“Now, Ghote, Mr. Mistry was telling me—I don’t want to hear the ins and outs of it, mind—that you happen to be in possession of a set of keys to the flat in the Marzban Apartments building once occupied by a lady of unpleasant repute by the name of Dolly Daruwala. Correct?”
What was this? What did the keys that he had blackmailed that Muslim locksmith in Bapu Khote Cross Lane into making have to do with Mama Chiplunkar and the hold the brown-sugar kingpin had over himself?
“Yes, sir,” he managed to get out in answer.
And, yes, he thought, he did actually still have those keys. After all this time. He had intended to dispose of them, as incriminating evidence, immediately after his illegal entry into Dolly Daruwala’s flat. He had slipped them into the top pocket of his second-best uniform, the uniform Mr. Mistry had insisted on his wearing, and in the aftermath of the terrible event that had taken place there he had forgotten all about them. And he had not had occasion since to wear that uniform, rather than his best one kept for court appearances and rare ceremonial occasions. It had hung in its place in the almirah unwashed, unironed, from that day to this.
But why was the Commissioner talking about keys?
“Now, perhaps you don’t know—as I say, we’ve been keeping security cent percent tight—that this flat at Marzban Apartments was purchased some time after the Daruwala woman’s death by none other than our friend Mama Chiplunkar. Apparently he had a need for somewhere unknown to most of his confederates, a sudden need. What that was exactly we haven’t discovered. But the Intelligence wallas have found out definitely that the flat was bought—black money transaction, needless to say—by Chiplunkar in person.”
You may not know why he was buying it, Commissioner sahib, Ghote said to himself with a tinge of triumph. But I can have one jolly good guess. It must have been to keep Ranchod safe inside, the one only threat Chiplunkar possessed to obtain the services of a new goinda at headquarters.
But when would the Commissioner get around to Ranchod?
Or, could it be … It was too astonishing to allow himself to think about. Could it be that this summons to the great man’s presence was not, after all, anything to do with Ranchod and the blackmail that had begun with him?
“Now, Ghote, the point is this. Thanks to Inspector Arjun Singh and his altogether excellent background knowledge of the city’s ne’er-do-wells, we have got Chiplunkar back in our sights once more. In fact, we know he has booked a flight here from Ahmedabad, where apparently he has some sort of love nest, for today itself.”
The Commissioner broke off and looked for something among the few papers on the huge expanse of his desk.
Mama Chiplunkar coming back to Bombay, Ghote thought, all his fears and troubles rushing back. Coming back today. And what would be the first thing he would do? He would go to Dolly Daruwala’s old flat, pick up from there Ranchod, and take him around to whatever friend he has at whatever police thana to tell his tale about one Inspector Ghote. Inspector Ghote who had dared to give him the Duke Wellington answer.
And it would not help at all that it was known now that the flat belonged to Chiplunkar. Even if they raided it as soon as the man himself had arrived from Ahmedabad and found him there with all the brown sugar and even the apparatus for making it that they could want, he still would be able to take his revenge. Ranchod would still be there. Ranchod’s account of what happened at Marzban Apartments on the night Dolly Daruwala was stabbed to death would still be there to be told. His true account. And passing it on would doubtless still make things a hell of a lot easier for Chiplunkar, however much brown sugar was found in his possession.
So it was leadenly enough that he heard the Commissioner, who had at last found his note of what time the plane from Ahmedabad was due, go on to detail the plan to arrest Chiplunkar. It was exactly as he had begun working it out. Using those keys he still had, they would enter the flat as soon as possible. In it they would conduct as thorough a search for evidence as time permitted. Panches to witness it had already been notified. Then, as Chiplunkar stepped through the door, as he was likely to do very soon after his return from Gujarat, anxious to make sure the basis of his ill-gotten fortune was still intact, he would be nabbed.
“So where are those keys, Ghote?”
“Keys, sir? What—”
He pulled himself together.
“They are at my flat only, sir. It would not take twenty minutes to be fetching them.”
“Good. First class. Take them straight to Marzban Apartments. You’ll find Inspector Welankar there with a search party and the panches. This will be a good day for Bombay Police, Ghote. A damn good day.”
Oh yes, Ghote said to himself as he carefully closed the two tall doors of the Commissioner’s office behind him. Oh yes, for Bombay Police it will be a damn good day. But for Inspector Ghote …
For Inspector Ghote, whatever happened, it would be the worst day of his life.
SEVENTEEN
Once again Ghote approached Marzban Apartments. The last time he had stood looking up at the tall tower block it had been at night when he had seen Mr. Z. R. Mistry leaving and had discovered that Ranchod was no longer in his employ. He had supposed then that the man was dead, another victim of brown sugar, and all the while—fleetingly he gave a rictus of a smile at the irony of it—all the while the fellow had been Mama Chiplunkar’s prisoner in this very block. His counter in the evil game he was set on playing.
The time before that when he had waited, hiding in the shadows, he had been, despite his police uniform, intent on nothing less than housebreaking. And now once again here he was, not wearing uniform but in his oldest, green-and-black-checked shirt, which he had not dared to take time to change while he had dashed into his flat, run to the almirah, wriggled the two keys out of his uniform pocket, babbled something to Protima about “official business,” and rushed away again.
Well, this would be the last official business it would ever fall to him to undertake.
So now, instead of climbing flight after flight up to that twentieth-floor flat as he had done the distant night when, little though he had known it, his lifetime career had entered its path to destruction, he simply took the lift. He pressed the neat button with the figure 20 lit up beside it and was swept smoothly and almost silently to his destination.
There, stepping out, he found the landing crowded almost to overflowing. Inspector Welankar had with him two subinspectors, four constables, and—he started with surprise—Mr. Framrose, his witness to Shiv Chand’s attempt at blackmail, with the second panch for this operation, a nondescript, dark-complexioned man, probably some sort of southerner.
Somehow the unexpected presence of Mr. Framrose—only, it was not really so unlikely: he must have been noted as a useful panch at Shiv Chand’s trial—filled him with a sense of unease. Perhaps it was simply because the old man was a Parsi, like Dr. Commissariat. There was another similarity about them, too, he thought. The aged panch had mentioned once—it must have been on their way to the court of sessions when his own mind was fighting back thoughts of killing Mama Chiplunkar—that, now he was retired, he prayed always for two hours a day. And, for all that prayer had not been part of his own life since his early boyhood, he had always felt a certain awe for those who sincerely practiced it. Yes, Mr. Framrose was, like Dr. Commissariat, though on a less heroic scale, a good man.
And now here he was himself about finally to betray Dr. Commissariat. There was nothing anymore to be done about it. The fatal step had been taken. It had been taken at that moment he had defied Mama Chiplunkar. But he found in himself now a new doubt about that sudden decision. Very well, it had been, in its way, a good action. It had given an evil man the courageous Duke Wellington answer. But it had also been—he felt it at this instant more keenly than ever—the betrayal of a man of goodness.
Should he, after all, have done it, he asked himself yet again. Could he not, somehow, have continued to pay Mama Chiplunkar his price? Cheating him where h
e could, withholding what he could when he could? And saving in the meanwhile a man who had made a great sacrifice for the sake of his fellow citizens? Who had made, really, two great sacrifices. First, in scorning the riches of America and coming to his native land with his life-giving invention, and second, in freeing from Dolly Daruwala’s icy clutches all those she had had in her power.
But too late now. The conveyor belt he was on was rolling steadily forward. He had been put on to it, he had put himself on to it, and there was no getting off.
“You have brought those keys?” Inspector Welankar asked urgently.
Ghote drew them from his pocket.
“Then open up. Open up.”
He stepped forward, slid the first of the keys into its slot.
The series of little scraping sounds it made as he pushed it home gave him a horrible sense of repeating an action he knew was going to lead him into a nightmare. Everything seemed, indeed, dreamlike. And as much filled with inexplicable menace as dreams often are.
But the key turned without real trouble, as it had done on the night Dolly Daruwala had died. Its fellow slid home more easily, as it also had done. And then the flat door was open, and Welankar and his men surged forward.
Inside it was all blackly familiar. On the small table in the hallway where Dolly Daruwala had been accustomed, foolishly, to drop her keys as she had entered, there was still the large creamy white fluted vase that, when he had been here before, had held a luxuriant display of flowers. It was nearly empty now, although drooping from it were some pale dried fronds. Could they be, he thought, the remains of the very flowers he had seen before? Yes, almost certainly they were.
He found his mouth had gone suddenly dry.
Brushed onward by Welankar and his men, he entered the drawing room. And again, it was all familiar. Eerily familiar. The big Amritsar carpet looked, perhaps, a little less flowerily bright than it had that night. Dust must in the weeks and weeks since then have settled on it undisturbed. A grayish film of it lay, indeed, on the low table where Dolly Daruwala had kept the big silver cigarette lighter that flouted Parsi principles. The lighter itself was no longer there. It was, after all, the sort of thing Mama Chiplunkar would appropriate. But the copy of Gup Shup he had noticed that terrible night, and had nearly told the Assistant Commissioner that he had seen, was still lying where it had been, equally beneath a powdery layer of dust. Hardly what Mama Chiplunkar would choose to read, if he ever read anything at all. The cover of the television was lying on the floor beside the set, a sprawled mess. No doubt television had kept the brown-sugar kingpin amused at such times as he had stayed in the flat with his prisoner.
Had it amused Ranchod as well? And where in any case was Ranchod? He must be here. Why else would Mama Chiplunkar have allowed the flat to stay in this semideserted state? But there had been no sound out of the fellow. Perhaps he was crouching somewhere—under that green-covered bed in the next room?—hiding in fear at this noisy invasion.
Or had his own guess been wrong after all? Had Chiplunkar put his drug-addict prisoner into some other place? And would that mean that somehow the witness against him might never be brought forward?
No, he dared not hope it.
“Safe?” Welankar barked out, looking up from the tear-away search he and his men were making. “There must be a safe. The stuff would be in there. No sign of anything here.”
Ghote nearly blurted out that the safe was actually in the bedroom beyond—its door was shut still—but just in time he remembered he was not supposed ever to have been in the place. Never mind how he had come into possession of keys to it.
But Welankar was already striding toward the bedroom.
Its door resisted him.
Ah, Ghote thought, Chiplunkar must have kept Ranchod locked up in there. And, yes, he must really be lying under that green bed, among all the dust rolls, shivering in fear.
Welankar was now throwing himself in a fierce shoulder charge at the locked door.
Well, Ghote said to himself, it will not resist for long. The woodwork in these posh flats is altogether rotten. I remember that from before. And when they are finding Ranchod inside, that will be the end itself.
Could he possibly get hold of the fellow before Welankar did? Take advantage of Welankar making first of all for the safe and the evidence of brown-sugar dealings he wanted? Haul Ranchod from under the bed and push him outside without anyone noticing? All right, then he would most likely become once again the man’s blackmail victim. But that blackmailing had been curiously acceptable. Pleasant, even. A known routine.
But, no. No, it would be impossible to get the fellow out of the flat unseen. Mr. Framrose and his fellow panch, at least, would be bound to notice. They had been standing, he had been vaguely aware, just inside the drawing room door, like a pair of tethered and bewildered goats.
And somehow being seen with Ranchod by the good old Parsi would be a sort of unspoken condemnation. No, his downfall was there before him at the end of the conveyor belt, and there was no way of halting its progress.
Welankar had ordered the burliest of his search party to join him in battering at the locked door. And now, with a rending squeak, it gave.
Ranchod, it was at once evident, was not hiding under the shiny green cover of the bed. He was lying on the floor immediately under the open door of Dolly Daruwala’s safe. Brown sugar in fearful plenty was scattered beside him. More smeared his outstretched hands. Yet more was still stacked in the safe above. And he was dead. Dead beyond all doubting, though not long so. Utterly overdosed.
They clustered round the distorted, convulsed body.
“This is one damn bloody complication,” Welankar said.
To Ghote the implications were only slowly sinking in. For him, surely, Ranchod’s death—the fellow must somehow have learned the combination of the safe where he knew Chiplunkar had stored the brown sugar from his laboratory—was far from being a complication.
But then, into the awed silence that the sight of the body had produced in everyone except Welankar, there came three sharp rings from the telephone in the drawing room.
“My God,” Welankar said, “it must be Chiplunkar himself arriving downstairs. I told the chowkidar to give warning.”
In a staccato burst of orders he told all but two of his men to remain in total silence in the bedroom, indicated to Ghote that he should stay with them, bundled the two panches in as well, and then positioned himself with his toughest constable just inside the drawing room where they could not be seen by anybody entering the flat. Ghote pushed the bedroom door almost closed, hoping its splintered lock would not be immediately visible.
They waited. At last from outside they heard keys turning in the door. There followed the sound of someone sibilantly whistling.
It grew nearer as Chiplunkar—if it was Chiplunkar—strolled through the hallway and stepped into the drawing room.
There was a muffled cry.
“Ram Chandra Chiplunkar,” came Welankar’s voice, “I am arresting you under Section Two-six-seven-A, Indian Penal Code, unauthorized possession of drugs.”
And it was over, Ghote realized, a great wash of light breaking in on him. It was over, over, over. The unimaginable had happened. He had at times during his long nightmare toyed with thoughts of how some impossible piece of luck might pluck him to safety. But he had not for a moment really believed that would happen.
But it had. It had. And it had happened not entirely by a miracle. His own action had been the trigger for it. If he had not at last given Mama Chiplunkar the Duke Wellington answer, Chiplunkar would not have fled in panic from Grant Road station to his Ahmedabad hideaway. And then Ranchod would not have been left hour upon hour, day after day, locked in the bedroom of the flat here, locked in with that safe full of the brown sugar he craved. He would have not then worked at its combination till his guesses at the right figures, half-seen perhaps when Chiplunkar had hurried in to hide the stuff from his laboratory, had at last o
pened its door to him.
Yes, that was how it must have been. And it meant that the weight on him was, unbelievably, lifted. And more, he realized. The black boulder that had loomed on his horizon ever since he had witnessed Dr. Commissariat dealing with that vermin, pest, and snake Dolly Daruwala in this very room had vanished away as if it had never been. He himself, and he alone, now knew that good man’s secret. No one was going to believe Chiplunkar if he tried to repeat Ranchod’s story of what he had seen on the stairs that night, nor had he the least trace of proof to back it up with.
And he himself would keep the secret deep sealed in an ever-locked chest within himself. The great scientist was safe. He himself was safe. It was over, over, over.
He was already waiting at home when Ved came back from playing cricket—he was vice-captain now of the Regals—but he did not even take time to ask him how the game had gone. The moment Protima unbolted the door he spoke.
“Ved, I have been thinking only. I am sure it is one first-class idea for you to have home computer. Do you think that one will have gone by now?”
A huge smile broke out on Ved’s face.
“No, Dadaji, no,” he said. “It is still definitely available. I was telephoning gentleman in question as soon as I was seeing you would in the end decide in favor and saying yes. Yes, we would buy.”
Ghote did not know whether that was blackmail or not. And he did not care.
The Iciest Sin Page 19
