At last the old man answered him.
“Do you know, my dear sir, that many years ago here in this baag itself there was a murder?”
A murder. Could it be— No, surely, this was too much to hope for.
“Well,” the old man added quite hastily, “I am saying murder, but perhaps it was something less than that.”
“Less?”
Was the old fellow retreating now from some contemplated fantasy? Was his “murder” going to turn out to be something no worse than Freddy Kersasp giving some other boy one black eye?
“Yes. You see, what was happening was that a gentleman then living in the baag, one Mr. Topiwala, the former owner of a sandalwood shop close to our big Parsi fire-temple behind Girgaum Road—very successful business with all the worshipers wanting to buy before going to that agiary … Well, Mr. Topiwala had become a notorious miser in his retirement. In his flat, so it was said by one and all, he was keeping untold wealth. And then one day he was robbed. Every rupee, every anna. And afterward he was found dead. In the end the police were giving out that it was just only case of heart attack caused by fearful distress of event. But, after all, that is not so much different from murder.”
“No,” Ghote agreed, his mind racing once again. “No, it is almost as bad as murder itself.”
But was the old man saying that Freddy Kersasp had been that murderer, or near murderer? And, if so, would it be possible after all the years that had gone by to bring the crime home to him?
“Sir, that is altogether most interesting,” he said. “And is it that you are telling that Mr. Freddy Kersasp, now known to one and all as Gup Shup proprietor, was that selfsame robber?”
“Robber?” the old man said, with a sudden sly look. “What are you asking about robber? I was telling story of Taj Mahal Hotel, yes? That they are saying and slandering that it was by mistake built wrong way round. Well, I tell you, sir, if that is what you are thinking you are well … and truly … mistaken. Yes, mistake …”
Then what Ghote had earlier feared might happen, that the ancient storyteller would be overcome by sleep, seemed to have occurred. His good twinkling eye and his clouded one closed. His head sank toward the hands clasped over the ornate head of his stick.
Or was he feigning sleep? Was he getting out of having once again fallen into the self-made trap of introducing fantasy into a factual account by pretending to have forgotten what he had been saying? And had he capped his ruse with this pretense of sleep?
He looked at the bony, white-clad figure hunched on the steps, head lolling.
There was no telling. And if the man had truly lapsed into sleep, it would be heartless to wake him. Nor would he in all likelihood remember what it was that he had been talking about. Even if he was pretending sleep, he would, forced back to the light of day, evade either confirming or denying what he had said. That could be taken as certain.
What to do?
He could, possibly, call at the local police station and see if they had records going back as far as he needed. But he hardly had enough to go on to guide him. No definite date. Only one name, that Mr. Topiwala, former proprietor of a shop selling sandalwood to pious Parsis wishing to feed the sacred fire in their agiary. It might take weeks to dig out the facts of the robbery in the course of which Mr. Topiwala had been murdered, or had died. And even if he found the records, it was by no means certain that Freddy Kersasp in his youth had had anything to do with the case. There was only the old man’s abrupt reference to the robbery after Freddy Kersasp’s name had been mentioned to indicate there was any link at all.
There might, too, of course, be other very old inhabitants of the colony who would remember the Topiwala case. Perhaps it would only be a matter of going about until he found someone ancient enough to have remembered. But would any one of them know as much as this old man sleeping beside him about Freddy Kersasp’s connection with the affair? After all, it cannot have been common knowledge, or the young Freddy Kersasp would have been arrested and charged with the crime.
But then had the owner of Gup Shup really been connected with the business at all? Or had that been yet another of the old storyteller’s flights of fancy? And anyhow it was not going to be so easy to discover another informant going back as far and with as good a memory apparently as his first lucky find. He had certainly seen no one else of the same sort in the time he had been here. So would it be a matter of going around knocking at every door in the baag and asking if there was any very old person there? That, again, could take days if not weeks. And in the end he might find no one with a really good memory of those distant days.
He sat on the steps next to the old man snoring with a soft sizzling sound beside him and gave way to sudden rolling waves of frustrated misery. What a damn complicated business had been thrust on to him. And all, when you came down to it, because of that other blackmailer, dead Dolly Daruwala. If she had not tried to gather into her icy net Dr. Commissariat, that fine man and benefactor, then he himself would not be sitting here, trying to make sense of the senseless fantastical ramblings of an ancient Parsi and under orders to find evidence with which to charge-sheet for some offense, for any offense, the man half of Bombay—or half of influential Bombay—dreaded and feared.
What a first-class bloody mess it all was.
NINE
The strip of shade in front of Zarina Baag’s D Block moved quarter-inch by quarter-inch down the steps where Ghote and his aged sleeping source of information sat side by side. The children playing natgolio finished their game amid a sharp outbreak of quarreling. The beggar seeking leftover food from the wives of the firstfloorwalla and the secondfloorwalla moved on to A Block. An eggs vendor arrived and added his cry of “Hen eggs, English eggs” to the various other sounds of the compound. The oilwalla, sales finished, began pushing his cart toward the gate.
And, quite suddenly, Ghote realized that he did after all have a way forward that promised to get him the quick result the Assistant Commissioner himself was under pressure to produce.
The old snoring fellow beside him was not, he had actually himself admitted, the oldest inhabitant of the baag. That was a woman. What had her name been? She came from B Block, yes. That much he remembered.
And, yes … yes, she was a Mrs. Vacha. And when the old man had declared that she had “forgotten everything,” there had been a definite underlayer of jealousy in his voice. So was Mrs. Vacha, in fact, a rival to him as the keeper of the traditions and anecdotes of life in the colony? It might be. It very well might be. Yes, she would definitely be worth going to see.
He jumped up.
His arm had brushed against the aged figure sitting beside him, eyes lightly closed, head lolling, bony hands resting on the head of his stick. For a few moments the old man rocked to and fro sideways till it looked as if he might topple over. But then the motion ceased and he remained lost in slumber.
So that sudden attack of sleepiness had been genuine after all. No matter. The old man and his memories were no longer vital. In all probability a source of information as good or better awaited.
He ran, despite the still-battering sun, across the compound, dodging one of the cricket-playing boys running for the ball. Inside the hallway of B Block he saw, to his abruptly sweat-running relief, a painted board bearing the names of its tenants. And, at the top of it: MR. AND MRS. D. VACHA.
There was a lift at the back of the coolly dark hallway. He hurried over.
LIFT IS TEMPORARILY OUT OF ORDER. The words were written in very faded ink on a sheet of paper stuck between the bars of the gates, crisp and buckled with age.
With a sigh he turned to the yet-darker well of the stairs. It seemed a weary tramp up, even though it was no more than three floors. But what made it more sapping of the spurt of hope he had experienced when he had realized this Mrs. Vacha might well hold in her head, more to be trusted than the old storyteller’s, the very facts he needed was an uprush of recollection. Into his mind there had flooded again the memory of tramping u
p the many, many more flights of the stone stairs of Marzban Apartments on his way, weeks ago, to Dolly Daruwala’s flat. What had happened there had been something that had struck at the whole edifice of his beliefs. Was something almost as bad somehow lying in wait for him now?
He stopped on the second landing, more to beat down that premonition, groundless though it surely must be, than to regain breath. But standing letting such black thoughts sweep over him was not going to get him anywhere.
He braced his shoulders and marched up the remaining flights to the third floor. And there on one of the flat’s doors was a small wooden plaque saying, again, MR. AND MRS. D. VACHA, though Mr. Vacha, he suspected, must be long dead.
There was a bellpush at the side of the door. He put his finger to it and pressed.
At first he thought from the still silence that followed that his luck must have run out already and that Mrs. Vacha, despite her age, must be out visiting. But, just as he was about to turn away, having counted to a hundred—the flats after all could not be very large—but then to another hundred just in case, he heard from the other side of the door the laborious slap-slap of someone wearing chappals very slowly approaching. He did his best to adopt a quietly sympathetic expression and waited.
Inside, he heard the door bolt slowly being wriggled open. Then there was another lengthy delay. He imagined Mrs. Vacha, infinitely aged, a mere wraith scarcely still present in the world, pausing to rest after her fluttering labors. He increased the sympathy in his expression till he felt his face creak with it.
At last the door opened.
An enormous woman stood on the far side. She was old, certainly, even very old. But it seemed as if she had devoted all the years she had been alive to increasing layer by layer her girth. Her body was one immense balloon, swathed in the white that Parsis of the older generation so often wore, right up to the scarflike mathoobanoo with which she had covered her head and the fat round tire of chin below it. From her finely wrinkle-covered huge moon of a face there sprouted, here and there, curling white hairs.
A great waft of eau de cologne rolled out from her toward him.
But, he noted with a dart of pleasure, the eyes in the enormous head were, despite the lady’s age, bright and black with intelligence.
“Madam,” he said, realizing suddenly that for all his long wait for the door to open he had prepared no excuse for wanting to talk. “Madam, I … I am …”
Then he thought that there was perhaps nothing for it but the truth.
“Madam, I am a police officer, Inspector Ghote by name, and I am making inquiries about the activities here in this baag as a youth in days long gone by of one Mr. Freddy Kersasp.”
“Firdaus.”
For a moment he failed to understand what she had said. Then it struck him.
“Yes, yes. One Firdaus Kersasp, sometimes known as Freddy.”
“Come.”
He wondered whether Mrs. Vacha, from extreme old age or from her mere immensity, had difficulty in producing more than a word or two at a time. Perhaps he was not going to find it as simple a matter as he had hoped to confirm from her that a murder, or a death following a robbery, had taken place in the colony when Freddy Kersasp had been a youth on the verge of manhood. Or that it was possible that Freddy, or Firdaus, had been involved, however little the police at the time had been aware of it.
Meanwhile Mrs. Vacha had begun to work her huge, white-clad bulk around with the evident purpose of letting him in, and he suspended judgment. At last she got herself pointing in the right direction and began to move forward, lumberingly and hesitantly as a buffalo at the full span of its days. At each step a chappal softly slapped the floor in a slow, irregular rhythm. Anxiously he followed.
“Bad.”
The word emerged like a tiny explosion from the cautiously progressing balloon in front of him.
He felt a bounce of hope. Surely that word, isolated and minimal though it was, must refer to Freddy Kersasp in his early days here in the baag.
It was a supposition reinforced as the trembling inflatable preceding him maneuvered herself along past the open door of her kitchen—it looked too narrow ever to admit her, though the gas stove on its table and the wide washing mori down at floor level both looked well-used—and uttered one more puffed-out syllable.
“Lewd.”
But this was followed almost at once by two words of explanation.
“Dirty remarks.”
“Fred— Firdaus Kersasp as a boy was cutting dirty remarks?”
“Always.”
So perhaps that was all Mrs. Nath, new Inspector of Smoke Nuisances, had had to flourish against the owner of Gup Shup. But with Freddy Kersasp’s present-day status, it might well have been just enough. The question was, though, whether young Firdaus had once done worse than make lewd jokes. Whether, possibly, he had robbed the retired sandalwood merchant, Mr. Topiwala, and left him for dead.
Mrs. Vacha had now contrived to squeeze her tremulous bulk into the flat’s living room. Following, Ghote saw against every wall cupboards and boxes and chests, more almost than he could count. Each was thickly dust-layered and safely fastened with a dangling padlock. On such parts of the walls that were left free there hung heavily framed photographs of past Parsi worthies, grave-faced men with large moustaches wearing the same puggrees on their heads as he had seen in the two dark oil portraits in Mr. Z. R. Mistry’s drawing room.
At the thought of his meeting there and its consequences, he felt again an upswelling of chaotic despair. The world was full, it seemed, of blackmail and blackmailers, each exploiting some fellow creature. And he himself was among them, threatening that Muslim locksmith to make him forge the keys to Dolly Daruwala’s flat, and even as a boy—something he had contrived for years until recently to blot from his memory—promising to tell on that pencil thief Adik Desmukh.
He experienced a renewed jab of determination to find some offense other than blackmail to use to put the owner of Gup Shup out of circulation. Something uncontaminated by that virus.
“Mrs. Vacha,” he said urgently, “do you remember anything about Firdaus Kersasp to his detriment more shameful than the uttering of lewd remarks? Do you know even anything about the death in suspicious circumstances here in this colony many years ago of one Mr. Topiwala?”
“Firdaus was doing that.”
The huge old woman stood puffing and trembling after the effort of producing the brief accusation. But Ghote dared not show her the consideration he would have liked to have done.
“You are definitely stating and accusing that Firdaus Kersasp in his much younger days was responsible for the death of that man?” he asked demandingly.
“Everyone knowing.”
“But Firdaus Kersasp was not arrested. Was he so much as questioned?”
“Questioned and questioned he was. But police are fools.”
Ghote decided to ignore that.
“But,” he said, “if Firdaus Kersasp was questioned and then let go, there cannot have been one hard-and-fast case against him.”
“He was doing it.”
The firm accusation had seemingly exhausted the immense old woman. She looked about her, took a faltering pace backward and fell in a huge white heap into a broad armchair, which from its sagging seat showed every sign of having been frequently subjected to such treatment over the years.
For a second Ghote wondered whether his eager ferocity had been altogether too much for his ancient witness. But he saw that the bright black eyes in that huge, wrinkle-skinned face were alert and alive.
“Why are you saying and saying the boy was guilty,” he punched out at her then, “when he was never at all charge-sheeted? Why?”
For a little while Mrs. Vacha did not reply. But Ghote suspected this was because she simply lacked the breath. The eyes in her vast face under the white mathoobanoo were shining still.
At last she answered.
“Everyone said … was always round at that flat. Demandi
ng money. Knew …”
“What knew? What?”
“Mr. Topiwala. Secret vice.”
Ghote decided this was a line he did not need to pursue. No doubt long-dead Mr. Topiwala had had some vice he wanted no one to learn about. But all he himself needed to know was that Freddy Kersasp had apparently been blackmailing him over whatever this was. Because it would follow, if what Mrs. Vacha was remembering had any shade of truth about it, that the young Freddy had known that the retired sandalwood merchant had money available. The young blackmailer eventually must have pressed too hard, and when Mr. Topiwala had rejected him at last—in the true Duke Wellington way—Freddy had resorted to outright robbery.
Yes, it was all decidedly likely. Only, why had the police at the time contented themselves with questioning only?
He must find out why, if he could.
“Madam,” he said, “you have been very very helpful. But may I kindly ask one thing more? Are you remembering what year it was that the late Mr. Topiwala was robbed and died also?”
“Married,” Mrs. Vacha puffed out from her wide armchair.
“Married? You are saying that Mr. Topiwala was married? But what has that to do with his death in the end?”
He felt suddenly furious. Furious and baffled. Why had it all become so muddled just when he was on the point of getting it clear?
But Mrs. Vacha, speechless, was pointing to one of the photographs on her wall, a small and smudgy one that hung all on its own in a narrow space between two of the tall, dark padlocked cupboards.
Ghote looked at her, still angrily puzzled. She continued to hold up a gross tubular, trembling arm and indicate the one photograph and nothing else.
He went over to the gap between the cupboards.
And then he understood. The photograph was of a wedding pair. Plainly Mr. and Mrs. Vacha, although she was barely half her present size and he was a dried-up, late-marrying bridegroom if ever there was. But the point of her directing him to the picture was at once evident. In small golden letters on the foot of its frame a date was inscribed. A date in May thirty-seven years earlier.
The Iciest Sin Page 10
