CHAPTER 18 Solankis Whisper
The call came at eleven on Monday night, when the rain had softened to a drizzle.
"Drive with me, saab." Solanki, thick with paan and something under the paan — tiredness, or the particular weariness of a man who has read a thing he cannot unread. "Your name is getting loud. Too loud. Better we talk where walls don't have memories. Ten minutes. Come down."
Raghav had been home since eight, the first time in a fortnight he had been home before nine, and had not sat down.
He had slept four hours that afternoon in a chair in his office with the blinds drawn and the door locked, and woken with a crick in his neck and the burner in his fist, and had gone downstairs at six and stood in the lobby and watched people go home.
Rested people. Tired people. He had not, he found, been able to tell the difference.
He put his jacket back on and went down.
The Ambassador sat at the kerb with its parking lights on, white once, now the colour of an old tooth.
The springs groaned under him as he got into the back.
The car smelled of decades — cigarette smoke baked into the vinyl, old sweat, ten thousand conversations that had happened on that seat and been denied afterwards.
A driver in a windcheater did not turn round.
Solanki sat in front, half twisted towards the back, his bulk making the driver look like a boy, a paper cup already in his hand.
"Go," he told the driver. "Anywhere. Mahim side."
"Mahim is under, sir."
"Then go slowly."
They crawled south. At Mahim the streets were rivers, and the streetlights lay broken up in the water. A BEST bus sat beached on the divider with its passengers long gone and its LED sign still displaying, with great optimism, a route that no longer existed.
"You know what I love about monsoon?" Solanki said, and did not wait.
"Makes everyone equal. Rich car, poor car, all same in flood.
All same when engine drinks water and dies.
Very democratic, water." He spat into the cup.
"Your friend Vik made good news today. Arrest video, two million views already.
Rain, shouting, reporters pushing. Like film scene. Public loves film scene."
Through the window a man was wading through knee-deep water with a briefcase held over his head.
"He didn't do it," Raghav said.
"Of course not." Too easily. "Too messy.
Too loud. He shouts at the gate, saab, who shouts at the gate?
" He rocked with the car through a pothole that had become a pond.
Water hit the doors and found the rust holes.
"But loud makes good story. Vik fights, Vik threatens, Vik gets caught with a bag of pins.
Beginning, middle, end. Media loves. Public loves.
Even stock market loves — see?" He held up his phone.
A graph, green arrows. "Already recovering.
Your Meera madam sent me this herself. With a smiley. "
"The real—"
"Is boring. Probably. Most probably." He put the phone away.
"You know what nobody investigates in this city?
Boring. Nobody suspects boring. My constable — keen boy — he came to me yesterday, sir, sir, I have a theory, and I said, does your theory have a photograph, and he said no, and I said then it is not a theory, it is a feeling, go and have it somewhere else.
" He worked the paan across. "I had a case once.
Long back. Byculla. Wife murdered in the kitchen.
Everybody says husband — drinks, fights, another woman, very exciting suspect, we had him three days.
You know who did it? The accountant. Fellow who came once a month to do the shop's tax.
She found two lakh missing. Two lakh, saab.
He killed a woman for two lakh and then he went home and had dinner and came to the funeral with a garland.
Boring men kill for boring reasons. To keep things neat. "
A street dog swam past the window with great purpose.
"Why are you telling me this."
"I am getting there. I go round. It is my method, everybody complains." He shifted; the springs complained too. "Your company has many boring people. Very neat people. People who arrange things just so. People whose name you cannot remember after ten years in the same building."
"Like who?"
Solanki smiled with the red teeth in the passing light.
"Like people who file complaints about parking.
I told you. Four times in two years, and one time on his own car, one inch over the line.
Photograph, form, receipts in a plastic sleeve.
" He looked at Raghav. "I am not saying anything.
Officially I think nothing. I notice. I notice that boring people document everything.
They create alibi by being visible being boring.
Everybody at your party remembers your Mr. Kapoor was there — because he was in every photograph holding a soda, not drinking it.
Who remembers a man holding a soda? Only if he wants you to.
" He shrugged. "Or maybe he likes soda. I am a policeman, not a doctor of the mind. "
"You've said all this before. In your office."
"Yes. And you did nothing with it, and neither did I.
So." The car lurched through an intersection that had become a lake; water came up to the door handles and for a second Raghav thought the Ambassador might simply float away with them in it.
The driver said something to God in Marathi.
"See, you cannot arrest boring. Cannot make headline from neat.
So we arrest angry. We arrest loud. City gets its killer, company gets its share price. Everybody happy."
"Except—"
"Except truth, yes, yes, you were going to say truth.
Everybody says truth in the back of my car, it is like a temple.
" He drank from the cup and grimaced; it was the tea one.
"I know what I can prove and I know what the city wants to believe.
Different things. Okay." He turned right round in the seat then, all the way, and the humour went out of his face.
"That was the speech. Now the reason I am here at eleven o'clock in a car that leaks. "
He held out a hand without looking, and the driver put a folded paper in it, and he passed it back over the seat.
"Your logs. Your token. The ones IT gave me with a paper.
I gave them to my forensics fellow — same fellow, twenty minutes about a brake housing — and I said run it again properly, with the reader clocks corrected, everything.
He ran it. Same result." He tapped the paper.
"Legal floor, Sunday, twenty-three twenty.
Executive lounge, Wednesday, twenty-three forty. "
"I know what it says."
"You know what it says. Do you know what it means?
Wednesday, twenty-three forty, forty-seventh floor.
You know where you were at twenty-three forty on Wednesday?
Yes, you know. In a ballroom in Colaba being introduced to a man from Singapore, photographed.
I have the photographs. Meera madam sent me those also.
Very proud." He let the paper sit in Raghav's hand.
"So either you are Superman, saab, or somebody is teaching you a lesson. "
Raghav looked at the two lines. His name, and two times, in a photocopy of a photocopy.
"Too neat," Solanki said. "Real crimes are messy.
Real frames are also messy — a real frame picks a time you cannot account for, not a time when four hundred people are photographing you.
This is not a frame. This is a — a demonstration.
Somebody wanted you to see how easy it is to become guilty.
Consider it education." He held up one finger.
"Not accusation. Education. I say this so you will remember I said it, when it matters. "
"Who?"
"If I knew who, I would be teaching them something.
" He turned back to face the windscreen.
The wipers went. "But I will tell you what worries me.
Education is fine as long as only the teacher and the student are in the room.
And now your name is getting loud. Not from me.
From the city. Constable at Colaba noted a Trinity car on the wrong street on Friday-Saturday night — I told you.
Now a bar owner in the same street has filed a complaint about a broken mirror and a customer who went over the counter, and then withdrew the complaint, and then, this morning, un-withdrew it, because somebody visited him.
Bartender says a man came at one in the morning and took something off the bar's laptop and ran through the kitchen.
" He did not look round. "You had dinner in Colaba, you said. "
"I had dinner in Colaba."
"Good dinner?"
"Solanki."
"I am not asking, saab. I am telling you what is on my desk.
If tomorrow somebody sends me a paper — and somebody will, this city is full of helpful citizens this month — that says the COO of Trinity went to a bar at one in the morning and took company files off a laptop, I will have to ask you what files.
And you will have to show me. And then the story has a beginning, and a middle, and it has your token at two bodies, and it has you holding the paper that says why they died.
" He spat. "Loud enough to be next Vik, maybe. Or Vik's next."
And there it was, sitting in the back of a leaking Ambassador with him, cold and finished — the thing he had been not-looking-at since a taxi up Marine Drive with one shoe on.
They had let him.
Three men had come down eleven steps to stop him and had stood at the mouth of an alley and let the taxi go, and he had told himself it was because they knew where he lived.
It was not that. It was that a man running through a kitchen with a laminated record sleeve and seventeen stolen files on his phone was more useful than a man stopped at a bar.
They had wanted him to have them. Whoever they were — hers, or the other's, or both, and he no longer believed those were separate answers — the files on his phone were not a weapon he was carrying.
They were the weapon. Catch him holding them, and the frame did not need a single line more than it already had.
Whistleblower turned thief. Thief with a token at two doors.
A motive in every file. He had walked out of the Blue Note believing he had taken something, and he had been handed it, the way Solanki had just handed him a paper over the back of a seat.
"You have gone quiet, saab."
"I'm thinking."
"Think faster. Merger is Wednesday. After Wednesday everything is signed and filed and a very neat man will want the desk clear." The car had turned; they were on the sea road now, going back the way they'd come, the water lower here and the Ambassador running easier. "You still have my card?"
"Yes."
"Good. Keep it. Rate card is still open." A pause. "For now."
They pulled up outside his building. The rain had gone back to a drizzle. The watchman looked at the Ambassador and looked away, and Raghav thought that this was the second car with the wrong sort of person in it to drop him at this kerb in a week, and that the watchman would remember neither.
He put his hand on the door. Solanki did not turn round.
"One more thing," he said. "Why I called you and not Meera madam. Boring people don't only kill, saab. They keep killing. Regularly. Neatly. Like maintenance schedule." He tapped his phone, where a headline was scrolling with Raghav's name in it. "And your name is getting louder every day."
Raghav opened the door. Rain came in and sat on the vinyl. He got one foot on the pavement.
"Saab."
He stopped.
"The envelope I got. Wednesday, in my office.
You saw it come." Solanki was looking at the windscreen and the wipers going across it and nothing else.
"My nephew's file. Whole thing. Station code, date, the algorithm's little number for him.
Somebody wants me to remember Arjun this week.
Not last month. This week." The paan moved.
"Somebody who knows exactly what I am for sale for and exactly what I am not.
Very precise person. Very good aim." A breath. "You know anybody like that, saab?"
He did.
"No," Raghav said.