Читать книгу Dead on Time - H. R. F Keating - Страница 9

It took Ghote a good long while to calm down. To seem to have been on the point of finding out something about Ganpatrao Pendke at last, and then to have been presented with a tale of murder some two years before the victim had been found dead, it was infuriating beyond endurance. And time had gone by. He had sat outside that wretched chaikhana for heaven knows how long waiting for the tea-slurping elders to open a conversation so that his inquiries should not be obvious, and in the end it had all been a waste of time.

With anger boiling in him, at countryside life and ways, at himself, he tramped here and there about the big village, along close-crowded, rubbish-strewn lanes, past scores of the little houses, their open doorways giving glimpses of everyday goings-on within, past children playing in the dust, past more than once the same cluster of men gambling with a pack of greasy cards, past the village blacksmith’s, the tree outside his hut adorned with a dozen dangling bicycle tires and orangey inner tubes. He stopped short once only, when turning a corner at the end of one more narrow, urine-smelling, dung-fires-aromatic lane, he found himself not twenty yards distant from the sole two-story building he had come across, a big, blank-walled, startlingly white-painted place that could only be the house of the Patil.

He had wheeled around then, as if confronted by a buffalo gone crazy. Plagued by the taunting thought that, while he himself had spent all that time getting nowhere, back in Bombay expeditious A.I. Lobo might well have persuaded Rustom Fardoomji to repeat his confession in front of a magistrate. Whether that confession was obtained by fair means or foul, once made, rescind in court later though Fardoomji might, he would have a hard time escaping being found guilty. While all that he himself had to set against such a case was the garbled talk of a man so advanced in years that he did not even remember whose side he had fought on long ago in Africa, or perhaps here in India. That, and the belief of the two Dhunjeebhoy brothers that the relative they hardly knew would not have committed a crime of such brutality.

At last, exhausted more by sustained fury than by his tramping march, he slumped onto the low wall surrounding a small whitewashed shrine near one edge of the village, a little red flag drooping from a bamboo mast above it. For as much as ten minutes—though he had ceased almost entirely to make any semiconscious count of time—he sat on, too tired even to think anymore.

But then, glancing up, he found he was looking straight into the open doorway of one of the village’s more prosperous houses—its roof was covered in red Mangalore tiles—and he was seeing a scene that took him back to his boyhood days and simultaneously sent a prickle of revived hope through his numbed brain.

All he had seen was a man, seated on the hut’s floor, having his underarms shaved by a barber. But the sight recalled for him, in an immediate flood of memories, the itinerant barber who had served his own village together with four or five others nearby. And the great thing about that man was that his duties, besides shaving beards and from time to time heads and underarms, as well as performing minor pieces of surgery and prescribing occasional herbal cures, included acting as a messenger between one village and the next, one household and another. He was the carrier of news, good and bad, and the maker of marriages. And, perhaps really more important than any of this, it was his unofficial duty to be the retailer of plain gossip.

More, the barber of his youth had had a wife who performed similar offices for the better-off womenfolk, paring nails, rubbing away hair on legs with pumice-stone, cutting out corns, decorating the soles of brides’ feet, and gossiping and matchmaking. Between the pair of them, man and wife had known almost everything that went on in the four or five villages they used to visit, everything openly spoken of, very nearly everything kept secret.

So, surely, the barber here, whisking his open razor now on the stone slab at his side as he squatted next to his client, testing the sharpness on the inside of his arm, rapidly applying lather from his little brass basin and wiping the excess off on the ball of his thumb, surely he would know all about Ganpatrao Pendke. Surely he would be able to produce, if handled right, something more solid than the breath of a rumor from an ancient soldier.

He sat waiting on the shrine’s low wall till the barber, chattering hard all the time, had finished his task. At last the fellow—he seemed to be in his active early fifties, short, rather monkey-faced, bow-legged, wearing only a green and red headcloth and the invariable dhoti draped round his waist—went striding off along the lane, walking rather faster than anybody he had yet seen in the unhurried village. He contrived in a few moments to catch up with him. He fell into step and risked at once opening a conversation.

“Namaste, Barberji,” he greeted him. “I used, you know, to love watching the barber at work in my own village as a boy. If it had not been for caste, I would have liked nothing better than to have been a barber myself. Going here and there, seeing life, hearing of people’s troubles and their good fortunes.”

There was a moment when he thought the fellow, talkative though he had seemed at his work, was not going to respond. But it was a moment only.

“And I myself, I have never wished to be anything but a barber. I was born to be a barber. My father before me was born to be a barber. His father before him was born so, and his before him again as long as the world has been.”

He could not have sounded more friendly, and Ghote realized that, if he himself wanted to learn something from the barber, the barber was more than ready to learn all he could about this stranger in the village to have some good fresh gossip to pass on. So he gave him as many details as he could about his family and early life, his wife’s name, his son’s age, how long he had been married, his father’s name and profession of schoolmaster, his sisters’ names, their husbands’ occupations. And if he carefully avoided saying he himself was a police officer, what did it matter?

It mattered, he soon found out, quite a lot. Because the moment he had finished his somewhat embroidered account, the barber asked him directly the one question he had foolishly not prepared himself for.

“So what is bringing you to Dharbani?”

He swallowed.

And inspiration came. He grabbed it with both hands.

“I had learned that Dharbani is a prosperous place,” he said, recalling the electric lamp rising up through the banyan in the square and the row of well-stocked shops behind it and coupling that with a quick memory of Mr. Saxena of the watches-covered forearm in Bombay and the reason he had given for coming to look at Rustom Fardoomji’s shop. “And I am by trade a watchmaker. So I am thinking this would be a good place to set up a shop.”

The barber burst into laughter.

“Oh, my friend,” he said, “you have come to as unlucky a place for you as you could. You are not going to find any timepieces to mend in Dharbani. Never. The Patil has a clock in his house, yes. But it stopped, to my knowledge, four seasons past. And he has never thought of winding it since. No one else round about has anything of the sort. Why should we? We can see when the sun comes up, and when it is dark we can see that we can no longer see. We do not need any clock watches to tell us such things as that.”

Ghote felt totally deflated. He ought, he realized, to have foreseen everything the barber had said. Had not his own boyhood days been just as the fellow had described? He had made the comparison more than once since he had been in Dharbani. In spite of the place’s touches of the modern, it was really almost unaffected by the counting of minutes and hours.

But evidently his mistake had put the barber into an even better frame of mind. He went chattering cheerfully on.

“Yes, yes. No clocks and watches here. True, times have changed a little. There is the bus now. It can take you into Ramkhed whenever you are wishing. There is even a girl from the outcaste quarter here who goes on it every day to work as a steno for a lawyer. She went to school, you know. We are that much of forward-looking here. But you will not find any watch on Sitabai’s little wrist. Bangles only, my friend. Bangles such as they have always been, if nowadays they are coming from Bombay or somewhere instead of being made here itself.”

“A forward-looking place?” Ghote asked, recovering enough to try to steer the talk again in the direction he wanted it to go. “Tell me, is the Patil, despite that clock he has forgotten to start up, is he then a forward-looking man?”

“No, no,” the barber answered, plainly delighted to have the chance of laying out a character study he must have worked on over the years. “No, Bhagwantrao Pendke, Patil of Dharbani, believes that things were well long ago when he was a boy, and as much as is in his power, he means them to stay that way here forever.”

“And a great deal is in his power?” Ghote asked, glimpsing his way ahead.

“Oh, yes, yes. Government in Delhi may rule India. But, as they say, Delhi is far away. The ruler in all District Ramkhed is the Patil here. He is the one who says what is the law. Not any chief minister in Bombay, not the collector in Ramkhed, not those swines of police there.”

Ghote swallowed the “swines of police” without a catch. He was getting nearer, surely.

“So if I myself lived in Dharbani,” he said cautiously, “and was a good friend of the Patil, I could commit as many crimes as I was liking? Is that the way of it?”

“No, no. Once more wrong.”

They had come out of the village now and were walking through the fields. Evidently the barber was on his way to some neighboring smaller place.

“No,” he went on, “you could do what is against government law only if Patilji thought it was not wrong. He is a just man. But it is his own justice.”

So would the Patil, Ghote thought, protect his grandson Ganpatrao if he was convinced he had committed murder? He had, according to S.P. Verma, committed a good many lesser offenses, things that at least ought to have got his name on to the police Bad Character Roll, and the Patil had arranged to have them all ignored. But murder? Would the Patil consider murder as something against government law but not against his own? Perhaps it would depend on what his feelings were for each of his grandsons. If, for some reason, he had nothing good to say of the sickly Ramrao and delighted in the nefarious exploits of Ganpatrao …

He decided to explore the barber’s opinions of the Patil a little further, a little nearer dangerous ground.

“I was saying, if I was just only a good friend of the Patil,” he ventured. “But if it was a matter, for example, of a relative? Does the Patil have sons who might commit serious crimes?”

“Ah, no. Patilji has lost his sons. Lord Yama has taken each and every one. But grandsons he—but one grandson he has remaining. His first grandson, Ramrao, was murdered, you know. Yes, just two days ago. In Bombay. Where such things happen.”

“Murdered? Does anybody know why? Do they know who did it?”

“Yes, yes. It was some shop owner there. In Bombay such people will beat you to death for rupees ten only.”

Ghote dutifully shook his head over the wickedness of the big city.

“Terrible, terrible. But you were saying, the Patil has one more grandson at least.”

“Yes, yes. One only now. After that just only a daughter. And what a grandson.”

“He is a good man, this one remaining?”

“No, no, no, no. Ganpatrao is the greatest rogue in all District Ramkhed. He is drinking. And the girls he has seduced … the people he has ridden down on that motorbike of his also … chee, chee.”

Ghote, walking steadily along the narrow, dust-powdery path between the fields beside his splendidly useful source of information, wondered if he dared push the talk yet nearer his objective.

“The greatest rogue in District Ramkhed?” he said. “And does he, this Ganpatrao—it is Ganpatrao?—does he go so far as to do these wicked things beyond Ramkhed? Does he go to Nagpur? To Bombay, even?”

Had he risked too much? Would the barber feel he was being asked unnecessary questions? Wonder then whether this too-hopeful watchmaker really was what he had said he was? Would he go and talk to the Patil about him?

But it seemed not.

“Oh, Ganpatrao has been in Bombay,” the barber answered, clearly happy to be able to relay so much juicy gossip to someone who had heard none of it before. “Yes, that is where he was learning such bad habits. The Patil sent him to college there. He sent both his grandsons. But while Ramrao did well and learned much about getting rich, Ganpatrao learned just only about drinking and whoring. Oh, if he could have got more of money out of his grandfather he would have stayed and stayed in Bombay. Often he is saying it.”

“So does he go there still when he can? Was he … was he perhaps there just only three-four days ago?”

It was not a very clever question. It risked, if anything did, alerting the barber. But he had been able on the spur of the moment to think of no more cunning way of obtaining that one vital piece of information.

However, the barber simply wagged his head ambiguously.

“Perhaps yes. Perhaps no. Who can say? With that motorbike where can he not go? To Nagpur it is easy. And then all places are there for him on the train.”

Ghote sadly admitted to himself that he had failed to have had the tremendous piece of luck he might have done. For a little he walked in silence along the dust-soft path scarcely wide enough for the two of them.

“The Sarpanch was away three-four days ago,” the barber suddenly said, turning with happy crudeness to an as yet untouched subject for gossip-mongering.

“The Sarpanch?”

Ghote’s mind was at once awhirl with questions, hopes. Surely that memory-dazed old soldier had said that the Sarpanch of the village was the Patil’s son-in-law. Indeed, that must be why the barber had abruptly mentioned him. And had he himself not just learned that after Ganpatrao the Patil had no other male heir? Just his one daughter? So this Sarpanch would have almost as much to gain from Ramrao’s death as Ganpatrao. And the Sarpanch had definitely been away from the village at the time Ramrao had been beaten to death in the Tick Tock Watchworks. So could it be …?

“Yes, our sarpanch, Jambuvant Dhoble by name. He is the husband of Patilji’s daughter, you know. Patilji said he was to be voted sarpanch when Bapurao, the father of Ganpatrao, was no more.”

Yes, so he was right. Here, surely, was another suspect. And, if what that muzzy idiot of an old soldier had told him was true, that the Sarpanch took bribes from both sides, then he was probably as much of a bad hat as Ganpatrao himself.

But how to obtain some hard evidence against him? Or against Ganpatrao? How to get hold of something more definite to set against A.I. Lobo’s case than the mere fact that someone with a motive had been away from his home at the time of the victim’s death? Something that would make his own name with the D.G.P.?

Till now all he had learned had been rumor and guesswork, better though it was than the state of total ignorance he had been in when he had first set foot in the village. But very likely the D.G.P. would dismiss mere hearsay out of hand. And the barber, plainly, had little more to tell, if anything.

Then it came to him.

If what the old soldier at the chaikhana had said, though muddled, was more reliable than he had believed, as the barber’s gossip tended to confirm, then perhaps one other thing the old man had spoken of was more than the mere confusion of a mind that had lost all sense of time.

The boy brahmin. The old soldier had said that a boy brahmin, presumably the son of the regular village priest who had perhaps died early, was accustomed to visit the Patil’s house every day to perform the necessary rituals. Surely that boy would know, if anybody, whether Ganpatrao had been absent from the family home.

So how to find the boy? Not easy without asking direct questions that, in a village like Dharbani, would at once provoke questions in return, questions it might be difficult to answer.

He thought.

“Tell me,” he said at last, “does the Patil keep to all old customs? Are prayers said in his house each day?”

“Oh, yes, yes. Patilji is a good man, I was saying it. He would not think any day had begun unless the brahmin had visited his house.”

“And the brahmin … I expect he has been going to that house for year after year?”

Once more the barber was delighted to put this ignorant stranger right.

“No, no, no. The brahmin we had for some years was expiring. So now it is his son who goes to the Patil’s house.”

“Ah, yes. And if your brahmin was a man of many years, I suppose this son of his is well used to the work?”

“No, no, no, no. No, the brahmin now is a boy only. Luckily he was old enough to take up the task when his father was dying. He was just past twelve. He had received his sacred thread.”

“So he is twelve-thirteen only now? You know, I would like to see that boy. To do a brahmin’s work at that age, it is something Dharbani can be proud of.”

“Yes, yes. You are right for once. That boy is very, very good.”

“So where is it I could see?”

Was his inquiry too sudden? Apparently not.

“Oh, that is easy. The boy goes each day after he has visited the Patil’s house to the old temple on the hill. No one else is going there these days, but the boy goes. He is saying the god has called him. He is a boy in a thousand. In two thousand.”