Breaking and Entering

by H. R. F. Keating

  ‘I am able to guess.’

  ‘Well, to tell you the truth, I don’t like even to take their name. But, yes, it was those fundos coming invading into my little private place where Pinky thinks. And under open threat of force – yes, force – there was nothing I could do about them. I had to promise that Yeshwant would not appear in my column again. But, when in the Badshah you told me someone would ring and say all Yeshwant’s loot had been returned, then I thought I might write one last piece about him. And perhaps at the same time I could say something about that invasion of my territory. A Yeshwant Retires story would bring me so much kudos I could afford to defy those people. And so I was doubly pleased to fall in with your shadowing plan.’

  ‘To trick me and come back, yes?’

  ‘Yes. And that is why I’ve got a ruined sari and a very unpleasant wet feeling all the way up my legs. The moment that ugly fellow of yours saw me he seized hold of me by the shoulders, shook me like a rat and flung me down where you found me. I think even I passed out altogether. All I can remember is seeing that swine walking away, with some sort of knapsack on his hunched back.’

  ‘Madam, I am sorry. But tell me, what like did that scavenger woman look?’

  ‘Like all such women, for heaven’s sake,’ Pinky replied irritatedly.

  ‘But were you seeing which way she was going?’

  ‘No, I was not. I was looking at that ugly, twisted face thrust into mine and wishing I was somewhere else, anywhere else.’

  ‘So she had finished her work in that room?’

  ‘Yes, yes, I suppose she had. She was going away when I came, with a big gunny sack over her shoulder. And no baksheesh from Mr Ugly. He was too busy shaking me to death.’

  With that, he escorted the soaking and smelly journalist to Sukhlaji Street where, he was thankful to see, Axel Svensson there with a taxi. Together they put the stinking writer of Pinky Thinking into it and saw her off, Ghote not daring to imagine what Pinky was thinking as she went.

  It took him the rest of the morning and a good part of the afternoon to locate the scavenger Pinky had declined to give any description of. But going tirelessly round the area, questioning every old woman he came across, with Axel Svensson plodding along at his elbow offering helpful but unhelpful suggestions and the words forty-eight hours never quite out of his mind, find her eventually he did. She was a little wizened creature, scanty white hair screwed into a bun at her neck, dust-impregnated bright red sari tight-drawn between her legs, rubber chappals on her tiny feet.

  ‘Sister, was it you who cleared a room for a man with a twisted jaw this morning?’ he asked.

  ‘Perhaps …’

  Ah. At last.

  ‘Sister, this firinghi will give you much money if he can see what you were finding there.’

  He wondered whether to tell the Swede what he had promised, in Marathi, he would do with some of the cash eventually exchanged against a traveller’s cheque. And decided not to bother.

  The old scavenger looked Axel Svensson up and down, and eventually seemed to decide he was fool enough to do what Ghote had promised.

  ‘Come,’ she said.

  They followed her to one of the houses in Kamathipura Fifth Lane where she was mistress of a few sacks of rubbish waiting in a corner to be sorted, as bottles to be refilled, or as rags or paper for the rag-merchant or the paper factory or, finally, as broken glass, eventually to be made into new bottles.

  The old woman, scarcely half Axel Svensson’s height, boldly faced up to him.

  ‘Money,’ she said in English.

  Rapidly Ghote explained what he had promised her. Coin by coin the Swede counted out the sum from the copious handful of change he had got from the taxi-walla he had found to take Pinky Dinkarrao home. At last the sack the old woman had carried away from Victor Masters’ swept-clear room was tipped out in front of them.

  Its contents formed a not very hopeful pile. Besides a tattered plastic rug, which Victor Masters must have used to sleep on, a chipped tin plate and a steel glass there was little else but a clutter of banana peels, scraps of paper and old cartons evidently discarded over some weeks past.

  ‘All the same, we will have to examine,’ Ghote said. ‘Each and every thing. It is the only chance we are having of finding a clue.’

  Lumberingly Axel Svensson got down on to his knees.

  ‘Axel sahib, you are being a tip-top detective now,’ Ghote said. ‘I am happy to be taking your help. Kindly look first for any piece-paper with handwriting on. We may be lucky.’

  They were not. It took them a good deal of time to sort through every item in the sack. But in the end they had come across not a single handwritten word.

  ‘That also is significant,’ Ghote told the Swede as the big man gruntingly got to his feet again. ‘You see, Victor Masters has gone to very, very great lengths to obliterate each and every clue that may link him to anything from his former life. But he must have had such a life. Someone somewhere must be sending him, for instance, letters, even if only some government department. No one, except the poorest of the poors, can escape such. So that man has a secret. He has. And I am going somehow to find it out.’

  He looked at the few things of any value that Masters had seemed willing to have left behind, the chipped tin plate, the steel glass and a small knife. Idly turning over this last, beneath the layer of sweat stains on its wooden handle he saw something.

  ‘This also was in the room?’ he asked the little old scavenger.

  ‘You are calling me one liar?’

  Eyes glittered. A battle in prospect.

  ‘No, no,’ Ghote quickly soothed her. ‘It was only, I was thinking, the single thing worth having in whole pile.’

  ‘And you are not having. Not unless you pay-pay.’

  ‘Well, I will give you even two rupees for it.’

  ‘Four.’

  ‘Three.’

  ‘Now?’

  Ghote thrust his hand into his pocket, brought out three coins, passed them over.

  ‘You are wanting glass also? It is good. Three rupees only.’

  Ghote shook his head.

  ‘Two? Two? Two rupees for this glass, like new. Like new.’

  Waving her off, Ghote led Axel Svensson away.

  ‘But why were you buying that knife?’ the Swede asked when they were barely out of the old bargainer’s hearing. ‘It wasn’t any good.’

  Ghote smiled.

  ‘Look,’ he said.

  He held the knife up so that the Swede could see its handle. On it in smudgily stamped, small blue Devanagari-script letters were a couple of printed lines.

  ‘It is the address of a shop down in Colaba,’ he told the Swede. ‘It must be the sort of place selling anything that poor people, like the Koli families down there, may be wanting.’

  ‘Koli families? What are they?’

  ‘They are, if you like, the people to whom Mumbai itself should be belonging,’ he answered with a little smile.

  ‘But—’

  ‘Yes, you see, they are descendants of the fisherfolk who were here when all this city was just only a few islands, mostly at times covered by the sea itself. And ever since then, when the Portuguese were coming and afterwards the British, they have stayed where they were. In all those years the city has let their little villages remain, like a grit in an oyster, you know.’

  ‘And have they become a pearl?’

  Ghote laughed.

  ‘No, no, not at all. They are barely making living from fishing, and some small-time smuggling also. But this knife may turn out to be a pearl, gritty though it is seeming. If Victor Masters was buying this knife – dirty, you see, but the blade not at all old – the people at this shop may know something of him. So, chalo.’

  ‘Chalo? What is that?’

  ‘It is let’s go. Let’s go, Axel, my friend. And let’s also hope we would be lucky.’

  They were lucky, and they were unlucky. Ghote had no difficulty in finding the shop. It was a
ramshackle place, half permanent, half under a low roof, not far from the wharf where the boats of the Koli community were tied up after their dawn fishing. They saw, as they had approached from the slightly higher ground where the tall blocks at Cuffe Parade rose into the sky, that its roof in fact was chiefly formed out of a huge old discarded film hoarding. The monstrously enlarged painted face of the heroine stared up at them, together with part of the film’s title in English script, Chor.

  ‘Chor?’ Axel Svensson asked. ‘What is that?’

  ‘Thief. It is meaning thief,’ Ghote answered, thinking to himself that though he had tracked down the thief Yeshwant he still had far to go to find the murderer of Anil Ajmani. And much less now than forty-eight hours to do it in.

  Leaving the Swede, he plunged into the shop. At once the dark of the interior after the brightness of the afternoon sun brought him to a halt. He stood where he was, blinking and shaking his head.

  Then, before he could open his mouth to ask a cautious question about who had bought the little knife, he heard a voice from the inner depths, growling rather than speaking.

  ‘Policia. Damn policewalla.’

  Ghote was all too familiar with the way the city’s goondas could recognize him as a policewalla at a glance. It must be, he had thought long ago, something about the way he unconsciously stood, or the look on his face when on duty, which he could wipe from his features only with a deliberate effort.

  But nevertheless he cursed himself for having stepped into the shop without making more of a careful assessment. No doubt it must be a place engaged, as he had mentioned to Axel Svensson, in small-time smuggling.

  But there was no help for it now.

  ‘Police, yes,’ he snapped out, as the shopkeeper who, looking much like a Koli himself, gradually came into his view as he became accustomed to the interior darkness. ‘And questions I have to ask.’

  Then, still a little bemused in the dim light, he saw the fellow was advancing towards him. And in his hand now, seized from among half a dozen objects fastened to the wall at his back, was a fish knife, its fearsomely sharp blade glinting.

  ‘One question,’ the man growled, ‘and I will throw you out like a rotten onion.’

  NINETEEN

  Ghote retreated. It was not something he liked doing. But he saw no other way open to him. He had made the mistake of stepping from bright sunlight into this dark shop without pausing to discover who might be there inside. He must pay for that.

  For a brief moment he had considered calling in Axel Svensson. The sight of the big Swede might have been enough to make the knife-wielding shopkeeper think again. But on the other hand it might not. The Swede coming blundering in, blinking and peering in the semi-darkness, would not have looked all that menacing. Nor was there any reason to involve him in any trouble.

  So, it is what they are calling better part of valour, he had said to himself. And had backed out of the place.

  ‘Axel, my friend,’ he said, as he emerged, ‘I am having second thought about asking questions here just now.’

  He looked up and down the lane where the shop stood halfway between the hanging fishing nets at the wharf and the road beyond with its occasional passing cars.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I see an Irani restaurant up there. We’ll go and sit inside until I am seeing come out the fellow who owns this shop, one top-notch ne’er-do-well.’

  ‘But what is an Irani restaurant?’ Axel Svensson asked.

  If only all the questions I have to answer were as easy, Ghote thought.

  ‘Irani restaurants,’ he said, ‘are to be found all over the city. They are run by Parsis of the poorer kind and have been inherited down the years from their forefathers itself coming from Persia or, as they are now saying, Iran. They give you decent food at decent prices, if not at all posh.’

  Axel Svensson gave a tremendous grin.

  ‘Then challing,’ he said. ‘No. No, wait. No, that’s not right. It is … It is …’

  ‘Chalo?’ Ghote suggested eventually.

  ‘Yes, yes. Chalo. Let’s go.’

  The restaurant was much like the scores of its kind Ghote had had occasion to use since he had first come to Bombay. Outside it there was a blackboard with a long list of things its patrons were asked not to do. No smoking. No fighting. No talking loud. No discussing gambling. No spitting. No combing. No sitting long. No division of beverages. No water to outsiders.

  ‘Not too welcoming,’ Axel Svensson said.

  ‘Well, look, that list is headed by word Sorry. And this area is full of people who would be taking advantages. The owner must earn his living after all.’

  ‘Yes, yes.’

  Inside, Ghote chose the nearest marble-topped table to the window, despite the fact that it was leaning heavily to one side on its one ironwork leg. He pulled out the tin-seated chair which would give him the best view of the shop under the Chor awning.

  Axel Svensson was looking round.

  ‘Those cakes on display,’ he said. ‘The yellow and pink iced ones, I have to say that they are attracting a lot of flies.’

  At that moment the proprietor, who looked as if he was permanently armed with a fly-swat, brought it down on the dark wood surface of the counter in front of him with a whack that belied the frail appearance his loose white shirt and pyjamas gave him.

  Ghote felt he could hardly brush aside the Swede’s complaint.

  ‘Yes, there must be flies,’ he said. ‘You must expect flies when, even up here, you can smell the little fish they are drying by the hundreds on wooden racks down there. What is being called Bombay duck. But, if you are too worried, have just only a cup of tea.’

  The proprietor, victory over one fly achieved, came up to take their orders.

  ‘I am always happy to see a police coming in,’ he said. ‘Then I am knowing nothing will spoil my calm.’

  Axel Svensson looked up at him.

  ‘Do you know my friend?’ he asked.

  ‘No, no, sahib. But you can always tell the police.’

  Ghote, sighing, ordered the Swede’s tea and an omelette for himself.

  He had eventually eaten a second omelette, thinking of the hours out of a total of forty-eight ticking away. Then he had scraped the fly-spots from more than a few pink iced cakes. At last, with the first signs of the swiftly coming dark in the sky, the owner of the film-hoarding shop suddenly emerged and began to walk briskly away in the direction of the wharf.

  Ghote, tugging an overgenerous fifty-rupee note from his wallet and slamming it on to the leaning table, was out of the door at a run. Scarcely looking to see if Axel Svensson was following – he would welcome the back-up the tall firinghi might seem to provide – he pelted down the lane ahead.

  In a minute or two he had overtaken the quickly walking shop-owner. He whirled round and confronted him head to head.

  ‘I had questions,’ he banged out. ‘Inspector Ghote, Crime Branch.’

  A look of thwarted rage came up on the fellow’s dark face. His hand went down towards the top of the red lunghi round his waist, his sole garment.

  But Ghote was quicker.

  He darted forward, seized the top of the knife-hilt he had seen and flicked the weapon out into his own hand.

  Right, he said to himself. I am not going to let this badmash go on in his comfortable lying life. I will thrust my way inside his head until I am getting to truth, even if I have to thrust this knife into him here and there to make him know I mean business.

  He flipped the knife round and put its tip against the man’s bare chest just under his windpipe.

  ‘Now,’ he said. ‘No nonsense. A man was coming into your shop not long ago, a man with hunched shoulders and a jaw that is always twisted to the left.’

  ‘No. No. No, I have never seen.’

  But it was all too obvious from the momentarily upturned whites of his eyes that the fellow had, indeed, seen Victor Masters.

  ‘Yes,’ Ghote said.

  ‘No. Nev—�
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  Unhesitatingly, Ghote pushed the knife he was holding a quarter of an inch forward. He felt the flesh at the top of the liar’s chest give a little, and knew that, if he were fool enough to look down, he would see a trickle of bright blood there.

  ‘You know that man,’ he said, stating the bare fact.

  ‘Inspector, once-twice … once-twice I may have seen.’

  ‘Not once-twice,’ Ghote shot back. ‘More.’

  He decided to take a risk.

  ‘You are knowing him well,’ he said. ‘He is coming to your shop many times, to buy food and drink. A plate, a steel glass and a small knife for cutting food also.’

  He saw he had hit on the facts.

  ‘So what is his name?’ he demanded.

  ‘Inspector, he never said it. I promise you that. Never. Ever.’

  Ghote guessed he was telling the truth now, at least about Masters’ name. He took one more risk.

  ‘Very well. But he was telling you, just two-three days back, he was going away, yes?’

  He watched the face in front of him as the fellow decided whether to lie about this or not. And saw that he had decided the truth would pay best.

  ‘Inspector, yes. He said he was in shop for last time.’

  ‘And he told you where he was going?’

  Victor Masters may or may not have done, he thought. Most probably a man who was so careful to conceal where it was he had lived until today would have said nothing. But he might, he just might, have let something slip at a time when, for whatever reason, he was almost certainly putting that shop behind him.

  Again, the flicker in the eyes in front of him that spoke of a decision being arrived at.

  ‘Andheri, Inspector. I am helping police to my fullest, yes? He was saying once he would some day go back to Andheri.’

  Andheri, Ghote thought. He remembered seeing Masters put his head out of the train coming in to Grant Road when it had reached Andheri Station. At the time he had thought Masters might be getting ready to make a dash for it. But, thinking back, the way he had looked out had not been like that. He had, rather, been giving the scene the sort of long look someone might give a familiar place not visited for some time. So, yes, Andheri: it was very likely.