Читать книгу The Crooked Bullet - Rotimi Ogunjobi - Страница 4

Upton Park, London.

Raj Desai sat alone in the back office of his jewelry shop. It was Saturday night, and the staff and security had left; but like every other night, Raj locked up by himself – he was a very careful man.

He opened the front door to peek up and down the street, Bhatti’s Jewellery was on Green Street and about a hundred yards away from the tube station. All around, the street this night teemed with African and Asian immigrants, many of whom perpetually looked defeated.

Not a lot different from what he and his wife must have looked like when they had come to live here more than two decades ago, he knew. The only appreciable commercial traffic at this time was from the Tesco supermarket. It wasn’t football day, else the pubs around would have been rowdy with drunken revelers from the stadium down the road where Westham FC played their home matches. Here on these streets, spotted with phlegm and perpetually smelling of disinfectant, he and his late wife had nevertheless found good fortune

Raj shut the door and turned the key. He failed, however, to see Kalyan Shetty his son-in-law to be, running down from the train station. Kalyan knocked eagerly on the door just as Raj turned away. He is dressed in a dark suit; obviously coming from work. Raj again opened the door to let him in and then drew down the electric-operated front window security grille.

“Good evening Papa. How are you today?” Kalyan asked.

“Very well thank you, my son. You are coming from work?” Raj Desai replied. They both spoke in Hindi,

“Yes, Papa. Rupinder says to meet her at home, but it is too early since she does not arrive from work at the hospital for another two hours. So I thought to come to have a chat with you, and then maybe go home along with you “, Kalyan said

“That is fine. She works long hours at the hospital sometimes. Too long for a woman even if a doctor.” Raj regretted.

They both entered Raj’s office at the back of the shop floor. Conspicuous on a wall of the cramped office were three portraits. One was of his deceased wife Sangita, her scowl still intimidating even in the picture. The second was of his only daughter Rupinder in her graduation attire from medical school. The third portrait was of Raj, Sangita, and Rupinder, taken twenty-two years back in Mumbai, and when Rupinder was just about three years old.

Raj looked up and pointed to the picture of Rupinder.

“She takes after her mother. Unfortunately, Sangita died when Rupinder was still a little child and left us alone.” he seemed to apologize.

“I am always sorry to hear that Papa. You have done quite well, however.” Kalyan told him.

“Oh no, she has done quite well. All that you see here in this shop means nothing to me. This shop, Bhatti’s Jewellery belonged to Sangita, and she made it a success by hard work. Only she taught me enough to be able to make it prosper still. This shop we bought the shop from her uncle Shami “Bhatti” Bhatnagar. He was widowed, quite fed up with his bad arthritis, and going back home to New Delhi. We came here poor, she determined to make us rich, and rich we became. Bhatti’s belongs to Sangita, my son, Rupinder is my only success. You will take care of Rupinder for me when you eventually get married will you?” Raj asked

“I promise Papa; I promise.” Kalyan patted his hand.

Raj opened a solid wood locker and brought out a black box, expensively decorated with black velvet and gold trimmings and about the size of a medium-size pizza box. Inside, the box was lined with purple satin. It contained a gold pendant attached to a gold chain. The pendant has the shape of a bent bullet.

“Look at this; what do you think?” Raj eagerly asked.

“It is beautiful Papa, and it looks very valuable,” Kalyan confessed.

“Yes, it is valuable. It is the Crooked Bullet. It is supposed to bring peace to the marriage. By family tradition, it must be passed to the first son to get married in the family as it had been passed down for five generations. But since I do not have a son, I will give it to you”.

“Thank you, Papa. I will take care of it and cherish it.”, Kalyan was pleased to learn.

“The pendant must not be lost though, else the result will be a life plagued with great hardship for many generations following.” Raj Desai warned.

“It will not be lost, Papa. I promise to keep it and also give it to your grandson when the time comes.” Kalyan promised

Raj closed the box, quite lovingly tucked it away again in the locker, and turned the key. Then he opened a big steel safe door to put the key in. The safe contained a lot of money that had been carelessly thrown in. He changed his mind; opened the locker once again, took out the box, and put it in the safe, nodding his head in the satisfaction that this made more sense.

“You have too much money in that safe Papa; you ought to take it to the bank at the end of every day.” Kalyan worried.

“Yes, I know. There must be more than a hundred thousand pounds inside there, which are the cash sales for the entire day. Too many customers prefer to pay cash for the jewelry you know. Sangita would have insisted that the cash should be taken to the night deposit at the bank down the road, but never mind I will do that in the morning. Nobody is coming to steal a safe my son, this is London.” Raj reasoned. Up on the wall, the scowling picture of Sangita seemed to accuse him even more and to make him momentarily nervous.

“After you and Rupinder are married, I think I will sell the shop and like old man Shami “Bhatti” Bhatnagar, return home to Mumbai.” He declared

They both exit the office, switching off the lights behind them. Raj engaged the shop security system, after which they both exit the shop through a side door, which Raj also locked. Raj’s car, a Mercedes, was parked a few yards away, and both walked slowly toward it.

There was still a bit of a chill outside; summer was still several weeks away. Raj pushed his wool cap tighter on his head and wrapped his coat tighter around him. He had been thinking of what to do next. When you were nearly sixty, life seemed to become so routine, and the choices available for nearly everything became so few. Before Kalyan arrived, he had been trying to make a choice between having dinner at the Hyderabad Darbar Restaurant down the road or going nearer home at Romford to Aroma on High Street. And maybe thereafter going to The Bitter End pub for a pint or two and a chat with the denizens. Now he wasn’t quite sure anymore what to do with himself, his coveted companionship with loneliness suddenly broken

“Give me the key Papa, I will drive you home,” Kalyan suggested. They both entered the car and drove away into the darkness.

Later that night, a grim conference took place at an upmarket health spa known as Woodstock. The place, located near Chigwell had previously been a farm. Now it was a celebrity hideout – where the annual membership was rumored to cost nearly as much as a brand new Rolls Royce. The rules inside Woodstock were for those to whom money meant very little – the primary of those rules being that shoes were not permitted to be worn within the grounds of the estate.

The office in which the night conference took place looked quite like it had been time-warped from the sixties. Moses Samuel or Rabbi Zulu as the proprietor of Woodstock was more fondly called, was having a discussion with four men of Eastern Europe stock. Also in his office were three other people, one of them his closest aide Sasha Cohen, a slightly plump lady who habitually wore dark John Lennon glasses.

The huge room was completely decorated with vintage furniture and fittings; including a large Beatles grandfather clock and an RCA radiogram. On one of the walls were two huge posters each of them about eight feet tall. One was of the singer Isaac Hayes playing at the Sahara Tahoe in the “70s – with dark aviator sunglasses, a heavy chain around his neck, naked to the waist and looking so sweaty sexy. It was an image Moses Samuel always faithfully tried to imitate to the limit that his own white skin would permit. The other poster was of a barefooted Masai warrior in a full battle leap. This was the one around which he had built the new philosophies behind his life and business.

Only one of the four men in attendance spoke English, but they all nevertheless understood the instructions that were being passed to them.

“The bank is in Hackney. It was in there that a person I knew, a hard-working man, lost his home to them way back and killed himself as a consequence, do you understand?” The men nodded.

“Yah! Yah!”; they understood. They also still understood the intolerable iniquities of uncontrolled capitalist economics.

Moses Samuel pointed to a television camera on the table before them.

“See this thing? Real techie stuff. I had it specially made for me in China. It is not only a camera; it will also scramble all CCTV signals and disable all other security equipment, and so nobody will be able to understand what happened. After the job, you will drive away to Dover from where you will cross the channel and then get a plane to Brazil. By the time you return home in a couple of months, you will have no worries. Plus you will be rich.”

Sasha gave the leader of the men a large envelope which contained plane tickets, some fake travel documents. They nodded quietly and left with the television camera.

Moses Samuel switched on the huge gleaming imitation vintage RCA radiogram standing in a corner of the room, and eagerly twiddled the tuning dial till he found the channel he was looking for. It was a rogue radio channel. A hip-hop remix of an Earth Wind and Fire ballad seeped out of the large speakers of the retro-modern music center.

You will find peace of mind

If you look way down in your heart and soul

Don’t hesitate “cause the world seems cold

Stay young at heart “cause you’re never (never, never, ..) old at heart

“He’s good, isn’t he?” Moses Samuel nodded his head, and at the same time seeking the ladies” approval.

“Yes, He’s cool,” Sasha said. The other girl in the room was not so committal; neither was the small, bespectacled young man who looked like a newspaper guy. They didn’t understand this type of music.

“I’d surely enjoy working with this guy. We do have a lot in common”, Moses Samuel said.

“Half of London is dying to know who he is. Keeps extremely modest for a musician, I think. I admire that”, said Sasha.

“Ex-Man,” Moses Samuel gushed. “Ex-Man; the most mysterious and perhaps the most talented musician in England. I love the name - Superhero; superstar.”

“I’ve got to go to bed now Rabbi”, Sasha said with a reverent bow. Moses Samuel pleasantly waved both ladies goodbye.

“This job you asked those men to do at the bank, do you think it has a hope of success?” the young man asked.

“Why not?” Moses Samuel seemed surprised that anyone could think this way.

“Oh well; robbing a bank with a camera. It seems such a ridiculous notion as I see it “, the man truthfully opined.

“Exactly,” Moses Samuel agreed with him. “And it is because it looks so ridiculous that is why it will succeed. Difficult to rob a bank with a machine gun; a hundred times easier to rob a bank with a camera”.

Together they had a good laugh over their ridiculous plan. The young man shut his laptop computer and lugged it out of the room, with a reverent bow at the door.

Alone in the office, at last, Moses Samuel sat behind his huge ornate oak desk nodding and humming to the music. Ex-Man’s weekly hour-long broadcast had become a phenomenon - regularly bringing the boredom index in London crashing down every Sunday night. The pirate radio came on around eleven till midnight and then completely disappeared from the air till the next week. Within a short time, it had become one hour that discerning Londoner came to look forward to.

Much of Ex-Man’s music was not new. Much of it was really a remix of old tunes but done in ways that nobody had ever thought possible. Now, Moses Samuel thought, here was one musician worth putting money on to go places. Ex-Man’s first single - “Dynomite”, had just about a month ago, hit the chart and quickly climbed up as fast as a monkey with its tail on fire. But still, nobody knew who Ex-Man was and so deliciously, neither was he going about advertising his identity.

Dynomite had been quietly released by Def Adam - a new and unknown private label - no parties, no press. Def Adam as he found out was owned by an Isle of Man company of the same name but with nominee directors, and the distribution of the four records of the label so far was being done by Michael Jah, a Jamaican agent from a shop hemmed in between two vegetable shops right inside Brixton Market. There the trail had gone dead.

“I just sell records man, I don’t sell comics. Yeah man”, the seemingly perplexed records broker had reasoned with him.

Moses Samuel had subsequently been even more intrigued by and full of respect for this unknown artist. Certainly not like any of the no-talent wannabes parading selves as musicians on the strength of being able to ingest a lot of mind-bending chemicals and scream at the top of their voices as a consequence; the papers were always plastered with their stupid faces.

Who was Ex-man? Ironically, that mystery really had contributed in a major way to the success of the new record. Moses Samuel loved that bit of irony. As a matter of fact, it was the same sort of device which had moved his life and business forward.

He walked over to another table on which sat the one-foot high scale model of what was a shopping mall, though anyone else could have called it an art gallery. It was two-stories high, looked about a hundred yards wide, and was painted up like Andy Warhol had been at work on it. Who is Moses Samuel? Yes, they did have a lot in common, him and Ex-Man; they were both definitely destined to go places. Possibly together.