Bribery, Corruption Also

by H. R. F. Keating

  Now everyone's on the bloody take. He felt it was a verdict. A verdict on the whole of their time in Calcutta. A verdict perhaps on all India. A verdict, if M. F. Tuntunwala was to be believed, on the whole contaminated world.

  But, before he went up to do what he could to pacify Protima, it occurred to him it might help finally to convince her that they had no alternative but to obey ACP Bhowmick if he could confirm that a watch had been placed on them. A quick trip to the hotel gate provided him with his facts. On the far side of Sudder Street stood two burly men in plain clothes, so evidently detectives they might have been carrying placards labelled CID.

  Upstairs, he found Protima, eyes dried, sitting at the faintly spotted mirror of the dressing-table.

  She turned round as he entered.

  'I suppose we must go soon to Dutt-Dastar.'

  'Yes,' he said, seeing that there was no point now in telling her about the watch set on them. 'Some things may be got over with as soon as possible. But it is not anything I am liking to do.'

  On that note of tentatively renewed togetherness they set off, Ghote unsurprised to see close behind them and making no effort to be unobtrusive one of ACP Bhowmick's watching detectives.

  At A. K. Dutt-Dastar's chamber the new peon admitted them. The clerk Haripada, inky-fingered as ever, scraped his way out of the narrow space between his table and the big old safe behind it to go and see if his master was free.

  Waiting for his return, Ghote found himself recalling what Protima had told him of Tagore's poem about Haripada. How he shared his meagre room with a gecko, covered by the same rent but the lizard having the more to eat, how he saw his umbrella as being as full of holes as his pay after the fines had been deducted. And yes, he thought, when we leave a certain briefcase at the Kalighat Tfemple tomorrow evening a very big fine will make one giant tear in the umbrella we thought we had for our old age. Well, we must try then, like poor Haripada, to listen to the flute.

  ‘Dutt-Dastar Babu is engaged. He would see you presently.'

  A jet of rage. Engaged? No, he is not. Not when he has to obey M. E Tuntunwala's order. Not when he has to hand us that briefcase full of money, which no doubt M. F. Tuntunwala does not know we are to pass on to ACP Bhowmick.

  No, damn Dutt-Dastar is thinking that, now we are beaten down, he also can put his foot on our faces.

  ‘Come,' he said to Protima.

  And he marched straight over to the door that the clerk Haripada had just pulled closed behind him. He thrust it open and, followed by Protima, her eyes too glinting with fire, went in.

  A. K. Dutt-Dastar, caught sprawling in his too big leather chair behind his too gleaming desk, sat up as if some knife-wielding goonda had suddenly touched the tip of his weapon to the back of his neck.

  ‘What— What is— I was telling my clerk I was not ready to receive you.'

  ‘But we are ready to be received,' Ghote shot back. ‘You have a briefcase containing a certain sum for us. Let us take it and be done with it. If there is some receipt to sign, put it in front of my wife and she will sign it.'

  The lawyer slowly felt across the width of his desk till he had found his wrap-around black glasses. He fumbled with them.

  ‘No need to be wearing any specs,' Ghote said, still feeling with pleasure the rage ripping through him. 'We are well knowing you now. No need for more concealings.'

  He saw the lawyer attempting to regain some dignity. And abruptly deciding it was no longer worth doing.

  ‘All right then, all right. Here. Here is the receipt you are to sign. Let me call my clerk as witness.'

  He yanked open the drawer in front of him and took from it, almost without looking he must have had it so to hand, a single sheet of paper. Then he banged on his bell for the clerk Haripada.

  Protima, her anger sparking off from his own, put the five fingers of her hand down on the sheet like a kite descending, swirled it round, snatched one of the arrow-planted pens from the desk's pen-set, and raised it to sign.

  'No,' Ghote barked out. 'We are not dealing with a person who can be trusted. Read all with care, and wait also for the witness to be here.'

  After an instant she darted him a look of gratitude, and stood leaning over the gleamingly polished desk reading and waiting for the old clerk.

  At last the door was slowly opened and the upright old man crept in.

  ‘Signature to witness' A. K. Dutt-Dastar said between clenched teeth.

  There was little to read on the sheet, Ghote saw. No more than the bare acknowledgement of the sum paid in purchase of the house, the too-small sum. In less than two minutes more Protima had finished. Once again she raised the pen. The clerk Haripada creakingly approached to a point where he could, absolutely, see the pen-point traverse the paper.

  Protima signed.

  'In the safe,' A. K. Dutt-Dastar said to the clerk, mouth taut with hatred, 'you will find one black leather briefcase. Be careful to show the contents to this gentleman, who is a fully suspicious inspector of police from Bombay, and when he is satisfied you may let him take the case back to where he comes from.'

  So solemnly they followed the old ramrod-stiff clerk out and watched him pull away the battered bentwood chair on which he sat at his splodgy typing so that he could get to the safe. He then unlocked a small drawer underneath the table and extracted from it a large iron key. With this he opened the safe. Then, peering into its depths like a tortoise inspecting a likely leaf, he pulled out a large shiny black plastic briefcase. Ghote saw on it a seemingly accidental broad smear of white paint.

  The clerk Haripada set the briefcase down beside his tall typewriter. It was evidently unlocked because he was able simply to pull it open. With a gesture of something like distaste, he invited Ghote to examine the contents.

  He duly did so, if without much care.

  Since every rupee inside was to be left for ACP Bhowmick to scoop up from wherever they decided to leave it in the Kalighat Temple it did not seem much to matter what sum it contained, although from the look of the banded packets of high-denomination notes inside that must be large enough.

  'Very good; he said to the clerk Haripada, somehow wishing he could tell the upright old man that he was not such a dubious character as he seemed.

  But that was not to be.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  No, Protima said.

  They were once more sitting in their room at the Fairlawn. On the flowery-topped stool at the dressing-table stood the shiny black briefcase with the white paint mark. Despite the large sum inside its cheap-looking exterior, Ghote had somehow not liked to put it in the hotel safe.

  'What No it is?'

  'No, I am not willing to let that man do what he is liking.'

  'Which man? If it is M. F. Tuntunwala you are talking, I am telling you, when it is someone as altogether rich, there is no good in saying No!'

  'Oh, duffer. I am not talking about M. F. Tuntunwala. I am well knowing now that he can make us do whatever he is wanting. No, it is that snake of an assistant commissioner. How dare he try to take from me every rupee I was inheriting?'

  'But he has. Or when tomorrow we are visiting the Kalighat Temple he will.'

  He looked once more at the briefcase standing there on the stool, as if it was a work of art on a pedestal.

  ‘No. But there must be some way we can make the flesh fall from his face like a leper's.'

  Oh, here is my Bengali wife back once more, Ghote thought. All fire and explosions.

  But perhaps those are better than tears and defeat.

  ‘I would like to defeat him also,' he said. ‘I can perhaps accept he should be the tool of some politician. Such things happen in Bombay. Or everywhere in India. But somehow I had thought, I had wished at some times, that in Calcutta, your Calcutta, it would not be so. And now when I am thinking he also has the powers to take our money, your money, is altogether too much.'

  ‘Then what will you do?'

  He had not till now thought of doing an
ything. When ACP Bhowmick had laid down his terms there had seemed to be no getting out of them. The marked briefcase, the secret exchange, the airline tickets in the envelope propped up at this moment against Protima's pot of red sindur. They had seemed so many steps on a long descent impossible not to slide down.

  But need that be so?

  Sitting on the other side of the bed from Protima, he thought.

  ‘Yes,' he said at last.

  ‘What yes?’

  ‘Yes, I think something maybe done. We must leave Calcutta today itself. Instead of going tomorrow, when those air-tickets are stating, we will try to exchange them. Or even once more pay a bribe to get seats on any flight whatsoever. But, first, we would have to get rid of those two fellows standing in the street outside.'

  ‘But how?' Protima abruptly reverted to despondency. ‘How, if he has put watchers there, can we escape?'

  Ghote allowed himself a small smile.

  ‘Well, in my time I have very often been given orders to follow some badmash. Once even I was spending all day under the hot sun dressed up as a Moslem lady in a black burkha, and altogether horrible inside there it was. But you may trust one who has learnt to follow to know how not to be followed.'

  With pleasure then he saw that Protima was regarding him almost with open admiration. The Bombay detective.

  And are we truly on the point of going back to Bombay? he asked himself, hardly able to suppress a grin of delight. By whatever devious route may be necessary? To report for duty at Crime Branch, what a relief. Be given whatsoever difficult case I may, it will seem altogether a fine time after what Calcutta has done to me.

  ‘So what it is we would have to do?' Protima was asking.

  ‘Well, I have been thinking. You know you were saying that we should visit the Victoria Memorial?'

  ‘Yes. But we were too late that day, and now . . .'

  ‘No. Today we will go. That is a huge place, yes? Inside, there should not be too much of difficulty to give any follower a slip.'

  Her eyes shone.

  ‘Then let's go. Now. At once.'

  ‘No, no. It would be best to wait till the afternoon. Those fellows outside will be on hundred per cent alert just now. But after a long morning when we are seeming to have no intention to leave the hotel they will not be so quick. We may even be able to get into a taxi before they can be ready to follow. Then we would not at all need to go even to the Victoria Memorial.'

  ‘But what a pity . .

  Her voice drained away.

  Yes, he thought, you were going to say, What a pity you should not see one more glory of Calcutta. But then you were thinking: no more need for showing off Calcutta glories, we are to be simple Bombayites once more.

  And so we will be. If with more of rupees in the bank than we were once having.

  He glanced again at the shiny black briefcase.

  ‘We would have to leave all our baggages here,' he said, thinking a note of briskness was what was now needed. ‘Perhaps later they will send them. Today we will take only that briefcase and its money.'

  ‘But if the men of that good-for-nothing Bhowmick are seeing that, they will know what we are doing.'

  ‘No, no. Quite safe. Those fellows will be just only some CID men Bhowmick is relying on. He will not have said one word about a briefcase he himself is aiming to take up in the Kalighat Tfemple.'

  ‘Yes. Yes, you are right. But all the same we must not give out any sign now of what we are meaning to do. I shall even leave on the dressing-table there all my things. Then if the room-bearer has been bribed by those watchers to report on us he will suspect nothing.'

  ‘First-class idea. So, when we have had a hearty lunch - we may not have time to eat for the rest of the day at least - we will just only walk straight out and, if a taxi is near, get into same.'

  ACP Bhowmick's watchers were, however, smarter than Ghote had counted on. There was a taxi waiting almost outside the Fairlawn's gate at the moment he had chosen for their flight. But its driver was leaning out of its far window watching a party of shouting, gesticulating men erecting the bright blue draperies of a pandal - yes, he registered, Kali Puja celebration beginning, Goddess Kali will be put there - and failed for a minute or more even to notice Ghote opening the nearside door and pushing Protima and the black paint-smeared briefcase inside. The slight delay was enough for the ACP's watchers. One, a fellow in a dayglo shirt of a particularly nasty green, jumped into a cycle ricksha. His companion, Ghote saw, was struggling to tug from his belt one of the mobile phones that were the craze of Calcutta, and indeed of all metropolitan India.

  So there was nothing else to be done than snap out ‘Victoria Memorial' and abandon any thoughts of going directly to Dum Dum airport. And it came as no surprise, considering the density and exuberant irresponsibility of Calcutta traffic, that when they arrived at the Memorial it proved that the cycle ricksha with its burly green-shirted passenger was drawing up not twenty yards away.

  ‘Never mind,' he said to Protima. ‘Inside here we would have no difficulty to get rid of Mr Green-shirt.'

  They walked past the huge seated statue of a tightmouthed, even disapproving Queen Victoria, up towards the glaringly white, high-domed building. On either side of the wide gravelled path, on grass verdant once again after the heat of summer, families sat picnicking, little girls in frocks darting here and there like butterflies. There was a quiet calmness about the whole scene from the stately, massive white marble building down to the mellow grass of the lawns and Ghote suddenly began once more to see Calcutta in a rosy light.

  Perhaps, after all, it was not such a bad place. The Bombay he was used to had its bad side, the hustle-bustle, the crimes of the Crime Capital of India, its almost absolute concentration on making money, whether legitimately or through its own particular sorts of corruption. While here, in this part of the city at least, there was a wholly different atmosphere. Not only calm, but somehow there was in the air a belief in the finer things of life, the happy play of children, the preservation of the past. Art, painting, music, poetry. ..

  He thought with fond dismay that he would never now listen again to Mr Bhattacharya quietly singing alone on his rooftop. Nor would he meet Khokon Roy again, and glow happily in the light of his darting humour. And that scrupulously honest brown sahib, Gopal Deb: soon it would be all he could do to remember at times his existence. Even the clerk Haripada: he would never now learn his real name nor watch in perplexed admiration the stiff rectitude of his conduct.

  For a long moment he wished that, after all, there had been no difficulties over the house, that he and

  Protima would actually in the end have come to live in it.

  But then, perhaps because out of the comer of his eye he had seen the man in the bright green shirt looming closer, reality broke in. No, they had to get out of this city of corruption, if possible with as much of their own money as could be saved from the wreckage.

  He began to think what sort of situation might arise inside the huge building ahead that would allow them to dodge out of sight of Mr Green-shirt for a few vital seconds. Just long enough to begin a headlong rush for safety.

  Vaguely he was aware that Protima had fallen back into her old history-lecture, guidebook manner.

  'If you are looking right up, you may see the famous statue of Victory on the very top of that magnificent dome. In old days it was able to revolve round and round. But now it has been stuck.'

  Let her talk, he said to himself. This is our last few hours in her beloved Calcutta. Tomorrow, if all is going well, we would be back in down-to-earth Bombay. She will no longer be a bhadrolok lady, and I shall like her all the better.

  They went up the steps to the entrance portico. On either side two bronze pictures of very historical events. Though when, as a matter of duty, he asked Protima what they were of she avoided answering

  In any case,' he said, reading the words beneath, ‘by Sir Goscombe John R. A.'

  ‘From UK and all ove
r the world they were coming to make this great Calcutta memorial, with funds voluntarily subscribed by the Princes and peoples of India.'

  More guidebook. Must be almost the last. And voluntarily subscribed, that to me is saying bribes demanded and given.

  They went in. Ghote, stooping for a moment as if to tie his shoelace, noted Green Shirt reaching into his back pocket for his wallet to pay, in his turn, the entrance fee.

  And if I am having anything to do with it, he said to himself with a flick of malice, you will be losing your money.

  But, inside the huge building, he saw no immediate opportunity to throw the fellow off. He became aware, too, that lugging everywhere the shiny black briefcase he was easier to keep in sight than he would like.

  A black burkha, he thought, would be just the thing now. Inside tent of same it would be a child's-play to hide this damn give-away briefcase.

  But, failing that, the thing to do would be to press forward as reasonably quickly as they could until there appeared one of the places he had hoped to find. Some corner to slip round, some large object to slip behind.

  'Listen,' he hissed to Protima, 'be showing maximum interest in what is there to be seen. We must get that fellow behind us to believe to one hundred per cent we have just only come to look at whatsoever marvels are here before we are leaving Calcutta tomorrow.'

  He took then a swift survey of his surroundings. Bronze busts on pedestals of royal-looking, old-times Britishers, marble statues of the same. And, ah, yes, some sort of very old clock.

  'Over here,' he whispered to Protima.

  He took her with him to stand in front of the clock. By Whitehurst of Derby, he read. The clock was not going.

  ‘Wonder why it is here,' he said.

  ‘It is from old Calcutta days,' Protima answered with a touch of sharpness. ‘Even then they were sending such things all the way by sail to Calcutta from UK to add to the beauties of the city.'

  ‘Oh, yes,' he said, noting nowhere at this point to slip into momentary hiding. ‘But I think now we can pretend to have seen everything in this entrance hall.'