The Iciest Sin

by H. R. F. Keating

  This must be when the Topiwala robbery had happened. It would be something Mrs. Vacha could not have forgotten if her marriage had taken place at much the same time.

  “Madam, thank you. Thank you, madam. You have been one hundred percent helpful. Please do not attempt to show me out. I can most easily find my way.”

  Head fluffily swirling with pleasure, Ghote blundered from the flat and down the dark stairs.

  No, he reflected, his fears on the way up had proved ridiculous. Far from meeting with some new unguessable disaster, he had come away with something real and hard and damn useful.

  He hurried, despite the thickly amassed afternoon heat, to the police station from which, all those years ago, the robbery at Zarina Baag would have been investigated. Sticky with sweat both dried and fresh, he introduced himself to the station house officer. Would their records extend back thirty-seven years?

  “Oh, God, yes, Inspector, as long as station itself has been here records are there. Kindly help yourself.”

  The sight that confronted him in the station’s records room, a long black place lit only by a strip of small windows close to its ceiling, soggily stuffy and smelling of long-accumulated mustiness, was grimly daunting. He experienced a strong desire to give up his hunt before he had even begun.

  But somewhere among the files and papers stacked in bundles, two and even three deep, on the slatted wooden shelves that ran all around the walls and continued in long islands in the center, there might be a case diary relating to the death of one Mr. Topiwala at Zarina Baag. The thought drove him to brace himself and plunge in. If he could discover somewhere in the daily notes that investigating officers had to enter in a case diary, by standing order, something to use even now against Freddy Kersasp, any labor would be worthwhile. Had that blackmailer not brought death in Delhi to Mr. Ramesh Deswani? And more than likely death or black misery to many others as well?

  He found after a little poking about that the stacked files were at least in chronological order, more or less. So inside half an hour he had actually located the year he wanted. But even as he heaved down the heavy, date-labeled bundle of papers, it began to crumble in his arms.

  White ants, he thought. The whole damn lot has been invaded by white ants.

  Swiftly he lowered the floppy, fragments-shedding bundle to the floor. Then, sitting cross-legged beside it, he prised open the time-hardened knots of the tape, colorless with age, that bound it.

  His surmise proved accurate. File after file in the bundle simply disintegrated as he attempted to pick it out. In minutes he was surrounded by tiny ragged paper pieces like wind-heaped piles of fallen petals. Across such sheets that remained more or less intact the ants’ perforated trails wound haphazardly. Here and there their droppings made darker stains on the faded brown to which the ancient sheets had long ago been reduced.

  He sneezed violently, once, twice, three times.

  Even the cardboard covers of the case diaries he found among the files in the ruined pile—they were a different shape from the ones he was used to, but he recognized them for what they were at once—had, he saw, been mined to pieces by the relentless mandibles.

  Misery welled up in him once more. So near yet so far.

  But the mound was not yet wholly sorted through. Wrinkling his nose and shutting his mouth tight, he plunged in again. One more case diary came to light, but even as he read the words on its cover the whole fell to bits in his hands. He plucked out one last likely cover. Yes, it too was a case diary. Even the date of the year he had so looked forward to immersing himself in was easy to read. But at least half the book was simply paper crumbs. Cautiously he turned one by one its remaining half pages, alert for the words Zarina Baag, or Topiwala, or even half of them. But at last he came to the final one. Nothing.

  Wearily he eased himself to his feet, gritting his teeth at the pain in his thighs. And then he saw it. At what would have been the very bottom of the tape-bound pile before it had been ant-eaten to so much rubbish, there was the by-now-familiar cover of yet one more case diary as they had been in those distant days. It looked, too, as if, perhaps because of its position at the bottom of the bundle, the ants had largely failed to get their destructive little jaws into it.

  He swooped, painful legs forgotten.

  And, yes, it was almost totally intact, and the date on it was right. He opened it.

  It was at once evident that the first case it happened to have dealt with all those years ago was the Zarina Baag affair. There, written not once but time and again, was that name Topiwala.

  In triumph he bore away the slim book, from which all but the bottom pages once under carbon sheets had been long ago torn out. With a brief apology, he settled himself at a corner of the station house officer’s table and avidly began to read.

  Very soon he found himself feeling more than a little admiration for the officer who had investigated the affair, one Inspector V. P. Lavande. He was splendidly conscientious. There could be no doubting that he had made his entries, as per regulations, each and every day, which was more than some harassed officers did nowadays. Even his handwriting was beautifully clear, and he had pressed with such firmness on the top sheets that the carbon copies were as easy to read as if they had been made just the day before.

  Then he came across something infinitely better than the name Topiwala: the name Firdaus Kersasp. Inspector Lavande, it seemed, before his investigation had been more than a few days old, had heard talk about young Firdaus’s relations with Mr. Topiwala of the “secret vice.” In decency he had at that early stage gone no further into what that vice had been than Ghote had himself. But no sooner had his suspicions been aroused than he had taken Firdaus Kersasp down into the station’s detection room for interrogation.

  His record of that was as meticulous as all the rest of his notes. After going through the first page Ghote realized he had in front of himself an almost word-for-word account.

  Surely now he would find something. Something with which, never mind how many years had gone by, he could pin the crime at Zarina Baag on to Mr. Freddy Kersasp, now proprietor Gup Shup.

  Only why had Inspector Lavande, that exemplary police officer, not been able to charge-sheet his suspect at the time?

  Before very long he found the answer. Freddy Kersasp, or Firdaus as he was called then, almost as soon as Inspector Lavande had begun questioning him, had been indignantly anxious that his imminent departure to England for “higher studies” should not be delayed. It appeared that he had paid for his passage—in those days by ship not plane—well before Mr. Topiwala had been robbed. So he could not have got hold of the necessary money in that way. Nor, it seemed, had he obtained the sum by blackmailing the retired sandalwood merchant, as rumor in Zarina Baag had held. Mr. Topiwala, according to the inspector’s scrupulous notes, had been accustomed to keep a daily account with a running total of his hoarded finances, and there had never been any deductions from that total beyond the very small amounts Mr. Topiwala allowed himself for food and other unavoidable expenses. Inspector Lavande had gone back years, till well into the time that Freddy Kersasp would have been a mere Standard V schoolboy, in his meticulous checking.

  So, after all, Ghote recognized with twisting irony, at least as a youngster Freddy Kersasp had not been a blackmailer, whatever he had come to be in later life.

  He remembered now, too, from the inquiries he had made about the owner of Gup Shup that he had as a young man gone to the U.K. Freddy Kersasp had always stated, apparently, that it was there he had acquired the money to start up his magazine. Back in those distant days his parents, he had explained to Inspector Lavande, had borrowed the passage money he had needed. Even that Inspector Lavande, admirably conscientious as ever, had confirmed with old Mr. Kersasp, bookkeeper on minimal salary at a place called the New Laxmi Paper Mart. Firdaus’s parents had held a modest party for their relatives to see off the boy some days before the Topiwala robbery had occurred, though he had not departed then.
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  From all this Inspector Lavande had decided that the Kersasp line led nowhere. It was a conclusion that Ghote found he could only agree with.

  Once more he was left with nothing to go on.

  Next day—it was well on into the evening now—he would have to have yet another session with Shiv Chand and see if that shark-smiling Punjabi could after all rake up just one other name in the tally of those who had paid for insertions in Indians of Merit and Distinction. But this was a faint chance at best, and there was always the danger that Shiv Chand would put him on to some influential citizen who had genuinely sought admission to the as-yet-unprinted prestigious volume. If he went to one of them hinting they had done something to lay themselves open to blackmail he would be—

  He spoke the words aloud.

  “In one hell of a soup.”

  Doing all that he could to fight off the deep depression his afternoon’s fruitless work threatened, he made his way home. Perhaps next day Shiv Chand would produce a perfect witness he had hitherto not so much as even remembered, one ready and willing with only the merest hint to go into the witness box under the guise of Shri X. Or perhaps Freddy Kersasp himself would have heard some rumor about what was happening and would have decided that enough was enough and have returned, forever, to America. Perhaps. Perhaps.

  But more likely than not, he said to himself darkly, he would arrive home to find the squinting, sidling figure of Ranchod waiting for him, hand held out for another hundred rupees. He had come last time several days before a month had been up, and had been yet more slyly urgent in his demand.

  But to his relief there was no one outside his door. He tapped in his customary manner and in a moment heard Protima unloosing the door bolt.

  The comforts of home. The prospect of showering away the sweat and the filth of the white ants’ destructiveness, of sitting and relaxing—he would ask Protima to press his feet—of the evening meal bubbling with delicious spiciness on the stove began to lift his gloom.

  “Well,” Protima said as soon as she had opened the door, “I have some news.”

  Somehow he knew it would be good news. It had to be. He could bear nothing else now. And besides, Protima seemed quietly pleased.

  “Yes?” he said. “What news it is?”

  “It is Ved. He has bought his home computer.”

  He felt himself assailed by conflicting emotions. First, since Protima seemed so delighted, he tried to feel equally pleased. But then also he was considerably puzzled. How could the boy have acquired enough money to pay for a computer? And had he got it legitimately from Vision Radio and Computer Service? Or had he bought it, smuggled, from a pavementwalla at Flora Fountain? But if he had done that, why was Protima still pleased? And then did he himself actually welcome Ved getting the thing at all? Such an outlandish, modern object?

  He even detected in himself a tinge of jealousy. How had it somehow come about that Ved, his little Ved, knew about computers when he himself was hardly aware of anything more than that they existed? They were there, mysterious, useful no doubt, but altogether in the realm of the unknown. And now his son—his son—seemed to be very much at home with them. And had bought one.

  Ved had bought a home computer when he himself had said the very word was not to be mentioned under his roof.

  He found he was standing deprived of speech just outside his own door. And, as much as anything not to show Protima that the arrival of the computer had put him into this state of bewildered perplexity, he stepped briskly inside.

  “Well, well,” he said with assumed loud confidence, “let me see this great new thing we are having, yes?”

  Ved appeared at the doorway of his room.

  “You have it inside?” Ghote asked. “You are keeping this big-big thing to yourself only?”

  “No, Dadaji.”

  “It is going to sit with us, then? Poor old television is to be sent into kitchen, one hundred percent in disgrace, yes?”

  “No, no, Dadaji. You are having to use screen of TV with home computer.”

  Ghote felt a flicker of anger coming to dominate the conflicting emotions the news had sent swarming up in him.

  All right, he had got it wrong. But how was he to know a home computer used the TV screen? Why should he be some expert in electronics all of a sudden? If electronics was the word he meant.

  “Well, well,” he said, rasping with sarcasm, “so none of us is to be allowed to watch TV anymore, is it? So your mother will have to give up every Sunday morning the Mahabharata when that so holy program is meaning so much to her she is even taking bath before it? And your father, will he have to go without knowing what is happening in world because news in Hindi or English cannot be seen?”

  “No, Dadaji, no.”

  “I am glad to hear.”

  Ved in the doorway of his room seemed to be having the grace to look a little ashamed. He scraped the side of his bare foot along the floor.

  “Computer is not here,” he said. “Yet.”

  “So? When it is coming? When is flat to be made into twenty-first-century temple only?”

  Ved looked even more abashed.

  “I am having to pay still,” he muttered.

  And at that Ghote’s half-suppressed rage flared into full flame.

  “So that is your idea,” he shouted. “Trying to make me agree to damn thing by saying it is bought already when you have laid down not so much as one rupee for it. That is blackmail, my son. Damn bloody blackmail. And you will suffer for it. I will be teaching you one lesson you will not ever be forgetting.”

  “Husbandji,” he heard Protima faintly protesting.

  But his rage, which he knew had been fed as much by the frustrations of the day behind him and, beyond those, all the troubles that had assailed him ever since the evening he had been sent to see Mr. Z. R. Mistry, was not to be appeased.

  Furiously he looked around to see if he could find something with which to beat his son as he had never been beaten before. And in a moment he spotted one of the boy’s chappals where he had kicked it from his foot as he had gone into his room. With anger-fueled strides he marched over to it.

  But then, at the very instant he bent to pick it up, something in his head let in a cooling gust of unexpected enlightenment.

  I would teach the boy to be jumping the gun like that, he had been thinking in thick rage. And suddenly he had realized that, only a few hours earlier, he had equally encountered somebody who had jumped a gun. Young Firdaus Kersasp. Firdaus Kersasp had told the world that he had booked a passage to the U.K. for his “further studies” well before the robbery of Mr. Topiwala’s hoarded fortune. But there was no real reason why in advance of committing a robbery he had long planned he should not have pretended to book that passage. Or even have got hold of a temporary loan actually to book it. Later, when Inspector Lavande’s inquiries had come too close, he could have persuaded his father to say the passage money had been provided by himself, swearing to him he was innocent and saying he feared for his place at that college in the U.K. if police inquiries delayed his departure.

  He let Ved’s chappal fall almost as soon as his hand had grasped it.

  TEN

  Next morning, first thing, Ghote requested an interview with the Assistant Commissioner. When he was summoned, something over an hour and a half later, he laid out, briefly as he could, his theory about how the young Firdaus Kersasp had provided himself with a sort of prealibi before robbing Mr. Topiwala, the crime that had led to the old sandalwood merchant’s death.

  “Yes,” the Assistant Commissioner said when he had come, a little breathlessly, to a halt. “You may well be right, Ghote. I am inclined to think you are. Yes, right enough. But we would need somewhat more before we try tackling Mr. Freddy Kersasp.”

  He sat behind his sweep of a desk and pondered.

  Ghote, standing to attention in front, was careful not to interrupt the process. At last the Assistant Commissioner spoke.

  “Yes. Well, if what
you suspect is correct, then the money Kersasp used to start up that appalling publication must have come not from some magazine he is supposed to have run in England but from what he stole from that Parsi recluse of yours. What’s his name?”

  “Topiwala, sir.”

  “Exactly. The money must have been what Mr. Topiwala had made from the sale of his sandalwood business. A good deal, no doubt. Say what you like about your Parsi, he’s a damn good businessman.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Yes. It stands out a mile. All that stuff about his early days Freddy Kersasp is always writing in that column of his must be the sheerest fabrication.”

  “Please, sir, what stuff is that?” Ghote asked.

  “Don’t you read the rag, Inspector?”

  “No, sir. Never have, sir.”

  “Yes. Well, my wife— That is, the damn servants sometimes bring copies into the flat. Suppose it’s my duty, in a way, to keep an eye on it.”

  “Yes, sir. Of course, sir.”

  “Well, thing is, Kersasp keeps claiming that during his sojourn in the U.K. he started up some damn magazine to do with Indian arts and made a hell of a success of it. And the fruits of that, he has the bloody impudence to say, he brings to the task of correcting the ills of society here. Says he does it only for the sake of India itself.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “So he’s got to be stopped, Ghote. And I venture to think I’ve seen the way to do it. Now, if the fellow didn’t make that fortune of his in the U.K. as he claims, we ought to be able to get evidence for it. Damn it, if that magazine there never existed or was no more than some wretched sheet nobody wanted to buy, then we can quickly enough find out. I’ll have a message sent to Scotland Yard ek dum. They’ll provide an answer in no time at all. And when we find that claim of Kersasp’s is all bunkum, as I personally am willing to bet, then we’ll have every bit enough to tackle the fellow with.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Clicking heels in salute, Ghote left the Assistant Commissioner’s cabin. In his heart he cherished the thought that, thanks to something he himself had hit on, the tremendous machinery of distant Scotland Yard was going to be set rapidly to work.