Sitting in his office in Schottenring, Johann Schroeder was ecstatic when Richard Anderson came to meet him. When the latter had first come to the office of Vienna’s President of Police, he was shooed away. No one allowed him to see the president or his deputy. He had somehow managed to get the email ID of Schroeder and had sent him a mail requesting for a meeting, mentioning the agenda. So compelling was the reason for his request that Schroeder had called off a few meetings to accommodate him. That explained why Richard Anderson was sitting in front of him that morning.
The Deputy to the President of Police stared calmly at Richard, who looked rather meek in his presence. Richard, who was of Indian origin, was a young guy in his mid-twenties who aspired to be a body-builder, but had nothing done about his aspirations, as evidenced by his waistline.
‘So you sell coffee?’
‘No sir. I don’t sell coffee, I work in a café.’ Anderson was a bit irritated at this comment from Schroeder. It took a lot of courage to say it the way he said it.
‘It’s one and the same thing,’ Schroeder retorted. ‘So tell me what happened.’
‘Sir, it was quite late in the night. The last customer had left. And there was hardly any traffic on Ringstrasse. There were three of us in the café at that time. Two of my colleagues and I.’
‘What time was it?’
‘Around 1.15 or 1.30 a.m.’
‘What were you doing in the café at that hour?’
‘The café closes at 1.00 a.m. After that it takes us about an hour to close our accounts, upload data for the day to our central server in Bengaluru in India, clear up everything in the café and get it back in shape for opening in time for breakfast the next day. And being on Ringstrasse, we get a good crowd in the morning, so we open early.’
‘Okay, keep going.’
‘We were just about finishing our routine when we heard someone banging on the grill. It was a couple. They seemed to be in duress. Very hassled. Panting as if they had been running. I recognized them as the same couple that had come to the store a few hours back, in the evening. A cute Indian couple. They had spent over an hour at my store browsing the Internet and talking to a few friends over a cup of coffee.’
‘That’s fine. Tell me what happened,’ Schroeder said, gruffly.
‘By the time we could get the key from inside and open the grill, they had left. We saw a Lamborghini parked in the parking lot outside the café and three guys pointing towards our outlet. And then one of them came running towards the café. Thankfully he didn’t come towards us but went running in the direction that the couple had disappeared to.’
‘Hmm. . .’ Johann’s eyes were focused on Richard Anderson and didn’t leave him even for a second. This was making Richard sweat a bit. He was wondering if he had made the right decision in coming to Johann Schroeder.
‘That was the last I saw of them. Within a few minutes the Lamborghini drove off, and two more burly men headed off in the same direction as the first one. They were relatively relaxed.’
‘Were any images captured on the CCTV camera?’
‘We have security cameras outside the café, to capture movements at night. But. . .’
‘But what?’
‘The video is too dark. The lights outside the café were not on. And so the figures are unrecognizable.’
‘Okay.’ Johann was getting a bit irritated. ‘So?’ He was wondering why Richard was there and what it was that he had to offer.
Richard fumbled a bit and pulled out a pen drive from the right pocket of his trousers. ‘This has the video from the security cameras. I am not sure this will be of much help, but I wanted to hand it over to you sir.’
‘Thanks, I will ask someone to look into it. Is there anything else you want to tell me?’
‘Sir, I’m not sure if this is of help, but I also brought along the bill that they had rung up that day. Just in case you asked for it.’ He reached into his bag kept by the side of the antique wooden chair he was sitting on and pulled out the bill.
Schroeder, stretched his right hand out and took the thin piece of thermal paper from Richard’s hand. He looked at it carefully. ‘Two Espresso Macchiatos, one plain and one with hazelnut flavour, a double choco muffin, a chicken sandwich, a bottle of clear water, two more Espresso Macchiatos.’ He read out the bill sarcastically. What use would it be to him to know that the killed Indians had a basic espresso with milk foam six to seven hours before they died? He wanted to throw Richard out for having wasted his time, but he was not the regular, arrogant cop. He was the human face of the Vienna police. When he had agreed to meet Richard, he did harness hopes of being able to solve the case. No longer. ‘Thanks Richard. I’m glad that, as a responsible resident of Vienna, you came forward to help with whatever information you had. Thank you.’ Richard knew it was an indication that their conversation was over.
Johann got up and forced a smile on his face. Richard had taken the effort to tell him all he knew. There was no point being critical of him. He held out his right hand to shake Richard’s hand, and with his left he brought up the café bill to his eye level. Your two cups of Macchiato have cost me twenty minutes of my critical time, Mr Lele, he thought, as he stared at the bill. Richard turned and started walking towards the door. Schroeder settled into his chair, wondering how and what they were going to do to resolve the case.
He tossed the bill nonchalantly on to the reams of paper on his table and casually watched it float and finally settle on his table a few feet away from him. As it flew down and came to rest in front of him, something caught his eye. Immediately his right hand reached out and picked up the paper. He stared at it, but couldn’t make out anything. Switching on the table lamp, he held the cheque against the lamplight. And then he shouted for Anderson, who by then had stepped out into the corridor. Richard turned and headed back into the room.
‘There seems to be something here.’
‘Pardon me?’
‘Look, there is something here.’
Richard stared at it but couldn’t make out anything. ‘Alright, wait here. I will be back.’ Johann stepped out of his cabin, walked up to his assistant’s table and asked her to bring a pencil and a parer to his room. In no time he had a new pencil and a battery-operated pencil sharpener on his desk. ‘Sit down’, he thundered when he saw that Richard was still standing. ‘Tell me, what do you do with the bills once the customer pays?’
‘Sir, the moment we pick it up from the customer, it is taken to the cash counter where it is placed in the tray below the counter and it stays there till end of day, when all the accumulated bills are taken to our back office. At the back office, the entire bundle is placed in a box and sent for storing. Occasionally someone tallies these to see if any bill is missing. Even if it is, it doesn’t matter, because we have our system records to go by.’
All this while, Johann was sharpening the pencil. Richard was bewildered at what he was doing, because he had shaved almost half the pencil off, without really making use of it. The lead particles and the wood shavings were soiling his table, but that didn’t seem to bother him. Once he reached two-thirds into the pencil, Johann stopped. He carefully picked up the wooden shavings and threw them away, stopping to make sure that the black lead particles attached to the wooden shavings stayed on his tabletop.
Putting aside his laptop and all the other accessories in front of him, he carefully laid out the Café Coffee Day bill on his table. With the air of an expert, he collected all the lead particles into a heap on the right side of the bill. Richard Anderson was wondering what Schroeder was up to.
Schroeder scooped the lead particles into his hand and scattered them over one corner of the bill. With his right hand, he carefully and softly spread the lead dust all over the bill. ‘I was in forensics before I moved in here, son. So relax,’ he said looking at a confused Richard and for the first time that day, he was smiling. He lifted the bill and jerked his hand softly to shake off the remnants of the lead particles from th
e paper and placed the bill back on the table. He blew on it and the last vestiges of the lead disappeared from the bill. He now picked it up and held it against the light as both Schroeder and Richard peered at it.
‘Wow’, Richard exclaimed. ‘What is that?’ Something was scribbled on the bill which could now clearly be seen.
Schroeder ignored the question. ‘Now think clearly and tell me the sequence of events when they came for coffee in the afternoon.’
‘Sir I told you everything I knew. After ordering coffee, the lady got onto Skype. She was speaking to someone, I think from India, because at times they spoke in Hindi, the local language spoken by most Indians. And then she asked me for a piece of paper. I thought she was asking for a bill and took it to her. She told me that she wanted a blank piece of paper. In the rush to give her the paper, I just pulled a blank tab of thermal paper from the scroll on the bill printer and took it to her. She wrote down something on it, I think it was an address. She said something like, she was going to check out something. After finishing the call, both of them left.’
‘Hmm. . .that explains it.’
‘What sir?’
‘You see this?’ And Johann held up the bill. Richard stared at it as if his life depended on it. He could vaguely see something scribbled on the paper. ‘Strange. How come I didn’t see this earlier?’
‘Because it was not visible to you. In fact it would not have been. . .to anyone. When she asked you for a paper to scribble on, you first gave her the bill and then a blank paper. She kept the blank paper on top of the bill and wrote down something. Given that your bill printer uses a thermal paper, which is extremely thin, whatever she wrote on the blank paper left an impression on the bill. The tip of the pen you gave her to write with was obviously hard enough to have left an impression on the bill below. The impressions were not clearly visible to the naked eye. But when held against light, the impressions appeared darker than the rest of the paper. When I spread out black pencil dust on the paper, it gave texture to the impression and whatever was written became visible immediately.’ Schroeder spoke at the speed of light. He now seemed like a man on a mission.
‘Oh wow.’ Schroeder had made it sound so simple.
Schroeder quickly called the chief of police of Central Vienna district, ‘I want you and a team of four cars outside my office in the next five minutes. We are going on a search operation. Move out, now. We don’t have much time,’ he barked over the phone.
He looked at Richard. ‘Thanks Richard. You have been very helpful. Hope something comes out of it now.’
The Chief of Central Vienna Police was outside Schroeder’s office with four cars, each containing a team of three trained officers in tow, within the committed five minutes. Schroeder joined them in a jiffy. ‘Let’s go!’ he ordered. ‘We have a solid lead. If we get this one, we crack the Lele deaths.’
‘What’s the lead sir?’
‘We have the address where the Leles might have gone that night.’ And he told him the entire story. ‘The address has been scribbled onto their bill. Vienna Police might just be able to maintain its stellar record.’
34
GB2 Headquarters, Mumbai
Afternoon/ Evening, 31st January 2012
That afternoon, Hemant, accompanied by the ACP, walked into Indrani’s office. Jacqueline asked them to wait in the visitor’s room while she spoke with Indrani, who at that time was with Karan. Karan was briefing her about what they had found thus far.
‘Karan, would you like to join me?’ asked Indrani. Over the last few hours Indrani herself was beginning to wonder why she trusted Karan so much, and that too over her own teams. For her own interests, she wished that Karan would be able to solve this issue.
Within a couple of minutes, Indrani, with Karan in tow, walked into the visitors’ room. Never having met Karan, Hemant assumed he was an executive assistant to Indrani.
‘Indrani, we happened to stumble across something today.’ And Hemant narrated the entire issue of the credit card fraud at the mall. ‘Now we come to the most critical part.’
‘Yes?’ Indrani was all ears. She glanced at Karan, who was busy taking notes. The journalistic streak in him was intact.
‘The credit card that we picked up belonged to Pranesh Rao, the teller with the Bandra Branch who died sometime mid-last year.’
‘Really?’Indrani’s eyes widened and her eyebrows almost disappeared into her hair, anxiety writ all over her face. Somehow, the way things had been going over the last couple of days, she knew that something worse was to come.
‘And Lyndon, the guy we picked up, has confessed to. . .’
‘Confessed to what, Hemant?’
‘Confessed to having killed Pranesh.’
‘What?’ Indrani nearly fell off her chair. ‘Killed Pranesh? Oh my God. I thought it was a road accident.’
‘Indrani. It was not a normal road accident. He was killed. Knocked down intentionally by a speeding truck. The merciless guys who knocked him down stopped to check if he was dead before they moved on. Lyndon was one of the guys. When they got off the truck to check if he was dead, Lyndon stole his credit card. They didn’t steal the wallet, else it would look like a crime committed for robbery and not a hit and run case.’
‘Oh my God,’ Indrani’s hands had involuntarily moved up to her mouth as she exclaimed. There was fear in her eyes and horror in her voice. She looked at Karan and in a trembling voice, said, ‘What the hell is going on?’
The ACP answered. ‘Apparently they were lying in wait for Pranesh to pass through the lonely stretch before knocking him down. In fact, that’s what helped us nail him. Lyndon’s cell phone GPS showed that he was in the area for three hours before the incident. And he moved out swiftly once the act was done. When we confronted him with the GPS records, he couldn’t say much. He broke down and confessed. He has given up the names of all his accomplices. Search teams have been sent to pick them up. But our experience in such cases has been that these guys are just the hired muscle. The brain behind all this is surely someone else. Secondly, there is no way for us to get to know the motive, and only once we have the motive can we get to the bottom of this.’
‘Indrani, may I?’ intervened Karan. Indrani just nodded.
‘Maybe he was killed because he knew too much about something.’
‘About what?’ The ACP asked.
‘Don’t know. That’s what we are trying to find out. I am not too sure if you know, but a compliance officer of the bank was found dead this morning. Also, a Relationship Manager was mysteriously found dead in what was presumably a road accident in Vienna. This could be a part of one big scam. We don’t know yet. But soon we will find out.’
The ACP looked at Karan suspiciously. ‘He is helping me sort out a few things internal to the bank,’ Indrani volunteered.
‘Sure,’ said the ACP as he got up. Looking at Hemant he said, ‘Maybe you can give them the details. I will have to head back. Have to report this new development before I leave for home.’ The ACP shook hands with them and left. Indrani turned and looked at Hemant. ‘Now that you know what’s going on, please help Karan and Kavya through this.’ Hemant looked at her blankly. Karan took his arm and led him inside the conference room. It was time for a quick debriefing.
35
Devikulam
Evening, 31st January 2012
Early evening, after Sulochana’s sermon to Krishna, she left him alone to reminisce on his easy chair, and went to the nearby temple—a routine that she had followed every single day since they had moved to Devikulam. Krishna sat there for a long time wondering what had gone wrong. He had set out to do some good for the people in the neighbourhood. The ill fate that had befallen him over two decades ago should not come upon anyone else in Devikulam. That was all he wanted. Was that a crime?
Jayakumar’s ascendency in the protest-related matters had caused him a fair bit of grief. Not because he was now beginning to hog the limelight, something which even Sulochana
thought was the reason for the rift, but because the agenda Jayakumar had was completely divergent from his. While Krishna wanted the well-being of people in the neighbourhood, Jayakumar wanted favours. The latter had a political agenda, which if met, would not only signal the end of Jaya’s role in the protest, but the protest itself.
It could also not be ignored that the protest had really gathered steam and got noticed both by the local and national media only after Jaya’s NGO had backed the protest. Whether it was the aftermath of the Fukushima disaster that got the press to notice TNPP or it was the financial muscle of CNRI, he wasn’t too sure.
But after hearing multiple conversations that Jaya had had with people across, he was shattered. He had to distance the protest from Jaya’s agenda before it was too late.
He picked up his phone—an old Nokia handset. He stared at it for a long time while confusing and contrary thoughts churned through his mind at a feverish pace. Should he or shouldn’t he? Finally, he decided to go ahead and make the call. Selecting a contact on the phone, he dialled the number.
‘Times Today, Mumbai,’ someone picked up the telephone at the office of the most popular TV News channel in the country.
‘Can I speak to Mohit Sengupta?’
‘Who should I say is calling?’
‘Krishna Menon. I am calling from Devikulam and it is regarding the protest against the Trikakulam Nuclear Power Plant.’
36
GB2, Mumbai
Evening, 31st January 2012
Hemant’s debriefing took about fifteen minutes. When he walked in, Hemant had wondered as to why Indrani had preferred an outsider to investigate what was internal to the bank, and not handed it over to the fraud control team. When he heard the entire story, however, his doubts vanished.
Kavya was patiently waiting for Karan to finish. The moment he was through, she butted in, ‘Karan, the CCTV feed for the Cochin branch has come in. Do you want to see it now?’
‘Do we have an option Kavya?’
The Bankster (Ravi Subramanian) Page 22