The Assistant Commissioner’s faith in the swiftness of Scotland Yard inquiries proved to be misplaced. As days, and then weeks, went by Ghote took it on himself to ask from time to time whether an answer had arrived. And after a while he thought it wiser not to ask.
Work on cases mercifully with no tint of blackmail to them kept him busy. He had one satisfying triumph when, thanks to recalling that it was a custom among Sindhis to offer guests from their own community crisp and spicy papads as a snack with any drinks, he deduced that the visitors who had murdered a Sindhi businessman must be of Sindhi origin themselves, and had then been able to trace and arrest them. And he had a good many days of frustration in trying to get a line on some distributors of “brown sugar,” the crudely processed heroin that was becoming a menace on the Bombay streets.
Before long he even began to feel that the whole miserable period of his life that had followed his visit to Mr. Z. R. Mistry was going to slide into the past, become simply a time to be looked back on, and that as infrequently as possible. Even Inspector Singh, he gathered, had moved on to other matters than the Dolly Daruwala murder, for all that the affair had not been officially relegated to the files.
Eventually it was only the visits Mr. Mistry’s Ranchod continued to make that kept an uneasily prickling consciousness of blackmail in his mind. Ranchod’s demands, though he had come to feel them as no more than one of the irksome routines of life, were, however, becoming little by little more frequent. Where at first they had been strictly once-a-month affairs, now the fellow was appearing certainly at two-week intervals. He seemed each time, too, to have a more unpleasant air about him. He had developed a habit of drooling at the mouth, or was no longer taking pains to control it, and even his squint appeared to be getting yet worse.
But on the other hand he felt it safe now in response to Ranchod’s outthrust hand to say firmly that he would get no more than fifty rupees. Once even, toward the end of a month when funds were short, he made it as little as twenty-five, confident from the look of pleading in the fellow’s eyes that he would be satisfied with even that much.
Yet he could not bring himself finally to give him the Duke Wellington answer. The payments he made him were not a tremendous drain on his resources. By cutting down on one or two little luxuries—he stopped altogether buying paans to chew from the brass-bright stands of the vendors—he could pretty well make up the money. And it was worth making absolutely sure such a figure as Dr. Commissariat—the TV news still sometimes showed him standing in front of some impressive piece of apparatus in his new laboratory—remained untouched.
Then one day, nearly three months after the Assistant Commissioner had sent his message to Scotland Yard, the phone in Ghote’s cabin rang and he heard the familiar brisk voice ordering him to come up.
“You sent for me, sir.”
“Ah, yes, Ghote. Ghote. Now what … ah, yes. Scotland Yard. Well, they have turned up trumps, as I always said they would. You can trust the British to get things done, Ghote.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Yes.”
The Assistant Commissioner riffled through the papers on his desk.
“Ah, yes, yes. Here it is. Short and sweet. Short and sweet. Listen to this, Ghote.”
“Yes, sir.”
“No trace any periodical owned or managed by Frederick, otherwise Firdaus, Kersasp.”
“Then, sir, it must be certain Mr. Kersasp was acquiring the money to start up Gup Shup from that robbery in Zarina Baag.”
“That’s it, Ghote. Told you so in the first place. Shady customer, Kersasp. Always was.”
The Assistant Commissioner sat back in his broad chair.
“Now, this is what we’ll do, Ghote. In point of fact, so many years after the event there’s precious little hope of getting a case that would hold water in court. We know that. But Mr. Freddy Kersasp can’t be altogether sure how much we might be able to do. So, it’s perfectly simple. We go to him, and lay our cards on the table. Some of them. We make out that we’ve got his best interests at heart. And we say: Get out of India while you can, or we would not be able to hold back full investigations. That ought to do it.”
Yes, Ghote thought, that may very likely do it. It may very likely achieve what whoever up there spoke to the Commissioner in the first place is wanting done: putting an end to Gup Shup and its nasty allegations and those costly entries in Indians of Merit and Distinction. But all the same it is one thing only: blackmail.
“Yes, Ghote,” the Assistant Commissioner said, his voice purring as a fish-fed cat’s. “So, no time like the present, yes? Make an appointment with Mr. Kersasp straightaway.”
“Sir, me?”
“Yes, Ghote, you. You. You don’t expect an Assistant Commissioner of Police to go doing that kind of dirty— To go asking to see someone like Mr. Freddy Kersasp, do you?”
“No, sir, no.”
“Very well, then, get on with it, man. Get on with it.”
“Yes, sir.”
Ghote took it upon himself, however, not to carry out the Assistant Commissioner’s instruction to the letter. He calculated that for a task as delicate, and alarmingly difficult, as he had been given, it would be necessary to choose the very best time and place. It would be madness, for instance, to go to the offices of Gup Shup at this hour of the morning and attempt in those surroundings to—to blackmail Freddy Kersasp. There was no other word for it.
So he spent some time reviewing everything he had learned about the owner of Gup Shup from its dismissed office manager, still awaiting trial on a charge of extortion under Section 383 of the Indian Penal Code. And eventually he came to the conclusion that the best moment to make his bid would be, in fact, at the end of that very morning. Because this was Wednesday.
Every Wednesday at the Ripon Club it was the custom to serve at lunch the great Parsi dish, dhansak. And every Wednesday, Shiv Chand had said, Freddy Kersasp was accustomed to set out from the Gup Shup offices at precisely half past twelve to walk to the club, there both to savor the dhansak and show himself to the cream of the Parsi community in all his dangerous glory.
To fall in beside Freddy Kersasp on that walk—“He is progressing there as if he was King-Emperor only,” Shiv Chand had snarled—might well be the best moment to conduct his awkward negotiation without any witness. Now that he himself had to play the blackmailer, he was not going to make Shiv Chand’s own mistake at the Taj Mahal Hotel.
So in good time he stationed himself a couple of hundred yards away from the Gup Shup offices and waited.
And, just as Shiv Chand had said, to the minute there appeared King-Emperor Freddy Kersasp. At once Ghote saw why the bitter Punjabi had applied that expression to his former boss. Freddy Kersasp was an undeniably impressive figure. From his shock of prematurely white hair to his thickly jutting white eyebrows, to his wide and curly white moustache, on down to his solidly puffed-out, white-shirted belly over which there flowed a wide, colorful, striped tie, he exuded rosy self-confidence. Among the weaving hundreds making their way here and there or nowhere on the pavement, he was probably not particularly noticed. But, silver-headed shiny malacca cane grasped in one hand like a scepter, he acted as if every eye was upon him. It was, indeed, a royal progress.
Ghote pulled back his shoulders and thought of the Assistant Commissioner. He had been ordered to do what he was about to do. He was acting, in fact, with all the implied authority of the Commissioner himself, however much what had been asked of him was—no hiding it—blackmail. And however little, if things went wrong, he would get any backing from above. That much he knew without having to think about it.
Now the sailing, self-confident figure was almost upon him.
He felt a lurch of apprehension but nevertheless stepped boldly forward.
“Excuse, please. It is Mr. Freddy Kersasp?”
Freddy Kersasp did not show, by the least flicker of his eyes or turn of his imposing white-haired head, that he was in any way aware of the approa
ch.
Ghote’s heart sank. Was this how the dreaded figure dealt with unexpected introductions? No doubt in the course of his battening career he had had some nasty encounters with those he had threatened. So did he ignore any stranger now entirely? And would he be able to get away with it? Sweep triumphantly past? Progress all the way to the sacred portals of the Ripon Club and there, surrounded by witnesses, be safe from all demands and threats?
And then he saw it.
From Freddy Kersasp’s left ear there dangled a silky black wire. The cord of a hearing device. Like many Parsis, then, he must suffer from deafness. Deafness in one ear at least. And it had been on the deaf side that, by chance, he had made his approach.
Careless of dignity, he scuttled around behind the slowly progressing, cane-twirling figure, took a skip and a jump to get just in front of him, and tried again.
“Please, it is Mr. Freddy Kersasp?”
And the King-Emperor graciously answered.
“That is, as it happens, my name. What can I do for you, my dear sir? It is some charitable request? Alas, I am well-known through all Bombay as what is called a soft touch.”
“No, no. It is not at all that.”
“Then what is it, my dear chap? I am a busy man, you know. I have appointments. Appointments.”
Freddy Kersasp, who had deigned for a moment to halt his progress toward the Ripon Club and its steaming, spicy dhansak, started to move away. But then, abruptly, he stopped and turned to face Ghote directly. The white projecting eyebrows beneath his shock of white hair contracted into a sharp frown.
“I don’t know you,” he said. “You are not, I hope, someone attempting to complain about something I have written in my magazine? Because if so are I must warn you …”
He shifted his grip on his heavily knobbed malacca stick.
“No, no,” Ghote said quickly. “It is in no way such. It is that I am wishing to speak with you as a friend only.”
Freddy Kersasp began now to turn away again.
“As friend,” Ghote added, rapidly throwing in an extra lie, “and as a very, very great admirer of your Gup Shup column itself.”
It was enough to make Freddy Kersasp transfer his cane in an instant to his other hand and swiftly to capture Ghote’s arm with his own.
“Recognition, my dear sir,” he said, for all Bombay to hear if they cared to listen, “is welcome. Always welcome. You may be surprised to hear it. You may think that a person like myself, a writer like myself, will have had his surfeit of recognition. But, no. No, a modicum of praise is ever welcome.”
In face of that, Ghote was unsure how to go on. But again he thought of the Assistant Commissioner and what it was that had been required of him.
He swallowed as, marched onward by the buoyantly sailing Freddy Kersasp, he became aware of how much nearer, even in a minute or so, they had got to the gates of the Ripon Club and all those there who must not hear a police officer practicing nothing less than blackmail.
“Sir,” he said, “what I have to tell is altogether one hundred percent urgent.”
“Ah, information,” Freddy Kersasp exclaimed, at once freeing Ghote’s arm. “I thought somehow you were not a person … However, no matter. I regard it as my duty to receive information—however disgusting, however revealing it may be of the ills of our present-day society. Speak, my dear fellow, speak.”
But then he came to a halt once more, the briefest of halts.
“One thing however,” he said, raising a warning hand. “Not a single paisa. I do not pay, my good sir, to be told the tittle-tattle of the sewers of society. Though if what you are good enough to inform me of proves satisfactory, there may be a small honorarium. A small honorarium.”
He resumed the royal progress.
“Speak, my good fellow, speak. Do not hesitate. Not a word goes any further.”
But now Ghote was experiencing a healthy crackle of revulsion at the blatancy of the Gup Shup blackmailer’s tactics.
“Sir,” he said sharply, “it is not at all a question of information for the pages of your—”
He managed to check the savage description he had been about to apply.
“What I am telling,” he went on, letting an edge of authority have full play in his voice, “is that you yourself are in very much of danger.”
“Danger? My dear chap, Freddy Kersasp has faced danger enough in his time. Do you think I carry this stick simply for show? I tell you—”
“No,” Ghote broke in, pretty well convinced by now that in fact Freddy Kersasp did carry his silver-headed stick for show. “No. Do not be thinking your danger is in any way something that a few blows from a stick will be saving you from. Mr. Kersasp, you are in danger of finding yourself arrested for one cognizable and nonbailable offense.”
Once more Freddy Kersasp came to a halt. Fleetingly Ghote wondered whether the fellow’s Wednesday progress toward his dhansak lunch had ever been so often interrupted.
“My good man, I do not know what you are attempting to tell me. But let me make it clear to you. Freddy Kersasp has been in danger of arrest on more occasions than he can count. But once only has he ever set foot inside a court, and then he emerged in triumph. In triumph, sir.”
“But that was on a charge of extortion only,” Ghote snapped back.
And now Freddy Kersasp’s broad, white-eyebrowed, white-moustached face took on, for a single instant, a look of fear.
“Who the devil are you?” he shot out.
“I am a police officer, Mr. Kersasp. But one who is your friend only.”
“My friend, are you?”
“Yes indeed, Mr. Kersasp. And that is why I have taken the chance to speak with you altogether in private.”
Slowly Freddy Kersasp threaded his arm through Ghote’s once more.
“Yes, my dear fellow?” he said, setting out in the direction of the Ripon Club once again but at a noticeably slower pace. “Now, tell me everything. You say you have enjoyed my column in Gup Shup? Is that the only reason you are being so good as to—to warn me?”
Ghote was tempted to make this the moment when he came out with the real reason why he was telling Freddy Kersasp about the threat hanging over him. But he decided that the pretense might be worth carrying on a little longer.
“Oh, yes, sir,” he said. “I would not at all like to see a person of your—of your very great cleverness being put on trial under Indian Penal Code Section Three-seven-eight.”
“Section Three-seven-eight? What on earth is that?”
“Sir, it is theft.”
“Theft? Theft?” Freddy Kersasp broke into a giant laugh. “Well, I have been accused of many things in my time, but I never expected to hear myself called a common thief. Thank you for your kindly warning, my dear sir, but I think you have got hold of the wrong man.”
“No, sir.”
“No? Come, my good fellow, enough of this.”
“No, sir. The theft you are very, very likely to be accused of was occurring at a Parsi colony by the name of Zarina Baag some thirty-seven years past.”
For the fourth time Freddy Kersasp stopped in his tracks. A renewed look of fear came on to his bluff face. And stayed there longer than an instant.
“What are you saying?”
“Mr. Kersasp, I am saying the whole truth. Police inquiries in recent weeks have led to the utmost suspicion that it was you and you alone who was responsible for a certain robbery of one Mr. Topiwala at Zarina Baag those many years past, and that perhaps the death of the said Mr. Topiwala can be laid to your door also.”
“And how the devil do you know so much about that? What’s your name? You’ve been pretty careful to keep that under the table.”
“My name is Ghote, sir. I am an inspector of Crime Branch. But there is a colleague of mine, one by the name of Inspector Arjun Singh, and it is that man who has got upon your track itself.”
Feeling a dart of pleasure at the swiftness with which he had put, so to speak, a mythical Arjun S
ingh between himself and his still-formidable opponent, Ghote gave Freddy Kersasp a long, steady look.
“Well, Inspector Ghote,” the owner of Gup Shup said slowly, “let me thank you for the warning you have seen fit to give me. But let me also point out to you that this crime, this alleged crime, took place nearly forty years ago. And what is more it happened when I was on the point of leaving for higher studies in the U.K., where incidentally I later very rapidly prospered as a magazine owner. Editor and owner, as perhaps you may know.”
“No, sir, you were not at all prospering in that line in U.K. We have received Scotland Yard information to that effect.”
Again a look of alarm appeared on Freddy Kersasp’s face.
“But—but—” he said. “But I could not have taken that old man’s money so as to get to England. I had paid for my passage long before that robbery took place.”
“No, sir. That would not wash also. There was no reason why you should not have borrowed money to secure your passage and at once paid back same from part proceeds of robbery.”
“But my father, Khoedai rest him—”
“No, sir.”
Freddy Kersasp’s tongue appeared beneath his luxuriant white moustache and licked at his lips.
“Well, Inspector,” he said after a little while, “as I was saying, it is good of you to tell me all this. But I do not believe on reflection that I am in any real danger. No one is going to bring a prosecution after so many years. And I have friends … friends.”
“Sir, you have also enemies.”
“No, no, my good fellow. Freddy Kersasp may have said some harsh things on occasion about certain people, but that was necessary. Necessary to cleanse the Augean stables of this country. A phrase of which I have often, alas, had to make use.”
Ghote looked at him.
It was plain the shock of hearing that his long-ago crime was once again being actively investigated had rapidly worn off. He had even turned in the direction of the Ripon Club once more, and was lifting his head as if the odor of dhansak was already in his nostrils.
The Iciest Sin Page 12
