It was some time past ten o’clock when I heard the growl of the engine. I stepped out of Miss Colah’s bungalow and, dressed not in the attire of a burglar but of a businessman, walked hurriedly to her car. The clothing was a conscious choice. In India, as I suspect might be the case the world over, the best defence against interrogation by a zealous durwan was to adopt an air of entitlement. Wealth is a vaccine that inoculates against many maladies.
I do not know what the chauffeur made of it, being ordered to drive me on such clandestine journeys, but while the man was as professional as ever, keeping his responses to a brief ‘yes, sir’, the expression on his face reflected in the rear-view mirror suggested that he did not entirely approve of me.
We drove, first down the meandering, canopied lanes of Malabar Hill, and then, at its foot, onto the graceful, lamplit arc of the Queen’s Road, which the locals called Marine Drive. Above, the night sky was pierced by a thousand stars, clearer and brighter than they ever appeared over Calcutta with its eternal shroud of industrial smog.
The bay-front was deserted, save for the lungi-clad municipality workers, sweeping detritus from the gutters and emptying the bins so that this most elegant of promenades would once more be pristine in time for the locale’s British residents to partake of their morning constitutionals.
Rather than halting a block or so from Irani’s office, I ordered the chauffeur to pull into the In and Out driveway and park immediately outside the entrance.
The car, like my suit, looked the part, and to all the world I appeared to be a businessman returning to the office for some late-night emergency. I walked up the steps to the glass door and rang the night bell. Inside the foyer, the nightwatchman rose from his chair behind the front desk and rushed over.
‘Hā saahb?’
I gave the man short shrift, browbeating him into opening the door with a mixture of choice English words and rudimentary Hindi. Such an action, I am ashamed to say, came naturally to me. Growing up in a household not short on servants and not all of whom spoke Bengali, I was well enough versed in the ways the more boorish of the bhadralok classes dealt with the lower orders. I’d like to say that we learned these things from our British masters, but even if that were true, the fact was that in this area at least, we proved ourselves to be model students.
The poor man, suitably cowed, failed even to ask my name as I strode past him and up the stairs. At the first-floor landing, I stopped and waited. Sam had briefed me that Irani’s office was on the second floor, but for now I required to hold position right here. I had imparted clear instructions to Miss Colah’s chauffeur. It was simply a question of waiting the few minutes before he carried them out and hoping the nightwatchman too played his part. I realised I was shaking, as much from the encounter with him as in anticipation of what was to come. I steadied myself, concentrated on my breathing and reminded myself I had been in worse scrapes, which, though true, made little difference to my heart rate.
The seconds ticked down, each punctuated by the pounding of blood in my ears. Five, four, three, two, one…
From outside came a horn blast, then another, and finally, a long, constant piercing drone. I steeled myself and crept slowly back down the stairs. At the front desk, the watchman was up from his chair. I willed him to leave his post to investigate, but he simply stood there. I realised I had miscalculated. To most men of his position, an automobile was a fantastical contraption, mechanical yet also magical. To him, the blaring of the horn was like the snorting of a dragon – it grabbed the attention, but was not something you wished to get too close to.
A minute passed. The wailing continued and I was about to give up hope when, finally, he picked up a torch from under his desk and went off to investigate. I waited till he was outside before slipping into the space behind his desk. There, on the wall beside it was the wooden box that held the spare keys to all the offices in the building. Each key was on a hook, in rows sorted by floor and position. I narrowed Irani’s key to one of three. Outside, I could hear the nightwatchman remonstrating with the chauffeur. I figured I had thirty seconds at most before my driver would miraculously fix the fault with the hooter. I had no way of knowing which was the correct key, and so instead I swiped all three. Closing the box, I sprinted for the stairs just as the sound of the horn began to ebb.
The ringing continued to echo in my ears even as I ran back up the stairs, not fully subsiding until I was trying each of the keys on Irani’s door. As ever it was the final key that did the trick. I heard the click and felt the key turn, and in an instant, I was inside and closing the door behind me.
Taking the torch from my pocket, I flicked the switch and cast its narrow golden beam in an arc, illuminating a desk in front of me. Sam had mentioned the anteroom where Irani’s secretary sat, kept company by a visitors’ sofa and a row of gunmetal filing cabinets that loomed out of the darkness like battleships.
I started with the drawers of the desk, finding nothing of interest, merely letterheaded stationery and a trashy novel of the sort sold for two annas on street corners and station platforms.
The filing cabinets were unlocked, and with good reason. Two were empty and the third contained half a dozen thin manila files, each with the most rudimentary of paperwork relating to merchant vessels plying the trade routes of the Indian Ocean.
I carried on to the next room, which I assumed was Irani’s, and which certainly contained a better standard of furniture: a leather-topped desk, a chair on casters which creaked more than it rotated, and several more filing cabinets. Again they were unlocked and I went through them with the exactitude of a tax inspector, albeit one working illicitly and by torchlight. Once more I found little of value. Just more manila files and marbled box folders filled with nothing more interesting, or incriminating, than a few flimsy bills from the electricity company and the foolscap pages of an office rental agreement at what seemed an eye-watering amount for such a small set of rooms. There were other files of course, papers on ships and vessels, insurance details, registration, tonnage, and other facts as dry as the Thar Desert, but as I read them, a thought gradually dawned. What was interesting was what was not there. There were no sales contracts, or bills of lading, or invoices, or correspondence with customers or clients of any sort. For a man running a trading business, Irani did not seem to be trading much of anything. That was a curious omission. As Sherlock Holmes might have said, it was the dog that didn’t bark, and its silence grabbed my attention.
How did a man maintain an office in South Bombay and a suite at the Taj without any income? It was possible that his operations in Rangoon were so successful that he could afford it, but it begged the question that if things were so good in Burma, why had he not made even the slightest headway in establishing his business here in Bombay?
Something didn’t smell right, and by the look of things, I wasn’t going to find the answers here in this Potemkin office.
I headed for the door. Locking it behind me, I made for the stairwell, wondering how I was to return the keys to their box without drawing the attention of the nightwatchman. I had expended all my intellectual effort in planning how to steal them and had overlooked the fact that I would also require to replace them. In the end I decided the best thing would be to simply engage the man in conversation and surreptitiously slip the keys onto a corner of his desk. It wasn’t much of a plan, but then I was not much of a criminal. Fortunately it turned out that he wasn’t much of a nightwatchman either. He was slumped, snoring in his chair with his arms folded across his chest.
I reassessed my options. Dropping the keys on the desk was still the safest course of action. Indeed it was the sensible thing to do. But now I could see the cabinet on the wall behind him, temptingly close. If I could return the keys to the box, now that would be a job well done. I held my breath and crept towards him, inching silently through the gap between his chair and the wall behind. I reached over and pulled gently at the wooden door of the cabinet. It yielded with a creak that ought to have been loud enough to wake the dead. Slowly, I extracted the keys from my pocket. Beside me, the durwan’s snores stopped abruptly. I froze. The man groaned, a noise not dissimilar to a performing street bear when the owner pulls on the ring through its muzzle. I turned, expecting to see him rising irately to his feet. Instead he lifted a hand to his face, scratched at his chin and began snoring once more.
I wasted no more time, opening the cabinet and replacing all three keys on their hook. A minute later I was out of the front door, thanking Maa Kali, and hailing the chauffeur.
‘Miss Colah’s residence, sahib?’ he asked once I was safely ensconced in the back.
‘Yes,’ I said, as the car began to move.
He pulled carefully out of the driveway and set course for Malabar Hill.
‘One moment,’ I said.
I checked my watch. It was approaching eleven.
‘On second thoughts, there’s somewhere else we might go first.’