Let Bhutto Eat Grass 2

by Shaunak Agarkhedkar

  But it remained beyond Sablok’s abilities to mask every bit of evidence. Hussain’s handcuffed hands had red welts on the flesh around his thick wrists from when he had struggled to escape his restraints. Sablok hadn’t checked Hussain’s legs but was certain that the shackles had similarly marked the ankles. That was why exiting the area without being observed or stopped was critical. Arora had assured him that the Gendarmerie Nationale—the police force responsible for Rambouillet and the surrounding rural areas—rarely, if ever, patrolled it and never with much enthusiasm. The plan called for him to dispose the handcuffs, shackles, and medical paraphernalia in Paris. ‘The Gendarmerie don’t operate in Paris, Captain. French cities come under the police force called the Surete,’ Arora had informed him when they were planning the operation.

  ‘Regardless of that, Arora saab, I’m not carrying the restraints and syringes out of the forest. It’s needlessly dangerous,’ Sablok had protested.

  ‘We don’t just want him dead. It is important that his death remain hidden for as long as possible. If what that doctor told us holds true, a post-mortem will conclude that he died of a heart attack and brain bleed. That’s perfect. But that will only work if the handcuffs and syringes aren’t found.’

  ‘I’ll drive a few kilometres deeper into the forest and hide them,’ Sablok had countered.

  ‘Every extra minute you spend there increases the risk of your getting caught, Captain.’

  ‘But at least I’ll be caught without evidence of a murder, sir. If they find and stop me, and if I don’t have those things in my possession, they cannot tie me to the murder. They’ll have to let me—’

  ‘Look at yourself in the mirror, Captain. You are far too brown to slip away so easily. You speak far too little French to be able to talk your way out of that situation. If they find you in that forest, you will be interrogated. Your cover story won’t survive being arrested while driving a stolen vehicle. No! You must exit the forest on time. Between five and 6 a.m. on that day, the policemen that patrol the perimeter of the forest will be kept busy with reports of a robbery in a town on the other side from your location. There will be no time for a detour,’ Arora had said with a tone that brooked no further argument.

  ‘Jurisdiction won’t matter in a murder case,’ Sablok replied stubbornly.

  ‘Jurisdiction is everything to a policeman. Nobody likes being responsible for solving a murder case that happened on someone else’s watch. If the Gendarmerie find the corpse and the Surete find the interrogation equipment, it will take them days—possibly even weeks—to connect the two. And that is if they’ve recently had a change of heart and begun cooperating closely with each other.’

  As Sablok fought the van to keep it moving away from Hussain’s corpse, he found himself finally reconciled to Arora’s arguments. The corpse itself wasn’t much of a concern now. The doctor they had consulted in Delhi had assured them that a post-mortem would conclude that Hussain had died of a heart attack accompanied by cerebral haemorrhage; the dose of adrenaline Sablok had injected into Hussain’s thigh was beyond what the human body could withstand.

  The van turned to avoid a massive oak and found itself on a gravel road. Sablok wondered if the results of the field interrogation were “sufficient”. The original plan had been to abduct Hussain and transport him to India like Eichmann had been brought to Israel to stand trial. But Almeida had chuckled when he heard it.

  ‘To mangle something George Bernard Shaw said, youth is forgiven everything,’ he had said to Sablok before turning his gaze to Arora. ‘But an old rogue like you should know better, Jugs. Last I heard, the Mossad had at least a dozen agents on that operation and, critically, they had the support of their Prime Minister. You have a callow agent and me. Your P.M. knows nothing of any such operation, thank god. Has it been so long since you were last in the field yourself that you have forgotten everything I ever taught you?’

  ‘We can tap the Milieu for muscle, chief,’ Arora had replied in a voice remarkable for its lack of conviction.

  ‘You know as well as I do that what you are proposing is madness,’ Almeida had said before falling silent. Arora had made to speak but the old spy-master had raised a hand to cut him off. He wasn’t done. ‘This plan cannot succeed. Must we subject ourselves to the tedium of arguing endlessly about a hypothetical that cannot and will not happen?’

  The plan had been rejected.

  ‘We can’t send him alone,’ Arora had pleaded with his head inclined in Sablok’s direction.

  ‘We have no option but to rely on Captain Sablok’s gallantry and resourcefulness. Besides, he volunteered. Have you changed your mind, Captain?’

  Arora had resented the manner in which the Chief was almost goading Sablok into what could very easily turn into a life sentence in a French prison. He had hoped Sablok would see what was happening.

  ‘Not one bit, sir,’ Sablok had replied with vigour. ‘I’ll get the bastard!’

  And get him he had. The field interrogation in the Citroën had gone as well as Sablok could have hoped, and the cocktail of drugs he had injected into Hussain’s shin had worked its magic exactly as expected. For what seemed like hours after Hussain had woken in the van, the portly colonel had revealed secret after secret. All Sablok had to do was gently probe with a question each time. Hussain could have been lying, of course. Sablok hadn’t overlooked the possibility that Hussain hadn’t “broken” and was instead feeding lies and half-truths. Almeida had accounted for that and prepared a list of questions the answers to which the Wing already knew. Sablok had had to memorise those questions and answers before leaving Delhi and was supposed to use them as tripwires of sorts. And he had. In the first hour after Hussain had woken in just the highly suggestible, disoriented state the doctor had promised, Sablok had asked four tripwire questions. Each of those answers had matched what Sablok had memorised. Later, when the effects had begun wearing off, Hussain had turned argumentative and sullen. But by then Sablok had got what he needed.

  As he left the gravel road behind and turned onto the highway to Paris, Sablok decided to leave it to Almeida to sort fact from fiction.

  It was nearly an hour before he was on the outskirts of Paris and headed for the slate-grey Seine. Shortly afterwards, he crossed it and pulled over. The sky was bright here; it and the early risers out and about at 7 a.m. made him nervous. It had taken far too long to find his way out of the forest, and there was little time for him to scope out a more secluded spot. He killed the ignition. The now-dormant engine was hot from the exertions of the morning and overwhelmed Sablok’s hearing with furious ticks and tocks as it cooled. He was on the eastern bank of the river. Tall trees that could have been oaks or elms lined the broad street. Or was it an avenue? He pushed the question away and took a deep breath.

  Reaching below the seat, he grabbed a heavy canvas bag and stepped out, almost slipping with his first steps on the wet cobblestones below. The bag jingled with each step down to the river’s edge, sounding like the massive bells of Notre-Dame de Paris to his strung-out senses. He glanced around furtively after a few steps. He wasn’t being watched. At the edge of the water, he removed the shackles from the bag and threw them as far as he could into the river. They splashed loudly but were gone in the blink of an eye. A hundred wings fluttered deafeningly somewhere to his right. He fought the urge to run, strolling instead as calmly as he could. A minute passed, then five. Upstream, the river went under a bridge and so did he. It could have been the one he had crossed; focused on the task at hand, he didn’t think the identity of the bridge mattered. The stone structure provided some respite from the brightness of morning, easing his nerves in its darkness. The handcuffs sank with a pleasant plop, and the Trocar and syringes slipped in without noise. A coal barge floated in silently, its appearance startling Sablok and causing him to drop the now empty bag into the water. But the captain of the barge was busy peering into a pair of binoculars p
ointed downstream and didn’t notice Sablok. As soon as the barge’s cabin had passed him, Sablok turned and walked hurriedly, emerging onto the street almost a kilometre upstream of his van after climbing a flight of stone steps.

  He was exhausted. As he walked back to the van, he considered leaving it right where it was and hailing a cab to the hotel, shuddering involuntarily at the thought of driving that mobile heap of scrap metal another kilometre. But the van’s exteriors were caked in thick mud and so, he presumed, were his. The van obviously didn’t belong on that elegant street and would quickly attract attention to itself if he left it unattended. He would have to leave it in one of the poorer neighbourhoods like the one he had been instructed to pick it up from; perhaps one of the Banlieus if he could find them. And then he would have to clean himself as best as he could before heading back to the hotel. Besides, the van contained the cassettes and the portable cassette recorder he had used to record audio from the interrogation. Time was running out. Parisian policemen weren’t renowned for turning up to work at the crack of dawn, but it would soon be 8 a.m. and surely a few traffic policemen would be out manning chowks or squares or whatever they were called in France. A dirty van being driven with considerable effort by a dishevelled brown man wouldn’t escape their notice. Walking back towards it on the side of the street furthest from the river, he drew a map of Paris from his pocket and searched for a dingy lane.

  ***

  Alone at the safehouse Sablok felt dejected. No matter how hard he tried recalling the events of that morning, he still couldn’t remember where he had picked up the injury to his calf. Nor could he say for sure if he had bled and left evidence behind in the van, although it seemed extremely likely given how badly he had bled through his clothes. After going through the events one more time without any success, Sablok gave up.

  He switched on the radio and slowly dialled through each frequency it was capable of catching. He had heard stories of bugs that transmitted audio being detected because their signal interfered with radio reception and was listening for a tell-tale squeal. There was none to be heard. By 5 p.m. he had run out of ways to occupy himself. All this while the urge had remained, blending quietly into the background, patient, growing. But now it asserted itself with a vengeance. He opened the kitchen cabinet and retrieved the bottle of red wine—Château Mouton-d’Armailhacq, the label said. The wine dated back to 1953. He poured some into a glass, swilled it around and took a sip, just like he remembered his parents doing at one of the parties they hosted. The memory of his father soured his mood. He gulped the rest of the wine in his glass in short order and poured another. The bottle was empty ten minutes later and Sablok was disappointed. Then he remembered the miniature bottles of whisky from the flight. He slept fitfully that night but didn’t dream at all.

  Sablok woke at 6 a.m. with a fearsome headache. It took a long, cold shower to ease it. After a breakfast of bread and smelly cheese, he settled down in the living room to ruminate on the events of Rambouillet. This time his thoughts went to his interrogation of Hussain. Revenge for Malathi’s murder hadn’t been the only reason for abducting the Pakistani. Hussain had been Abdul Qadeer Khan’s handler. In that role, Hussain had helped direct Khan’s efforts. That meant Hussain knew as much about the ISI operation to source information about nuclear weapons from Europe as Khan himself did. Interrogating Hussain was the next best thing to interrogating Khan himself, and they couldn’t reach Khan now because the rat had fled to Pakistan.

  The recording of the interrogation would definitely be on its way to New Delhi by now. Perhaps Almeida already had the cassettes and he and Arora were listening to them as Sablok sat on that sofa in Paris. But cassettes only captured audio. They couldn’t narrate the way Hussain had stiffened, almost imperceptibly, in response to a remark about Moraad Baksh and Sultan Mahmood, or how his eyes had widened when Sablok had brought up the fact that the Wing was aware that the ISI’s Residents were no longer involved in procuring equipment from Europe. Sablok had been bluffing with that last statement, but Hussain’s reaction had confirmed their suspicions. The more Sablok thought about it, the more it seemed that Hussain had been truthful when he accepted that Pakistan’s Residents in Western Europe were no longer involved.

  Sablok wondered if the Pakistanis had connected Malathi’s murder to Hussain’s disappearance yet and found himself smiling. The smile then morphed into giddy laughter which stopped just as suddenly as it had begun when he heard footsteps in the corridor outside, heavy ones. Whoever it was seemed to know where he was headed. He passed the apartment Sablok was in and calmly walked to the far end of the corridor. Then he stopped. Sablok strained to hear the sound of keys or a doorbell. None came. The footsteps sounded again, growing louder. He was returning. As the footsteps neared, Sablok thought they slowed down. He rose from the sofa and tiptoed to the kitchen, returning moments later with the sharp knife. The door was five feet ahead of him and to the left. He waited. The footsteps stopped. He heard the jingle of keys, then the sound of metal scraping—whoever it was, he was opening a lock. It sounded like the keys were opening some other flat’s lock, but Sablok braced himself just in case. A different door slammed shut nearby. Sablok still waited. The footsteps had gone past his door before returning. That would not have been strange if it was a guest, but guests usually rang doorbells; they didn’t carry keys. A minute, then two. He waited, his ears straining for the slightest footstep. When a good five minutes or so had passed and the building was back to its silent self, he took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. He looked down to see a knife that was shaking violently. Disgusted with himself, he walked to the kitchen and tossed the only weapon he had onto the counter. His forearms and hands glistened, and his blurry eyes stung from the beads of sweat pouring down his forehead. He checked every cabinet in the kitchen for wine, then rummaged through his suitcase for another miniature bottle. Finding nothing at all, he returned to the kitchen and made himself another cup of coffee—his sixth for the day. The headache had returned.

  Sleep deserted him that night. Each time he closed his eyes and was about to doze off, sounds of footsteps filled his head and the scraping of metal keys inside locks consumed his thoughts. By midnight the bed was wet, and in his delirium he couldn’t tell if it was just sweat or if eight cups of coffee had caused his kidneys to work overtime. Dawn found him sitting under the shower with his back against the wall, his mind rustling up visions of policemen rushing to his apartment.

  ***

  Nissa returned that afternoon carrying a satchel. Dressed in a mini skirt and a fresh white blouse, and with each strand of auburn hair in the pixie shining, she seemed well-rested and pleased with the progress she had made.

  But her happy mood faltered on seeing Sablok’s condition, and she promised to return in half an hour before leaving the apartment once again. She returned twenty minutes later, with more bread and cheese, and half a kilo of Boudin Noir sausages. And then she handed him a large bottle of whisky.

  ‘That’s okay,’ Sablok protested.

  ‘I’ve seen that look before, Captain,’ she said, pressing the bottle on him. ‘Now is not the time for rehabilitation.’

  He poured himself a glass and gulped greedily. She looked away, busying herself with her satchel.

  ‘The passports are almost ready,’ she said. ‘All we need are photographs.’ Then she noticed him staring at the sausages. ‘They’re precooked. Just heat them on a pan,’ she added.

  The whisky seemed to have begun its magic. He moved quickly, grabbing a pan from a kitchen cabinet and placing it on the gas stove, then pouring a dash of oil on it. A few minutes later, the sizzling of sausages and their aroma filled the apartment. When the first batch of sausages had crisped up and become pitch black, he placed one long link each in two plates and offered one to Nissa. She recoiled, declining with a rapid shake of the head.

  ‘Have you already eaten?’ Sablok asked, suspicion beginning to take
root within him.

  ‘I had a heavy breakfast,’ Nissa offered without conviction.

  Sablok slowly glanced down at the chronometer on his left wrist in a conspicuous action meant to convey disbelief. It was almost 3 p.m. Nissa was quick to pick up on his feelings of unease.

  ‘It’s made of pork,’ she said.

  Sablok tilted his head slightly, then smiled when he saw hesitation in her expression.

  ‘That leaves more for me,’ he said. ‘Will you at least eat bread and cheese?’

  ‘Can I see your passport? The one made in Delhi?’ Nissa asked while chewing on a mouthful.

  Sablok took a big bite of the sausage, placed his plate down on the kitchen counter, and retrieved his passport from somewhere in the bedroom. She opened it and looked at the photograph inside, comparing it to Sablok’s face.

  ‘The beard is growing well. You look sufficiently different to pass muster with a bored border guard now,’ she said. ‘I hope you won’t miss your hair terribly.’

  Sablok stared. The whisky had begun working long ago, but he was having trouble following her words. She retrieved a cartridge razor from her satchel. Downing another glass of whisky, he grabbed the razor from her and stepped into the bathroom.

  When he returned he was rubbing his hand over his bald pate. The scalp was pale, almost green, having rarely seen the light of day in the years since he had left Doon. She had finished eating. Her plate was washed and drying in the kitchen. She handed him a small container of cream, asking him to apply it to his scalp. It made the skin appear darker, more like the rest of his face.

  Satisfied with the results, she retrieved a Leica m3 camera from the satchel. After taking a few photographs of Sablok’s face, she handed him the camera and asked him to return the favour.