And then he realized there very likely was someone who would know.
Her poet lover would surely be able to say whether that this-way, that-way transaction over her birthday gift had or had not taken place. Nor should there be much difficulty in getting to see the fellow. From what Mrs Marzban had said it was plain he shared her flat at Meher Apartments.
Go there.
Go there straight away and find out what other name than Behram the fellow had. Mrs Marzban had murmured that he was going to visit her in the afternoon. This did not necessarily mean he would be in the apartment now at nearly noon. But it was not unlikely.
Heaving his scooter off its stand in front of the old beggar’s niche in the ancient banyan, Ghote settled himself on the saddle, fired up the engine and started off.
It was in the end all his little machine could do to get up the winding hill of Altamount Road and on to the twin block of apartments where Mrs Marzban had her flat. But at last, while it was still not much past midday, it brought him there. Only, as he tugged the machine on to its stand in the shade of a deep green mango tree, for him to hesitate once more.
What had there been, as a matter of plain fact, in what Mrs Marzban had said to cast doubt on her having purchased that diamond ring at Karamdas and Sons? She had brought out that name clearly and directly, even forcefully. So why not take her at her word? And there was also a certain problem about going up to the sixth-floor flat and trying to see the poet lover. Could he ring at the bell and ask for Behram, just like that? What if the servant said, Who Behram? And what if, even if he got to see the fellow, he turned out to be so sozzled that no sense could be got out of him?
He stepped back into the mango tree’s shade, half-determined to mount his scooter and go. But, as he did so, the long row of garages behind the blocks caught his eye. Each had, he saw, a boldly painted number above it.
He went over. Looking along the row, he soon enough spotted 62, the number he remembered from the First Information Report of the theft. And, more, its metal shutter was raised and from the interior music was coming, a radio or something playing holy bhajans.
So, someone there inside. Who else could it be but Mrs Marzban’s driver? Unless it was the sozzled poet himself, not perhaps very likely. But from the driver he might learn whether Behram existed, what his full name was, how worthwhile it would be to approach him.
The garage was almost entirely filled by a big dark blue Contessa. Beyond it a man in driver’s uniform was simultaneously idly polishing the already immaculate car and worshipping at a bazaar picture of Lord Ganesh, under which two or three agarbattis were perfuming the air with their grey-blue smoke. The music of the bhajans was, he realized, coming from a tape inside the car.
A sharp cough was enough to bring the driver out of his smoky religious haze.
‘Sahib?’
‘Inspector Ghote, Crime Branch.’
Although the man had not looked appalled at hearing his name and rank, as a good many in his position would have been, Ghote was pleased to note he showed at least a swift tinge of apprehension.
‘Inspector. What— What are you wanting?’
‘You are Mrs Marzban’s driver?’
‘Jee haan, Inspector. For seven-eight years, and not one complaint. Not one even.’
‘So you will be able to tell all I am asking.’
‘Jee, Inspector.’
Yes, he thought, the fellow will tell me anything whatsoever. He has heard what happens to servants under police custody when they are suspected of a crime, or even when they are not. I am not at all thinking that is a hundred per cent fine thing. But it has its uses.
Like now.
‘Mrs Marzban has had a long-time lover,’ Ghote shot out at the driver, scarcely making it a question.
‘Jee, Inspector. He is Shri Behram Bottlewala.’
Ghote saw he was being given a quick appraising look. The fellow was wondering whether he could venture to be indiscreet. He produced for him a faint expression of dislike, as if he was one of the people prejudiced against all Parsis.
‘Bottlewala by name …’ the driver said, watching him.
And saw that he had said enough.
So Mrs Marzban, poor sick woman, had not been imagining for herself a happy life that she had never had. Her poet lover did exist, and was clearly often sozzled. So, he truly had, as she had said, given her a very valuable diamond ring as an advance birthday present, and she really had paid for it herself. But had she paid at Karamdas and Sons?
Why did he still feel there was something wrong about that emphatic statement of hers? There was nothing really to indicate it was not the straightforward truth. Yet he still felt it somehow might not be.
‘Mr Bottlewala is at home now?’ he asked, putting an ice-sliver of coldness into his voice to make it plain that servants speaking ill of their employers was not something an inspector of the Mumbai Police wished to hear.
‘Jee, Inspector,’ the subdued reply came. ‘Bottlewala sahib not ever leaving apartment till late in afternoon.’
‘Right. Get on with your work.’
Ghote swung away.
Up on the sixth floor of Block A, he scarcely paused before ringing the bell on the door of Apartment 62. A servant promptly answered.
‘Mr Bottlewala?’
‘Yes, sahib. He is at home. What is your good name, please?’
‘Inspector Ghote, Crime Branch. In connection with the theft here of a valuable diamond ring.’
‘Yes, sahib. Terrible thing. That Yeshwant, climbing so high.’
The man gave a shudder.
No, plainly one servant who was not the daring and discriminating thief’s informant. In any case, even if he had been, how could he have informed Yeshwant about all the other robberies here and there over the city?
‘I will tell Bottlewala sahib,’ the man said now, and padded bare-footed away.
He returned almost at once and led Ghote into yet another rich drawing room. One, he felt from a brief glance, not basically unfamiliar. It was typically Parsi. Ancient furniture intricately carved in dark rosewood loomed from the walls. Heavy little tables, equally dark, were everywhere. Glass-fronted cabinets gleamed with the items of silver half-hidden inside them.
Items of silver, easy to carry off, he thought. But none of which Yeshwant had taken. Why, he wondered. Why?
But no time to ponder that now. Standing beside an open, very untypically Parsi, chromium-decorated drinks cabinet was a short, elderly-looking individual, face sloppily round, belly lolling out beneath a finely embroidered Lucknow kurta, the thin gold chain round his neck almost lost in its folds. The poet lover. And, if not sozzled now, showing all the signs of that state being habitual.
He introduced himself.
‘Inspector,’ the poet said, ‘I was just making myself a little drinkie. Can I get you one? You know, a spot of gin in the middle of the morning does wonders for one’s outlook. Away dull care. That’s the thing.’
‘No thank you, sir.’
The sozzled poet shrugged.
‘Your choice, Inspector. Well, perhaps I’ll do the drinking for you. Only decent thing.’
He poured a very generous quantity of gin into a tumbler. And swallowed it.
‘That’s better. Now, what can I do for you, Inspector?’
‘Sir, I have just come from the Bombay Hospital where Mrs Marzban was good enough, in spite of her most poor health, to answer to a certain extent some questions it was my duty to ask.’
‘Most poor health? Most poor health? My darling Dolly is dying, Inspector. Dying. Dying, Egypt, dying.’
‘Sir, I much regret such was also seeming to me.’
‘Nay, madam, I know not seems.’
What on earth was the fellow saying now? Yes, sozzled indeed.
‘Sir, I will be brief.’
‘As woman’s … No, no. Never mind a wretched old poet, Inspector, just ask. Ask and ye shall be answered.’
Ghote swallowed.
‘Very good, sir. Then kindly tell where it was Mrs Marzban was buying the ring this fellow Yeshwant was stealing. Sir, was it from Karamdas and Sons?’
All right, it was asked. Before anything else. Now for the answer.
The poet laughed.
‘Oh, my God,’ he said. ‘My poor Dolly. She has really gone out of— Oh, my poor, poor Dolly.’
The laugh, hardly ended, turned into tears flooding down limp, sagging cheeks as the poet slumped into the nearest heavily carved armchair.
Nearly answered, and now this. Would that answer never come?
Ghote turned away and looked out of the nearest window. The view of the far-stretching city was certainly wonderful. And, yes, he could see the sea, the peaceful sea, with, beyond its sun-glinting surface, on the far side of Back Bay the dark silhouettes of the tall office blocks of Nariman Point, close-packed as if they had been heaped together from a child’s playbox and churning out their facts, figures and fancies to enter into the heads of every man, woman and child in the city’s thirteen million inhabitants.
He stood where he was, trying to pretend he was not even there, while the sound of the poet’s gurgling sobs went on and on.
And then were checked.
‘’Nother drinkie. Dull care.’
There came the sound of gin being poured, if anything more generously than before.
Ghote ventured to turn back.
‘Sir … The ring. At Karamdas and Sons?’
‘No, Inspector. No, no, not at all. You see, we had one of our fights about just that. Dolly has never bought any jewellery at Karamdas and Sons. But I had heard that better bargains are to be got there. So I suggested I buy there the diamond ring I wanted to give her. Well, that she should buy for me there. But, no, she absolutely insisted on going to the showroom she had always been to even as little more than a girl.’
What showroom? Could it be …?
Ask then. Ask.
‘Sir, what place was this she was always going to?’
One last tear slid down the poet’s baggy left cheek.
‘She got them mixed up, you see, when she talked to you, Inspector,’ he said. ‘Her poor mind just switched the two over.’
‘I see, sir.’
Ghote fell silent. It seemed the least he could do.
A minute passed. Another began.
‘It was Pappubhai Chimanlal and Co., Inspector.’
So, yes, right to have felt instinctively that something had been wrong about dying Mrs Marzban’s assertion. Perhaps, looking back, it was because the ramblingly incoherent woman had made her assertion with too much conviction, too overwhelmingly. As if she had been issuing a challenge. As she had been. She had been challenging her sozzled lover over his choice of Karamdas and Sons as the place to buy the ring. But because her last fight with the man she loved had meant too much to her, she had switched the two shops over in her mind. She had somehow come to believe the ring had been bought at Karamdas and Sons as the poet had wanted. It had not. It had been bought at Pappubhai Chimanlal and Co.
Rescuing his scooter from under the mango tree, after leaving Mrs Marzban’s lover once more enclosed in his sozzled world, Ghote realized it was much darker under the tree’s shade than before. He looked up at the sky. Yes, a rain cloud had come up seemingly from nowhere, and it looked very much as if at any minute they were to have a heavy shower, perhaps the last one of the monsoon. And he was wearing no more than a shirt and trousers.
Stay where he was? Or risk a wetting?
He had seen himself, in so far as he had been able to plan ahead at all, once more grabbing a midday bite from the banana-laden handcart of a thelawalla. How much more comforting, he had thought, than all the air-conditioned luxury of the Taj buffet. But now he felt he owed it to Axel Svensson to admit at once that every one of Yeshwant’s victims had in fact bought from Pappubhai Chimanlal and Co. their stolen pieces of jewellery.
Risk a wetting to make his admission? Well, perhaps he ought to submit to such a punishment. Retribution. But to enter the cut-off, air-conditioned splendour of the huge hotel soaked to the skin like a drowned kitten? Must he do that? Dripping all over its floors and carpets?
Well, yes, perhaps he owed his inward-pushing, aggressive friend even that.
TEN
It seemed that the gods had decided to reward Inspector Ghote. Though the rain did come pouring down on to him, it lasted, like most late-monsoon showers, only a few minutes. By the time he arrived at the Taj to make his confession to Axel Svensson his shoulders were no more than a little damp. In the buffet his Swedish friend, back in his white suit again, was also in a magnanimous frame of mind.
‘Yes, yes, my good Ganesh. Your idea that someone at Pappubhai and Co. must be the person who is telling Yeshwant where fine hauls of jewellery are to be found is altogether justified now. So – I have eaten all I want here – shall we go at once and see what some sharp words will produce? You may even have your hands on Yeshwant himself in half an hour from now, if my notion is right that it is the man himself who sits there like a spider.’
A spider, Ghote thought. Yes, and one that every so often goes climbing up and up a long thread from its web to where high above it is seeing some juicy fly. But will I really pull this spider from his web? Am I in fact on the point of doing so? At the Zaveri Bazaar showroom of Pappubhai Chimanlal and Co.?
As they sat in the taxi going there, Ghote thought he ought now to enquire of Axel Svensson what he had been doing to amuse himself since he had left him the day before. He recollected, with a pang of conscience, that his friend had been in something of a sulk after being told in effect to keep his big Swedish nose out of his own affairs.
‘So, Axel, how has it been with you?’
The Swede gave him a grin, somewhat shame-faced yet not without a tinge of pride.
‘Not altogether good,’ he said.
Ghote felt a jab of dismay. What now? The firinghi caught by another touting guide with a new horror story? Even on their way to a possible confrontation with mysterious Yeshwant was the Swede going to tell him something that would demand his immediate attention?
‘So what it is?’ he asked, almost breathlessly.
‘Ah, well, it is over now, thank goodness. But at the time it was— Well, it was pretty scary, to tell you the truth.’
Over? So perhaps nothing to be dealt with just now. But would such a piece of luck really come to me?
‘But, Axel, what was happening? Tell me.’
Another grin.
‘I was in a riot.’
‘A riot? But what riot? Where it was?’
There was almost always a riot of some sort somewhere in the city. But Ghote could not recollect having heard of anything major.
‘Where was it, Ganesh? Well, I hardly know. You see, early last night I decided I would take a nice long walk. I love to see the life of the streets, you know. The people so cheerful and smiling, the noisiness and the bright colours everywhere, even in the dark. Mumbai or Bombay, this is a lively city.’
‘Yes, yes. But …?’
‘Well, as I say, I do not know really where I was. But there was a cinema there. It seemed to be showing a film called Fire. And at first I thought it must be something very popular because there was a big crowd outside, looking as if they were pushing to get in. So I went forward to take a look.’
‘But it was not only tickets they were wanting,’ Ghote said, suddenly realizing the sort of mess Axel Svensson must have got himself into.
Fire was a notorious film, the first in India, a few years back, to show lesbian lovers. It had, of course, outraged opinion then from one end of the country to the other. Such women could not exist in a good Hindu land. They never had. They never should. Wicked Western imperialists were attempting to invade the sacred country once more, if not now with troops with vile propaganda for inadmissible matters.
There had been letters in the papers then pointing out that all this was not altogether true. But t
here had been mobs in the streets who saw to it that the film was withdrawn, to be shown only in religion-less countries across the black sea. And now, it seemed, an attempt was being made quietly to bring out the film again. If what Axel Svensson was saying was an accurate account, at least one new riot had already been caused. In which the big Swede had been caught up.
‘But Axel, Axel sahib, were you hurt? Were you injured?’
‘No, no. I was not. Or only a little. A few bruises. My best shirt was torn.’
So that was why the white suit was on show again.
‘You are sure? How were you escaping? Did you see the hotel doctor afterwards?’
‘No, no. That was not necessary. Not at all. But, yes, I was escaping. I was escaping, I am sorry to say, by pushing my way out and running away as fast as I could.’
‘No, no. You were quite right. Sometimes a mob like that can go so far as to tear an enemy limb from limb. I was telling you, two-three days ago, how the Shiv Sena is ready to fight and fight to keep Maharashtra a good Maharashtrian state. No invasions, whether it is of southerners from India itself or people from the West bringing in their Western ways. No, if it was those people protesting there, you were hundred per cent right to get away as fast as you could. But you ought not to have plunged into an angry crowd like that, you know.’
‘Well, in the end no harm was done,’ Axel Svensson said, seemingly the better for having told of his adventure.
No harm done? Well, perhaps there had not been. But … But had the Swede, conspicuous as he always was, somehow aroused the enmity of the stop-at-nothing hangers-on of the Shiv Sena? Was there trouble somewhere ahead?
But at least there was none at present. Nothing between this moment and – could it be? – the moment when he would lay hands on Yeshwant?
The taxi drew up outside the glintingly smart exterior of the Pappubhai Chimanlal and Co. showroom.
Standing in front of one of its heavy glass doors, his hand on the big dark-engraved metal handle, the bustle and loud talk of Zaveri Bazaar in his ears, Ghote found he was by no means as full of optimism as the tall Swede behind him about their chances of coming face to face with the man he had been ordered to find.
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