“Fitting farting, man. You go worrying about getting every least little thing to agree, you’re there all day and all night. And in the end you’re no better off than you were in the beginning. No, get a nice confession, and that’s quite enough for me. Got to get him to repeat before a magistrate, of course. But he’ll do that when the time comes, God bless him.”
“Are you sure, A.I.?”
“Swear to God.”
Ghote stretched across the little marble-topped table and pulled his Special tea toward him. He took a careful sip.
“All the same,” he said, “I would like to see the fellow.”
“Hey, man,” Lobo abruptly exclaimed, reaching forward to Ghote’s wrist, bared as he had pulled his tea toward himself. “You not got a watch? How’s that?”
Ghote felt a dart of resentment at the interruption.
“Broken,” he said curtly.
“Then I’m just the guy you’re needing, Inspector. See this.” Lobo shot out his own wrist to reveal on it the most complex watch Ghote had ever seen. Large-dialed and black-faced, it had two smaller dials within it, a large sweeping white second hand, a day-and-date window, and what was surely a compass as well.
“Japanese,” Lobo said. “Bet there aren’t half a dozen like it in entire Bombay. Smuggled only last week. Super job. And, now, look at this.”
He dug into his back trouser pocket and in a moment plonked onto the table another watch. Not quite so large, with a glintingly shiny chrome surround, a copper face, and a multifaceted glass.
“Wore it for more than a year,” he said. “See, second hand in gold, antimagnetic, water-resistant, everything. Let you have it for fifty bucks. Bargain of the year. Got my initials and motto on the back. But you can easily get the initials changed, and the motto you can keep. ‘First past the post.’ Do you some good.”
“No, thank you,” Ghote said. “I will be getting my own repaired.”
“As good as this? I bet not. This is a watch that makes people look at you, man. I hate to part with it.”
“No, all the same. I am preferring my own.”
He thought then how unreliable his watch had, in fact, been for months past. And, little though he liked Lobo, he thought as well how, if he was to learn every fact and detail about the Tick Tock murder, he was going to need all the cooperation he could get from this pink-shirted “expeditious investigator.” The very words the great Dr. Hans Gross had used, rich with scorn, read by himself a hundred times, came back to him. “When our artistic Investigator is sufficiently skilled in suppressing the difficulties and obstacles that may prove troublesome in quick work, he will well deserve the title of ‘expeditious.’” But he fought them down.
“Look. A.I.,” he said, “let me after all borrow your watch for two-three days. Then if I am liking, I will buy and forget my old one. How is that only?”
“Fine, fine,” Lobo said, thrusting the watch across. “Keep it a week, keep it a month. But give me my fifty chips at the end, eh?”
“We would see,” Ghote answered, secretly resolving to take his own watch to the repair shop near his home as soon as possible.
He strapped the copper-faced, shiny object he had been lent around his wrist.
“And now,” he said, “let us go back to your lock-up, and I will see what I make of this culprit of yours.”
A.I. Lobo looked across at him.
“Sorry, Inspector,” he said. “Not possible. God bless you.”
TEN
Ghote sat back in blank astonishment at the flat declaration that he was to be prevented from seeing the man who had confessed to killing Ramrao Pendke. Evil suspicions scurried like scorpions through his mind, confirming in a moment all the doubts he had felt about Lobo’s handling of the murder.
He was on the point of ripping into the fellow and insisting, with all the authority of his superior rank, on going at once to question Rustom Fardoomji when second thoughts made him hesitate. He could get to see the influential Dhunjeebhoy’s cousin later. When it came down to it, no one could stop him. Certainly not this jumped-up D.G.P.’s pet. He would make sure of that. And in the meanwhile he still needed the fellow’s cooperation.
Just as much, he thought, as Lobo must see himself as needing cooperation on his part, to be obtained either by the sort of flattery he had been using up to now or by cunning evasiveness, so as to put off any interview with Fardoomji until after a formal repetition in front of a magistrate of his confession. He might need only as short a time as twenty-four hours. But need it he would.
Yet, if Lobo wanted that minimum of twenty-four hours, that, too, was quite long enough to give himself plenty of opportunities to demand to see Fardoomji. And then, if indeed it looked as if that confession had been beaten out of the fellow, it should not prove too hard to make it clear to him that fear need no longer prevent him asserting his innocence.
But in the meanwhile he could do with seeing the First Information Report on the case. That would have in it all the exact times and circumstances. He ought to have more to go on than that bare 11:08 at which the dead man’s watch had stopped.
If he failed to get cooperation from Lobo, he could always carry out an investigation in spite of him. But, without his aid, everything would take twice as long and, in any inquiry, time was never on the investigator’s side, however dangerous it was to be artistic and expeditious.
So in the end he contrived a mock-careless shrug and said that of course there was no hurry to see Fardoomji. “He would not be running away, isn’t it?” And, swallowing the last of his Special tea, he rose to go.
What he might do, he thought, was to start at the beginning of the victim’s day and get hold of some accurate times for that. Armed with those, he could later make sure of seeing the First Information Report and add from it to a timetable of events. It came swimming into his mind’s eye at once, a neat, tabulated list of events, each with a time against it. It would make the whole business totally clear.
And he could make his start without any assistance, or possibly any hindrance, from A.I. Lobo. The D.G.P. had told him the name of the America-returned surgeon who had apparently restored Ramrao Pendke to life. Yadekar, it had been. Dr. Yadekar. No difficulty in finding out where his clinic was and going to see him.
Stepping out of the restaurant, once more to the greasy smiles of the proprietor, he consulted his newly borrowed watch. And found its gold hands against its copper face and with its heavily faceted glass made it nearly impossible to read. Eventually with not a little turning and twisting of his wrist—he saw Lobo pretending not to notice—he made out that it was nearly half-past seven. Almost certainly too late to find anyone responsible at the clinic, even when he had located it.
Bed, he thought, suddenly very conscious of his aches and bruises and drained of energy after a day that had begun so long ago and in such a disabling fashion. But a long, long night’s sleep. And then see how A.I. Lobo matched up to an investigation not at all expeditious.
And next morning, his bruises again the better for an application of turmeric and sugar, he found in the telephone directory that there was a Shrimati Usha Yadekar Clinic at an address on swanky Altamount Road. Ringing as early as he dared, he was given an appointment, not by Dr. Yadekar himself but by his wife, Dr. Mrs. Yadekar.
That was not, however, until ten o’clock. “I have my duties, Inspector,” the sharp voice, with a tinge of American in its accent, had said. “The care of patients must take priority.”
So, before setting out, he realized he would have time to visit the Big Ben Watch Stores, where he had always in the past taken his watch or the family clock for repair. He wondered why he had. He disliked the proprietor intensely and had once sworn never to enter his shop again, only hardly had that word never entered his mind than the thought of all the minutes, hours, weeks, and years it implied had made him hastily rescind that inner oath.
The reason he disliked the man he always thought of as “Mr. Big Ben” so much was h
is habit of handing out moral advice along with his mended clocks and watches. Sometimes this would take the form of a maxim delivered at parting. More usually it came as a carefully written card prominently propped among the dusty clocks in the little shop’s window bearing more words of sage warning.
As he approached the shop now, he saw that a new card had been placed in its narrow window, PUNCTUALITY IS THE POLITENESS OF PRINCES (RAJKUMARS), it read. He nearly turned away at the door. But he badly wanted to give back to A.I. Lobo the copper-faced monstrosity on his wrist. So he quickly slipped the damn thing off and hid it away, the better to be able to claim he was without the means of telling the time.
Mr. Big Ben took the old watch he had seen on not a few occasions before, fastened his glass to one eye, opened the back, and peered at it.
“Balance staff worn, winder detached also,” he announced eventually.
“It can be mended?”
“Oh, yes. I am able to mend anything.”
“And how long would it take?”
“Try in one week. Or more.”
“One week?” Fury flared up in him, a paper fire. “Listen,” he shouted, “I am a police officer, as you well must be knowing. A police officer is most often required to state the exact time to one hundred percent. Now, are you going to get that watch mended at once, or are you not?”
“My son, there are things in this world that cannot be hurried. If I set to work on this watch, throwing the parts here and there, racing and pacing, what would happen? You would never see your watch going again. No, no. Haste makes waste, that is one good old truth. Haste make waste.”
“But I am saying I need that watch. I need it now. By tomorrow at the least. I must have it.”
The old man shook his head in negation. And with pleasure, Ghote thought bitterly.
“Then you must take it to some quick-flick fellow. I can work no faster than I am able to work. But, if you want that repair to be a repair which is not going to go wrong again as soon as you are putting it on your wrist, then you must leave it with me.” Ghote stood poised, caught by indecision. He would have been delighted to have seized the watch, stamped out of the shop, and gone to “some quick-flick fellow.” But he knew of nowhere. And Mr. Big Ben had, at least, always been reliable in the past. Each time his own watch had had to be mended it had been for some new fault. At some unknown shop he might be made to pay and pay, and still not get the job done properly.
“Oh, very well,” he snapped. “Keep the damn watch. Take your time. I will not care.”
“Yes, yes,” old Mr. Big Ben said, putting the watch onto a shelf behind him.
Ghote saw with flaring dismay that the shelf held a dozen other watches and half a dozen clocks, all stopped, all silent.
“Next week,” Mr. Big Ben wheezed. “Try Tuesday. But I am not promising.”
Ghote turned to go.
“And remember: If you can fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds worth of distance run, yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it, and—what is more—you’ll be a Man, my son. Shri Kipling is saying it.”
And with those clangingly moralistic words echoing in his head, Ghote hurried off to the Shrimati Usha Yadekar Clinic.
The house on Altamount Road where Dr. Yadekar had established himself was a large white-painted building, notably spick-and-span among Bombay’s customarily years-marked edifices, with a garden in front of it, if a large dried-up stretch of grass and a much overgrown archway could be called a garden. Ghote extracted the time from A.I. Lobo’s unreadable watch, now on his wrist again, to make sure he was not too early, the D.G.P.’s advice of the day before coming back to him like the taste of a too spicy meal. Then he went up to the wide front door under the imposing portico and rang the bell there.
A neatly uniformed servant answered and asked him to wait. In the reception hall he sat himself cautiously on one of the half-dozen well-sprung, velvet-covered chairs dotted about and looked around him. The room, which was large and impressively well decorated, was dominated by a sculptured panel set in one wall, evidently dating from when the house had been in private hands. It depicted a timeless and bouncingly unreal mythological scene of full-breasted maidens entertaining with dance and music a languid young man. On either side of it there hung, in stern contradiction to its voluptuousness, framed certificates of medical degrees. Dr. Yadekar’s, ranging from a Bombay M.B. to awards in surgery from America, were on the left. Dr. Mrs. Yadekar’s, another Bombay M.B. and U.S. qualifications in psychiatric medicine, were on the right.
Ghote had just time to wonder whether he would have the courage to ask a lady apparently so formidable, in learning and in position in the social structure, for the small details of her patients’ routine that he needed to know, when the servant returned. He was asked to follow.
They went up a flight of stairs to a consulting room furnished all round with clinical-looking steel cupboards. It smelled, faintly, of antiseptic. From behind a glass and steel desk Dr.
Mrs. Yadekar rose to greet him, a trim, starchily severe figure in a short white tunic and white trousers, dazzlingly clean.
For a moment Ghote managed to think how like her outfit was to the salwar-kameez many smart Bombay girls wore. And how unlike in its utter lack of gracefulness. Then Dr. Mrs. Yadekar descended on to him.
“Inspector, I shall give you any help I can. Of course. The late Mr. Ramrao Pendke was our patient. But I must warn you, I can spare you five minutes only.”
Ghote licked his lips.
“Thank you, madam,” he replied hastily. “I am thinking you would already have spoken with A.I. Lobo in charge of the case from the local police. I am from Crime Branch.”
“No, Inspector,” the doctor said. “I have in fact seen no one from the police at all. To my surprise. But, frankly, I put that down as just one more example of Bombay not being as efficient as the States, where my husband and I were pursuing our careers until my father-in-law decided to take sannyas and left us his practice here.”
Ghote was as much struck as Dr. Mrs. Yadekar by A.I. Lobo’s not even paying one visit to the clinic. And some of his astonishment must have leaked into his next, merely polite inquiry of “Your father-in-law was taking sannyas?” because Dr. Mrs. Yadekar sighed sharply.
“Yes, Inspector,” she said, “you do well to show surprise. I myself find it hard to understand how a man trained in scientific principles, a doctor, could abandon a perfectly good practice to become no more than a wandering beggar. But after my mother-in-law’s decease that is precisely what happened. We don’t even know where he is now. In Benares, I guess. You know what they say: ‘Thora khana aur Banares rahna.’”
Ghote was more surprised to find that a lady with so much of America about her allowed herself to speak as much Hindi as “A little to eat and to be in Benares.” But he felt his alloted five minutes must be fast going. Quickly he turned to something that had puzzled him as he had thought about the circumstances of the murder on his way to the meeting.
“Please,” he said, “can you be telling me how it was that the late Mr. Ramrao Pendke was able to be outside this clinic at the time of the attack upon him? What exactly was he suffering?”
Dr. Mrs. Yadekar looked at him with something like shock.
“Surely at least you read our noticeboard outside?” she said. “We specialize here, Inspector. Already we have a considerable reputation for our work. Renal. It is renal.”
“Please?” Ghote asked, entirely baffled by this last, American-intoned word.
“Renal, Inspector. Renal. Diseases of the kidneys. My husband is a brilliant surgeon who was specializing in renal in the States. So when his father gave up his practice here and asked us to return we altered its nature and set up this clinic. I mean, we could hardly tolerate the usual kind of practice here, those billboards advertising ‘Consult in All Kinds Diseases, Phthisis, Catarrh, Sterility, Constipation.’ Really.”
The vigor of her denunciation almost silenced Gho
te, especially as he had realized he did not even know exactly where in the body the kidneys were.
But one thing about them he did know.
“So you are here doing transplants?” he asked, hoping to regain ground.
“Of course. One of the few advantages of practicing in India is that at least a regular supply of organs is available from donors willing to sell.”
But now the thought that there were people who actually sold their kidneys sent him back into a state of dismayed bewilderment.
“They give up their kidneys, their renals, for money only?” he stammered.
“Hardly their kidneys, plural, Inspector. The body cannot function without kidneys. You ought to know that much, at least. But with one kidney a human being can remain in a relatively healthy state.”
Something in the doctor’s high-minded, clinical attitude made Ghote react. He found he wanted nothing more than to hit on something that would knock her from her perch.
“So you are taking out kidneys from the poors and putting in the rich?” he asked, scarcely hiding the venom.
“Where such a course is indicated, yes,” Dr. Mrs. Yadekar replied, loftily as ever. “In other cases artificial substitution of renal function may be preferable. We have imported the latest dialysis apparatus.”
Conscious though he was that his stipulated five minutes must be fast running out, Ghote was still unable to refrain from one more attempt to unseat this cool, America-returned practitioner.
“The donor, as you are calling him, and the person who has paid for his kidney, do they meet?” he asked. “Does a cash handover take place even?”
“Of course not. Of course not. Do you know nothing of medical ethics? The donor never knows—that is, the recipient is always unaware of the source of the replacement organ. That goes without saying.”
The look she gave Ghote made it plain he had been guilty of an unpardonable offense.
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