Sacred Games (11 page)

‘Yes, madam.'

She slid a thick envelope across the desk. It was plain white, with a phone number in black ink centred on it. ‘You report to me, and only me. This envelope contains copies of the photographs from the album we found in Gaitonde's desk. And photographs of the dead woman. Also, these are keys that were in the dead woman's pocket. One looks like a door key, the other is a car key, Maruti. The third key, I don't know what it's for.' The keys were on a steel hoop.

‘Yes, madam.'

‘Any doubts? Any questions?'

‘No, madam.'

‘Call me at the number on the envelope if you have any queries, or information to report. Parulkar Saab has told me that you are one of his most dependable officers. I am sure you will produce good results.'

‘Parulkar Saab is kind. I will do my best.'

‘Shabash,' Parulkar said, looking quite expressionless and unreadable. ‘You may leave.'

Sartaj stood up, saluted him, took the envelope and walked smartly out. Outside, in the brilliant light of the morning, he blinked and stood near the railing for a moment, hefting the envelope in his hand. So the Gaitonde incident was not yet closed. Perhaps there were coups to be counted yet, and laurels to be won. Perhaps the great Ganesh Gaitonde still had some gifts to give to Sartaj. This was all very good, being chosen to conduct this secret investigation in the interests of national security, but Sartaj was uneasy. Anjali Mathur's urgency had somehow smelt of fear. Gaitonde was dead, but his terror lived on.

Sartaj stretched, swung his shoulders from side to side and swatted away a fly that buzzed close to his face. He hurried down the staircase and went to work.

 

Majid Khan's office was crowded with representatives of a local traders' association. They were protesting about the shocking police inaction in the face of the flood of extortion calls their members had received in the last few months. Sartaj took a chair at the back of the room and listened to Majid soothe and calm them and ask for their help in return. ‘We can't do anything if you don't call us in, if you give in and pay them,' he said. ‘But tell us in a timely fashion, and we will do our best.' Fifteen minutes of this and the traders finally all rose together, shifted their paunches about and left, but not before their president, a particularly lardy paan-chewing type, managed to mention that in addition to the burden of constant fear, he had to carry so many weighty expenses for his daughter's wedding next month. Even in these hard times, the wedding was going to have to be respectably expensive, these days people expected so much, and after all, MLA Saab was coming, Ranade Saab was coming. The trader-president bowed low over Majid's hand as he shook it, but nevertheless left behind the fact of his closeness to MLA Saab, and therefore the strong possibility of his being able to cause policemen's transfers to distant and dry postings.

‘Bastards,' Majid said dispassionately when the office was emptied of traders.

‘Bastards,' Sartaj said, getting up to sit in a chair in front of the desk. The wood was still warm from a trader, and he shifted uncomfortably in it.

‘So I hear you had a very important early meeting with important CBI people.'

‘Yes, yes.' That Majid knew about the meeting was not surprising, but Sartaj was still sometimes surprised by the speed at which news got around the station. ‘That is what I wanted to consult you about, boss. Here.' Sartaj spread the photographs from Gaitonde's album across Majid's desk. ‘Do you know any of these women?'

Majid stroked his moustache with both hands, testing it for flair and neatness. ‘Actresses? Models?'

‘Yes. Or something like that.'

Majid leafed through the photographs. ‘To do with Gaitonde?'

‘Yes. I'm just curious.'

‘You are trying to be discreet, my friend. But don't tell me. I don't want to know.' Majid shook his head. ‘One or two look familiar, but I couldn't tell you names. Bombay is full of girls like this. One looks like the next one. They come and they go.'

‘And this one?' This one was the dead one, caught in close-up. She looked unmistakably dead, with her blue lips and inert bare shoulders and complete indifference to the camera watching from up close.

‘This is the woman inside Gaitonde's house?' Majid said softly. ‘Who they are hiding from the papers?'

‘Yes.'

Majid gathered up the photographs and slid them back to Sartaj. He leaned back, and folded his arms across his chest. ‘No, baba, I don't know. I don't know anything. And you be careful, Sardar-ji. Don't be brave. Parulkar Saab will try to protect you, but he's in trouble himself. Poor fellow, he's not a good enough Hindu for the Rakshaks.'

‘Where does that leave you and me?' Sartaj said. ‘I'm not a very good Hindu.'

Majid smiled, a big, toothy widening of his face which made him look like a boy, in spite of the moustache's awful grandeur. ‘Sartaj,' he said, ‘you're not even a good Sikh.'

Sartaj stood up. ‘I must be good at something. But I don't know what that is yet.'

Majid gurgled out his long, slow laughter. ‘Arre, Sartaj, you used to be good with women. So if you want to know about these women, ask other women.'

Sartaj waved a dismissive hand and left. But he couldn't deny that Majid – lumbering big-footed Pathan that he was – had the right idea about asking women about women. It was early in the day, though, and women and national security would have to wait till later. There was a murder to investigate first.

 

‘This whole area stinks,' Katekar said as he pulled the Gypsy into a narrow parking space between two trucks.

There certainly was a heavy smell that he and Sartaj had to endure as they walked down the road, but Sartaj thought it was a bit unfair of Katekar to single out this locality as especially stinky. The whole city stank at some time or the other. And after all, the citizens of Navnagar had to pile their rubbish somewhere. It was not their fault that the municipality's collection trucks came by only once a fortnight, to make a dent in this undulating ridge of garbage to their left. ‘Patience, Maharaj,' Sartaj said. ‘We'll be out of the stench soon.'

Katekar refused to let go of his sourness. Sartaj understood that he was being sullen not about the smell, but about being here in Navnagar at all.
So a Bangladeshi boy had been murdered by his yaars, but so what? It was a minor case with minor possibilities, and it could easily be investigated on paper, just like the municipality lorries which on paper ran punctually every morning. Nobody would mind too much if this case was left undetected, and so it was silly to be out here, suffering odours and the odiousness of these foreigners. But Sartaj wanted to investigate. He told himself that it was proper officerly ambition to solve cases and get ahead, if only a little, but he knew that it was also just stubbornness. He didn't like people getting killed on his beat, and he hated the thought that murderers could just walk away. He knew that Katekar knew this, that it wasn't even idealism that drove Sartaj through certain cases. It was just a keeda that he had. They had been through this several times, with Sartaj doggedly following a lead and Katekar disapproving but staying close behind. Sartaj sometimes wondered why Katekar didn't just ask to work with someone else, or even for a transfer to some wetter posting. He needed the money, surely. And yet Katekar always went through the ritual of displeasure, and came along anyway. Now Sartaj stepped off the road and started up the slope, and he was sure that Katekar was to his left, a little behind and flanking.

Navnagar in the morning was marginally less crowded, but Sartaj still felt the kholis pressing in on him as he manoeuvred his way through the lanes. People stood aside and pressed up against the walls when they saw his uniform, and still he had to turn his torso to avoid brushing into them. In this city, the rich had some room, and the middle class had less, and the poor had none. This is why Papa-ji had retired to Pune, he said he wanted to be able to wake up and look out long, to feel as if there was still some empty space in the world. Papa-ji had found his little piece of lawn, and a vegetable garden behind the house, but Sartaj suspected that he had sometimes missed these tunnel-like streets of Mumbai's slums, these shacks that crept forward every year, each added-on room seizing ground and holding on. He certainly never stopped reminiscing about them.

Papa-ji had never told a story specifically about Navnagar, perhaps because nothing spectacular or particularly grotesque had ever taken place here. But he had told Sartaj often enough that the way to an apradhi was through the family. Find the mother and father, he had said, and you will find the thief, the murderer, the forger. So Sartaj and Katekar were in Navnagar, looking for the relatives of Bazil Chaudhary and Faraj Ali, who had killed their friend Shamsul Shah. As expected, the immediate families of the killers had fled. They had packed up as many of their
belongings as they could take, and had locked their kholis, and had decamped on the day of the murder. Sartaj and Katekar broke the locks, and inside the kholis they found old mattresses, empty gunny sacks and an old colour photograph of Bazil Chaudhary's family. In the picture, Bazil Chaudhary was only a ten-year-old boy in a bright red shirt, but now Sartaj knew what the parents looked like. He had no doubt he would find them, sooner or later. They were poor, they would have to sell the kholi, they would depend on their connections in Navnagar to survive. It was much harder to disappear than people ordinarily thought. The task, for the policeman, was to pick up the strands of their lives, and follow along.

The interviews in Navnagar that morning yielded some information, none of it case-breaking but all of it quite relevant. The Bangladeshi neighbours of the victim and the apradhis were sullen and secretive, and declared they knew nothing. After Katekar loomed over them, and Sartaj threatened a trip to the police station and quick deportation, they allowed that they maybe knew a little, a very insignificant little. Shamsul – the dead one – and Bazil both worked as couriers, and Faraj took temporary jobs here and there. Yet for the last few months they all three had a lot of money, and nobody knew why or how.

In the empty kholis Sartaj and Katekar had searched, there was scant evidence of money. The families of the apradhis had taken their luxuries with them. But in the dead boy's house, there was a brand-new colour television, and a large gas stove in the kitchen area, and shiny steel pots, and his father now confessed that the departed son had bought a new kholi a few days previously.

‘He was a good boy,' Nurul Shah said.

This kholi was very small, only one room divided by a faded red sheet. Behind the curtain, Sartaj could hear women rustling and whispering. They needed more space, and the good boy had obtained it for them. The family had been about to move into the new kholi when their son had been cruelly taken from them. ‘But,' Sartaj said, ‘a big new place, that must have cost a lot of money.'

Nurul Shah lowered his head and watched the floor. He had thinning white hair and taut shoulders toughened by a lifetime of hard work.

‘Your neighbours say your family is suddenly rich,' Sartaj said. ‘They said your son treated his sisters well. They said he bought new spectacles for his mother.'

Nurul Shah's hands were clamped around each other, and the tips of
the fingers now whitened from the pressure. He began to weep, making no sound at all.

‘I think,' Sartaj said, ‘if I look behind the curtain, I will find other expensive things. Where did your son get all this money from?'

‘Eh,' Katekar rumbled, ‘Inspector Saab asked you a question. Answer him.'

Sartaj put a hand on Nurul Shah's shoulder, and held on past the man's sudden panic at the touch. ‘Listen,' he said very softly. ‘Nothing is going to happen to you or your family. I am not interested in bothering you. But your son is dead. If you don't tell me everything, I can't help you. I can't find the bastards who did it.'

The man was scared of the policemen in his home, of what had happened and what could happen, but he was trying to find the courage to speak up.

‘Your son was doing some business, some hera-pheri. If you tell me everything, I will find them. Otherwise they will escape.' Sartaj shrugged, and straightened up.

‘I don't know, saab,' Nurul Shah said. ‘I don't know.' He was shivering and bent over. ‘I asked Shamsul what he was doing, but he never told me anything.'

‘He and those two, Bazil and Faraj, were doing something together?'

‘Yes, saab.'

‘Was there anyone else?'

‘There was Reyaz Bhai.'

‘Another friend of theirs?'

‘He was older.'

‘Full name?'

‘I only know that much: Reyaz Bhai.'

‘What does he look like?'

‘I never met him.'

‘Where does he live?'

‘Four lanes down, saab. On the main-road side.'

‘He lives here in Navnagar, in the Bengali Bura, and you never met him?'

‘No, saab. He didn't come out of his house much.'

‘Why?'

‘He is a Bihari, saab,' Nurul Shah said, as if that were an explanation.

But the Bihari was gone from his kholi as well, and there was already a new family living there. Sartaj and Katekar found the landlord, a portly
Tamil who lived on the other side of Navnagar. He had found the room unoccupied on the day of the murder, and had promptly cleaned it out the next day and rented it again. No, he didn't know anything about this Reyaz except that he had paid in advance, and was no trouble. What did Reyaz look like? Tall, thin, young face but with full white hair. Yes, completely white hair. The man could be forty, fifty, anything. Spoke smoothly, was definitely educated. He had left nothing in the kholi except some books, which the landlord had sold that very afternoon to a paper and raddi shop on the main road. No, he didn't know what the books were.