But what else could he do now?
“All right,” he said to the squinting fellow greedily regarding him still. “I will get your rupees one hundred. But let me tell you this: If ever you come anywhere near me again, I will see that you damn well regret it.”
Next day, as he made efforts to get on with what routine work he had on his desk before the time came to go to the Taj Mahal Hotel and tackle the Gup Shup blackmailer, the scene with the squinting Ranchod came back time and again to Ghote’s mind like bursts of sound issuing from a switched-off radio.
Should he really have let the fellow get away with his demand? What would Duke Wellington have done faced with his dilemma over Dr. Commissariat? Would he have still said publish and be damned? And what would Dr. Commissariat have done? Would he have been as active for good as he had been in dispatching Dolly Daruwala?
Well, one thing was clear, he thought. He himself could not eliminate his pest in the way the Parsi scientist had eliminated Dolly Daruwala. Not just for the sake of a hundred rupees. Not even to make sure of not being faced with a succession of demands for that sum. Not, surely, in fact for any reason.
Just after eleven o’clock a constable from Lokmanya Tilak Road police station brought around the two panches he was going to need that afternoon to witness with him the scene in the gentlemen’s washroom of the Taj Mahal Hotel. At first sight he was distinctly pleased with whom he had been sent. He had gone to great lengths the day before on the telephone to impress upon the Lokmanya Tilak station house officer that he needed panches who were decent enough to be taken through the splendors of the Taj Mahal Hotel without attracting notice, and these two looked really respectable. They were a junior municipal building inspector, a young man with wide, frightened eyes and a narrow moustache, nervously twisting and twisting his hands together, and an aged Parsi, so thin that he looked like nothing so much as a long bag of rattling bones, dressed with scrupulous care in the white garments often clung to by the older members of his community. There would be no difficulty marching either of these two through the hotel into its washroom. In court eventually, too, they ought to make just the right impression.
But then a flicker of doubt about the Parsi came into his head. Would he, when it came to giving evidence, attempt to say too much because a fellow Parsi was the blackmailer’s victim? And the old fellow’s face seemed somehow familiar, too.
“Have I been seeing you somewhere before?” he asked him sharply.
The old man produced a shy grin.
“Oh, yes, Inspector,” he answered. “Almost certainly.”
“Where is that?” he demanded, his prickle of suspicion growing.
The old man’s grin broadened a little.
“On television, Inspector,” he replied. “I am the old Parsi in that advert they are showing and showing. Since I was retiring from my job at Anklesaria Sandalwood Mart I have joined film line. In my small way.”
“Oh, yes. Yes, of course.”
He could see the old man exactly now, smiling benevolently as he praised whatever it was that he was advertising. Though just what that was he could not for the life of him remember.
He glanced down at the chit the constable had brought, looking for his name.
“Listen, Mr. Framrose,” he said eventually, “I am a little worried about making use of you. I do not think it would at all matter if His Honor in court is recognizing you from the TV. But in the case where we are requiring your services as a panch a Parsi also is very much involved. Now, what is going to happen when you are giving evidence about his each and every action?”
The old man straightened up a little.
“Inspector,” he said, “I have always been accustomed to do my duty. And I well know what is the duty of a panch. It is to witness what occurs and to state the same in court, yes?”
“Certainly.”
“Then that is what I will do, Inspector. I will faithfully tell what I have seen. That and no more.”
So it was with fewer forebodings than he might have had that Ghote set off in good time for the Taj. And, there, everything seemed to go on going well. The security officer greeted the three of them, as arranged, at the staff entrance. He guided them rapidly through the magnificent foyer with its scatter of Indian and foreign guests dotted here and there on the richly covered sofas and its long, glintingly polished reception counter with its three or four receptionists in their elegant uniform saris. In less than two minutes they arrived at the heavy studded wooden door of the washroom.
Shiv Chand, the securitywalla murmured confidentially, had bribed the attendant on duty to make himself scarce for a quarter of an hour. So he, once he had extracted that information from the fellow, had allowed him to do as he had been asked.
“So, all yours, Inspector,” he said. “And best of luck only.”
“Thank you,” Ghote replied, not altogether pleased that it should be thought necessary he should have the best of luck, or any luck at all.
But the thought of what had gone so terribly wrong during the last blackmailing attempt he had witnessed had entered his head once more, and he felt ominously that he well might need any luck that was going.
Leadenly he inspected the washroom’s sparkling white marble walls, its deep basins, its row of heavy doors guarding the cubicles, and decided that the best he could do to conceal his two panches was to put them both behind the half-open door of the farthest cubicle. He showed them exactly where to stand and warned them of the need to be absolutely silent.
At once the first of his difficulties manifested itself. The young municipal building inspector seemed suddenly overcome by the splendor of his surroundings.
“Inspector sahib,” he said, clasping and unclasping his hands with each time a sweaty little pop, “I am not at all liking it here.”
“It is not a question of like or not like,” Ghote said, unable to prevent himself snapping. “You are under orders. A person is not able to refuse when requested to act in the capacity of panch.”
“But—but, Inspector, I am feeling sick only. Inspector, there is one heavy sweet odor in this place.”
“Of course there is odor, you owl. It is some first-class disinfectant.”
“But it is causing me very much of sickness.”
Ghote felt his rage growing. At this rate he would be found arguing with the young man when Shiv Chand himself arrived.
“Take one drink of water only,” he said to him sharply, indicating the gleamingly polished taps of the washbasins. “That will finish your all troubles.”
The young man at least did as he had been told. Bending down to one of the taps, he noisily sucked in the flow of water.
Ghote turned to Mr. Framrose.
“And you,” he asked, “are you feeling in any way sick?”
“Oh, no, Inspector. Long ago I was making up my mind that wherever you are in the world it is much the same. I have not had any opportunity till now to find myself in the place of the rich, but some nights in my room I put myself on the floor to sleep. I feel if the poor and the downtrodden can do it I should do it, too.”
But Ghote had no time to think about that, or ask himself if he, too, should attempt such an exercise. The building inspector had risen from his crouching position over the spurting tap and was wiping his wet face with his hands.
“Now get back into place,” he ordered him briskly. “And stay there, and do not make one single noise.”
Meekly the young man obeyed.
Ghote hurried over and turned off the still gushing tap. He would have liked to have restored the basin to its previously gleaming state. But he suspected there was not time. Quickly he slipped into the cubicle next to the one occupied by his panches. He adjusted its door till he had a good view of the major part of the washroom through the crack at its hinges. Then he waited.
But he did not have to stand in his confined position long.
Hardly a minute had gone by when the door to the place was pushed cautiously and wh
eezingly open and a young man entered holding a cloth bag that might have contained a student’s books. Although he was wearing the more or less anonymous shirt and trousers of all the Bombay middle class, Ghote had no difficulty in guessing he must be the Parsi, Falli Bamboat. He had the pale complexion of his community and, though young—little older than the wretched junior building inspector in the next cubicle, and almost as insecure-looking—early hair loss, again typical of an interbred Parsi, had made him three parts bald.
Altogether, he was not an impressive person. Would he ever be capable of playing the part he had agreed on in this encounter with the blackmailing Shiv Chand?
He wondered whether he might step out of his hiding place and offer the young man, who after all was being not uncourageous even in coming to the rendezvous, a word of encouragement. But, just in time, he heard the door wheeze open again, this time pushed with vigorous determination.
Shiv Chand—from the rapid and purposeful survey he immediately made, if from nothing else, could only be the blackmailer—was a burly individual of about fifty. His face was large, broad of jaw, prominent of nose, with somewhat scanty graying hair well-oiled and brushed hard back. His mouth wore a wide shark’s grin.
Ghote held his breath and locked his every muscle. Fervently he hoped the two in the next cubicle were keeping equally silent.
The Gup Shup office manager took a step or two farther in, ignoring Falli Bamboat, who seemed paralyzed already into total silence. Then he stood still and looked all around. Ghote, holding his breath until he felt near to bursting, tried to send thought waves of warning to his two panches.
Shiv Chand took another step forward. It was plain he was making for the first of the row of cubicles with the aim of checking that he and Falli Bamboat were alone.
Ghote, beads of sweat emerging on face and neck, foresaw his whole plan cascading into ruin. If the big Punjabi was going to say not a word until, one by one, he had looked into each of the cubicles, discovery would be certain. But where else could he have hidden himself? Where else put his encumbering panches?
Then, with the suddenness of a rock fall rattling from an ages-locked mountainside, Falli Bamboat spoke.
“It is Mr. Shiv Chand? I am Mr. Falli Bamboat. Have I come at the right time? This was the hour you were mentioning, yes? I was worried that I might be too late. Or too early even. But I did not relish staying in here with no reason, if I had come too soon.”
Well done. Oh, well done. Shabash, young man. Shabash.
Ghote, realizing what the young Parsi pianist was doing to halt Shiv Chand’s search, almost spoke the words aloud.
“Ah,” Shiv Chand said pouncingly at last. “Mr. Bamboat. Good afternoon.”
Falli Bamboat did not in answer begin well.
“Good—good—good morning. No, good afternoon.”
“Well, Mr. Bamboat, it is a very good afternoon for you, I am thinking. To have your name and fame only in Indians of Merit and Distinction and at a so-early age, that is something altogether great, yes?”
Ghote, his cheek pressed hard against the crack of his cubicle door, saw Falli Bamboat jerk back his shoulders in a visible effort to regain some initiative.
“Yes,” he said at last. “Yes, that is all very well. But if I am to pay the large amount you were mentioning on the telephone for that privilege, can I be perfectly sure that a certain item will not appear in—”
He came to an abrupt halt as if it was hardly possible for him to pronounce the name of the gossip magazine in which an account of his guilty secret, whatever it was, was threatened.
Then with a strangulated cough he managed to continue.
“In, that is, in Gup Shup.”
Well done again, young man, Ghote thought. You are driving him to state his business in words that we can witness. Shabash, shabash.
“My dear sir,” Shiv Chand answered. “You have only to ask and that little item will be cast in the dustbin straightaway. You know, we are not at all liking to print anything that is causing offense. Not at all, not at all.”
“I have only to ask?” Falli Bamboat inquired pointedly.
In one of the heavy mirrors above the row of basins Ghote was able to see the Punjabi’s shark smile widen yet farther.
“Well, no beating about the bushes,” he said. “You cannot ask such a favor until you are our friend only. Until you have become a valued entrant in Indians of Merit and Distinction. Until you have made one payment for your insertion.”
“And that payment is to be ten thousand rupees?”
Mentally Ghote applauded him yet again. The young man was by no means as timid as he looked. This was exactly what the two hidden panches ought to hear, and ought in due time to tell a court that they had heard.
“Yes, yes,” Shiv Chand said amiably. “That was indeed the sum we mentioned telephonically.”
Falli Bamboat managed a convincing gulp.
“Very well,” he said. “Here’s your money.”
He reached into his cloth bag and took from it not books but thick bundles of currency notes. He held them out in a heaped mess between both his hands.
With a new smile of sharklike pleasure Shiv Chand leaned forward and gathered them up.
Ghote took one long step out of his hiding place.
“Mr. Shiv Chand,” he said, “I am a police officer, and I am arresting you under Section Three-eight-three of the Indian Penal Code, intentionally putting a person in fear and thereby dishonestly inducing them to deliver any valuable security, thus committing extortion.”
SIX
Ghote hardly dared to believe that the arrest of Shiv Chand had gone so smoothly. And before long he found that he was right to have felt twinges of doubt. The Assistant Commissioner congratulated him, briefly, on the success. Then he added something more.
“But, of course, Chand isn’t the fellow they really want.”
A dart of alarm went through Ghote at that word they. He did not know who exactly the Assistant Commissioner was referring to, and he certainly had no intention of asking. But he realized altogether too clearly that someone up above, probably high, high up above, must have insisted at some time recently that something should be done about the activities of Gup Shup. Probably a friend of a friend of a friend had been one of the magazine’s victims and his objections had been passed on.
And, he thought with rapidly increasing dismay, it was clear now that none other than himself was to be put in charge of doing whatever was to be done.
Once more he cursed the Dolly Daruwala business. If Dolly Daruwala had not been killed, then this new task, with all its threatened complications, would no doubt have fallen to thrustful Inspector Arjun Singh, expert on blackmail.
But no use in wishing and wanting.
“It is Mr. Freddy Kersasp himself we must be placing behind the bars?” he asked, well knowing the answer.
“It is, Inspector, and I am looking to you to do it.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Right, go and put that Shiv Chand of yours through the damn mill. Get him to tell you all about Mr. Kersasp. And don’t be too pussyfoot in the way you go about it. I want results, Ghote. Results.”
So an evening that he had thought he would spend at home was devoted instead to a face-to-face confrontation with Shiv Chand. The evening, and the greater part of that night.
To no avail. The Punjabi stubbornly avoided telling him anything about his employer that was not already common knowledge.
Eventually Ghote even abandoned the pussyfooting the Assistant Commissioner had instructed him not to employ. But long before he did so he had caught on to what was making his prisoner so determined to give nothing away. Freddy Kersasp was still in America. Without some indication of his boss’s attitude to the failure of his own attempt at blackmail, Shiv Chand was going to make sure he did not commit himself in any way.
However, realizing all that did not mean that Ghote did not feel obliged to go on trying to prise something out of the fello
w. To go on and on. If next morning the Assistant Commissioner asked what results he had got, he did not like to think what the reaction would be if he answered that almost from the start he had come to the conclusion they would get nowhere till Freddy Kersasp was back in Bombay.
But at last it became obvious that even making the burly Punjabi stand in front of his desk for hour after hour without a break, without refreshment, without even a cigarette was not going to break him. So, with a bang on his bell to summon a constable to take the prisoner away and lock him up, he gave up.
But, he reflected, wearily making his way home through the deserted streets—deserted except for the dozens of pavement sleepers on this oppressively hot night—one fact at least he had squeezed out. Freddy Kersasp was not expected back at the Gup Shup offices for at least two weeks.
The next day began badly, even before Ghote had got to headquarters and the expected summons to let the Assistant Commissioner know what he had done about Shiv Chand. The trouble was young Ved.
Bleary still after his very short night, just as he was grabbing a hasty breakfast before setting off, Ved appeared at his side.
“Dadaji?”
“Yes? What is it? I am going in one or two minutes, you know.”
“There is something I am wanting to ask.”
“Yes?”
Ved stayed silent.
“Yes? Speak up, speak up. I have said I must go.”
“Dadaji, it is that home computer.”
At the very mention of the machine, anger flared up in him. He knew it was triggered not so much by the thought of the computer itself as by the revival of Ved’s youthful attempt at blackmail and, looming up behind that once more, the black boulder of witnessing how Dolly Daruwala had met her end. But the knowledge did nothing to bring him calm.
He swung around from the remains of the crisply fried puris in front of him.
“Now, listen to me,” he barked out at Ved. “I want to hear nothing more about that computer. Nothing ever again. Ever. Understood?”
The Iciest Sin Page 6
