CHAPTER 11 PR Leak
"They're saying I killed him."
Vik's voice was ragged — running, or crying, or both. Behind him a television was talking and somebody was knocking on something.
"Every channel. Every paper. My face next to the word 'murderer', Raghav. Next to the actual word."
"What are you — Vik, slow down. What are they saying?"
"Check your phone. Check any screen in the whole bloody city."
He pulled up the news with his thumb, still lying down, and then he was sitting up.
brEAKING: TRINITY VP THREATENED FOUNDER DAYS BEFORE DEATH. Under it: Elevator sabotage — inside source reveals executive rage. Under that, in the tabloid font: "I'LL KILL HIM" — WITNESSES REPORT VIOLENT CONFRONTATION.
The photograph had been chosen by someone who knew what a photograph was for. Vik at last year's Diwali party, mouth open mid-shout, finger jabbing at the air. Cropped tight, so the people laughing on either side of him were gone, and at that angle joy looked like rage.
"I never said that," Vik was saying. "I never threatened anyone. That photo is from — Raghav, that's the Diwali thing, that's me doing the — the sales-target thing, the joke, you were there —"
"I know what it's from."
"Then say so! Say it to somebody!"
"I will. Where are you?"
"Flat. There are reporters outside. Camera crews. Camera crews, yaar, with the vans. My neighbour's kids are watching from the corridor like I'm some kind of —" His voice cracked. "My mother called. She's seeing this on Aaj Tak. My mother, Raghav."
"Vik. Listen to me. Don't open the door. Don't talk to anyone. Don't—"
"Don't what? Don't exist?"
The line beeped. Meera.
"I have to take this."
"Don't you dare hang up on—"
He switched. Meera's voice came in sharp and already moving.
"Damage control. Boardroom, twenty minutes. Don't talk to anyone. Don't send emails. Don't think too loudly near a reporter."
"Meera, who's feeding them this?"
"Does it matter? It's out. It's got legs.
It'll be walking by noon and running by evening.
" He could hear her typing — six conversations and this one.
"And they've put Priya's photo next to his on two channels already.
Nobody's said anything. They've just put the photos next to each other and let people look. "
"That's obscene."
"That's television. Vik didn't help himself with the football thing last year either."
"That was a game. He was celebrating a—"
"Twitter doesn't do nuance, Raghav. Neither does the news. Twenty minutes."
She was gone. Immediately, another call. Unknown number.
"Mr. Malhotra?" A woman's voice, bright and professionally warm. "Rashmi Sharma, Times Now. We're running a segment on executive culture at Trinity. Would you care to comment on whether you were aware of Mr. Rane's history of violent—"
He killed it. Another. Another reporter. He turned the phone to silent and watched it light and light and light on the bed.
He rang Vik back. It went to a recorded woman telling him the number was busy.
He rang again pulling on yesterday's shirt, and again with one shoe on, and the third time it rang out and stopped, and he stood in the middle of the bedroom with the shoe in his hand and the phone against his ear listening to nothing.
◆
Bandra was under water at the junction and the taxi took forty minutes to do what should have taken fifteen, and the whole way the city was talking about it.
At a red light he saw his own face on a stranger's phone through the taxi window — a news app on Trinity's culture of aggression — and looked away.
The auto beside them had the radio on. …
serious questions about oversight at India's premier tech company…
The driver caught the name, glanced in the mirror, and decided not to ask.
At Mahim the water came up to the sills and a boy in shorts stood in the middle of it directing traffic with a bamboo pole and great authority, and the taxi went where the pole said.
Raghav thought, with the clarity that comes at the wrong time, that the boy was the only person in the city that morning who knew what he was doing.
Trinity's lobby was chaos. Reporters everywhere, all shouting; security had made a corridor of themselves, and cameras still came through the gaps.
"Mr. Malhotra, did you know—" "How long has the board been aware—" "Will you suspend—" "Sir, was Ms. Nair—"
He kept his face at neutral, the corporate setting that could mean anything and therefore meant nothing, and got to the lift. The doors closed on the noise. He could feel it following him up anyway.
◆
The emergency board had the feel of a wake where nobody had liked the deceased. Directors sat with the maximum distance between them, one empty chair each side. Krishnamurthy looked five years older than Friday and had not bothered with the cardigan.
"Explain," he said, before Raghav had reached the chair.
"There's nothing to explain. The allegations are false."
"False doesn't matter if the market believes them." Krishnamurthy turned his tablet round. Red, all the way down. "We're off eight per cent in pre-market. Singapore has rung twice and I have not picked up because I do not yet know what to say."
Arvind Kapoor, at his corner, said, "Seven point eight," without looking up from his notebook, and nobody thanked him.
The door opened and Meera came in like a surgeon arriving at a car crash. Laptop open before she had sat; the wall screens lit. Twitter feeds. News sites. A YouTube clip on loop, Vik's face and Deshpande's face and between them a question mark.
"Timeline." She did not sit. "The story broke at 5:15 on a finance blog. Small, but connected. By 5:45 three majors had picked it up. Six o'clock, television. Currently trending number two nationally, number one in Mumbai, and I'd expect us to overtake the cricket by lunch."
"Where did it start?" Raghav said. He suspected he knew, and did not know which of his suspicions he believed.
"Anonymous source. Someone with internal knowledge. Dates, times, overheard conversation." Meera pulled up a document. "They claim Vik said, quote, 'I'll kill him if he blocks the promotion again.' Three witnesses supposedly confirm."
"What witnesses?"
"Anonymous."
"Convenient."
"Effective," she said. "It's got a photo and a quote. That's all a Tuesday needs."
"He said it at a party. He was drunk. He'd just been passed over. Half the sales floor says worse about me every Friday—"
"Half the sales floor's boss didn't die in a lift the week after."
Alisha was at the far end, beside the window, and had not spoken. She was watching the screens the way she'd watched the lobby door on Wednesday night, and when Raghav's eyes went to her she did not look away and did not look anything.
"We need to suspend him," someone said from the middle of the table. The banker.
"That's an admission of guilt."
"It's distancing ourselves from a scandal." Krishnamurthy. "The merger is in its final stages. I have a fiduciary—"
"He's the Senior VP of Sales, he's not a—"
"He is a photograph, Mr. Malhotra. This morning that is all he is." The old man's voice did not rise. "I did not make him one. Neither did you. But I will not pretend he is something else in front of Singapore."
"Suspension is a personnel action," Arvind said, to his notebook. "It requires documentation. A board resolution, a letter, a copy to HR. If the board wishes to be seen to act, it should be seen to act correctly. Otherwise it is only a press release."
"Thank you, Arvind."
"I am noting it."
"Yes." Krishnamurthy closed his eyes briefly. "You always are."
Down the table the banker said, "Do the police have anything, actually?
Other than the — the shouting?" and nobody answered him, because nobody knew, and Meera said, "They have what everyone has, which is the footage and a photograph and a great many people who want to be helpful," and moved to the next slide.
Raghav's phone buzzed on the table. He looked down.
They're taking me in.
It went through him like cold water. He stood, chair scraping.
"Where are you going?" Krishnamurthy said.
"To do something other than manage optics while a man drowns."
But Meera had already put the live feed up.
A news channel had a crew outside Vik's building in Khar, and the whole board of Trinity Infoworks watched, in silence, as two constables and a man in plain clothes brought Vik Rane out through his own front gate into the rain.
No handcuffs. A hand on the elbow. He was shouting something and the reporters' voices drowned it.
The camera found his face and stayed on it — wet, furious, bewildered — and it was exactly the face the story needed.
DETAINED FOR QUESTIONING, said the ticker. Not arrested. Nobody at the table read the difference.
"Well," Meera said quietly. "That simplifies things."
His phone buzzed again. Not unknown. Verma, Strategy.
Loud men make good television. You told me that once, didn't you?
He had never told her that. He had never told anyone that. He read it twice. It was a question, and it was the kind of question that could be shown to anyone afterwards and would look like a woman asking. He deleted it. It had already got under his skin.
On the screens they replayed the gate. Each loop made Vik look guiltier. Each loop cut the story a little deeper into the city's memory.
"Draft a statement," Krishnamurthy said. "Support for the investigation. Full confidence in the process. Distance from the individual."
"His name is Vik."
"His name is whatever the media decides it is." Krishnamurthy stood and buttoned his jacket. "And this morning it is 'suspect'. I am sorry. I am. Sit down."
The meeting dissolved. Directors went out fast and separately, like people leaving a building somebody had said was on fire.
Arvind capped his pens in order and went.
Alisha went last but one; at the door she stopped beside Meera's chair, said something short, and Meera nodded without looking up.
Then Alisha's heels went away down the corridor and only Meera was left, fingers still moving over her keyboard, six windows open, none of them the one with Vik's face on it.
Raghav did not sit down. He waited until the door had shut.
"You leaked it."
She did not look up. "I managed it. There's a difference."
"You told me on Friday it was insurance. You said 'not to use — to hold'. You made me say it back."
"Insurance pays out, Raghav. That's what it's for.
" Her hands did not stop. "And I didn't leak it.
I don't leak. I had a source, and I had a photograph, and I had a decision to make about when a thing that was going to come out came out, and I made it.
Somebody was going to say the words 'I'll kill him' on television this week.
I made sure they said them on a Tuesday, at five in the morning, on a finance blog, where I could see it coming. "
"You destroyed him."
"I saved the company." She looked up then. "Forty thousand employees. Versus one man who was always too loud for his own good."
"That's not—"
"The story was going to break anyway. I made sure it broke favourably."
"Favourably for whom?"
"For the forty thousand who still have jobs after Wednesday.
" She closed the laptop. "Vik doesn't come into it.
Never did, not really. He thinks anger is honesty and volume is strength.
In this city both of those are just an invitation to be eaten.
" She stood, and for a second she was only tired.
"I liked him, actually. He was funny. That doesn't come into it.
Do you want me to say I'm sorry? I'll say it. It won't change the ticker."
"Who was the source, Meera?"
"Mine."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only one you're getting. I don't burn sources.
It's the last thing from the old job I've kept.
" Three taps on the closed lid. "Statement in an hour.
Continuity, confidence, distance. And Raghav — Priya's not the story now.
That's the other thing this morning did.
You might want to think about how you feel about that before you decide how you feel about me. "
She went out. The door sighed shut. He was alone with the screens.
The loop played. Vik through his own gate. Vik's face. Vik's mouth making a word nobody could hear. Then market analysis, then Vik again. The same thirty seconds, over and over, and each time a little more true — or at least more believed, which in Mumbai came to the same thing.
His phone lit. Unknown number.
The loud ones always fall first. The quiet ones keep filing.
He looked at it until it went dark. Then he looked back at the wall, and because there was nothing else to look at he watched the loop again.
This time, because he was not watching Vik, he saw the crowd.
Reporters. Umbrellas. Two boys on a bike who had stopped to see what the fuss was.
A woman at the very edge of the frame in a plain cotton kurta, no makeup, hair tied back, holding no umbrella and not seeming to mind, watching the gate with her head very slightly on one side.
She could have been anyone. A neighbour. Somebody's sister. She was there for one loop and the crop of the next one took her out, and by the time the third came round he was thinking about the statement, and had forgotten her.