Nor at headquarters next day was he able, as he had foreseen, to hide in the slight sanctuary of his office. As duties took him here and there about the compound he knew at every step what he ought to be doing. If he was not to risk Mama Chiplunkar revengefully betraying his secret, he ought to hail any colleague he saw and casually bring into the conversation the operation against the brown-sugar kingpin. There would be no difficulty in doing so, either. The operation was engaging almost every man in Crime Branch and there would be gossip and guessing in plenty about what was planned next.
But, though he had more than one opportunity, every time he balked at the last moment. Yet in the end, unexpectedly, a chance arose that he felt he could not fail to take. It happened when he found himself standing at a urinal stall in the mutri next to a visitor to headquarters, the bandmaster of the police band. He knew him just to speak to, a surly fellow who believed that the whole of the Bombay Police existed simply so that his band could play its music.
“Well, Inspector,” the old fellow said in answer to the word of greeting he had felt bound to offer him, “is it that you also are busy with this burra Chiplunkar bandobast? You know I am here because they are talking of taking my fellows from their duties? I was telling Commissioner himself my men have more important things to be doing than running after some brown-sugar badmash.”
Then he knew the moment had come. For the first time in his life he had to attempt to learn a secret in order to pass it on to a criminal.
He swallowed hard.
“So, Bandmaster sahib,” he said, dry-mouthed, “Commissioner is planning some big raid somewhere?”
“No, no. Not yet. And if you are asking me, he is not at all knowing when to raid or where. Whole damn thing is getting nowhere, I am believing. It is nothing but one whim of Commissioner’s. One whim only.”
Ghote felt the words as a shower of cooling rain in the days of premonsoon oppressiveness. So nothing was planned. Or nothing for the immediate future. For some time to come at least he could be the goinda at headquarters without betraying his lifelong trust. Or he could do so if what his sour old acquaintance had said was the truth. And in the meanwhile something might happen. Something …
He walked out of the mutri feeling suddenly almost happy. And in any case, he thought, tomorrow I am giving evidence in the Shiv Chand trial and there will be no chance of hearing office gup in the Court of Sessions.
So he sailed into headquarters next day—the evening at home had gone better, and he had even managed to say he was still considering the home computer advertisement—with the feeling that all might not be totally lost, however little he could see any way of getting out from under Mama Chiplunkar’s blackmail. At once his telephone jangled and, picking up the receiver, he heard the Assistant Commissioner’s voice.
“Ghote? Come up, will you?”
“Yes, sir. Straightaway, sir.”
What could the A.C.P. want? He must know from the big duties board behind his desk that this was the day he himself was in court. There could be no question of orders for him.
He hurried up to the A.C.P.’s big cabin, peered through the square window in the door to see whether the A.C.P. was engaged, found that he was not, knocked, and entered.
“You sent for me, sir?”
“Yes. Yes, Ghote. This Shiv Chand trial … that the fellow’s name?”
“Yes, sir. Yes.”
“Lot of interest in it. Interest in certain circles. Now, I want you to make sure there won’t be anything in your evidence that is going to cause—to cause unpleasantness connected with that book Indians of Distinction and Merit.”
“Indians of Merit and Distinction, sir,” Ghote corrected automatically, busy thinking whether, although the only charge against Freddy Kersasp’s former office manager was of attempting to extort money from the pianist Falli Bamboat, some mention of other entries in the always-unprinted volume might not arise.
“Well, man?”
“No, sir. No, there is the one charge only and that is concerning the man himself and no other.”
“Good, good. Damn nuisance all this just when the operation against Chiplunkar is coming to the climax. We’ve known all about that laboratory at Multiplex Chemicals and Drug Manufacturing for weeks, of course, but now, just when I am ready to give the green signal to catch the fellow there red-handed, I get these damned inquiries about that appalling Gup Shup. I must say I thought I’d heard the last of that rag weeks ago.”
Ghote felt as if a sudden huge iron collar had been placed round his neck. To learn this now, now when he had believed himself off the hook at least for a few hours. To have full details of an operation against Mama Chiplunkar thrust at him. To be told exactly what the brown-sugar kingpin would most need to know. It was wrong. It was unfair. It should never have happened.
“Right then, Inspector. That’s all I was wanting. Thank you.”
“Sir.”
Ghote watched himself, as if from a distant cinema seat, click heels in salute and turn to go. And then he heard the Assistant Commissioner’s voice again, coming from as far away.
“Oh, and keep all that under your hat, Ghote, won’t you? Security involved. Only a handful of people in the know as yet.”
“Yes, sir. Yes.”
Should he walk, walk like a mechanical man, straight out of the compound to the nearest safe telephone and ring 4520775 at once? That was the bargain with Chiplunkar.
But he could not do it. Not yet. Not quite yet.
He went down, almost staggering, to his office and groped his way to his chair.
Think. He had to think.
He looked at his watch and at last made out what time its hands were saying. He had only half an hour at the most before he was due to leave for court.
Mentally he composed the message of warning he did not know how he could avoid giving Mama Chiplunkar. “They are knowing about Multiplex Chemicals and Drug Manufacturing. They are waiting till you come there, Chiplunkar sahib, and then they are ready to raid.” That would be enough.
It would be too much. It would be the act of treachery finally and fully committed.
No, he could not do it. He could not. But how to avoid it? To go back up to the Assistant Commissioner, insist on seeing him again and confess all? But that would be to commit his act of treachery against Dr. Commissariat. It would be worse. Worse.
He sat there stultified.
And then, with strong in his mind the unforgotten sight of the Parsi scientist standing above the body of Dolly Daruwala, the thin shining steel blade of his gupti protruding from the rose-pink sari covering her plump frame, a thought came to him. A thought as terrible, in its way, as that of betraying Dr. Commissariat, as that of betraying his duty as a police officer.
There was, after all, one other way to take. One other way out of his iron-bound dilemma. He could himself eliminate Mama Chiplunkar as a vermin, snake, and pest. He could kill the fellow.
FOURTEEN
It needed an effort of will that gave him a feeling of nausea strong enough to make him sway in his chair for Ghote to get up, collect together what he needed, and go and shepherd his two waiting panches to the Court of Sessions. Had he loosened his grip on himself for an instant, he felt, he would have collapsed back into the chair and sat there hour after hour, heedless of his duty in court, thinking of nothing but the decision that had come to him. The decision he had taken.
At least, he thought, he had spared himself the need to go, or not to go, to a telephone and call that number 4520775 to give Mama Chiplunkar his warning. If the man had not long to live, it did not in any way matter whether he was warned of his danger or not. For now all he had to do was to make sure his part in Shiv Chand’s trial went without hitch. While the trial lasted—and he did not expect a clear case like Shiv Chand’s to take long—he would not need to think. Thinking would have to come, the working out of how to do what he had decided must be done. But it need not be yet.
Most of the proceedi
ngs in court passed by him as if they were happening in another city, in another country. He was conscious that both his panches gave their evidence without any complications. The young municipal building inspector had looked terribly gray, but he had stumbled through. Mr. Framrose was much better, dignified, concise, and evidently trustworthy. His own evidence he produced without hesitation or lapse. But beyond that, and at the end registering that Shiv Chand had duly been found guilty and sentenced to one year’s rigorous imprisonment, nothing impinged.
Still moving like an automaton, he returned to headquarters and hurried into his office.
The moment he sat himself in the chair where, some three hours earlier, he had made his fearful decision, it all came back to him. It was as if a switch had been pressed and letters had appeared on a screen. I must kill Mama Chiplunkar.
At once his mind started busily working out details. He was not going to go bald-headed to the man and strangle him with his bare hands. No, this needed the same deliberate planning as Dr. Commissariat had shown in disposing of Dolly Daruwala. It needed, however soon it must be done, the equivalent of Dr. Commissariat’s briefcase full of currency notes that, handed over, had induced Dolly Daruwala to open her safe so that all the evidence it contained could be destroyed. It needed similar forethought to Dr. Commissariat’s acquisition of a gupti, and its use over a period as a simple walking cane so that arriving in the flat with it would arouse no suspicion till the sword inside was drawn. It needed taking precautions as careful as Dr. Commissariat’s in touching nothing during the whole time he had been at the scene.
But where was the scene of Mama Chiplunkar’s disposal to be? He had to find somewhere isolated, lonely. But where in crowded, people-crammed Bombay could he do that? The old European cemetery at Sewri? No, beggars and the homeless were to be found at every hour among its moldering tombs. Out among the salt flats? It might be deserted enough somewhere there, but on what possible pretext could he induce Mama Chiplunkar to meet him at such a place? None. Plainly none.
An idea came to him. There was something better than a deserted place. A crowded place. Somewhere where among thousands of people all unknown to one another he and Mama Chiplunkar would be virtually on their own. And the moment the thought had come he found he knew exactly the place. A suburban-line railway station. One where people in their hundreds waited each evening in striving, struggling, jam-packed masses for trains to take them home. It would be easy there, surely, simply to give his victim one sharp push as a train approached, and then to melt into the throng of determined passengers waiting for the next one and slip away. It would be necessary, of course, to take some precautions. To wear inconspicuous clothing, to look around and guard against the almost impossible coincidence of someone who knew him by sight being at—where precisely? Why, at Grant Road station. This very evening. In the rush hour. That would do it. It was almost made for it.
Abruptly he looked up, caught a glimpse of his face in the little square of mirror hanging on the far wall.
What was he doing? he asked himself in sudden panic. What was he saying to himself? What, in God’s name, was he planning? He was planning—he licked his dry lips—he was planning to kill someone. To murder them. To commit murder. Yes, very well, the man he had in mind was at the far end of the scale of wickedness, a top distributor of that vile, death-dealing drug, brown sugar. He was a blackmailer, too. One perfectly prepared to use a fact he had come across almost by chance to force a police officer to betray his trust, to aid and assist him in evading the rightful forces of the law. But that man was still a human being, one who had some claim to life unless and until the law, in all its majesty, with all its care, decided that he was no longer fit to live.
He sat for a while breathing heavily, his mind emptied again of every thought as if it had been violently pumped dry.
Then, slowly, the facts he had considered before he had set off for the Court of Sessions began to come, step by logical step, back to him. Yes, Mama Chiplunkar had him locked in an impossible dilemma. There was no way out of it. Either he went to a telephone even now and passed on the strictly secret information he had happened to learn, or he did not. And if he sat tight until Mama Chiplunkar had gone to this Multiplex factory, where opium was being turned into crude heroin, and had been caught there, that would mean—there could be no doubting it—squinting Ranchod would be taken around to Vigilance Branch to betray him. In absolute consequence then, that man of goodness, Dr. Commissariat, would be betrayed in his turn. To break that stranglehold there was only one thing to be done. Mama Chiplunkar had to killed.
Yes, the decision, really, was taken. It had been taken from the moment the possibility of it had entered his head. The man must die. That he himself was to carry out the deed was, somehow, only a minor consideration. It was to be. It was there. There was nothing else to be said.
But how to get Mama Chiplunkar to the chosen place and at the right time? As quickly as he had asked himself the question the answer appeared, as if the whole plan had been stored up waiting for him. He had been given the very instrument, so to speak. That emergency warning telephone number, 4520775. He had, after all, only to ring Mama Chiplunkar there and say that “they” had learned about the Multiplex Chemicals and Drug Manufacturing place probably from someone in his gang itself, but that so far he had not been able to find out the man’s name though he should have it by the evening. Mama Chiplunkar might then even suggest himself that they should meet, and he could quickly give him his chosen time and place and at once end the call. Yes, that should do it. It would need a little chalak, but he ought to be able to manage it.
Without hesitation he got up and left. There was a telephone he could use safe from being overheard at the paanwalla’s stall not three minutes away.
Would Mama Chiplunkar come? Ghote prowled up and down a short stretch of the platform at Grant Road station, weaving his way mechanically through the dense collection of Bombayites leaving offices and shops to make their way to the far-off suburbs. Clerks in limp, sweat-patched shirts, secretaries in cheap cotton saris clutching plastic shopping baskets, a cluster of Goan girls in blouses and skirts chattering together in English laced with the last traces of Portuguese. Pushing their way through the tired waiting mass went vendors of this and that, a boy with evening papers hooked in a huge bundle under a string-thin arm, a hawker of jasmine garlands, their sweet scent made rank at this late hour of the day, a kelawalli, her last few sad-looking bananas sulking at the bottom of the round wide basket she had lifted exhaustedly from her head.
His telephone call to the brown-sugar kingpin had gone every bit as well as he could have expected. He had got straight on to the man himself, and had contrived to bang down the receiver the moment he had pushed out the place and time for this meeting.
As he had dropped the coins for the call onto the paanwalla’s gleaming brass tray, he had thought to himself with strangely savored irony that, by passing on the very warning about the observation mounted at Multiplex Chemicals and Drug Manufacturing, he had in fact done what earlier he had wished with his whole being he would never have to do. But the beauty of it was that it no longer mattered. Because sentence of death had been passed on Mama Chiplunkar. The fellow would not live to benefit by what he believed he had extracted with such calm insistence from the helpless victim of his blackmail.
The exact spot he had rapidly said to Mama Chiplunkar that he would wait at was on the platform for trains leaving the city, at the end nearest the terminus. It was the very best place for what he had undertaken to do. Any incoming train would still be going at speed at this point. One quick push at the right moment and it would be over. All that was necessary was to get Mama Chiplunkar near enough to the edge of the platform. If he could contrive to move in that direction as they talked it would be done in a second.
With a twice-repeated poop-poop a train approached, as at this hour of the evening they did at three- or four-minute intervals. He watched it slacken in speed and com
e to a noisy halt. The waiting crowd on the platform surged forward toward the ever-open doors. Somehow the pressure squeezed the already packed passengers inside back a little, and at each set of doors some dozen people managed to force themselves in, as determined at the ladies-only compartments as at any of the others. Above the jammed, sweating masses inside, the train’s fans twirled ineffectually.
The guard blew his whistle, the sound shrill above the general hubbub, and swung himself on board. Slowly the train began to move off. The unsuccessful would-be passengers reluctantly fell back. Here and there in the long length of the platform a daring young man leaped forward at the last instant and clung precariously to whatever hold he could find on the ever more swiftly moving train, swinging far out over the platform edge and then over the track. Shuddering and screamingly rattling, the steel monster at last disappeared from view.
And, yes, Ghote thought, the next one, or the one after that, or the one after that again, would be the one. If only Mama Chiplunkar would come.
He looked at his watch. In theory the fellow was still not late. There were three, perhaps four, minutes before the hour he had proposed.
He forced himself to take one more stroll along the platform. It would occupy the time, and it would make him less conspicuous than if he were to stand at his chosen spot consulting his watch every ten or fifteen seconds. He set off, weaving his way through the crowd where it was thinnest at the farthest point from the platform edge. Idly he made a show of looking at the posters on the wall beside him. BEFORE YOU BUY A CHEAP AIR CONDITIONER—SOME CHILLING TRUTHS. Well, AC had never been within his means. I WAS IMPRESSED WHEN MY DOCTOR SAID KEO-KARPIN HAIR VITALIZER REALLY STOPS HAIR LOSS.
The Iciest Sin Page 16