CHAPTER 17 Cotton Green
The taxi driver had asked twice, and at ten past three on Monday morning, with the harbour on their left and the road under an inch of black water, he asked a third time.
"Cotton Green, saab? Confirmed? Nothing is there. Godowns. Rats. Port Trust chowkidar who sleeps." He looked at Raghav in the mirror — jacket, no tie, no bag, a face that had not been to bed — and did the sum. "You are meeting a woman."
"Something like that."
"At three?"
"She keeps odd hours."
The driver made the noise Mumbai taxi drivers make when an answer will do, and turned off the main road onto a lane the monsoon had turned into a canal.
He had left the car at home, and the phone — the real one, the one whose token had walked past two dead people while he was on a stage and in his bed — switched off in a kitchen drawer under the takeaway menus.
He had come with a wallet and Friday's text in his head.
Monday, 03:15. Read the fallback. Somebody who was not Sana knew about this place.
He had spent the weekend deciding that this was a reason not to come and had got into a taxi anyway.
The lane gave out. Ahead, under a sodium lamp blurred by rain, the Port Trust godowns began — long, low, tin-roofed, running away into the dark.
Across the tracks the ship-breakers' yard at Darukhana was a wall of shadow with the front third of a hull leaning out of it, cut open, ribs showing.
The air was rust and diesel and fish, and over all of it the rain on the tin, a hard level drumroll that got into the teeth.
"Wait here," Raghav said.
"How long?"
"I don't know."
"Meter is running." The driver killed the headlights without being asked, which was the most sympathetic thing anyone had done for him in a week.
Gate 4 was a number stencilled on a concrete post and a steel gate padlocked and chained by somebody who cared more about the padlock than the gate.
The right-hand leaf hung off its lower hinge, and where it hung there was a gap a shoulder would go through.
Inside: a cracked and puddled yard, an open container with nothing in it, and against the far wall a squat brick building with a corrugated shutter down over its front.
Above the shutter, in the railway lettering that had been on every station in the country since before he was born, CLOAK ROOM then slower.
"I've got a pattern and a login and a hunch, and I know exactly what happens if I say a name to you tonight and I'm wrong.
You'll bury the right one to protect the wrong one.
Not because you're bad. Because that's what you do, sir.
You take a thing that's true and you make it — inconclusive.
" The word came out with an edge he did not, yet, understand.
"When I've got the session tied to a body — an actual person at an actual keyboard, not a login five people share — I'll say it, loud enough that even you can't file it.
Until then it's one of five and I'm not going to be the first sound that fits. "
He thought about pushing, and did not.