CHAPTER 5 Rooftop Rain
The rooftop lounge had been designed for a city that did not exist — white wicker, a polished bar, soft lighting — and at nine on Thursday night the real one had arrived.
Rain came across the terrace in sheets and hit the canopy hard enough to bow it.
Beyond the glass rail, the neon of BKC blurred and ran on the wet glass.
Raghav came up the last flight of stairs with his collar already damp.
The executive lift bank was still taped at forty-seven and the service car stopped at forty-six, so he had walked past Deshpande's floor in the dark — the tape, the one lamp still burning on the reception desk, three pens somebody had not thought to move — and up a stairwell that smelled of new paint.
Vik's sneer, Meera's tempo, Solanki's paan and the flat fan of Arvind's receipts had followed him all the way.
Over all of it, the thing she'd said to the door of Conference Four. You were on stage, weren't you?
He had an answer ready. He had had it ready for five hours.
She was at the rail with the storm behind her, and she did not turn.
Her dress was darker where the damp had reached it.
Her hair had begun to curl at the neck. There was a bottle on the low table beside her chair, sweating, and one flute in her hand with condensation running over her fingers, and one flute empty.
The bar behind them was shuttered and unstaffed, which was — he understood — the point of it.
"Rooftops suit you," she said to the city. "You look like a man who needs the illusion of distance."
"It's a roof. It was your idea."
"It was." She tilted her chin. "Companies run on illusions. Control, inevitability, trust — stories, all of them. Take them away and see what stands."
He put his phone face-down on the table beside the bottle, out of habit and out of a wish to be seen not checking it, and sat. She watched the phone go down the way she had watched a spoon in Arvind's hand.
"I was on stage," he said. "You asked. From quarter to ten, and again for the toast just before eleven, and at ten to midnight I was being photographed with a man from Singapore. Four hundred people. There's video."
"I know. I watched it." She turned, finally. "You're the best-alibied man in Mumbai. Doesn't it worry you, how good it is?"
"Why would it?"
"Because a very good alibi is a thing somebody can use, isn't it? It tells them exactly where you weren't." She sipped and, without ceremony, held the flute out to him. He took it. Her fingerprints were on the glass and the champagne was cold enough to hurt.
"You dissect everything," he said. "That the journalist in you?"
Something happened to her face and stopped happening. "Old habits," she said. "Truth is a currency. Onshore, offshore, it doesn't matter. The only question is who's paying and who's collecting."
"And which are you?"
"Tonight?" She took the glass back, drank from where his mouth had been, and set it down. "Collecting."
"From whom?"
"Everyone I talked to today. Your board, who wanted to be told they were inevitable and are now telling each other. Meera, who wants a source for everything and would like it to be her. Vik, who wants an audience."
"He's got one."
"He's got me, for as long as it's useful.
" She counted them off on the stem of the glass with one finger.
"Kapoor, who wants — well. I'm still finding out what Kapoor wants.
He answers every question you ask him, exactly, and no other.
It's like drawing water from a well one spoon at a time. Very restful."
"He told you about the pens."
"He did. You didn't listen." She sounded pleased with him for it. "Black is for what happened. Blue is for what was supposed to happen. Red is for the difference. He said it the way other men read out a train timetable, and I believed every word, and I'm still deciding what it's worth."
"And me?"
"You want to know what I've collected." She turned the earring. "See? Everyone gets something."
Far below, a local crawled along the Western line towards Bandra with its windows lit, a row of yellow moving very slowly through the black, and they both watched it go instead of each other.
"The lamp," she said. "On forty-seven. You said somebody had left it burning."
"Reception desk. The cleaners must have—"
"The cleaners had been. You said tidy." She let it sit. "Somebody left it on so a man could find his way to a lift, or somebody left it on so a man could be seen finding it. You'd know which. You've been up there more than I have."
"It's a lamp."
"Everything's a lamp until you ask who switched it on."
Thunder went across the sky and the canopy shivered. She sat — not the chair opposite; the arm of his — so that her hip was at his shoulder and he had to look up. Her hand rested on the wicker behind his head. Peppermint, and under it the rain on her skin.
"Eighteen months of negotiation," she said, low, "and your merger still feels fragile. Then Deshpande falls, and you stand where he stood, and suddenly it doesn't feel fragile at all. It feels deliberate. You can hear how that sounds to a certain kind of ear."
"You're implying something."
"I'm observing." Her eyes went to his throat, where his pulse had begun to show above the collar, and stayed there, and she smiled at it. "I'll tell you what I know about you. Free of charge, since you keep asking me why."
"I haven't asked."
"You've been asking since Wednesday night. You just do it with your face." Her thumb moved once along the wicker, an inch from his hair. "You need to see the pattern first. It's the only thing you've ever wanted — not the money, not the title. Those are what you get for it."
"That's a consultant's paragraph."
"To be the man in the room who saw it before the room did." She went on over him. "And that is a very easy thing to want, Raghav. It's the easiest thing in the world to give someone."
"Give," he said.
"Or take away. Same door." She leaned, not far.
Rain-mist stood on her upper lip. If either of them moved a finger's width the distance would be gone.
He was aware of every muscle it took not to move it, and she was aware of him being aware.
His hand lifted from the arm of the chair, found nothing it was permitted to do, and went to the rail instead. He held on to the rail.
"You enjoy games," he said. It was meant to be dry. It came out with a tremor in it that he heard and could not take back.
"I enjoy truths. And the ones you're sitting on are louder than this.
" She tipped her head at the storm. She stood, unhurried, and went past him to the table for the bottle, and as she went her fingertips trailed the table's edge, over the neck of the bottle, over the back of his phone where it lay face-down.
Under the rain there was a small sound — a click, soft, like a compact closing — and a vibration in the tabletop he took for the thunder that arrived a beat later, on cue.
When she came back with the bottle her smile had changed. Deeper. Harder to read.
"Why me?" he said. "Why talk to me like this."
She laughed — low, under the drumming on the canopy — and did not answer at once. She refilled the flute, drank, held it out to him again. "Because you still believe control is possible," she said. "It's very restful to be around."
Lightning laid the terrace flat and white. The lounge lights dipped, came back, dipped again. Somewhere below them a generator thought about it and did nothing.
"Come into the storm," she said.
"It's a monsoon."
"It's water. It comes off." She stepped past the edge of the canopy into the open strip of terrace and the rain took her at once, all of her, dress to skin, hair flat and gleaming.
She turned her face up to it and closed her eyes and let it happen.
She did not gasp or shriek or do any of the things people did with rain.
She stood in it like a woman being paid.
He held the rail. Every instinct in his body was a memo about the dry-cleaning. He watched her, and the rain ran down her arms and off her fingertips, and the dress was no longer hiding much of anything, and he stopped holding the rail.
Two steps and the canopy ended and the rain hit him.
Warm — that was the thing nobody said about it, that the monsoon was warm — and immediately everywhere, inside his collar, down his spine, filling his shoes.
She opened her eyes and looked at him with water running off her lashes and did not seem surprised.
"There," she said. "You can be got out from under things."
She stepped in close. Not touching. Her breath at his mouth was cooler than the rain. Her hand came up and took his tie — just the knot — and drew it down one notch, and left it there, and let go.
"Do you think it was an accident?" she said, so quietly it was almost only shape.
He knew the answer he wanted to give her. He felt it arrive and stand behind his teeth. What came out instead, stiff, soaked, absurd, was the other one: "I think speculation doesn't serve the company."
Her smile came slowly and it was, for a second, almost fond. "That's not an answer," she said. "Are you always obedient?" She did not wait for him to try. "You'll tell me soon enough, won't you?"
She went past him — her shoulder crossed his chest and the wet silk dragged, and it was the most physical thing that had happened between them and it lasted under a second — and out from under the rain into the shelter, and picked up her bag, and did not look at the table.
At the door to the stairs she turned, water running off her onto the lounge's pale tile.
"Goodnight, Raghav. Try not to drown."
The door closed softly.
He stood in the rain until the pulse in his throat had gone back where it lived. Then he went in under the canopy, dripping, and stood at the table, and looked at the two flutes and the bottle and the phone. He picked it up.
Lighter than it should have been. Not the weight — the weight was the same; it was something in the balance of it, the way a familiar object goes strange in the hand after someone else has held it.
He turned it over. Screen dark. No message.
He woke it and there was nothing there but the time, 21:47, and the merger deck, and Meera's text about Nariman Point.
Nerves. Just thunder.
He put it in his pocket, where it sat against his hip like a coin that was no longer his, and went to find a stairwell that would take a wet man down forty-seven floors without asking questions.
◆
Friday, half past eight, and he had not slept.
The rain had not stopped all night, and under it — every hour, more or less — the phantom buzz of a phone that had not, when he snatched it up, been buzzing.
He had lain in the dark going over the terrace the way you go over a contract, clause by clause, looking for the place he had signed.
Her hip at his shoulder. The knot of his tie.
The rain warm as a bath. His own voice saying speculation doesn't serve the company to a woman with water in her lashes, and her face when she heard it, and the fact that he could not decide, at four in the morning, whether she had been disappointed or delighted.
He had come in at seven because the flat had run out of ways to be paced.
The building at that hour was cleaners and security and the smell of the canteen's first tea.
On the way up the service car had stopped at the executive floor and opened on a corridor where two men from Facilities were peeling the tape off the lift bank — two of the three cars re-inspected overnight, a certificate in a plastic sleeve stuck inside each one, the third shaft still boarded.
He had looked at the boards for longer than a COO should and taken the stairs the rest of the way.
His office reflected him back in glass — walls, desk, the rain-streaked pane, four versions of a man in yesterday's tie who had had the good sense to change his shirt and had not thought to change his face.
On the screen, sixty-one unread. Singapore, condolences.
Legal, a reassurance that read like a warning.
Meera, three lengths. He scrolled through them and read none of them and checked, twice, that there was still nothing from an unknown number.
He turned the phone over in his hand. It was the same phone. It weighed what phones weighed. He had run out of ways to say that to himself, too.
The knock was one knuckle, once.
Priya Nair stood in the doorway with her spectacles fogged from the corridor and a green folder held flat against her chest with both arms. She had come up the stairs; her breath told him.
Her hair had come loose on one side and she had not fixed it, and in eleven years he had never once seen Priya Nair not fix a thing.
"We need to talk," she said. Her voice was calm. Her eyes were doing something else. "About offshore fraud. And Deshpande. I've hidden proof."