Bad Day at the Vulture Club

by Vaseem Khan

Inside the lobby, Chopra spoke to a receptionist, who led them smartly out to the rear of the building, to a private dock where a number of sleek yachts were berthed. The receptionist skipped up a ramp on to a fifty-metre-long, triple-masted sailing yacht inscribed with the name Xerxes’ Dream. The boat reminded Chopra of an old clipper, one or two of which could still be seen sedately gliding around the coast of Mumbai on occasion.

  They found Boman Jeejibhoy on the foredeck, bellowing up at a technician fiddling with the foremast rigging. The man seemed relieved to be high above the irate industrialist, and even more relieved when the receptionist redirected Jeejibhoy’s attention to his visitors.

  For some reason, Chopra had imagined Jeejibhoy as a thin, dry, old specimen. Instead he found himself confronted by a bullish man with the physique of a wrestler, hands like hams, sweating profusely in an ash-grey safari suit. Jeejibhoy had blunt features and a thick head of grey curls. His pale face seemed incapable of mirth. To Chopra, he had the look of someone who would gladly kick a fallen opponent in the stomach as he lay on the ground.

  He started to introduce himself, but Jeejibhoy interrupted him. ‘I know who you are. Engineer explained everything. Though he didn’t say anything about an elephant scuffing up the deck of my new yacht.’ He glared from beneath heavy brows at Ganesha, who was trotting around the foredeck examining his intriguing new environment.

  ‘I simply wish to ask a few questions,’ said Chopra.

  ‘And I simply wish to pick you up and hurl you into the sea,’ growled Jeejibhoy. ‘It is a good thing we cannot all just do as we wish.’

  Chopra wasn’t sure if the man was joking or not. ‘You were lifelong friends with Cyrus,’ he said hurriedly. ‘Yet you quarrelled, and then cut off all contact with him. What did you quarrel about?’

  ‘And if I were to tell you that it is no business of yours?’

  ‘I would ask again,’ said Chopra. ‘And keep asking until I got an answer.’

  His reply seemed to surprise Jeejibhoy. ‘Well,’ he said eventually, ‘at least you have a backbone. I can’t remember the last time anyone spoke to me like that. Not even my own reflection would dare.’

  ‘Perhaps Cyrus did. Is that why you fell out?’

  ‘Hah! That man – the man was an ingrate. Fifty years we were friends. Fifty years! And then he betrays me.’ Jeejibhoy seemed to be talking to himself. His eyes had clouded over; he was lost in the past.

  ‘Exactly how did he betray you?’

  Jeejibhoy did not seem to hear. ‘You know, when we were young we used to sail together. We won the Seabird class at the National Championships back in 1977. But he was never a true sailor. Couldn’t tell the difference between a bowline and a cleat hitch to save his life. It was me who did all the heavy lifting. He just wanted the glory.’ He shook himself back to the present. ‘It was a business deal gone bad. That’s why we fell out.’

  But the offhand manner in which he said this gave Chopra pause. ‘What sort of business deal?’

  ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘We had agreed to partner in a new venture, one that had been years in the making. A family business. I put up my half of the deal. At the last second, Cyrus reneged on his half. The agreement fell through, causing me . . . a great loss.’

  ‘Surely it could not have mattered that much. Given your wealth, I mean.’

  ‘I made a great personal loss,’ said Jeejibhoy. ‘We shook hands on the deal. My word is my bond. And so, I thought, was Cyrus’s. I was wrong.’

  ‘Do you know why he pulled out?’

  Jeejibhoy ground his jaw. ‘It does not matter why. The only thing that matters is his betrayal.’

  ‘He hurt you deeply. You felt a great anger towards him.’

  ‘Do you think I am a fool? I know why you are here, what you are trying to insinuate. The fact is that if I had wanted Cyrus dead I would not have waited all that time. And I would not have attacked him from behind. I would have throttled him in front of those doddering old vultures at the club.’ His meaty fists clenched repeatedly by his side as if he was, even now, imagining them around the deceased man’s throat.

  ‘What were you doing that evening? The night Cyrus died?’

  ‘I was at home.’

  ‘Alone?’

  ‘Yes. My wife passed away years ago. My daughter was out for the evening. The servants had gone home.’

  ‘Can anyone verify that you were there? For the whole night?’

  ‘No. Because I was not. I went out for a drive.’ Jeejibhoy’s expression dared Chopra to make something of this.

  ‘Did you have a driver with you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Where did you go?’

  ‘Nowhere in particular. I just drove around. I like to do that sometimes. Is there a law against that?’

  Chopra hesitated. ‘Can you think of anyone who would have wanted to harm Cyrus?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Jeejibhoy emphatically. ‘Me. Unfortunately, someone else did what I should have done.’

  A loud cry caused them to turn.

  Ganesha, who had been fiddling with the rope coiled beneath the foremast, scurried across the deck in alarm, just as the technician fell from the mast, his feet caught up in the rigging. Like a bungee jumper, the rope pulled him up short just before he ploughed into the deck, snapping his body taut with such force that all those watching could not help but wince. The man wailed again, before finally coming to rest, hanging upside down, his legs tangled in the rigging rope.

  ‘That – that elephant is a menace!’ he sobbed.

  Ganesha looked crestfallen. His ears flapped in distress, and he trotted forward to pat the man reassuringly with his trunk.

  The technician wriggled like a fish caught in a net. ‘Keep him away from me!’

  ‘Come on, Ganesha,’ said Chopra. ‘It is time for us to leave.’

  He led the forlorn calf off the boat, Jeejibhoy’s penetrating stare following him all the way.

  Ten minutes later Chopra eased the van to a halt, this time at a nearby restaurant. His stomach had informed him that it was time for lunch. He had stopped at a vegetarian eatery named the Pakora Palace, located opposite the Mumbai Plant & Herbaceous Fauna Quarantine Station.

  He thought it a strange place to site a vegetarian restaurant.

  Then again, nothing could be taken for granted in the food business. His own restaurant had become something of a haven for police officers, and, as a consequence, a tourist curiosity. He would often wander into the evening service to find locals taking selfies with the cops eating there. On more than one occasion he had even discovered well-known street criminals coming along to meet their police ‘friends’ – much to the embarrassment of said officers.

  He sat now on the restaurant’s rear porch, which faced out into the silty port waters, crowded near the concrete sea wall by a vast mat of mangroves. A warm breeze blew in off the water, ruffling his moustache.

  He ordered a vegetarian thali, a steel dish containing a range of vegetarian curries, lentils, potatoes and rice. Ganesha waited impatiently as his own order of a heaped tray of raw vegetables arrived. As the little elephant began happily shovelling carrots and turnips into his mouth with his trunk, Chopra took out his notebook and reflected on what he had learned so far.

  There was little to go on.

  As Kelkar had stated, Cyrus Zorabian did not appear to have an array of enemies, or skeletons in his closet that might hint at an alternative motive for his murder. By all accounts he was a well-liked man, a man who sought to do good for his fellow citizens. He had fallen out with Boman Jeejibhoy over a business matter – beyond that there was nothing to link the man to Cyrus’s killing.

  The fact was that there were few inconsistencies in the original police investigation into Cyrus’s death. As much as it galled him to admit, it was increasingly looking as if Rao and Kelkar’s verdict fitted the available facts – at least as much as any other theory.

  Then again,
it was too soon to draw a line under his own efforts. There were certain matters that remained unresolved. They bothered him, like ants crawling up his leg on a hot summer’s day. The newspaper clipping he had discovered in Cyrus’s office, the key in his wallet, the sheet with the strange line of text . . .

  He pulled out the copy Kelkar had given him and re-examined it:

  INDUKNAAUIKBAHNXDDLA

  He knew that Kelkar and Rao had wasted little time on this puzzle. In all probability, it had nothing whatsoever to do with Cyrus’s death. But there must be a reason Cyrus had kept the paper on him; it was the sort of insignificant detail that bothered him. He stared at the letters, mentally rearranging them. Perhaps it was an anagram.

  INDIA AND UK BALD . . . his effort petered out.

  BAN IND AND UK . . .

  LAND IS A BANK . . .

  After ten minutes of futile endeavour, he gave up. If it was an anagram, it was a convoluted one. Perhaps, instead, it was a code or cipher?

  Chopra knew, from his love of Sherlock Holmes, that the master detective had been adept at decoding ciphers. In The Adventure of the Dancing Men he had cracked a cipher made up of stick figures using a method called letter frequency analysis. In The Adventure of the ‘Gloria Scott’ he deduced that every third word in a terrifying letter was the key to the puzzle. In The Valley of Fear he worked out that a book cipher was being utilised by a spy within Moriarty’s organisation.

  The more he thought about it, the more he felt he might be on the right track. He decided to follow through on this line of thought.

  He took out his phone and began searching the Internet for websites about cracking ciphers. He quickly discovered that there were a great many such codes.

  He spent thirty minutes trying various types of cipher on the enigmatic line of text before finally alighting on one that appeared to show promise. It was something called a Rail Fence Cipher. The cipher scrambled up text by splitting it across a number of rows – called rails. Chopra read the instructions on how to decode it, and then began to apply them systematically to the line of text before him.

  First, he counted how many letters were in the text – twenty. Next the website asked him to work out how many rows – or rails – the cipher was using. He had no clue, but he guessed that Cyrus would have kept it relatively simple. He started with two rails. The next step was to calculate the width of the puzzle, which would tell him how many ‘units’ – i.e. letters and blank spaces – were in each rail. In order to do this, he had first to calculate the ‘cycle’, i.e. how the letters were arranged up and down the rails. Each cycle of letters ran from the top row, down through each subsequent row, and then up again, but stopping before reaching the top row again. The website provided an equation to allow him to calculate the cycle:

  Cycle = (No. of rails x 2) – 2

  This meant that, if he assumed Cyrus had indeed used two rails, the cycle would be (2 x 2) – 2 = 2. Next he had to calculate the width of each rail by dividing the total number of letters in the cipher by the cycle. This gave 20/2 = 10. Chopra separated the line of text into two lines of ten:

  INDUKNAAUI

  KBAHNXDDLA

  Then, using the cycle of 2 letters, going up and down the two rails, he tried to decipher the puzzle.

  I-K-N-B-D-A-U-H-K-N-N-X-A-D-A-U-L-I-A

  Chopra stared at the letters . . . But it was no good. The line was still nonsense. He had got it wrong. Either he was using the wrong cipher, or Cyrus had not used two rails as his base.

  Undeterred, he decided to try a three-rail permutation.

  Perhaps he had underestimated the old Parsee.

  He began again with the equation to calculate the cycle, coming up with: (3 x 2) – 2 = 4. Then he calculated the width of each rail. This gave 20/4 = 5. However, according to the instructions on the website, when there were more than two rails, the top and bottom rails always had half as many units per cycle as any middle rows. This meant that in a three-rail cipher – one containing 20 letters in total – the top and bottom rows would have 5 letters, and the middle one would have 10.

  Quickly, he divided up the text in this way to give:

  INDUK

  NAAUIKBAHN

  XDDLA

  Now, going up and down the rows, he came up with:

  INXANADUDIDKUBLAKHAN

  He stared at the text. At first glance it still seemed like a nonsensical string. And yet . . . Something was itching the back of his brain. There was something familiar here.

  And then he had it.

  With a growing excitement, he wrote out the line again – this time inserting spaces.

  IN XANADU DID KUBLA KHAN

  He stared at his notebook.

  It was always this way, the moment of discovery, of revelation. It was not a question of savouring such a moment, for hubris was not one of Chopra’s traits. It was more an instant taken to acknowledge that his own efforts had aligned with the stars, and in that alignment a light had winked on that might guide him a step closer to the truth.

  He reached into his pocket and took out the book of poetry found on Cyrus’s body, and within which the code sheet had been lodged.

  Flicking through the book, he quickly fell upon Coleridge’s famous poem: Kubla Khan. His eyes scanned the text, searching for another clue, for he was certain that the enigmatic code had been meant to guide whoever read it to this very poem.

  In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

  A stately pleasure-dome decree:

  Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

  Through caverns measureless to man

  Down to a sunless sea.

  Alph. It was the only word in the whole poem that had been underlined. Twice. Why? What was important about that word? He thought about why Cyrus would go to these lengths. Clearly, the whole exercise had been designed to protect something. And wealthy men like Cyrus usually had something of great value to protect.

  His thoughts circled around in his mind . . . and then there it was.

  The security locker.

  Kelkar had said that a security key had been discovered on Cyrus. The initial investigation had failed to find out which bank the locker belonged to. Which meant that Cyrus had taken pains not to use one of the major banks. But there was a bank, an international bank that had recently arrived in the city, following in the footsteps of operations such as HSBC, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank and Bank of America.

  The Alpha Bank, one of Greece’s largest private banking outfits.

  Chopra recalled their advertising campaign. One of the products they had aggressively marketed was bank lockers. Such lockers were popular in India, where the wealthy often had undeclared cash and other items of value to stash away from the prying eyes of the tax authorities.

  He picked up his phone and googled ‘Alpha Bank Mumbai’. The bank had only one branch in the city.

  Back in Bandra, close to the Vulture Club.

  In a bid to stand out from the entrenched players in the market, the Alpha Bank had set out to impress. Spread over three marbled storeys, the bank’s Bandra branch reminded Chopra of the sort of vast jewellery emporiums that had recently become commonplace in the city, rather than a hub of financial services.

  Walking up to a row of pristine glass doors, Ganesha trailing behind him, he saw that a snake charmer had set up shop on the pavement out front. The snake charmer, a dark man in a ragged dhoti and particoloured turban, had attracted quite a crowd. He had also attracted the attentions of the bank’s security guards, two beery specimens in smart black uniforms, wielding truncheons as thick and shiny as aubergines. The pair kept attempting to hustle the snake charmer away from the bank. But each time they stepped towards him, the charmer would give a quick blast on his flute and one of his pet cobras would slither towards the hapless duo, causing them to fall over one another as they beat a hasty retreat.

  Inside the bank, Chopra found Perizaad Zorabian waiting for him.

  ‘You said on the phone that you had discovered something impo
rtant?’ she said, rising to meet him.

  ‘I have discovered something,’ said Chopra. ‘Whether it is important remains to be seen.’

  He had asked Cyrus’s daughter to meet him at the bank, and to pick up the locker key from Inspector Kelkar at the CBI offices, but not to tell him about what they had found. Not yet, at any rate.

  There was a second reason he wished her to be here. He suspected that even armed with the key the bank might be reluctant to allow him access to Cyrus Zorabian’s locker. The man had been murdered, after all, and Chopra could not be sure of the exact protocols that now applied.

  He quickly explained his discovery to Perizaad. ‘Why would your father go to such lengths? I mean, surely he wouldn’t forget which bank he had a security locker with?’

  Perizaad’s brow furrowed. ‘I’m not sure. The truth is that his memory had begun to fail him of late. I suspected early onset Alzheimer’s – dementia runs in our family, I’m afraid. As usual my father refused to even admit the possibility. He hated the idea of showing weakness, particularly mental weakness. Parsees of my father’s generation are very sensitive about such labels, accused as we often are of “eccentricity”. In these last couple of years he had become increasingly paranoid about forgetting the smallest things. My birthday, for instance. He’d write it down all over the place, just so he wouldn’t forget that he was organising a surprise party for me.’ She smiled sadly. ‘As for the code . . . my father loved puzzles. Always had done, ever since we were children. This’ – she pointed at the code sheet – ‘this has his signature all over it.’

  He saw that she was struggling to hold back tears. For all his faults, Cyrus was a man who had inspired devotion. Chopra saw now the great love that powered Perizaad’s quest for the truth, her refusal to accept the police’s interpretation of her father’s final moments on earth. He wondered if that love had been returned by Cyrus. If so it might better explain why he had gone to such trouble to hide the locker, creating a code that few would have been able to crack. Perhaps it hadn’t been just Cyrus worrying about a failing memory – perhaps it had been more to ensure that should anything happen to him then his daughter might eventually follow his trail of breadcrumbs and find her way here.