my big brother Behram had, and I knew all too well no one was going to give an ugly child like myself even an ordinary pencil box. Then one day I caught Behram and some of his friends smoking, and in a moment I saw how I could get my geometry box.”
She gave a sharp pounce of a laugh.
“You remember my parents,” she said. “Altogether good, religious Parsis. Fire worshipers, as people call us. Smoking was an abomination to them. So all I had to do was to ask Behram to give me that geometry box, and say I would tell if he refused. He did not like it. He did not like it at all. But what could he do? Yet even then in the end it was Behram who got the praise. For being so kind to his little sister, always so bad-tempered.”
“Well,” Dr. Commissariat replied, “I don’t doubt you were driven to the—the profession, if you can call it such, in which you appear to have been so successful. But nevertheless a time must come when you allow other considerations to weigh with you. And that time is now. I ask you again, I ask you in the name of our community, in the name of all the poor of India, to return those papers.”
“And I ask you,” Dolly Daruwala flung back, “for the sum of one lakh. Cash. Now. I hope you have had the good sense to bring it.”
And then, to Ghote’s appalled dismay, this fine character who, he had thought more than once as he had listened to his exchanges with Dolly Daruwala, fully matched up to the British Duke Wellington and his “Publish and be damned” abruptly caved in.
“Very well,” he said. “Yes, I have brought the sum you requested. So let us be done with the business. Give me those papers, and let us never see each other again.”
“Ah,” Dolly Daruwala replied, with so much satisfaction that it was altogether audible to Ghote still wrestling with his cramp beneath the bed, “I knew you would see sense. They always do in the end.”
“Then get it over with,” Dr. Commissariat snapped.
Now they will come in here to the bedroom, to the safe, Ghote thought. Will I be able to keep silent?
The pain in his leg seemed to be easing a little, but he knew it could return, perhaps even more sharply, at any instant.
Hastily he lowered the green flounce he had been holding up. In the now stifling dark he strained to catch every least sound. He made out by the faint squeak of the door being opened wider that Dolly Daruwala had come in. Then he heard her go walki
ng round to where the picture of that Italian or French Mona Lisa hung, her sari swishing silkily. Behind her, he picked out Dr. Commissariat’s heavier steps. Weary dejection seemed to sound in every one of them.
But that picture. Had he replaced it exactly right?
Apparently so.
Cautiously lifting the edge of the bed cover by his side, he was able to see Dolly Daruwala now. She had her handbag, with no doubt her pistol in it, over her left arm. He could see that she had taken the precaution of reopening its clasp. Tightly grasped in the fingers of her left hand she had, too, the briefcase Dr. Commissariat had brought with him. It looked big enough to hold a lakh, say, ten packets of a hundred hundred-rupee notes each. Or perhaps Dr. Commissariat had managed to buy somewhere in the Kalbadevi area, at the customary premium of twenty rupees, a quantity of the hard-to-find five-hundred rupee notes.
With her free hand Dolly Daruwala now swung back the Mona Lisa picture. Then, though he could not see what exactly she was doing, any more than Dr. Commissariat just out of his sight at the rear would be able to, he guessed that she was twisting the numbered dial of the safe this way and that.
In a moment he heard a faint clunk as the safe’s lock was released. He saw Dolly Daruwala lean backward, tugging at the heavy little door.
Behind her Dr. Commissariat spoke again.
“Even now,” he said, “will you not relent?”
“Come,” Dolly Daruwala answered sharply. “Forget all that nonsense.”
Afterward, Ghote was to recollect that he had then been aware of a sudden swift scraping sound. But at the time he was momentarily mystified to see, an instant later, an inexplicable shaft of silver seeming to arrive from nowhere at the top of the rose-pink sari he had been observing so intently. There had been, too, an odd little noise, which, again later, he thought must have been a single choked squeal of breath.
But what he did see, beyond mistaking, after just a moment more, was the body of the most dangerous woman in Bombay falling to the floor with a single heavy thud. Then he realized that the silvery shaft he had not been able to account for was, in fact, the blade of a sword. Twisting his head farther up, he saw that its handle was the handle of the ornate cane Dr. Commissariat had been leaning on as he had entered the apartment. A sword stick, a gupti.
But it still took him time—perhaps in reality hardly a second—to take in properly the fact that Dolly Daruwala had been killed. And by none other than that good, even noble, man, Dr. Edul Commissariat. It was probably, he thought, looking back on it all, only when he heard the words Dr. Commissariat pronounced, a sort of epitaph, that he had realized exactly what it was that had taken place.
“‘Vermin, pests, and snakes are to be eliminated.’”
It was the sentence from Parsi scripture that Dolly Daruwala herself had quoted in contemptuous bitterness to this victim of her blackmail.
FOUR
Something prevented Inspector Ghote from immediately hauling himself clear of Dolly Daruwala’s bed and arresting her murderer. It might even have been, he was to think looking back on the whole extraordinary episode, no more in the first few instants after the blackmailer’s body had thudded to the floor than the mere difficulty of getting rapidly out from underneath that shiny green affair and onto his feet to confront Dr. Edul Commissariat in a manner proper to a police officer.
But soon enough he was to realize that what, in fact, was keeping him hidden there among the rolls of dusty fluff was a quite different decision he had taken almost without conscious thought. A different decision and a far weightier one.
He had rapidly come to feel, to believe absolutely, that the Parsi scientist was right to have made away with Dolly Daruwala. She had been calmly proposing to prevent him using this superconductor invention of his to pull the mass of his fellow countrymen out of the desperate poverty in which so many of them seemed to be sucked. That alone, set aside all the other victims icily tortured over the years, was sufficient reason, if ever there was reason enough, to condemn her.
Nor could there be any doubt, Ghote soon saw, that her death had been premeditated. Dr. Commissariat had given her a clear chance—more than one even—to think better of her purpose. Then, when she had scorned him that final time, he had put into action a plan he must have made almost as soon as she had first telephoned him with her demand.
The thought of this had come to him abruptly with the vivid recollection of seeing on television, more than once, the Parsi scientist arriving in Bombay. Then, plainly, he had in no way needed to lean on a cane. So he must have taken to using that sword-concealing gupti as a first step in a carefully worked out scheme. He had never had any intention of paying the lakh he had brought in that briefcase. The bundles of notes had been there only to induce Dolly Daruwala, if all appeals failed, to open her safe. Then, having given her that final chance, he would be ready to eliminate the vermin, pest, or snake, which she undoubtedly had been. How ironic it must have seemed to him when she herself had quoted those very words.
That the scientist had acted with all that premeditation was soon confirmed. Ghote heard him walk quickly back into the flat’s drawing room and, a moment later, return.
Risking lifting once more the edge of the shiny bed cover, he saw that what Dr. Commissariat had done was to fetch Dolly Daruwala’s silver cigarette lighter. It took hardly ten seconds for him to open the lighter’s underside, to thrust it into the open safe and let the fuel in it pour out. A moment later a flick of his fingers produced a spark that sent the whole contents of the safe up in flames. All those swords that had perilously dangled over so many heads, all the soft chains.
As soon as it was clear that nothing in the safe would escape, Dr. Commissariat carefully wiped the silver lighter with his handkerchief before pulling the gupti sword out of Dolly Daruwala’s inert body and resheathing it. Then he quickly stooped, retrieved his briefcase, and walked out of the flat.
For perhaps a minute more, even two, Ghote lay on under the bed, letting the consequences of his decision not to arrest the man who had killed Dolly Daruwala slowly flood into his mind.
First, he had acted in a manner totally contrary to all his rooted beliefs as a police officer. He had with his own eyes witnessed a crime, the worst of crimes even, and he had done nothing. He was appalled by that. Yet he found he still believed he had been right. Were there, then, sometimes circumstances when it was not a fault to take the law into one’s own hands? Plainly Dr. Commissariat, who from even the little he had heard him say was beyond all doubting a good man, believed that was so. He had believed it, and more, he had not hesitated to act on that belief.
So was he himself not right to take the same attitude? To learn from that example put so startlingly in front of him? Perhaps he was. No, almost certainly he was. This was a time, perhaps the only time he would ever know, when there was something that overrode his duty as a police officer. The solemn oath he had solemnly taken.
Next, there was now in his mind, to stay there forevermore, the fact that Dr. Commissariat, that man it was hardly too much to call a great soul, had in fact committed murder. It would even be possible for he himself now—the notion flitted through him like a monstrous joke—to levy blackmail on this noble figure.
Finally he realized that if at any time anything needed to be done to protect this man who had committed murder, then he himself was now obliged to do it. He felt run through him a sense of dread, of almost holy dread.
Slowly, as if some intolerable weight was settling down on him, he shuffled his prone body out beyond the edge of the bed and staggered, cramp-bruised, to his feet.
Then he set himself to think more practically. Already he would have to start acting on Dr. Commissariat’s behalf. Before long, one way or another, Dolly Daruwala’s body would be found. Had Dr. Commissariat left anything in the way of a clue behind him?
He concentrated fiercely. No, the scientist had almost certainly done nothing in the flat that would betray him. He had come to it with t
he clear intention, if it had to be, of killing Dolly Daruwala. A man of his intelligence would know all about fingerprints. Had he not taken pains to wipe that lighter? So he would have been careful the whole time he had been in the flat to touch nothing. Nor would he have left anything behind. He had himself seen him remove both his briefcase and the weapon. No immediate fears there then.
But what about himself? It was as important that no one, bar Mr. Z. R. Mistry, who had sent him here, should ever know he had been in the flat at the time Dolly Daruwala had been done to death. But had he been as careful as Dr. Commissariat?
Again he thought. Conscious when he had first come in that he was committing a crime—what a petty offense housebreaking was set against what he had just seen—he, too, had, without even thinking about it, taken every care to touch nothing.
Methodically he retraced his actions from the moment he had stepped inside, tucking his two false keys back into his pocket, till when he had lowered himself to the floor here and slid under the silky green flounce of Dolly Daruwala’s bed. And, no. No, he was certain. He had touched nothing. And, thank goodness, his uniform seemed to have stayed clean.
But there was yet another person involved. How had he come not to have thought of it before? Burjor Pipewalla, tax consultant, was due to present himself at the flat at almost any moment.
He looked at his watch.
No, not quite at any moment. It seemed there was almost half an hour in hand still. So what to do?
There should be plenty of time to intercept Mr. Pipewalla. And perhaps in that case it might bring the situation more under control, enable him to see some sort of alibi was put together for the fellow, if he were to make sure that the body was discovered reasonably soon.
The Iciest Sin Page 4
