by Vaseem Khan
What exactly was waiting for them in that locker?
They met with the bank’s manager, a man named Mendonca. Having grasped the situation, he led them down into the bank’s locker vault, though he requested that Ganesha remain in the lobby. If the elephant’s presence inside his bank surprised him, he did not show it. After all, there was no telling how much the elephant’s guardian was worth. If Mendonca had learned one thing in the banking business it was never to judge an elephant by its cover.
Inside the vault – a long, narrow room lit by strip lights and housing floor-to-ceiling banks of gleaming brushed-steel lockers – the manager led them swiftly to Cyrus Zorabian’s box.
Perizaad Zorabian rummaged in her handbag, then gave Mendonca the key.
He gave a small smile. ‘And the code?’
‘What code?’
‘I am afraid that a key is not enough to open our lockers.’ He gestured at the keypad prominent on the front of the locker, containing both the numbers 0 to 9, and the alphabet. ‘Each client is also required to input a code.’
Perizaad looked at Chopra in confusion. He hesitated only for a moment, then turned to the keypad, and typed in:
IN_XANADU_DID_KUBLA_KHAN
The keypad beeped, then the words ‘WELCOME BACK, MR ZORABIAN’ flashed on the display screen, followed by: ‘PLEASE USE YOUR KEY TO OPEN THIS LOCKER WITHIN THE NEXT TWENTY SECONDS. FAILURE TO DO SO WILL ACTIVATE ANTI-TAMPERING PROTOCOLS.’
A countdown began on the screen: 20 . . . 19 . . . 18 . . . 17 . . . 16 . . .
Chopra nodded at Mendonca, who stepped smartly forward, and, inserting the key, opened the locker. He peered inside, then reached in and removed a large steel box.
They followed the bank manager to a viewing room where he set the box down on a marble-topped table, then excused himself to allow them privacy.
Chopra waited as Perizaad opened the box, reached inside, and set its contents on the table.
The box contained three sets of items.
First, there was a sheaf of architectural blueprints. As Chopra examined them, he realised that they were for the new property development that Geeta Lokhani had told him about, called New Haven, the project that Cyrus had become heavily involved with, a slum resettlement scheme out in the suburb of Vashi. The blueprints were stamped with the words ‘Original – Confidential’. In a legend was the name of the holding company that owned the plot, and the site developer. The holding company was Karma Holdings Private Limited; the developer Kaveri Constructions.
The second item was a linen bag full of bundles of cash. Each bundle contained a hundred two-thousand rupee notes. Quickly, he counted the bundles – there were fifty in all.
Ten million rupees.
Though not an astronomical sum for a man like Cyrus, nevertheless it was a substantial amount. He wondered, briefly, if it was money that Cyrus had intended to donate to the cause of the resettlement complex.
But that made no sense. Why keep it here, in a secret locker? And why in cash? Particularly given the current government crackdown on ‘black money’?
The third item in the box was a set of letters, half a dozen in all, bundled together with a rubber band. Each letter was inside a pristine white envelope with Cyrus’s office address neatly typed on the front, together with a postage stamp. The letters themselves were all the same. They contained single sentences typed in a large font. The sentences were all different; similar in only one aspect – they all appeared to be in Latin.
He held out a couple to Perizaad. ‘What do you make of these?’
She read out the text: ‘Boni pastoris est tondere pecus non deglubere,’ and ‘Faber est suae quisque infortunii.’ Her expression crunched into a frown. ‘It looks like Latin.’
‘Why would someone be sending your father cryptic messages in Latin?’
‘I don’t know. My father studied Latin in school. So did I, as a matter of fact, but it never took.’
‘With your permission, I will get them translated.’
Perizaad nodded. She stepped forward, and ran a hand over the cash. ‘More confusing to me than the letters is this.’
Chopra raised an eyebrow. ‘It can hardly be surprising to you that your father held cash in his locker.’
‘You don’t understand,’ said Perizaad. She licked her lips, then plunged on. ‘At the time of his death my father was bankrupt.’
Prison is no place for the pious
Unlike most policemen of his acquaintance Abbas Rangwalla had never been comfortable around prisons. He derived neither a specious pleasure nor a malicious glee from observing those in the system being made to pay for their crimes. He sometimes wondered if Chopra’s antipathy towards the Indian judicial apparatus had rubbed off on him during the long years of their association. Corrupt law enforcement officers, a court system that barely functioned, a prison service that might have doubled as most people’s imaginings of hell. It was little wonder that the general public had such a low opinion of those appointed to protect their interests.
And there was also, lurking at the back of his mind, the sneaking suspicion that, but for the grace of God, he might well have found himself an inmate of the same prison that he had now come to visit.
Rangwalla had grown up in the tough environs of Bhendi Bazaar, running wild on the streets until his exasperated father had taken him by the ear and thrust him into the police service.
Five years later, he had been posted to the Sahar station, where he had discovered that the man in charge was something of an anomaly. Incorruptible, unwaveringly committed to his own sense of justice, and implacably resolute of purpose, Chopra had defied Rangwalla’s expectations. His previous commanders had been, at best, lazy and ill-disciplined; at worst, no better than the crooks they were employed to thwart. Having spent two decades at the station, there were moments when without Chopra to keep him on the straight path he might well have drifted into that nebulous grey waste of the soul that had claimed so many promising policemen in India.
The door to the interview room opened and a prison guard led Hasan Gafoor into the room, depositing the handcuffed man into a chair bolted to the floor. He hitched his pants over his protruding belly, then left with a grunt. ‘Thirty minutes.’
Gafoor was a small man with an avuncular face, a thin grey beard, and a round head partly covered by an Islamic skull cap. His eyes were deep-set, and, surprisingly to Rangwalla, serene.
‘Who are you?’ he asked.
Rangwalla explained his mission. ‘Your friend Kohli believes that there was more to the collapse of your building than the official investigation revealed. He has asked us to investigate.’
Gafoor’s hands were constantly in motion, clutching and unclutching a prayer book. Rangwalla recognised the volume of Hadiths – sayings of the Prophet Mohammed; he was himself a Muslim, though he left it to others to say whether he was a devout one. It had always amused him how readily men behind bars rediscovered their faith. It seemed that a stint in a dank cell, serviced by rats, cockroaches and other even lower forms of life in the shape of their fellow prisoners, was enough to drive anyone back to God.
‘What good will it do?’ said Gafoor. ‘Digging up the past will not bring his daughter back. Nor any of the others who died that day.’
‘No,’ agreed Rangwalla. ‘But perhaps it will bring him peace. Are you a father? Perhaps you can understand.’
‘I was a father,’ said Gafoor. ‘After my arrest my wife took my son and moved back to Lucknow to live with her parents. Now . . . now I am just a man living from one day to the next.’
‘Do you think you will find absolution in that prayer book?’
‘What makes you think I am looking for absolution?’ He held Rangwalla’s gaze, then said, ‘I did not kill those people. My father left me that building and the business that came with it. I made no money from it. I begged, borrowed, did whatever I had to, to keep it afloat. Not for myself, but for those who earned a living from the employment I provided.
So that their children did not go hungry at night; so that they did not have to sleep in the streets. They were my true family. The worst thing was not that I was convicted and sent here. The worst thing was that I was accused of killing my family.’
‘You were accused of ignoring BMC warnings. You were accused of trying to bribe BMC officials.’
‘Lies!’ snarled Gafoor, his face animated for the first time. ‘They destroyed my building. They caused that fire. They caused the collapse.’
‘They? Are you saying the BMC was responsible?’ Rangwalla could not keep the scepticism from his tone.
‘Not the BMC. The goons who tried to buy my site. They first came to me four years ago. They wished to build luxury apartments, they told me. Promised to make me rich. I asked them only one question: what happens to the people who work for me, the people I am responsible for? Of course, they had no answer.’
‘Who were they?’
‘I don’t know. They claimed they were only agents, representing a large property company. But they did not wish to reveal the identity of the interested party until they had firm agreement from me that I would sell.’
‘Agreement that you never gave.’
‘No,’ said Gafoor. ‘In the end, they bribed officials at the BMC to declare my building structurally unsafe, and then, when that did not work, to issue a demolition order. They thought that would force my hand. When I still refused, they collapsed the building.’
‘How?’
‘The fire. The investigation ruled that it was caused by a gas cylinder explosion; I kept one in the pantry so that my workers could make meals for themselves. But I was standing outside the building when the explosion happened. I saw the fireball – it did not come from the pantry. It came from the building’s main support columns.’
‘You’re saying that someone deliberately caused that explosion?’
‘It would not have taken much. The building was old – but not so old that it would have collapsed without outside intervention.’
Rangwalla was momentarily silent. Could Gafoor be right? Or was he listening to a deluded fool, or, worse, a consummate liar? His gaze rested on the man before him. Even in his filthy prison uniform Gafoor exuded a sense of dignity. Whatever anger may have possessed the former textile manufacturer it appeared to have burned itself out. Now he seemed simply a man who had come to terms with the hand fate had dealt him.
‘Your plot is being developed by a company called New World Developments. Do you think they were behind this?’
‘I do not know,’ said Gafoor. ‘All I know is that that day, when the building fell, I could not save my people. When the dust settled, I tried digging, with a shovel, with my bare hands. I could hear a scream, coming from deep inside. Someone was still alive in there. The authorities arrived, but could not get to whoever was down there. Eventually, the screaming stopped. There was nothing I could do. Now I hear that scream every night, in my dreams.’ He gave Rangwalla a look of infinite sadness. ‘Only God forgives, my friend. And only He understands why. I wish you well, but whatever truth you uncover will not change the past. It is God’s will.’
A fool and his money
‘I have had to do a lot of growing up in the past three years,’ said Perizaad Zorabian, her eyes fixed on the pile of cash on the table. ‘Ever since my father lost his mind.’
Chopra waited. In the silence of the locker vault, buried deep beneath Mumbai’s streets, the only sound was the soft hum of the air-recycling unit. It was clear that Perizaad was dredging through difficult memories; whatever it was she was seeking to tell him would soon become clear.
‘Three years ago. That was when he disinherited my brother and threw him out of our home, and out of the family business, to the ruin of us all. The Zorabian fortune was built on traditional industries. But India has changed. These industries are not as important as once they were – and only those organisations that have adapted, or those that have become the most efficient, have survived. We did neither.
‘My father sent my brother abroad, to study business management at Harvard. When he returned, he immediately took stock of all the Zorabian enterprises – and concluded that if we did not make immediate changes we would be bankrupt within the space of a few years. He wanted us to shut down all our big, non-profitable businesses and venture into modern fields such as telecommunications and software. My father disagreed. He saw himself as something of a patron to all those employed in his old businesses. He was horrified at the thought of moving into industries he did not understand. I am afraid that he was a little set in his ways.’
‘He would not be alone in that,’ said Chopra. ‘Nevertheless, it seems a harsh reason to disinherit his only son.’
Perizaad gave a sad smile. ‘That was not the reason he disinherited him.’
Chopra waited once more, but this time Perizaad did not expand. Instead, she said, ‘That is my brother’s tale to tell, not mine. Besides, it has nothing to do with my father’s death.’
‘You must allow me to be the judge of that. When I took the case, I promised you that I would be thorough. I must speak with your brother.’
Perizaad hesitated, then nodded. ‘I will ask Buckley to give him a call.’ She sat down, picked up one of the bundles of cash, eyed it morosely. ‘After my brother left, the business continued its ruinous decline. My father, incensed to be told that he had husbanded our ancestral wealth into the ground, tried to shore up the existing businesses, throwing good money after bad, and then, as the futility of his efforts began to dawn on him, he finally took my brother’s advice and began investing ludicrous sums in new businesses. The problem was that he did not actually take my brother’s advice. In fact, he decided that he did not need anyone’s advice.
‘He invested badly. All manner of ridiculous ventures, things he read about in the papers, things someone at the racetrack told him about, things he saw on the Internet. An Uber-style business for handcart delivery-wallahs. A social media dating site for pampered pets. Do you know he even ploughed millions into a tech firm that intended to build novelty robots to serve as bridge partners for the wealthy? He made these investments via new companies he set up – just to try to disguise his involvement.’ She shook her head. ‘Of course, I only found out all this after he died. My father said nothing about it all – only his chief accountant knew, and he was sworn to secrecy. I suspected things were bad, but I had not realised that he had all but squandered what had once been one of the largest private fortunes in the country.’
‘I do not remember seeing any of this in the news.’
‘That is because my father – and then I – did everything within our power to keep it from the media. We are a privately owned company, which has made it that much easier. There are no shareholders to report to, no public accounts to be published. I have been quietly working to try to stop the rot, to salvage what is left.’
Chopra realised once again how superficial Rao’s investigation had been, to have failed to uncover the fact of Cyrus Zorabian’s true financial situation. ‘You should have told me about this,’ he said, allowing his irritation to show.
‘I did not think it was relevant,’ she said. ‘More importantly, I did not want to risk word of our precarious financial situation leaking out. It would hinder my attempts to turn the business around. It’s hard to obtain credit when lenders already believe you are finished.’
‘It is my job to exercise discretion,’ said Chopra sternly. ‘The state of your father’s business affairs means there were potentially many with a financial motive for wishing him ill. Had the police known this they might have followed up, though it would not have been feasible for them, or me, to track down and interview every such individual. I have to wonder,’ he added gravely, ‘do you really wish your father’s murder to be solved or not?’
‘Of course,’ she said, colouring.
‘Then I must ask you to stop keeping information from me.’ He relented. ‘Given the state of your father’s commercia
l ventures, why did you not ask your brother for help?’
‘I did,’ she said ruefully. ‘But he refused. I’m afraid we had a falling out.’
‘Is that why Buckley has to call him to make an appointment, and not you?’
She looked pained. ‘He won’t take my calls. He feels that I sided with my father when he threw him out. He is right, of course. Back then I thought my father could do no wrong. It has been a painful experience to find out that the man I held up as a giant had feet of clay.’
Chopra did not tell her that this was a rite of passage for many children, the discovery that their parents were only human, with all the fallibilities of ordinary mortals.
‘Did your father leave a will?’
Perizaad nodded. ‘He changed it just before he died. Left it all to me, much good that it did me.’
Another reason for Darius and his sister to fall out, thought Chopra. Had Darius known about the will? If so, it might have been the catalyst for a confrontation with his father . . .
He picked up the blueprint of New Haven, the Vashi slum redevelopment. ‘I’d like to hold on to this as well. There must be a reason Cyrus kept this under lock and key.’
Perizaad nodded. ‘Yes. Of course.’
‘There was something else.’
He took out the newspaper clipping he had discovered inside Cyrus’s office about the burned car, and the bodies found inside it. ‘Does this mean anything to you?’
Perizaad examined the article. ‘No.’
‘Why would your father have kept this? I found it hidden inside a book in his office.’
‘I honestly have no idea.’
‘Very well.’ Chopra returned the article to his pocket. ‘One last thing: William Buckley. I wish to know more about his background.’