Vikram Chandra - Sacred Games

'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.

So Sartaj and Katekar stood at the edge of Navnagar, below the small world it contained. 'All right,' Sartaj said, looking at the terraced, untidy descent of the rusted tin roofs. 'So this Bihari is the boss.'

'He plans everything. These three, these are his boys.' Katekar wiped his face with an enormous blue handkerchief, and then the back of his neck and his forearms. 'They make money.'

'Doing what? Fraud? Robbery? Or are they shooters for some gang?'

'Maybe. But I've never heard of that, Bangladeshis in a company.'

'These boys grew up here, maybe they're more Indian than anything else. But this Bihari is the key. He's older, he's professional. He lives quietly, doesn't show off his money, he clears out fast and first when there's trouble. Wherever he is, those boys are going to be.'

'Yes, saab,' Katekar said. He put away his handkerchief. 'So we find the Bihari.'

'We find the Bihari.'

* * *

Pursuing the Bihari had to wait while Sartaj fulfilled certain obligations. Policing was often a scattered business that required setting aside one job to attend to another. What Sartaj had to do now was strictly unofficial and had nothing to do with any case, and he had to do it alone. He dropped Katekar at the station and drove south to Santa Cruz. He was to meet Parulkar in a sparkling new building just off Linking Road, near Swaraj Ice-cream. Sartaj parked behind the building and marvelled at the green marble in the lobby, and the sleek steel lift. The apartment Parulkar was waiting in was supposed to belong to Parulkar's niece. This niece worked at a bank, and her husband was in import-export, but they were barely out of their twenties, and the apartment was very large and very expensive. The gold letters on the nameplate spelled out 'Namjoshi', but Sartaj was certain that the three-bedroom apartment actually belonged to Parulkar. Certainly, the ease with which he sat cross-legged on a huge sofa in the drawing room, like a rotund, khaki-clad sage, suggested a man in charge of his own prime real estate and his own destiny.

'Come, come, Sartaj,' Parulkar said. 'We must hurry.'

'Sorry, sir. The traffic is bad.'

'The traffic is bad all the time.' But Parulkar was not reprimanding Sartaj, he was fatherly and patient, and only mindful of his own hectic schedule. He pointed at a frosty glass of water on the table. Sartaj took off the silver cover and drank, and followed Parulkar across the shadowed breadth of the drawing room, to a bedroom.

Parulkar shut the door behind them and padded around the high white bed to the other side of the room. He opened a cupboard, and hefted out a black duffle-bag. 'It's forty today.'

'Yes, sir,' Sartaj said. Parulkar meant forty lakhs. These were Parulkar's recent unofficial earnings, which Sartaj would move over to Worli, and hand over to Parulkar's consultant, Homi Mehta, who would funnel it to a Swiss account and charge only a very reasonable commission. Sartaj ferried Parulkar's money every few weeks, and he had long ago stopped being surprised by the amounts. Parulkar was, after all, the commissioner for a very rich zone. It was a very wet posting, and Parulkar drank deep from its burbling fount of money. He was an avid earner, but not greedy, and he was very careful about the disposal of the money. His personal assistant, Sardesai, handled the collection of the money, but Sardesai knew nothing of what happened to the money once he had given it to Parulkar. Parulkar passed it over to Sartaj, who moved it to Mehta, the consultant. Sartaj only knew that then, somehow, the money disappeared from India and reappeared abroad, where it sat safe and accumulated interest in hard currency.

Parulkar emptied the cash on to the bedspread and handed the bag to Sartaj. 'Eighty bundles of five-hundred-rupee notes,' he said. They trusted each other completely, but this was their ritual each time money went to the consultant. Sartaj gathered up a hefty brick of money and put it into the bag. He would do this eighty times while Parulkar watched, and then they would have an agreed-upon count.

'What are you going to do about this Gaitonde business?' Parulkar said, watching Sartaj's hands.

'I was going to ask you about that, sir.'

Parulkar pulled his legs up on to the bed and took up his meditative posture again. 'I don't know that much about the Gaitonde company. There was a fellow called Bunty who ran their business in Mumbai. Smart fellow, Suleiman Isa's boys shot him, put him in a wheelchair, but he was Gaitonde's trusted man, he stayed in charge from his wheelchair. There was a time when you could just go to Gopalmath and meet Bunty, but after he got shot he went into hiding. Ask Mehta for this Bunty's number, he will have it.' Mehta, as a money manager, was neutral in the gang wars. All sides used his services impartially, and valued him equally.