There was a tear, Ghote could not help noticing, in the left eye of the self-assured, perfume-protected woman who had stood under the glitteringly lit chandeliers to greet him.
‘Madam,’ he said, ‘I think I have no more questions.’
But one he had. At the door he turned and asked it.
‘Madam, you are knowing I must learn where is your brother Harilal’s shop?’
At once Mrs Mehta strode over to the side-table facing the voluptuous apsara. She jerked open its drawer with such force that the heavy gold cigarette-lighter on it fell to its side. From the drawer she snatched a dark blue leather-bound address book. She scrabbled for a moment at its pages and then thrust it under Ghote’s nose.
Harilal Tandon, he read, Video Valley – Subash Chowk, opp. Rajasthan Emporium.
He thought it best to leave without another word.
Video Valley, he found half an hour later, was more of a stream-trickling nullah than any sort of valley. Small, even tiny, the shop had a long upright slab of grained stone for its façade with Video Valley cut into it in letters of gold. A brightly lit display window next to this made up for its narrowness by the size of the film poster that was its sole ornament. The sound of loud Western music was thundering out from its half-open door.
Trying not to let the thumping rhythm penetrate, Ghote advanced into the hostile territory.
A young man with no more than a hint of a moustache was leaning moodily on the glass counter staring into total vacancy. Hardly the smart proprietor of this smart, if unpaid for, establishment.
‘Mr Tandon, he is available?’ Ghote asked him over the thump-thump-thump of the music.
‘Inside.’ And a yawn.
Ghote saw there was a door at the far end. Without another word, he marched up to it and thrust it open. He found he was in an office that was little more than a cupboard. But at the desk, a telephone clamped to his ear, was the man who must be Mrs Mehta’s bad-hat brother.
‘Inspector Ghote, Crime Branch,’ he banged out without ceremony.
Harilal Tandon dropped the telephone as if it had suddenly turned into a deadly snake.
‘Crime Branch,’ he choked out.
‘Yes,’ Ghote said. ‘And I am thinking a Crime Branch officer is a person you would very much like not to be seeing.’
Harilal Tandon began to recover a little. He picked up the phone and put it back on its rest.
‘But— But why should I mind whoever I am seeing?’ he said.
Ghote put a small grim smile on to his face.
‘Because, Mr Tandon, you may have something to hide. Something not at all legal.’
‘No. No.’ A gasp for breath. ‘Why should you think that?’
‘Perhaps because I have just been talking to Mrs Shantilal Mehta, your sister.’
‘Shantilal? What— What has she been saying about me? It’s a lie. Yes, she has never liked me. And now she is doing her level best to get me into trouble.’
‘I am more thinking that it is yourself who has been getting you into trouble.’
Harilal Tandon looked from side to side. But nowhere in the tiny office was there anything that might help him.
‘What— What sort of trouble are you— Are you meaning, Inspector?’ he muttered at last.
‘Well, I am not concerned with your financial difficulties,’ Ghote told him.
The reassurance did not seem to bring him any great comfort.
Ghote reckoned the young man had now been made to worry enough.
‘You may still help yourself, Mr Tandon,’ he said. ‘You have only to co-operate fully. So, tell me the real identity of your friend who is going by the name of Yeshwant.’
‘Yeshwant? Yeshwant?’
Harilal Tandon looked plainly bewildered.
He swallowed. Once.
‘Inspector, are you talking about that fellow the papers were making such a tamasha about? The fellow who got into my sister’s bedroom while she and her pig of a husband were snoring and made off with her famous diamond ear-tops?’
This was not what Ghote had expected.
He stood looking down at Video Valley’s owner retaining as much as he could of his unyielding expression. But through his mind there raced a whole squadron of questions. Had Harilal Tandon simply managed to pull himself together enough to make his brazen denial? Or could he really know of the name Yeshwant only as something he had casually read about in newspapers? Was his picture of Mr Mehta, snoring there like a pig, made not because Yeshwant had told him about it but out of mere passing spite? Was Harilal Tandon really not in any way hand-in-gloves with Yeshwant? And, if he was not, did that mean Axel Svensson was after all fully right?
And gradually the answers formed themselves in his mind.
Yes, it might be possible that this bad hat had somehow become acquainted with the man whose daring climbing burglaries had earned him the name Yeshwant. But, even if that were so, how could Video Valley’s owner have got to know where a stranger to him like Mrs Parulkar kept the karas she believed made her hands still look elegant? How could he have known where Mrs Gulabchand laid down her two-lakh choker when her fresh air loving husband had been allowed to open their bedroom window? What could have told him, when Mrs Patel in the late stages of her pregnancy had left her sapphire necklace out, that she had done so? Let alone how could the fellow have obtained all the other information that had helped Yeshwant to commit his burglaries?
No, nothing else for it but to acknowledge that Axel Svensson was most likely in the right when he insisted that the path to Yeshwant must lie through the Zaveri Bazaar establishment of Pappubhai Chimanlal and Co.
EIGHT
Next morning there were no reports of a new Yeshwant robbery. So Ghote, informed that Mrs Marzban could see him ‘if inquiries are really necessary’, set off on his scooter for the Bombay Hospital. But he found the monotonous throbbing of its engine was not for once sending him off into his Northern fastness. Perhaps, he thought, it is just only because peak-hour traffic is so bad today. At any one moment I may be knocked to ground.
A zooming little white Maruti brushed so closely past him that the sleeve of his shirt was almost whipped from his arm. Recovering, he reflected that, even if he was not safe in his own world here, at least last night there had been no more Swabhimaan versus Lost in Space trouble, if only because Ved complaining once more of mental harassment had gone out without so much as sitting down to eat.
Or, he added to himself glancing warily at the speeding cars behind, perhaps I cannot feel the contentment I had before Svensson sahib was breaking into my life again because I am still feeling the fellow is invading my mind with that belief of his that Yeshwant must be a Pappubhai Chimanlal employee.
As if it was not the idea I myself was having first, even if now I feel somehow it is not right. But, yes, definitely it is best not to go to Zaveri Bazaar yet. I cannot be finding arguments for what I feel, nothing that would make that firinghi change his damn Swedish mind. But all the same I am believing somehow, somehow, that Yeshwant being at Pappubhai Chimanlal and Co., quietly going about his business, is not the right sort of answer.
So let me hope Mrs Marzban, recovering after her nose-job or whatsoever it was, in that private bed, Cabin Number 17, will say altogether definitely she is never buying jewelleries from Pappubhai Chimanlal.
But – wait – here is the mosque with outside it the big rack, ten shelves high, twenty metres long, where worshippers are putting their shoes. Almost opposite hospital itself.
He brought his scooter to a halt and manoeuvred it off the traffic-mad roadway. There was, he saw, a huge old banyan nearby, its dangling dried-up brown roots forming a sort of open curtain all round, and right inside its wide-split trunk a beggar had made a little home for himself, safe from any final monsoon showers that might yet break out. Rags and poverty, but a picture of faraway peace.
Or is he after all some sort of holy man, cross-legged in meditation? He may be. Or he may be a man just
lost in his own thoughts, remembering perhaps days when he had had a wife, children, and had been happy. Or when he had had a nag for a wife and noisy demanding children and had been miserable.
In any case, don’t break in on him and ask him to look after the scooter while I am inside. Let him stay in his lost world while he can.
Shown by a white-capped ward boy into Cabin 17, Ghote was instantly aware of the sharp odour of liberally sprinkled eau-de-cologne. But the sight that confronted him on the white iron cot in the centre of the room brought him to a shocked halt. He had been expecting to see a spruce widow, recovering well from a minor operation. But Mrs Marzban, lying propped on a heap of pillows, looked like nothing so much as the remains of a person once active and alive, a rag doll in a white hospital gown.
A twenty-year-old nurse had at his entrance quickly put down the paperback Lost in Love, in whose pearly pink world she had been immersed.
Lost in Love or Lost in Space, he thought. What is there of difference?
‘Nurse, I am Inspector Ghote, Crime Branch,’ he snapped out. ‘I was informed Mrs Marzban would be able to answer some questions. But now I am asking if I have not come too late.’
‘No, Inspector, no,’ the girl said unconcernedly, ‘patient is not too bad. She has been sleeping only. If you talk, she will soon answer.’
In some trepidation, Ghote approached the hygienic-looking cot. There was a hard little metal chair beside it. He sat himself down, and realized immediately why the cabin had been so lavishly sprayed with eau-de-cologne. From the bandages on each of Mrs Marzban’s wrists there was coming the unmistakable smell of putrescent flesh. He saw, too, on the arm nearer him, into which the long tube of a saline drip had been inserted, a whole series of little blue-black bruises from where she had been given injections.
Poor woman, he thought, perhaps in the last stages of life to be brutally invaded by the steel prong of the drip, by all those needles.
‘Mrs Marzban,’ he said quietly.
No reponse.
He gave a little sharp cough.
‘Mrs Marzban?’
The eyelids in the skeleton head flickered.
‘It is you, Behram?’
The words, faint but clear as water, issued from the parched sunken lips.
Ghote did not know what to say. Who was this Behram he was being mistaken for? Not a husband. He had been told Mrs Marzban was a widow. Some dear relative? How should he disillusion this death’s-door woman?
But, in response to his silence, at last she turned her head further in his direction.
‘No.’ A sigh, or a groan. ‘No, not my Behram … He said he would not come till afternoon … And it must be morning still … Is it? Is it morning? Poor Behram, how he hates seeing me like this.’
My Behram. So definitely not a relation.
‘Yes, madam, it is morning,’ Ghote said, for want of anything better.
In the skull-like head with its wisps of remaining hair the eyes widened now. Ghote saw they were after all alert with questioning intelligence.
‘So, if you are not my lover, who are you?’
‘Your lov—’ Ghote brought out, not a little shocked at the blatancy of the dying woman’s question.
He recovered himself.
‘Madam, I am Inspector Ghote, from Crime Branch. I am here— They told me I could come. Come to put to you— Madam, I have to ask— I would like to ask certain questions about the theft from your home at Meher Apartments of a valuable diamond ring.’
‘Poor Behram.’
That, it seemed, was all the answer he was going to get. Mrs Marzban appeared to have slipped back totally into the deep drowse in which he had first seen her.
He sat in silence. Despondency at her sad state overwhelmed him. Nor did he know what to say in response to that name Behram. If he was ever to be called on for a response. Had she truly said my lover? Truly?
But at last his silence was rewarded.
‘That was the ring he would give me,’ the stricken woman on the cot said, adding murmured syllable to murmured syllable. ‘Knew my life was over. Still insisted on … insisted on giving me that toy.’
‘Madam, I am talking of a ring that is not at all a toy. Madam, I am understanding it was very, very valuable. A diamond ring as valuable almost as it is possible to have.’
There came a curious sound from the bed then. It took Ghote some seconds to realize it was a laugh.
‘Oh, yes, very, very valuable, Inspector. It is Inspector?’
‘Yes, madam. Inspector Ghote.’
‘Well then, Inspector, think about this. Ask yourself who paid for that very, very valuable diamond ring. Do you think it was a poet, a poet who even when he was famous and writing every day could hardly pay for the cigarettes he smoked? A poet who for years has lived on just the memory of those poems? Lived sozzled, happily sozzled, on the gin I keep for him? No, I was the one who paid for that present, Inspector. I paid. Who else?’
‘Yes, madam.’
What else could he say? If Mrs Marzban really had a poet as her lover and if that poet had spent the last many years happily, as she had said, sozzled, then who but she could have bought her own diamond ring?
Or was all this that a woman in the last stages of illness was saying nothing but imagination? Did she really have a lover? And was that lover a poet? Or was this, like the romance the careless nurse in the corner had gone back to reading, a mere dream?
Try to pin it down? Ask something that connected what she had been saying to the actual theft by climbing Yeshwant, from the sixth floor of Block A at Meher Apartments? If this interview obtained with such difficulty was to lead anywhere, something like that must be asked.
And, if it is answered, will it lead on to the question that damned Swede keeps putting into my head? Is every one of Yeshwant’s thefts linked to Pappubhai Chimanlal and Co.?
Try.
‘Madam, can you kindly be telling me when it was diamond ring in question was purchased?’ He drew in a quick breath. ‘And where also, madam?’
‘Oh, yes. Yes. It was stolen, wasn’t it, that silly ring? After all our fights about buying it. That man … The climber … Yes, Yeshwant. He climbed all the way up, up to the apartment. Romantic. Romantic, too. Nearly as romantic as my poor Behram. He should … write a poem …’
And silence.
After a little Ghote even felt obliged to lean forwards to make sure those had not been the poor woman’s last words.
He was confronted by eyes suddenly wide open again.
‘When? When? Inspector, didn’t you know that?’ A new silence. ‘It was a birthday present for me. And, poor impulsive poet that he is, Behram could not wait till the day. I suppose he thought in his heart of hearts I would never reach it. And I suppose I won’t. Even though his gift has already been stolen. By that Yeshwant. Yeshwant, the climber, yes.’
Ghote sat further back in his uncomfortable little chair.
‘So, madam,’ he said, ‘kindly say when exactly this birthday gift was purchased? And where also?’
‘Oh, if it is so important to you to know … I can very well remember going with Behram to buy it. I had to go, you see, because I had to be there to sign the cheque. My poor poet.’
‘So, madam, when?’
‘My birthday is October the thirty-first. In a few days, yes? Though I’ll hardly be here to celebrate. So then, it must have been on September the first, two exact months in advance, that we went to buy it. There, Inspector, one fact-fact for your police officer’s notebook.’
So, she was realizing all along I was suspecting this-all was a dream only. But, yes, I can rely on that date as a fact now. Then what about the next fact? The fact of where?
‘Madam, where it was it you made this purchase?’
‘Zaveri Bazaar, Inspector.’
‘Of course, madam. But at which jeweller?’
Now. Now it would come.
And come it did. With complete conviction. Overwhelming conviction
.
‘At Karamdas and Sons, Inspector.’
NINE
Leaving death’s-door Mrs Marzban, sunk once more into an uneasy half-sleep, and her attendant nurse back safely again in her pearly pink world of Lost in Love, Ghote could not help feeling sharp pleasure that he had clung to his irrational doubts about Yeshwant being a Pappubhai Chimanlal employee. However it had come about that the discriminating thief knew that Mrs Marzban had signed a cheque for a valuable diamond ring, it was plain now that he could not have learnt it sitting in Chimanlal’s workshop or standing behind a Chimanlal showroom counter. No, if Yeshwant was to be tracked down, it was not going to be at the Zaveri Bazaar jeweller’s premises.
For a moment he was tempted to ride his scooter at once to the Taj to tell Axel Svensson what he had found out. But then something made him hesitate, perhaps that same caution which had kept him from acting immediately on the Swede’s assertion it was certain Yeshwant worked for Pappubhai Chimanlal.
Had there been an indefinable something not quite right about what Mrs Marzban had said? Some illogicality? Something out of place among the words she had, out of her state of desperate illness, poured on to him in jabs of unconnected thought? It would be worth a lot to have some solid confirmation of all the things she had said. How far away from reality was she? No use asking little Head-in-a-book in the corner of the ward. The doctor in charge? But he might not know enough about her mental state to be able to produce a really definite answer.
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