The tailor directed his gaze towards Ghote, raising it a little above midriff level, to somewhere near the upper chest. He folded his hands in greeting and inclined his grey head.
For a little nobody said anything. Then Ghote felt obliged to urge the looming situation one centimetre nearer the edge.
‘These men now realize that it is your boy that they have,’ he said. ‘Your Pidku instead of Mr Desai’s son.’
‘Sahib, I am sorry.’
And it was totally clear that the old man was not sorry because his son had been taken instead of little Haribhai Desai, but that he was condoling with the proprietor of Trust-X for the attempt made on his heir.
Ghote coughed. Once and harshly.
‘Unfortunately,’ he said – at once cursing himself for the dreadful formality of the word – ‘unfortunately these men are not at present prepared to release Pidku. In the circumstances.’
Again there was a silence. The tailor waited. This time Ghote turned towards Manibhai Desai. He swung on his heel so that it was perfectly plain he was putting the burden into the rich man’s unwilling hands.
‘Yes,’ said Mr Desai eventually. ‘Yes, it is a very regrettable situation. You must see, the truth is –’
He stopped. The truth was too terrible to tell.
He turned and put out a glance of pure entreaty. And the piteousness in it, coming from a man not an hour ago armour-plated against all the blows of life, moved Ghote. He took a deep breath and faced the old tailor.
‘It is very bad news,’ he said. ‘They have demanded a sum of twenty lakhs against the life of your son.’
It was out. It was said. The both-arms blow to the head had been delivered.
The tailor quailed visibly under it. His bow-legs actually sagged by half an inch. His shoulders lurched forward.
And then he spoke.
‘Twenty lakhs is too much.’
He said it in acknowledgement of a fact, an immense fact. It was as if he was stating that, yes, the Himalayas are there, that, yes, the River Ganges flows, that, yes, the sea is deep.
Twenty lakhs of rupees is too much. Faced with that sum, there is nothing to be done.
The bare statement finally penetrated, as perhaps nothing else could have done, the layers of cushiony apathy that the dispenser of Trust-X had been wrapping and wrapping round himself ever since the flat voice on the telephone had made its outrageous demand.
He took one, quick, instinctive step towards the bent form of the tailor. His hands rose a little, open-palmed, as if he really had it in him to embrace the hunched shoulders of the prebereaved father.
‘It – it is not so bad,’ he uttered.
He stood looking at the victim, his bold-featured face showing the passage of conflicting emotions like rival armies spurring at night across a craggy countryside.
And then the sudden flood of impulsiveness was conquered.
‘But it is not time to give up hope,’ he said in a more controlled way. ‘There is much that can be done. Inspector – er – Inspector –’
He tried to find the name with an extended, groping right hand.
‘Ghote,’ said Ghote.
‘Yes. Inspector Ghote is a specially-sent, top-notch officer. You can rely on him to do his utmost. These fellows may still be apprehended. Yes, you have a top-notch man here, definitely top-notch.’
Ghote summoned up his resources to appear to be as much as possible the man Mr Desai had described. Perhaps it would comfort and sustain the tailor to think that his son’s fate rested in the hands of a top-notch officer.
But all the alertness and force he contrived to put into his expression did not seem to make the least effect on Pidku’s father. He had stated his position. ‘Twenty lakhs is too much.’ The blow had been struck. All he had to do now was to suffer.
He stood in silence, looking down at the rich Mizrapur carpet on the polished floor of the hall.
‘You have other children?’ Mr Desai asked abruptly. ‘Other sons? Fine boys?’
Ghote’s mind, tenderized by the scene up to now as if pierced with a hundred needles, quivered thwackingly at the appalling crudeness of Manibhai Desai’s questions. But all the same he was glad they had been asked. He wanted to know the answers.
And he wanted them, passionately, to be happy answers. It was too much to hope that the tailor would prove to be one of those men who father children as carelessly as they acquire items of clothing. Already he had shown that Pidku’s loss – and this is what he totally believed it to be – was a blow to the heart of hearts. But could it not be that he had other children, and above all other sons, to assuage over the months ahead the bitterness?
‘Sahib, I have no others. Many times did my wife give birth. To sons and daughters. But they were not ever to live more than a few days only. All except Pidku.’
‘But – but –’ the manufacturer of Trust-X answered this blank challenge. ‘But – Listen, I will pay. If it comes to the worst, I will pay. Something. At least something I will pay. A big sum. A good big round sum I will pay.’
Ghote supposed that at this the tailor should have broken down, embraced the feet of the manufacturer of Trust-X and poured out a stream of heartfelt thanks. In a film, he reflected, this would have happened – except that when the tailor had mentioned his dead wife it would have been the cue for a flashback to his early married days and, naturally, a song.
But this was life, and the tailor simply went on staring woodenly down at the floor in front of him.
‘I will pay, I will pay,’ the manufacturer of Trust-X repeated, his voice rising to a sort of shouting bark. ‘Listen, I too have a son. An only son. And his mother died in giving him birth after many miscarriages. I know what it is.’
His strong features were glossy suddenly with sweat.
‘And my wife now will not have,’ he added inconsequently.
The extent to which his voice had risen under the strain of emotion was abruptly proved. The door on which he had twice hammered demanding reassurance of his Haribhai’s safety was suddenly thrust open and a woman who could only be his second wife came in upon them like a squadron with banners charging.
She was wearing not a sari but bright, cherry-red kameez and salwar, the cut of the tunic emphasizing with its clinging closeness the youth and litheness of her body, the tightness of the trousers at the calves pointing up the length of her slim legs. Her hair was fashionably cut and curled in a close cap round her considerably made-up face. The red of the clinging kameez was picked up and sent cascading out in so many sparkling drops by the cherry-bright varnish on her long, spiky fingernails.
‘What is happening? What is happening?’ she burst out.
Manibhai Desai turned away from the bent-shouldered, bow-legged figure of the tailor and summoned up a teeth-flashing smile.
‘Things are coming under control, coming under control,’ he said. ‘We are getting somewhere.’
‘And it is about time,’ his wife shot back, sending a bright-with-anger glance darting round the hall.
Ghote, surveying the room in its wake, found that already the tailor had gone. He must, he thought, have slipped back round the corner of the door like the cautious old battered crab that he was, hearing the impact of a possible enemy on the dense wetness of the sand.
‘But my Haribhai,’ Manibhai Desai said, with a returning edge to his voice. ‘You have left him unguarded?’
‘Guarded. Unguarded. He is in his room in the middle of the flat,’ his wife answered. ‘Who is going to do anything to him there? And if he must be guarded why cannot Ayah guard? That is what she is paid for.’
‘But she is the one who must have betrayed my boy to those swine and sons of swine,’ Manibhai Desai shouted.
‘Betrayed? Betrayed? Ayah has not enough sense in her head to think of betraying,’ Mrs Desai countered. ‘Am I not knowing her since I was a baby, since the days when my father was alive and we had money for ayahs?’
‘Yes, yes,’ her hu
sband agreed, with quick soothingness. ‘You have known since you were a girl, and I dare say there is nothing in this business of suspecting her.’
‘Then there is no reason for me to stay and stay in the flat,’ his wife announced, a bright fire of triumph in her eyes. ‘Were you forgetting this is the day for the Beat Contest?’
But it seemed that Manibhai Desai did not even know what she was talking about.
‘Beat Contest? Beat Contest?’ he asked dazedly.
‘Today,’ Mrs Desai said, jabbing out the word. ‘Today. At the Shanmukhananda Hall. Beat Contest. In aid of Bihar Flood Victims. With first prize generously donated by Trust-X Manufacturing.’
‘Ah, that, that. I had forgotten. Yes, it is the day for that.’
‘It is almost past the day for that. The show was beginning at 9.30. The Busy Bees are playing. The Atlantics also. Vibration and the Mini Beats. And then also there is – there is –’
A quick frown appeared on her smooth forehead at her not having the name on her cherry-red, cascading fingertips. But then she got it.
‘Yes, yes. The Immortals. That is a first-class group. And there is also the Apaches. All are playing, and am I to be so late I will hear none?’
Manibhai Desai stood where he was and considered her demand to leave. Ghote felt that it was a considerable tribute to the crushing effect of the tailor’s tragedy that he was pausing to think at all. In all but the most exceptional circumstances, he suspected, Mrs Desai would have her way in family affairs as an absolute matter of course.
Certainly she looked daggers now at not receiving immediate agreement.
And, within a second or two, her husband did in fact give in to her.
‘Yes, yes, ’ he said. ‘I suppose you had better go. Perhaps after all Ayah can guard Haribhai. But she is not to go out. She is not to go out.’
‘Very well, you can tell her to stay in. It is all the same to me. And you will tell Ajit to get the car?’
In obedience to her request Manibhai Desai went across to the door through which the tailor had disappeared. But before he reached it he was unable to resist putting his tormented heart on display to her.
‘Car and car you shall have,’ he said. ‘Have while you may. Soon it may be that we shall not be running two cars. Not even one perhaps, when I have answered the call on my resources.’
At least Mrs Desai rose to the bait, though instead of the gawping pond-fish her husband had hoped to catch he got a flashing shark.
‘What call on your resources is this?’ Mrs Desai demanded. ‘Those men have not taken Haribhai. How can you be having to pay?’
‘But they have taken the tailor’s boy and for his life they have demanded the same sum,’ her husband explained.
The flashing anger did not leave Mrs Desai’s face.
‘But if they have demanded a sum for the tailor’s boy,’ she retorted, ‘then it is for the tailor to pay.’
‘But it is twenty lakhs they have asked,’ Mr Desai replied.
For a moment the hugeness of the sum gave his wife pause. She stood stock still in her figure-hugging red kameez and looked at him.
At last she spoke.
‘Twenty lakhs,’ she said. ‘Twenty lakhs, and you were talking of paying. You would have trouble to raise twenty lakhs even for your cute little Haribhai. Don’t be a fool, Mani. Don’t start being a fool now.’
And she swung away, twisted at the knob of the wide front door, tugged it open and marched out.
Her husband stood turning his gaze from the back of the door to the spot before him where, not long before, the old tailor had quietly disappeared. Then at last he rallied himself, stepped to the doorway and in a series of loudly shouted orders arranged for the chauffeur to drive his wife to the Beat Contest at the Shanmukhananda Hall.
But this display of squally energy seemed to exhaust him. He went back to the orange chair beside the telephone, slumped into it and stared with heavy despair at his knees encased in their knife-creased silk trousers.
Ghote imagined the balance he could not but be making between the wife he had taken after Haribhai’s mother had died and the married life he had known before, so closely paralleled from far below by the tailor’s life.
The silence in the hall lengthened and lengthened. Ghote felt he must do something to break it.
He cleared his throat with a thin grating sound.
‘There is the question of the envelope,’ he said. ‘The missing envelope, you know.’
Manibhai Desai looked up.
‘She is not like that,’ he declared as if in answer. ‘You have seen her at her worst only. She is …’
He gave up. Ghote too gave up his not very convinced attempt to raise again the matter of the missing envelope, though something inside him had implanted the thought of it like a little irritating grain.
Again silence descended.
Ghote thought about the second Mrs Desai. Although at the moment she might not be appearing in the best of lights in her husband’s eyes, it was certain that for most of the time those eyes must be dazzled by her. And they would be so again soon. It is seldom that scales drop in one flash of illumination, he acknowledged. So the chances of any money being paid out on the tailor’s behalf must be much smaller now that Mrs Desai had declared so firmly against. Perhaps even they had ceased to exist.
This time the silence in the opulent penthouse hall did not last long. It was broken by the sudden shrilling of the telephone on the mock-rosewood table.
Ghote darted a look at his watch. Exactly one hour had passed since the kidnapper had ended his first call.
4
The white telephone rang once, twice. Ghote had no doubt that it would be the flat-voiced criminal ready to tell Manibhai Desai where to leave the sum of twenty lakhs of rupees, probably in used 100-rupee notes – two thousand of them, it would not be too big a packet – in payment for the life of a five-year-old boy called Pidku.
For an instant, as the telephone shrilled out a third time, he was tempted to try to conduct the negotiations himself so as to have the opportunity of committing the manufacturer of Trust-X to making some payment for the boy. But he saw at once that there was no possibility there: the kidnapper would insist on talking to Manibhai Desai himself and no one else.
However, in accordance with their previously arranged plan, he did pick up the receiver and say, in a voice he tried to make thick with stupidity, ‘Here is Shri Manibhai Desai’s residence.’
‘Get Desai, and quick.’
It was that flat voice, and it was in no mood to be trifled with.
Ghote put his hand across the mouthpiece and turned to the manufacturer of Trust-X.
‘It is the man,’ he hissed. ‘He is insisting at once to talk with you. I think you had better answer.’
He held the telephone receiver matter-of-factly out to Mr Desai.
If he could contrive that the proprietor of Trust-X would as a matter of course negotiate with the kidnapper, then perhaps the possibility of not paying any ransom at all, as Mrs Desai wanted, would simply not arise.
Manibhai Desai took the receiver.
‘Hello?’ he said.
Although he forgot to hold the earpiece away from his head, Ghote was able to hear the hard voice at the far end quite clearly.
‘Listen, Desai. Here are your orders. And you had better obey. Go at midnight –’
‘But wait. Wait. I cannot take instructions straightaway.’
Mr Desai was succeeding, with more acting skill than Ghote would have given him credit for, in sounding simply flustered. Were the people at the exchange really working flat-out at tracing the call?
But the flat voice banged back in, sharply as ever.
‘Listen. Or you will be killing the boy.’
‘Yes, yes, I am listening.’
Ghote, despite the tension, recorded an inner leap of happiness. The manufacturer of Trust-X was after all still considering the fate of Pidku.
‘Listen. At mi
dnight go alone to a place we would tell. It would be where the beach comes near to a road, and you would walk down to the sea. There you would find a box painted white we have left between two rocks. Inside put twenty lakhs in old notes, fifties and hundreds. That is why we are telling now, to give time to get the notes. When you have left, next morning we would let go the boy.’
‘But how do I know that?’ Manibhai Desai snapped in.
‘You will have to trust. We are trusting you. Trusting to say nothing to policewallahs. Wait for six tonight to learn just where to go.’
The voice ceased.
‘Answer something,’ Ghote hissed in Mr Desai’s ear. ‘Speak, speak.’
At all costs the line must continue to be kept open. The people at the exchange were certain to need longer than this.
‘But – But, listen, please. I am not sure what time you said then. Please to repeat. Please, I insist.’
But even before Manibhai Desai had begun the line had clicked dead.
Giving Ghote a look of apologetic despair, the manufacturer of Trust-X put the receiver back on its rest.
Almost immediately the instrument rang again. Mr Desai snatched it up.
‘Yes? Yes?’
‘Mr Manibhai Desai? It is Superintendent of Police Karandikar who is speaking.’
Ghote experienced, willy nilly, a sudden stomach-turning sensation of rejection at hearing this name. Up to now he had succeeded in never having to work under Superintendent Karandikar, and he had felt always secretly grateful. The superintendent had an enormous and fearful reputation: he was, everybody always simply said, a tiger.
It was right, of course, that such a man should be given charge of a case like this. He was the obvious choice. Yet Ghote wished that chance had continued to keep him himself from coming underneath those claws. He knew that in an affair of this importance his own feelings must count for nothing, but he still could not help wishing, in a stream of pure desire, that it could be someone else now on the far end of the telephone.
Inspector Ghote Trusts the Heart Page 4