Читать книгу Breaking and Entering - H. R. F Keating - Страница 8

Ghote had told Axel Svensson before he had left him that his from time to time proviso would mean he could not be accompanied to the Bombay Hospital to see the patient he had hoped to interview there when that roar of It is Mr Ghote? had burst in on him. He had, in fact, some hopes of learning from this Parsi lady, Mrs Marzban, something that might get him nearer daring and discriminating Yeshwant. The officer who had interviewed her earlier was likely to have learnt little from someone soon to be admitted to hospital. Perhaps, now that she was under good care, he would have better luck.

But when he rang from home, after ascertaining that no new Yeshwant burglary had taken place overnight, he was told Mrs Marzban was in fact already on her way to the operating theatre.

A check. But there was the next address in his notebook, an apartment in one of the toweringly tall blocks up on Malabar Hill called Landsend. And, since he had told Axel Svensson he would not call for him until midday, he thought, without much violence to his conscience, he could go to this substitute interview on his own. Not having a huge hovering foreigner at his elbow to be somehow explained away was altogether too tempting, whatever twinge of regret he felt about not taking the sad man out of his gloom.

However, he set off on his motor-scooter hardly feeling ready to tackle the possibly difficult task ahead. His head was filled by a dull resentment. He knew he had in fact little to complain about. His breakfast puris had been as crisply puffed-up as Protima always made them. Some remnants of her quarrel with Ved over Swabhimaan and Lost in Space had been rumbling on, but those he could have dismissed as the sound of distant thunder. The trouble was the way he had been woken from his comforting end-of-night dozing dream.

What had brought him back to the world was an unexpected caress from his wife. He did not usually resent such advances, and he had very soon responded. But all the same his happy state of half-awake dreaminess had been broken into. It had not been the time that such things should take place. His response, he acknowledged now, had lacked enthusiasm. Which must have been why those puris, however crisp, had not gone down as well as they usually did, and why he felt more than a little unfitted for the tactful interview he suspected lay ahead.

But soon he found he was becoming cushioned from all that the outside world could throw at him by the pleasant vibration rising upwards from his feet, planked down on his machine’s ridged base. Despite the city’s as ever wildly erratic traffic all around him, he began at last to feel ready to tackle Mrs Latika Patel, wife of a Member of the Maharashtra Legislative Assembly, a man who was, more to the point, son of a prominent minister. Care would be needed, and he felt now he was comfortable enough within himself to give it.

There was little about the actual break-in, some weeks earlier, to take into account. It had been one of Yeshwant’s most audacious, and most successful. He had climbed the huge towering block, as usual in the darkest period of the night. He had eased back the flat’s open kitchen window, had evidently waited patiently till the cook, who had recollected being a little disturbed as she slept on the floor there, had gone back to sleep. And then he had silently crossed the narrow little room and entered the master bedroom. There, he had not at all interrupted the deeper slumbers of heavily pregnant Mrs Patel and her spouse and had simply picked up off the dressing table Mrs Patel’s latest acquisition.

It was perhaps the richest haul he had yet had. According to the full description supplied by Pappubhai Chimanlal and Co., it was a necklace in the form of tiny linked gold monkeys from which hung in a diamond-studded setting an immense cushion-cut Sri Lankan sapphire. Mrs Patel, it appeared, had taken advantage of the last wedding she was likely to attend before she gave birth to display it. But, tired out that evening, she had failed to put her expensive acquisition into the safe behind the painting of a stallion, groomed and adorned for a procession, hanging opposite the marital bed. But the real mystery was how Yeshwant had got to know that the loot was there to be taken. If Mrs Patel, tactfully handled, could give a clue to that, an arrest would be that much nearer.

The happy sphere of quiet Ghote had eventually grown round himself as he rode up Malabar Hill and along Dongersey Road was abruptly shattered, however, when he reached the tall block. A band of sex-changed hijras, engrainedly mannish despite the gaudy saris they flaunted, must have learnt that there had been a birth in one of the apartments in the building and had come to demand the tribute customarily given when a new human being came into the world.

Mrs Patel, he thought with a tumble of dismay. Hadn’t she been about to have her baby? Or was it that she had already done so? Plainly, if she was being invaded now by this rabble of men-women, she would be in no mood to answer detailed questions. And invaded she would be. Eunuchs always claimed that when in far-off times Lord Rama, exiled to the forest, had ordered back ‘the men and the women’ who had wanted to follow him he failed to address those who were neither men nor women. So they had shared, at a distance, the god’s fourteen-year exile, and thus had gained special privileges. One of which was that of bestowing a blessing on a newborn child, and getting a reward for it.

Why, oh why, did obstacles like this spring up whenever there seemed to be a hope of making progress? But nothing for it now but to wait and see if Mrs Patel really was the hijras’ target.

They appeared to have arrived not much before himself, and seemed to have only just begun dancing and singing to the lively beat of the tabla which one of them was playing, long flexible fingers swiftly moving on the little drum’s twin surfaces. Their aim at present was partly to attract passers-by and partly to induce the new mother – would it be Mrs Patel, or not? – to come out to receive eventually the blessing May the little one live long. And their leader, he noticed now, was really a beautiful creature. He was wearing a sari as boldly striking as those of his companions but, a pure lemon yellow, much more attractive. He even looked not unlike oval-faced Shabana Azmi, the film star. His eyes made to appear enormous by a skilful application of black kohl. A flashing red nose-jewel setting off the purity of his skin. Long silver earrings drawing attention to two neat, close-to-the-head ears. Vivid red outlining elegantly shaped lips.

Ghote felt a tremor of disturbance. The hijras’ dancing presence was forcibly upsetting all his customary feelings about the opposite sex.

He debated for a moment whether he should leave at once. He could come back at a better time.

But, no. He would not be made to run away by such a coarse band invading not only the home of this new mother but, worse, the quietude of his own mind.

He was glad, a few minutes later, that he had stood his ground. The new mother came out at last into the building’s forecourt, carrying her baby. Her young husband, looking a little sheepish, accompanied her. And it was clear they had come from one of the ground-floor apartments. So not Mrs Latika Patel.

Ghote knew he ought now to enter the building, find a lift, go up to the eighteenth floor and its double apartment, 18 C/D. But he allowed himself to stay where he was for a little longer, still half in thrall to this invasion of his mind by the hijra in the lemon-yellow sari.

Now that the mother of the newborn child had arrived, the next stage of the ceremony began. Swiftly under the lemon sari the dancing hijra had stuffed a bundle of clothes, and in an instant, no bad actor, he had become a heavily pregnant woman. ‘May my little one have a rich family,’ he sang repetitively in a voice that, deep though it was, was by no means harsh. Next he added a note of comic vulgarity, first hugging his enormous belly with ‘The British gave it to me,’ then repeatedly singing variations on ‘I lost my nose-ring under his bed’ and ‘He has stung me like a scorpion.’ Then, lapsing into his pregnancy role, he went on to ‘Oh, I am wanting something sour’ and ‘Oh, I am wanting sweet things.’

At last he collapsed into the lap of one of his fellow men-women, one dressed in a vilely vivid wide green skirt with a choli in shiny black and silver stripes above it. There he went through the motions of giving birth, with many a groan and moan of pain. Until at last he rose, the bundle under his sari adroitly transformed into a hardly visible baby in his arms. He went across to where, in the surrounding semicircle of applauding onlookers, the new mother sat, half-smiling. Cunningly loosing the clothes bundle, he appeared to bestow on the real mother the real baby already in her lap.

A hand to bless her. An embrace for the uneasily grinning new father, not without its share of sexuality. Hastily from his shirt pocket the father took the stapled wad of small denomination notes he had put there in advance. And the invasion was over.

Quickly Ghote slipped past the still-delighted crowd, ran up the steps of the building, found the liftman he had hoped for, shot upwards.

He found Mrs Latika Patel, when a servant had ushered him in, sitting plumply comfortable in one of the huge brocaded armchairs in the big, coolly air-conditioned drawing room, its tables laden with pieces of fashionable tribal art, its walls dotted with gold-framed mirrors, its floor richly silk-carpeted. She had a baby in her arms – to judge by the tiny pink dress, several weeks old – and was looking still almost as much a new mother as her neighbour down in the forecourt.

‘Madam,’ he began sharply, when he realized he was getting little of Mrs Patel’s attention. ‘Madam, I very much regret it has become necessary to ask further questions about the theft from this apartment one month past. Police has, I am sorry to tell, failed so far to obtain any information leading to the arrest of this criminal they are calling by the name of Yeshwant.’

Mrs Patel at last glanced up from cooing at her little daughter.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘A terrible, terrible shame.’

Ghote felt a little disconcerted. But he rallied to the defence of Crime Branch.

‘Shame, yes,’ he said. ‘But kindly remember that an investigation of this sort is not at all an easy matter. When the thefts—’

‘No, no. The shame of it is my losing my sapphire. Already my guru is telling me I should be wearing some new one, or my ill-luck under Saturn will go on and on. But how can I be finding time to go to Pappubhai Chimanlal and Co. when I must be nursing my little Amrita? But then Guruji is saying this is not yet the time when I can finally emerge from the cloud Saturn has shadowed me with. My seven years of bad fortune are not quite over yet.’

Ghote had no particular belief in astrological predictions. But he felt he should at least keep the baby-struck mother talking.

‘Seven years?’ he said. ‘So what it was, madam, that caused you to come under such a curse?’

‘Who shall say, Inspector? Who shall say? Perhaps it was just that I was conceived on a moonless night. But I have at last conceived a child of my own, and under a full moon. So we may yet live a happy life.’

‘Madam, I am hoping so,’ Ghote brought himself to say. ‘I am seeing your problem. Nevertheless, it is a vital matter for us in the police to obtain even the smallest indication concerning the identity of said Yeshwant.’

But Mrs Patel, back again to smiling down at her baby and crooning away, had plainly re-entered the cosy world she had been inhabiting when he had come in. He waited for a long minute, and then tried again.

‘Madam, can you recall any circumstance of the robbery that was seeming peculiar when you were discovering same?’

No response.

‘Madam? Madam?’

‘Yes, Inspector? Something you were asking?’

‘Yes, madam, yes. I was asking were any of circumstances peculiar?’

He thought, once more, that she was not going to reply. But after a lengthy pause she did manage to raise her head from contemplating the baby.

‘Peculiar? Well, you see, when I was married … It was a semi-arranged marriage, you understand, and— And for various reasons it had to take place at short notice, my husband’s relations going back to Europe, America, a question of the auspicious date. Many reasons.’

She dipped her head back down to her baby. Ghote thought he had lost her again. But she looked up almost at once and went on.

‘So there was no time for obtaining all the jewelleries there should have been. But, when at last after six years I became pregnant, of course the first thing was to buy some good pieces in case my baby was a girl and would need a proper dowry. After so many years childless, now I am having my sweet little girl I must buy many more jewelleries. When it is coming to her wedding I must have as many jewels to give in dowry as her status is requiring.’

Now at last I have got her attention, Ghote thought, and what is she telling? Some nonsenses only about buying more and more jewellery. These rich women. Not that she is worse than most of Yeshwant’s victims I have already interviewed. Almost without exception they seemed to regard police inquiries as one irritating nuisance. With each day that has passed since they have been robbed the sting of it appears to have lessened. Insurance was there, they seemed to be feeling. Why am I, they say, to be wasting my time answering each and every question this policewalla is liking to put?

And Mrs Patel was prattling on.

‘We were very lucky before my sweet Amrita was born that Pappubhai Chimanlal and Co. had just made a necklace that would fit well with the very good sapphire they had. They are saying they will be able to make another just like it now, but only if we are giving them time to find a sapphire equally as good.’

And, with that, the excessively devoted mother turned back to her little Amrita. Eyes for nothing else.

Inwardly cursing her, Ghote found himself wondering how it was that, married for six years, the Patels had only just achieved parenthood. Some women’s problem? Or, perhaps, the semi-arranged marriage, a negotiation where the girl could say, No, had been instead a fully arranged one, a contract between two families that left no room for the bride’s rejection? In such cases it was sometimes long before successful sexual adjustment was arrived at, so it was no great surprise that the little girl was getting so much attention. It was good, in fact, to see a wealthy mother not passing a baby over to an ayah at the first possible opportunity.

But this was no time for such speculation. If only just one of his questions would get a proper answer. And then, too, he would like to be given permission to examine the kitchen where climbing Yeshwant had entered, and he would like to see the master bedroom and the exact place that Mrs Patel’s sapphire necklace had been left.

And, most of all, he wanted to question the servants. Could any one of them have told Yeshwant that the necklace was there to be stolen?

He ought, too, perhaps, to be getting more exact details of where else in the apartment Yeshwant must have been. Somewhere still there might be some tiny piece of evidence the dizzying climber had left behind, a fragment of cloth, a fingerprint that could be identified. But what hope was there with this utterly faraway mother in front of him? The two days of his investigation had been—

His train of thought was suddenly and brutally interrupted.

The door behind him was flung open and, turning, he saw come striding in a man, wearing smart sports clothes, short of stature but nevertheless totally commanding, full-faced, double-chinned, the whole suffused with rage. He could be none other than Shri R. K. Patel, son of a minister and himself an MLA.

And it was immediately evident, as scrambling to his feet he assessed the situation, that he was not going to be able to get from the newcomer even as much as he had so far extracted from his wife. Such overwhelming rage could not be penetrated.

‘Tea,’ the MLA spluttered out, hardly, it seemed, taking in the fact that he was not alone with his wife. ‘Tea. Where is my tea? I am coming back from Bombay Gym, tired and exhausted after my hard work-out, and where is my tea? Where? Where?’

Absorbed as she had been in her tiny daughter, Mrs Patel could not but respond to the irruption.

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Oh, you are back itself already? What time it is?’

‘What time? What time? It is time for my tea. And where is it? Where?’

‘Oh, I had not realized it was so late. I was— Darling, this is a police inspect— Oh, please, please, Inspector, ring that call-bell that is just beside yourself.’

Ghote, a little bewildered, looked round, saw on the wall near him a big brass push-bell, pressed it.

And found that R. K. Patel’s rage had, momentarily, been redirected. To himself.

‘Police. Police. What in God’s name is a policeman doing here? In my drawing room. Some jack-in-office itself?’

Ghote glanced back at Mrs Patel, but saw at once that she was not going to offer any explanation.

‘Sir,’ he said. ‘Sir, I am Inspector Ghote. From Crime Branch. I am here, sir, in connection with the burglary that was taking place. Sir, one sapphire necklace, with gold chain of altogether little monk—’

‘Damn it, Inspector, do you think I don’t know what my own wife’s stolen necklace was made of. It cost enough, let me tell you. It cost—’

But at this moment through the door that R. K. Patel had left swinging open there appeared a servant boy. Pale with terror, he was holding in front of himself a large tray on which there rested teapot, cup and saucer, sugar bowl, and plate heaped with spicy-smelling snacks. He scuttled forward and placed it all on a table beside what was evidently the master’s chair.

‘At last. Tea.’

R. K. Patel slumped down in the chair, reached forward, snatched the carefully folded napkin matching the tray’s pretty embroidered cloth, spread it over his fat little tummy, seized a samosa from the heaped pile, thrust it towards his mouth, bit half of it off, masticated noisily.

Ghote wondered if he could after all go back to putting his questions to Mrs Patel. She had, at least, been thoroughly roused from her baby-oriented dreamworld by this invasion.

Hastily he reviewed the conversation he had so far had with her. Yes, permission to speak with the servants. That must be next.

He took a short step forwards.

But from beside him, from the master chair, there came then a scream of fury, louder even than anything that had gone before.

‘Teaspoon. Teaspoon. No damn teaspoon. Put sugar in my tea, and nothing to stir it with. Damn it, damn it, damn it.’

And R. K. Patel rose to his feet like a giant sea-serpent shooting up from the depths, seized the tray beside him, lifted it into the air and brought it crashing down, sending tea from the pot streaking out along the richly carpeted floor and the remaining samosas scattering everywhere like so many pieces of an exploding bomb.

Ghote saw that now the only thing he could do was to leave. As unostentatiously as he could.

But, almost at the door of the apartment and its waiting servant, he had a piece of luck. From somewhere a little further along the wide carpeted corridor there emerged a man who could only be the family guru Mrs Patel had spoken of. He was an odd-looking figure, at least in contrast to the opulent apartment he seemed to be at home in. Out in the streets half a dozen wandering sadhus, three white stripes across their foreheads, might look much as he did. But here he stood out. He was, to begin with, totally naked except for a cloth hanging from his somewhat fleshy hips and twisted under his loins. Then his hair, which was grey almost to whiteness, had been allowed to grow to its fullest extent and appeared to be caught up behind him in half a dozen loose ropes, coloured by the years to an unappetizing yellow.

But, despite his outward appearance, he at once betrayed, in speaking in excellent English, a degree of education no one would necessarily have expected.

‘Good morning. I believe I am addressing Inspector Ghote?’

‘Yes. Yes. But how were you knowing …?’

A roguish twinkle in the old man’s eyes.

‘Are you looking for supernatural powers, Inspector? Have you forgotten that servants talk?’

‘Oh, yes. Yes. Yes, I suppose that is the answer.’

He wished once again that he had been able to question these servants. Was it possible that one of them might have sent a message somehow to Yeshwant telling him that the necklace was there for the taking?

‘Yes,’ the curiously disconcerting guru went on. ‘That has given you one answer. And I am able to set your mind at rest on another matter, too.’

‘Yes, Guruji?’

What other matter could the man have in mind?

A smile on the full, fattish face in front of him.

‘You have been hoping one of the servants here has been able to tell this famous thief Yeshwant where he could find madam’s sapphire necklace, yes?’

‘But— But—’

‘But how did I know that, Inspector? How did I know what it was you were thinking? My mysterious powers? No, not at all. Think. Think, as I have done. What else but that would a visiting police officer want to know?’

‘Well, yes … Yes, I see now that is— Obvious.’

‘Just because a man has undergone what is necessary to free himself from the world and its cares, it does not mean that he has lost all the brains God has given him, you know.’

‘No, no … I— I am sorry to—’

‘But not to mind. What you are wanting to know is whether your Yeshwant had a spy in this household, yes? And I can answer that easily. How could he? How could any servant know that madam would leave her necklace outside her safe that night? And if any one of them did by some unlikely chance, how could they then tell this climbing thief of yours in time for him to come when he did? Yes, Inspector?’

Ghote thought. But he needed to think only for a moment.

‘Yes, Guruji, you are right. I do not think it is at all worth surmising on the servants here any more. Thank you.’

Another faint, there-and-gone smile of the plump face.

‘So, tell me, before you sensibly left madam after that tea-tray crashed so noisily to the floor, were you finding the other questions you came here to ask answered equally well?’

Again Ghote paused a moment to think. But no reason not to tell the simple truth.

‘No, Guruji. In fact I was not gaining very much of new knowledge at all.’

‘Madam much occupied with her little Amrita, yes?’

‘Yes. Yes, she was.’

Then an idea came to him.

‘But you, Guruji,’ he said. ‘Perhaps you can give me some better informations?’

‘Fingerprints? Footprints? A thread caught on some protruding ledge? No, Inspector. I was not here when the robbery occurred. And even if I had been I am not someone likely to notice smudged surfaces, dirt on the floor or little pieces of cotton where they should not be. I am, after all, detached from this world.’

A sharp look from his droopily large eyes.

‘I think I see you are asking yourself how it can be that someone who can speak English as it should be spoken is still one who has renounced the world. Let me rid you of that problem. You see, I came from a very well-off family, and before I was twenty years of age, while I was still at college, my father and mother had found a good match for me. She was a girl in a family whose business would fit in well with that of my father. Now, at that time, I was by no means averse to the feminine. I do not want you to think I was someone like those hijras down in front of the building just now. Not at all. But I felt that a marriage simply for the sake of joining two families together, although it was to a girl who though I had never seen I might have liked, was altogether too much of an intrusion upon me. So I took the only course I saw as open. I ran away. I became a wandering sadhu, and eventually I found myself up in the Himalayas, in a cave, alone. And there for some long time, perhaps it was years, I meditated. And at last I found I had filled my head with inner peace. Then I felt able to come down to the world, to my native Bombay even. And here I have been able to give advice to people facing the problems of daily life, even if I sometimes put that advice in ways they are able to accept. And so I became the guru of a distinguished family in the city, and I go also to other houses from time to time. There, does that put your mind at rest, Inspector?’

‘Yes. Yes, of course, Guruji.’

Were there other mysteries this man, who seemed to know so much about what went on in this sky-high isolated apartment, could explain?

But he was not to discover.

‘However, enough of myself. Or rather enough of the man you see before you, whose life I can look at from a distance as one used to look at lives in books. No, Inspector, all I have to tell you now is that you will hardly learn more from poor Latika.’

From the abruptly distant expression on the guru’s plump face Ghote saw that he was going to hear nothing else from him.

‘Well, Guruji,’ he murmured, ‘I am glad to have met.’

He turned towards the front door where the servant was still patiently waiting.

So, one other interview, he thought, when I have learnt nothing of any actual use. But somehow I must. If I myself could only be the one to lay by the heel this Yeshwant …