John Irving - A Son of the Circus

“The Duckworth Club gardener?” cried Dr. Daruwalla; he’d always disliked the head mali, without knowing why.

“There was a different head mali then… you will remember,” the detective said.

“Oh,” Farrokh said. He was feeling more and more amateurish by the minute.

“Anyway, Rahul is possibly the one making the phone calls—that’s as good a guess as any,” Patel said. “But he’s no car-bomb expert.”

The doctor sat dismally still, looking at the photographic history of the murdered women. “But why would Rahul hate me— or Dhar?” Dr. Daruwalla asked.

“ That is the question you don’t answer, or even ask, in your written statement,” said D.C.P. Patel. “Why, indeed?”

Thus were both men left with this unanswered question—Dr. Daruwalla as he took, a taxi uptown to meet Martin Mills, and Detective Patel as he reclaimed his desk chair. There the deputy commissioner once more faced the winking elephants on the slack bellies of the brutalized women.

The deputy commissioner reflected that the mystery of Rahul’s hatred was probably unsolvable. There would be no end to the conjecture on this subject, which would remain unsatisfactorily answered, probably forever. The matter of what motivated Rahul’s hatred would remain incomplete. What was truly implausible in all the Inspector Dhar films was that all the murderers’ motives were plainly established; the reasons for this or that hatred, which would lead to this or that violence, were always clear. Detective Patel regretted that Rahul Rai wasn’t in a movie.

In addition to Dr. Daruwalla’s written statement, the detective had secured a letter from the doctor, for it hadn’t escaped Patel’s attention that Dr. Daruwalla was guest chairman of the Membership Committee at the Duckworth Club. On behalf of Deputy Commissioner Patel, the Duckworth Club was requested to release the names of its new members—“new” as of the last 20 years. The deputy commissioner sent a subinspector to the club with the letter of requisition; the subinspector was instructed not to leave the Duckworth Club without the list of names. Detective Patel doubted that he would need to peruse the names of all 6,000 members; with any luck, a recent membership to a relative of the late Promila Rai would be easy to spot. It was hard for the deputy commissioner to contain himself while he waited for the subinspector to bring him the list.

At his desk, Detective Patel sat among the dust motes that danced in the movement of the ceiling fan, which was silent not because it was truly noiseless, but because the constant orchestra of the secretaries’ typewriters concealed the fan’s faint whirs and ticks. At first, the deputy commissioner had been enthusiastic about the information he’d received from Dr. Daruwalla. The detective had never been this close to Rahul; now he thought it was inevitable that the killer would be apprehended—an arrest seemed imminent. Yet Detective Patel couldn’t bring himself to share his enthusiasm with his wife; he would hate to see her disappointed if there remained something inconclusive. There was always something inconclusive, the detective knew.

“But why would Rahul hate me— or Dhar?” Dr. Daruwalla had asked. To the deputy commissioner, this question had been a typical inanity from the creator of Inspector Dhar; even so, the detective—the real detective—had encouraged the doctor to keep asking himself that same inane question.

Detective Patel had lived with the photographs for too long; that little elephant with its cocky tusk and its mischievous eyes had gotten to him, not to mention those murdered women with their unresponsive stomachs. There would never be a satisfactory motive for such hatred, the deputy commissioner believed. Rahul’s real crime was that he didn’t have sufficient justification for his actions. Something about Rahul would remain uncaptured; the horror about murders like his was that they were never sufficiently motivated. And so it seemed to Detective Patel that his wife was destined to be disappointed; he wouldn’t call her because he didn’t want to get her hopes up. As he might have guessed, Nancy called him.

“No, sweetie,” the detective said.

From the adjacent office, the sound of typing ceased; then, from the next office, the typing also stopped—and so on, all along the balcony.

“No, I would have told you, sweetie,” the deputy commissioner said.

For 20 years, Nancy had called him almost every day. She always asked him if he’d caught Beth’s killer.

“Yes, of course I promise, sweetie,” the detective said.

Below, in the courtyard, the big Dobermans were still asleep, and the police mechanic had mercifully stopped his infernal revving of the patrolmen’s motorcycle’s. The tuning of these ancient engines was so constant, the dogs usually slept through it. But even this sound had ceased, as if the mechanic—in spite of his throttling up and throttling down—had managed to hear the typing stop. The motorcycle mechanic had joined the speechless typewriters.

“Yes, I showed the doctor the photographs,” Patel told Nancy. “Yes, of course you were right, sweetie,” the deputy commissioner told his wife.

There was a new sound in Detective Patel’s office; the detective looked all around, trying to identify it. Gradually, he became aware of the absence of typing. Then he looked up at the revolving ceiling fan and realized that it was the fan’s whirring and ticking that he heard. It was so quiet, he could hear the rusted iron wheels of the hot-lunch wagons that were pushed by hand along Dr. Dadabhai Navroji Road; the dabba-wallas were on their way to deliver hot lunches to the office workers uptown.

Deputy Commissioner Patel knew that his fellow policemen and their secretaries were listening to every word of his conversation, and so he whispered into the phone. “Sweetie,” the detective said, “it is slightly better than you first believed. The doctor didn’t merely see the bodies, the doctor also knows Rahul. Both Daruwalla and Dhar—they actually know who he is… or at least who he, or she, was .” Patel paused, and then he whispered, “No, sweetie—they haven’t seen him, or her… not for twenty years.”

Then the detective once more listened to his wife—and to the ceiling fan, and to the grinding wheels of the dabba-wallas’ faraway wagons.

When the deputy commissioner spoke again, it was an outburst, not a whisper. “But I never dismissed your theories!” he cried into the phone. Then there entered into his voice a familiar tone of resignation; it so pained his fellow policemen, who all admired him and could no more fathom the motive for the extreme love that Detective Patel felt for his wife than there was any fathoming the motivation for Rahul’s extreme hatred. There was simply no determining where either a love or a hate like that came from, and this mystery compelled the officers and their secretaries to listen. All along the balcony, it overwhelmed them to hear the intensity of what appeared to them to be a groundless, irrational love.

“No, of course I’m not angry,” Patel told Nancy. “I’m sorry if I sounded angry, sweetie.” The detective sounded drained; the officers and their secretaries wished only that they could help him. They weren’t eavesdropping for information related to those murdered prostitutes; they knew that the evidence of what had been done to those women was never farther away from the deputy commissioner than the top drawer of his desk. It was the pathetic sound of Detective Patel’s love for his wretched wife that removed the hand of the motorcycle mechanic from the throttle.