The Case of the Deadly Butter Chicken (33 page)

'When he's due to play again, sir, you know?'

'Tomorrow. And there's something else. He'll be facing none other than Kamran Khan.'

'How so?'

'He's returning to India.'

'So soon?'

'Business is business I suppose,' said Mattu with a shrug.

The club's acidic tea worked its way swiftly though Puri's digestive system and before heading to the office to follow up on Mattu's revelations, he paid a visit to the men's changing room. There he spotted a set of electronic weighing scales and decided to check to see how his diet was coming along.

The LCD screen registered 91 kilos.

Confused, he stepped back off the pressure pad, looked to make sure the screen read zero and then tried again. Same result.

'Lohit!'

The 'boy' who worked in the changing rooms came running. He was at least sixty-five.

'Sir?'

'Scales are malfunctioning,' complained Puri.

'No, Sahib. Not possible.'

'I'm telling you. This thing has got my weight wrong certainly if not totally. See? Should read eighty-nine point five or less.'

Lohit scratched his head. 'Sir, it's a new one,' he replied.

Puri decided that all the tea he'd drunk had skewed the result and went and relieved himself.

'Bloody thing is wrong!' he cursed when he weighed himself again and got the same result.

Lohit suggested that perhaps Sahib might like to try the set of old-fashioned balance beam scales in the gymnasium. These confirmed Puri's worst nightmare. He hadn't shed a single gram.

'Bloody useless,' he cursed, throwing the last of his diet pills in the bin.

Tubelight called the moment Puri stepped into his office. The diamonds had been exported, complete with a bona fide certificate of origin stamped by Indian customs.

'What's the destination exactly?'

'Antwerp, Boss. A company called Patel and Patel. The stones will be put up for sale there.'

'Tip top,' said Puri, who promptly ordered Tubelight to return with Flush to Delhi, where he now needed them. He then called his client James Scott and asked him to find out everything he could about the Antwerp firm.

The detective's next call was to a sports journalist who owed him a favour. 'I'd be needing the mobile numbers of two ICT players,' he said, naming Kamran Khan and Vikas Patil.

'Saar, you should know media is not allowed direct access to players,' replied the journalist.

'Come on, yaar, don't talk nonsense!'

Ten minutes later Puri had both the numbers as well as the names of the five-star hotels where the players would be staying.

Finally he put in a call to a former batchmate working for India's external intelligence agency, RAW. Had he any information about Aga's whereabouts?

'Nothing,' was the reply. 'We've not had a sighting of him in months in fact.'

It was all over in a few seconds. A flash; a series of sharp cracks like a string of Diwali firecrackers going off; the sound of breaking glass; people all around him screaming.

Puri felt himself collapse on to the pavement. He lay on his side, staring at one of the shiny hubcaps of the Ambassador, the reflection of his face grotesquely warped, as in a House of Fun mirror. The world was quiet for a moment, almost peaceful, and he found himself thinking how much he would love a nice plate of butter chicken right now, preferably without aconite. He became conscious of a throbbing pain in his shoulder and then a babble of voices crowded his thoughts. He rolled on to his back to find that a crowd had gathered around him. They were all staring down at him as if he'd washed up on a tide.

Puri sat up, non-responsive to the repeated enquiries as to his well-being. He began to run a kind of all-systems check to make sure there was no serious damage and found that the pain in his shoulder had been caused by his fall to the pavement, a bruise rather than a wound. Relieved, yet still dazed, he sat there for a moment or two longer, brushing away pieces of shattered glass from his clothes, and then accepted the offer of an outstretched hand.

It belonged to Handbrake.

'Boss, are you OK?' he asked in Hindi as the detective got to his feet, still shedding bits of glass like a skyscraper in an earthquake.

'It was that same bloody bastard on the motorbike - one from other day, the paan wallah assassin,' he said, suddenly remembering what had happened.

'He got away, Boss. Sorry, too much traffic.'

'Anyone else is wounded?'

'No, Boss. Just a scrape or two.'

'Thank the God,' murmured Puri in English.

'And the car. The bullets hit the side, Boss.'

'Don't tell me.'

Handbrake pointed out the holes.

'Bloody bastard,' cursed Puri. 'I'll get him if it's the last thing I do.'

One of the jawans who 'patrolled' Khan Market approached, dispersing the crowd with the tact and sensitivity for which the Delhi police are famed.

The detective suggested he might like to form a perimeter around the scene of the shooting before calling Inspector Singh and asking him to bring the ballistics boys over right away. Leaving Handbrake to guard the car, he returned upstairs to his office. He helped himself to a large Scotch and then opened the safe. Inside lay his .32 IOF revolver. This he loaded and slipped into one of the outside pockets of his safari suit.

Puri was an hour late in picking up his wife from home, arriving in a taxi without the flowers he'd promised to buy. He didn't want to have to tell her about the attempt on his life - she had a way of getting upset when people tried to kill him - so he said the Ambassador had broken down.

Thankfully, Rumpi let him off lightly and they spent the fifteen-minute journey to Lotus Gardens Phase Two reminiscing about their three daughters' mundans - how their second-eldest had cried and cried when her head had been shaved, and how Radhika, their youngest, had revelled in the attention and giggled uncontrollably as her locks had been shorn.

'Such a silly little bachi,' smiled detective with a fond smile.

The conversation set the tone for the afternoon. Puri and Rumpi entered their eldest daughter Lalita's apartment to find it heaving with members of both their families. Soon, the detective was able to put all thoughts of poison, match fixing, Antwerp and attempts on his life out of his mind - at least for an hour or so.

'Getting so big, beta, haa?' said Puri as he held up his grandson, Rohit, and gave him a hug.

The boy blew a loud raspberry.

'And naughty, haa?' he guffawed.

'Very naughty!' chorused everyone approvingly.

Rumpi disappeared into the kitchen where large amounts of kheer and ladoos were being prepared, and Puri's son-in-law Arun brought him a cold drink.

'All well, Papa-ji?' he asked, as formal as ever.

'First class.'

'You came from work?'

'Direct from office.'

'Heard there was some problem?'

'Where you heard that?'

'Mummy-ji said there had been some shooting?'

How the hell did Mummy find out these things so quickly? 'Just a small misunderstanding, that is all,' he told his son-in-law.

'Misunderstanding with a gunman?'

'Correct.'

Inevitably the conversation turned to cricket, with most of the men in the room gathered together discussing a recent controversial decision by an Australian umpire, which had almost certainly lost India an important international match.

It took Mummy to put an end to it. 'Cricket talk is getting over,' she said. 'Come. Challo!'

They all adjourned to the dining room where the family priest was sitting in the middle of the floor. After greeting the pandit and bending down to touch his feet, everyone found a spot on the Indian quilts that had been laid on the floor. Rohit, dressed in a smart kurta pajama, was brought forward by his mother.

The priest recited some mantras, sprinkled drops of Ganga water over the boy's head, and then, with a pair of scissors, snipped away a few strands of his hair. A local barber, hired especially for the event, then took over. Using a straight razor blade, he began to shave the head clean, shearing Rohit's mop like wool from the body of a lamb. The child began to wail and everyone tried to appease him - 'No need to cry, baby'; 'Not long now, bacha' - but the tears kept dripping down on to the floor along with his baby locks.

Puri found himself staring down at the hair, thinking back on the time when, as an adult, his head had been shaved. He'd been in his early twenties, stationed in southern India. While on leave, he visited the magnificent Vishnu temple at Tirupati.

Like all pilgrims, he was required to get his head tonsured before entering the holy site. The shaving was carried out by one of the temple priests, a matter of a few minutes' work, his hair mixing with that of thousands of others carpeting the ground.

Puri only came to know later that Tirupati, the richest temple in the world, sold approximately a ton of hair every day to the international cosmetics industry. In other words, his youthful locks had ended up as part of a wig. In the years since then, he'd derived a good deal of amusement from the thought that someone was walking around wearing his hair.

The thought of hair and wigs recalled him to the moustache case. What if the thief intended to wear Gopal Ragi's moustache himself, perhaps as part of a disguise?

A chilling possibility came to mind. The moustache, once fixed to the thief's upper lip, could be used to strangle someone. Puri pictured the thief passing through tight security, getting close to, say, an unsuspecting dignitary who was under close guard, unravelling the tresses and . . .

He could think of another, less morbid possibility. And as the last of Rohit's hair fell away and the barber crafted a little tuft at the back of his head, Puri made a mental list of professions where a big, bushy moustache was required as part of the job description.

In regiments like the Rajputana Rifles, President's Bodyguard and Border Security Force, there was hardly a serving man to be found without facial hair. Those with the most outlandish of moustaches were always put on display during public ceremonies like the changing of the guard at Rashtrapati Bhavan or the Republic Day parade for example.

In some parts of India, like central Madhya Pradesh, officers were given financial incentives for nurturing growth on their upper lip. Male actors appearing in theatrical performances of the Hindu epics, during Dussera for example, were often well endowed in the facial hair department as well. Who else? Cadres of the martial Sikh Nihang order.

Puri could think of only one other profession: hotel doorman.

Many a five-star hotel employed Sikhs or Rajasthanis with dramatic moustaches to man their entrances. They wore colourful turbans and inauthentic uniforms - window dressing that bespoke romantic 'Indiaaaah'.

Puri was brought back to the present by a loud cheer as the last of Rohit's hair, deemed to be associated with his past life, dropped away.

The boy was still wailing as he was shown a reflection of himself in the mirror. The priest applied sandalwood to his forehead and blessed him. Envelopes of large rupee denominations (along with a traditional single rupee coin for luck) were laid before the child. And then everyone descended on the food.

Given the religious nature of the day, it was all vegetarian: gobi aloo, pooris, daal and malai kofta.

It was with a full stomach that Puri joined Rumpi and the rest of his family on the dance floor, where they strutted their stuff to the beat of Daler Mehndi.

TWENTY-FOUR

PURI WAS SLEEPING soundly on his office couch when the moustache thief entered through the window. Being a consummate professional and fancying himself as something of an artiste, he'd come well prepared - razor, can of shaving foam, even a little block of alum to treat nicks and cuts.

He began by kneeling down next to his victim and tying a towel around his neck so as to catch any wayward hairs. He inspected the perfectly formed handlebar moustache, appraising it as a sculptor might a block of virgin stone. There came a squirt from the can as a little foam was extracted and applied to the detective's upper lip. He opened a Sweeney-Todd-style razor and inserted a new blade. The steel glinted in the moonlight as it hovered a few inches above the detective's face. Then it began its descent. Slowly, as if in slow motion . . . closer. Puri felt the cold steel make contact with his skin.