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A man walked into the bar’s dark air-conditioned interior. In the center of the garishly decorated place was a huge dance floor on which a few dozen young girls dressed in traditional Indian outfits gyrated to the rhythm of Bollywood songs. Seated at tables arranged around the dance floor were lecherous men who would get up every now and again to shower cash on girls who caught their fancy. Waiters unobtrusively served alcohol while quietly pocketing cash for arranging private encounters with the girls.
The man appeared at the door of Munna’s booth. “Hello, Munna bhau,” he said.
“Have you come to talk business?” growled Munna.
“Indeed I have,” replied Rupesh.
Chapter 21
SANTOSH UNLOCKED THE door and entered without bothering to switch on the lights. His second-floor apartment was close to the Taj Mahal Hotel, a short walk from his office in Colaba. The bright sodium-vapor street lights outside his windows bathed his dark living room in an eerie golden hue.
In the kitchen, he took out a glass from the overhead cabinet and placed it under the ice dispenser, enjoying the reassuring clink of ice cubes in the glass. He took it into the living room where he picked up the half-empty bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label from the side cabinet, poured the golden liquid into the glass, listened to the ice cubes crackle as the whisky settled in.
Just one, he told himself. Just the one. Johnnie Walker or Jack Morgan—he’d made his choice. Jack had had faith in him, helped to pick up a broken man. And this—this was the biggest case Private India had handled so far.
He wasn’t going to let Jack down.
Santosh settled in too. He stretched out on the sofa, picked up the remote, and switched on the television set. He rarely watched TV but found the sound strangely reassuring. It was a news channel showing another uproar in the Indian parliament as the government and opposition benches traded charges of corruption and incompetence.
Santosh ignored the events on television, took a generous gulp of the whisky, and stared at an oversized photograph on the wall. It showed a laughing young woman holding a six-year-old boy in her arms. It was a photograph he had taken at a hill resort, a few hours away from Mumbai.
He had not known at the time that it was the last photograph he would ever take of his wife and son.
He downed the rest of his glass in a single swig and poured himself another. His drinking had increased over the past few years, but it numbed the pain. The drooping eyes, the graying hair and unsmiling face were the result of a combination of loneliness, aging, anguish, and the drinking. Santosh continued to gaze at the photograph until he fell into a slumber. Then the nightmare took over. It was a recurring theme and varied only minimally.
Santosh, Isha, and Pravir were returning from a weekend trip to the hill resort. It had been Santosh’s effort to reconnect with his family. His work had kept him so completely absorbed that he had begun to feel like an outsider when he was seated at the dinner table with his wife and son. Even though Isha had never complained, the distance between them had been growing. For the moment, though, they had succeeded in forgetting about it. Santosh was driving the car with his wife seated next to him. Pravir was playing a video game, seated in the rear. Santosh took his eyes off the road for a few seconds. He did not see the tree at the crest of a hairpin turn a few yards ahead. There was a sickening sound of crumpling metal as the car smashed into it. The screeching of tires, the car spiraling out of control, the smell of burned rubber and fuel … Darkness.
“You killed them, you drunk bastard,” said a cop, holding out a pair of handcuffs to Santosh as he woke to the sound of alarm bells ringing in a hospital.
The alarm bells continued ringing. Switch off those goddamn bells, thought Santosh. The bells persisted. Switch them off, motherfucker, he thought, but there was no respite. The bells continued to clang noisily in his head.
Santosh woke to find his telephone was ringing. He pulled his feet off the sofa and sat up. He rubbed his eyes groggily. The clock on the wall showed three o’clock in the morning. He picked up the cell phone that was persistently ringing next to the empty bottle of Johnnie Walker and took the call.
“What’s the matter with you? I’ve been trying to reach you for the past half-hour,” said Rupesh irritably.
“Sorry, the phone was accidentally switched to silent mode,” lied Santosh.
The answer seemed to mollify Rupesh. “We’ve got a third body,” he said without pause. “You need to get yourself over to Hill Road immediately.”
Chapter 22
HILL ROAD WOUND through Bandra, a posh suburb favored by Bollywood actors, musicians, and artists. The house in question was toward a quiet stretch of the street, close to Mount Mary Church.
Santosh had asked Mubeen to pick him up. His head was aching and his stomach burning from alcohol-induced acidity. He had hurriedly dissolved a couple of Alka-Seltzer in a glass of water and gulped them down before jumping into Mubeen’s car.
There was virtually no traffic on the roads at this hour and Mubeen was able to get them to Bandra within fifteen minutes. They waited in the car at the closed gate for a few minutes before the steel grille was raised electronically to let them through. Mubeen parked in the private driveway of the bungalow next to several police vehicles and gathered his equipment from the boot of the car.
The house belonged to an Indian pop singing sensation—Priyanka Talati. A single song in a single Bollywood movie had fueled her meteoric rise to iconic status. That one song had made her a legend throughout India and all of South Asia. The soundtrack album had charted in sixteen countries worldwide, and the song had become the fastest-selling single in Asia. In a short career of five years, Priyanka had sung on over forty soundtracks across five languages and had won fifteen awards, including one National Film Award, two Filmfare Awards, and three International Indian Film Academy Awards.
Hari and Nisha were already at the crime scene, having been alerted by Santosh to the developments. Rupesh was there too, lips red with cardamom-flavored chewing tobacco.
“Your chap Hari Padhi has checked out the security system,” he told Santosh. “It’s a highly sophisticated one but it was never triggered. Either the intruder understood the technology or they were allowed in by the owner.” He led them through the entrance passageway into an elegant living room.
One of the walls was covered with awards, trophies, and gold and platinum disks while another bore a huge canvas by Indian painter Syed Haider Raza, the painting having been publicly acquired by Priyanka for three million dollars during a charity auction.
“Quite obviously the killer was not interested in either the painting or its value,” remarked Santosh, as he observed Nisha taking photographs of the crime scene. “Only a very wealthy individual would leave such an expensive painting on the wall. On the other hand, an intruder of modest means might not have fully appreciated its value.”
He shifted his gaze from the walls to the floor. Toward the center of a vast and expensive Pietra di Vicenza marble floor lay the body of Priyanka Talati, dressed in a designer tracksuit and expensive sneakers. Around her neck was the now-familiar yellow garrote.
