He found he was unable to refrain from passing a hand over his own head, though “hair loss” was not one of his troubles.
But what it is they are doing? he thought abruptly. They are blackmailing me or anybody who has lost a few only hairs. Yes, that is what it is. Blackmail. And that goes for the A-C also. They are blackmailing anybody who has paid the minimum by stating, without actually saying it, that any cheap machine will conk out. Blackmail, blackmail, blackmail. Not as altogether bad as Mama Chiplunkar’s, or even as Freddy Kersasp and his Gup Shup, but still blackmail.
He looked to see if all the other posters were as unpleasantly persuasive.
PRESTIGE—COME BY IT NATURALLY WITH RAYMOND’S SUITINGS, SHIRTINGS, TROUSERINGS. Yes, that was attempting to obtain money from the innocent by making them feel they were altogether lacking in “prestige.” Then there was that big ad for cigarettes with the picture of the handsome boy and the seductive, modern-looking girl. MADE FOR EACH OTHER. Yes, what was that saying but “If you are not smoking our cigarettes you will not be one successful lover”? Blackmail. Blackmail, again. And those small-small letters underneath: CIGARETTE SMOKING IS INJURIOUS TO HEALTH. They did nothing to take away from the message. And was not that blackmail also? Even if it was blackmail to good purpose, as his own blackmailing of Freddy Kersasp had been. Perhaps.
Now, abruptly, he looked at his watch once more. Okay. He had not let too much time slip by, entwined in that sudden quagmire-revealing vision.
He turned back toward his chosen spot.
In his mind he felt the whole procedure he was to go through as being fixedly laid down. It was a pattern already embarked upon to be simply followed to its end. Mama Chiplunkar was a vermin, snake, and pest who by the foulest of means had maneuvered himself into a position where he could guarantee himself immunity from the servants of justice. He deserved to be eliminated. He would be. And by the very instrument the man himself had selected. He would be eliminated at the hands of a person he believed unable to do anything other than what he had demanded. It was just.
Lost in these thoughts he banged up against a tea-boy coming from the stall farther along the platform, six glasses in his wire basket. All but two of them slopped out the best part of their contents.
At once the boy—he could not have been more than twelve—launched into a splatter of abuse in the foulest Marathi.
“Take them back to the stall,” Ghote said, overcome by remorse all the sharper for what he had been thinking when the accident had occurred. “I will pay for them to be filled again.”
He noticed, with a gleam of amusement he was surprised to find himself capable of now, that the urchin was taking pains to place himself where he could make sure this unusually accommodating person was not planning some trick. Together they approached the tea stall, its front bright with a giant painted cup on a glaring blue background, a thick black wisp of steam twisting upward from it. Above, the rate list in crude red lettering in Hindi and English offered TEA—COFFEE—JAM CAKE—SAMOSA. Ghote planked some coins on the counter next to the shiny tea urn and moved away at once.
What if, while his back had been turned, Mama Chiplunkar had come? Had taken a careful look and, because he himself was not at the exact place specified, had decided this was some police trap? Had immediately made off?
But, no.
There standing at the very spot, looking around comfortably and without hurry, was the plump, white-clad form.
Without hesitation Ghote went up to him.
“Chiplunkar sahib.”
“Ah, it is you, Inspector. Good, good. Now what is it you have to tell? There is someone informing on me to you policewallas, yes?”
Ghote seized on the chance his victim had given him. With something to say that would hold his fullest attention he could easily drift him toward the edge of the platform. The deadly edge.
“I am very much fearing there is one goinda in your outfit, Chiplunkar sahib,” he said.
The look of vicious intent he saw then in the gang boss’s little fat-encased eyes confirmed for him, if more confirmation was at all needed, that here was a man of evil. A vermin. A snake. A pest. And with a deadly sting, ready at the slightest crossing of his will to dart out poison.
But how to keep the talk going while not losing the intentness that was robbing the man of every other consideration?
He put on an expression of acute anxiety.
“Chiplunkar sahib,” he said, “please understand, it is very difficult for me.”
Chiplunkar’s small mouth hardened into a short, uncompromising line.
“Difficult-difficult,” he said. “I want none of that from you. From you I am wanting just only one name. Who it is? Who it is who has dared …?”
Ghote swallowed, and not by any means in pretended apprehension. This man was deadly dangerous. No doubt about it. Compared to Mr. Z. R. Mistry’s “most dangerous woman in Bombay,” he was a cobra set against a mosquito.
He put on a show of looking all round as if he believed that even here one of Chiplunkar’s toadies and hangers-on might be watching. That the goinda himself, sneaking after his boss, might be ready at this very last moment to prevent him discovering his name.
And he took two quick paces toward the edge of the platform.
Luckily at just the point he was making for there was a small gap in the line of would-be passengers waiting for the next train, the train due at any moment. The spot could look like somewhere where it would be safer to murmur a secret.
He felt a shiver of triumph as Chiplunkar without any hesitation stepped forward at his side.
If only a train would come in another instant, as soon as they both had taken two more steps forward. The circumstances were so precisely right. Although there was no one within two or three feet to either side of the spot he was aiming for, not far behind there were enough people for him to be able to step back sharply the moment he pushed Chiplunkar down in front of the onward-rushing blank steel monster. Then in a second he would be not the man standing beside the fellow who had fallen under the train, but simply one of the crowd of shocked onlookers. Dressed as he was in his oldest shirt—the green one with the wavy black squares by happy chance kept in his office to change into after his court appearance in uniform—he would look altogether like any of the weary waiting clerks or shop salesmen lined up to his rear.
But above the noisy clamor all around, he could hear no sign of any new train approaching. The jabbering of the waiting passengers, the squealing of car brakes as rush-hour vehicles making their way along Naushir Barucha Marg parallel to the rail tracks halted, moved on, halted again, their incessant, irritated, and illegal hooting, with a little farther off the roar of buses, and everywhere the unending caw-caw-cawing of the crows, blotted out all more distant sounds. But surely a train must come soon. Surely.
In the meantime he must hold Chiplunkar’s attention, come what may.
Rapidly through his mind he ran the names of such members of Chiplunkar’s gang as he knew. But how safe would it be to point the finger at any one of them? The man with the name he chose might well, for some reason he could not even guess at, be impossible as the police spy. Already behind bars. Sent away days before on some distant errand. Long ago externed from the city and forced to obey the magistrate’s order.
No, he must find something else to hold his man.
Already Chiplunkar was beginning to look around about him. Was he, after all, wondering now whether this secret meeting was being observed? Was he half suspecting a police trap? Had it just crossed his mind that this tool of his might, despite everything, have gone to the Assistant Commissioner? Have told him what he had done? And, to earn back something of his good name, might have agreed to lure the man they so much wanted to a place where he could be picked up without trouble?
But, no, the fellow could not possibly have ideas like that. He would know, if anybody did, that it was only of use to the police to arrest him with evidence of dealings in brown
sugar on his person.
He risked one more casual step. And another.
And Chiplunkar, as if positively proving his lack of suspicion, came to stand beside him at the platform edge, pushed even closer to the drop by an old toy seller, a bundle of bright balloons, red, yellow, blue, green, floating above his worn gray head.
If only a train would come.
He cocked his head and strained to hear the familiar clattering onrush above the row all around. But he could make out nothing.
“Chiplunkar sahib,” he said hastily, “as I was telling per telephone, we—they—the police are knowing about Multiplex Chemicals and Drug Manufacturing. Just where it is, just what is being done in the place. Everything is ready for when you are coming there.”
“Yes, yes. You have done well by me there, Inspector, I am telling you. You are earning your price, just as I am paying mine by keeping that fellow Ranchod safely shut away for you. It is what I am saying, we are having a deal. Business-business.”
Ghote endeavored to put on a look of doglike gratitude.
“That name, Inspector?” Chiplunkar shot out brutally. “That name I am wanting.”
Ghote could only fight to keep from his features the mingled feelings of perplexity and something not far off fear that he was experiencing.
What could he say to the man now? What dare he say?
And then, with an altogether sudden rush of sound, he heard behind him the noise of a fast-approaching train.
He pretended, with a gesture, that the sound was already making it difficult to be heard.
Chiplunkar wagged his round head up and down once in acknowledgment and prepared to wait till the train had come to a stop. Behind them both Ghote could sense the waiting passengers nudging forward. Conditions were ideal.
He took a quarter step back, so as to be in a position to give the brown-sugar kingpin that short swift inconspicuous shove at just the judged moment. He turned—the movement was perfectly natural—to face the arriving train.
Its buff-yellow front was only thirty yards distant. Twenty. Ten. The noise it was making was overwhelming.
Now. It was now.
And he failed to do it. Some inner person, deeper buried even than the man he had believed he had found in himself who was prepared to kill, stopped him. A life had been in his hands. He could not, he was not in his deepest self able to take it.
FIFTEEN
The train under which Mama Chiplunkar had not perished came to a halt. From behind Ghote as he stood beside and a little to the rear of the crime kingpin at the platform’s edge—the rush of air accompanying the speeding steel monster had buffeted his whole body—the waiting passengers surged forward. In a moment they were at the open door in front of them, pushing and shoving, squeezing and wriggling in passionate attempts to secure themselves room on board.
Ghote and Mama Chiplunkar stood there, knocked and scraped by the battering torrent. Plainly it was still hopeless to try to communicate.
And what must I say to him now? Ghote asked himself in something like horror. One minute ago I was promising to inform him of the name of a goinda for the police among his hangers-on. It did not matter then that I had invented that fellow. Chiplunkar was under sentence of death. Before he had heard one word of what I had seemed to promise to tell him he would have been a mangled corpse under the wheels of this train here, halted, now.
But instead he is standing beside me. Hale and hearty. And just only as soon as the train is given the green signal and is moving away, while those who did not succeed to get in are dropping back, he will expect me to give him that name. And, worse, worse, worse, already I have given him one true fact that I should never have let pass beyond my lips. I have told him that the police know of that laboratory making brown sugar, Multiplex Chemicals and Drug Manufacturing, and that they are waiting to nab him there.
What to do?
His mind was blank. All willpower seemed to have been drained from him. Dimly, as if from some other planet altogether, he heard a shrill blast of sound. The guard’s whistle. At once the train in front of him began heavily to get into motion. The would-be passengers at his side stepped back in resignation.
And in a minute, in much less, in a few seconds only, Mama Chiplunkar would turn to him demanding to know who was the goinda in his gang, the totally false goinda.
Now the train was beginning to gather speed, once again creating too much noise to make words audible. But for only seconds more. Already the succession of its open doors was starting to blur into an intermittent pattern: people, train side, people, train side.
Then he did it. It came to him in an almost simultaneous conjunction of decision and action. He launched into a long-stepping run, took a wild leap forward, hand reaching for a hold, and swung himself into, or half into, one of the open doors rushing past.
The strain on his arm was fearful, as if some monster from prehistoric days was endeavoring to tear it off. But then his left foot found a firm grip on the carriage floor, and the strain miraculously eased.
He turned his head. Mama Chiplunkar was standing there where he had left him, mouth agape in astonishment.
“No!” he yelled back at him with all the force of his lungs. “No! No! No!”
It was the Duke Wellington answer at last.
He did not know whether with the roar and jangle of the train the business-blackmailer would actually have caught the words of his repeated defiance. But he knew that he must have taken it in. The action had spoken as loud as any yelled-out word. The Duke Wellington answer.
He brought his right foot up beside his left, twisted himself around till he was butting up against the bare back of one of the last passengers to have scrabbled in, the old toy seller. He almost hugged the fellow in his effort to ensure his safety. The strong odor of his sweat struck pungently at his nostrils.
Above them both, the bright bundle of balloons bobbed up and down joyously, for all the imminent danger of being exploded by the nearest twirling fan.
At the next stop, Bombay Central, he got off. His mind still in turmoil, he wandered over the pedestrian bridge down into the main-line terminus and made his way, wrapped in increasingly down-spiraling thought, through the concourse, vaguely heading for home. Hardly anything he saw registered. An anxious clerk was attempting to amend the notice-board of the second-class reservation chart. There was the usual soldier with rifle and bayonet on guard outside the divisional pay office. A row of sleeping men on spread-out gunny sacks had high up above them a long line of identical posters one after another advertising a film with an English title New Delhi. But those two words did, curiously, impinge. He thought abruptly of his fellow blackmail victim, if at Freddy Kersasp’s hands rather than Mama Chiplunkar’s, Ramesh Deswani, who had jumped from the sixteenth floor of that new four-star hotel in the capital. Should not Ramesh Deswani have dared, instead of admitting in his suicide note to “serious mistakes,” to give his tormentor the Duke Wellington answer?
But he found himself unable to pass judgment.
The thought had put fully back into his consciousness, however, what it was he had done himself. Yes, he had defied Mama Chiplunkar, as perhaps he ought to have done at the first mention of blackmail. But what would Chiplunkar be doing in face of that defiance? Perhaps even now? He imagined him as having turned away at once as soon as he had seen the man he had believed to be his pawn vanish away onto that speeding train. He would immediately have suspected a police trap and scurried and run to get out of it.
That notion gave him for an instant a dart of pleasure. It was high time Chiplunkar was made to run.
But darker thoughts swirled back. It would not have taken the brown-sugar kingpin very long to have realized there had been no trap, that there were no pursuers. And then … then he would at once have begun to think of taking revenge on this victim who had dared to defy him. More than sweet revenge, too, he would want to teach anyone he had forced to accept one of his business bargains that it was somethi
ng they could not go back on.
So, as soon as he could, Chiplunkar would go to wherever it was he was hiding his wretched witness, Ranchod. Then he would take the fellow to some sycophantic police officer—he was known to have not a few of those, lavish as he was with whisky, women, tickets—to repeat his account of seeing this Inspector Ghote leaving Dolly Daruwala’s flat in the wake of the man who had murdered her. And that would be the end of everything.
His own career would be over from that moment on, with only the grim process of an investigation by Vigilance Branch and subsequent disciplinary proceedings to be dragged out afterward. It would be terrible. But in a way it was deserved. He had deliberately committed an act that by the standards of the law and the courts was wrong. He had let—there could be no backing away from it—a murderer go free, even if he was a man who was an honor to the human race.
And now by one impulsive action, right though it may have been, he had betrayed that man to everything that earlier he had seen himself as saving him from.
The thought was almost unbearable.
Was this the time, after all, to do what Mr. Deswani had done in that Delhi hotel? To end it all?
Yet he found there was still something in him that put that dreadful last step out of the question. No, disgrace would come. Poverty, no doubt, would follow. And the acid remembrance of what he had done to a great man would be there forever in his mind. But he could not, for whatever reason, for no reason, plunge into that final dark hiding place.
He found that he had left the bustling terminus and had walked more than halfway home. He had even drunk one of the tiny glasses of milky-brown coffee served by the fellow who customarily squatted with his pail of the scarcely warm liquid just outside the big station. If he happened to pass that way he invariably stopped and bought a glass. In his earliest days in the city he had been told it was the best coffee in Bombay, and though he had since discovered this was patently untrue, the habit had persisted, if only for the pleasure of exchanging a familiar word. But had he actually drunk a glass just now, said a word, smiled? Or had he simply gone by unseeing? He could not remember.
The Iciest Sin Page 17
