Vish Puri 02; The Case of the Man Who Died Laughing

by Tarquin Hall

  “Trust me, I am a professional!”

  “Go on! Shoot!” a voice in the audience shouted encouragingly.

  The young woman, whom Puri suspected was a plant, eventually agreed to his request. She took aim and fired. And lo and behold, Manish the Magnificent caught the bullet between his teeth.

  “Next I will grow a mango tree from this pit before your very eyes.”

  The magician planted the pit in a pot and watered it. Soon a green shoot appeared. Within a few minutes this had grown into a miniature tree that bore fruit, which he picked and threw into the audience.

  One of India’s oldest tricks followed: a young boy climbed into a basket and Manish the Magnificent drove swords through it. The blades appeared bloodied, but the boy emerged miraculously unscathed.

  Last came a version of the Indian rope trick.

  The magician began by sitting next to a basket and playing a pungi, used by snake charmers. The end of a rope stood erect like a cobra and began to rise up into the air. When it had reached a height often feet, the boy climbed up the rope and, apparently out of nowhere, picked some coconuts.

  ♦

  After the show, Puri found Manish the Magnificent in his well-appointed office, puffing on a fat cigar. By now, he had shed his whiskers and turban.

  “Mr. Vish Puri, sir,” he said, shaking the detective limply by the hand and then motioning him into the chair in front of his desk. “It’s been a very long time. But not long enough.”

  Ten years had passed since Jaideep had robbed Khanna Jewelers in Karol Bagh in broad daylight.

  Posing as a customer, he had swapped fifty lakhs’ worth of diamonds for glass replicas without any of the store attendants noticing. The detective, working on behalf of the owners, had caught him as he tried to sell the stones. Subsequently, Jaideep had been sentenced to six years in Tihar jail. Puri, unaware at the time that the thief was a trained magician, had never figured out how he had pulled off the robbery. Now that he had witnessed Jaideep’s conjuring skills, however, the mystery was finally solved.

  “I’m not going to beat around bushes,” said Puri. “I want to know your location yesterday morning between six and six thirty exactly.”

  The magician smiled through the haze of cigar smoke that separated them. “Ah, so that’s what you’re doing here. You’re investigating the murder on Rajpath. And you think I’m the guilty one.”

  “Answer the question,” directed Puri.

  “I’m flattered. But, you see, I couldn’t have done it.”

  “Why exactly?”

  “Because I am a reformed individual, Mr. Vish Puri, sir. I have been successfully reintegrated into society.”

  “Don’t do jugglery of words,” scolded the detective. “Once a crook, always crooked. Now tell me where you were.”

  Jaideep drew on his cigar and blew a big cloud in his visitor’s direction.

  “Like any sensible person, I was in bed, of course. Naturally I was not alone. I think her name was Candy. She tasted sweet, that is for sure.”

  “Anyone else can confirm?”

  “Naturally my servants will be only too happy to do so. My driver, also. I can provide you with Candy’s number as well if you like. She provides a very reasonably priced home service if you’re interested.”

  Puri did not rise to the bait.

  “There can be no doubt this murder was done by a master illusionist,” he said. “There are only a handful of you fellows around. So if you’re not the one, must be you’ve a good idea who he is, no?”

  “You expect me to give you names? Why should I?”

  “Because I am something of a magician myself. You don’t believe me, is it? Very well. Allow me to show you one trick I learned long time back.”

  The detective took his mobile phone from his pocket.

  “This is my portable device. Nothing out of the ordinary. But see here this button? When I press it – hey presto! – one number appears. Know to whom it belongs? Inspector Jagat Prakash Singh, Delhi Police. Now there is nothing up my sleeve. Nothing hidden. See? But should I have need of pressing this green button, in seconds, only, Inspector Singh would answer day or night. Now… Inspector Singh is a very motivated young officer. I am quite sure he would be most interested in knowing where so much of money came for buying such a fancy club as this and what activities you are up to, also. That is aside from pulling so many rabbits from hats.”

  Jaideep met Puri’s hard, uncompromising stare. He laid his cigar down on the lip of an ashtray and ran his fingers through his hair.

  “I’ve got nothing to hide.”

  “Sitting in your bar for past forty minutes, only, I saw three crimes committed. Number one, your hostess was supplying drugs to customers – cocaine, looks like. Number two, the barman was watering down the whisky. Third, you’re having so many rats in your kitchen.”

  “How could you know that?”

  “Rats are always there, Jaideep.”

  The magician scowled. “OK, Mr. Vish Puri, sir, you can put away your mobile. You’re right. What was done yesterday on Rajpath – the levitation, I mean – it’s never been achieved before, not out in the open. It’s a first. And before you ask, I have no idea how it was done. I’ve watched that video a dozen times and I can’t figure it out. Someone worked very hard to perfect that illusion. It’s a masterpiece.”

  “Who did it?” The detective was still brandishing his phone.

  Manish the Magnificent hesitated.

  “Who?” demanded Puri.

  “There are only three individuals capable of pulling off something like this,” said the magician. “The first is currently in intensive care, so you can rule him out. The second is a certain Bengali and he’s on tour in Europe.”

  Puri made a note of their names all the same.

  “And third?” he asked.

  The magician paused, licking his lips, which had become dry.

  “These days he’s known to people as none other than the great, all-seeing, all-powerful… Maharaj Swami.”

  “You said ‘these days’.”

  The magician looked suddenly coy. “That’s not the name he’s always gone by.”

  “You knew him before, is it?”

  “Oh, yes, I knew him. But what I’m about to tell you didn’t come from me. Is that understood?”

  “Perfectly.”

  “And you’ll leave after this and not come back?”

  “Is that the way to treat a guest?”

  Manish the Magnificent retrieved his cigar from the ashtray and blew on the tip until it glowed orange again.

  “Very few people know what I’m about to tell you,” he said. “But the great Godman grew up in Shadipur in a family of magicians. His parents were Hindu, but they died when he was four and he was adopted into a Muslim family. His real name is Aman. We were neighbors and both grew up assisting the older jadoo wallahs on the streets and learning magic tricks. When we were old enough, we became partners and started working for ourselves.”

  “Allow me to guess,” said the detective. “You got into criminal activity and eventually there was a falling-out.”

  The magician eyed him warily. “Something like that. It was about twelve years ago. He suddenly disappeared one day along with a great deal of my money.”

  “And?”

  “Naturally I tried to locate him, but he was nowhere to be found.”

  Some cigar ash fell into Manish the Magnificent’s lap and he brushed it away.

  “Life went on,” he continued. “I went to prison – as you well know. Then a few years ago I was watching TV and Maharaj Swami comes on. I didn’t recognize him at first. Not with all that getup. He’d made himself look a lot older. He was also changed physically – he’s mastered yogic prana-yamic breathing. But the moment he started conjuring objects out of thin air, I knew it was Aman. I’d recognize his technique anywhere.”

  Puri thought for a moment and then said: “One thing I am getting confusion over. Assuming it�
��s true your former partner betrayed you, why you’ve got tension about revealing his past?”

  “Haven’t you heard, Mr. Vish Puri, sir? Maharaj Swami is now one of the most powerful men in India. The prime minister doesn’t go to the toilet unless he okays it. He could make life very uncomfortable for me.”

  It was obvious to Puri that although the magician had made a pretense of not wanting to reveal what he knew about Maharaj Swami, he was only too happy to pass on what he knew.

  “I take it you would not shed too many of tears in the event Swami-ji ended up behind bars,” he said.

  Manish the Magnificent smiled. “Not many, no.”

  “Then we have something in common – us two.”

  “I suppose so,” the magician answered begrudgingly.

  “Very good! So what else you can tell me about your friend Aman?”

  “Only that he’s the most gifted magician I’ve ever come across. If anyone could have pulled off the illusion on Raj-path, it’s him.”

  “What about his character?”

  “He’s a perfectionist. I never knew him to give up on anything.”

  “Any habits – drugs, alcohol?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Women?”

  “He was always nervous around them.”

  Puri made a note of this.

  The magician remembered something else.

  “Aman had this habit of collecting things – little mementos from places he’d been,” he said. “Railway ticket stubs, menus from restaurants, postcards. It was a kind of obsession with him. He used to keep a diary as well. He left it out once and I read some of it. He had written down everything that had happened to him – dates, names – along with notes and diagrams on the magic tricks he was developing.”

  “He kept all these things where exactly?”

  “In a silver metal trunk.”

  ∨ The Case of the Man Who Died Laughing ∧

  Ten

  National Highway 58, which ran for 334 miles northeast of Delhi, had been under construction for nearly a decade. The few sections that had been completed between Ghaziabad and the holy city of Haridwar offered three smooth lanes in both directions. Drivers reaching one of these stretches experienced instant elation, as if they had entered a vehicular promised land where there were no tedious, terrestrial speed limits.

  But the euphoria was short-lived. After just a few miles, each tarmac tract ended abruptly in a rugged tear – the destructive influence of corruption and ineptitude, and not, as it perhaps appeared, an act of God. Even the most robust of vehicles had to brake suddenly and inch down sharp inclines into a purgatory of rutted, potholed tracks.

  Windows were hastily rolled up as tires stirred clouds of fine white dust. Through this choking pall, drivers and passengers passed laborers with bleached faces breaking piles of rocks with chisels and crude hammers. Rows of concrete supports for half-complete flyovers appeared suddenly, giant and potentially lethal obstacles. Rusty construction equipment stood idle like tanks abandoned by a fleeing army.

  That Puri was able to sleep soundly through all this – head back, mouth agape, snoring loudly – was thanks to an inherited but yet-to-be-identified Punjabi gene that endowed him with the power to snooze through almost anything. But it helped that he was exhausted from his encounter yesterday with the cricket bat in Dr. Jha’s office followed by a long day of interviews.

  It had been almost eleven o’clock by the time he reached the Mount Kailash Hotel, a seedy ‘businessman’s lodge’ off Connaught Place, where he had spent an hour.

  Room 312 had been registered to ‘Miss Neena’, who had an understanding with the discreet manager.

  ‘Miss Neena’ was but one of the lovely young woman’s aliases. Indeed, she used so many that even Puri, who had been making use of her services for nearly five years, sometimes lost track of who she was pretending to be at any given time.

  Had she ever told him her real name? he sometimes wondered.

  What he knew of her past was certainly sketchy, pieced together from scraps of information.

  Originally from Kathmandu, she had run away from home as a teenager to join the Maoist rebels, undergone combat training in a camp in the mountains and taken part in numerous guerrilla operations against the Nepali state. During one of them, she had witnessed or experienced something terrible. Disillusioned with the cause, she had fled and escaped to India.

  For the next few years, she had rambled across northern India. She spent a year with a traveling theater troupe in Assam and worked as a bar girl in Mumbai and an ayah for a wealthy Delhi family. In between, there had been a marriage that ended disastrously.

  Puri had also noted the following characteristics about her: she didn’t trust the opposite sex; considered alcohol nothing short of evil; was a night owl; could handle herself in a fight better than most men.

  There was a distinct possibility that she had a child (a couple of times on the phone he had heard crying in the background). But Puri had never visited her home or pried into her private life.

  Indeed, despite her secretive nature, their relationship was based on mutual trust. They had met in Mumbai during the Case of the Deaf Dabawallah when Puri had saved her life. Subsequently, she had moved to Delhi to work for him as an undercover operative.

  Given her talent for blending into almost any situation and ‘putting on so many of faces’, he had dubbed her Facecream.

  Now he was asking her to take on a task that would stretch even her considerable resources: to infiltrate the Abode of Eternal Love, Maharaj Swami’s ashram north of Haridwar.

  Last night, in the Mount Kailash Hotel, she had listened attentively to Puri’s briefing.

  “Frankly speaking, thus far, nothing has come to light linking Swami-ji directly with the murder,” he’d told her. “But I am in possession of Dr. Jha’s file on ‘His Holiness’ and grounds for investigation are there – no doubt about it at all. Dr. Jha spoke to three of Swami-ji’s ex-associates – naturally it was off record – and seems our Godman is very much active in money laundering for politicians. This Abode of Eternal Love is also Abode of Washing Machines, we might say. Black money goes in and comes out white.

  “Through Right to Information Act,” Puri had continued, “Dr. Jha was endeavoring to prove Swami-ji’s corrupt practices. Thus, he had petitioned for financial statements of numerous ashram bank accounts in India and Switzerland to be made public. Thus Dr. Jha had become a thorn in Swami-ji’s side.”

  “Dr. Jha had political enemies,” Facecream had pointed out. “It could have been one of them who killed him.”

  “Bullets delivered to the backs of heads are more their style, no?”

  Puri had also briefed Facecream on what Manish the Magnificent had told him about Maharaj Swami’s secret past and about his being an obsessive hoarder of personal memorabilia. He left the file with her to study.

  On the journey along Highway 58 this morning, she had been reading through the information Dr. Jha had acquired about the death in April at the ashram of twenty-six-year-old devotee Manika Gill. There were press cuttings, copies of police reports, ‘witness’ statements and affidavits from the girl’s family. Dr. Jha’s notes and transcripts of interviews he had conducted with some of her friends and the local farmer who had found the body lying facedown in the river were also included.

  Facecream was able to glean the following:

  Prior to coming to the ashram, Manika, whose father was a wealthy jeweler, had been a ‘rebellious type’. During her late teens and early twenties, she had ‘entered into’ a number of casual sexual relationships. At twenty-five, she had found herself pregnant. At her father’s insistence, she had ‘gone in for’ an abortion. Naturally this was hushed up; apart from her parents, only her best friend, Neetu Chandra, had known about it.

  Soon after, Mr. and Mrs. Gill, who were both devotees of Maharaj Swami, had escorted their disgraced daughter to the Abode of Eternal Love and implored their guru to give her �
��direction’. Manika had found the place ‘tedious and boring’ at first but then had undergone a ‘spiritual awakening’. According to several different sources, she had seen a vision during a special darshan conducted by the Godman.

  Neetu Chandra said Manika ‘wasn’t the same person’ after that. All she talked about was Maharaj Swami. The two drifted apart. Seven months passed. Then on the night she died, at around eight o’clock in the evening, Neetu received a distressing call from her friend.

  “She wasn’t making much sense. Just babbling about how she hadn’t slept in days and she’d been having these terrible nightmares. I told her to get the hell out of that bloody freak show, but she said she couldn’t trust anyone. She said she’d told her parents but they didn’t believe her. Told them what? I asked. She didn’t answer. She sounded afraid, just broke down in tears. I told her to stay put and I’d drive up to fetch her.”

  Neetu Chandra had set off from Delhi early the next morning. By the time she arrived, Manika had been discovered drowned in the Ganges. The police had quickly concluded that she had gone for a swim near the ashram at eleven o’clock at night.

  Mr. and Mrs. Gill maintained that their daughter had drowned by accident. But according to Manika’s friends, she couldn’t swim and was scared of the water.

  No suicide note was discovered.

  ♦

  Handbrake, at the wheel of the Mercedes four-wheel drive Puri had hired in order to make the right impression at Maharaj Swami’s ashram, turned off Highway 58 south of Haridwar. The single-lane road passed through waterlogged, emerald-green paddy fields fed by the mountain meltwater of the Ganges. Here and there, farmers stood in mud up to their ankles tending to their crops, and zebu, humped oxen, dragged wooden plows through the rich, oozing mire.

  The holy city of Haridwar, where drops of the elixir of immortality are believed to have been spilled by the celestial bird Garuda, announced itself with a line of budget hotels with names like Disney Inn. The idyllic rice fields gave way to the all-too-familiar detritus of dusty dhabas, vegetable carts and car-repair shops with oil-stained forecourts.