A shadow. Who? I looked into Raj’s squirrel eyes. He didn’t know, that was for sure, didn’t want to know either.
“And Askari & Co., when did they act for Ketan Securities?” I asked.
Raj clutched at his temples. “Always. Fifteen years, maybe more. They still act for them.” He slumped against the railing. “There, I’ve told you. I can say no more. You can beat me but I’ll say no more.”
He hadn’t told me much more than I’d already guessed, but I reckoned he’d earned a crumpled order-routing agreement for his trouble. The poor guy was in a state of near collapse.
I patted him on the shoulder. “There’ll be no beatings. I’ll get the agreement for you. Wait here.”
Raj nodded weakly.
I used the side entrance of the hotel to get back to my room; I didn’t want a confrontation with the burly Sikh doorman.
In the elevator, other guests backed away from me, like I was a rat escaped from the sewer. When I got to my floor, I hurtled down the balustraded landing, nearly sending a porter with a trolley cart of mini-bar refills over the rail and into the depths below.
My room had been made up while I was out. Tidy bed, huge bolsters nestling at its head and a laundry bag at its foot, waiting for a new consignment of tropically matured underwear.
The wardrobe door was ajar and I opened it fully. I tapped in the year of my birth on the room-safe keypad slinking in the shadows behind my socks.Whirr click.I yanked the little door open.
Empty.
My hand dredged the dark interior. Nothing.
For a moment I stood transfixed, before running to my briefcaseand tearing it open. Everything seemed in order; nothing missing, so far as I could tell.
I ransacked the room, but I knew it was hopeless. I hadn’t imagined putting the document in the safe and I hadn’t forgotten taking it out again. Someone else had gotten it. Floating in the river of data had been my safe number.
Shit: my passport, money, and airline ticket. Then I remembered. I patted my jacket pocket. Lumpy and soggy, but my travel arrangements were still intact.
I ran to the spot where I’d left Raj. He wasn’t there. I circled the Gateway twice; the seaward side was even more treacherous than before, and I didn’t fancy a third round trip. I wandered across the rain-swept piazza, deserted except for a man selling balloons in the shape of hot dogs. He started to follow me and I wished I had an umbrella so I could swat him away, or at least burst one of his blessed balloons.
The order-routing agreement and Raj had disappeared at the same time. The agreement was, in the final analysis, just a piece of paper, but Raj was flesh and blood. And my fear was that the flesh and the blood were about to be separated from each other.
Back in my room, I wondered what to do. Call the police? And say what? Yeah, right. A hero of theAmerica Daily’s front page implicated in the death of a Wall Street banker is worried about a friend who has gone AWOL.
Stay your hand a while, I counseled myself. Cool it.
My hand stayed where it was for half an hour.
I then called Askari & Co. and asked for Raj.
“One moment, sir.”
It wasn’t one moment.
“Hullo.” It certainly sounded like Raj.
“You okay?” I said. “You did a disappearing act on me. The order-rou—”
“I’m sorry, but I got a call on my cell phone and had to dash along.”
He didn’t have a cell phone; he’d told me at the Khyber Restaurant.
“I’ll come to the office,” I said. “And we can go over what to do next. I finished the drafts and we can discuss them.”
“No.” The tone was uncharacteristically firm. “There are some documents you missed, I think.”
There weren’t. The day before, I’d played with a full deck. Raj would know that. Raj was telling me something, and I sensed he wasn’t alone.
“Okay,” I said.
“Did you like the fishing people?” He sounded jovial, as if he was keen to reminisce about our seaside stroll.
“Sure.”
He sighed. “I have asked my friend whether they fish at night. It would appear that I was wrong in my first conjecture. They fish at night. The best time to fish.”
A nocturnal bombil hunt.
“Think of it,” he said. “For thousands of years they knew the best way to catch fish. There is much that the West could learn from them.”
“You’re so absolutely right, Raj,” I said. The relief coming down the phone was palpable. “I shall remember the fisherfolk when I go back home. I’m due to leave Bombay, you know.”
“Oh.” Raj sounded desolate. I could picture him tugging at his mustache.
I laughed. “Probably tomorrow morning. I would never be able to pack all my souvenirs in time to get a flight today.”
“Yes, yes.” He sounded relieved. A night fishing trip was still a possibility.
“Will I see you later on?” I asked.
A pause. “I don’t think so. We can speak after you land and discuss outstanding issues.”
“Well, Raj, it’s been a pleasure. I’m sure we’ll meet again soon—”
“Assuredly,” he said stiffly. “And be a bloody brilliant Boy Scout, ya?”
Be prepared. Good advice.
“You bet,” I said.
***
Mendip wanted me in London. I wanted to be in New York. Neither of us wanted Bombay.
I called Delta. Their schedule didn’t work for me. I called Air India. There were flights to London and New York around the same time the next morning. New York at seven-ten. London at five-fifty-five. That worked.
“I don’t know if I’m going to London or New York,” I explained.“Can I book two seats?”
“Certainly, sir. If you pay for two seats.”
It figured.
I swapped my first-class coupon to New York for a seat on the London flight. And I bought a one-way to New York—in coach—on my credit card, and arranged for collection at their desk at the airport.
My bets were now hedged.
I showered and changed and called Paula again. Still busy. I called my mother. Still not answering.
I called down to reception to ask for a car to take me to the airport the next morning. I didn’t want an Askari car. If Raj wasn’t safe, then the same would go for me. I ordered a car for 2:00A.M.;that would be consistent with the London flight, should anyone be interested.
I ordered another car. For right away. Not cash. It could go on my hotel account.
“Where do you want to go?” I was asked.
“Pherozshah Street, the Ballard Estate, and Dr. Dadabhoi Road.”
“Is a Mercedes all right, sir?”
Perfect. Perfect to go looking for swastikas.
THIRTY-FIVE
The rain had eased to a dribble when I emerged from Bookpoint empty-handed. The Strand bookstore had been no good either. It was going to be hard finding swastikas in this town.
For the West, swastikas meant Nazis. For the East, it meant good luck. West met East in the works of Rudyard Kipling; he used to have the swastika emblazoned on the spines of his books. He might have employed a different symbol had he known that Hitler was around the corner.
I remembered my father’s bookshelves. An early set of Kipling, just like the one in Baba Mama’s. If she had a set of Kipling, then I reckoned she might haveIn Black and White. That meant three people with the same book: Mendip, in his briefcase, Ernie Monks, in his hotel room, and Baba Mama, somewhere in a brothel. And the volume they’d chosen was at the obscure end of the Kipling catalog; not likeThe Jungle BookorKim.This was advanced students’ reading, an oddity in cheap paperback. It didn’t even warrant a swastika. But the book obviously meant something to them, though God knew what.
“Dr. Dadabhoi Road, please,” I told the driver.
As we glided through the traffic, exhaustion gripped me again and I dozed. No dreams this time, though.
We slowed to a crawl. The
re was a crowd in front of us, heads turned all one way, necks craning to get a view. An accident maybe.
We edged forward. Suddenly there was brilliant light and an array of large metal stands topped with outsized umbrellas. An army of men with bulletin boards rushed around warding off the crowd and screaming into walkie-talkies. A truck with thick cabling threading from its rear rumbled like a plane waiting for take-off.
“Ah,” the driver said, sounding excited. “They are making a fillum.”
He brought the car to a halt. I peered into the center of the chaos. Lights, camera, but precious little action. There didn’t appear to be an actor in sight.
The driver turned to me. A lecture on Bollywood? I waved himoff.
The car picked up speed and the driver was silent until he drew up to the curb.
“Here,” he said and pointed at the head of a dark arcade, a pipeline leaking people into the street and drawing in as many replacements. And over the entrance the yellowMof McDonald’s. This wasn’t going to be the great library of Alexandria.
Still . . .
I asked the driver to wait and joined the procession entering the arcade.
Each side was lined with stalls. Only some sold books, the rest peddled dark glasses, ancient electronic equipment, coins, flashlights, belts, posters of deities, Indian singing stars, and Britney Spears. Those thatdidsell books, were, for the most part, little more than shoe boxes with a few moldy scraps in them. A few were more ambitious with giant stacks of old software manuals and magazines. Popularity seemed to signify a measure of quality: One or two stands were virtually inaccessible due to the crowd around them. Prying my way through a couple, I found teak bookshelves lined with volumes in alphabetical order, presided over by white-shirted, bookish men whobarked warnings to any browsers who looked as if they were going to make off with the merchandise.
But noIn Black and White.
I was near the end of the arcade and the far end of my tether, exhausted by the crush, drained by fending off the urchin children who scrambled in the undergrowth of an adult forest, tugging at pants, looking up, big-eyed and imploring, begging with remarkable eloquence.
And then there was Mukherjee’s Antiquaria; a stained white linen banner slung between two arches declared what lay below. The throng around this pitch was more animated and unyielding than any I had so far encountered. But I fought my way to the front and faced a white-bearded man, stout and smiling, stationed behind a trestle loaded with books. Mr. Mukherjee, I presumed.
Among the Dickens, Austen, and Shakespeare, I could see the glint of a swastika.
I shouted, “Do you haveIn Black and Whiteby Rudyard Kipling?”
The old man’s eyes lit up as he reached under the trestle and produced a dirty green paperback just like the one I’d seen in Mendip’s briefcase and Ernie’s hotel room.
I felt an elbow in my stomach and tried to wrench myself around. This was crazy, worse than any rummage sale I’d been to with my mother as a child.
The old man held the book up for me to see. “An original copy. Very valuable, very rare.”
This was going to cost.
“How much?”
The man looked sad. “I do not think I want to part with it.”
Save me the heirloom shit. Everything was for sale here.
I tried to reach into my jacket for my wallet, praying the pickpockets hadn’t been at work.
The man sighed. “Three thousand rupees.”
Thatwasa lot. But what the hell. I managed to extract my wallet.
I found myself in the midst of a new wave of jostling. A man tried to push me and as he did so I heard a muffled crack. The man fellheavily onto the trestle and it split in two, sending him and a hundred books crashing to the ground. He just lay there, a large pool of red expanding across his stomach, vivid against his white shirt.
There was shouting to my left, and I could see the crowd bend and part like a field of grass with a dog running through it.
For a moment the crowd around the stall froze, but then they got the point. The man in the white shirt had been shot. The panic started: screaming, shouting, and shoving. I felt myself being twisted in all directions by the mass of bodies and every time I moved my head someone would yell in my ear.
But Mr. Mukherjee stood statue still,In Black and Whiteheld aloft in his pudgy hand. I buried my elbows into the bodies next to me and thrust forward, suddenly finding myself leaning over the corpse. I grabbed the shoulder of an onlooker for balance and plucked the book from Mr. Mukherjee’s hand. I then turned and head-butted my way through the tide of people that was rushing to see what had happened, into a more sparsely populated area whose inhabitants sensed something momentous unfolding, but didn’t know where to catch it.
By the time I’d reached the end of the arcade I was trying to act casual, against the cramping tension in my limbs.
The Mercedes was waiting and I told the driver to head for the hotel.
As we drove away, the driver craned his neck to look back at the arcade. “Is something happening in there?”
I didn’t follow his gaze. “Somebody fainted, I think.”
I sat on my bed.
That shot was meant for me, meant for me, meant for me.
Someone wants to kill me. No repetition. I needed a train of thought, a way through the mire. They wanted to kill me with a gun and some poor bastard who had tried to take a closer look at Mr. Mukherjee’s library got between me and a bullet.
Wait a minute, it was a big step to infer that the guy who got shot wasn’t the intended victim. No. That shot was meant for me, meant for me, meant . . . Shut the fuck up and think in a straight line, not a circle.
I’d seen my father dead, Ernie dead, and somewhere in a heap of twisted metal, JJ Carlson. But this was different. I was now a target. Take aim, fire. Missed the first time, but what about the second? And who was pulling the trigger? I couldn’t believe we had come to this.
I was shaking. Have a drink.
After three miniatures of Remy, I was still shaking. I opened the window. It was raining again and I let the warm shower beat against my face.
The phone rang.
“Wake ya?” Oh God, what a wonderful sound. Paula.
“Someone just tried to kill me.”
“Jesus.” She paused. “You hurt?”
“No. But I don’t mind admitting that I’m scared. I need to get out of this place. I don’t know what the hell’s going on.”
I looked at my watch: five o’clock. Christ, where had the time gone? The seconds ticked by and there was no sound coming down the line. “You still there?”
“Yes.” The voice was choked, distorted, but she was still on the line. I wondered if my father had held the phone to his ear after I’d hung up. Did his voice rise in panic as he asked me to answer, give a signal of my presence? Did he hammer violently on the cradle like people do for some reason when the line’s dead? What did he feel like when the fact of his solitude hit him?
“They shot some poor bastard standing next to me,” I said. “He just wanted to buy a book, for God’s sake. And they shot him.”
I needed things I could understand, concrete things. “I’ll be on a flight to New York tomorrow. Only you know that and Terry Wardman will when I call him. Okay?”
“Sure.” She was great; there wasn’t a trace of terror coming over the line now. Her calm was infectious.
“You got any news for me?” I asked.
“Your guy in Antilles knows how to move quick, although he says the fee will blow our minds.”
“And?”
“Huxtable is creepy. His words, not mine. He says the accounts are as black as ink and will tell you squat. The directors are all locals:attorneys and trustees. But the shareholder list is more revealing. A few companies with weird names. Indian, he reckons.” She listed the names, and I jotted them down on a Taj Hotel notepad. “And a more recent shareholder, Saracen Securities.”
Ernie’s client. Oh God. T
he one that Ellis Walsh hadn’t liked, but his client Reno Holdings seemed to have eyes for.
“Your guy reckons that Saracen is Turkish. He says that anything with Turkey and India on the same brass plate is bad news. Just a tad better than Russia, maybe.”
“Did you check if Huxtable features in any client records?”
“Yup. And it doesn’t show anywhere. If it was there, I’d have found it. I nearly blew my PC to pieces in the search.”
“Anything else?”
“Yes. The name of Askari & Co. figured heavily in some of the documents among the Huxtable papers. Someone called Dakma as well, not a director or shareholder, but his name seemed to come up more than others. That’s d-a-k-m-a. No, wait. There’s anhin it. D-a-k-h-m-a.”
Dakhma? Dakhma wasn’t a person, it was a thing, a black ugly thing.
Paula continued: “He says he dug deep and stuck his neck out to find stuff you normally don’t get to see. He says you owe him.”
He was right, I did. But I still didn’t have anything tangible. The only smoking guns were real ones on Dr. Dadabhoi Road. And now I didn’t even have the order-routing agreement; I needed to reel in new bits of paper to wave around. Night fishing for Raj’s missing documents.
“You’ve done great, Paula.”
“I know.”
“One more thing,” I said. “Terry Wardman’s home number; you got it?”
“I always keep the Clay & Westminster home directory next to my bed, in case I get lonely.” I heard a rustle of pages. “Here it is.”
“Thanks. I’d better be moving along.”
“Fin.” I could hear the concern back in her voice. “Don’t get yourself hurt. I don’t think I could handle that.”
“I’ll be careful. And when I get in to New York I’ll call you and let you know where I am.”
I’d forgotten to mention my forthcoming appearance in the New York edition ofAmerica Daily.“You may read stuff about me in the papers tomorrow, about Carol Amen too. Don’t believe it.” I gave her the gist of the piece.
“Won’t they stop you at Kennedy?”
“I think that depends on Terry Wardman.”
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