CHAPTER 12 Solankis Game
The police station at Worli had been built to sweat confessions out of people, and at three on Wednesday afternoon it had got as far as the paint.
It peeled from the ceiling in strips, each one trembling in the draught from a fan that only shook.
The floor — once white tile, now mostly paan stains — held Raghav's shoes for a half-second at every step.
Somewhere in the building a pipe dripped.
The reporters had gone from the gate; the story had moved to Khar, and to a lockup Raghav had not been allowed to see, and the only person under the awning when his taxi pulled in was a constable smoking with his back to the weather.
Solanki's office was worse than it had been on Saturday.
It smelled of mildew and old paper and sweet tobacco.
The desk was ringed with water stains. Three tin cups on one corner held tea in three stages — fresh, forgotten, fossil.
Solanki himself looked as if the room had made him.
His uniform had given up on crisp and settled for present.
The paan swelled his left cheek into a permanent half-smile.
"Sit, sit." He waved at a plastic chair that had once been white. "Sorry for the chair. Sorry for the fan. Tea?"
"No."
"Good. Fresh one is mine." He drank from it and put it back in its row.
"Thank you for coming. I said I would come to you, and then I thought, no, let him come here, let him see the fan.
Everybody should see the fan once." He looked at it.
It shook. "Your Ms. Nair. Friday morning, you were in her office.
Eleven minutes, your log says. What did you talk about? "
"The merger."
"Everybody's answer. Very popular merger." He did not write anything down. "She was worried?"
"She was — yes. She was under strain. Legal is under strain in a merger; the paperwork is—" He heard himself and stopped. "She was worried."
"About what?"
"She didn't say specifically."
Solanki nodded. He had heard the answer before, from other chairs. "And Sunday night, where were you?"
"At home."
"Alone?"
"Alone."
"Hm." He turned a cup a quarter-turn in its row. "Never mind. Everybody was alone on Sunday. I was alone on Sunday. My wife was at her sister's." He waved it off. "Your colleague. Mr. Vik Rane. Very loud fellow. Very angry. Media loves angry, na? Makes good photos. Mouth open, fist up. Sellable."
He pulled a folder from a drawer, its edges soft with humidity, and fanned the photographs across the desk. Vik at the football match, mid-tackle. Vik at last year's Diwali, glass raised like a weapon. Vik in a boardroom, finger jabbing air, taken from low down the table on somebody's phone.
"See?" Solanki tapped each with a yellow nail. "Man with temper. Dead boss. Editor doesn't need a third photo."
"That's not evidence. That's—"
"Character assassination?" The paan-red teeth. "That is a nice phrase. Where did you get it, from your Meera madam? Sit down properly, you are on the edge of the chair like a candidate."
"Did he say it? That's what you want to know. He said it. Last Diwali, in front of the sales floor, with a drink in each hand. He'd been passed over that afternoon and he was—" Raghav stopped. "It was a joke. A bad one. Everybody laughed."
"Everybody laughed. Then everybody went home. Then the man he was joking about fell down forty floors." Solanki spread his hands. "Jokes I also collect, saab. I have a drawer."
"He didn't do it."
"Maybe not. I have had him since yesterday and he has told me about his promotion eleven times, and cried twice, and asked for a particular brand of cigarette, and told me the old man liked him really, underneath.
He has told me nothing else because he has nothing else.
" He shrugged. "That is not the same as innocent.
That is only a man with nothing to say. I have a whole lockup of them. "
"With what?"
"With whatever the city sends me. Yesterday it sent me a photograph. Today—" He looked at his desk, at the folder, and did not finish. He spat into the third cup, accurate from long practice, and looked at Raghav for a while, and it was not the look of a lazy man.
"But you," he said, "you are interesting. Your access card dancing all over crime scenes. Your token playing bhangra at midnight."
He turned a page. Printouts. Entry logs, his name highlighted in yellow, timestamps circled in red. L2-East, Sunday, 23:20. E47-Lounge, Wednesday, 23:40. The lines Nidhi Rao had wiped off the wall on Monday morning at his own instruction lay on a paan-stained desk in Worli in somebody's photocopy.
His mouth went dry. "Where did you get these?"
"I asked with a paper. Your IT gave. Everybody gives when there is a paper, saab, that is what a paper is for.
" Solanki shrugged. "Don't look like that.
If they had not given, I would have thought you told them not to.
Now I only think somebody is very correct in your basement.
Small girl, tight hair. She had it printed before I finished asking. "
"Those logs can be explained—"
"Everything can be explained. Question is, who pays for the explanation?
" His voice dropped, the way a man's does when he is about to say something private in a room with a barred window.
"See, truth in this city, it has a rate card.
Wholesale for facts. Retail for lies. Premium for silence.
" He waited. "You are not laughing. Vik Rane laughed when I said it. Then he cried, but first he laughed."
He slid something across the desk. A business card, white, blank except for an account number in neat blue digits.
"Consultation fee. For ensuring investigation stays — focused. On correct suspect."
Raghav looked at it. The numbers seemed to sit up off the card.
"You're asking me for a bribe."
"Bribe." Solanki looked wounded. "Such an ugly word. I prefer 'investment in narrative stability'. Your company likes stability, no? Always stable markets, stable growth, stable this. Why not stable investigation? Same thing, less paperwork."
Thunder crossed the sea, distant, coming closer. The one bulb on its flex swayed and moved Solanki's face between comedy and threat and back.
"My nephew," he said, and it was a different voice, "Arjun."
Raghav waited.
"Twenty-two. Dharavi. Computer science topper — topper, saab, in his college, first rank. I have the certificate framed in my house because his father's house has no wall dry enough."
"Your sister's boy?"
"Brother's. Father drives auto." He let that sit. "Your company's algorithm — SafeCity — marked him. 'Potential theft risk'. You know why?"
"I—"
"Because he lived in Dharavi. Because his father drives auto." His fingers went on the desk, one at a time. "Police picked him up. Not my station."
"Which station?"
"Does it matter which? Two days lockup. No charge, only questions. Then sorry, go home." He shrugged, and it cost him something. "But now no IT company will touch him. Name is in a system somewhere. He serves tea at construction sites. Very good tea. He makes it very correctly."
The pipe dripped.
"Your algorithm doesn't see people, saab. It sees probabilities. My nephew became probability. Now you are becoming probability also. How does it feel?"
Raghav's phone buzzed against his thigh. He did not reach for it.
"Is there — could something be done? For him. If Trinity—"
"Could you what? Give him a job?" Solanki considered it seriously, which was worse than the laugh.
"He would not take it. He is proud, like his uncle.
Also his name is in a system, and your HR runs the system, and the system will say no before a human sees the form.
You built it like that. Very efficient." He waved it away.
"Anyway. That is not why I am telling you. "
"Then why?"
"So you know I am not asking for money on that. Everything else, yes. Not that."
"I didn't build SafeCity."
"No. You only sell it." Solanki leaned forward until Raghav could count the stains on his teeth. "Which is why I am asking you and not him. He cannot pay. You can."
He tapped the card. "Think of it as tax. Every business in this city pays some tax it does not put on the form."
The fan shuddered, stopped, and started again with a grinding note. Somewhere in the station a woman was wailing — grief or guilt, no telling. The smell of rain came in through the bars and mixed with the mildew.
For a second — less — Raghav thought of the phone.
Seventeen files, in a folder called nothing, behind a passcode he had changed on Monday.
Mauritius, Riyadh, a compliance note. He could put it on the paan-stained desk between the tea cups and say here, this is what she was worried about, this is why they're dead, and watch a man who had just slid him a bank account decide what it was worth.
Priya's voice, Friday, level: An inspector who eats paan asked me what my department bills a year and wrote the figure down. He kept his hand where it was.
"What did the lift company say?" he said instead. "The pin."
"Lift company wrote me a very nice letter. 'Foreign object, source undetermined, no evidence of manufacturing defect.' On their letterhead. Dsouza brought it himself and sweated on it." Solanki drank his tea. "A pin I cannot arrest, saab. It has no address. Ask me about something with an address."
"What guarantee—" Raghav began.
"Guarantee?" The laugh came from the belly, and it was bitter all the way down.
"This is Mumbai police station, saab, not Amazon.
No returns. No refunds. Only receipts." He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand.
"But I will tell you a secret, since you came all this way in the rain.
Boring killers are harder to catch than loud ones.
Loud ones — like your friend Vik — they make noise, leave traces, pose for photos, shout at the gate.
Boring ones? They file murders away like tax returns.
Very neat. Very forgettable. You know how many boring men I have arrested in twenty-six years? "
"No."
"Neither do I. That is the point."
He stood — the chair screamed — and went to the window. The sea was the colour of old chai.
"Your CFO," he said to the glass. "Mr. Kapoor."
Raghav said nothing.
"Very boring man. Very neat. Comes here to file complaints about parking.
Not once. Four times in two years. Somebody's Innova one inch over his line in your basement, and he brings a photograph, and a form he has filled himself, and receipts in chronological order — parking receipts, saab, from your own barrier, in a plastic sleeve.
" He shook his head, almost fond. "Once he reported his own car.
Over the line by one inch. He came and filed it. On himself."
"He's — Arvind is particular."
"Particular." Solanki tried the word and put it back. "You know what I think? I think boring men don't file complaints about parking. I think they file complaints to be seen filing complaints. To be remembered as a man who follows rules. Very clever. Very—" he searched for it "—tidy."
The word sat in the room.
Raghav stood. The chair scraped. "I should go."
"Take the card. Or don't." Solanki did not turn. "Angry man kills boss — that one I can put in front of a magistrate by Friday. CFO keeps parking receipts — that one my own constable will laugh at. So. You see what I have."
Raghav picked up the card. It weighed nothing. He put it into his wallet, between his insurance and his identity card, and it went in easily.
He had his hand on the door when a constable came in without knocking — a young one, wet to the shoulders, holding a plain brown envelope by its edges the way you hold something you have been told is important and not told why.
"Saab. Haath se aaya. No sender." He put it on the desk, on top of Vik's photographs. "Fellow at the gate. Didn't wait."
Solanki came off the window and looked at the envelope and did not touch it until the constable had gone. Then he picked it up, turned it over — nothing on either side — ran a thumbnail under the flap, drew out a few sheets of paper, and read the first of them.
His face changed. Raghav, at the door, saw it change and could not have said into what. Not surprise. Something older than surprise, that arrived and settled and stayed. Solanki said nothing at all. He read to the bottom of the page and did not turn to the next.
From the door Raghav could see only the top of the printout, upside down across the desk. A police case reference — a station code, a year, a serial — and beside it, small and blue and unmistakable, a logo he had last seen on a slide labelled LEGACY PLATFORMS: the shield and the eye. SafeCity.
He should have gone. He stood there instead with his hand on the door and the card in his wallet, and Solanki did not look up, and after a while Solanki put the sheets face-down on the desk and set the tea cup on top of them, and went back to the window.
He began to hum. An old film song — Raghav half knew it, the words gone and the tune left. He hummed it to the sea, not turning, and did not stop when Raghav let go of the door and went out past the constable, and the last thing Raghav saw of the room was the tea cup, sitting on the envelope.