Go West, Inspector Ghote

by H. R. F. Keating

  He saw no look of belief enter the grey eyes that had held him throughout his narrative. But he had hardly expected to do so.

  He added then the sentence he had intended to add from the beginning.

  “Such things happen, Lieutenant, but nevertheless I see no reason why such an explanation should be resorted to in the present circumstances.”

  “All right, Inspector,” said the lieutenant. “What you’ve told me about the guy in your gaol is contrary to anything I’m ever going to believe. I’ll tell you that. But I also accept that, for good reasons of your own, you do give credence to such—”

  He paused an instant.

  “To such accounts. However, I’m interested in your reasoning here.”

  “For such events to take place,” Ghote said, “there must be an individual present with the powers that are required. In the length and breadth of India there are, I am certain, a number of such individuals alive today, and there have also been many of them in past ages.”

  “Yeah, but the swami here,” Fred Hoskins broke jarringly in. “There was a guy with mystic powers.”

  “No, you are wrong,” Ghote said, without hesitation. “You are entirely wrong, Mr. Hoskins. Yes, the swami possessed certain unusual powers. He was able earlier today to realise that I, a complete stranger who had only just entered the hall where he was, that I was suffering from a severe headache even though he was many yards distant from me. And he was able also to cure that headache with one touch of his hand. But he did not possess powers in any way greater than that.”

  “And why was this?” Lieutenant Foster asked quietly.

  “Because the fellow was a cheat only,” Ghote answered. “A proven cheat.”

  EIGHT

  Ghote hoped for a word of approval from Lieutenant Foster for that confident assertion of his, based on the one swift glimpse he had had of the car brochures, that Swami With No Name, whatever healing power he might possess, was no mysterious wonder-worker but a familiar confidence trickster. But, though he thought he had seen a hint of quick pleasure in those cool grey eyes, the lieutenant was given no opportunity to speak. From Fred Hoskins, at the door of the big bare room, there came a roar of anguished rage that obliterated everything.

  “No,” he yelled. “No. Jeez, there’s nothing pisses me off more than to hear a guy try and talk himself out of an assignment that fits him like a goddam glove. Don’t listen to him, Lieutenant. You got yourself the only guy who can solve this case. You can’t tell me this isn’t some kind of magic happening here, and right in front of you you’ve got the one guy who knows about Hindu magic from A to Z.”

  But the lieutenant remained unimpressed.

  When Fred Hoskins had finished, Lieutenant Foster simply turned to Deputy Barnes and began giving him orders to get hold of someone in authority at the ashram. Ghote got only a terse inquiry as to whether he knew where Nirmala Shahani now was, and when he said that he at least knew the name of the hut where she slept, Shanti Sadan, he was asked to get hold of her if he could.

  So, instead of rapidly solving the case under the patronage of Fred Hoskins, he found himself after he had brought Nirmala to the lieutenant, left standing with nothing to do. He leant against a tree just outside the central circle of ashram buildings, while the night was made noisy behind him by the arrival of vehicle after vehicle bringing in the technicians of the Sheriff’s Department murder investigation team.

  In front of him there stretched the dark mass of night-hidden redwoods. Above were the stars in a cloudless sky. But the scene was not peaceful. At his elbow Fred Hoskins was talking.

  For little reason that Ghote could see, at first, the hulking private eye was giving him a detailed top-to-bottom guide to the Los Angeles Police Department. Figures of frightening size poured out. Statistics tumbled forth. Until at last there emerged the fact that there had once been in the force a certain Fred Hoskins who, because of various hinted-at jealousies and pieces of appalling ill-luck, had never risen beyond the lowliest of grades, patrolman.

  “So I retired, Gan boy. But how do you think I retired? I’m asking you that.”

  Ghote had been listening only because listening was better than putting to himself. uselessly time and again the question how it could be that the swami had met his death in a place where there was no weapon and no way a weapon could have been taken out. He realised abruptly now that the hammering stream of sound had come to a temporary halt with a query he was supposed to find an answer for.

  “How did you retire? I am not having any idea whatsoever, Fred.”

  It appeared that that response would do. Fred Hoskins cheerfully thumped a vast palm with a vast fist.

  “Then I’ll tell you, Gan boy. I did not retire as a has-been. No, sir. I retired as an am-right-now. I quit at age forty-two with a pension of one thousand dollars per month, and the very next day I opened an office as a P.I. in downtown L.A. And let me tell you, Gan, I haven’t looked back since.”

  “That is very good.”

  But Fred Hoskins paid no attention to this modest and hypocritical, morsel of praise.

  “Now,” he said, “I’m gonna put you in the picture about the L.A.P.D.’s brother force, the Sheriff’s Department, among whose personnel I number some very good friends, not excluding Lieutenant Foster.”

  “Thank you, Fred.”

  Thanks, however, were not needed. Another torrent of factual information had been embarked upon. Words banged ceaselessly once more into the pine-scented night air.

  “A total of sworn personnel in excess of five thousand … a computerised gas chromatograph … as many as nine hundred radio-equipped mobile units … in excess of fifteen copters … snowmobiles … dune buggies …”

  What on earth is a dune buggy, Ghote wondered. And all that other transport Into his mind, so clearly that he almost felt it to be present, there came an image of one of the cars of the Bombay police in which he had so often gone out on an investigation, of its scuffed grey leather seats, its crackling radio over which it was hard to make out even the simplest of messages, of the number crudely painted in white on the dashboard in accordance with regulations.

  But no amount of comparing Californian opulence with Bombay make-do could for long push out of his head the mental search he kept conducting and reconducting of the big bare room in which the Swami With No Name had met his death. The close-fitting boards of its floor, the yellow cushion-throne, the blank doors of bedroom and bathroom, the blank, windowless walls.

  Well, perhaps all the technical equipment at the command of the Sheriff’s Department—through the open double doors of the swami’s house there had been coming the regular intense blue flashes of photographs being taken—provide the answer that he could not even imagine. The simple, logical answer.

  And Fred Hoskins was yammering on.

  “… flexible communications computer maintains a bookkeeping function and also equally distributes incoming traffic among the many radio-dispatching positions. This computer is capable of sensing an incoming digital message and of assigning the same to an electronic console within fifty milliseconds at the same time that it provides the console with all the transmitters, receivers, telephone lines, and status signals necessary for …”

  Do we have status signals at Crawford Market headquarters? he asked himself. And anyhow what is a status signal? He very much doubted whether such things played any part in the operation of the ingenious file-flapping mechanical device that was the pride of Records Section at the Detection of Crime Branch. But they did not do so badly, he reflected, when it came to putting criminals behind the bars.

  “I would like to conclude this topic,” the voice beside him twanged on, “by listing some of the …”

  But in the darkness of the central circle of buildings a sudden swathe of bright light cut out from the administration block. In it, Ghote saw the small, sari-clad figure of Nirmala Shahani. Lieutenant Foster had finished interviewing her.

  He strode off in her dire
ction, leaving the huge private eye still listing whatever it was he had been determined to list. Nirmala Shahani was his duty. He was not here, he told himself sharply, to rack his brains pointlessly in trying to think how the swami could have been killed. He was here in California simply on behalf of Mr. Ranjee Shahani, of Shahani Enterprises Private Ltd., to see that his daughter was returned safely to Bombay, to her already arranged marriage there with the financial benefits that would bring, to the world of comfort and order.

  “Kumari Shahani,” he called out.

  At the sound of the Hindi words the girl stopped and stood peering into the darkness.

  Ghote came quickly up.

  “Good morning again, Miss Shahani,” he said. “Now is there anything I can do to assist you?”

  The girl looked at him in silence. In the dark he had largely to imagine that soft face of hers with its yet softer, new-born animal nose.

  “I do not think I would get any assistance from the man who tried to make me turn my back on Swamiji,” she said.

  “But—”

  Surely the stupid creature could not still be believing that the swami was the god-like person she had once thought him to be. But perhaps she did not yet know that close beside the man’s bed there lay that pile of brightly coloured car brochures. A pity that with Lieutenant Foster’s technicians still swarming all over the house he could not march her in there at this very moment and make her see how wrong she had been. Well, she would just have to take his word for it.

  “Miss Shahani, I think you do not understand. Perhaps Lieutenant Foster did not tell you everything. You know that I was the person who discovered Swami’s body? I went into his house when he was meant to be in the Meditation Hall in a state of samadhi, and while I was there I saw beside Swami’s bed a large pile of brochures for motor cars.”

  “Cars.” The girl spat the word out. “What are cars mattering now? How can we know why Swamiji had those brochures there? They mean nothing now.”

  “Well, that is not exactly so, you know. They still do mean that Swami was very, very interested in selecting the best and most expensive gift for Mrs. Russell Walters to give him. I know that it must hurt you to hear this. But it is the fact. Swami lied to Mrs. Russell Walters when he was saying he did not know anything about cars, and he lied also in saying that he was going to spend the whole of this night in meditation. Swami was no more than a common cheat only. Miss Shahani, let me take you now back to Los Angeles where we would find you a hotel. And tomorrow we will take the first available flight to Bombay.”

  “You fool.”

  The words rang out like bell-strokes in the clear, cool night.

  Ghote took half a step backwards. He could still just see that pretty, soft-nosed face. It was glaring at him.

  “Do you think I did not know that Swamiji did not intend to stay in the Meditation Hall?” Nirmala demanded. “He had told me that he would want to see me during the night. In his own house. He said I would know when to come. He would put the thought into my head. But in the end, he never had time to do that.”

  At least that last claim was probably true, Ghote thought. The girl had been fast asleep when he had found the hut called Shanti Sadan. But, never mind about whether Swami had or had not said he would remain in the Meditation Hall, there was still the matter of the motor car brochures. The fellow was a liar. And he was greedy.

  “Very well,” he said stiffly. “There is still the question of his lies about cars. It is no use to say it does not matter. Those brochures were in his room. I saw them. They are there. They prove he was not at all a truth-telling person. Miss Shahani, come with me now. Mr. Hoskins will drive us to Los Angeles.”

  “How can you be so stupid?”

  He saw the girl stamp petulantly on the pine-needle soft ground. And a corresponding rage swept up in him.

  “I am stupid?” he said. “Let me tell you, it is you who are being stupid, stupid. Please think about what I have told. Swami lied. He lied, and he showed himself also to be as greedy for possessions as any of the people in the West he was denouncing. That is the truth, Miss. Kindly accept it.”

  “Won’t you see?” the girl stormed back at him. “Won’t you see what is in front of your eyes? Swamiji had troubles, many, many troubles. More than you could know. The time had come for him to go. To go from this terrible, materialistic country. To go altogether from the world. But when he went he left behind him a sign. A sign that told, for ever and for ever, that he was a great soul, that he could do those things that only the greatest souls can do.”

  Thoughts tumbled and cascaded in Ghote’s mind like the shards in a violently shaken kaleidoscope. Tumbled and cascaded, and fell into a new unexpected pattern.

  “You mean—you mean that Swami committed suicide?” he said. “Cut his own throat and then caused the knife he had done it with to disappear?”

  “Of course.”

  It was possible—provided you were willing to accept that Swami possessed the powers Nirmala believed he had. There was nothing in logic to say that he had not taken his own life rather than being murdered. If the weapon had disappeared by means unknown to science, then suicide was just as likely as murder. And suicide was a clear possibility if the man had had mysterious troubles about which he himself knew nothing. Or very little. Because, after all, Lieutenant Foster had been going to come to the ashram originally to investigate not Swami’s death, but his activities while he had been alive. Activities that might have included summoning pretty, innocent, defenceless Nirmala to his house in the middle of the night.

  He was about to admit, cautiously, that what she had said might be part of the truth when she spoke again.

  “Now do you see at last? Swamiji was a great soul, a true yogi. He has put thousands in the East as well as in the West on to the path. It was the most wonderful thing that ever happened to me that one day in Los Angeles I went to hear him talk just because I was homesick and he came from India. I thought I wanted to hear an Indian voice only, and I found that my whole life had been altered.”

  “Yes, I see that,” Ghote conceded reluctantly.

  It was still plain to him, despite what Nirmala had said, that the swami was at best very dubious. And it was still his duty to get the girl away from this place and back to Bombay. Everyday Bombay.

  “I am sure,” he went on, picking his way word by word, “that you will remember Swamiji as long as you live. He will be a great, great influence on you. Even you will tell your children about him and they will—”

  “What children?” Nirmala interrupted sharply.

  “Well, I am sure that you will one day get get married. Perhaps that will be sooner than you think even. Once you are back in Bombay you would—”

  “I am not going back to Bombay. I am not leaving the ashram. I am staying here all my life, devoting myself to Swamiji’s memory, meditating in the way that he taught us.”

  “But—but—but surely the ashram will pack up now. The whole place was Swami’s idea, wasn’t it? And now that he—now that he has gone, it will have to come to an end. You are distressed, Miss Shahani. Let me take you to a hotel.”

  “Won’t you ever understand? Have you seen nothing here? Do you think Swamiji had no influence on anybody? There are hundreds of people who will stay here and come here. I will be only one of them.”

  “Well, yes, I expect there will be others who feel as you do. But all the same I think that you will find that quite soon … you see, you will all be without any leader whatsoever, and that is not an easy situation to overcome. You know, I still think it would be best for you to go home, for a little while at least. Then you can see—”

  “You idiot. You bewakoof. Haven’t you seen Johnananda? Couldn’t you tell that he would be the ashram’s leader? Swami made him his deputy. Now he takes the mantle.”

  “But—but he is an Englishman.”

  “Does God make any difference between Indian and Englishman? Between Indian and American? Swamiji bequeathed hi
s mission to Johnananda. It will be Johnananda who sees that Swamiji’s book is published, that it goes all over the world. Millions and millions are going to find the way because of it. Swamiji said so. That is what Johnananda will do. And I will be one of those that help him. Here. In the ashram. Which will become a world-renowned shrine. Here. Here. Here.”

  Ghote stood, suddenly chilled in the diamond-starred Californian night, and wished with all his might that at this very instant someone would come bursting out of Swami’s house shouting into the cool quietness “I got it, I got it, I found the weapon.”

  But there was no sound other than muffled voices from anywhere within the circle of ashram buildings, and the stars twinkled emptily as ever.

  “Miss Shahani,” he said wearily, “believe me, I am very well understanding your feelings at this moment. You have spent weeks as a devoted disciple of that man. He had captured you entirely. But, please, I have proved to you that he was a liar and an altogether greedy individual. Please try to take that in. Miss Shahani, there will not be a shrine here. Swami was not the man to cause a shrine to grow up. He was not. In a few months only this place will be deserted altogether.”

  “When all the world has heard how Swamiji took his own life and made the knife that he used disappear? Made it disappear so that no one, however much scientific apparatus they are using, will ever find it? Do you believe that?”

  And Ghote had to admit to himself that if what she had described did come about, it was possible, more than possible even, that a cult would spring up here. And that man had been a cheat. A cheat. A figure on a footing with the idle, cash-seeking bhagat he himself had detected playing the mango-tree trick at the Azad Maidan.