He felt a swift surge of joy, hunter’s joy. Surely now at least he could be certain that he had in sight someone who had suffered at Freddy Kersasp’s hands. But would he be able to bring her to the point of standing up in court, as Shrimati X, Y, or Z, and getting her revenge on the editor blackmailer?
“Madam,” he said, putting into the words all the authority he was capable of, “I am here to request and require you to give evidence against the said Mr. Freddy Kersasp on a charge of blackmail shortly to be brought. You are cent percent aware that Mr. Kersasp has blackmailed you by demanding an insertion in the book Indians of Merit and Distinction. He has blackmailed in similar manner many others also, and now is the time to put one stop to his each and every nefarious activity.”
For a long while Mrs. Nath remained silent.
Now with all the ferocity which she had first shown gone, Ghote decided that there was nothing more for him to do now but to look. To look at her unblinkingly, until she succumbed to the inevitable.
But then slowly—he could see it happening as if a visible movement was taking place—that ferociousness came seeping back into the stout body of the new Inspector of Smoke Nuisances. At last she spoke.
“Many others. You have said, Inspector, that Mr. Kersasp has blackmailed many others?”
“Yes,” Ghote replied, if with a small sinking of dismay he was unable to prevent. “Yes, madam, many people have become that man’s victims. We are looking to you to lift off from them their burdens and bugbears.”
“And why to me only, Inspector?” the sharp voice came back at him. “Why, to a woman only when there must be men, by tens and twenties, who could do what you are asking?”
Despite his premonition, Ghote felt blankly deprived as Mrs. Nath’s evident refusal was put so aggressively before him.
“Madam,” he stammered. “Madam, there are reasons. Good reasons, I am assuring you.”
“And what are they, Inspector, if you please?”
Mrs. Nath was wholly back now to the formidable figure who had greeted him at his first coming in.
“Madam—you see, there are difficulties.”
“What difficulties, Inspector? I do not think you were foreseeing too many difficulties in my case. What difficulties do you see in others’?”
Ghote felt he could well understand now how it was that Mrs. Nath had been appointed Bombay’s first female Inspector of Smoke Nuisances. It would be a tough mill owner who dared defy her.
He swallowed.
“Madam, there are not so many witnesses we have with good evidences that blackmail has taken place.”
“But I am not the only one, Inspector?”
It was a question in form only. And he knew, even as he spoke the words, that the answer he gave to it was feeble.
“It is not always possible for persons, even with the best intentions, to agree to appear in court.”
“And so you have myself only, Inspector? And you have come to me, a woman, to help you when no one else was willing to do it?”
“No, madam, no. That is …”
“That is yes, Inspector.”
Again the blunt statement.
“Well, Inspector,” Mrs. Nath went on, turning to one of the piles of papers in front of her with a markedly businesslike air, “I must tell you that I am no more able to help you than any of the gentlemen you have so far asked. Yes, I paid for an entry in Indians of Merit and Distinction. But that is something altogether over and done with. Mr. Kersasp would not ask again, I can tell you. You see, when I was a girl only we stayed next to the Parsi colony, Zarina Baag, where Freddy Kersasp was residing, and I am knowing enough about Mr. Kersasp’s bad boyhood habits for him not to want me to talk to some other gossip sheet. So, Inspector, I must ask you to let me get on with my work. I have plenty-plenty.”
Leadenly Ghote turned to go. He knew when he was beaten. A piece of minor blackmail was keeping Mrs. Nath safe from any more demands from Freddy Kersasp. She must have chosen to use it only when, perhaps, he had talked of a second payment for Indians of Merit and Distinction. It had been enough, however. She would pay him no more. But neither would she go to court to give evidence against him.
So what can I say to the Assistant Commissioner? he asked himself as he stood on the pavement outside the offices of the Inspectorate with the heat of the day beating up at him from the dirt-blackened stones. This is the end of the trail. Definitely.
EIGHT
It was only when Ghote was faced with the Assistant Commissioner himself next day, across the expanse of his wide, papers-piled desk with its glinting array of little silvery paperweights each bearing the Assistant Commissioner’s own initials, that he realized he had not, after all, come to the end of the trail. Or perhaps not. Not quite.
He had been on the very point of admitting that, after all the time he had spent, he had nothing to report. But then, reliving those last dispiriting moments in the cabin of the Inspector of Smoke Nuisances, he had abruptly realized just what a few words she had thrown at him aside might mean.
When I was a girl only we stayed next to the Parsi colony, Zarina Baag, where Freddy Kersasp was residing, and I am knowing enough about Mr. Kersasp’s bad boyhood habits …
Perhaps those bad habits had been the bad habits of almost any boy. But if the threat of telling another gossip sheet about them had been enough to keep Gup Shup at arm’s length, then they were surely more than just boyhood pranks. As a youth Freddy Kersasp must have been a real miscreant. And that was, now he came to think about it, very possible.
After all, if Freddy Kersasp’s family came from somewhere no higher in the social scale than the Zarina Baag colony—one of those groups of flats endowed by rich charitable Parsis for members of their community with jobs such as bank clerks and bookkeepers—then the young Freddy would not have had the money to start up anything like Gup Shup. That was an altogether glossy affair, and always had been. So its young proprietor must have got hold of finance somehow, and what more likely than by illegal means.
At a colony like Zarina Baag there should be, too, people still there who had known Freddy Kersasp before he became notorious. In crammed and crowded Bombay any Parsi who had decent accommodation at a reasonable rent was not going to leave till they were carried away by the corpse-bearing nasehsalas to the Towers of Silence. So by talking with the very oldest colony residents, with luck he could get a line on Freddy Kersasp’s illegalities of twenty-five or more years earlier. Then they could perhaps get him charge-sheeted for something less tricky than blackmail, and that would be the end of him. Which was what somebody up there wanted. As did the Commissioner. And the Assistant Commissioner, Crime Branch.
“Sir,” he said, standing at attention in front of that wide, wide desk, “it has been altogether difficult, but I think I see one way to proceed.”
Then he outlined his thoughts.
“Very well, Ghote. So what for are you standing here? Get out to Zarina Baag, man, and do some damn digging.”
“Yes, sir. At once, sir.”
He did not go to Zarina Baag with as much speed as the Assistant Commissioner had required. A little thought had made him realize that to find anyone there old enough to remember the days when Freddy Kersasp, dreaded owner of Gup Shup, had been no more than a youth, it would be best to arrive well into the afternoon. Only by three o’clock or after would the oldest inhabitants have woken from sleep in the heat of midday and be ready happily to gossip.
He was right. At a quarter past three exactly, squeezing through the tall rust-bitten iron gate in the heavy stone wall that surrounded the colony, he saw at once just what he had hoped for. He had had no conscious plan for getting hold of a likely source of information, reckoning it would be pointless to anticipate what he would find. He had hoped simply that by merely looking about he would come across someone old enough to remember young Freddy Kersasp. But now, the moment he had entered the stone-flagged compound of the baag, his luck seemed to be in.
Sitting in the shade on the steps of one of the four yellowy-gray buildings around the compound—a faded board above the entrance proclaimed it as BLOCK D—was an aged man, dressed in a white bows-tied dugli. Hands folded over the head of an elaborately carved walking stick, he was evidently telling a story to a cluster of children on the steps below.
He ought to be ideal.
Strolling round the sun-glaring compound as if unsure which of the four damp-stained blocks of flats it was that he wanted, or whether he wanted any of them at all, Ghote gradually got himself nearer and nearer. At last, after even halting to peer at a chalk-scrawled cricket wicket on one of D Block’s walls—he would have been hard put to account for the action had he been questioned—he arrived within hearing distance of the ancient storyteller. As soon as the tale was over and the children back to their games of cricket or natgolio—the necessary pile of seven flat stones stood in a corner of the compound—he was going to seize on this heaven-sent source of information.
Idly amused, he listened to the tale, remembering boyhood hours spent drinking in long and long stories he had been told. It did not take him more than a minute or two, however, to gather that, ancient though the teller was, his tale was modern enough. It was an account, nothing less, of a pioneer solo feat of aviation made in his young days by the millionaire industrialist J.R.D. Tata. Something designed presumably to rouse in its juvenile Parsi hearers a stirring of pride and ambition.
Only, as the tale progressed, it became apparent, to Ghote’s increased amusement, that it was by no means a strictly factual account. J.R.D. Tata’s airplane was made to perform some unlikely, and very daring, feats. And as each one was added, Ghote thought he was able to detect in the old man’s right eye—the left was clouded with a cataract—a sharp twinkling of delight in the embellishments that had occurred to him.
At last, with a triumphant and wholly fantastical double loop-the-loop the intrepid aviator was brought safely to land and a garland-wielding reception from every single inhabitant of millions-crammed Bombay. The listening circle, after pleading in vain for “Another, Uncle, another,” reluctantly dispersed.
Ghote descended then on his prey like a sharp-taloned kite that had pinpointed from high above a juicy morsel. Only, his swoop was not as free as the bird’s of any thought other than of the object below.
Suddenly he had realized that, if his half-blind informant could insert a double loop-the-loop into Mr. Tata’s undoubtedly real exploit, then he might well be capable of adding any number of fanciful extras to whatever he might remember about young Freddy Kersasp. But too late now for second thoughts. The old man had begun to push himself up with his ornately carved stick from his place on the top step.
Ghote stepped forward.
Seeing this stranger approaching so directly, the old storyteller let his ancient, rake-thin body happily fold back into a sitting position.
“Good afternoon, sir,” Ghote said. “Forgive me for having listened to the tale you were telling those children, but I was finding it altogether very, very interesting. There must be many things about your community in the old days that you are remembering.”
He was delighted to find he had hit neatly on a way into the very heart of what he had come to discover. His approach proved to have been exactly what was needed. Quite plainly there was nothing his discovery enjoyed more than mulling over events from his distant past.
Half an hour, almost three-quarters, drifted by. Settling after a while on the steps beside his potential source of information about the young Freddy Kersasp, Ghote was regaled with a scarcely faltering stream of reminiscence. Out beyond in the compound the children shouted and called. Cricket had been resumed at the chalk-scrawled wicket. In the far corner the natgolio ball was flung, retrieved, and flung again. A few of the more enterprising spirits—the Kersasps of some future time, Ghote wondered—tried to evade the watchman at the gate and get to the sugarcane vendor on the pavement opposite cranking his iron mill as he fed it with the inch-thick purply lengths of cane and caught in his heavy, smeary glasses the thick sweet juice that ran out.
But two things spoiled Ghote’s feelings of achievement. From time to time he caught in the old man’s good eye, plain to be seen, the twinkling he had spotted each time some fantasy had been added to the real exploits of Mr. J.R.D. Tata. And, try though he did more than once, he never seemed able to edge the talk toward events in Zarina Baag itself at the time he was aiming for.
Eventually yet another anxiety entered his mind. For how much longer could such an old man keep up this lively flow? Soon, surely, he would begin to grow tired. He might even in midsentence just nod off to sleep. The very old did that.
“Excuse me, sir,” he interrupted almost brutally once more, “but you must have many jolly interesting remembrances of this baag itself, yes?”
The old man gave him a slightly aggrieved look from his one good eye.
“Well, I am not saying that there are not many things I could tell,” he answered. “I am, after all, the oldest inhabitant of the colony, eighty-five years, man and boy—if you do not count Mrs. Vacha in B Block and she forgets everything. But never mind all that. What I was recalling when you were breaking in was the time when old Mr. Tata himself, that great Parsi, was building the Taj Mahal Hotel. Kindly let me finish. Young men these days are no more having any manners.”
“No. No. Please go on. I am sorry.”
There was nothing else to be said. The old man was certainly showing he had an astonishing memory, much of it even of events in the period when Freddy Kersasp must have been a riffraff in the very compound they were looking on at. It would be madness to get on the wrong side of such a fountaining source of information. But would he ever contrive to get him on to the subject of young Freddy Kersasp himself?
The old man grunted in ungracious acknowledgment of his apology.
“Yes, as I was telling, Mr. Tata was building that very-very posh hotel itself because he had been refused admittance elsewhere on account of not being a white sahib. But … but … Now, what was I going to say?”
The old man sat blankly regarding an oilwalla who had come pushing his barrel-cart into the compound, singing out his presence, halting from time to time as housewives appeared with containers to be filled.
Oh, no, Ghote thought. It has happened. He is starting to lose his grip. It is the beginning of tiredness. In two-three minutes he will be asleep.
But suddenly the old man broke into speech again.
“Ah, yes, manners. In my day young people in this baag had manners. Things were very different, I am telling. Every single boy in the colony was altogether polite to elders. Never any—No. No, I am wrong. One there was who was not at all polite.”
He paused and shot Ghote a new glare out of his one unclouded eye, as much as to say that here was another clearly failing in manners.
But who was the one boy he was recalling who had been not at all polite? Could it possibly be Freddy Kersasp? But why should it be? After all, the old man might not even be thinking of that particular time. His wandering mind might have flipped back to half a century past. Or to only ten or fifteen years earlier. Yet …
“You have heard of one Mr. Freddy Kersasp? Now owner of that notorious magazine by the name of Gup Shup?”
Ghote could scarcely bring out a sound indicating he knew what the old man was talking about. Happily the choked gasp he produced seemed to be enough.
“Now there was one who was all the time causing utmost trouble,” the aged storyteller went on, with every sign of being thoroughly embarked again. “Do you know what he was once doing? I will tell. He was—he was—he was kidnapping the dastur we had then, a very holy man. Yes, he took prisoner a priest and held him to ransom. Every family in the baag had to pay rupees ten before Dasturji was let go.”
Was this it? Was this what Mrs. Nath had known to Freddy Kersasp’s discredit? And would it possibly be enough to charge-sheet him with after all these years?
Ghote
’s mind raced.
Until it was borne in on him that in the single bright eye in the old man’s face beside him there was, distinctly, a twinkling. Then, guided by some instinct, he looked away across the sun-battered compound, milling now with the various vendors permitted to enter, the vegetablewalla with his cry of “Onions one rupee the kilo,” the fishwalli with her basket of gleaming pomfrets, the man who exchanged old clothes for cheap metal bowls. And there, just turning out of the gate, was a Parsi priest, a dastur, wearing the flowing white garb of his profession, bearded to the waist as laid down by religious ordinance.
Should he indicate to the old man at his side that he knew perfectly well now what had put that fantastic kidnapping story into his head? If he did, would it so offend him that he would refuse to say another word? Just at the point he had cajoled him toward for a solid hour? But, if he refrained, how could he ever be sure that what he might learn about Freddy Kersasp’s past was in any way the truth?
He gulped.
“Oh, sir,” he said, “that is one very, very good tale. One hundred percent joke. But this Mr. Freddy Kersasp, he was also truly doing wicked things in his youthful days?”
He waited, not daring so much as to breathe, for the response.
The one unclouded eye in the time-creased face beside him twinkled yet more brightly.
“Well, well. Perhaps, telling tales to the young ones so often as I do, I have allowed something of the fairy story to come in. Yes. Yes, something of the fairy story.”
“But there are things about Mr. Freddy Kersasp in his youth that are not at all fairy story?”
For a little—for what seemed to Ghote almost to be long hours—the old man did not reply. A beggar who had sidled his way into the compound was loudly calling, “Firstfloorwalla bai, feed the poor. Secondfloorwalla bai, give and get blessing.” The heat seemed to be springing up even more throbbingly from the uneven paving stones in front of them.
The Iciest Sin Page 9
