CHAPTER 8 Jazz Bar
The Blue Note kept its door at the bottom of eleven steps behind the Colaba hotel's kitchen entrance, and at one on Saturday morning the steps were a waterfall.
Raghav went down them with one hand on a wet wall and pushed the door with the other.
The brass handle was warm. Inside, in defiance of a ten-year-old law, smoke hung at head height, and from the speakers a trumpet was playing So What — going to static every time the thunder came in over Marine Drive and coming back when it left.
The bar had survived in Colaba by ignoring the century.
Red leatherette, a mirror the length of the counter gone silver at the edges, a turntable under a plastic hood, and behind the bartender a wall of vinyl in shelves that ran floor to ceiling, spines out, hundreds of them.
Four customers at this hour: a couple in the far booth not talking, an old man asleep upright under a Coltrane poster, a woman at the end of the bar reading a paperback in the light from the till.
The bartender looked up without surprise.
Heavy-set, sweat darkening his cotton shirt, eyes that had heard enough confessions to qualify as a priest. He put a coaster down where Raghav's hand had landed on the bar and looked at the water running off Raghav's sleeve onto it, then at Raghav's face, and seemed to find both about what he had expected.
"Whiskey," Raghav said, and heard the word crack in the middle.
It came without ceremony. He did not touch it.
He had left the car two streets over on the only stretch of kerb above water and walked the rest — past the hotel's dark portico where a doorman slept upright under the arch, round to a night porter smoking under the kitchen awning who had pointed him to the steps without being asked what he wanted.
Now his eyes went up the wall of records and found them.
Kind of Blue, twice over. One on the third shelf in a sleeve gone soft at the corners.
One on the fifth, laminated, catching the bar's yellow light and giving it back shiny.
Two copies of the same record. Multiple choice with the same answer twice.
"That one," he said. "The top one."
The bartender's hand went up and stopped. "You sure, saab? Bottom one's the better pressing."
"The top one."
The man pulled it down carefully, like something he had been handed with instructions, and set it on the bar between the coaster and the till.
"Lady brought this one in. Spectacles. Said the pressing was no good, said keep it up high where the damp can't reach it, said somebody might ask.
" He wiped his hands on the cloth at his belt.
"Somebody did ask. Thursday night. Not you.
I told him we don't do requests." He let that sit.
"I'm telling you because you look like you'd want to know, and because it's one in the morning and I don't like being asked things twice. "
Raghav looked at the sleeve and did not pick it up yet.
Priya had been thorough. She had sealed the cardboard against the monsoon in plastic that had begun to lift at the edges.
In the lower corner of the back, exactly where she'd said, small as a birthmark, was a QR code the size of a fingernail.
You would have had to be looking. You would have had to have been told.
He took out his phone. Twenty-three per cent, red. He braced his wrist against the sticky wood and held the camera over the square until it caught.
Access denied: Local sync required.
Of course. Not the cloud. Here — on the bar's own system. He looked past the bartender's shoulder to a laptop open beside the turntable, its screen showing a playlist in the tired blue of some free software, waveforms scrolling under the trumpet.
"Your system," he said. "Five minutes. That's all."
The bartender's eyes went to something over Raghav's shoulder and came back changed. When he spoke his voice had dropped. "Can't do, saab."
"I'll pay—"
"Not about money."
Raghav turned on the stool.
Two men in the corner booth who had not been there when he came down the stairs. Dark jackets in a room where nobody wore a jacket. Faces set to neutral — men memorising a room. One stirred his drink anticlockwise. The other stirred his clockwise. Between them, on the table, nothing.
"Friends of yours?" the bartender said. It was not a question.
The door chimed. A third man came down the last of the waterfall shaking out an umbrella like a man with all night to spend, took the stool three down from Raghav's, said "Rum" without looking at the bottles, and did not look at Raghav either.
He looked at the mirror. In the mirror he looked at Raghav.
The bartender polished a glass that was already clean. He leaned in, and under cover of the cloth slid the laptop half an inch along the counter — towards Raghav, away from the turntable, into the shadow of the till.
"Kitchen's through there," he said, barely moving his mouth. "Back door, alley. First—" the laptop came another inch "—thirty seconds. Starting now."
Raghav's hands were on the keys before the sentence finished.
The playlist software had a scan function buried under a menu meant for barcodes on new stock.
He found it on the second try. Held the sleeve to the laptop's camera.
Nothing; the laminate glared. Tilted it.
Nothing. Third time the square resolved, the screen changed, and a folder he had not opened opened itself.
Files ran down the window. Doc001.wav. Doc002.
wav. Doc003. Down to Doc019, each with a timestamp, and the timestamps marched — 23:57, 00:02, 00:07, 00:12 — three hundred seconds apart, exact, like a man walking a corridor and touching every door.
He clicked the first. White noise came through the laptop's tinny speaker; and under it, when the ear adjusted, a pulse — syncopated, deliberate, a pattern hidden in the hiss.
Sana's. He would have known it in a crowd.
Twenty seconds.
He set the whole folder to transfer to his phone.
The progress bar came up and began to crawl.
Beside it the metadata pane scrolled as each file was touched, one line at a time — the labels she had given them, glimpsed and gone.
Doc001 — First Payment — Mauritius Holdings LLC.
Doc007 — Export Licence — Delhi, Mumbai; sub-lic.
Jakarta, Riyadh, Ankara. Doc013 — Compliance Note — maintain 5-minute cadence for audit stability — AK.
The initials went past him the way the initials at the foot of every compliance note in every company he had ever worked for went past him: a department's stamp, a desk's tick, the kind of thing you stopped seeing in your first year.
He was already looking at the next line.
Doc014 — Bias Audit — false-positive tables by locality.
Priya's own audit. The one she'd been told to file and forget.
Ten seconds.
The man with the umbrella had stopped pretending to drink. He had turned his glass a quarter and was watching Raghav in the mirror with nothing on his face. In the corner booth the two spoons had stopped.
Five.
The bartender's hand came down flat on the laptop and closed it. "Kitchen. Now."
Too late by a second and a half. The umbrella man was off his stool and standing in the gap between the end of the bar and the kitchen door — not blocking it so much as occupying it — and his smile, when it came, was apologetic and corporate, the kind that comes before a letter.
"Mr. Malhotra," he said. "We should talk."
Raghav had never seen him. He was sure of that later and he was sure of it then. Thirty-something, forgettable by design, a face you would pass on a station platform without registering it. Somebody's function rather than somebody's name.
"I don't think so," Raghav said.
He picked up the whiskey and threw it. Not at the man — at the mirror.
The glass hit the silvered surface behind the bottles and the mirror came apart in one bright crash — glass, amber, a bottle going over — and everyone in the room flinched the way people do when something large breaks.
In the second that bought him he put his hand on the bar and went over it.
His knee took a bottle of rum with it. The bartender stepped aside — a man who had survived raids and was not going to die in a bar fight over somebody else's record — and Raghav went through the kitchen door with the laminated sleeve in one hand and his phone in the other, the progress bar in his pocket still crawling.
The kitchen was steam and ghee-smoke and a single cook at a tava who did not look up. Past him. A door with a bar across it. He hit the bar and the door gave and he was in the alley.
The alley was a river. Water ran ankle-deep, then shin, carrying the night's rubbish — cigarette ends, marigold petals from some earlier ceremony, one blue chappal without its partner — towards a blocked drain.
He went left because left was downhill, and lost a shoe to the flood in the first ten metres and did not stop for it.
Behind him the kitchen door banged. Feet — but careful ones.
Nobody ran flat out through a Colaba alley in July unless they wanted to leave in an ambulance.
A gate. A courtyard with a tulsi plant drowning in a pot. A second gate that gave when he shouldered it. Somewhere above him a window opened and a woman's voice asked, in Marathi, who was making that racket, and the window closed again without waiting for an answer.
Left, then right, then left. The lanes closed around him.
A cat on a corrugated roof watched him go by.
A washing line whipped in the wind and somebody's sari came off it and across his face — cotton, starch, another life's soap — and was gone.
His phone shuddered against his ribs: transfer complete, or complete enough. He did not stop to look.
He came out onto a road with a taxi in it.
The taxi was arguing with the flood and losing.
He put his hand on the roof and bent to the window.
The driver looked at him — soaked, wild-eyed, one shoe, a laminated record sleeve held to his chest — and made the calculation every Mumbai taxi driver has made since the invention of the taxi. Crazy meant cash.
"Chalo, baitho."
He got in. The seat took the water off him without complaint; it had taken worse.
His own car was two streets behind him on its dry stretch of kerb, and it could stay there until daylight and a man with two shoes came for it.
The driver asked where. He said north, and then, because the man was still looking at him in the mirror, said Bandra.
The driver said Bandra was under water and Raghav said so was he.
The car heaved through the flood and found the road, and he looked back through the rear window as they went.
Three figures at the mouth of the alley. Rain blurred the edges of them. Two in dark jackets and one with an umbrella, standing where the lane met the road, watching the taxi go.
They did not chase. They did not turn for a car. As far as he could see, they did not move.
They didn't need to, he thought. They knew where he worked.
Where he lived. Where he would have to be on Monday morning at nine.
He held on to that thought all the way up the coast, because it was frightening and it was simple, and it was easier than the other one: that three men who had come down eleven steps to stop him had stood at the end of an alley and let him go.
The sleeve had held. He turned it over on his knee under the passing streetlights. The laminate had lifted at the corners and the cardboard under it had started to soften, but the little square in the corner was still there, still readable.
He took the phone out. Battery eleven per cent. He opened the folder.
Doc001 through Doc017: transferred. Doc018: transfer failed — source unavailable. Doc019: the same.
Seventeen. He had been interrupted at seventeen.
He put the phone face-down on his wet knee and pressed the sleeve against his chest and watched Marine Drive go past with its lights doubled in the water.
For a moment he was almost — not happy; nothing that simple — but in possession of something, which was more than he had been at midnight.
The phone buzzed under his hand.
He turned it over. Unknown number.
You have some of the song. Not all of it. Check what's missing.