by Vaseem Khan
The dog barked again, and the spell was broken. She pushed him away, turned towards the wheel, gripping it like a drowning woman grabbing at a lifebelt. ‘It’s late,’ she stumbled out.
He stared at her stupidly, then slowly returned his spectacles to his nose. ‘Yes. Of course.’
He opened his mouth, then closed it again.
She heard the door open. ‘Goodnight, Persis.’
She didn’t dare look at him. ‘Goodnight, Archie.’
The sound of footsteps, moving away. She glanced around, saw him vanish inside the gate of his compound.
She swore, then lowered her head to the steering wheel.
Her father was waiting up for her, hunkered in his wheelchair, reading. She slumped on to the living room sofa, and held her head in her hands. He looked at her from over the top of his half-moon spectacles.
‘May I give you a word of advice?’
‘No.’
‘Matters of the heart are never simple. The heart wants what it wants. Unfortunately, it rarely knows what it wants for very long. The only way to navigate the minefield is to charge right through it and hope the explosions don’t catch up with you.’
She stared at him glumly.
‘And now, I bid you goodnight.’
Unable to sleep, she took out her notebook and returned herself to her work. It seemed the only safe port in the current storm threatening to capsize her neatly ordered life.
Briefly, she wondered how Fernandes had got on with the Kramer investigation. The truth was that they had run into a dead end and her own mind was too full with the unfolding mysteries of the Healy case.
She took out the two notes the Englishman had left behind. Two passages from two separate books in Dante’s magnum opus.
What connected them? What did they mean? More importantly, how did they point the way forward?
She stared at the words until she felt the letters would fall off.
Glancing at Akbar dozing beside her, she muttered, ‘Maybe he was crazy.’
There was nothing about these riddles that pointed anywhere. Just two verses plucked, seemingly at random, from the manuscript. The only difference between them was that one was spaced out—
She paused.
Why had Healy done that? He’d left a trail of breadcrumbs, each just obscure enough that it would take time and effort to unravel. But these two were not clues at all. They were simply verses taken from The Divine Comedy. If he intended them to serve as clues, then there had to be something else here, something she wasn’t seeing, something between the lines—
She froze.
The thought stood out like a steeple on a flat landscape.
She slipped out of bed, and padded to the kitchen. Turning on the gas hob, she held the second of the two notes above the flame. Moments later, characters began to form in the spaces between the lines of text.
Invisible ink. It was so simple, so childish, that she almost let out a shout.
She wondered what agent Healy had used. Vinegar? Lemon juice? A honey solution? She knew that even cola worked well. Such agents oxidised at a lower temperature than the surrounding paper, turning the words written with them a brown colour.
When all the hidden lines were revealed, she tried the other note, just in case. There were no spaced lines, but she wanted to be sure.
Nothing.
She sat at the dining table, set the first note aside, and focused on the second one, examining the newly revealed words. Together they formed another riddle.
The road to salvation has many gates,
That which you seek in Cutters embrace awaits,
’Neath Sun and Moon and unchanging skies,
Watched over by God, in litteral disguise,
’Twixt Jerusalem and Mecca, it lies.
Chapter 37
‘Curious fellow, this Italian of yours.’
Birla had wandered over and perched himself on the edge of her desk. ‘Haq and I took the liberty of following him again yesterday while you were recovering from your fracas.’
Recovering? That was hardly a fair description of how she had spent the previous day. She bristled, but he cut off her incipient protest by raising a hand.
It was mid-morning and Malabar House was relatively quiet. Fernandes was busy typing at his desk, Haq was out, and Seth had barely made his presence known.
‘Belzoni went to Healy’s home,’ continued Birla. ‘Marched in, spent an hour in there. When we checked afterwards, he’d pretty much torn the place apart. Cut up the sofas, moved the fridge.’
What was he looking for? The manuscript? No. That would be pointless. Surely, he didn’t think they were that incompetent?
She realised that she now had good cause to bring Belzoni in and haul him over the coals. Rattle him around to see if anything shook loose.
But what would that achieve?
Belzoni would simply plead desperation. He’d made it clear that he would not leave the country until the manuscript was recovered. The man was Italian and a scholar; clearly, the book meant a great deal to him.
‘What else did he do?’
‘He followed some white woman around,’ continued Birla. ‘Blonde. Small. Angry-looking.’
She sat straighter in her seat. ‘Do you mean Erin Lockhart?’
‘I don’t know. I didn’t catch her name. I figured you would know.’
There was only one reason for Belzoni to follow the American around. He must be hoping she’d lead him to wherever Healy had hidden the manuscript.
Which meant that he suspected Lockhart.
Did that mean that Belzoni himself couldn’t have been in league with John Healy? Or was there something else going on here that she hadn’t grasped?
She pondered the pieces of the puzzle, but couldn’t make them fit.
Birla wandered away.
Her eyes strayed to Fernandes, hunched at his desk. She considered asking him what he’d been up to on the Kramer case, but the words died in her throat.
Ten minutes later, she was saved from having to do so.
Seth looked at them both sternly. A copy of the Indian Chronicle was open on his desk. On the second page was a piece about Francine Kramer, including a ghoulish photograph taken at the morgue. In the space of a few paragraphs, the article managed to skirt decency, accuracy, and good taste.
‘Can either of you explain this?’
‘What’s there to explain?’ said Persis. ‘That’s a morgue photo. You should be talking to Raj Bhoomi.’
‘I’ve already spoken to him. He claims to know nothing of it. He suggested that one of the morgue orderlies might have been bribed to let Channa and his photographer in the back door.’
Aalam Channa. The man behind the article. Bombay’s most notorious hack and the same man who’d painted such an unflattering portrait of her own efforts on the Herriot investigation after she’d refused to play ball with him. The same man to whom Fernandes had leaked information.
Seth turned his attention to Fernandes. ‘Have you been up to your old tricks?’
Fernandes stiffened, a shocked puff of breath escaping him. As he squirmed under the SP’s gaze, Persis discovered, to her surprise, that she didn’t enjoy the man’s humiliation.
Strange.
‘He didn’t get anything from me,’ Fernandes finally ground out.
Seth continued to scrutinise him. ‘Very well. Then perhaps one of you can explain exactly where we’ve got to on the investigation? No doubt someone will come knocking on my door soon enough, someone I can’t throw back out into the street.’
Fernandes remained silent, waiting for her to speak. She found words in her mouth, words that, minutes earlier, she wouldn’t have dreamed of uttering. ‘Fernandes has taken the lead while I’ve focused on the Healy investigation.’
She could feel him staring at her in astonishment.
When he finally turned back to Seth, waiting impatiently, he spoke quickly. ‘Our only real lead is the suspect identified as Mr G
rey aka Udo Becker.’
‘The man with the scar?’
‘Yes. I’ve been trying to find him. I did a tour of the major railway stations and spoke to the porters. I spoke to the staff at the aerodrome. Then I spoke to the concierges at some of the bigger hotels, the sort foreigners usually stay at.’
Seth waited. ‘And?’
‘And nothing. The man hasn’t been seen. Whoever he is, he seems to know how to keep a low profile.’
‘And yet he was present at Le Château des Rêves. Why? What was he doing there? Who was the man he met with?’
But neither of them had an answer to this. Seth sighed. ‘What next?’
‘I keep looking.’
After Fernandes had returned to his desk, Seth looked at her thoughtfully. ‘Could it be that you two have learned how to play nicely?’
She frowned. ‘I’ve been too busy to monitor his every step.’
‘It’s called delegation, Persis. Fernandes is a good policeman.’
‘So you keep telling me.’
‘He has a two-year-old son.’
‘I know.’
‘Did you know that his son has a congenital liver disease? That it costs Fernandes a small fortune in medical fees just to keep the boy alive? That he often picks up extra work on his off days as a dock labourer just to make ends meet?’
Her jaw tightened. She stared at him.
‘No. I didn’t think so,’ said Seth. ‘He’s not the type to talk about it and you’re not the type to ask.’
‘What’s your point?’
‘My point is that before you judge others, you should at least have all the facts to hand. What Fernandes did was wrong. But he did it for the right reasons. His reasons. For what it’s worth, I consider him a man of integrity.’
She chewed on this silently, before Seth turned his focus to the Healy investigation. ‘What next?’
She quickly brought him up to speed on the discovery that James Ingram might have been a Nazi.
‘Nazis!’ He collapsed spinelessly back into his seat. ‘They’ll tear the clothes from my back if this gets out.’
She wasn’t sure if he was talking about the press or the marionettes in Delhi.
He recovered sufficiently to open a drawer and pour himself a drink. Having settled his nerves, he asked, ‘Why would the damned Nazis want a copy of The Divine Comedy? Last I heard, they were all running to South America with their tails on fire.’
A question to which she could offer no answer.
‘As if we didn’t have enough madmen of our own,’ he muttered, shaking his head. ‘You know why I hate the Nazis so much?’ He put down his glass, picked up a pen, and scribbled on the back of a sheet of paper, then turned it towards her.
On it was a symbol now recognised around the world.
The Nazi swastika.
Seth observed her reaction, then put his pen to the paper again, adding four dots, in between the four arms of the swastika. He then turned the paper so that the base was flat, instead of at an angle, as the Nazi logo had been.
Persis recognised the new symbol – everyone on the subcontinent did.
‘Symbols have great meaning, Persis. The word “swastika” comes from the Sanskrit for “well-being”. For thousands of years we Hindus have used the swastika as a symbol of good luck, something benign. But in two decades those bloodthirsty murderers have turned it into an image of hate. Every nation has had its madmen; every society is carnivorous to some extent. The difference is that the Nazis managed to turn mass murder into an ideological enterprise. And now you’re telling me one of them has been running around Bombay, up to God only knows what mischief.’
‘Once we know Ingram’s real identity, we may be able to understand his motives. For what it’s worth, I don’t think he was working alone.’
‘What makes you say that?’
‘Common sense. What would a lone Nazi gain by exposing himself out here? There has to be something bigger going on that we haven’t yet understood.’
‘Don’t go inventing conspiracies,’ warned Seth, waving his glass at her. ‘It’s the surest way to put us in the firing line.’
‘We’re already in the firing line,’ she shot back. ‘It’s just that the shooting hasn’t started yet.’ She took out her notebook and showed him Healy’s latest riddle.
Seth examined it glumly. ‘Well, I can’t make any sense of it.’
‘The good news is that I think it might be the last one.’
‘What makes you say that?’
‘The second line. That which you seek in Cutters embrace awaits. I think this time Healy intends to lead us to the manuscript itself.’
‘You still believe he wants us to find it?’ His scepticism was obvious.
‘I do.’
‘Then why this ridiculous runaround?’ Frustration boiled from him.
She considered, perhaps for the first time, the enormous pressure he must be under.
Seth had once been an excellent policeman. But with independence, he’d found himself on the wrong side of history, accused of aggressively enforcing the whims of his former masters, the sort of silent, insidious accusation against which there was no defence. With the reorganisation of the imperial police force into national and state services, he had found himself sidelined, a noose slung around his career and the stool kicked out from under it.
For Roshan Seth, Malabar House represented the last chance saloon. Another failure and he’d be shoved back out into the coldness of the civilian world.
She couldn’t imagine him slaving away at a managing agency, or standing behind a department-store counter selling fridges to housewives.
‘It’s his funeral later today,’ she said.
He frowned. ‘Whose?’
‘Healy’s. His father has given instructions that his son should be buried locally.’
‘He doesn’t want him shipped back home?’
‘No.’
Seth considered this. ‘I suppose they weren’t close. Fathers and sons rarely are, in my experience.’
‘On the contrary, I think he loved him very much. But Healy became a stranger to him after the war. I think he feels that his son came out to find peace in India and he wants to believe that he did just that.’
A strange half-smile took over the SP’s lips. ‘Did you ever read Rumi? That passage about the lion jumping at his own reflection in the water. It was his way of telling us that the evil we see in the world is really just the potential that lives inside us all.’
Dipping back into her notebook, she threw out another name. ‘Enrico Mariconti. He’s an Italian military attaché. I need you to call your friends in Delhi and find out a bit more about him.’
‘I don’t have any friends in Delhi,’ he snapped. ‘Just a bunch of bureaucrats who enjoy pulling the wings off people like me.’ He pouted in self-pity, then knocked back his whisky, and said, ‘Why do you want to know about this Mariconti?’
‘Because I want to rattle someone’s cage.’
Chapter 38
Two hours later, she arrived outside a grand home at the southern tip of Marine Drive, in Nariman Point, Franco Belzoni’s place of work. The bungalow, an art deco affair – recently painted, by the look of it, in pastel shades of pink and yellow – sat serenely in the afternoon sun, surrounded on three sides by the Back Bay, where boats bobbed on the water.
She was led inside by a uniformed house servant.
In an office at the rear, she found Belzoni working at a desk. The office was vast, more of an audience chamber, complete with chandeliers, tapestries, and the sort of heavy furniture that looked as if it could survive a direct hit by V2 rockets.
Belzoni stood as she approached, greeted her, then asked her to take a seat.
‘How can I help you, Inspector?’
‘You can start by telling me the truth.’
He raised a quizzical eyebrow. Leaning back in his chair, framed by sunlight falling in from the window behind him, he held a pen, caught be
tween the tips of the index fingers of each hand. ‘I do not understand.’
‘Why are you really here?’
‘I have already explained this.’
‘I had a couple of my officers follow you around. You met with an Italian military attaché named Enrico Mariconti. Why?’
The pen slipped from his fingers. He sat up straighter. ‘You had me followed?’ He seemed astonished, more than upset, yet she was satisfied that she had scored a palpable hit. ‘But this is an invasion of my privacy!’
‘You can write to my boss with a complaint,’ she said. ‘Why were you meeting with Mariconti?’
His expression hardened. ‘A personal meeting. It is no concern of yours.’
‘I disagree.’ She took out her notebook. ‘The Indian Home Office has taken a keen interest in my investigation. They’re very concerned that we recover the manuscript. They were most helpful when we made enquiries about your friend. It appears that Mr Mariconti is more than simply a military attaché.
‘For many years, he worked as a senior operator in the SIM, the Servizio Informazioni Militare, the Italian Military Information Service. This was the military intelligence outfit of the Italian Royal Army. There are also reports that he worked for OVRA, the Organization for Vigilance and Repression of Anti-Fascism – Mussolini’s secret police, and the outfit that Hitler’s Gestapo was modelled on. The OVRA was employed by Mussolini to control those opposed to his regime, and to bring others into line, including the Vatican – OVRA maintained a regiment of spies inside the Holy See whose sole task was to dig up dirt on Vatican priests so that Mussolini could bend the Pope to his will.
‘After the war, both OVRA and the SIM were disbanded, to be replaced, in part, by SIFAR, the Armed Forces Information Service. Mariconti works for SIFAR.’ She paused, waiting for a reaction, but Belzoni’s normally animated face had settled into a stone mask. ‘So my question is this: why is a senior Italian military intelligence officer meeting with an Italian academic who just happens to be in town when a priceless Italian treasure goes missing?’